Chapter Ten: Beneath the Oak
He gave his life to the world. At the end, he gave the world to his children.
The hill was as he remembered it.
The oak was old — older, perhaps, than he was — and it spread its branches in all directions with the unhurried authority of a thing that has been in one place long enough to know it belongs there. The evening light came through the leaves in long golden shafts. The city was below, its lights beginning to appear as night came on.
They helped him to the base of the tree and he sat with his back against the bark and his sword across his knees.
He would not lie down. This he was firm about.
His retinue gathered around him — the generals and ministers and attendants who had traveled with him, people who had spent their careers in the orbit of his work and who now sat on the hillside with the expressions of those who understand they are present at something they will spend the rest of their lives describing.
The people of the city came too, as he had known they would. Word had spread the way word does in cities — quickly, through a hundred simultaneous channels — and they came up the hill in twos and fives and families, keeping a respectful distance but not leaving, filling the hillside with a quiet that was not quite silence, because fifty thousand people being still together is its own kind of sound.
His crown prince arrived, breathless, having ridden through the night when the news reached the capital. He was fifty years old now. He had come alone, without ceremony, just his horse and the road.
He sat beside his father without speaking.
Aurelion looked at him for a long moment.
"You will be a great emperor," he said.
"I have had the best teacher," his son said.
Aurelion almost smiled. "I was not always a good teacher. I was too impatient when you were young. I expected too much too quickly."
"You expected exactly enough," his son said quietly. "I needed what you gave me. Even the difficult parts. Especially the difficult parts."
They were quiet for a moment.
— ✦ —
The light was going. The stars were beginning to appear, one by one, in the deepening blue of the sky above.
Aurelion watched them come out.
He had always loved this — the moment when the stars appeared, when the sky's depth became visible, when the world that normally occupied all of one's attention became, by contrast with that depth, appropriately small.
He could feel the wound. He had been feeling it since the fight, a steady deep wrongness that he had placed aside and kept aside and would keep aside until he had no more need to keep things aside. He was not in fear. He was not in confusion. He was here, fully, in the way he had tried to be present for everything that mattered.
This mattered.
The people on the hillside had grown very quiet. Word had passed through the crowd — he is speaking, he will speak — and they had settled into themselves.
He looked at them. He looked at the thousands of faces turned toward him in the darkening light.
He spoke, and his voice was steady and clear, the same voice that had commanded armies and counseled scholars and told the world what he intended to do with it.
"My children."
A pause. Long enough that the words could settle.
"When I was born, my kingdom was small. The world was large and indifferent and full of borders. When I was young, I decided that the borders were not necessary. That the world did not have to be the way it had always been. I decided to test that. And here you are — the test, and its results."
Someone on the hillside was crying. Many people, perhaps.
"Everything I built, I built for you. The roads and the academies and the laws and the peace. I built it for you and for the people who will come after you, whose names I will never know. I built it so that you could go further than I could go. Because the horizon I aimed for was not this one."
He looked up. The stars were bright now, the sky fully dark, the Milky Way a faint river overhead.
"The sky, my children. That is the next horizon. Not tomorrow. Not in your generation, perhaps. But in the generations after, if you keep what I built and build on it, if you keep the academies full and the roads open and the questions asked — you will get there. I know it. I have staked my life on it, and this is my life."
He stopped.
The stars were so clear. He had never seen them so clear.
He thought, briefly, about the astronomer who had told him about the orbital mechanics — about the way the planets moved in their vast silent courses, pulled by forces that were only beginning to be understood. He thought about the children in the classroom in the mountains, clever, so clever, given a room and a teacher. He thought about his father, standing at the window above the snow-covered valley, saying: he will need to be strong.
I was strong, Father.
I hope it was enough.
"Conquer the heavens, my children. I have given you the earth. The sky is yours to take. Go. Build. Dream without limits. And remember who you came from — not me, but each other. You are one people now. Under one sky. Be worthy of it."
He closed his eyes.
His hand was still on the sword.
The stars moved overhead in their ancient, indifferent, magnificent courses.
On the hillside, fifty thousand people held their breath.
Aurelion Caelum, the First Emperor of the World, the Builder of Roads and Academies, the Conqueror of Earth and Dreamer of Skies — he who had been born in a small kingdom in a hard winter and had remade everything — sat beneath the oak with his sword across his knees and looked up at the stars he had given his life to reach.
And smiled.
And was still.
— ✦ —
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