“Not free, Caesar. In my custody.” Her voice grew syrup sweet. “Saladin’s a good dog, he won’t run off, will you?”
Saladin slid back behind Madame, the Utopian coat settling over him until only a trained eye could track him by the shadows between the hem and floor. “No, ma’am! Are you kidding? First time I’ve ever had a mentor I could actually learn from, I’m not quitting.”
“A mentor?” MASON repeated.
Saladin laughed. “All these years I thought the only thing for a Cynic to do when we realize all the social rules are crap was to go live free like an animal, but Madame’s learned better. They didn’t have to cut themself off from society to keep from getting tangled in the puppet strings. All they had to do was genuinely not care.” He prowled toward me around the circumference of Madame’s skirts. “I don’t get it, Mycroft. We thought Cornel MASON was a keen mind, but you and I can spot a predator at fifty yards—how come they can’t after sleeping with one for twenty years?”
My chest did not have strength enough to laugh, but the attempt gave anesthesia’s gradual withdrawal an opportunity to highlight my incision with lines of pain. Madame did it. One night, sitting by his cage with tender musings and philosophy, and she made a convert even of my Saladin. Diogenes the Cynic was our childhood mentor, Saladin’s and mine, the first of our wretched race to realize that honor, glory, ambition, wealth, success, all are artificial things, and that pursuing them only makes us miserable. True happiness is to live as Diogenes and Saladin dared, like a dog by the side of the road, eating when the urge comes, pissing when the urge comes, saving all one’s energy for the happy exercises of the mind, which no tyrant can deprive you of. Legend tells us that Alexander himself visited the wise old man, offering Diogenes anything in the world the Conqueror could grant; the Cynic asked only that the Great King stop blocking the sunlight so he could keep reading. Saladin never expected to find a living teacher closer to Diogenes’s model than himself, but Madame too drew kings to her silk-lined barrel with rumor’s allure. It is true that, unlike Diogenes, Madame took advantage of how much one can exploit a king’s offer when one doesn’t care if one actually gets anything, but she who could play the puppet web like harp strings was still undeniably closer to Diogenes’s ideal than Saladin, who dared not touch the strings for fear of being snared. When we first committed ourselves to the Cynic path, we had lamented that there was no master of the School to guide us eager novices. This was not a wish Saladin had expected Providence to grant.
The Father of Men and Gods faced the shadow cast by Apollo’s stolen armor. “I have long known what Madame is, monster. Do not presume to understand my thoughts.”
Madame perked. “Then you don’t mind if I keep him? I know you can’t stop me if Papa can’t, but I won’t keep him if it distresses you, Cornel. I want you to be comfortable around me.”
MASON faced her squarely. “I thank you for your honesty in answering my questions, Madame.”
She frowned. “What will you do now, Cornel? You’re the trickiest. Unlike the others, you can change any day the name sealed in the Successor’s Vault in Alexandria, and neither public opinion, nor law, nor I, can stop you.”
MASON: “The law forbids speculation about the Imperator Destinatus.”
Madame: “He needs omnipotence, Caesar. Yours is the largest Leviathan; you can take the biggest blindfold off him.”
MASON: “The law forbids speculation about the Imperator Destinatus.”
Madame: “He is your Son. He really is, more than anybody else’s, your Son.”
MASON: “You say that to a lot of men.”
Madame: “I lie to a lot of men, but not to you.”
MASON: “What about Spain?”
Madame: “Nurture matters more than nature. Jehovah could be Kraye’s son but They’d still be yours.”
MASON: “And their mother? When Jehovah was born you promised Spain you’d marry them if the public ever learned who the child’s father was. Will you break that promise?”
Madame’s gaze fell away from Caesar’s. “I can’t deny that His Majesty has asked again that I marry him. And I’ve consented. With Crown Prince Leonor dead, Jehovah must be legitimated or the Spanish strat will fall apart, possibly Europe as well.”
MASON turned away. “We both know Spain’s views on monogamy. Things can’t continue as they have been between us if you are Spain’s Queen, it would eat them away inside, not to mention what the public would say.”
She took the Emperor’s hand. “I didn’t want it like this, Cornel, you know I didn’t.”
He pulled away again. “You’ve told the truth this far, don’t spoil it. If you didn’t want this, you would have arranged things differently.”
Madame’s hurt might have been genuine. “I told you I didn’t plan this, I just planned the creatures who could achieve it. You think everything went in line with my ideal? I loved Brussels. I was very proud of my Merion Kraye, I didn’t want him dead. I’ve lost my Ganymede to the law, poor Dana? is half dead from the shock, and Bryar and Ancelet will never forgive me. I loved them, Cornel. And I love you.”
I omit the next few exchanges, reader. MASON deserves some privacy, and what matter is it to history, the sentimental terms and gestures with which old lovers say goodbye?
“Jehovah!”
They wheeled him back to us now, lying on a gurney, not because of weakness, but in deference to the hospital habit of circumscribing patients in the geometric borders of a bed.
“My darling Boy! Are You all right?” Even Madame does not hug Jehovah anymore, not that her Son objected, but His black gaze chills even her too much. “How are You feeling? Does it hurt?”
He answered with a string of all tongues, interwoven like pointillist brush strokes, meaningless to untrained ears.
“What?”
The doctor was a tiny Utopian, trailing a coat of molten stone which made the room into the layers of a volcanic mountainside, hardening at a century per second. She shared Madame’s frown. “No one’s been able to understand much of what they’ve said since they arrived. Short exchanges make sense, but nothing long. But I understand that’s normal when Mike is stressed, yes?”
I smiled hearing the grandest yet humblest of His many names. “It is,” I answered, straining against the straps as I leaned forward far enough to see Jehovah’s eyes. “Usually I translate when He’s excited or upset.”
The doctor nodded. “What’re they saying now?”
Men say Jehovah’s tone never changes, that He stays equally cold before the Senate House and gentle Helo?se. It is almost true, but Felix Faust, whose expertise can read the temper of an earwig, tells me there is one exception, slight, an ease which tints the pitch of His voice in one circumstance only: when I arrive. The Brillist definition of a bash’mate adds to the legal one, not just that you live together, but that you speak the same language, ideally the same group of languages, though mixed-tongue bash’es birth their own pidgin, each member injecting favorite foreign phrases into English. Bash’ by this definition is not just a group of people, but that special group of people with whom one can communicate completely. Madame has never answered whether she was pleased or angry when her Great Experiment found another who could comingle English, Latin, French, Spanish, a little German, Japanese, and Greek.