The Summer Prince
Authors: Alaya Dawn Johnson
Tags: #Science Fiction, #Juvenile Fiction, #Emotions & Feelings, #Social Issues, #Adolescence
W
hen I was eight, my papai took me to the park to watch a king die.
At first, all I saw were adults clad in bright blues and greens and reds, in feathers and sequins, in cloth glittering with gold and jewels. Carnival clothes for carnival day, but covered in the early-morning chill with darker coats and shawls. I looked up at this mass of grandes like I had stumbled into a gathering of orixás. I couldn’t see their faces, but I could see their hands, the way they twisted them around each other, or clicked through a string of rosary beads. Some held candles, some held flowers. They were dressed for carnival, but they were quieter than I remembered from other years. The legs and torsos swayed and jostled, but no one danced. A few of the men cried. For the first time in my life, I knew a carnival without music.
I held my papai’s hand. He did not look at me. A strange sigh swept over the crowd, like the wind howling past the cliffside during a winter storm. A woman’s voice boomed through the park, but I was too young, too close to the ground to understand.
“I can’t see,” I said, tugging at my papai’s hand.
With some difficulty — our neighbors had pressed forward, packing around us so tightly he hardly had room to turn around — he knelt.
“This is how the world works, June,” he said to me. “Are you sure?”
I didn’t understand his downcast mouth, the crying from the crowd, the austere finality of the woman’s voice on our city’s speakers. Carnival was supposed to be fun and beautiful. But I knew, because
my papai never asked me idle questions, that I was to consider my answer. That if I said no, he would leave me on the ground where I could see nothing I didn’t understand, and understand nothing of what I heard. And if I said yes, the answer would change my life.
I nodded. He lifted me, though I was heavy for my age, and perched me on his shoulders. If I blocked anyone’s view, no one complained.
There was a holo in the sky. It projected a few meters above the heads of the people in the park, near the falls where I would play with Mamãe in the summer. Queen Serafina stood in a stark room of wood and stone — the high shrine. I liked her because her skin was dark and glossy and her hair silk-smooth. I had even gotten a Queen Serafina doll for my birthday last June. But today her face was fierce and still; today she held a blade in her hand.
Beside me, a man shook his head and murmured a prayer. I thought it sounded nice and wished I could join him. Mamãe didn’t like the city shrines, so I’d never learned any prayers.
The holo angle widened, showing an altar with a miniature projection of our city glowing at the far end. A man had been bound with ropes beneath it, so the great hollow pyramid of Palmares Três looked like a crown. An appropriate symbol for our latest king, elected exactly one year ago.
“Why is Summer King Fidel tied down?” I asked Papai.
He squeezed my hand and shushed me gently. “Watch, June,” he said.
“I honor our ancestors who were slaves, and their legacy for which we have named our city,” Serafina said, icy and calm in her white ceremonial turban and white shift.
From the altar, Fidel responded in a steady voice, but his shoulders trembled and his eyes had dilated a permanent, unnatural black. “I honor the dead who have fallen like sugarcane before a scythe. I honor the men who lie beneath us and the women whose strength and wisdom have saved us.”
“Heir of Zumbi, great king, you are infected,” the Queen said, words almost familiar and ultimately incomprehensible. “Will you give this great city the gift of your sacrifice? In the name of Yemanjá, in the name of Oxalá, also called Christ, will you offer your soul to the orixás, and your choice to Palmares Três?”
Fidel nodded slowly, as though he was already swimming in Yemanjá’s ocean. His too-black eyes stared wide, and I shivered. We were safe in the park on Tier Eight, while he was tied to the altar on Tier Ten, but still I felt as though he watched me. “I will,” he said, and fell back, prone on the stone altar.
Now the man beside me wept openly, and even Papai wiped his eyes.
I was eight, and no one had told me what happened to the kings at the end of winter. In the end, no one needed to.
Serafina mounted the stairs to the altar. She touched Fidel’s shoulder with her left hand; her right fingers tightened around the blade.
“You will mark your choice of the woman to be Queen,” Serafina said. “In gesture or blood.”
He nodded. A few seconds passed. She swept the knife across his throat, clean and irrevocable and deep. His mouth opened and closed like a fish in fresh air. His blood pulsed in spurts over her hands and dress and altar.
I cried, but I didn’t want to stop seeing. “He must point!” I said, my stomach so tight I thought I might vomit.
The crying man beside me nodded. “It will be okay if he doesn’t, filha,” he said. “It’s a moon year. Serafina is the only one in the room for him to pick.”
I don’t know that I understood him then. The five-year cycle, the elections, the Queens and their kings, the moon years and sun years — they govern our lives, but are not easily parsed. Especially not by an eight-year-old, shocked to tears by the sight of a young king killed by a beloved Queen.
And then Fidel managed. A bloody hand raised, trembling and final. He smacked it on Serafina’s belly with enough force that its wet
impact echoed over the tinkling of the falls. A bloody handprint marked her stomach, final and sure.
The holo focused on Fidel’s body. In death, his eyes stayed wide open and impossibly black.
Papai took me home. Mamãe was in one of her rages, berating him for letting such a violent ceremony mar my carnival day.
“You’ll let her have the celebration without showing her why?” he said.
“She’s too young,” said Mamãe.
I took a deep breath. “Did he want to die?” I asked Papai.
He regarded me very seriously. “I believe so, June. His sacrifice helps our city.”
“Then it’s okay,” I said. “I’m old enough.”
We call him the summer king, even though we choose him in the spring.
It is early September. Gil and I dance through a screaming throng of wakas, hoping to trick our way into the roped-off section in the front of the stadium. In a few minutes, all three young finalists for this year’s summer king election will appear onstage, and we need to be as near to them as possible. I’ve never seen Enki up close before — holos don’t count — and my excitement makes me feel like I’m vibrating. Gil turns, sees my eyes scanning the stage for any sign of them, and laughs.
“We have at least five minutes, June,” he says, taking my hand to pull me forward.
“What if we miss him? What if the cameras don’t see us?”
Gil shrugs; he respects my craving for fame and recognition, but he doesn’t share it. One of the hundred things I love about him.
“It doesn’t matter if they see,” he says, pointing to the cloud of thumb-sized camera bots buzzing on and around the stage. “It matters if
he
does.”
He. Enki. I take a deep breath and feel my pocket again for the reassuring weight of the portable holo we’ve smuggled inside. Just a week ago, Gil and I got around security bots in Gria Plaza to paint graffiti stencils on the side of an office building, but we’ve never attempted anything as daring as this. I’ve never invited exposure before. Oh, there was always a
chance
that some security bot would dart me and I’d wake up unmasked in a holding cell on Tier Two, but I’m not stupid. I may not be quite as good at running around the city as a grafiteiro from the verde, but I’m tiers above the other wakas in my school.
But today I’m dressed as myself, with a ticket bought in my own name, with my own money. Today we’re planning to get caught. Mother and Auntie Yaha won’t be pleased, but they never are. I think of it as a coming-out party — if this works, the whole city will see my art for the first time.
The stadium is the pride of the bottom tiers — built inside one of the dozens of spherical nodes that help give our hollow pyramid city its internal structure. The clear dome soars above us, high enough that on some days wispy clouds can form, obscuring from sight the pulsing, glowing city rising into the distance above. From this angle, transport pods shuttle through a glittering lattice of tubes like silver blood through luminous triangular arteries. Megatrusses lined with gardens and shops and houses stretch to our left and right. I’m caught off guard by the spectacle, one somehow more familiar to me from dramas than personal experience. Even though I’ve lived here all my life, I don’t spend much time on the lower tiers during the day. Growing up on Tier Eight, I’m used to seeing the glowing pyramid lattice of Palmares Três from a loftier position.
Two guards stand in front of the velvet curtain separating the special seats from the general rabble. My stepmother is an Auntie, a rising star in our government. I could have asked her for help getting in here, but then she would have known that Gil and I were skipping
school to see the show. I couldn’t bear the thought of another interminable argument with Mother, Auntie Yaha acting as frustrated peacekeeper. I can’t bear very much about either of them.
So Gil and I will have to improvise. I grin and my worries flow out of me in the tense, gritty joy of danger and release. The guards check tickets with a bulky security fono. Only wakas are allowed in this special section, since we’re the ones the Aunties want to show asking questions in a moon year election. Some grandes fill the stadium seats, but most of this crowd is under thirty and respected for it — a rarity in a city run mostly by women past their first century.
Gil squeezes my hand and approaches one of the guards. He casually hands over his flash — an identity chip embedded in the same worn pyramid charm he’s used since I’ve known him. The guard swipes it over her fono, then frowns.
“You don’t have a pass,” she says.
Gil’s bottom lip trembles and his eyes widen. “But I won the essay contest for my school! My teacher told me everything was settled.”
The woman sighs. The other guard, accepting latecomer flashes a few meters away, raises her eyebrows in inquiry.
“Everything okay there?” she asks.
“He says he won a contest.”
The second guard looks nervously back at the stage, then walks over. “What’s this about …” she says, but I don’t have time to hear the rest. In full sight of the five wakas still waiting to get in, I dash past the guards distracted by Gil’s beautiful pouting face and hurry for two empty seats on the opposite side of the enclosure. I sit like I’m supposed to be there, and no one pays me much attention. Everyone stares at the stage. I hope most of them support Enki. He’s the surprise favorite this election, the beautiful boy from the verde no one expected to make it to the finals. He will win — he has to — but just to make sure, I convinced Gil to help me with an art project.
A very public art project.
The glass dome turns smoky gray, gradually darkening the stadium
until I can only see the lights on the stage and the smaller lights on the floor, leading to the exits. A moment later, Gil slips into the seat beside me. He bites his lip and squeezes my knee.
“I can’t believe they let you in!” I whisper.
He rests his head against mine and breathes deep. “You know me, menina,” he says. “All I ever have to do is smile.”
I jab him with my elbow. My best friend in the whole world is vain as a peacock, but that’s all right. He’s pretty enough to justify it.
Auntie Isa, the highest-ranking member of the government aside from Queen Oreste, walks onstage in a careful spotlight. Cheers and chants sweep over the stadium audience until my ears ring with the combined jubilation of ten thousand people. Gil yells Enki’s name in unison with a hundred or so others nearby, while different factions for Pasqual and Octavio chant their support. I would join Gil, but I can hardly breathe. I’ve been planning this for weeks, ever since I first saw Enki at the start of the contests.
Auntie Isa has round cheeks and full lips, skin about as light as mine and smooth, thin eyebrows that seem faded somehow — the only part of her that looks old. Beneath her iconic red turban, her face is ageless and familiar. She’s been sub-queen for more than fifty years — five Queens have reigned with her by their side, but she’s never put herself forward for the royal position.
“My children,” she says once the noise has quieted. “I welcome you to King Alonso Stadium. In a week, the whole city will once again vote for our next king. I have gathered the finalists here this afternoon so that you might ask questions of these fine young men who have put themselves forward this moon year.”
Our cacophonous cheers might be deafening to some grande, but I don’t notice. I’ve found my voice, and I’m screaming with the rest. Even if something goes wrong with my small project, it won’t matter. I’m overwhelmed with the sense of being part of history.