Hearts of Oak Read online

  Lewis turned back a couple more pages, stopped, and ran his finger down a page. He tapped a line near the bottom of the page where something had been belatedly squeezed in, a single word: ALYSSA. Next to it was a time, right at the end of the working day.

  “So he met her?”

  “Seems like it.”

  “Do you remember her?”

  “Sorry—a lot of people pass through this office.”

  “Thank you,” said Iona and left.

  * * *

  The morning wore on but still the king lay in bed. He had woken up early with bad dreams, but instead of getting up he lay there, thinking.

  Clarence entered, carrying the morning letter. He stopped and dropped the letter onto the floor.

  “I’ll read it later,” the king said, without turning over.

  “You should stay up to speed,” Clarence replied.

  “I’m sure they’re on top of it. What do I even do anyway? I said the other day that I never made any tough decisions—but I never make any decisions.”

  “Nonsense. Only last week you decided on the design for the new street maintenance building.”

  “From a choice of two. Either of which would have been fine.”

  Clarence trotted to the side of the bed. “Come on. Rise and shine.”

  “I’m trying to get some peace and quiet, Clarence.”

  “Your city needs you, you can’t just lie in bed—”

  Clarence bent down, clamped the bedsheets between his teeth, and pulled. The king gripped the sheets and pulled back. The sheets tore down the middle, forcing the king to get out of bed and seek some clothes.

  “The city needs me to do what?” said the king furiously as he searched for some underpants. “I stay up here all day, I only really talk to you and these guys—” Here the king indicated one of his attendants, who had just arrived with his trousers. “I read all about people’s lives but am I connected to them? I bet to them I just seem distant, like I don’t care—”

  “No no no. You’re the heart and soul of this city.”

  The king chose some shoes from a selection of three proffered by the attendant, then turned back to Clarence. “You say that but this fire business—what if people feel like I’m not listening to them and they have to burn down a building to get me to listen? What if next—”

  “With respect, you’re flattering yourself that everything is about you—”

  “Let me finish,” snapped the king. “What if next time they burn down this place?”

  “The tower is much, much better guarded than an empty, unfinished building—this is the safest place you could possibly be.”

  The king was staring out of the window, shaking his head. “I’ve been up here too long.”

  “Focusing on the reasons for this attack endorses destruction as a means of—”

  But the king was already walking toward the door.

  Clarence hurried around in front of the king, alarmed. “Your Highness, you can’t—” he said, but the king just stepped over him.

  “You can come with me if you like,” said the king as he left his chambers.

  Clarence had no choice but to follow.

  * * *

  Iona sat at the table in her house, spinning the object she had found in Victor’s office. She did this by grasping the object with her left thumb and right forefinger and flipping each side of the object in a different direction simultaneously. She watched it spin for a few moments, then slapped her hand down to stop it. She didn’t know how she knew how to do this, because she had never seen anything like it before. But she had done it without thinking.

  The thing was made of metal, so first of all it was odd to find it lying around. Metal was a precious commodity in the city and was only used where there was no adequate substitute. It was used for cutting-tools, for example, and in larger furnaces such as the ones in the Points of Return (domestic furnaces were generally made of stone). This small disc served no such purpose.

  Despite all this Iona knew what it was. Her first sight of the object had prompted the dream-word coin to spring to the front of her mind. Another word had followed it: money. It was a unit of common exchange. You earned it with labor and bought things with it.

  But money was not a concept that existed in the real world. In the city you weren’t paid for your work and if you wanted or needed something you just asked for it. So why was this here?

  Iona picked up the coin. It was very weathered and a small hole had been drilled into it just inside the edge. She let it tumble down the outside of her fist. She didn’t know how she’d thought of the trick but she mastered it very quickly. As if she’d done it before.

  Iona was coming to the conclusion that these were not just things from her dreams but things she had forgotten, and that made her wonder why she hadn’t seen them in so long.

  * * *

  It was quiet on the street where Victor lived. This was a district for high-ranking professionals and they weren’t around at this time of day. Iona found Victor’s house (she noted with amusement it was another of her designs) and knocked on the door.

  There was no answer, but Iona was in no hurry. She knocked three more times, leaving a minute or so between each knock. While she waited she looked around, checking who might see her. Victor’s house had an extensive porch that partly hid her from view.

  When Iona felt sure nobody was watching, she pushed the door. It opened—doors in the city only locked from the inside, so that appeared to confirm Victor wasn’t at home. She stepped into the house and closed the door behind herself.

  Iona searched through each room. The house was neatly kept, not dissimilar to her own. The main point of difference was that at the back of the house he had a small workshop with a fine set of tools, a workbench, and some good-quality wood. The workshop was lined with shelves containing a number of small carved ornaments, presumably made by Victor himself. The pieces were crude, lacking the finishing that the city’s manufacturing plants offered—definitely the work of an amateur, though they were much better than anything Iona could muster.

  The piece on the workbench attracted her attention.

  It consisted of a cylinder about thirty centimeters long, slightly tapered and with a larger cone on the tapered end. Two holes had been drilled in the cylinder and a couple of slim, short rods had been slotted in. These rods had rectangular panels attached to them. Iona moved her hands closer to the object but stopped short of touching it. She knew the object was very important but she also felt afraid.

  Iona took the object and turned it over in her hands. It had been sitting upside down on the bench but Iona didn’t know how she knew it was upside down. The rectangular panels were adjustable and she tilted them forward and back.

  A name appeared in Iona’s mind: Mull of Kintyre.

  Now Iona imagined the same shape, but not made of wood: she imagined it in black and gray and white, and made from materials whose names she couldn’t think of right now. She saw it on a huge platform in a place with no trees or buildings. She saw herself, and some other people, going inside it . . . but she couldn’t imagine why she was going inside it and she couldn’t picture the faces of the people who were with her. But she felt sure this was a model of something larger . . . something that really existed somewhere.

  But where though? You couldn’t hide something that size in this city. And why had she forgotten about it for so long?

  Iona had to stop looking at it now because she was in danger of being overwhelmed by the thoughts it was triggering. She went to search the rest of the house.

  * * *

  The idea had been for the king to see what people’s ordinary, everyday lives were like but, as Clarence pointed out, there was a paradox at the heart of this, because as soon as people saw him they stopped their ordinary, everyday lives to gawk at him.

  “But I want people to see I’m just a normal guy really,” said the king.

  “What a ridiculous thing to say,” Clarenc
e replied.

  “I am though. I never asked to be king, did I?” As he said this the king wondered if that was actually true. He couldn’t remember if he’d asked or not. But it was true he was just a normal guy. He was an amiable sort of bloke who just wanted people to think well of him and for everyone to get along. No drama.

  Clarence leaped up onto a fence and hissed in the king’s ear. “People don’t want to think you’re normal. They need a focal point—someone they can look to for a leader.”

  “How do you know what they want? Have you asked them?”

  “You’re not helping anything here. We should be going about things as usual, not changing your routine. Whoever started the fire probably wants us to worry and panic.”

  “Who’s worrying and panicking? I’m just going for a walk.”

  And the king kept walking.

  * * *

  On the upper floor of Victor’s house Iona looked through his small collection of books but this was more out of prurient interest than anything else—she always liked looking through other people’s books. He seemed to enjoy escapist fiction.

  Finally she looked in the bedroom. This was a personal space and she’d left it until last because she was undecided whether to go in there at all. But the carving told her she needed to know more about Victor. If he had made that he could explain to her what it was and why she remembered it.

  The bed was neatly made and did not look slept in. There were still clothes in the wardrobe—she wondered if he had taken any with him at all. Next to the bed was a chest of drawers. She opened the top drawer.

  Inside she found a single folded piece of paper. She unfolded it.

  The paper had been printed with a series of diagrams: she quickly realized these were stages in a process. It was an instruction manual, and Iona wondered what for. As she stared, she eventually perceived something in the simplified shapes in each diagram—but she still didn’t understand what these instructions were telling her to do. She turned the paper this way and that and concluded she was still missing something.

  But still, the paper piqued her curiosity. She put it in her pocket and left the house.

  * * *

  The king had almost reached the edge of the city, where it wasn’t so busy. Citizens who weren’t at work—seated in pairs at tables—looked at him through their windows and he waved cheerfully to them. A small crowd had been following him at a short distance all the way from the city center. They were a bit weird but their presence cheered him, just knowing they cared enough to follow him around. He couldn’t see Clarence but assumed he was somewhere in the crowd.

  The king paused and wondered where to go next. He decided he’d walk around the city limits for a while and then head back into the center via a different route so he could see some other parts of the city. The little crowd moved after him.

  Until now the king had been enjoying being out in the city, getting a feel for the rhythms of ordinary life. But as he looked through another window and saw another pair of citizens sitting at a table, something troubled him. The silence of the suburbs troubled him. The idea of what the city would be like after that longed-for day of completion troubled him.

  He felt like he was missing something very important.

  Then one member of the small crowd broke away from the rest and raced toward the king, who failed to react before the man clubbed him over the head with a mallet, beating him to the ground.

  6

  AS IONA PASSED PEOPLE in the street on her way home she vaguely noticed they seemed troubled, panicky even—something had happened and it was causing alarm. But she was too preoccupied with her own thoughts to ask about it, or even to speculate. Maybe another building had burned down. She felt surprised by how little she cared. Right now all she cared about was getting home. She hurried along, avoiding eye contact with everyone she passed.

  Iona entered her house, closed the door, and put the instruction manual she’d stolen from Victor’s home on her table. She unfolded and flattened it and studied the steps again, over and over. She spent a long time doing this—she lost track of how long. Slowly it became clear what they were telling her to do. It seemed insane yet the bright, clear presentation was so lucid, professional, official—boring, almost.

  She wondered if she had the nerve to carry out the instructions.

  A knock resounded through Iona’s house. Nervously she hid the manual in a kitchen cupboard, then she went to answer the door.

  * * *

  The king woke up, remembered what had happened, and cried out in alarm.

  “Calm down, Your Highness,” said an attendant—a rather shapely female one. She laid a hand on his shoulder and gently eased him back down into his bed.

  Bed. He was in bed, and everything was fine, and his shutters were closed, and nobody was trying to attack him. Still, he started in surprise when Clarence jumped onto the bed.

  “How are you feeling?” asked Clarence.

  “How do you think I’m feeling?” said the king. “Someone hit me on the head with a bloody mallet.”

  “I did advise you against going outside.”

  “You told me the citizens love me!” The king put a hand to his head and for the first time registered the presence of a bandage. He winced.

  “Your Highness, there’s always some discontent—but it cannot be cured by going among the people. You merely put yourself at risk.”

  “Why is anyone discontented? We give them everything they need. Everyone’s got a job, everyone’s got a home—what else am I supposed to do?”

  “It’s not always enough to make people happy.”

  “So who was he? The guy who did it?”

  “His name was Ward. But don’t worry, he’s dead.”

  “Good.” The king said this a little too vehemently and it made his head ache again. “Who killed him?”

  “Your loyal subjects took revenge on your behalf. Which is technically murder but—”

  “Yeah, I’ll overlook it.”

  “So you see, most people do love you. They rushed to your aid. It’s only a small minority who—”

  Clarence was interrupted by a knock at the door.

  “Tell whoever it is to go away,” sighed the king.

  “I don’t advise that,” said Clarence.

  “You’re full of advice today—why don’t you advise that?”

  “She’s a reporter from the newspaper. She wants to interview you about the attack.”

  “Oh.” The king sat up in his bed. “Fair enough, I’ll talk to her then.”

  The reporter was a young earnest type, clearly a little overwhelmed to find herself in his presence. The king gave her some good material about how his visit had stirred his pride in the city—even the attack, because the people had shown loyalty and courage in defending their king. He encouraged her to speak to the people who had rushed to his aid, get them to tell her their stories.

  “That was very good,” said Clarence after the reporter had left.

  “I thought so,” said the king.

  “You should get some rest.”

  “Yeah, that has taken it out of me a bit.” The king returned to his bed, went back to sleep, and dreamed of pushing the man who’d attacked him into a furnace.

  * * *

  Carter had come to see how Iona was. Which was nice of him, she kept telling herself: he’d obviously heard she’d asked for time off for personal reasons. But she was nervous and distracted and knew she was coming across as such.

  “What have you been doing with yourself?” Carter asked. Iona realized they were sitting at her table opposite each other, just as she’d seen other citizens do many times through the years but never done herself. What a strange time for this to happen. She wanted to enjoy it—but she kept thinking about the diagrams. Her mind kept superimposing them on Carter because that was, inescapably, what they showed: the body of a person.

  “This and that,” said Iona. “I did mean to take some proper time off but I’v
e got design work with deadlines.”

  “Good chance to catch up on it, I suppose.”

  “Yes, I’ve . . . got some modifications to make to the forestry office design.”

  “Has anything else happened with the investigation?”

  “I was going to ask you that. I haven’t heard anything at all. Are they still going on with this theory about Weston?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the only person who’s mentioned it.”

  Silence fell. Perhaps Iona could just tell Carter what she’d found, show him the coin and the manual. The young man had an inquiring mind. They could discover the truth together. But with a queasy feeling Iona realized there was another opportunity here, one she couldn’t pass up—she was alone with another citizen in the privacy of her house, someone who trusted her and deferred to her seniority. It was an ideal chance to test what she’d seen in the diagram.

  As she debated it in her mind she realized she was going to do it and the longer she left it the harder it would be.

  “Would you like to hang your jacket up?” she said to Carter. “You must be warm.”

  “Oh,” Carter said. “I wasn’t going to stay long—”

  “Have you got something to get back for?”

  “Not exactly, but—”

  Iona stood. “Come on. Give me your jacket and we’ll have a chat. I’m thinking of writing a paper on planning regulations, maybe you could help.”

  “Alright,” said Carter after an uncertain pause.

  Iona tried to swallow down the tension in her throat.

  Carter leaned forward and removed his jacket.

  Iona walked swiftly around to the back of Carter’s chair, gripped his shirt with both hands, and lifted it to reveal what lay underneath. There she saw exactly what the diagrams had depicted—a hatch in Carter’s back, about a foot square—and in that moment she knew everything in the diagrams was true. But she couldn’t ponder this discovery just yet.