And don’t forget: this was back in the early medieval period, so the Red-Rose Knight and his men were no beauties.
They really were sacks of worthless crap.
But they were the only dicks in town.
Richard Johnson wrote that the Red-Rose Knight’s men knocked up most of the women of Fairy Land.
This isn’t true.
The only person who got knocked up was Celia.
She gave birth to the Fairy Knight.
Then, about a year later, she had her daughter.
Celia named her daughter Fernstuff Wirethorne, Keeper of the Sacred Flame, Fiery Green Horsetender, and Mistress Magical of Fairy Land and Its Environs.
No one on Fairy Land could be bothered saying Celia’s daughter’s full name.
Everyone called Celia’s daughter Fern.
Not long after the birth of this daughter, the Red-Rose Knight keeled over and died of an ailment that had yet to be named.
He was murdered by typhoid fever, which meant that he’d been killed by water filled with human shit.
Unbeknownst to everyone, one of the Red-Rose Knight’s men was an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever.
The carrier’s name was Orson.
Orson’s hobbies included skipping rocks across ponds, speaking in a high-pitched voice while imitating his mother’s folk wisdom, and pretending that he was a beautiful princess waiting to be rescued by a dashing knight.
Being an asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever meant that although Orson never showed any signs of having the disease, his body was in a state of constant typhoid production.
Orson was like a factory worker under crony capitalism: he was making something, but he didn’t share in the gains of that production.
One night, Orson was corralled into helping prepare a feast. This had happened because one of the usual preparers of food was busy fucking out his brains in a shadowy elm grove by the Ancient Rocks of Forever.
And so Orson helped prepare the feast for the Red-Rose Knight, the Red-Rose Knight’s men, and all the women of Fairy Land.
Orson placed the Red-Rose Knight’s drinking vessel on the communal table.
Because it was the early medieval period, Orson hadn’t washed his hands after using the latrine.
He got his left index finger in the Red-Rose Knight’s water.
The women of Fairy Land were immune to typhoid fever.
When the Red-Rose Knight died from drinking too much water filled with Orson’s shit, he resolved an ethical dilemma.
The dilemma was this: despite liking to fuck, Celia also believed in and embodied the organizational principles of Fairy Land, and the preeminent organizational principle of the Realm was that all men had to be killed or banished.
Celia had stretched this rule for a very long time. For years, she’d let the Red-Rose Knight and his men stay on Fairy Land.
Her citizenry had started to complain.
At the very moment when the Red-Rose Knight died from consuming too much of Orson’s shit, Celia had been trying to figure out how to tell the father of her children that he was to be banished from her island.
After the Red-Rose Knight died, the women of Fairy Land killed all of the Red-Rose Knight’s men who’d survived their encounter with Orson’s shit.
With one exception.
Rusticano was allowed to live.
Orson was the first to lose his head.
Unlike in his fantasies of being a princess, no one saved him from death.
His hands were filthy.
Chapter Two
Some Facts about Fern
A magical bullshit thing had happened when Fern was born. Maybe it was because she was the Queen’s daughter, maybe it was because she was King Arthur’s granddaughter. Maybe it was because she was the first and only woman born in Fairy Land after the expulsion and murder of its men.
Whatever the cause, the effect of this magical bullshit was that the health of the Realm of Fairy Land was tied, directly, to Fern.
She was its living avatar.
In the times when Fern was happy, Fairy Land was a paradise, full of joy and pleasure. The harvests were incredible, the livestock flourished, and the lesbianism was euphoric and multi-orgasmic.
When Fern was angry, Fairy Land was miserable. The harvests were pathetic, the animals all perished, and the lesbianism drifted into a mythical bed death.
In the times when Fern experienced feelings of vulgar existentialism, wondering about the purpose of her or any other life, the whole of Fairy Land entered a state of paralysis, of grinding malaise without discernible beginning or end.
In the five days before Fern ovulated, Fairy Land was hell on Earth.
One of the ways by which Fern dealt with being the living avatar of Fairy Land was to go on vacation.
Most women on Fairy Land never left the island. There was no rule against travel, but enormous social pressure kept the citizenry from venturing into the wider world.
Some people went on trips, sometimes, but it was always awkward.
No one left as much as Fern.
Fern’s first departure from Fairy Land was in the Year of the Silken Cutthroat, which roughly corresponded to 1349 AD, 749 AH, and 5109 AM.
Fern set off on a little boat, with no crew, and sailed across the sea to France.
Once she had landed, she made her way by horse to Paris.
Are you wondering how Fern managed to do all of this?
Don’t forget: Fern’s mother was Celia, the Queen of Fairy Land. Fern was the daughter of an undying being possessed of supranatural abilities, and Fern herself was the living avatar of a magic realm.
Money and horses and boats and all of that?
Fern waved her hand.
Fern performed magic.
And if you’re like the Los Angeles-based artist William E. Jones, when you read about Fern performing her magic, you thought to yourself: “Every time that the supernatural enters fiction, it’s a cheap shortcut around the craft of storytelling.”
And you’re right.
Fern’s bullshit magic really was a cheap shortcut around the craft of storytelling.
But take a deep breath.
Calm down.
Everything is going to be fine.
Just remember: this level of unprofessionalism has been positively reviewed by the New York Times.
When Fern got to Paris, the French capital was not what she had imagined.
It was 1349 AD.
The Black Death had arrived.
Tumors were sprouting from people’s skin and then bursting open into fireworks of wretched fluid.
The Black Death was rotting people’s flesh with gangrene until the people died.
They were living beings and they had lives and loves and hates and cares and worries and now they were lifeless matter.
Food for worms.
Trash scattered around the streets of Saint-Germain-des-Prés.
Stinking to high heaven.
It was a pretty shitty vacation.
When she traveled around Paris in 1349 AD, stepping over the bodies of the tortured urban poor, Fern collected news and information about the outside world.
It’d been about a century since the people of Fairy Land had learned much about what men were doing to the planet.
The news was not good.
It never was.
Fern was nothing if not resolute.
When she returned to Fairy Land, she decided to rest, but also decided that she would go again into the wider world.
And so she went on more vacations.
It was the late medieval and early modern periods. Fern saw unfathomable amounts of human suffering, but other than the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 AD, nothing was ever as bad as Paris in 1349 AD.