Issue #59 • Dec. 30, 2010
“The Summer King,” by Megan Arkenberg
“Transitions of Truth and Tears,” by David G. Blake
For more stories and Audio Fiction Podcasts, visit
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THE SUMMER KING
by Megan Arkenberg
“Guess,” Boss Gaude said, dripping her sticky smile all over my parlor. “You’ll never—”
“Shit, Gaude,” I said, “just cough it up. I know Camden sent you.”
“You ain’t got cause to get fresh with me.”
“You’re wasting my time.”
That’s how it had been all summer—all Prairial, I should say, since that’s as far into the season as we’d gotten, though the air was already hot enough to singe. Gaude had taken to hanging around my place because her district, Acacey, was right on the river and it smelled like a corpse. So here I was, trying to collect rent and settle fresh-off-the-boat immigrants and keep influenza from reigning hell in the tenements, and here was Gaude letting Acacey fall to pieces and tangling herself up under my feet—when she wasn’t running errands for Boss Camden up in Eustache. It made me mad enough to spit.
Gaude may be stupid, but even she knows not to keep kicking me when I’m in that kind of mood. She sat straight and prissy on the center arm of the chaperone sofa and swung her feet like a kid.
“Alright, I’ll guess,” I said, massaging my forehead. I’d pinned my hair too tight that morning, but there wasn’t time to fix it. “It’s not your news, Camden wants to tell me in person, and you’re jealous as a bridesmaid.”
“Of Camden?”
“Of me.” I took a deep breath and pressed my eyes closed with my fingertips. Nice going, Livy, now you’ve got the bitch confused. But this conversation was shot in the gutter anyway. “I suppose rent can wait. Did he say where to meet him?”
Gaude mumbled unintelligibly, which meant two things: one, that Camden was meeting me somewhere nice. And two, that he was meeting me alone.
Now, Gaude’s crush on Camden had been old news since they hung King Bastian, back before they changed the calendar. I couldn’t see the attraction myself—I mean, he was cool and smart and pretty as a peach tree, but he had this slow sprawly way of moving and talking that frustrated the shit out of me. How he’d kept Gaude in his bag for twelve and a half years, I’ll never know.
“Cough it up, Gaude,” I sighed, “and I promise I’ll let you come.”
She did, and I did, and that’s how I wound up with Gaude in the ballroom of the old Hôtel Vienne, sheeting sweat in the ugliest armchair imaginable while Boss Camden of Eustache told me we were completely, irredeemably, and uncompromisingly fucked.
* * *
“The Assembly,” Camden said, spinning the word out like a spider, “has appointed a king.”
My jaw just dropped. I wouldn’t’ve been more surprised if he said they’d appointed an imperial flower arranger.
“Shit,” I said, and was surprised it came out clear. “Why?”
Camden shrugged. He’d managed to get himself silhouetted by a full-story window, and the sunlight made his curly hair into a mesh of shadows. Pretty as a peach tree, and knew it.
“Scapegoat,” he said. “The Assembly knows we’ve got the people trained to spit at their coat-tails and now they want to pass the blame.”
“They want to take over from us, you mean.”
Gaude made a confused little grunt, which didn’t surprise me. Camden raised his eyebrows, which did.
“No offense, Livy darling, but I can’t quite see Speaker Jaque bringing bottles of camphor to the tenements in Olimpia.”
“I didn’t say they’d do it well. But they’ve wanted to drown out the ward bosses for years. They know they can’t make the plebes hate us, but if they can hand over a king on a bed of rose petals—”
“Then they can take over for the bosses and we become superfluous.”
“Shit,” I said again. And stood up, and sat back down. “Shit.”
“That’s not the worst of it.” Camden slid over to the couch, where Gaude was busy arranging her skirt like a lady’s fan. He sat down right over the hem, which must’ve cut off the breeze on her fat shapely legs and oh, that just about made me queasy imaging it. I don’t know how Gaude, with her tight corset and massive crush on Camden—whose warm golden skin was just a squirm away from hers—well, I don’t know how she could breathe at all.
I picked a dusty fan off the dressing table behind me and waved it in a way I hoped could be described as languid. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Shit, Livy,” Gaude giggled. “Show some respect.”
“Shut up, Gaude.” I turned physically to Camden. “What do you mean, that’s not the worst of it?”
“Look at it from the Assembly’s point of view. They want to make the people hate the new king instead of hating them, yes?”
“Yes.” I didn’t need to say it, but Boss Camden’s bright brown eyes were like a magnet drawing it out of me.
“And they want to get rid of us, the bosses, who the people love.”
“Yes. But how does that fit—” And then I saw it, clear and hot as summer. “Oh, shit. Shit.”
“What?” Gaude asked, stupid as a peacock.
“The King’s going to kill us,” Camden said. He rose and went around behind the couch, where a splintered crate was hidden in the black shadow of a piano-forte. The bottle he dredged up was green and dusty and probably hotter than tea, but I was shaken enough that when he handed me a glass I gulped it like iced lemonade. “To make the people hate him, the Assembly’s got to make him kill us.”
“The people will protect us,” Gaude said. She took a glass from Camden but didn’t drink; the wine shuddered in her moist white palms.
“Gaude, darling, even you ain’t that stupid.” Camden rolled his eyes to me. “You see why I’m distressed.”
“I’ll kill him,” I said. Despite the wine, my throat felt like glue. “I’ll kill the King.”
“You’re no assassin,” Camden said, but not like it bothered him. He’d been hoping I’d have a bright idea to take the load off his shoulders, and it was beginning to look like I did.
Except for the part where my idea was fucking horrible.
“We have until Thermidor,” I said. Thermidor was the riot month; nobody would start anything until then, not even the Assembly. “Everyone can go to ground by the end of Prairial, and I’ll have the King’s head in a basket before you can say apple harvest.”
“How?” Gaude pouted.
Camden grinned wryly and raised a toast, which I drank without liking it. For the first time in history, I knew Gaude was thinking smarter.
* * *
“Going to ground” for Gaude apparently meant “moving into Boss Livy’s parlor.” Worse, her shitheaded worship of Camden meant she’d adopted his taste in decorating, which ran to stuffed birds and dried flowers under glass. So there was my parlor, looking like Queen Gloria’s Garden for all the Olimpia district to goggle at, and there was me still fighting influenza and employers and taxes on property I wouldn’t choose to keep a dog on, and—how could I forget—I had a King to off by Thermidor. Oh, yeah, and it was still fucking hot.
I’d seen the King once, from a distance. I didn’t know if they’d made the title official yet, but that was what Camden was calling him, and what Camden said the other bosses all repeated. The plebes had picked it up somewhere—not from me, since I watched my mouth, but I knew plenty of ward bosses who didn’t—and now it was stuck like a wine stain.
So anyway, I saw the King one day towards the end of Prairial, a little afte
r the meeting in Hôtel Vienne and a little before Gaude dumped her plants in my parlor. Shit, the boy was gorgeous—not like Camden, all blond and brown and soft golden lace—but like something out of a fairy tale. His hair was this rich coffee-black, and his eyes were huge and piercing, and I swear you could smell apple blossoms just from looking at him. He was summer dipped in chocolate with a glass of rich red wine, and when he spoke his voice just melted in your bones.
I had it on passable authority that His Majesty was eighteen or nineteen years old; that he’d showed up in Bonifaz’s orchard some nine years ago and moved between hostels in the bad wards ever since; and that he was clever as a goat about words but couldn’t follow politics for a penny or a princedom.
It was like that old tradition they’d had back when I was a girl, of making some kid the King or Queen of May—May was like Floréal or Prairial back then, I can’t remember which—but anyway, we’d make this kid a crown of flowers and he or she would read speeches and poems and all that kind of shit, and like as not they’d get beaten up by the older kids on the way home from Acacey.
That was exactly what they were doing to this boy—only this time the Assembly had gotten involved. And where the Assembly gets involved, somebody has to die.
I was sorry it was him, but I sure as hell wasn’t sorry that it wasn’t going to be me.
* * *
I was fourteen or so when they hung King Bastian, so I remembered it but not the way people like Camden and Gaude did. I remembered the singing and the banners and these big heavy flowers I bought for my sweetheart, and the hot sticky pastries he bought for me. They were wrapped in blue paper, and my sweetheart’s eyes were blue, and the sky that day was so blue that it hurt. So that’s what a king meant to me, in its own strange way—songs and sunflowers and the color blue.
And I knew the new king couldn’t have remembered it that way, but that didn’t stop him from making blue his color. Not like livery—I mean, he never wore it, never wore color at all, just plain black vests and a shirt so white it could blind you. But, well, here’s the best way I can explain it. Mama Stanislaw in the rooms below mine has this Crotian phrase that she says means “blue-talk,” like whoever’s doing it is trying to talk down the sky. And that’s how it was with the King. He talked blue, all hope and plenty and sacrifice and yes, war too, because the plebes wanted something to be flamed about and the Assembly wouldn’t give them one. The King couldn’t give it to them either, but he didn’t know that yet. The Assembly was writing his speeches.
He lived in the old Hôtel Camus, which was just up the street from Hôtel Vienne and thus Eustache territory. The Eustachites tend towards quiet, though, and they didn’t take much exception to Boss Livy of Olimpia loitering under their windows. Well, the King’s window was actually a door, but it opened onto a blue-slate roof and I didn’t think his majesty was going to take a trip out any time soon—unfortunately, since that would make my job a lot easier.
For the first few days, I made like I was admiring the curtains. Stand beneath the nearest lamppost, lips quivering in excitement or peachy unalleviated boredom, shit, even fake a faint when His Prairial Excellency threw a glance at me. People like to see that kind of thing, and besides, it set me up as a silly love-struck bitch with more guts than sense. Scary but, well, harmless.
Sometime in the last stretch of the month, I made a bid to meet him. I mean “made a bid”—it was like the Winter Market on auction day. The Hôtel’s waiting room was just packed, with everybody shouting and offering up gold and silver for the privilege of kissing His Majesty’s hand. Or sticking a dagger down his throat. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking to do it.
The guards must have thought so too, because they wouldn’t let any of us in. No, not one of us, not even the lady who looked fit to sell half the family jewels for the privilege. I pitched a tantrum, of course—not enough to be remembered, just enough that nobody’d get suspicious. Then I tramped down to Camden’s rooms in the Vienne.
“He’s not taking visitors,” I said as soon as he opened the door.
“Shit, Livy,” Camden said—drawled, actually, so I knew he was mocking me. “You’re no kind of assassin at all. Crawl through his window or something.”
Which I guess I should have expected. “That kind of thing doesn’t end well,” I said. He took a step back—not because of me, I’m sure, but I took advantage of it anyway, sweeping into the ballroom and taking a seat on the couch.
Camden’s lips twitched, but he only closed the door and stood leaning against the wall. The wallpaper was striped green and red and yellow, and it did absolutely nothing for his color. “You’re not going to marry the boy, Livy. Why does it matter if you meet him before?”
“Shit, Camden, that’s not what I’m thinking. Can you picture me scaling a wall and half a slate roof and then having enough red blood left to knife the bastard?”
“Then wait.” He made a face that probably mirrored mine. “You’ve got a while yet. Keep listening to those half-assed speeches and waving your handkerchief. You’ll get your chance.”
It wasn’t very helpful, but it was all I was going to get. I took it and left.
* * *
The Assembly and the bosses didn’t like each other much, and we did our best to keep our distance. We had the people, the tenements, the carnivals; they had the law, the Hôtels, and the feast days. They hung kings, we cheered. We collected rent for our services and they taxed us, imprisoned us, shot us like sick dogs.
We trained the plebes to bite, and the Assembly lost fingers.
So a scapegoat made sense from their point of view. The problem was getting the people to accept their new whipping boy. No, not accept—they took to him like flies to honey. The problem was making them hate him.
Some people—Camden again, and the older bosses like Hucky and Mirabel up in Greensleeve—just hated the idea of a King, and it didn’t matter to them if he tossed golden coins out his windows, which he did, or kissed babies and grandmas, which he also did, or got down on his knees and asked them to marry him—which he hadn’t done yet, but I wasn’t far from holding my breath—they weren’t going to like him. But most everybody else—including Gaude, who was thinking away from Camden for a change—well, most everybody else loved him for the coins and kisses and his pretty blue speeches. And they loved the Assembly for giving him to them, which must have been all sorts of awkward over in the Hôtel de Ville.
I’m not the gambling sort, but my fingers were just itching to bet on when the Assembly was going to say no, little children, you’ve got it wrong—this is how you play with your new toy. And the plebes would get caught up in the game, and next thing you know, the gorgeous Summer King is hanging and the old ladies are selling hot buns. Which would be fine and dandy, if it weren’t for the fact that the Assembly was sure as hell going to kill the ward bosses to show the people how it’s done.
Which was why I had to kill the King first.
Complicated, and maybe a little ironic. I don’t know. There’s a lot of things you learn as a ward boss, but irony isn’t one of them.
I actually got to speak to him on 1 Messidor, at the horse festival. Not that anyone except the Assembly could afford a horse but, well, it’s a nice gesture. His Majesty was sitting on a huge white stallion—picked out by the Assembly, you can bet, to whet the crowd’s jealousy—and I was slouched over by the water bucket, waving at myself with one of those silly commemorative fans. He steered his horse over to get a drink, and when I looked up to see those big, pretty eyes looking down on me I just about fainted. Or, well, faked it pretty good. The King slid out of his saddle and caught me around the waist at the last possible moment, before I drenched myself in the trough or broke my act by stepping out of fall. So far, so good.
“Thanks, Your Majesty.” I said.
He smiled—dazzlingly, his white teeth like a slice of apple flesh against the red skin—and straightened me. I think I was blushing a little. He really did smell like
apple blossoms. “What’s your name?” he asked, like the kid he was.
He may have been silly as a bird, but there was no way he was going to hear “Boss Livy” without thinking of some pretty nasty shit. So I batted my eyelashes, channeling Gaude like a hot wire, and said, “Livia, Your Majesty. What’s yours?”
Part of that was honest-to-goodness curiosity, because of all the things the Assembly had let leak, no one had mentioned His Majesty’s name.
The King looked a little flushed, like I’d propositioned him or something, but the smile didn’t melt all the way. “I can’t tell you,” he said. “They haven’t picked one yet.”
His arm was still on my waist, hot like an iron rail.
“Why don’t you think of something to call me, Livia? Something other than Your Majesty.”
“Shit,” I said, and that sat there ugly and twitching for a few seconds before the stallion decided he’d had enough and wanted to go check out the mares. The King just had enough time to swoop up into his saddle before the horse made a beeline through the crowd.
“Come and see me sometime, Livia!” he called, and then he was gone, swallowed up in the blue.
“Shit,” I said again, and grabbed a palmful of water before I fainted for real.
* * *
“Good girl,” Camden said—but absently, like his mind was swirling along with the wine in his glass. Gaude gave me a poison-steeped look over his shoulder.
“So you want me to take him at his word?” I asked.
“Shit, Livy.” The drawl was in his voice, and hard. “Why not?”
For once, Gaude got it quick. “Kings lie,” she said, nasty as a gutter.
“Not about wanting to see a pretty girl. Alone.” He gave me a short, inscrutable look before turning back to his wine. “And not about seeing us hang.”
“He’s starting that already?”
Gaude giggled until I looked at her. “You ain’t seen the handbills, Livy? Or you ain’t able to read?”
“I can read just fine, unlike present company. What handbills?”
Beneath Ceaseless Skies #59 Page 1