Fourteen

He wrote it on the back of a permission slip.

He had nothing else. The green exercise book was in his bag, and his bag was on the fourth floor of the hotel, behind a fireman and a length of yellow tape. He had the clothes he was standing in, with the dust in them, and Theo’s phone, which did not work, and two strips of tape over his left eye.

At a quarter to nine, on the end of his cot, he asked Señora Ruiz for a piece of paper.

She opened the folder and went through it, past the medical forms and the telephone numbers that did not work, to the spares at the back, and took out a blank permission slip. SOPHOMORE CLASS TRIP: LOS ANGELES, MAY 29 TO JUNE 5, and a line at the bottom for the signature of a parent or guardian.

“It’s all I have,” she said. “It’s got writing on the front.”

“It’s perfect,” said Frederick, and turned it over, and borrowed her pen.

---

He wrote it four times and crossed it out three. Short, his father had said in November. He thought about the woman from the Governor’s office on the chair in the gym saying this was the first thing on the list, and left it out. It was not his to put in.

When he had finished it was five sentences and a name.

At nine Castellanos crouched by the end of the cot.

“Sir. The Prime Minister’s private office would like a moment, and then the Prime Minister, and then, if you’ll take it, a call the Compact’s secretariat has put together.” He paused. “All the realms, sir. All thirteen, on one line.”

“All of them?”

“Brunswick to Raj. And Her Majesty after, at ten to ten. She asked for ten to ten.” He stood up. “The principal has lent you her office. There’s a door that shuts.”

---

The principal of Franklin Middle School was a small woman with a grey plait and an orange vest over a cardigan. She was waiting at the door of her office with a camping lantern, and she held it up and looked at him, and he watched her face do what the nurse’s had done on the stairs.

“It’s a mess. Everything came off the shelves. I’ve put the chair back up.” She held out the lantern. “There’s no power down here. There’s water on the desk.” She looked at him a moment longer. “I have a son your age. He’s in Phoenix with his father. I spoke to him at seven, on the telephones.” She put the lantern into his hand. “Take as long as you need, honey.”

Castellanos stood outside with his back to the door and pulled it shut.

Books all over the floor. A filing cabinet on its side. A framed photograph of children on a playing field, face down on the carpet in its broken glass. He did not sit behind the desk. He sat in the plastic chair in front of it, the kind you sit on to be told things, and put the lantern on the desk, and held the satellite telephone in his lap.

It rang at four minutes past nine.

---

“Your Majesty, this is Helen Achterberg in the Prime Minister’s private office. I’m so glad you’re safe, sir. The Prime Minister has about five minutes between the Cabinet and the House, which is sitting late. At a quarter past, the heads of government of the other realms will speak to you in turn, two minutes each.” A pause. “They’re in order of size, sir, smallest first. It’s the Commonwealth’s custom, and the only order nobody could argue with. So it’s Brunswick first, and Raj last but one, and the Prime Minister last, as host.”

“That’s fine.”

“I’m putting him through.”

A click, and the long hiss, like the sea.

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock.

---

He talked for four minutes, item by item, without a folder. The Navy from San Diego, three ships off Ventura since four and a fourth coming. The Army from Fort Irwin and from the March, on whatever roads were there. The Air Force into Riverside Field, the one airfield in the basin that was open. The Supplementary Estimate laid at six, every party agreed. The House sitting late so that members from California could speak. The member for Ventura had spoken for nine minutes.

“I won’t tell you what she said, sir. You’ll read it. Everybody will.”

Telephones working in eleven shelters in the western basin, thirty by morning. The Governor had sent the first of them to Franklin.

“She didn’t say why. She didn’t need to.”

And there was no figure.

“Nobody knows yet, sir. I’ll give you the first figure anybody signs, and not before.”

“Thank you.”

“The Household tells me you’ve written something. Rosalind Aird is on the line from the palace. She’ll take it down and it’ll go out at ten, your time, as you wrote it. If you want it to go.”

He held the permission slip to the lantern, and read it.

This morning I was on the pier at Santa Monica with my class when the ground moved, and I watched the sea go out and come back. I am safe, and so are the people I came with, because strangers carried each other up a staircase and nobody pushed. Ventura and Oxnard and the coast have been hurt very badly, worse than here, and the whole Realm is coming. I am going to stay with my class until we can all go home together. Thank you to everyone who is carrying somebody tonight.

George R.

The hiss.

“Got it, sir,” said Rosalind Aird, very small and far away. “Every word. Ten o’clock.”

“Thank you, Rosalind.”

“Sir,” said Lord Whitlock. “Nobody pushed.”

“They didn’t. I was in the middle of it. A man shouted once and a woman told him we were all going up together and he stopped.”

“I believe you, sir. I’m going to go back into the House and read that sentence to it, if you’ll let me. Before the vote.”

“Yes.”

“The realms are waiting. I’ll come back on at the end.”

---

A click, and a wider silence, as though a great many lines had opened into a very large room.

“Your Majesty, this is the Secretary-General of the Compact, in London. I have the heads of government of the thirteen realms on this line. Each has asked me to say first that they speak to you as their King, in their own capacity, and that none of them can advise you in the affairs of any realm but their own, least of all America’s, and none of them is going to try. It is not advice, sir. It is help.”

“Thank you.”

“The Minister-President of Brunswick.”

---

A woman, in German and then English, very quick and very formal, a little frightened. Brunswick was a small duchy and had very little, and what it had was his: two fire-and-rescue teams on an aircraft from Hanover at six, Brunswick time. She was sorry it was only two.

“Danke, Frau Ministerpräsidentin. Zwei sind sehr viel.”

She laughed, once, surprised, in Brunswick, where it was seven in the morning and already light.

Normandy. A man, in slow French so that he would understand. The Norman forest fire service, who knew about fires in dry hills, forty of them, and the aircraft to carry them, which the Emperor had already said France would let go.

Ireland. A woman, warm, with a sentence in Irish she did not translate. Money from the Dáil in the morning, and doctors, and something about a coast the sea came over.

New Wessex. A voice like a farmer’s, slow and flat. An urban search-and-rescue team, eighty of them, who had done this after their own earthquake and were already at the airport.

Hanover. One square sentence. The team who had come in November would come again. They had asked to be the same people.

He said thank you to that one twice.

Malaya. A woman, very quiet. Malaya could send only what could be flown, and would fly it, and at Friday prayers in the mosques of Kuala Lumpur tomorrow the prayers would be for Los Angeles. That was not a thing she could promise as a minister. She was promising it anyway.

The River Plate. A man, in fast Spanish, slower when Frederick answered him in Spanish. Two Navy ships from Buenos Aires that would take a long time and would come anyway. Then: Majestad, my grandmother was in Valdivia in 1960, as a little girl, and the sea came in, and she told me the thing she remembered was the people who carried her. He said nothing else.

The West Indies Federation. Teresa Villanueva, warm and quick and fierce. In October the Windward Islands had had their hurricane and the Realm had come, and the Federation did not forget. It had two hundred people in its disaster reserve with nothing to do this week, and they were going to California. Don’t try to stop them, Your Majesty. I have been chairing the Commonwealth for a year. I know how to win an argument with a King. He laughed, in the lantern light, and so did she.

New Albion. Eight water bombers flying south at first light for the fires above Malibu and Ventura, and a field hospital already in the air.

South Africa. A voice like a bell, with a sentence in Zulu and one in Afrikaans. Surgeons who knew what to do when there were more people than beds. And he had been told the King had stayed with his class, and South Africa was proud, which was not a thing a head of government should say to his King, and he was saying it.

The Philippines. A woman, in English and then Filipino. The same ocean had come into her country many times. A Navy hospital ship had sailed from Manila at noon and would be off Ventura in nine days. She knew nine days was too long. The water comes back on the ninth day, she said. And the trains.

Mr Paredes in his yard in Pomona. The six-oh-two. He could not answer her for a moment, and she waited.

Great Britain. Alistair Rennie, dry and low. A frigate off Hawaii, turned round at four, off the coast by Sunday. A team from London. Money. Then, more quietly, not for the record: the British Cabinet had stood up at the table that morning when they were told the King was alive. He had never seen it do that.

Raj. A man, very formal, very slow, down a line with an echo in it. The Empire had its own floods and cyclones and earthquakes, and knew what to send because it had needed it so often. An army medical unit. A thousand tents. Your Majesty, the House and the Senate in Delhi could not agree on anything today. They agreed on this, unanimously. It is the first thing they have agreed on unanimously since March. A long pause, from Delhi, where it was half past ten in the morning. You did that, sir. Without meaning to.

“And the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of America.”

Lord Whitlock, from a corridor, footsteps and doors round him.

“I read it to the House, sir. Nobody pushed. They stood up.”

The whole line went quiet, Brunswick to Delhi, for perhaps three seconds. Then Thank you, Your Majesty. Goodnight, and the lines closed one by one, click, click, click, and he was alone with the lantern and the photograph face down on the carpet.

A quarter to ten.

---

He had learned them at nine, in the library at Government House, with the Charter open between the brass lions: eleven kingdoms and two duchies and one empire, in order, with their styles and the dates they came to the Crown. A list.

A woman in Brunswick who had not expected to go first. A man whose grandmother had been carried at Valdivia. A Senate in Delhi. None of them could tell him anything, and all of them had rung.

---

The telephone rang at ten to ten.

He picked it up and heard the line open, and the hiss, and under it, very close, at ten to one in the morning in the study at Columbia Palace, his mother breathing.

“Frederick,” she said, in Swedish.

“Mamma.”

Was he hurt? A cut; a nurse had taped it. Which eye? He told her, and she was quiet. Had he eaten? A sandwich, at seven. That was not enough, she said, and he said a cook from Pomona would agree with her, and she laughed, the short surprised one.

She had been at the hospital at four, his father’s four, in his place, and had read his father the trains from Richmond, badly, because she did not know how to do it the way Frederick did. His father had listened with his eyes shut, and at the end he had said a word, and the word was Frederick. She had not been able to read him any more after that, and had sat with him instead.

He could not answer that.

In the last half minute, with Castellanos shifting outside the door, she said one more thing. One sentence, in Swedish, quietly. It was not about the earthquake or the class or the realms. It was about him. She did not wait for an answer.

“God natt, älskling.”

The line closed.

He sat in the plastic chair with the telephone in his lap, and kept the sentence.

---

At ten the lights in the gym went out, all but the one over the doors.

He gave the lantern back to the principal, who was on a folding chair outside the gym with her eyes shut, and opened them, and took it. He found his way along the end of the rows to the wall by the stage, past Castellanos on the floor with his back to the wall, and lay down on his cot in his clothes, under the scoreboard, between Theo and Marcus.

Theo was on his back with his eyes open, looking at the girders and the dark heaters and the banners that said FRANKLIN.

“Was it your mum?”

“Yes.”

“Is she okay?”

“Yes.”

A while.

“Priya’s got a radio. The woman with the baby lent it to her. They read out the thing you wrote, at ten, on the ABC.” Theo did not turn his head. “The bit about the stairs.”

Frederick lay still.

“Marcus cried. He says he didn’t. He did.” A pause. “So did I.”

Along the row a small radio murmured, a tired man’s voice reading something out. He could not hear the words. He listened to it not quite saying them, and to Theo breathing, and to the generator in the car park, and to two hundred people in the dark trying to sleep, and he was asleep before the man had finished.