Thron: (Part Two)

 

They threaded their way down to the banquet table, the boy Wesmer going before, gauging his pace by the tapping sound of his master's steel-shod cane, opening the doors and announcing the King's progress to the castle guard, who barked their unchanging noisy salutes as they passed. Teq followed a pace behind and slightly to Thron's left, ostensibly to protect him from the rear, but more and more these days (the old Morg knew) to guide him through moments of thoughtlessness and catch him if his failing legs stumbled.

     When they finally entered the dining hall, Thron was greeted by the braying of brass trumpets and the clattering rise of the assembled lords. He was reminded briefly of the sound in his rapidly fading dream, but let nothing show on his impassive face. The old Morg walked stiffly to his seat at the elevated table, turned, and stood looking for an uncomfortably long moment at his court with grim eyes and drawn brows, muzzle turning slowly this way and that. His squires stood breathlessly on either side of him, waiting in suspense. At last he acknowledged "My Lords," and sat back into his chair, his hands firmly grasping the arms on both sides as if claiming his territory. The room broke from attention and, after a murmured respectful greeting, sat down to eat. Teq took Thron's cane away by its heavy knobbed head, and Wesmer began selecting the royal breakfast.

     This was a simple task these days. Although the table before Thron was piled with many rich dishes, it was mainly symbolic, tributes from the cities throughout Forlan that owed his kingdom allegiance. Fancy breads from the fields in the south, beef from the plains, fish from the icy streams of the north and the salt sea to the east, together with fowl, fruit, and fabulous culinary spectacles paraded before him, along with a half-dozen bottles of wine from far and near. At his nod, Wesmer brought Thron three boiled eggs, some butterless toast, and the highlight of his meal, a bowl of honeyed gruel. A glass of cool milk (not too cold) was set by his hand. The rest of the King's table would be doled out to the poor at the tower gate as tradition dictated, a token of his bounty, and the old Morg gazed at the feast before him and envied the sturdy beggar who could still enjoy such largesse. He nibbled his egg and glanced yearningly at the forbidden pork pie, swimming with gravy, that sat steaming in a golden pastry shell not three feet away from him.

     To distract his thoughts from food, he looked up and surveyed his court. He noted with displeasure, and not for the first time, that nearly half his council now consisted of Men. He remembered the days when he had started to rule, when Morg City - hah! - had been for the Morgs. It was his own fault, he ruminated. It had been his brand-new policy to allow human refugees to swell his armies and settle in to help defend the unconquered Sun Tower. By the time the Black Lord's Ogre troops were soundly repulsed, the Men had been settled in for too long and were unwilling to return to their own ruined cities. Thron's kingdom had benefited greatly from their presence, but something in his heart still resented them. He wanted things to be as they had been in the days of his youth.

     Now they were everywhere, even on his council and in the chain of command. He thought sullenly of Bronn, his old General, who on his retirement had, in a surprising move, passed on his position to Taryn, a human, placing him in the highest echelons of the City. He squinted out at the crowd and noticed Taryn hadn't even attended the levy this morning; he often didn't, pleading the press of business. And what possible pressing business could he have in this time of peace? Thron cursed Bronn as a traitor, then recalled with a guilty start that his old friend had lain cold in the Hall of Heroes for twenty years now.

     Everyone he had known and trusted in the old days was dead. He looked out at the obliviously feasting court with disgust. Somewhere in this rout was his probable successor, and the thought did not fill him with confidence in the future of Forlan. Anyone whom he might have felt to be slightly capable had passed away while waiting for him to die and vacate the throne. He himself had been chosen as a wartime monarch, and his popularity waxed and waned with the wars, supported when there was a crisis and criticized in peace. Now this new generation of the lords of the Great Houses had never seen battle, and the other statesmen - politicians, Thron sneered to himself - were more like merchants than warriors. Forlan will need a warrior, he thought grimly, when Norda moves again. And move it surely would.

     Thron had had ambitions in the early days of his rule, high hopes that he would be the one to finally destroy Bharek and end his threat. Thron had crushed every incursion by those vile armies, only to be stopped at the mountains, beyond which the crafty Black Lord himself never ventured. Minions came and went, hordes were driven back or decimated, but somehow the South could never muster the might to invade and totally defeat that evil power. Thron was past hope now. The conflict seemed as eternal and inevitable as the tides or the seasons. The sorcerous Bharek showed every indication of outliving the old king, his demonic vigor undiminished through the centuries. It was embittering. There seemed little hope of Morg City enduring long after Thron, and he felt past caring. He would defend his kingdom until death, then it would fall, and that would be that.

     At least Thron wouldn't be around then for that annoying wizard, Dunwolf, to tell him "I told you so." What good had the old man ever done himself, despite all his meddling? He had failed to preserve Rhavenglast in the Black Lord's latest foray beyond the Knash; it was the king's forces that had penned the Ogres back into the Northlands, although they came too late to save the city. The old trouble-maker was always coming and going, stirring up Thron's people, making plots behind his back, recruiting allies. Thron had dark suspicions that Dunwolf even wanted to put Taryn on the throne; imagine it, a Man, king of Morg City! He coughed in rage at the thought.

     Several of the court looked up at that, then went back hastily to their meal. Thron noticed one particularly nervous countenance that caught his attention: the thin, brown-bearded Royal Scholar of History, Korm, his worried muzzle made conspicuous by the tall furry cap that swiveled with every movement of his head. That was another one of those people close to him, he was fairly sure, who had been suborned into Dunwolf's circle. He thought he recognized much of the wizard's words and counsel parroted back to him by several advisors, and none so obvious as the artless Korm. If the King did not so much value the opinion of his old friend Belmok as to the scholar's historical prowess and veracity, he would have expelled him some time ago. Belmok was dead, too, (thirty years!), but he had saved Thron's life on one of their adventures together before he was even king, and loyalty to the old teacher's memory made him reluctant to dismiss his pupil. But let the little Morg put one toe out of line...!

     The thought grew obsessively in Thron's head as he stared at the scholar eating from his bounty with such careless gusto, while inside most likely harboring another's plots and designs. His slowly smoldering anger burst into determination as he watched. He would put Korm to a little test, apply a sort of trial, and watch him twist. It should even kill some time through the long dull hours of the morning. By the end of the meal, when all had ceased feeding and sat awaiting the royal word to go about their affairs, the old King had devised his own diversion.  He chuckled grimly to himself as he rose to his feet.

     "My Lords, to your business," he announced formally in the usual ritual, face carefully neutral. But his next words rang out in a stern tone of command that silenced the shuffling feet of the rising court. "Master Korm!" All stopped, some looking up in surprise at Thron, some at the wildly gaping scholar who squatted halfway in rising from his seat, frozen suddenly by the unwanted, unwonted attention. "You shall attend me in the Throne Room in one hour!" Thron turned with regal hauteur and swept out of the banquet hall before the flummoxed historian could even acknowledge the command.

     He didn't turn his head to watch, but as he walked away he listened with dry satisfaction to the wondering murmurs and whispers he left behind. That would show them. He was not simply a stuffed figurehead to be propped up in the morning and evening and ignored in the hours between. He was still alive. He had teeth. And Korm could hang in the wind for an hour, wondering what the King would do, what he knew, what he could possibly mean by the severity in his voice. Underneath the old Morg's gratified amusement, a part of his mind wondered if this was an action worthy of the victor of the battle of Gartus Wolnek. Thron locked that thought away mercilessly. A thirsty man does not throw away present water for the memory of past wine.

Notes

Thron began his existence, of course, as the usual obfuscating elderly authority figure so familiar to us at the time in so many media, the 'Denethor', if you will, of Goldfire. Slow to take advice, suspicious of powerplays around him, of course doomed to be swept away in the general ruin and renewing of the world, he was 'the old order yielding to the new'. With nearly forty years more experience, I began fleshing out his rather cardboard character and finding more 'human' motivations for his actions.

It was John who came up with the name 'Thron', which is both a recalling of 'thrawn' ('contrary, ill-tempered, twisted') and a curtailment of 'throne'. ('Why do they call a king's chair a throne?' 'Because every time you come up to it, you get throne in the dungeon!' Zot!) And I just noticed that it is almost a backward anagram for 'north'. But that's neither here nor there. I should also note that this was easily a decade before 'Grand Admiral Thrawn' in the Star Wars mythos.