When they had given up hope of finding out what had happened in the story—when the story had faded enough from their own lives, from his father’s work at the base and his mother’s teaching at the local high school, that the Queen’s fate no longer held them in the morning when they woke and at night when they fell asleep—the boy did tell them. It was many months later, and at dinner, as always, that he said:
“The Queen was too cynical to fall for his lie. She had never sensed in the King Helmet’s heart the capacity for love that would have allowed him to sire a child with a conch, with a woman of another species. And in this she was right. He was too vain, too proud, to be sullied by such mixing, and the Queen knew this. But this was not all that protected her from his ruse. It was her own cynicism, her own insistence on the profound sadness (the idea of her barrenness) with which she had lived so long that she could not live without it, that protected her most from his lie.”
His parents stared, waiting. “Yes?” they both said.
“Nevertheless, the Queen agreed to marriage—though in name only, with separate quarters, their lives sharing not even breakfast—that their kingdoms might be joined for the sake of the people of the Ancient Sea.” The boy paused, as if sad, though perhaps (they told themselves) he was only feeling thoughtful. His mother had seen a mark on his face the week before, a little puncture wound, like a spider bite, one that made a hole, but it had healed. He’d had a fever then, too, but there was no reason, the boy insisted, to think the two matters were related. “She was a queen, after all,” he was saying to them now, “and did in her heart, despite the sadness that told her who she was, truly care about her people. Is this not what a queen must do, even if she despises the partner of the union that may achieve it?”
The boy’s parents nodded. Of course that is what a good queen must do; and it made them proud that their son, whose whole life was reading and seashells and had so little in common with the world other people lived in, could be so wise, could in fact understand that world perhaps even better than they, who had lived in it for so long.
“It is the story of the Queen’s Minister of Coral Reefs that matters now,” the boy said, obviously upset, “because he is the one who may actually destroy the Kingdom in the end, though that is the last thing he imagines he could ever do. He falls in love with the Queen. That is how it happens. I have tried to help him see the truth, but it is impossible. . . .”
There was indeed, his parents saw, a sadness in their son’s eyes (which were still red, as if a trace of the fever were still in him). He was fourteen now, and had been asking about girls recently—what they were like in their hearts and minds, in the way they thought and felt, how they were different from boys, if they were, and the same, if they were—and, given his words now, it was difficult for them not to imagine that the two were somehow, in a way only he understood, related.
“Love doesn’t always—” his father began, stammering, then tried again: “Love doesn’t always need to end in tragedy.” As soon as he said it, he felt embarrassed; but his son, who was looking at him now, smiled. “I know, Dad, but thanks for reminding me. I’m just speaking about the Minister, who is not experienced in love and so can be taken advantage of. Those who do not walk the corridors of power can afford to engage in the playfulness of love without tragic consequence, but I’m afraid the Minister is not one of these.”
His parents did not know how to respond. What could they say? The boy understood it better than they possibly could. But shouldn’t something be said?
“Is there no way,” his father went on, “to warn the Minister, to help him understand?”
The boy’s mother stared at her husband as if he had lost his mind; but then she too looked at the boy, nodding, wanting an answer. There were no marks on her son’s face, no marks on his arms (which were bare), so she did not have to worry and could listen.
The boy sighed. “I wish it were so, but those who live as the Minister lives are too isolated to be warned, or to listen even if they are.”
Again, his parents thought they saw in their son’s eyes something more personal than the story he was telling, but what words could they give him? His father was not going to say, though he wanted to: “Could the Minister not listen more carefully to his heart, to find wisdom there that might protect him from foolishness?” Or: “Could he not stop for a moment and see that love might not really be a trap, but a way to live—to really live—even if the corridors of power make it so difficult?” His mother was not about to say, “Whatever happens to your Minister, Brian, that is not what your life needs to be.” Certainly not that, though that was what was in her heart, both as a mother and as a woman who loved a man, and whose life was good, even if they both worried sometimes about their son.
When the boy entered high school, his body—which often did not feel like his own—changed, and with it his mind and what that mind saw in the world; and though the seashells were still with him, so were girls and other boys and teachers. Without planning it—without seeing at first the dynamic of mind and heart that might allow and ensure it—the people he came to know at school and after school, those willing to speak to him despite his manner of speech and the rash he often had, suddenly seemed real to him; and he began to write about them in the diary where he now recorded the Kingdom’s story as he knew it; the diary he had been keeping for the past year and, like the marks he brought back from the Kingdom each night, had not confessed to his parents.
One day at school, in the corridors of the main building, he spoke to a girl, one he had two classes with and noticed frequently outside of class. They spoke on the Ninth Grade patio. How it had occurred, he could not be sure when he looked back at it that evening in his bedroom. She had been standing there, talking to other girls, and had turned to look at him as he passed. She did not stare at the rash on his neck, which itched from the sea, but simply looked at him, eyes open to what she might see. He had stopped because she had looked at him this way; and when she said, “Hi, Brian,” he stood there looking back at her until he heard himself say, “Hi,” too. The other girls left, and he and she remained, sometimes finding words (she found them more easily than he) and sometimes just standing there, looking around at the other students, not saying a thing, but also not leaving, as if being together mattered to both of them somehow. What all of this meant, he could not be sure.
They spoke again two days later, impulsively and spontaneously and more thoroughly, as if they both knew, without needing to think about it, what to say. She had long dark hair and pale, but not unhealthy, skin. He liked looking at her, though it made him shy, too; and, as he looked, he felt not only an excitement—the racing of his heart—but something else; a tenderness, a kindness, toward her. He had said something that morning in English class that the other students had laughed at and that the teacher, a conscientious woman, had praised, but with a look on her face that suggested she hadn’t perhaps understood it. The girl had not laughed, which told him that she was not afraid to be alone in the world or pursue in her life what she believed was right.
Standing there on the Ninth Grade patio again, she asked about his own life, where he lived, what his parents did, and what he enjoyed doing most—what made him “happiest.” He answered the first questions easily—the way other boys and girls would answer them (something he was learning to do)—but the last question left him silent until she said, “If it’s against the law—if you like to shoplift and that’s what makes you happiest—you don’t have to tell me.” It was a joke, he saw. There was a light dancing in her eyes, which meant she was being playful. He said, “I love the sea.” It was not an answer to her question; but he did not know how else to phrase it.
“I do too,” she answered quickly, and he could tell she meant it. She had touched his hand, a hand whose raw skin would have frightened many. Should he ask her to come to his house after school? She lived only a few blocks from the military base, from the beach were he spent so much of his life, the
one that was always empty because even the sailors never used it, and that always displayed on its sands the seashells of the bay, the Chiones and Tellinas and Turitellas. His father could get her a pass so she could visit, so the guards at the gate would let her through; but he didn’t know what she would think of his seashells, or the Kingdom, or whether she had a place in it, or even wanted one.
That night, as he lay in bed, a voice said: Be careful, my soldier. Remember, you are in my service. In her beauty this Volute of yours may be a subterfuge. The King Helmet will, I am certain—and this haunts my sleep—never relinquish his plans of empire.
Two nights later, however, as he began to fall sleep, the same voice spoke, with a sigh: I advised you poorly, Soldier. An innocent and a commoner, she may not be a spy. . . .
I believe this, too, Your Majesty, the boy answered, but is she the one? Is she the one that I, simple servant that I am in your service, have been waiting for all these years, stationed with the other Fighting Conchs on Your Majesty’s northernmost Barrier Reef, here to repulse what may threaten you, our bodies wounded and yet prevailing for your sake? Is she, pretty and pale as she is, the one I will fight and perhaps die for if I do not die for you—for love is worth nothing, is it not, unless the lover is willing to risk everything for love?
The boy waited, very awake. He would go to the Kingdom this night, as he did every night, and fight for his Queen. He would go as soon as she ordered. But the voice did not speak, and its silence made him shake. The next morning he still did not have his answer. Not knowing what else to do, he wrote about the girl in his diary. In his story, where the boys and girls he knew were all seashells, each with a role in the story of the Ancient Sea, she was indeed a young, impulsive Juno’s Volute, pale, with beauty marks, though she might as well have been the Black Cowry, Cypraea nocturnis, in its enigmatic, starry beauty. He could not make up his mind, and he could not be certain of her role. He wrote about her five mornings in a row, posing again and again to himself and to his silent Queen the questions of who this girl might be in the great tale the Kingdom was and would always be, and whether his body would ever be truly his; but on the sixth morning he stopped, put down his pen, and stared at the page, which no longer made sense. She—Carey—her name was Carey—was a girl. Was there anything more important than this?
At school that day, near his locker on the bottom floor of the main building, he asked her if she would like to come over sometime, after school or on a Saturday, to do homework together, if she wanted, and also, if she wanted, to see his seashells.
She cocked her head. Then she laughed, though not unkindly, touched his hand again, making it tingle and burn as any touch did; and, with the light dancing in her eyes again, said, “Sure!”
As she did, he saw suddenly that all was well at last in the Kingdom, that a peace not easily ruined—one that might prevail for years—had at last been achieved by the most willing of hearts; and that, because it had, his Queen might no longer need him and might soon (if he listened carefully enough for her voice) let him go. Only then would he stop bleeding from the battles he engaged each night in another body, returning with countless small wounds to his own. Only then would he stop having to clean spots of blood from his sheets after his parents left for work in the morning; stop worrying about the venomous bites of the Cones and Augers (which made his body burn); stop hiding his wounds with every trick he knew; and let his body heal at last, his once more.
She was looking at him still, and she had, he could tell from her eyes, which were darker than any sea, no intention of looking away.
Copyright © 2010 by Bruce McAllister
illustration by Eric Fortune
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Document ID: 61543d00-cdca-449d-98da-9f77ba57dd61
Document version: 1.1
Document creation date: 02 June 2010
Created using: FictionBook Editor 2.4 software
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released by Tor.com
1.1 — converting from html to fb2 — mtvietnam (2010)
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The Courtship of the Queen Page 2