1846

After she discovered the human world Ariel had lay and fantasised over at the Nerissa Ravine; she had wondered, "There's no way all this unfilled land couldn't be somewhere," and when she couldn't stay still any longer she swam up to the shore by the camphor farm and looked for a way to ascend further inland. A guest and a chubby master chatted dimly under the shade of a gazebo: a conversation about commerce and horses, both things foreign to her. A blue jay on the beach had become purple in the amber light of evening, and she could hear guitars playing from where the fishermen napped. There was no reason to believe anyone had spot her yet.

Of course, Ariel said to herself, what she was trying to see she could have found out from Sebastian instead, and he wouldn't have minded – but he often embellished his stories and there was no way of telling which of her questions reached her father's ear. She found a canal opening into the sea and turned to go inside when she noticed a barn mate standing on the edge change his stance. His head faced stiffly away, a rake angled in his hands, he looked only intense, while struggling to uproot a weed intersected with the foot of a tree. But he too hadn't detected her, and she passed fearfully around his tussling shadow.

When she surfaced again, the toll of an abbey bell came across the sky. Below, in the mysterious silence of the plantations, the shadows were clean. But the still air inside the grove smelled overwhelmingly of camphor. A low–lying bud tempted Ariel to squeeze the oil upon her hair, but when she reached and looked past it, what she saw shocked her utterly, after ten years of life spent at the bottom of the world: that what rose highest in her vision was not the canopy but a towering mound of stone that seemed to wheel the entire sky across its summit. She was once informed that had been the highest mountain in the land, and indeed, Ariel believed that; and that there was where all the unearthed ground must've gone.

But seeing it so close, there was a doubt in her imagination of what lay atop: perhaps it was only snow, or perhaps a mystic altar to grant every wish. Perhaps that was where humans harvested thunder to power their 'fires', or perhaps it was a panorama of the whole world, and the thought made her shudder.

And suddenly she was overcome: the excitement had bubbled inside her for a few years now. If it had been the lattermost – and I'm sure it is! – then she was passionately certain that her great conviction was to reach it. She had no idea what she would see once at the top, nor what she wanted to see. She only knew that there lay there the point of light which had been provided for her alone and which would irradiate her boredom with the sea and everything else.

1873

All of a sudden she noticed her existence had begun to fall apart on her, that the veins had started to show in her ankles like the string of grey in the red of her hair. She still remembered the weight of youthfulness that had suffused into the empty bedroom during adolescent marriage, which evaporated now – to who knows where? – with no longer the two required personalities to hold it, as the final gesture of a declined life. She examined the room with the clairvoyance of the new day and was repeatedly reminded of the truth: the nightstand by the made bed whose clouded, patient mirror refused to reflect her single image, the granite washbasin with the razor and scent meant for masculine faces, the heartless stillness of the red sand hourglass on the desk that had dripped into the other end to time their sessions of scacchi, always at this hour, all until the day before. She looked at the board as they had left it, and saw the wanton symbolism – two enemy horsemen pinned her king and queen in the middle. If she sacrificed the queen to save the king, then the game would have went on, but the queen cannot go alone the other way around: and the totality of her situation once more fell onto her. The Calabrian King Eric d'Assisi Maria Leopoldo, former galley hand, patron of chess, and her husband of forever twenty–one years, had slipped from the torments of mortal existence the evening before draped in linen scented by camphor perfume.

Ariel found the fourth possession, a chequered naval blanket, beside the window that had been left open to clear the scent, and she looked down into the square. All the nobles had disembarked in their mourning clothes and lingered, and she knew she could not make them wait any longer. Somebody knocked on the door.

"Your Highness," a voice said.

"It won't be much more time." She didn't feel like turning her head to acknowledge – she could see the maid's apron reflected in the glass.

"Your Highness," the voice continued, "King Urbino has also come to attend the funeral."

Ariel was shocked. "How? Wasn't he far?"

The maid didn't know: she was only here to tell her.

"He wants to see you," she said.

"Don't they understand that we're grieving? All of them!" Ariel said. She clamped down on her thigh. "How urgent is it?"

The maid said she could stall him.

"No, you mustn't. I'll be done now."

"I'm sorry, ma'am," the maid relinquished, and stepped away from the door. There wasn't any point in delaying, so Ariel stood up and rustled her hair in the mirror – she wasn't going to be dignified for such a man. She glanced at the chessboard going out and wind had knocked the king over: a fleeting premonition that had already been conveyed.

Dignity was also why she refused courtesy from the king when she saw him. She had still been so exhausted from the night before that when she entered the silent marble anteroom she nearly lost sight of the main question – why would the unwell be required to walk to the well–wisher? She had met the Sardinian King Urbino several times before, always as he the one who visited them, and recalled him because he was always suspected by her husband, a 'cunning and senior' man. He had been a conqueror in his youth, and took many princely states of the north under his vivacious banner; now he was seventy–seven and crooked but ambition stayed in his remaining pupil like a bullet. When Ariel took his hand he gave way at once, sat on the shoe bench and crossed his cane over his knee, and spoke in a voice hoarsened irreversibly by a lifetime spent campaigning in the mercurial Alpine air.

He said, "Queen consort. I'm so sorry I asked you to come."

"You shouldn't be. But I can't talk for long."

"Oh, that's not a problem – I've unnerved your people too much already." His eye was on a lithograph map of the coast as though absorbed in the red centred in his nation of yellow. "I wanted to give my condolences about your husband. In person."

"Thank you. But how did you come?"

"I'd been invited recently to attend a banquet nearby in honour of a duke's jubilee."

"You were the one who had to go?"

"I chose to," King Urbino replied. "My regent rules well enough. He's busy and effective. The old must find someplace to fit in."

"You talk as if you're dying," Ariel said, looking past the king at a hovering servant. She signalled for coffee. But he raised his hand.

"For this throat – I'd prefer whiskey. But not now."

"You haven't told me why you have come," Ariel replied. "You know there's time to give condolences after the funeral. I am grateful, but…"

"A wake conducted the next morning. The burial that same afternoon."

"If you're telling me it's too soon, I won't hear it."

"No. The young must live life vigorously." The king frowned, tenuously and softly. "It is simply: it was in a similar situation to this that I became king of my country."

The servant brought coffee regardless. The king lifted the cup to his nose, letting the steam rise into his skin. Ariel said with caution and fatigue, "Who are you talking about?"

"Your daughter – she is now queen. Of a small nation, a remaining nation: but a queen nevertheless. The servants here have told me she is only seventeen. I was twenty–three when I ascended, and already that was so difficult. It is to her I give my foremost condolences. A young queen."

Ariel said, "Yes." She seemed to be looking for words with which to convey the condition as precisely as the king had done. "A very young queen." They remained there in the tall marble anteroom waiting for one of them to speak. A mosquito droned in the king's ear but he didn't react. Only the cup clattered against the saucer held in the other hand, but perhaps it was the Parkinson's. Disease, when it did not border on death, was at that moment unimportant to Ariel. While he sat there on the hard shoe bench, she imagined he could have waited patiently for death, and she would still be uncaring. Death had already found her, and she could see the king taking those two facts in.

"Perhaps you should fetch your daughter now," he said. As she walked away she heard him murmur a 'good luck', but the reverb in the auditorium made its audience unclear: himself, Melody, or her.

Ariel saw her daughter for the first time that day when she approached her door to escort her to the square. A night of tears and a facecloth had purified the experiment of mascara beneath her eyes; sadness had uncurled her boyish knuckles around the knob, and she wobbled in the dark dress of ruffled organza.

They went downstairs together. She helped her daughter walk, touching her arm where the pulse was light, then tucking it under, supporting her and looking proud.

Along a fragrant road in the middle of a fragrant market, the square glittered silver after rain and against their steps sputtered. Ariel saw appear from the mist the platformed tepee of cremation, attended to with rakes and fans by two men in apostolic white clothing, and by them was the pump to incite the fire and the table with the jug of aromatic oil and the urn. She held her nose high and recognised the oil as that of extract of apple seed – a relief, that it was no longer camphor.

The nobles made a column for them to pass. Keeping to the translucent shade of the shop awnings, Ariel went to the men without disturbing the silence. They talked secretively. Melody watched the sun's descent after its noon high and tried to imagine that she was in another place: and that the purple steeples of the churches were blue jays tinted amber by evening, and the imageless pools in the paving were drops of dew on camphor leaves that drained its magnificent scent. She crossed her arms over each other and listened to her mother's conversation become a babble amongst the wind, and through a break in the diagonally–hung garlands saw the mountain named Aries in the sky that was forever brilliant, and behind her, the nobles filling back into the column, silently, with handkerchiefs and purses, and canes, to hold them low and bow. The buttons on their jackets looked like medallions, and as their chins went downwards they jangled: and the light of Aries became a sparkle against their brushed domes. With powder smeared across their cheeks, their mourning looked courtly and maintained – but the radiant scent of the apple seed oil soothed like a placebo, and once the casket was opened on the stake, Melody remembered that they had no reason to grieve as much as she did.

They let her see her father one final time. His complexion had been carefully retrieved with makeup, and crammed alongside him in the coffin were the four possessions for the afterlife: a sextant, the familial photograph, the model sword, the chequered naval blanket. The lid was pushed on, and a servant made the announcement in a sorrowful voice:

This funeral has been called
To mark the worldly departure of our King
Eric d'Assisi Maria Leopoldo
May he be blessed when crossing into the other life.

They stood together in the square, watching the casket ebb away. When the fire eventually ceased to burn Ariel heard a noble step forward.

It was King Urbino. The others looked upon him admiringly and fearfully, but his eye was on Melody alone. He asked a comrade to help him kneel, brought a fist to the other side of his chest, and hailed in that hoarse voice:

"To Queen Melody!"

The rest of them slowly echoed him: "To Queen Melody!" In the heat the disjointed cries became a holler and Ariel held her daughter near, watching hatefully. But she could say nothing. The servants led them to their carriage and Melody began to cry, dipping her head in a cushion, and Ariel glimpsed into the crowd, scowling for Urbino, but seeing that one man stood straight without saluting: he was in uniform, she thought she exiled him from attending, his name was Myburgh and he gazed back at her penitently…

She remembered the night before when she had met him. It was just after she found Melody, in the inevitable moment of sorrow that came when she relayed the news, and the cicadas were hawing together in the reeds that filled the dark. But there remained moonlight sufficient to illuminate the man watching them from the shore. He placed his hand over his heart, and the confession which followed horrified her; a sincerity so devoid of shamefulness...

Ariel's first instinct was to condemn the man to a fate of execution for profaning the sanctity of grief while her husband's body had yet to cool after the struggle against Cholera. But previous teachings on how to conduct fury in dignity held her back; and especially her child's presence. "Get out of here," she said. "And don't show your face to me again for all the years that are left to you."

As Myburgh put on his waistcoat she spoke again. "And I don't think we've ever met. If you believe your own memories, then your conviction can join you in the grave."

He replied in an identical tone:

"Princess, it is because of the conviction you gave me that I cannot go anywhere."

Now it was again evening and Ariel sat in a marble pavilion on the cove, watching the sun go down, and she had been regretting her spitefulness towards the diplomat. A portion of the floor had been excavated to allow the seawater to rise in, and the presence of the sentinel who had swum up the channel reminded her of the teachings indentured into her since birth – you're royalty, Ariel, you shouldn't be petty with commoners – his beard spilling like a vine onto his chest, the lilies clinging onto the succulent back after ascending, and the blue fin curled on the mosaics so powerfully as to put whales to shame.

A paraffin lamp revealed his metal–coloured hair. He was in his seventy–second year of life, but King Triton's age had not seemed to accelerate since the day he turned sixty; the propriety condition of mermen with little to age them under the sea. He had already seen the same fail to apply to his daughter and no longer frowned being confronted with it.

Ariel asked, "Did the solstice festival go well?"

"That wasn't important. We were grieving with you."

"Would they have wanted to attend the cremation?"

"No," Triton said. "We all understand the existence of merpeople can't become too common knowledge. You held the wake near the sea; us being at that was enough."

Ariel appeared grateful. She had taken off her shoes and immersed her feet in the water; it cooled her; she looked to the tower of the castle where Melody's room had been.

"Has she been taking this well?"

"No."

"Nobody at that age does."

"No."

"I heard there was a stir. Did anything happen?" Triton asked.

"One thing," Ariel said.

"Tell me."

"They saluted her as queen. All the people in the square. Not a moment after the cremation was done."

Triton said, "Oh, no."

Ariel took her feet out of the water; presently she oscillated between feeling obligated to comfort and being unworthy of it. "For a child. Don't they understand? It's traumatic…!"

"Did they start on their own?"

"Urbino led them. You've heard of him before."

"Eric didn't like him."

"Oh yes."

She fell silent with the air of one who had done much thought behind closed doors. "And yet," Ariel went on, "I've been getting to thinking – maybe it's good he brought it up."

"Good?"

"Better than worse. Naturally, not the salute."

"Will you say what you mean?"

Ariel exhaled and replied without stammering, sensitively, "The truth is, Melody's totally unfit to rule."

Triton stood with his fin coiled beneath him like a serpent. "Ariel, that isn't what matters now."

"Grieving matters. I know. She can grieve."

"She can grieve," Triton repeated, "in the midst of what?"

"It's an idea I've had for a while. Of course, I wanted Eric to come with. That we go on a Royal Tour. Northwards – through the leftover princely states and Sardinia, until the mountains. And on later trips, down into Africa and much, much later, the Orient. It's like how you went to the Indian Ocean. Like Marco Polo. We'd go to all these places, and it'll make us worldly, see. Melody most of all. Worldliness is the first aspect of a wise ruler. Without worldliness, you're limited."

"I can teach her instead," Triton said.

"The sea is smaller than the human world. She can only learn so much there."

"And if you go, who will rule in your place?"

"Grimsby. He's busy, and effective…" Ariel said it with a small hesitation, finding herself imitating Urbino.

"A butler. You can't be romantic at this time."

"I'm very serious."

Triton loomed. He looked vigilant and heavy. "No. This isn't all about Melody." He pointed at his daughter, leaned his trident against a column with no noise, and concluded in a grave voice:

"You didn't come to the shore only to be with Eric. Your own words describe it: that world is too small. You are trying to fulfil your young dream of travel."

The beard–hairs on his rising and falling chest scattered quivering shadows in the feeble lamplight; Ariel's dangerous, glittering gaze never left him as if to menace. The reflection of the sun in the background traced a ridge of orange across his shoulders and conjured his vambraces into shimmering gold. It was authentic gold of the sea, gold of ravines and cavernous grottos; never the gold that fell from the shipwrecks. Ariel was taking a long time to respond. Maybe she delayed purposefully.

"Let's say it was true, what of it? Shall you attempt to stop me if I got up and walked away?"

"I'm your father, Ariel. But I can't force you like a child anymore."

"Does that mean you disagree but won't do anything?"

"I'm asking you to decide again."

"I'm sorry. I won't."

"Then, will you promise to travel near to the coast?"

"As much as we can."

The sun set. Every so often a maid appeared to attend Ariel; the latest one she made linger there.

"Are you sure you won't reconsider?" Triton asked helplessly again.

"Let's stop this already and have some perry."

"It's a bit early," he said.

"It's far too late."

Two glasses were poured out and Ariel raised hers and stared through the vinegary liquid at the faraway mountain of Aries. She remembered the previous night when she had stood in its shadow and Myburgh claimed to know her. Played together as man and mermaid in the camphor groves … she had no memory of such a thing, though decided to ask her father.

But when she pronounced the name his reaction astonished her. "Myburgh? Wasn't he that imaginary friend you used to have?" She had no answer for him, so they drank saying nothing.

Caro Els, his youngest diplomat, found him floating with his eyes open in the long drapes of the estate bed and thought that he had died. He knew this was one of the many ways King Urbino meditated, but the repose in which he lay drifting seemed that of a man prepared to no longer be of his own body. He did not dare come closer but called to him in a hushed voice, complying with the heralds' orders to awaken him before midnight so he could take his medicine. The king came out of his trance and saw in the half–light the clear azure eyes, the ferocious blonde hair, the patient dignity of the steward who cared for him every day since arriving in this country and who held in his hand a cup of the curative infusion of ground primrose and garlic extract. The king grasped the posts of the bed without rocking it and rose with elephant–like steadiness, in a motion that was surprising in so wasted a body.

"Yet another day I've spent in the bed now," he said. "I'm going to pass on to the next life. Very soon."

Caro had heard him say this on so many different occasions and so many different times that he still did not believe it to be true, even though the horses lined up outside for the procession back to the capital and the members of the official delegation were beginning to change into black of bereavement. In any event, he helped him to sit straight and wrapped him in a goatskin blanket because the trembling of his hands made the cup rattle. Months before he had attempted to put on a pair of muslin trousers he had not worn since the capitulation of the Two Sicilies and discovered he was losing height as well as weight. Thereafter his health had begun sliding down an incline so steep it seemed jubilant as it went – dysentery, autointoxication, glaucoma in the left eye, and then, as the mental difficulties multiplied, a culmination in a visit to a physician that lastly prescribed his fate. The cartridge of tuberculosis had taken him hostage, he was never to be free again, and in three months it would all come to an end.

"Today is Monday, June 28, 1873, a week after the June Solstice. The return of light, the never–ending force of the sun that recreates life," announced Caro.

"The last day of the third month since I visited that doctor," King Urbino said, sipping the medicine. "I suppose, since the week has begun again, you have news to give me?"

"Only one thing," Caro replied. "Queen Mother Ariel of Calabria has announced that, starting on the 30th, she will be undertaking a Royal Tour throughout the peninsula accompanied by her daughter, the Queen … Melody."

King Urbino laughed. He couldn't help it. They were so unexpected and serious. "Do you think that salute I did was what made her take such a decision?"

"There's more."

"Go on."

"She wishes – for the diplomats of the nations that they will pass through to accompany them. The diplomats stationed here. The names of who that'll be will be drawn at the palace tomorrow."

"Will they go to Sardinia?"

"Yes."

King Urbino wondered what his diplomat would have done if his name were selected, but he knew that being twenty–five years of age and married he would never want to go. Caro was quiet, he seemed careful; on the first day he appointed him in the capital he sometimes had to interrogate out what he was really trying to say. And he was very, very serious. His existence at only a quarter of a century appeared so complete, and the king envied him a little.

Caro said, "Don't you think it's outdated to keep on calling it Sardinia? You united the land. It's Italy, now."

"Not perfectly united," King Urbino replied. "This place still stands out."

"It's miniscule. They can't last for long."

"They'll last for longer than I will."

"Does Your Majesty feel like he's failed?"

Opposite the king on the wall a sabre was hung with its edge pointed to the ground. He remembered when he first learned swordplay and the tutor watching him from the shade. Those were days of infinite toil – in the courts and the gardens of a royal family that under every numerous title laid a conspiracy.

And he had soared so highly only because he had been the most ambitioned of them all: I'm the only person destined to conquer the land; that's right, me! He had no concept of a moment that initialised his obsession, a mentor's encouragement, or a knight–comrade's dying wish. From birth he simply possessed the conviction that the world had been his solely to grasp and no–one else's.

"No, it's not quite a feeling of failure. It's useless to try and explain it." King Urbino watched his diplomat's reaction; he breathed slightly quicker, the boredom in his eyes seemed to be whetted. Shockingly he realised that he may have disappointed him with his mildness. So he asked:

"Caro, do you believe in the time I have left I can still make Italy mine?"

Caro finally smiled.

"No one else but you may do it, Your Majesty."

The king nodded. That was the reputation the people had forged for him; and in his dying moments he had no energy to reject the people. He made a great effort to stand and pushed Caro aside. The king took his cane and coat and went over to the door.

"Your Majesty!" Caro called out.

"Don't misunderstand. I'm not going to do anything rash. I'm just going for a walk."

He opened the door.

"I'll be back within an hour. Don't follow me. It's your king's orders."

The duke whose jubilee he attended had granted the king residence in his villa, though humbly he had refused a front gate emblazoned with carnations in his name and instead left through the back door wrapped in moonlight. He walked to the sea road between the palisades of the cypress trees on the secret, leaf–blanketed paths, shielded by them from the snowy winds that blew from the summits of the southern Apennines, holding his cane stiffly out to prevent a death by falling that would have been ingloriously accidental.

The ocean glowed so deeply blue that night, and the grasses were so fragrant under a sky of motionless clouds, that the king did not think of his disease again and instead used the evening to consider why he had not taken Calabria when he could have. He by acknowledgement had infinite chances: even now, his regent would listen to him, and his army and people would support him if he gave the order to march; the symmetry of power in Europe would not be changed and no fellow monarch – fellow, though inferior – would be offended. It was such a small and unimportant nation. Yet what withheld him?

The bleached and romantic structure of the castle formed in the distance. What limited administration could be performed there, he thought, where the greatest enemy is a foreign king who takes no action, and the greatest revolution is saluting a queen yet to be crowned? The rulers of Calabria had no need to flourish and be ambitious – he knew. From when he met Eric's father, laid at his feet in offering tribute, to Eric himself, and the wife he chose. It was at a consulate gala, and he was still king of only Sardinia…

She had been excited to see an exotic sovereign and wore a sugary seashell necklace as she walked across the ball to greet him. Her eyes, unmistakably young and unused, examined every unfamiliar face in the room using great focus. With her gangly legs and red bunned hair and doe's gait she seemed incapable of harm. Someone had said that she still learned how to walk, and he believed it doubtlessly. "Are you the Sardinian king?" she asked as she cast a cursory glance at his dress uniform.

"Yes. I'm honoured to meet the crown princess," he replied.

"Oh, I'm just Ariel." She carried modesty like a lesion. Going on: "They say sardines were named after Sardinia because so many of them are caught there. Of course, I'd never eat fish. But it's interesting. How many stories are there like that in the world, do you think?"

King Urbino replied plainly, "There must be thousands."

Then she had stopped paying attention to him, and continued to talk to a Dutchman about his spare encyclopaedias, squeezing her husband's hand. Suddenly he was sorry for having nothing interesting to say. She seemed so easily pleased.

Seventeen and married and totally naïve – he had seen so many princesses and crown princesses and duchesses the same way. They were bored with their own lives and turned their vision outwards, and one must be comfortable in something to ever be numb of it: to him the ultimate curse of aristocracy. He had not yet conquered Italy at the time and as a result was less considerate of such stagnancy. But he had stepped outside the ballroom and spoke to a lieutenant in disguise as a Tuscan merchant.

"Unlace the poison. Call off the assassination."

The lieutenant would never disobey, but he questioned the decision.

"That girl still wants to see the world, don't you realise? We haven't come here to destroy children's dreams. If her father–in–law's dead she'd become queen consort; and she'd be tied down by her position and be unable to fulfil anything. A very young queen. In that case, it is the duty of the old to give way to the young, no matter what."

The lieutenant nodded his head in assent. The king began to walk away, finalising:

"But, one day, when she's grown – I'll be sure to return. And then Urbino of Sardinia's and Ariel of Calabria's dream can be on equal grounds with one another, and mine will undoubtedly end up victorious!"

So many years later, King Urbino could not believe himself when he uncovered the reason for his idleness. He had linked the Alps and the Apennines, brought Milan to the Mediterranean, solidified Syracuse in Sardinia and italicised Italy in the straight–fonted pages of nationhood, all by himself, with no wife and kin. Yet it had been a passing feeling of sentimentality towards a child which had him hesitate near the very end.

He looked up to the sky and a strange concocted disappointment gurgled in his heart. He knew he had enough fortitude of mind to cast it away, but he chose not to. The king was so absorbed in reverie that he did not notice he had walked into the farm of camphor from which no–one would see him completely re–emerge – not even himself – and he would not have ever noticed if not for a misstep on a branch that revealed the two highwaymen stalking him from behind. He saw the drawn swords, looked at where he was, and at them again, and realising that they were just robbers and were not going to kill him was overcome with ferocity and screamed with the final brilliance of his life:

"Stab me! There is only one Urbino Battista Sidotti!"

He caught one bandit around the neck with a victorious sigh: conquisterò ancora. But he released him immediately because the sword had punctured his chest and for an instant it suspended his fall and then he realised that he had died without solving the mystery of his sister's disappearance, without time to repent for the murdered and without unifying Italy, at five minutes to midnight on the final day of the third month since learning of his ineluctable death appointment.

Because of the leaves, he landed without a sound, facing towards the ocean. He was prepared to never see land again. But alas, even on the insides of his eyelids there were the swirling eddies that pulled his body away from the alluring seabed of rest: and he opened his eyes and the eddies remained in the two azure pupils of Caro Els bearing witness from the trees.

Is that all, Urbino?
Athena, the Goddess of War, would be disappointed.

Without knowing why, he awoke with a start. A warm smell of camphor and seafood stew, robust and broad, was coming from the other room, mingling with an omniscient blond light that flowed through an open window on the westward wall. He calmed down; the spirit he abruptly gained facing death was lost. It must have been dawn now, because light only came in so strongly from that window when the sun had been setting: and yet the room was shadowless. Because of that, in spite of the pleasurable scent of the stew and the warmness of the rays, he could not shake the feeling he had been brought to a dimension above earth, neither against or by his will, where the nexus of planetary stimuli was not fully present.

But the greatest reason the scene was so strange to him was this: he had spent the years of his childhood in this room. Those years were most of them dull and their memories replaced over time by the vast accrued caches of strategic knowledge and conquest memorabilia, but this room he had never forgotten.

He heard his titleless name, "Urbino," and the surroundings changed.

Next he was travelling on an invincible white horse – he remembered now – through a countryside – he'd had this vision frequently before – past wide, artificial trees that on their branches drooped jewels containing portraitures of his life – he remembered that he had been stabbed through the chest – the first love, the first dance, the first war, the first kill. He'd had that vision many times but never paid attention to it. There behind one tree was the ghost of his sister, the better version, his twin, signalling for him to stop the horse. He nearly glided past when she tugged on the reins and the recoil caused him to fall.

On the ground he said, "What's the matter? I was quite enjoying that."

His sister looked down with terrible pathos.

"You haven't reached the end yet, Urbino." And he felt the world vanish from beneath him again.

He knew he had returned to earth because now he was positioned behind Caro's shoulder and was watching the highwaymen go through the pockets on his limp body. Half–behind a tree, half courageous and reluctant, his diplomat looked akin to the troubled vanguard who loved his master but was not willing to die for him, evidenced by the reluctant grip on the sword–holster, and he absolved him from blame, saying out loud, "If I were Caro, I would've run away already." The sister stood beside them.

She said, "This is purgatory. You've died, but you haven't passed on yet."

"I've experienced this before, in the wars, when I was wounded," Urbino replied. "Back then I always managed to bounce back. But now you can take me. This is alright. I've done enough."

"That isn't what you really think, is it?"

Athena, your sister, would be terribly disappointed.

Urbino heard the rupture of his soul. That's right. What was it I desired from the very beginning? Had it been Italy? No – that was only the manifestation of his desire. Power. Yes; if only he had power! Power to overthrow his father. Power to die on his own terms. Power to yet make the world his!

"No!" he shouted. "I still need more power. I can't stop here!"

"Then," Athena said, "I shall give you longevity to attain power, but at a price."

Returning to present, the bandits were cussing because they had found nothing valuable in the body's pockets, but they wouldn't have cussed if it had been the corpse of an ordinary man. Withstanding the malnourished appearance, damaged by life and different from the broadsides that were posted around Italy with his portrait, it had nevertheless been the resounding proclamation which identified the king to them:

"Stab me! There is only one Urbino Battista Sidotti!"

They perceived a shadow step out from under the trees. "And indeed, you should be unsettled." It stood in the moonlight that filtered through the branches with baleful confidence and raised its voice. "Because you have just murdered the king, and the king is well–loved by his people and his army, and you'll surely be punished." They saw the ferocious blonde hair and the clear azure eyes, but noticed within them an uncharacteristic and burning impatience: and the inevitability of their judgement came barraging down.

"I recognise you. You're one of Italy's ambassadors to this place," the bolder of the two robbers said. "Yet you talk like you're Urbino himself."

"That is because I am."

Caro Els was different; he was less refinement and more arrogance. He towered and flared his voice high and waved his sword as he spoke. It was the same sword that had pointed towards the floor in the villa, so defeatedly – but spurred by possession it now soared into the sky and threatened to impale the stars on its triumphantly erect tip.

Only the beholder was more glorious. By means never precedented, King Urbino's mind had been transplanted into the body of his young diplomat. This was the longevity the ghost in his dream spoke of, who by this point he had forgotten as the ghost of his sister. He looked at his pocket watch and it was past midnight on the fourth month, exactly three minutes into the new day after he was meant to die, but none of it mattered any longer.

"On the charges of robbery and homicide in self–defence, your verdicts are meant to be light," Urbino said. "But the king has found personal offence within your actions, and therefore, you have been sentenced to death."

His performance after that was imperceptible. Urbino sat by the bodies of the robbers and his own body until the blood on the sword stemmed, watching his humanity dwindle away. The ghost's final words burned like a childish token in his heart:

"You'll have this body for thirty days. If you want to keep it forever, bring me the blood of the ruler of Calabria before that time ends."

Urbino chuckled. "Do you think that's such a difficult condition, ghost of death?" He buried his old self as he talked, absolutely ecstatic. After all, I'd have to kill them anyway, if I'm going to unite Italy!

The next morning at the castle, a valet on a pedestal cleared his throat, and all the nobles shushed for the announcement.

"The diplomats selected to accompany the queen and queen mother on their Royal Tour are:
… Myburgh, representing the Principality of Monaco …
… and Caro Els, representing the Kingdom of Italy."