The Princess and The Whisk Heads : A Fable

Chapter One

Once there was a princess who ruled a tiny kingdom. Which would have made her a queen, but (I can explain) the old king, her father, was still alive. He had officially given the governance of the state to her because he was too old and tired to see to the daily trivialities. So, although her mother the queen was long dead, she was still called Princess Juliana out of respect for her father. Furthermore, she was so young and pretty she looked like a princess.

The kingdom was called Liralove, and was almost circular in shape. Bounded by a mountain range on one side and by a high concrete wall to the north, it was protected from the cruel and contemptuous industrial state that surrounded it. There was one city in the kingdom – Stjornokh, the capital – and a few nearby villages; the rest was meadows, streams, lakes, and small forests, all dotted with the low stone houses that were an architectural tradition of the Liralovians.

They enjoyed a temperate climate: snowy in winter, warm and humid for two or three months, and misty the rest of the time. Behind each house wet green gardens flourished, filled with wildflowers, morning glories, clematis, dahlias, primroses, peonies, roses of all colours – and, as the Liralovians would proudly show you, oleander (although even the most experienced of the famous gardeners of the kingdom struggled a little with the oleander; they brought them into the warmth in winter).

The dwellings, whose gardens were separated by low stone walls, were mostly ancient, but so solid there was little need to build more – except in the capital, which was a centre of art and philosophy and was home to many bristling steel structures, fantastic architectural models without much function.

There were about a dozen of these. Intricate towers and spires, made of foreign stones, coloured glass, and finely wrought platforms of chrome and mesh striped the sky. Invisibly suspended staircases led nowhere; turrets with gleaming windows were held aloft by snaking arms; interior corridors became labyrinths. Some towers even had moving parts, and parts that made sounds in the wind: reflective shields that spun like wailing comets around the spires in the afternoon light, sheets of silky fabric that floated like hummingbirds up and down the galleries and balustrades. Some towers comprised impenetrable dark solids like building blocks, and some boasted feats of engineering that made them appear impossibly balanced, whole gridded platforms hovering high above the grey stone streets below.

These towers, known as the Architectons, built by the kingdom’s most popular artists, young and old, were the fruit of a prosperous and tolerant state. They housed no lords’ apartments nor merchants’ offices, but were simply for marvel and discussion, pure form, the plastic manifestation of the great architects’ whimsy and experimentation; rich food for stories not yet told.

The other famous Liralovian tradition was the working of jewellery with microscopically fine wire. The wire was made from precious metals – silver, gold, and platinum – beaten to airy thinness and woven into abstract shapes. These were sometimes worn as necklace or bracelet, sometimes actually woven into the skin like a metal tattoo.

This unhygienic practice was the most traditional use for the jewellery, but had fallen into disuse in the last century. In the countryside, a few ancient craftsmen still sported white beards and the traditional leather trousers of the peasant, with patterns of silver illuminating their forearms and shoulders, gleaming like a network of rivers seen from a mountainside.

The young no longer subjected themselves to the decoration. Mostly, nowadays, the jewellery was bought and sold for display, like sculpture. It was dazzlingly intricate, so fine as to disappear from sight at certain angles. It remained in the eye only as a brief flash, an ethereal gleaming, a lacy imprint of light.

This was the kingdom’s only export. Foreign artists and anthropologists were never able to duplicate the amazing delicacy of the wire lace, nor even analyze the conditions of its making: the skill was kept a close secret of the craftsmen and their women, who passed it only to their sons and daughters. Sadly, there were fewer and fewer still living who were truly skilled.

Juliana’s father had amassed a fine collection of traditional work and kept it in the castle’s galleries.

The castle – itself built by her family, long centuries before the vogue for Architectons – gripped a mountaintop just outside the city. It was made of a translucent rose-coloured stone, and spiky with high towers.

Juliana’s private apartment looked over the city. Her favourite sight was the view from her two narrow, arched windows, through the vines that wrapped around their sills: at dusk, the tallest of the Architectons looked like a fine needle. A column of emerald stone glowed at its centre and it was wound with stairways and studded with platforms bearing sheets at odd angles like sails. In the setting sun it seemed to spin, shift, and flutter like a living thing.

The princess’s days were not busy. She trusted her councillors and advisors, and the systems of administration that her father had established. She cared, of course, passionately, for her kingdom and her subjects. She knew that the talk among the noblemen, and in the Convocation of Commoners, was of improving the sewage system in the capital, which was unsanitary; she was even prepared to donate a large sum of her own money to this project, and was trying to take an interest in the physical details of the construction plans, but this was difficult when there were so many experts who knew so much more about it than she did. She had confidence in her engineers.
She also knew that it was important to attend as many public openings and ceremonies as she could. Truth be told, there weren’t many of these, so she had not often cause to take a carriage or horse down the steep hill into the capital.

But her image was everywhere in city and village: because of the public memory of her wise father and because of her youthful beauty, she was much loved by the populace. Her long red hair was especially idolized by the public sculptors.

She was fortunate to be able to spend pleasant idle time with the other children of noble families: she frequently saw the handsome Lord Lucas, who had excelled, in his adolescence, at swordplay and riding, and who had only recently studied politics for a year, abroad, at a famous progressive university, so that now he was preoccupied with social reform. He was particularly concerned with the kingdom’s sewage system. He was working on a bill, to be presented at the Diet of Lords, which would institute a costly overhaul of the entire city’s underground and, he claimed, improve the lot of countless poor families, now living in unpleasant and unsanitary conditions. The princess’s advisors saw him as something of a romantic, as overly sensitive, perhaps even a troublemaker, but Juliana herself admired him for this new social conscience – a great improvement over endless talk of sport – and was prepared to support his bill; still she found him a little bit single-minded on the issue.