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In a large royal bedroom, befitting a king of means and purchase, with a propensity for paintings of eels, awoke King Hector Cornswallow. The morning sun shone through his bedroom window and glistened off his many crystalline aardvark figurines.
"Algebra!" he cried to the ceiling. "Algebra! Bring my honeydew and a scoop or two!"
The ringing of the servant's bell with a pale, clammy hand ruffled many brows down the corridors outside his majesty's sleeping quarters.
"Algebra, dammit!"
Squeaking in from the shoulder room came the kiwi-nosed manservant. His face was pinned to his skull with much fret and foreboding. "Yes, m'lord Distemper?" he wheezed, invoking his majesty's middle name, a common practice among the lesser-enabled rodentia of the kingdom.
"Bring me my morning melon, and something with which to partake of it...uh...with," the slab gristled, puzzled by his own manner of breezy bravado. He snapped his fingers thrice for no apparent reason.
"Yes, yes, m'lord," the expedient mound replied whilst shuffling out of the bedchamber. Within a squawk or two, the melon did arrive, on a fancy silver tray decorated with many far-fetched etchings of an ancient war no one could ever quite comprehend. A large scoop was provided as well, so that the master's fingers could remain well above the entire situation.
"Here, m'lord Distemper, your morning melon, cut just as you like it...in mostly half." A slight bow occurred to the servant as he acquiesced.
"Ah," the leathery old man smacked, "Yes, 'tis morn-time now, with the ascending of the sun, and me melon likewise awaits its own voyage, but one which will entail it descending...namely, down my raspy gobble." The old punter did his best to smile but his lips were not cooperating. "My small intestine does grapple with the ecstasy of it all, I must say, it gurgles like a clogged storm drain."
He gingerly picked up the scoop, but just before it penetrated the orangey flesh of the aforementioned fruit, the king quickly pivoted his eyelids toward his cowering manservant.
"You may vanquish thyself to the hinterlands of thy procurement," he sizzled sharply, "Tend to other matters which may better regard your somewhat upright position."
The shaky underling bowed again to fulfill an ancient tradition of caste and lot, before he lumbered away on his two gout-stricken feet. The room was suddenly full of liquidy mastications and gesticulations of the consuming sort, as the leathery lips and tongue of the king devoured the sweet meat of the melon.
Awarded with his own solemn solitude, the manservant traipsed down the corridor, although his club-footed swagger was quite unbecoming. His cloth ascot swayed in abject disagreement with his rib cage, but with each step his horizons broadened, as did a crease above his uni-brow and another smaller crevice just above his pointy chin. Uninhibited and slightly cock-eyed, his self-manipulations were showing themselves among the gaps of his teeth and in the spring of his step. His future bindings were unraveling about his ankle sores and he partook of vain fantasies concerning parades, and dishonorable games of chance.
'Maleek Algebra Mallock' was his birthright ― a treasure from the old homestead, bestowed upon him like his commonality and his feverish fondness for ale ― a maternal gift that had been siphoned through an umbilical cord ― a hand-me-down that he could not refuse, or trade, or even redeem for either rare stamps or crates of second-hand merchandise.
Later that day, lying in a small bed, with oily women draped in nylon and nicotine as accoutrements, he saw through the opiate-enhanced reality of his life and realized that he would never have wished such a sentence upon even the falsest of his childhood idols.
"Know thy place." His father had once etched into his young, misshapen skull. "Know thy place and thy place shall know you."
Such was the circumference of his world.
Vespius Cornswallow, also known as the 'Jester of Pyre and Other Assorted Counties,' the son of King Hector Cornswallow, a.k.a., Lord of Gastro-Land, and Major General in the 'Society of Oddfellows with Long Ear Hair', swam in the deep entrails of a sinister plan.
Vespius had no friends, only acquaintances. As the son of a powerful man, he had the right pedigree and family bearing ― but most saw through his watery bloodline and envisioned him as just a half-witted scoundrel. Vacant and slightly porous, his character was often questioned, sometimes rebuked, but mostly seen as a component of some deep, well-seated genetic deficiency. He was part-and-parcel the unseemly by-product of rampant and unflinching royal inbreeding.
So much for his particulars...
He sat at his piano, which was so badly out of tune that many thought it played in an alien musical alphabet heard only by castrated bloodhounds or the occasional tone-deaf mongoose. It was only on very rare occurrences that the sound that emanated from it even came close to resembling music per se. With a thunderous chorus of strident, low-pitched discordance, Vespius began the concerto:
'Macaroni! Macaroni! Come hither now and speak your peace.
Bring your friends Tesla and Marconi, and pray for early release.
Oh, lift me up now, so that my feet won't be so afraid
Of the moon-shaped buttons upon her carnal cavalcade,
Or the glimpses of those pale palisades
Seen through the legs of her pompous parade.
All is a charade.
Which, in time, will fade.
Sing it now with that old familiar ring:
Life, like old furniture, is a many splintered thing.'
A few notes twinkled away in all their pitchy glory, and the room grew silent once more. Vespius stared out the large window of his father's library, and peered across the green and yellow pasture that stretched past the castle walls, to the hills of conifers that faded into the distant horizon.
"My swill be done," he slithered through his lips.
He left the piano to its own murderous devices and pulled a dusty book off of a shelf. His fingerprints were already all over it. Opening it up, he read from the 'Book of Jasper,' a tome written during a panic famine in Lower Patuglia, near the end of the Second Age of Bronze Artifacts:
'Thus, the bovine and reptilian vermin-nauts congregated near the apex of the Southern Fidelity, in order to fathom the foremost and to deter the vanquished. Where arose Vas Deferen, Lord of Vermillion and the overdrawn counties of Fairlux and Ballywaddle, to seize the 'Wrench of the Covenant' and to lay vengeance upon the milky-white valley of Tangolisp.
So, it came to pass that the intestines of the Marmapukes and their acrid allies did seize and rumble with great fury and trepidation, for the 'Vine of God' did flower in the spring at the Mausoleum of Slorsh, but did wither during the summer's 'days of the dogs', and wandered no more by the fall's rains.'
...And then, by way of cross-indexing, Vespius looked up the writings of King Vas Deferen, in another book, and discovered this gem:
'Argue my fancy. Say not what for, but praise the twofer!
Like crooked cobblers, these are the days that vie for men's soles.
For it was in the age of such malcontents,
That Poindexter the Porkster grazed upon his compliments, and cried:
'Abrasion! Abrasion! My kingdom for an abrasion!'
Vespius leaned back in the chair. His shoulders slumped low, leaving the book lying upon his little peachy-haired gut. His arms draped down upon the floor beneath the chair, resembling two long, thin, sweaty sausages. As his eyes darted about the room, his foot began tapping the floor in 6/8 time. Conflicting thoughts fought for his attention inside his rather thick skull.
"Much ado about muffins," he puckered toward the bookshelves.
He sighed heavily and blew several strands of his coal-black hair away from his dark-lashed eyeball-holders. His emerald pupils darted from left to right as if both sides of his brain were having a tennis match.
His devious mind leapt from one possible outcome to another — with little empty spaces in between. He touched the pale skin of his cheekbone with his thin fingers. A shade of stubble encircled his jaw line, coming to a triangular goatee upon his sad excuse for a chin.
"Of course, this could all be the work of some mean-spirited, jealous, god-like, super trooper, if only..." His eyes sprang up to ponder the ceiling. "The clues were not so obviously...obvious!"
He slowly began to rub his fuzzy abdomen before letting out a faint, squeaky, bubble of gas through his spongy posterior. "The king knows everything, I'm afraid, or possibly...soon will." Another thought raised its hand for attention. "Or, perhaps he is, in fact, the bumbling idiot my thoughts so often portray him as being, and cannot see the foreshadowing on the wall from a splayed plate of Devonshire snails."
Then, in a stark moment of cerebellum solidarity, a crystal clear thought elbowed its way to the front of the line. Vespius creaked a smile across his young face. "Yes," he whispered, "Yes..."
The successful thought beamed proudly inside his head, and bowed, while a group of pithy neurons clapped in clamorous approval.
ns 172.70.39.155da2
