The Sunken Square, as Magnus quickly glanced, had the appearance of a valley of sorts down the middle of which rushed a river in spate, only breaking its flood to divide and roll round a black crag. Looked at more slowly, the river was revealed to be the usual throng and the rock to be moving against it as it parted: vast and unmistakable was the immense figure of Emma Katterina, Dowager Margravine of the Ister, Dowager Great Duchess of Dubrovnik, and Titular Queen of Carinthia... a.k.a. Tantushka, Mammushka, Fat Emmy, Her Fatness, and Great Katinka: from head to toe in fusty black slowly growing green for years, and accompanied by what was for her a train of state: “three witches and a priest,” as they were popularly described. She was also the widow of the half-brother of Ignats Louis, King-Emperor of Scythia-Pannonia- Transbalkania, as the Triune Monarchy was now called. Her parsimony was notorious; even now she was walking all the way across Bella in order to avoid the two copperka fares on the tram. Earlier, later, other sovereigns might negate this or that with some such phrase as It is not Our pleasure or La Reyne non veult; Emma Katterina accomplished it with the words, “Mamma wouldn’t let.” Metternich himself had shrugged his defeat by her, Francis Joseph would greet mention of her name by slowly rolling his head from side to side and uttering pained little moans. Bismarck —
Emma Katterina was not only immensely tall, immensely fat, immensely charitable (which was where her pensions mostly went); she was also immensely ignorant. She had certainly never heard of Darwin or Pasteur. It is doubtful if she could have placed Scandia, let alone Froreland, on a map; but, face to face with their Conjoint King, she had recognized his face at once. She had curtseyed. The effect was somewhat as though the Alps had curtseyed. Magnus bowed. Emma Katterina passed on by. Her moles bristled and her chins flowed. Then she crossed herself. Then she spat. Three times. A king was a king.
And a heretic was a heretic.
She knew her duty.
“Who was that?” asked Magnus again.
“Who was that?” someone else, far across the Sunken Square, asked his companion. “ ‘Tantushka’? Tell us something new. No: who was that she bobbed to? No. Fool. Does she bob to everyone? Find out who she bowed to”
“Why was The Mamma pleased to bob and spit just now back there a bit?” asked one of the “witches,” surtitled the Baroness Bix and Bix.
“The Mamma saw that that there youngling was a far-off king; The Mamma knows the faces of all the kings in Christendom,” nodding firmly as she strode along, said Emma Katterina; “and emperors, too, even Of Abyssinia, who is in Asia, and Of Brazil, which he is in Africa. Oh yes!”
“Oh yes!” echoed the second “witch,” surtitled the Countess Critz. “The Mamma she cuts them kings’s faces out of the penny papers and pastes them up in the excuse me.”
“And what far-off king the youngling was?” asked the third “witch,” surtitled the Highlady Grulzakk.
Emma Katterina shrugged. “The King of Koppenholm, somethinglike,” she said. “The Mamma spit, after-like, what because, because he’s a Calvinist: to burn,” and here she spat again . . . without malice. “Nicelooking boyling, yes.”
“In Koppenholm,” the Chaplain said, screwing up his scrannel jaws, and unscrewing them down again, “the people there, may the canker eat, are said to be, allegedly, Lutherans, some say.” The Chaplain may have been a bigot, but he was a tactful one.
“Lutherans are the worst kind of Calvinists,” said Emma Katterina, nothing fazed. “Doctor Calvin was a doctor, in Paris-France,” she explained to her suite. “And he turned heretic, for what because? Because for what he wouldn’t buy a bishop’s dispensation to marry his first cousin’s nephew’s niece. The Queen of Navarre, of blessed memory, she argues with him till she could see green worms with little red heads; but no and no and no! ‘For Heaven’s sake, Dr. Calvin,’ says she, ‘buy the bishop’s dispensation, what does it cost, a richman like you?’ But no and no and no\ ‘I’ll not have no dispensation,’ says he, ‘though the heavens may fall, and what’s more,’ says he, ‘I’ll not have no bishops, neither!’ ”
Gasps of horror and disgust greeted this revelation of total depravity. “So the Queen of Navarre, of blessed memory, who was minding the schloss while her brother was off a-fighting the King of Ireland, she condemns him of course to be burnt at the stake for Unitarianism without benefit of strangulation. So off he runs, with his codpiece a-flapping at ween his knees, not stopping till he gets to Gascony, where he changes his name to Doctor Luther, but the Elector a-sends him a packing. Nextwise he settles down in Switzerland, where their brains be all addled from the snows; Zwingling, he calls himself then. ‘Away with all bishops!’ says he. And there hasn’t been no bishops in Switzerland from that day to this, which is the reason them Switzers has to come down into France or Lichtenstein for to receive Confirmation. Come here incognito, it seems, this boy-chick, which it means, without no uniform, so that republicans and other anarchists won’t fling dirt in his face; what it means to be a king these days.
“Or a queen,” she added. And slowly shook her massive head.
Somewhere under its roof-slates the Grand Hotel Windsor-Lido maintained a dormitory and a row of cubicles for the housing of its employees and the servants of its guests; “Ole Skraelandi” did not bother to see where he was to be quartered according to the G.H. W.-L.; he knew his place and his place never varied: whether it was the turf beneath a reindeer-hide tent or the thick Belgian carpet of an elegant hotel, he slept across the threshold of his sovereign’s chamber. Somewhere far away amidst the moors and marshes of Skraeland, so void of landmarks to the outside eye, was a small hollow amidst a grove of dwarf willows. Here the child was born to whom the shaman gave the name of Eeiiuullaalaa. No one could have expected the pastor of the State Church, charged ex officio with the registration of births in his vast parish — he lived 100 kilometers from that willow-girt hollow — no one could have expected him to have spelled Eeiiuullaalaa correctly and so perhaps he hadn’t; the Skraelings, being largely illiterate, would not have known the difference. Largely is, however, not entirely. The shaman knew how to spell it and he had spelled it — once — in runes carved onto a piece of reindeer horn, which he had entrusted to the infant’s parents, strictly cautioning them not to show it about lest someone use it to work a spell upon the babe. The shaman had been the infant’s uncle or great-uncle, and in celebration of the event he had gotten drunk on Hoffman’s Drops (if “drunk” was quite the word to describe the effects of that antique but still potable and still potent mixture of brandy and ether, of which it was said that, “Three drops will paralyze a reindeer, four will kill a bull-elch, five would stun a polar-bear, six would bring a musk-ochs to its knees, and seven make the troll-hag smile”); so perhaps he had not spelled it correctly, either.
The boy did not grow tall, for the Skraeling are not a tall-growing people; but he grew, and, growing, learned deer-craft from his parents, and from his old uncle or great-uncle learned leech-craft and elf-craft and troll-craft; other things he learned, too, even the general names for which the Skraeling do not tell to others. And when a time came, and it did not come often, to select a shaman to go and live with the King and protect the King from harm (the incumbent shaman knowing he was now of an age to die), the young man suddenly and successively had visions and dreams of such a potent and indicative nature that every shaman in Skraeland agreed it was this one who must go. At the Court he took care of the sacred egg, of preparing charms for going under the threshold or under the bed, of beating the toom-toom if necessary and of blowing the eagle-whistle if necessary (these last two had not been necessary), and of chanting protective chants. And as indication of the trust the Court of the Scands and Frores had in the Skraels, they allowed him full charge of the care of the Sovereign’s boots, shoes, and slippers: a most important magic! Each night as he rubbed off the dust or scraped the dirt or mud from the royal footgear, and by observing where the King had been, was able to decide where the King should be: Bear him well, , bear him well, well, well, he would murmur, as he rubbed into the footgear of the King of Scandia and Froreland the tinted, scented grease they had provided him. Once, in the time of the previous king, John XII and XI, he, “Ole Frori,” as they called him casually at Court, had observed on the twice-royal buskins, traces of a marl which could have come only from the estate of a certain high-born (and beautiful) lady known (though not to John XII and XI) to be a double-agent in the pay of both the Russians and the Prussians. Such elf-craft he performed upon every single item which the King ever wore upon his feet that the King went not thither ever again. Nor knew why not.