The Stone Orchard

Every pear in the royal orchard was carved from marble. At breakfast the king tapped one with his spoon and declared that the gardeners had failed him again.

He had bought the orchard from a magician who promised that its trees would grow whatever their keeper desired. For seven years the king had desired an orchard nobody could steal. The resulting fruit was very secure.

Leda arrived as the new apprentice carrying a wooden pail. The head gardener showed her the pruning shears, then showed her the royal decree forbidding anybody to alter a single branch.

“What do we prune?” she asked.

“Our expectations,” he said.

That afternoon a boy climbed the wall. He put a marble apple in his pocket and immediately fell through the rotten roof of a potting shed. Leda found him sitting among broken clay, crying over a twisted ankle.

“My sister said kings ate better,” he explained.

Leda gave him her lunch. When the guards arrived, she said she had broken the roof herself. The boy limped away through the servants’ gate.

The king summoned her at sunset. He held an apple whose white surface bore a tiny patch of red.

“You have done something to my property.”

“I wanted someone to have enough to eat.”

“Then want that again.”

She tried. Nothing happened. She imagined banquet tables and enormous loaves, but the apple remained mostly stone. The king threatened dismissal. Her thoughts filled with wages and the cost of her mother’s medicine. A second apple hardened around its stem.

The head gardener came quietly into the room.

“Keeper,” he said, “is not another word for owner.”

The king ordered them both out. All night he walked between the trees. From the gate Leda heard the scrape of his boots and, much later, a pail being filled.

In the morning a royal notice announced that the orchard would open to everybody. The king himself stood beside the gate. A little girl examined the pale fruit and asked whether there would ever be real apples.

“I don’t know,” he said.

She took his hand and led him to a low branch. Together they waited beneath it, making no claim at all.

By noon one apple was red. They cut it into such small pieces that everybody tasted mostly the idea of it. Leda saved the seeds. For the first time, the king asked what she planned to plant.