CHAPTER 08: CORNFLOWER: A STATUE OF SOMEBODY ELSE

The cornflower is a weed of disturbed ground and grows best in a field somebody else has ploughed. It was blue enough that armies took it for a badge, and it was common enough that taking it cost nothing, which is the whole reason it ended up standing for remembrance in three countries. Nobody planted the first one. It simply came up where the wheat had been cut, and stayed, and people decided afterward that it had meant something.

The bicycle was pure selfishness and she never once pretended otherwise.

It began on a wet afternoon in the spring she turned ten, when she had to go from the manor to Ganner's workshop in the estate village, which was eleven minutes' walk, and which she had done perhaps nine hundred times, and which she was doing that day for the fourth time since breakfast because she had left a drawing behind and then left a different drawing behind.

She stood in the rain at the halfway point and thought, with real violence: I want a bike.

There was no public good in it. There was no memorandum. There was no boy in a hayfield and no column of names out of a burial register. There was a ten year old girl who was tired of walking and who could remember, with an ache that had not faded in ten years, exactly what it felt like to lean into a corner on a cheap steel frame on a summer evening with her jacket open.

She went home and drew it that night and did not sleep.

Ganner took one look at the drawing the following morning and said, "It will fall over."

"It will not fall over while it is moving."

"That is the same as falling over. It is only falling over later."

"Ganner."

"Two wheels," he said, "in a line. One behind the other. With a person on the top." He put the page down. "My lady, I have made you a machine that lifts water out of the ground from twenty three metres and I made you a copper screen that men come from Vellhorn to look at, and I have never once told you a thing was impossible, and I am telling you now, because this is a joke and somebody has played it on you."

"Make me the frame," said Theresia, "and I will fall off it in your yard, and you may watch, and if I cannot stay on it in one afternoon I will drop it entirely and never mention it again."

She could not stay on it in one afternoon.

She could not stay on it in three, because the first frame had the wrong angle at the head tube and it was unrideable by anybody in any world, which took her four days to work out and which taught her a great deal about how much of a bicycle is geometry and how little of it is effort.

The second frame worked. She rode it across Ganner's yard on the second attempt and up the lane and back, in the rain, standing on the pedals, with her hair flat to her skull and her skirts hitched into her belt and her mouth open in a grin so enormous and so stupid that the smith put down his hammer and came out into the road to watch.

She came back down the lane and stopped badly, by putting a foot down, and stood there breathing hard.

"Right," said Ganner.

"Right," said Theresia.

"I was wrong."

"You were extremely wrong and I intend to be gracious about it for about ten more seconds."

The chain was the real problem and it took eight months. A chain that will carry drive without stretching to uselessness in a fortnight requires a standard of small repeatable metalwork that did not exist in that province, and solving it meant Ganner effectively inventing a small parts workshop, with jigs, and two apprentices, and a way of hardening pins that took nineteen attempts.

The bearings took another four months and were solved in the end by a saddler, of all people, who had been listening to Ganner complain in the tavern and who pointed out that what they were describing was a problem his grandfather had solved on a different machine for a different reason.

That was the part she loved most, in retrospect. Not the riding. The way a hard problem put into a village the size of a village pulls answers out of people who never knew they had them.

Her brothers were merciless.

"It is a toy," said Karan, with his arms folded, on the day she rode it up the drive.

"It is transport."

"It is a toy with a wheel at each end and you look ridiculous on it."

Two days later Karan stole it, rode it four miles to Brackwater and back, came into the hall at dinner covered in mud with a cut over one eye from a hedge, and announced to the entire table without any preamble whatsoever that he required one of his own by the end of the month.

Casiles had one by autumn. Carlan, who was eleven and sensible, waited until the brakes were better and then had two.

Thames held out on principle for a year and a half and then was observed at six in the morning, by Miriam, riding one very badly and very happily around the stable yard in his shirt.

The army came for them in the third year.

That was not a thing she had anticipated at all, and it was Fribal who saw it, in about four seconds, the first time he watched a courier take a bicycle from the manor to Vellhorn in fifty minutes on a road that a ground dragon did at forty and a walking man did at five.

"It does not eat," he said.

"No."

"It does not need a stable, it does not need a boy, it does not go lame, it does not panic, and it does not have to be fed in the winter when there is nothing to feed it with." He was looking at the machine the way he looked at very few things. "How many can that man of yours make in a year?"

"At the moment? Perhaps forty. With money, a great many more, but not by him. You would need a building in Vellhorn and sixty people in it."

"Then we shall need a building in Vellhorn," said her uncle, "and sixty people in it."

Within five years there were two thousand of them in the kingdom and the Royal Courier Service had been rebuilt around them, and a man named Ganner who had been making hinges in a village workshop had a manufactory with his name on the gate and had entirely stopped being able to remember the names of his own employees, which he complained about to her, at length, every single time she visited, for thirty years.

CHAPTER 08: CORNFLOWER: A STATUE OF SOMEBODY ELSE: 02

She also started writing down the stories, and that one cost her more than anything else she did, and almost nobody ever understood why.

It began as a practical matter. The estate village had no school. There was a woman called Anne Tarrow who taught letters to about eleven children in the back of the chapel on two afternoons a week out of a single book of scripture and one volume of provincial law, because that was what there was, and the children had learned to read on the law of property and were consequently the most litigious eleven year olds in the province.

Theresia offered to fund a school. Anne Tarrow said what she actually needed was something worth reading.

So Theresia went home and sat down with a sheet of paper and wrote out the one about the tortoise and the hare.

It took her forty minutes and she had to stop twice.

She had not thought it would do that. It was a children's story about a tortoise. She had heard it first from her mother, her actual mother, Naoko Natsuki, out of a book with a cardboard cover that had a bite taken out of one corner because Subaru had chewed it at two years old and it had been kept anyway, and she had not thought about that book in nineteen years and it arrived in the middle of the fourth paragraph with the force of a thrown brick.

She finished it. Then she wrote the one about the ants and the grasshopper, and the one about the boy who cried wolf, and the one about the fox and the grapes, and she was still going at three in the morning.

Over the following two years she wrote out about ninety of them.

The Greek ones with the animals. The German ones with the forests, which she rendered carefully and did not soften, because she had strong views about what happens to a story when you take the teeth out of it. The Japanese ones, which were the hardest, because she had to move them: a fisherman and a turtle and a palace under the sea, and she had to decide whether the palace was still under the sea in a country with no sea worth speaking of, and she decided that it was, and invented a coast for it, and cried about that for reasons she could not have explained to anybody.

She did not put her name on any of them.

Anne Tarrow copied them out and the chapel children learned to read on a tortoise and a hare instead of the law of property, and within a year a printer in Vellhorn had them, and within three years there was a bound edition being sold in the capital, and within five there were four competing editions and two of them had extra stories in them that Theresia had never written and could not identify the source of.

And then one afternoon in the autumn she was ten and a half, walking back from Ganner's, she came round the end of the tannery and there were six children sitting on the wall, and one of them, a girl of about seven with a scabbed knee, was telling the others the one about the boy who cried wolf.

She was telling it wrong.

Not slightly wrong. Comprehensively wrong. In this version the boy cried wolf three times for a joke, exactly as written, and the villagers stopped coming, exactly as written, and then the wolf came, and the boy did not die.

In this version the boy ran, and he got to the village on his own legs, and nobody believed him, and so he went back up the hill alone with a stick and he stood in front of the sheep by himself in the dark, and he lost most of the flock and he lost two fingers and he did not lose the sheep his mother had given him, and the story ended with the village finding him in the morning and saying nothing to him at all, ever again, about any of it.

Theresia stood behind the corner of the tannery and listened to the whole thing.

It was, she thought, a considerably better story than the one she had written down. It was a story that had been passed through a village where people get hurt and then have to go on living next door to the people who did not believe them, and the village had quietly repaired it.

She could have corrected it. She was the Lady with the Lamp, a national treasure of the kingdom of Lugunica, and she could have stepped round that corner and told a seven year old with a scabbed knee that the boy is supposed to die at the end, and the child would have believed her instantly and for ever.

She stood behind the tannery wall with her hands in her pockets and she thought about the fact that she was the only person in any world who could say what the original was.

Then she walked home the long way and let it go.

That was the whole of it, and she never told anybody, and it was one of the three or four things she was proudest of in a life that eventually contained a great many things worth being proud of. She had been carrying a dead world around in her head for ten years like a man carrying water in his hands, losing a little of it every year, and she had finally poured some of it out into a place where it could be drunk, and the very first thing that place had done was change it.

That was what happened when you gave a thing away. It stopped being yours.

She had known that in theory since she was six years old and had watched the word pizza go out of a kitchen door and become a man with a handcart.

She had not known what it would feel like.

The statue was Anastasia's fault.

She was twenty by then, and had begun to acquire the particular weight that comes to royal children at about that age when it becomes clear which of them is going to matter, and she had been at three separate councils where the question of how to reward the Astrea girl had been raised and dropped, because the Crown had already given her a title and a fortune and there was no obvious next thing.

"And I said," Anastasia told her afterward, cheerfully, in a carriage, "that you did not want anything, which is true, and that the question was therefore not what to give you but what to do about you, which is different. And then somebody said a monument and I said yes before I had thought about it properly, and by the time I had thought about it properly there was a sculptor."

"There was a sculptor."

"There was a sculptor," said the Princess, "and he had already been paid."

It went up in the capital, in the square at the north end of the bridge, and it took four years to build and it was unveiled in the spring Theresia turned twelve, and it was the single most excruciating afternoon of her entire life to that point, which was a life that had included being carried out of her own bedroom by her uncle.

It was four storeys high.

She had assumed, when they described it to her, something the size of a person. A plinth. A dignified likeness at the end of a street that pigeons would ruin within a decade and that people would walk past without looking at, which is the correct and proper fate of a statue.

It was four storeys high. It was on a stepped base of grey granite that added another storey. It was visible from the far side of the river and from two of the city gates.

It was a woman in a plain working dress with her sleeves pushed up past the elbow, which was at least accurate, holding a lamp up above her head at the full stretch of her right arm.

And the face was her face, but not.

The sculptor had come out to the estate twice and had drawn her for three days, and he had done something she could not object to and could not forgive, which was that he had made the face about four years older and had taken out everything that was awkward. The jaw was hers. The eyes were hers. The expression was of a woman looking steadily at something in the middle distance with complete calm and no doubt in her whatsoever, and Theresia van Astrea had never in twelve years worn that expression for longer than eleven seconds at a time.

Thirty thousand people came.

She stood on a platform in a dress she hated with the King on one side of her and Anastasia on the other, and a herald read out a declaration that lasted nine minutes, and the cloth came off in three enormous falls, and thirty thousand people made a noise she could feel in her sternum.

Karan, three rows back, laughed so hard he had to be removed.

He told her afterward, weeping, holding onto the rail of the carriage, that it was the funniest thing he had ever seen in his life, that it would be there for a thousand years, that children not yet born would be told it was a great lady of the realm and would never know that she had once eaten eleven fried chickens and been sick in a flower bed, and that this was the single greatest joke ever played on a kingdom and he was privileged to have lived to see it.

She hit him with her fan and it broke.

Casiles said it was very fine. Carlan said the lamp was the wrong shape, which it was, and which nobody else in the world would have noticed. Thames said nothing at all for about a minute and then said that their father would have talked about it until everybody in three provinces wanted to strangle him, and the two of them stood there and looked up at it together and did not say anything else.

And in the evening, when the reception had emptied and the torches had been put out along the bridge, she went back.

She did it on foot, alone, which took some arranging, and she stood at the base of the granite in the dark with her hands in her sleeves and looked up at four storeys of a woman she had never met.

The lamp was lit. They had run an actual oil lamp up inside the hand, which was a piece of showmanship that she would have vetoed if anybody had asked her, and which meant that from the far side of the river you could see it burning at the top of the square all night.

She looked at it for a long time.

There is a boy, she thought, and nobody in this world knows his name.

He stood eleven metres from his mother in a railway concourse and he did not move. He went home and he stopped opening his post and he stopped answering a friend called Kenta and he died on a floor at nineteen years old between a desk and a bed with a cracked controller under his hand, and the only two people who would have gone to the funeral were already dead, and there is no stone for him anywhere in any world, and there never will be.

And they have built me a lamp four storeys high because I boiled some linen.

She was not bitter about it. That surprised her. She stood in the dark and waited for the bitterness to arrive because she had a great deal of practice at it, and what came instead was something much flatter and much worse.

You cannot buy it back.

That was the whole of it, in four words, and she had been working around the edges of it for six years without ever letting herself write it down. She had built wells. She had changed the way a kingdom treated a wound. She had put a story about a tortoise into the mouths of eleven thousand children and a machine under four hundred couriers, and every single thing she had done had been, at some level below the level where she could see it, an instalment paid against a debt from a different world.

And the debt did not take instalments. That was not how it worked. She could put a lamp on every corner in Lugunica and there would still be a boy standing on a tiled floor with his hands open at his sides, and he would still be standing there when she was ninety.

Theresia van Astrea stood under her own statue at half past eleven at night and understood, without any drama at all, that she was going to be doing this for the rest of her life, and that it was never going to work, and that she was going to do it anyway because the alternative was to sit still.

"That is not the worst arrangement anybody has ever had," she said out loud.

A watchman at the far end of the square, who had been pretending for ten minutes not to have noticed her, decided that he had definitely not heard that.

—=<>=—

Fribal found her at the inn afterward.

He did not ask where she had been, which was his way, and he sat down across the table in the empty common room and poured himself something and did not drink it.

"You saw the delegation," he said.

"I saw four men in southern colours standing at the back and leaving before the reception."

"They came up from Karsten's country. They were at the council on Tuesday and I was in the room." He turned the cup a quarter turn. "There is trouble on the southern border. Not war. Nothing so tidy. A quarrel at a market that became a killing, and then a reprisal, and then a village that has stopped paying tolls to a road it does not think belongs to the men collecting them."

"Demihumans."

"On one side of it, yes. And humans on the other, and a great many people on both sides who have been waiting four hundred years for exactly this and are now enjoying themselves enormously." He looked up. "It will be settled by the autumn. These things generally are."

"But."

"But I have been the Sword Saint for twenty nine years," said her uncle, "and I have noticed that there is a particular tone men use when they want something to happen and have decided to pretend that it is happening to them. There was a great deal of that tone in the room on Tuesday."

Theresia sat very still.

"Why are you telling me?"

"Because you are twelve," said Fribal, "and because in four years you will be sixteen, and because I have watched this family lose three people in five years and I have developed an aversion to surprising anybody."

He stood, and put the cup down with the drink still in it.

"Go to bed," he said. "You have a statue. It is a great deal of responsibility. It will be there in the morning, unfortunately.".

Join my Discord Server: https://discord.gg/X7sphRUsxJ