the problem of susan
So here is something no one thought to say about Susan Pevensie, the last and lost Queen of Narnia, co-creator of a golden age she only ever saw in ruins. She inherited the Professor’s estate, when everyone died.
The Professor’s uncle was a Magician, and a fairly bad one, but he’d laid foundations for his nephew, groundwork solid enough to set a house on. Diggory Kirke had come back from Narnia with rings in his pockets and puzzles in his head, enough for a lifetime of study, enough for all the halls of a strange old home with wardrobes to other worlds and historical tours on Tuesdays.
Susan keeps the tour schedule just the same: the building is a historical monument, after all. But she adds parties, and fundraisers, and private events such as weddings and reunions. Susan has spent two lifetimes knowing how to host, and she is a grown woman again, older than she’s ever been before and beautiful with it. She knows a smile is as good as a sword: better, even, with the right lipstick. She makes the Professor’s home make her money. Some she gives away to good causes. Some she keeps for her own purposes.
She walks the hallways and peers into every corner and under every rug and above every mantle and lintel and through all the mirrors. She digs out every book from her inheritance of stone and secrets with the patient tenacity of a girl raised by dwarves, by badgers and beavers and the very occasional lion. Susan Pevensie has clerks again, has a staff again, has secretaries, but she keeps her own records on these books. She fills one private journal after the next that no one else ever sees.
There is magic in every world, no matter how poor, how gray and damp and disappointing. There is faith and beauty. Susan’s nylons never tear. Her lipstick never smudges on to her wine glasses. Her high heels neither chafe nor break. Her hair doesn’t frazzle or wilt, even at the end of the longest of balls, even in this worn-thin world. There is magic in knowing exactly who you are and what you’re doing. And Susan has known for decades.
Finally, when she’s absolutely certain she’s got every last piece of Professor Kirke’s puzzles solved, she returns to the wardrobe. It is made of magical wood. It remembers more than its own life in England. If asked correctly— if reminded of itself— it lets her out to somewhere else.
The wood between the worlds is as soft and mild as it’s ever been, sweetly timeless, and Susan feels a great peace come to rest on her, as if the air and light were heavy. There’s a smell she remembers from Narnia, the smell of green growing magic, of lands making themselves. The wood between the worlds is always green, always fresh, always becoming. She enjoys it.
Susan has to walk a long way to find a piece of ground that has neither pool nor tree, but she’s prepared. She has sensible shoes and a sturdy rucksack, and she doesn’t look back at the small pool of her second world, not once. Susan was once a girl who looked back, who regretted, but that was a very long time ago.
Susan kneels in the short, dense grass, and presses firmly with her hands at the turf beneath until there is a hollow. She takes an apple from her pocket, fruit from the trees that stand at the end of worlds and the beginning of worlds and in the damp little forest outside of a particularly strange and secretive country estate in England, and she eats it down to the core. Then she plants it at the edge of the hollow, and pours a canteen of water over the little mound of broken ground and torn grass, so there’s a pool. The canteen is military surplus. The water is from the estate’s kitchen sink.
Here is the problem of Susan, the pawn turned queen turned pawn again, and too proud to play someone else’s game thrice: she is Aslan’s problem. He comes on great soft golden cat paws, through the pale slim trees, small until he’s close and then enormous. She sits and waits for him, and watches the first white, tender apple shoot climb up through the moss.
“Susan,” he says. “My Daughter.”
“Aslan,” she says. “Lion, King, Son Of The Emperor Over The Sea. I loved you and I served you and I learned to live without you. I’ve played your games, Aslan. Now, will you play mine?”
Aslan blinks his golden eyes, slow and contemplative, a bit mournful.
“The Deep Magics require sacrifice,” he warns her, and she laughs in his beautiful golden face.
“Everything requires sacrifice!” she cries. “I learned that before I ever learned any of the Deep Magics, and I’ve learned them too. I am ready, Aslan. I am prepared. I will be Queen of a land of my own creation. Carest thou to oppose me?”
Aslan’s ears go back, and his tail thumps just once.
“I accept,” the great cat says.
“Then let’s begin,” she says, and dives, headfirst, into the cool clear water of her next life.
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