The Courtier

Here's something I wrote for AP Euro in which we had to describe our own Renaissance man and I got a little weird with it. Have fun availing yourself of this short story.

Hard rain pounding away on a man’s castle. A castle with gravel floors, streams forming through well-worn paths. A roof made out of asphalt and government regulation supports. But a mansion to anyone getting wet. The king stumbles his way into the fortress, his royal cape made from tattered rags and held together with bedraggled apathy. They hang heavily around his neck, dragging gravel and sticks behind him. His jester lies in waiting. Juices from a dead rat trickling down his chin. His colorful dress sports a mix of black, brown and every shade of grey. “Caught ‘im just now, broken leg what’s did ‘im in. Wanna bit?” The king shakes his head, loosing bits of mud from his regal locks and slumps down on an almost dry spot of broken concrete. The sound of grotesque chewing and cracking rat bones.

            “It’s a boy.” The chewing turns into a swallow.

            “Good fer you then. Name him after me?” The jester’s mouth turns to a blood-stained grin, laughing at his own joke before returning to his meal.

            “Ain’t got a name, not yet.” The jester grunted,

            “Good thing that. Old lady might get too attached, cry too much when the winter gets ‘im.” The king nods slowly and looks out into the downpour. The books he used to read always said rain sounded like a faraway train, clicking along its airborne tracks. But it always reminded him of construction crews erecting fences, a thousand shovels hitting soft ground, just like digging trenches when he was in the army. Dirt flying up in his face, the brown mist making him blind with torpor.

            “Ain’t no conductor goin out in this.”

            “Watcha say?”

            “Huh? Didn’t say nothin. Rain’s gettin to ya.” Chimes creep through the sound of organized digging, eleven ring out clear. When the day was bright, the king could see the clock tower that made them, could walk in the shadow it cast.

            “Guess them Harvard boys startin on the fifth course ‘bout now. Bet none of them got their very own rat, one they found all by themselves.” The jester chuckles smugly and wipes the remaining blood onto his sleeve. The king shot back angrily:

            “What you so proud for? You ain’t gone killed notin. Jus’ found the poor feller under a rock somewhere.” A blank look finds the king’s eyes.

            “Same thing init?”  The king scoffs and finds a flat piece of concrete to lie down on. Within minutes his mind slips through the stone and floats lazily into the air, carried by memory and passing fancy it drifts through multiple dimensions before landing in a daytime Boston. Metal monoliths meet the sky while sun cooks old bricks below. Bricks set in ancient universities. Cobblestones on historic streets. Here is revolution. Here is independence. Here is the timid king on the outer edges of the city light, shying away from the eyes kept hidden in abandoned stores, staring from loose floorboards. Libraries line the streets, their mountains of books filled with unknown words and misunderstanding. Music plays from the windows, the melodies of singers and guitarists rocking the king to tears as the strings fly at him like razors and the words burst his eardrums. The breath of runners and pounding of feet lead a beat of rhythmic retreat, just as they hammer the monarch into the ground, trampling bones and determination. Compassionate mothers swoon cloyingly to their children; they talk to plants to watch them grow, but the king they let go. They leave him weeping on the outskirts, finding cages to put himself behind. Through tears and a chain link fence he watches the city in motion, a veil of ornate miasma covering darkness and homes under bridges. He almost misses the infant crawling past his barricades, his infant that moves steadily into the haze. Cries are muffled by drug dealers with hands over his mouth, gangsters holding knives to his throat. The prince moves into the city square, growing older with every step he takes. Libraries fling books at his head, words flitting off erudite pages and flying into his eyes. Guitarists improvise scales and move up step by step, notes climbing into his ears and flying out his mouth.  Cyclists spin rotors and tires, the prince hooking on to their chains and donning a yellow jersey. Crying mothers bombard him with sadness, running into his arms, finding answers on his shoulders. Breaking from the crowd, he steps past the king’s sight to find a lady of the lake proffering a sword twisted with gold and blood. She holds the sword to him, his young face looking back with eyes white and sightless. He dashes it to the ground, throwing lady and weapon to the hard stones. Finding not Arthur’s stone but one much smaller, the prince rips a pen from the clasping rock and writes away the fog his father sees. Buildings turn to numbers and clothing into words, robing people in poetry and constructing math from inspiration’s foundations. Eyes under the floorboards are illuminated to evince monsters of imagination while houses are built under bridges. Carried on words and numbers the prince flies out of the city in a direction never known while the king sinks back into his body on the concrete. The rain stops but the streams still run, they run with the king fleeing his kingdom, never to be seen again. “Dreams don’t mean nothin”.

            The new mother holds her baby, but only slightly as her arms are weak, all the energy drained from her body, her eyes dimming, the sun ostensibly stealing all the light from them. As they shut to sleep forever, her son reaches towards the window, staring right into the sun. His first sight of the world doused with flames, a fiery puzzle with every solution. Conflagrations form into chain link fences and the child conductor crashes his train of raindrops into a burning universe.