The Fire Boy
There was a full moon in a clear sky. The sound of the brook running in the forest surrounding the fields and farmhouse was gentle. The autumn night was fresh with the smell of pine trees and spruce trees. The midwife, an old woman, whom some accounted wise and some accounted too wise, held the baby and smiled at it, catching its brand-new eyes with her own, and offered it the blessing of her gaze, which she averred ever after, that the child accepted, smiling from the uncannily knowing depth of his own new being. She handed him then to his mother, an honest, beautiful, delicate woman, still a girl, really, who kissed him, and in her turn blessed him before she died in child bed.
His father was a strong man, older than his wife, an architect to the king as well as the manager of his vast farmlands. He even helped to put up the buildings he designed. And days after his wife's death, he worked with his men to bring in the harvest. He worked quietly, and the men around him worked hard and quietly as a sign of their esteem for him. His broken heart ached with sadness and grief for his lost wife but there was no bitterness against the boy in his heart. He loved his son with the same ardent and solemn love that he felt, still felt, for his deceased wife.
The boy grew strong and tall. He was handsome to the point of ethereal beauty. He was lithe and agile and often did yeoman's work on the farm. His particular joy was Roan, the stallion his father gave him when he turned six. He loved the horse. The horse loved him. Together they galloped through fields and forest, one of mind, one of body, nerves and sinews undifferentiated. Yet, despite the grace that was his, the boy's disposition was humble. He was sweet and gentle in his ways, modest in his bearing, intuitive with all animals. With people he was generous, kind, and loving. Coming from a privileged class, he gave consideration of class no place in his estimate or treatment of people. Life within him was a flame that warmed all who were near him and glowed with a luminous presence.
As a child, he hung on his father, who gladly carried him everywhere, and as he grew he became learned in the things of nature, which he gathered from his hours roaming through the forest, and the things of culture, which he gathered from his father's extensive library, and from their visits to the city, where the wonders of towers and bridges and crowds and music and theater captivated him.
Although his father never forgot his wife or loved her less than when she lived, he was not a man of morbid temperament, and when he met Rosa deVale, a beautiful widow, with two children, a girl a year older and a boy a year younger than his son, after a happy courtship, he married her and brought her and her children into his large house that had creaked under the weight of emptiness long enough.
Oliver, for that was the boy's name, had not felt the house to be lonely, but he sensed that a life that was ample for himself was not enough of a life for his father. He welcomed his stepmother and his stepsister and -brother with gladsome spirit. His stepmother seemed to dote on him, and he accepted her embraces and kisses with grace and returned them with modesty. To his stepsister and –brother he introduced the secret of the surrounding woods and shared with them the revelations of the city, and though they ventured with him where he took them, never did he get the sense that they surrendered themselves as he did to the excitement of the worlds he brought to them. He showed them the best horses in the stable, but they disdained to ride with him and teased him whenever he came back on Roan bouncing with life after riding several hours through the countryside. As for the worlds they brought to him, there were none. They seemed, it bothered him to think it, lazy and petulant, and when not called upon by external stimulation, reposeful to the point of lethargy.
When he was sixteen, his father died, and within a week, everything changed. No longer did Rosa deVale dote on him but rather addressed him with contempt, and began to command him to perform tasks that he had willingly done before. He acquiesced, not being of a rebellious disposition, and excused her to himself by imagining that grief at her husband's death had unbalanced her: Otherwise she would have felt what the loss must be to him. But she did not, and he sought to please her by obeying her and harbored the hope that that would pacify her anguish and give her the wisdom to see him for who he was and love him.
It was not, however, to be. The longer he sought to bring her relief, the stronger he became her bondsman. And not only hers: the faults he had discerned in her children, with the death of his father, and encouraged by their mother's unconcealed disdain for him, became the overriding engines of their behavior. They were indeed sloths, ill-tempered, violent, insistent, and demanding.
The winter came, and it was a cold one. Oliver became the fire boy, for the farm hands had been dismissed by his step-mother as a matter of economy and his siblings would not chop wood, nor would their mother ask it of them. He left his straw bunk in the barn, where he slept now, at five each morning, and made the fire in the kitchen hearth and kept it alive all day. When the family rose, he made the fires in the stoves in each of their rooms, and set water to heat for their baths. Each night, he tended the embers and then retired to the barn with a lantern. There, he was often visited in the dark by the midwife who had brought him into the world.
"This will not last," she said, when he sat across from her, aching with tiredness and smelling of his labor.
"It will if I don't get out of here."
"There is nowhere else for you to go," she said. "That will change nothing. You carry your future within you. It does not lie outside. What you must endure, you must endure."
So he endured, and making it a little easier to endure were the gallops he stole with Roan, his horse, through the forest many midnights when all were asleep. Under bright moon or black sky, he and the horse knew the forest well enough to need no light. Thus it was that his horse was walking through a meadow lit only by moonlight late one May, that he saw another nightrider approach.
"Good evening, friend," said the rider, pulling near and reining in his horse.
"What besides the beauty of the night brings you to this meadow?"
"You have spoken the truth. It is the beauty of the night, but also, the consolation that this beauty gives to my spirit that is oppressed by injustice."
"Of what injustice do you speak?"
"Because your voice is warm with winning courtesy, and your face, in the moon light, appears gentle and true, as your form appears handsome and graceful, I will tell you my story. Let us dismount and sit on those stones that form natural places to sit beneath this great chestnut."
"With pleasure," the stranger said, "although I fear there will be more that gives pain than pleasure in what you will tell."
"True," said Oliver, "except that even to relate a history of pain to a sympathetic interlocutor transforms past pain into present pleasure.
"My father was," Oliver began as the moon illuminated them, "land surveyor and architect to the king. My name is Oliver, his only son, and an orphan held in bondage now by a stepmother who beguiled my father in his last years but upon his death betrayed every goodness she had deceptively bestowed on him alive. And I am left alone without inheritance or heritage, friendless but for the old midwife who presided at my birth and this horse, once my father's gift to me, later taken away from me, now my secret companion, with whom I share the stable and who was returned to my care -- to groom, not given to me to ride."
"Like you," the stranger said, "I am a creature of the night. By day I do not belong to myself, although, for me, it does not look like the bondage that weighs you down. I am burdened by privilege. The consequence of my privilege is that I owe to the kingdom over which my father rules – my father is the king who cherished your father -- an image I do not recognize or accept as myself."
His eyes in the moonlight were luminous as he spoke and glittered like diamonds. They fascinated Oliver, and although nothing by either of them was directly spoken, each understood the question each was putting to the other, and each said yes. They lay on the midnight meadow grass, the moonlight hallowing their fancies, and each reached for the other's hand. They clasped their hands together and felt the consent of desire. They turned towards each other and kissed. It was the moment that without knowing it, each had been waiting for, the moment that made sense of, because it gave shape to, everything that had come before. Everything that had seemed random and without purpose now became realigned, reconfigured, and became prologue to this climax, which wasn't just a climax, but an inception.
They gazed into each other's eyes and kissed again, long, meaningful kisses that announced the opening of a new heavens and the creation of a new earth. The reaction of their bodies was a new testament to the fact of this recreation. Hard together and trembling with the energy that stiffened not only their penises but their very frames, and that stretched their yearning for each other until it reached the breaking point and they fused, when they shattered the pieces of each that flew every which way settled again inside them newly organized and filling each one with a part of the other, where the part of him that had gone into the other had been.
The moon dipped and the stars appeared, until the advancing day made them a memory. Oliver woke first and looked at Maxim and stroked his sandy hair. The prince, under that touch, opened his eyes and smiled.
"It is already morning," he said. "So often I long for night to remain, but never more than now."
"We can have every night for ourselves," said Oliver, "and live as we must in the day, without sacrificing ourselves to the day."
"Or even better," Maxim said, "devise a way to make the luminosity of night overcome the opacity of day."
Oliver went about his chores with a lighter heart but there was no outer indication of this alteration. He had never shown sullenness, sloth, or resentment at the abuse he endured. This benevolence of spirit, natural to him, had been a terrible irritant to his tormentors, and it made them more surly in their exploitations, for part of the motive of their oppression of him did not involve the convenience of being served that it brought to them, but a wish for the pleasure of seeing one of whom they were jealous rage in impotence. That he did not, provoked in them rage.
It was shortly after Oliver's first night spent with the prince in the open meadow that Wilma and her brother Vladimir, after complaining to their mother about Oliver's obstinacy and arrogance and indifference summoned him one afternoon to the sitting room. Although the space of two years divided them in age from each other, the siblings seemed in appearance and disposition more like twins than older sister and younger brother. Both of them had snub noses with quite openly visible nostrils, eyes set far apart, a low and protuberant brow, and lips of an exceptional thinness. With respect to their mousy brown hair they differed: hers was stubbornly straight; his, curly and untamable. Although no one they knew found either of them attractive, they held an allure for each other that was reproachable, and what they were deprived of with regard to physical affection from the rest of the world they secured from each other.
Sliding her arm round Vladimir's waist when Oliver entered, as if in defiance and to present a united front, Wilma began, "What do you do at night?"
Oliver looked at her shocked that he was being interrogated.
"I go to sleep," she said. "Where do you go?"
"How does that concern you?"
She and her brother, as if of one mind and one body took several steps closer until they actually were in his face. "Everything about you, everything that you do concerns us," she said, taking him by the shoulders as Vladimir banged the heavy bronze ashtray sitting on the table beside them on his skull. Oliver staggered, and at that moment, when he fell to the floor, the two of them locked his wrists behind him in a pair of handcuffs. "Everything with regard to you," Wilma said, "as you will see from now on, concerns us."
There was no need to stand guard over Oliver. They shackled him to a bolt attached to one of the timbers that held up the stable and left him.
Roan watched, with big troubled eyes, as Wilma and Vladimir pushed Oliver into the stable and threw him onto a straw pallet in the stall next to his, and fastened the chain. When they left, the horse, leaning over the low fence that separated the stalls, poked his face against Oliver's. Oliver, his hands freed, but his legs shackled, stroked his cheek and tried to calm him, but he was restive. Roan would not eat, but seemed to make a vigil beside Oliver. At midnight, he began to nudge Oliver again.
"I am a prisoner," Oliver said convinced that Roan understood exactly what he said. And he did, for he lifted the cross bar that held the gate of his stall closed, and quietly walked out of the barn and just as noiselessly, at a walk, went to the edge of the farm. There he broke into a gallop and arrived in the meadow, where Maxim was waiting, in almost full darkness under a star-salted sky.
The clatter of hooves, the glare of lanterns, and the sound of iron striking iron woke Wilma and Vladimir in the bed they shared, and woke their mother. They all rushed out into the night, fearing thieves, and were met by half a dozen of the king's horsemen who surrounded them. The midwife was there, too. She had been roused by an uncanny dream: Roan was swimming, attempting to swim, in the moat around the king's castle, but faltering, whinnying and braying. The noise woke her. She quickly dressed and when she arrived at the stable, she found the prince and his horsemen there.
Maxim was distraught. "Once I knew your situation, I should not have let you go back. I thought I needed time to figure things out. But I did not stop to think if there was time," he said. Lifting Oliver from the straw, he led him out of the stable where Roan stood.
"Can you ride?" he asked.
Oliver mounted Roan, who stood waiting for him. The horse trembled with pleasure as Maxim helped Oliver to mount him. At a trot, accompanied by the six horsemen, they set off for the castle leaving Wilma, Vladimir, and their defeated mother standing outside, cursing Oliver and their own ill-fortune.
"They will come in the morning and take the house from you. Pack now what you wish to keep. They will be better than you and give you a cottage where you may live in contentment or misery, as your own souls determine," said the old midwife who had presided at Oliver's birth, and vanished into the forest where she easily made her way home without a lantern.
2
Well-ordered kingdoms are all alike. Kingdoms in which the order has collapsed are each out of order in their own way. At Maxim's father's castle everything was turned upside down. The foreign secretary was not sure if he would be travelling that day to a neighboring kingdom where he had planned to converse with another foreign secretary about a boundary dispute between the two kingdoms involving water rights. The major domo was not sure what orders to give the domestic staff with regard to rooms in a hardly-used wing of the castle that was to be aired and prepared to accommodate a party of royal bureaucrats scheduled to arrive from the city, and the equerry was unsure if the hunt for which he had readied a dozen horses was to proceed or not.
The king had not shown himself since the entire castle had been aroused some time around three a.m., when the prince stormed in with a troop of royal guards and commanded a meal right then for himself and a companion, who, definitely, those who had seen him reported, was not of royal lineage. Nor had the prince himself been seen, nor the unaccounted-for companion, whose whereabouts in the castle remained a mystery. Was he a guest or a prisoner? was the question most often asked.
Oliver was definitively not a prisoner, and he was something more than a guest. At the moment when speculation about his identity and his whereabouts was rampant, he was recumbent in Maxim's arms.
Not only had Oliver been locked in the stable by his tormentors, but he had been denied food. The effects of hunger and the knockout blow that he had sustained had dizzied, confused, and weakened him. It was more to be attributed to Roan's intelligence that Oliver reached the castle safely than to Oliver's equestrian skill. When Maxim saw his condition, he realized that Oliver would be able to do nothing more than sit upon the stallion's back, if that. He positioned him with his arms around Roan's neck and his head leaning upon it as if it were a pillow, and trusted to the horse. In like manner, when the meal was prepared, Maxim fed Oliver the little that he could eat, and, with Oliver's arm round his neck, he walked him to the chamber we now find him in asleep.
He awoke in the midst of splendid tapestries, vaulted windows and Maxim's hand caressing his brow and Maxim's eyes intent upon his as they opened, awaiting just that. When Oliver smiled with recognition, Maxim's every feature relaxed and his face bloomed with smiles. His lips touched Oliver's and ripples of kisses ran over them.
Although it was difficult to acknowledge, it was equally difficult to ignore, the kingdom had fallen into a state of atrophy. The king, foolish and filled with pride, in his youth, with the arrogance of belief that a king was a master and not a servant, had wasted his strength and his patrimony in promiscuousness, concupiscence, and debauchery. After each quest in the realm of lust, he returned to his kingdom greatly dispirited and further removed from his power. Unable to govern his lust, he became unable to govern his realm. A mysterious wasting disease came upon him. The energy of youth ill spent became the lethargy of depleted age. And the blight that affected the king came to affect the kingdom. Now the fields were feeble nourishers and crops were meager and scrawny. Trees that had grown strong succumbed to boluses and bareness; leaves seared before they became big green fans; flowers failed to blossom and no fruits followed. The corn was dry and the wheat was wizened, like an old man's voice. The rivers showed their muddy bottoms, and streams were dry gorges cutting through eroding landscapes.
Some said, particularly the old midwife who had presided over Oliver's birth, that human corruption had diseased the earth. The blight in Nature revealed that a sympathetic vibration connected the way people behaved and the way the earth performed. The earth was responding to, was in discordant harmony with, was influenced by destructive human agency. "There is magic in human action," she declared. "A life that rots at the human core causes the earth to rot. A life of love gives the world vitality." But her wisdom was contemned. The king's lawyers said that her judgment with regard to how the king had lived lacked respect and was perhaps treacherous. His academicians mocked her pronouncements as primitive, At best she was confusing literary tropes like the one at the start of Sophocles' King Oedipus with hard reality. She held her ground with the stubborn reiteration of the gnomic pronouncement, "I know what I know, and you will come to know it, too. Life fades when love falters."
The king received Maxim and Oliver without leaving his bedchamber, shivering under down quilts. Age had brought illness but also the wisdom of defeat. He blessed them and pronounced his abdication, conferring on Maxim the duties of kingship, the burdens of which, rather than the privileges, he now understood.
After their departure, he fell into a heavy sleep and dreamed he had been captured and confined naked and shivering in a dank stone cave, carved into a mountain at a perilous height. The abutting ledge was jagged and covered with ice. He pulled at the bars that fell like stalactites and blocked the mouth of the cave, desperate to free himself. The bars loosened and broke; he lost his balance and fell upside down, head first, through the sky, the earth threatening him with its deadly approach. Below him, a spinning vortex, spiraling, was a muddy castle moat: in it crocodiles swam. In terror he awoke. With an uncanny and preternatural intelligence, an inherent intuition that rose unaccountably he knew that he had encountered himself in his dream and he was afraid of himself. He cried out in terror and when the guards pushed open his door, they found him dead.
Epilogue
"Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."
William Blake
As much as there is death in life, so there is life in death. When news of the king's death spread throughout the kingdom, there was no rejoicing, for he was not a wicked man, nor an evil man, but there was a great feeling of relief, the sense that a great gloom had been lifted and that the kingdom would once more welcome the light of heaven, absorb it, and thrive.
"My father was a lonely man," Maxim said as he spoke in the grand gallery in the castle, standing on a platform beside his father's coffin, before a great assemblage of the realm's subjects. All who could come journeyed there to bring the strength of their hope. It was more than a lamentation over death they sought, but a cautious celebration of a transitional moment, when the passage from one era to another occurs. They brought the hope that out of a decayed moment one of renewed possibility was emerging. They were filled with the spirit of metamorphosis. "He sought himself," Maxim said in a voice hushed by sorrow, "in the regard of others, but had little regard for what others might be other than mirrors he needed to reflect himself. He was a powerful man. It was, unfortunately, a power that came from him but was not his to bestow; it was the power that diseases have to disturb the health of nature. I know that I am not un-filial in saying this, that I am fulfilling the greatest obligation a son has: to restore his father's humanity by recognizing his failings."
He said nothing of what would be – for the future is a matter of acts, not of words – but only of what had been.
Afterwards, six courtiers carried the coffin outside and placed it on a pyre. As the day gave way to night, they set the fire, and flames arose from this incarnation of the past like hands in prayer. That night Oliver and Maxim did not sleep but cantered to the meadow where they first had met. Becoming one again in their embrace, they began the regeneration of their land.