by Trevor Veale
But that’s for tomorrow, she thought as she finally entered sleep. Oh God, it’s only a few hours away…
Chapter 9
The Unlucky Lovers
On the morning of his wedding, Prince Catheter woke up ravenously hungry. He was eager to feast himself on…something. He imagined the warm coffeeshop smell of croissants and muffins among the musky odors of the bed sheets. Snuggling beside him, Lucinda awoke to hear his whispered fantasy of coffee and pastries, to which he now added spoonfuls of guava jelly. “Some yoghurt would be nice,” he murmured, then he turned abruptly to face her.
“Why don’t we buzz over to Mania for an anonymous breakfast at some peasant café?” he said.
She pulled her freckly face into a look of perplexed delight.
“You’re amazing,” she said. “How can you be so sure we won’t be recognized?”
“Mania’s too remote for the paparazzi – especially at this time of day. If we leave now we’ll be able to eat and go before the civilized world wakes up.”
Lucinda chuckled and wrapped herself around him, prompting his penis to twitch. She loved that they were in a private place – her apartment – and could be as unrestrained and passionate as they pleased. In public, where they pretended not to be lovers, she was forced to keep her excitement in check. Here she was free to let it rip.
Catheter was feeling about the same, although his libido was tempered by the thought of his imminent wedding. He felt his penis go slack.
“Fuck! It’s wedding day,” he murmured.
“Let’s make love them,” she said in a rough whisper, “while we still have the chance.”
He nodded, eager to be brought back to pleasure, and rolled on top of her – hardening again – and toggled his way into her. He began pumping – her gasps urging him on – and soon found himself working up a head of steam. He didn’t want to come inside her, however, although he knew she was on the pill, so when he reached the point of no return, he yanked himself out and pasted the middle of her stomach.
“Are you trying to protect me?” she said.
“No, I’m trying to protect us both. If I knocked you up, we’d never be allowed to marry. In Melloria, a future king may only marry a virgin.”
“Strange laws we Mellorians have,” she said. “In other countries, if a man makes a woman pregnant he has to marry her!”
He squirmed in embarrassed silence, feeling he’d just reached another moral impasse, thanks to Mellorian law. His hard-on disappeared.
Lucinda was not completely satisfied so she attempted to rehorn him and, by maneuvering her hips, bring him back inside her. However, for him the moment had passed, and he reached across her to pull out a tissue from the box to wipe away the goop. He felt he could not embark on another fuck, even though she was obviously still horny and continued to coax him in. This made him laugh and he pinned her hips down so she couldn’t move them. She fought to release his grasp, alternately laughing and groaning.
“Please, I order you to enter me!” she said.
“Jawohl!” he replied hoarsely and tried to crank up his lust. By giving it all he had he managed it somehow, and gave her the orgasm she wanted.
She looked at him and wondered at his stamina. His breathing was now ragged and it was clear he was pooped, while she was finding some ultimate place where pleasure was the only emotion. The faint noise in the apartment, the dark shuttered bedroom, the bed, even his face above hers, swam into oblivion. She wanted sweet exhilaration to stay with her forever.
He suddenly found some energy. “Come on, get your clothes on – I’m hungry!” he gasped.
The light was already seeping in between the shutters as she stumbled about the room, looking for her clothes. Then, while she dressed, Catheter put on the bushy black beard and steel-rimmed glasses with bottle lenses he wore to avoid recognition. Lucinda immediately tore them off him, laughing uncontrollably.
“You don’t need to look like a Russian spy, you stupid fuck! You said we wouldn’t be recognized!” she shrieked. Catheter smiled sheepishly. “No, you’re right. Let’s just go,” he said.
They crept out of the sleeping building and into Catheter’s Jaguar. Soon they were slipping through the shabby viscera of East City, heading out to one of the remotest places in Melloria. Their goal was a tiny village whose largest building was the church of Our Lady of Mania, perched high on a cliff overlooking the roaring River Lupus, a place where miracles were rumored to occur.
I need some miracles right now, Lucinda thought, leaning on Catheter’s shoulder. Number one – let this bloody wedding be called off!
The potholed road they were on was completely empty, save for the occasional donkey cart. It was too early for motorized transport in the part of Melloria they were heading for. They raced to the top of a hill where the road petered out. Catheter stopped the engine and looked at Lucinda imploringly.
“I know you think I look like a dork, but please let me put on some bloody disguise before we get there! I don’t want some sneaky peasant with money on his mind blabbing to the press that I’ve been out here with my… sweetheart. Worse – taking pictures!”
Lucinda softened. “Go on, then, put on your Groucho beard and glasses. I don’t care!”
Catheter couldn’t remember Groucho ever having a full beard, but he didn’t care either. He reached into the glove compartment and put on his second-best disguise.
The car was parked on the edge of an enormous ridge that overlooked the churning Lupus. To reach the church of Our Lady of Mania and the tiny village beyond, they would have to make their way slowly down the side of the gorge, cross the river using rocks at its narrowest point and climb the other side of the gorge. Never did a couple make so much effort in search of a quiet breakfast. That they did so, using the sagebrush for handholds, was a tribute to their tenacity. Feeling lightheaded from the fragrance, they practically danced down the slope, laughing and listening to wild bees buzzing over the roar of the river.
A half-hour later they emerged from a jungle of fig and honeysuckle trees just below the church. It appeared on its craggy outcrop like some Tibetan lamasery. Huge boulders loomed over it. They stopped and looked down at the gorge they had just crossed, thick and bushy like the pubes of a hairy giant, and continued past the church to the village. Catheter’s earlier dream of croissants and guava jelly vanished at the sight of the lumpy hovels, among which lurked a traditional Mellorian eatery.
When they sat to order they decided to both go for the Breakfast Special, which turned out to be eggs mellorian with dark brown cabbage in plum and goat meat sauce.
“Yummy!” Lucinda exclaimed, after the waitress had brought the steaming bowls and she slurped her first spoonful of the vermilion sauce. “Gosh, Melloria must be the wildest place on earth – it’s completely uncivilized.”
“Typical Mellorian slop,” was Catheter’s comment after his first mouthful. He looked around the village square desolately as he chewed for dear life. “Look, the local zombies are out already!”
From the far side of the square and kicking up dust as they shuffled along, four raggedly-dressed men with straggly beards and matted hair were making their way directly toward them. They reminded Lucinda of pigeons in the park converging on people with food.
“I wonder if they really are zombies,” she giggled.
“No, just poor bastards out of their faces on Saint,” Catheter grumbled. “I doubt if any of them has had a wash in years.”
“What if one of them is a Wise One?” Lucinda persisted. She had been thinking again about miracles she wanted to have, and her second one would be for Catheter to increase her allowance.
Catheter gave a short cynical laugh. “Only one way to find out,” he said and fished out his wallet from his chinos.
As the first of the ragged men approached their table, the couple could see that his gaze was fixed glassily on a spot directly in front of his face. Yet he shuffled with unerring precision. Catheter laid the wallet on
the table beside his bowl and took off one of his shoes. Carefully, he laid the loafer on the dusty ground half a meter in front of their table. As the man drew near it, without looking down he silently sidestepped the shoe, shuffled two paces and stopped beside Catheter’s chair. The man stank of stale sweat but not of Saint.
“Good morning, sir,” he said in a deep, resonant voice that belied his scruffy appearance. “Is there anything I can do to help you today?”
“Ha, ha, you’ve got me!” Catheter exclaimed. “You certainly know your way round a shoe!”
Catheter and Lucinda were at a loss to know what to say next. They knew that about one in every hundred Saint stoner was actually a Wise One, and that these sages didn’t smoke weed and lived in Sufiesque seclusion in a network of caves that wound deep inside the rocky escarpment below the church of Our Lady of Mania, but beyond that they knew very little about them.
Lucinda was suddenly inspired to blurt out what was uppermost on her mind.
“I’ve been praying for miracles!” she said, then added: ”Would it do any good to go to the church of Our Lady?”
“Would it do any good to kiss the Infant of Prague?” the man said rhetorically. “Only if you believe in Our Lady.”
“What if you’re not a believer,” Catheter inquired. “Where can you go then?”
“For miracles?” the man said. “Only other place to go is to the Magic Mountains.”
At this both breakfasters laughed. The man had done well avoiding the shoe, but perhaps he was only a lucky stoner after all, even though he didn’t have the smell on him.
“The Magic Mountains of Melloria, you mean?” Catheter decided to tease the fellow.
Yes, of course. Do you know about them, sir?”
“Of course I do, every bastard in Melloria knows about the Magic Mountains!” Catheter was becoming exasperated. “The thing is – where the hell are they?”
“In the fourth dimension,” the man replied.
“And where’s that?” Lucinda asked.
“Just next to this one,” the man said softly. “But you have to keep very quiet to find the way in.”
“Okay, we’ll all keep very quiet now,” Catheter said. He had decided the man was a wackadoo after all. “Here, take this and be gone.” He pulled a hundred-moon bill from the wallet and dropped it in front of the man.
The man’s face contorted in something like a smile. “Thank you, sir. Thank you, miss. I wish you a very good day!” he said and scooped up the bill. He waved it at the three other zombies and they converged toward him.
“Yeah, whatever,” Catheter replied, and they watched the men shuffle away. “Well, what do you think of that?” Catheter added.
“Oh, I believe, I believe!” Lucinda gushed. “After all, why not? I mean, there’s so much we don’t know about.”
Catheter scratched his beard. “Well, there’s one thing I know about – I’m gonna be fucking married today. Bastard!”
Lucinda touched his arm and waited till the waitress, bearing a steaming pot of acorn coffee, had gone.
“Poopsy darling, don’t get upset. I know, it’s going to be difficult – “
“Difficult? It’s going to be fucking impossible! I feel like a rat in a trap – I’ll probably go insane.”
Lucinda blinked in surprise at his vehemence. “Poopsy, you won’t do any such thing! You’re a Gorm, you’re strong. You’ll see this thing through.”
He pounced on each word. “Strong… see it through… Yes, if I don’t kill myself first!”
His thick bottle glasses misted and his eyes filled with tears. She felt wracked, looking at his pain, the anguish and rage flooding out. His eyes spilled over.
“Don’t,” she said bleakly. “Stay alive for my sake.”
She gestured toward the now-deserted village square. “One day we’ll escape this awful place and live somewhere far away – in peace and happiness.”
He turned away and momentarily took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “Okay, enough about me! Let’s finish our slop and get back to Hellhole Palace.”
While Lucinda silently chomped on a few more mouthfuls of egg and sauce and sipped her coffee, Catheter grimaced, and not just because of the chunks of tough goat meat he was chewing. Before the stupid churl had interrupted them, Catheter had been enjoying a mild intoxication. The sight of Lucinda’s face in the morning sunlight, the sound of her laughing voice, the scent of her perfumed body had beguiled him into a state of sheer bliss, and now he felt like a man just hours away from the guillotine.
“Poopsy darling, I’ve got something I have to ask you,” Lucinda said in the awkward silence Catheter had created. “Is there any chance you can increase my allowance?”
The silence just got awkwarder. Catheter gulped down his chewed meat and pondered a new problem. Whenever Lucinda mentioned money, a stuffy flintiness he had inherited from his father seized his mind. While he was willing to freely give her his seed, his essence, his manhood – the giving of money was something else entirely. He wanted to say No bluntly, but realized in the present circumstances bluntness would not be appropriate. In his mind he began to elaborate a suitable excuse.
“Well, Lollipop,” he said slowly, “I really can’t right now. You see, after I’m married the personal allowance I get from the Mellorian treasury will actually go down – it’s because of something called joint spousal retainer, and it’s written into Mellorian law – “
“Oh God, Poopsy, I’m so broke!” Lucinda suddenly cried. “Everything’s always going up – food, clothes…And my landlord keeps hassling me to pay more rent! The other day he trapped me on the stairs, he just went on and on, said he might have to evict me – and he was staring at my boobs all the time he spoke!”
His face went into a variety of spasms, and she put her hand up to his face, fearful lest the spasms dislodge his beard. “Don’t worry, Poopsy, I’ll manage,” she said gamely. “Now is obviously not the right time to – “
“I’ll think about it, okay?” He suddenly felt a surge of anger at the way the world was pressing down on him. He looked blazingly at her, and she visibly wilted. Now he felt like a shit.
The serving wench approached with more coffee, poured it liberally into their cups and sat down on an empty chair close to Catheter. It was a local custom in this part of the country that she engage them in some conversation, and the two breakfasters squirmed in awkward acquiescence.
She began with a complaint. “All the young men these days spend their time sitting in cafes, smoking Saint and discussing how to live without working! Thank God the government is cutting the welfare at last or nobody would work! When the Slobodians finally come – “
Lucinda silenced her with a hand placed firmly on her arm. “I think we’ll have the check now, please!”
The two soon-to-be-estranged lovers left the village by a different route where the landscape was less romantic – birch trees, wooden shacks, goats and chickens, mounds of manure and roaming packs of dogs. Old ladies stood by the roadside with bunches of wild lupins in their hands, begging rather than selling, their faces filled with forlorn hope.
The passed some corrugated-iron shacks perched on a hillside and Catheter turned off onto a dirt road. The endless birch trees whizzed by, then they came to a steep grassy bank where Catheter stopped the car. He took Lucinda’s hand and they climbed until their legs ached. At the top of the bank, the slope on the other side dropped down to a marshy plain, beyond which gleamed the Sea of Slobodia, a twinkling line of water far in the distance. This was actually a lake which had been named after the country that now possessed this strip of coast. The marshy plain belonged to Slobodia by right of conquest, as did the barely-visible township that lay on the lake.
“Isn’t that Shekels over there?” she said.
“I hate Shekels!” he replied.
She was taken aback. She knew that his parents had their summer palace there – before the Slobodian invasion – and that it had been their fav
orite resort. She tried to imagine what it had been about the marina, the plaza, beachfront casino and tacky giftshops that had so endeared the place to them.
“Isn’t that where your family went every summer?” she asked tentatively.
“Yes, worst luck. The Slobodians are welcome to it!”
She stood closer to him, stroking his arm. The sun was rising higher and a breeze had whipped up. She felt they probably wouldn’t meet again for a long time. She acknowledged that he was under great pressure to make the marriage work and produce a future heir, and she felt bad about asking him for more money. She resolved to find another way to solve her financial difficulty. Most of all, she wanted him to know she would always support him.
“It’s all right, Poopsy,” she said. “We’ll find a way out of this.”
“He grunted and shifted his feet.
“Won’t you give me one last cuddle to keep me going till we meet again?”
His response was sudden and, despite the vehemence of his passion, unexpected.
“I want to fuck you!” he said. “Right here, right now.”
They stood for a moment looking at each other, and she slipped off her shirt. She began to unbutton her bra. This time, though, her lust was forced and mingled with misgivings. She stopped, with her bra half unfastened. She couldn’t do it, it wasn’t right – it seemed more like adultery, now they were so close to his wedding. She dropped her arms.
