Free Nowhere by Thomas Berger Page A

ruler.”
    “But now, Your Royal Highness, you need answer to nobody,” said I.
    “How wrong you are! Commoners never understand these matters,” said the prince with a profound sigh. “I am in reality a helpless prisoner of tradition!” In a lugubrious manner he sucked two more little avian delicacies off their dead legs, but then quickly cheered up when more dishes arrived.
    No doubt it would be as exhausting to read more of this meal as it was to sit there throughout it sans appetite. I couldn’t have kept up with Sebastian at the most esurient moment of my hollow-bellied adolescence. I had no taste for the succession of dishes that arrived on the trolley, which never stayed long at rest: the game course (hare); the roast; the vegetables, which came in separate servings and included things like cardoons, salsify, baby artichokes no larger than plums; a profusion of salads; savories of cheese, mushrooms, bacon; and puddings and pastries and fresh fruits, each second or third course divided from the next by a palate-refreshing sherbet; and finally a great platterful of so-called friandises: bonbons, petit fours, candied chestnuts, and the like.
    The prince said no more, seeming indeed to forget me as well as all else, in the transports of what could only be called his orgy, though again, as with the initial ice cream, he dropped or dripped nothing from his implements and, so far as I could discern, had not even a sheen of grease on his lips, which were thin for such a plump face. He did, when in the so to speak thick of things, breathe rapidly and stertorously, and his eyes when not rolling were closed.
    How long this spectacle went on I cannot say, for though eating no more I continued to swallow champagne, my supply of which was ever replenished by my personal footman, but with little consequent peace of mind or, inexplicably, any reaction to the alcohol.
    But I was taken by surprise when Sebastian ate a final chocolate cream, lowered his chin and produced a shattering belch, then, raising himself slightly, whitening knuckles on the ends of the chair-arms, flatulated even more loudly.
    I tried to stick my nose into the champagne glass, but unfortunately it was of the narrow gauge called a flute. However, it might be of some interest here to note that the prince’s farts were, in my limited experience of them, not noisome: explain that if you can without embracing the assumption that his bowels were as regal as his blood.
    As the echoes of this report were still reverberating amongst the high vaultings overhead, Sebastian looked at me and said, “For some time now I have been bored with the affairs of state, from which a monarch cannot relieve himself short of abdicating. But I have no one to whom to turn over the crown. I am myself an only child. I have not yet married. By modern tradition the sovereign weds only a Sebastiani commoner. Until the late Renaissance we took wives or husbands from the other ruling families of Europe, but usually this meant that the consort was from a much larger and more powerful country than our little state, and too often it happened that the wedding was but a prelude to an attempt by the larger country to annex our land. We repelled all such, but at an awful price in Sebastiani lives. Sebastian the Eleventh was our Henry the Eighth, beheading as he did four queens in succession and all for the same crime: conspiring to betray their adopted country to the advantage of whichever German or Bohemian or Rumanian kingdom they came from.”
    The prince signaled to Rupert, and the old retainer brought him another glass of mineral water. He drank it down in one prolonged swallow, and then changed his position in the chair and farted again, this time producing a peculiar vibration that made the crystal glassware tremble.
    “I know I should marry some healthy peasant,” he resumed, “and impregnate her several times in succession, for my parents were irresponsible in producing only