by Mark Helprin
“It is, Freddy,” said the queen. “Now, will you please sit down?”
“I will sit down,” Freddy said, “but I will not take this sitting down,” and he sat down.
“Your Majesty,” Apehand asked, “is he a privy councillor?”
As the queen nodded, Mr Neil said, “Ha!”
“What do you mean, ‘Ha!’?” Pimcot inquired, coolly. “I know the list, and despite what Her Majesty has indicated, you, sir, are not on the list.”
“I, sir,” said Mr Neil, “am a councillor of the Witan, which gives me rank superior to that of a mere privy councillor.”
“The Witan?” asked Apehand.
“Mr Apehand,” the queen said, “Mr Neil is indeed a member of the Witan, and what he says is correct.”
“But the Witan,” Apehand held, restating anyway what everyone knew, “existed in the time of King Alfred.”
Mr Neil approached the leader of Her Majesty’s Opposition, and, in the most savage and unpleasant way, said, “You filthy peasant. I hate peasants. They smell, they stink, they know nothing, and all they have is appetite, like beasts.”
Needless to say, as a Labour politician all his life and a member in good standing of the Socialist International, Apehand took offence.
“You are a peasant elevated by accident of history from the dark earth into the high halls of Westminster, like a termite in the rafters. It is wrong that you participate in governance with knights, lords, and kings. One of the great sins of all times is that your power is greater than that of those who once possessed you. Dare you argue with me, stinking peasant?”
“At last,” said Apehand, “an honest Tory.”
“That’s hardly fair, Doyle,” Pimcot protested.
“Doyle?” Freddy asked. “I never knew his name was Doyle. Doyle Apehand?”
“It isn’t,” said Apehand. “It’s Vladimir Ilich, but Tories can’t pronounce it.”
“Look at you,” Mr Neil said. “Clearly, you are inferior. Your body is inferior. Short. Obese. Dark. Bandy legs. Ill health. Fleshy lips. Tufted eyebrows that are thick, gross, and black. You move so slowly that, in a quest, you would surely fail and die.”
Pimcot broke in. “And what about you, you spindly, bilious, malicious old bastard? Surely, you, too, would die in a quest, and how dare you insult my honourable friend, who represents the strength of Britain and its soul as much as I do, and, at times, when the people declare it, more so. The prince is right, Your Majesty,” he said, addressing Her Majesty. “Must we listen to this . . . this gentleman?”
“Oh!” said Mr Neil, “three against one! The prime minister, the leader of the Opposition, and the Prince of Wales. What am I to do?”
“Yes,” Freddy said, feeling that the moment was about to be his, “what are you to do?”
“As this is a democracy, of which all of you seem enamoured, why not put it to a vote, and if necessary I will break a tie?”
Certain that Fredericka would vote as he would, even were his parents momentarily enchanted, Freddy accepted. Apehand and Pimcot winced. As experienced politicians, before agreeing to a vote they reflexively would have polled, cajoled, and twisted arms.
Mr Neil framed the resolution: “A nay vote will deny me my rightful opportunity to speak—after all, I was invited, I graciously accepted, and I came a long way. An aye vote will express the confidence of this assembly in my powers and prerogatives. So?”
“I vote nay,” Apehand said, starting the process after conspicuously failing to insist upon a careful definition of what Mr Neil called his powers and prerogatives.
“Nay as well,” added Pimcot.
“Absolutely nay,” said Freddy, looking confidently at Fredericka.
“Aye,” said the queen.
“Aye,” said Paul.
And, “Aye,” said Fredericka.
“How could you, Fredericka?” Freddy demanded.
“He’s so nice, Freddy. It doesn’t matter what he says, he’s nice.”
“He’s nice? He’s a nasty son of a bitch.”
“No he’s not. You can tell from the story of the rabbits.”
“The story of the rabbits?” Freddy asked. “What rabbits?”
“Freddy,” the queen said, as if to a small child with conceptual difficulties, “we have been sitting here for two hours listening to the tale of Pacatooth the Rabbit.”
“We have?”
“Yes.”
“Pacatooth?”
“Pacatooth.”
“Have we?” Freddy asked the politicians. They nodded in the affirmative.
“I will now break the tie,” Mr Neil said, “by voting aye. Let us proceed.”
“I don’t understand,” Freddy said. “How can you presume to direct the assembled leaders of Great Britain, you, who work in a sex toy factory?”
“He does?” Pimcot asked. “I thought it was a joke.”
“I do,” volunteered Mr Neil. “Fascinating work. You see, I’m an old man whose powers are declining, and in place of them I want to know absolutely everything. I worked in a nuclear weapons factory, making warhead triggers. I was a baker. I am about to learn tree surgery.”
“You should study the history of democracy,” Apehand said.
“That, I have seen with my own eyes. It started here, you know. I’ve never liked it. I much prefer the idea of royalty menaced by threat.”
They had no idea what he was talking about, but Pimcot took him seriously. “What do you mean, ‘It started here’? It started in Greece.”
“Not quite,” said Mr Neil. “The Greeks had noble ideas but couldn’t put them into practice. We have from them mainly democracy’s name. The fact of democracy started on this exact spot.”
“What spot?” Freddy asked.
“Right here,” Mr Neil said, softer now, as if moved by his account—whatever it was—of the origins of the democracy he refused. “Here, with the Round Table.” He pointed to the floor.
“You mean, here at Windsor,” Freddy, ever the historian, corrected. “The Round Table was in the Round Tower, not here.”
“No,” Mr Neil said. “Because the Round Tower is round, people got it into their heads that the Round Table was there, but it wasn’t. It was here.”
“How do you know?” Paul asked, crisply, though not as a challenge.
“This is Winlesora,” Mr Neil answered, almost dreamily. “I know it well. Arthur chose it not because it was near the river, or because of the hill, but because it smelled so good. He rode here in late spring, in the company of Sir Gavin de Mildrep and Sir Gondred and Sir Gawain—he liked to do things like that, taking out three G knights at once—and when they were on the hill they smelled a marvellous perfume, from what plant they did not know, but it grew near the river and was fed by its waters, and every spring it made Winlesora heaven.
“The Round Table was right here; it was too windy up at the tower, too cold in winter. Arthur sat there,” he said, pointing to an empty space above the floor. “You, sir,” he said to Apehand, “are sitting where Sir Launcelot sat. That is why, perhaps, I was so severe with you. My heart was pained. I offer my profoundest apology.”
“What does this have to do with democracy?” Pimcot pressed.
“Because the table was round, everyone got the idea that he was the equal of the others, including even the king. That’s what started it. Arthur had endless troubles thereafter.”
“Why did he choose a round table, then?” Pimcot asked.
“He didn’t. It was an accident. He said to his carpenter, ‘Build me a table so big that I can sit around it with all my knights.’ The carpenter was a literalist, and when he heard the word around, democracy was born.”
“I need a drink,” Freddy said.
“Drinks for all,” Mr Neil proclaimed, and out from the shadows three extremely grubby, long-haired boys dressed in black and brown rags appeared with wine-glasses of chilled mead, six in all, and nothing for Mr Neil.
As they drank the wonderfully swe
et and cold mead, Mr Neil went on. “He was stuck with it, but because he saw that it was God’s will, he made the best of his trials. He was a king unlike any other. He was the king, rex quondam, rexque futurus, and when he died, Britain lost its shield, if only temporarily, for he still watches over it. He even grew to love democracy, and to practise it, didn’t he, Philippa?”
“Yes,” the queen affirmed.
“How do you know this, Mater?” Freddy asked, feeling as if things had moved far beyond his control.
“I knew him, Freddy,” the queen said, “and so did you, thank God.”
“You knew him?” Freddy asked. “I knew him?” He pointed to himself.
“Don’t you remember when he showed you the pistol he used at Omdurman?”
“Mother,” Freddy said, compassionately (Fredericka perked up), but as if the queen were insane, “that wasn’t Arthur, that was Churchill.”
The queen smiled gently.
“Oh God,” said Freddy. “You believe that Churchill was Arthur?”
“Once every thousand years or so, Arthur returns,” Mr Neil said, matter-of-factly, “but only when Britain is in mortal danger. I’m so sad now—no, I’m heartbroken—that he will not return for a millennium. You, Frederick, had the misfortune of being born at the end of his glory, but at least you had the privilege of knowing him, of being touched by his life. He was liveliness itself, greatness itself, and when he was in the world, the world was magnificent. But, when he died, the moths came out to eat the fabric of time.”
“Splendid,” said Freddy. “Very entertaining, fascinating—almost plausible. By the way, who were the boys who brought the mead?” He asked this of Mr Neil and his parents both, not knowing who would answer.
Mr Neil did. “That would be Swinebert, Borlock, and Chuffy the bastard of Sir Gavin de Mildrep. They assist me.”
“They assist you,” Freddy repeated dryly.
“Yes.”
“In the sex toy factory?”
“Naturally not, they’re too young. In my idyll they have little to do, and have spent most of their time in social intercourse with the street urchins of Naples. Unfortunately, I caught Chuffy the bastard of Sir Gavin de Mildrep smuggling cigarettes, so I made him run up and down Vesuvius twelve times.”
“Mr Neil,” Freddy inquired somewhat insanely himself, and certain that his mother was in the grip of a madman, “did you know Arthur?”
“Arthur Goldberg?” Mr Neil asked.
“No, the king.”
“The king?”
“Yes, the king. King Arthur.”
“It all depends on what you mean by know, what you mean by did, and what you mean by you.”
“What about the punctuation?” Freddy shot back mockingly.
“That, too. You can end a sentence with a barst, a frid, a sylapse, a dipont, or a teetingle, and unless you know what you’ve ended it with—which you cannot from mere speech—you cannot know what it means.”
“Did you know the first kings of England? I end that sentence,” Freddy said, throwing all to chance, “with a frid.”
“You don’t even know who the first kings of England were, so how can you ask such a question and end it with a frid?”
“I do indeed know who they were.”
“Oh no you don’t,” said Mr Neil, swinging his right leg to and fro like a pendulum, which seemed childlike and incongruous. “You think you do, but you don’t.”
“Pray tell, Mr Neil,” the queen asked, “if it is not who we think, who was the first king of England?”
“Gershwin, the Baby King, in the Age of Blue.”
“Do you mean George Gershwin?” Pimcot inquired, now happily stunned by his mead. “How could that be?”
“I don’t think his name was George. I don’t think he had a first name. It was thousands of years before Arthur.”
“Thousands of years before Arthur,” the queen echoed, delighted to hear this, as it deepened her pedigree.
“Thousands,” said Mr Neil. “Arthur was a newcomer, like all of you. But of the hundred kings or more before him, there had to be a first, and that was poor little Gershwin.”
“The Baby King,” Freddy interrupted, “but not George Gershwin.”
“The Georges came later, twit. Gershwin, just Gershwin. What is the matter with you people? Learn something, will you? Little Gershwin was just fourteen months of age when in the autumn (there were no calendars then) two hundred boatloads of Pontic and Fippian Norsemen beached at what is now Scarborough. Ten thousand warriors burned their way across England, filling the sky with heat and ash. The nobles and headmen of the time could not even conceive of an army that size. The biggest army in England was the forty-five-man force of Sir Bakwin De Muth.”
“How could Sir Bakwin De Muth have been a knight?” Freddy asked contentiously, “with no king to knight him?”
“I’m translating,” said Mr Neil. “His actual title was Lachpoof, and his name was Bachquaquinnik Dess Moofoomooach. I’m just updating the terms, much like expressing prices in current or inflation-adjusted sterling. Anyway, you can imagine the state of Bronks if Lachpoof Bachquaquinnik Dess Moofoomooach’s was the largest military force.”
“Excuse me?” Freddy asked. “The state of what?”
“Of Bronks, or, as they would have said then, The Bronks.”
“What was that?”
“That was the first name of England as a whole.”
“The Bronks?”
“Yes.”
“You mean like that awful place in New York, where I dedicated what I believe was called a Methadrone clinic?” the queen asked.
“How would I know?” Mr Neil asked. “I’ve never been there.”
“What language did they speak?” Pimcot asked.
“Bronksian Snep and Bronksian Chia,” was Mr Neil’s answer. “Often Snep and Chia were indistinguishable, as in Thumswak inchka entlama bisko frigadooka, which was exactly the same in both dialects, and which meant, in today’s parlance, ‘Ghastly bad luck that you’re so small and like not to bathe in the sea.’ ”
“Let’s keep this to ourselves, shall we?” Paul suggested. “Can you imagine what the Americans would do with it?” They all agreed.
“Gershwin,” continued Mr Neil, “lived with his parents on the Cornish cliffs. They were birds’-egg gatherers, and though the Norsemen had been burning their way across England for a month, they had not heard. One day, out of the blue . . . I should explain. Everything was much bluer then, and not only the sky and the sea. Most things that now are grey and brown were shades of blue and silver-blue. When the waves broke, they turned not white but lavender. Out of the blue, then, came the Norsemen. Gershwin’s mother hid Gershwin in the hay and ran toward the cliffs to warn the father, who was on his way back with an armful of eggs. Terrifying and leather-clad, the Norsemen, having come joyously to the sea, the end of their conquest, slew them more casually than if they had been animals.
“Knowing somehow of his parents’ deaths, Gershwin cried. The Norsemen heard him, came into the barn, and pulled him from the hay by one of his little legs. They took him out and laughed at him as he cried, holding him upside down, and swung him in a circle like a hammer. The one who did it, a giant in black leather and stud armour, thought it amusing, and so did the rest. As he swung the baby, now silent perforce, the Norsemen parted ranks so that he could move closer to the edge of the cliff. And when he was close enough, he twirled and twirled, and near the slain father and mother they laughed as he hurled Gershwin over the edge of the cliff high above the sea. The conquest of England was complete, they thought.
“But that was not so, for at that very moment, as the child hung in the air over the water far below, after England had been crossed and recrossed by savage armies that bled it deep and held it down, and no man would have dreamt that the conquest was not permanent, at that very moment, God turned His long-absent gaze to this island. And seeing a baby about to fall into the waves, He commanded everything that was
blue to rise. The waves tried to come up to the dizzying height of the cliffs to catch him, and blue haze and mists over distant strands rushed to his defence, but it was the blue sky that saved him, cupping him in a sapphire-coloured cradle that held him gravityless above the sea, and infilling his soul with kingliness.
“The silver-blue rocks begged to help, and from them came, at that instant, the kingly sword. It was the first sword known to man that was of bright steel and strong enough to break all others. It lay across the cradle of sky as the baby was comforted by visiting clouds. England had a king. He was, Madam, your first royal ancestor, and though the stories of his boyhood, youth, and reign are as great as one might expect, suffice it to say now that he found the very Norsemen who had slain his parents, and the very Norseman who had thrown him from the cliffs, and put them under his sword. Though they were in their old age, he was neither merciful nor slow, for at that time he was in the midst of reconquering England, which, with armies clad in blue, he did.
“He was Gershwin, the Baby King, the first king of England, crowned by God, in the Age of Blue.”
Freddy looked about. Fredericka was dabbing at her eyes. The queen breathed deeply in satisfaction. Paul seemed reflective and grateful. Pimcot, as usual, was hard to read. The only hope was Apehand, who had been called a stinking peasant, and who could not have been kindly disposed to Mr Neil. Freddy was not happy, however, to appeal to Apehand, who, after all, wanted to abolish him; who once, on the hustings in his constituency, had referred to Freddy as “that mindless royal pipsqueak who thinks he’s Pope Innocent the Tenth”; and who in private habitually referred to the royal family as the Romanovs-in-waiting.
“Mr Neil,” said Freddy, the voice of reason and restraint. “How do you know all this about Gershwin the Baby King? No one has ever heard of it.”
“Ask Chuffy.”
“Chuffy’s gone, it seems. I’m asking you.”
“No one living may have heard of it, that’s true.”
“Yes, well, then, how do you know? Is it written in some great source that until now has been hidden from historians?”
“No,” said Mr Neil, blinking like an owl.