the Palace Walls
By Chris Jarrett
Copyright 2014 Chris Jarrett
Edited by Emily Akin
Cover by Keith MacDonald
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Autumn
The tired, aging man rubbed a hand against his stubble and blinked away fatigue as he set down his quill on the heavy, oak desk. He shut the ledger he had been writing in and slid it aside as he looked up at the mousy, ancient man wringing his hands in front of him.
“Yes, DuPont? What is it?”
The meek administrator furrowed the brow of his already pinched face and drew papers from his coat pocket. He adjusted his eyeglasses and checked the contents of the papers one last time, as if hoping the words would change.
“Your Grace, it…uh, um it seems that the unrest from the outer provinces has finally made its way to the city. There was a mob earlier this evening at the market. My sources say that a baker was killed for price gouging his customers. He had claimed that the war had depleted his supply, but the crowd tore him apart.”
The king pushed himself back into an upright position in his chair and frowned deeply, “Greedy merchants are nothing new, but a mob lynching one is not normal. What’s different this time?”
The chancellor’s eyes widened in quiet exasperation. He began to stammer, “B-b-because, your Grace, the people are starving. Your people. This war with the Archduke has cost us dearly. And now there are marauding enemy soldiers burning our fields! As I have been telling you: the people are at their breaking point—”
“Do NOT give me that smug hindsight, Chancellor!” roared the king, pounding a fist on top of the oak desk. He grunted and allowed his voice to drop a few levels, “Going to war with the Archduke was a matter of honor. As king I could not allow him to challenge my authority.”
“I tried to advise an alternative path, your Grace,” muttered the chancellor, dryly.
“You tried to advise weakness, and weakness is deadly, DuPont,” the king growled.
The chancellor looked defeated, opening and closing his mouth several times searching for a response. The king shut his eyes tightly and rubbed his temples; there would be no victories for his kingdom. Not on the battlefield, not in his council chambers, and not with his people.
“Who would ever wish to be the king, DuPont?”
The chancellor’s face, lined with the weight of administration, softened a bit and he gave his liege a pained look, “No one, your Grace. And everyone.” With that he gathered his reports and left the king’s office, closing the door behind him with a quiet thud.
Winter
The great oaken doors creaked open and shut as the chancellor entered the royal office. The king noticed that each day DuPont approached his desk with greater hesitation; the lines of worry on his face had severely deepened, like those on the king’s own countenance.
DuPont visibly gathered himself before beginning, “Your Grace, as you know, the harvest this year did not fare well, mostly due to the pillaging by the Archduke’s mercenaries. However, the food shortage situation has worsened considerably. The peasant revolts in the outlying provinces have only served to destroy even more of the food stores in those regions.”
Clearly on edge, he adjusted the eyeglasses on his nose and continued, “In their desperation, the people have taken to thieving, arson, murder and other forms of banditry over food. You know well that the city has not been spared of the food shortage, either. With the exception of the royal food stores, the city outside is starving. Th-the people are at their boiling point, your Grace.” His mouth drew itself into a line and he appeared to reconsider as he regained his composure, “I mean to say that they are past it, your Grace.”
The king rubbed his hand against his ever-graying beard. He had been partially tuning out his chancellor, unable to focus entirely on his miserable tidings. He looked up at DuPont, “My family, what of them? I want news of my wife and sons.”
“They are being brought here to the palace from the rural manor by some members of your house guard. They should be here within the safety of the palace walls by this evening.” The chancellor paused for a moment, and then pressed on, “Meanwhile, the remainder of the house guard are being posted along the walls and gatehouse. The city watch has been doubled, but their families do not eat as well as the house guard. I worry that some of them have seen a great deal of hardship over the past few months. Should a full-scale riot break out, I cannot put much faith into their loyalty.”
“So the house guards are the only ones that we can be sure about,” muttered the king. He struggled up from his chair, turned to the windows, and took in the view of the city. His city. Yet now the only control he was sure of was that which lay within his palace gates. He opened the balcony door and stepped out on it. Guards were hurrying around the palace gardens as a commander directed them to places of importance. “DuPont, I was king of several provinces, anointed by God and I was His servant on this world. Now I am king of a mere garden.”
The king’s memory transported him a few years into the past. He knelt in the garden, scooped up his eldest son up in the air, the boy cackled with glee, while his younger brother sat in the queen’s lap. After a bit, the king sat Philippe down and tousled his hair.
“Son, one day you will inherit the realm and all of its responsibilities from me, as I did from my father. You will be king and in charge of the kingdom.”
Philippe looked up at the old king, perplexed, “But Father, you are the king. There can’t be two kings!”
The king smiled ruefully at the young prince. This was not the first time he wished for a return to the ignorance of youth. He glanced over at his young queen, who bounced their youngest child up and down on her lap. She cooed softly at the gurgling infant. The warmth of the sun and calm of the city around him would be one of the happiest moments the king had.
His ancient chancellor stood next to him in a foreign moment of familiarity. He surveyed the cityscape alongside his liege, and for a moment the years of formalities and ceremony evaporated, leaving an old man who had all but been a part of the king’s family since the king was a young boy. The king glanced over at the chancellor. Although DuPont often put on an air of petulant aloofness towards the royal family, the king liked to think it had always been tempered with a paternal caring.
DuPont strained his eyes and leaned forward on the balcony, peering into a distant quarter of the city. The king followed his gaze to see what had caught his attention to sharply. The familiar sight of brown and gray buildings was set against a backdrop of the morning haze; however, bright spots of orange stood out distinctly and soon bloomed into larger bursts of bright red.
By nightfall the air was filled with the acrid smoke from the fires all over the city. The very idea of quiet seemed far away; instead the king’s ears filled with the sounds of shouting and the crackling of fire. The house guards, more visible than the old king ever remembered, hurried from room to room speaking in hushed whispers. His wife and two sons had been escorted to a nearby bedroom with guards posted at either side of the door.
“…Likely an unnecessary precaution, your Grace,” intoned DuPont earlier when the guard captain had insisted on additional protection for the royal family, “but Captain Bertrand insists that we consider the possibility of a breach of the palace gates.”
The king grunted absentmindedl
y at this, but hours later as the sounds of a city destroying itself pervaded the air he thought back on that conversation with growing worry. The night chorused with screams, shattering glass, and bellows of rage. He began to experience a gnawing fear of the unknown as his royal isolation from the reality of the world vanished before his eyes. The king was a sheltered royal, so hunger, unrest, and violence never threatened to exist in his world. Once merely notes in DuPont’s reports, soldiers previously fighting under his banner set fire to his city instead of the cities of his enemies. Despite the illusion of security falling apart around him, the king’s household staff tried its best to maintain it for the sake of their king and his family as well as for their own selves. These servants and guardsmen lived their own lives of relative isolation from reality, being well taken care of as members of the royal household. A nearby chambermaid was keeping herself busy worrying over dust in the halls to maintain her own mental distance from the chaotic melee outside the walls.
The king pushed himself up from his desk and wandered out into the corridor, his thoughts cloudy and out of focus. He wasn’t sure where he was headed, but he knew he did not want to sit in his office waiting for these events to pass. Nor did he want his family to see