He has a coin in his collection that he’s especially fond of. It hails from a place forgotten where such things were rough and ready, a little blob of metal smashed into shape with a fierce hand. Ancient coins adorned with symbols of the towns where they were made. An owl at Athens, Pegasus at Corinth.
This one shows a wolf in full profile and has signs on it in a language I’ve never identified. He esteems it above even the appurtenances of his ducal authority.
He speaks about it professorially; although pride of ownership taints his lecture. He claims that the writing identifies it as specie struck in a mint older than any in Europe’s long memory.
He changes the subject, and my attention has drifted from the coin to other articles on display in his study. As a child, I was never permitted entrance. Cases of deeply oiled wood and smoky glass, wherein offerings from a hundred dig sites are entombed. Mute landscapes in oil so overburdened by chiaroscuro that they can only imply their subject. Endless rows of books whose bindings I find more interesting than their contents.
The Duke himself could be from a time before the Bible was invented. His speechifying lulls me. My mind picks up the coin and sees it pass from hand to hand until it is lost in some bygone place. Meant to pay a soldier’s wage, it fell by the way when a pickpocket fumbled his pull. What happens when a petty tyrant fails to pay the man he bought, when the man he bought is a killer?
“You’ve enjoyed your rights, now you must do your duty.” His verdict recalls me at once.
I came to the Duke when a child, after my parents were killed on a highway. I had always thought of him as a distant relation but felt no less an orphan. Ours has been a transactional relationship.
“Just so, I have completed my duty—to your dear parents—and will now have my rights.” His words cold and dry, winter’s bite.
I imagine him lying beneath me, a heap of broken twigs, my hands reach down to compass his neck so that I might strangle him at last. But even my fancy was not mine. I found no neck to lay hold of, but beneath my hands only endless waves of blooming fur.