The Alyssa Chronicle

by Michael Strelow

  Back ways, dark halls, once waiting until a worker passed, then out the small garden door, Eugenie’s garden clothes back on their pegs. The castle lights glowed behind me. And soon I saw another glow.

  The old couple’s garden, ahead of me and down the path, seemed lit up from the inside in some way. The flowers were not only fresh looking, but they seemed to have some kind of light shining on them. It might have been a trick of the evening light. It might have been my tired eyes, my weary soul, my side aching from being a cupboard dweller, but these flowers were not just growing in this early summer light, they were efflorescing. I think I have that word right. Almost like they had taken up all the color they could and now were capturing bright colors from butterflies and flashes of hues from birds. I sat down to rest and watched. Not a person stirred in house or garden. Small smoke trailed up out of the chimney.

  Everything around seemed to be waiting with me. I found myself holding my breath in the still and thickening air. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was waiting for, but I couldn’t leave. As noisy as the Council chamber had been, this garden was the same intensity but quiet. I don’t know how long I sat waiting, but the light held and held until it seemed the world had stopped to wait too. And then, after a short time that was hard to tell how long, a small breeze came up and seemed to set everything in motion again.

  I took the path around the garden, and even when it was at my back, I could feel the glow there as if plants could smile.

  I made it into the barn just as my mother was calling me from the house. I tossed a little hay on myself, brushed most of it off, and made my way to the house. And then I noticed Jake high in a maple tree seeming to sway at the thin end of branch like some ripe fruit. The breeze continued to pick up, and he rode there as if he might just fly off into the sky.

  Altogether a very strange afternoon. I have to admit that I prefer my afternoons simple and focused and reasonable—farm or castle, either place. Flirting with the spiders in the castle walls, being gobsmacked by a glowing garden, Jake ascending to the heavens—too much for a tired girl. I wondered how Eugenie was feeling.

  The next morning I asked my mother to tell me what she knew about the old couple and their garden.

  “Not much, really,” she said. “That is, I don’t know much of anything. But I’ve heard many things. You always hear things about people who keep mostly to themselves. But, dear, what you know and what you hear about people should always be kept separate in your head.”

  She paused and looked at me to make sure I knew the difference. I nodded and made sure she knew I was paying attention. She was a good storyteller, but she always tried to include some kind of lesson about living a good life. Sometimes that lesson ran over the story a little. You had to wait for the lesson and then she would continue.

  “People say they lost a child. And that’s a very difficult thing for anyone. But they say that the old couple took it very hard. No one saw them at all for almost two years. And then they would show up at the market on Saturdays to sell flowers and vegetables. And their flowers, especially, were the best anyone had ever seen. They lasted longer and were bigger and brighter than any other flowers. Some people—and you would know these people if I told you their names; they still talk like this today—well, these people immediately thought there was some kind of witchcraft involved. That both of them, man and woman, had become witches and used evil powers to make such flowers as the ones they sold in the market place. And these people were quick to make something evil out of a thing as beautiful as well-tended flowers. They still do. Whatever is beyond them, they think must be wrong and somehow evil.” She paused and rolled her eyes for effect. “The plain term for this kind of thinking is: stupid. They are stupid people. And there will always be stupid people in life.”

  I knew the lesson was coming and waited.

  She looked at me, and I nodded though I didn’t know exactly what I was nodding about. Then she continued.

  “How you deal with stupid people will be a test of your character all life long. I prefer the smile-and-leave technique. It works best for me. But each person must find their own way in this matter. Your father…well, your father has a different way. Had a different way, I should say. When he was younger he would snap back at the stupid part, not let a word go by without stuffing it back into the stupid mouth it came out of. Since he is a big man, this also had the effect of stopping the stupidity for a while. Same as my way. But my way had the advantage of not making enemies. So you may choose. Find your own way.”

  As important as this was, the story of the old couple seemed to be getting lost in the lesson about how to deal with stupidity. I would wait. She always came back to the story.

  “So those people who said they were witches, must be witches if they could grow those unnatural flowers, well, they were always looking for other people who believed the same way. And if they found enough of them, they would help each other to more and more unpleasant conclusions. After a short time, and enough other stupid people nodding in agreement, the old couple was said to eat children, walk with the evil spirits at night, chant songs in a language nobody else knew, boil big pots of strange animals and animal parts, and turn animals into people and people into animals. I think that’s most of what they began to believe. There might have been even more. It’s funny how that list was the usual things people say against something they don’t understand.”

  My mother rolled her eyes again, and I steadied myself for the next lesson on how to live. But I think she realized that I didn’t need it spelled out. I’d got the idea.

  “And then one day, enough of those—what should we call them?—those ‘easily swayed people,’ gathered at a farm near here and marched over to the old couple’s house. I believe they were going to confront them. Or drive them away. Or maybe burn them. I don’t know. We’ll never know, because the whole group came back from their march shaking their heads. Not one of them could remember what had happened. And even more important, not one of them could remember what they had gone there to do. We, your father and I, found them all wandering in our field, all fifteen or twenty of them, looking as if they had had too much beer to drink. Or as if they had become completely lost and had not yet found their way. Of course, we knew most of them from the market days, but they could only agree that they had gone some place together and now could not remember what for.”

  She turned to look out the window in the direction of the old couple’s farm. She sighed.

  “It’s very hard to lose a child, I think. Their flowers became their children. Something to care for and…”

  My mother stared out the window as if she too had lost a child. But as far as I knew she hadn’t. Or she didn’t tell me if she had. Maybe she just understood somehow.

  I asked, “Has anyone tried to talk to them?”

  “We all tried, at some time or another. We took food and tried to talk. But it was so long ago, and most of us were so much younger than they were, and we, well, we just didn’t understand enough. And so we tried to talk to them and be neighborly. They were polite. Asked us to sit down. Brought water to drink. But somehow they let us know they were better off being by themselves. And so little by little we left them completely alone. We thought they would come find us if they needed help. Or someone to talk to. We offered. And finally, they seemed more real in the stories we told about them than they were in life. They were over there, and we were over here.”

  I thought about Jake. He went wherever he wanted, on the ground or in the trees. I wondered if he had seen the old couple or talked to them. Jake talked to anybody—any time. He could have wandered over to their house and jabbered his jabber at them if he felt like it. I didn’t think Jake would recognize anything in the world stranger than himself; it was his powerful way of going through life.

  Mother clapped her hands together, maybe to signal the end of our conversation, maybe to swat an insect I couldn’t see. “Anyway, that’s why we let them be. Their flowers are a kin
d of symbol of both their sadness and their way of dealing with the sadness.”

  Chapter Seven

  Eugenie and I were each in the place we were born to, each longing to return to the other one’s place we had come to love—that was our situation for days. Days dragged on like this. I couldn’t wait to find out how her time in the castle had been affected by her speech to the Council.

  I sent her a message to make a meeting date. No answer. I sent again. No answer. She had disappeared into the castle. I had to find out what happened. I pictured her in the dungeon. Then I pictured her locked in her rooms. That was more likely. They wouldn’t throw a princess, their own daughter, into a nasty dungeon, I don’t think. I had to go to the castle—again—and find out.

  The wedding preparations were now making a spectacular mess for almost a mile around the castle. There were wagons piled high with colorful flags or banners waiting to be put in place. The roads were being rebuilt with cobblestones and fresh gravel so the approach to the castle seemed to have glowing, new stones like glittering arrows to show where the celebration would be. There were camps of workers strewn across the hillside and muddy paths leading down to the work sites. Then the food preparers had set up in lower spots to feed the workers. Closer to the castle it seemed an entire carpenter shop was established with young men on treadmills walking fast to drive belts attached to pulleys that had more belts driving machines that made spindles and spires and every sort of shaped wood. I could smell the fresh pine and cedar being made into what I supposed were important chairs and benches for important men and women’s bottoms. Of course, there would be cushions of red with yellow trim and deep blues with light green trim—the Queen’s favorites. And then each visiting state would sit on a bench with their own colors. The pillow makers were hard at work in rows beneath awnings that shaded them from sun or kept off rain as they worked. A whole village, two villages, had sprung up along the road. There was a general tizzy with quick-stepping and urgent shouts.

  I paused on the road to admire the scene. Eugenie would find this whole business completely disgusting; I know she would. She would say it was wasteful, silly and pretentious.

  The pretend part, the being something you weren’t, the false and empty faking, the special kind of lie that all this represented—that was what would anger her.

  Me? I was of two minds. First of all, this whole spectacular kind of circus was just plain interesting to look at. New people, new colors, music and play and work that you hadn’t seen before. I found that very pleasing. And second, I understood (and so did Eugenie, to be truthful) that spending all that money on a wedding, and the wedding of a known goofball on top of it, was really an investment in a kind of social plan, a compact. That was the word the Queen used—compact. A deal. An agreement. And all of the compact had future reasons for the present extravagance. The kingdom was planting seeds, sort of, for a future crop of marriages and agreements and everyone’s safety. That was what the thinking was. One time, I overheard the King and councilors pondering the advantages of the great wedding expense. It all seemed to me to be counting chickens before they were hatched—future chickens, very expensive chickens that could never lay enough eggs to get back their original cost. But I was just a visiting princess. What did I know?

  There was a great noise at the castle gate and everyone looked up and paused. It was Beauregard Arbuckle the Third coming out the main gate to inspect the scene. And immediately I knew that I couldn’t let him see me again. I reached down to the muddy roadside and dipped my fingers in the warm goo and rubbed my hands together and then dirtied my face. I tucked my princess hair up into a cap and drew my hands up into my sleeves. What else? I was far enough away that Arbuckle wouldn’t see me for a while. But if I was going to get into the castle and discover what had happened to Eugenie, I would have to have business there, business that could include my mud disguise. Oh, what job could a mud-faced young girl have that would require her to go into the castle and wander the halls until she found Eugenie? That was my problem.

  I looked around as if somehow I would see something that could solve that problem. There were so many people, young and old, that out there I could float from one group to the next without difficulty. Arbuckle’s inspection party came closer and closer. Then I saw my chance.

  A cart loaded with beets and turnips had paused in the roadway and the farmer was looking for a way to let the inspection party past. I crept up behind the cart where the farmer couldn’t see me and grabbed one bundle of beets and one of parsnips, both with their leaves tied together like a bouquet of flowers. With my arms full and the leaves covering my face I popped out from behind the cart just as the group approached and waited for the farmer to clear the road. The beets and parsnips were still covered in the dirt that would be the logic of my disguise—farm girl with dirty face carrying food to the kitchens, kitchens everywhere in the castle now that feeding the hoards of new people had become a full-time job.

  I had my disguise and my reason for being in the halls of the castle. And the farmer was so flustered trying to get out of the way of the royal party, well, the semi-royal party, anyway, that he didn’t notice me passing him by and curtsying my way past Arbuckle who never even glanced at me. His nose was pointed vaguely at the sky as if something didn’t smell quite right. His green water-master vest had been replaced with a brocade vest in castle colors. He wore a single earing. He snuffed as I passed. Traces of the old Arbuckle.

  In his party were a number of people who might have recognized me. But my root vegetables held high, my edible bouquet, magically allowed me to pass and approach the castle. Behind my leaves I snickered and took a bite of the leaf of the smallest beet. I always loved the littlest beet leaves with the deep red vein running up the middle. It was like eating a delicious little map.

  Inside the castle no one said a word to me. Girls carrying food were not remarkable here any more. I said yes ma’am and no sir and curtsied and bowed my head in passing. Like a silly dance, I thought. Again. I was getting good at it. In this dance I had complete sympathy with Eugenie and her dislike for empty gestures.

  The first person to look at me carefully stopped me just outside Eugenie’s chambers.

  “Princess Eugenie! How did you get out? Wait. Wait,” the maid said excitedly. “You know you can’t be out here.” And she swept her cloak over me to hide me and began to whisper. “You’ll get us all in trouble, Princess. You agreed to stay in your rooms until the King…” She looked around wide-eyed and hid me further in her great cloak. “Let’s get you back inside quickly.”

  I figured out immediately what was going on. But I also thought the less I said the better off I’d be. The better off we would be. Maybe all of us, including the maid.

  She unlocked the chamber door with a huge key fastened around her waist with a white ribbon. I had never seen the key before, maybe because the rooms had never been locked.

  The maid continued whispering to me as she worked the big key. “How did you get out? And where did you get these clothes? And what did you do out here?”

  She gave no time for answers between rushed questions. Finally, she cranked the key twice around and something clanged inside the door, and it opened. She pushed me in very quickly and shut the door. I supposed that all the hush and rush would somehow become clear, but there I stood returned to my rooms that now felt as if I had been tossed into a dungeon. It was a very nice dungeon, though.

  All the rough walls were hung with story-telling tapestries. The stories began with simple rabbits and other woodland creatures nibbling their way across a green and gold landscape while a farmer stopped to wipe his brow. In the distance was a house with smoke curling out the chimney, in the far distance a mountain or high hill, and in the very far distance the sun was broken into rays and glowing fabric to give the whole tapestry a wonderful sense of depth. Then down the hallways came the more complicated stories. I knew these were history stories about the founding of the kingdom: boars and bears,
and even lions, fought fierce battles surrounded by armies of men with lances. I always thought the men with lances looked very bored and tired of the whole business. But row after row of battle figures seemed to be joining reluctantly in some great war that, of course, was frozen in the woven moment forever. I imagine the weavers put some of their own tiredness into the faces of the closest men.

  And down the hallway was room after room that I knew well. At the far end was my favorite. It was smaller than the other room, the ceiling was lower and the fireplace smaller. But the room warmed up quickly, there was a very big chair and good light streaming in a high window. It was a fine place to read. It was also the perfect place just to be alone, to sit and be alone with whatever doll I wanted to talk to, whatever daydream I wanted to follow.

  And there by the fire sat Eugenie.

  I had walked in so quietly that she hadn’t heard me until I entered the room. Her surprise quickly turned to delight, then to worry.

  “I can’t believe you came here,” she scolded, after first giving me a great hug. “This is risking everything we have worked for. They’ll see us together and then…and then the whole game is done.”

  “Game?” I said. “Maybe that’s the problem. It was all a game until they decide to lock you up for saying the truth. I think the game is over any way you look at it.”

  “Well, that’s exactly what happened, you know,” she said. I was going to tell her that I knew about the speech and everything except the locking up part, but I decided to wait. She went on, “First they politely applauded my little speech”—(little speech? I thought, is that what she calls telling off the councilors and calling the oldest ones ignorant?)—“then, after everyone had left, my father took me aside and said he had decided, for reasons very complicated and secret, to confine me to my room until the wedding. He said with all the important people coming, he didn’t want me running around—that’s what he called it, ‘running around’—making trouble with all the people who came for the wedding. And for the peacemaking. He really called it ‘peacemaking.’ He said, with lots of finger wagging and using of the royal ‘we,’ that it was all about proper order of things, after all was said and done. And that I had made a temporary mess of that order by scolding the Council. Then he sighed and said he would have to work hard to fix what I had broken. But he would do it. For the good of everyone. And he didn’t want to discuss it or any sassiness either. And that was that. They tossed me in the dungeon. Well, this dungeon, anyway.” She pointed around us at her very pleasant dungeon. “Okay, it’s not bad. But it’s the principle of the thing. I’m wrong. They’re right. Over and done.”