There was, in short, no love lost between the Federation’s competing oligarchies, and so no telegram congratulating the Grand Duke on the birth of a second son on whom the future continuation of his dynasty depended, was sent.
The Grand Duke was asleep when Prince Fracassus was born.
There was a reason for this lukewarmness. Fracassus had an older brother. Jago. Of Jago everything had been expected but none of it delivered. Once bitten, the Grand Duke contained himself. He was not a bitter man. The Republic of Urbs-Ludus, as overseen by the Duchy of Origen, promoted petty grievances not grand resentments and as Grand Duke he had to be forever setting an example. He would not rail against enemies or fate. And he would not again tempt either by showing the size of his expectations.
Thus neither longed for nor dreaded, but no sooner incarnated than hosanna’d – for he was, for all to see, an Origen, with the tiny eyes indicative of petty grievance, the pout of pettishness, and a head of hair already the colour of the Palace gates – Fracassus came griping into the world in expectation of every blessing that a fond father, a copper-bottomed construction Empire, a fiscal system sympathetic to the principle of play, and an age grown weary of making informed judgements could lavish, short, that is, of a sweet nature, a generous disposition, an ability to accept criticism, a sense of the ridiculous, quick apprehension, and a way with words.
Of these deficiencies Fracassus lived the early part of his life in blissful ignorance. How different was he, really, from the usual run of children? No baby is magnanimous; all infants have thin skin; small boys will often mistake boisterousness for mirth and bullying for wit; and wordlessness, as is well known, is something children grow out of at different rates. Many a great orator begins life as a tongue-tied toddler, indeed the greatest orators in Urbs-Ludus’ history remained that way.
So Fracassus’s parents had no reason to notice anything amiss and they too lived in blissful ignorance of his shortcomings, if shortcomings they could be called. He was an ordinarily pugnacious, self-involved and boastful child, not much attentive to the world around him and used to getting his own way.
Visitors to the Palace did what visitors to palaces do and doted on the heir presumptive. That he took not the slightest notice of any of them was evidence both of his self-sufficiency and the richness of his interior life. That he cried the moment he was denied whatever it was his little fingers reached for only proved his resolution. That he never spoke a word they recognized suggested he was already master of innumerable foreign languages. That he spat and spewed and farted in their company only showed his indifference to the world’s opinion.
It hardly needs saying that in a Republic whose power resided in the spell of awe and majesty it wove around its citizens, the Internet enjoyed high esteem. The Great Duke lent his name to a dozen blogs and funded any website that promoted values close to his heart – the freedom to drink sugary drinks, to choose an example at random. Of these, the foremost at the time of the Grand Duchesses’s lying-in was Brightstar, a platform for nativist, homophobic, conspirationist, anti-mongrelist ethno-nationalism which might have caused greater concern to people in high places had they only known what any of those words meant.
Brightstar saw the advantage in associating itself with Prince Fracassus from the moment of his birth. Indeed, it charted his development with such sycophancy that some subscribers to the site weren’t entirely sure whether they were a reading a pean to the Prince or a parody of him. Was there a difference, anyway? However to understand it, the Prince’s extraordinary untutored mastery of foreign tongues was painstakingly explored. Noises he had made were phonetically laid out and readers were invited either to guess at their meanings or confirm, should they be speakers of those hypothesized languages themselves, their lingual accuracy. At this early age, Fracassus was already becoming an inspiration, an example to the people of what freedom from instruction could achieve.
In one of those brief political reversals to which any truly original site is subject, Brightstar was compelled to cease publishing for a while and some of its pages were lost beyond recovery. So there is no way to confirm that on the Prince’s second birthday his water was bottled and, for a nominal sum, offered to subscribers, together with a certificate of authentication in his own hand. Porcelain pill-boxes containing samples of his ordure the same. Some say this is malicious fabrication but there are people who claim to have purchased one or other or both and to have them still.
Among the Grand Duke and Duchess’s closest friends the usual jealousies stood in the way of adulation on quite that scale. A little more animation wouldn’t have gone amiss, they muttered among themselves. A Prince wasn’t expected to show intellectual promise, but wasn’t this Prince slow beyond the usual meaning of the word? And those eyes – were they ever going to open? But out loud they voiced only praise. ‘He will be an ornament to your Dynasty. He will be a flower in the garden of the Republic. He will be a Prince among princes.’ The Grand Duke liked the idea of his son as ‘ornament’, wasn’t sure about ‘flower’, but took strong objection to that equalizing ‘among’. His son, he hoped, would leave the others in his wake. The rest were not Princes but ten-a-penny princelings, as ineffective as that ancien régime from whom, along with weak chins and syphilis, they’d borrowed their titles. Some couldn’t even afford to live in their own tower blocks.
Concealed in his contempt for minor Monopoly aristocrats was a gnawing consciousness of inferiority that could only be explained as shame at being a Monopoly aristocrat himself. The Grand Duke looked down on everybody except those who looked down on him – the gubernatorial classes, unpropertied, untitled, unnoticed by the media and often badly dressed, but wise in the ways of governance and exercising an influence which couldn’t be quantified but for that very reason attracted a near mystical envy and respect. For all his wealth and eminence, the Grand Duke had never met the Prime Mover of All The Republics, whose pronouncements, though delivered from an undistinguished address, were listened to the world over.
The Grand Duke was stung.
Secretly, his ambitions for his son were unbounded. The name of Origen could climb higher yet ino the empyrean. Fracassus would build betting halls of such magnificence that only gods could afford to play in them. But after that… after that the Grand Duke looked to his son to Muck Out the Pig-Pen, seize the levers of power, and win for the House of Origen the mystical respect which had so far eluded it.
And then they’d see who’d spurn the advances of whom.
The Grand Duke did not lack realism. His was a republic within a Republic, admired and emulated, yet for all its devotion to innocent indulgence, it had always had its critics – mumblers, and fly-posters, half-day insurrectionists who sat down on rubber yoga mats and read their messages. There was no violence; it was hard to be angry outside the Palace of the Golden Gates. The building made people smile. They enjoyed looking up and feeling dizzy. Even the homeless liked to see where other people lived. But recently, encouraged by the success of the Artisanal Bread Riots, these demonstrations had got more boisterous. The Grand Duke was a lover of social platforms, but these too spread disaffection, stoking envy and encouraging the unhappy to pick publicly at one another’s scabs. Follow-my-leader discontent, he called it.