The King’s Highway and Forgotten Garden

by Elizabeth Anne Hartmann

He didn’t remember how it had begun, or how long he’d suffered the scaly skin and the ache between his shoulder blades. Headaches that sliced upward through the base of his skull and burned through his temples left him heaving and gasping, barely able to shelter himself in the nearest shrub, before his gut spewed forth like the fiery mountains across the far valley. For days uncountable, he’d lain lost and timeless in his dark cottage, praying for the sun to set and not knowing if it did. Pale and watery as the thin moon above, he stumbled on rattling legs to his empty cupboard and cold hearth with such a hunger, and such a thirst.

Because he had nowhere else to go, he returned to his job of clearing field and forest for the King’s Highway. From cool sunrise to dusty twilight, he bent his back to the repetition of digging and chopping, hauling and laying gravel. His fellow laborers shook their heads, and some stopped to clap him on the shoulder with a rough joke about too many tankards. He returned their greetings with a grimace and a grunt.  And all too soon, they turned away to their own labors, and left him to himself.  The road, as well as the day, was long for all of them. They paused only at noontime to rest in the shade outside the King’s Garden.

That was where he first saw her, first heard her singing rich and low, a crazy girl enchanting weeds to wonders, transforming thorns into thimbles of sweet berries, and delighting over pale flowers that blinked like the flash of a firefly, and were gone. Her dark-lashed eyes glowed green, and warmed the deep blue depths of his own. Come evening, she brewed potions that eased his headaches, and massaged warming oils into his aching shoulders. He marveled at the strength in her small brown hands, and enclosed them in his own, and they were wed.

By the time their first child was born, his headaches had gone and he said he had no need of her salves. The King’s Highway required his strong shoulders, he proclaimed, and the King’s Garden could find itself another drudge. She was to give up her herbal craft and tend to kettle and kinder, while he journeyed to the far end of the road, beyond the fen and beside the mountain.

By the time his father returned from the Highway, the child was old enough to hold himself up at the table and mouth the gold coin his father had brought home. The child’s eyes were wide and watchful of the thunder and heat of this man, so unlike his mother. The girl, now wife and mother, wondered at the cost of such coin, barely recognizing the boy she had married in this man from the mountains. 

Yet he delighted in his son, tossing the child high in the air with a roar, and catching and holding him in the protection of his well-muscled arms. At first the boy was frightened.  But soon he grew to love the flight, and even more, the return to the warmth and scent of his father’s broad chest.

She was also frightened. In the passing days of his time at home, she had noted the growing unsteadiness in her husband’s gait, and the loss of sureness in his hands. When she urged him to be more careful, he turned his roar upon her, eyes darkened to midnight.  Silenced and chastened, she turned on her garden, pulling savagely at the weeds she once would have nurtured, replacing berries with potatoes, and flowers with kale.

There were still nights of gazing at the bright moon, her hands softening his jaw to kisses, his thighs quickening hers to open like the blooms she had tended long ago in the King’s Garden. And she sang to him, his head pillowed in her lap, running her fine brown fingers through his thick, dark hair. For a while, that was enough.

Their second-born adored her father from first breath, newborn eyes locked within his heart as she gazed sharply at him from the shelter of her mother’s arms. She learned to crawl into her parents’ bed at sunrise, waking her father with morning kisses, to begin his day of work for the King.  The Highway was never complete and never satisfied, but a man would always have work as long as his back was strong and his spirit willing.  In just a few turns of the season, the girl was able to follow her father down the King’s Highway, each midday tilting with the weight of his pail of stew and cup of ale.

            His fellow laborers looked on the man with envy. Some told him what a fine daughter he had, that if they were only a few years younger, and she a few years older, she would make a fine wife. He answered their good humor with a grimace and a grunt, and all too soon they bent their backs to their own labors, for the road as well as the day, was long. And the man made them uncomfortable.

Each day he wiped his mouth with the back of a hand grown dark and scaly, and sent his daughter home with a gentle swat on her behind. Each night she waited by their cottage door for his return, and when there was no moon, she often fell asleep waiting for him.

The boy watched with eyes that missed nothing, and ears that heard all. Often it was he who gathered his sister in his arms, like wildflowers from the side of the roads his father had built. He tucked her gently into her cot, as his mother had tucked him into his own bed so long ago. He sang low, sweet lullabies as he lay down next to the child, and she curled into his side like a seed resting through winter.

And when their parents’ arguments turned from sharp pebbles to avalanches of boulder and ice, the two would join hands and slip from the cottage, to find the one corner of their mother’s garden where moonlight glowed off tiny petals of fragrant herbs, forgotten and thus not rooted out.

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The woman approached the far valley on foot, alone. Her trusted pony had refused to go beyond the boundary of the last ravine. Something about the blackened bushes lining the brackish, whirling water had caused him to rear and shriek, eyes flashing and teeth bared. He waited on the far side of the divide, pawing skittishly at the water’s edge, whickering uneasily as his mistress stepped from the dark forest and followed the ravine that fled the valley and the fen upstream. She continued alone, rueful of the oily sheen the waters left on her journeywoman’s moccasins.

She stepped into the valley and began her descent. Thorns tore at her woolen cloak, and cobwebs clung to the hardened line of her jaw. Shivering, she brushed them away with worn leather gloves and pressed forward until she came to the place where even thorns dared not venture. The looming mountain cast a thick, sulfurous shade over the fen, broken only by the desultory sprinkling of fiery cinders and ash.

The woman knelt at the edge of the fen and lifted her eyes and hands to the darkened skies. Her shoulders shook from sorrow or terror…she knew not which. She had been born and apprenticed in the safety of the King’s Garden.  Her strength was to charm from rough and wild soil, palliative herbs that soothed like a wise woman’s hands, blooms that winked in and out like the firefly’s dance, and berries that dissolved on the tongue like a flash of sunset. What good were these gifts now? Yet the silvery threads of her children’s souls called to her, wavering and weakening with each sun’s turn. There was no time left. She dropped her hands and rose to her feet.

The carrion stench had begun to thicken the already-still air. She held her worn kerchief, doused with spirit of peppermint, over her mouth and nose. She had some aching knowledge of what she would encounter in this confrontation.  She had heard the dragon’s roar tear through the moonless midsummer night, just before her children had been taken.

The mammoth creature laid oily brown and curled on his side across the length of the clearing. Bluebottle flies buzzed at its oozing eyes and crawled into a crusted nostril, only to shrivel in the monster’s exhalation. A pressured gurgling emanated from the slug-white belly of the beast, and it rolled and groaned as it picked off a scale the size and shape of a gravestone.

As it uncoiled the ropy length of its tail, she saw them, the small boy and the still-smaller girl, thumbs in mouths, and curled around one another. No sound, no movement, but the sweetness of their souls called faintly beneath the hiss and rumble of the creature. The woman had to continue.

She dropped the kerchief and stepped out of her moccasins, and the ground popped beneath her feet like rotting corpses as she stepped closer. Maggots leaped about her ankles, and flies buzzed about her nostrils and lashes. The dragon hoisted its head in dull surprise, yawned, and belched from the pit of its belly. Frenzied, the flies returned to their host and buzzed in and out of its slavering jaws. Still the children lay wrapped together, shining like moon and star.

Dropping first one glove and then the other, she stepped over the massive tail, which stirred only slightly at her passing, and knelt to her children. She wrapped a hand around the back of each child’s head and kissed their slickened brows. At her touch they stirred and whimpered.

She felt the dragon’s tail touch her back questioningly. She shoved it away. The children moaned and pulled themselves to a sitting position. The tail returned, paused to shake off a maggot, and lightly touched the woman’s jaw. The children blinked and reached their hands to the dragon’s tail, gripping its spines.

She hesitated, pulled the tail to her and drew her fingers along its length. She felt the spines dissolve, then drop to the ground in steaming piles. The children unfolded their legs and rose, holding each other close. The creature shuddered and sighed, rolling under the woman’s caresses. The flesh slid off its bloated body, revealing wet, white bone. Silently, the children turned to the dragon and began to separate the skeleton of the rib cage, which released with a sodden crack and collapsed like phlegm around the figure of a man. He lay within what remained of the cavern of the creature’s body, curled about himself, naked and bloody as a newborn.

Deftly, the woman and children picked the detritus from the man’s body. He lay with eyes squeezed shut, an occasional shudder rolling along his fragile spine. The children lay their hands on the man’s brow, and pushed his dark hair away from his eyes, turning his face toward the sky.

The woman placed her palm on the man’s thin chest and paused. For now, the only way home with her children was along the King’s Highway. And the only way free was to reclaim the forgotten garden. They would come this way again, and again.

With a sigh, she lifted his arm to her shoulder, braced herself, and drew him to his feet

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Liz Hartmann is a long-time public servant working in the Twin Cities in Minnesota. She has a background in Psychology and Education, and she balances her time between raising teenagers, checking in on aging parents, and enjoying the journey towards retirement; writing helps to keep her balanced.