by R W Sowrider
Frank beamed down at Rowen who managed a weak smile in return.
“Oh, and I have a delightful present for you,” Frank said, fetching a ceramic jar from a side table. “It’s your precious treasures. We’ve preserved them in alcohol so we can bury them with you when you die. And then when you’re reborn into your next life, you’ll be whole again.”
***
As the birthday celebration that followed the imperial coronation was coming to a close, Frank took Rowen aside. “I’ve got wonderful news,” he said, eyes sparkling.
“What is it, Your Excellency?”
“I’m appointing you scrivener to the imperial cherry-popping. As you can imagine, it’s quite the honor and I’m happy to bestow it upon you.”
“Thank you very much, Your Excellency. But I don’t quite follow.”
“You will have the distinction of recording the first time the Emperor of China has intercourse. You simply watch and write down everything that happens.”
“Oh. … Thank you very much.”
Frank could hardly contain his delight. “And there’s more.”
“More?”
“Yes. I’ve chosen as my counterpart …” Frank held his breath as he gave Rowen the quintessential wait-for-it look. “Xera!”
Rowen’s heart dropped through his chest. “Xera?”
“Yes. Since you can’t have sex with her yourself, I figure the next best thing is for you to watch me do her.”
“…”
“While taking notes.”
“…”
“I was a little surprised about the notes thing myself, but according to the Queen Dowager, it’s something that must be done. Something about a scientific method to increase the imperial fertility ratio. Regardless, it’s win win win.”
“…”
“You get to see Xera in all her carnal glory. Xera gets the honor of being the Emperor’s first. And as long as Xera doesn’t fuck everything up, I get to sire an heir to the throne.”
“…”
Frank apparently mistook Rowen’s jaw-dropping shock for elated astonishment. “Isn’t this great?! The perfect way to commence your service to the crown.”
“…”
“I’ll see you in the Chamber of Bumping Uglies in 10 minutes.”
***
Despite failing his first assignment (Rowen’s notes on the lightning-quick love-making session consisted of: “Awkward. Awkward. Awkward. Oh My God, he’s hurting her!!!”), Rowen soon became a valuable advisor, and as the two boys matured into intelligent men, their successes mounted.
In addition to abolishing feudalism, they replaced hereditary rights with a meritocracy, standardized units of measurement, had networks of roads and canals constructed, and created a common currency and writing system.
When times were good, Frank would summon Rowen and a handful of gorgeous concubines to the Garden of Supreme Harmony and Intoxication where they would indulge in an artistic drinking game.
Floating along the gentle stream that meandered through the garden were cups of wine. If a cup stopped in front of you, you had to compose a haiku for the group. If the haiku displeased the emperor, you had to down the cup of wine.
Regardless of whether they were chugging wine in defeat or sipping it at a leisurely pace, the group would always give thanks and praise to Dionysus for the blessing.
As such, Dionysus greatly enjoyed witnessing the amusing events and when Yahweh expressed an interest in the region, he brought him to one as well.
“Life grows inside me
It kicks my belly with force
It must be a son”
“I like the sound of that,” Frank said to Xera when it was her turn to recite a haiku. “But since the first two children you bore me were female … Drink!”
“Garden of beauty
Full lips, breasts, and curvy hips
Care for a handshake?”
Frank burst out laughing at Rowen’s poem. Almost nothing delighted him so much as Rowen’s self-deprecating humor with respect to the frustration of being surrounded by beautiful women but not being equipped to do anything about it.
“That’s rich,” Frank said. “It makes me laugh, but it also makes me a tiny bit sad … so Drink! Chug it down in honor of the almighty Dionysus.”
Rowen obliged as a pair of elegantly dressed concubines comforted him.
“Well, these full lips will always be here to give you smooches,” one of them said, rubbing against him and stroking his cheek.
“And these full lips will always be here to tell you how fat you’ve been getting,” the other one said, patting his ever-expanding belly .
While Dionysus of course enjoyed the game immensely, particularly the praise, Yahweh was overcome with jealousy. When it was time for the next haiku to be delivered by a lovely young concubine, he took control of the words leaving her mouth.
“Don’t forget Yahweh
Let us praise and bless His name
He is the one true God!”
“Drink!” Frank said in disgust. “Not only do we not know or care what you’re talking about, but the last sentence had six syllables. So gulp that down in shame, you half-witted monkey fart.”
Yahweh, needless to say, was not pleased.
In retaliation, he caused the Mongolians to the north of China to launch a series of raids so devastatingly brutal that anyone within 50 kilometers of the border who had not been raped or killed lived in constant fear of being so.
Completely clueless as to how to prevent further raids and at wit’s end, Frank and Rowen decided to consult an oracle. They would ask the Gods for guidance to once and for all put an end to the barbarian raids.
The process was as simple as it was obvious.
They asked the diviner a clear-cut question: “How do we protect ourselves from the savages to the north?”
Next, the diviner carved the question into the back of a tortoise shell and placed it into a blazing furnace until it cracked.
Lastly, the diviner interpreted the response by reading the cracks and writing the answer on the underside of the shell.
At the precise moment that the shell hit 68°C, Apollo—God of Light, Prophecy, and Skinny Punks—gave his reply:
If you build it, they will stop coming .
The instant that Frank and Rowen read the response, they knew exactly what must be done.
A Great Wall!
“Perfect!” Frank said, a spark in his eye. “And you know what?! We’ll make those rapist barbarians pay for it!!!”
Rowen furrowed his brow. “I’m afraid that just doesn’t make any sense. I mean you no disrespect, Your Excellency, but while I have heard you say a lot of insanely idiotic things, this achieves a new level of stupid. If you inbred blobfish for a thousand years, the resulting blobfish would not be able to even conceive of anything so dumb, let alone say it out loud. Why in the world would our enemy pay for a wall to keep them out?!”
“Trust me,” Frank said with a self-satisfied smile. “They’re gonna pay for this wall.”
***
While it was undeniable that having the Mongolians pay for the wall was an ideal solution, and while Frank maintained throughout construction that it was indeed the Mongolians who were paying for it, in practice, it was the Chinese themselves who paid the price.
Not only with their time and labor, but very often with their lives.
As to be expected, it was not easy to build an impenetrable wall with watchtowers every few hundred meters along an inconceivably long, treacherous border that extended through plains and precipitous mountains alike.
In fact, it was an unimaginably long and costly endeavor.
When possible, they procured raw materials from the immediately surrounding area, but more often than not, they had to transport the materials from far away on the backs of soldiers, peasants, and livestock.
Despite utilizing such technological wonders as wheelbarrows and rope, the amount of manpower necessary was a
stounding.
As such, Emperor Frank decreed that all males who were unable to pay a hefty Compulsory Labor Exclusion Fee, or a get-out-of-wall-building fee as it was commonly referred to, were required to donate two years of service to the effort.
In general, the construction consisted of building the sides of the wall with heavy stones and durable bricks, and then filling the space between with packed earth.
While the labor in-and-of-itself was extremely grueling, the harsh conditions were magnified by the fact that Frank was in an outrageous hurry to finish. Many surmised that the main reason behind this was that he was eager to have an everlasting symbol of the greatness of the man behind it, the Son of Heaven.
As a result, workers were often whipped and beaten when overseers deemed their effort to be lacking. It was not uncommon for them to drop dead of exhaustion, if not blunt force trauma.
In such cases, the corpse was simply dropped into the packed earth that filled out the inside of the wall.
“Why waste resources,” Frank said. “Let them continue to serve their glorious empire.”
So as the number of sons who failed to return home increased, so too did the number of distressed letters from grieving parents.
And as the number of farmers who struggled to feed their families grew due to the high taxes, so too did the seeds of civil unrest.
“We have a serious problem,” Rowen said one day to Frank as they strolled through the Garden of Sublime Wisdom.
“Oh, please,” Frank interrupted. “I’m not in the mood to hear any more depressing updates about the wall.”
“But Your Excellency,” Rowen persisted. “Just yesterday, I encountered another grieving mother outside the Gate of Heavenly Peace. She was crying hysterically, tearing off bits of her ragged clothes, and bashing her forehead against the ground.”
“Really, Rowen?! Is there nothing you can do other than rain on my parade?!”
“But Your Excellency, what’s the point? With thousands upon thousands of our boys dying, who are we trying to protect?!”
“Me,” Frank snapped back, before realizing that this might not be an appropriate reply. “The state. We are protecting the state. You need to look at the big picture. We are losing a few drops of blood from our pinky finger to protect our entire body. To protect our heart and our soul. And to sow the seeds of future prosperity.”
As the confrontation reached a head, the two noticed what looked to be a vagrant charging headlong at them. He was screaming obscenities and brandishing a rusty blade above his head.
Never before had the walls of the Forbidden City been breached, and as such, the scene so confounded Frank and Rowen, that rather than flee for their lives, they stood as still as statues, mouths agape.
When it finally dawned on Frank that he was mere moments away from having his throat slit, he screamed in horror and soiled his drawers.
Yahweh, watching from Verixion, was pleased.
The vagrant, however, was tackled just short of Frank by a steadfast guard and before long he was being pummeled by a mob of them.
“Guard,” Frank said as the beating subsided. “Have this man explain himself.”
“What in God’s name were you doing?” the guard asked .
“I was trying to put an end to His Majesty’s life,” the man said, scowling at Frank.
“Why on earth would you do that?” the guard asked.
“Because he is the bane of our existence.”
“How dare this piece of street garbage speak of me this way,” Frank said to the guard. “Give him a taste of the cane.”
“Because we live in filth,” the man continued through grimaces as he endured a barrage of blows to the ribs, neck, and head. “… while you live in luxury. We are unable to scrounge enough food to eat. All the crops we grow are taken as taxes. We have nothing.”
“I do not believe my ears,” the guard said. “If you are so miserable, why didn’t you just kill yourself? How dare you bring your problems to the Forbidden City.”
“Well said,” Frank concurred. “If he thinks he had it bad before, he has no idea what the penalty for treason is. I sentence him to death by Surgical Incision Extravaganza.”
Frank punctuated his proclamation by hocking a massive loogie in the man’s face. Then he turned to Rowen and gave him a your-turn look.
While Rowen obediently spat at the man’s feet, he took comfort in that fact that his spittle contained no phlegm whatsoever.
Frank beelined it for the nearest Chamber of Heavenly Bowel Relief to take care of some unpleasant business, but managed a smile as he visualized the punishment that the deranged criminal would receive: a meticulous surgical procedure where his body would be slowly carved up in such a way that his vital organs remained intact, ensuring that the torture would last as long as possible.
***
When times were bad, Frank would summon Rowen and a throng of gorgeous concubines to the Garden of Supreme Harmony and Intoxication to drown his sorrows in wine and haiku.
Not too long after the assassination attempt, Frank had a case of the blues and was recounting the many reasons when the cup landed on him.
“Two little brothers
Too many eyes on the throne.
Two more fresh dirt homes.”
“To my poor little half-brothers,” Frank said while pouring half of his wine on the ground in tribute. “And to the supreme deity Dionysus,” he finished, holding his cup in the air before downing the other half.
Dionysus, watching from within the courtyard, was pleased.
“It was a great tragedy,” Rowen said, sympathetically. “But it was a necessary tragedy. There was nothing else that could be done, Your Highness, so do not beat yourself up about it.”
It was clear to everyone that the father of Frank’s half-brothers, and maybe even the Queen Dowager herself, wanted Frank out of the way so that the little brothers could reign. While Rowen was reluctant to shed blood, there was little else that could be done to extinguish the threat, so he had advised in favor of doing so.
As he did his best to comfort Frank, the ravishing concubines at Rowen’s sides clung to him.
“You are so sweet,” one of them said, staring at him almost dreamily.
“I could just eat you up,” the other said as she placed a hand on his enormous belly. “It may take a couple of years,” she continued, laughing. “But I swear I could just eat you up.”
Frank smiled. A rare occurrence when playing the game in a melancholy mood .
The next time the cup landed on him, Frank turned his attention to the women in his life.
“Mother bore treason,
Xera bore only daughters,
Betrayal bred goodbye.”
Frank again poured out half of his wine in tribute to the Queen Dowager and Xera, then chugged the other half in honor of Dionysus.
Rowen was aware that the Queen Dowager had been banished to a remote village in the corner of China. In fact, it was he who had advised Frank to do so. It was all he could do to save her life when Frank was convinced that his mother too conspired to see his half-brothers on the throne.
However, he was not aware that Xera had been banished and hearing the news was a shock. It almost felt like a dagger piercing his heart. Fortunately, he knew where to find her.
The third time the cup landed on him, Frank turned his attention to the topic that was most on his mind these days.
“A bum with a knife
Threatened my crown and my life
You too, Grim Reaper?”
After the assassination attempt, Frank had become more and more concerned with his mortality. Prior to the incident, he had been convinced that he was the Son of Heaven, and the thought that he might die had never even crossed his mind. But the bolt of fear that struck his mortal body the day of the incident had him scared to death of death.
“We must take measures to ensure my immortality,” Frank said to Rowen after downing another cup of wine .
“Indeed,” Rowen replied, racking his brain for a way to pacify Frank, whose paranoia and mental instability grew steadily with each passing day. “How about a shrine?”
“A shrine?” Frank echoed, letting the idea wash over him.
“Just like we do for the Gods, we can build you a shrine on sacred ground. And when your earthly body expires, your ashes can be enshrined there so that the people of China can worship you forever.”
“Yes, yes, yesss,” Frank said, nodding his head. “Wait. Shrine? Ashes? No, no, nooo.”
“No?”
“No. A shrine will not do. We must think bigger. What we need is the Forbidden City.”
“You want to turn the Forbidden City into a mausoleum?”
“No. I would be a sitting duck. We need a whole new Forbidden City. One that nobody knows of and that nobody will ever find. A secret complex of palaces, buildings, and gardens. With eternal rivers flowing in between. And the main palace will be of gold and bronze and will house my most valuable treasures. And to protect it all, a fully equipped army standing guard for eternity.”
Frank’s eyes blazed as he shifted his wild gaze from concubine to concubine. “And you, my pretties,” he said. “You will be there for my delight. You and you and you.”
Lastly, he pointed ominously at Rowen. “And youuuuuuuu .”
“Of course,” Rowen replied, reassuringly. “We will all serve you in spirit.”
“Oh no,” Frank said, shaking his head, wide-eyed. “You will be there in body. Much like we’ve preserved your precious treasures in alcohol, so too shall we preserve your entire bodies. All of you. And all of the army. We must start at once. Have someone begin preparation of the embalming alcohol immediately. Thousands of my most steadfast soldiers must be mummified in formation and stationed on all four sides of the Secret Forbidden City.”
Rowen again racked his brain for a way to mitigate Frank’s madness. “This is a brilliant idea. But first of all, if we start embalming our soldiers now, who’s going to protect and fight for you in this life? Secondly, I’m afraid that embalming people will cause them to be trapped in this world. No one will be able to protect and serve you in the next one.”