by Trevor Veale
Hunting was a passion that consumed Godfrey almost as much as sex had once done. It began with a ritual down in the gun room, a hallowed section of the palace basement. He liked to prowl at dawn in the dimly-lit cellar for his rifle and cleaning case, and now he and his sons were doing the same. Godfrey liked to perform the necessary preparations without the help of servants. A major objective of the hunt was to sharpen one’s military skills, and one never knew when the ability to arrange one’s shooting gear on a rough wooden table, assemble the cleaning rod, swab the barrel and load cartridges into the clip would come in handy. For all one knew, when the next Slobodian attack came, the skills honed on hunting trips would prove absolutely crucial.
The next stage of the ritual was for the three huntsmen to tramp upstairs to the palace kitchen and eat a hearty breakfast. Godfrey had learned from painful experience not to attempt to have their breakfast in the drawing-room. The drawing-room, although most comfortable with its regency furniture and Persian silk carpet, was now strictly off-limits to breakfasting hunters. The one time Godfrey had attempted it, he had experienced his wife’s scolding tongue after she had discovered evidence of dirt marks and gun-oil smears on an antique sideboard, china figurines and – worst of all – on her priceless regency sofa.
Now Godfrey and his two sons were inhaling the steam that rose from a pewter coffee pot and looking forward to the piles of hot buttered toast and platters of crispy bacon rashers and shiny fried double-yolk eggs that a serving-wench was placing before them. After she had gone to fetch some venison sausage, fried tomatoes and mushrooms, the king looked up from his plate and fixed his eye on the high arched windows.
“What a glorious sky!” he enthused, staring up at the reddening dawn sky outside. His two sons grunted, shoveling forkfuls of fried egg and bacon into their mouths, and the king beamed a huge, satisfied smile. God’s in his heaven, all’s well with the world, he thought. Then he poured himself a brimming mug of coffee and inhaled the steam again, his nose almost touching the rim. He sipped his coffee with a nonchalant air, then put down the mug and began tearing into his breakfast with unrestrained pleasure. Already the bacon rashers the wench had brought had almost all gone, and he was just able to impale a few on his fork. Wielding the fork with gusto, he attacked the crunchy slices.
“Bring us more bacon!” he called out to the perspiring kitchen workers.
Guns, provisions and a pack of beagles packed in the Range Rover, Godfrey started the engine and they rumbled out of the palace courtyard. The brooding crenelated pile with lights still blazing fell back, and the dark road beckoned. It was the time of year when Godfrey felt glad to be alive, and although the Range Rover bounced painfully on the underrepaired pavement of Melloria City – about which Godfrey had nagged his advisers to no avail – within half an hour it hit a smooth highway and settled down to whisk them through the freshening dawn. Jammed in a corner beside the beagles, Catheter began to feel a sense of ease at last. He could almost dream that he was in another world, with a dark highway in front and flashing trees on either side.
He leaned toward Anton, stretched full length, his head resting on his backpack and his feet among the beagles.
“Wouldn’t it be nice to just keep going, until we were out of this bloody country?”
Anton snickered. “Which of us is gonna kick dad out, you or me?”
“I heard that!” Godfrey growled from the front. “I want you boys to look at the map – there’s a trail we’re going to cross just past Crapula.”
He reached over to the glove box and fished out the map, which he flipped into the tangle of princes and dogs.
It landed near Anton, and he groaned and opened it. Catheter switched on the overhead light.
“You should be watching for a dirt road on the left,” Catheter said
“Shout when you reach it,” Godfrey said, then immediately began to drowse. When they came to the dirt road he drove past, and by then Anton and Catheter were dozing. Only the beagles perked up, urgently wagging their tails and yapping as though tormented by horseflies, but nobody was listening.
“How much longer till we reach this blessed dirt road?” Godfrey asked, snapping fully awake.
“A few more k’s I guess.” Anton’s voice was slow and slurred.
A brown rabbit darted across their path, eyes refracting the headlights, before disappearing in the darkness.
“See that?” Anton croaked.
Catheter nodded. That’s done it, he thought. A rabbit crossing my path – seven years bad luck for sure. I’ll probably never see Lucinda again.
Anton glanced down at the map.
“Oh, oh,” I think we’re gonna have to do a U-turn,” he said, shame-faced.
After two hours on the road in the rattling Range Rover, the three hunters reached the dirt road and sped past the depressing shanties littering the East Mellorian Highway. They veered off the paved road and the four-wheel-drive engaged with Clarksonian efficiency. The vehicle sank and rose in the ruts and potholes and Godfrey, nursing the dregs of a brandy hangover, chuckled as the weathergirl’s voice from the radio chirped optimistically about how pleasant the morning would be – just the weather for a brisk walk.
“Or for killing a brace of bucks!” Anton piped from the rear of the truck.
Godfrey turned off the radio. They had just passed a sign that said: ROYAL FOREST OF GORM, NO TRESPASSING. They swerved into a lumpy morass of tangled roots and mud. It felt like they were going over a long succession of speed bumps. Gobs of sticky mud slapped against the windshield and the long wipers had to be used. They pulled to a halt near a steep bank, and Anton and Catheter busied themselves leashing the six jostling beagles. Godfrey climbed out stiffly and let down the tailboard. The newly-freed beagles tumbled out, lunging toward the edge of the steep bank, and had to be yanked back from the brink by Catheter and Anton who scrambled out of the truck. Then Godfrey gave the order to advance, and the bundle of men and dogs slithered down the embankment and into the groves of birch and cedar that marked the beginning of the forest.
Once they had picked up the trail of the snaggle-tooth, Godfrey unclipped the leashes and let the dogs loose. The princes hurried after the baying hounds as they surged among clumps of tall trees, frothing and yelping, clawing at tree trunks and leaping in the air, their sides pumping and their breath coming in quick spurts.
“Oh, how nice to be taking the dogs for a walk!” Anton mocked in a puffed voice. Catheter dipped his head and strode on without comment, his silence dominating the trek.
They reached a stream that cut across their path, and the dogs joyously plunged their muzzles in the water, lapping and lifting their panting heads. Godfrey nodded to his sons and all three sat on tree stumps and rested. Shortly, Catheter stood up and went over to the stream, bending over the beagles, rubbing their ears and letting them lick his cheeks. From his pack, Anton opened a can of Mellorian Bullet beer, drank deeply and gave a loud belch in Catheter’s direction. Godfrey unshouldered his rifle and pushed cartridges into the clip, then he shoved the clip in and injected a cartridge into the chamber. Watching his sons haggle over who got to finish off the beer, he took three of his painkillers. The breathless run through the woods had brought on his stomach ache, so he swallowed the pills and washed them down with brandy from his hip flask.
Whistling at the dogs, Godfrey got up and set out along the trail, stepping through the stream. The dogs bolted ahead as if they knew the route well, and were soon frothing around a little clearing deep in the forest. A short while later the three hunters caught up with them and Godfrey whistled them to come to the edge of the clearing and remain still. He took each of them by the collar and snapped on their leashes. The next stage would require delicacy and precision. Reaching into his jacket pocket, he took out a small packet of salt which he emptied in the middle of the clearing. Then he took two of the dog leashes and crouched behind a bush. He pressed the two dogs behind him and motioned for Anton and Catheter to do lik
ewise.
They all waited silently for many minutes until they heard a faint thrashing in the depths of the forest. A female snaggle-tooth, its speckled back glowing in the dappled light, ventured into the clearing. It lowered its head and began licking the salt. Godfrey flicked the safety off his rifle, took aim and was confronted with the big brown eyes of the animal, which looked up at the click from his rifle.
Damn, Godfrey thought, hate shooting them between the eyes. Still, mustn’t back down now – have to set an example. Steadying his aim, he fired the trigger at the pair of soft eyes. Not waiting to see if he’d hit the doe, he snapped the leashes on his two beagles and let them surge out of his hands. When the last echo from the gun had faded, the doe could be heard bleating weakly as she tried to crawl toward the trees. The beagles were pawing her flanks, their jaws snapping around her wounded neck, and Godfrey got up and walked into the clearing. Calling the dogs away, he lifted his rifle and, with a quick hip shot, put the creature out of her misery.
The dogs surged forward again, and Anton and Catheter allowed their hounds to join in the melee. Godfrey barked at the dogs to keep back, then he gutted the antelope with his hunting knife and threw them the slops. By now, Catheter had reached the end of his endurance. He stood up, his face like chalk, stared at the freshly-killed carcass and the excited beagles feasting on its entrails and vomited a colorless fluid. Anton, looking only slightly less sick, emerged from his hiding-place and slumped against the trunk of a birch tree.
Twenty minutes later, the Range Rover was back on the road again. Bouncing beside the carcass of the antelope in the back of the truck, Catheter couldn’t remember a time when he felt worse. Anton was uncharacteristically silent, rubbing one of the beagles, and Godfrey had turned the radio back on. Melloria’s only official station (the king never played the pirate ones) was broadcasting a concert by FreeksHoh, a Mellorian indie folk-rock band, and the announcer was gushing about the band’s style of music in a way that made Godfrey groan. The band’s lead singer Uno, known to his friends as Brian, had originated the band’s style, which was known as Brianism, a blend of minimal, fiddle-driven, rustic primitivism that drew its inspiration from the soulful, despairing, introspective melodies that underpin the bulk of Mellorian folksongs, describing life in the world’s smallest absolute monarchy in a way both gut-wrenching and self-lacerating. Codswallop, was Godfrey’s sour thought and he quickly switched the radio off.
By now, the three hunters were beginning to feel the effects of their copious consumption of breakfast coffee, plus the beer and brandy they had swilled. They were riding past a stretch of mountains scarred by the striations of desperate Mellorians seeking firewood, and Godfrey remembered there was a creek nearby.
“We’re going to stop for a piss,” he said, yanking the steering wheel to bring them level with a one-lane bridge over the creek.
They all got out and strode onto the bridge, but while peeing over the rail none of them noticed the rash of rickety wooden hovels perched on the bank of the creek. These decrepit dwellings, shored up with cement blocks to prevent them sliding into the water, were home to families of displaced refugees from the port of Shekels, which the Slobodians had seized, and who were regarded as pariahs by the local Mellorians, since they had renounced their nationality, under duress, for Slobodian citizenship.
People in ragged clothes gazed curiously from makeshift doors and plastic-sheeted windows and children peered through knotholes in the walls as three thin streams of royal urine splashed into the creek. The hunters had been trying to outdistance each other in a pissing contest, and the inhabitants of the hovels were glad none of them had enough peeing power to drench their dwellings. Eventually the three royals zipped up their pants and went away, leaving the shanty-dwellers to their back-breaking trade, the men sorting piles of junk into copper and steel scraps, the women sorting out rags and glass bottles.
Tumbledown shanties and drafty wooden shacks, some beginning to cave in, festered alongside the road back to the palace. A few of their occupants had tapped illegally into the electricity grid by slinging wires over the main line, others used makeshift lamps made from tins filled with kerosene, whose smoke filled the huts. It was easy for a child or a dog to knock these over, and fires sometimes started, spreading from hut to hut and burning everything hidden in the roofs for safe-keeping, including the welfare benefit books on which the inhabitants depended.
None of this caught the attention of Godfrey or Anton, although Catheter flicked uneasy glances out the window as they passed the rows of rickety dwellings. This royal indifference toward the king’s poorest subjects was matched by the cabin dwellers themselves. Their meager store of loyalty to the king and his family dwindled daily as they struggled to scratch a living from their flimsy holdings. Families who were too poor to raise cattle, pigs or sheep, and who would have eaten the same animals’ feed to keep themselves alive, kept goats and scrawny chickens and sustained themselves on millet seed and comforted themselves from small plots of the local marijuana, Saints’ Breath.
Saints’ Breath, or Saint, made their grim lives bearable, as did the visits of saints of a different sort. Men and women in the black uniforms, red ball caps and yellow boots of the Mellorian People’s Revolutionary Party, popularly known as the People’s Party, trudged from cabin to cabin dispensing cans of pickled cabbage and onion stew, powdered milk, baby food, condoms, sanitary napkins and rat poison. They also ran mobile provisions stores from the backs of trucks for those with a little money, breaking packs of cigarettes and selling cigs for a moon apiece, stale ones for free. They also sold aspirins, Tylenol tablets and other pharmaceutical supplies, as well as shotgun shells or cartridges for amounts that varied according to caliber. Paperback books with revolutionary or subversive contents were always given away free.
These benefactors from the People’s Party were acting under the instructions of a Central Committee, whose Chair, Paul Slamil, had determined there would one day be a revolution that would sweep away the monarchy once and for all. He had taught political science at Shekels Community College before the Slobodian occupation, and had arrived in Melloria City in a refugee truck. He soon began organizing the party into an effective thorn in the flesh of the government and, although a price had been put on his head, he had survived arrest by moving from safe house to safe house, sleeping on floors and living on onion stew and cabbage soaked in vinegar, the food of the people. Since his leadership began, local party cells and action groups were steadily expanding the party’s reach, influencing more and more people to join the party and educating them in the techniques of revolutionary politics and terrorist action. A rash of underground cells poured out propaganda from clandestine publishers and bloggers. The party produced a free newspaper that was scathing of the monarchy, without wallowing in the celebrity gossip of the Bugle.
Chapter 7
The Queen Reminisces
One day before her son’s wedding, Queen Letitia was sitting up in bed, her head propped up as usual on three pillows. She was rifling through a box of old greeting cards while steeling herself for a delayed visit to her mother, the dowager Queen Gloriana, who had fallen ill after eating a dodgy canapé at Princess Dawna’s reception. The Old Queen, as she was affectionately known to the people, had been moved from the hospital to a nursing home which Letitia hated having to visit. It distressed her to see her mother hobbling about on her walking-frame or on Rupert’s arm. Her young page had transformed himself into an apron-wearing care assistant to conform to health and safety regulations. He no longer wore the black and gold livery of a royal servant, but a blue cotton uniform and a pair of plastic crocs. I suppose gay men don’t mind a change of costume, Letitia thought.
The odor of old age, urine and overcooked food in the home was something she didn’t want to think about. She had always been sensitive to smells, particularly bad ones, and the reek of decay that she also smelled on her mother – in spite of perfumes and colognes – filled her with desp
air. The Old Queen’s skin was now almost transparent and mottled with dark liver spots. Her eyes were thick with cataracts and sunken into folds of skin, her face was criss-crossed with broken veins and even her hair – once thick, dark and luxurious like Letitia’s – had become scant and snowy white and revealed her scalp, dotted with more liver spots. Nevertheless, visiting her mother was a necessary burden.
Necessary burdens were becoming increasingly irritating to Letitia, particularly the burdens of monarchy. The novelty of opening a new hospital ward or shopping center had long worn off and she resented the crowds of people jostling her and shouting their inane cries of “Long Life!” – she wished they could have her life. There seemed to be no end in sight to all the sacrifices she had to make. And now there was the upcoming marriage between Catheter, whom she knew had no desire to be king, and the unknown quantity of Her Supreme Scrumptiousness, whom she strongly suspected was going to be a bundle of trouble. So she now decided it was time to sift through a box of old cards she had collected for a wallow in cheap sentiment.
Most of the people who showered her with cards on her birthday assumed that roses were her favorite flower. Consequently red roses, yellow roses, and roses in every imaginable combination lay spread out on her quilt. She tolerated the pictures of kittens and winsome-looking puppies wreathed in roses, but drew the line at goats and chickens in idealized barnyards with roses in the foreground as being too Mellorian for her taste. As for Godfrey’s latest card, showing a posse of beagles snapping at the heels of a doe garlanded with roses, she just had to laugh. He always included a hunting scene as part of his birthday greeting. She opened the card and perused the text. It contained some lines by Stanislaw Crust, the Mellorian national poet: