The Eyes of a King Read Free Page B

being real.”
    As we walked on I watched him carefully, still startled thathe could remember these things. “Why?” I said. “Why does it make sense?”
    He thought for a moment. “The prince was sent there, for one thing. And the prince was real.”
    “Most people think that the prince was killed,” I told him.
    “I don’t.”
    I smiled at his certainty. “Is that all?”
    “No,” he said. “The poem that Grandmother’s brother wrote said the prince would go there, not die.”
    “The prophecy written by the great Aldebaran.” Aldebaran was our great-uncle, but we kept quiet about it. Harold North as our father was enough. “No one pays attention to those old prophecies these days,” I told him.
    “They should,” he said. “It isn’t old—it’s sixteen years. Besides, they are usually right.”
    “Perhaps. What do you know of prophecies?”
    “Not a lot. But all the real ones that I have heard of have come true. If the great ones who make them can actually see into the future, then they must be true.”
    “Well, perhaps this was not a real one.”
    “It was a real one,” he said. “That means England is real.”
    “All right then,” I said. “It may be that England is real.” But I did not really believe it, now that I said it out loud.
    “Speaking of the prophecy …,” he began.
    “What?”
    “I wanted to ask you—but …” We were nearing the school gates, and we always reduced our talk to harmless chatter when we got to this point in the road. It was understood, though we never said it—this point opposite the newspaper stand, on the corner of Paradise Way. “Later,” he said.
    There was no queue, so I bought a newspaper. “What’s the headline?” Stirling asked.
    “ ‘Deadlock.’”
    “What’s that?”
    “When a situation is going nowhere.”
    “The war, then. What does the rest say?”
    “Too much to tell you now,” I said.
    “Will you read it to me when we get home?”
    “All right.” I folded it and put it into my pocket. “You know, you need to learn to read. You’re eight years old.”
    “I can read, almost. Anyway, you can get clever without reading.”
    “I know. You think a lot.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Mostly in class. And in church. Do you think that is bad?”
    “No,” I said. “Grandmother might, though.”
    Our grandmother took Stirling to Mass with her every day. His First Communion would be in July—July the twenty-first; the date was already set. I had never made my First Communion, and now that I was fifteen, Grandmother had given up suggesting it. And I refused to go to church except on Sundays. I think that it had as much to do with hating to be told what to do as with not being especially religious, though both were true.
    “Yes.” He laughed. “Grandmother might. Would God think that it was bad?”
    “I doubt he even notices.”
    “He does. He notices everything. The sparrows and everything. So he’d notice for sure if people didn’t listen in church sometimes. If it was bad.”
    “All right, all right,” I told him. “Don’t preach. And you know I don’t like to be asked these religious questions.”
    “Why not? I’m only asking what you think.”
    “Stirling, leave it.”
    “Sorry.”
    He said it so humbly that I went on, more gently, “I’m sure he doesn’t think it’s bad. Anyway, I am the one going to hell, because I
never
listen in church.” He laughed. “Come on,” I said. “We’re late.”
    The last boys were stumbling past us through the gate and rushing through the slushy snow in the yard to line up. Sergeant Markey, Stirling’s teacher and the worst in the school, was surveying them with his usual expression, which was hard to identify as any emotion. It changed to contempt when he saw Stirling and me. He hated us and made no secret of it.
    I glared back and gave Stirling the look I gave him every morning—a look of patient endurance, like a criminal resigned to his execution—and we turned to