The voices subsided a bit as Julian led me in and seated me.
I sat there until the trumpet notes, to which I was forced to rise.
I heard the toast called out:
“To Eric the First, King of Amber! Long live the king!”
I didn’t drink to that, but no one seemed to notice. It was Caine’s voice that had called out the toast, from far up along the table.
I ate as much as I could, because it was the best meal I had been offered since the coronation. I gathered from conversation overheard that today was the anniversary of Eric’s coronation, which meant I had spent an entire year in the dungeons.
No one spoke to me. and I didn’t make any overtures. I was present as a ghost only. To humiliate me, and to serve as a reminder to my brothers, no doubt, as to the price of defying our liege. And everyone had been ordered to forget me.
It went on well into the night. Someone kept me well provided with wine, which was something, and I sat there and listened to the music of all the dances.
The tables had been removed by this time, and I was seated off somewhere in a corner.
I got stinking drunk and was half dragged, half carried back to my cell in the morning, when the whole thing was over save for the cleaning up. My only regret was that I hadn’t gotten sick enough to dirty the floor or someone’s pretty garments.
Thus ended the first year of darkness.
9
I shall not bore you with repetition. My second year was pretty much like my first, with the same finale. Ditto for the third. Rein came twice that second year, with a basket of goodies and a mouthful of gossip. Both times I forbade him ever to come again. The third year he came down six times, every other month, and each time I forbade him anew and ate his food and heard what he had to say.
Something was wrong in Amber. Strange things walked through Shadow and presented themselves, with violence, to all and sundry. They were destroyed, of course. Eric was still trying to figure out how they had occurred. I did not mention my curse, though I later rejoiced in the fact that it had come to pass.
Random, like myself, was still a prisoner. His wife had joined him. The positions of my other brothers and sisters remained unchanged. This bolstered me through the third anniversary of the coronation, and it made me feel almost alive again.
Light-
Light! One day it was there, and it made me feel so good that I immediately broke out the final bottle of wine Rein had brought me and opened the last pack of cigarettes, which I had been saving.
I smoked them and sipped and enjoyed the feeling that I had somehow beaten Eric. If he found this out, I felt it might be fatal. But I knew he didn’t know.
So I rejoiced, smoking. drinking and reveling in the light of that which had occurred.
Yes, the light.
I’d discovered a tiny patch of brightness, off somewhere to my right.
Well, let’s take it like this: I had awakened in a hospital bed and learned that I had recovered all too soon. Dig?
I heal faster than others who have been broken. All the lords and ladies of Amber have something of this capacity.
I’d lived through the Plague, I’d lived through the march on Moscow.
I regenerate faster and better than anybody I’ve ever known.
Napoleon had once made a remark about it. So had General MacArthur.
With nerve tissue it takes me a bit longer, that’s all.
My sight was returning to me, that’s what it meant—that lovely patch of brightness, off somewhere to my right.
After a time, I knew that it was the little barren area in the door to my cell.
I had grown new eyes, my fingers told me. It had taken me over three years, but I had done it. It was the million-to-one thing I spoke of earlier, the thing which even Eric could not properly assess, because of the variances of powers among the individual members of the family. I had beaten him to this extent: I had learned that I could grow new eyeballs. I had always known that I could regenerate nerve tissues, given sufficient time. I had been left paraplegic from a spine injury received during the Franco-Prussian wars. After two years, it had gone away. I had had my hope—a wild one, I’ll admit—that I could do what I had done then, with my burned-out orbs. And I had been right. They felt intact, and the sight was returning, slowly.