The King sits on his throne, his outline gleaming.
The hall stretches out before him, cavernous and unadorned. Every day he finds himself here swarmed by petitioners. They beg him to fine the miller, drop the tariff, feed the poor, but somehow the outsiders always shout his subjects down. Sardonico the marked thief seeks to win his pardon, Sir Chivalreigh quests for glory, Ka’ryn the disguised heir pleas for allies to win back her stolen kingdom.
Unannounced, these adventurers push past the chancellor and interrupt his advisors. A bustle follows, then silence in the court.
Normally, the King would expel the interlopers—guards, seize them!—but something is wrong. Something is very wrong. His chest tightens at a distant threat suddenly remembered. Gripped by dark foreboding, he cannot help but table today’s business of state.
“Proceed,” the King says. His chief minister scowls like a farmer boot-deep in cow patty.
The King and the adventurer tend to converse without formalities. Hardly anyone calls him their “liege.” Sometimes the adventurer takes liberties, running little circles around the throne while they talk. During times like these the King—who has had men strung up by their thumbs for less—offers at best weak reproaches to the adventurer’s insults. Blandly tolerant, he perches unmoving on the chair’s sharp angles, his back straight. He and his guards stir only to stop an unsheathed blade.
Today the King presides over the barbarian freebooter Cromach—or was it Finnric?—who has shown up to this royal occasion shirtless but well-oiled.
The King’s unanswered supplicants file from the room. His retinue fades into the background. Cromach appears in a tight close-up. We find ourselves beneath the shade of his commanding jawline, menaced by the overhang of what can only be termed a hawkish nose. His raven-black hair lashes about as he speaks.
“I come to seek my fortune,” Cromach states. If only all the King’s pleaders showed themselves to be so guileless and direct.
We see the King. Beneath a golden circlet, his face appears chiseled by stern resolve.
“I have need of an adventurer such as you,” the King responds after a pause.
Squelching bog bodies plague the outer district. An upstart rebel disturbs the peace to the north. A great serpent—we thought it a legend!—leaves behind all-too-real victims. There’s a curse or a troll-witch or a necromancer. Everything in the court right now is fine, but somewhere the King’s subjects die screaming, and he can’t seem to do anything about it.
“And your knights have failed to defeat this vile lamassu?” Cromach asks with what the King takes to be a disdainful chuckle.
So it goes. Sometimes the King dispatches his finest warriors only to receive reports they’ve been repelled. At other moments, the King discovers too late that his army is tied up on the western frontier even as the fiend rampages across the eastern frontier. Occasionally complicated political reasons bar him from acting outright. More than once, he’s been hamstrung by ancient tradition. Regardless, the King finds himself stymied at every moment while the monster makes its way toward his favorite meadhall.
Why does this keep happening to him?
The King may seem helpless as a newborn, immobile on his throne, but the kingdom runs just fine. Taxes and tributes flow back to the King if only to heap up rewards for wandering adventurers.
He isn’t a mad king. He doesn’t even qualify as feckless. He speaks in an alert tone of genuine concern, unconstrained by sinister viziers. He’s trying his best, really. If anything, the King is hypervigilant, instantly apprised of dangers. Emboldened by the rainy season, wormfolk abduct children from the kingdom’s exterior provinces. Maybe he monitors the situation through hilltop beacons or secret spies. Either way, he’ll know the second the hero triumphs, and we’ll find him at the ready with a banquet or a parade upon their return.
“My troops were depleted in the War of Bloodletting,” the King replies. “Now they strain under the onslaught of Megapicts. I cannot spare any of them to rid the world of this flying abomination.”
“What’s in it for me?” the barbarian drawls.
At this point an archivist might appear holding an artifact that bursts into a neon glow at the appropriate moment, or sometimes the Keeper of the Privy Purse drags the King’s cashbox across the groaning floor and opens it to the adventurer’s delight. Today the King’s smith materializes holding a jewel-encrusted sword as long as a ship’s yardarm. Heedless of being cut, the smith displays his spell-forged weapon by laying it across two open palms. Maybe it won’t hurt him because it’s all ensorcelled, the King doesn’t know.
The barbarian’s gold bangles clink together as he’s taken aback by its magnificent craftsmanship. “Oho, a worthy prize indeed!”
Death dwarfs on drill machines terrorize the kingdom’s northwest reaches.
All this back and forth feels grubby. The King would as lief command his subjects, not bribe or beg them. People’s lives are at stake, and Cromach is haggling with the monarch. Where’s the majesty here? Every hero has him in a bind. The King’s life devolves into a series of undignified transactions.
The King can’t even get caught up in the dread that made him grant the adventurer audience in the first place. He sends the hero off to kill the hydra only to see them return an hour later with its heads wrapped up in a gory bouquet. Every day follows an interminable rhythm of challenge and victory, challenge and victory. He breakfasts to dire rumors but nods off amidst triumphant celebration only to wake up to dark whispers and portents once more.
“We will be forever in your debt,” the King says with a twinge of anguish.
Ether elementals assault the kingdom’s exurbs with their cosmic rays.
The King imagines himself laying out his woes to his wife the queen at bedtime. He feels like a toll collector fixed to one place as a thousand wayfarers stream past him. Far from being the true sovereign, he is a mere minder of a station or a checkpoint on someone else’s journey. Sure, his guards seem imbued with the power of instant death, but the King slumps impotent in his chair, an eternal officiant at incessant medal ceremonies.
Maybe this is middle age or a crisis of faith, the King muses. If you look at it another way, the King is almost a saint. It requires a certain grace to do nothing in the face of infinite peril. He refuses to rely on his own limited power and instead entrusts his life to heroes the way others give themselves over to the divine.
Every adventure is a miracle sent by a strange providence that seems to ignore the fixed rules of the King’s world. They don’t act like the rest of us, the King thinks. He tries to remind himself of this when the hero walks over to a far wall and stands facing away from him while they talk. Anyway, if the King did try to stamp out the enemy, he would certainly fail, but with heroes all things are possible.
But at other moments déjà vu creeps upon him and the King fears that he is mouthing someone else’s words. Of course, a king’s life is forever governed by royal protocol and diplomatic formulae, the price of being a figurehead. And yet during these exchanges with the hero the King wishes he could be sure that he remained the author of his own destiny.
Sewer giants, hippo centaurs, feral hexes, hungry clouds, all gnawing at the kingdom’s edges.
The heroes don’t seem to have the King’s worries. Take this barbarian, for example. After his long-lost mother placed him in a cradle of reeds and sent him downriver to foil the False Priest of Sadomorrah, he went on to become a scourge to all civilized despots and cozeners. Despite his manifest cynicism, Cromach defended the weak from their oppressors. He escaped a burning brazen bull, demolished the Ziggurat of Despond, freed the rebel gladiator Libertas, slew the Attack Harpies of Aerieland. Wherever Cromach went, things changed. Obstacles tumbled from his path as he journeyed to become someone greater than his humble beginnings could ever suggest. What’s more, he went places. Phyringia, Cairnaan, Rôm, he’d been everywhere.
And yet could Cromach have done otherwise?
The King wonders.
Cromach seemed bound to come to this room and receive this quest. If he didn’t do it today, he’d be back tomorrow. Events conspire to bring Cromach here, just as they swayed Ka’ryn, Chivalreigh, and Stabbit. The King is stuck in his place, but the hero travels a circuit no less circumscribed.
Compare Cromach’s life to the King’s. Well. The King was of noble birth. He had a childhood. It must have been formative. His father was a king, his mother a queen. He has many memories, surely, some of them fond while others less so. He rules over the land. He is married to his wife the queen.
Come to think of it, the King could not remember the last time he saw his wife the queen.
He imagines last night and every night before they reposed together in a four-poster marriage bed surrounded by velvet or silk. Is this what you’d call a bower? It might even be perfumed. One would assume that a fire roars, but the room is otherwise dark. She would tell him about her day, including anecdotes illuminating her rich inner life. “How typical! How odd!” he’d respond to his wife the queen. It’d feel so good to let down his guard and listen after a day of verbal jousting in court. Their relationship must have deep roots. Anyway, he’s certain they enjoy an intimate luxury together once he removes his crown, which he’s pretty sure that he does on a regular basis.
What does his wife the queen look like again?
Maybe she had been stolen from him. A kidnapping, like in a quest. He can almost see it: hunchbacks in domino masks, no, acolytes cowled in jaguar fur, slinking servitors of a nameless god (Sadomorrah?) who crept into his inner sanctum and absconded with his wife the queen. She shrieked and fainted, no, she put up a good fight, actually, and later the guards found three of the seven servitors slain but, alas, the miscreants pressed a rag soaked with the soporific essence of the black lotus to her lips before she could best them all. That seems right to the King.
So the King’d have to save her. He’d get up out of the throne, walk through the chamber, and pass through an antechamber into what is presumably a courtyard with a road leading out of it that goes to the rest of the kingdom. Plausible.
There would be helpers along the way as well as episodes in which he’d be forced to fight people and/or creatures. He doesn’t have what you’d call “mighty thews,” but remember, the King possesses a visage of stern resolve, so he would not turn back to sit down on the throne. It would be easy to stay on the throne in this situation, true.
He would get up from the throne and march through the land he rules to a bubbling crater filled with foulness or a corkscrew tower that spirals up into space until the air grows thin. As long as he could get up from that throne, he could pursue the hooded servitors to their remote lair.
Once he got to their arcane stronghold he would see the cultists capering—capering!—around his wife the queen. The servitors would know a culturally specific form of martial arts, but the King would dodge and roll until each one got to the edge of the tower’s parapet at which point he’d skillfully knock them over the side. One by one, pow, pow, pow.
At long last the King would see his wife the queen, whose pale skin would shine lustrous—let’s say marmoreal—in the cold moonlight. The King feels a bit breathless now. She’d be tied to an obelisk, naturally.
Beneath the black stone the King would see a squat cauldron emanating a lime-green aura. I have come too late to stop the ritual, the King would think to himself in dismay. Rocking and shaking, the cauldron would belch out a vast, quivering mass with too many smiles. This god who is not of this world—but still into this sort of thing—would begin to reach out toward his wife the queen with the express intent of absorbing her into its colloidal embrace. The god’s tendril extends, it’s getting longer, it’s going up the obelisk, it’s almost to his wife the queen’s heel, she’s not even wearing shoes, it’s so close to metabolizing his wife the queen!
Would the King save her and stop this nameless god in time? Obviously.
He’d only have to leave this damned throne first, and then he could return for feasting and a ticker tape parade and someone—the archbishop seems right—would ask him to kneel to receive a medal on a red, white, and blue ribbon that goes surprisingly well with the armor he’d have picked up along the way. His wife the queen would tell him that it’d been “a close one,” and he’d kind of laugh because, even though he’s a tough guy who knows there was no doubt he was always going to win over that monster god, the King’s ultimately quite modest when it comes to heroism. An iris shot closes on a great big kiss.
But who would give him the quest?
Who does he have to speak to get his quest?
Who is his quest-giver? The King goes blank.
“Keep this sword warm for me,” Cromach says, “because I’ll be back for it soon—with the lamassu’s head.”
The King shakes out of his reverie. He feels the anxious urge to say what’s inevitably required of him in this moment. He pauses like he’s going to formulate another response—but then he sees himself as if from the barbarian’s perspective. What would Cromach do if he didn’t bestow this quest? The King has a duty to perform.
“Good luck to you on your quest,” the King says.
The adventurer leaves, the King remains.
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J.S. Carroll is the author of Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right (University of Minnesota Press, 2024) and Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of US Literature (Stanford University Press, 2021). His first book won the MLA Prize for Independent Scholars, and he was also the recipient of the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. Carroll’s writing has appeared in American Literature, Post45, Polygon, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Nation. |