The Palace at Four A.M.

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    My fathers kingdom was and is, all authorities agree, large. To walk border to border east-west, the traveler must budget haeen days. Its name is Ho, the fu term for harmony. fuism was an i of the first ruler (a straaste in our part of the world), and when hed cleared his expanse of field and forest of his ewo turies ago, he indulged himself in an hommage to the great ese thinker, much to the merriment of some of our staider neighbors, whose domains were proper Luftlunds and Dolphinlunds. We have an ey based upon truffles, in which our forests are spectacularly rich, aricity, which we were exp when other tries still read by kerosene lamp. Our army is the best in the region, every man a el -- 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-er 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.

    -- from the Autobiography

    I am writing to you, Hannahbella, from a distant try. I daresay you remember it well. The King encloses the opening pages of his autobiography. He is most curious as to what your respoo them will be. He has labored mightily over their position, w without food, without sleep, for many days and nights.

    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 try, to do him the great favor of ging the phrase "two disied and impartial arbiters" on page thirty-oo "maligs uhe ideological sway of still more maligs." Otherwise, he is delighted. He asks me to tell you that your touch is as adroit as ever.

    Early iobiography (as you see; we enter the word?s: "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 prehend the dimensions of the pie. He tinues: ". . . in which refles from the kit delier 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 ot bear to look upon your donkey face again. "

    The King wishes to know, Hannahbella, whether this passage seems to you tainted by self-pity, or is, rather, suitably dispassionate.

    He walks up and down the small room o his bedchamber, singing your praises. The decree having to do with your banishment will be resded, he says, the moment you agree to ge the phrase &quot;two disied and impartial arbiters&quot; to &quot;m<bdo></bdo>aligs,&quot; etc. This I urge you to do with all speed.

    The King has not been at his best. Peace, he says, is an unnatural dition. The try is prosperous, yes, and he uands 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 sidering several new wars, small ones, he says, small but iing, plex, dicey, even. He would very much like to sult with you about them. He asks you to ge, on page forty-four of your article, the phrase &quot;egregious usurpations&quot; to &quot;symbols of benign transformation.&quot; Please initial the ge on the proofs, so that historians will not accuse us of bowdlerization.

    Your attention is called to the passage in the pages I send which runs as follows: &quot;I walked out of the castle at dusk, not even the joy of a new suo e, 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 try, that the place was haunted (but my heads enough thten any ghost).&quot; Do you remember that shred of black cloth, Hannahbella? &quot;I ate a sliy mothers spinach pie and sidered my situation. My priness would win me an evening, perhaps a fht, at this or that nobles castle in the viity, but my experience of visiting had taught me that her royal blood nor y 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.

    &quot;I had not wiped the last crumbs of the spinach pie from my whiskers when something lay down beside me, uhe hedge.

    &quot; Whats this? I said.

    &quot; 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.

    &quot; 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.

    &quot; A bogle, said the tiny one, with precision, is not a black dog.

    &quot;Well, I thought, now I know.

    &quot; A bogle, she tinued, is not a boggart.

    &quot; Delighted to hear it, I said.

    &quot; 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 thier?

    &quot; You may lie elsewhere, I said, if my face distenances you.

    &quot; I am fatigued, she said, go to sleep, well discuss it in thbbr>9９lib.</abbr>e m, 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 --

    &quot;She was fusing, 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.

    &quot; Sir, she answered, I would not venture upon whats strange and whats not strange, if I were you, a on to say that if I did not abstain from further impertinence she would it 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.&quot;

    The King wishes you to know, Hannahbella, that he finds this passage singularly moving and that he ot read it without being forced to take snuff, violently. Similarly the :

    &quot;recisely, 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 i: that donkeys came inally 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 versations reached every quarter of the palace, at every season of the year. My mother named me Dun (var. of Dunkey, clearly) a into spasms of shrinking whenever, youthfully, Id offer a cheek for a kiss. My father, in trast, 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, ially, remained firmly ambivalent about me even after long acquaintance.

    &quot;I explained a part of this to Hannahbella, for that was the bogles name, suppressing chiefly the fact that I rince. She in turn gave the following at 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 perfe 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 eai of the tryside. Iter of rank and prece, the mea bogle outweighed the greatest king, although the kings of this earth, she ceded, would never aowledge this but in their dotty solipsism ducted themselves as if bogles did not eve. 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?

    &quot;Well, I wouldnt have minded a bit. She was wonderfully crafted, that was evident, and held in addition the fasation surrounding any perfect miniature. But I said, No, thank you. Perhaps another day, its a bit chill this m.

    &quot; 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. &quot;

    The King ot reread this se, Hannahbella, without being reduced to tears. The world is a wilderness, he says, civilization a folly we eain in cert with others. He himself, at his age, is beyond surprise, yet yearns for it. He longs for the versations 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 being, a modest supper of chi, fruit and wine on the sideboard, only the pair of you awake in the whole palace, at four oclo the m. The tax evasion case against you has been dropped. It was, he says, a hasty and ill-sidered uaking, even spiteful. He is sorry.

    The King wonders whether the following paragraphs from his autobiography accord with your own recolles: &quot;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 tht), explaining to me that my fathers administration of the realm left much to be desired, from the bogle point of view, particularly his mad insisten 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. Dun, 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 r 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.

    &quot; Dun, youre not listening! Hannahbella was naming the chief iing things about bogles, whicluded 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 e 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 i, 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 bee 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 rown things with asss ears, for example; and that there was a something in the <mark>９9lｉb.</mark>road ahead of us to which it might, perhaps, be prudent to pay heed.

    &quot;She was right. One hundred yards ahead of us, planted squarely athwart the road, was an army.&quot;

    The King, Hannahbella, regrets having said of you, in the journal Vu, that you have two brains and . He had thought he was talking not-for-attribution, but as you know, all reporters are sdrels and not to be trusted. He asks you to hat Vu has suspended publication and to recall that it was never read by a serving maids and the most insignifit 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 geous going. On page seventy-five of your article, he requires you, most humbly, to ge &quot;monstrous over-reag fueled by an insatiable if still childish ego&quot; to any kinder stru of your choosing.

    The Kings autobiography, in chapters already written but which I do not enclose, goes on to ret how you aogether, 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 jourogether for many weeks and found that your souls were, in essehe same soul; the shrewd means you employed to place him in painst the armed opposition of the Party of the Lily, on the death of his father; and the many subsequent campaigns which you eogether, mounted on a single horse, your armor banging against his armor. The Kings autobiography, Hannahbella, will run to many volumes, but he  himself to write the end of the story without you.

    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). Exging 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  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 e was, he thinks, a pretext. He at once fives you and begs your fiveness. The Chair of Military Philosophy at the uy is yours, if you want it. You loved him, he says, he is vinced of it, he still o.9９lib? believe it, he exists in a dition of doubt. You are both old; you are both forty. The palace at four A.M. is silent. e back, Hannahbella, and speak to him.

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