Thus while the other men abandoned their companions to cluster round me and the President, jaws slack and mute adoration streaming forth in palpable waves, Ambrose watched, at first, with an expression of bored detachment. He stroked his chin as if in thought. The one stroke attracted another; those two strokes got together and bred a litter; that litter grew up, courted, had the banns read, married one another, and they and their offspring became obliged to move out, scattering hither and yon across the land for lack of space in the original abode. By the time the other men, still arrayed about me in benign sensual worship, had begun trickling drool from the corners of their open mouths, Ambrose had fetched himself up against a silver pillar and was rubbing his back on it fast and fiercely like a great gray bear, his face taut in an exquisite grimace and his knotted fists jammed into his thighs, straining not to scratch a much more private elsewhere.
“Ambrose Hinton, scratch thyself.”
Malory Hinton was straining not to laugh. She said:
“Queen Morgan, I would be most pleased to call you my ally, and I would be most grateful for your assistance with my re-election campaign.”
“Indeed, President Malory.” In all the years of our acquaintance from that moment onward, she never gainsaid my use of her title and Christian name; in fact, I believe she rather enjoyed it. “How may I assist you?” Malory’s usage of the word “campaign” had put me in mind of a war, and so I was expecting the typical requests: weather magic, the strengthening of troops and fortifications, the enhancement of spears and swords such that they might not grow dull so quickly through repeated use, sharpening archers’ eyesight, and the like.
Malory said, “I very much would like to put you in charge of the entire operation.”
Ambrose, recovered sufficiently that the last of his generations of scratchings had just about died off in their old age, scowled. “But what about Brad? I appointed him!”
The look Malory turned upon her consort could have frozen his soul; had I felt so inclined, I could have pushed it the distance for her. In retrospect, I should have granted us both that boon. “And you can fire him, too. He is an odious, petty little tin-plated dictator whose chronic detachment from reality and delusions of godhood have done nothing but given far too large a foothold to the opposition. I tolerated him for as long as I did only because you owed him a favor.
“Morganna Hanks—Queen Morgan—I name you my new Campaign Boss, with all the authority and responsibilities and privileges this duty entails!”
The one word I heard of the President’s proclamation was “Boss.” It echoed in the chambers of my brain until I thought it would drive me mad.
I sighed silently, recalling the second rule of queenship, but smiled and accepted the position.
Chapter VIII:
The Boss
THUS, HERE I was, vested with authority over hundreds; not the thousands I was accustomed to governing by my very hand, or the tens of thousands more in dozens of kingdoms big and small in which my fame and fear of my name loomed large, even unto the gates of the Holy City itself, owing to the questing of the Grail knights, Sir Percivale de Galis and Sir Galahad most notably—but ’twas a beginning. The rest would come soon enough, I reasoned; the price of patience stood as high as my yearning to return to my rightful era, but I could afford it. Without knowledge of the means by which my time-traveling enchantment was subverted to deliver me into this century—from Clarice I learned that Ambrose was responsible, but he kept as taut-lipped as a week-dead corpse about the matter—I could only bide my time and pray for the opportunity to learn more.
Mayhap, inquisitive reader, you wonder why I did not enchant the information from Ambrose and be done with it. I could have tried, of course, but I never could have been certain of whether he had spoken the truth. Interrogation enchantments are not altogether reliable. A person’s will to lie in defense of a secret grows ever stronger with the secret’s magnitude, and he will resort to all manner of true-seeming falsehoods and half-truths (which are in truth also half-lies) and schemes and trickeries to deceive his adversary. By my reckoning, the workings of Ambrose’s time-manipulation magic would require nothing less than an act of Our Almighty Lord God to shake out of his close-guarded tree; and while I perform my Christian oblations and obligations to the fullest extent required by the Church, as a dutiful daughter thereof, I am not so entirely self-deluded as not to realize that my—talents—and their exercise can bar even my most fervent prayers from being answered. By all rights, my soul should have been purified by fire long ago, as is commanded in the Holy Scriptures; but the practicality of the matter is that there exists not one mortal servant of God possessing the necessary fortitude to commit the deed himself, nor even a mob large enough and mad enough to overcome their collective dread of my powers to dare lay hands upon my person, and thus I ever continue within the vein that has guided my life. Since Our Lord has not seen fit to strike me down Himself (unless one cares to place my inadvertent time displacement onto the down-striking list), I adjudge myself to be safe…for now.
On Monday next, following a day to discharge my spiritual obligations as was good, right, and salutary inside the magnificent National Cathedral of Washington—attending all of the services throughout the day, from Early Holy Eucharist until Evensong, and in the betweentimes walking about, gazing entranced at the myriad statues and carvings and window-pictures wrought in vibrant glass and at the relics such as the True Moon Rock and the Holy Helmet of Darth Vader (whatever miracles Saint Vader had wrought, they must have been wondrous indeed for his helmet to have been preserved in all its shiny black glory), and after repairing to my private chambers to rest awhile and watch the premiere of the ninety-first season of a show featuring a bizarre little yellow family called “The Simpsons”—I received my first introduction to the city of Washington.
Other chroniclers have offered descriptions of this city throughout the ages. For the sake of expediency, I quote the most venerable of these chroniclers herein:
…Washington gathered its people from the four winds of heaven, and so the manners, the faces and the fashions there, presented a variety that was infinite…
It is winter, and night. When you arrived, it was snowing. When you reached the hotel, it was sleeting. When you went to bed, it was raining. During the night it froze hard, and the wind blew some chimneys down. When you got up in the morning, it was foggy. When you finished your breakfast at ten o’clock and went out, the sunshine was brilliant, the weather balmy and delicious, and the mud and slush deep and all-pervading. You will like the climate when you get used to it.
You naturally wish to view the city; so you take an umbrella, an overcoat, and a fan, and go forth. The prominent features you soon locate and get familiar with; first you glimpse the ornamental upper works of a long, snowy palace projecting above a grove of trees, and a tall, graceful white dome with a statue on it surmounting the palace and pleasantly contrasting with the background of blue sky. That building is the capitol; gossips will tell you that by the original estimates it was to cost $12,000,000, and that the government did come within $21,200,000 of building it for that sum.
You stand at the back of the capitol to treat yourself to a view, and it is a very noble one. You understand, the capitol stands upon the verge of a high piece of table land, a fine commanding position, and its front looks out over this noble situation for a city—but it don’t see it, for the reason that when the capitol extension was decided upon, the property owners at once advanced their prices to such inhuman figures that the people went down and built the city in the muddy low marsh behind the temple of liberty; so now the lordly front of the building, with its imposing colonnades, its projecting graceful wings, its picturesque groups of statuary, and its long terraced ranges of steps, flowing down in white marble waves to the ground, merely looks out upon a sorrowful little desert of cheap boarding houses.
[Excerpted from The Gilded Age: A Tale of To-Day by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner,
1873, Chapter XXIV, written by Mark Twain as documented in his letter to Dr. John Brown, Feb. 28, 1874; public domain.]
Thus, my aforementioned assumptions regarding Hinton Tower proved correct: Ambrose plied his trade from the flying fortress, but Malory did not, instead resorting to a paltry old earthbound dwelling called, not very creatively, the White House. It was white, and it was a house, and not much more even now, two centuries after the chronicle I quoted was written; this not-kingdom called America enjoys a long tradition of belittling its rulers’ abode and the city wherein it lies. There is nothing more I can add, except the observation that if clothes make the woman, and if said woman is a ruler of people, her abode by necessity makes the realm. Small castles exert very little influence upon invading armies.
The primary difference in the outlook of the city itself lies in the fact that the mud no longer exists, having been replaced by roads surpassing the quality of work performed by the Romans themselves. As in Rome of old—and in my Britain, where the Romans deigned to build a few—every one of these roads exists in a perpetual state of decay and repair, no doubt as a ploy to control the flow of traffic throughout the city, and to keep a battalion of workers occupied forever.
For this chronicle I make further note that I include the quoted references to the winter weather of Washington, in spite of the fact that my first introduction thereto occurred on a mild day in early autumn, because in two centuries that aspect had not changed either, as I would discover in the ensuing weeks as autumn blazed red, crumbled to brown, and blew away beneath winter’s onslaught. It became my foremost priority as Campaign Boss, therefore, to correct this dire oversight of nature, for who can regard with any degree of serious intent a ruler who governs from such a place wherein its weather behaves as chaotically as its people? This magic, as with all my enchantments, I wrought in secret; and if any one ever chanced to observe me smile at his mention that the winter of 2079–80 in Washington was the most pleasant in living memory, he would merely think me appreciative of nature’s mercies.
The chambers wherein I was to conduct my affairs as Campaign Boss were situated in Hinton Tower below Ambrose’s own. Of course as queen I am quite unaccustomed to occupying any position below any other person, with the single exception of my half brother Arthur the King; but since Ambrose was the President’s consort, I conceded him those chambers without further contemplation of removing him from them. If the conduct of his affairs at times grew noisome and annoying enough to intrude upon my travails, ’twas naught to remedy with a simple silencing spell, ofttimes mid-moan.
The only time Ambrose’s path ever crossed mine longer than a few moments, now and then, while entering or exiting Hinton Tower, was upon that first day, when at the President’s command he arrived at campaign headquarters for the purpose of dismissing the Campaign Boss whom the President had appointed me to replace.
When I, flanked by Ambrose and Clarice, stepped into the outermost of what would later reveal itself to me as a mazelike suite of chambers, I saw a portly little man engaged in the unabashed verbal assault of a second man, with other men and women arrayed about, looking on while others were attempting to appear busy and therefore not looking on; yet even these folk could not help but listen to the grotesque display of audible abuse being suffered by their companion.
Ambrose did not intervene.
At length the portly man stopped, noticed our presence,—rather, he noticed Ambrose’s presence and did not deign to greet me with so much as a single nod—and left his victim to gather his (the victim’s) few personal items from his desk, slump-shouldered and dejected, while he (the short portly man) strode toward us to bid Ambrose a hearty welcome.
Although Ambrose commanded the portly man to accompany him to a private chamber, thence to conclude the mission with which his wife had charged him without others to bear witness, I derived satisfaction from the withering of the odious little man’s grin as he observed Ambrose’s grim countenance and even grimmer greeting. Since I well knew the nature of Ambrose’s mission, I did not trouble myself magically to listen to his intercourse with the portly man, but instead inquired of Clarice what I had witnessed. I would have questioned the portly man’s victim, but he had already departed campaign headquarters. Clarice said:
“Oh, that? It’s been a long time in coming. Dirk and Brad never had much liking for one another, but Dirk has always been an exemplary worker. However, last week Dirk dared to question Brad’s leadership skills in front of the President. Brad was not present when Dirk made his remarks and so did not learn about them for several days. Doubtless Brad chose this time and place for his revenge upon Dirk for maximum public humiliation. What you witnessed was Brad not taking kindly to Dirk’s criticism.”
“Was that criticism warranted?” I suspected the answer, for this man called Dirk had a countenance even through the sorrow of his suffering which proclaimed honesty, loyalty, and courage. Portly Brad, in contrast, conveyed the arrogant, grasping, greedy, covetous aspect of one who wishes not one jot less than to see all he controls and control all he sees. While someone in whose veins flows royal blood is justified in sacking a subject for a minor offense, it was clear to my eyes that this Brad not only was not of the blood royal, he possessed no more scruples than an alley cat; and cats, at least, grant the favor of a warm purr when it suits them.
Clarice nodded in reply, but before she could say more, the door swung open and a scowling Brad emerged and raked the curious crowd with a glare that commanded their immediate return to their tasks, which they did with alacrity bordering on outright panic. Brad stomped into his private chambers, slammed the door, causing pictures to leap off the walls and dash themselves to pieces on the floor to escape his wrath; and it took no invocation of magic to hear the subsequent angry thumpings and bumpings, punctuated by the occasional loud, vulgar oath, as he assembled his personal effects.
Ambrose cleared his throat and commanded the workers’ attention. The words no sooner had flown from his mouth that I, “Morganna Hanks,” was to replace Brad Ratcliffe as Campaign Boss than a burst of applause and cheers engulfed the chambers, rattling the rafters. Brad was obliged to cross the distance listening to the din grow ever louder and more joyous even as his scowl deepened and darkened. Clarice stopped him before he could escape through the door. She said:
“Brad Ratcliffe, for the evils you’ve inflicted upon Dirk Deadlee and everyone else to salve your wounded pride, I do not wish for you ever to fare well in this world again. I bid you fare poorly now and forevermore, for this is what your habitual ill conduct has earned. I know the overweening pride in your heart prevents you from perceiving that you have wrought any wrongdoings whatsoever. My prayer is that one day you’ll awaken from your insanity of rabid self-delusion, remember my words, and repent.”
A formidable curse, indeed, and I harbored no doubt that it would perform its intended function; so I told Clarice after Brad Ratcliffe had taken his leave without deigning to reply. He possessed neither grace enough nor wit enough to appear the least bit chagrinned at her pronouncement.
“That was the very least I could do,” Clarice said with a sigh. “Dirk is a good man. He knew this job better than any of us. And did Ratcliffe ever acknowledge his accomplishments? No, he repaid Dirk with unfounded accusations, bald-faced lies, and malicious rancor. The President should have known better than to trust anyone whose name begins with ‘Rat.’”
’Twas all the endorsement I required. In my first official act as Campaign Boss, I dispatched Clarice to locate Dirk Deadlee and fetch him back to these chambers for to be a close adviser of mine. I am pleased to report his acquiescence to my request, and even more pleased to report that he served me faithfully and well, as I knew he would, through our ensuing years together.
Hinton Tower had the virtue of being a dragon hop from the White House whenever I felt the need to confer with Malory in the flesh. Clarice and Dirk and their companions made much boastful noise about their communication devices, a
nd these devices wrought wondrous magic, allowing persons to see and speak with each other across vast distances; but even such wonders as these provide no suitable substitute for a personal meeting. Not to mention the fact that decision-manipulation magic becomes diminished by distance.
Did I ever cast manipulative magic upon Malory? As Our Lord God Almighty stands ever my witness, I did not. My official duties as her Campaign Boss entailed governing sundry enclaves of minions charged with tasks such as arranging the myriad details of the President’s schedule of public appearances, accompanying the President during those appearances, monitoring opinion polls and research into the opposition, obtaining and evaluating information from campaign offices scattered throughout the land, bribing voters through the establishment of jobs and the bestowing of royal boons that in this century are called “federal grants,” and granting other such favors to an ungrateful and undeserving populace. Unofficially, I was constantly working my magic upon the public to show them to be both grateful and deserving, as to be demonstrated by the casting of their votes in the election of November 2080. In a land of half a billion inhabitants, it was a prodigious lot of magic to cast. I had by force of necessity to make certain concessions: to the opposing candidate I gave Alaska, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Guam, the popular Virgin Islands, the Bahamas, Jamaica, and Cuba, those states being the outliers (however attractive their lands might be), and by population not terribly significant to the cause. Bermuda, another insignificant state, I reserved for Malory for purely sentimental reasons, said state having once been a British protectorate and still retaining much of its ancient charm; throughout the winter I cultivated a fondness for Bermuda’s pristine beaches and clear waters teeming with turtles and fish and sunken ships and drowned silver dragons; thus I could not bear to visit those blessed islands thinking that Bermuda’s denizens might not wish to vote in favor of the re-election of President Malory Hinton.
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