Fantasy Story A

Imagine a castle. Tall, imposing and altogether fairytale, with colourful flags adorning each tower spire. It is unfortunate that we have visited this place on a thunderously miserable night. Rain strikes against an ornate window and behind it, you should imagine a King. Only a very sad King. With no beard, or round belly, or golden hair, but with dark, drab clothes and hair the colour of coal. He is resigned to his quarters, pointed against the window and brooding. He has this talent for brooding. A talent one can only acquire from years and years of practice. He takes  a glance to his side and lays his eyes on a small silver headpiece. It almost seems wrong to call it a crown. Crowns are golder, pointier, embellished with jewels and sometimes have a weird cushion bottom that I’m sure no one likes. Yet, crown it was and the burden of it was weighing heavy on our King’s mind. The thought of wearing it again was set to tear him apart, to cause him untold anguish and anxiety. He fell asleep in his chair soon after, but I’m sure it was a torturous, angst-ridden sleep.

You’ll be pleased to know the following morning was considerably more pleasant. The sun shone brightly through the King’s brooding window and woke him from solemn slumber. He dutifully put on that hated crown and moved himself towards the great hall. Today’s Kingly obligation was one of the most arduous. He had to attend his own party.

Walking past the portraits of his ancestors, each one of them a perfectly posed frame of the monarch and their partner, the King lamented the myth that had soured his childhood with false hopes and dreams. “An Unprecedented Era of Peace and Prosperity”. The family mantra would echo through his mind whenever he needed it least. According to the story, were his marriage to yield in a pure, unadulterated true love his kingdom would not only be peaceful and prosperous, but it would no longer be his kingdom. The promise is that on achieving true love, the monarchy would simply just fade away.

Load of bollocks obviously, but the King had tried absconding from a courtship party once and his mother tried to throw herself out the tallest tower. That’s the funny thing about family traditions. It doesn’t ever seem to matter how truthful or how useful they are. You just kind of get caught up with them, whether you want to or not. When the King at last entered the great hall, he did so with a sombre melodrama, and was met with the applause of local nobility. He was getting a reputation for eccentricity, but nobody really minds so long as you provide enough booze. Pleasantries and grand entrances complete, the only thing left was for the King to immerse himself in the party.

Now I’d like you to imagine again. If you find I’m asking for too much of your imagination, perhaps fantasy stories aren’t for you. I’m sure there’s some fascinating Wikipedia entries you could be reading or maybe you can watch one of those How It’s Made videos. I’d like you to imagine a woman. An elegant, noblewoman. A beautiful noblewoman, with long, shimmering blonde hair. Not just a beautiful noblewoman, but the most beautiful noblewoman you could possibly imagine. This woman, this awe-inspiring woman, was what stood before our King. He must have been so stunned by her beauty that he could not think straight, or form a sentence, because he walked directly past this woman. And then past the next inconceivably beautiful woman. And past the next. The hall was soon filled with a crowd of disappointed beautiful women.

Now I don’t want you thinking of our King as a shallow man. Or, at least, not shallow in the usual terms. It wasn’t the faces or the bodies of the women that repelled him, but their total ubiquity. Each one of them was otherworldly beautiful, each one of them was dressed in the finest gowns and each one of them curtsied in precisely the same manner. This was the one-hundred-and-fifty-seventh such party that he had attended since his coronation. The King had long abandoned any pretense of civility. He’d politely greet the women, of course, but no longer was he interested in hearing their carefully rehearsed marriage pitches. They were all the same anyway.

Our King was coming to the end of this round of prospective wives now. He’d almost stopped to talk to one redheaded woman, until he noticed that she was wearing a brooch shaped like a leaf and so, really, what was the point. He was ready to decrown himself and spend another evening lamenting his condition. It was then that something most peculiar happened. Just beyond his line-of-sight, there was a struggle within the crowd. Guards seemed to be in a fuss and the nearby noblewoman seemed mightily distressed. As the King marched over, the crowds split. The guards took to their knees and left in the centre of the commotion was a woman. Her skin was darker than her pale sisters. There was a tear down the skirt of her dress and her corset was on backwards. She quickly moved a stray strand of her hair off her face and met the King’s eyes. Time slowed. The King considered what to say. But decided against saying anything at all. He excused himself and walked back to his private wing of the castle.

In three weeks time, the two were married. For the kingdom it was Winter, but for them it was a great Summer. They talked unendingly about the most significant nothings, taking walks across the castle grounds and treading the first footprints in freshly fallen snow. The King loved her intelligence, they would often spend hours in the library mixing and matching characters from all sorts of books to create their own stories. She seemed to have no worry or responsibility and seemed to be making the most of every monarchical fancy or pleasure. She was kind to servants, even friendly with many of them, and had even convinced the King to take cooking classes with her under the castle’s head chef. Neither of them were very good, but their subjects naturally ate everything they were served and declared it the result of culinary genius. There could be no other response. The King wasn’t into decapitations, but he’d certainly give them a sinister stare. The two had a romance most of us only get to dream about (or read about in fantasy stories). They had an emotional connection, an intellectual intimacy. They had a unique bond. They had really great sex.

In Spring, the Kingly duties arose again. Grateful as he was to have completed his task of finding a wife, she had done little to absolve him of the boring matters of tax, diplomacy and whingy landlords. It was on a day where the King had taken Court that his wife took the time to meet his family. They were all dead, but one shouldn’t underestimate the power of oversized portraits and loneliness. She had a great deal of riveting conversations with her great-great-great-in-laws and promised to each of the painted couples that she would be the best wife she could be.

A servant, bringing along a replenishing fruit basket so the King’s wife could enjoy conversing with the long-dead as long as she pleased, noted that she seemed enamored with the paintings. The King’s wife said that it was because she was, she felt an odd kind of kinship with them. It was almost like they really were family, though she had never met them before tonight. She mentioned that she hadn’t known that her wedding ring had been passed on through so many generations.

The servant was shocked to hear this. They’d assumed, quite reasonably, that the King’s wife, of all people, would know the dynastic myth. But she didn’t. She hadn’t heard of it at all. It was much later that night, when she saw her husband again after his duties were completed, that she made her new discovery known. Unable to even look into her husband’s eyes, she soon burst into tears. His tiredness slipped away immediately. He asked what was wrong and pleaded to know what he could do to help.

So, she told him. About how on the day they met the guards were trying to throw her out the castle. That she had snuck in amongst the crowds. That she had stolen the dress she had worn. That, really, that wasn’t the first day they met. That really they first met years ago, when her company was passing through the kingdom. She had noticed his kindness, and his sadness, and all those gaudish rings. She had decided to stay in the hope of seeing the sad King once more. It all came out in a sputtering pace and the deeper she went into the story, the more lies that she uncovered, the more tears streamed down her face. She was okay with dooming a man. She thought that the worst that could happen is that she’d make a disappointing wife, and she was content enough with that, so long as she had the comforts of high society and one or two weeks of married bliss. She struggled a little more with dooming an entire people. She feared that her unwashed, innoble status removed any hope of the kingdom knowing that era of unprecedented peace and prosperity.

Her husband inhaled deeply as he weighed the news. Then, he responded:

“Back in the intercontinental wars, the King and Queen would spend all their days locked away in their chambers. Some historians figure they were trying to sex the war away.”

His wife gave a sad smile in response. The kind you feel obliged to give when someone makes a joke, but you’re not in the mood to laugh.

“Later, when the coffers ran dry and the crown found itself in insurmountable debt, the marriage at its head apparently couldn’t have been stronger. They were childhood rivals turned passionate lovers and their storybook romance just wasn’t good enough for the family myth.”

“Hell, that’s just the good ones. Even at the turn of this century, the throne has seen its perfect marriages grow sterile and stale. One Queen soon found that she was interested in far younger men than my grandfather. And the King and Queen before me? Well, if there’s was a love so gallant and true then perhaps my mother wouldn’t be living so vicariously through me.”

“The point is they all, at some point, thought they were in love. And if our thoughts are all we are then, I think, when you think you are in love, you must be. And even though you’re in love, sooner or later, it will all fall to shit and there’ll be no peace and there will be no prosperity and the Kingdom will wilt and the march of monarchy will go on and on and on.”

He stopped himself before continuing.

“This isn’t coming out right.”

“What I mean to say is, I don’t care. Wait, that’s not right either. I do care. I don’t care about some story or some idealised, magical, fairytale love that has never existed and will never exist. But I care about you. I love you.” He reached out and embraced his wife, pulling her onto his lap. “And you haven’t doomed us all.”

She rested her head on his chest, noticing that her eyes were drying and her mouth was smiling.

“Perhaps we were doomed from the start but, I mean, that’s hardly your fault. Am I getting this across?”

She looked up and met her husband’s eyes. The air in the room had shifted. They weren’t the words of a poet, but a poet’s words are often cold, heartless verses that promise beauty and bely artifice. No, these were his words and his awkward delivery assured his wife of their authenticity. Her fingers ran across his face, then through his hair and then she answered her husband with a kiss. And as their lips met, the rubies on their rings gave off the slightest bit of light…

Or, at least, that’s the way I heard it.