The Summer House, warmed by September sun poured in through its big windows, was still and dusty. On the table where once his diary and spying equipment had lain, and where later he had sorted through Auberon’s pictures, there lay now a mass of scribbled-over papers, the sixth volume of Gregorovius’s Medieval Rome, a few other large books, and a map of Europe.
Auberon studied the top sheet, which he had written the day before:
The scene is in the Emperor’s tent outside Iconium. The Emperor is seated alone in an X-kind of chair. His sword is across his knees. He is wearing his armor but some of it has been taken off, and a servant is slowly polishing it, and sometimes he looks at the Emperor, but the emperor just looks straight ahead and doesn’t notice him. The emperor looks tired.
He considered this, and then mentally crossed out the last sentence. Tired wasn’t what he meant at all. Anybody can look tired. The Emperor Frederick Barbarossa on the eve of his last battle looked… well, what? Auberon uncapped his pen, thought, and recapped it again.
His play or screenplay (it might end up either, or be transmogrified into a novel) about the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa had in it Saracens and papal armies, Sicilian guerillas and potent paladins and princesses too. A congeries of romantic place-names where battles were fought by mobs of romantic personages. But what Auberon loved in these doings wasn’t anything that could be called romantic. In fact all that he wrote was only to bring forth that figure, that single figure on a chair: a figure seen in a moment of repose snatched between two desperate actions, exhausted after victory or defeat, hard clothes stained with war and wear. Above all it was a gaze: a calm, appraising look, without illusions, the look of someone coming to see that the odds against a course of action were insurmountable but the pressures to execute it irresistible. He was indifferent to the weather around him, and as Auberon described it, it was like him: harsh, indifferent, without warmth. His landscape was empty, save for a far tower with an aspect like his own, and perhaps a distant muffled rider bearing news.
Auberon had a name for all this: Glory. If it wasn’t what was meant by Glory, he didn’t care. His plot—who was to be master, that’s all—didn’t really much interest him; he was never able to grasp just what the Pope and Barbarossa were arguing about anyway. If someone had asked him (but no one would, his project had been begun in secrecy and years later would be burned in secrecy) what it was that had drawn him to this particular emperor, he wouldn’t have been able to say. A harsh ring in the name. The picture of him old, mounted, armed, on his last futile crusade (all crusades were futile to young Auberon). And then swept away by chance in that armor under the waters of a nameless Armenian river when his charger shied in the middle of the ford. Glory.
“The Emperor doesn’t look tired exactly, but…”
He marked this out too, angrily, and recapped his pen again. His huge ambition to delineate seemed suddenly insupportable, as though he might weep that he had to bear it alone.
But he had worked so hard to make that shell look just like him. He thought everyone had been fooled, and they hadn’t been.
Dust swam in the sunlight still being cast into weighty blocks by the windows of the Summer House, but the place was growing chilly. Auberon put his pen away. Behind him on the shelves, old Auberon’s boxes and portfolios stared at the back of his head. Would it always be so? Always a shell, always secrets? For his own secrets seemed likely to separate him from the rest of them as surely as any secret they had kept from him could have. And all he wanted was to be the Barbarossa he imagined: without illusions, without confusions, without shameful secrets: ferocious sometimes, embittered maybe, but all of a piece from breast to back.
He shivered. What had become of his jacket, anyway?
Not Yet
His mother was drawing it over her shoulders as she climbed the hill, thinking: Who plays baseball in weather like this? Young maples along the path, surrendering early, had already flamed beside still-green sisters and brothers. Wasn’t this football or soccer weather? An extrovert, she thought, and smiled and shook her head: the glad hand, the easy smile. Oh dear… Since her children had stopped growing up quite so fast, the seasons had started going by Daily Alice faster: once, her children were different people in spring and fall, so much learning and sensing and laughing and weeping were packed into their age-long summers. She had hardly noticed that this fall had come. Maybe because she had only one child now to be readied ftr school. One and Smoky. Practically dutiless on autumn mornings with only one lunch to make, one sleepy body to chivvy from bath to breakfast, one bookstrap and one pair of boots to find.
And yet, as she went up the Hill, she felt huge duties calling to her.
She reached the stone table at the peak of the Hill, a little out of breath, and sat on the stone bench by it. Beneath it—a sorry mess, decayed and autumnal-looking—she glimpsed the pretty straw hat that Lucy had lost in June and mourned all summer. Seeing it, she felt sharply her children’s fragility, their danger, their helplessness before loss, before pain, before ignorance. She named them in order in her mind: Tacey, Lily, Lucy, Auberon. They rang like bells of different pitch, some truer than others, but all answering her pull: they were fine, really, all four, just as she always told Mrs. Wolf or Marge Juniper or whoever else inquired after them: “They’re fine.” No: the duties she felt calling her (and she felt them more intensely now, seated in the sunlight above a wide landscape) didn’t have to do with them, or with Smoky either. They had, Somehow, to do with that path upward, and this windy hill-top, and that sky raddled with fast-moving, pigeon-feather gray-and-white cloud, and this young autumn full (as every autumn so strangely is) of hope and expectation.
The feeling was intense, as though she were being drawn in or swept away; she sat motionless in its grip, marveling and a little frightened, expecting it to pass in a moment, like sensations of
“What?” she said to the day. “What is it?”
Mute, the day couldn’t answer: but it seemed to gesture to her, to tug at her familiarly, as though it had mistaken her for someone else. It seemed, and it would not stop seeming, just about to turn all at once to face in her direction, having heard her voice—as though she had all this time been looking at the wrong or back side of it (and of everything, always) and was now about to see it plain, as it really was: and it she, too: and still it couldn’t speak.
“Oh, what,” Daily Alice said, not knowing she spoke. She felt that she was dissolving helplessly into what she beheld, and at the same time had grown imperious enough to command it in every part; light enough to fly; yet so heavy that not the stone bench but the whole stone hill was her seat; awed, yet for some reason not surprised as she came to know what was being asked of her, what she was summoned to.
“No,” she said in reply; “no,” she said, softly, as she might have to a child who had by mistake taken hold of her hand or the skirt of her dress, thinking her its mother, turning up to her, inquiringly, its wondering face. “No.”
“Turn away,” she said, and the day did.
“Not yet,” she said, and rang the bells of her children’s names again. Tacey Lily Lucy Auberon. Smoky. Too much, too much yet to do; and yet there would come a time when, no matter how much was left to do, no matter how her daily duties had grown or shrunk away, a time when she could no longer refuse. She wasn’t unwilling, or afraid, though she thought that when the time came she would be afraid, and yet could not refuse… Astonishing, astonishing that there could be no end to growing bigger, she had thought years ago that she had grown so huge that she could grow no more, and yet she hadn’t even begun. But: “Not yet, not yet,” she said, as the day turned away; “not yet, there’s too much to do still; please, not yet.”
The Black Crow (or someone like him), far off invisible through the turning trees, called its call, heading home.
II.
