A Wild Swan (12 page)

During the months after his coronation, it was increasingly impossible for her to believe that he undervalued her intelligence (she was, in fact, intelligent). It was ever more apparent that he prized her opinions over those of his counselors (she whose only official purposes were peacekeeping and the production of heirs). By the time he'd turned twenty (just after she'd turned twenty-four), it was evident that they ruled together, secretly; that he (as tradition demanded) would offer as his own pronouncements, every day, that which they had decided together, the night before, when they were alone, in bed.

Decades passed. They had a son, a daughter, and a second son.

Their lives, their reign, was not untroubled. Among their subjects there were robberies, contract disputes, lawsuits over property lines that had been drawn a century ago. The axe-maker's wife beat her husband to death with a lamb bone and, as the police took her away, proclaimed that she hadn't wanted to sully one of the axes. In the castle, a maid was impregnated by a page, and (although the king and queen would not have punished her) drowned herself in a well. The cook fought continually with the housekeeper, each delivering, for almost thirty years, a weekly report about the excesses and callousness of the other.

Among the family, the daughter, the middle child, who had not only inherited but doubled her mother's tendency to corpulence, jumped out a window at the age of twelve, but—it being only a second-story window—landed unharmed on a hydrangea bush and, having made the gesture once, seemed to feel no need of making it again.

The second son, the youngest child—knowing he'd never be king—ran off when he turned seventeen, but returned less than a year later, thin and ragged, having tried to live as a bard and troubadour in a neighboring kingdom, but having found that his limited gifts attracted scant attention. He decided he could manage as a prince, composing verses and singing songs at occasional palace recitals.

The oldest boy was almost suspiciously untroubled. He was hale and stalwart, confident without an edge of arrogance, but his was not the most subtle and penetrating of minds, and it was impossible for his parents to refrain from periods of doubt about his ability to be king himself when the day arrived.

Although the king and queen never ceased entirely to worry over their children, the older boy remained true and devoted, and took on a more royal aspect as he entered his twenties. The younger boy married a homely but insightful princess from several kingdoms away, wrote volumes of verse for his wife, who believed him to be a genius, unheralded in his time but sure to be vindicated by history. The daughter did not marry (though she had offers) but became an expert archer, a hunter, and a sailor, and took great joy in everything she did so well.

The king and queen themselves were not untouched by sorrows or trials. In late middle age, the king believed himself to have fallen in love with an absurd but imperiously serene, lunar and ethereally pallid duchess, and needed a fortnight to learn that she intoxicated but bored him. The queen, soon after the duchess episode, returned to her old habit of pushing pages and stableboys down onto hay bales and secluded lawns, until the boys' helpless willingness, the thoughts of advancement that were audible through their lascivious moans, became more humiliating than gratifying.

The king and queen returned to each other, battered, humbled, and strangely amused by their escapades. They found, to their mutual surprise, that they seemed to love each other more rather than less for having shown, rather late in the game, this capacity for their blood to rise.

She said to him, on occasion,
I'm turning slender and sly, I'm learning to weep discreetly when the nightingale sings.

He said to her, on occasion,
Straddling me won't raise you any higher, are you sure it's worth the effort?

Which (to their shared surprise) always made them both laugh.

*   *   *

Eventually, decades later, when the king was dying, the queen gently ushered everybody out into the corridor, closed the door to the royal bedchamber, and got into bed with her husband. She started singing to him. They laughed. He was short of breath, but he could still laugh. They asked each other, Is this silly? Is this … pretentious? But they both knew that everything there was to say had been said already, over and over, across the years. And so the king, relieved, released, free to be silly, asked her to sing him a song from his childhood. He didn't need to be regal anymore, he didn't need to seem commanding or dignified, not with her. They were, in their way, dying together, and they both knew it. It wasn't happening only to him. So she started singing. They shared one last laugh—they agreed that the cat had a better voice than she did. Still, she sang him out of the world.

When the queen was dying, years later, there were twenty-three people in the room, as well as three cats and two dogs. There were her children and their children and their children's children, three of her maids, two pages (the older and the younger, long known to be lovers, their secret honored by everyone), and the cook and the housekeeper (who'd delivered their final complaints only weeks earlier). The animals—the dogs and cats—were in bed with the queen. The people knew, somehow, to stand at a certain distance, except for Sophia, the oldest maid, who moistened the queen's brow with a handkerchief.

The room wasn't silent, or reverent. One of the babies fussed. One of the dogs snarled at one of the cats. But the queen, who was enormous by then, and pale as milk, looked at all the beings surrounding her, human and animal, with a certain grave compassion, as if they were the ones who were dying.

Just before she passed away, a grandchild said to another, “She's like a planet, don't you think?”

The other replied, “No, she's like a sick old lady.”

Each felt pleased by the proof of the other's foolishness. Each boy, as their grandmother the queen sank away, thought of his own promising future; one because he had a poet's eye and heart; the other because he was unsentimental and true. Each believed, as their grandmother died, that he'd go far in the world.

As it turned out, both of them were right.

*   *   *

All the children prospered, after the queen had been put to rest. Her eldest son, who had, at his mother's insistence, ruled since his father's death, remained just and benevolent, and the male heir produced so quickly by his wife looked, early on, to be another compassionate king-in-the-making. The castle did not crack or crumble. Every tide brought in new swarms of fish. The sons and daughters of the carpenters made tables and chairs even more marvelous than those their parents had produced; the sons and daughters of the bakers rose early every morning to produce more pies and cakes, more bread and muffins.

There was, in general, peace, though robberies and contract disputes continued; sons and daughters still occasionally ran off, or lost their minds; irritation, long harbored, still festered occasionally into murder.

Nevertheless, overall, there was abundance and grace. There were marriages that lasted lifetimes. There were festivals and funerals, there were artisans and poets. Inventors produced mechanisms that shed clearer light, that uncomplainingly performed the drearier tasks, that captured and held music long thought to exist only as long as the players played and the singers sang. In the forest, the hares and pheasants paused occasionally, with the same surprised interest, at the sound of music, and did not know or care whether the music emanated from living musicians or from musicians long dead. In town, children—all of whom had been born long after the old king and queen were laid side by side in their sarcophagi—discerned, from among the music and the laughter that emanated from cafés, their parents, calling them home. Some went willingly, some went grudgingly, but all of them, every child, returned home, every night.

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Michael Cunningham
is the author of seven novels, including
A Home at the End of the World
,
Flesh and Blood
,
The Hours
(winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Pulitzer Prize),
Specimen Days
, and
The Snow Queen
, as well as
Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown
. He lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

 

A NOTE ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR

Yuko Shimizu
is a Japanese illustrator based in New York whose work has been featured in
Time
,
Newsweek
,
The New York Times
, and
The New Yorker
. Her self-titled monograph was published by Gestalten in 2011; her drawings appeared in
Barbed Wire Baseball
, written by Marissa Moss. Shimizu teaches illustration at the School of Visual Arts. You can sign up for email updates
here
.

 

ALSO BY
MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM

A Home at the End of the World

Flesh and Blood

The Hours

Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown

Specimen Days

Laws for Creations
(editor)

By Nightfall

The Snow Queen

 

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CONTENTS