Here I dreamt I was an architect
If all roads led to Cair Paravel, the Narnians had King Edmund to thank. The humor of that fact was not lost on Edmund himself. Once, lost and frightened in the thrall of the White Witch, he’s mused to himself that when he became King of Narnia, his first task would be to make some decent roads. This, of all things, ended up being true enough. The crown had scarcely settled on Edmund’s head before he began sketching new arteries onto old maps of Narnia.
Edmund, of course, had no expertise as an engineer, so he asked about and eventually contracted the services of a dwarf named Rawlin. Rawlin knew stone and stonemasonry better than anyone, it was said, and he had a canniness for the lay of the land. Together, Edmund and Rawlin designed and constructed many wondrous things.
The roads came first: a vast network of stone streets stretching from the Archen Pass to the market thoroughfare at Beaversdam to the Great Northern Aqueduct, another of Edmund’s endeavors. But there was also the Harbor of Cair Paravel, a maze of docks and piers that sprang forth over an unused stretch of coast a little way from the castle, and the series of levees built at Glasswater to minimize flooding in the spring, fortifications on the Cair, and watchtowers, and oh so many other things. Never did Edmund mar Narnia’s beautiful wilderness with industry; rather, he and the Narnians who worked under him build beautiful structures that grew out from the landscape like they’d always been there.
Not for nothing was his family’s reign called a Golden Age.
So, when Edmund, ten again, returned to the place that had once been Cair Paravel, it was little wonder that he did not recognize it.
“Don’t you remember — it was the very day before the ambassadors came from the King of Calormen. Don’t you remember planting the orchard outside the north gate of Cair Paravel?” said Peter, nearly frantic with nervous energy.
Edmund gazed at the ruin, trying to imagine Cair Paravel as it had once been. A wide stone lane from the gate to the road. A smaller flagstone pathway leading into the orchard. He remembered sitting across his desk from Lilygloves and Pomona and good old Rawlin, architectural plans spread before them, deliberating over which way the trees would want to grow.
“This must be all rot!” he exclaimed. “To begin with, we didn’t plant the orchard slap up against the gate. We wouldn’t have been such fools.”
It was only the most pressing objection. Moment by moment, he thought of more and more.
If Cair Paravel were on an island, I would have built a bridge to the mainland. If we were really in Narnia, my harbor would be just south of us and we would have seen it down the coast when we were on the beach. And we wouldn’t have wandered about in the forest; we would have found the main road before long. And what about my beautiful curtain wall? It cannot have disappeared.
But Edmund was wrong. It was Cair Paravel. It was Narnia. The treasure chamber still stood, even if the harbor and the roads, his outer curtain wall and battlements and fortified towers, and even the very land itself had changed and gone away. There was his armor and his favorite longsword. There was his signet ring, emblazoned with his kingly seal. There was the marble bust Rawlin had chiseled of him, looking so much older and graver than he did now.
Peter and the girls claimed their Christmas gifts, but Edmund slipped his signet ring into the pocket of his trousers when no one was looking. He had marked so many structures with that seal— structures that were supposed to last forever.
Long after the four children had ascended the stairs that night, Edmund couldn’t sleep. Instead, he paced the place where his great curtain wall had stood and remembered the words of a poem he had once encountered in Professor Kirke’s library: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair.”
Inspired in part by this post by @saxifrage-wreath
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