The Hogman's Homunculi and the Angelwing Massacre: Chapter Four!
Oh. Hello mother. Prince Darov abandons the fantomance genre and things go downhill from there.
After committing a grotesque faux pas at yet another Gliesan funeral - violating the genitals of a grieving relative in the process - Prince Darov now has to deal with the fallout from his mother and brother. Ultimate Performance guru Jake Norwich isn’t helping.
Remember, this is pretty much unedited, so take your helpful critique and shove it up your arse! If you’re enjoying the story, however, you can read the first adventure in the Lemuria series - a series pilot, if you will - as part of my short story collection, Anomic Bombs.
And my new sci-fi horror novel This Burdened Clay is now available at full price!
Chapter Four: Galaxy Class Basics
Prince Darov sat with quill in hand hunched over his latest work in progress, a bawdy novel called Three Men in an Imperial Cutter. The prologue lay in a pleasing stack of six hundred and seventy-four sheaves, fastened with leather cords and placed neatly in a silver tray on the grand writing bureau.
The silver tray was the eye of a storm, for a chaos of paper surrounded it on the bureau and floor. Half-arsed character profiles, invented histories of worlds that would never exist, scraps of paper scrawled with cryptic tidbits which no doubt made sense when a drunken Darov had written them, but were now cleaved from their meaning by the cold blade of sobriety. Pirate harem but ghosts. Beard personality. Greased hoglet escapade. Mood / bodily function: sweat, digestion. Piss?
Darov was part of the disarray, for he sat with his hair a bird’s nest, wearing one sock and an inside-out night shirt. His fingers were ink-stained and an idle wipe of the face had left streaks of darkness beneath his eyes as if he were preparing to storm an enemy base at night single handed.
For this latest effort, Darov had abandoned the literary genre which he had singlehandedly invented: fantomance, a captivating blend of romance and fantasy. His most recent publication of that ilk, Princess Jularia and the Roguish Master of the Shorse had however proven a critical and commercial disaster, although it was popular with the wretched inmates of the Denovian Secure Hospital for Hysterical Spinsters. They had started a fan club and everything.
Darov moved around the bureau to face a wall upon which coloured string and bits of paper had been secured, with nails and blobs of used chewing gum, as a means of visualising the interweaving plot strands of his latest novel. One string connected an Inciting Incident next to a portrait of his late father the Duke of New Edenesburch, to a Dramatic Turning Point partially obscured by the curtains. He plucked at the string with one hand and scratched his stubbly chin with the other.
“How shall readers learn of Captain Longshanks’ secret loathing of the empire?” he muttered.
He was answered by a clipped voice behind him. “I am not au fait with the specifics of your narrative dilemma, sir, but received wisdom would have it that as a general principle, showing the reader is preferable to telling him. Sir.”
Darov whirled and glared at the speaker, a podgy, balding little man who had materialised in the doorway of the royal bedchamber. “What do you know about it? Who are you? Where is Hissaq?”
The man was unruffled by this verbal assault and hooked a thumb into the waistband of his pantaloons. “I shall take each question in turn, sir, if I may. As secretary to the Poet Immaculate and holder of multiple degrees in pre- and post-Exodus verse and prose, I humbly lay claim to more than a passing familiarity with literary matters. My name is Parsons, and it is my honourable obligation to fulfil your needs while your regular equerry, Mr Hissaq, leads the research mission known as Project Meet and Greet. If I may be so bold sir, I am not a little uncomprehending of your failure to recognise me. I have after all, been engaged as your interim equerry for the past three weeks and have visited the royal bedchamber on a daily basis.”
Darov threw up his hands. “Well Parsons, I am unimpressed by the service you have provided so far, to say the least. Despite your ubiquity you have singularly failed to keep me abreast of my duties. Hissaq always tells me exactly where I need to be every hour of every day, what to wear, what to eat, how to comport myself and so on and so forth. Perhaps if you had fulfilled your role with the conscientiousness befitting an equerry of the royal household, I would not have made a total arse of myself at the Gliesan funeral last week. I hold you responsible.”
Despite his petulance, it would not be quite accurate to simply suggest that Darov was enraged while delivering this rant, for he was capable of a uniquely emotional state which combined cheerfulness with irritability, and was the product of a lifetime of berating members of the servant class. Cheeratibility.
Parsons appeared unmoved, though his use of the third person betrayed a degree of frigidity. “As his Royal Highness has been reminded, daily schedules for all members of the household are readily available via the electronic tablets which were recently distributed to them.” He gestured to a neglected rectangle of black glass which peeked out from the under the royal bed.
Darov scowled at Parsons and then at the tablet. He had tried to use the damned thing during a bored half hour last week but could not make head nor tail of the interface. Tapping buttons at random, he had somehow ordered sixty imperial tonnes of scorchnuts from Squitsisle—almost collapsing the island’s economy—and had ordered the execution of the queen’s Chief Lady in Waiting. Her Majesty herself was forced to personally intervene as the captain of the guard hauled the screaming woman from her bedchamber. If the imperial boffins were going to adopt “execute” as computer lingo, what did they expect would happen?
“Befuddle me not with your imperial wizardry, Parsons,” Darov scoffed. “If I wanted lessons in—”
“Sir, I actually came to inform you that—”
“Silence, you oaf, this rant is far from over. If I wanted lessons in royal—”
Parsons appeared rattled, to Darov’s satisfaction, and glanced over his shoulder out of the door. “Sir, I really must inform you that your mother the—”
“Silence, I say. You underlings are woefully ignorant of the pressures upon senior members of—”
Queen Aneela gently eased Parsons aside with a pristine gloved hand as she entered the royal bedchamber. The air contracted around her.
“Oh. Hello mother,” Darov said.
The queen flicked the tiniest glance in the direction of Parsons, who bowed low and departed. Darov caught a hint of a smirk on the little bastard’s face as he left.
Prince Josep followed Her Majesty into the room, taking up position a respectful distance behind and to one side of her.
“Oh, Josep,” Darov said. “How nice to see you.”
“Brother,” Josep replied cordially, then out of sight of their mother, glared at Darov and stuffed his tongue between his bottom lip and teeth: a spaz face.
“Won’t you sit down, both of you?” Darov said, swiping papers, dirty clothes and odds and ends from a couple of chairs. For the first time that day he was acutely aware that he was not wearing any trousers.
“No thank you, Darov,” his mother said. “I should not keep you from your business any more than strictly necessary.”
Darov liked to think of himself a proficient exponent of verbal swordplay, but next to his mother he was a rank amateur. She was the undefeated gladiatrix of passive aggression.
“The funeral incident has disrupted the smooth course of human-Gliesan relations, Darov,” the queen continued, “and your role in the regrettable episode has not gone unremarked among the nobility of both races.”
Darov opened his mouth to speak but was silenced by an almost imperceptible hand gesture. Her Majesty was not finished.
“One does one’s best to smooth things over, of course. However, our diplomatic endeavours are strained by factors beyond our control. Namely, the fear among the Gliesans caused by the fungal plague, and the tensions associated with having a human ruling over them as Autarch, at least in name. I suggest that familiarising yourself with the basics of Gliesan culture and anatomy would be a good use of your time.” Though she said “suggest,” a suggestion from the queen was not really a suggestion at all.
“I will mother. And I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
Josep smirked, made a spaz face at Darov again and waggled his hands about on limp wrists as if he had lost control of them.
“I am observing your antics all too clearly in the reflection from Darov’s window, Josep,” the queen said, an edge creeping into her voice. “Desist, if you would.”
Josep turned maroon and bolted erect, hands behind his back. “Sorry mother.”
“Thank you. Now Darov, I am visiting Rigel Prime with the Guild of Project Managers on a fact-finding expedition, and I will be away for some time. This should provide insights as to the seamless introduction of advanced technology into pre-industrial societies, as the process was completed with quite successfully there. Prince Josep will be in charge while I am away, and you are to follow his direction. And Darov, your allowance is suspended indefinitely. Regard this not as a punishment, rather a measure to help you maintain focus while you educate yourself in all things Gliesan.”
“But mother—” Darov started, but the words evaporated. Rather like Gliesans, a perfectly stationary queen could signal imminent danger. “Yes mother. I understand.”
“Excellent. Now, I will leave you two to catch up. Good day gentlemen.”
She turned to leave but stopped when Darov called out to her.
“Oh, mother?”
“Yes Darov?”
“Have a good trip, won’t you. I’ll do my best.”
Her Royal demeanour warmed a fraction of a degree. “That is all I ask. Thank you, son.”
“I wish you a good trip too, mother,” Josep called hastily as their mother departed. She didn’t answer and left both men eyeballing each other as her footsteps receded.
“Buck your ideas up, numb nuts,” Josep hissed. “Mummy’s trusting me to hold the fort and if you screw things up, I’ll have you flayed.”
Darov slumped back down on his chair. “Oh fugg off Josep, shouldn’t you and the princess be working on an heir or something?”
Josep purpled, sprang forward and grabbed Darov’s cheeks in one manicured fist, tipping him back in the chair. Pages fluttered to the carpeted floor. “Listen spunkrag, I’ll keep this simple. There’s only one rule while she’s away. You do what I tell you. Got that?”
Darov nodded as best he could in his brother’s vicelike grip. Josep gave his face a little shake and released him.
Darov rubbed his cheeks and muttered under his breath, “Everyone knows your arrows are blunt anyway.”
“What was that?”
“I said happy birthday for yesterday.”
“What?”
Darov pointed to a gift bag sitting on the floor beside the bed, an attractive suede thing with little handles tastefully decorated with stars and moons of gold thread.
“Oh. Thank you.” Josep retrieved the bag and looked inside, then looked up at Darov. “It’s empty.”
“Yes, it’s a gift bag. The bag is the gift.”
Josep released a breath via one nostril and then the other—it was an unusual ability of his—and winced as if in pain. “Let me ensure I have this correct. For my birthday you have given me a gift, which by its very nature, is designed to be given away. To be surrendered by its owner, rather than kept, as is traditional with gifts. Is this a dim-witted metaphor of some kind?”
It had not been intended as a metaphor but now that Darov thought about it he was quite taken with the idea. He shrugged mysteriously.
Josep shrugged in return and turned to leave. “Alright, I suppose I’ll find a use for it. Remember what I said, Darov. And oh, you’ve got a visitor on the way up.”
Josep left, and before Darov had a chance to either process the encounter with his relations, or indeed locate any trousers, another man appeared in the stone doorway.
Enter Jake Norwich, Ultimate Performance guru.
“Oh. Hello Jake.”
Jake plopped his rangy form into a chair beside the writing bureau, shuffled a few papers around and cast his gaze around the bedchamber. His movements were birdlike. When he first spoke, Darov thought the man was breaking into song, for he said “D…D…D,” in a descending glissando.
“What gives, big D? Look at this place, it’s a mess. You’re a mess. We talked about this, remember? Galaxy class basics. Get those right and what follows?”
“Poly-something?”
“Poly-level excellence, that’s right. Multi-tiered potency. Right now you’re nowhere, you look a right old state.”
“Mmm.”
“Compost it straight in the memory hole. Failure is a comma, not a full stop. Slow down to speed up, you know?”
“Clearly.”
Jake appraised Darov a moment then thumped the bureau so hard as he spoke each of the next three words, he made the prince jump in his seat. “Galaxy. Class. Basics. I’ll keep saying it until it sinks in, Big D. Look, I can see you’ve had enough of your day already, so let me tell you about mine as an exemplar. It’s the same every single day.” Jake’s gangly arms gesticulated wildly as he spoke and the effect was mesmeric. “I’m up with the cuckerel[1] at dawn, and I drink a full flagon of water first thing with a few drops of morningstarberry and thistleroot extract for the vitamins. You heard of vitamins? They’re the tits, real game changer. Then it’s fifty jumping jacks, masturbate if alone or attempt to initiate sexual intercourse if female company is present. Defecate, urinate. Then a dunk in the ice bath from which I bellow my personal development demands to the universe. Get out, dry off, get dressed and down another flagon of water. Then I grab the Jotter of Becoming and write my SMARM goals for the morning. Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Remarkable, and, um…Measurable again, because you’ve got to measure the before and measure the after. Behavioural activation for the nation, right?”
“Erm, right.”
Jake’s voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “If you don’t do this stuff, D, you know where you’re headed, don’t you?”
“Planet Nut Nut.”
Jake snapped his fingers. “So you do listen sometimes. That’s right, Planet Nut Nut. Now pop some trousers on, there’s a good chap, and tell uncle Jake what ails thee.”
Darov groaned to his feet, crossed the room on pale, skinny legs and retrieved some trousers from under the bed. He pulled them on and regaled Jake with his woes. “The queen’s off on a mission somewhere and is leaving that pompous arse Josep in charge. He’s going to make my life a misery. My novels aren’t selling and the new one’s giving me a headache.”
“Woah, woah,” Jake said. “Gain some altitude, buddy. Elevate to appreciate.”
Darov secured the buckles and clasps of his royal britches, then disappeared into the vast royal wardrobe for a clean shirt. He had had the wardrobe built specially, and it jutted out like a huge boil from his tower. Staring now at the rails of finery, he considered shutting himself in and refusing to leave. He should be so lucky.
“Oh, and I sexually assaulted a member of the Gliesan nobility by mistake,” he called out as he pulled a silken chemise over his head.
“These things happen,” Jake called back. “Don’t worry about it. You know, D, it sounds like someone hasn’t been filling their positivity pot.” Jake waited impatiently for Darov to return from the depths of the wardrobe, and when he did, immediately thrust a pen into his hand and herded him back to the chair beside the bureau. He spread a piece of blank paper out before them. Darov noted that the pen was one of the fancy imperial ones with its own cylinder of ink inside a plastic casing. He preferred quills.
“Fancy piece of kit, isn’t it?” Jake said. “Keep it, it’s yours. Now, let’s fill the positivity pot together. Draw a circle. It needs to be a big one, royal sized.”
Darov did so.
“Lovely. That’s your positivity pot, so let’s fill that mother. Write these down: I am a prince…I am handsome…I have excellent teeth…I…erm…I weave magical worlds through my stories…I have terrific hair.” Darov obediently wrote these words down as Jake said them.
“Now you think of some more, D, the pot’s barely full.”
“I don’t know what to put.”
“Okay. What makes you you? Tell me something that enables you to stand in your wholeness.”
“Erm…I drank a gallon of Heavenvale wine without falling over last night.”
“No, not that.”
“A matron told me I’d brought a modicum of entertainment to the bleak existence of hysterical spinsters.”
Jake winced. “No, not that either. Never mind, D, you get the idea. Think up some in your own time, okay?” He inspected the mess upon Darov’s writing bureau more closely this time, and made a show of looking through some of the piles of paper. “You know what I think the problem is here, D? You spend so much time inhabiting other people’s stories, real and imagined, that you’ve neglected your own. Stand up.” Meek as a baby gort,[2] Darov obeyed. “Now, take this.” He handed the weighty prologue of Three Men in an Imperial Cutter to the prince, untying the leather laces which were keeping the sheaves together, and casting them aside. “Throw it out the window.”
“What? I worked hard on this, Jake. I’m not going to just—”
Jake grabbed an artisanal didgeridoo which some grovelling serf had given Darov as a gift, and touched it to each royal shoulder. “Prince Darov, by the power vested in me I hereby declare you master of your own narrative. Arise, sir, and inhabit your story. Consign trivial yarns to the four winds, for they have imprisoned you for too long.”
“Trivial?”
Jake moved to the window, opened it, and made an after you gesture towards the sky, as if inviting Darov to leap to his doom. Darov was tempted. “Throw the manuscript out of the window.”
Darov hated the whine in his voice. “Is this strictly necessary, Jake?”
“It’s for your own good. Pinch your sphincter and strangle the turtle.”
With glacial slowness, Darov came to stand beside Jake and stretched his arm from the window with the manuscript clutched in his fist. He closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and opened his hand. The pages tumbled down and away. Gusts lifted them momentarily, but gravity carried them inexorably downwards towards the uncaring earth. They were like baby birds ejected from the nest too soon.
“Feel better?”
“Not really. My mother stopped my allowance and I don’t have two centimes to rub together. I was hoping the publisher would grant me an advance.”
“Ah yes, that reminds me why I came here in the first place,” Jake said. From his pocket, he pulled a crumpled piece of paper, smoothed it out and handed it to Darov. It was an invoice with Jake’s ludicrous made-up coat of arms at the top and a large number scrawled at the bottom. Darov’s eyes boggled at the number.
Both men returned to their seats, Jake watching the prince closely. Darov chewed at his lower lip. “This much? Really?”
“You had thirteen coaching sessions since the last time you last paid, D. Ooh, hang on.” Jake snatched back the invoice and the fancy pen, crossed out the number, wrote a larger number in its place and handed back both invoice and pen. “Fourteen sessions. Forgot to charge you for today.” Before Darov could respond, Jake slapped his own forehead and snatched the invoice and pen once more. He crossed out the number he had just written and wrote a yet larger one in its place. “And the cost of the pen.”
“I’m broke, Jake. Until the queen returns, at least. I have other, um, financial commitments. Can you wait a few weeks?”
Jake smiled sadly. “I get it, D. The debts are piling up, right? I feel your pain. I feel it. But a guru’s got to eat. Ultimate Performance coaching has overheads, you know? There’s the research, travel expenses, and other things which also incur costs.”
They sat in silence at something of an impasse. A gentle breeze from the open window rippled the velvet curtains and fluttered the bits of paper stuck to the wall. The silence grew so uncomfortable that Darov rang the servant bell simply to break it. After a suspiciously brief interval, Parsons appeared.
“Sir?”
Darov spared Parsons not the briefest glance, merely gestured vaguely with his fingertips. “Drink.”
“Certainly sir.”
Minutes flowed treacle-like while Darov and Jake endured the silence once again, until Parsons finally returned with a bottle of wine and two crystal goblets on a silver tray. He placed them on the bureau and left.
Darov poured two glasses of wine and held his own up in resigned sort of way, as if toasting someone to whom he had lost a reckless wager. Jake clinked his own glass against it, took a sip and smacked his lips.
“Ah, good stuff. Much obliged to you, good sir. Now, I’m a solution focussed individual, so during that awkward little hiatus I thought up a solution to our quandary.”
“Oh yes?”
“Oh yes. Make yourself comfortable and I’ll tell you a story. Last month, I was weekending down at Lord Ulay’s chateau in Lillian’s Glade. Some place that is, I tell you, massive. I’m the Lady Ulay’s nutritional consultant and she invited me to a shindig. Anyway, long story short, it was the end of the night and me and his lordship were sharing a bottle in his study. He was pretty tight, the old peepers glazing over somewhat. He starts telling me about this fantastic opportunity he’s stumbled onto, then he opens up his desk and pulls out an imperial communications cube, you ever seen one of those?”
Darov shook his head.
“It’s a little translucent cube with a light in the middle of it, an imperial storage device for confidential communications and so forth. Encrypted, whatever that means. I don’t think the light does anything, just for show. He pulls this thing out of his desk and waves it in my face, gloating. ‘This little beauty is going to make me very, very rich, Mr Norwich,’ he says. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s whom you know.’”
“Who.”
“What?”
“Who you know, not whom.”
“Right, I think you’re missing the point, D. Anyway. Lord Ulay reeled off some pretty big numbers, let me tell you. I probed for deets, but he was schtum, despite being three shits to the wind.”
Darov took a swig of wine and didn’t bother wiping away the moisture from his stubbled chin. “What’s your point, Jake?”
“Well, Mr Prince Darov of good house Winwick sir, that’s where you come in. If a certain debt-riddled prince were to retrieve said cube and pass it on to his Ultimate Performance guru, said guru would consider any outstanding invoices to be paid in full. Who knows, you might be in credit for a few half-price sessions.”
Darov sat mannequin-like until Jake coughed politely and said, “Is that clear, D? I’m asking you to steal an imperial comms cube from Lord Ulay’s chateau and deliver it to me, and the debt’s paid. How’s that sound, old buddy?”
Darov mined his last reserves of indignation. “You cannot ask a Prince of the Kingdom of Cartreffi to perform a burglary, Jake. It’s unseemly. I won’t do it.”
“I get it, you’re suffering analysis paralysis, this isn’t your kind of thing, whatever. But remember, you can’t adjust the sun but you can swing your solar sails in a different direction. That right there is galaxy class basics.”
“What?”
Jake sniffed. “Alright, let’s attack this from a different angle. A jeweller in Poeditch sold me a page from his ledger which proves that four years ago you purchased an emerald necklace for Prince Josep’s then-future wife, Katarzyna, quite some time before he met her. Ergo, you were in a relationship with the future queen of Cartreffi. Get me the comms cube or I’ll tell Prince Josep.”
Darov’s mouth dropped open and he blinked a few times.
Jake drained his wine and licked his lips. “Hey, no need to look at me like that. Sometimes galaxy class basics means speaking softly but carrying a big carrot. We do what we must.” He stood and clapped the paralysed Darov on the shoulder. “Think it over, D. When the shorse of opportunity crashes through the scullery door, sometimes you just gotta grab the fleece and hope for the best. So long brother.”
Jake stood and loped out the door, bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet.
Darov remained motionless for some time, his mind drained of thought. Eventually he stood, removed his trousers and chemise and lay on the vast royal bed with his fingers laced behind his head, to stare at the ornately painted ceiling. His mind was blank until eventually thoughts began to coalesce, like silhouettes emerging from mist. He yanked the bellpull next to the bed. Parsons appeared.
“Yes sir?”
“Parsons,” Darov said to the ceiling, “do you recall the name of that odd little friend of Mr Hissaq’s? The hogwrangling fellow who is uncannily adept at finding solutions to seemingly intractable problems?”
“Mr Tavian, sir?” The name seemed to cause Parsons some distaste, like a bite of greening potato.
“That’s him. Find him and bring him to me, this instant.”
“Very good sir.”
If this Tavian fellow couldn’t help, then Darov would go to the comms room, get on the N-space transmitter and speak to the human ruler of the Gliesan Dominion, the Autarch himself, or Mr Mariss as he was formerly known.[3] Tap him up for a loan. Or a murder.
Some hours later Parsons returned to find Darov still prone on the bed. The prince had barely moved an inch, but had dozed fitfully and dreamt of sexy Gliesan-human hybrids with ample breasts who wanted to eat his brain.
Darov’s mood improved considerably upon seeing that Parsons sported a black eye and a pronounced limp.
“Sir,” Parsons groaned, “it transpires that Mr Tavian has been missing for some days. I spoke to his wife, a woman both formidable and if I may say so, rather uncouth. Believing I had kidnapped her husband, she attacked without warning and cost me a tooth.
[1] A descendent of Old Earth fowl, the cuckerel is the male of a common domesticated bird of Cartreffi. The birds pair bond for life, although every morning the male crows with the dawn, inviting other males to come and mate with his partner.
[2] A domesticated animal, descended from Old Earth goats. They are fluffy and affectionate as babies, but turn violently psychotic as they reach adulthood. Many skunts of Cartreffi believed them to be possessed by demons.
[3] Due to his ownership of a certain Gliesan relic, it could easily have been Darov himself who ended up as Autarch. In the event, he managed to shift this responsibility onto an Imperial guard named Marris, through the timely deployment of a false beard.
Thomas - this really is MY thing. As I said in a review of AB, you are the new Jack Vance - and it's about blody time someone took up his mantle.
Gosh thanks Gene, it's feedback like this that keeps a man going.