Pence Page 28

  Chapter XVII

  …The time is more than a hundred years ago today. The Prince was just a boy, young and full of spirit. He would have made a good king had his sister not been born the year before him. She was first in line to inherit the Throne and the King, their father, refused to change his mind about this, to the Prince’s bitter disappointment. Furthermore, as Crown Prince, it would be his life’s duty to serve as his sister’s Honor Guard and foremost protector, placing her life always before his own. To this end he was trained all of his youth with weapons in his hands. In the few moments he stole for himself away from the accoutrements of killing, he liked to sit at the window in his bedchamber–highest in the tower, overlooking the sea–and watch the whales.

  There is no grander house of mortals in a hundred kingdoms, this tower. It was the King’s first great ambition, an undertaking so massive it spanned more than half his reign. The price of fulfilling his vision was the best years of countless men’s lives–a sum the King was categorically unconcerned with–as well as the better part of his coffers. When construction was finished, no more awesome work had ever been wrought by the minds and hands of men.

  The base of the tower was chiseled strike by strike out of a cliff face spearing up from the sea; when the tide rose, it looked as though the tower grew out of the water like a titan’s arm grabbing at the noonday sun. The King’s throne was shaped from the natural rock of the utmost peak of the cliff, and the walls of the tower were grown around this central room like a tree from seed. Construction to such enormous scale was fueled by an endless supply of white stone mined out of the mountains themselves–this was the conception of the tunnel road.

  When the Prince looked out his window he heard neither the songs of birds nor the percussion of waves far below. He was above them all. His life was lived above everything. In his daydreams he often thought about leaping from the window. He would fall forever…

  One floor down from the Prince’s bedchamber were his sister’s quarters. Every night they would talk window to window–late after they should have been to sleep–and watch for whales in the dark.

  He was… misunderstood, the Prince. His tutors and trainers–whom he saw more than his own father–raised him with deadly steel in his hands, sparring against orphan children with wooden swords. Young boys should have dirt and frog slime on their clothes at the end of the day, not handprints of blood. The Prince was just a boy…

  His father, the King, was a cold man, as though his veins were filled with the same icy waters out of which his tower broached. He was a big man, but frail. The creation of his almighty fortress had sapped his vigor, turned his hair white, and stooped his back with age.

  With his tower complete and his legacy unchallenged, there should have been little to weigh on the King’s mind, but always he sat brooding on his throne, gripping its arms like an eagle his prey. Who knows where first he heard of the accursed garden? Who knows what tales of the well were whispered in his ear, what promises of fortune, life eternal, or power unbound?

  The second half of his reign–and all the last years of his time in this world–the King chased the garden but he never told anyone to what ends. His could have been a life of luxury, prestige, and pleasure, overseeing a sprawling kingdom from a tower that was every other monarch’s envy; instead, he dwelt on stories of the garden like a man who cannot reach an itch in the middle of his own back.

  He depleted the last of the kingdom’s wealth hiring explorers, cartographers, storytellers, mercenaries, anyone with a plan to find the legendary garden. None would succeed. And yet of hundreds, perhaps thousands, only a handful ever returned and tried to explain to the King how a simple garden could prove such vexing quarry. The King smiled and listened patiently and then he made the Prince cut out their tongues and stitch their lips together. Unsurprisingly, no one bothered to return after that, and it must be supposed that any number of his majesty’s subjects–farmers and scoundrels and the like–came to collect their share of the rapidly depleting treasury, pretending to be trackers and famous explorers, knowing the old King would give them a little jingling bag of coins and expect them never to return unless they had found a place that was surely no more than a fairytale.

  When the gold ran out, the King raised taxes and dismissed the castle staff and auctioned away every piece of furniture, every statue and painting, the silverware, window drapes, doorknobs, rugs, and chamber basins. All he kept was the throne, and only that because it was carved from the mountain itself. But the garden eluded him even as the allure of it bore deeper into his heart.

  Destitute and desperate to continue funding his obsession, the aging King schemed to marry off his daughter, the firstborn Princess, to the highest bidder, for she had grown from a big-eared, freckled child into a young woman of renowned beauty. The King’s idea was a heartless thing if ever there was one: he commissioned to be made one hundred pennies bearing her countenance on one side–to show off her captivating smile–and then he had them delivered in ninety-nine handsome purple coaches to the richest lords and noblemen in all of the ninety-nine other kingdoms of man. On the back of each penny was an engraved script inquiring what each would-be suitor was willing to pay for the Princess’s hand.

  Now, although the Prince was not unpleased by the prospect of his sister’s departure–for it meant he would ascend the Throne one day, after all–he was observant enough to see how tightly his father clutched the arms of his cold stone seat, how quickly his eyes darted back and forth amongst even his most loyal captains, suspecting them of harboring secrets about the garden. The Prince knew his own position at court had grown tenuous at best, but he was just a boy–what could he do?

  While awaiting word back from the would-be suitors, the King set out with his retinue on one last ill-fated campaign to locate the mysterious garden. Lodging at an expensive inn in an otherwise nondescript country village, paying their stay with violent threats for the innkeeper and his family instead of fair coin, the King and his men rode out each day in a new direction, returning to the inn each night in worse airs than the day before.

  One gray day like any other, the Princess disappeared without her Honor Guard–without her brother, that is–and, although she returned safely to the inn that evening, the next morning the King discovered a strange brand upon her right hand: a small heart burned into the skin on her palm. Not red and black and cracked and bleeding: green, fresh as a sapling bud, which is to say not burned at all, but… grown, perhaps. Truly there is no word for it, but the King demanded an explanation.

  The explanation, the Princess said with far too much satisfaction, was that she was in love, if that loathsome word will suffice. In love with a boy, she said, from a hidden garden. The King gazed at her, through her even, then slapped her across the face and sent her to be locked in her room.

  The King’s fury was to be expected: the Princess knew she was to be married off. It was her own doing, what befell her family for her affair.

  If they had been at the tower, she never could have escaped. If they had been at the tower, she would not have found the garden in the first place. However, being a resourceful sort of girl, sneaking out of a third-story suite at the inn, climbing down the ivy trellis, and quieting away cannot have been overly difficult. Especially with no soldiers posted outside–the King had called them in early. As she rode away from the little village, she did not see her brother ducked in the bushes below her window, the only guard left out in the cold, per their father’s instructions.

  When she reached the garden at dawn, the Prince was a stone’s throw behind her, still unseen. She disappeared between broad leaves and bright flowers. There were uncountable multitudes of birds singing in the Holy Tree and the shade was as deep and cool as a hidden pond.

  The Prince, for his part, was uncertain what lay ahead, but he knew it was unwise to cross his father. And he was just a boy, he told himself. He sauntered along the garden path with a grin on his face, like a child who has just caug
ht their sibling stealing a piece of candy.

  Few men have heard what came to pass in the garden when the Prince confronted his sister and the orphan boy, but the stories generally do not want for color. Be you satisfied that the orphan boy raised a hand against his kingdom’s royal son and paid for it dearly. Know the Princess was rescued and brought back to beg for mercy.

  When they entered the inn, the Prince pushed his sister before the King. Thinking himself fit for a medal, the Prince was taken aback to find the first of his father’s barbed questions fired at himself. “The garden, did you find it?” the old King roared. “Speak, spindly brat! Tell me the way!”

  The Prince was a skilled hunter and tracker, but try as he might, though his memory of the path did not seem at first to be overly befuddled, he could not manage to proffer any more intricate directions than if his tongue had been tied in a knot. The King spat in his son’s face and turned his wrath to the Princess.

  She stood defiant, bound in chains, but here is the curious part: she hid something in her hand, kept low at her hip, out of the King’s sight.

  The Prince heard… or thought he heard… a beating, like a heart’s pulse… or if not heard, then felt. It was… most unusual. So he seized her wrist and held it up, boasting his cleverness to the King in order to win favor.

  The King told the Prince to cut off her hand if she would not willingly consent to reveal what secret she bore from the garden. The Prince picked up his axe.

  The King raised a hand and let it fall onto the arm of his throne like a guillotine blade. He betrayed no more remorse than he did for the countless dead mixed into the mortar of his tower.

  It was not a choice. It was the King’s order. A boy cannot cross his sire–he cannot even begin to. That is why the Prince hewed off his sister’s hand and let her suddenly rigid body collapse to the inn floor. He looked to his father for approval but met only a devil’s eyes.

  On the floor, the Princess convulsed in spasms of pain, screaming sure enough to wake all the town and countryside. Calm as the eye of a storm, the King told his son to take up her severed hand and pry it open.

  The boy’s dark road had been assured as soon as the axe came down. Emotionless, he picked up his sister’s hand.

  Do you know what he found? Do you know what she was willing to lose her hand to try to protect?

  It was a penny, young master.

  One worthless penny, the last spared from those sent to her would-be suitors.

  Why would she do that? The penny was a symbol of a future held captive in courts and castles and false kisses. She should have loathed it, thrown it in the King’s face like a hex. Yet she held it fast until the Prince swung his axe.

  She lay in a growing pool of blood on the floor but no one dared help her until the King had vented the remainder of his belligerence. Gripping his throne cravenly, he bade the Prince step forward and show him the penny. There were no unusual markings on the coin of any kind, nothing at all to do with the garden–just the Princess’s face on one side; on the other, the now-voided proposal: What will you pay for her hand? And what of the mysterious pulse the Prince had felt? Gone without a trace.

  The King kicked the Prince away. The boy fell and landed in his sister’s blood. By now she had fallen silent. For an instant, deep inside his heart, the Prince lamented that there would be no more long talks between their windows at night.

  Later, physicians would treat the Princess’s wound with flames and needles and thread, so the story goes, and she would stave off death for a time. But the Prince would never see her again, not to this day.

  The penny held fast in his gloved hand, pressing the image of his sister’s sad smile into the black leather on his palm, the Prince rose from the pool of blood. “What shall I do, father?” he begged, fighting tears. An older boy might have taken the axe and won the Crown with a single swing, and his father would probably have never let go of the arms of his throne to raise a hand in his own defense. How much better things would be, then? Instead, the boy cowered in his guilt and fear. “Shall I return to the garden in your name?” he whimpered, for he had seen that the garden was more prized to the King than his own children or even his marvelous tower, although the Prince did not and could not then understand why.

  The King laughed derisively. “And do what, in my name, you floundering, beak-faced fool? A rock will count the stars before you will stumble upon the garden again! On this they all agree: a man who finds the garden but once has already used more luck than his life is afforded, for the well does not often seek to be found. You have likely ruined any chance for me to ever find it, either, when you stained the sacred soil with innocent blood! A curse is born this day. Let it be on you, and you are no heir of mine.”

  The Prince was stunned by his father’s arcane knowledge of the mysterious garden. More than that, however, his own curiosity was piqued by the mention of the well, as if a hole in the ground was more significant than the Holy Tree itself, to which all legends award preeminence.

  “You have sealed your fate,” the King told the boy. “Your actions have doomed this kingdom, as they have doomed me. I shall never forgive you. You will never sit the Throne. May your dark deeds be on your shoulders until the end of days and a pox of decay upon your heart. You are forthwith exiled from court.”

  The Prince fell to his knees, his fine pajamas sopped in blood. He let the axe fall from his hand. In his other fist he still held the penny tight–a talisman, perhaps he felt, against the awful things his father was shouting down at him; a charm to light the dark road he had started down.

  “If you return, I will throw you from the top of my tower–let it be out your very own window! Unless,” the King could not suppress his obsession, “unless it is to report that by some malfeasant miracle you have managed to lie, cheat, and steal your way back to the garden. And although I am quite certain you will never see it again, if you do, if you do… it would vanish again the moment you left. But if you do find it, throw that cursed penny in the well, wish for this sin of yours to never have happened, and pray it comes true. If you should return before that you will find yourself falling through the heavens like an angel with a chain around its wings.”

  His sister, all that blood… nowadays the Prince never thinks of it. He feels no remorse because he knows that when he finds the well, he will set everything back proper. There will be no blood to cry over. He will be a boy again, watching whales from his window. He has learned much about the garden in his exile; he has heard all the stories–more even than his father–and he has come to believe them just as much. The garden is truly a home of wonders—this, he knows.

  That much of the story is common fodder for tavern-rats and barmaids, for the King let news of his son’s fall from grace spread like Spring. The Prince soon became synonymous with sedition, evil. The populace vowed to string him up if they ever saw him–they were eager to hold someone, anyone, accountable for the kingdom’s shameful debt. Speaking out against the King or his quest for the garden would have been no better than putting the rope around their own necks; so, for a scapegoat, the Prince would have to do.

  It was around this time that the drought took hold–not like it is today, though, not at first. It still rained in those days. Now the farmers have turned to dust. Was it because the Holy Tree was unmade? Who can say?

  The rest of the Prince’s story is not one you’ll hear from anyone in this kingdom. But this is only one realm among a hundred, is it not? The Prince rode far and wide, infamy never farther back than his shadow.

  It had taken him only a day to realize that the garden simply was not where it had been before. The labyrinth of foothills was not small, but neither was it vast. His father had been right: whatever force presided over the garden, it clearly did not want him to return.

  One more day and a near run-in with an ale-roused mob showed the Prince how dangerous it would be to delay any further. He resigned himself to his exile and rode for the border at once. There is
not a kingdom in the world he has not visited, now; not a corner of the map he has not explored.

  At some point in his travels, a rumor spread about the Prince: his left hand was locked in a permanent fist and no one had ever seen what he held inside. Understandably, the stories were each more ludicrous than the last. Some said it owed to a curse, some to a covenant with demons. Yet it was true that the hand which held his sister’s penny he could not open and never had since the day he took the Princess’s hand from her body.

  His fingers simply would not obey him. Nor could he peel them open with his free hand or any other instrument. A doubt hit him: Had his sister also been unable to open her hand that fateful day she stood defiant before the King? Had he severed her arm for nothing? But then why would she not have said so? Why would she not have groveled for clemency? And what of that ethereal rhythm in her hand that he had heard–felt–just before he cut?

  The Prince was struck by a second revelation: if he eventually returned to his homeland to seek the garden, he could not make his wish–as his father had bidden him–because he would be unable to release the penny into the well.

  Ah, he thought, but his was only one of a hundred. He knew where the other pennies could be found–in the hands of the wealthiest earls, lords, dukes, magistrates, patriarchs, and heads of state in ninety-nine kingdoms around the world.

  No other man alive or dead has set foot in each of the One Hundred Kingdoms of Man–indeed, few men can even put a name to more than a tenth of them. For many lands are not so easy to pin on a map as our own. Some lie below seas, or in the clouds, under mountains, or inside dreams. Some are reached through spelled books, some are as small as a tuft of cottonwood. Others lie beyond horse-years of deserts or plains of snow. One can be found only in the memory of finding it, which is quite difficult to remember when you’ve never been there a first time. The Prince made his way to them all, and that you can trust.

  One would have been enough–one penny–and that first one took no great time or talent to collect. It was stuck in the hand of an odiously fat nobleman from the Kingdom of Cows. This repulsive heifer claimed he had not been able to release the coin since the first time he picked it up, when he had been eager to make an offer for the lean, appetizing Princess. The Prince told him he could free the penny easily. The nobleman held out his hand. The Prince swung his axe and the penny fell to the floor, clutched in lifeless, twitching fingers. The fat nobleman bleated like throat-cut cattle until he bled out.

  The Prince took his prize and turned for home to seek the garden and make his wish, but he lost the penny out a hole in his pocket. Though he scoured the road for days, retracing all his steps, he never found it.

  Alas, but there are ninety-eight more, he dismally conceded.

  The second penny was slightly harder to locate, but equally simple to liberate. It was in the hand of a widowed earl. He had been preparing to sell his three daughters to make enough money to be the Princess’s highest bidder, so the story goes. The Earl wept as he held out his hand and the Prince obliged to set him free. The axe whistled. The Earl died quietly with guilty eyes. His daughters did not weep for him.

  The Prince had not yet left the late Earl’s estate when he checked his coin-purse and found inside a tiny hole, the penny gone. Furious, he and the Earl’s daughters searched the castle all that season to no avail. Finally, he beckoned each of the girls to him with his axe, demanding they admit to having found the penny and hidden it away for themselves. Although all three maidens claimed to have done precisely this when the silver axe was pressed under their chins, the Prince knew none of them were his culprit.

  Alas, but there are ninety-seven more, he dismally conceded.

  The third penny was more difficult to track down, and although the Prince took every precaution to ensure its security, he lost that one, too, in an impossible coincidence involving a puddle of mud, three half-wild pigs, and a fungal cucumber.

  The fourth penny took an entire winter to acquire, but only the span of an ill-timed sneeze to lose down the side of a waterfall.

  The Prince is no fool. He knew there was more than poor luck at play. But he was determined. For every penny he recovered on adventures each the more remarkable than the last, he would lose it in happenstance of astronomical odds all the more remarkable still. And for every penny lost, he set off on another adventure to another uncharted kingdom. Thus occupied in mind and body, the Prince grew comfortable in his exile. Years unwound.

  His determination was matched by his success, which was exceeded only by his folly in losing each penny before he could return home, no matter his precautions. He put them in locked boxes, stuffed them in slaves’ mouths and sewed them shut, even hung one from a hook attached to his own nose and never took his eyes off it, but never a one did he see safely back to the borders of his homeland.

  It is said that he took them all for himself, every last penny. It is said that he had to cut off a lot of hands to do so. The last few dozen were already dead and buried; it seems the Prince was not the only one finding it difficult to let go of a little money.

  Now? Ninety-nine kingdoms, ninety-nine pennies recovered on ninety-nine grand adventures of every variety… and ninety-nine pennies gone missing in ninety-nine of the unlikeliest, misfortunate, inconceivable jests of fate the world has surely ever witnessed.

  What has befallen the Prince’s father, the bygone King? Today the people do not recall. His voice faded from the land as he disappeared back through the tunnel road on that fateful day, home to his tower to stay. In the interregnum, the tower–once a spectacle of the civilized world–has crumbled into disrepair, they say. Certainly no one knows where the Princess was taken, or whether she was ever married off after the physicians finished tending to her stump.

  Now? There is only one penny left. In the end, the Prince needn’t have chased down all the rest, for the one he held in his left hand was the only one he never lost.

  At least he had grown accustomed to the inevitable–it no longer made him sick to his stomach: when he crossed back into his own kingdom for the first time in a century, he calmly held out his left hand and, with his right, raised his axe as he had done so many times before. One final hand to set free.

  He has his heart set on the well. He would unravel every season’s stitch for a hundred years. He would wash away his crimes and be cleansed of the sins of his father. He will wish away the garden. He will wish away the well.

  He would see his sister again. He would talk to her past bedtime and look for whales in the night.

  The Prince is happy. He has not felt this way since he was a boy dreaming about stepping off his windowsill…