"No," said the butler, serious again. "I think I should go on with the story. This is not a game. None of this."
Raymond was suddenly frightened, though he could not have said exactly why. "Yes, go on, Field," he said.
"Prophecy was my main role in the secret service," said the butler. "At least at first. I moved up the ranks and became very famous. The people would read in the newspapers that Aldebaran had uncovered a plot against the king or broken up a chain of arms dealers, and so "Aldebaran" became a familiar name. There was an old prophecy about a great one who would come from the west of the country. People began to connect it with me. But it was only my taken name that was famous-the name I took on after my training. In the secret service, you remain anonymous. No one knew my face."
"Aldebaran?" said Raymond. "That was the name you took after you trained in magic?"
"Aldebaran is my name, yes. After a star. That is the custom-to name the great men and women after stars, constellations, planets-you know."
"Are there enough?" said Raymond, glancing out at the first stars that were appearing over the mountains.
"They haven"t run out yet," said Aldebaran.
"So your name never was Arthur Field?" said Raymond.
"It was Arthur Field once," said the butler. "But all those years in the secret service I was just Aldebaran."
"Go on with the story," said Raymond, leaning forward in his chair.
"There were very distinguished men and women in the secret service," Aldebaran went on. "Most of them had powers; I was no one extraordinary there. Talitha was the greatest. She was the same age as me, but she always undertook the most serious and dangerous missions. She was far more powerful than I ever was. She had more raw talent to begin with, and more ambition. She was head of the entire Malonian secret service by the time I was in my late forties. But I was just as famous by that time. Perhaps more so after that, because now I was gaining glory on the most difficult missions while she was directing operations from the city.
"Anyway, one day a task came up that Talitha nominated me for. The king, Ca.s.sius the First, had died the year before, and his son, aged only ten, had suddenly had to take up the throne. As a result of this, security was tightened, for fear of revolution. For a long while, the Kalitz family on Holy Island had been suspected of plotting an uprising; Marcus Kalitz had been an advisor to King Ca.s.sius the First, and had been fired in a mystery that no one quite understood.
"Now Mr. Kalitz was advertising for a tutor for his children. The plan was for me to infiltrate the family and keep a close watch on them. I thought that I was far too well-known for such a job. But for some reason Talitha had fixed it in her head that I was the only one to go. I suppose it was logical. I am a native of Holy Island myself. It is a separate state, ruled by the Kalitz family rather than the monarch, and the accent and the customs are very distinctive. I had that accent and I knew those customs. It was my home, which I loved, and though I did not admit it, I thought that I would prefer teaching a couple of children to negotiating politics. Those were the wrong reasons, perhaps. But I agreed."
I put down the book. There was a silence. Then Stirling whispered, "He is Aldebaran."
"Yes," I said. " We were right."
"And Margaret is Grandmother, and baby Harold is Great-uncle Harold," Stirling continued. "His family, that he was talking about at the beginning."
I turned back to that page. I remembered Grandmother telling us once about the three of them growing up on Holy Island-a long time ago, before she stopped talking about Aldebaran. She had told us about how they used to sit in front of the fire with the baby, just as Aldebaran had told the old man. It was strange to read it again here.
"He must miss her," said Stirling. "Aldebaran must miss Grandmother. She"s the same to him as I am to you."
"I suppose she is." I had never thought before about Aldebaran being Grandmother"s elder brother, and how they probably walked to school together and argued and talked for hours like Stirling and me. Aldebaran seemed too much of a legend for that. "Shall I read on?" I said. Stirling nodded. We had half an hour before Grandmother would be back from church, and there were several pages left.
Outside the window it had grown quite dark, but Raymond made no move to turn on the lamp. "Go on with the story," he said. "Tell me about Holy Island."
The butler gazed out over the lake again. "This was what I was going to explain about. This mission that went wrong." He seemed to be thinking for a moment, then began again. "Talitha ordered me to leave at once. I went to the harbor and boarded a ship that was going south to the coast, then northwest to Holy Island. All the time I traveled, my heart was lifting, because I was going home. The roads grew familiar as I neared Valacia."
"What is Valacia?" said Raymond.
"The capital. The Kalitz mansion was outside it a short way, not ten miles from where my parents used to farm. But I would not be able to communicate with my family. I knew that I would be as good as a prisoner in that place; I could not go out and risk being recognized, and besides, the Kalitz family lived set apart, behind high fences. They had an army of servants too, half of them guards. They were all lined up along the drive as I approached, just for show, even though I was only the children"s new tutor."
"Did you say they were royalty?" asked Raymond.
"Not exactly. They are n.o.bles. But they are royalty as far as Holy Island is concerned, and they expected to be treated as such. Anyway, the only one I could stand was Anneline, the little girl. Mr. Kalitz did not even come down to greet me when I arrived, and barely spoke to me in the weeks that followed. Most of the time he maintained a sullen silence. The only one he really spoke to was his son, Lucien. He would lecture him for hours. He preached to him against the monarchy as if he was a priest proclaiming the gospel."
"Why did he hate the monarchy?" said Raymond.
"He hated the royal family-the Donahue family-mainly because of the argument between him and King Ca.s.sius the First. The king said that Kalitz had tried to a.s.sa.s.sinate him, and Kalitz said it was a misunderstanding. But the Kalitz family all hated the royal family."
"What about the others?" said Raymond.
"Celine was just as irritating as her husband. She spent all her time comparing others to herself and finding them inferior. The servants were considered a lower race."
"Surely you were not a servant?" said Raymond.
"I was counted a servant in that house. Not by Anneline, but by everyone else. Even the boy, Lucien, would order me about. He was eleven when I arrived, and as ambitious as his father. Often it happens that a child so pressured by a parent will rebel against this with all his strength. I have noticed that here in your country too. But Marcus Kalitz could not have wished for a better firstborn in Lucien. He was even more ferociously antiroyalist than his father."
"What about the little girl?" said Raymond.
"Anneline," said the butler. "I could never find a single fault with her, even now. She was nine years old when I arrived, and very timid, but she changed. That was the one good thing that came out of this mission, perhaps-that I taught her."
Raymond shifted in his chair, his eyes still on the butler. "It is important that I tell you all this, sir," Field said suddenly. "Even now, I am trying to work out what went wrong. You do not think that I am wasting your time in explaining this to you?"
"Of course not. Go on telling me. I want to hear."
The butler nodded. "Well, I did try hard to be a worthy tutor to them. I did not think it was fair that their education should suffer because I was an impostor. Anneline was an attentive pupil, easy to teach even when I was struggling with some fact that I had got out of a book the day before. But Lucien did not concentrate. He was clever, but he would not work. And the parents encouraged it. They thought he was a natural genius, born to be a great man."
It was almost completely dark in the room. Raymond sat motionless, listening, the last firelight glinting on his gla.s.ses. "Things started to go wrong early on," said Aldebaran. "I should have pulled out. Instead, I got too involved. I was starting to think I was a real tutor. I taught Anneline to sing the national anthem. That was my first mistake. I was not thinking. I was just astonished that she did not know it, and I did not think it would be outside the role of a real tutor to teach it to her. She had a lovely singing voice. She was a very accomplished pianist too. She used to play for her parents" guests when they gave parties.
"Anyway, at one of these parties I heard her picking out some of the tunes I had taught her, adding the chords herself. She could improvise like that even at nine years old. And then she started the national anthem, and suddenly all the voices stopped together. A moment later Celine was shouting. I heard Anneline mumble something, and I knew it would only make things worse if I went in and explained, so I thought it best to retreat upstairs.
"I heard Mr. Kalitz come running up the stairs not long after, a gla.s.s of spirits still in his hand. He was shouting like a madman. "You have been indoctrinating my children! You have been corrupting them with your royalist values! You know how I feel about the monarchy!" And so on. He grabbed hold of my shirt and threw me against the door."
"What did you do?" said Raymond.
"Well, I could have done anything," said Aldebaran slowly. Then he shook his head. "I just let him grab hold of me. I was a servant there, not a great one. I kept saying, "Yes, sir; sorry, sir," trying to calm him down. He threw the gla.s.s at the wall and went on shouting. And then some of the guests were coming out to see what the commotion was, and he had to quiet down. "Never ever let me hear report of this again," he told me. "You teach them the real history of Malonia, the real geography, the real literature. Is that clear?"
"I just said, "Yes, sir," again to that, and he let me go. "I am disappointed in you, Field, more than I can say," he told me. And then he turned and marched back down the stairs. I nearly felt guilty about that, to tell you the truth. He was so pa.s.sionately antiroyalist. Although his feelings were not justified-not really-I felt sorry for him because of the sheer fervor of them. And I was supposed to be inconspicuous here. I had gone against my duty to the secret service in teaching Anneline that song, and caused her all kinds of trouble from her family. From then on I tried to teach the children in a way that would not cause any more problems."
Raymond reached out his hand to turn on the lamp, then drew it back. He would not break the stillness of the room. "How long did you stay there?" he said.
It was a while before Aldebaran replied. "The days just pa.s.sed," he said eventually. "I don"t know how. Three years were gone before I had even noticed being there one. I had barely communicated with Talitha. I panicked then, when I realized how long I had been there. I tried to contact her."
"How?" said Raymond. "By telephone? Wouldn"t the family be watching your every move?"
"Telephones do not exist in Malonia," said Aldebaran.
"Telephones exist everywhere," said Raymond. "Surely, Field-"
"My country is not like England," said the butler. "No, I used my willpower. I wrote in a book, and used my willpower to transfer the words into another book as I wrote them, a book in Talitha"s possession. That was my own idea. It was difficult, but it worked. I thought that communication by magic was the safest. I was worried, because somehow I had been there for so long, and I had tricked even myself into believing that I was a tutor. I had stopped reading the newspapers. For all I knew, revolution could be imminent and I might never have known it. So I did not want to waste time with letters."
"Why did you forget to contact Talitha?" said Raymond. "What about being on your guard? I thought you were supposed to be a very famous spy, Field."
"There was something strange about that house. A kind of stupefying atmosphere that made me stop being careful. That alarmed me, when I realized it. I am always on my guard. It must have been magic. That is all I can think now." Aldebaran shook his head. "I should have realized."
He paused, then went on. "Talitha only replied when I suggested in desperation that I come to the city. She wrote briefly that all was under control, and that on no account should I move from the house. So I tightened my watch on the family, and began to practice my skills again. I had begun to forget how to use my willpower.
"That was when I started to suspect that someone was watching me, because no matter how hard I tried, I could not seem to see any more than an ordinary person; someone was blocking everything I did. I wondered if I was losing my powers. That has been known to happen. Sometimes the great ones grow out of their powers. And then, one night, a vision came to me."
"Vision? How do you mean, a vision?"
"I dreamed, and I wrote a prophecy. So I knew that I had not lost my powers. I began to suspect that the rebels were stronger than I had thought, and that someone knew who I was and was controlling what I did."
"What did you do?" said Raymond.
"Continued teaching Anneline. There was nothing else to do. Lucien was taught solely by his father now, and I could see enough to understand that there was some large plan in their minds. But above that I could tell nothing. It could have been a party, for all I knew of it. We were allies more than ever in those years, Anneline and I. She was almost completely ignored by her family, and I was uneasy and had too little to do even as a tutor. I went on teaching her, and she used to come to me for advice also. She began to talk about leaving when she was still young. She hated that house. She wanted to go to the mainland.
"So the first young man who proposed to her, she almost accepted. She was only thirteen when the sons of n.o.bles and rich traders started asking for her hand in marriage. Her parents said that she should wait, and I agreed with them. I did not realize what they meant-not wait unconditionally, but wait for something. They wanted her to marry the young king. The two met at a ball when she was fourteen and he was sixteen, and it was barely six months before he proposed to her too. Marcus and Celine had known that would happen."
Aldebaran frowned at his hands clasped on his knees. "I am not pretending that Anneline did not love Ca.s.sius," he continued. "She did; I knew her well enough to see it. And Marcus and Celine pretended to disapprove of their daughter"s marriage. But they had been trying to engineer meetings between the two for months-even I could see it. The thing was, Marcus and Celine were antiroyalist, but they were deviously antiroyalist. They were ruled by reason. Lucien-he was pa.s.sionately antiroyalist. The day she announced her engagement was the last day that he spoke a word to her. Hatred of the Donahue family flowed in his very blood. He left the house while Anneline prepared for her wedding. He refused to step back through the door until she had gone.
"The evening before she left, just after her fifteenth birthday, I was in the empty schoolroom with her, helping her to pack her last belongings. We were sad to part; she had almost become a daughter to me. I said as much to her then. "If it were not for you, I would have gone mad in this house, Aldebaran," she said. What was strange was that she used my taken name so pointedly. I had given the name Arthur Field in that house, as I gave to you, my name before I was trained in magic. That was how she knew me."
I stopped there and rested the book against my knees. The clock in the square was chiming the quarter. "This is Lucien"s story as well," said Stirling.
"Yes. I never knew that Aldebaran was his tutor when he was a boy."
"They don"t teach us this at school," said Stirling.
I laughed at that. "No. This would be Highly Restricted if it was a real book."
Stirling looked worried. "It"s all right," I said. "I haven"t told anyone about it, except for you. And anyway, I am not to blame. I do not write these words."
"Who does?" said Stirling. "It"s strange. Do you think it"s someone with powers trying to communicate by magic, the same way Aldebaran was trying to communicate with Talitha?"
"I thought about that," I said. "But why would a great one write this? Some of it is important, but some of it only means anything to you and me."
"Maybe ...," said Stirling, "maybe it"s someone trying to communicate with us."
I was startled by that. "Who?" I said eventually. "Aldebaran himself?"
I had been joking, but Stirling did not notice. "It could be!" he said. "If he is still alive. Read on. There might be a clue. Read on, Leo."
Across the lake, a church bell was chiming. The butler glanced toward the sound, as though it had brought him back from his thoughts. "What did you say when she addressed you as Aldebaran?" asked Raymond.
The butler laughed. "I don"t think I said anything at all; I was too startled. I just stared at her, and she said, "I know you are the lord Aldebaran; I have known it for a year or more." She began to laugh then; it must have been the way I was staring.
" "How do you know?" I said eventually.
" "I guessed," she said. "I guessed, and I think my mother and father know too-but they did not guess it; someone told them. But Lucien does not know. If he did, he would have killed you."
"She was only half joking. We were all of us slightly afraid of Lucien-even I was, to tell the truth.
"She was glancing edgily at the door, and she stepped closer to me. "There is something I want to talk to you about before I leave," she said. "I am afraid that my family are developing some sort of underhanded plan. I hear things, though they would never tell me."
"I asked her what kind of plan, but she could not say. "It is just that Father, when he goes out with Lucien, does not drive out on the estate as he says," she told me, whispering now. "I do not know where they go, but I have seen them leaving on the road. And you know how long they stay away for. Days and weeks sometimes."
"It was true that they were developing some plan. Of course they were; that was why I had been sent there to begin with, because they were suspected of plotting revolution. "I think the same," I told her. "But what do you want me to do?"
"She took my hand and said, "Escape far from here. Go tonight, when I leave."
"Again, I was too startled to reply. "I think that there are very powerful men and women involved in this," she said, "and perhaps they will try to kill you. And if Lucien finds out who you really are, he will strangle you with his bare hands while you sleep. You know him. He has a mad streak. Truly."
" "Are you frightened of him?" I asked her. She was looking up at me as if I was her own father.
" "Yes," she said. "Of course I am frightened of him."
" "You are good," I told her. "He cannot harm you. The good are protected."
"That is what I would have told her if she had been my own daughter. It was not true, and she knew it. She always saw through me when I struggled with some point of science or history in one of our lessons; she had a way of lowering her eyes, though she was too polite to say anything. She was looking like that now. "I think you should leave," she said again. "I am not going to change my mind. I think you should leave."
"I was still not convinced. But she caught hold of my hand and went on begging me to escape. "You are valuable to our country, and you must protect your life at all costs. You have great powers. You are a very important man." She went on. And then she looked at my hand in hers and let go of it, as though she did not have the right to do that now she knew who I was. "Sir, you must leave," she said.
"It was strange to hear her call me "sir" like that, and I started to tell her not to, but she was already impatient to say something else. "Take this with you," she said, and put something in my hand.
" "What is it?" I asked. But even before I had finished asking, I realized."
"What was it?" Raymond demanded, leaning forward in the darkness of the room. "Field, you keep pausing at the most important points."
The butler laughed, though he had been doing that on purpose. "Sorry. It was a famous and valuable jewel-probably the most famous and valuable in all Malonia. It is a necklace in the shape of an eagle. The silver eagle, all the stories call it."
"A necklace?" said Raymond.
"Do not look so disbelieving. I"ll tell you the story. Long ago, Malonia City was under siege and the people were almost starved. All the great ones-the magicians-sure that they would die whatever happened, decided to preserve their power. One of them, a rich man, had a valuable necklace that had been in his family for generations. It was common sense to choose the most valuable object, because it would never be lost or thrown away. And even if it was, silver and jewels endure. So they put their power into this necklace, killing themselves in the process."
"But they would have died anyway?" said Raymond.
"No. By some strange turn of events, those in the city actually defeated the enemy. Anyway, the silver eagle had been lost for years, but it was generally thought that some powerful magician, some great one somewhere, owned it. So I was astonished to see it now in my hand. "Where did you get this?" I said, and she lowered her voice still further.
" "From my father"s cupboard. He should not have had it. Take it with you when you go."
" "I cannot take it," I told her. And I was not even sure that I was going.
" "You have to," she said. "You must escape, now. There are prophecies concerning you-about how you will save the country in a time of trouble. If you don"t escape, what will happen to us when that time comes and you are dead? And this necklace is dangerous in such foolish hands as my father"s."
"It was against my judgment, but I took the necklace. Then, for some reason, I went and got the prophecy I had written, and gave it to her. "It will not come true," I told her. "It was a mistake."
" "I will keep it safe," she said, as if she believed it might.