Thronemaker by Nathaniel Spain
Two wurms were carved above the throne-room door, entwined in a fight to the death. Their tails slithered down the jambs, coiled and flickering. Claws and fangs flurried in the vaulted shadows. Each scale on their sinuous bodies had been detailed, muscles shifting beneath the surface. The wood was so lacquered that it shone. When he looked up at this spectacle, young Roland Mosseter had believed he could hear the roars, the chop of teeth, the swish of eel-like bodies scything through the air.
The lord’s throne in Mosseter Hall had always been one of stone, but according to tradition the lady’s was one of wood. Unfortunately whoever had made the lady’s throne had not been so accomplished a carpenter as that of the dragons. Old Lord Mosseter’s first wife had tolerated her uncomfortable, ugly chair; the second had complained of its lumpen, back-breaking form; the third had despised it. She had it smashed for kindling during the last ferocious winter.
When Roland took up the mantle of lordship, he found himself sitting upon a cold and lonely throne at the head of the hall. One of his cousins offered to arrange a marriage for him, to which he agreed with enthusiasm. The lord of the Western Waters had a daughter named Theophania. Lord Mosseter went to ask for her hand and returned very pleased with himself. Now he was to have a companion, he would have to find her a suitable thing to sit upon. His eyes were drawn to the wurms upon the lintel.
The carpenter was a retired septuagenarian. He lived in a hamlet in the hills nearby. Whatever modesty his home had in size was made up for in ornamentation; everything within and without had been carved into a menagerie of woodland creatures, coiling vines, spreading leaves, miniature people hunting through miniature forests, horses and dogs parading along the gables.
When the invitation arrived to make the throne, the carpenter was flattered. His granddaughter was less pleased. ‘You stopped working years ago,’ she said. ‘You get out of breath and tire easily. Your knees are delicate, your hands are stiff, and the wedding is only six months away.’
‘Six months is enough,’ he replied. ‘I’m bored and we need the money.’
She watched with raised eyebrows as her grandfather gathered his tools together. He collected a small upfront sum and used this to hire several woodsmen. They went out into the deep forest, his granddaughter following at a distance. They traversed groves of small stunted oak. They passed rows of dark conifers. They crossed streams and scaled steep overgrown paths where hazels pressed close about them. The carpenter walked slowly. He whittled himself a walking-stick. The woodsmen waited on him deferentially. They pointed out this tree and that, the carpenter dismissively shaking his head, until they came to a clearing with an old wild cherry-tree standing at its centre. Unseasonally ripe cherries hung in clumps from its boughs, blood-red and shining.
The carpenter nodded approvingly. ‘We’ll use this,’ he said. ‘Make a cut as low to the ground and as clean as possible. Keep the boughs intact; don’t dice it up like fire-wood. And don’t eat a single cherry. They’re favoured by woodland spirits. Any man who eats them forfeits his life.’
The carpenter’s granddaughter remained watchful and removed. The woodsmen cut the tree and sectioned off its boughs. A mule was fetched from the hamlet and was fastened to a cart with which to haul back the trunk. The carpenter insisted it was retained as a single piece. Another mule had to be brought as the first animal alone could not pull it more than a quarter-mile. After a week of toil, all the timber had been brought to the carpenter’s house where it stood to dry.
The following day one of the woodsmen fell ill. It was said that he had accidentally squashed a cherry under his thumb and had sucked the juice without thinking. The carpenter gave a portion of his retainer to pay for a doctor. The gesture was futile. After several days of a violent, incurable sickness the woodsman was left a stiffening corpse. The carpenter gave the rest of his retainer to the dead man’s widow. She left the hamlet and was not heard of again.
The carpenter cut the seat of the throne straight from the trunk of the cherry-tree. He stripped the bark, hollowed and chiselled, smoothed and sanded. He cut a slot for the backrest. He worked every day from the moment it became light to the setting of the sun. Watching the old man toil and sweat, his granddaughter was moved to help him. She was a promising woodworker herself—the house was adorned with her practisework—and she aided him in carving delicate patternwork along the armrests. He taught her charms to etch into the wood, to protect and enlighten its owner. Whenever they turned the seat, solid and grand and heavy as it was, they had to fetch the help of their neighbours.
The carpenter’s complaint was that they did not have the young lady in question to test the seat during its construction. Each day his granddaughter would sit upon it and they would smooth and adjust the wood until it felt as soft as a pillow, but the carpenter supposed that every backside was different, just as every tree was different. His granddaughter suggested that if it was comfortable for both of them, then certainly it would be comfortable for a lady. Who could be less alike in build than they? The carpenter was bent-backed and scrawny. His rump was as flat as his back was curved. His granddaughter by comparison was solid and broad. The carpenter agreed that this made sense, though each time he sat on his creation he felt like a blasphemer. Surely the young lady would be mortified if she knew an old peasant had sat where she would be sitting.
Cold air poured over the hills. Frost crimped the grasses, spreading traceries over the leaves of the trees. One morning the carpenter found he could not get out of bed. His granddaughter stood over him. ‘You’ve been working too hard,’ she said.
‘I have not.’
‘You’ve been working too hard out in the cold and now you’re ill.’
The carpenter huffed and tried to get up. His head spun and he lay back down quickly. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll rest.’
His granddaughter fed him porridge and drew water from the well for medicinal teas. She tended to the house. She employed several men to help her shift the half-made chair under cover so that it would not be damaged by rain or frost. She made a long trudge to market and back, twice a week, for groceries.
The old carpenter made a slow recovery. For weeks he was able only to shuffle about, to work on the throne an hour each day before succumbing to exhaustion. His granddaughter took over the bulk of the work. Under his dictation she constructed the back-rest. It was made of eight ornate spindles fanning upwards. They took the form of twisting branches, bursting with leaves and berries, to meet an elaborate crest rail. Squirrels and birds danced through this lattice. Small children wearing hats of conker-shells and acorn-cups peered behind leaves. It was beautiful, but tedious to make. Several times she ruined a spindle and had to begin anew. Her hands stung with the cold. Twisting, laborious wood stretched through her dreams.
The solstice season came and went. The carpenter had developed an unpleasant cough and was deeply fatigued. With a little over two months to go until the wedding, their work came to a halt while the carpenter’s granddaughter tended to him. He rambled, half-cogent, in a state of dreaming wakefulness.
One day—she did not know the time—the carpenter’s granddaughter started awake from her vigil beside his bed. The candles had melted down to waxy stubs. A sliver of foggy light crept through the shutters. Her grandfather was looking at her. ‘Are you well?’ she asked. ‘Do you need something?’
He held out his hand to her. ‘It’ll be worth it,’ he said.
‘What will?’
‘The throne,’ he said.
‘It’s worn you as thin as paper. How can you say that?’
‘It’ll be my swan song. I’ll be remembered for it.’
‘For a chair,’ she replied incredulously. ‘You’ll be remembered for a chair.’
‘But what a chair!’
‘They won’t even remember your name,’ she said. ‘If you’re lucky you’ll be referred to only as the carpenter who made it. I’ve put as much work into it as you these past months. If I’m remembered at all, it’ll be only as your granddaughter.’
‘Then you’ll have to make a throne of your own.’
‘I’ll have to become rich enough to buy one, so that I can forget who made it for me.’
Her grandfather chuckled, coughed, and turned aside to sleep.
A week before Theophania was due to arrive, Lord Mosseter and his men went into the hills to see why her throne hadn’t yet been delivered. They travelled along muddied lanes, shadowed by branches bearing the first green of the year. Birds sang in the trees. The air was fresh and damp, lively with insects waking from wintertime slumber.
They found the carpenter’s granddaughter in the small barn adjoining their house. She was rubbing oil into the chair. The piece stood eight feet tall in ornate, rosey wonder. Seeing them at the doorway she dropped her rag and gave the lord a stiff curtsie. Roland looked past her at the chair. ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘Is it almost finished?’
‘Yes, sire,’ the carpenter’s granddaughter said. She admitted that effectively it had been complete for weeks, and only needed another coat of varnish and time to dry before it could be moved.
‘You should have brought it before, and kept me from worrying,’ said the lord.
‘Forgive me, sire. We ran out of money to pay for a cart to bring it to your hall. I would’ve come to tell you, but I’ve had to care for my grandfather.’
‘Where is he?’
The carpenter’s granddaughter opened a doorway to the adjoining house and showed them through. In the musty parlour, under the glow of candles, the old man’s body lay upon a table. The lord and his men took off their caps and bowed their heads respectfully. They gave the dead man’s granddaughter the coin-purse of earnings, so that she might pay for his burial, with the promise that she would bring the throne to Mosseter Hall within the week. They took their leave and returned on horseback to the hall.
The carpenter’s granddaughter rode with the throne wrapped in fleeces and bound with cord as it trundled down the hill under ox-power. She had not seen Mosseter hall before. She looked up at the imposing mass of stone and wood in solemn wonder. She followed the labourers as they carried the throne into the central chamber, supervising them as they unwrapped it.
She took a few paces back to appreciate it standing in its new environment. In that dim hall, the throne seemed to glower with an internal light. A piece of wild woodland surrounded by dust and stone. The lord’s chair looked miserably plain by comparison. She knew her grandfather would have been pleased by that sight, but she did not smile.
The carpenter’s granddaughter remained at the Mosseter estate, sleeping in the stables and eating with the servants, until the young bride-to-be arrived with her retinue. Festivities were held in the central hall. The carpenter’s granddaughter found her place in the crowd, squeezing between Theophania’s handmaids and servants. A hum of appreciation passed through the hall as the young lady entered wearing a tailing gown of blue and silver. The carpenter’s granddaughter had seen nothing like it in her life. ‘What a dress,’ she murmured.
A servant who stood beside her must have heard this utturance, for she asked her if she liked it.
‘It’s very fine,’ she replied.
‘It’s made of silk,’ the servant whispered proudly. ‘Three thousand silkworms created that gown.’
The carpenter’s granddaughter wondering how such a transaction occurred. She watched Theophania walk towards the head of the hall. Lord Mosseter guided his fiancée to admire what soon would be her place beside him. The carpenter’s granddaughter watched as the young lady ran her delicate hands over the throne’s armrests. ‘It’s beautiful,’ she said, and turned to smile beamingly at the amassed crowd.
The carpenter’s granddaughter sold his house. She wrapped up his tools. She bought a horse from a nearby farm, secured the remains of her earnings in a purse hidden within her jacket, and left the hamlet to practise the woodworker’s trade elsewhere. She was the carpenter now.
The young carpenter took a final look back from her saddle at the hamlet. Its small, cosy beauty had been her entire world for many years. Now it looked decrepit. Too many people had left. Tall weeds grew between the houses. She turned away, spurring the horse on towards future matters.
The carpenter would ride from town to town, repairing spinning-wheels and wooden ploughs for the common folk, until she purchased a small workshop in a port-city miles to the south. There she would make beautiful things for those who would not otherwise afford them. She built latticed chests, high-back chairs, toys and fine lacquered dragon-statues. She was repaid in kindness, in hospitality, in shared human goodness. One day, perhaps, she would train as a ship-builder, and work on vessels to carry those who could still dream to a republic of their own making.
Lord and Lady Mosseter were ecstatic when their small family increased with the birth of a curly-haired baby boy. They named him Oliver. The infant was lively and robust, growing into a child who loved to climb. He would scramble upon furniture, scale trees, and make mischief. Roland and Theophania indulged and spoiled him.
Most of all Oliver loved to climb upon the spindles on the back of his mother’s chair. He would hang from the wood by his plump hands, pressing his eye close to all of its fine details. He gave names to the squirrels. He pretended himself to be one of the acorn-cup children dancing their way through miniature boughs.
One day, as Oliver was hanging with his full weight upon the spindles, kicking his legs joyfully, there was a loud crack. Theophania glanced toward her son. Oliver hung there for a moment, unsure of what was happening. Then the chair shifted. The child ripped the backrest from its purchase. Spindles cracked. The boy fell in a shower of splinters. The chair rocked upon its base. Theophania was gripped by a vision of the throne falling back to crush her child. She dashed forward. Oliver lay on the floor wailing, a spindle-shard clenched in each hand. The throne rocked and then steadied.
Theophania scooped her boy up in her arms, cooing and shushing him. ‘My sweet Oliver, my little Ollie,’ she said into his hair. ‘All is well. All is well.’
Oliver held the broken wood up for her. ‘The chair,’ he cried, ‘I broke it!’
‘No, no, Ollie. It wasn’t your fault. It doesn’t matter. We can pay to have it fixed. We can buy another. We can afford another. Please don’t cry.’ She pressed a kiss to his forehead.
Theophania and her husband conferred with the men of the estate to see if they could remember who had built the throne. A page vaguely recalled the hamlet in the hills, and the old man who had lived there.
Roland Mosseter and his retinue took the journey upwards, passing through the leafy forests, retracing their path to the carpenter’s house. Once they reached the hamlet they were told no skilled carpenters lived there anymore. Years before there had been an old man and his granddaughter, but what had been their home was now a hoggery. The carved walls were gummed with muck. The workshop was filled with squealing hoglets. The retinue returned downhill.
Lord Roland sent for a merchant to bring the latest in fashionable chairs from the mainland, to see what models his wife and son liked best. They draw coins from their coffers like water from a well, purchasing a mahogany seat with velvet upholstery, to stand primly beside the unmoving monolith of the old stone throne. The broken throne was placed in an antechamber, beside other damaged things. To become pockmarked by the passing of small worms.