He huddles, tense and shivering, in the center of the cage as the servants lift it from the cart. The cage is generous enough that he could kneel with his neck perfectly straight if he wished; instead, he makes himself as small as he can, a tight, furry ball, arms pressed hard to his ribs, sharp elbow-points in the hollows of his palms. He does not want to know where they are taking him; his eyes close. He pretends that he is in his nook.
The cage bumps a little with the servants’ uneven steps. Pedro’s heart bumps, too, each time he hears a gasp or exclamation from someone they pass. He focuses on the little wind that ruffles over his body through the cage bars.
And then, quite suddenly, the air changes, grows still and stagnant; and scented, too, like the air inside a church, as if the servants have carried him into a building, a closed-up place filled with the perfumes of the wealthy. The murmurs thicken around him. Pedro tightens his arms around himself, rocking slightly.
He is unprepared, when the servants set the cage down, for the cacophonous swelling of murmured voices to suddenly cease. There is a faint rustling, like fabric or tree leaves, from all sides; and then a single voice directly beside Pedro, speaking in the language of the pirates but gently, and in a tone of wonder. Almost against his will, Pedro opens his eyes, one after the other, to find himself eye to eye with a man crouched on the other side of the bars.
The man has a narrow face, and a beard that makes his chin look very pointed. His eyebrows tip up in the center; his eyelids droop down. There is a gold hoop in his ear, from which a pearl dangles. When Pedro looks at him, he makes a sound of delight and, gesturing excitedly, turns to say something to the man standing beside him.
It is the blue-eyed man who bought Pedro at the market, who does not look at Pedro at all, though Pedro reaches out, folding his fingers around the bars of his cage, peering up between them. All around are other people, men and women both, richly dressed in cloth of red and black and blue and gold, whispering to each other behind their hands. The whispers echo, for the ceiling of the room is very tall, and all their staring eyes fix upon Pedro. His blood surges high and fast as a wave dashing itself against a cliff; the muscles of his legs bunch, as if they would spring. He breathes through his mouth like a winded dog.
The bearded man stands from his crouch, and he and the man who bought Pedro speak together over the cage for several minutes, their tongues whirring. Pedro’s fingers clench on the cage bars; his ears ache for something he can understand.
Then the man who brought Pedro here bows low before the bearded man. And then he is leaving—Pedro swings around to watch as he walks briskly down the long length of the room, the two big servants falling in behind him—a call sticks in Pedro’s throat, choking him. But the blue-eyed man, who fed Pedro meat from his own knife and combed his hair as gently as Isabel once did, is gone.
Pedro has only a moment to stare after him before he is surrounded by all the people who whispered at the edges of the room before. They bend down, pushing their faces close to the cage; their mouths spill forth still more words that Pedro cannot understand; their fingers, heavy with rings, reach curiously through the cage bars. Pedro shrinks back, pulling all his limbs in tight; his head moves in little frantic shakes. “No,” he says, a breeze of a word, and, “Please—I want to go home—”
One of the women hears and exclaims, pointing. Pedro pushes himself as far away from them as he can, the cage bars hard against his spine.
They put him inside a windowless chamber, filled with odds and ends—trunks and tapestries, heavy carved chairs and silver platters, their stacked forms casting bulging shadows across the walls. The cage is set down with a jarring thump. Pedro sits very still but for his chest and shoulders, which rise and fall with his rapid breaths. The servants who bore him into the room bend to get a better look at him, but he does not look up until they leave, the door clunking into place behind them with terrible solidity.
He is still naked, and a little cold, when the storeroom door opens abruptly sometime the following day. His stomach aches, with hunger and fear both. He dreamed last night of goat’s milk, hot from the teat.
The man who enters looks wary. He opens the cage with a key, looking as if he would like to leap back as Pedro, after a moment’s hesitation, half-crawls from within, standing slowly. Muttering something Pedro cannot understand, the man slips a rope around his wrists, pulling it tight, tugging so Pedro follows as he leads him from the storeroom and into a maze of corridors. His shoes are loud upon the floors, Pedro’s bare feet softly slapping. Pedro keeps his eyes on his toes against the tiles, his back rounding against the stares of the few people they pass.
There are men with swords at the door where they finally stop. The man with Pedro fiddles with his end of the rope. When he knotted it earlier around Pedro’s wrists, his fingers grazed the back of Pedro’s hand, and he hastily wiped them on his own hose. Pedro stares now at those fingers, long and white as bones. There is a buzzing inside his ears. He wills himself invisible.
The door opens, and the rope is tugged, and Pedro stumbles forward, his wristbones creaking, his back absorbing the whispers from the guards like thwacks. Voices speak, but Pedro cannot hear them; the buzzing rises, bees swarming. His head whirls upon his neck, as if he stole too many sips of wine.
And then one voice cuts through the rest—raised only slightly, but for some reason, everyone else in the room goes silent. Two feet in soft round shoes appear before Pedro, and he looks up, bound hands awkward over his nakedness.
The bearded man from the day before looks down at him. Like yesterday, he wears a pearl in one ear and shows no sign of fear at Pedro’s nearness, only a look of wonder. As if Pedro is a saint, or something from a story the man remembers from childhood.
“I am told you can speak,” he says, in Spanish that is perfect, almost without accent. Pedro feels an echoing expression of wonder come over his own face. “Is this true?”
“Yes,” Pedro says. He has to force the word over his very dry tongue. At the sound, the man’s eyebrows jump like delighted children, and his face, so long and solemn, suddenly transforms itself with a grin, his eyes rumpling at the corners.
“Well, now,” he says. “Not such a savage, then, as I was told, if you can speak a Christian tongue. I swore I’d never again speak the language of my captors, but here we are.”
But then something in his expression slackens. “You truly are just a child,” he says. “I didn’t realize—” He speaks over his shoulder to a group of men Pedro had not noticed, who huddle together, looking like goats in a storm despite their fine clothes. When he turns back to Pedro, he crouches so that their faces are level.
“A child,” he says again, and the wonder is back in his voice, along with something else, something that makes Pedro think of Manuel’s voice when he talks about the building of churches. Pedro is silent, fingers knotting. His joints ache, every one, from holding them tight and ready. The man continues to look at him, then says, “I was told you would have been a king in your own country, once upon a time. That your father was a great Guanche king, slain in the last battle with the Spanish. Tell me—from one king to another—are all your people so hairy as you?”
Bewildered, Pedro’s eyes flick from the man’s face, with its long, straight nose and neat beard, to his clothing. His hat, Pedro sees now, is sewn all over with pearls to match the one in his ear. Around his neck hangs a heavy chain, from which the largest pearl Pedro has ever seen dangles below a thick golden cross.
From one king to another. Nonsense words. Crazy words. Pedro opens his mouth to ask a question, then closes it again. The blue-eyed man who brought him here never answered any questions Pedro asked; surely questions would only anger this man, who says he is a king.
“N-no,” Pedro says at last, stutter-tongued. For a moment, he is back on the beach, pirate hands clasped tight over his struggling limbs and seawater splashing. This man does not look like a pirate, but there is something in his face that matches the something in his voice, an eagerness at the thought of an entire island of hairy people. A king, or even a man rich enough to dress all over in pearls, could command ships to steal people. Pedro flounders up out of the wet, wrenches away from the hard fingers.
“No,” he says again, and then stops, flustered. How is one meant to address a king? Or a madman? But the man just watches him, apparently unconcerned by Pedro’s confusion. So Pedro tries again. “They are not—we are not—” He shakes his head. “I am the only one like me.”
In his head, he hears Isabel’s voice, warm and wry and very far away: You are very special. His throat catches, as if around a small spiny shell; under all the unblinking stares in the room, he does not feel special, only very naked.
The huddled goat-men come forward when the king beckons them. They are tense and narrow eyed, their hands going to their knife hilts. One, braver or more impatient than the rest, stretches out a hand, ink settled into the vertical cracks and ridges of his fingernails, and touches the long hair that falls from Pedro’s cheek. Pedro stands very still; and then they all come forward, their fear of him withering when he does not feed it. They touch him, every one of them, and point to bits of his body, murmuring together, nodding. They examine his ears and nose and navel; they spread his fingers and toes and turn over his hands and feet one after the other to peer at his palms and soles. One of them puts his big, porous nose just behind Pedro’s ear and sniffs. The king-man watches, one half of his mouth curled up.
“Have you a name?” he says as one of the men nudges Pedro to turn around so that he can examine his back and buttocks.
“Pedro,” Pedro says in a whisper.
The man cocks his head, smiling again with all his long white teeth. “Only Pedro? A prince must have more name than that.”
Pedro has no family name; if Isabel knew it, she never told him what it was. Certainly, he is not a prince. Bare and shivering, he almost says so.
But he looks at the man, who stands very kingly, feet apart and elbows wide, as if to proclaim his right to more space than other men. If the man is mad, he seems to fully believe his own madness. How wonderful, to be able to turn king just by saying so.
But kings have family names. Dynasties. Pedro licks his lips, which are dry and flaking.
The man shifts his weight from one foot to the other. His eyes dull, just slightly, with impatience.
“Gonzales.” Pedro forces the name out. Isabel’s name, and Manuel’s, too. He used to pluck finished beads from Isabel’s workbasket, rolling them between his fingers; this feels somehow similar. “I am Pedro Gonzales.”
“Pedro Gonzales,” the king-man repeats, and then says it again, this time accompanied by other words in his own language, to the other men surrounding Pedro. They take up the name among them like congregants mumbling Latin prayers. His new name sounds handsome and proud, rolling off so many tongues. Pedro Gonzales.
He hopes, clench-fingered and aching, that—as with the beads—Isabel would not mind the borrowing.
The days from that point flow in and out like waves over the beach. The king takes great care of him—assigns him a chamber, all his own; and a gouverneur, a keeper just as his own children have, and the animals in the menagerie, too, someone to ensure their needs are seen to. His gouverneur, Monsieur de la Vacherie, speaks Spanish, though not so well as King Henri, and with the coins allotted from the king’s coffers he buys Pedro clothing, toys. A fine jointed horse, a top that spins madly with the flick of his wrist. He is brusque, but kind enough, with a distant sort of kindness, though Pedro wonders whether the kindness is his own inclination, or if it is the king himself who requires it of him, the king who is so delighted by his wondrous hairy boy. The clothing Vacherie orders made for him is tailored to fit Pedro exactly; accustomed to wearing Manuel’s old things, Pedro cannot stop marveling at a sleeve that stops just at his wrist, or a doublet fitted, glove-like, to his chest and belly. There is room for his toes to wiggle inside the soft shoes, but they are not so big that the heels flap.
The courtiers will want to see your teeth, Vacherie warns him. They will want to touch your hair. Follow His Majesty’s lead in this; he is fond of children, and fond of dogs, so I imagine he will be doubly fond of you, should you behave well.
And fond he is. A stool is brought up beside the king’s own chair. Pedro perches there, back straight and hands on his knees, mouth closed and gaze unfocused against all the covetous eyes of the court. Embarrassment, anger, fear, wonder all wash over him, again and again, turning him prickling-hot and shivery-cold in waves as the king shows him off to dignitaries; lets his mistress tie ribbons in Pedro’s hair.
“You are the most interesting gift I have been given for my coronation,” the king says, leaning close and whispering to Pedro, as if imparting a great secret. “Better even than the leopard.” He grins, sets a warm hand on Pedro’s shoulder. “It is very beautiful and very fierce; but it cannot speak.”
Pedro can speak, though he is no longer supposed to speak his own language, but the language of his new country. Since he cannot, he says little. But His Majesty is patient; he points to objects around the room—a cup; a table; a sword—and names them in French. When Pedro repeats each word, the king applauds, as if for a tumbler’s extraordinary feat.
When his formal education begins, his keeper securing a tutor for him at King Henri’s command, the man shakes his head when he sees Pedro; says that at ten years old he is too old to begin such rigorous study as His Majesty demands.
A little savage, learn? he says, distaste wrinkling his fishhook nose. The other children are so far ahead of you they are but specks upon the horizon.
But Pedro does learn; to please the king, whose rare smiles are as warming as fire, he learns and learns—first to speak French properly, then to read it in his hornbook, and to write, the letters small and looping and even. Then Latin, the language of the church, and Greek, and Italian. Manners; swordplay.
The more he studies, the less time he has, he finds, to think. To remember. To feel again the splash of salt water, the bruising grip of hands, the lock of the cage. His mind, he finds, is a depthless well; he can fill and fill it, and still there is room for more. The king’s mistress, said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, likes to sit him by her side at feasts, that he might stand upon the bench at her request and declaim in Latin for the amusement of the entire court.
What a marvelous little beast he is. Such tricks he can perform!
Often, he imagines himself as one of the sea’s empty shells; like a shell, he lets the waves bear him forward and back, day into night, again and again. And, like a shell, he is sometimes plucked up, turned over, wiped clean of grit, burnished. Admired; or discarded.
One day, he sits at the king’s feet, on a little stool kept there for that purpose. His Majesty has been away, gone to the palace he keeps for his beautiful mistress, and Pedro has been left behind with the queen, who sometimes feeds him from her hand as if he is one of her dogs.
But King Henri is back now, returned for the birth of his newest child, Louis; and he is asking Pedro what he has been studying, his half-smile as he listens, nodding along, making Pedro’s chest thrum with pleasure. It is February, the windowpanes frosted at their edges, the palace so cold that Pedro’s breath goes before him like smoke. He hates the cold, finds himself wishing that his hair were a true and proper pelt; but there is a different sort of warmth in having the king back again.
“You have been diligent,” His Majesty says.
“A noble beast, indeed,” says the man directly beside the king. Older, with a white fluff of beard, he is someone the king looks to often whenever someone comes to him with a question; rarely does His Majesty seem to doubt this man’s judgment.
But he does now, his lips suddenly frowning. “He is a man,” he says, and the white-haired man bows his head in acquiescence and apology. “Or he will be, when he is grown. A wild man, now so tamed that he can speak in the language of scholars and the church.” His smile returns when he looks back at Pedro.
“Petrus Gonsalvus,” he says, casually returning Pedro’s chosen surname to him in God’s chosen language.