The Kingdom of the Seven Stars: Chaturanga

Chapter 4

King Geoffrey's funeral took place the next morning, in the royal cemetery behind the palace.

Captain Zachary and fifteen of his royal guardsmen in blue dress uniforms lined the long paved path that led across the grass and wound through the trees of the orchard. The orchard was planted solely with cherry trees. Their short trunks and spreading branches were in full bloom in white and pink as Jessamine led the way slowly along the footpath after the service with Alex, Alice and Ellen beside her. The wind moved the trees very gently. A few Magentan birds sang in the branches.

The orchard was long and the trees, which were not planted in any pattern, ran from oldest to youngest, becoming smaller and shorter as they walked towards the back of the cemetery. Two trees were waiting for them at the end of the footpath, where the paving stones stopped in the middle of the grass. One was young and small, planted fifteen years ago and only slightly taller than Alex, with a thin straight trunk and short branches growing out from around the top. Cherry trees grew slowly on Magenta and the other one next to it was even smaller. Planted five years ago, it was still only a sapling and was only just taller than Alex's knees, but he was pleased to see that it was flowering at last and pink petals were showing among its short branches.

In between the two, a space had been marked out and a square of the grass had been cut away, revealing the dark brown soil. The royal steward and the head gardener were there waiting for them.

They reached the end of the path and Alex looked up at his mother. All of their relatives, the prime minister and all of his cabinet, the heads of all the main political parties, the heads of the army and the navy, all of the Pleiades aristocracy who had been able to make it, lots of King Geoffrey's oldest friends and – to Alex's horror and Ellen's fury – Lord Blackstar, who the royal steward had not been able to find an excuse not to invite, waited in silence behind them.

Jessamine paused for a moment, then nodded. Alex saw the tiny tears in the corners of her eyes. He could feel similar ones in his own and quickly blinked them away. He would not let them affect him. He would get this right.

Alex breathed in, let it out and stepped forward. The head gardener handed him a spade. Alex took it and looked down at the square cut in the grass. He used the corners to judge where the middle was and pushed the spade into the earth, scooping the soil out and placing it to one side on a green plastic sheet laid on the grass. He worried for a minute that he might be making the hole too deep or too shallow, but then he realised it did not matter. If there was a special depth it was meant to be, the royal steward would have told him.

He stopped after three scoops, having made the hole about twelve centimetres deep. He stepped back and rested the spade on the grass. Alice and Ellen stepped forward next. Alice was carrying a small metal cryogenic-storage box. The airtight seal hissed softly as she opened it and swirls of cold mist curled slowly out over the edges. Ellen used a temperature-proof glove to reach inside and drew out a cherry seed. The seeds all came from one tree, which had grown somewhere called Japan on Earth centuries ago. There were only a few dozen left in the box, but all the seeds that had ever grown on all the cherry trees planted in the orchard from these first ones had been collected and stored for use when the originals ran out.

Ellen knelt down on the grass, sniffed back her tears and placed the cherry seed gently in the hole. She stood up and stepped back and Jessamine stepped forward, gently removing the lid of bronze urn she was carrying. Captain Zachary and all the royal guards saluted as Jessamine knelt down and carefully poured the ashes into the hole on top of the seed. She stood up and stepped aside and Alex used the spade again to scoop the soil back up and refill the hole, covering the seed and his grandfather's ashes. He managed to get all of it in three scoops again and patted the soil flat with the spade. Once he'd finished, he handed it back to the head gardener, who in turn handed him a hosepipe with a spray nozzle. Alex took it, sniffed back his own tears, and squeezed the handle, sprinkling water back and forth over the spot, making sure there were no dry patches. The palace gardeners would be doing this for the next few weeks and monitoring very carefully, until the seed started to sprout.