by Paula Guran
What she said to convince him, we’ll never know. Perhaps he wasn’t all that difficult to convince; having no family and only minimal prospects, he had little to lose here himself. Perhaps he’d wanted to run away with her all along, but was too shy to ask.
Whatever she said, it worked. He slipped back into his room to retrieve from under a loose floorboard a small amount of money he’d been able to save—perhaps against the day he could convince Eleanor to marry him—and then they were off.
By now, everybody in town knew about the slipper and the hunt for the Mystery Girl, and you could already hear the hounds baying in the distance.
They escaped from town by hiding in a dung cart—Eleanor’s idea, to kill her scent.
After scrubbing in a fast-moving stream, while she shyly hid her breasts from him and he pretended not to look, they set off on foot across the countryside, walking the back roads to avoid pursuit, hitching rides in market-bound farmer’s carts, later catching a narrow-gauge train that started and stopped, stopped and started, sometimes, for no apparent reason, sitting motionless for hours at tiny deserted stations where weeds grew up through the tracks and dogs slept on their backs on the empty sun-drenched platforms, all four legs in the air. In this manner, they inched their way across Europe, slowly running through Casimir’s small store of cash, living on black bread, stale cheese, and sour red wine.
In Hamburg, they sold Eleanor’s father’s silver to buy passage on a ship going to the United States, and some crudely forged identity papers. Before they were allowed aboard with their questionable papers, Eleanor had to blow the harbormaster, kneeling before him on the rough plank floor of his office, splinters digging into her knees, while he jammed his thick dirty cock that smelled like a dead lizard into her mouth, and she tried not to gag.
Casimir never found out; there were some of the harbormaster’s companions who would have preferred for him to pay their unofficial passage fee rather than her, and Casimir, still being a boy in many ways, would have indignantly refused, and they would have been caught and maybe killed. She considered it a small enough price to pay for getting a chance at a new life in a new world, and rarely thought about it thereafter. She figured that Casimir had nothing to complain about, as when she did come to his bed, after they had been safely married in the New World, she came to it as a virgin, and they had the bloody sheet to prove it (just as well, too—Casimir was a good man, and a sweet-natured one, but he was a man of his time, after all, and couldn’t be expected to be too liberal about things).
They made their way eventually to Chicago, where work for seamstresses and glaziers could be had, and where they had forty-five tumultuous years together, sometimes happy, sometimes not, until one bitter winter afternoon, carrying a pane of glass through the sooty city snow, Casimir’s heart broke in his chest.
Eleanor lived another twenty years, and died on a cot in the kitchen near the stove (in the last few days, she’d refused to be taken upstairs to the bedroom), surrounded by children and grandchildren, and by the homey smells of cooked food, wood smoke, and the sharper smells of potash and lye, all of which she now found oddly comforting, although she’d hated them when she was young. She regretted nothing that she’d ever done in her life, and, except for a few moments at the very end when her body took over and struggled uselessly to breathe, her passing was as easy as any human being’s has ever been.
After the Old King died, the Prince only got to reign for a few years before the monarchy was overthrown by civil war. The Prince and the rest of the royal family and most of the nobility were executed, kind or cruel, innocent or corrupt. The winning side fell in its turn, some decades later, and eventually a military junta, run by a local Strongman, took over.
Years later, Eleanor’s grandson was in command of a column of tanks that entered and conquered the town, since one of the Strongman’s successors had allied himself with the Axis.
Later that night, Eleanor’s grandson climbed up to the ruins of the royal castle, mostly destroyed in an earlier battle, and looked out over the remains of the floor of the Grand Ballroom, open now to the night sky, weeds growing up through cracks in the once brilliantly polished marble that still gleamed dully in the moonlight, and wondered why he felt a moment of drifting melancholy, a twinge of sorrow that quickly dissipated, like waking from a sad dream that fades even as you try to remember it, and is gone.
Gardner Dozois is the founding editor of The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies (1984–present) and was editor of Asimov’s Science Fiction magazine (1984–2004), garnering fifteen Hugo Awards and thirty-two Locus Awards for editing. He has edited more than one hundred anthologies not including the (so-far) thirty-three volumes of The Year’s Best. As a writer, he’s authored more than fifty short stories and twice won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story. He was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2011.
“The Queen Who Could Not Walk” has no basis in any particular fairy tale, but like many older stories it has a king, a queen, a wise beggar woman, and a journey to understanding and forgiveness that plucks on the heartstrings.
The Queen Who Could Not Walk
Peter S. Beagle
Far Away And Long Ago is a real country, older and more enduring than any bound by degrees and hours and minutes on a map. For a time there lived a king and queen there no worse than most kings and queens, and probably a little better. These two ruled their subjects kindly enough, considering that they rarely saw any of them, except for the servants who assured the king and queen that they were better rulers than the ruled deserved. When they rode abroad on their semiannual passages, the streets were lined with ranks of cheering people who waved their caps, if they owned any, and threw flowers, if they could afford them, and kisses if they could not. And the affection and loyalty displayed was reasonably genuine, for the people knew well how much worse things could be, and often had been, and were thus grateful. Part of their tenderness for the queen undoubtedly stemmed from the well-known fact that she was crippled, her legs stricken useless from the very day of her wedding. Her affliction caused her no pain—indeed, her health otherwise was remarkably vigorous—but no doctor was ever able to provide cause or cure, nor could any wisewoman mumble and chant her way through the mystery, however many chickens she slaughtered. So the queen sat all day on her padded throne, or reclined gracefully on a specially built divan; she was carried everywhere within the palace and its great crystal-roofed gardens by the king himself; and, of course, traveled in a closed sedan chair whenever she went outside. Everything was done for her comfort that might be done, and if sometimes that constant awareness was an ache in itself, she kept it close and never let it show. For she had been raised properly, and she knew how queens properly dealt with aches.
It says a good deal for the king that it never occurred to him to reject his wife, to return her to her family as damaged goods, as many advised him. On the contrary, he had both sense and wit enough to treat her altogether as his partner and companion in all matters: ruling in sorrow at times, and in discomfort always, but ruling. And, as has been said, they were at least better than the average run of those who had come before them.
Now it is to this day a curious aspect of the governance of that realm that kings and queens are not born to royalty, but selected in earliest childhood, and at a certain mirror point in life—a time never known until it arrives, until certain priests have cast their bones and consulted uncharted stars—he or she must step down, exchanging jeweled crown and stately robes for loincloth and begging-bowl, and go out into the world far beyond the sheltered world they have known since first being raised up. None were encouraged to linger in their old surroundings, and few ever did, but drifted away silently along every curve of the round earth. Once in a great while, word would come of a lost king being worshipped as a holy man in some spiny mountain village, or rumor might whisper of a former queen achieving rural renown as a cook in a village inn. But in the main they simply wandered off into
absence without protest or complaint. Some were quickly forgotten; others—for good or ill—never were.
When the end came for this particular king, announced for his ears alone by a wizened, sour-faced old priest with a lisp, he grieved deeply to leave his wife to the mercy of time and her ruined legs. But he had prepared as well as he could, hiring, at great expense, the finest deviser he could seek out to design a chair with wheels for her, a sort of mobile throne: the first ever seen, as it happens, in the land of Far Away And Long Ago, where all moves slowly. The king disliked the result, as he had known he would, having always taken great delight in carrying the queen in his arms himself wherever in the palace she desired to go. But the queen in fact was quite pleased, and played with her new wheelchair like a child, rolling and spinning and turning in circles. And when she did notice the sadness in her husband’s eyes as he looked on, she said to him quickly, “But you will always have to push me, you know. I cannot make this thing go very far by myself.” And the king smiled and nodded, and kissed her, and said nothing.
He also spoke privately to a servingman he trusted, and whom he knew to be fond of the queen, asking him to look after her in his place when he should be gone forever. The man promised to do all that one of his lowly status could do to aid and comfort a royal personage, and allowed himself the liberty of rejecting the handsome payment that the king offered him. “My services are not for sale, Majesty,” he rebuked the king gently. “The strength of my arms and my back is for sale. My friendship is not.” And the king was much shamed by this, and asked his pardon.
When the king left, quietly, in the night, so as not to awaken the queen to grief quite so soon, she was inconsolable as she had not been since she lost the use of her legs. The servingman was too wise to attempt to comfort her—which would not have been his place, in any event—but he did what he knew how to do, keeping palace officials and family members alike graciously and dexterously away from her until she felt herself at least a little recovered and able to deal with such matters. For she must now be queen in full measure, reigning alone, with no guide, and no true knowledge of those she governed. She could only do her best, he counseled her, as he and her many other servants did.
And so she lived, ruling as she imagined her husband would have done—Where could he be now? Sleeping cold in what hayfield? Begging his evening meal along what road?—until her own time of stars and runes and farseeing priests came. She was aged then, though not as old as many had been who obediently cast aside power and took up holy homelessness. Her servant—old himself now, but long ascended to the highest rank in her household—fiercely pleaded her case for unique consideration, on the grounds of her disability; but the gods were the gods, implacable as ever. The only mercy allotted her was permission to take her special chair along with her into the wild. It was the last service her old friend could perform; she never saw him again.
There she sat, day after day: one old woman among the throng of beggars, hawkers and petitioners who crowded the courtyard of the palace that had for so long, and so recently, been her home and her life. It was the hot season, and she suffered greatly; but to wheel herself back into the blessed shade of a god’s statue meant making herself less visible to those passersby who wished to gain merit by placing coins in pleading hands. Most would have offered alms gladly to one who had lately been their ruler; but few of those had ever seen her face, and fewer still recognized her in her dusty rags. She went thirsty most days, and hungry many a night; and still she sat on alone on her wheeled throne.
Then the rains came. Within a day they had driven half the courtyard swarm to cover; within two they had beaten down all lowering growth and battered every leaf off the ornamental trees that ringed the palace. In three days the cracked and withered earth, soaked beyond absorbing, had become a hungry, gummy marsh, sucking boots and sandals off their wearers’ feet, and making it impossible for the wheels of the old queen’s chair to turn at all. Prisoned on her throne, her begging-bowl full only of water, her condition more hopeless than that of the lowest beggar in her former realm, she bowed lower and lower beneath the pitiless lash of the rain, and waited to die.
She never really remembered the beggar woman coming to her, though sometimes she thought she recalled a voice out of the wind and rain, and rough, strong hands over hers on the arms of the wheelchair. But when she opened her eyes fully it was to the steamy, pungent warmth of a cowshed, and the hands were drying her face and hair and body as they stripped her few scraps of clothing from her starving body and lifted her out of her chair to set her down, curled like a child, against a warm, breathing flank and cover her with straw, piles and piles of straw. She fell asleep with the soft, comforting murmur that cows make to their newborns in her ears, and she did not wake until the storm had passed and sunlight was shining in her eyes through the chinks in the shed walls.
The beggar woman was sitting on a hay bale, knees drawn up to her chest, greedily munching a fruit in its skin. Her voice, when she saw the queen reaching feebly for her chair, was as rough as her hands. “Lie still—you haven’t the strength of a blind kitten. Show some sense now, and lie still!”
The queen could not tell the woman’s age. Her brown face and bare arms were streaked with dried mud, and her hair was so dirty and tangled that it was impossible to be sure of what color it was. As for her dress, it was little better than the queen’s rags, and she wore no shoes at all. She finished the fruit, tossed away the core with a grunt of disgust, hopped down from the hay bale and rummaged to find a bucket lying loose in one of the stalls. With this in hand she addressed herself to the cow who had kept the queen warm and alive all night, and quickly returned with new milk all but spilling over the bucket’s rim. “You’ll have to sit up and lap it as it stands. This inn’s well enough for bed, but it’s not much for breakfast.”
The beggar woman strolled close to look at the wheelchair, propped against the stall door. “A pretty thing,” she remarked, “but not much good without a dog or a goat to pull it, I’d think. Or maybe—” and here she turned and smiled sardonically at the exhausted and bewildered queen “—some poor fool to push it? Drink your milk while it’s warm, best thing for you.” She scraped with a dirty forefinger at the mud caking the chair’s wheels. It fell away in long lakes and wrinkled clods. “Pretty, though, I’ll say that . . .”
The queen drank as much as she could manage of the sweet milk, and only then found the strength to ask, “Who are you?”
The beggar woman shrugged. “No one you’d know.” But the queen had fallen back to sleep, and the beggar woman put more straw over her; then picked up the begging-bowl, fallen to the dirt floor, and studied it thoughtfully for some time. “Pretty,” she said again, and left the shed with the bowl under her arm.
The queen drowsed out the rest of the day under the straw, waking only to sip more of the milk and sleep again. Waking at last, warm and hungry, she saw the beggar woman crouched nearby, sorting through loaves of bread, entire rounds of cheese, sacks of dried lentils and peas, two bottles of wine, and even a packet of salt fish. When she saw that the queen was awake and watching her, she smiled proudly—the queen noticed that several of her lower teeth were gone—gesturing grandly over her treasure. “There’s money, too,” she announced, jingling coins in her hand. “All enough to see us on our way, I should think.”
“On our way to where?” the queen asked dazedly. “And where is my bowl? You have saved my life, and I must beg for both of us now—it is the least I can do to repay you. If you will help me into my chair . . .”
The beggar woman laughed as harshly as she seemed to do everything else. “We’ll neither of us need be seeking alms for a while now, my fine lady; how on earth did you come by a begging-bowl lined with silver?” Not waiting for an answer, she went on, “Well, we’re not bound off anywhere tonight—nor tomorrow, either, until you get some strength into you. But winter’s coming on, and there’s too many sparrows pecking for crumbs around a palace, if you take
my meaning. We’ll do better in the hill country, where folk see fewer of our kind.” She peered sharply at the queen then, out of shrewd, quick dark eyes. “Not but what it’ll take wiser than I to ponder what your kind is. But you’re some somebody, anyway, with your silver-lined bowl and that bloody chair that I’ll be forever pushing and pulling out of every rut, I’ve no doubt. And maybe that . . . that air of yours will pay for itself along the way. Here—” she handed the queen a torn-off heel of bread and a chunk of cheese to go with it. “Eat and sleep for a few days, until the roads are dry. Eat and sleep.”
The queen took her at her word, doing nothing for three days but dozing and waking, nibbling this or that of the beggar woman’s bounty, and turning back to the deep comfort of the cow’s warmly receptive side. In the night, vaguely roused by her companion’s snoring a few feet from her, she tried hard to think about her lost life and her lost husband . . . but even he seemed as distant as though he had never been anything but a story that she had told herself in her childhood. She dreamed often during those days and nights, and while some of the dreams were sad, and some were frightening, in all of them she walked, as she had walked before her wedding day. But in those dreams she was always alone.
The beggar woman herself came and went as she chose: always cheerful, in her odd, half-mocking way, most often unwashed, sometimes with food or a few coins and sometimes not; but frequently, as the queen’s vision cleared, bearing bruises on her legs and arms, or even on her face. When the queen pressed her for an explanation, she would either turn the question aside with a snort and a gesture, or say simply, “Minor disagreement.” From somewhere she procured a sailor’s needle and thread in order to mend the queen’s torn and fouled clothes as best she could. Being no seamstress, she pricked her fingers often and swore interestingly each time; but she kept at the work with a gruff patience that belied the perennial half-derisive air with which she otherwise tended the queen. She spent a good deal of time squatting by the chair, cleaning the mud off the wheels and adding soft rags and feathers to the cushion that padded the seat. Now and then she would look up to growl wonderingly, “Tell me again who made this bloody ridiculous thing for you? He must have taken you for a monkey—you need two sets of hands and a tail just to steer.”