Those who’d lost patience ground out, “She’s got all those mirrors. She damned well had better use them before someone makes her stop her unnatural screeching.”
But she did look into her mirrors. She certainly didn’t need to be out there, watching Alarick ride away. What she saw in some of those mirrors, in fact, made her scream and cry all the more. But there were no servants anywhere to watch her when that happened. No one would be able to say what it was she’d seen that had terrified her to such extremes; then again, what would it matter? A madwoman would see what her broken mind insisted. A bleak reflection of her shattered self might be enough. The memories stirred by her image in the mirror’s depths could be the result.
“Stay away from him,” she’d cry, clawing frantically at the mirrors. “Don’t touch him! Leave him alone!”
Phantom faces merely laughed at her from the mirrors’ dark depths.
“No one understands,” came the low sobbing as the veiled queen flitted from one room to the next, wringing her bruised and bleeding hands. Whenever she found herself back in that dreadful room—now cleaned up of its blood and other messes—she’d walk up to the loom and stare at it in wonder. The tapestry she’d woven had long been taken away and destroyed, but the loom remained behind, as did the bed.
Suddenly calmed by the sight of the loom, Ulrike would sit down on the chair which she’d moved to the window, and she’d gaze out in childlike wonder at the trees outside.
“I’m waiting, my love,” she’d whisper, a hint of a smile brightening her pale and haggard face. “I’m waiting.”
* * *
There was blood—a lot of it. There was dismemberment. There was a good deal of cutting. Some men lying in the soaked battlefield died slowly in that miserable slipping away of strength and breath, where minutes faded into something that was impossible to count. Desperate pleas to the gods for swift, merciful death remained unheeded. Some died not because of their wounds but because of the carrion birds that swooped down, pecking every ounce of life from their mangled bodies. Some died with a look of utter shock fixed on their faces, their eyes wide open and staring at entrails that burst out of gaping holes where their bellies used to be. Quite a few severed heads lay next to their bodies, eyes open and staring in no less shock at their previous “homes”. The stench of blood, guts, and mud rose from the battlefield, the coming sun cooking cold flesh and adding to the vile scene of decay. Swarms of flies eventually appeared to feast and lay eggs before bodies were hauled off for proper burial.
There was also mercy on the battlefield for some of the more fortunate ones. Soldiers from both sides spotted dying comrades and enemies and chose to end their suffering with one quick sword-stroke. But with the dead outnumbering the living, acts of mercy were few and far between. Those unlucky enough not to be noticed simply waited out the time till the end finally came.
There was also glory in the battlefield for the victors. Those bloodthirsty upstarts had been defeated and driven back to their sad little kingdom. There they’d lick their wounds, possibly undergo a revolution if they knew what was good for them. There would be time enough to reflect and to kick themselves where it hurt the most. There would also be time enough to pluck out the so-called traitors from their midst: commanders and ministers and anyone else whom people could blame for the bad turn in their fortune. They’d be brought to a quick and very partial trial before dying in a very public execution, which would be the peasants’ only source of entertainment before plunging into a deeper economic crisis.
“It’s their fault,” toothless hags snarled as they shook their fists at the twisting, writhing bodies dangling from the scaffold.
It was their fault, yes. It was always someone’s fault when a kingdom was cheated of its glory in war. It was always someone’s fault for allowing the monarch, like the crowned dimwit that he was, to gather his forces and exert his power over strange lands no one had ever even given any thought to before. And for what reason? Because he thought he could.
It was always someone’s fault that starving children would now die, for all resources had been spent on war. Paupers’ graves would fill up quickly. More holes would need to be dug up elsewhere. The stench of rotting bodies piling up would be more difficult to ignore this time around. Then disease—one shouldn’t even get them started on that.
Damn those traitors to hell, everyone cried, and the dangling corpses were cut down the day after, to be carved into separate pieces and set on spikes, depending on the kingdom’s traditions of justice.
“If you don’t behave, you’ll end up like that miserable bastard,” mothers warned bothersome children, pointing at a twelve-foot spike with a severed head set awkwardly on top.
No one would care, of course, that the severed head once belonged to a general who was known for his intelligence and even-handedness, and who was wrongly accused, tried, and executed. Failure in war demanded a scapegoat, and as luck would have it, he drew the short straw.
Noblemen were equally unfortunate in these cases. Most of the time, they simply got thrown in prison cells, there to be forgotten and to rot, literally, to death. If the peasantry and the gentry were provoked enough, the entire royal line would get snuffed out in one fell swoop. Ministers and soldiers were easily bribed. Their alliances were never a source of concern for anyone who demanded change in the highest levels of government.
Following the overthrow of the monarchy, fresh blood ascended the throne. Promises to the disgruntled masses were made. A turbulent season followed, filled with final purges and a settling of accounts. The new monarch, oftentimes the bastard child of a disgraced nobleman, ironically, assumed command and moved forward with his plans, which ultimately led to war with neighboring kingdoms. New ambitions required more room to grow, naturally, and people would discover too late that they’d replaced one mad, tyrannical ruler for another.
The cycle then continued, with the peasants too ignorant or mentally weakened by starvation to learn from their past blunder. Such was the fate of the losing kingdom.
Chapter Seven
Alarick and Roald returned in triumph, and the kingdom rejoiced. Lambrecht drank himself nearly to death in the company of his closest friends, all of whom weren’t any better than the slobbering monarch. Girls were taken from their homes or were hired for that evening’s revelry. The madwoman in the garden cottage consulted her mirrors and saw things no one else could. Servants who were given the sordid task of looking after her complained of her incessant crying. At times they’d catch her squatting in one corner of a dusty room, her skirts hitched up as she relieved herself. Her tattered veil spilled over her crouched form, soaking up her urine while she muttered gibberish about the end of the royal bloodline.
Sometimes marks of her past humanity would appear for a few fleeting moments. She’d sink before the mirror, her head bowed, her filthy hands lying limp on her lap. “Please don’t take my child away,” she’d whisper. “He’s all I have. Please don’t turn him against me.”
Sometimes she’d ramble on and on about her past glory. Strange, nonsensical things, like “Who’s the fairest of them all?” Surely not her younger sister, she’d quickly argue, her veil catching her spit. That ill-tempered bitch was too dark. Too imperfect. Too high-minded. Too moralistic. Too bad she had to be executed for threatening the queen’s life.
“Serves her right, the little shit,” Ulrike would crow.
Alarick tried to see his mother, and while Lambrecht didn’t want to witness the touching reunion between mother and son disrupted—it was like twisting the knife more deeply in that bitch!—the prince’s wish kept getting thwarted, at least for a time. The young fool, some people noted, still loved her despite her madness and her odd ambivalence toward him.
“Your Highness, she can’t be reached,” the king’s ministers said. They tapped the sides of their heads meaningfully. They’d always been fond of pointing out the obvious, and Alarick had always held them in contempt for such pitiful limits in
understanding. “Not quite there, you see.”
“It’ll be useless for you to try to connect with her again,” Roald whispered in the darkness as they lay in each others’ arms in Roald’s chambers. “She hates you. She’s always hated you.”
Alarick took after his mother in some ways; he could be a bit of a stubborn ass. Roald, thankfully, was incredibly persuasive, and it never took long for him to have the prince—his superior, equal, friend, and lover—agreeing with him.
A kiss, starting out gently and deepening with increasing ferocity, never failed in shutting up the younger boy. Lessons learned in the idyllic privacy of their little glade had moved on to the rougher and more desperate explorations in the battlefield—explorations made more urgent with the threat of death hanging over their heads. Roald had claimed Alarick a few times in the midst of filth and rain, his bandaged and bleeding hand muffling the prince’s cries as he pushed hard, fast, often pressing Alarick’s bruised face against the grass or the mud, sometimes against the bark of a tree. The delicious warmth of a tight and yielding body gave him a glimpse of eternity, and he wondered if paradise in the afterlife was like being buried deep in his lover’s backside.
There had been times when, overcome by the loss of comrades in the battlefield, Roald had crawled over to Alarick in the dead of night and had taken the prince without the courtesy of waking him up first. Muffling his sobs against Alarick’s soiled hair, Roald moved inside his lover, nearly suffocating the prince as he drove relentlessly on in a futile attempt at wiping away that day’s bloody scenes.
Roald had always pictured a completely different scene for Alarick’s deflowering, but Fortune seemed to have other plans for them. No lily-livered sap, however, Alarick demanded and claimed in equal measure when violence and death drenched his reality and forced him to scrabble for a small vestige of humanity amid the carnage. In fact, when he first took Roald, he prefaced it with a hollow-eyed glare and a fist in the face, the furious rutting that followed left them both with mouthfuls of mud.
Now, in the calm of victory, they both tried to unlearn the savagery of lovemaking in the midst of war. They held back. They eased their demands on each other. They tempered their desires. They tried to explore each other’s bodies more leisurely this time around. Half the time their efforts worked. The other half? Well, at eighteen and nineteen, they simply couldn’t help themselves, and a few subtle yet telling bruises bloomed here and there.
In the daylight hours, thwarted in his efforts for so long, Alarick’s concerns for his mother shifted in purpose. They turned practical, and it was all he could do to ensure that the queen was properly looked after by servants.
“Make her sanctuary a proper place for a queen, at least,” he said, and they quickly obeyed, though not without some muttered complaints. It took some doing, but the reluctant, snarling, spitting queen was given a more a more decent and humane hideaway. Her cottage was cleaned up and enhanced with newer furniture, a flowering garden, and a good deal of light from a rich supply of candles. Lightly drugged to keep her from struggling and fighting, she was bathed and refreshed, given a new gown and toys with which she could distract herself day in and day out. A pair of nurses was assigned to look after the partially conscious but resplendently-dressed woman day in and day out, their living quarters in the cottage beautified to their specifications as a means of encouraging them to remain.
Their orders were simple: “Keep her human.”
Once reassured of the queen’s humane treatment, prince and lover grew even more inseparable. Before long, after the initial post-war euphoria faded, tongues began to wag. Having proven themselves in the battlefield, Alarick and Roald now raised concerns about the royal line despite the fact that Alarick was never technically in line for the throne. Over cheerful card games, impromptu masquerade balls, incessant flirting in the pleasure gardens, and indiscriminate fucking within private apartments, idle gossip came alive again.
“The prince needs to get married,” a countess said to her friend, hiding her words coyly behind her fan.
“What for? He’s not useful to the crown, either way,” the friend replied, snorting in a very unladylike way.
“Well, curing his—uh—habits—will be good at any rate.”
“Do you think he’ll marry a masculine girl?”
“Mmm, I’d dearly love to see him in a gown. He’d make a lovely girl.”
The friend giggled as the two sat idly on one of the stone benches in the floral gardens, the slight distance between them required in order for their skirts’ hoops to enjoy their full circumference. All the same, it still proved to be a rather crowded seat for all their efforts. “Perhaps he wears one when von Thiessen fucks him.”
From a nearby rose bush, a bird twittered.
“He needs to spawn children—the more, the better,” one of the grooms said with secret relish as he brushed one of the horses till the animal’s coat gleamed in the sun. He’d always been fond of children but was too poor to maintain a large family.
His fellow servants agreed and were soon engaged in comparing notes regarding their own children.
“He’s abusing his body again,” a very austere lady said with clasped hands and bowed head. “It’s immoral.”
Her lover’s laughter stopped her disapproving observations, and the recently knighted gentleman swooped down for a passionate kiss, making his lady forget the fact that her husband was out doing diplomatic work for the king in one of the western kingdoms. It would be a month, he’d said in a recent letter, before his return. The somber, virtuous lady was grateful for that.
The pair broke apart, smiled at each other, and then hurried off to the knight’s apartment.
* * *
Lambrecht roused himself from his usual foggy state. He’d grown more and more unintelligible and sluggish with each day, and those around him wondered if it was from all the wine, food, and sex. Some ministers frowned as they puzzled over their king’s rapid deterioration.
A growing number of Lambrecht’s ministers, in the meantime, hid their smiles and continued to exchange whispers in Paradies’s glittering hallways or the darker, heavier rooms of public houses up and down the countryside. Small silk pouches were exchanged, murmured agreements mingling with the sounds of jingling coins. Ministers who once mocked at witches now sought their counsel and their magic powder. Alchemists proved to be easily bought. Words that muddied a powerful man’s brain were clearly laid out on yellowed paper, and instructions on how and when to whisper them in a ruler’s ear accompanied the deadly scrolls. The tainted powder went with those as well, with precise instructions on dosage. Guarantees were demanded, threats of death in the event of failure made. Crones well-versed in the black arts merely laughed in toothless, joyless mirth at the anxious traitors’ nervousness while snatching their gold from their clients’ clammy hands.
When assembled before their king, everyone could feel the growing strain of rebellion among the group.
“That’s brilliant!” Lambrecht gurgled, blinking stupidly at his frowning ministers. He didn’t even know what it was to which he’d just responded in such glowing terms. Everything seemed like an endless loop of swirling images, color, and sound. It was magical. It was remarkable. While he didn’t know how his world suddenly ended up that way, he wasn’t one to complain.
Then he inquired after his favorite brothel before collapsing on the floor in a drugged swoon, his servants and perhaps only a handful of his old and most trusted ministers scrambling to help him up or carry him off to the sickroom. And there he’d be plied, unwittingly, with drinks that had been tainted with dark powder from a witch’s cupboard.
* * *
What could the world offer perfection? Quite a few had wondered. What did the world have that the prince didn’t? Sober men bent their minds in the direction of the fair sex.
Alarick had proven his worth in the battlefield. He’d been an exemplary scholar. He’d always been a devoted son despite the misfortune of be
ing born to such a set of parents as an incompetent wastrel who was visibly rotting where he sat and an adulterous madwoman who reeked of human waste and hunted for spiders to eat. Or, if one were to be more technical about it, his real father being a dandified buffoon who now lay in the countryside somewhere, mourned by no one but his broken lover.
Fairy tales would have the young man aided by a fairy godmother, but all he had were his wits and his own frailties. Perfect princes in those quaint little tales would be charging off to distant lands, tall, brave, and proud, determined to right all wrongs, and the king and queen’s current distresses would certainly be a great part of those. What they suffered from, according to these stories, were nothing more than the effects of curses made by vengeful creatures. Stepmothers, most likely.
“Surely,” well-meaning, foolish ministers said, “there are dozens of young princesses out there who need to be saved in one way or another. The prince has to be kept busy, and there ought to be at least one princess somewhere who’ll work her magic on him. He simply needs to find her.”
When some started to raise the same tired corrections regarding Alarick’s claim to the throne, they were forced into silence by a new argument: “The royal line has to be broken. It’s the only way. His Majesty is incapable of siring, and the queen isn’t faring any better. Where do we find a successor? His Majesty is the last of his bloodline!”
As proof, they all called forth a small group of historians and genealogists, who’d been assigned to trace out Lambrecht’s family tree. No, the royal line would truly die with the king, for everyone who could have succeeded on legal grounds had died. War, disease, murder, suicide—the trail was cold and bloody, and all leads went nowhere.
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