Chapter XVIII:
In the Queen’s Dungeons

WITH THE OVERDONE beef still curdling inside my vitals upon my return to London following the WBF “banquet,” and with the list of player candidates still forthcoming, causing me to commence making serious plans to rack somebody—anybody—for the unconscionable delay, I was left with no recourse other than to return to my perusal of the Yankee’s chronicle.

While I found a small fraction of the chronicle to be genuinely interesting—to whit, the disastrous decisions the Yankee had made following my departure from the sixth century—men possess a special talent for bollixing up a thing, with total disregard for consequences; and the higher the rank, the more of this talent they possess—most of the chronicle I consigned to the asinine ramblings of a self-deluded megalomaniac. That being stated, I feel compelled to comment upon what had transpired with the Yankee while visiting my castle, lo these many centuries ago, and my dungeons.

The Yankee and I endured several disagreements over the law of my land and, specifically, what constituted “valid” reasons for imprisoning and/or executing a person. Somewhere in the dim recesses of the Yankee’s “enlightened” brain, he viewed it as good, right, and salutary to allow thieves, murderers, and other violent people to roam free, with nary a thought in regard to future ill consequences. Imagine if you will an entire country peopled with said thieves, murderers, and other lawless ne’er-do-wells, whose sole purpose in life lies in preying upon innocents, depriving them of life and livelihood, of substance and sustenance.

Ah, but I forget myself. That in fact characterizes twenty-first-century America; they may keep it, and God help them in the keeping. “Innocent until proven guilty” is the war-cry of the army of the guilty led by lawyers who fatten their purses by defending their guilty “innocents.” Other war-cries they brandish with exuberance are, “Extenuating circumstances!” and, “Temporary insanity!” Merciful God, spare us all.

It is far better for the rest of the populace to lock away all these miscreants to rot in dungeons to prevent them from wreaking further harm upon the realm. And by “rot” I do mean rot: no VRTV, no contact with one another to plot more evil amongst themselves, no comforts or considerations whatsoever. That and public executions with no appeals will go a long way toward whipping all the closet miscreants into line; trust a queen with many decades of experience on this point.

Yea, even the man whom I had imprisoned for calling my hair “red” instead of using the proper term, “auburn,” was incarcerated for good reason. My husband King Uriens has—had—red hair, thick and coarse and unruly. By likening my fine, glossy, silken hair to his, the man heaped upon me the most intolerable insult imaginable, and therefore he had to pay for it. A lesser action would have diminished my power and authority as queen in the eyes of all, high and low; in point of fact, it would have destroyed my rule. Arranging faux funerals of the man’s family throughout the years of his incarceration, which I knew he could glimpse from his slit of a window, may have been a bit—I confess—overboard. I do excel at holding a grudge. So sue me.

As to the matter of the prisoners incarcerated by my castle’s previous owner, well, the Yankee did have the right of it. I cannot speak for my husband, but for my part I had not given the dungeons or their contents a moment’s thought. Uriens and I had been far too busy settling affairs—establishing perimeter defenses, patrols, and other duty schedules, assigning quarters for the members of our court, gathering victuals, collecting taxes, meeting with village leaders and tenants, and so on and so forth—when we first took possession of the castle to be bothered with the detritus that had been left behind. After that, there was always some feast or tournament to host, or some errant knight to entertain, or some war to fight, or some crisis to manage, that the pattern of our days never lent itself to thinking about the dungeons except when I needed them to exude noise as an aforementioned public demonstration of my power.

Again, sue me.

In regard to the Yankee’s report of my reactions to his freeing of forty-seven of my forty-eight prisoners, well, of course I was furious. Would you, sympathetic reader, not feel thusly when confronted with the highest-ranking minister of your liege lord, who uses his authority to trample your own, especially when he has not the first concept of how matters are conducted in a century to which he does not belong? Would you not suffer under the cruel lash of powerlessness, believing that you could not inflict retribution upon this person for his offenses because the legend of his magical prowess had become known to you—and secretly feared by you—before ever he had set foot across your threshold? Of course you would, on both counts, and you would not have liked it any more than I did.

And to think all that supposed power of his was an utter sham, and we, all of us, to the last man, swallowed his lie whole as easily as swallowing mollusk meat. For our singular stupidity we, all of us—myself included, alas—deserved all of the insults and atrocities the Yankee meted out to us.

’Twas no small wonder, then, that our world plunged into a centuries-long era of intellectual and political darkness after the Yankee was done with making everything “better.”

Since this is not the same century that gave birth to that meddling ass, I shall try not to inflict the same level of damage upon this era that he did upon mine.

I do not, however, make any promises.