A Royal Party

Arrivals to the Party

The warrior planted his feet firmly on the quay and peered into a sea mist enclosing him on all sides. Was this mist the face of a pagan god? The mist had certain defining characteristics that brought this thought to mind. It obscured the sky overhead. It was opaque. It cloaked everything more than twenty feet distant from him. The invitation sent to him by post the week before suggested this, a rather queer postage stamp on the face of it, as the location for the party. He suspected, however, that he had stumbled onto an edge of the earth, a point from which there was no going onward, a mythical place where mermaids dwelt, a land of faeries. As far as he could determine no land was attached to the quay. A sacred space could abide no land, only water for its surrounds. The ancient world beheld the theatre as a place set apart and thereby sacred whether it would contain comedy or tragedy. Squeezed between tragedies was the comedy, a rather queer affair, for players with large phalli romped about the stage, exultant, for the hilarity of the spectacle. Most noteworthy about the architecture of men and women is the sexual areas, though generally covered, is actually at the center of attention. So the Greeks jubilantly made comedic gesture.

The quay was undoubtedly old. The sea in the hoary past vomited it forth. The belly of the sea offered it in bitter protest at an angry, judgmental and venomous lord, as a patroness would offer crumpets to her venomous master. The warrior who had read deeply on undersea cultures surmised that mermen had built the quay for quasi-religious gatherings intent on human sacrifice. Above all else they coveted depressed females.

Probably there was an altar to the goddess Hysteria for that very purpose. It was a thoroughly atavistic culture. The mermen and mermaids cared nothing for political structures. They merrily continued as their forefathers and foremothers had swum. The ocean is frigid, far from shore, and the sea masks shame.

Glistening droplets of fog damp, cursedly cold, dampened the warrior’s cheeks.

“The damnable unpleasantness of the sea is true. I will attest to that.”

He paced the quay’s precincts as he would pace the deck of the ship in sharp lookout for the isle whereon apart from sadness dwelt immortals. All seaman and explorers held close to the breast private beliefs. Well he remembered the treachery of the sea and the illusions born thereon. He tried in vain to cast away into the perilous waves his own dreams.

Looking outward again the warrior noted the gray lamenting sky. He considered stowing himself away in his ship’s hold to stare at a waxen candle. After death all men turn to wax. At times he achieved a level of communication with the dead H. by concentrating on the tip of the flame though this was rare. A flame’s tip is dastardly difficult to fix. The nature of fire is unstable like the heart. As he turned to go back to his ship he saw a hoop of flame suddenly appear before the mist swallowed it entire. Curious he arrested his momentum. He waited for the hoop makers to appear. What did this unexpected visitation portend? Unfortunately he could not consult the zodiacal positions of the stars. Happenstance and chance are unkind masters.

A long narrow boat snaked forward out of the mist, a horrific gorgon’s head at its mast. The warrior marveled at the strange fate that had brought a monster-like gorgon to this same uncharted quay in the middle of a sea of mist. More unusual was the absence of rotting corpses to draw it here. Rumored was a gorgon’s fantastic sense of smell. What motive had driven it to this quay uninvited to the party and unwelcome, though certainly extravagantly tressed?

The warrior stood still in the gray salty air in expectation.

A dragon slapped his mate on the back and said, “I told you we’d make it first. No one has stepped onto this quay for a millennium.”

“The earth has many such places!” his companion groused. “This cannot be the place described in the maps. Is not the map flat? Where is space for the treasure?”

“But it is,” the first dragon interrupted. “Maps are flat, tortillas are flat, tires are flat if there is no air inside, and musical notes are flat.” He opened his palm. “My hand is flat.”

The second dragon buttoned his lips. “Wait,” he whispered. “I hear the noise of another ship lying nearby. We have been out guessed. The royal dragoons pursue us through the maze of clues we left behind like Hansel and Gretel, crumbs will be our undoing.”

Dragons love donuts.

“‘Nonsense.” answered his mate. “The dragoons could never have followed so intricate a trail as they have no sense of the absurd. See how our tuxedos will blend in with the other guests, we are unstoppable.”

They Enter the Precincts

The warrior stepped forward through the shrouds of mist. An inspiration had dawned on him, a present from Hortense and Heloise. The women had written the invitations and had included reference to a green door.

“My compliments, dear dragons,'” the warrior said, “on your prompt arrival. The party

starts in half an hour. A cocktail?” He noted the spats of their pointed shoes. He pointed behind him. “The spiral staircase leads down to the bar.”

He lent his arm to the dragons and pulled them up to the quay.

“What a charming place, we never imagined,” mouthed one of the dragons.

“I think it rather musty,” answered the warrior. “Providence smiled at us, though who are we to accept the beneficence of the Lord?”

The dragons murmured against organized religion and all of the senseless rituals involved.”

“To what end?” they asked.

The warrior added, “Small minds beget nonsense.”

“A blessed virgin is the queen,” said the dragons mirthfully, for they were well aware of the peccadilloes of the palace, and wished not to trespass.

They came to the great green door of the bar.

“Are we below sea level?” asked one of the dragons.

“I would have to guess at that,'” said the warrior.

The dragons shivered. “Our holy books warn dragons not to venture beneath the sea lest they have discarded this perspiring flesh and entered the afterlife.” They clearly fretted.

The warrior jocularly made a swipe at their scriptures, “Beware of fetishes. This is the sea of mists and not the sea of which your sages spoke.”

The dragons laughed and their spines pricked. “It is hard,” they thought dourly, “to know if one has met his finality or persists yet in the pre-rhapsodic reality we call the everyday.”

The warrior gleefully pressed onward, “Let us enter this green door and don the party hats.”

   At the Bar

Old party horses filled the bar to the brim while dallying overlong at the waterhole. The dragons and the warrior sidled past into the belly of the bar. Tables of fish-lipped patrons watched the snatch girl burn her panties and brassiere with a cigarette lighter. The trio navigated their way through all the heated sexual energy stoked by the combustible mix of nudity, liquor and ribald conversation. A professorial dragon his beard singed by the fire that occasionally erupted from his nostrils so enflamed was he by his subject held forth to a half-besotted companion.

The professor asked, “Are you delighted with the pageant this woman displays? Is not her bosom an invitation to lust after her?”

His companion, a religious scholar, tore his eyes from her reluctantly. “And have you another dream equally pleasant to insert into a man’s pajamas?”

The professor smiled, “Have you thought of the close similarity between the sacrifice of Isaac and the crucifixion of Jesus?”

The religious scholar grimaced in pain, “There is no such connection unless in the jumble of your mind. Pray, explain.”

“‘Never mind that the old testament is used by the Christians as a sop, to lure the ignorant to its pews. In a more startling manner they lifted whole a motif from the account of Isaac’s sacrifice by his father and fit it into its account of the sacrifice of its God’s son. Do you see the parallel; both are sons of immensely important fathers? In the case of Isaac we have Abraham the first Jew, the first Patriarch, who fathered his son when he was 100 years old by means of a miracle. Isaac his son is vastly important as he was the single link from Abraham to all the succeeding generations of Jews, yet he underwent the terror of sacrifice by the hand of his father. On the face of it this is murder, a ghastly crime, even human sacrifice.”

He glanced nervously from side to side as he was aware mermen might be present.

His friend interrupted, ‘But Isaac didn’t die, and Jesus did expire in great pain.

Furthermore, you are wildly off track as Isaac was a young boy in the sway of his powerful father and Jesus was a fully grown man perfectly aware of what he had undertaken.”

The professor blew tiny bubbles of fire from his nostrils. “Perfectly incorrect, my friend.

“Isaac was 36 years old and he willingly joined his father in this act. He even asked his father to bind his arms lest he instinctively smite him at the stroke of the knife, and by some accounts Isaac did momentarily die. God brought him back to life thereby bringing into the world the miraculous ‘techias hamasim’ or ‘bringing back to life those who are dead’. Now consider Jesus. He was bound on the cross, another kind of altar. He was resurrected within three days and proved to the world that there is a kind of immortality available to believers. Though he was persecuted and imprisoned on the cross he knew this was his destiny and he welcomed it. Jesus was also the first Christian, a vitally necessary link and starting point representing the new dispensation often cited by the Christians as justification for its departure from Judaism.”

His friend scoffed, “Interesting.”

“Did you ever wonder where from all the people come?” the warrior asked the dragons while nodding toward the professor and his friend the scholar. He liked wild ideas, as he had some of his own.

“Our holy scriptures,” recited the dragons piously, “conclude that people sprang out of eggs like dragons.”

“Oh,” said the warrior, bemused at the quaintness of their beliefs. “Do you mean uterine eggs?”

“No,” a female dragon flirtatiously tittering who had overheard the conversation. “Silly, haven’t you heard of the smiling egg?”

“Humpty Dumpty?”offered the warrior, somewhat confused by the image. “He crashed and all the pieces couldn’t be fixed together again.”

“Exactly!” spouted the dragon. “From all the cracked pieces of the egg shell, some infinitely small and oddly shaped, came people.”

The warrior looked away from the snatch girl jiggling her breasts to see a dragoon coming swiftly upon him and his companions. The girl had drawn faces on her nipples and they were having a fight over the correct shade of pink. One nipple named Heloise, the other Hortense.

The warrior had a weakness for puppet shows. They reminded him of the smallness of men. “Was Manly in the house?” he wondered.

         Invitations Challenged

“Are you members of the royal family?” the dragoon challenged with the fixed stare of a bayonet in his eyes.

The warrionr fumbled in his pocket overfull with old notes, bills, cards, receipts, stamps, and other undigested information until he found the royal engraved invitation.

The dragons produced theirs.

The dragoon laboriously read each invitation syllable by syllable. For some the written language is a mystery.

When he finished he refolded the invitations and handed them back to the royal guests. “Enter, friends of the Crown!” he barked.

The warrior and his companions half-bowed and dove into the courtly pageantry within the secret hall.

The dragoon had stopped them at the threshold to this sacred precinct as was his royal duty. All the variegated races representing all the realm had gathered here dressed in the highest fashions direct from Parisian tailors.

The warrior overheard, “At the naval battle of ’48 an astrologer advised me to fill our cannon balls with mustard, and so we sailed to victory over the rebels,” said an admiral to his colleague who was blue about the gills from all the liquor had consumed.

The warrior thought to say something about that particular battle but bit his lip instead. “Scant reward for meddling in the conversation of an admiral,” he recalled from his naval days.

They pressed further into the din of the assemblage.

The dragons sought out others of their peculiar kind.

The warrior found himself standing alone in a veritable sea of the richly attired.

Many of the guests had drawings of the queen’s silhouette on a pin on their bosoms.

The warrior grimaced. He had forgotten his. He turned on his heel intending to return to his ship to retrieve it when the trumpets blared announcing the queen’s arrival.

All eyes turned to the door. A hush quieted the party talk.

The warrior beheld this all with a jaded eye. This reverence is trivial, mere astral luminescence, stuff and hints to the actual ladder to the immortal isle. He suspected the queen knew this above all others.

She entered grandly. She handed her wrap to standing butlers by her side to reveal her beauteous shoulders.

Everyone oohed and aahed at the marvel of her crown’s jewels dazzling in the chandelier overhead.

She looked at all of them into the quick of their beings. An instantaneous mask of despair stole over her face at the poverty within which she had assayed.

As her eyes swept over her subjects she felt the fiery gaze of the warrior intently watching her. A sparkle in her eye told the warrior to approach.

The other partygoers returned to their own mystery plays and flirtations with spirit and flesh.

The warrior walked with the queen that night on the quay to talk of the voyage to the faraway isle of the quest.

“Will Manly join us?” he asked.

Hortense was truly a magnificent queen, though he preferred her in other guises.

She blushed a deep pink, reflecting the starry light dancing on the water, and said, “Manly has slipped between my breasts. I don’t know if he will ever part.”

“No matter,” said the warrior, “the waters here are perilous for a seaman such as myself. I would like to hire Manly to steer the helm.”

Manly peered from her bodice at the warrior. He didn’t quite like him.

He took note of Manly’s vexed eyebrows. ‘Do you believe in hobgoblins?’

Manly believed in all sorts of spirits, fiends, and other dwellers of the dark. They oppressed him and he sought refuge in Hortense’s warmth. He shrank at the mere mention of an unwanted spirit.

The warrior held a flask of gin in front of Manly’s face. “Smaller men than you have drowned in this liquid.”

Manly frowned and turned away toward Hortense’s nipple.

A laughing face painted on her tit stared back at him. It so unnerved him he involuntarily lept out from her bodice and into the hand of the warrior.

“I’ve got you now, Manly.”

Manly could only dumbly nod, his mood downcast.

The warrior told him, “Lift up your chin, and behold the wide world at your fingertips. Will you captain the ship that will take us all to the isle we have described?”

Manly looked between the two lovers and saw fiery magic linking them. “When do we depart?”

“‘At this moment.” said Hortense. She stepped from the quay onto the warrior’s ship.

Some others had already gathered on the ship in wait for the queen and her consort to arrive.

Heloise had arranged the pink carpet on which the queen first stepped.

Some dragons including the professor and his scholarly friend continued a now heated discussion about the relevance of ‘Sir Gawain and Green Knight’ to their earlier conversation by the bar.

Hortense adored learned companions.

Manly heaved the wheel toward the brightest star in the firmament, the fish its rudder.