A Portrait of Silas Fox - Part IV
In Part III, Silas Fox discovers the Marchioness’s appetite for cruelty. He meets Signore Foscarini while in her court in Florence and is ultimately sold to Nightwick Keep in exchange for a painting.
And then I came to Nightwick, of course, which is where you find me now. I arrived here with my spirit broken, my mind beat down, my body healed but scarred, and this place took me in. It is here that I honed the skills that have made me a true philosopher, a jester, and, as Lord Barrow sometimes describes me to his contemporaries, the Magical Advisor to His Grace.
It was not always so. At first, I was resigned and hesitant, fearful to learn the scope of my new job. I knew that it was possible this new place could hold even more violence in store, perhaps even enough to claim my life. The thought had crossed my mind back in Italy: if I were to crack my skull on the marble of a great hall after being tossed, what impact would my death have? The answer was nothing noteworthy: I would be buried in the garden, perhaps beside the pets of the estate that had passed on, and if I was lucky, I would get a headstone lamenting me: THE COURT DWARF.
On my first night, I joined Lord Barrow in the sitting room. He preferred to dine there alone, surrounded by his collection of artwork and candlelight, and the dining hall went largely unused. When I arrived, he was flipping through a large stack of letters and scribbling down notes with one hand, shoveling potatoes into his mouth with the other. A bit of radish sauce was spilled upon his shirt, and his glasses threatened to fall off the bridge of his thin nose.
“Ah,” he said. “Hello. I heard you had a long journey.”
I bowed. “Your Grace.”
He waved his hand in a careless pardon. “Tell me,” he said between bites of roasted potato. “What are your specialties?”
Sitting like a doll, I thought. Being thrown across the room like a toy and not a person. “I am primarily a storyteller,” I told him.
He looked up from his books. “Indeed, I know that you are a storyteller. Lord Ashby of Oakmont Hall gave me word of you and sent over a few scrolls of tales you told in his court. It is why I wanted you for a court dwarf.”
“Ah. Of course, your Grace.”
“And you are good at it?”
“Sir?”
He waved his fork. “Storytelling. You are good at it, you think?”
“I have oft been told so, your Grace.”
“Well.” He looked down at the papers in front of him. “I have a challenge for you, then. Tell me the story of the Bishops’ Wars as a fairy tale.”
“As in, a parable?” I asked.
He nodded. “So an English child of middling intelligence could understand it.”
“Lo, a tale for the ages of our great kingdom,” I began. And then, after all those years away from this craft, I began to spin the story as it appeared to me: a society of wild horses, beset to the north by a kingdom of unicorns and a kingdom of donkeys. The horse king ruled over all the land, but the unicorns and donkeys wanted to limit his power. A convoluted series of battles ensued, and I described each one in whimsical allegory. At one point, I included a fortune telling witch who revealed to the horse king that if he did not create unity between all the equines, he would perish.
When the tale had gone as far as I could spin it, I paused.
“I know not what comes next,” I said. “For there is not an ending to the story yet, is there?”
Lord Barrow had, as I was speaking, taken off his glasses, placed his silverware on the table, and brought a hand to his neck. He seemed to be in deep contemplation.
“Aye, there is not,” he said slowly. “This you know, along with your expanse of knowledge about the politics of our country. How did you learn all of this?”
“I suppose I listen to conversations around me, Your Grace,” I said.
He furrowed his brow. “And what of the fortune telling witch?”
“Sir?”
“Well, is she right? Must the horse king create unity between all equines, or is she really against him, perhaps working with the unicorns all along?”
“She is a being with great power, unrelated and uninvolved in the equine conflict,” I said. “Her word is that of divination, so it can only be trusted by those with a belief in prophecies.”
There was a long silence in which he considered my words. He dabbed his quill into ink and scrawled something on the parchment that was indecipherable from my angle. Then he lit a candle between us and said, “I must ask you something now. Are you…a prognosticator?”
“A prognosticator?”
“Yes. Someone with the power of prophecy, as you describe this character. One who can lift the veil of the present and glimpse the future. A seer. I have heard that some dwarves have supernatural abilities such as this.”
I was taken aback by the question, though I tried to keep my face placid. I made the quick and fortuitous decision to play along.
“I cannot claim to have supernatural abilities, for all my abilities have been with me naturally since my birth,” I said. “But…I do have the gift of intuition, and I believe that as a dwarf, I am in touch with some spiritual planes not visible to men.”
He considered me for a long time, looking at my face, perhaps searching for something in it. I stayed determined and did not waver from his stare. Eventually, he picked up the goblet resting by his meal and raised it in the air with a light hand.
“To our future,” he said.
I repeated after him. He raised the goblet to his lips, and I watched them stain red.
*****
It was not long after that I began joining Lord Barrow routinely to discuss political and philosophical matters. It started slowly and abstractly: he would ask me my thoughts on a particular scenario, cloaked in nom de plumes and vague descriptions, and I would give my perspective through an allegorical story. As time went on, his trust in me grew. I have been here ten years and am now privy to many of the political affairs of Lord Barrow, and thus the affairs of England, though I dare not reveal these to you.
Lord Barrow only asks me to entertain when he has guests, and even then, my duties are far more conversational than those of my past. I spend many nights telling tall tales to noblemen, often fabricating events from my life to be more entertaining. I tell them my father was also a dwarf, and that I lived among dwarves until I was kidnapped by a human. I tell them my life in Florence was glamorous, and that I was surrounded by great artists and fine wines.
A few of Lord Barrow’s close peers know about my prophesying. Though he refuses to loan me to them for these purposes, he sometimes will ask me for guidance on a query of theirs. In some circles I am spoken of as a lucky magical being, and in others I am a serpent in the tongue of the Earl, pulling strings of a marionette. I am honored merely to be spoken of. To loom in the mind of strangers is a strong kind of power, the kind many men work for their entire lives and never achieve.
The strangest part of my long tenure here has been occasionally meeting other court dwarves in my travels. I have encountered them across the land in various halls and keeps and abbeys, and though each of them is distinct as men are, not one of them has failed in making me feel strange. I feel the inherent need to help them–we are of the same kind, of course–but I also hesitate to grow too close to them, perhaps out of self-protection. If other dwarves were to adopt my same tricks, my value would decrease. It is for this reason that, when we shake hands, I maintain a cold distance, and when they write to me, I never send any reply.
Here at Nightwick I am afforded privileges such as private chambers with a window, as many books as I desire, expanses of leisure time, silk clothing made to fit. But mostly, I am afforded respect: the servants know me, and they nod their heads. It was not a surprise to me that Lord Barrow wanted to commission someone for my portrait.
In the end, I chose you not necessarily because I favor your technique–I beg of you not to take offense to that, for I am no painter and my words may be worms as far as you are concerned–but because I saw the portrait you did of the peasant girl in Rome. It is hard to believe you were not compensated for this portrait, for you captured her eyes so authentically in all their misery and determination, and in those eyes, I saw a younger version of myself.
*****
Before I am ready to sit for my portrait, there is one last person I need to tell you about.
The Ambassador of Morocco, Rachid Mohamed, paid a visit to Nightwick Keep this past autumn. A new deal had allotted many of the dry goods from Lord Barrow’s land to be sent to Tangier, and with this deal came an influx of money and visitors from afar.
The Ambassador arrived in a lavish carriage and entered surrounded by several important men. All of them were dressed in kaftans and deep red turbans that wound tightly around their heads. The Ambassador’s noble advisor stood out from the rest. His skin was black as night. He had a wide smile and no turban, revealing silver cropped hair.
Through gossip in the court, I came to be aware that the advisor’s name was Adeyemi. He was allegedly from the Kingdom of Benin, and had been sold into slavery at some point out of a Moroccan port. Somehow–the rumors varied here–he had climbed his way into the world of nobleman, and his cunning political savvy had won him favor with the Sultan of Morocco. He had been living in London and serving as the advisor to the Moroccan Ambassador for the last eight years.
I entertained throughout dinner with my usual stories and philosophical conversation, and I felt I earned the respect of all the guests but one. Adeyemi eyed me inquisitively, as though he were watching a wild animal and gauging its moves. I tried to ignore him, but there was something about his stare; even as I turned away, I felt it burn into my cheeks.
One evening, I was on my way to meet Lord Barrow in the sitting room for one of our routine political discussions when I encountered Adeyemi, who was walking in the same direction. Our paths diverged. I nodded curtly, but he fell in step beside me, stopped, and bared his teeth at me in a grin.
“Silas the Dwarf,” he said, bowing exaggeratedly. “How do you do?”
“Adeyemi. I am well, thank you. How are you?”
“Curious,” he said merrily. “I am feeling quite curious these days. I want to know something. How is it that you are so good at speaking?”
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that when you talk at dinner, everyone listens. That is usually my same role in London. Of course, I know how I got good at this. But how did you?”
“I am educated. My father was a merchant. I am versed in three languages. I am skilled in the art of buffoonery. I am a person of respect here at Nightwick Keep.”
He shook his head. “You’re a slave to the noble court.”
His words were not cruel, simply a matter of fact, and yet hearing them felt as though I had been plunged into icy water. I had been standing on ice, and in an instant, it had splintered, shattered, and this man pulled me under.
“And what are you?” I asked angrily. “Now that we are dropping all pretenses, your honest tongue will do you well.”
“The same as you,” he said. “Only I have no illusions.”
“But you seem to have influence and power.”
“As do you, my friend.” He smiled again, the whites of his teeth glowing. “And we have both used our circumstances to climb up this ladder. It is very clever of you to be playing this game about the world of dwarves and magic powers. There is nothing they fear and admire more than magic, and some power is about fear. But there is no top of the ladder for us, do you understand? We will never reach the top. We will never be able to stop climbing.”
Just then, the voices of our masters came warbling down the hall.
“Sir Adeyemi, where are you?” the Ambassador called. “Do join us for dinner.”
“Yes, Silas, you too. Come out from whatever corner you’re reading in,” teased Lord Barrow. I could hear the drunkenness in his voice, see the smile lines and the wrinkles around his small blue eyes.
Lord Barrow is a good man. And yet after this conversation, I would never be able to shake the feeling that there was something sinister about him, something that he himself was never even aware of. The words of Adeyemi took residence inside of me and lingered like a tumor. They are in there even now, as I tell this to you.
I had dreamt that one day, I might become so wise that I will be regarded as a philosopher rather than a natural phenomenon. It was Adeyemi who made me aware of the ladder. While I am amenable to climb it, I find that as I am getting to be an older dwarf, I am growing tired.
I was not alone with Adeyemi again, but when he and the Ambassador departed, he shook my hand and slipped a small piece of parchment into the pocket of my coat. I pressed my fists into the pockets all throughout dinner, feeling the paper beneath my knuckles. When I retired that evening to my quarters, I unfolded it, careful not to rip it where it had crinkled. It read, in looping and beautiful script:
Silas–I am pleased to have made your acquaintance. I want you to know that I am certain of something. I am certain there will be a place for people like us someday. I mean a place where we will not have to play this wretched game. Perhaps it will be in another time. Fare thee well. –Adeyemi
*****
Perhaps after hearing all of this, you feel prepared to paint me. You have an image in your mind of the colors, the shadows, a position for me to pose in, an expression of mine to cement. Or perhaps you feel as though your understanding of the job has been complicated. Perhaps what you thought would be a simple court dwarf portrait, a tiny fool standing next to his master, something you could finish in one afternoon and move onward, can no longer be so. Of course it cannot. Perhaps you are rudderless, completely lost in artistic vision.
Whatever the case may be, I told you that I would lay myself bare, and I have.
Listen: I am not entirely proud of this life I live. I want you to know that. It is true that when I see myself reflected in the eyes of Lord Barrow and his kind, I see a distorted, seductive version of myself, and this version slips away when I return to the reality of my circumstances here. When I see myself reflected in the eyes of other broken, jealous court dwarves, I see the same distorted person, and I want to cry out, this is not who I really am! But then I remember–it is who I really am. I have frauded and connived my way into this standing. This is my truth to carry, always.
I have a personal motto, and at times like this, when my inner voice becomes troublingly loud, it bears well to repeat it. It is this: for the world has been rough with me, I must be rough in return. I have seized this world to the best of my abilities, pulled what I can from its meaty flesh and left behind what I cannot. If I am in a cage now, as Adeyemi implies, it is one lined with golden trim, bars of fine alabaster, and it is as many meters wide as there are people in this world who regard me as a bewitching curiosity.
Listen: you are a painter, and I suspect you have the power to look into the soul. Now that you know my tale, it is your turn to take it in your hands, as if a coin, and consider it as you portray me in brushstrokes. Depict me as you must, and spare no detail. I will be remembered, even if in another place, another time. It took a lifetime of little cruelties, of friendship won and lost, of evil and power and everything that lies in between, for me to become the man who sits before you.
Kaylie Saidin grew up in California and now lives in North Carolina. She received her MFA in Creative Writing from UNC Wilmington, where she served as fiction coeditor of Ecotone Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Oxford American, Prairie Schooner, New Orleans Review, Los Angeles Review, Nashville Review, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere.
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