Authors: Rick Moody
F
airest monarch
of our empire,
great king,
conduce in me, lowly tanner of hides, a righteous song as I embark to tell the tale of your origins, spinning for townsfolk
the narratives of the province whence you come, that savage northern province of brigands upon highways who accost travelers
with blunt, crusted foils called, in those lands,
squeegees,
or in due course how you came from the prolific farms of
Jersey
to rule over all this principality of scribes and divers musicians, how you brought probity to scoundrels of disputatious
cast. Lead me as you have led others, eternal administrator,
make your tongue my tongue
as my inscriptions cover this stone and I tell of your reign, to those in the crib, to those upon sickbeds rank and odiferous;
let it be me, the tanner, who paints your masterpieces, paints your portraits in tongues of men, as if tales were altarpieces
of historical churches, let me be as a butterfly with your paintbrushes, as you
climb down from your folding chair.
There was a lad, born in the first third of our century, precocious stripling, much given to reverie and to silence. In his
bedchamber, he labored over problems mathematical and geometrical, never venturing forth, even should he chance to see a fair
maiden dancing on the village green beyond his mullioned windows. He paid no mind to her jolly braids, nor to her furious
dancing, nor to the particular brother of this particular girl, a woeful prince (for any comely lad of means was potential
regent during the bloodshed and disorder of our
interregnum),
whose acute melancholy was said to have been owing to his terror of ascending to the throne. No, our future king secreted
himself in his chamber, covered with animal skins, studying magics and potions through which he might better the station of
workers of fields and shopkeepers and salespersons of viands and pickled vegetables. The lads formula, for the upstanding
meritorious valor of aforementioned salespersons, was said to have been called the
Formula of Surplus Value,
completed by him in quill on goat’s parchment, under a candle that, according to spell of witchery, never burned down.
One day, our yet-to-be monarch and chief agonist, buoyed by the influence of a thick Turkic potion known as
espresso kaffee,
and because of faintest impropriety of speech that by and by inhibited the correct recitation of spells, turned the comely
nervous prince —Maxwell Hennesy Charming, brother of the
flapper maiden
already mentioned —into a performing monkey, or hanuman. As I say, it was inadvertent. The young artist of physick was making
as to formulate a concoction of
creamy distillate
for his beverage. Nevertheless, wherefore Prince Maxwell, with fashionable opiated eyes and bulbous cheekbones, had dressed
in long flowing
garbs that might as well, in a dreamer’s tossings, have been the robes of women, now, as hanuman, he became the
dandy.
Breeches of a dusty rose and a blue waistcoat with diamonds and rubies all upon it and stones as these days are called by
the name
rhinestones,
such that he shimmered when he crawled on all fours or hung from a bough by his serpentine tail. Wherefore Prince Maxwell
had been known to help a blind woman of our village, Miss Hogg, ahead of the carriages thundering by at street trivia, only
to be named
infernal scamp
on deliverance of her to the farther side, as hanuman the prince was a rake and a Lothario, and would as soon inflict his
manly endowments on a maiden as he would devour a banana in payment for his games of chance. I tell you,
I
never liked that particular prince,
when he was under the curse, and would occasionally seize his tail and dip it into inks or poisons.
The family of Charming, a lordly assemblage of counselors and barristers, made suit against our young hero for having turned
Prince Maxwell into a
tree monkey,
and this case was duly heard, on a day marked by grand hailstones.
Well it is remembered in my village,
how we had to flee the collapsing of thatched roofs, the merciless raining down of godly disapproval, but the courthouse,
never have you seen such astonishing manufacture, with steps made out of
the same pink marble used for imperial towers of clerks,
and a roof that held fast beneath all assault. The carriages in which the barristers arrived to disgorge the principals of
this story pulled fast to the curbstone and lords hastened indoors. Two or three footsoldiers were yet crushed by the hailstones
so that their brains ran out into the street,
each of
them a mother’s son, alas.
Yet I was lucky among townspeople to sit in witness of that trial, in a box marked for commoners. A rabid bitch kept us in
our place by gnawing ceaselessly if any of us should so much as take modest breath.
The courtier
Ebenezer Sloane served as the plaintiff’s counsel, and his miserly and shifty eyes were such that all present agreed he’d
have bartered away his mother’s petticoats if circumstance permitted. So
wide
was he that his frilly collar scarcely closed about his neck and but a tiny residuary chin protruded from his mounds of bulk.
When cogitating earnestly —which was not often —folds of skin on Ebenezer’s forehead would move and bulge, as if flowing of
the humors to the skull so required.
The king, of course, not yet so crowned, was merely a young knight given to solitary and religious pursuits, and among witnesses
and barristers he had none of that splendor we lately associate with his personage. Charges against him were read out by a
lady in the employ of the judge —though some say
it is more than employ
and that saucier pursuits in her instance might be more accurate. I’m speaking of Lady Calderon, Duchess of Fidget, who next
declaimed,
Hear ye, hear ye, unworthy taxpayers of back alleys and fundaments of this very stinking mound of livestock droppings, we
are gathered in this space to discuss the fate of this young magician, he of the oily pockmarks and unwashed parts, here to
contemn in strongest terms what has confounded the very order of our local nature, an irrefutable slight against the family
of Charmings, consisting of Maxwell Charming now deceased or metamorphosed into a primate from Asia Minor, his sister, the
lovely Andalucia Charming, a father, Lancer Charming, Esq., his wife, Lady Charming, all drug into these premises to seek
restitution for the fact of their nobility and station infringed upon by this young man of origins foul and mean.
The duchess, that
sow
—with mane of black curls, eyes jaundiced from gourmandish quaffing of mead
eight days per week;
a bosom that would barely be contained in her evening gown; pearls like a profane rosary circumnavigating her patchy neck,
her lips horribly pursed. It was evident from the first syllables of her declamation that any celestial muse of justice
would not necessarily adjudicate in this tragical matter.
And yet at the
woeful charges
an uproarious tumult issued from the cronies of the Charmings. Jailkeep-ers rustled their irons at the corner of the space.
Dogs grimaced and spilled their putrid salivas about us. It was a pretty show. And sure the king turned even bluer than his
constitutional imperial shade, for his very term seemed about to come due, and if not capital execution then such tortures
as
being branded with fiery iron, eyes excavated with wooden spoons, leg eaten off by ravenous boar.
Yet the king was prepared to meet his woeful fate without complaint: he was humble before persecutors.
Just then the queen —
Heart beat softly! I have given away a portion of the end! May my listeners forgive me!
—or rather the young Andalucia Charming assumed the throne of witnesses before our magistrate so deaf and blind that it is
said he lingered for days though the courthouse be emptied, and she was sworn in,
under enchantment,
because the likes of which she spoke had never been uttered in a courtroom before or since,
Your honors, worshipful townsfolk, I have nothing but love for that contemned man, my heart
throbs at the apperception of his fine manly features, I would unsheath myself of these fetters of rank and privilege and
live with him as a lover, adrift upon breezes of sentiment, I would have no more divisions between folk, I recognize none,
there shall be only love!
Consternation upon the courthouse. In later times it was said that this enchantment was not the kings own, yet whichever
the origin, its most devastating magic was upon
the very head of our king,
who loved Andalucia at once and from that moment forward, as a rich illumination hovered about her. Her braids, her gladsome
lips, her downcast eyes. Who would not love the queen? Who would not kneel to declare for her?
The king thereupon rose to mount his defense, unaided by barristers.
I am a lowly inventor of magics and alchemical poultices,
he began,
neither kith nor kin of any here on this
terra firma,
and my poor parents moldering six feet down, and I am called here for no reason but that I have increased the local population
of apes by one, a feat which does not deprive the world of a living thing, nor does it infringe, as milady says, on the divine
aspect of nature, since whichever way I chance to pivot is nature, and the same with you, for what is man but natures most
frolicsome plaything, and I would not undo my enchantment, but would rather accept my fate, yet that this young woman should
perish in a foul grief at the loss of her brother, a prince, and so, out of respect for her loveliness, I vow to remove this
curse upon hanuman and restore this savage to Prince Charming, meanwhile to ensure the preservation of some qualities of his
former apish state, namely a robust and amusing demeanor, so that he might talk freely with the fairer sex, and with passersby
upon the street. If my fate is commuted
until nightfall tonight I will total the figures and assemble the tinctures needed for this magic.
The king, having no clear idea of
how
he had made the prince a monkey in the first instance —when, in like mishaps, he had changed a charwoman into hedgehog, and
then, on attempting to return her to a former shape, had made her instead into
a large snaking desk lamp
—was agitated about the prospects for his next formula, but knew that his passionate affinities were enough to liberate him
from the courthouse, as indeed a
lady of the court,
in sunshiny curls and clutching a velvet accessory in which were housed her several gold pieces, rose up from the audience,
in recognition of his fancy oratories, and cried out,
That man shall be king!
(For it had been said that the most just and enterprising of our many princes would
ascend to rule.
) This being a piece of prophecy that she was in no way equipped to repeat, as I have heard that this selfsame heavily rouged
and plucked woman of the court was later pauperized
by making wagers upon sport between poultry.
Next, the town gossip, Mudge, afflicted with a peculiar ocular condition known among chirurgeons as
wall-eye,
as with a smart additional set of bicuspids, this Mudge strode, all inflated as when the peacock in thick of venery attempts
to impress his mate, into the street to cry to all who would listen,
New regent, romancer or necromancer? New regent chooses a Charming bride and dazzles all!
Those of us gathered likewise spilled out into a dripping besmirchment of hailstones and forthwith made riot in merry dancing.
The king, as sunset fast approached, was not, of course, able to find any oath that would restore the hanuman —
which beast he had caged in his bedchamber so that while laboring he was subjected to a torrent of abuse in an excessively
ornamented verbiage,
Hey, fair and pungent youth, I would not be the damned prince again! I’m happy just the way I am! I’d rather be mummer before
thy endless processional of monarchical brats than be again that cur!
Moreover, the animal made the king so excitable by tactics of percussive nattering and drumming upon the bars of his gaol
that his lordship kept mixing the parts of lizards and the vomitus of small birds
incorrectly,
with the effect that his housekeeping, his Oriental rugs and French chaises, magically yielded to a sequence
of stuffed antelopes.
With this in mind, the king, short of time, saw no other recourse but to make appointment with
the most feared and reviled citizen of our village,
the pustulating warlock known hereabouts as Levi the Dispatcher.
The Dispatcher, as any here will assent, could not be found by searching, because such gray and black places as he sequestered
himself were one day apparent down neglected thoroughfares and next entirely vanished. Only prayers of desperation, in combination
with the production of ducats and other gold curios, would produce the dreadful troll of a man. Thus, the king, not yet coronally
adorned, walked the streets in rags muttering in low tones,
Oh, good Christian gentleman Levi, I will give you a tenth portion of my treasury, should I ever ascend to the magnificence
of rulership, if only you will dig me out of this infernal quackery into which I have plunged myself
At which, finally, like lightning upon meadow, the foul warlock stepped out of a most ostentatious carriage called a
sport utility vehicle,
and confronted
the incipient monarch, while picking encrustments out of his large nose,
Wait, let me be an answerer of riddles. Somewhere a neurasthenic lad is converted into a chimp and the humbler who brought
to pass this enchantment comes hither to have him restored. The further action of this drama? That shall cost you a pretty
sum, my lordship, as you well know.
The king’s pockets were unfortunately spacious, indeed quite
ventilated,
and therefore he agreed to a special arrangement called
margin
(I have only passing acquaintance with the transaction), and this arrangement concluded the warlock rose, red curls like a
kerosened halo, up above the streets to declaim the following lines of verse, no doubt composed by himself in a joyful interval,
Prince, oh prince, once so charming, your fine sports become alarming, yet since your future needs be farming, your apelike
features we are harming,
during which moment, according to manifold witnesses, a jocose Prince Charming did suddenly appear upon the avenues of our
fair city, smiling broadly and bestowing blessings on
women of mean reputation,
while here in our tale a ghoulish laugh issued forth from the warlock and he performed a number of somersaults and fell to
earth before the king, saying,
It is done, and now I require of you a token of your esteem.
At which point the king ran him through with a dull blade. Manly act of a manly king.