The Princess Gardener

by Michael Strelow

  It was Alyssa, of course, telling me what she thought Arbuckle was imagining. I think Alyssa loved filling in, maybe better than he could himself, what Arbuckle was thinking.

  He studied the princess who, of course, was a not-princess. He couldn’t just up and accuse her. She had all the position and status. And besides, she seemed so healthy, as if she alone somehow had escaped the general malaise and sickness. She seemed to have made a pact with some supernatural force to be spared. He must be careful of whatever that force was. She was on top for the moment—for now, had all the power. For now! He must proceed carefully.

  For her part, Alyssa embraced her task. She knew the hill she had to climb to enlighten those who refused the light itself. She would demonstrate the sickening power of the water.

  She said she set up two cages as if she were doing the most natural activity in the world for a princess. In one cage she fed three mice only fruit and vegetables, mice she herself had caught in the fields near the castle. And in the other cage, three other mice who had water to drink as well as food. She kept them in the hallway, and each day she wrote down her observations. She spoke to no one about the two cages, explained to no one what she was doing, included no one in her plans.

  Arbuckle saw the mice and assumed the worst. The princess-witch now had accomplices in her evil work. Those mice were certainly dangerous far beyond their tiny size and twitching noses.

  Arbuckle crept up toward Alyssa, sliding along the castle wall, looking this way and that. He had spied on her outside her lessons regularly, kept his distance, but his shadow always gave him away.

  Now she saw his shadow duck down when she called out to him. “Arbuckle. Come here. I have something interesting to show you.” She picked up one of the healthy mice and offered it toward where he was hiding. “Look. He won’t hurt you. He’s very tiny, actually.” And then, she told me, she couldn’t help herself. Her sense of silly got the best of her. She swallowed down a giggle and kept going. “See. It has a little nose and a little…” But the shadow fled down the long hall, Arbuckle’s footsteps gaining speed. She thought he was running as if chased by a wolf. How odd? A tiny mouse would make him fly like that. I wonder what’s wrong with him.

  Each day the vegetable and fruit eating mice scurried and ate and grew fat. The other cage held tired and listless mice, too sick to mate or romp. They cowered, and one shook constantly. Two died very soon. The remaining one’s eyes glazed over, and it lay panting its last hours. The princess went to her experiment more and more obviously, each day sitting at the cages making notes and even trying to chat with those who could still move about the castle.

  Finally, one old councilor stopped on his way to respond to his urgent bowels and looked at the mice. “What magic is this you’re trying out in the halls, princess?” He had to go, and soon, but the cages and the princess with her pages of notes held him in thrall. “Why do you keep dead mice in a cage?” he croaked. “What have you done to kill them?”

  “I gave them water,” she said matter-of-factly. “Water. And these”—she indicated the lively cage—“these got no water. I believe the water disagrees with these mice.” The last live mouse in the cage rolled on its side, as if on cue, and lay panting into the straw. And then expired.

  “Well, that’s the last one,” she said. “It outlived the others by two days. Here”—and she held up her sheaf of notes—“see how the activity decreases each day and the thirst for more water increased. As if they were trying to kill themselves with the water…”

  “Got to go,” the old councilor barked, and he was off down the hall. But Alyssa knew he had seen what was necessary. On the other hand, Arbuckle was nowhere to be seen and hadn’t even crept around since fleeing into the shadows.

  What the councilor had seen was still with him the next day. And the next. He must have felt like a mouse, and he wanted to exchange cages with the healthy mice. He began, on his own, to find ways to avoid the water. The next day he felt a little stronger. The next even better. He had learned quickly. He then persuaded one more convert among the old councilors, and the two of them rose toward health. Word spread. Then a decree: don’t drink water until the King says you can.

  The priests and other wizards claimed success. The chanting and smoke and bells and potions and enchantments had worked, they exclaimed.

  Those who had read the chicken guts and other critters claimed that they had seen the change coming and pointed out their clever prophecy in the coded messages they had announced.

  The Alyssa released her live mice and buried her dead mice and slapped her hands together—job done. And smiled. She had managed to teach the old unteachables something true and valuable to the community. She didn’t have to have credit for it, so she said nothing as every group in the castle claimed to have solved the problem of sickness. “Water, it was the water!” they all proudly proclaimed. Alyssa smiled. War was called off.

  But while the kingdom was getting well, and while the word was sent out to the farms and villages, Arbuckle saw his chances for immortality slipping away, brought low by six mice. He had to strike and quickly before the entire population of court got well. He panicked.

  You may have figured out that Arbuckle, who was not stupid, as I said, was also not the sharpest sword in the armory. But he was ambitious, and he was greedy—an unfortunate, but, alas, common combination.

  Alyssa acted out for me her very funny version of what was going on in his panicked mind.

  He had decided to risk everything and accuse the princess of not being the princess, and also accuse her of being the real reason why the kingdom grew dim with bad water. Alyssa, paced back and forth for me doing her best Arbuckle imitation. And while he was at it, he’d accuse the princess of unnatural acts to bring off her evil plans. And also of enchanting animals. Of being a witch. And he’d…. Wait a minute, he thought. I better be right or I’m dead meat, dead mice, dead or in exile. Exile! Not that. She threw the back of her hand onto her forehead and wailed like an overwrought Arbuckle.

  “They’d send me away to live in a…yuk…village. A farm. I’d work all day and cry all night. I’d have to eat dirty food and drink out of wooden cups. I’d have to sleep on the floor with…mice!” Ahhh, she sighed long and sonorous. “I’d better think about this some more. How could Jake help me? How could I make it look like it was his idea if my accusations came back to bite me? Oh, this doesn’t feel good.” She pranced a little dance like Arbuckle did when he got very excited. “I have to go slow. But by then the kingdom will heal, and I’ll have no glory at all. I’ll be a cipher the rest of my days. A public fool. A nobody. Go slow. Go fast. Go slow.”

  Alyssa reported this to me. She very much enjoyed acting out Arbuckle thinking and prancing back and forth like a player on a stage. I laughed and laughed like any appreciative audience.

  In the village, I had made converts to my fruit and vegetable diet, but the bad water remained, and no one would do anything about it until some authority sent word. But then word did come trickling down from the castle from councilor to courtier to soldier and kitchen maid and stable hand—it was the water! All the authorities, of course, had claimed wisdom for themselves, and the Alyssa returned to her duties fully expecting the others running the kingdom to fix the water situation. But what to do about the water, they all asked? What can we do about the secret sickness growing there?

  And so Alyssa and I decided to risk everything. Jake and Arbuckle (at Arbuckle’s urging) did too. Now that everyone was feeling much better, people were out and about in the land, so any of our meetings could be discovered

  It was inevitable, I suppose, that the four of us should somehow collide like planets hurling through the peculiar spaces of the kingdom. Arbuckle in disguise, Alyssa skulking toward the farm in the twilight, I making up excuses to mend a fence and clear a bramble patch after supper, and Jake, as usual, brachiating from tree to tree—all of us came together.

  Jake, from his tree, spied us all. Alyssa cam
e over a rise, and there was Arbuckle. I slunk out of a copse, and there were the other two, wide-eyed and stuttering their what-the-hell-you-doing-heres. And Jake with a whoop and a yahoo swung down from his tree and landed perfectly among us.

  After the initial denials, the layers of deception dropped away on all four sides.

  “And just as I suspected,” Arbuckle croaked. “You two are not you two at all.”

  We looked at each other; was the jig up? Or should we soldier on through and insist on a new lie on top of the old lie? What would you do?

  Well, Jake, from the tree-wisdom there at the bottom of his brain, asked the most important question. “What’s the difference?” And the rest of us looked at each other, each asking him or her self, yeah, what is the difference?

  Jake’s question hung in the air between us as if a butterfly of truth suddenly riveted our attention. Arbuckle sighed, a sign that he was thinking. Alyssa scratched her nose and pursed her lips. More thinking. Jake began whistling to himself and glancing around to see, I supposed, if there was some high place to swing away. This would have to count for thinking. And I, without much thinking at all, immediately saw that we could do this. There was no difference who did it in what combination or even who got credit for it.

  We, after some few words of agreement, decided that all four of us, were the real difference. That is, we could make the difference that would change the kingdom forever after.

  “We are the difference,” I announced, hoping to get some kind of cheer going. But Alyssa just laughed. Arbuckle was already rubbing his chin with exaggerated seriousness. And Jake swung away with tree-full grace.

  Arbuckle found a way to save himself. Alyssa and I found a way to keep up our very happy switched lives. And Jake, Jake the one who had cut through all the potential confusion and difficulties and phantom impossibilities, Jake the natural philosopher and tree-swinger, he had become heroic without it even occurring to him—the best kind of hero, it turns out.

  And so we did our work.

  Arbuckle became minister of water (thereby joining his illustrious family with his portrait in the royal galley). He returned to court and led the task of moving the unfortunate dump and protecting the precious water both above and under ground for all time. His motto became, “The water is the gift.” And the kingdom had learned what dangers lay very close by if ever their watchfulness waned again. THE GIFT must always be protected, it was proclaimed everywhere.

  A banner was sewn with gold thread and decorated with flying, colorful birds on a background of forest green in case anyone might forget, and it said simply, THE GIFT, and was hung across the castle gate. Arbuckle turned his tailor to producing a wardrobe for him of muted green, teal, sage and ecru as he went about his duties as protector of health, guardian of THE GIFT. He stepped into the landscape and blended in only to appear at council meetings as if by some forest magic. And then back to nature, ever vigilant, he swept. It turned out Arbuckle’s real talent lay in making up slogans, and THE GIFT caught on and spread to our neighbors. Our kingdom’s whole sad tale of bad water, of bad sickness, of tending the land, spread to others, so that we became the lesson they could teach themselves without going through all of our wretchedness.

  Alyssa and I at first thought we would have to change what we had been doing. We would have to work our way back to our original lives though neither of wanted to. But Jake’s tree-wisdom prevailed. Who was to know about the exchange if none of the four of us revealed it? Arbuckle’s theory of things out of place quickly gave way to his rising status at court. Jake kind of liked me, his new sister (and maybe even a little better than the real one; I never told Alyssa that, either). And my passion for the garden dirt, the labor of love on the farm, these were so strong in me that the kingdom could go on primping without my participation. Alyssa had developed a knack for that court business, and the kingdom was better off with her in the princess finery. I gave that up gladly, and she gladly said yes to it all. Finally, the entire court had realized what her mice in the hallway were all about. And she began to show others what great things we could learn by looking carefully at mice—and birds, and insects, rocks, trees, wind, deer, and even under the smallest pebbles in the smallest streams.

  And one more thing, it was reported—though it’s hard to be certain these days though the witnesses were said to be many—one day there was heard a great and thorough sigh of thanks from somewhere under the earth, somewhere in the wrinkles and cracks and fissures of the land, that the kingdom had turned its eye and heart to keeping the water clean and pure. The witnesses said it was like the great shoulders of the world shrugged and then relaxed.

  And joy was in the water—the gift.

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