So he took a few big, sturdy reed baskets, and with some soldiers he went around the ravines and the plains and gathered from the tree hollows and the rocks as many bee colonies as he could find, and he brought these back and placed his reed baskets by the entrance of the wood.
And the bees produced so much honey that the Prince decided to harvest it and put it in his storehouses for the winter.
But how was he to get hold of the honeycombs?
“Fumigate the hives with sulphur, my lord,” said a lad who had just come back from abroad. “The bees will die, and then you can harvest your honey at your leisure. That’s how the Franks do it in their land.”
“Why should we kill the bees?” replied the Prince. “It would be quite a shame, now, wouldn’t it? We must increase their numbers, on the contrary.”
And turning a full skep upside down, he covered it with a large empty basket, and with a few light taps on the outside of the full hive he drove all the bees away and into the empty basket, which he then covered once more, and placed it where the skep had stood previously.
“This is how we can harvest the honey easily, without killing the precious workers who produced it,” said the Prince.
He strained the honey into earthenware jars, and he gave the beeswax away, to be melted into thick candles, so they could have light during the winter, when the days would grow short.
Several months went by, the crops matured, and the soldiers who were also farmers harvested them and put them in the storehouses built by the soldiers who were also builders.
And everyone who owned a vineyard received an order from the Prince to prune the vine roots neatly and to treat them with sulphur, so they might destroy the aphids that for years now had ravaged the plants, on which the clusters of sour grapes would then rot without ripening.
The soldiers who were also woodsmen had been so industrious that although seven ships were now navigating the river northwards as well as southwards, great stacks of timber still remained, piled up by the riverbanks, and the master builder no longer had the time to use it all, and to drive his nails into the wood.
The Prince saw the heaped logs taking up all this space and it occurred to him that he could find good use for them at once. He had the men load them one day onto three of the ships, and gave orders to Polycarpus to go with some of the soldiers to the nearby kingdom of the King the Royal Cousin.
And while four ships were keeping watch over the river, for the sake of safety, the other three unfurled their sails and set off for the kingdom of the King the Royal Cousin, looking most splendid and majestic.
This monarch was greatly mystified when he was told of this, and he asked to know what was going on with the Fatalists, who were buying sheep and selling timber. Polycarpus merely smiled, however, took the florins, and returned with the three ships to hand the florins to the Prince, who put them overjoyed in the purse of his leather money belt for safe keeping; they were to be used for the upcoming needs of the state.
Thus the winter came, the leaves fell off the trees, the birds flew away to warmer lands, the beasts of the forest hid themselves and the land was covered with snow.
Then the Prince opened up his storehouses, took out the grain, and distributed it to the villagers who carried it to the mills; once ground and milled, they distributed the flour to the women who kneaded it and made bread.
The Prince shared his crops, and so the winter passed and no one had to face hunger.
The children learnt to read and to work, they learnt to shoot arrows and to throw the spear.
XVIII. The King the Royal Cousin
IN THE MEANTIME, however, the King the Royal Uncle had recovered his health.
He sought to reassemble his army, but there was not a single soldier in sight, nor could he track them down any longer.
The blackest melancholy seized hold of him then. He lost his sleep, and he fumed and fretted so much that he could not swallow even a morsel of food.
Seething with rage and tearing at his hair, he crossed the border back into his own land; and once he had regained his capital, he cut off his general’s head, because, he claimed, he had deserted the field of battle without requesting permission.
That, however, did little to cure him of his melancholy.
And so he summoned next the humpbacked and bandy-legged jester of King Witless, who had found refuge in his palace, having first consumed in feasting and in frolics all the money that he had made for himself by selling the jewels he had stolen from the King of the Fatalists. The King the Royal Uncle commanded the jester to dance before him and to make him laugh.
The jester, however, thanks to the lavish life he had been enjoying, had unlearnt how to dance and how to act the fool; and because of all the rich food that he had been greedily consuming, he was now enormously fat. So that when he tried to dance before his new master, his crooked little legs got into a tangle and he fell panting on the floor.
“What a complete idiot you are!” yelled the King the Royal Uncle in wild frenzy. “You are not even funny any longer! Why should I go on feeding you, vile and ugly as you are?”
And he drew his sword and lopped off the jester’s head.
He then summoned his officers; and with terrible threats he ordered them to raise instantly a most fearsome army, cross the border yet again, and lay his nephew’s land to waste.
Yet they no longer had any weapons, since the soldiers had abandoned them on the battlefield during their flight. Nor was it so very easy to gather together the men, who had by now scattered to every corner of the kingdom, each of them holed up in his village.
And so it came to pass that, whether he liked it or not, the King the Royal Uncle was forced, for all his seething rage, to postpone his vengeance until a new army might be raised.
The Prince, who was being kept informed of all enemy movements by his secret envoys, ordered a unit of soldiers to leave the camp and proceed all the way to the border, and there erect a mighty citadel, right up on the very top of the rocks, in the exact place where the ruins of the castle built by his grandfather, Prudentius I, could still be seen.
The soldiers carried there provisions for their maintenance; and since the women had gone with them, to knead bread and to cook food, they also had to build some wooden huts to shelter them.
The water, however, seeped in through the cracks between the logs when it rained, and the blustering wind froze them to the bone.
The men therefore decided to build stone cottages, and at nightfall, after their work at the citadel was finished, they would work little by little on their cottage.
And so it came to pass that when it was springtime once again, an entire village had spread at the feet of that great rock, and the Prince ordered them to build a second citadel on the rock next to it, to offer it protection, just at the very spot where there remained the ruins of another old fortress of Prudentius I.
Once some shacks had been erected there as well, the Prince found himself obliged, in order to guarantee their safety, to build a third citadel, and then a fourth, and so on, all along the frontier.
In the meantime, the seven ships had become fifteen, and a good half of these kept sailing away, loaded with timber. Polycarpus kept coming back with ever more florins, so that they could no longer fit in the purse of the leather money belt, and the Prince had to order a heavy iron coffer with a sturdy lock from Miserlix; he put the florins inside, and kept the coffer under lock and key in the palace cellar.
Knowledge and Mistress Wise did after all accept the Prince’s invitation to come up to the palace and live there, for with the very first rain showers, their tree hollow had become uninhabitable.