Jitterbug Perfume (3 page)

With some difficulty, for others tried to insist on accompanying him, the king excused himself from court and took the giant dog Mik for a romp outside the citadel gate. Circuitously, he made his way into the woods to a spring he knew. There, he fell to his knees and bent close to the water, as if to drink. Smothered under a swirl of cloudy mixtures, his reflection only spasmodically came into focus. Yet, among the bubbles, twigs, and jumbled particles of light and color, he saw it once more: a hair as white as the snow that a swan has flown over. It spiraled from his right temple.

Undirected—and unencumbered—by thought, King Alobar's hand shot-.out as if to ward off an enemy's blow. He yanked the hair from its mooring, examined it as one might examine a killed snake, and, after glancing over his shoulder to assure that none save Mik was his witness, flicked it into the spring, in whose waters it twisted and twirled for a long while before sinking out of sight.

Alma gnashed her semen-greased teeth in her sleep. Each distant owl note caused Mik to twitch. Between them, Alobar lay wide-eyed, his war-marked hands caressing the fur covers for comfort.
It is with shame and fear that I rest tonight,
thought the king.
The way bewilderment lies upon me, I have no need of blanket.

In Alobar's kingdom, a minute city-state, a tribe, if you will, it was the custom to put the king to death at the first sign of old age. Kings were permitted to rule only so long as they retained their strength and vigor. Regarding its rulers as semidivine—god-men upon whom the course of nature depended—the clan believed widespread catastrophes would result from the gradual enfeeblement of the ruler and the final extinction of his powers in death. The only way to avert those calamities was to kill the king as soon as he showed symptoms of decay, so that his soul might be transferred to a vigorous young successor before it had been impaired. One of the fatal signals of fading power was the king's incapacity to satisfy the sexual passions of his wives. Another was the debut of wrinkles or gray hairs, with their indiscreet announcement of decline.

Heretofore, Alobar had not considered this tradition unfair. After all, were the king allowed to grow senile and ill, would not his weakness infect his domain, interfering with the multiplication of cattle, causing beet crops to rot in the fields, disabling the men in battle, and generally perpetuating disease, delirium, and infertility among those whom he ruled? And did not all intelligent peoples (which left out the Romans) hold this to be true? Why, in some nearby kingdoms, a slight blemish on the royal body such as the loss of a tooth was enough to bring about the death sentence. In Alobar's city, the execution was a ceremony of much dignity and aesthetic weight, the king's Number One wife bearing the responsibility for delivering to her husband's lips the poisoned egg. Among less civilized peoples in the region, the ruler was dispatched by the crude, though perfectly sufficient, process of being knocked on the head.

Heretofore, the ritual of putting the king to death had seemed to Alobar natural, inevitable, and just. But tonight . . . tonight he cursed that cruelly traitorous strand, that hoary banderole of mortality that waved so thoughtlessly from an otherwise dark temple; that skinny, silver scroll upon which was written in letters bold enough for all of nature to read, an invitation to the burial mound. O most unwelcome hair!

From the lemony southern islands to the mountainous haunts of trolls, there was no honest person who could call King Alobar a coward. Numerous times he had risked his life in combat, exhilarant the cry of his charge. And why not, what was there in death to fear? Death was this world's tribute and the other world's bequest. To shun it was to cheat both sides. In yanking out" the gray hair, he felt that he had betrayed his people, his gods—and himself. Himself? Self? What did
that
mean? Alobar pounded the pillow with his head, causing Mik to growl softly and Alma to flail both arms, although she did not surface from that sea without fish.

At first light, ere a rooster had reached the doodle part of his cock-a-doodle-doo, Alobar shook Alma awake, ordering her back to the harem and requesting .that she send Wren in her stead.

"What are you grinning at?"

"My lord, I am merely happy to notice that you have regained your appetites."

"What are you insinuating, woman?"

"Nothing, my lord."

"What?"
He seized her by her yellow braids.

"Don't be angry, sire. It is just that some of your wives grumble among themselves that you have neglected them of late."

The king released her. Automatically, he raised his fist to the temple where the white hair had sprouted. Were another about to emerge, he would squash it in its follicle.

"Have they . . . have they spoken of this to the council?"

"Oh, no, my lord! It has not come to that. To tell the truth, I think they are merely peevish because you spend your best seed in that clumsy little cunt, Frol."

In the depths of his tangled beard, Alobar managed half a smile. Young Frol was pregnant again, and from the size of her belly, there developed therein a second set of twins.

Kissing had yet to be discovered in Europe, alas, so Alobar rubbed Alma's nose with his own. "My balls are so heavy I cannot leave the bed. Quickly, now. Fetch me Wren!"

As soon as she had gone, he arose and forced open the massive oak window. While Mik licked his feet, he uttered a succession of prayers to the rapidly diminishing sparkle of the morning star.

Those whom Alobar governed were a blond race, of such recent northern origin that snow-trolls and mystical red toadstools still figured in the tales the elders told around the fires, although the king himself, save for that morbid filament he had drowned in the spring, was on the dusky side. Wren, the daughter of a southern chieftain slain in battle by Alobar's predecessor, was even duskier. "The only dark meat in the king's larder," some of the warriors joked. Her coloration was one reason he favored her. More importantly, however, he loved her good sense, although in that place in that time, "good sense" was considered no more a virtue in a wife than "love" in a king.

Alma's advance advertising must have been effective, for Wren arrived in the royal chamber already nude and lathered, wine in her cheeks. Thus, she was surprised to find her husband fully clothed, sitting with his hound on the great bear rug at the foot of his bed.

"I—I—I am sorry, my lord," she stammered. The vintner in her veins pressed a more ruddy grape. "I was informed that you had summoned me."

"That I did, dear Wren. Please come sit at my side."

"Well, all right, of course. But first let me fetch my robe. I've left it in the anteroom."

Smiling at her decorum, Alobar started to detain her. Even in his agitated mood, he could admire this walking flower of intelligent pink, this industry of honey and brine. But the image of the hair cast its shadow, and he allowed her to dress. He petted the dog.

"So, you plucked it," she said, after he had related the events of the previous day.

"Yes, I did."

"Plucked it?"

"Yes."

"But why?"

"I hoped that you could help me answer that."

Wren shook her head of skunk-black curls. She appeared puzzled. "No, my lord, I think not. I have never met nor heard story of one who so resisted fate."

"Surely I am not the first," said Alobar. "If so, I must be madman as well as coward."

"Oh, neither, my Alobar."

"Then what?" He watched dispassionately while Mik got up, yawned, stretched, and lumbered to a far corner of the room to relieve himself. "Tell me, Wren, what do you believe awaits you after you die?"

"Awaits
me?
Me, Wren? I have never pondered what death might hold for this one person, born Wrenna of Pindus, now Wren, wife of Alobar. Death is not a personal matter, is it? It is the business of the clan. Our clan is responsible for maintaining the continuity of our race against the terrible whims of heavens and earth, and since the clan is weakened by the loss of one of its members, any death can be an ordeal for the whole."

The king nodded. No gray hair nodded with him, though not having viewed himself that morning he could not be certain of that. "Which explains why our people hold such elaborate and energetic funerals. We entertain the immortals in order that they might be persuaded to help us recover the strength and unity stolen from us by death. However—and this occurred to me only last night as I lay abed undreaming— the clan usually succeeds in closing that breach death tore in its defenses, but what of the one who died? In some regions, they believe that he will pop up again in springtime like a crocus, but never have I observed such a blooming. In the past, I have thought: I shall entrust myself to whoever is more powerful in the next world, the gods or the demons. Yet now, my own speedy demise a rising possibility, I do not willingly submit to playing the part of prize in an otherworldly tug-of-war."

"Is this blasphemy, my lord?"

"I think not. Those who crafted me, be they gods or demons, crafted this mind that shapes my resistance to their schemes. Surely they were wise enough, at the wheel where I was thrown, to anticipate future resistance in the heart they were abuilding." Alobar looked at her hopefully. "Can you not agree?"

Wren placed her own soft hand upon Mik's coat. At her touch, the huge hound seemed almost to purr. "I can neither agree nor disagree. I came here this dawn a quarter asleep, expecting to have my furrow plowed, only to have you sow in my mind such strange ideas." She gave her fingers to Mik so that he might affectionately wet them.

"Perhaps," said Alobar, "I ought to turn to the necromancer for advice."

"No, no, Alobar. Do not. Please do not."

"Indeed, why?"

"This is hard for me to express, my lord, but I shall try.

The kings of your ancestors have been celebrated around many a bonfire. But celebrated for cunning and for brawn. Wisdom, true knowledge, has been the province of the necromancer alone. You have changed all that, and Noog does not like it. You must forgive what I am about to say, for it is fact. There are men inside these city walls more powerfully built than you, Alobar; more adept with the spear. Men who can run faster, hurl a stone farther, face an awesome enemy with an equal absence of trembling, and pacify a harem with as sturdy a shaft. But you, well, while I cannot imagine how you acquired it, you have a brain. Time and time again, you have demonstrated your unusual ability to see inside of men and to interpret the silent pleas they aim at the stars. In the past, many kings have
ruled
this people. You have
governed
them."

"Governed?"

"It is a Hellenic word—"

"Hellenic." Alobar closed his eyes and thought of what he had heard of the Hellenic city-states far to the southeast, near the edge of the earth. How glorious they were rumored to have been, how wealthy and learned and proud of their arts. Long ago northern tribes, not unlike his ancestors, had sacked them. What good was righteous governing if rough people could come along at will and chop you up?

"—a Hellenic word, meaning to exercise a directing influence. That you have done. The heroics of past rulers only kept your kingdom in a state of agitation. You have calmed it. And Noog resents you for that, because as a result of your reasonable leadership, the necromancer is less necessary and less admired."

"I am not surprised. There is a limit to the admiration we may hold for a man who spends his waking hours poking the contents of chickens with a stick."

"Divination has its worth."

"Yes, and so, perhaps, does the elimination of time-trapped kings. Yet, rebellion stirs within me this daybreak. I appreciate your warning about Noog, Were I to tell him what I am about to tell you, dear Wren, I would be dining on bitter egg ere the moon is ripe. I have seen kings bite that egg, watched them turn green as ivy leaves and flap about the yard like freshly beheaded fowl. And all the while the populace on-looking as if it were at a bear-and-dog match. Now, in the eyes of the stars, men may be no more exalted than beasts, and kingly men no worthier than the wretched. Well, forgive me, perhaps the sap of that silver hair has made me drunk from inside my skull, but I am seized with desire to be something
more.
Something whose echo can drown out the rattle of death."

As Wren blinked her bituminous lashes at his queer behavior, Alobar stood, disrobed, and turned slowly around and around before her like prime merchandise at a slave market. Save for the occasional phosphorus mark where some blade had stung him, his body was smooth and tan, braided with muscle, supple, quick; neither as massive nor as hairy as many warriors who had marched behind him. His chestnut mane was chopped an inch below the ears, his beard was shaggy and full. Less prominent than her own southern model (maybe there is simply more to whiff in tropic climes), his nose was banded at the bridge with a ribbon of scar tissue. His eyes, bright as torches in an ice cave, were so blue they seemed on certain days to bleed into the sky. Alobar's mouth, what could be glimpsed of it through the whiskers, was thinner than the meaty mouths of his fellows, and at the same time less crude; it reminded Wren of her late father's mouth, and she admired it most of all. On several occasions in his company, she had come within a pucker of discovering kissing.