Read 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale Online

Authors: Danbert Nobacon

3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale (4 page)

BOOK: 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale
7.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
 
It was actually an ENORMOUS black cat, with horns and electric red eyes that pierced the graydark. On two occasions in her waking life Stormy had seen the sandy colored mountain lions in the high country above Morainia. But this creature was jet black and ten times the size, so in Stormy’s mind it definitely qualified as a monster. Face to face, it was even bigger than the tales mountain folk told of it in their night stories in the taverns.
 
“I’ve come to rescue my father,” gasped Stormy. She was very afraid, but determined. She knew that she had to somehow get past the beast, go inside the cave, and rescue her dad. And she was going to do it, too. Just like you would for your dad. “You get out of my way,” she ordered.
 
“Can’t,” rasped the beast. “Come back later. I’m busy.”
 
“No, you’re not,” Stormy said. “What have you got to be busy about? If you’re anything like my cat, you eat, lie around, and sleep most of the time.”
 
“Eating sounds like a good idea,” said the beast, flicking a pink tongue the width of a tree trunk across its lips.
 
“Now you’re trying to scare me, you mean thing! What’s your name, anyway?”
 
The Black Cat shrugged its head, and Stormy thought it looked momentarily ashamed. “Proton,” he murmured. And then, regaining his momentum, he boomed, “Girlchild, know me as Proton, King of all the Mountains. Precursor of all monkeys and men.”
 
“Oh … ’er, I’m … I’m Stormy,” said Stormy. It seemed the right thing to say at the time. But, to Stormy’s surprise, it WAS the right thing to say.
 
The Big Black Cat, aka Proton, King of the Mountains, Precursor of all monkeys and men, opened his electric red eyes wide.
 
“Ah! So it is you.”
 
Now it was time for Stormy to open her eyes wide. “It is me what?”
 
“It is you who, in the stories of the Ancient Ones, brings the never ending storm to my mountains. For even though I rule here, in the absence of sunshine it seems like everyone’s got a monk on all the time, and no one pays me the proper attention anymore.”
 
Well, in that case, thought Stormy, I’ll walk right on in and find my dad. She started making towards the cave in her determined way.
 
“What? What? What? … What do you think you are doing?”
 
“Out of my way, Cat, or whatever you’re called …”
 
“Are you not forgetting something S-t-o-r-m-y, bringer of storms?”
 
“What?”
 
“If you wish to enter this cave, then you must bring the sunshine back to me.”
 
Now it was Stormy’s turn to stop. She was very confused.
 
“But I didn’t bring the storm,” she protested, concentrating hard. Had she brought the storm? “No! I just dreamed it and ...”
 
“Ah you see! You admit it.” Proton laughed and began moving from foot to foot, for the entrance to the cave was not wide enough for him to pace back and forth. He looked as if he had just scored a point for the prosecution.
 
“No!” Stormy sobbed. “What about my dad?”
 
“He’s busy too. Digging. But we need sunshine. Come back with some sunshine.” The Cat turned to go.
 
“Wait!” cried Stormy.
 
Proton turned its head back to the girl and yawned a gaping yawn, showing stalactite and stalagmite teeth. And that curling red carpet of a tongue. “What?” he asked.
 
“Where do I find sunshine?”
 
The Cat looked mildly irritated now, like he really was being held up from having a snooze, which, as you know, all cats hate. Harrumphing, he said, “Very well! You must climb the highest mountain. And it’s not this one, I’ve already looked. Climb the highest mountain,” the Cat went on, “and you will know it at night by the constellation of the Mightor. Remember in your mind, the portion of the sky where the Mightor’s arse is marked by the stars, and in the morning the sun and life will shine forth from there.”
 
“But that’s the kind of jokes that boys tell,” said Stormy, trying not to laugh.
 
“Well I didn’t make it up. Go and ask the Giggle Monkeys if you don’t believe me.”
 
In waking life, if had Stormy been able to remember these fine details of this dream, she would have first thought that if Proton was King of all the mountains, then why didn’t he get up off his cat ass and go and find the sunshine himself? And if she had to do it, then she would have despaired at the enormity of the task. However, in dreamtime logic it all seemed relatively straightforward and clear.
 
She knew the highest mountains in the world lay to the north and the east of Morainia, and the highest mountain was self-evidently one of those. All she had to do was cross hundreds of miles of unexplored wilderness, climb mountains that were previously impenetrable to humankind, and then she could map the position of the sun by the Mightor’s arse, harness its energy, bring it back to Proton, and in so doing be reunited with her dad.
 
And just as she felt the restorative resolution of having a clear plan, the cat and the cave dissolved. The morning sun shone, and Stormy did not remember anything about her quest for sunshine.
 
Instead she found herself on the shore of an ocean.
 
On a rock, a stone’s throw from the shore, sat a creature with her back to Stormy. From folk tales she knew the creature to be a Mermangel. The Mermangel seemed oblivious to Stormy, and was busy preening herself. A flutter of her wings, a swish of her tail as she combed her wet blonde locks.
 
And then the Mermangel stopped what she was doing and began to turn her head. For a half moment Stormy was petrified, thinking the Mermangel would have the hideous look of a devil-beast. But she had a woman’s face. On closer inspection Stormy realized that the Mermangel was her own stepmother, Gwynmerelda.
 
“Hello darling,” said the Gwynmerangel. It seemed to Stormy like the most natural thing in the world that she would be talking to her stepmother Mermangel, in a place she had never been, while inhaling the unmistakable smell of the ocean.
 
“I was just coming to say goodbye,” said Stormy.
 
“Darling child,” said Gwynmerangel. “I know I cannot stop you, but I wish you would know before you go careening off all over the place, that it will most definitely end in tears.”
 
Then Stormy woke up just as the real sun was beginning to cast its warming rays through the gaps in the shutters of her real bedroom, making patterns of horizontal lines across the drapes. She pulled the curtains open with a swish, and the lingering fragments of her mad dreams disappeared.
 
Chapter 4
 
THE WILSONS AND THE GODLOVES
 
W
ance upon a time there was a beautiful princess, named Alexandra Stormybald Wilson. Stormy lived in a sort-of-castle on Bald Mountain, with her father the King Walterbald Wilson the Second, and her sort-of-ugly, sort-of-but-maybe-not-evil stepmother, Queen Gwynmerelda. Bald Mountain Castle was in the territory of Morainia, which was a small and fairly isolated part of a much larger and much unexplored world.
 
Had Walterbald been writing the story, he would have begun it with the words
Wance upon a World
, for Time, as you and I know it, had not yet been invented in Morainia. And if we begin to dig, as we shall inevitably have to do as we accompany a thirteen-year-old princess suddenly let loose, then we shall discover that there was something about this world that was not at all right. King Walterbald knew something of this, and that was why he was going on his expedition: to find out more.
 
For Walterbald, in his quest for knowledge, had become aware in recent summers that there were certain ideas people knew and took for granted, which had always seemed to fit with the lore of this fairy tale world, but which increasingly, to a logically enquiring mind like his own, were all out of whack.
 
The house on Bald Mountain was a sort-of-castle, because while it was certainly spacious by contemporary standards (it had to accommodate various members of the King and Queen’s extended families, and had to have a barn attached that was big enough for large gatherings of more than fifty people), this castle was made almost entirely of wood. And to the honest eye, it could reasonably be described as ramshackle. There were metal fixings, but these were always used wisely and sparingly, because workable metal was a rare commodity, even in Morainia. Although there were rumors …
 
Notable among the castle’s other inhabitants were the widowed Grandma Natasha Godlove, the Queen Mother. Grandma Godlove, or Gigi as she was affectionately known, and her granddaughter Stormy got on like a house on fire. Then there was Grandma Zilpher and Grandpa Jakerbald Wilson, the King’s parents.
 
These were a handful to say the least cantankerous and contrary with each other, and more so with their own children. And if it does not seem to make sense that Jakerbald Wilson was alive and yet Walterbald was King, fretter ye not.
 
We all know about Queen Mothers, but the idea of a King Father seems strange. But why should it be ask yourself that. And anyway, Jakerbald was only strange when he played Grandpa-ish tricks. He was actually a very cheery and highly intelligent fellow. Highly original in his outlook, although, it must be admitted, a bit ornery.
 
It was in keeping with his ornery character that when Jakerbald reached his fifty-fifth birthday, he took the unusual step of retiring, becoming the first known King Father, and causing a proper constitutional storm in a water tank.
 
Most people in Morainia were wangodmatists to some degree or other, at least on the surface. But most were too busy with daily life to be more involved than attending Seventh day services and religious festivals. Wangodmatism had its professional holy men, called probbers, missioned throughout the western lands. And the ruling body of wangodmatists in Morainia, the unimaginatively named High Council of Wangodmatists, had seen Jakerbald’s resignation as an in.
 
The probbers said that the whole Wilson family should thus be excluded from the throne. They’d never liked those Wilsons anyway all of them too lively by half. And the Council suspected they were a bunch of Freethinkers to boot. That Jakerbald! And Walterbald was worse! And no male heir! Of course they saw an opportunity to make their own man, Probber Rogerley Bishop, the new King. Or at least someone with a couple of sons.
 
The more pragmatic Council of Town Elders said it really should go to a vote, because even if it WAS a kingdom, the Council of Town Elders knew you only could lead when you led where people wanted to go. So four prospective kingdidates were put forward, including Bishop and Walterbald. In the event, when it was put to a popular vote, despite the dirty-trickery and shenanigans of the wangodmatists, the Morainian people decided that Walterbald should be King after all. And not purely out of a respect for tradition. They liked Walterbald. That was the long and short of it. And he was useful, King or no.
BOOK: 3 Dead Princes: An Anarchist Fairy Tale
7.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Saving Avery by Angela Snyder
Incendiary Circumstances by Amitav Ghosh
Stupid and Contagious by Crane, Caprice
Sunset Ridge by Carol Lynne
One Lavender Ribbon by Heather Burch