All of the
princesses were barbarians. There was no way around the fact: the king would
marry a savage.
It had nothing
to do with the fact that, in the early days, several of the princesses that
came for his hand were from neighbouring kingdoms that King Agrememnon (known
to the royal family and to myself as King Aggie) had managed to offend or
deliver the cold shoulder to, and the most logical solution at the time was to
propose marriage. The marriage was not a guarantee, no, there was still the
test, because these things have to be done right if they’re done at all. But a
marriage assuaged the burn, stroked the abrasion, pulled the royal foot from
the royal mouth. The sort of girls sent to King Aggie from these kingdoms were
harsh at best, and simpering cut-throats at worst. Really, if I had been given
reign in this department, I would have made much better selections. But the
Chancellor had high hopes those days for peace. When he began to run out of
eligible candidates, he dropped his hopes so low that they could not even
bounce. They made a gruesome shape on the floor.
This is the
story out out of order. To tell you the story in order, I have to tell you that
my family has no place in a royal household, but has had a place for
generations in the royal household. For a king who respects the workers of the land,
whoever is chosen to train the beasts belonging in the royal barn and stables
should be chosen very, very carefully. It is not that the animals are
particularly hard to take care of, though they are prone to melancholy due to
the perpetually grey skies and the rain, and it is not because they make uneven
dips and crests in the bushes on the far side of the property that is visible
from the road, though not from the gardens, and it is not because it happens at
least once every two years that a storm spooks most of the sheep badly enough
that the rams and ewes begin to trample their own young. It is because animals
are cunning enough to wait until you trust them before turning on you. I am
cunning enough to see through it, and cunning enough to turn false loyalty into
true. Loyalty, King Aggie would say, is everything.
Which is one of
the reasons it has been a daughter or son from my family plucked every
generation to tend the king’s beasts. I have only been at it for most of my
life, and the earliest part of my life was spent in learning how to tend the
king’s beast. Our family was chosen by past kings and continues to be chosen by
the current head of the crown because of parallelism. While our family is
contstantly progressing, acquiring and passing down new knowledge with the old
(so long as the new does not contradict the old), the royal family is
constantly looking for progression. As our family makes advancements, the royal
family values them. I myself was chosen from five sisters and three brothers
because I am the least fearful (important as some of the horses have been born
with the devil’s temper), the least ill (fortuitous as the animals do not have
days off, and I, therefore, never have either), the most proactive (ideal as
many of the animals are clever enough to know when would be the worst time to
start a ruckus, and it takes only a stern word or action to convince them,
before appointed time, that their life means much more than biting the king’s
hand), and, as I mentioned, loyal.
It does not do
any harm that I am more savage than any of the princesses that came to see him.
It takes a certain dislocation of the mind and the spirit to look a beast in the
eye, see oneself and ones’ emotion, and to break that neck very tidily in one’s
hands. King Aggie does not always want me around, in the way that one does not
always want a flu-patient around. As though brutality is a disease he is
frightened of catching. His mother was a savage woman as well, and the family
was constantly inspecting DNA for signs of brute force in himself or his sister
(married and exported to her husband’s kingdom across the channel). But if the
king occupies his territory, I am happy to occupy mine.
I am called on,
rarely, but for good reason. When I am needed.
King Aggie’s
previous wife died of a mysterious illness. An asp had mysteriously been
clasped to her breast in her bed. There had been no signs of a break in to her
room, mysteriously. She had been very unhappy to be wed to the king,
mysteriously. But like King Aggie’s father before him, and his father before
him, and all fathers before them back to the first father that had worn a
crown, he had to be wed. Not to take the crown, but because there had always
been a wife. Except for those that died mysteriously or in childbirth, and then
there had to be a quick replacement made. King Aggie sought his chancellor’s
help in procuring candidates, and my help in procuring a wife from them. There
may be no wife at all, as it had happened before that he had lost interest in
all of the girls, suddenly and completely. The entire palace scurried, but
warily, without much aplomb. We had gone through the motions several times. Table
cloths were cleaned and laid out. The bottoms of curtains and tapestries were
dusted. The sheep were shooed from the castle grounds and locked in a pen. The
horses were polished, then their saddles were polished. All doorknobs were
polished as well, and servants despaired at their inability to get a good grip
on any of the knobs. Black piglets were dragged from the wooden pen to the
painted pen. There was enough space around them to get in a few elevated benches.
A coliseum of sorts. This was the puzzle the king had chosen for the
princesses: out of the black pigs, of which there would be one per princess,
one of the picks would have a golden coin in his mouth. Their mouths were all
closed with an easily broken adhesive. The coin had yet to fall out, but it
could not be swallowed, lest the pig choke and give itself away. If there were
twenty girls, there were twenty pigs, and the twenty girls stood in the pen
with the pigs and descended on them like a murderous frenzy. The rightful
princess for the crown was the one who plucks a pig from the ground and pulled
the gold coin from its mouth. Only one pig could be plucked by each princess.
If in the end there were three princesses of twenty with not the skill or
determination or wherewithal to pluck a pig from the ground, and the remaining
pigs ran free in the pen, and the gold coin was not in the mouth of any chosen
pig, then no one had won and the king’s search continued. The losers were
killed, their bodies strung before the gates to warn subjects and enemies of
the punishment for imposters.
This last bit
did not happen. But there were some girls that made me wish it did.
The girls caused
enough pain as it was, housing them and feeding them and washing their
clothing. Some of them saw fit to bring their own stallions or mares. IF that
was not bad enough, they were prepared to marry King Aggie, and let a pig’s
disgusting eating habits determine whether or not they were right for the
crown. No more random than the birthplace lottery that chooses our kings. But,
still.
Our kingdom gets
into arguments easily, you see.
Aggie was
agitated, as usual, when he was to choose his bride to be this time. He ad been
suggested find a wife in the summer. And find a wife in the summer he
attempted. All of the childish joy had vanished from his eyes. He was attached
to frivolity, and what was more frivolous than being with bank and without
wife?
The king saw to
the pen and I. I told him he should be resting, not watching the pigs. His
experience with horses would not teach him which was the best bet, which was
the most likely, or least, to be caught. Which mouth was most likely to swallow
the coin before someone else could grab it. I have more sympathy for him than I
should, for a woman in a family that had not gotten a raise in four years. “This
fretting will change nothing,” I told King Aggie. “You will just be tired and
short with the princesses that do come. Do you not trust the hands behind
this?”
“The pigs? Oh,
goodness, Margaret, no,” King Aggie said. “Getting sleep will change nothing. I
supposed when I am with wife and absent of others I will know what it is to
sleep. To never leave the bed. The room. The house. Has God forsaken my life?”
My life had
been, until now, entirely to make sure he could say nothing of this ilk on the
subject of his life. Graciously, I said nothing about God. God was not the one
about to strangle a black pig with a gold coin. Instead, I said, “You are not
forsaken. Greet them. Be curtious and polite.”
There is
something deeply embedded in the heads of many children. When they speak to
someone they have known all their life, who is bigger, that they have known to be
bigger all their life, they find it difficult not to be polite about it. So
King Aggie went to greet the princesses. I gave him specific instructions,
about greeting them and holding their elbows or touching their wrists.
Princesses are
an entirely different breed of human. They are especiall ugly, and especially
beautiful, in the way that pearls and rosewater masks can make one beautiful. Especially
ugly in the way that they have a knack for ugly expressions. You will notice in
many stories that princesses are demure and good-looking. They are not always
good-looking, that is simply luck, and they are not always demurring, that is
simply bad luck. It was not the type that King Aggie preferred. But what to do?
No one liked a savage princess, but the strongest girls grew in the roughest
soil.
That made
eighteen black piglets in the pen. Not many, but their squealing would cause
quite the racket.
King Aggie made
polite conversation; it was killing him. He restrained himself at dinner; it
was killing him. He asked about history and politics in neighbouring kingdoms
and was treated to blank stares; it was killing him. He was not intrigued by
the princess who seemed to think she could make herself useful singing old
ballads.
One of the
princesses brought him a present of a kitten. He was charmed. I took the kitten
to the kitchen, where the King would not be made ill by it, and the kitten
would thrive. During this time, whilst also feeding the black piglets, stuffing
coins down their throats, chopping the heads off chicken, wiping down horses
with blood-splattered hands, the King was quiet in his preferences of the
girls. I still found time to participate in the bet. I know already who would
win the king’s hand, and that it would happen this time. The other staff were
betting, making a game of it, but I was not there for the game. It was clear
who everyone would have preferred to win. Equally clear who everyone thought
would win. They were never the same person. It was hard to imagine a cream-complectioned
face capped with gold hair reaching a hand into the stinking gullet of a pig
and pulling out a golden coin. It was hard to imagine beauty of any sort having
the stomach for potentially activating a pig’s gag reflex.
There was a
feast, which made use of the boar I’d been keeping since King Aggie last caught
one, and a powerful ale that put several of the dukes nearly to sleep at the
table. One of the princesses nearly knocked over her goblet, then stopped,
quickly, and snatched it up before a drop spilled. King Aggie left the feast
early and resigned himself to his private chamber to confront his worries in
private. I was part of the private. I stood at the door of his private chamber,
the chancellor on one side, the earl on the other. King Aggie handed to me the
gold coin for the pig’s throat. On the other side of the door, the princesses
were holding themselves up against the wall. Tomorrow, they would have to be
ready to wrangle pigs. Tonight, they proved to the servants which of them could
handle our strong ale. Again, it was hard to imagine a beauty who was also a
good drinker. There was one beauty among them and she had been wilting against
the wall when I entered the great hall. Each princess was given a key with a
boar’s head, made of a different metal, to correspond to the metal boar’s head
plate on the door of their respective rooms. Beyond bronze and gold and silver,
one had to have an eye for the metals, but there were also servants for the
job. There was a princess with a brass key, and another with bronze. One with
copper, and one long-legged princess with copper that had turned green. One
with a shade of gold that was too white, and another with no metal at all, but
a crystal boar’s head. I had known them for the space of hours, and it was
enough to know my own choice. King Aggie said nothing. He had also been through
this ritual too often. But he was right, to have that hunted look beneath his
wariness.
I accepted King
Aggie’s gold coin. We pretended there was ceremony. I passed the girls in the
hallway and went toward the door that led to the pig pen, to stuff a coin down
a throat. I made a detour to the kitchen on the way. It does not do good to
look like a drinker when carrying out royal business, but it was in the
business of royalty that I carried a mug of ale with me.
I went past the
servants in the garden, the servants in the stables, to the pig pen, where
eighteen piglets slept and digested their own dinner. I was alone, hidden, as I
climbed into the pen and seized one of them. Down his throat went the beer.
Into the centre of the frenzy went the pig. He would not soon sleep off this
alcohol. A princess would have to be quick in her reflexes to notice him
sleeping, and quick in her reflexes to jump to him in the middle of the pen.
Then, because I was savage, and valuable in carrying out the king’s business, I
put the coin down the pig’s drunk throat. I nudged him into the centre of the
pen. For good measure, I slit each of his legs, enough to paralyze him. King
Aggie was in for a resilient bride.
Text by Lucie MacAulay
Art by Adam S. Doyle
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