Kingdom Come

The pears were the finest the boy had ever seen, and his mother was insulting them.

"Three kind? For pears this small?" She weighed one in her palm and held the seller's eye as though he had said something improper in front of the children. "Cordillion himself would have reopened the gates at that price, and called it mercy."

The seller only laughed and kept his price, because in Avenrose, on this morning of all mornings, even robbery wore a smile. All around them the market was dressing for the night to come. Men stood on each other's shoulders to hang banners the deep gold of the royal house; women strung garlands between the stalls; somewhere out of sight a drum was being tested, three beats and a rest, three beats and a rest, as though the whole city were learning its own heartbeat. The boy turned a slow circle and tried to hold all of it at once and could not. There was too much. That was the glory of a feast day. There was always too much.

His mother paid the three kind. She always did, in the end. The haggling was a courtesy more than a war, a thing you performed so the seller might keep the pleasure of having won. She settled the pears into the basket already groaning on her hip — bread, a fat hen bound in cloth, onions, a twist of saffron she had fought over longer than the fruit — and caught the boy's hand before the crowd could carry him off.

Above every head, across the square, Cordillion watched them go. The founder stood in weathered stone where he had always stood, one arm flung up, the other resting on the head of a child carved kneeling at his knee, the words beneath his boots worn too smooth now for most to read. The pigeons had made their feelings plain. But today someone had climbed up and crowned him in green laurel, and hung from the crook of his raised arm a board fresh-painted and bright, which the boy could read, because his mother had taught him his letters at the kitchen table: THE THREE-HUNDREDTH RISING OF AVENROSE — TONIGHT — THE ROYAL PLAZA — ALL SOULS WELCOME.

By the fountain a knot of players was rehearsing for the night. They had a great painted gate on wheels, and a fat man in a tin crown who kept being driven backward through it by a lean man in farmer's brown with a wooden sword, while a third shouted corrections from a stool and a fourth wept that the gate would not roll straight. The farmer was meant to be Cordillion. The boy knew because the children gathered to watch cheered the brown coat and booed the crown. He would have stood there until dark, had his mother let him.

"Are we going?" he asked. "Tonight. To the Plaza."

"We are going home," said his mother, "where no stranger can tread on your feet or lift your father's purse. Your aunt is crossing the whole of the river country to sit at our table, and your cousins with her. That is feast enough for any boy."

They left the market for the long stone corridors of the lower city, the cool shaded passages that ran beneath the great houses and carried the plain traffic of Avenrose — handcarts, a water-seller, two washerwomen with a basket swinging between them, a goat that had got loose from somebody and was making a holiday of it. The city climbed above them in pale terraces toward the palace, which the boy did not lift his eyes to often, because it made his neck ache and turned his thoughts to strange shapes.

"Mother," he said. "What is the rising? What are we keeping, truly?"

She shifted the basket and considered him, well pleased. She loved a question like this. "You know this one. You've had it every year you've been alive."

"Tell it anyway."

So she told it, the best way she told it, in step with her own feet. Long ago, she said — longer than your grandmother's grandmother, longer than anyone can carry in their head — a sickness came across all these lands. And the great people, the ones who lived up the hill where we are walking, not down in it where we live, took fright. So they shut their gates. They drew all the grain and all the medicine and all the warmth inside their high walls, and they let the gates fall closed, and on the far side of them the ordinary folk, the very folk who had grown the grain to begin with, were left out in the cold with the sickness for company.

The boy had heard it a hundred times. His chest still tightened at the part that came next.

But there was a man, his mother said, and her voice dropped low and went proud, as though she had stood at his very shoulder. There was a man who would not abide a shut gate. Cordillion. He gathered the hungry and the furious and the unfrightened, and he rose, and he did not stop rising until the gates stood open and these lands were free and ours, and a kingdom of our own grew up where the closing had been. We called it Avenrose. And every hundredth year we light the candles and we eat past all sense and we remember that once the gates were shut, and one man opened them.

"Were you there?" the boy asked.

His mother laughed aloud, surprised and full, the basket leaping on her hip. "Was I — oh, my heart, no. Three hundred years ago. I was not so much as a wish, then. None of us were."

He frowned. He had been sure, half a breath before, the way a child is sure of a thing right up until it comes apart in his hands. "But you tell it like you saw it."

"I tell it as my mother told it, who had it from hers. That is how a thing three hundred years old gets carried — hand to hand, mouth to mouth, like a hot dish nobody dares be the one to drop." She pressed his fingers. "I am no Queen Cosima of Avenrose, sweet. I am only the mother of one curious boy, and of a basket that is breaking my arm."

He almost let it lie. They had gone half a corridor further, into a passage turned gold with afternoon and warm with someone's cooking, before the rest of it caught him up.

"Mother. Was Queen Cosima there?"

She stopped.

Not the way she stopped to straighten his collar or to scold. She stopped the way a teller stops when the listener has, without meaning to, asked for the best part of the tale. When she turned to him her face had changed — a brightness in it, near to mischief, the delight of a grown woman about to set something enormous into a child's two hands.

"Yes," she said. "Queen Cosima was there."

"But you said — three hundred years —"

"I said that I was not there. That your grandmother's grandmother was not there." She walked on, slower now. "The queen was there. The queen is always there. She watched the gates come open. She watched, too, when your grandmother's grandmother was a girl barefoot in this road. She is not carried hand to hand like the story, sweet — she is the one thing in all of Avenrose that no soul need remember, because she has never once gone away. She was, and she is, and she will be. Our queen does not die."

The boy walked a while inside that. It was a wide thing to walk inside. "But she'll grow old," he said, and stopped, and tried again, because the question kept breaking apart on him. "Everyone grows old. Old, and then —" He did not care to say the last word aloud on a feast day.

"Not her."

"How? How does a person not?"

And here, for the first time in all the long afternoon, his mother had no tale ready. He watched it happen. She opened her mouth to answer him and found she had none, because never once in her life had she been asked to account for the queen's deathlessness, any more than she had been asked to account for rain falling down instead of up. It simply was. It had always simply been. Cosima of Avenrose did not die, the way the sun came up and the river ran on and the gates, now, stayed open.

"Some say a god gave it to her," she tried. "A gift out of the heavens. Some say darker things." She heard how thin it sounded, and let it go, and gave him instead the truer thing she held, which was the better gift. She crouched, basket and all, until her eyes were level with his, and laid one cold market-chapped hand against his cheek. "Some things are not meant for us to understand, my love. Some things we are only meant to be glad of. A queen who never leaves us — that is one of those. Now. Will you help me carry this hill, or interview me the whole way up it?"

He took the bread. It was heavier than it looked.

***

Home was three rooms above a cooper's yard, and by the time they had climbed to it the light had turned the very color of the saffron she had fought for, and the whole twisting city below them had begun to glitter as the Plaza lit its first lamps. She had the hen half-dressed and the fire built high when the door banged and the boy's father came in carrying the yard on him, and the long road, and somebody's offered ale.

He stopped dead at the table.

"Bloody hell, woman." He lifted the cloth from the hen, the bread, the pears, his brows climbing at each in turn. "You've bought out the whole of the market. Kingdoms have gone to war over less. How much kind did this cost me?"

"It is the rising," she said, unbothered, flouring her hands. "It comes once in a hundred years, and my sister is crossing half the river country to sit at our board, and her children with her, and I will not have them say we set a thin table the night Avenrose turned three hundred. So. It cost what it cost."

He held out against it one breath longer, then laughed and gave it up, the way the seller had given up his price in the market, because some bargains are not worth the winning. He crossed the little room and kissed his wife on the brow — on the flour, and the loose hair, and the warmth of her.

"Heavens bless Avenrose," he said. "And every soul in her."

She smiled down into the hen. "Heavens bless Avenrose," she agreed. And then, light as a pinch of salt let fall into a pot, not so much as turning round: "...or the exact opposite."

Her husband huffed a laugh out through his nose and went to wash the yard from his hands. The boy laughed too, a beat behind the both of them, because they were laughing, and on a feast day a laugh is a thing a child joins without first needing its reason. Only his mother had not laughed. She had said it smiling, and she was smiling yet, down into the pot, the spoon going slowly round — and the boy watched her a breath longer than the moment asked, and could not have told a living soul why the smile made him want to cross the floor and take her hand.

Then his cousins were on the stair, loud and many and damp from the river road, and the door burst inward, and there was too much again, the way there was always too much on a feast day.

He ran to meet it.