The children were clustering around him when there was a shudder of the whole building, followed by a loud, flat noise. The children immediately looked up at him to see if they should cry. “Practising the big boom fireworks for Bobbo’s birthday, do you like big boom fireworks; do you like big sizzle-sparkle fireworks? Be good kiddies and say your prayers and take your medicine and sit on the potty-chair and make poo when nursey tells you, and you shall be allowed to come and watch the fireworks, see? How’s the little footsey? ‘Some better?’ Not all better? Well, let Bobbo bend over and kiss and it will soon all better because Bobbo is the Lord’s Anointed, see, and if Dr. Quaatsch doesn’t like it he can go . .. back to Vienna. This little piggy went to market. . ..”
They were all waiting for him when he got outside.
“What dreck-dribbling whoremongering sow-sucking son of a bitch was responsible for that punk-futtering explosion at this hour of the afternoon with no warning given to prepare the kids; I’ll geld him like an oxling!”
And then they told him Everything.
The men in the tower were still gazing through their telescopes when the clock in the corner began the brief musical notes which announced that it would next sound the quarter-hour. Only one of them bothered to turn and glance at it, then he turned away. Then — very, very swiftly — he turned back. “Is that the same clock that was always there?” he demanded, his voice gone high and weak. This time they all turned. The clock in the comer began to sound the quarter-hour. They all rushed for the door. They did not quite make it.
The two devices were well-timed, and the explosions had really sounded like one.
Everything, that is, which they knew about to tell him.
“We’ll see about this all, later,” said the King-Emperor, suddenly not so much angry as weary. “Immediately I must get down there and show myself to calm the people,” he said. “Bring the Whitey horse —”
Dr. Quaatsch stepped forward, cleared his throat. “As the Court Physician it is my duty to say that I cannot approve your Royal and Imperial Highness doing anything of the sort, and Your Royal and Imperial Highness very well knows why.”
The Emperor looked at him. “I have my duty, too,” he said.
The horse was (of course) white, the Emperor’s uniform was white, the ostrich feather in his cap was white, the Emperor had not yet begun to stoop and was still usually tall and straight, and as he now chose for the most part to ride standing in the stirrups he was visible for blocks. “Fun’s all over now,” he said (and said); “go home now, boys. Go home. Go home. Spread the word.”
Or: “Go home, wives. Go home, go home. It’s soon time to put the spuds on, if you’re not there the man will try to do it himself, scald the baby, and set the house on fire. Go home, ladies, go home — ”
At the Five Points: „...Amen... He doesn’t fife no more, upon which
I spit,” said Emma Katterina, starting to get up, her Chaplain scrambling to help her, the three Ladies-in-Waiting hustling to hide their apparatuses and, this done, to help brush off her skirts. Emma Katterina looked up, looked around. “What, you are still down there?” she asked of those of the multitude yet on their knees. “Up, up, it’s over, everything is now all right.” She raised her voice as she started walking: “To home or to church! Go! Go!” She shook her skirts as though shooing chickens. „ Go! „
“Boys [the Emperor], go home. Go —”
Voice from crowd: “But the Turks, Bobbo! What about the —”
“No more Turks! All gone! All gone!” — which was, historically, quite true, even if they had “all gone” a hundred-odd years earlier. “Go home ....”
Voice from crowd: “But what about that there Antichrist, Your Allness?”
Ignats Louis turned upon him in a well-simulated, well, perhaps it was not all simulated, fury. “I’ll give you ‘Antichrist, ’ you dumb son of a bitch; you leave that sort of thing to the Archbishop, the Patriarch, and the Holy Synod! Go home, I say! Go home!”
[“Ahh!” they said in the crowd. “That be a real Emperor, hear him cuss!”]
If the Frorish delegation was taken aback at seeing their Sovereign atop a palace wall, still, after all, they had come all the way to Bella to see him — however, they had not expected to see him waving the Frorish flag just a moment after they had been listening to the Frorish National Anthem. It was at this moment that he cupped his hands and called down to them, “I grant your demands!”
They did not cheer, being after all, Frores. After a moment one of them, The Patriotic Female Helga Helgasdochter, cupped her own hands and called back, “What, both of them?”
“Both of them!”
Silence. He pressed her so strongly that he might soon have done her a mischief, had she not foiled him by her ready acquiescence. . . .
Then: “The Scands will never approve!”
Magnus did not hesitate. “Then I shall abdicate... as King of Scandia, that is.” And, the implications of this slowly dawning on them, they slowly applauded. The Frores, it is well-known, are not a people given to sudden enthusiasms. The Scands, as a matter of fact, were indeed loath to approve — until their approval was made contingent to the subsequent Trade Treaty whereby the surplus stockfish of both Scandia and Froreland was sent to Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania in return for the Triune Monarchy’s surplus wheat; after which the price of breadstuffs went down in both Far-Northwestern Kingdoms (as it came to be known) grew abundant upon even the humblest table in the Triune Monarchy. But this was later. After. After, that is, young Cornet Eszter- hazy had persuaded Emma Katterina that all the Scotch steam engineers had gone on somewhere else. Baluchistan, maybe. Or Australia. And that the Royal and Imperial Ironroads could not only be obliged to pay a thousand ducats a month towards her charities, but would also build her a glassed-in drying shed for her laundry-drying, thus saying Make clear the way to a direct and swifter, cheaper rail route to the North.
Later.
After. After word had meanwhile gotten around of the role played by the staff of the Major James Elphonsus Dandy Great Texas and Wild West Show in the capture of the old Dalmatian Palace and the demise of the Brigand Boustremovitch, the show’s business boomed. And it kept on booming. Word, of course, had gotten distorted quite into folklore; but what of that? As for the brute Bruto and Pishto-the-Avar and the henchmen of the Boustremovitch, they all became (usually: again) “ships’ carpenters” in the dockyard/prison; it was hard work, but healthy, seeing the most of it was done in the open air. And perhaps it just might be that they were in some way less degraded as they hauled timber and heated tar and sawed and so on than if they had been confined instead in immense dungeons where they might or might not have tended to reform and to become penitent.
But this, too, was later.
By the time he had almost circumambulated the center of his city, Ignats Louis’s voice was worn to a croak. Observing, then, a sign Apothecary, over the open door of a shop, and the apothecary in his apron standing in the doorway and thinking perhaps to ask him for a glass of mineral water, the Emperor beckoned. The man came over and the Emperor leaned down; in the man’s ear he croaked, “My piles are killing mei”
“So I had assumed from Your Majesty’s stance, standing in the stirrups the whole way down the street; so here I take the liberty of offering Your Majesty a pillule of opium and a large glass of mineral water and brandy,” and he handed up first the one and then the other.