The school of magicians at the castle that practiced scientific research in secret had discovered many centuries earlier that there was a water-based bacterial infection in that bathtub that had caused Niton’s death, and the Chief Magician was among them. But, they never managed to have the courage to advise changing the coronation ritual for fear of losing their heads due to indulging in scientific explorations. The kings that weren’t assassinated within a decade of gaining the throne typically died of the complications related to that bacterial infection.
Once King Lohsa’s head was fully soaked in the bath water, the Chief Magician took a glass container of a magical oil and poured the entire bottle over the king’s head, rubbing it into the king’s scalp and covering his face with a thick layer. In older times, the Chief Magician used to smother the king with that oil all over his body, including the private parts, but a bit of molestation of the younger new kings by the Chief Magician during this intimate ritual led to oiling being confined only to the head.
Then, the Chief Magician’s assistant brought out a chalice of yksvy and King Lohsa gulped the entire cup down in moments. This made his body weightless and he floated up out of the tub, revealing his nudity again. A special magical shield was passed down and positioned at the edge of the tub. King Lohsa stepped onto it and it took off like a bullet. It slowed down when King Lohsa regained control of it, and he made three elegant loops around the ceiling of the Dome of Magic.
Finally, the king landed and he was given a red dress that signified the power of his reign to put on. Once it was tightened in place with an exterior corset by his servants, the Chief Magician brought out a gold-colored tray that held the four-moon earrings that were the official symbol of the king’s dominion over not only the continent of Kyllary, but also over the four moons circling the planet. All four had Kyllary magical exploratory outposts on them that staked them as belonging to the Kingdom of Kyllary. The Chief Magician cast a protective spell over these earrings to imbue them with the power to keep away hostile spells. The Chief Magician poked giant holes in King Lohsa’s ears to pierce them with a giant needle. Then he inserted the earrings, which were so large that they stretched the king’s ears until they doubled in length. The king cast a small pain-relief spell on himself before this ritual started, so that he did not squeal out in pain instead of portraying strength and power.
At the end a troop of knights came up and bowed on one knee to the new king, who lightly slapped the tops of their heads with his flying sword to rub some of the protective magic he was just saturated in onto them.
That evening, King Lohsa consummated his new power with an orgy that involved around thirty virgins that had failed to find a husband before they turned twenty and were sold by their families into the royal harem. After a pretty sedate and measured sexual existence, this sudden abundance of pleasure overwhelmed King Lohsa and the night soon stretched into a month of sexual excess, without much work getting done about running the kingdom. His supporters finally gathered to discuss this matter without him.
“He’s been fucking for a month now. He only emerges from that bedroom of his to eat or for a fly-around with the harem. He promised that we’d see a growth in profits, and instead we’re seeing an unprecedented slump. I say it’s time for us to choose a new king and get on with the next coup,” the commander that had just helped King Lohsa a month earlier demanded.
“We can’t just have a coup every month!” a magician said.
“Why not?!”
“Just the cost of the funeral and the coronation alone make a major dent in the budget. We’ve been knocking them off every few years. If we speed up the process to a monthly schedule, we’d be multiplying the expense of monarchical turnover by dozens.”
“Fair enough…”
“What we should do is find him a wife,” one of the king’s advisers said.
“A wife… for more fucking?!” the commander shook his head with consternation.
“No, a wife will cure him of his addiction to sex. Mine cured me,” the adviser replied.
“Yes, I think we’ve all stopped regular intercourse after our marriages, but who’d take him?”
“He’s not a bad-looking fellow, and there are more benefits to being the queen than king. The queen gets all the royal luxuries without the threat of certain assassination,” the magician commented.
“We should make solicitations with the top aristocratic families near the capital to see who’s available on short notice,” the adviser said, “if we’re going forward with it?”
The group agreed on this course of action and they sent out envoys to find suitable young ladies that could present themselves at court shortly for the king’s review. King Lohsa was presented with the idea by his adviser.
“Your Highness, how would you look at a ball being hosted at the castle that would feature the most beautiful young ladies in the region?”
King Lohsa thought for a moment about this proposal. He liked beautiful young ladies, he liked dancing, and he liked looking at beautiful girls dancing. “Sure, let’s have a ball,” he announced.
The ball was quickly thrown together, complete with floating decorations, the best aphrodisiac foods and drinks, and music-emitting fireflies that danced across the darkened ceiling in beautiful patterns. The ladies came dressed in their most luxurious tailored dresses, and shaped their hair into the most exquisite sculptures of beasts and plants from Laruta; this sort of complex hairstyling was fashionable in the court at the time.
The king reclined on the royal sofa that was positioned on a low stage in the center of the back wall, as the ladies filed in and were presented by their names and titles through the wide gilded entrance. They all began a complex dance where the ladies danced without partners in kaleidoscope-like formations with all of the other ladies. The king watched them, swallowing tiny red fruits that are difficult to describe to somebody that hasn’t seen a fruit on Laruta. The ladies were all pretty, but most of his harem girls were sexier, danced with more seductive power, wore makeup better, and otherwise were more arousing. Then, King Lohsa’s gaze focused on a seventeen-year-old girl swimming like a swan in a lake of ducklings. She had extremely long black hair, which she let loose, while the others had worked to restrain their locks. Her hair was swaying in waves down to her thighs, drawing attention to two perfectly elegant butt cheeks that displayed her love of riding a two-headed scaly beast that served the same purpose on Laruta as the horse on Earth. When she turned and faced the king, he was amazed by the enormous size of her black eyes, which seemed abnormally large like the rising moon or sun that’s oddly close to the horizon. Her features and her body were idyllic in every measure the king could’ve contemplated, and they created a unique image of perfected beauty that was only lustful showiness in the girls from his harem.
He stood up and made a small signal of the hand for her to come over and dance with him. She floated over to him, and he was hit with a wave of an aphrodisiac perfume that she had mixed in her home magic lab for the occasion. It made him swoon a bit as they took off in a rapid circling dance, and before long they floated up off the ground to have the entire open space above the dancers’ heads to entertain themselves with. The king dipped her, spun her, lifted her, and tossed her into an aerial spin across the space of the hall. They were both nimble dancers, as they both enjoyed vigorous physical activity. The chemistry was obvious to everybody present, and the king, who had not realized that the ball was intended to present him with potential wives, was suddenly so smitten that he proposed that very night by writing a long poem that detailed her beauty and other amazing qualities he discovered in her in their talk after the dance.
Ronela, for that was the girl’s name, received it in her mansion, where she was the duchess and heir of a large estate near Tur. She was impressed with King Lohsa’s complex poetical rhythm and rhyme, and she was easily flattered by his flowing admiration. She had spent her youth in intense studies with her tutors, and infrequently was
in public places where her beauty could be met with a courtship. This was her first public outing in search for a mate and she had immediately struck gold.
The following weeks were spent with the tailor to design a wedding dress that invented a fashion trend in aristocratic wedding design. Magicians worked tirelessly to concoct pastries that actually melted or turned into gases in the mouth, though the latter had less success as most of the cake’s nutritional value tended to evaporate out of the nostrils. Everything was thought of and planned, and there were schedules and sub-schedules and rescheduling and reworking, and an enormous amount of buying and acquiring that only King Lohsa’s coffers could withstand without collapsing, though they also trembled a bit, making his advisers doubt if a wife was less expensive than possession of a harem that did not require any formal ceremonies.
Finally, the wedding day came, and notices were sent to every aristocrat in the kingdom inquiring if they knew any horrid gossip about Ronela’s sexual past that might prevent King Lohsa from being able to marry her in accordance with their prudish, moralist magical doctrines. As usual, the monarchy received a few prank unaddressed replies that claimed that Ronela had slept with every goat herder and farmer on her estate, or that she had herself had sex with goats and horses, but since those came without just evidence, they were dismissed and Ronela was informed that she was fit to marry.
The wedding was held outside of the Dome of Magic’s closed doors, which signified Ronela’s virginal purity before the wedding night. There was a long list of questions the priest asked the couple, such as, “Do you promise to dutifully have intercourse nightly until one of you shall die?” and “Do you swear to cast magical love spells on each other regularly to keep the spark of love going, even long after it has died?” Some of these are typically written by one of the marrying parties for the other, while others are standard questions that are asked at every wedding ceremony. When finally this string of questions was over, the Chief Magician pierced both of their noses and inserted nose rings with a symbol in the shape of the continent of Kyllary. This was equivalent to what humans call wedding rings. Larutans just believe that jewelry that bounds somebody to a position or a person has to be more permanently attached to the flesh.
After the wedding, they had an enormous feast to which the general public was invited. The king, his court, distant family members, and aristocrats ate inside in the main dining hall. The peasants were fed at enormous outdoor tables that were flooded with magically summoned fish that flew out of rivers and seas and landed on the giant grills in front of these tables, where peasants could with a few flips prepare a fine dinner for themselves.
When everybody was full to the brim, most of the guests and peasants left, but a few chosen advisers and family members gathered around the king’s lightly curtained bed to observe the consummation of the marriage. There was a standard procedure that had to be followed with this segment of the festivities. The king and the new queen had to achieve sixty of the required sexual positions in the set-aside eight hours reserved for the task. Because of the deadline, the king did not bother with too much foreplay, though Queen Ronela certainly deserved such attention because of her extreme beauty. He once again threw off his robe and jumped onto the bed, where Ronela was taking off her own silky robe when he landed on top of her. After position forty, King Lohsa was a bit confused, trying to remember the next position that he hadn’t practiced with the harem that much, until he looked it up in the Guide to Complex Sexual Practices that he had by his bedpost. The night concluded just before dawn, and the exhausted couple fell onto their pillows for a long sleep. The guests that were watching the show had fallen asleep in their chairs hours earlier.
Chapter 2: Levies, Land, and Bondage
The first few weeks of the marriage were taken up with wild intercourse and trips to exotic locations across the continent, the sea, and the sky. The king and queen were flown around the most breathtaking sights in a carriage behind the two-headed lizard-like beasts that could be spell-bound into flight. They made magically induced ecstatic love on mountains, in flowery valleys, and even with an oxygen mask on atop the surface of the largest of the four moons. But after the honeymoon passed, and they had tried every wild fantasy they could imagine, they started to feel a void as if they were missing some ingredient in a potion they were brewing, and perhaps that ingredient was love beyond their immediate lust for each other.
When Lohsa started to feel his libido waning, just as his advisers expected, he became more interested in the country’s politics and economics, areas that had been neglected in the first months of his reign. While they were waiting for his interest to return, the advisers drew up detailed plans and presented them to him one evening during a meeting that included dozens of ministers, generals, and others that had gathered to support the plan they were pitching to the king.
“What we propose is asking people to pay levies on the land they own or lease from regional dukes or from the crown,” said Leop, a financial minister that had been in charge of running the numbers.
“Ask poor peasants to pay levies for renting land that they can barely afford paying for on the money they make growing magical or crop herbs, when they can barely afford paying the base amount? Why?” the king asked, puzzled at the motivation behind this technique.
“The goal is for the peasants to go bankrupt and to report that they cannot pay the required levies and fees.”
“Ha? Why would that help us? They’d default on their payments.”
“No. Defaulting is a very serious crime, and we can send them to debtor’s prison or execute them for it. No, they won’t default.”
“OK, but I still don’t see why paying to keep debtors in prison will benefit the monarchy.”
“We’ll present them with an alternative: bondage.”
“We’re going to spank them?”
“No. We propose a system where somebody in debt or starving can sell their souls and bodies into bondage to us, and then in return for basic shelter, food, and clothing, they will be obligated to do the jobs we assign them to for the rest of their lives.”
“You think people would willingly sell their souls and bodies for food.”
“Yes, we believe they would. We’ve run experiments that have shown that men who are near dying of starvation and those who are about to be executed for defaulting on their debt are willing to sign just about anything over to avoid these outcomes.”
“Let’s put it into action. Pen the details and I’ll sign on it,” the king agreed.
The new taxation system was put into place by sending messengers with the king’s decree to all parts of the kingdom on the two-headed flying beasts. Within a month of the announcement an army of levy collectors were sent out on similar vehicles to enforce the new laws. These knights came in enormous numbers and all were armed with both physical and magical weapons that terrified the peasants when they heard the sound of the hoofs of the feet of their stomping beasts. Peasants who were too poor to pay the levies were whipped on the first collection round. On the second round, spells were put on them that deprived them of one of their senses, or made one of their limbs inoperative. Then, on the third collection round, if they were still unable to pay, they were told that they had lost control of their farm or smith shop and were offered what became known as the Soul Contract, and if they failed to sign it, they were executed in dozens in the public squares. Regular executions convinced others to pay the levies or to sign themselves into bondage. When the king’s advisers saw these successes as their coffers were lined with gold, they added levies on the income of those that were not bound to land leasing, and were more reliant on the income from their jobs. Those were harder to put in bondage, but when income taxes were increased to fifty percent, many poor workers couldn’t afford paying for food and shelter at this margin, and took out loans that also quickly led them to debtor’s prison and through the collection rounds.
When money started rolling into the coffers in c
arts, the king decided it was time to build a new castle that would represent his power and opulence. The castle he inherited from his predecessor had been used by a dozen of the prior kings, and was refurbished, and slightly remodeled by each new king. Nobody had attempted building a brand-new castle in many generations because the lifetime of the king was a fickle thing and extravagant spending and wastefulness by the crown frequently led to a speedier beheading for the king. But, King Lohsa felt that his crown through the power of Niton that flowed through it fated him to a right to his people’s levies. He used the incoming funds to hire the best artists, architects, and magicians from the period, who worked tirelessly to design new patterns, structures, and chemical compounds that would make the most structurally sound and aesthetically pleasing castle that Laruta had seen to that date. Laruta’s architectural style in that period was similar to Earth’s medieval style, but the innovations the army that was put to this task came up with moved it ahead. The stones used were imbued with magical powers from the strange new potions the magicians came up with when they were funded to do nothing aside from enriching the lifestyle of the king.
The more money and human resources the king invested into the improvements to his castle, grounds, and wardrobe, the more frequently his advisers gathered at night to discuss the matter of the mismanagement of the funds that were supposed to trickle down into their pockets. When they brought the matter to the king’s attention, he increased their salaries and offered bonuses that corresponded with the volume of levies they brought in. This pacified them out of an immediate new coup and they sprung to the task of devising new levies and ways of collecting levies more efficiently and more expediently.
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The Kingdoms of Laruta: Book 1: Campaigns Against the Olden (Grim's Labyrinth Series) Page 2