Date: Tue, 14 Jun 2016 15:54:52 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: The Fire Boy

*The Fire Boy*


     There was a full moon in a clear sky. The sound of the brook running
in the forest surrounding the fields and farmhouse was gentle. The autumn
night was fresh with the smell of pine trees and spruce trees. The midwife,
an old woman, whom some accounted wise and some accounted too wise, held
the baby and smiled at it, catching its brand-new eyes with her own, and
offered it the blessing of her gaze, which she averred ever after, that the
child accepted, smiling from the uncannily knowing depth of his own new
being. She handed him then to his mother, an honest, beautiful, delicate
woman, still a girl, really, who kissed him, and in her turn blessed him
before she died in child bed.

     His father was a strong man, older than his wife, an architect to the
king as well as the manager of his vast farmlands. He even helped to put up
the buildings he designed. And days after his wife's death, he worked with
his men to bring in the harvest. He worked quietly, and the men around him
worked hard and quietly as a sign of their esteem for him. His broken heart
ached with sadness and grief for his lost wife but there was no bitterness
against the boy in his heart. He loved his son with the same ardent and
solemn love that he felt, still felt, for his deceased wife.

     The boy grew strong and tall. He was handsome to the point of ethereal
beauty. He was lithe and agile and often did yeoman's work on the farm. His
particular joy was Roan, the stallion his father gave him when he turned
six. He loved the horse. The horse loved him. Together they galloped
through fields and forest, one of mind, one of body, nerves and sinews
undifferentiated. Yet, despite the grace that was his, the boy's
disposition was humble. He was sweet and gentle in his ways, modest in his
bearing, intuitive with all animals. With people he was generous, kind, and
loving. Coming from a privileged class, he gave consideration of class no
place in his estimate or treatment of people. Life within him was a flame
that warmed all who were near him and glowed with a luminous presence.

     As a child, he hung on his father, who gladly carried him everywhere,
and as he grew he became learned in the things of nature, which he gathered
from his hours roaming through the forest, and the things of culture, which
he gathered from his father's extensive library, and from their visits to
the city, where the wonders of towers and bridges and crowds and music and
theater captivated him.

     Although his father never forgot his wife or loved her less than when
she lived, he was not a man of morbid temperament, and when he met Rosa
deVale, a beautiful widow, with two children, a girl a year older and a boy
a year younger than his son, after a happy courtship, he married her and
brought her and her children into his large house that had creaked under
the weight of emptiness long enough.

     Oliver, for that was the boy's name, had not felt the house to be
lonely, but he sensed that a life that was ample for himself was not enough
of a life for his father. He welcomed his stepmother and his stepsister and
-brother with gladsome spirit. His stepmother seemed to dote on him, and he
accepted her embraces and kisses with grace and returned them with modesty.
To his stepsister and –brother he introduced the secret of the surrounding
woods and shared with them the revelations of the city, and though they
ventured with him where he took them, never did he get the sense that they
surrendered themselves as he did to the excitement of the worlds he brought
to them. He showed them the best horses in the stable, but they disdained
to ride with him and teased him whenever he came back on Roan bouncing with
life after riding several hours through the countryside. As for the worlds
they brought to him, there were none. They seemed, it bothered him to think
it, lazy and petulant, and when not called upon by external stimulation,
reposeful to the point of lethargy.

     When he was sixteen, his father died, and within a week, everything
changed. No longer did Rosa deVale dote on him but rather addressed him
with contempt, and began to command him to perform tasks that he had
willingly done before. He acquiesced, not being of a rebellious
disposition, and excused her to himself by imagining that grief at her
husband's death had unbalanced her: Otherwise she would have felt what the
loss must be to him. But she did not, and he sought to please her by
obeying her and harbored the hope that that would pacify her anguish and
give her the wisdom to see him for who he was and love him.

     It was not, however, to be. The longer he sought to bring her relief,
the stronger he became her bondsman. And not only hers: the faults he had
discerned in her children, with the death of his father, and encouraged by
their mother's unconcealed disdain for him, became the overriding engines
of their behavior. They were indeed sloths, ill-tempered, violent,
insistent, and demanding.

     The winter came, and it was a cold one. Oliver became the fire boy,
for the farm hands had been dismissed by his step-mother as a matter of
economy and his siblings would not chop wood, nor would their mother ask it
of them. He left his straw bunk in the barn, where he slept now, at five
each morning, and made the fire in the kitchen hearth and kept it alive all
day. When the family rose, he made the fires in the stoves in each of their
rooms, and set water to heat for their baths. Each night, he tended the
embers and then retired to the barn with a lantern. There, he was often
visited in the dark by the midwife who had brought him into the world.

     "This will not last," she said, when he sat across from her, aching
with tiredness and smelling of his labor.

     "It will if I don't get out of here."

     "There is nowhere else for you to go," she said. "That will change
nothing. You carry your future within you. It does not lie outside. What
you must endure, you must endure."

     So he endured, and making it a little easier to endure were the
gallops he stole with Roan, his horse, through the forest many midnights
when all were asleep. Under bright moon or black sky, he and the horse knew
the forest well enough to need no light. Thus it was that his horse was
walking through a meadow lit only by moonlight late one May, that he saw
another nightrider approach.

     "Good evening, friend," said the rider, pulling near and reining in
his horse.

     "What besides the beauty of the night brings you to this meadow?"

     "You have spoken the truth. It is the beauty of the night, but also,
the consolation that this beauty gives to my spirit that is oppressed by
injustice."

     "Of what injustice do you speak?"

     "Because your voice is warm with winning courtesy, and your face, in
the moon light, appears gentle and true, as your form appears handsome and
graceful, I will tell you my story. Let us dismount and sit on those stones
that form natural places to sit beneath this great chestnut."

     "With pleasure," the stranger said, "although I fear there will be
more that gives pain than pleasure in what you will tell."

     "True," said Oliver, "except that even to relate a history of pain to
a sympathetic interlocutor transforms past pain into present pleasure.

     "My father was," Oliver began as the moon illuminated them, "land
surveyor and architect to the king. My name is Oliver, his only son, and an
orphan held in bondage now by a stepmother who beguiled my father in his
last years but upon his death betrayed every goodness she had deceptively
bestowed on him alive. And I am left alone without inheritance or heritage,
friendless but for the old midwife who presided at my birth and this horse,
once my father's gift to me, later taken away from me, now my secret
companion, with whom I share the stable and who was returned to my care --
to groom, not given to me to ride."

     "Like you," the stranger said, "I am a creature of the night. By day I
do not belong to myself, although, for me, it does not look like the
bondage that weighs you down. I am burdened by privilege. The consequence
of my privilege is that I owe to the kingdom over which my father rules –
my father is the king who cherished your father -- an image I do not
recognize or accept as myself."

     His eyes in the moonlight were luminous as he spoke and glittered like
diamonds. They fascinated Oliver, and although nothing by either of them
was directly spoken, each understood the question each was putting to the
other, and each said yes. They lay on the midnight meadow grass, the
moonlight hallowing their fancies, and each reached for the other's hand.
They clasped their hands together and felt the consent of desire. They
turned towards each other and kissed. It was the moment that without
knowing it, each had been waiting for, the moment that made sense of,
because it gave shape to, everything that had come before. Everything that
had seemed random and without purpose now became realigned, reconfigured,
and became prologue to this climax, which wasn't just a climax, but an
inception.

     They gazed into each other's eyes and kissed again, long, meaningful
kisses that announced the opening of a new heavens and the creation of a
new earth. The reaction of their bodies was a new testament to the fact of
this recreation. Hard together and trembling with the energy that stiffened
not only their penises but their very frames, and that stretched their
yearning for each other until it reached the breaking point and they fused,
when they shattered the pieces of each that flew every which way settled
again inside them newly organized and filling each one with a part of the
other, where the part of him that had gone into the other had been.



     The moon dipped and the stars appeared, until the advancing day made
them a memory. Oliver woke first and looked at Maxim and stroked his sandy
hair. The prince, under that touch, opened his eyes and smiled.

     "It is already morning," he said. "So often I long for night to
remain, but never more than now."

     "We can have every night for ourselves," said Oliver, "and live as we
must in the day, without sacrificing ourselves to the day."

     "Or even better," Maxim said, "devise a way to make the luminosity of
night overcome the opacity of day."



     Oliver went about his chores with a lighter heart but there was no
outer indication of this alteration. He had never shown sullenness, sloth,
or resentment at the abuse he endured. This benevolence of spirit, natural
to him, had been a terrible irritant to his tormentors, and it made them
more surly in their exploitations, for part of the motive of their
oppression of him did not involve the convenience of being served that it
brought to them, but a wish for the pleasure of seeing one of whom they
were jealous rage in impotence. That he did not, provoked in them rage.

     It was shortly after Oliver's first night spent with the prince in the
open meadow that Wilma and her brother Vladimir, after complaining to their
mother about Oliver's obstinacy and arrogance and indifference summoned him
one afternoon to the sitting room. Although the space of two years divided
them in age from each other, the siblings seemed in appearance and
disposition more like twins than older sister and younger brother. Both of
them had snub noses with quite openly visible nostrils, eyes set far apart,
a low and protuberant brow, and lips of an exceptional thinness. With
respect to their mousy brown hair they differed: hers was stubbornly
straight; his, curly and untamable. Although no one they knew found either
of them attractive, they held an allure for each other that was
reproachable, and what they were deprived of with regard to physical
affection from the rest of the world they secured from each other.

     Sliding her arm round Vladimir's waist when Oliver entered, as if in
defiance and to present a united front, Wilma began, "What do you do at
night?"

     Oliver looked at her shocked that he was being interrogated.

     "I go to sleep," she said. "Where do you go?"

     "How does that concern you?"

     She and her brother, as if of one mind and one body took several steps
closer until they actually were in his face. "Everything about you,
everything that you do concerns us," she said, taking him by the shoulders
as Vladimir banged the heavy bronze ashtray sitting on the table beside
them on his skull. Oliver staggered, and at that moment, when he fell to
the floor, the two of them locked his wrists behind him in a pair of
handcuffs. "Everything with regard to you," Wilma said, "as you will see
from now on, concerns us."



     There was no need to stand guard over Oliver. They shackled him to a
bolt attached to one of the timbers that held up the stable and left him.

      Roan watched, with big troubled eyes, as Wilma and Vladimir pushed
Oliver into the stable and threw him onto a straw pallet in the stall next
to his, and fastened the chain. When they left, the horse, leaning over the
low fence that separated the stalls, poked his face against Oliver's.
Oliver, his hands freed, but his legs shackled, stroked his cheek and tried
to calm him, but he was restive. Roan would not eat, but seemed to make a
vigil beside Oliver. At midnight, he began to nudge Oliver again.

     "I am a prisoner," Oliver said convinced that Roan understood exactly
what he said. And he did, for he lifted the cross bar that held the gate of
his stall closed, and quietly walked out of the barn and just as
noiselessly, at a walk, went to the edge of the farm. There he broke into a
gallop and arrived in the meadow, where Maxim was waiting, in almost full
darkness under a star-salted sky.



      The clatter of hooves, the glare of lanterns, and the sound of iron
striking iron woke Wilma and Vladimir in the bed they shared, and woke
their mother. They all rushed out into the night, fearing thieves, and were
met by half a dozen of the king's horsemen who surrounded them. The midwife
was there, too. She had been roused by an uncanny dream: Roan was swimming,
attempting to swim, in the moat around the king's castle, but faltering,
whinnying and braying. The noise woke her. She quickly dressed and when she
arrived at the stable, she found the prince and his horsemen there.

     Maxim was distraught. "Once I knew your situation, I should not have
let you go back. I thought I needed time to figure things out. But I did
not stop to think if there was time," he said. Lifting Oliver from the
straw, he led him out of the stable where Roan stood.

     "Can you ride?" he asked.

     Oliver mounted Roan, who stood waiting for him. The horse trembled
with pleasure as Maxim helped Oliver to mount him. At a trot, accompanied
by the six horsemen, they set off for the castle leaving Wilma, Vladimir,
and their defeated mother standing outside, cursing Oliver and their own
ill-fortune.

     "They will come in the morning and take the house from you. Pack now
what you wish to keep. They will be better than you and give you a cottage
where you may live in contentment or misery, as your own souls determine,"
said the old midwife who had presided at Oliver's birth, and vanished into
the forest where she easily made her way home without a lantern.

2

     Well-ordered kingdoms are all alike. Kingdoms in which the order has
collapsed are each out of order in their own way. At Maxim's father's
castle everything was turned upside down. The foreign secretary was not
sure if he would be travelling that day to a neighboring kingdom where he
had planned to converse with another foreign secretary about a boundary
dispute between the two kingdoms involving water rights. The major domo was
not sure what orders to give the domestic staff with regard to rooms in a
hardly-used wing of the castle that was to be aired and prepared to
accommodate a party of royal bureaucrats scheduled to arrive from the city,
and the equerry was unsure if the hunt for which he had readied a dozen
horses was to proceed or not.

     The king had not shown himself since the entire castle had been
aroused some time around three a.m., when the prince stormed in with a
troop of royal guards and commanded a meal right then for himself and a
companion, who, definitely, those who had seen him reported, was not of
royal lineage. Nor had the prince himself been seen, nor the
unaccounted-for companion, whose whereabouts in the castle remained a
mystery. Was he a guest or a prisoner? was the question most often asked.

     Oliver was definitively not a prisoner, and he was something more than
a guest. At the moment when speculation about his identity and his
whereabouts was rampant, he was recumbent in Maxim's arms.

     Not only had Oliver been locked in the stable by his tormentors, but
he had been denied food. The effects of hunger and the knockout blow that
he had sustained had dizzied, confused, and weakened him. It was more to be
attributed to Roan's intelligence that Oliver reached the castle safely
than to Oliver's equestrian skill. When Maxim saw his condition, he
realized that Oliver would be able to do nothing more than sit upon the
stallion's back, if that. He positioned him with his arms around Roan's
neck and his head leaning upon it as if it were a pillow, and trusted to
the horse. In like manner, when the meal was prepared, Maxim fed Oliver the
little that he could eat, and, with Oliver's arm round his neck, he walked
him to the chamber we now find him in asleep.

     He awoke in the midst of splendid tapestries, vaulted windows and
Maxim's hand caressing his brow and Maxim's eyes intent upon his as they
opened, awaiting just that. When Oliver smiled with recognition, Maxim's
every feature relaxed and his face bloomed with smiles. His lips touched
Oliver's and ripples of kisses ran over them.



     Although it was difficult to acknowledge, it was equally difficult to
ignore, the kingdom had fallen into a state of atrophy. The king, foolish
and filled with pride, in his youth, with the arrogance of belief that a
king was a master and not a servant, had wasted his strength and his
patrimony in promiscuousness, concupiscence, and debauchery. After each
quest in the realm of lust, he returned to his kingdom greatly dispirited
and further removed from his power. Unable to govern his lust, he became
unable to govern his realm. A mysterious wasting disease came upon him. The
energy of youth ill spent became the lethargy of depleted age. And the
blight that affected the king came to affect the kingdom. Now the fields
were feeble nourishers and crops were meager and scrawny. Trees that had
grown strong succumbed to boluses and bareness; leaves seared before they
became big green fans; flowers failed to blossom and no fruits followed.
The corn was dry and the wheat was wizened, like an old man's voice. The
rivers showed their muddy bottoms, and streams were dry gorges cutting
through eroding landscapes.

     Some said, particularly the old midwife who had presided over Oliver's
birth, that human corruption had diseased the earth. The blight in Nature
revealed that a sympathetic vibration connected the way people behaved and
the way the earth performed. The earth was responding to, was in discordant
harmony with, was influenced by destructive human agency. "There is magic
in human action," she declared. "A life that rots at the human core causes
the earth to rot. A life of love gives the world vitality." But her wisdom
was contemned. The king's lawyers said that her judgment with regard to how
the king had lived lacked respect and was perhaps treacherous. His
academicians mocked her pronouncements as primitive, At best she was
confusing literary tropes like the one at the start of Sophocles' *King
Oedipus* with hard reality. She held her ground with the stubborn
reiteration of the gnomic pronouncement, "I know what I know, and you will
come to know it, too. Life fades when love falters."



     The king received Maxim and Oliver without leaving his bedchamber,
shivering under down quilts. Age had brought illness but also the wisdom of
defeat. He blessed them and pronounced his abdication, conferring on Maxim
the duties of kingship, the burdens of which, rather than the privileges,
he now understood.

     After their departure, he fell into a heavy sleep and dreamed he had
been captured and confined naked and shivering in a dank stone cave, carved
into a mountain at a perilous height. The abutting ledge was jagged and
covered with ice. He pulled at the bars that fell like stalactites and
blocked the mouth of the cave, desperate to free himself.  The bars
loosened and broke; he lost his balance and fell upside down, head first,
through the sky, the earth threatening him with its deadly approach. Below
him, a spinning vortex, spiraling, was a muddy castle moat: in it
crocodiles swam. In terror he awoke. With an uncanny and preternatural
intelligence, an inherent intuition that rose unaccountably he knew that he
had encountered himself in his dream and he was afraid of himself. He cried
out in terror and when the guards pushed open his door, they found him dead.



Epilogue



"Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."


William Blake



     As much as there is death in life, so there is life in death. When
news of the king's death spread throughout the kingdom, there was no
rejoicing, for he was not a wicked man, nor an evil man, but there was a
great feeling of relief, the sense that a great gloom had been lifted and
that the kingdom would once more welcome the light of heaven, absorb it,
and thrive.

     "My father was a lonely man," Maxim said as he spoke in the grand
gallery in the castle, standing on a platform beside his father's coffin,
before a great assemblage of the realm's subjects. All who could come
journeyed there to bring the strength of their hope. It was more than a
lamentation over death they sought, but a cautious celebration of a
transitional moment, when the passage from one era to another occurs. They
brought the hope that out of a decayed moment one of renewed possibility
was emerging. They were filled with the spirit of metamorphosis. "He sought
himself," Maxim said in a voice hushed by sorrow, "in the regard of others,
but had little regard for what others might be other than mirrors he needed
to reflect himself. He was a powerful man. It was, unfortunately, a power
that came from him but was not his to bestow; it was the power that
diseases have to disturb the health of nature. I know that I am not
un-filial in saying this, that I am fulfilling the greatest obligation a
son has: to restore his father's humanity by recognizing his failings."

     He said nothing of what would be – for the future is a matter of acts,
not of words – but only of what had been.

     Afterwards, six courtiers carried the coffin outside and placed it on
a pyre. As the day gave way to night, they set the fire, and flames arose
from this incarnation of the past like hands in prayer. That night Oliver
and Maxim did not sleep but cantered to the meadow where they first had
met. Becoming one again in their embrace, they began the regeneration of
their land.