In a small hilly daley kingdom the people were blessed by a king, and blessed was that king from all the proper and respectable authorities of the heavens and earth. He was huge, and strong, and fast, and keen with his blade, and fierce with his fist, and under his protection they feared nothing from no other. In all manner of respects was he perfect, save for one small manner: he believed that the sun was his cousin, and a shiftless one to boot.
“Why does he shirk my lands so?” he complained to his court on a beautiful summer afternoon. “Look! See how he slowly begins to slink into the west! What’s so wonderful over there that he should quit my kingdom so eagerly! Is not the cathedral’s steeple so high and grand? Are not my fields ripe and full? Are not the trees so thick and lustrous? Whyfor have you, my advisors, permitted some secret shame to thus rob me of his kinship?! Whence did this wound against his pride occur?! Woe!”
“I’m sure we can remedy this matter,” implored the eldest and closest of the king’s counselors, who could see his swording hand clawing restlessly at his pommel. “We shall consult the court polymath, wise Gum, who knows all manner of truths of earth and water and beyond. In her hands we may place a matter of this import, as it lies beyond our humble means.”
“Wonderful,” said the king. “And if this fails, I will know you have all only managed to further insult my cousin and will chop you all up.”
***
Wise Gum did not appreciate being dragged from her study, nor did she enjoy being introduced into a category of court personnel liable to be chopped up, and she was a little less than pleased when she was informed that it was laid upon her efforts and skills to prevent them all from being chopped up.
“A little notice would have made this matter easier,” she told the king, with a distinctly unwise amount of peevishness.
“Fear not,” said the king, whose mood at the moment was too expansive and buoyant to notice little things like other people. “As long as my cousin tarries tonight at my table, I shall be content. That leaves you at least three hours to entire him, does it not?”
“So it does,” said wise Gum. “I will go now to prepare my arguments and arts.”
“Excellent,” said the king. “I look forwards to not having to chop you all up.”
So wise Gum left the company of the cheerful king and left the anxious court and strode into the town below the king’s estate and made very fast friends with several very fast woodcutters and lo! The king was halfway through his evening meal before he realized something strange had happened.
“Ho!” he called at the glow through the banquet hall’s western windows. “Why do we still not need candles lit at this late an hour? Has my cousin decided to stay for the meal?”
“Indeed,” said wise Gum. “And overnight, if it pleases you.”
“Greatly!” said the king, shedding many familial tears. “So greatly! I have half a mind to run outside and embrace him myself!”
“A bit too much too quickly,” cautioned wise Gum. “Give your cousin his space and privacy while he visits outside the standard hours of the day, please.”
“Of course, of course, of course,” sniffled the king, pulling himself together. “At least for three days, I think. At least. And if he remains distant after that time I will know you have all told him foul lies about me and will chop you all up.”
Wise Gum bowed as low as was diplomatically necessary and excused herself from the meal. She hurried out the manor doors, passed by an exhausted and sweaty crowd of deeply overworked loggers, charcoal-burners, and woodcutters making a very large and beautiful bonfire of all the tallest and oldest trees in the area, and headed back down into the town, where she began knocking on the doors of every sail-stitcher, tailor, paper-miller, tent-maker, painter, and muralist in sight, and a few that weren’t. And they were just the start.
***
The sun continued to grace the king’s estate with his presence at all hours, and so enraptured was he rendered by this that he went very nearly the full three days without complaining. But in the evening of the final day his attention span began to wane, his lip grew a pout, and he chopped off the littlest fingers on both the hands of his steward for clinking a mug too loudly when serving him.
“Does something trouble you, your majesty?” asked wise Gum, who’d taken to sitting in at evening mealtimes and loudly asking the king complicated questions whenever he got too close to any of the windows.
“Three days is too long,” said the king, standing up with the full authority of his station and knocking over the dinner table. “I’m going to go see my cousin now.”
“Certainly,” said wise Gum. “But first you’ll need to shave. You don’t want to meet your cousin with an unshaven face.”
“True!” said the king.
“And before you shave, you must bathe.”
“Right!”
“And after you bathe, you must dress grandly.”
“Certainly!”
“And after you dress grandly, you should walk in stately procession to meet your cousin. Don’t rush! Don’t hurry! Don’t fumble!”
“You are indeed very wise, Gum,” marvelled the king. “I will do just that.”
“Haste is the enemy of dignity,” said wise Gum. And so speaking this she sipped her soup slowly until the king departed for his chambers, whereupon she leapt from her seat and ran out of the manor so quickly her shoes nearly caught flame.
The procession was indeed stately. It was indeed grandly-dressed. And it was indeed in no rush, at least until the king became bored halfway there and broke into a little rush, forcing the rest of his court to hurry after him and getting three of his older counselors trampled.
“My cousin!” the king shouted grandly as he flung wide the estate doors. “I am here!”
And lo! Though it was far after hours, there was yet light! A soft, cloudy late afternoon, lit by a gentle glow concealed behind beautiful and nigh-motionless haze that filled the sky from horizon to horizon. It was ethereal and beautiful, even if the perspective was a little funny where it reached the edges of town and the shade of the light perhaps suggested that someone had run low on the right shade of red at the last minute.
“Ah cousin, what poor luck, for such an overcast moment to herald our proper introductions,” lamented the king. “But you remain here, and wish to remain with me! It is a blessing forsooth for me to see you guest so gladly, and in proper manner rather than nesting outside my window! Why, I could be satisfied with this sight all my days.”
And all the court breathed a sigh of relief.
“Let us go together on a midnight hunt in one week,” said the king brightly, and so all their hearts shattered together.
***
The king was too pleased with chatting with his cousin as he roamed his estate to notice half his treasury had been paid out to the town’s artisans, and very nearly too pleased to comment on the remarkably static nature of the sky, but he was not QUITE pleased enough to fail to notice that the beautiful golden fields that surrounded his estate were somewhat withered.
“Ah, the crops suffer,” he said. “A sorry sight to show my cousin.”
“Droughts are not unseasonable this time of year, your majesty,” noted wise Gum, who was hastily shoving rocks and loose brush in front of an odd texture in apparent midair that one might have called a rip or a crease.
“It is true, it is true. Would that we had some rain!”
“Hopefully not for a week,” said wise Gum, dropped the last of her armful of bracken and twigs atop a scraped-bare patch of what appeared to be canvas.
“What? Why?”
“Omens,” she said with a mysterious gesture.
“Ah. Of course. But in a week I shall ride through the woods with my cousin at my side on a midnight hunt in the light of midday, and there will be peace and goodwill between us, and if this does not happen I will know that he is displeased with the advice you have given me about him and will chop you up.”
“Quite so,” said wise Gum. “Quite so.”
***
The rains came overnight at the week’s end, and in a moment of merciful timing it was when the king was abed, blissfully slumbering in the warm light of two am. It took half the town to take down the great wooden framework of poles and stilts that had held the boxed sky aloft, and the other half to clean up the acres of soaked paper and runny-painted canvas scraps, and a THIRD half to collect up all the melted-down-to-the-nubbin candles and lamp-wicks that had burned out every evening for the past week, and between all of that there was absolutely no help left to lend a hand to wise Gum in her chambers, which was how she liked it because if someone had said something or sneezed or twitched or breathed in the wrong way while she was mixing the last of her ingredients the manor might have exploded or maybe just stopped existing.
Instead, she got precisely what she wanted: a little piece of transparent waxy substance the size of her thumbnail, which she put in a glass globe, which she dangled from a wire, which she gently suspended from the corner of the king’s crown as he dozed upon his throne.
And into that globe she added three tiny drops of oil, plink plink plunk, and from that globe came a bright and terrible light.
“Wuzzat?” said the king, who was a terribly light sleeper.
“It’s your cousin,” said wise Gum, gesturing just above and between the king’s eyes. “He so wished to go on the hunt with you that he arrived early, and he’ll go with you wherever you wish.”
“MAGNFICENT” yelled the king. “Oh my cousin, I would hug you if not for your likelihood of burning my arms. Come! To the horses! To the hounds! To the woods! Wake up my lazybones servants; there is no need for sleep for there is no longer night in my lands! My cousin has well and truly come home!”
And so good was his mood that he didn’t spare a single glance for the shreds of paper and paint that his horses waded through as they charged past the once-parched and formerly-light-starved fields on their way into the woods in search of animals to kill.
***
There were four principal downsides to the king’s cousin.
First, he made speaking to the king very difficult – the light shone just above and between the king’s eyes, which did made it easy to modestly avert your gaze in deference but was problematic when attempting to look him straight in the face with firm and clear-eyed sincerity. This led to the execution of approximately one courtier a week for ‘treasonous squinting.’
Second through third were the little drops of oil every week, plink plink plunk. The king had already been a terribly light sleeper and an insomniac, but now he was a man possessed by such joy that he fought sleep with every huge and robust sinew and bone in his body. He dozed fitfully and without plan, so that wise Gum had to follow him almost everywhere with a droplet-dispenser and an oil-skin, ever ready for an opening.
The easy part was convincing him to never take the crown off. “Your cousin finds it most regal,” she had told him, and that had been that; it would never leave his brow again. In the fields, in the woods, at the high table, at court, in bed, in the bath. Never, ever, ever.
After two months of this the royal jeweler was in tears at the state of the thing. “Dust!” he cried. “Cobwebs! Ruin!”
“Chopping,” reminded wise Gum, and he subsisted into despair and whimpers. But he was right.
***
On the second week of the third month of the king’s endless and personal accompaniment by his cousin the sun who graced his lands with his unending and glorious light, the king rolled over in his sleep and pressed the globe to his crown briefly, triggering a small but intense dust fire and causing the thin glass to explode with a tiny ‘pff.’
The king yawned, stretched, smelled smoke, scratched out the flames attempting to take root in his chest hair, rolled over again, and was blissful as a babe until the precise moment he awoke at ten am.
“BETRAYAL!” he screamed as he hurled himself out from his bedclothes. “ALARM!” he howled as he descended the stairways to the rooms of wise Gum, sword in hand. “TREASON!” he shrieked as he hauled her from her workbench by her scruff. “My cousin has abandoned me!”
“No, no, no,” said wise Gum, whose brain was still half in the mathematical proof she’d been working on and half on thoughts of lunch and was refusing to budge in the same way a rabbit might when stalked by a wildcat.
“YES YES YES!”
“No, no, no,” tried wise Gum again.
“YES YES YES!”
“Your cousin probably had to go back to the sky to attend to matters for a moment,” said wise Gum, whose gut had seized control from her brain in extremis. “I’m sure everything’s fine.”
“Without a WORD to ME?” hollered the king, waving his sword through a candle, a desk, and a stool forwards and backwards.
“He’s very very busy.”
“TOO BUSY for his OWN COUSIN?” bellowed the king, biting off one of his own incisors in fury.
“Ask him, I’m sure he’ll-”
“I WILL!” roared the king, and he threw wise Gum carelessly through her bed and ran from the room, from the manor, to the cathedral, up the belltower, and onto the rim of the lip of the edge of the highest window under the very tip of the steeple.
“GET BACK HERE, YOU SHIRKER!” he called. And with that he jumped, and with that he seized, and for one glorious moment the sunlight was covered by his hands and he could almost see it shining between his fingers.
His heart rose. The rest of him, inevitably, didn’t.
***
The next king was a very distant cousin. He was smaller, and older, and slower, and he didn’t like spending much time in town or at court or with his family or with anybody in particular.
This was considered a blessing. There are worse things to have in slight deficit than a fondness for the company one’s associates and relations. Particularly when astronomy is involved.