Once a Queen in Narnia...

M

Malacandra

Member
(New readers: Some years ago I posted a story called Plumbing the Depths in which a repairman who was called in to replace a radiator in a retirement home had a long conversation with one of the residents, a Miss Railly (pronounced "Rye"). At the end of the conversation the repairman presented her with a small stuffed toy lion before departing. Although this must have been fifteen years ago if it was a day of my time, for the lady in question only a few days, weeks maybe, have passed)

On a rainy evening, there wasn’t much to do. Every book on her shelf had been read several times over, every programme on the small television in the corner seemed equally vapid, and while the company in the lounge was polite enough, it was all purposeless: here in a well-appointed nursing home where every morning saw one counting the faces and looking for any absentees, to see who else had finally acknowledged that there it was time give in to the inevitable end of old age. Miss Railly – as she was generally known – could not, as the saying went, “be having with that”.

Only the quiet gurgle of warm water in the radiator reminded her of the one interesting thing that had happened to her in many years; and she had accepted almost as soon as it had happened that it would not be repeated. The best stories never did repeat themselves, that she knew; and while she might be white-haired and unable to suppress the slightest stoop when she stood, she had still a tough inner core that was too pragmatic, too sensible, too flat-out stubborn to waste time wishing for things to be otherwise.

But –

She picked up the perfect little stuffed plush lion and looked him squarely in the face. “I know,” she said. “I was wrong. I was foolish. And I put the blame everywhere except where it belonged; and at long, long last I got around to realizing it. I shut you out when I ought not to have done, and I am so, so sorry for the time I wasted and the wrong roads I took. But can’t you understand? I don’t know what to do now!”

In another time and place, in another world entirely, the lion might even have answered her then and there. Not here. She knew it didn’t work that way here; but she didn’t know what way things did work. She hugged the lion in a mixture of frustration and sheer sorrow, for about the hundredth time. “Please? A hint, maybe?” she whispered.

Seconds later her eyes opened wide, and her fingers searched for the momentary sensation they had found out and then lost again. And… there. Just behind the mane, a little core of hardness under the skin that didn’t belong there. She inspected the place with deep suspicion, but more than that: a thrill of hope, as though the clouds outside had parted and a shaft of clear moonlight had shone directly into her soul. She was too human not to hesitate at least a little; but she had reached an age where there were too few tomorrows left as it was, without wasting the precious allowance of time she had left to her in idle vacillation.

In her bedside drawer were a few small personal effects too useful to do without, and one of these her pale, almost transparent-skinned hands unpacked with sure and careful movements. There were needles of varying sizes, small spools of thread in an assortment of colours, a pair of scissors not much bigger than a baby’s hand… and a little tool made for unpicking stitches with the least effort and minimum of unintended damage. Miss Railly seized the last of these and gave the lion a direct look.

“If this is lese-majeste, I apologise in advance – and I will put things back how they were the moment I am done,” she said, with the ghost of a chuckle that came from a vanished age when all laughter was innocent and joyful, “but first, there is something I need to know.”

For many years she had been used to doing things for herself – even here, where the staff were well-paid, expert, and solicitous to an absolute fault. A little make-do and mend once in a while was an easement to the spirit, and her fingers still had their skill and her eyes their sharp focus, though she was nearer ninety than eighty. The seam gave way before her expert touch as though it was actively cooperating and had even been expecting her to reach this conclusion weeks ago; and she was true to her intention to do no more damage than absolutely necessary. Inside – a small paper packet, maybe two inches square, of plain paper. And on it:

Susan Pevensie. Do not for any reason touch either of these with your bare skin unless you have the other one safely on your person. You must heed this!

and not another word. She felt a tight band wrap around her heart and she had to sit down at once; but she was determined to stay in control even though the room seemed to be roaring in her ears and the light was fading. Leaning against the chair for one long moment, she picked up her jacket and put it on; there were pockets in that, and she slipped the paper packet into one of them.

Susan Pevensie.

She took one shuddering breath, and it felt laboured. Everything was a struggle, suddenly, as though dark wings were beating at her and turning the very air stifling around her. Her hands shook. It was like those dreams she sometimes had where she turned the light on, but the room didn’t grow light, or where she tried to find a place in a well-known book, but the words made no sense. That –

That wasn’t important right now.

She reached for control, and she had it; one moment poised in the balance where she was free to act. The packet was in her pocket, the pocket was pulled around where she could see into it, the paper of the packet gave way to her fingers, and two strange rings of coloured metal spilled out. They were like no earthly metal, for one was the bright yellow, not of gold but of a spring daffodil, and the other the clear green of a well-watered lawn; and yet they were metal, for all that.

Once, a long time ago, she had heard of these. But she had grown out of childish fantasies by then, and she hadn’t listened to the Professor, and it was very many years since he had gone where she could not ask him for a second hearing. She wasn’t sure what either of them were even supposed to do, never mind what they did do. Still: Rings they were, of a size to be worn on the finger, so if there was an ounce of sense left in the world… She slipped the green one on to her right hand and wondered what she had expected; at any rate, nothing happened. Then the yellow onto her left, and still nothing.

All very anticlimactic. Miss Railly scowled and shut her eyes for an angry moment… before Susan Pevensie opened them again. With very, very great care not to let it fall anywhere but in her pocket, she eased the first ring off, leaving only the second ring on; and the instant the green ring no longer touched her skin, and she was wearing only the yellow, the room went truly and finally dark around her.
 
It was impossible to say how long the falling sensation went on for. Time didn’t seem to mean much any more. But it was not for ever, and then sight and sound and the other senses came back quite abruptly, beginning with the realization that her feet were wet. As her eyes opened, they took in a tranquil treescape that extended an unguessable distance in all directions. Also, she was standing in a pond almost up to her knees.

With a firmer tread than she had felt capable of for quite a while, Susan floundered out of the pond – not really chilly enough to be uncomfortable, she noticed – and stood for a few moments on its bank. At intervals, trees gave way to other trees, and here and there another pond or pool, and also here and there some that seemed to have dried up; and in between, the kind of soft level turf that you would not expect to find on a forest floor, where the trees shaded out the grass and the drift of their leaves soured the soil. But the grass seemed to ache to be walked on just as keenly as her feet ached to feel it, and Susan peeled off her wet, muddy slippers, in two minds whether to bother to take them with her.

Meanwhile, the rings? The yellow was still on her hand, and nothing changed when she removed it. Equally, the green ring (and she took absolute care to pocket the yellow first) seemed to do nothing here. That was a puzzle that could wait for a better time, though. From a distant memory some awareness seemed to come back to her: Shelter. Drinking water. Food – but the last of those can wait for longer than you think. And while in a pinch the pond water might be a hundred times better than dehydration, it looked far from inviting. Nothing seemed to grow in the water; no flies skipped over it, no birds came to drink from it, nor – so far as she had yet been able to see – did any fish swim in it.

But by all that was blessed, it was peaceful here. The turmoil of a few minutes ago (was it a few minutes? She could not be altogether sure) had entirely ceased. It seemed like a pleasant place for a snooze under a tree, and yet Susan reflected that she did not feel as though she needed one. Well, then, a pleasant place to walk for a while; and any direction seemed as good as another. Except –

Warned by some instinct, Susan carefully eased up a hand-width of the turf beside the pond; and she moistened the soil that came up with it, and daubed a smear of wet mud on the smooth bark of the nearest tree. And now – pausing only to moisten and daub every second tree or so – she might wander as she would.

There was no hurry, and no particular reason to prefer any one way, and indeed very little changed for several hours. All was quiet and still; there was not a hint of rain in the air, nor did the light change by a flicker from its steady overcast-afternoon intensity. From time to time she looked back the way she had come and satisfied herself that she could start back whenever she wished, but she felt no strong urge to. Nothing had happened yet; and she had seen nothing but woodland, and done nothing but walk in it. Agreeable though it was, she had hoped for more.

Long after she had felt as though she had missed both lunch and tea (but she was not hungry), Susan finally saw something different. The trees cleared, and for something more than fifty yards in diameter there were well-tended beds of shrubs and little flowering plants, and in the middle of all, a fountain of white stone, at the centre of which water cascaded into a wide shallow bowl. She heard it long before she saw it, of course; although as she drew closer to the garden it struck her that a fountain playing as merrily as this should have been heard at a much greater distance. The sight and the scent of the beautifully clear water made her suddenly aware that she was thirstier than she had realized. It was too long since she had been for a long hike in the country, and the sheer quiet pleasure of it – too quiet to be called “joy”, but no less real for all that – had rather distracted her. Still, the reminder and the cure were one and the same, and immediately to hand.

The bowl was low, too low to stoop over, and with a tiny grunt of effort Susan lowered herself to both knees – less easy now than sixty or seventy years ago, but not more than she could manage with the solid, smooth stone of the bowl to grasp – and cupped her hands to drink. It was, by a distance, the best she had drunk in years, and she helped herself to several double handfuls before she stopped with a cry.

Looking back at her from the bright waters of the pool was a face she had known well; she had seen it every day when she put on her make-up, in the days when she had grown too fond of lipstick and blusher and eye-shadow and a hundred other little vanities… but this was a fresher face still, which she had seen when innocently brushing her hair, in a still longer-vanished year; the face of a lovely young girl, without conceit, shapely, fresh, healthy and wrinkle free, back before…

Back before it all went wrong.

Her cool wet hands came to her face – and they too showed in the reflection, and in plain sight, as the smooth pale hands of a young girl on the edge of womanhood – and she covered her eyes and cried without restraint.
 
“Woman, why do you weep?” said the gentle voice of a strange man after a long while. Supposing him to be the gardener, Susan answered:

“Because this is a cruel mirror, and shows things that are not, and that cannot ever be again; and it seems that it shows them to wound me.”

The voice said, “Susan.”

At that she turned, and saw, and would have risen, but her legs wanted the strength; and the strange man (but was he so very strange, after all?) helped her to rise, and her eyes took in his face. There was kindness there, and understanding, and a thousand other things, and as she shook her head in wonder and bewilderment he smiled and said “I am other than you expected.”

Dazed, Susan could only stammer. “I – do not know what I expected. Yet – you are…?”

“You know me… you, Susan, know of me by at least two names, and you know what they are. Your heart guides you truly on that, at least.”

Her breath seemed to catch in her throat. “And only on that?”

He said neither Yes no No, but he beckoned to her and showed her to a stone seat a little way from the fountain, and helped her to sit; and he said, “Let us talk – you who were a Queen in Narnia. There are many things you wish to know, and this Garden is the place to ask them, and this Gardener the one to answer.”

At a loss for a better question, Susan took in the woods and the garden with a single gesture that did not dare to sweep, exactly, and said “What is this place?”

“One of many that do not keep exactly the Laws as you knew them,” the Gardener said. “You stand now outside all worlds and all times. Did you so choose, you could remain here with the perfect assurance that you would never know discomfort, nor distress, nor danger nor hunger. But you would be alone.”

“Is there nobody else here in all this Wood?” Susan asked; and a moment later she bit her lip and nodded. “A foolish question. You mean, I would never meet them. I have to know: am I…?”

He turned his gaze to one side, and she followed his direction and saw clearly her own room at the retirement home, and herself slumped back in her armchair, her hands clenched as in pain or shock, and no sign of movement, not in herself nor in anything else in the room – and she saw the clock radio by her bed, its digits frozen. The Gardener inclined his head. “Here, you are outside all times. So, there – That page in your story is not turning while you are here. But it is you, just as surely as this here is you.”

“And if I went back?”

“You know the answer even as you ask the question,” he said gently.

For a long time she was silent. Eventually she said, “Then it all happened with a lot less fuss than I was expecting. And the mirror showed me truly? I have drunk of the Water?”

“Truly, truly, I tell you,” said the Gardener, “whoever drinks of this water shall thirst again. That which you have seen, that which you feel in you, you see and feel truly; but it is not yet the best drink of all. That is not how your path lies.”

Her mouth formed an O of surprise and even disappointment, but she rallied as best she could. The next question was one she needed to gather all her courage for, though, and instead she temporised, asking “If it is permitted to know – the man who came to fix my heating, the one who listened to me, the one who gave me the Lion… what was he, truly?”

“A servant of mine,” the Gardener answered. “A little further along than you, but not so much further as you might think. A Son of Adam and nothing more; but that is enough for you to know of his story. You have, do you not, a more pressing question about your own?”

Susan could not help lowering her gaze in shame. “What must I do now?” she managed to whisper.

He did not answer; and it was not for many minutes that it dawned on her that he was waiting for her to raise her eyes to him again. Then his eyes seemed to pierce her like a spear of fire; but his voice, though quiet and, she felt, a bit sad, was gentle and kind still.

“Once you were a Queen in Narnia,” he said, “and this was all for a purpose; that you would learn to know Me there as you would later know Me on earth – for I greatly wanted you to be led to Me. But as you confessed yourself to my friend and servant, and as you now know in your heart, you learned the wrong lessons and you turned away from the right, and all that you could have gained has gone for nothing. But for all that, dear Daughter, it was promised that whoever was once a Queen in Narnia should always be a Queen in Narnia, and that was promised with words that could not be broken.

“Equally,” the Gardener added, “those words still endure even though the Narnia you ruled is long gone. I shall not send you there, where the cold plain of a world that has run its course lies still and empty beneath a starless sky that shall never see another dawn, with nothing to reign over but the grains of dust that not a breath of wind disturbs. Do not weep; all that was good there was gathered up and is kept safe in store.”

The beauty and terror of his words stirred a conflict in her, but a hope also. “Then…?”

“There is room enough in the uncounted worlds for more second chances than you imagine, Susan Pevensie,” said the Gardener, “and lessons that went unlearned can be done over. This whole Wood is yours to wander in – but this Garden was made for you, and from here you, who sought to be a Queen again for vain and foolish reasons, can find worlds that need a Queen who will be a wise and dutiful one.”

“Please,” Susan gasped, “I want to be.”

“Then you will find that the Rings you brought with you will take you from this Fountain to a world that needs you. Wear the green ring when you stand in the Fountain and you will be taken to one; put on the yellow ring when your task is done, and you will return. But as I mentioned just now, you will thirst for this water again – so whatever task you find that needs to be done, be sure to apply your wits and your courage to it promptly. Water you will find wherever you go, but none that will do for you as this water has.”

He did not ask if she was ready, nor talk about what would happen when she did as she was told. For a moment his words hung on the air; and he was not there, and in all the endless Wood there was no-one but her.

She stood up, taller and straighter than she had stood in half a century and more. Beyond the Fountain was a world that needed a Queen – and here in the Wood was a Queen who needed to go over her lessons again. There was nothing else to do.
 
Reading the first seven paragraphs, I was at a loss for how Miss Railly fitted into a Narnian story. Then I wondered how Miss Railly could BE Susan Pevensie, but also receive a note FROM Susan Pevensie. Did Susan foresee that she would somehow lose her memories, and therefore left a note which would be there for her to see after she forgot being herself? (This would be similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger's character in "Total Recall.")

I quickly grasped why the Lord Jesus DID NOT appear to Susan in the form of Aslan. Jesus, after all, WAS Jesus before Mister Lewis imagined Him being Aslan. Your presenting Our Lord as "The Gardener" comes off as a superior choice in storytelling. Almost every fanfic writer in your place-- I myself, probably, in your place-- would have taken the path of least resistance, and had Jesus appear in the form of Aslan. But since you're depicting events AFTER the end of Narnia, Jesus manifesting Himself differently is fully appropriate.
 
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As to the first, "Miss Railly" is the central character in Plumbing the Depths (it's lurking somewhere in the recesses of this forum); it's pronounced "Rye", and as The Plumber explains when he gives her the lion, which is addressed to her with a three-syllable name she hasn't seen for many years, it seemed to him that one South Coast port, creatively misspelled, was as good as another. (Rye and Pevensey -- note spelling -- are two of England's Cinque Portes, and I used to be able to quote the rest.) I think I hit on this idea before ever learning about Neil Gaiman's "Miss Hastings", which uses a similar idea.

Whoever put the rings and the envelope inside the lion labelled it; but it's not a note from Susan to herself -- by the time Digory told the Friends about his old adventure, Susan wasn't listening any more. So someone (perhaps The Plumber) found the rings, dug them up, and put them there.

Incidentally, there is a Kipling short story "The Gardener", which is about a grieving woman searching a very large military cemetery in France... it's worth a read.
 
(I have some ideas, but I was quite unwell last weekend - enough to take a Covid test but mercifully it came up negative. I have some ideas jostling for attention, the oldest of which is at least as old as the idea for this whole Woods/Fountain/Gardener sequence. I will start bashing it down and see if it looks coherent.)
 
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