King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court

by Kim Iverson Headlee

“The shade of red in the new logo design—” began Caffeine Charlie between slurps of his yard of coffee.

  “It’s too close to the shade in the logo of the Tokyo Ninjas.” That from Miz Knowitall.

  “It looks the same as always!” argued Sugar Sue, although I found it difficult to take her seriously with confectioner’s sugar dusted here and there upon her lips and blouse. I engaged a harmless little spell to gradually make the bits disappear. “Are you sure the color is off?”

  Of course Miz Knowitall (Deirdre Stardahl, in this meeting) was sure; she is always sure.

  We spent the next five minutes listening to her dissertation about how her retinas are keenly adapted to sensing subtle color variations before Sandy came to our rescue with, “Noted. Deirdre, go back to the design group and have them double-check their color settings. Report back here in a week.”

  Miz Knowitall nodded, looking more than a trifle smug as everyone else suppressed groans at the prospect of yet another meeting. At least Miz Knowitall contributes to the solution, even though it galls everyone else to admit that her ideas bear merit.

  “No,” said Faultfinder. “Next week at this time is a bank holiday. No, you cannot expect Design to come up with an acceptable…”

  Standing in stark contrast, Faultfinder forever blows holes in every presentation, looks for the black cloud towering above the silver lining, and prefaces each remark with “No,” before launching into chapter and verse regarding why a thing cannot be done, should not be done, and will not be done forever and evermore, amen. Faultfinder does reveal a valid issue from time to time, which is why I excused this Faultfinder’s earlier remark, but the primary fault I find with all Faultfinders is they fail to realize that I would value their counsel far more highly if they were to temper their nays with even half as many yeas.

  “We’ve got to push them,” Sandy said in a low, measured, dangerous tone that had to be the envy of every tiger in the London Zoo.

  Aided by my prophetic gifts, I added, “If we do not, the product line will not be ready in time for spring rollout.”

  “Yes’m, I’ll give Design a push for you!” offered Yes’m. “We’ll have the new line ready for Opening Day, yes’m, we will!”

  I was about to ask Yes’m if I could make his head roll if he failed to make good on his promise when Court Jester said with a grin, “Ms. Hanks could make a personal appearance at their office. That would get their”—he grinned wider and winked—“balls rolling, won’t it, Mr. Carter?”

  Jesters in my court of fifteen centuries past performed a critical function: they broke the tension of a stressful situation with a well-timed laugh; at least, those jesters funny enough to survive till retirement did. Nobody has any use for an unfunny jester.

  On this day, neither did Sandy.

  He leaped out of his chair and fairly flew across the table to begin throttling Court Jester, muscles pumping—

  “Ms. Hanks.”

  I am not certain who spoke first, Sugar Sue or Tiny Bladder. At this point, it mattered not to me as I remained mesmerized by the spectacle of shirts ripping, fists pounding, sweat flying, blood spattering—

  “Ms. Hanks!”

  The shrill chorus had grown to Greek proportions, incorporating all the women present: Sugar Sue, Tiny Bladder, and Miz Knowitall. Of their male colleagues, Timekeeper, Fidget, and Caffeine Charlie were wrestling Sandy into submission, while Yes’m and Faultfinder pulled a battered and very much not laughing Court Jester beyond flailing range.

  “That is quite enough, gentlemen.” The combatants’ struggles ceased at once, though I derived no satisfaction from their obedience to my command.

  Yes’m phoned the closest security guard post and stepped from the room. “Yes’m, we’ve had a bit of a dustup here,” I heard Yes’m say in subdued tones to the woman on the other end of the line. “Yes’m, everyone is fine, for the most part. Yes’m, dispatching an officer would be most helpful.”

  I faced Court Jester and said, “Mr. Christopher, stop by the team physicians to get bandaged, then take as much time as you need to heal. You are hereby excused from all team duties and responsibilities, with pay, until you feel fit to return. Payroll shall not to deduct this from your pool of sick days.”

  “I want an apology!” Court Jester whined. “And restitution!” If he had been wearing garb appropriate to my era, I am certain the bells on his cap would have been clamoring in furious agreement.

  Having finished his call, Yes’m rejoined the gathering.

  Sandy looked far too belligerent, caught fast in the grip of Caffeine Charlie and Fidget (who had begun shifting from foot to foot in the wake of his adrenaline discharge), to do anything other than resume his attack. I said:

  “Mr. Carter shall apologize to you, publicly, when he is ready to do so. His restitution shall be the sum of fifty thousand pounds, split evenly between you and the team, and payable at once.” I glanced toward Yes’m. “Make all the arrangements with Payroll.”

  “Yes’m!” he said, and bounded off to do my bidding. I suppressed my amusement; usually, Yes’m was a colossal annoyance with his constant refrain, as if I were a witless child who could never bear to hear the word no. Usually, I would be tempted to remind Yes’m that the world would not end if he must tell me “No” as the occasion demanded, that if Yes’m would stop saying “Yes’m” and listen, I could tell him that I know for a certain prophetic fact the world shall not end until 11/11/3111, the day all the digits turn odd, turning the entire world so odd that the center cannot hold.

  After Sandy’s attack upon Court Jester, and Yes’m proved that he did listen to me for once in his life, I appreciated his ebullient assistance no matter how many yes’ms he had tacked to it.

  The arrangements seemed to satisfy Court Jester. With a funny attempt to repair his dignity by rearranging his disheveled clothing and an even funnier, beetle-browed glare at Sandy, he palmed his communication device and marched from the room.

  The chief problem with jesters is that I cannot fire anyone for being unfunny; and in this case, I had no desire to incur consequences that would have been far more complicated to resolve. I am, however, a creative woman.

  When I turned my full attention upon the hapless Sandy, his bellicose attitude withered into something resembling the puppy that knows it will be punished because it peed on the prized antique Persian rug. Never having allowed myself to be manipulated by guilty puppies, I said:

  “Mr. Carter, you are hereby suspended from all team duties and responsibilities, without pay, until such time as you are able to sincerely and publicly apologize to Mr. Christopher, or for the period of one week, whichever is longer.” By his reaction to the slight emphasis I put on the word “all,” I knew he understood that meant being benched from personal liaisons with me, too. I hated to do it, but his behavior warranted nothing less. The latter stipulation I added to give Sandy—in truth, both of us—hope that his benching would not be permanent. Less sternly, I said, “Let the physicians examine you on your way out.”

  As I watched him nod and shuffle from the room, escorted by the security guard Yes’m had summoned, in that one terrible moment it was not good to be queen.

  I wish to God that had been the only such moment during my reign…in either century.

  I spent those dreary seven days willing time to speed up so that Sandy and I could reunite.

  Look at me, digressing again. You would think after fifteen centuries I would know better than to moon after a pair of trousers, no matter how enticingly they clung to certain regions. With Sandy, as with Accolon before him, it was nigh impossible not to moon. The heart does what the heart does.

  I reconvened the meeting, but everyone was displaying various degrees of having been shaken by Sandy’s breach of decorum. I said:

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I hereby add a third item to the list of prohibited meeting behavior: violence. It should not have needed to be said, but obviously Mr. Carter has demonstrated otherwise. I reserve the
right to mete whatever fines and punishments, to include firing”—that pronouncement raised eyebrows all round the table, but I resisted the urge to advise them to count themselves lucky that I had not included torture and execution—“as I deem necessary. Ms. Stardahl,” I said to Miz Knowitall, “ensure that a memo is disseminated team-wide to this effect, including the farm teams. You may include a summary of the events that transpired between Mr. Christopher and Mr. Carter at your discretion.”

  Since I knew good and well that Miz Knowitall prided herself upon the accuracy of her knowledge, she was the only one to whom I could entrust this delicate task and not have it degenerate into a PR nightmare.

  “Yes’m,” she said.

  Silently I forgave her that indiscretion.

  Aloud, I dismissed the battle-fatigued group. Caffeine Charlie, Sugar Sue, and Tiny Bladder were the first to rush from the room, doubtless to pursue nature’s invitations toward various aspects of their constitutions. I waited for everyone else to take their leave of me.

  Alone among the walnut-paneled walls, gleaming brass fixtures, twinkling crystal, and leather-padded swivel chairs, I propped my elbows upon the mahogany-framed tabletop computer monitor, lowered my head into my hands, and began my slow, self-imposed torture of separation from Sandy.

  Chapter XIII:

  Free Agents!

  I FIND IT laughable that, for all the so-called improvements loudly touted by the residents of late twenty-first-century America, their society remains enmeshed in ancient patterns of thought and behavior.

  “What?!” I can hear them exclaim. “We are modern! Postmodern! Super-duper-ultra-schmultra-postmodern! We have freedoms and liberties and tons of technology; last year we stopped killing our whales for cosmetics and our tigers for aphrodisiacs; we recycle everything from abandoned cars to sneezed-in tissues; we use greenhouses to grow our own food, solar power to cook it, and green cleaners for the mess; and—”

  Horse dung.

  I wish they would stop and listen to themselves. The changes in hunting and agricultural and cleaning habits merely demonstrate good stewardship of their domain, as Our Lord God commanded of their forefathers many millennia ago. Seek they commendation for doing as they have been told? I am so very sorry to inform them that I am fresh out of medals, and all my blacksmiths are dead. My citizens of Gore worked the land to keep it clean and productive—without benefit of technological wonders, I grant—but they wasted neither meat nor grain; they reshaped old broken tools into new ones and harvested the ruins of buildings for new structures; they cut down a torn dress to make a tunic, a torn tunic to make a vest, a torn vest to make a scarf, and all the leftover bits too small for any other use to make a cloak. They sought neither award nor accolade for performing these tasks, and neither should anyone else.

  As for the so-called freedoms and liberties, permit me to pose one simple question: what happens when one fails to pay his taxes? Does the benevolent government say, “Oh, never mind that little detail. You just keep on living in your house as if nothing ever happened, and you can pay when you are able”? Nay. The property is confiscated, the delinquent property owner is evicted, and the property is bestowed to someone who is capable of paying the king—excuse me, the government. In that aspect, American society is no different from mine. They do not own their land; they rent it from the government, which also is empowered to seize it in the interest of “the public good,” even if the land-renter has never missed a tax payment. In that respect, their situation is no better than that of my subjects, and in point of fact, it is worse. Even my despicable brother King Arthur never dealt so falsely with someone whose lands he coveted; he possessed decency enough to declare war first, and he graciously offered the besieged the chance to defend themselves. I should know. He employed this tactic on me more than once; to no avail, I am pleased to add. American society pays direct and merciless homage to the ancient custom of land leasing with every house and farm and shed and bed that undergoes a “tax sale.” This says nothing at all about the foreclosures forced by the robber-barons who control the ebbing and flowing of their society’s currency, though I have less sympathy for victims of this plight, since most of them have brought it upon themselves due to lack of wisdom and discipline in financial affairs.

  Ah, but they have the freedom to openly criticize their government? Choose new officials to replace those no longer deemed to represent public interests? The chosen replacements, flushed with the newfound rush of power, immediately seek (as do all people invested with power, myself included, and why not?) to broaden that power base by whatever means possible, legitimate or otherwise. “Public servants” should rather be titled “self-servants,” for in that pursuit they all excel.

  If these words seem harsh, dear reader, ’tis because I feel you owe it to yourself to wake up from this pleasant dream of blissful ignorance and examine your situation in the critical light of day, as I know you are fully capable of doing.

  I confess there is another reason fueling my pique.

  My day began pleasantly, following one of our athletic all-night meetings. If Sandy resembles Accolon in countenance, I must say he surpasses my dead lover in bedchamber prowess a hundred fold. With Sandy’s companionship, I have not missed Accolon in a long, long time.

  I cannot recall exactly, but I presume I must have slept at least a little, for I woke after dawn in Sandy’s arms, feeling a heavenly lassitude, the kind that infuses the mind and limbs with a delicious half-sleepiness of the like only to be felt on a lazy Sunday morning with no ballgames or other commitments looming. Yet it was not Sunday, as Sandy pointed out, but Monday, and we had to prepare for a breakfast meeting with the agent of a free agent we had been attempting to acquire for quite some time. By now I had become proficient in the donning of the dark twenty-first-century raiment, colloquially known as the “power suit”—which performs a similar function to the “power suit” of my era, plate armor, in the intimidation of opponents—but I welcomed Sandy’s assistance for fastening the hook and zipper at my back. A little magic finger-snap would have sufficed; but where was the fun in that, when Sandy’s fingers brushing along my skin produced their own distinctive magic?

  If there was an incantation that could clear my sleep-fogged head, I did not know it; and yet I did not mind being a bit foggy, for I trusted Sandy to have the meeting’s matters well in hand. He had been communicating with the not-free agent of the free agent for days, defining details of salary and bonuses and whatnot, and he had handled negotiations of this sort surpassing well in the past. I had no reason to believe to-day’s meeting would proceed otherwise.

  As the saying goes, there is indeed a first time for everything.

  This is territory I admit I do not understand. The World Baseball Federation functions much like the society of my birth in that players are oath-bound to their team’s owner—handsomely compensated for their athletic services, but otherwise subjected to the owner’s pleasure in terms of when and where and whether played, and for how many seasons. That much, I understand. I also understand that a player earns freedom in exchange for a minimum number of years of service to his team; this practice has roots delving deep into the earliest chapters of the first book of the Bible. I, as Queen of Gore, have granted freeman status to those of my subjects who have, through years of hard faithful service, earned the privilege. I even understand why free-agentry in professional sports came about: the players craved more money. What I fail to understand is how team owners of old could have allowed themselves to be maneuvered into opening these now forever unclosable floodgates. They were the lords of their day, rulers of all they surveyed, and yet their serfs managed to overthrow the ordained order in favor of this system of free-agentry which, for the owners, is anything but free.

  Add to the mix the agents who speak for the agents, whose services are not free, who speak faster than a hummingbird flaps in the hope that you will miss an important detail, keep insisting that you “show [them] the money” while cackl
ing madly as if it is some grotesque jest, and you have yourself one big, muddled brew.

  My job during these negotiations is to look intractable and imposing while Sandy hones the details. This division of duties plays to my strengths, and his.

  As soon as Sandy and I walked into our favored local eating establishment for such meetings, the Outfield Inn, I knew aught was amiss. The not-free agent greeted us cheerily, a broad grin pasted to his face as if the Arctic wind had frozen him that way. The not-free agent’s client, the free agent, towered over him in all his muscular glory, also grinning.

  I looked at Sandy, framing the question with my mind but remaining silent. He made a show of ushering me to the table, pulling out my chair, and helping me sit, but he did not make eye contact. That was his first mistake. The not-free agent grinned even more broadly, if such a thing was possible; he and his client shared a soft chuckle. That was their first mistake.

  Sandy shuffled the sheaf of contract paperwork he was holding—on the eve of the twenty-second century, the concept of an all-electronic office has yet to take root and never will—and muttered, “It’s all here, as agreed. All we need are Ms. Hanks’s and Mr. MacDougal’s signatures.”

  Usually I do not read the small print. Sandy reports to me the salient points in advance of the meeting, like base salary, signing bonus, and escalation rate, and that is all I require. This day my instincts warned me that I must read the contract rather than sign blindly, and I am glad I heeded them: I found an extra zero in the base salary, and not on the pence side of the decimal point.

  I smiled at Sandy. “Mr. Carter, there seems to be an error here. This salary figure is ten times the amount you told me.”

  Sandy had the grace to look chagrinned. “There was an offer late last night from the Connecticut Yankees. You instructed me to acquire Don MacDougal at any cost. The Knights need better hitters, and his average is almost four hundred—”

  “And you thought it would be best to tell me now?” I rose, contract papers in hand, and ripped them in half. “Gentlemen, this meeting is adjourned. Permanently. Mr. MacDougal, I bid you the best of luck in Connecticut.” I needed no prophetic vision to know MacDougal would receive plenty of luck the following season, all bad, since I already had placed a curse on his bat. In retribution for the not-free agent’s role in the treachery, I cursed his financial accounts. This left one more punishment to deliver, and my heart felt heavier than a power suit, the ancient iron sort. As the free agent and his not-free agent prepared to take their leave, I faced Sandy and said—