Free Polystom by Adam Roberts

Stahlstadt of course, and on a few occasions young Polystom had accompanied them. The first time he had been overawed by the scale of the city, the luxuriance and heat of the planet of Bohemia on which it was located. The second time, he had swaggered more, being fourteen and of a swaggering age. The three of them stayed in the same hotel, his father and co-father in one room and Polystom in a room by himself. But he had not wanted the other people in the hotel to know how largely, still, the towers, high walkways and massy stone objects of the city intimidated him. He had pretended a world-weary confidence, strolling up and down the wide stone stairways, riding the sliding cars as if he had been doing it all his life. Everybody else seemed so much sleeker than he. Everybody else seemed tofit in. Once, foolishly, he slipped off a sliding car and grazed his knee on the track. He never saw anybody else do that. On another occasion he walked down a main esplanade so caught up in admiration of the trio of colossal towers that dominated the city centre that he put his foot in a grille and fell over. People were too well bred to laugh openly, of course, but he sensed their amusement. Back in the hotel, as the three of them were leaving, a hotel servant dropped one of Polystom’s bags. There was nothing fragile in the bag, but Polystom beat the boy with a rage fuelled by relief that there were clumsier people on the planet than himself.
    He had been glad to return home after the second visit, back to the estate where he knew every square metre of the wood around the house, where the servants respected him. He sank into his favourite poetry as a weary man sinks into a hot bath, for the comfort as well as the sensation of being cleaner afterwards. It was a month before his seventeenth birthday. He was reading Phanicles’ ‘Meadow Poems’.
    Who is it, then, that imagines me out of my mountain lair
and into the habit of hovering, here, at the doorstone,
mornings, in the slant new sun, the cobwebs covering
a whole field like a shroud of butter muslin
woven, light and water, like a poem
coming quietly into being?
    He had visited the arable land south and east of the Middenstead often enough, and it was pretty countryside of course, but Polystom’s heart was in the woodlands. He wished fervently that Phanicles had written some ‘Forest Poems’, but there was a subject that had never inspired the great man. Polystom tried writing such poetry himself, tried to imagine himself becoming, after his father’s death, the Poet-Steward, the ruler with poetry in his soul. But somehow the poems fell flat. No matter how excited he had been writing them, no matter how much of the thrill and energyof being in the forest he tried to pour into them, somehow they simply didn’t work as poems.
    I stand in the forest, still and straight
as a tree, arms at my side
and the mist wraps around my legs
in the marvellous morning
like a thought of the beauty of the trees all around me
each tree like a beautiful thought itself
here I can feel the cool quiet comfort
of safety and satiety. The trees
like arms, they protect me. The atmosphere
of trees all
around me, like air upholding a wing, so here I am I
.
    No, it was no good. He was ashamed to show his poetry to anybody in the family. He made his groomsman read it, but the fellow was a servant, and all he could do was nod and mutter appreciatively. One day, Polystom thought, one day I’ll have a soul mate, somebody who’ll understand my poetry and my love for poetry.

[fifth leaf]
    He told her, one breakfast, ‘We have not been together as man and wife for a week.’ He meant
we have not made love
, but could not bring himself to speak so directly.
    She looked at him, but didn’t reply. She drank coffee for breakfast, ate no food. It was no wonder she was so slight in her frame. If she nibbled away a side of bread in a day it was a large meal for her. Eat! he shouted inwardly. Eat some damn food! Build