Jamais
As he smelled the intermingled scents of sea salt and vanilla he was taken back to the time he had visited his uncle's farm on the island of Sam Cruix. There among the bustling life and the ranks of orange trees spanning out across the rocky hills as men at arms at muster he had discovered love at the age of thirteen. It was then only to a peasant girl, perhaps ten years older than he; a woman really. But in her weathered face and gentle smile he had found the love that was missing from him in his childhood. Denied from him by a distant pious mother and an absent father. Both he had known as specters. But in that three year summer at the domain of Dom Pierou, his uncle he had found that love which he missed. And it had transcended that maternal absence. It was strong and passionate, physical. He was awakening then as a man and came to be one in the peasant woman's arms. Then as suddenly as he had gone there, he left it.
As he smelled those sensuous pleasures once again years later his imagination drifted back to those days that he just left, maybe six months ago. His father was dying, and now he had died. He had not thought how much such a near memory would return in bitter sweetness. Sweet in that it was life. Bitter that in this moment it was in death. The cold and pale corpse of his father, the king Leon of Troubesville lay still in his casket. His skin having lost the color of life resembled creamy, leathery parchment in its paleness. His eyes were covered by volcanic stones washed up from the beach. His body limp and stiff as the corpse slowly began bloating in the heat and humid wash of the sea. The body's surreal stillness flustered the young prince. There was a cold pit that opened in the bottom of his bowls and he felt himself grow sick and feverish looking down at his father. The old round face, once beaming with the light from heaven itself as he had charged into and out of his life in episodic fits.
In its still repose it was mystifying for him to see his father lying so still. Last it had lived it had flown across the kingdom by horse and by yacht. A man of consummate action. Sociable, well loved. A renowned hunter. He had never known him, these were only things that he had been told. A poem was once written about how far he could throw a spear, and how accurately the throw was. But it had never left the court. Seeing him dead here, it was sure the poem would never leave. But as he had lived outside of the bounds of court and castle, so had it lived inside of the castle and court.
“I am sorry you had to return on such short notice.” a single and imposingly tall figure had stepped up alongside the prince. His tall physique was not hard to miss among the other heads of the kingdom and foreign delegates who were in attendance. But his steps were light and well placed and he moved like a breath of cold air. “But illness had taken him faster than we thought, Maximilian.”
Prince Maximilian, stunned to his bones quietly shook his head. The man, Almarando Ruge looked down at him. His long hawkish face pulled long by the way his brow rolled back with his long graying hair. From a dark face of earthly clay a pair of equally dark eyes looked down at the young prince from behind a turnip of a nose. “I'm not sure anyone told you yet, but your crowning begins the day we bury him.”
“Ah- yes, sure...” Maximilian began, stunned. His words felt numb on his lips until he realized, “But that's tomorrow.”
Almarando nodded. His head fit on his neck like a pelican's, and a gesture so normal on other men was rendered completely alien by him.
Prince Maximilian felt frozen as he shook his head. Almarando, the master of the royal estate sighed, “No bother, it will happen whether or not. The realm needs a king, it's never waited.” he said coldly. He bore the badge of resigned indifferent on his tongue. His language was cold on the ears and it stung the small grieving spirit in Maximilian.
“Everyone is already here who would ever need to attend.” he added, turning and pointing the prince's attention to the assembly of old men huddled around the base of the chapel's pillars. In their long gowns and white mourning costume they resembled shades at the edge of existence, standing in the shade of the layered, twisting marble pillars as if they were allergic to the sun that came in through the towering windows behind and over the alter and where the former King Leon lay in state. His body surrounded by cuttings of vanilla flowers and the dried beans that had been broken open and scattered over his dark tunic. Other fruiting flowers had been laid about, to aid in the masking of the death stench.
The chapel was a private building, but none the less a tall building. Its high ceiling was lost in the darkened light that reflected off the polished stone floor, leaving the candles that hung in their pewter chandeliers to hang like stars in an ill tempered aether that consumed everything that rose up to it, and shone only where it mattered. From the high vaulted ceiling the immense masonry roof was held aloft with great ribs which held the whole mass of its arched ceiling, the red stone above giving the impression of the cavity in a great whale. The entire mass itself held up by pillars of red and white marble patterned one on top of the other as they ascended in a corkscrew. And looming down from the vaulted red night of the ceiling loomed the face of the third face of the White Mother, the crown. Her face gilded in gold leaf as silk sheets fell from her face as a veil that ruffled in the breezy ocean wind. Like wise her visage, eyes closed hung over the great doors of the chapel, the gold leaf brightly illuminated by the sun and the silk headdress falling in great waves down from the crown of her head.
At the head of the sanctuary, where the corpse lay the walls were cut and open to the air and the weather through tall cavernous windows. Arched and decorated with colored stones and ceramic tiles. Vines had come to grow there, and their out reached fingers wormed up the pillars framing the great open windows and into the chapel itself. Their heads sending out shoots that bloomed with broad emerald leaves or small vibrant flowers of ruby and sapphire colors.
Through the windows the ocean breeze passed in and out and soft breaths. The air moved with the soft passionate breathing of a giant. Swaying back and forth it ruffled and moved the silken banners of the old White Mother. Drawing in an out like a rising and falling chest, the chapel felt alive.
Looking back down the nave, Maximilian saw the crone's face over the doors, beyond the noble men who stood stoic and deathly in their shade's robes and he felt as though her closed gold eyes were moving to watch the men and women there. He could not tell what she may think of them. If they were good, if they were bad. If the connived in darkened hallways or honored the broad day light and were not afraid for everything to be public, because they could do no wrong. “Are they good men?” the prince asked, seeing them.
“They are loyal, and they followed your father.” Almarando said.
Maximilian doubted that. After all, he had felt loyalty and love in the arms of a simple peasant woman. What could he find in the cold glazed expression of the nobility?
But what Maximilian felt he had to ask, is if they were good men. If they were capable of goodness. But he could not find the words. They hung lodged at the back of his throat and the silence he stood in was read as a sign of acceptance by Almarando.
“You will have time to meet many of them in person. But for the day ahead, you should be ready.” he reached out and touched Maximilian with the tips of his fingers. What he felt with that touch wasn't that of pure or genuine comfort. He felt as uncomfortably cold as the corpse that lay there in state. Maximilian stiffened in response. He held his breath.
Almarando headed for the door. His steps short and timely. He didn't make haste. Neither did he look back. He simply walked, arms crossed ahead. Eyes forward. Lost and alone at the sanctuary he stood in the light of the windows. He watched Almarando walk with pensive uncertainty. Twiddling his thumbs together under the heavy sleeves of his funerary robes he made the uneasy decision to leave, and followed after the old house keeper with uneven staccato steps.
Later that night, Maximilian stood at the open windows high in the old castle, Mon Jamais. The once warm orange-red stone of the walls cooled with the dewy imprint of evening mist. Below, the city of Jamais itself glistened and glowed a citrine yellow in the fog that enveloped it. Distantly the sounds of music drifted out from the narrow and winding cloistered streets of the town below. Leaning out over the window Maximilian looked down at the tiled court at the bottom of the cliff the keep of the castle stood on. Winding gardens conformed to the curvature of the court yard, forced between carved rock and plateau spaces before the ground fell out just on the other side of tall walls. In torch light guards paced along the walls. There was an eerie serenity. A solemnity unknown from the day. High above the city, the castle stood high as a silent and quiet brooding monastery to the music wiles of the city nestled as its feet.
Maximilian stood and thought about the city he had known before he had left for his uncle's estate. It had changed much then. From the towers and bastions of the castle the whole city marched out along a rugged stretch of land that stretched out like a long finger from the mainland. The rocks gave way to steep slopping hills to white ivory beaches. The shore, particularly on the inside of that finger pointing towards land were the bristling spikes of the piers and docks of the shipyard and port where a hundred ships traveled in and out. Through the late night mist that hung over the city the solemn light house that served as a beacon and a herald to ships making their way to port shone through the fog as a fierce star awash in a space of smokey white, and glower with a nebulous light. Likewise the smaller stars of the ship lights drifted along faintly visible in the night mist.
On clear nights the port at night would still be a circus of sharp pin pricks of light as ships were rowed to shore on inky black water, or later night sailors set out to sea. Filling the waters too would be the late night revelers of the merchants on their boats. Or the minor nobility, who having demesne far away but no inclination to live the social life of the capital remained in their yachts and in the glow of amber and golden flame went out onto the water and held private concerts or drinking parties. Both launching from the relative safety of shore-side estates or apartments where both classes lived respectively.
Looking down at it, Maximilian felt a pang of sadness and the gnawing of terror. All of this was his now. Though he could not say it was unforeseen, for he had lived all his life that he would come to rule this. But he looked at it all realizing it was his to rule but he had never received instruction from his father, who was so missing to carry out his own business. He didn't know where the first step was. He felt he was enclosed in a foggy mist like the rest of Jamais, but without the comfort and the terrible joy of nightly revelry and torch lit streets. He felt alone in his own darkness, having never been told what was expected as being good, or bad. That while he had been taught, he only ever learned what was expected of him as a prince. As a king in the making, but never a king that would be pulled from the fire and cast so soon.
He trembled with the tought. And sleeplessly he walked back to the bed. His light night gown brushed smooth against his nakedness as he sat on the heavy down sheets. What was he supposed to do alone? Could he do it alone? The next day they would bury Leon, and then he would inherit the crown. A sweeping movement, burying the old and bringing out the new. And what then? A cold shiver came at the thought.
Looking aside at the bed side table he looked at himself in a gold mirror. There he was, a young man. A boy really. His smooth face had known nothing but the softness of an afternoon sun and the coolness of an evening moon. Round, infantile. He was less a man and more a boy. He had not grown any beard, and his thick black hair curled on his head in naturally tight nests, course and bushy. His flesh was dark and unblemished, browned by the air about him.
He lay down, laying out spread eagle across the sheets of the bed and looking up at the plain red canopy over him. Mosquito netting encapsulating all sides but the one. Closing his eyes, he tried to sleep. But the pervasive anxiety that invaded him forced them open and he soon awoke and lay listening to the air about him. He listened to the whisper of the wind across the high tower windows and the distant lapping of ocean waves.
Like a moth to the flame he walked back to the window and looked back out. How long had it been? In the time he had laid down the light had gone out, save for the constant beacon of the lighthouse. He rubbed his hand along the stone pillars in the window, feeling the dew that was collecting there in its cracks. The wind blowing from the ocean feeling cool against his skin. He shivered as goosebumps bloomed up and down his skin and he gave out a long sigh.
He felt alone. But looking down at the still patrolling watch he at least knew he would not be the only one not sleeping tonight.
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