"Well, I thought, now I know.
" Whats a bogle? I asked, immediately fetched, for the creature was small, not at all frightening to look upon and clad in female flesh, something I do not hold in low esteem.
The King feels that your falling-out, over the matter of the refugees from Brise, was the result of a miscalculation on his part. He could not have known, he says, that they had bogle blood (although he admits that the fact of their small stature should have told him something). Exchanging the refugees from Brise for the twenty-three Bishops of Ho captured during the affair was, he says in hindsight, a serious error; more bishops can always be created. He makes the point that you did not tell him that the refugees from Brise had bogle blood but instead expected him to know it. Your outrage was, he thinks, a pretext. He at once forgives you and begs your forgiveness. The Chair of Military Philosophy at the university is yours, if you want it. You loved him, he says, he is convinced of it, he still cannot believe it, he exists in a condition of doubt. You are both old; you are both forty. The palace at four A.M. is silent. Come back, Hannahbella, and speak to him.
" A bogle, said the tiny one, with precision, is not a black dog.
Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: "I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new sunrise to console me, my shaving kit with its dozen razors (although I shaved a dozen times a day, the head was still a donkeys) banging against the Walther .22 in my rucksack. After a time I was suddenly quite tired. I lay down under a hedge by the side of the road. One of the bushes above me had a shred of black cloth tied to it, a sign, in our country, that the place was haunted (but my heads enough to frighten any ghost)." Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? "I ate a slice of my mothers spinach pie and considered my situation. My princeliness would win me an evening, perhaps a fortnight, at this or that nobles castle in the vicinity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that neither royal blood nor novelty of aspect prevailed for long against a hosts natural preference for folk with heads much like his own. Should I en-zoo myself? Volunteer for a traveling circus? Attempt the stage? The question was most vexing.
"Well, I wouldnt have minded a bit. She was wonderfully crafted, that was evident, and held in addition the fascination surrounding any perfect miniature. But I said, No, thank you. Perhaps another day, its a bit chill this morning.
-- from the Autobiography
The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural condition. The country is prosperous, yes, and he understands that the people value peace, that they prefer to spin out their destinies in placid, undisturbed fashion. But his destiny, he says, is to alter the map of the world. He is considering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but interesting, complex, dicey, even. He would very much like to consult with you about them. He asks you to change, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase "egregious usurpations" to "symbols of benign transformation." Please initial the change on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.
The King cannot reread this section, Hannahbella, without being reduced to tears. The world is a wilderness, he says, civilization a folly we entertain in concert with others. He himself, at his age, is beyond surprise, yet yearns for it. He longs for the conversations he formerly had with you, in the deepest hours of the night, he in his plain ermine robe, you simply dressed as always in a small scarlet cassock, most becoming, a modest supper of chicken, fruit and wine on the sideboard, only the pair of you awake in the whole palace, at four oclock in the morning. The tax evasion case against you has been dropped. It was, he says, a hasty and ill-considered undertaking, even spiteful. He is sorry.
The King wishes you to know, Hannahbella, that he finds this passage singularly moving and that he cannot read it without being forced to take snuff, violently. Similarly the next:
My fathers kingdom was and is, all authorities agree, large. To walk border to border east-west, the traveler must budget no less than seventeen days. Its name is Ho, the Confucian term for harmony. Confucianism was an interest of the first ruler (a strange taste in our part of the world), and when hed cleared his expanse of field and forest of his enemies, two centuries ago, he indulged himself in an hommage to the great Chinese thinker, much to the merriment of some of our staider neighbors, whose domains were proper Luftlunds and Dolphinlunds. We have an economy based upon truffles, in which our forests are spectacularly rich, and electricity, which we were exporting when other countries still read by kerosene lamp. Our army is the best in the region, every man a colonel -- the subtle secret of my fathers rule, if the truth be known. In this land every priest is a bishop, every ambulance-chaser a robed justice, every peasant a corporation and every street-corner shouter Kant himself. My fathers genius was to promote his subjects, male and female, across the board, ceaselessly; the people of Ho warm themselves forever in the sun of Achievement. I was the only man in the kingdom who thought himself a donkey.
" Just the breasts then, she said, theyre wondrous pretty, and before I could protest further shed whipped off her mannikins tiny shirt. I buttoned her up again meanwhile bestowing buckets of extravagant praise. Yes, she said in agreement, thats how I am all over, wonderful. "
"I explained a part of this to Hannahbella, for that was the bogles name, suppressing chiefly the fact that I was a prince. She in turn gave the following account of herself. She was indeed a bogle, a semi-spirit generally thought to be of bad character. This was a libel, she said, as her own sterling qualities would quickly persuade me. She was, she said, of the utmost perfection in the female line, and there was not a woman within the borders of the kingdom so beautiful as herself, shed been told it a thousand times. It was true, she went on, that she was not of a standard size, could in fact be called small, if not minuscule, but those who objected to this were louts and fools and might usefully be stewed in lead, for the entertainment of the countryside. In the matter of rank and precedence, the meanest bogle outweighed the greatest king, although the kings of this earth, she conceded, would never acknowledge this but in their dotty solipsism conducted themselves as if bogles did not even exist. And would I like to see her all unclothed so that I might glean some rude idea as to the true nature of the sublime?
" Dont you ever shave? she asked. And why have you that huge hideous head on you, that could be mistaken for the head of an ass, could I see better so as to think better?
"She was right. One hundred yards ahead of us, planted squarely athwart the road, was an army."
" Soft, said the new arrival, dont be afraid, I am a bogle, let me abide here for the night, your back is warm and thats a mercy.
The Kings autobiography, in chapters already written but which I do not enclose, goes on to recount how you and he together, by means of a clever stratagem of your devising, vanquished the army barring your path on that day long, long ago; how the two of you journeyed together for many weeks and found that your souls were, in essence, the same soul; the shrewd means you employed to place him in power, against the armed opposition of the Party of the Lily, on the death of his father; and the many subsequent campaigns which you endured together, mounted on a single horse, your armor banging against his armor. The Kings autobiography, Hannahbella, will run to many volumes, but he cannot bring himself to write the end of the story without you.
The King has not been, in these months,in the best of spirits. He has read your article and declares himself to be very much impressed by it. He begs you, prior to publication in this country, to do him the great favor of changing the phrase "two disinterested and impartial arbiters" on page thirty-one to "malign elements under the ideological sway of still more malign elements." Otherwise, he is delighted. He asks me to tell you that your touch is as adroit as ever.
" I am fatigued, she said, go to sleep, well discuss it in the morning, move a bit so that your back fits better with my front, it will be cold, later, and this place is cursed, so they say, and I hear that the Prince has been driven from the palace, God knows what thats all about but it promises no good for us plain folk, police, probably, running all over the fens with their identity checks and making you blow up their great balloons with your breath --
" Duncan, youre not listening! Hannahbella was naming the chief interesting things about bogles, which included the fact that in the main they had nothing to do with humans, or nonsemispirits; that although she might seem small to me she was tall, for a bogle, queenly, in fact; that there was a type of blood seas superior to royal blood, and that it was bogle blood; that bogles had no magical powers whatsoever, despite what was said of them; that bogles were the very best lovers in the whole world, no matter what class of thing, animal, vegetable, or insect, might be under discussion; that it was not true that bogles knocked bowls of mush from the tables of the deserving poor and caused farmers cows to become pregnant with big fishes, out of pure mischief; that female bogles were the most satisfactory sexual partners of any kind of thing that could ever be imagined and were especially keen for large overgrown things with asss ears, for example; and that there was a something in the road ahead of us to which it might, perhaps, be prudent to pay heed.
The King, Hannahbella, regrets having said of you, in the journal Vu, that you have two brains and no heart. He had thought he was talking not-for-attribution, but as you know, all reporters are scoundrels and not to be trusted. He asks you to note that Vu has suspended publication and to recall that it was never read by anyone but serving maids and the most insignificant members of the minor clergy. He is prepared to give you a medal,if you return, any medal you like -- you will remember that our medals are the most gorgeous going. On page seventy-five of your article, he requires you, most humbly, to change "monstrous over-reaching fueled by an insatiable if still childish ego" to any kinder construction of your choosing.
The King wonders whether the following paragraphs from his autobiography accord with your own recollections: "She then began, as we walked down the road together (an owl pretending to be absent standing on a tree limb to our left, a little stream snapping and growling to our right), explaining to me that my fathers administration of the realm left much to be desired, from the bogle point of view, particularly his mad insistence on filling the forests with heavy-footed truffle hounds. Standing, she came to just a hand above my waist; her hair was brown, with bits of gold in it; her quite womanly hips were encased in rust-colored trousers. Duncan, she said, stabbing me in the calf with her sharp nails, do you know what that man has done? Nothing else but ruin, absolutely ruin, the whole of the Gatter Fen with a great roaring electric plant that makes a thing that who in the world could have a use for I dont know. I think theyre called volts. Two square miles of first-class fen paved over. We bogles are being squeezed to our knees. I had a sudden urge to kiss her, she looked so angry, but did nothing, my history in this regard being, as I have said, infelicitous.
" You may lie elsewhere, I said, if my face discountenances you.
" Sir, she answered, I would not venture upon whats strange and whats not strange, if I were you, and went on to say that if I did not abstain from further impertinence she would commit sewerpipe. She dropped off to sleep then, and I lay back upon the ground. Not a child, I could tell, rather a tiny woman. A bogle."
The King wishes to know, Hannahbella, whether this passage seems to you tainted by self-pity, or is, rather, suitably dispassionate.
" Whats this? I said.
"I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, under the hedge.
"What, precisely, is a donkey? As you may imagine, I have researched the question. My Larousse was most delicate, as if the editors thought the matter blushful, but yielded two observations of interest: that donkeys came originally from Africa, and that they, or we, are the result of much crossing. This urges that the parties to the birth must be ill-matched, and in the case of my royal parents, twas thunderously true. The din of their calamitous conversations reached every quarter of the palace, at every season of the year. My mother named me Duncan (var. of Dunkey, clearly) and went into spasms of shrinking whenever, youthfully, Id offer a cheek for a kiss. My father, in contrast, could sometimes bring himself to scratch my head between the long, weedlike ears, but only, I suspect, by means of a mental shift, as if he were addressing one of his hunting dogs, the which, incidentally, remained firmly ambivalent about me even after long acquaintance.
I am writing to you, Hannahbella, from a distant country. I daresay you remember it well. The King encloses the opening pages of his autobiography. He is most curious as to what your response to them will be. He has labored mightily over their composition, working without food, without sleep, for many days and nights.
" Delighted to hear it, I said.
" A bogle, she continued, is not a boggart.
Early in the autobiography (as you see; we encounter the words: "My mother the Queen made a mirror pie, a splendid thing the size of a poker table. . ." The King wishes to know if poker tables are in use in faraway lands, and whether the reader in such places would comprehend the dimensions of the pie. He continues: ". . . in which reflections from the kitchen chandelier exploded when the crew rolled it from the oven. We were kneeling side-by-side, peering into the depths of a new-made mirror pie, when my mother said to me, or rather her celestial image said to my dark, heavy-haired one, Get out. I cannot bear to look upon your donkey face again. "
"She was confusing, I thought, several issues, but my God! she was warm and shapely. Yet I deemed her a strange piece of goods, and made the mistake of saying so.
He walks up and down the small room next to his bedchamber, singing your praises. The decree having to do with your banishment will be rescinded, he says, the moment you agree to change the phrase "two disinterested and impartial arbiters" to "malign elements," etc. This I urge you to do with all speed.
