Rose Mary

At its height, the Kingdom of Karambo exported spice, silk, and reputation. Reputation traveled furthest, and the royal city of Karambi fed on it. In such a city, even a baker could become too well known.

 

So it was with Elwyn, who received one spring morning what many would later describe as the greatest honor of his life.

 

“Oh no,” he muttered, staring at the seal before the wax had fully cracked. “No, no, this cannot be.”

 

One of the cleaning maids, passing with a basin, paused to smile at him. “I should think it a high honor, sir. Whatever is the matter?”

 

“Of course you would think that,” said Elwyn. “Idiot.”

 

The summons required his presence at court before noon.

 

The King had been looking forward to the meeting. He quite liked Elwyn and, more than that, enjoyed making him anxious. It did not take much. The morning had already been dimmed by some strange inconvenience involving his missing Chief of Security and a scandal no one seemed able to explain clearly, but he waved it all aside for later. Elwyn would be more amusing.

 

When the baker was admitted, the King’s face opened at once into a smile so broad that several courtiers smiled with him before they knew why.

 

“There he is,” said the King. “My favorite.”

 

Elwyn bowed low.

 

“Did you know that?” the King asked.

 

“No, Majesty. How could I?”

 

A few men laughed. The King raised a hand, pleased.

 

“Oh yes,” he said. “And believe me, that means something. I have options. A thousand cooks a day would have me taste this or that if they could. I have eaten from the finest kitchens in all my lands. But you—” he pointed at Elwyn as though presenting some prize beast— “I chose early.”

 

Elwyn bowed again.

 

“I have watched you grow,” said the King. “Do you remember where I found you?”

 

“In poorer days, Majesty.”

 

The King laughed. “Poorer? He lived in a cart. His house was a cart, his kitchen was a cart, and his future was four rotten wheels from becoming kindling.”

 

The room laughed with him.

 

“I had him dragged before me,” said the King, “for selling dumplings in my streets without leave, license, tax, citizenship, or shame. Do you remember what I told you?”

 

Elwyn remembered. He had remembered every word for years.

 

The King took pleasure in making him say it.

 

“You said there was a reason not just anyone was allowed to feed the guests of your city. That every morsel served here must be the best in the world. That my whole life rested on your next bite.”

 

The King clapped once. “Perfect. You see? He remembers.”

 

It had happened almost exactly so. The King had snatched a dumpling from Elwyn’s basket before his tasters could object. He had chewed slowly, frowned, rolled it once in his mouth, and swallowed. Elwyn, who had already begun collapsing inside, remembered the silence afterward as the purest silence he had ever known.

 

Then the King had said: “See that this lad is given a place on Main Street. I do not care whether one exists yet.”

 

That had been the making of him.

 

It was also, Elwyn now understood, the beginning of the trap.

 

The King smiled down at him with the warmth of a man preparing to spoil someone else’s sleep.

 

“My birthday approaches,” he said. “You will prepare something worthy of it.”

 

Elwyn bowed, because the only other thing to do would have been to die on the carpet.

 

“You understand me,” said the King, still smiling. “Not impressive. Not rich. Not rare. Special.”

 

“Yes, Majesty.”

 

The King leaned back and studied him. “I am told you are an artist, Elwyn. Let us see whether that is true.”

 

When Elwyn left the palace he was smiling and bowing and walking upright like a man in favor. Inside, something had already begun to sink.

 

He had served the King before. That was part of the problem.

 

A lesser ruler might still be surprised by rarity, excess, or novelty. This one had tasted too widely and remembered too well. Any spice worth naming, any fruit worth slicing, any technique worth stealing had likely crossed the King’s tongue already, perhaps in secret, perhaps years ago. If some new pepper arrived by caravan, the King might well have tasted it before it reached market. If a confectioner in the river quarter discovered a new way to harden spirits or cast sugar into glass, the palace almost certainly knew first.

 

For a week Elwyn and his assistants worked like condemned men.

 

Sugars were pulled and molded into impossible shapes. Spirits were hardened. Meats were thinned, folded, and reformed. Aromas were trapped beneath pastry domes, then loosed at the table in perfumed clouds. Sauces were broken, remade, strained, heated, cooled, and broken again. One dish dazzled the eye. One proved his mastery of spice. One was rich enough for a prince. One moved two assistants nearly to tears.

 

None of them felt unprecedented.

 

“No,” Elwyn kept saying. “No. He will already know this.”

It was obvious before too long. Novelty alone would not get him out of this predicament.

 

He ran his staff ragged. He harassed spice sellers, apothecaries, brewers, herb wives, fishermen, and smugglers. He slept less each night than the one before. He asked himself, over and over, what the King could possibly care about. The answer came back empty each time.

 

It had to mean something.

 

That was the misery of it. Elwyn was an artist enough to know that excellence alone was not excellence. The meal – “No, not a meal”, he thought, “My fate will be decided in one bite!” That first bite had to carry a story. It had to strike some hidden chamber of the mind. It had to arrive with the force of recognition.

 

He had seen the King do it before. The pause. The weighing. The slight furrow in the brow. The slow chew. Then either pleasure, or ruin.

 

By the second week Elwyn had begun to understand that more fame could not save him. Wealth could not save him. Even success might not save him. To be the King’s favorite was to stand on a narrow ledge above a long drop, waiting to be summoned again and again, smiling each time.

 

He might escape this challenge only to die of the next one.

 

The break came in rain.

 

A man whose face Elwyn never saw clearly took a small stack of gold from him and placed a hood over his head. He was put into a carriage, jostled through wet streets, turned three times or thirty, then led through a narrow door into air that smelled of old smoke and damp linen.

 

There an old woman received him.

 

She listened without interruption while he explained what he needed, though by the time he finished he no longer knew whether he was asking for a flavor, a secret, or a miracle.

 

The woman nodded as if she had all three.

 

Then she told him a story.

 

Years ago, she said, when the King was still only a prince, he had loved beneath his station. The girl was no lady. Some said she was scarcely better than a servant. Some said worse. It had not mattered. He had loved her enough, at one point, to threaten scandal for her.

 

“What has this to do with food?” Elwyn started to ask, but the woman went on.

 

The girl had one humble duty in those days. On certain mornings she was to see that fresh bread and newly churned butter were set out early, before the household woke, so that warm grain and cream scented the halls. When their affair began, she told the young prince that whenever she herself baked the bread, he would know it. She would put in one thing no one else would think to use.

 

She never named it.

 

But the next morning, upon tasting it, the prince’s mother is said to have spoken the girl’s name without meaning to, struck at once by some clean and strange brightness in the loaf. The prince laughed before he could stop himself.

 

The old woman told him the ingredient.

 

Elwyn sat perfectly still.

 

It was not expensive. It was not rare. That, more than anything, frightened him.

 

He raced home through the storm and did not sleep at all that night.

 

The next day, at the royal birthday observance, the tables bent beneath silver, fruit, glazed birds, sugared citrons, towers of rice, and fish laid out like jeweled offerings from three coasts. Every chef who mattered had sent an offering. The court expected a spectacle from Elwyn. This expectation delighted the King.

 

Instead the baker arrived carrying only a covered wicker basket.

 

The King regarded it with amusement.

 

“Have you mistaken me for a farmer?” he asked.

 

“No, Majesty.”

 

He removed the cloth.

 

Inside was a loaf. Beside it, wrapped in linen, was fresh butter.

 

A few courtiers lowered their eyes at once. Others stared. No one spoke.

 

The King, trusting him still, tore off a piece of bread with his own hand. He did not butter it. He bit into it plain.

 

The change in his face was immediate and terrible.

 

His eyes widened, but not with pleasure. He chewed once more as if forced to continue. Spring and summer passed over him. Then autumn. Then something colder. His head bowed. A single tear broke loose and slid into his beard.

 

For one suspended instant Elwyn believed he had done it.

 

Then the King made a sound no one in the room had ever heard from him.

 

“Rose Mary,” he said.

 

The words came out low and ruined. Several people glanced at one another, not sure whether they had heard a name,   or an accusation.

 

Then the King looked up in fury and roared it.

 

“ROSE MARY!”

 

The hall froze.

 

His life, his secrets, his weakness, touched by a common hand. Thumbed through like papers in a drawer. The outrage of it was too complete for language. There was also the smaller matter, though perhaps not smaller to him, that a king observed in grief was a king observed in weakness.

 

That could not be permitted.

 

Elwyn was still trying to understand what he had achieved when he was seized.

 

He was hanged by the neck before the hour was out.

 

The birthday festivities were canceled. In disgust, with the day spoiled beyond repair, the King demanded at last to know what this nonsense was concerning his absent Lord Chen. The man hadn’t shown his face in weeks. When he was told, he sat very still indeed.

 

“Bring before me this Slave Song,” he said.

 

By the next season, Elwyn’s was only a location again, and Karambi was already making a legend of someone new.