Chapter 1
"To begin with he had hands and legs and arms and did things with other people. Same as you and I?" shouted the history teacher trying to answer one of my questions.
When he was racing to begin where did he begin? Where did he get lost when was he getting lost to? Towards all he had the happiness, he had made the mates he had begun to accumulate now aloof and alone. His whole world the tiniest bites which brought him to size.
We startled stare at the windows which had the show. The man had come alive in something like the mirror image of the past into the present it was magic. Yes but the thing was it is different.
They forage for food? The soup was off again. Someone got poisoned because stood in the way of someone else.
The dead buried they got on with dinner.
"What was wrong with that?"
"It made it difficult to make sense of who was what to whom because there appeared to be nothing to differentiate them."
"They all ate together in the cavern. The same pot. Who was the cook they took it in turn."
"Except when someone poisoned someone in there?"
They would be punished cannot have that lot here.
"Bad for the morale and who was to say someone else would not be poisoned?"
"We know who it was sir Sultan."
"The woman wept the woman always did."
"Now not a drop."
The history teacher suffered a technical difficulty. Her notes went to the floor and flooded her.
She went in and came out flustered. Her head is shiny.
"Yes. That is it."
The teacher continued with her class.
"Of course, he did he was a smartly educated man a prince soon to be king. But working as a king as his father has enslaved in the dungeons of the evil queen his third bride."
"But why?"
Someone forgave her boy friend and went inside herself smiling if all went well she would never have to bother again.
"Because she was a cruel beauty." She said smartly and continued.
I can still hear that woman speaking as if yesterday then she forgot to tell me the ending so had to look the whole thing up. You see if the telling was in the story there is a hell of a story.
But the thing was we were a long distance in time in a faraway country living in poverty. So this history which was our own was not ours.
"You telling fibs again?" someone asked.
"No mistress." By then I had become a servant. My ex-partner's wife had made me a servant.
So where did the jump come in? You see the child who did not bother could never bother again married the man who made her bother. Then she became cruel. She was cruel because I did not share my Macdonald's with her.
"Queens should only be written by queens." Said J in a moment trying to clasp her happiness to herself. She had married a trillionaire. And she said I had let the man leap off my bed into hers as she better at it. She was a shat? Well, sort of but something bad must have happened to her also?
I got so peeved I let the years pass in some slumber.
"She is so charming our J. What dear you go and hang your coat up and do not stand looking lost."
I would do obediently what I was told and was totally at a loss why in a classroom I was besieged by her dear friends.
Wherever I went to the dear thing was never far away. So I got used to it like a drum inside my head. So I continued to dream but the drum was there constantly reminding me that there might be someone else to pray to other than the man who became the husband of J.
She cast a spell on everyone and there was no denying her dying her hair meant she got so used to having the attention.
"Well, there they go wrong. I might not be a scholar but I have studied them intently." The teacher was understanding did not twist the arms of anyone to understand her lesson. But if we failed we had to leave the class. She hated failures.
"What did you study?"
"I had some time so I went and studied the Alfons."
"They are Turkey you fool."
"I do not know."
"How do you know them?"
"Books and I dream them."
"She had been a bad woman? The third queen." asked the student learner.
"No, she was already married to another king."
"What she a bigamist?" asked the poor audience. We all jeered so Alfo had a wife who had another man. Well, times have chained us now.
They had literature images and such and the poor offering left them famished.
The Alfo was a Sultan but who was wealthy enough for the queen. Her husband supported her illusions. He owed money to everyone whom he killed.
"Totally what she said as he was in a better position to make her happy. His lands far richer and his spoils far wealthier."
"Who was there speaking?"
"Fuck that was me."
This dumpy woman was telling the staff what to think about things that happened over 1000 years ago. Well, it certainly beats the queen.
"We are social distancing." sighed the teacher.
She looked at the class in displeasure. I mean she did not even speak. She said the class was dismissed because we were a bunch of nerds.
"I know it is the done thing."
"No one is allowed out except on business."
"You have to improve your handwriting." She told me.
"Miss how they are shaky."
"Do you drink?"
"No Miss."
"Because I want to."
"Well, it is making us have a headache. No one reads that writing."
"My eight-year-old writes better. If you take pains."
"How Miss I have bad hands."?
"See this beautiful handwriting written by an armless woman written with her bare feet."
"Most impressive. How long did it take her?"
She was nonplussed at the question.
"Self-pity is not the answer. I just bought a house with the toils of labor."
"No one shows mercy."
"The queen in my story dropped in for lunch and did not return to her own time." I just went into another time and place. I had failed anyway might as well enjoy the free-thinking time.
"You mean her reincarnation did remain?"
"How else did she stay then?"
"Who is the king?"
"I am not telling you he is a real resourceful man who lived a thousand years ago and does have a real photo in the history books. It is a real man."
"Why chose him?"
"He was the first Sultan."
"Then there came the second." Continued the teacher amiably then she saw the look of concern on our faces. "Now open your books on page 340."
"I did not read that far."
"Well can you open your book?"
"Yes."
"Good."
Someone helped me to open it to the right page.
"He was a man just a man. He had no ideals left his daddy was imprisoned. He was brought up by strict codes of conduct. He was going to inherit a kingdom and he was at school all the time. He was better schooled than his father."
"Unlike his dad who had been a warrior and free. Now in a cage said his mum."
She smiled.
"He is now suffocating in a dungeon with her."
"His whole perspective was aloof. His mother was right. She had been the second wife she had born the king's children. Did not please him in the end and he got rid of her. She did not say a word about the whole thing. Left him alone with his whores. The dismayed queen now only the queen mother. No longer the wife but the woman who had given the egg to fertilize the semen."
"Good grief." I thought the poor Queen.
"In the olden times that is how it was. Duty was all-important."
"What nonsense."
"Nothing of the sort or you will have to stand in the corridor."
"He had one wife whom he loved so very much."
The wife in question just went and said the piece she had to talk through time and space because if she did not speak she would return to the grave in silence.
So I sat it out and through it all. Did fidget but did understand most of it.
"The insolence of the king." She demanded someone to see her point of view. " I was not auntie I could never ride so many miles with him. He just used me and left me to fend all the fiends in hell. "
She was so much upset she just had to walk it off and then began to get even more tired and annoyed. She just hated being nothing, not a beauty. A wife who had been discarded. Why had he made her with child and wandered off to some war? And the war went on and then another war began.
The men came tumbling out of the woodwork trying to pitch into my tent. All my valuables there too. And some did get the jewelry but the diminishing stuff did not take long to replenish."
"That was only the very beginning of me." She sighed. To her friends and they laughed asking questions.
"I used to think marriage to a man was a good deal. Marriage to a king a super deal."
"Well was it ?" asked her lady. The ladies in waiting were bored because they disliked waiting on a trollop. So they egged her on. She had been such a beauty now she was smarting and her expression was sullen and bad-tempered.
"Well nothing doing the swine has to fight in the daytime do not set eyes on him for five years while he calms unrest and all that. Then he comes grumbling for his dinner."
"He had been a handsome man." Said her lady mother.
"Yes indeed Alfo was such a great guy." he has assumed a disguise do not worry his disguise is safe.
"He saw me naked swimming came over to speak."
"How shocking?"
"Mummy and auntie did it on purpose."
"I am so shocked." Smiled her women.
"We are true." Said the rival.
The boy listening got into tiresome fits of passion how could they all go over and over such oddness? They were gloating as if the spicing up of their boring lives were not the issue.?
"He got rid of the trowels."
In the blazing lightness of birdsong. Near that river of love. Nobody went there but he. It was his particular place where his wife had been raped by a gang of ruffians who were trespassers.
Her woman did not speak when they were not allowed to. It would have spoilt her chances.
"Well, no time as the present he said as if he had no time left as if seeing me nude had maddened him."
"Children should never say that sort of thing." Shouted the teaching staff.
"But you were a virgin?" I was drifting into dreams. The window of my mind left me and somehow something strange had happened. Like I could see far away.
"Well, I did nothing wrong it was the family."
"That is when you began to swim in the lake where he would happen to be."
The poor woman I thought her reputation destroyed.
"Well, it was the only place to be noticed."
"Life is grossly unfair."
"He understood I married for the money. For the position, I had also been without my sweetheart so had to be sorted."
"He understood at first."
"You were blunt.?"
"I had to be I had two of his children in two years the man was unstoppable. He said he had not been with a woman a wife and he had been hungry. He sat it out when my tongue leashed him."
"When did he leave?"
"He left after his daughter was born a King did not have a daughter he said and left the tent immediately."
"He left so sudden like?"
"Well, it was a shock to me too."
"Why? You wanted him to leave?"
"Well not soon after our daughter was born."
"Sudden shock?"
"Yes, he said he could not cope with a little woman. " Then she continued remembering.
"He disliked me certainly but two and one of him would end him."
The ladies in waiting just whistled with laughter and the listening boy went and hid in his corner. His ears rang tunes of spite and negative thinking.
"Lucky he had been born?" Shrugged the teacher. On another planet time, there was silence. Every rumor has been quashed there is no spark of the things which had happened.
"But people's mouths are not sacks to be shut."
"Alfon the 2 was a timepiece waiting to explode."
"We did not care to see the real issues here."
Alfon thought when he was king he would behead them all for listening to all the gossip about his family. His dignity was so damaged he went to bed.
He wet his bed again and he without thinking asked the man the servant to change the sheets. He is so used to being obeyed. No boy nowadays would let anyone see that sort of thing.
"Well, I did not say anything about any issues. Just do not sell oneself short."
"But he a king."
"Well, a lot of good it did them."
"People still talk?"
"Damn right they do."
