In the Yellow Country, where we once were young, summer isn’t over yet. The fields still yield late corn, the chickens lay, vines bow their trellises with fruit. But life is cut short nonetheless. Night thieves steal eggs, guns lean against doorframes, green tomatoes ripen inadequately in baskets the rusting sunbeams have to seek. The wise think of that future when pickles finish pickling, cider matures and the lost are forgotten. The young, though, the strong, the naïve—the princess foremost among them—think of Orangeland. And daily, hourly, they defect.
In Orangeland, people carry chainsaws everywhere, and we who can no longer call ourselves people retreat to the trees, hiding, burrowing, hoarding. We squirrels count ourselves among the wise—even the visionary, since our transformation—though in the Yellow Country no place for us remains; such is life. One can see a long way from the trees, at least until they’re toppled.
Princess Grace of the Yellow Country has youth on her side and against her. Time seems longer to the young. Endings happen with greater finality. This, according to her new maid-in-waiting, former best friend Marie, is why the people chose her to try to stem the tide of exodus. They wanted someone who would grieve for those lost to that beckoning border. Grief, it was believed, would lead her not so far astray as stoicism.
And she does grieve. Too much, if you ask Marie. She grieves not only for lost friends but their families. She grieves for the fields left behind, the corn there’s no one left to eat. She despairs at the task they have set her. She isn’t worthy of their trust.
“Don’t think on it too much,” warns dark-haired Marie, “lest you learn to resent them.”
“Do you resent them?” asks the princess.
“Oui.”
She is their princess, she thinks. She can change things.
She declares a holiday from harvesting. “Let’s have summer again, just for a day.” A next best thing, she thinks, to banning thoughts of Orangeland altogether.
Grace rides between farmholds, quaffing cider with those sun-grizzled whose gazes linger west. The taste: effervescent rot, fruit skin and dryness. The tradition, she is taught, is to swallow a whole thin glassful in one go, then toss the lees into the brittle, trampled grass.
“It goes back to the earth that way,” says Gus, whose brother George went a month ago and hasn’t come back.
“No one comes back,” says Marie.
“Next year,” says Gus, “we won’t have any. My brother made the cider.”
Princess Grace throws her lees in the grass; her horses trample them. “Was it the same when you were young?” she asks the old couple who drive the carriage.
Whenever Carlo nods at the reins, Vieve wakes like a shot. A bad rhythm for connubial harmony, admits Vieve, but they’ve made it work somehow. “It was, your majesty. It’s always the same this time of year.”
“But you resisted. You stayed.”
Vieve frowns. “We…had each other?”
Tell that to Gus,” says Marie.
The princess, at ease with her power—though not what it’s meant to achieve—makes a curtailing gesture.
In the carriage, against a backdrop of yellow leaves somersaulting westward, Grace and Marie whisper heatedly. “You’re not helping!” says Grace. “You’re not wrong. You’re not. But you’re letting it get to you. Isn’t that what you’ve been warning me not to do?”
“I’m trying. We can’t all be princess, you know.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You want to be princess instead?”
Marie tosses her shadowy curls. “I didn’t say that.”
“I didn’t ask for this!”
“I know.”
“Then why are you being so mean?”
“I hate to say it, princess, but you’re not helping either. You’re not keeping anyone from leaving—you’re making it worse. They put their faith in you, and what do you do? You pretend you can stop time. You make them drink the cider they’ve been saving for the hardest moments. This isn’t the hardest. Not even close. If you thought so, you were wrong.”
Apples and noble rot quease the princess’ gut. She did think so. What could be harder?
“My mother went. In the fall, one year when I was little. Did you know that?”
“No. I mean, I assumed…”
“I believed them, at first. When they elected you. I thought you could change things. Change the way people think. Even though I knew you weren’t who everybody made you out to be. As a girl you were so…exuberant, with your pageants, your little songs. You made people happy. You made them forget. Nobody stays a kid forever. But I didn’t care you got to be princess—I just wanted to help.”
“So help,” says Grace.
Marie throws aside the blanket that warmed their skirted legs and tumbles from the carriage. “Don’t you get it? You can’t help anyone! Not here.”
Beyond the rolling fields and orchards bordering the West Road runs the green and golden brook that marks the end, falling over rocks too sharp-edged to have lain there long. Beyond that await orange woods, brown-carpeted, cathedral-vaulted. Her skirt-hems in her hands, Marie wades first through water, then leaves.
In the front of the carriage Vieve sleeps like a rag doll. Carlo draws gently back on the reins. The horses nod in their blinders. The light tarnishes.
“It isn’t not thinking,” Carlo supposes, considering a question asked hours ago, “so much as what you think of.”
Marie isn’t the first friend Grace has lost to the west, or the hundredth, but this loss hurts worse than the rest. She relied on Marie. She’s right, the princess realizes. Whatever answers there are to be found won’t be found here, but in Orangeland. Maybe when they left they didn’t know why, but they must know now.
“Take me home.”
Princess Grace packs alone, so no one will worry or know what she plans. She girds herself with her tokens of state, sword and circlet. No one has ever come back. She knows just because no one’s been Princess before doesn’t mean she’ll be the first to return. But they all put their faith in her. She has to do something.
She takes a horse, but turns it loose before the last field. At Gus’ house, she minds the rifle by the door and leaves the chicken coop alone, but steals one more bottle of cider. “This one,” she swears, “I’ll save until it’s really time.”
The sharp stones beneath the border brook slip with moss. “Help,” the water murmurs over and over. The sun goes dark in the leaves of the orange forest as the princess pulls herself damp onto the bank. Shrill voices—ours—accuse from the branches. On a chill wind she smells smoke, spicy and invigorating. There’s no sign of Marie. But the Queen of Orangeland approaches, clothed in a scorched and smoldering dress the colors of fire.
We watch from the trees, we who no longer call ourselves people, since we came and were beaten. A princess in Orangeland? We huddle and whisper, worrying after our hoards. Worry is endemic here, but paranoiacs can’t be wrong all the time.
“We’ve been expecting you,” says the Queen—not the royal “we”, nor quite the plural, but the prescient. We, the squirrels of Orangeland, were expecting her, though until this moment we didn’t know it. Orangeland’s queen has been long at her task; her vision at times outdoes even our own.
“I’ve come to bring my subjects home,” says the princess. “Every one of them. Their loved ones miss them. Without them, my country isn’t the same.”
“No one’s is,” the queen agrees with sympathy. “But I’m afraid they’re not your subjects anymore. No one goes back, unless they go the long way. For another thing, you’re not their princess. You crossed the brook, didn’t you? Your former countrymen—those who remain, I mean—must name another in your place, if they want one. There are no princesses in Orangeland.”
Hurrying to match the queen’s long, graceless strides, Grace looks back on the Yellow Country. Beyond the jagged little brook, the fields have gone flat, painted scenery in a play. Already she wonders how anyplace could have been so bright. “But they’re here somewhere, aren’t they? Everyone who left my country.”
The queen shrugs, a helpless gesture. “Unless they’ve gone on.”
“On?”
“Oh, Orangeland has borders too, though you’ll struggle to find them. What is it the cartographers say? ‘That way lies death’?” And she jerks a thumb west.
Pausing for breath beneath a torched tamarack, Grace smooths back green onionskin skirts from toes already dry. She sniffs the air, the ashes curling past like snowflakes. She’s here, it’s too late to go back. Orangeland, it’s easy to see, is no place for idling. One must move to keep warm, if nothing else. And it’s not as if she didn’t come prepared.
She touches the thin, gleaming blade at her hip, then her circlet, its chick-colored stone. In the distance, trees creak. Saws cackle.
“No princesses,” she calls, “but there are queens.”
The Orange Queen pauses only a moment. People walk a lot in Orangeland—it’s a big, restless place. “I don’t decide who goes or stays, you know. I’m not the one who makes the rules. I just embody them. Like you.”
“And what if I don’t like the rules?”
The queen laughs. “That’s how it’s going to be?”
War comes to Orangeland: a civil war. It had to happen sometime. We have all been defectors. Someday we must all be again. War means that day will come sooner for some. Not us, though! We have our hoards of food, our safe hiding places. Let the storms pass! Let winter come!
Grace culls her armies from the roadsides, from around campfires, from caves. She walks the roads from camp to camp, proselytizing. “Build, don’t just let it be destroyed! Put down your burdens. All those skills you took away from the Yellow Country—use them! With all these trees we could have homes, not just burn piles. From dry corn and these cold streams, we’ll make ale. Song doesn’t need summer! Love doesn’t need warmth…though it helps.”
They call her the Green Queen. Friends she thought lost flock to her banner. She finds Gus’ brother George, her aunt Louelle, her friends Matthias and Dani, and more she never met who love her nonetheless. Not Marie, though, who she wanted most.
Her cause is doomed right from the start, but they’ll have to learn the hard way. No shortcuts in Orangeland.
“Why did you leave?” she asks George one night around the omnipresent fire. Even exhausted irregulars can’t shake Orangeland’s walking blues; while Matthias plucks banjo and Dani shakes a jar of seeds, they dance.
“I couldn’t sit idle anymore,” says George. “Anything I could think to do was wrong, except leave. At least here it’s already happened. At least there’s something to do instead of wait.”
George made the bottle of cider in her pocket, but she doesn’t tell him that. “I guess it was the same with me.”
This country was made for war, with its stump-scattered valleys, its deadwood-choked swamps. The armies line the ridge-tops, then charge to meet at cold streams. We scamper in the aftermath, scavenging. The Orange Queen gloats: at night, her colors fill the cloud-lined skies, and still the chainsaws echo. Grace’s green dress frays. Stains darken it beneath her arms, straw-color at the hems. Bits of fabric flake away. Now they call her the Onionskin Queen. She gives up talking of home or thinking it, except to remember the waiting, the helpless feeling, and to compare it with now.
“At least we’re doing something,” she tells them, all of them. “Time enough to think of making a home,” she tells herself, “when it’s over, when there’s only one queen.”
At the top of an opposing ridge one afternoon before the end, Marie’s hair flies beneath an orange banner. Grace calls to her troops, in their worn workboots and trousers thin at the knees. She draws the little sword, the one her subjects in the Yellow Country gave her at the coronation, the brightest thing in Orangeland that isn’t fire. Her troops level pikes made from pitchfork tines and do what they do best: they walk, across the cold stream and up the long slope, against the wind, against the cold current of Orange partisans coming the other way with chainsaws. And when they gain the hill, the few who remain find fewer still awaiting them surrounding Marie and her banner, nothing but burned ridges and white sky beyond.
“I’ve been here all the time, you know. Ever since this war started. I rallied them against you.”
“Why?” says Grace. “I only came because of you!”
“Because of what you did back home. You drove me here. And…well, because she said this was the way beyond. You know, to the border. Can’t you see there’s no beating her? We fight and fight. At the end, she’ll be the only one left. She and the squirrels.”
We know wisdom when we hear it.
“This is the end,” says Grace. “Look around. We’ve won. And she’s not even here! When I’m queen, the only queen, I can change things. We can—”
“I’m here,” says the old Queen of Orangeland, putting aside her pitchfork-tine pike and throwing off an ashy hood. She turns, draws her hair to one side. Her grand dress, the smoldering thing, has leather laces at the back, corset strings. “Go ahead, I’m ready. I’ll take Marie and we’ll go on. You wear the mantle for a while. Who knows, maybe another doomed princess is at the east border even now.”
“I don’t want your old dress,” says Grace, “I’ve got my own.” Though there’s little enough of it left, just a shift and some fragments, it’s hers. Once, it was green.
The queen shakes her head, her hair like brittle branches crumbling. “Orangeland can’t have a Parchment Queen. I’m sorry, but those aren’t the rules. Maybe in the next country. I doubt it would last—but then what do I know? I’ve never been. Go on, if that’s what you’d prefer. Most of your friends are there already.”
It’s true, of course. George fell at the last ridge, or the one before that. Matthias and Dani went ages ago. Louelle defected to us—to the trees—as so many have before her.
Among the last of the Orange Queen’s partisans, Grace recognizes Gus. “No hard feelings, your majesty?”
Grace relents. “Enough!” She rushed into it the last time. Maybe if she’d stayed, she’d have learned to live like Carlo and Vieve, to sleep through the hard parts. Though that doesn’t strike her as a way to live, not really. Anyway, she’s learned to like walking.
She digs her fingers into the Orange Queen’s laces, feeling for the ends. “Everyone says you’ve been at this a long time. You go on with Marie. I’ll stay and see what it’s like to be queen here. I’ll have to learn the rules.”
“You will. There’s no getting around them. It just takes time.”
They sit and drink George’s cider together, swapping the bottle. The lees they toss out in the leaves. Marie and the old queen grind them in on their way west.
Gus helps Grace into the dress.
So it goes in Orangeland.
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Michael J. DeLuca‘s debut novel The Jaguar Mask came out in August 2024 from Stelliform Press, and his novella Night Roll was a finalist for the Crawford Award in 2020. He publishes Reckoning, a journal of creative writing on environmental justice. He also operates the indie ebooksite Weightless Books. His short fiction has been appearing since 2005 in venues such as Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Apex, Mythic Delirium, Fusion Fragment, and Three-Lobed Burning Eye. He lives in the post-industrial woodlands north of Detroit with partner, kid, cats, and microbes. |