The Way of Kings
O0O0O0O
The way of kings is not what people think.
It is not all glory and honour and swords. Nor is it all planning and papers and strategy. It is not all balls and banquets, nor famine and warfare. It is better than that. It is so much worse.
It is, as a wise King of Archenland once observed, to be first in every desperate attack and last in every desperate retreat. To be a King, that wise King said, was, when there was hunger in the land, to wear finer clothes and laugh louder over a scantier meal than any man in the kingdom.
He said other things too, but history has forgotten most of them. He was a wise enough King, but not a terribly well-spoken one, and the court scribes could only do so much with the material they were given.
The way of kings, though . . . that has held true in Narnia for all time and beyond.
To be a King, to be a Queen . . . even when nobody is watching, you must live as though everyone is. You love, serve, rejoice and accept rebuke as graciously as you receive coffers of gold. You seek to know more, and strive to boast less. The greater you grow, the more humble you must become. You see in the least and the lowliest one who is greater than yourself. These and more, these are the way of kings.
Peter has lost this way.
Not all at once, nor in one fell swoop, but bit by bit, piece by piece, he has lost it all the same. The world, you see, has been edging in. Chipping at him, beating him down, eating at the tattered remnants of his humility and leaving false, cheap, hard pride in its place.
He remembers he was once king, but he does not remember what that means.
When Lucy still looks into the faces of the hungry and longs to feed them, Peter sees feasts and remembers when such were held for him.
When Susan holds her head a little higher in times of great shame, and bows only when honour is bestowed upon her, Peter holds his head high on receipt of honour, and bows it in shame.
When Edmund turns his cheek, walks away from taunts and catcalls; when he offers a hand of peace in the face of childish jeers, Peter is ready and all too eager to fight.
Yet still they stand by him, as they did even when he was yet the King they once knew. Still they are what he has almost ceased to be; still they remain his family. And though they cannot understand it, they do not turn away. Not even when he is the least of them, in the worst possible way.
"Fight, fight, fight, fight!"
Perhaps, for mere moments, he can pretend it is the roar of the crowd at the grand tourneys once held in their honour.
Perhaps, Lucy thinks, as her lungs burst, her legs churn and she ducks and dodges through startled pedestrians (" . . . pardon me, I am so sorry, oh, Sir, I didn't see you, please let me get that, I didn't mean to knock it down, I'm only in such a hurry, I am so very sorry . . .") he does it so he can pretend, even for a moment, that he is what he once was.
Or perhaps, she thinks, he forgets what he really was.
Perhaps she forgets too.
At least Peter, she thinks, is still willing to fight. He has that much left to him, anyhow, even if it is so much cheapened beyond what she knows he can be. At least Susan is gracious as ever, gentle, quiet, loathe to see anyone hurt . . . and Edmund . . . Edmund was always wise. He is quiet now, and much subdued, but he is still wise.
I, Lucy thinks, am none of those . . .
Then she jerks to a frightened halt at the screech of the horn, the shout of the driver— and there, beneath his anger, she can hear his fear. The stranger behind the wheel sees what could have been, the child dead on the street. Lucy looks at him in honest, stomach-clenching sympathy.
"Sorry," she says, and means it; oh how she means it. Sorry. So very sorry.
Sorry she can't lift them all up on her own two shoulders. Sorry she can't reverse everything that has been done to them. Sorry she can't make the driver see that the death he fears for her is a thousandth of the horror that it means to be torn from what makes you a Queen. What makes you a King.
From the One who made them so.
And on she runs, oh her heart is fit to burst . . . and there is Susan.
"Susan!"
Lucy's timing was never the best, but now . . . Susan rounds on her in weary expectation. Damn, she thinks, and then is appalled at herself. Is this how she receives her sister?
Lucy's freckled face is all over anguish. It's a look Susan knows well, and she remembers too what it looked like on a face so very much older than this. Seeing her sister awakens each last agony, each anguished recollection of everything she loved just a little too much. Seeing Lucy, she remembers holding court in a living dream . . . people seeking their counsel, trusting their judgment as sound.
Grace and beauty and truth, lived out each day, every day, even in the hardest of times.
The boy standing beside her now, he is so very much the opposite of all that she knew; all that she was. Men once promised kingdoms in exchange for her hand; they waged wars for her honour. This boy, skinny, bespectacled and unable to see gentle rebuff for the generous gift it is . . . he hurts her. By his very dissimilarity to all she once had, he deeply, physically hurts her. And now, worst of all, she has surely wounded him too. Surely . . . provided, that is, he is even clever enough to realise that she cannot be called two things at once, and that the name she has given him is false.
"False jade!"
Is this what she has become? A self-loathing thing who longs even for the insults of her most feared enemies? Why bother to deny the truth in it; she would take the very darkest and worst of those times, if only it means she might be there once more . . .
Then they are running again, together, not as queens through the corridors of their grand and stately home, but as two schoolgirls trapped in the city, breathing dirty city smells, their stiff new school shoes slapping the slippery street. Into the tube station the girls run, miring themselves in the stink of the steel and the sweat and the concrete, plunging into the shouts of a low and ugly crowd.
"Fight, fight, fight, fight!"
Peter, oh Peter . . . she looks at him in sickened desperation. This is not the way of kings. Half-grown men in fistfights have less honour than a pair of curs brawling over a bone.
Edmund is not one for sickened desperation. He finds it lacks productivity. True wisdom is knowing when to act; knowing when to keep your brother from getting his fat head kicked in. He wills himself to be economical in his blows, to not loathe his clumsiness, to not long for greater skill than this. Who longs for greater skill on his side when one is already a king fighting little boys?
Coward, he calls himself, tackling one off Peter, knowing Peter will hate him for it; even hating himself. Coward; low, filthy coward, fighting children when you were once a man.
Who has made us this way? he wonders, turning to repel the second onslaught. I fought Princes and bested proven warriors on the field of battle. You are children, and still I can't bear up against you. What, then, have I become?
What then have we become?
Then come the men. Grown, aged men who have seen more of the world than even the Kings they separate . . . men who do what they can now because they are too old to do what others must.
"Act your age!" the fellow shouts, and in his deep, fierce, and instant resentment of the edict, Peter finally sees it. Here he stands and scorns a man of greater years, a man of age and wisdom, a man who may never be King but has seen more of his own, one life than have the boys he glares at now seen in both their lives combined.
In all their lives, combined.
It is not the way of kings to be repulsed by those who offer wisdom. Not of true Kings. Peter feels the depths to which he has fallen, and deplores them. Edmund's scorn, heaped upon him, is earned; deserved, even. Yet he resents it, loathes it and turns . . . and there are his sisters. Queens in worsted wool, women trapped in the bodies of children, aged far beyond their years. Lucy looks heartsick; Susan looks hollow.
They are empty, all four, and together they are alone.
They are shadows of all they have been, brought to a depth that was never meant to be.
This, they know, standing together, strangers in their own world, this is not the way of Kings.
O0O0O0O
A.N.: Yes I saw the movie, if that's not already painfully obvious. I liked it. It was a good movie. It was just a bloody rotten adaptation.
The lines about the first in charge, last in defeat and all that were, of course, taken direct from The Horse and His Boy. Those lines and all the rest of Narnia belong, for now and for always, to the man who created it. CS Lewis is every kind of awesome. I just play in his garden and take liberties with his characters . . . but not, I sincerely hope, so many liberties as some.