…and came to, lying on the floor. Roosevelt was standing over me. His face looked yellowish and drawn.
“A commendable effort, Curlon,” he said. “One hour and twelve minutes. But as you see—you lost. As you must always lose—because it’s your destiny to lose to me. Now—will you join with me willingly?”
I climbed back to my feet, feeling dizzy, and with slow fires still burning in my shoulders. I raised my arms to the crucifix position.
“Ready to try it again?” I said. Roosevelt’s face twitched before he laughed.
I grinned at him. “You’re afraid, aren’t you, Roosevelt? You see your grand scheme coming apart at the seams—and you’re afraid.”
He nodded. “Yes—I’m afraid. Afraid of my own weakness. You see—incredible though it may seem to you—I truly wanted you to be a part of it, Plantagenet. A foolish sentimentality—but you, like me, are a man of the ancient stock. Even a god can be lonely—or a devil. I offered you comradeship. But at the first trial, you turned against me. I should have known then. And now I’ve learned the lesson. I have no choice left to me. My course is plain now.”
“You’re a flawed devil, Roosevelt,” I said. “A devil with a conscience. I pity you.”
He shook his head. “I want none of your pity, Plantagenet. As I can have none of your friendship. What I want from you, I’ll take, though the taking will destroy you.”
“Or you.”
“That’s a risk I’ll run.” He motioned to the waiting guards; they closed in around me. “Spend these next hours in meditation,” he said. “Tonight you’ll be invested with the honors of a dukedom. And tomorrow you’ll be hanged in chains.”
The dungeons under the viceregal palace were everything that dungeons should be, with damp stone walls and iron doors and unshielded electric lights that were worse than smoky flamebeaux. The armed men in Swiss Guard uniforms that had herded me down the upper levels waited while a burly man with a round, oily, unshaven face opened a barrel grill on a six-by-eight stone box with straw. I didn’t move fast enough for him; he swung a kick to hurry me along, but it never landed. Roosevelt showed up in time to slam the back of his hand across the fat face.
“You’d treat a royal duke like a common felon?” he barked. “You’re not fit to touch the floor he stands on.”
Another man grabbed up the fat man’s keys, led the way along the narrow passage, opened an oak door on a larger cell with a bed and a loophole window.
“You’ll meditate here in peace,” Roosevelt told me, “until I have need of you.”
I lay on the bed and waited for the pounding in my head to retreat to a bearable level.
…and woke up with a voice that wasn’t in my head, whispering, “Plantagenet! Be of good cheer! Wait for the signal!”
I lay where I was and waited for more, but there wasn’t any more.
“Who’s that?” I whispered, but nobody answered. I got up and examined the wall by my head, and the bed itself. It was just a wall, just a bed. I went to the door and listened, pulled myself up and looked out the six-inch slit at a light-well. There were no lines dangling there with files tied to them; no trapdoors opened up in the ceiling. I was locked in a cell, with no way out, and that was that. The voices were probably courtesy of the management, another of Roosevelt’s subtle moves to either wear me down or convince me I was crazy. He was doing pretty well on both counts.
I was having a fine dream about a place where flowers as big as cabbages grew on trees beside a stilt lake. Ironel was there, walking toward me across the water, and the water broke into a sea of glass splinters, and when I tried to reach her, the flowers turned to heads that shouted threats and the branches were arms that grabbed at me, and shook me—
Hands shook me awake; lights shone in my face. Men with neat uniforms and unholstered nerve-guns took me along passages and up stairs to a room where Roosevelt waited, rigged out in purple velvet and ermine and loops of gold cord. A jewel-covered sword as big as a cased garrison flag hung at his sides as if it belonged there. He didn’t talk, and neither did I. Nobody was interested in the condemned man’s last words.
Servants clustered around, fitting me with heavy garments of silk and satin and gold thread. A barber trimmed my hair, and poured perfume on me. Someone fitted red leather shoes to my feet. Roosevelt himself strapped a wide, brocaded baldric around my waist, and the tailor’s helper attached a jeweled scabbard to it. The hilt that projected from it was unadorned and battered. It was my old knife, looking out of place in all this magnificence. The armorer complained, offered a shiny sword, but Roosevelt waved him away.
“Your sole possession, eh, Curlon?” he said. “It shares your aura strongly. You’ll keep it by you—in your moment of glory.”
A procession formed up in the wide corridor outside, with the gun-handlers sticking unobtrusively close to me. Roosevelt was beside me as we walked up a wide staircase into an echoing hall hung with spears and banners and grim-faced paintings. Wigged and spangled and beribboned people filled the room. Beyond an arched opening, I saw a high, stained-glass window above a canopied altar. I knew where I was then.
I was standing in the spot where I had stood with Ironel, with the griffin, Vrodelix, beside us, just before Roosevelt had tried the first time to reach the altar. Now the floor was carpeted in gold rose, and there was an odor of incense in the air, and the woodwork gleamed with the dull shine of wax—but it was the same room—and not the same. Not by a thousand years of history.
We halted, and priests in red robes and dry-faced old men in ribbons and fluffy little wigs went into action, handing ritual objects back and forth, ducking their heads at each other, mumbling incantations. I suppose it was an impressive ceremony, there in the ancient room under the damask-draped, age-blackened beams, but I hardly noticed it. I kept remembering Ironel, leading Roosevelt to her Pretty Place, so that he could destroy it.
The odor of incense was strong; strong enough to burn my eyes. I sniffed harder and realized I was smelling something more than scented smoke; it was the real kind, that comes from burning wood and cloth and paint. There was a faint, brassy haze in the air. Roosevelt was looking back; the head priest interrupted his spiel. The gun-handlers jostled in close to me, looking worried., Roosevelt snapped off some orders, and I heard yells from outside the big room. A wave of heat rolled at us then, and the party broke up. Four guns prodded me toward the archway. If this was a signal, it was a dandy, but there wasn’t much I could do about it. The nerve-gun squad cut a path through the notables who were dithering, coughing, half headed one way and half the other. We reached the low steps, and two new guards came in from the flank and there was some fast footwork, and they were close to me, and the crowd was closing around us, fighting for position. An old boy in pink and gold, with his wig askew, thrust his face close to mine.
“Favor the left, y’r Grace,” he hissed in my ear. I was still working on that one when I saw the nearest guard put his nerve-gun in his partner’s kidney and press the button. Two more men in uniform came from somewhere; I heard a thud behind me, and then we were clear, peeling off from the edge of the main crowd, heading right into the smoke.
“Only a few yards, y’r Grace,” the little old man squeaked. A door opened and we were in a cramped stairway, leading down. On the landing, all four guards stripped off their uniform jackets and tossed their caps aside and pulled on workmen’s coveralls from a stack behind the door. The old fellow ditched his wig and cape and was in a footman’s black livery. They handed me a long gray cloak. The whole operation was like a well-practiced ballet. It didn’t take twenty seconds.