Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Chapter 1 - The king didn’t make a decision

A singularly unpleasant silence fell upon the great hall in the palace of King Blink, The Very First Dynamic Monarch and Patron of Small, Unlicensed Pubs. The palace, or Big Place, as it is generally known, is a huge establishment, carved from the Big Mountain itself. Inside its stony hallways and cavernous chambers the slightest sound can be heard to echo for days after. In fact, visitors to the palace often hear snippets of conversations between the King and his wife, Queen Flatface, Mother of the Nation and Fear of All Plastic Surgeons, days after they had had their conversation. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then, to hear that many a reporter has been found skulking in some hidden corridor, eager to catch some slip of the King’s tongue.

For once the hallways were almost totally quiet. From the cook’s chambers some snippets, uttered a week ago, floated through the air. A discerning listener could hear something like: “Don’t worry about the tail and ears, they’ll never notice. Just keep the tag out of the soup this time.” Hearing this, a more astute diner at some previous dinner might find that he was totally correct in assuming that what looked like dog, in fact was Pedigree Corgi, bred to perfection and basted in a delicate mushroom sauce. It might also be added that the said Corgi and aforementioned cook had had no animosity spared between them.

The hallways were, as mentioned annoyingly many times now, quiet. The court scribe, Scribbler, the Unforgettable Student Who Managed To Flunk His Own Birth, wrote with enthusiasm: De holls whirr kwyit. De kieng whaas knot ien charts eniemor. Saailins rained. Even the King’s Fool, Tom, The Man With But One Name, was silent for once. What could have happened to shut up a whole crowd in only a few moments?

Could it have been the thought of eating dog at the King’s table? Could it have been the recent disappearance of a large garlic butter roll, a disappearance so utterly lacking in any significant detail that it had kept the country guessing for weeks? It might even have been the thought of someone eventually having to marry the King’s daughter, Grue, The Princess Who Should Have Been Swapped At Birth. It might have been this but it wasn’t. It was much worse.

It had happened just after dinner. Everyone had just retired from the meal, some still struggling with a hair stuck in the throat. Suddenly, just when the Darn Duke Dimwit, The Man With The Breath Like The Living Dead, was about to strike up an ode praising the protein content of food left over in a tooth cavity, Genius the Genuine, skirted into the room.

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