Thron: (Part One)

I’ve decided that, for whatever reason, I’m finding a great reluctance to continue with my ‘The Lord of the Rings: Chapter by Chapter’, so I’m going to take a break this week rather than force the issue. Instead, I’ll post another Tales of the Morgs tale, ‘King Thron’, in several parts.

The Morg tales actually grew out my transcription of my brother John’s and my juvenile effort at an epic fantasy in the early Eighties, that we called ‘Goldfire’ (this was before Stephen R. Donaldson’s Gildenfire). After nearly forty years I thought it was time to finally put it in a more easily readable document, and as a sort of relaxation as I finished A Grave on Deacon’s Peak, I started the project.

I had never been much of a ‘short story’ guy, but as I finished AGODP and ‘Goldfire’, I found the tales arising quite naturally from the experience. I completed about sixty short stories in the years that followed, breaking the record of about seven for the decades before. I hope to return to LOTR by the end of the week, at least to finish ‘The King of the Golden Hall’.

THRON

 

     Thron was at his father's old house, in the distant suburbs south of the City. He was relaxing in the backyard, by the garden, thinking that he might finally harvest and eat the apples he had been waiting for so long to ripen, when suddenly looking up to the clear blue horizon to the east he saw a rising fire, like a flaming arrow or fiery dragon, ascending heavily into the sky. He watched, a sick feeling of dread growing in his stomach, as the fire turned and began to fall towards the City on his right. He opened his mouth, trying to shout out a helpless warning or cry of despair, but his voice was cut off, drowned by what sounded at first like thunderous applause and then like hooves clattering by in panic haste. He woke up, and found it was rain spattering on the metallic awning outside the window.

     Thron sat up in bed, rubbing his sleep-smeared eyes and untangling his long dirty-white beard with trembling claws. His mind tumbled into place like an unwilling soldier called to muster. His first thought was that he had not been to the old house on Circle Street since his father had died, almost a hundred and twenty years ago. Thron had already been king then for -- what, thirty years? With that thought came the crushing recollection that he was still king, and with that thought he snarled and swung himself out of the nested coverlets.

     The wind was blowing damp and chill through the open window, and his body immediately twanged with pain, especially his withered right leg, seamed up and down the calf with an old wound, stupidly got sixty years ago on a completely unnecessary hunt. Kings were expected ..., he thought ruefully, then his muzzle twisted into a grimace. He yanked angrily on the bell-pull to summon his servants, snatched up his ebony cane, and limped over in bare feet and nightshirt to close the hatch himself. Last night when he had opened the window it had been too warm, stifling; now the keen North wind blew in and seemed to be feeling out his weakest spots.

     He had just managed to fumble the heavy shield-shaped shutter back into place, smashing his thumbnail in the process, when the squires came rushing in. The pair, a young Morg and a human boy, looked a little frowzy yet, and there was a waft of a breakfasty air that followed them into the room. Thron turned on them in anger.

     "Dolts! Sluggards!" he barked. "Why do you not attend your King?"

     "But you commanded us, Lord ..." the boy began, then stopped, terrified, as the Morg squire shot him a frantic look. In a flash the lad realized he had been about to question the King, an unthinkable act, punishable by disgrace and dismissal. In the same moment Thron remembered that he had ordered them the night before not to disturb him until he called. He had been having trouble sleeping through the night lately, falling into a doze only in the last watches of the night and then being awakened after a handful of hours at most. And he had opened the window himself; they could not have known.

     "What's the time?" he snapped, to cover his rue. The squires almost sighed, and visibly relaxed, but not much. The old King would never apologize; this ignoring of the situation and moving on was the best they could hope for.

     "The first hour of the day is halfway gone, Lord," the young Morg replied smartly, and Thron groaned inside. So early? Even before he would have ordinarily been awakened. He glanced longingly towards his rumpled blankets, but knew it was useless. He might as well start the day; the only way back to bed was the long way around. He ran his claws through his beard again, and pushed back his stiff, thinning hair. He stretched his back, and it cracked painfully.

     "Well, let's begin, then," he growled, and started limping toward the privy room hidden behind the curtains by the headboard. The boy approached the bed and began to make it with nervously formal moves, and the young Morg opened the wardrobe with a stately, self-conscious air. When Thron was safely ensconced behind the closed door, they looked at each other worriedly.

     "Another bad day, Teq?" asked the boy, quietly.

     "Looks like it, Wesmer," said the young Morg, wrinkling his muzzle in a frown. He pulled out a soft grey pair of shoes with silver buckles. "Better tread carefully today."

 

     Thron sat on the close-stool, his night robe hiked around his hips, and tried to let his mind wander. A few burning, begrudging spurts of urine had squirted out at first, then stopped, and now there was a heavy load lurking reluctantly in his bowels. He had to relax, he knew; but worry, the burdens of his throne and state, made him clench. So let his mind wander he must: to the seat warming under his rear, to the stream of cold air coming under the door into the stuffy room, to the little fat-bellied spider spinning a web high in one corner. A distant observer in his brain was noting with hope that relief was nigh, when a sudden memory of his dream, along with its dread feeling, replayed itself in his waking thoughts. The hoped-for release shot back up into his body, and he knew the moment was lost.

     Thron rose, robe falling to his knees, and went to rinse his hands in a bronze ewer on the nearby table. What could the dream mean? Was it just a jumble of memories, or did it forbode something, like in the old tales? Somehow, in the sagas, the heroes were always very sure about these things. The old Morg sourly meditated that a King's dreams were supposed to be significant, but cold common sense said you could only know for sure retroactively. He looked at his blood-shot eyes in the mirror over the basin and tried to apply his weary mind to the details.

     The fire had arisen in the east. That made no sense. There was nothing but desolation in the east. Now if it had come from Norda and the North that would have been obvious, or even from the west and the Passes of the Knash, but from the east? Nothing had moved there for three hundred years. Thron shrugged and dismissed it again from his thoughts. Just an old, old life, playing with its memories and mixing them up like the ingredients of an Autumn Cake. He sweetened his hands with a dash of lavender, dried them on his beard, and left the room.

     Outside, the squires had put his chambers in order, and a fresh set of clothes were on the bed. He stood stoically as they dressed him for the day in a heavy brocaded inner robe, covered with the long sleeveless overcoat that was part of the royal regalia. They thrust the seal of the City over the knuckle of his left forefinger, the ruby ring of his coronation on his right, and put the massy linked chain of office around his scrawny neck. Last of all came the conical silver crown, ringed with emeralds, pressed gently but inexorably on his wrinkled brow. As it went on he closed his eyes and sighed; when his eyes opened again, he was the King.

     "Let us proceed," he announced.

Notes:

“I chose Thron as the main character for this tale (Oct 2018), since he is, of course, the last of the major Morg characters from the original tales, and was able to weave details from MIGHTY MIKKU(Nov.2017) and KORM'S MASTER (Dec 2017) into it - with Bronn who had been rescued by a young Roth as the eventual General of Thron's army, and Belmok who oversaw Korm's "college" education as Thron's old companion on the adventure that cost the old Master his eye -- tying them all together into a neat knot, to the point of the very day when they all intersect -- which I had no clear idea was going to happen until halfway through the story.

“I really only started with Thron waking up from his dream to the sound of rain -- which was exactly my situation Wednesday morning. The rest just flowed and blossomed from there. I wanted to sort of explore the reasons for his crankiness and his gusts of anger, and the fact that he had really been a good king in his time. His habit of obsessively counting things in decades and his suffering from what I call the "Since Syndrome" and his emotional withdrawal from the world -- that was very familiar to me.” From an e-mail to John.