The King's Men Ch. 01

[This is a completed five-chapter novella that will post by the end of first week in August 2019; this is a fantasy parallel take on Richard the Lionhearted's conquest of the island of Cyprus in 1191 to rescue his shipwrecked and captured wife, Berengaria.]

It has never ceased to amaze me that they never see us and yet we know all. The nobility live their lives with their every whim and need taken care of. And yet if someone asked them how that happened, they invariably would stop and ponder and still not know. Those of us who do all of that for them are invisible. There is no limit to what they will do or say in front of us and believe that they were alone, that no one else was there to see—and, more interestingly—to see through them.

Thus it was with those at the court of my king, Claude de Lusane, the man my lady, the Princess—now Queen—Blanche, brought me to and might have loved—perhaps as much as I came to love him. Although of that I must not speak. The high born can think on it and indulge in it. But not one such as me. Unless, of course, I am wanted in that way. But ugly and deformed as I am, I almost never have been wanted that way—at least not since I was young—even though many around me have been. A pity that. Although I have been fucked. Yes, I have. I have exchanged my loyalty for the cock as well as any noble has. Perhaps not as often. Certainly not often enough. Most often because the man wanted something from me that it was difficult and risky for me to give.

Thus it was that after that harrowing, storm-tossed month at sea and the indignity of the Limonean prison—they called it a castle, but if it was, I'd hate to see how their serfs live—I came to be witness to all that happened in that momentous first half year at the Kibrit court. Perhaps not all, but enough of it to make clear the what and why of it, holding puzzle pieces that none of the confused or scheming lead actors in the drama had in their possession—or bothered to look for, even though they nestled right under their eyes. And all just by being there, standing in the room, being invisible to those who were playing high stakes with their lives—and with the lives of others—with my life as well.

And perhaps that's another significant difference between one such as me and the nobility. I have nothing to lose or to gain—it's all on sufferance from them. They, on the other hand, have so much at stake, and it is all on risk during their every waking moment.

* * * *

What appeared at the time the most fearful and endangering moments of my life paled in the light of the to-the-death intrigue I encountered in King Claude's supposedly sedate court. The sea voyage from Holland to the shores of the island of Kibrit ended, thanks to the capriciousness of the storms of nature, with my lady and her retinue landing, amid the wreckage of the only ship of the flotilla that survived, on an enemy shore rather than in the safe harbor of her newly wed husband. And this not to mention, as the queen warned me never to speak of it, what she had to do for us to survive to see the king's court.

The welcome Simon Limona gave to my lady, Blanche, at his castle in the harbor of his city state on the southern coast was both menacing and just within the bounds of propriety—or so I have been commanded to say of it. There is a code of conduct and deportment among the nobility of Europe now, one driven by the Holy See in this age that centers on the crusades to reestablish the faith in the Holy Land, but it was not understood here on Kibrit. There was no love lost at all between Simon Limona and King Claude. Limona was hanging onto his miniscule kingdom by a last death hold against the increasing might of the king. And the island of Kibrit we landed upon is at the corner of the civilized world. And as long as I have lived there, I've never been sure about which side of the "civilized" line it rested on.

Claude, already the king of Damascus and Acre, had been granted suzerainty over the Mediterranean island of Kibrit in recognition of his defending of the faith in two previous crusades—a prodigious effort for one so young, the king barely having reached the age of two score. His first crusade, in the company of his aged father, King Claxton, had been the old king's last. And Claude's next crusade had been under his own banner as king and had been the campaign in which he had subdued and subjugated Damascus and Acre.

The only problem with the pope's gift was that there already existed city state kingdoms on Kibrit. To establish his kingship there—and acquire what would be the first substantive base for his rule—Claude first had to subdue the island. This he had methodically been doing—he was a superb military leader and warrior in his own right—right up to the very moment I first laid eyes on his physical visage.

I had seen paintings, for true, of him, exchanged with the House of Holland during the negotiations over his yet-to-be-consummated marriage to Blanche, and he had certainly been handsome and commanding in these. But the paintings were nothing in the stead of the magnificence of the golden-haired young king when I first set my eyes on the in-the-flesh man. I could not see how any man who might succumb to the charms of another man could resist him. And I soon could see—although many others apparently could not—that, with King Claude, many were the men who couldn't—and didn't—resist him.

King Claude would not have been in the harbor city of Paphaes on the island's west coast to receive Blanche even if her flotilla had not been thrown off course by the sudden storm on the Mediterranean. The marriage to Blanche was important, yes, but it was secondary to the need for there to be a welcoming and safe home for Blanche to come to and for the young king to start his married life with a queen—with a queen who could bear him sons to solidify the rule of the house of Lusane. So, instead of awaiting her arrival at Paphaes, he was in the north, on the ridge of the chain of mountains running east and west the length of Kibrit, attacking the last mountaintop bastion castle, save one, of the last holdout Kibrit independent kingdom, save Simon Limona's small city state. At the moment I first saw the king, the castle of St. Jerome had fallen into his hands, and he had broken the back of the proud and ancient kingdom of Turionia, which had been forged on the eastern and northern coast of Kibrit by the remnants of the victory fleet returning home from the Trojan war that had been separated from the main flotilla and washed up on the shores of a paradise even more enticing to them than their Acadian meadows.

Perhaps in fairness to the king, I should write something in response to the subsequent rumors that have been floated about the cool relationship between King Claude and Queen Blanche in that first year of their marriage—one arranged a continent away with, by custom, neither husband nor wife ever seeing each other in the flesh until many months after the marriage. It is true that Blanche did not conceive a son in that first year—and, although not fully relevant—the rumors of the king's preference are also true. But it's not true that Blanche hated the king from the outset because he let her fall into the hands of the enemy and placed his conquest of Turionia above her honor and comfort. And it is not true that she denied him for that year as a result—or that she believed him of a different persuasion from the outset.

Of the rumor that Simon Limona enjoyed what should have been the king's marriage bed and the queen's secret purse ever before Claude did that surfaced later in their married life when Blanche brazenly took on lovers and the king nearly as brazenly danced on the cock of his lieutenant—and that, I am proud to say, largely through my own intrigue—I will surely here try to resist attesting to.

First, Blanche was foisted upon Claude in a lie. Few, of course, know that, and history certainly will know nothing of it. Only such as I who silently stand in the presence of scheming, unseen and unregarded, within the court, learn of such things. Blanche was not the young fourth daughter of the House of Holland, as claimed. She was the older, second daughter. None of the daughters paraded in public, so none but the inner court in Vollendam knew anything of the truth. Thus Blanche, as beautiful as she was, was at the very edge of child bearing.

And it was not true that she showed any coolness toward Claude at all. She melted at the sight of Claude and she lifted her skirts and opened her legs to him whenever she could get him to lie with her. As a salamander on the wall at the court at Vollendam, I can attest to the truth that Blanche easily lifted her skirts to any man as handsome as Claude—or certainly any big-cocked man. Later, of course, the reality of their relationship changed. But even then, she lusted for him and would have overlooked all and lain with him if ever he looked at her.

But eventually Claude, who in the first few months of their meeting, fucked—excuse my baldness, but, as I am no gentleman of the nobility but am a man of the earth, this is going to be a tale of honest baldness—his new wife as often as he could in his desire for an heir, came to realize his inclinations were otherwise. And on the subject of bald language for the acts of man, let me say that it is my firm conviction that if the nobles can do what they do so freely and openly, I can certainly call what they do what it is. There came a time when I believed that the nobles lived for the fuck and for the fuck alone—either fucking another in body or in soul and for gain and the command of all. Or for mere survival. And I'm not so sure I think otherwise even now.

I see no need to hold back in the description and revelation here. I write here for my own pleasure, and parchment can easily be assigned to the fire as surely as this will be ere I finish writing it. I am all aglow, fresh from a most satisfying fuck, which comes so infrequently at my age and withering condition. The monks sent me back to my rooms for fear of my health, saying I looked flushed. And of course I am flushed. I have danced on a cock with their stable boy, a comely half-blind, well-hung lad who claims that my old channel is as tight and supple as he would want, but, truth be known, is, as I said, half blind and at the age and temperament where he would fuck a sheep, pig, or dog given the opportunity. My heart is pounding and my mind is soaring. And if it be my desire to prolong the ecstasy by dallying here and writing down the true, unabridged history of Claude's house of Lusane, where is the harm in that? No one but me will be seeing it.

But, returning to the thread of my revelations, there was none of this upon-sight rejection and coolness by Blanche for the rumor of Claude's deviations. And there were no such deviations in Claude's preferences—despite the overflowing of it in the minds of many of the king's men swirling about him at the time—in those first few months.

And, if secrets of secrets must be revealed—and I hesitate in writing of this and only do so because I know it is no one but myself that will read it, perhaps not putting it to the fire but perhaps putting it aside to revel in in post-fuck reverie the next time I find the stable boy alone and fondling his precious staff—it will not be by me. The nobles of the Lusanes can have no idea that I know any of this—let alone that the monks have now taught me, in my seclusion—to write and read. But of deep secrets, I must say, meaning no harm to the House of Lusane—that when Blanche did produce her son, it was not a true son of Claude—or Blanche for that matter—but a result of her own scheming with a willing noble family whose daughter had been compromised so that Blanche was not to be cast away from the husband she adored no matter what his change in interests. If nothing else, Blanche wanted to be queen. And as queen, she could command cocks to rise to her desires.

However I digress—and perhaps to sustain interest, I will not dwell—at least yet—on the trials of Blanche and the survivors of her retinue in the castle tower of Limonea, with her sneering host, Simon, making all assortments of threats and suggestions against her honor and life—ones, as written for the history, never carried beyond voicing but ones for which Simon paid with his kingdom and his life within the fortnight, in any event.

I will, instead, pick up my pen next to regain the narrative from the moment, as an unnoticed salamander on the wall, I shared in Claude's victory at the castle of St. Jerome and the spinning out of the tale of triumph, scheming, treachery, and glory of the King's Men.