3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale

by Danbert Nobacon

  Stormy winced, and the Fool gingerly put a reassuring arm around her shoulder.

  “Tools over weapons, my dear girl,” said the Bird. “Ideas over ideologies. Like the wonderlook. It helps us see things in new ways. If we have the tools and the imagination to look at the world afresh, then we will never cease to be startled by what we find in it.”

  Through a break in the trees, Stormy saw the first night star far above, and remembered that she had flown here. After everything that had happened was still happening before her very eyes she wondered, how can the world ever look the same again?

  Chapter 18

  TWO DEAD PRINCES

  The Lumbiana River was mighty and wide, even in darkness. Prince Toromos stood on deck as he often did, stroking his prized gold cannon, congratulating himself on the subterfuge by which he had come to possess it. He loved that cannon. His chest swelled with pride as he marveled at the Oosarian miracle. He called it the Oosarian miracle. His brother called it the Oosarian miracle. His mother called it the Oosarian miracle.

  A shadow moved at Toromos’s side and a ghostly white face appeared in the moonlight. It was Queen Nukeander, dressed in mourning black. “The time will soon be with us, son,” she rasped, putting a bony hand on the prince’s shoulder. “Not only shall we take Morainia, but we will avenge the death of your brother in triplicate.”

  They had repeated this mantra, in various forms, since Nukeander’s cortege had rendezvoused with the procession by Bridgeton on the Lumbiana. They had convinced themselves that the ships and the cannon were bigger than anything this corner of the sort-of-fairy tale world had ever seen. To look at Prince Toromos strutting about the bridge of the lead vessel like a puffed up peacock for his mama, one would think the technology was all Oosarian. This was not the case.

  Two summers previously, much smaller, clumsier Oosarian warships had encountered bizarre never-before-seen vessels in the waters by the furthest southern isles. Those ships were strange, and those who sailed in them stranger still. They were sort-of-men. They were like men, and then they were not like men. They walked upright. They talked. They had more hair than Oosarian men, and a much more pronounced brow. They had very good night vision and great strength. And melding the ocean-going technologies of the strange men with their own, the Oosarians had built these longships and stolen the idea for the cannon. Using the strange men as muscle power had enabled the Oosarians to drop anchor in view of Bald Mountain, on this dark night before the dawn.

  More than anything, the sort-of-men laughed. They laughed when they woke up. They laughed as the afternoon wind caught the sails and eased their passage up the Lumbiana. They laughed even more as they rowed the great ships at the end of the day against the meandering Lumbiana current, and against the katabatic night wind. They were always laughing.

  When they heard that they were invading Morainia, with the hastily added casus belli of avenging the murder of Mercurio, they laughed hardest of all.

  Toromos had only shed droca tears for his younger brother’s death, for he knew all his brothers to be rivals.

  “Wangod bless you with a conqueror’s dreams,” hissed the Black Queen as she bade him good night.

  Prince Toromos turned to watch Nukeander go, and as the shadows swallowed her up, he heard that incessant laughing once again. He smiled, for he cared little now that the giggling slaves had brought him to the brink of his destiny. He sang to himself,

  Tomorrow Tomorrow,

  Tomorrow is an ugly day,

  For any who stand in my way.

  Down below in the hold, King Walterbald of Morainia defied his own thoughts by quite enjoying some gruel his captors had provided for his evening meal.

  As a king, Walterbald was worried, of course. He knew how formidable a force was about to assault Morainia. But as a scientic and an explorer, he couldn’t help but be fascinated by what he had seen on the Oosarian vessel. From where, he wondered, had the sort-of men come? The laughing soldiers of the south were like no life-form Walterbald had ever seen. Who was transkinked from who, he wondered now? These were surely very close relatives of humans. His scientical mind boggled. What force of nature had given them different tools than the western peoples? What exactly were those tools? The golden piece of pipe that graced the prow of Toromos’s ship the cannon they called it. What was that?

  Most of all, he wondered, why would the sort-of men subject themselves to the Oosarians? How could the Oosarians possibly exert power over soldiers who, when they relaxed from their rowing, looked so carefree and strong?

  There was something not quite right about it all. And strangely, there was something about those southern sort-of men that gave Walterbald hope. It wasn’t a rational hope, but as many a scientic had discovered before him, sometimes the things that weren’t rational were the most rational of all.

  Given the circumstances, Princess Stormy was having a fine Accidental Adventure. She would not have admitted this to others, and she found it hard to admit it to herself, but it was true.

  The flight over the Twin Moraine Mountains, around the town of Morainia, and then along the loominated ribbon of the Bald River, was itself relatively short. As Emmeur had warned his passengers, they would initially by-pass Bald River Falls, staying north to join the Lumbiana downstream. Then by doubling back on themselves, dropping low over the forest on the north bank of the great river, they could steal a peek at the war fleet.

  Stormy’s heart leapt when she saw the twinkling lights of her hometown. It was not too much to say she was enjoying herself, even though her country’s situation was dire. Stormy was not the first person to discover that having something difficult to do was exciting and frightening, both at the same time.

  She could see nothing untoward in the darkness of the valley floor, out to where the Bald River cascaded in a spectacular waterfall into the Lumbiana below. That said, the Princess knew the Morainian Defense Guard would be fully deployed and ready. She thought of Gwynmerelda and wondered if she was there too. To her surprise, she found that she longed to see her stepmother.

  As The Gricklegrack began to drop low, Stormy could smell the fir and pine trees she knew so well. The air was warmer here, and it was alive with the summer buzzing of life. Bats flitted zizzerhither, tracking down skeeters. She heard a longeared owl somewhere below, and then she saw the glint of the moon on the Lumbiana.

  “Geez-ar-us!” whispered The Fool.

  The Gricklegrack looked round as if to command silence, and Stormy saw the luminescence of his blood-red eye rings.

  Below them was the line of ships, anchored in a giant eddy of flat waters, a safe distance from the mighty Bald River Falls. With the quartermoon high in the sky and the Lumbiana chasing it into the eastern distance, the war fleet was silhouetted like a pack of dark, slumbering night monsters, speckled with the firefly eyes of kero-lamps.

  There were ten ships, for Stormy counted them. They seemed only to promise heartache and misery to a girl who had only seen ships a quarter their size. Her heart sank, and she buried her head into the feathers of Emmeur’s neck.

  Only the Bird seemed unperturbed. “It could be worse,” he mused.

  “How could it be worse?” quizzed The Fool.

  “If the longships had wings it would be worse,” said the Bird.

  And then it did get worse. From the prow of the lead ship there was a loud bang, and a fireball zipped across the whole width of the Lumbiana, smashing into the cliff opposite, and sending rocks tumbling. Toromos, in his eagerness for the morning to come, could not resist unleashing a cannon ball for the pure hell of it.

  The Gricklegrack banked steeply to the left and climbed, hefting his mighty wings with a whoosh-shoosh of air.

  The Fool groaned.

  “What was that?” said Stormy, struggling for words, for no Morainian had ever witnessed anything resembling the explosive power of gunpowder.

  “That, I believe,” said The Gricklegrack “is precisely the kind of thing your father search
es for. Magic, or more accurately mechanagics, that predate the western peoples.”

  Stormy looked back, but the great ships were only tiny black specks now. From this distance she could have picked them up and scrunched them between her fingers. She felt the balmy flush of the summer night again, as they crested the Falls and entered the hanging valley of the Bald River proper.

  Before she knew it they were on the ground again. Voices surrounded them. In the dark, hands were helping her from the riding harness. Somebody murmured “Princess,” and helped her to the ground. She wobbled as her feet searched for stability on the familiar but rough terrain. Then, an even more familiar voice reached into her heart.

  “Alexandra!”

  Stormy turned and threw herself the few short paces into Gwynmerelda’s arms. Stormy buried her face in the familiar smell of the queen’s hair where it fell from her helmet upon her shoulder.

  “Come come, my darling. Come inside,” whispered the Queen.

  The Fool was being hugged by Jakerbald, and Geraldo ushered everyone in with the promise of hot food and drink. Gwynmerelda guided Stormy into the homely surroundings of Eagle Cave.

  If any eagles had ever lived in this cave, it had not been in recent living memory. For this cave, which was close to Bald River Falls, but hidden by the out-crop from anyone coming up the Falls Road, had been the nerve center of Morainian defense activity for generations.

  As Stormy sat sipping soup, she looked again at the ancient pictures of eagle-like birds on the walls. Stormy had first seen these pictures when her father showed them to her as a younger child. Now she saw how one bird stood like a giant next to the human stick figures in its path.

  She saw and remembered the bird’s ochre red eyes, pigmented in part from the metals that lay beneath Morainia’s mountainsides. She turned and saw The Gricklegrack, Emmeur, not twenty feet away in deep conversation with Geraldo, Gwynmerelda, The Fool, Jakerbald and some others she knew were battalion leaders of the defense force.

  Along with a network of caves, mostly smaller than the one they were now ensconced in, the Morainian defenses involved an extensive series of buried earth lodges. Each housed twenty people or more, mostly scattered around the fringes of the forest where the valley sides began to rise away from the river, all the way back to the bottleneck of Bald River Gorge. The long meandering road that wound its way down from the Gorge was securely barricaded at the top of the Falls Road, along the northern bank of the river. From there, the road switched back and forth over a short mile to the northern bank of the Lumbiana, and the waiting war party.

  The Princess put her empty soup bowl down and stood up.

  “More soup love?” It was Grandma Gigi. She was joined by Grandma Wilson. “I can make you some goodnight tea,” said Zilpher.

  “No thanks,” said Stormy. “I have to know what is happening,” and she walked over to the other side of the cave.

  There, gathered like an amateur football team two goals down at halftime to the western champions representatives from the various arms of the Morainian Defense Guard had gathered in an impromptu circle. A multifarious bunch of parents, grandparents, and lateens, who doubled in waking life as farmers, builders, foresters, and bakers. There was the man from the ditch committee, Fred’s mother Claire, the message-bird mistress, and Athiane, who ran the library where Stormy worked … now all taking on third jobs as war tacticians.

  Stormy found a space for herself next to Fred. Fred smiled at her and he shuftied over to give the Princess more room.

  Geraldo was chairing the meeting. “What say you, Captain Arahab?” he asked of one of the defense guards, who Stormy knew in ordinary Morainian life as an organizer of the farmers market.

  “I wish we could hit them in the dark. We might stand a chance then,” Arahab said, looking at Stormy, “but me and the other captains. We all agree.” There were murmurs of general assent from behind him. “We won’t launch an all-out assault if they still have Walterbald. Though it be dangerous if we have to let the Oosarians march up the Falls Road. Very dangerous.”

  “How do we deal with the fireball thrower? asked Athiane,

  “It’s the slave army still worries me,” Geraldo said.

  “And what about the flying lizards?” asked The Fool.

  Everyone was quiet for a moment. The Morainians are a pragmatic people, and they don’t waste much energy on things they can’t control. They tend to focus on what’s in front of them, which is probably why they’ve lasted and thrived in this sort-of fairy tale world.

  The flying lizards and fireballs could wait for now.

  “Anyone know anything about Prince Toromos? What he’s like as a commander?” asked Arahab.

  “Toromos is vain and cruel, but he’s not stupid. Braggardio was always the crazy one,” Gwynmerelda said.

  “I too have met Toromos,” said The Fool, “and more recently than the Queen. He remains vain, but he is clever. He is a good tactician, but something tells me he is also a mite blind. I am guessing he thinks this huge technological leap in ocean power will scarify us into submission.”

  Stormy made an impatient gesture. After the Accidental Adventure of the last few days, she felt she’d earned the right to say her piece now. “Do we have a plan?” she said briskly to the Bird.

  Surprised, Gwynmerelda looked at her. And the Queen, in spite of her many worries, smiled.

  Emmeur smiled too, though he hid it when Stormy looked a demand his way.

  “I , we, The Fool and I, have a sort-of-plan,” he said.

  “Oh,” said Stormy. “Will it sort-of-work?”

  “I am sort-of-hoping so.”

  “And so what is it, Gentelmengracks?” asked the Princess. At this, all three of her grandparents smiled. She looked just like her father in that moment.

  “Fighting ships are all very well so long as one is not attacked from the air. It’s like the redfish you ate for dinner. He never saw me coming.”

  The council considered this.

  “It is a gross act of war, there being ten warships below the falls,” said Jakerbald finally. “Us being able to inflict a blow against them is the very last thing they expect. You’re right. If we can unsettle them in some way, then it will not be as one-sided as they might have thought.”

  “This golden tube that sends fireballs. You’ll aim for that,” said Geraldo, sensing where they were going with this.

  “Yes,” said The Gricklegrack. “Only, I can’t do it alone.” He rubbed at his feathers and looked up at the ceiling of the cave. “I need someone one person to balance with the rock, and to tell me when to let it fly.” He cleared his throat. “It should be a smallish person. One who has already proved she…I mean she or he … has rapport with me in the air.”

  Well, of course Stormy knew who he meant. She looked at the faces of those gathered around her, and then at her feet, looking for the strength to make the decision for herself. She did not like it one bit. She looked at Emmeur, and thought she saw a look of reassurance.

  After a heartbeat of hesitation the Princess announced, “I’m doing it then.”

  “No, you are not!” screeched the Queen.

  “Am too. Emmeur says he needs me to do it.”

  “Aggh Mmmm!” intoned The Gricklegrack. “It’s true, gracious Queen.”

  “That’s settled then,” said Stormy. She said this in the determined way of a Princess who knows where her duty lies.

  And the Queen, who was, as we have seen, as wise as she was beautiful, knew that it was so.

  It was some time after midnight but a longer time before dawn, when Stormy was once again strapped to Emmeur’s back.

  They were only about a half-mile from the cave to the point where the Bald River cascaded off into the dark night below. Once down near the riverbank, Emmeur broke into a sort-of-jog. He remained very sure-footed, despite his size and the uncertain nature of the rocky terrain. Stormy felt the cool air skimming her cheeks.

  The moon had passed its zenith
and was moving towards the western sky now. As they neared the edge of the falls, The Gricklegrack slowed to a walk and then stopped. Stormy stared over the edge to the Lumbiana far below. The Bird sat down by the riverbank and sort-of-wiggled his whole rear end.

  The noise of the water crashing below the cliff was deafening.

  He had given her instructions. When they took flight towards the ships, she was to wait for him to cry out. He had told her the flight would be very quick and warned her that his caaw would be deafeningly loud. As soon as she heard it, she was to tug with all her might at the feathers around the left side of his head where his chin would be, if he had one. He had her practice again now, finding the right spot with her fingers, taking hold of the feathers, but not pulling just yet. She felt that she knew what she had to do, but she was still puzzled. Where was the weapon? Unless, yes, of course, Emmeur had secreted it in his undercarriage.