What is the worst thing that the impulse to evil can
achieve? To make people forget that they are the children of a Sovereign.
* * *
Once there was a King who fought many wars against his enemies. And because he was a good King, he always went at the head of his troops, leading them into battle. But once he went off to war at the head of his army ... and disappeared. No one knew what had become of him, whether he was well but unable to communicate, or had been captured, wounded or even, God forbid, killed. Soldiers returning from the battle-lines could only say that the war was still going on. They could not say which side was winning, nor what had happened to the King.
Now while the King was away at the war, the Queen gave birth to a child, the King's son. Nothing was heard from the King for many years, and during this time the young Prince grew to manhood. Naturally he was very curious about his father, but since he was young he was not permitted to travel to the front to try to see his father the King, nor was he allowed to search for him. And the Queen could not take him either, since the journey was judged too dangerous and she had essential duties at home in the capital.
The young Prince was very precocious, and he realised while still quite young, that the ministers and royal officials who came to the palace were attempting to carry on their business as if the King were still present. The royal chamberlain would lay out the King's clothes each morning and turn back the sheets and blankets on the King's bed each night. The royal guards stood at the front of the entrances to the throne room and the King's private apartments, just as before, and the chief guard would even announce the King's bedtime each night so that all the courtiers would be sure to make no unnecessary noise. And each morning the courtiers would be assembled to hear the King's standing orders.
This state of affairs continued for some considerable time, and would have continued until the King's return, had he not been delayed so long. The problem, the young Prince noticed, was that even though the King was away, royal decisions were still required for the sake of the governance of the kingdom. An empty throne would not do, but neither could a new King be crowned since the old King might return at any moment. At first the ministers would not discuss the issue, precisely for this reason, but after a while they knew they could delay no longer.
First, the ministers thought about the possibility that the Queen might act as regent in the King's absence. But she declined, because, although she accepted her role as figure-head for the King, she felt that taking on a decision-making role might compromise her ability to counsel subjects in distress.
Next, the ministers considered the notion that the young Prince might act as regent in the King's absence, but they rejected this because they judged him too young and too inexperienced in the skills of statecraft.
Finally, they decided to approach the King's younger brother, a Duke, with a view to having him act as regent in his brother's absence. They did this with reluctance, however, since they distrusted the Duke because he always sought to gain political advantage at that expense of his elder brother, the rightful King. Yet they had to ask him, because according to the laws of succession of the kingdom, he would be next in line (unless the Prince were of age) to take the throne.
Of course, the Duke had been hoping, indeed working behind the scenes, for just such an outcome, and so, although he made of show of hesitation when the ministers came to him with their offer, he accepted the new role that they had proffered.
The young Prince accepted the decision too, though he too distrusted his uncle. The Prince felt that he had no choice, and hoped that this would be a temporary situation lasting only until the King returned.
But the temporary situation continued long after it was hoped that it would have ended, and still the King had not returned. In his absence, the Duke ruled as regent with special responsibility for the Prince's education and upbringing. Believing that a King's primary responsibility lay in the arena of warfare, the Duke had the Prince tutored in the martial arts, but neglected his teaching in the finer arts. Still, the Prince learned to love literature and music under his mother's guidance.
As the young Prince grew towards full manhood, he began to speak more openly of his desire to seek out news of his father, and to put his case to be allowed to do so more forcefully to his uncle the Duke. The Duke realised that the Prince was adamant, and that he would have to give his permission, but also understood that this could be the opportunity he had sought to remove the Prince or nullify his influence in the kingdom. So, he attempted to stall the Prince from pursuing his quest straight away, while he considered what ploys he might use to achieve his own devious ends.
In the meantime, the Prince was not idle. He began to take secret trips outside the palace, secret trips that only his mother, the Queen, knew about. On these trips, he would visit as much of the capital as he could, as well as surrounding villages. In each place, he would frequent the local taverns, telling himself that in this way he might learn news of his father's fate. The Duke learned of these trips from his personal spies, and responded by ordering some of them to teach the young Prince the pleasures of strong drink, for he hoped that this would distract the young man from his quest. And indeed, on many occasions, the Prince was distracted, completely forgetting why he had come to the tavern or what he had hoped to achieve. Nevertheless, in calmer moments, the Prince remembered what he was aiming for.
One day, the Duke called for the Prince to come and see him in the throne-room. 'Word has come to me from my spies....our spies,' he said, 'that there is a certain woman in the poor part of our capital city who has some information about my dear brother, the King. Perhaps, your Highness should visit her to question her. I would have her arrested and questioned by my guards, but that might tip the hand of our country's enemies by letting them know that we know who she is. But you could go to her disguised in ordinary clothes and question her without arousing suspicion.'
The Prince was delighted. At last, it seemed that his uncle was listening to him, and was taking his desire to try and find the King seriously. He could hardly wait to see the woman the Duke had spoken of, and avidly took in the directions he was given about how to find her.
The Prince dressed in beggars' clothes, topped off with a bedraggled black hat and black cloak that seemed to have more holes than cloth. He walked to the quarter of the city his uncle had described to him, until he came to the woman's house. It was early evening by this time, and the woman was looking out of a first storey window making ribald comments to passers-by. From the street, the young Prince thought that she was the most beautiful woman that he had ever seen. Seeing that he was interested in her, she invited him upstairs.
But once upstairs, it did not take the Prince very long to realise that the woman was not only not very beautiful at all, but she didn't have any news about the King either. In fact, she told the Prince that the King must be dead, otherwise, he would have found some way of communicating with officials in the capital. Nevertheless, the woman was very charming, and a remarkable hostess, so that the Prince spend many hours with her on this first visit, and many other visits as well. 'In fact,' the Prince thought to himself, 'she is so charming, I think I am in love with her.' And he asked her to marry him, and forgot all about his search for the King. But she did not love him; she was merely doing what the Duke had instructed her to do: keep the young Prince occupied and out of the way.
Still, the couple spend at great deal of time together, and the woman did develop a real fondness for the Prince, but she also informed the Duke of all his movements, although as her fondness grew she often told him less than she might have. Years passed. The couple seemed happy, though the marriage never seemed to take place. Then one day, the Prince took a wrong turn on the way to the woman's house--and walked into a beggar, nearly knocking him over. When the beggar had regained his footing, he looked at the Prince's face very carefully, and muttered 'Is that you, your majesty?...No, no, I must have made a mistake--You're not the king!' The Prince was so flabbergasted that he could not say a word. By the time he had composed himself, the beggar was gone. Running through the narrow streets, the Prince tried to find him, but it was no use.
Finally, filled with resignation and disappointment, he headed back for the woman's house, and as he approached, he resolved to resume his search for the King. Once inside, he told the woman of his decision. She mocked him, and he suddenly realised that this relationship was not meant to be. He kissed her goodbye, and left.
After the failure of this scheme, the Duke hit upon a new idea to keep the Prince from searching for the King. He would send him to an academy of higher learning. 'You could even study the history of the royal family,' the Duke told the Prince, 'and in that way, you might even find clues to the King's whereabouts.'
The Prince was very pleased to try this approach. So, he went off to the academy and pursued a course of royal studies: he studied the reports of those who said they had seen the King in the distant past, he sat at the feet of teachers who expounded theories as to why the King had disappeared. Some went so far as to suggest that there really was no King, or that the King's disappearance was in some mysterious way a test of his subjects, or that this was a secret which only the most reckless of subjects would pursue, since no one but the King could really know what had happened. The Prince even met one or two teachers who said that they had met the King, after his disappearance, but after speaking with them, the Prince felt that they only thought they had met the King. Still, the Prince immersed himself in his studies, so much so that soon he was totally mesmerised by the study of ancient texts by and about the King that he began to imagine that he really would find the King through the study of the texts.
The Duke was very pleased, for he knew that Prince would only find the King if he actually went out looking for him. At best the study might help the Prince recognise the King better, but it could never help him find him. For years, the Prince studied; he even graduated from the academy with honours, but he never found the King, of course.
One day, near the end of his studies, the Prince was walking down an alley near the academy, thinking so deeply about a royal decree he was studying, that he walked into an old man, the same old beggar he had met before. When he regained his balance, the old man asked: 'Aren't you the King? I have seen you before, but you're not the King, are you?' 'No, I'm not,' the prince replied. 'You look a bit like him,' the old man went on, 'but I guess I've made a mistake again.' 'Wait,' the Prince said, 'did you know the King?' 'Yes,' came the reply, 'I used to be his armour bearer, until he disappeared, that is. Now, I have spent these last years looking everywhere for him, and someday I'll find him too.' The old man was adamant.
The Prince began to ask him many questions about the King, and as the old man answered them, the Prince realised that the old beggar was speaking the truth, and that all his studies, important though they were, had distracted him from his chosen task of finding the King.
The Prince began to spend more and more time with the old man, and gradually the elder revealed to the younger all that he knew about the King, where he had seen him last just before his disappearance, and so forth. Together, without the Duke's knowledge, they went out to explore the battle field where the King had gone to fight his enemies all those years before. They searched every inch, but could find no clues as to the King's current whereabouts.
Finally, the old man told the Prince that he had taught him everything he could, and that it was time for the Prince to go out and search on his own. With heavy heart, the Prince went out on his own to explore the kingdom to its very borders.
Several years later, after much wandering, at a country inn, near the point where two of the Kingdom's major roads crossed, the Prince very nearly gave up his search. He felt that he had accomplished nothing in all the time that had passed since he had left his teacher, the old beggar. He had met so much indifference to the fate of the King throughout the Kingdom that he began to think that perhaps the search was futile after all. The innkeeper's daughter noticed how disheartened he looked, and asked him why. When he had explained, she revealed that she too had been looking for the King, that the reason why she worked in her father's inn was because it was at the crossroads and that she hoped to learn some news of the King's whereabouts from travellers who stopped to eat or spend the night there. Her father had been in the King's personal guard in his younger days, and so she had been brought up to believe that some day the King would return.
At first, the Prince suspected that this young woman was part of another of his uncle's plots, but what she said, and the obvious sincerity with which she said it, soon convinced him otherwise. After a time, they fell in love, and secretly married. The Prince and the innkeeper's daughter were very happy together. They would spend their days roaming the countryside looking for clues of the King's whereabouts. In the evenings they would return to her father's inn and listen to the tales the travellers told. They dreamed of having a family and home of their own, but they vowed never to give up the search. On the contrary, they promised each other that if they had children, they would teach them to search for the King too.
The Prince was so happy being with the innkeeper's daughter that he nearly forgot that he was a Prince, with a palace and servants and wealth. But now he never forgot that he was looking for the the King.
One day, several very official-looking men came to the inn. They immediately recognised the Prince and, sought, as they put it, 'an audience' with him. They were the King's ministers, and realising that the Prince had come of age, they wished to take him back to the capital for immediate coronation. Though they were doubtful of the suitability of the innkeeper's daughter as a companion for their Prince, they agreed to take her with them once the Prince refused to go without her.
Once that was settled, the small entourage made its way as quickly as possible to the capital, using the back roads and byways of the kingdom. When he realised what route they were taking, the Prince asked the ministers why they were travelling on the back roads, rather than taking the King's Highway, which would have been the most direct route. 'We must avoid be seen by the your uncle, the Duke's men, Your majesty,' they replied, 'because he would stop at nothing to prevent your majesty from ascending the throne.' The Prince had not thought that his uncle would go that far, but he said no more about it.
Suddenly, the party arrived in the capital, and were entering the grounds of the royal palace. The ministers tried to whisk the young Prince into the state chamber in order to proceed quickly to the coronation, prior to the public audience, but they were surprised to find the Duke and his men waiting for them. The ministers were arrested, but the Prince challenged the Duke to a duel, saying that this was a personal matter, which should be settled between two gentlemen.
Both men drew their swords, and a furious battle ensued, with now one, now the other, seeming to gain ascendancy. It seemed as if they were evenly matched, and neither appeared able to gain a lasting advantage. Finally, the Prince bested the Duke, and held his sword to the Duke's throat. The Duke demanded that he be killed, but the Prince insisted on the Duke's undying loyalty instead. And it must be said, the Duke kept his word from that day forth, serving his master faithfully.
The duel won, the Prince gave orders for the ministers to be released. The coronation went ahead, and the next morning, the new sovereign was publicly presented to his people at the balcony of the royal palace.
Listening to the approving cheers of the crowd, with the
innkeeper's daughter, now the queen, at his side, the Prince realised that
now he was the King.