The Apocalypse, Almost

Of course, the end of the world loomed close more than once an era. Commoners really had no idea how close they’d come to the end and how many times they had. The kings always felt a little bad for letting it slip this close without appealing to the gods for some sort of saving, but they found that despite the economic consequences, there was always a rise in the approval of the people when the king stepped up to offer food, housing, blankets, alcohol- anything to help them get through the apocalypse. Ajax didn’t care much for approval, and the apocalypse had really only gotten so close to happening because he’d skipped his trip to the temple to watch Twin Peaks from the living room couch. This was a pitiful thing to do with his night, he thought. What was even more pitiful was the fact that no one could seem to come up with a better alternative. There were things and people to do, but he’d done them all. Not the people, but enough to tire. He always had more options, but here he was. Twin Peaks. He was on the second episode.

He knew, in the way that he only gave half of his attention to, that the apocalypse was coming. He didn’t want to offer to help. He wanted to be called upon. But this was the downside to commonor ignorance. Having never looks the end of the world in the face, they did not know exactly how desperate they should let circumstances get before they called upon him for help. They might wait to see the state of the next dawn before they asked him, and the next dawn might not even come. He couldn’t quite tell if it would. He’d only just seen Laura’s father burst into tears.

Kaylin was not in the mood to hear it when she phoned. She was also impervious to his apologies, even when there was a speckle of sincerity on them. Kaylin, he also thought, was not her name. He thought this every time she came to see him. But no ruler ever went by their first names in public. Partially because it was only members of the royal family and the gods that could speak them, and partially because they did not necessarily want to say them. They tended to accumulate (depending on where you were from) unnecessary vowels, or unflattering consonants. Ajax was not his real name either, but his name was made for someone with three tongues and a lot of time on their hands to say. It had left his mother sweating to say it in its entirety. One day, some royal relative’s name would anger the gods and bring about an entirely separate apocalypse. No amount of prayer made by any royal family would help. Kaylin, or whatever her name was, told Ajax that he’d been putting off saving the world again because he wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to live in it.

“I beg to differ,” Ajax replied. He was in a silk robe. He’d gotten it from an eastern country, imported, and it had cost him as much as it would have to feed one of the villages in his kingdom for a month. But it was a beautiful shade of seafoam green that a common girl had once told him made his green eyes look luminescent. This was the sort of thing to him that seemed celestial, godly. Kings liked godliness and despised it. There was only one step between kings and gods, but as kings did not have supernatural powers, it was not a step that could be overcome. The flattery and his luminescent eyes were as close to magic as Ajax was going to get.

Kaylin made a gloriously resentful noise on the other end of the line. “You don’t beg for anything. What did your last slave die of anyway?”

This was because Ajax had suggested Kaylin end the apocalypse instead of hm. Sovereigns did not like to pray in the place of others, and it wouldn’t make him look very good in front of the gods. He cared more about how he looked in front of Kaylin than the gods. Ajax wold have apologized, but his father had taught him that kings did not apologize. They did not make mistakes, or commit misdeeds worth apologizing for. Beside, Ajax didn’t really wish for the earth the fold under a rain of asteroids or boil under a sheet of molten rock from a sulfurous explosion. It was just that he didn’t want to put in the effort to stop it.

“Don’t answer that,” Kaylin said. “For goodness’ sake. What is it, anyway? Flu, I heard. I’ll go ask them to stop it.”

He told her how nasty the flu was. What the gods wanted for it. Kaylin snorted.

“This is something you could have fixed a week ago,” she told him. “If it had taken out any of my kingdom you can bet I would be asking the gods to contain it just to your country. I’ll take care of it, I don’t mind. No, really. And you’re welcome. Which temple?”

He told her.

Kaylin snorted again. “I’ll let you know when it’s done.”

Ajax didn’t care much for correspondance, but: “Come over. Let’s do something. One of those unity between nations, things. We’ve done nothing but praying for ages.”

Kaylin hung up on him. She didn’t call him back, but the flu receded. In between episodes of Twin Peaks, Ajax checked the news. The number of cases coming into the hospital had slowed to a trickled, then ceased all together. The flu could not be caught from contaminated bodies. Patients were already making a remarkable recovery. The flu was fleeing from the respiratory system as the news caster spoke. Ajax had little to do but watch Twin Peaks again. The gods might be upset with him, but they’d been negotiated with. He was both bored and wary of truly forcing himself into action. How many people had the gods been planning to take out with that flu?

A few day later, Kaylin’s entourage was knocking at the door and holding it open for her when she stepped inside. She stepped all the way inside, to the private reception chambers. Ajax shooed everyone outside. He didn’t like anyone except himself getting ogled in the private reception chambers. But Kaylin was lovely, with dusky, dark skin and lips the colour of squid ink. She had eyes as yellow as a wild cat’s. She looked furious and deadly.

“Were you wearing that when I called?” she asked, narrowing her eyes at his seafoam robe. “How bored are you?”

Ajax pulled his robe tightly around himself. He felt that this moment was a misrepresentation of his natural glory. The chamber itself was a bit of a mess with papers and several cups of coffee from different nations. He thought he liked something from Asia, or a blend from Africa. It was interesting to put different flavours of dirt in your mouth. He offered her a cup of flavoured, hot dirt and reminded her that if she wanted to drink from a clean mug she had to call for one herself, and then fix the coffee maker herself. He had someone who usually did it for him, but he’d sent them out. Kaylin took one of his pre-existing mugs and topped it up. She sat on a daybed and eyes the seafoam robe. Ajax opened his eyes wide, so she could see how luminescent they were.

“You can’t wear that,” Kaylin said.

Ajax looked down at himself. “I certainly can. I have evidence right now that I can.”

“You can’t wear that out.”

“Out? Outside? Where to?”

Kaylin said, “You said you wanted to do something unifying.”

Ajax did want to do something unifying, just without the rest of the court. The rest of the court wasn’t present, though. While Kaylin sipped her transcontinental coffee, he went in search of proper outdoor robes. As a king, he had a plethora of robes to choose from. As Ajax, nothing was what he wanted to wear. Kaylin turned her head while he changed in and out of one and another. The country ran itself outside and Ajax finally settled on something embroidered with winged snakes and man-eating flowers. It was resplendent, even if it wasn’t seafoam. It was the fourth most expensive robe in his closet, but this was a special occasion.

Kaylin looked back at him three hours later. She’d dumped the contents of each coffee cup down the sink and found his liquor. She was drinking either red wine or watered down blood when she assessed his outfit. “Somewhere no one knows us, then.”

“Is it too much?” Ajax said. “I can tone it down.”

“I really don’t think you can,” Kaylin said. “It’s fine. Let’s just go.”

Outside, in Ajax’s kingdom, he took stock. He sometimes forgot that this was the kingdom he’d chosen to create, from his father’s. All choked with people, cars, stray cats and dogs. Every alley branched off into a warren of alleys, thin as corridors. Everywhere, people of different colour, race, religion, gender, tunneled and dispersed. Ajax had been enchanted by the multiculturalism of it once, but that was the state of the world, now. And people were really no different. Not to kings. They shred this with gods. The commoners looked like a frantic population that did not share a common goal with Ajax. He could not exactly tell any of them apart.

It was a girl that caught his eye. Kaylin’s too. Not because the girl was beautiful or he particularly desired her. Though she was beautiful. But she was young, with a china-doll face and huge black eyes, and a skein of silky golden curls down her back. She was tossing her ball quite close to a fountain. The fountain was deep and the ball heavily weighted. Kaylin and Ajax both knew a story when they saw one. The gods loved stories like this, and kings liked to make them happen, with a little help from the gods. It was easier when a god was the direct subject of a story, but surely one of them was willing to give a hand here. Ajax prayed and, when the girl tossed her ball into the fountain and broke into tears, watching it sink, a frog leapt onto the fountain’s edge to offer its services. It had a voice and a personality. Making it human would be a little trickier, but the kings and the gods had time. Really, if it was speaking full sentences to the girl, it was halfway to human already. The girl had to take the frog home, first, and who knew where that was anyway?

Ajax fetched a samosa and a couple vadas and trotted happily back to Kaylin. It was a little obvious that he was pleased with himself. A king’s happiness was almost never out in full force, but his was right now. He turned it accidentally on a poor passerby, who tripped and spilled her trundle buggy of produce. A god melted in the sky, reminded of why they were so fond of humans, and why they cared for them at all in the first place. Kaylin, beside him, was reminded too, in a way that bothered her. Particularly because she knew this story too. The gods loved romances that spanned countries or conflicts. So several were made happy when she leaned forward to kiss Ajax.

Ajax had not been kissed by her before. He’d kissed many of his own subjects, brought to him by his face or the gods’ will, not by a phone call. He felt warmed by several degrees, like a polar ice cap melting. He was sure something had gone wrong with him. Everything had gone sharp at the edges for a moment. The streets and the faces, like it had been when he’d only been his father’s son, before he’d inherited the kingdom. There were hundreds of stories to tell in this square. He need only insert himself in one to know the rest of it.

“That felt more like the apocalypse than anything,” Ajax said.

“Well, keep an eye out,” Kaylin said.

Art by Maja Wronska

Text by Lucie MacAulay