THE CHEESE

A Tale of Sogmarsh — told by a wheel of Sogmarsh Blue.

*A Tale of Sogmarsh — a standalone story of the realm. Stands on its own; not part of the Reader's

Edition collection.*

I have been aging on the fourth shelf of the Rind larder, in the cold cellars under Castle Bastable, for longer than several of the surrounding counties even considered existing, and in that time I have developed two things a cheese has no business developing: a minor feudal system, and a mild and most inconvenient clairvoyance.

The feudal system runs the shelf. I, a wheel of Sogmarsh Blue, hold the middle estates. Beneath me sit the young chèvres, soft and white and stupid, who do not yet know they are doomed and spend their brief lives gossiping. Above me, on the high shelf, broods the Wensleydale — a vast, cracked, self-important elder who claims to remember the actual date of Creation and will tell you so, at length, whether you have asked or not. And presiding over all of us, of course, is Old Mother Stilton, who stopped being a cheesemaker some centuries ago and became, by slow sad degrees, the cheese itself: the memory of the whole castle, kept cold and kept close, because the cheese remembers everything the chronicles were too embarrassed to write down.

Now. You will want to know what I am like, up close. I will be honest, because at my age there is no point being anything else.

Once a year I have my weeping season. I secrete a fluid — a clear, ambitious sort of fluid — which will dissolve a stout leather boot down to the buckle in an afternoon, and which, spread thin upon a hardtack biscuit, is so addictive that two footmen once came to actual blows over the scrapings. My smell, during this season, has been entered into evidence. My veins move when no one is looking. I am, by any reckoning a sane person would use, a horror in a rind.

And I know things. I cannot help it. The larder is the coldest and oldest place in the castle, and down here, if you are very still and very old, you can feel it: a slow patient hum coming up through the stone, a deep below-the-deep, a thing that does not seem to want anything to finish — and so the milk in me never quite turns the last turn, and I age, and age, and do not die, and I see things coming the way you might see weather.

Which is how I knew about the boy.

He came on the third cold night of the autumn — a scrap of a thing, ribs like a birdcage, the kind of hungry that has stopped crying about it. He had got past the door (the door has its own opinions, but it likes the small ones) and into the dark of the larder, and he stood in front of my shelf with his eyes fixed on the deep blue heart of me, where the rind splits, where the richest part of any cheese lives.

And I saw, the way I see, exactly what would happen if he ate it. My centre is not for a starving child. It is too rich, too strange, too old. He would eat his fill in the dark, and lie down warm and content for the first time in a year, and sleep — and it would be the kind of sleep that lasts forever.

So I did the only thing a cheese can do. I turned. I called up every foul, dissolving, war-crime ounce of my weeping season at once. I rotted my own outer face on purpose; I made myself the single most disgusting object in a castle that has real competition for the title; I drove such a stench off my rind that the boy's empty stomach revolted and turned him, gagging, away from me — and toward the safe, plain heel of yesterday's bread and the cold broth on the low shelf, which would do him no harm at all and see him to morning.

He ate the bread. He kept the warmth. He left, and he came back the next night for more bread, and the night after, and by midwinter he had the beginnings of cheeks again. He never once thanked me. He thinks I am the worst-smelling thing he has ever met. He is correct, and I have never been prouder of anything.

I have had a very long time to learn this, here in the cold where nothing is allowed to end:

True maturity is knowing exactly when to turn sour for the good of the realm.