Pussy

CHAPTER XVI Containing the whole science of government

Great as was the consternation, and deep as was the sorrow in every heart, the moment for the Prince to leave came around without mishap or interference by the fates. Fracassus did nothing further untoward. And Sojjourner did not make a last minute appearance. It was written. The world was waiting and it was time he ran into its embrace.

Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt would accompany him, acting as mentors, confidants, travel guides and porters to the Prince and as eyes and ears to his parents. Report your every perturbation, they were told. But do not scruple to describe the highlights too.

Speaking for themselves, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt were delighted to be going. They too believed that indiscretions were best committed far from home.

The Grand Duke found it as hard as he knew it would be to bring the Grand Duchess round to Fracassus’s departure. He reminded her that they had often been away and left their son, but accepted that this was different. When they had gone travelling the boy was safely ensconced in the palace with a television to watch in every room; now he would be wandering God knows where. Not without technology – to compensate for his cruel pulling of the plug, the Grand Duke lavished the latest phones and tablets and laptops on Fracassus; even a watch that would double as a direct video link to the Palace and fitness activity tracker – though you could never be sure how good the signals were going to be in foreign parts. But he had mature company. And there were signs that he was maturing himself, if one only knew where to look for them. He’d been seasoned by misfortune. He had taken up tweeting again and had more than a million avid followers.

The Grand Duke and Duchess decided against going to the heliport, fearing the parting would prove emotional They saw the party off at the Golden Gates. Renzo took his son in his arms and begged him in a voice thick with emotion to remember all the advice he’d given him over the years. He had a great future. All he had to do now was earn it. Look, listen, learn. Limp and unresponsive, Fracassus gave the impression of somebody who’d forgotten everything that had ever been said to him already. ‘Write to me,’ his mother said, catching Probrius and Cobalt exchanging ironic looks. ‘And I mean write, not tweet. I refuse to read those things.’

Wherever possible, Fracassus would travel First Class, his tutors Economy. This suited all parties. For their part, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt were pleased to have time together. They took that very particular pleasure in one another’s company reserved for people who look alike. Both had attenuated bodies and long necks, both were pared down into that leanness often found among servants of the wealthy, and both had complimentary sideways tilts that came from having to whisper into each other’s ears in the presence of majesty. Thus they always looked hugger-mugger even when they weren’t. Just what their travelling relations would be had not yet been decided. They would leave it, they thought, as they had left it for the last few years, to chance and opportunity. They weren’t young and reckless like the Prince. They could wait. To tell the truth, they found postponement titillating.

Fracassus, who had yet to meet anyone his own age he resembled, had only himself for company. He didn’t mind that. He had always preferred his own presence to that of other people. Moving from television set to television set in the weeks his parents were away, he had been free to let his mind riot in future scenarios of power. Solitude, he discovered, particularly when passed in front of a television screen, could be phantasmagoric. There had been times when what was true and what was not were so hard to tell apart that Fracassus felt he was exercising power already. ‘Me,’ he would cry inwardly, and sometimes even outwardly, as Nero lowered his thumb and the bodies piled up in the Colosseum. ‘Me,’ he would proclaim – ‘Ich!’ – with every rewind of Max Schmeling flooring the Brown Bomber. Wrestlers, of course, were him. ‘Do you submit now?’ They didn’t just submit, they whimpered their surrender. And feral motorists. Leaping from the burning car and watching it explode on the outskirts of the Mexican village, he felt a passing twinge of something – pride, was it? – knowing the other passengers had not been so fleet of foot and quick of thought. ‘Me, me!’ Their own fault if they were burnt alive or scarred irremediably. A Mariachi band played to show there were no hard feelings. The car had been worth half a million in whatever currency.

Well, ‘me’ was a trickier entity after meeting Sojjourner. Sojjourner who’d loitered briefly in his thoughts like a scented candle (his own simile) and then went out. For that brief time ‘Me’ had become ‘us’. But here he was, back to being singular again. He was surprised how quickly he’d got over the heart-ache and liked what it said about him. He was a tough guy. He was hurt-proof. Love is for pussies, he tweeted.

Though the helicopter flight to Gnossia was only half an hour in duration – no more than a quick hop over the Wall – it irritated Fracassus that he had to travel the same class as everyone else. ‘Can I sit on my own if I buy the airline?’ he asked the pilot. ‘That’s not my decision, sir,’ the pilot told him. Retard, Fracassus thought.

A delegation of Gnossian Republicans greeted Fracassus and his party on their arrival. Though Gnossia and Urbs-Ludus were essentially the same country divided by a Wall, the air felt different to Fracassus. Professor Probrius pointed out that this was because there were fewer towers and ziggurats in Gnossia, so they could see the sky. Fracassus seemed disgusted by the idea of fewer towers and wondered why they’d come to such a hell-hole. ‘Diplomacy, Your Highness,’ Probrius reminded him. ‘There has been tension between the two Republics. We are here to further your education, but let us not forget that this is, inter alia, a peace mission. The Grand Duke harbours great hopes for this visit. He believes you to have good negotiating skills.’

‘I have great negotiating skills.’

‘And that is why you’re here.’

‘Are these good guys?’ he asked Probrius, sotto voce.

‘Very good.’

‘Then tell them we want peace. And tell them if they want a few more towers I’ll build them.’

‘It would sound weightier coming from you, your Royal Highness.’

A small dinner of fish that Fracassus refused to eat was thrown in honour of the visiting party, after which the Prince was granted an audience – though he hadn’t asked for it – with the President of the Gnossian republic, Eugenus Phonocrates. The President was elderly, and received Fracassus in his bed at the Presidential Palace. The President’s face was lined as though he had been sleeping on a crumpled pillow all his life. He was said to have kind eyes but Fracassus, who was said to have no eyes, couldn’t locate them in the great railway intersection of deep wrinkles.

‘I once met your father,’ Phonocrates said. ‘He must have told you that. It’s some years since we met but I see the family likeness in you.’

‘I have his hair,’ Fracassus said.

‘And I hope his good character.’

‘I have a great character,’ Fracassus said.

Phonocrates tried to sit up in bed and called Fracassus closer to him. It didn’t occur to Fracassus to offer help. ‘Many years ago,’ Phonocrates said, ‘your father told me he admired the way I ran my country and asked me to divulge to him the secret of good government. I told him that if he would ever do me the honour of sending his son to meet me, I would divulge it to him. You have an older brother, I believe. He never did come to see me. I don’t know why.’ (Transgender faggot, Fracassus decided against telling him.) ‘So I am doubly honoured that you have.’

Fracassus inclined his head. The President waited for him to say the honour was all his, but he didn’t say it.

‘Anyway,’ the President continued, ‘I am today pleased to be keeping my promise. That is not something I usually do…’ He paused, coughed, and banged his chest. ‘And there you have it.’

Fracassus waited. ‘There I have what?’ he asked at last.

‘The whole secret of good government.’

‘Where? What?’

‘Don’t keep your promises.’

Fracassus had no idealism to be outraged, but even he was taken aback by the the old man’s candour.

‘Not any?’

‘Not any… I know what you are thinking. I might have got away with not keeping some of my promises. But all! And maybe for a short time. But for more than sixty years! But this is to miss the point. And listen to me carefully now… To be successful in politics you must be thorough. If you are half-hearted you will fail. A half-hearted liar the people will not forgive. “Ah!” they will say, “did you hear that, did you notice that? He has just told a lie. He cannot be trusted.” But if they know you to be a liar through and through, and you show that you know they know you to be a liar, they can trust you. They grow fond of your lies. Eventually they will come to feel that the lies you tell are their lies. It is like pillow talk. Everyone lies in love. That’s the game. You don’t honestly believe what you say to one another. She is not really the most beautiful woman on the planet, and you are not really the most handsome man. But in the game of love you pretend it is so and think none the less of one another for telling lies and believing them. The game of politics is the same. Tomorrow you will all be employed – you promise. The day after tomorrow you will all have free health care. The day after that you will pay no taxes. Who really believes any of that is going to happen? Not the people, much as they would like to. And while they love me for telling them what they want to hear, they love me even more for the theatre of illusion I give them. They think I am the villain in a pantomime and everybody cheers the villain in a pantomime. You ask me are the people stupid. Very far from it. They can smell a fraud a thousand miles anyway. But ask me if they know what’s best for them, then the answer is a resounding no, because their besetting weakness is that they love a fraudster. If someone who wants the best for the people lets them down, they will never forgive him. But a joker who wants the worst for them they will follow into hell – this, Prince Fracassus, is what I would have told your father.’

The following morning, Eugenus Phonocrates, lover of the people, was found dead in his bed.

No one blamed Fracassus.

He stayed for the state funeral. Bells rang. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the streets. Men and women of all ages wept openly. Some cut their arms and faces. Any baby born that day, no matter what the sex, was named Eugenus Phonocrates.

At the biggest sporting arena a football match was called off so a memorial service could be held. Fracassus, as Heir Presumptive to the Duchy of Origen, was guest of honour. He sat between Phonocrates’ sons on a raised platform in the centre of the field, carried a candle, thought of Sojjourner in her trousers and wept a hard dry tear for the cameras.

Midway through the service, by which time the mourning had fed on itself like a flame, leaping from the mourners’ chests as though to be consumed by their own fervour was the only end they sought, a wild person wearing rags broke though the crowds and dropped at Fracassus’s feet. Carried away by the emotion sweeping through the stadium, the Security Services did nothing to remove the intruder. He was part of it. His own private conflagration.

Fracassus did what he always did when he was afraid and jutted his jaw.

‘Listen to them,’ the wild man said, as though to someone sitting on the Prince’s shoulder. ‘Behold the wondrousness of human folly.’

‘I don’t frighten easily,’ Fracassus said. ‘I have less fear than any man on the planet.’

The wild man ignored his words. ‘Look around you,’ he went on. ‘Man in his massed magnificence. Crowds screamed and cried for me once. Woman said and did disgusting things. They encouraged their own daughters to do the same. They abandoned shame, if they had ever known it. I was the best known singer in Gnossia. The Republic came to a halt when I performed. The radio fell silent. Doctors stopped performing operations. Tickets for my concerts changed hands for more than people paid for their houses. I loved the crazed attention. I studied every face. I drank in the adulation of every person in that crowd. I had the power not just to move but to possess. They weren’t listening to my voice, they were my voice. I loved it and then I hated it. I had thought it was about me but it wasn’t. It was about them. They screamed because they needed to scream. They waved their arms in the air like one great beast with a thousand limbs because they wanted to lose their humanity. That was the only way they could find themselves – by losing what made them separate. Singing, dancing, marching, sport, religion, mourning, war – they’re all the same when the great beast waves its million arms. Only by losing do they find. Something must have happened in the history of humanity that made people cast away their reason. Maybe it was the appearance of a strange planet. Maybe God descended. Maybe it was the applause humanity awarded itself when it moved in a mass out of the great soup of creation. “We’ve made it! We’ve done it! We’re here!” Whatever the cause, adulation for themselves in the appearance of another became a fixture of human life. You no doubt think that when you are applauded it’s because of something you have said, or done, or just because of the way you look. Disabuse yourself. You simply fill a vacuum. The need for you, whoever you are, was there long before you were. You are the object of the habit of hysteria, that’s all.’

Fracassus felt himself sliding into a trance. They can’t half talk, these Gnossians, he thought. Then, through half closed eyes, he saw the once famous singer raise his hand. He’s going to kill me, Fracassus thought. It’s me he blames. He remembered Max Schmeling and made a fist. Then he landed it in the middle of the singer’s face.

Report at once spread that as part of well-orchestrated coup there’d been an attempt on the lives of Phonocrates’ grieving sons. Prince Fracassus, son of the Grand Duke of Origen, here from the Republic of Urbs-Ludus on a peace mission, had foiled it. Cheers mingled with tears. The habit of hysteria had gone looking for a cause and found it in Fracassus.

Back in the Palace of the Golden Gates, watching the late news on television, the Grand Duke saw it happen. He would have liked to call his wife but she was locked away in her fairy grotto chocolate factory. ‘My boy!’ the Grand Duke said, alone.

Fracassus gave interviews to the world’s press gathered in Gnossia to report on Phonocrates’ funeral. The late President was a great guy, he said. He shook his head and, with a dying fall, repeated the felicitous phrase. ‘Great guy… great guy…’

Had he been frightened. No, he had no fear, no fear.

Anything else?

He raised his face to the cameras. ‘It’s been a great night, thank you, thank you.’ Then he remembered a line Professor Probrius had given him for a rainy day. ‘The fight against terror goes on.’

CHAPTER XVII A hero of our time

There being nothing further to keep them in Gnossia, the Prince’s party betook themselves to the little airport. Fracassus didn’t like flying but at least he had a row of First Class seats to himself. He settled in to watching television on the back of someone else’s seat in a language he didn’t recognize on a screen the size of a postage stamp.

Language had never been an insuperable barrier to Fracassus’s enjoyment of anything. The conversations he most enjoyed were the ones he couldn’t hear or understand and even his favourite television programmes worked best for him with the sound turned off so he could interpolate his own dialogue. Some people’s brains are crammed and noisy places; Fracassus – though he enjoyed commotion and liked imagining himself to be its cause – kept a quiet head. The word ‘Me’ pinged about in it like a bagatelle ball in a deserted basilica.

And now ‘Me’ was an emntity they had tried to kill and failed. The word suggested impregnability. ‘Me’ was armour plating.

Soon after the plane took off, he found himself quickly engrossed in a game show the essentials of which would have been plain in any tongue. Based loosely on a sketch by a once beloved comedian called Monty Python – a repeat of which Fracassus had watched a hundred times without finding it remotely funny, so there must have been nothing else on those nights – the show comprised a host wearing a faceted metallic suit, a hostess exiguously dressed in bank notes, a studio audience exceptionally collaborative in spirit, and the contestants themselves, tempted to blow the whistle on people they loved, whether by giving away their secrets to their spouses, divulging their medical histories, casting doubts on their legitimacy, or informing on them to the police. The longer they held out against betrayal, the plumper the brown paper envelope they were offered, though of course – or there would have been no point to the game – the offer might be rescinded at any time. You had to choose your moment. Those who refused to stab their friends in the back were jeered – ‘Spravnos,’ the studio audience called out, which Fracassus translated as ‘Lock ’em up!’ – while those who held out for more money and then sold their family down the river were applauded wildly. ‘Spravchik,’ the audience shouted, which Fracassus took to mean ‘We love you.’ Fracassus registered a provisional interest in the witch-queen hostess, part Lilith, part Shinigame, who handed out or held back the envelopes, dropping a curtsy either way, in order to avoid bending over. But it was the Tempter in Chief himself, brawny as a bear but soft-voiced like a serpent, who grabbed Fracassus’s attention. ‘Me,’ Fracassus thought, as the plane landed at Cholm airport.

A middlingly-stretch limousine was waiting to collect the party and transport them to their hotel. The cocktail cabinet and television were smaller than his father’s but Fracassus was, for him, too full of what he’d been watching on the flight to complain. ‘So what exactly was the principle of this game?’ Dr Cobalt asked. She would have liked to take in the scenery of a country she had never visited before, but this was not a journey for her pleasure. And besides, flushed from whatever had happened in Gnossia, Fracassus had turned voluble and peremptory.

‘You get money for shopping your friends,’ he explained. Already he had assumed the menacingly soft tones of the Master of Betrayal.

‘Is that it?’

‘And people shout Spravchik.’

‘Spravchik?’

‘Spravchik.’

On hearing this word, the driver of the limousine swung round in his seat. ‘You know Spravchik?’

Dr Cobalt looked at Professor Probrius. They were both accomplished linguists, but no, neither of them knew what Spravchik was.

‘Spravchik is not a what, he’s a who,’ the driver called over his shoulder. ‘Vozzek Spravchik is our Foreign Secretary.’

‘Why, in that case, would people have been calling out his name on a game show?’ Probrius asked.

‘Why? Why not? It his show. They were calling for him.’ Cheem, they were calling for cheem, he pronounced to the Prince’s delight. Setting aside Gnossia, where people spoke the same language he spoke, Fracassus had never left Urbs-Ludus and had not heard a foreign accent before. His genius for mimicry was tickled. Cheem, he kept saying to himself. He added it to his repertoire. Lordy, lordy; the floppy limbed spastic bedmaker, and now Cheem. A comic routine was taking shape.

Probrius did know something of the world beyond the Republic, but he was still surprised by what the driver told him. ‘Your Foreign Secretary is a game show host? Is there not a conflict of interests?’

‘What conflict? He is also Minister of Home Affairs, and Culture Secretary. Why not? No conflict.’ Confleect.

A thrill went through Fracassus. Confleect. Chwy not. Cheem. Life had become very amusing suddenly. If only he had an audience bigger than Probrius and Cobalt to amuse. An audience the size of the one that had watched him knock out the subversive singer. Spravchik!

The next morning, following a day of sightseeing in which Fracassus saw nothing, Vozzek Spravchik invited the Prince and his little party to meet him at the Ministry. The plan before they’d left home had been for Fracassus to travel this leg of the journey incognito, without the hindrance of diplomatic nicety and protocol, but he had been so insistent in his desire to see the Minister in the flesh, that messages had been hurriedly exchanged, permissions sought, and here they were.

To Fracassus’s disappointment, the Minister greeted them in an ordinary lounge suit and without his assistant from the show. He could have been a civil servant. But then he took his tie off and spiny black bristling hairs, that reminded Fracassus of a wild boar he’d seen on a natural history programme, sprang from his shirt. A pungent smell came off him. On the walls of his office were photographs of Spravchik in his swimming trunks, driving a jeep, diving, surfing and standing in an olympic pool balancing on each shoulder the two synchronised swimmers who’d won silver medals for their country in the recent games. There were also two life-size paintings in the heroic style – one of him arm-wrestling a polar bear and the other of him gently removing a thorn from a lion’s paw. ‘These are the two sides to my personality,’ he explained. Fracassus’s initial disappointment in the man dissolved in his admiration for the art.

‘Welcome, anyway, to you all,’ Spravchik proclaimed, as though to a vast gathering, extending a hand to each of the party in turn. ‘There are, I hope, no hard feelings left between our peoples. Sometimes you have to have enemies to know who your friends are.’

Though Fracassus was not aware there’d been hard feelings between the Republic of Urbs-Ludus and Cholm, he liked Spravchik’s verbal style and wanted to show he could match it. ‘And sometimes you have to be right to be wrong,’ he responded.

Spravchik appeared delighted by this and clasped Fracassus to his strong chest. ‘We should wrestle,’ he said.

Professor Probrius wasn’t sure that was a good idea. The Prince had only recently got off a long haul flight and was no doubt suffering jet-lag.

‘And I have just knocked someone out with my fist,’ Fracassus added.

The Minister roared his approval. ‘Show me how you did it.’

‘Not a good idea,’ Probrius put in, fearing another diplomatic incident. ‘Perhaps in a few days, when the Prince is recovered, Minister.’

‘Just name the day. That will be beautiful. I have a full size wrestling ring.’

‘That is an occasion we all look forward to,’ said Dr Cobalt.

‘Looking forward can be dangerous,’ said Spravchik, ‘but not as dangerous as looking back.’

Fracassus decided against trying to match his verbal style again. ‘How long have you been doing your show?’ he enquired instead.

‘Is a question I am always asked: which came first, your political career or show business? Chicken/egg, egg-/chicken. I say they came together. What’s the difference? The people love my show and vote for me. The people vote for me then watch my show. Trust the people. They don’t make the false divisions intellectuals do. Whoever touches the soul of the people embraces truth. The people sometimes need guidance but they are never wrong. The people are beautiful. You want tickets?’

Probrius and Cobalt were about to shake their heads but Fracassus nodded his.

‘We are recording this evening. You must come. All of you. I will get you tickets. Never put off doing until tomorrow what you can do today – and that includes invading your neighbours…’ He paused to measure his effect. ‘Only having fun with you,’ he went on.

‘Sometimes fun can be mistress to a not-so funny deed,’ Professor Probrius said, though the moment he said it he couldn’t understand why he had.

Nor could Secretary Spravchik. He narrowed his eyes and showed his teeth, much as he did when offering a contestant money to betray his best friend’s political affiliations to the secret police. Professor Probrius started from the steely light. Fracassus felt drawn into it. This was the first great man he had ever encountered face to face. Compared to Spravchik, Philander and Hopsack were minnows. And Eugenus Phonocrates was dead. ‘Yes, please,’ he said. He had a new word and wondered if he had the courage to use it. ‘Tickets would be beautiful.’

‘It takes great faith to ask,’ the Minister said, clasping Fracassus to him again. ‘And it takes even greater faith to give. I am guided by my faith in everything I do. I have so much faith in me you can hear it beating against my ribs. No man has more faith.’

Fracassus listened and could hear it. He had promised his mother he would write and now he knew what he would say. ‘Dear Mother, I have just held genius in my arms. Don’t worry. Not a Rationalist Progressivist. Not a hooker either. Your loving son, Fracassus.’

That night he sat on the front row of ‘Whistle Blowers’ and when the crowd rose to bait the faint of heart, so did he. ‘Spravnos!’ he shouted.

Professor Probrius also planned his email to his employers. ‘We have barely been away three days but already Fracassus has won the hearts of all Gnossians, and is now further extending his understanding of foreign customs,’ he would write. ‘He is winning friends and forging new alliances wherever we go. The honour he is lending to the name of Origen is all you would have wished for.’

Lying in Yoni Cobalt’s arms he whispered ‘Spravchik.’

The Doctor jumped up. Many were the hours and long were the nights through which she’d lain in a fever of desire, imagining just such a moment as this – she and Kolskeggur alone in a foreign place, listening to the howling of the wolves, far from television and the internet, every minute before dawn theirs to do with as they wanted. And he had chosen to whisper ‘Spravchik’ in her ear. What did he mean by it? Was he playing some perverted jealousy game? Was he one of those men who needed to feel rejected before he could feel loved? ‘I’m not turned on by Spravchik if that’s what you’re trying to find out,’ she said.

‘I should hope you’re not,’ Probrius said. ‘Neither am I. But it would appear our little Prince is. For a supposed tough guy he’s easily swayed by other tough guys, wouldn’t you say?’

‘What are you implying?’

Professor Probrius laughed. He didn’t know. That the boy was easily impressed, that was all.

Yoni Cobalt saw it as the Prince trying out what sort of man to be. He’d been groomed to greatness. But what kind of greatness? It was up to them, wasn’t it, to show him other ways than Spravchik.

Kolskeggur Probrius kissed her fondly. ‘You want to make a good man of him, do you? Who are your models? Jesus? Gandhi? Doesn’t he own too much property to make it into their league? You can’t grow up on a Monopoly board and hope to direct others how to live nobly.

‘You can if you discard the Monopoly board.’

‘And the television.’

‘Yes, and the television.’

‘And the internet.’

‘Yes and the internet.’

‘And the social media.’

‘Yes, definitely the social media.’

‘And then there’s abnegation of the ego.’

‘So we’ll leave him to Spravchik, then?’

They went to sleep thinking their own thoughts. Not for the first time, Probrius felt that if he could only stay patient things would work out nicely in his favour. Fracassus a saviour? Hardly. Fracassus a scourge, more like.

He listened to what the wind was saying, and it agreed with him.

Minister Spravchik would not hear of Fracassus and his party leaving just yet. He put a super-stretch government limo at their disposal, together with an interpreter and a guide to the country’s monuments and museums. Just as the car was about to pull away he ran out in front of it, waved it down, and jumped inside. He was wearing a track suit in the colours of his country and a bobble ski-ing hat. ‘You two can get lost,’ he told the interpreter and the guide, pointing his thumbs back over his shoulder.

Fracassus added another expression to his collection. You two can get lost. And then the thumbs. He’d use that one day.

‘What I think we’ll do first,’ Minister Sprachik told them, pouring himself a Slovitzvitzvička from the limo’s cocktail cabinet and knocking it back in one swallow, ‘is go up into the Blackbread Mountains where you will be able to see indigenous handicrafts being made and taste the local brew. Then if there’s time we’ll go back down into the White Canyon and do the same.’

He foamed with laughter, which Fracassus reciprocated.

The colour went out of Spravchik’s face. ‘The idea of meeting indigenous people amuses you?’

‘No,’ Fracassus said. All the colour that had fled Spravchik’s face flew into his. ‘I thought it amused you.’

‘Why would it amuse me? I am Culture Secretary. The welfare of our most ancient and poorest inhabitants is of the first importance to me.’

They drove into the mountains in silence. Fracassus had never been into mountains before. But he couldn’t look around him. He was too upset.

Spravchik’s mood, however, appeared to improve. ‘Come,’ he said, when the car stopped at the summit. ‘First we enjoy the view – the greatest in the world. Then we watch the ceremony of the threading of the beads. People have been practising the art of bead threading on this very spot for hundreds of thousands of years. They mine the quartz from the mountain, shape them with fintstones, drill holes through them with a sharpened dogwood stick which they rub between their hands – a method unique to Cholm – then string them on ropes made from the wild grape liana. Come. Look.’

Sitting outside a rough habitation were a dozen of the saddest, blackest individuals Fracassus had ever seen. They appeared to have been staring vacantly into space until the party wandered over, whereupon they bent their heads industriously and began the drilling.

‘It must hurt their hands to do that,’ Fracassus said. He wanted to show what a great interest he was taking in the indigenous customs of Spravchik’s country.

‘Not any more,’ Spravchik said. ‘They were doing this when you were still a bacterium in the belly of a wriggle fish. Here’ – he seized a finished necklace of beads from a woven basket and hung it around the Prince’s neck – ‘a gift from the Numa people. Now we’ll go over to witness the fermentation ceremony and have a drink.’

Fracassus fingered the beads and got immediately drunk.

‘Strong, huh?’ Spravchik said, enfolding Fracassus in his arms.

‘You?’

‘The drink. We’ll make a man of you before you leave us… Unless I can persuade you to stay. Will you?’ (It was the same low serpent hiss Spravchik used to persuade contestants to sell their sisters for sixpence.) ‘Say yes. We could invade a country together. I’ll let you pick one. What do you say Professor Probrius? Can I have him? And you Dr Cobalt? Your role is the mother’s, I presume. Can you bear to part with him?’

There was much mirth and saying ‘If only’, but it was impossible to know if the invitation was genuine.

On the road down the from the mountain Spravchik continued to enthuse about the Numa people and their customs. But the moment they were back on flat land he began to inveigh against their laziness, their alcoholism, the tawdriness of what he called ‘their shitty little customs, and the cost to the exchequer of keeping them in welfare.

The party fell quiet. Fracassus because he was asleep, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt because of who they were.

‘I know what you are thinking,’ Spravchik said to Dr Cobalt whom he had picked from the start as subversively liberal.

‘I’m not thinking anything, Minister, except how beautiful your country is.’

‘I appreciate your flattery but I know your culture and I know you are wondering how I can praise the peasants when I am among them and wish to exterminate them when I am not.’

‘I hadn’t thought you wished to exterminate them, Minister,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘There you are. That’s the very judgmentalism I was referring to. Exterminate is just a manner of speaking. I could as easily have said ‘remove’ or ‘relocate’, but I wanted to provoke you into outrage. And I have succeeded. Allow me to say that you don’t appreciate the complexity of holding several conflicting portfolios simultaneously. I have to be all things to all people in this country. On the mountain I am Culture Secretary. Down here I am Minister for Home Affairs.’

Fracassus had woken up. ‘And you are beautiful as both,’ he said, slurring his speech.

As was the custom in Cholm, Minister Spravchik kissed him on the mouth.

CHAPTER XVIII In which Fracassus almost reads a book

Picture the emotions warring in the chest of young Fracassus. Word of his fame as the hero of Gnossia reached him intermittently. Cholm was mountainous and the signal erratic. He tweeted his thanks to his admirers but couldn’t be sure they ever reached them. This was the wrong place to be at such a time. It was as though the world was celebrating his birthday without him. But didn’t Spravchik’s company compensate for this? He wasn’t sure whether to be flattered by Spravchik’s friendship or miffed that Spravchik wasn’t adequately flattered by his. Did Spravchik always mean what he said? Where, for example, was the promised wrestle?

But the most perplexing question of all concerned heroism. Could one be a hero and a hero-worshipper?

To the best of anyone’s knowledge, that’s to say to the best of his own knowledge, Fracassus didn’t dream, but he was getting perilously close to dreaming of Vozzek Spravchik. He felt spurred to emulation but somehow diminished at the same time. Was heroism a virtue one could forfeit in the act of admiring it in others? He would have liked to discuss this with his father, but his father was far away. This left only Professor Probrius, whom he didn’t like and after more than half a dozen words couldn’t follow, and Dr Cobalt, but Dr Cobalt was a woman. Could a man – should a man – discuss heroism with a member of the very sex heroism existed to impress?

He decided he would raise the matter with her casually, much as he might raise the matter of a missing shirt. Just by the by, did she happen to know of a book on heroism? She wondered why he wanted it. She ventured to hope he hadn’t gone overboard on Spravchik.

‘Overboard?’

‘Well he is what many would regard as a heroic figure and I can see that you respect him.’

‘What’s wrong with that?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with respecting any man so long as he is worthy of it.’

‘And you think Spravchik isn’t? Is that because he drinks?’

‘Not just that. The man has an appalling human rights record.’

‘Because he arm-wrestles bears?’

‘No, I wouldn’t call arm-wrestling a bear a violation of human rights. Though it might violate animal rights.’

‘What if the bear wins?’

‘Good for the bear, but the gay and lesbian people he imprisons and the women he flogs for having abortions won’t be consoled by that.’

Fracassus allowed his mouth to fall open. There was an unwritten code at the Palace as to what did and did not constitute appropriate conversation between a Prince and his tutor. There were grey areas but abortions weren’t one of them. As for any sexualities other than heterosexuality, no mention was permitted of these either after Jago’s dereliction. Had foreign travel caused Dr Cobalt to forget herself?

She asked herself the same question. ‘I apologize if I have offended you, Your Highness,’ she said. ‘I thought you were asking my opinion.’

‘I asked you to recommend a book on heroism.’

‘You are right to correct me. That was indeed what you asked. You might, in that case, like Bear Grylls’ Spirit of the Jungle.’

Fracassus shook his head in frustration. ‘No, no, not a story,’ he said. Spirit of the Jungle sounded like the stuff his mother had tried to force on him. Spirits, fairies, fantastic beasts. What would Spravchik think of him reading a book about animals you couldn’t wrestle because they weren’t really there? ‘I want something more… I don’t know the word… more true, not made up, more something like an atlas or a Bible.’

‘I will think about it,’ Dr Cobalt said. Later that day she arranged for Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Thomas Carlyle’s On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History to be delivered to the Prince’s kindle and waited for what he would have to say to her about them.

In the meantime she wondered if she’d gone too far and would be recalled to Urbs-Ludus. She told Kolskeggur what she’d done.

‘You brought up the matter of Spravchik’s violations of human rights with the Prince?’

She screwed her eyes up. ‘Have I been a fool?’

‘What did Fracassus think?’

‘Fracassus doesn’t think. He looked ill-pleased.’

‘By you, or by Spravchik’s violations?’

‘I very much doubt the latter. He has grown up in a jungle of human rights violations.’

‘Tut, tut.’

‘Are you tutting me or the Grand Duke?’

He kissed her forehead. A fatherly kiss. ‘I’ll tell you what I think,’ he said. ‘Whenever I heard people talking about human rights in my university I wanted to reach for my shotgun.’

‘Kolskeggur!’

‘That wasn’t because I wanted anything less for the despised and underprivileged than they did. I just described my outrage differently.’

‘Thereby making it about yourself.’

‘No, the very opposite.’

‘Are you saying I was making Spravchik’s crimes about me?’

‘That depends on what exactly you said and how you said it. But if you flew the flag of your emotions and showed your pain, then yes.’

‘Human rights are a flag to you?’

‘Well they will be to Fracassus. The very phrase affects members of his class the way a spade affects a garden worm. They might not be able to describe the weapon but they know they’re under attack from it.’

‘Silence is a recipe for defeatism.’

‘Well whatever war you’re fighting you already aren’t winning. Listen to what’s in the wind. May I speak my mind?’

‘Well it would appear I have spoken mine.’

Professor Probrius took a breath. Never a good sign if you were the interlocutor. ‘Every time you champion a special interest group you alienate those who fall outside it. That does make them illiberal. I don’t say be silent but I do say clean up your language. Change your precious cast of victims. Don’t make an enemy of anyone who doesn’t feel the hurt you do. Or just don’t give a damn.’

Dr Cobalt didn’t know why she suddenly felt peeved, but she did. ‘Do you know what,’ she said. ‘Why don’t you talk to the little prick your way and I’ll talk to him mine.’

Professor Probrius put up a hand of peace. Her way worked perfectly nicely for him. She might as well have been loading Fracassus up with sticks of dynamite. He didn’t want any harm to come to her. He hoped that if he listened to the wind he would know when the explosion was coming and would be able to whisk her away from it. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t looking forward to the bang.

Fracassus said nothing further to Dr Cobalt that day. She couldn’t tell what mood he was in with her. But he did leave his Kindle lying about – perhaps deliberately – and she noticed what he he was reading on it. Bear Grylls’ The Spirit of the Jungle.

CHAPTER XIX The spirit of the jungle

The party remained in the country of the Numa for several months, though there was no further trip to the mountains. Fracassus continued to receive tickets for Spravchik’s television show and attended it religiously. On one evening the warm-up man’s role was taken by Spravchik himself. ‘Tonight you’ll have to put up with me in all capacities,’ he told the crowd who shouted and called his name. He must have been aware of Fracassus’s presence because he translated some of his funny stories into a form Fracassus could understand.

Between anecdotes he talked about the deviancy that was eating the heart out his country the way mice gnaw at a harvest. Homosexuality, he said, was against the will of god, whichever god you believed in. The Numa people, for example, before whose ancient wisdom he stood in awe, would throw any child showing homoerotic inclinations off the mountain. They could detect these inclinations in the first six months of the child’s life. And the moment they did – he made a motion suggestive of spading dirt into an empty grave – it was over the side with them. There was no hatred in this; it was all kindness. They couldn’t bear the thought of homosexual children going through life scarred by their unnaturalness.

‘Spravchik!’ the studio audience cried.

He had one more thing to say. For himself, he would rather have cancer than a lesbian for a daughter.

Spravchik! Spravchik!

Did he fling a smile – suggestive of spading dirt into an empty grave – at Fracassus?

Fracassus knew what he would tell Dr Cobalt should the subject of Spravchik’s violations of human rights crop up again. He would tell her that Spravchik was motivated by kindness not cruelty. He would tell her the minister was joking. And he would tell her to remember her place.

Some of the tweets Fracassus composed in the time he was Spravchik’s guest throw light on his feelings for the man—

_{May 4th}

Great meeting with Vozzek Spravchik, television host extraordinary and Culture Secretary of this great country.

_{May 6th}

Journey to mountains with Vozzek. Great view. The Numa present me with bead necklace. Lovely people.

_{May 6th}

Vozzek says country can’t afford to go on looking after Numa people who drink too much. Sad.

_{May 9}

Wrestle with Vozzek Spravchik Minister of Home Affairs and ‘Whistleblower’ host. I let him win.

_{May 11th}

Rematch. I let him win again.

_{May 20}

Go swimming with Vozzek. Someone pulls my shorts off under water. Great guy.

_{May 20}

Person who pulls my shorts off not Vozzek but I think his assistant from ‘Whistelblower’.

_{May 29}

I’m learning so much here. Could stay forever

_{June 7}

Appalled to hear of violent demonstrations in my country. What do these people want…

_{June 7}

…they have everything

_{June 8}

Vozzek offers to send army to restore order. Classy guy.

_{June 17}

Vozzek Spravchik’s daughter announces she is lesbian. So sad.

Eager to mobilize his forces though Foreign Secretary and Defence Minister Spravchik was, he didn’t again invite Fracassus to pick somewhere on the map for them to invade. Fracassus was disappointed. Had it all been just another tease? Nor did Spravchik send help to Urbs-Ludus where the troubles had apparently subsided as quickly as they’d begun. But he did say his country was constantly monitoring the situation and that Fracassus could rest assured that his parents were safe and calm. Fracassus thanked him for the reassurance but wondered how he came by his information. ‘By hacking into your father’s computer system,’ Spravchik laughed.

Joking aside – supposing he were joking – something seemed to be troubling the Minister. He could not see Fracassus without embracing him and then withdrawing from his company with a sigh.

Not counting Sojjourner – and Fracassus was no longer counting Sojjourner – Fraccassus had never been in love. So he didn’t know the signs. When Nero was in love he showed his feelings by raping the girl’s mother. But that didn’t help Fracassus in his current predicament. Was Spravchik in love with him or not.

Finally, on a horse ride into the Makindo Desert – Fracassus sitting behind the bare-chested Spravchik and clasping him tentatively round the waist – the Minister unburdened himself of what had been on his mind. He wanted a casino. Something memorable and monumental. And he wanted Fracassus to design it.

Was that all? Fracassus was disappointed. He’d hoped… but what had he hoped.

Of course he said yes.

Delighted, Spravchik proposed they toe-wrestled. Cholm was the world capital of toe-wrestling and an invitation to toe-wrestle the Culture Secretary was the highest honour the country could bestow.

Spravchik rode them to a natural amphitheatre, where fallen logs served for seats and two rocks, the distance of two men apart, were positioned like pillows. Spravchik told Fracassus to strip down to his unterhosen. Fracassus was embarrassed: his legs were fine but he rightly feared his pecs were flabby. Spravchik explained the rules. They would stretch their lengths upon the stony ground, lie right foot to right foot, then left foot to left to foot, pillow their heads upon the rocks, interlock big toes, and attempt to force the other’s foot into the flaming torches which Spravchik would now light. Best of seventeen throws. And damned be him that first cries ‘Hold!’ There would be no witnesses – Spravchik dismissed his servants.

They stripped, shook hands, then took up their positions. Fracassus looked up into the sky. Above him eagles soared. The sun beat down. ‘Spravnos!’ Spravchik shouted, and so it began. Their feet locked, their big toes, equally matched despite the difference in their years, clamped like spanners or the claws of eagles. Fracassus felt the strain of effort through his thighs and back. Spravchik hummed quietly to himself. The advantage went this way and that. Doubtful it stood, as two spent swimmers that do cling together.

The light began to dim.

And all day long the noise of battle rolled…

The following day, back in the Ministry, the two men, limping slightly, talked zoning and location.

‘Build it wherever you like,’ Spravchik said.

That was when Fracassus had his brain wave. ‘Let’s build it on Blackbread Mountain,’ he said.

Spravchik leapt from his chair and embraced him. Then he stepped back and tapped his lip.

Was he wondering what to do about the Numa, Fracassus enquired. If so, he had the perfect solution. They could work in the kitchens and thread beads in the foyer.

Spravchik embraced him again. ‘Nice thought,’ he said. ‘But we must respect their ancient culture.’

Fracassus nodded. ‘How do we do that?’

‘We move them on.’

Fracassus was relieved. He’d hoped Spravchik would see it that way.

He stayed on a year to see the project through its developmental stage. He tweeted links to artists’ impressions of the building. Classy partnership: classy building. News of its construction travelled far and wide. The Pleasure Temple of Numa, the pillars of its sacrificial temple stretching high into the clouds.

Yoni Cobalt, in Kolskeggur Probrius’s arms, wondered how long it would be before they’d be throwing babies who showed gay tendencies off its ramparts.

‘Shh,’ Kolskeggur Probrius said.

CHAPTER XX Fracassus discovers the price of freedom and tweets about it

The party left Cholm by train. Fracassus was sad to leave. He felt that a part of himself would always remain here. He and Spravchik had embraced in private on the morning of the departure. Fracassus liked to think that between men of surpassing power there existed a sort of electric force field and that when they embraced, especially for the final time, sparks like those emitted by the First Creation would fly between them. No such sparks flew between Spravchik and Fracassus, but it was a melancholy farewell notwithstanding.

Though the journey was reputed to be beautiful, Fracassus didn’t notice the meadows or the streams. There was good coverage on the train and he didn’t want to miss it. He was pleased to find his name wherever he looked and to see himself widely talked about. ‘What’s a wunderkind?’ he asked Professor Probrius.

‘A wonder child. Why?’

‘That’s what they’re calling me.’

‘That’s what you are, Your Highness.’

Less satisfying was the news from Urbs-Ludus. More disturbances were reported. Every day another demonstration against something. Every demonstration lasting longer than the one before. He sent an email to his father in the language of Twitter which was now the only language he could think in. He hoped it would convey the seriousness of his concern. Minister Spravchik sad to see me go. Everyone is. Even a wunderkind has to stay focussed.

Probrius hadn’t arranged for a car to meet them this time. He didn’t want another Spravchik situation. Better to get their passports stamped and slip in otherwise unobserved. A little more fuss was made of Fracassus on account of his title than Probrius thought necessary, but sycophancy always put the boy in better temper. ‘Welcome to Plasentza,’ Prince Fracassus.’ When a stranger called him Prince it was as though he had never heard the word before and became a stranger to himself. He would stand around, waiting to collect every rag of accolade, before he could be persuaded to move on. The luggage was being sent on ahead so they could walk through the city. Fracassus rarely walked and had certainly never walked anywhere like this.

‘What have your brought me to?’ he asked as they left the station. He had noticed people sleeping on the floor. He guessed this was because their trains were late. But then he saw people sleeping in shop doorways as well.

‘It’s called an advanced liberal democracy,’ Probrius explained.

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means there’s no monarchy, no presidency and no dictatorship.’

‘So who runs the place?’

‘Elected members of parliament.’

‘Who elects them?’

‘The people.’

‘Who elects the people?’

‘No one elects the people. They’re the people. They just are.’

Fracassus scratched his face.

‘This,’ Professor Probrius went on, ‘is considered to be the fairest form of government mankind has yet devised.’

Fracassus pointed to a couple of beggars sleeping top to tail in a cardboard box in the doorway of a coffee shop. He asked if they were toe-wrestling. Professor Probrius said he didn’t think so.

‘Then why are they here?’

‘Because there’s nowhere else for them to sleep.’

‘But aren’t they the people?’

‘You are indeed a wunderkind, Your Highness,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘You put your finger at once on the contradiction at the heart of government by the people. It doesn’t work because people aren’t nice to one another.’

‘Just a minute – ‘ Dr Cobalt began, but Professor Probrius stared her into silence.

‘How,’ Fracassus wondered, ‘do you unelect the people?’

Dr Cobalt was again frozen into silent compliance by Probrius’s stare.

‘It’s been tried, Your Highness. Your father has been wrongly accused of doing that very thing. A better way, in my view – and, if I may say so, in the the view of many experts – is to give the people what they want in the full knowledge that they don’t know and then let them give the power back to you.’

Dr Cobalt could contain herself no longer. ‘Whereupon it will cease to be a liberal democracy,’ she said.

‘And whose fault will that be?’ Professor Probrius asked.

Fracassus had the answer. ‘The people’s.’

‘It’s never a good idea,’ Professor Probrius said, feeling he was coaching the Prince already, ‘to tell the people you are saving them from themselves. Better to tell them you’re saving them from someone else.’

‘Like who?’ Fracassus wondered.

‘Like anyone you can come up with.’

De Cobalt’s look met Professor Probrius’s. Like your father, they were both thinking.

Fracassus had an identical thought.

The following morning a bomb went off not many streets from their hotel. Six people were killed. Dozen injured. Fracassus watched the news on the hotel television. He could smell sweet gunpowder. And something worse.

It was by no means the first time such a crime had been committed and innocent bystanders killed or wounded. ‘This is the price we pay for our freedoms,’ a senior politician was saying. He had been accused before of taking a sort of satisfaction in it, as though a healthy liberal democracy needed the occasional atrocity to justify itself. But in one form or another almost all the politicians interviewed in the immediate aftermath of the bombing said the same. It was the price – the terrible price – the country paid for its freedoms.

Did Fracassus think it was too high a price? All one can say for sure is that he tweeted Terrible price to pay for freedom.

Because of the outrage, the Prince and his party weren’t allowed to leave the hotel that day. All three sat and watched the television in the hotel lobby in silence. Two hours after the bomb went off a terrorist group claimed responsibility. An hour after that the leader of a civil rights organization warned against scapegoating the immigrant group whose ethnicity the terrorists shared. Already, Probrius nudged Fracassus into noticing, more concern had been expressed for the safety of the immigrant group than for the lives that had been lost. Makes you wonder who the victims are, Fracassus tweeted.

Dr Cobalt knew what Professor Probrius was doing and what Fraccasus, under his tutelage, was struggling to give birth to as a thought. She seized a moment while Probrius was paying a visit to the lavatory to nudge Fracassus in another direction. ‘This could have happened anywhere, you know.’

‘Never has at home.’

‘That doesn’t mean it never will.’

‘Couldn’t happen in Cholm. Spravchik wouldn’t let it.’

‘You can’t be sure of that.’

Probrius was back sooner than she’d calculated. It was possible he’d changed his mind, realising what she was shaping up to say to Fracassus.

The three exchanged suspicious glances in silence until Professor Probrius asked her how she would define a phobia.

‘You know what a phobia is.’

‘I want to hear it from your lips.’

‘A phobia is an irrational fear.’

‘What’s irrational about a fear of being bombed?’

‘Nothing. It’s perfectly rational, unless it paralyses you from living your life.’

‘Then what’s irrational about being afraid of the people doing it?’

‘Nothing. What’s irrational is blaming everybody who looks like them.’

‘Is it wrong to identify a source?’

‘It is wrong to spread the net so wide that the source becomes an entire people.’

‘How else, in a liberal democracy, are we to set about stopping it from happening again?’

‘Increased security. Detective work. Intelligence…’

‘And if they fail?’

‘We have to try making the world a better place.’

‘And in the mean time?’

‘Act humanely.’

‘And that means sympathizing with the terrorists.’

‘If it was terrorists who did it.’

‘Oh, come on, Yoni, they’ve claimed it.’

‘Ah, so now you trust them?’

‘Ah, so now you don’t?’

Fracassus, who had been attending to every word between them – it was the longest conversation he’d ever listened to from start to finish – tweeted underneath the table: Liberal democracy equals more sympathy for bombers than for bombed.

CHAPTER XXI The loneliness of the braggart

Never was a truer word spoken: A prophet is not without honour, save in his own land.

Far from his native country, where he had grown up in the shadow of his father the Grand Duke, Prince Fracassus was attracting attention for his ability to attract attention. With each new tweet and exploit another clipping was added to that collage of moral force and popular influence known to an age of rapid dissemination of trivia as personality. After his heroics at Gnossia, stories of the temple he was building in Cholm began to appear on message boards and news sites. A photograph of Cholm’s Chief Minister, Vozzek Spravchik, annointing him with Numa oil high in the Blackbread Mountains with nothing but a drop into black infinity behind them, and soft round clouds like women’s buttocks floating above, appeared again and again in celebrity magazines and colour supplements. Only an official selfie of the two men toe-wrestling in the barren Makindo Desert as the sun went down received more coverage – though that mainly in magazines for men who liked looking at photographs of men.

When his tweets on the subject of the Plasentza bombings appeared it was as though the prayers of thousands had been answered. The country did not lack for information and opinion. A Liquid Crystal Display Device in the hands of every citizen facilitated the transmission of all conceivable views on all conceivable subjects. Anything that could be said, had been said. But the digital context was everything: no one, especially in a liberal democracy such as Plasentza, wanted to see their thoughts or secret beliefs replicated word for word on a hate site. Young himself, and photogenic in the sense that people were becoming accustomed to his image, Fracassus made available to the under-thirties what until now only the over-fifties had thought. By virtue of the family he came from, the title he held and the size of his property portfolio, he lent centrality to opinions hitherto only heard on the lips of disreputables and drunks. Though he could no more have strung his random vociferations into a system than he could have read a sentence of Thomas Carlyle on Hero Worship, others had begun to marshal and codify everything he said for him. To those who argued that it hardly amounted to a political programme, others argued that it did. Does/doesn’t was the stuff of twitter and kept Fracassus’s name before the public.

Occasionally at first, but with growing frequency, word of what he was saying leaked out of Plasentza back to the Republics. It began to be invoked in the course of those yoga-mat demonstrations which had been no more than a minor inconvenience for traffic at the time Fracassus left Urbs-Ludus, but had since grown into a serious threat to the stability not only of Urbs-Ludus but to All the Republics. ‘Where is Fracassus?’ was a call heard first on this side of the Wall, and then on that. ‘Who is Fracassus?’ the Prime Mover of All the Republics was reported as enquiring. Though whether in fear of his influence or in expectation of his support no one could be sure.

Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, few had known of Fracassus in his youth. He had not ventured out into the world much. Brightstar intermittently championed him, but so ironically hyperbolic (unless it wasn’t) had been their coverage that for every enthusiast they won to his cause, they lost a dozen. Now he was somewhere else, theories as to his true identity proliferated. He was an invention of a news-starved media. The house of Origen, having been shaken, first by the rumoured scandal of a sex-change heir, then by the demonstrations outside their properties, had come up with a manufactured robotic figure to mend their fortunes. Fracassus was a charlatan, a chimera, a ghost, a bankrupt. By the same token he was a businessman who turned to gold leaf everything he touched, an architect of wild dreams, a patriot, a hero, and an orator of genius.

That all this made him the ideal person to be given his own television show could not be disputed when the idea was floated to the head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television. The word went out. Find him. Bring him back. Offer him anything.

But no one said ‘Immediately,’ so there seemed to be no hurry.

‘Our boy is shaping up,’ the Grand Duke told his wife.

‘What as?’

‘The thing we always wanted him to be. And quite frankly, if you take a look at what’s happening on the street, the thing we need him to be.’

‘I’m a mother, Renzo. A mother only wants her son to be happy.’

‘He can be happy and great.’

‘I still see his face on the day he left.’

Knowing his wife’s aversion to their son’s looks, the Grand Duke doubted that. ‘Describe it to me.’

‘He looked so sad.’

‘It’s good for someone his age to suffer disappointments.’

‘Renzo, his whole world came crashing down.’

‘He’d only known the girl ten minutes. I’d call that a brief disenchantment. Brief, but necessary.’

‘You seem pleased it happened.’

The Grand Duke rose from his chair and paced the room. He did not like concealing things from his wife. ‘My dear Demanska,’ he said, ‘I am pleased it happened and have no regrets that I made it happen. At the time he left us, Fracassus was, for all his stubbornness of character, a clay man. A person had only to graze him with their thumb and it left an impression that lasted for a month. It struck me as best to get some impressions over and done with while he was still young. I feel wholly vindicated by the figure he is cutting in the world right now.’

‘You made it happen?’

‘I did.’

‘You hired a girl to break my son’s heart?’

‘Demanska, our son doesn’t have a heart.’

‘You actually paid someone?’

‘Sojjourner, yes. I auditioned actresses but none could quite manage the self-righteousness. It turns out that only a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist can convincingly play a Progressive Metropolitan Élitist for money. I wanted Fracassus to fall for her and fall for her he did. I wanted him disillusioned and disillusioned he became. Now look at him. I made him so Progessive-proof that even Reactionaries start from his pronouncements.’

‘And you know for sure the girl is not in his life somewhere?’

‘They wouldn’t last ten seconds in each other’s company today.’

‘Then I wonder who is in his life?’

‘Ambition.’

‘How lonely he must be.’

‘You’ve forgotten how much he enjoys his own company. A vain man is never lonely. Which is a good job because a braggart never has a friend.’

‘My poor Fracassus. How cruel you’ve been to him, Renzo.’

‘Only to be kind, my dear. Only to be kind.’

He didn’t tell her that the Head of Celebrity at Urbs-Ludus television had been enquiring as to Fracassus’s availability and mentioning eye-watering sums of money. Bearing her sensibilities in mind, he did suggest they think about giving Fracassus a book show, an idea they said they’d consider, though in such an event the fee would not be so eye-watering.

CHAPTER XXII In which the Prince forms an even higher estimate of his gifts

International communication having reached a level of sophistication and celerity unknown to previous ages, word of what the world was thinking of Fracassus reached him almost before it thought it. He would not have been human had this not moved him to what in a lesser person might have been called conceit, but in him passed as self-awareness.

The bomb, he found the modesty to confess, had quickened his maturity. I have gone from boy to man in a single morning, he tweeted.

Within the week, newspaper supplements were carrying the story HOW A BOY BECAME A MAN, alongside photographs of mangled corpses. These he no sooner saw than he retweeted, and so there and back around the globe the message went as though it were the media equivalent of perpetual motion.

In the bomb, Fracassus saw – that is to say Professor Probrius taught him to see – not only his opportunity but a truth that offered opportunity for everyone. Society had grown degenerate. It had lost the ability to draw a distinction between the guilty and the innocent, it had lost the courage to blame, it had taken ordinary decent outrage and turned it into bigotry, it had made good people fear the consequences of their goodness. Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer, he tweeted.

That should be scared, Professor Probrius told him. But it was too late.

Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer was re-tweeted more than a million times. Scarred was considered a master-stroke, enmeshing in a visual, an auditory but, most important of all, a consequential way, the concepts of fear and wound, cowardice and disfigurement, the momentary and the never-to-be-forgotten. That which scared us scarred us. That which scarred us marked us out as scared. We who were afraid to condemn the bombers were also victims of their bombs. But where other victims died, we were only scarred, which made our being scared the more ignoble. Or was there something holy in our refusal to kill? Scared was an anagram of sacred, the anagrammatizing clue being the verb to scar. Disfigure the word for afraid and we got the word for righteous.

There was no end to the play people could make of this mistake of genius.

‘He’s claiming it as his, I suppose,’ Dr Cobalt said.

‘He’s trying to,’ Professor Probrius replied. ‘But he isn’t quite sure what it is he’s done. He came across the word anagram in a tweet the other day and had to put himself to bed. He’s going in for a lot of jutting and pouting which is the usual sign he’s bluffing something out.’

Whether Fracassus was aware of what he’d done or not, his name now hung in the firmament, fierce and vivid, like a hunter’s moon. Invitations to him to return home and give a talk, a seminar, a lecture, anything he chose, flooded his mail box. Caleb Hopsack congratulated his ‘star twitter pupil’ and begged him to address the annual conference of the Ordinary People’s Party. It took a while for the phlegmatic citizens of Plasentza to grasp that the tweeter of the hour, a real live Prince and property tycoon who’d broken the spell under which they’d been living for decades, was actually resident in the capital city of their country. But once his presence had been verified they were eager to hear him. They hadn’t realised how pusillanimous they were until, in 140 characters of fire, he’d shown them. They had practised tolerance for evil-doers and tried to reintegrate them into society. They had cared for minorities and strangers, but now these same minorities appeared to them as self-pitying schismatics and those same strangers were planting bombs. What about their own needs? Who was speaking up for them?

Fracassus was.

Time to Muck Out the Pig-Pen, he tweeted, remembering a phrase his father had whispered into his crib.

Invited to discuss the Bomb as Opportunity at a meeting of the Plasentza Scientific and Philosophical Society, he drew huge crowds. He had feared he would have to make a speech of more than 140 characters and ordered Professor Probrius to write it for him, but the organizers assured him it would be enough if he simply mounted the rostrum and shouted ‘Kill the killer.’

‘Kill the killer,’ the crowd chanted back.

‘We’re too scarred,’ someone shouted. And then that too was picked up and passed from voice to voice.

Not knowing what to say, Fracassus turned his face sideways to the audience as he’d seen someone called Mussolini do in old newsreels. It was the very expression – though he could hardly be expected to remember that – with which he came into the world. He folded his arms and pursed his lips: a stance suggesting petulance on a Homeric scale. As though by divine chemistry, the audience was at once transformed into supplicants and Fracassus into a God who could stand there for eternity, waiting to be appeased. Nero, Mussolini, Fracasus.

‘Fra-Ca-Sus!’ the people called.

Peevish and impassive, his fists clenched, Fracassus raised his chin and stared towards the East.

He left the stage still clenching his fists. Women fought to kiss his knuckles. ‘Such a boy,’ one said. ‘And yet such a man,’ said another.

‘You haven’t seen anything yet,’ he told them.

‘They haven’t heard anything yet either,’ Dr Cobalt muttered to Professor Probrius. They were standing to one side, waiting to escort him back to the hotel, not wanting to be seen. Fracassus was a prodigy. A monstrous and abnormal thing. He appeared from nowhere. It would disappoint the faithful to learn he had an elocution teacher and a life coach.

‘He has a terrific advantage,’ Probrius said, ‘in that they don’t actually come to hear him. There’s something about him that compels attention. It can’t be looks and it can’t be presence, because he has neither.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I think it’s that very question. What is it? Why are we looking at him? He possesses the opposite to charisma to such a degree that people will stand for hours trying to figure out why they’re standing there for hours.’

‘But see how transfigured they look as they leave. It is as though they’ve been vouchsafed a vision.’

‘They have. A vision of themselves. He is a mirror into their secret selves. They applaud their own words and leave transported.’

‘He should go far.’

‘He will.’

But first he had to address the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce.

Observing his reluctance – for Fracassus had been asked not to make his ‘Kill the Killer’ speech in deference to the feelings of businessmen who might have thought he meant them, and he couldn’t remember what else he believed – Professor Probrius undertook to brief him, though his own understanding of business matters extended little beyond the conviction that the pursuit of money softened men’s brains.

‘Hardens them, you mean,’ Dr Cobalt said one night, by way of pillow talk.

‘I think that’s your politics talking,’ Probrius replied, sitting up on one elbow. ‘In my experience, those we call business men are the quickest of any profession to be impressed by the platitudes of success; to be dazzled by the prosaic financial exploits of one another; and to invest the most basic tricks of their trade, though they don’t surpass the bartering of the schoolyard, with an unfathomable mystique. The whole science of business could be written on the back of a post card.’

‘You’ve never heard of the rich crushing the poor?’

‘I have, my love. I have heard of it and observed it. But the cruellest of men can be gullible, and it is to tickle their gullibility that I am preparing the Prince.’

In which spirit he advised Fracassus…

To claim credit for what he hadn’t done. To inflate figures. To make much of little. To drop names of people he didn’t know. To invoke the sacred mysteries of the ‘deal’ and declare himself a master of its arts. To take delight in scoring the meanest of triumphs over the smallest of men. To reverse the normal rules of polite society and brag about his worth. In short to be himself.

How Fracassus beguiled an audience of bankers, fund-managers and developers three or four times his age, is the stuff of Plasentza business community legend. How he told them that he owned more properties than in actuality he did. How he omitted all mention of his father and presented himelf as a phenomenon of self-generation. How he told them, above their gasps of admiration, that he aimed high. How he told them that he thought big. How he made the shape of something big with his hands. How he divided life into those who push and those who allow themselves to be pushed, and how he was a pusher. How he told them that the first law of business was to know what you wanted, and how he told them that the second law of business was to make sure that you got it. How he told them that enriching oneself was Godly but enriching oneself at the expense of others was very heaven. How he told them that he paid no taxes, for to pay tax only showed one ran one’s business inefficiently. And therefore how he told them that he never would pay tax so long as there was a bone in his body…

As the audience of high aimers and big thinkers rose to reward Fracassus with their admiration – for never had the things they thought found better expression – Professor Probrius counted himself satisfied.

‘Didn’t I tell you?’ he told Dr Cobalt.

‘To be proved right isn’t always to be vindicated morally,’ she said.

‘You mean what’s true shouldn’t be true.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean.’

Vindicated morally or not, Probrius had to admit himself surprised by how well Fracassus’s asseveration that he paid no tax was received, not only by the business leaders and captains of industry, but by the waiters and waitresses, the winer pourers, the glass polishers, the ushers, the security men, the sound engineers, and the members of the press. If the poorest of the poor had been here, Professor Probrius thought, they would have cheered with equal zest. Here, to all men, in an age of business, was the apotheosis of success: ONE WHO PAID NO TAX.

Yet again, Fracassus had his finger on the pulse.

Twitter, too, was busy that night.

Amazing guy. Remember to know what you want and get it. If only I’d known half of what he knows at his age. Amazing.

Inspirational, was another. Think big! Aim high! Wow! Thank you, Prince Fracassus.

CHAPTER XXIII A short chapter with no lessons to be learnt therefrom

Though Prince Fracassus could sink slowly into oblivion for all Dr Cobalt cared, Professor Probrius was her lover and she was conjoined with him in his enterprise, however little she approved of it. She had to enquire, therefore, whether the Prince did not risk losing supporters from one level of society by his assiduous wooing of supporters from another.

Probrius understood her concerns but thought not. There was a universalism in the Prince’s messages, he believed, which Yoni, who’d seen less of him close up, had not grasped. Take tax…. But Yoni Cobalt would not even listen to what Probrius wanted to tell her. So far and no further, she told him. Tax was her red line.

Probrius laughed cynically. ‘The road to hell,’ he said, ‘was paved with politicians’ promises never to cross a red line. At least Fracassus would never make such a promise.’

‘Proimising not to make a promise to cross a red line is also a promise,’ Yoni Cobalt said.

It so fell out that the Prince’s next engagement was to judge a beauty pageant. Miss Plasentza. This time it was Professor Probrius who felt uneasy. He strongly advised the Prince against it. It was off-message, he said. You couldn’t tweet Bombs only kill when we’re scarred to kill the killer one minute, and then talk lipstick and deportment the next. But Fracassus knew his own mind. Judging a beauty pageant beat opening department stores and addressing groups of the hard of hearing.

‘I’m very good with beautiful women,’ he said.

Plasentza being a liberal democracy, its beauty contest was tolerated but not much approved of. It was held bienially in a small hotel on the outskirts of the capital and reported only on local radio. Fracassus agreed to participate on the understanding that the organizers booked the largest ballroom in the country, guaranteed the presence of television cameras, and gave him fifteen per cent of the take. Such was the fascination he engendered, his stipulations were met and his percentage increased to twenty.

He had lost much of his shyness. He could look women in the eye now. And not think they all looked like his mother. He had a metallic suit made for the occasion based on the one worn by Spravchik, and on the big night he inspected the contestants as he remembered the Minister inspecting the Numa women, getting the prettiest of them to twerk for him and then open their mouths to show him their teeth. He lowered his voice and asked each of them in turn if she was here only because she needed money to continue her studies. All but one said they wanted to be a model because the world needed beauty. The exception burst out crying. ‘I can’t believe that you can tell that about me,’ she said. ‘It shows,’ he said. ‘it shows.’ He crowned her Miss Plasentza and backstage, after the show, made her cry again by pushing his hand down her dress.

BOMB BOY TYCOON BLOWS HIS TOP the Plasentza Mail reported. But it soon became clear that far from detracting from his burgeoning reputation, the assault helped it burgeon still more. He was a red blooded young man. He meant what he did as a compliment not a rudeness. He had a love of loveliness in women and was expressing it.

A national debate followed. For many, this was a test case of liberal democracy itself. Enough was enough. People were tired of being told what they could and couldn’t do, could and couldn’t think, could and couldn’t feel. They were fed up with having to feign pity every time the violation alarm was raised by some professional thin-skin who could weep and shake to order. So Fracassus had handled a woman’s breast without remembering to ask her first! People who thought that was a crime needed to live in the real world where violence meant being held up at gun point in the food queue and sexism didn’t stop at the misuse of a pronoun.

Women’s magazines carried out polls of their readers. Ninety per cent of women in the lower ranks of society approved the Prince’s action and said they wouldn’t have minded in the least had he done it to them. It reminded some of them, fondly, of being woed by their husbands. Fracassus tweeted that the ten percent who disapproved were probably dogs. But he took no notice of any other figures. The people had spoken. The people were his people. And he was their man. Great support, he tweeted.

Sojjourner could fuck off.

‘Unless you want to go on judging beauty pageants,’ Professor Probrius advised, ‘it might be time to think of moving on.’

Fracassus wasn’t sure what Probrius had against him judging further beauty pageants.

‘I don’t think it’s what your father had in mind for you.’

‘He wanted me to see the world. I’m seeing it.’

But then he grew bored himself. There weren’t that many beauty pageants to judge. Could that have been because there weren’t that many beauties in Plasentza? ‘Blame liberal democracy,’ Dr Cobalt told him. ‘The women here value things other than their appearance.’

Fracassus screwed up his face. ‘What other things?’

‘Intellectual development, careers, charitable causes, growing old gracefully.’

‘Is that possible?’ Fracassus asked.

‘Intellectual development?’

‘Growing old gracefully. I think women can be too old.’

‘Too old for what?’

‘Being a woman.’

Don’t tweet that, Your Highness, Probrius advised.

Lacking the energy for a fight, Fracassus agreed. He had grown listless again. He sat in his room watching television. The world was talking about him but he wasn’t talking about the world. There was nothing for him to do. He would have liked to build a casino or a chamber of horrors while he had time on his hands, but Plasentza had building regulations that Urbs-Ludus did not. He missed Spravchik. He missed women. He couldn’t remember when he had last stood next to a woman who was taller than him. Probrius was right about liberal democracy and beauty – the more you got of the former, the less you got of the latter.

‘What we could really do with,’ he said one evening after dinner, ‘is another bomb.’

And then, in a manner of speaking, one dropped.

CHAPTER XXIV On the sadness of things. A son returns, a father prepares to depart

Mortality spares no one, let him build higher than a kite can fly. The Grand Duke fell ill.

It felt, to the people of Urbs-Ludus, like a sign. The Grand Duke was ill because the state was ill.

‘Your father needs you,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘It’s time to say your goodbyes and leave.’

A sadness descended on Fracassus. He realised he had no friends to say goodbye to. ‘What have I achieved here?’ he thought aloud. ‘I haven’t built a casino. I haven’t wrestled. I haven’t had much in the way of pussy.’ ( In fact he hadn’t had any pussy but didn’t want to admit that to himself.) ‘The people love me, but I don’t love them.’

He had heard there was a thing called depression. Could it be…?

It was Dr Cobalt he turned to in matters of feeling. ‘It’s the lull before the storm, your Highness,’ she told him.

‘I’m not asking about the weather,’ Fracassus said. ‘I’m asking about me.’

‘It’s the lull before your storm.’

Fracassus hated metaphors, without knowing what they were, almost as much as he hated foreign languages. ‘What storm?’

Dr Cobalt, who had not had a great year herself, turned the screw. ‘The éclat that’s waiting for you when you return.’

What was waiting for Prince Fracassus on his return can be briefly stated. A dying father. A distraught mother. A flustered Palace. A restive populace. The possibility of war – for when trouble struck one of the Republics the others were unable to resist the opportunity to attack it. Air that had grown filthier in the time Fracassus had been away, though no more remarked upon than in the time he was there. Ditto, substituting heat for filth, the climate. A hunger for change. A dread of change. A virulent mutual distrust that pitted citizen against citizen. A passion for saying ‘Love you’ and appending smiley faces to messages expressive only of hate. Technological advance that had so far outstripped any human use for it that people were sending high definition images of their faeces to imaginary acquaintances on the moon and watching others doing the same on screens they at all times carried in the palms of their hands. A belief in the free market of goods and ideas that concealed a profound reluctance to trade freely in either. A delight in what was gaudy that concealed a contempt for the wealth that made the gaudy possible. A contempt for weath that concealed a veneration for it. A sense, that is to say, of universal futility and despair for which – and here was the part that interested the Prince – the only antidote was him.

Fra-Ca-Sus!

The Republic was waiting for him.

All the Republics were waiting for him.

The Grand Duke received Professor Probrius in the Grand Boudoir. The room was decorated in the Grand Duchess’s taste and so had fairies riding dragons on the walls and, to please her husband, dragons eating fairies on the ceiling. The mattress was fashioned to resemble a gold ingot and for all Probrius knew was a gold ingot. The duvet bore the Origen crest.

Professor Probrius made his deepest bow. ‘I am sorry to see Your Highness brought low,’ he said, ‘but I trust the return of your beloved son will go some way to restoring your health. I believe you will find him much changed and ready for whatever you expect of him.’

The Grand Duke raised a frail hand. ‘How the world loves a braggart,’ he said in a frail voice.

‘I hope you are not dissatisfied with the progress of his education, Professor Probrius said. ‘It goes without saying that neither I nor Dr Cobalt consider it to be finished.’

‘We are more than happy,’ the Grand Duke said. ‘There are qualities of which my dear wife would have liked to see more. And others of which she would have liked to see less. But I confess myself satisfied. We entrusted a rough buffoon to your hands, and you have brought us back a polished one.’

Professor Probrius bowed again. ‘And now, Your Highness?’

‘And now the boy takes over from me as head of the House of Origen, and must prepare himself for the great leap forward. I confess it is all happening sooner than I anticipated and would like. He is young still. But my illness together with the appeal his youth evidently exerts combine to give this inevitability. History awaits us, Professor. There are already people below who, finally but fully cognizant of his gifts, are anxious to meet him and discuss how we proceed from here. The significance of this meeting, from their point of view and from ours, cannot be overstated; but time, I fear, is not on anyone’s side. The streets are angry. We must proceed quickly. I am not strong enough myself to sit in on let alone superintend the discussions. I feel confident that your attendance will keep Fracassus focussed and ensure no liberties are taken with him. I have not seen the Prince since his return. I am weak and frankly find his company exhausting. He is said to have my eyes but I never did much like them. He is with his mother at the moment. Those in whose hands the destiny of the Prince and the House of Origen depend are in the Council Chamber on the ninetieth floor. Perhaps you will be so good as to repair there at once. Take Dr Cobalt with you. You have proved a formidable team. I will have the Prince join you presently, if he can tear himself from the bosom of his mother. He was suckled until his fourth year, you know. I put the formation of his character down to that.’

So saying, the Grand Duke fell back on to his pillows. Probrius feared the worse, but in fact His Highness was only sleeping.

It was with a great sense of purpose, to say nothing of a consciousness of history and honour, and therefore in a high state of nervous agitation, that Professor Probrius made his way to the ninetieth floor. He did not know who he was going to encounter in the Council Chamber, whether it would be the Prime Mover of All the Republics himself, or some of his most senior ministers, but the urgency with which the Grand Duke had prepared him, clearly pointed to the imminence of a decisive political act – surely not a resignation in the Prince’s favour, but why not a cabinet position.

He texted Dr Cobalt. Highest shoes, he wrote. And Quick.

In fact she was already in the Chamber when he arrived, and deep in conversation with a person whose relaxed style of dress and free and easy demeanour declared him to be anyone but the Prime Mover.

‘I might as well do the introductions, since I’m here,’ Dr Cobalt said. ‘Professor Probrius meet Lance Folder, Head of Celebrity for Ubs-Ludus Television.’

CHAPTER XXV ‘Stop It!’

Whether Prince Fracassus’s distinguished television career could be said to grace the annals of politics or light entertainment was to remain a matter of controversy long after the Prince became what he became. It depended, to a degree, on the point of view of the disputants, and of course on how the Prince’s rise to power, the reasons for it, and the resultant plusses or minuses of his ‘reign’, were viewed in toto.

Despite good will and alacrity on all sides, it took a fortuitous slip and then a fortuitous correction to get Fracassus on to the screen. Months were squandered, as the Grand Duke lay dying, debtating such basic questions as what exactly it was that Fracassus could do, what his interests were, who would be his target audience, whether he was the stuff of day-time or night-time television, whether he should be scripted or spontaneous, and who, in the final analysis, would have creative control. That Fracassus had no interests, Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt could have told the producers, but the latter had their own way of drawing the talent out and liked to make their own decisions as to watchability. In the end they reached, in this as in other matters, the same conclusions Dr Cobalt had come to years before. The Prince had no words and no interests and therein lay both his originality and – as could be attested to by the successes he had enjoyed on his travels – his popular appeal. What form to give this most rare of talents remained the stumbling block. Fracassus himself cited Spravchik as a model but Urbs-Ludus wasn’t Cholm. Reality television was of necessity cruel, but there were guidelines, and handing your wife over to the secret police for stealing a flower from someone’s garden breached all of them. The Prince’s other idea was to make a contemporary reality version of The Life and Loves of the Emperor Nero, with himself taking the role of a latter-day Emperor, and volunteers, of which there would surely be no shortage, playing Christians (or Muslims, Hindus or Jews – Fracassus was without prejudice). In the original, Nero dipped the Christians or whoever else in burning oil and then employed them as human candles to light his pool parties. The production team was quick to reject this suggestion, but on the grounds of cost rather than morality.

It sometimes happens that a title precedes a programme, indeed can be the inspiration for a programme, and so it proved to be in this case. In the months following his return to Urbs-Ludus, there gathered around the Prince – that is to say around the Prince’s name – a sizeable representation of the Republic’s youth who discovered in his utterances much that found an echo in their own breasts and, even where his thoughts were unfamiliar to them, much with which they sought to make common cause. In their ebullience, they formed a cheer squad – Fracassites, they called themselves – wherever and on whatever subject the Prince spoke, threatening any members of the audience who showed the slightest inclination to disagree, or who even, by their lights, did not agree emphatically enough. At first they threatened violence without actually doing any. But imperceptibly, the mood of the meetings changed. Impressionable himself, Fracassus found an echo in his breast of the echo of him the Fracassites had found in theirs, and truth to say took pleasure in encouraging them. ‘Chuck ’em out,’ he’d shout, whenever the Fracassites lit upon dissenters, and in the mayhem that ensued – for no sooner did he shout ‘Chuck ’em out’ than everyone was shouting ‘Chuck ’em out’ – the odd bone was broken and a little blood was shed. The Grand Prince ordered Fracassus into his presence.

‘This is not the way we do things,’ he told his son. ‘Put an end to it.’

Fracassus was disappointed. He’d seen professional wrestlers break more bones on breakfast television. But he couldn’t countermand his dying father. ‘What can I do?’ he asked.

‘It’s not for me to tell you,’ his father said. ‘Have some human decency. And if you don’t have any of your own, steal some.’

Fracassus thought hard and then addressed the Fracassites in a video link. ‘Stop it,’ he said, pointing a finger. He also put up posters in railways stations and at bus stops showing him mouthing the same words. ‘Stop it.’

The phrase gained a sort of currency and finally reached the ears of the television production team. There it was, the thing they’d been looking for all these months. Stop It! Nobody else could deliver those words as Fracassus did. Nobody else could lay hold of so little in the way of moral indignation that what was intended as a reprimand came out sounding like an invitation. ‘Stop it,’ young men sidled up to women and whispered in their ears. And as often as not the stopping it went on through the night.

The moment the programme had a title it had a form. Fracassus would invite wrong-doers – wife-beaters, drug-takers, rapists, alcoholics, pickpockets, body snatchers, arsonists, forgers, cat burlars, paedophiles – to own up to their criminality, and then he’d tick them off for it. Stoppit! No outrage. No holier than thou condescension. No off-putting moralizing. No warning or threats. And no bleeding-heart liberal connivance in the criminality either. Just Stoppit!

The advantage to Fracassus himself was obvious. He had only to say two words, and if he forgot those there was always auto-cue.

The show was an immediate success. It laid bare the immorality at the heart of society, sought neither to extenuate nor forgive, and then shrugged. Pinioned between moralists and apologists all their lives, the people tumbled on to their sofas, heaved sighs of relief that could be heard all over the Republic, and allowed Fracassus to disembarrass them of the ancient burdens of blame and absolution.

He was on their screens once a week, and then twice. If they watched repeats they could see him every other day. There were women to whom Fracassus’s features were more familiar than their husbands’. Men thought of him as their friend. Children trusted him and would have leapt willingly into his black limousine had he pulled up to them in the street and offered them chocolate. Stoppit!

The day the Grand Duke died the papers carried the story that the father of Fracassus, the television personality, had Stopped It.

Professor Probrius and Dr Cobalt met in one of their old salad bar haunts by the Wall and discussed what had transpired. They rarely saw the Prince now but he had retained their services out of some queer affection which they felt guilty about being unable to reciprocate. Occasionally he texted them regarding a word, but then either found another or changed his mode of expression. ‘He’s keeping us in reserve,’ Professor Probrius said.

‘Do you know what for?’

‘I think he might be more insecure than we’ve ever realised. He could be wondering when he’s going to run out of the ten words he uses and when, in that case, he’ll need us again.’

‘I think you flatter yourself.’

‘Could be. But I’ve been right about everything so far.’

She spluttered into her salad. ‘Right? What have you been right about?’

‘Didn’t I say that the secret of his success was failure?’

‘No. I did.’

‘Yes but you were talking about his failure. I say the secret of his success is the failure of the people who look up to him. They want a hero who isn’t there.’

‘I said the first part of that. You said the second.’

‘You/me – same difference. Man and wife are one flesh and all that…’

‘Man and wife? Is that a proposal?’

‘Could be.’

‘Does that mean that the Prince has unwittingly brought us together? Can something come of nothing?’

‘Is that a terrible thought?’

‘Terrible.’

CHAPTER XXVI Retards

With his father dead, there was no one in the way of Fracassus’s rise, at least within the walled confines of Urbs-Ludus. His mother, who had spent increasing periods of time in her room, now never left it. As for his brother, no one knew where he was or would have recognized him had they known.

This situation released Fracassus into the fantasy that was himself. He bought up property, knocked it down or built it higher, as the fancy took him. He put casinos into poor houses and strip clubs into old people’s homes. From the sky, the Republic of Urbs-Ludus had begun to take on a magical quality, so vertiginous were Fracassus’s towers and so extravagant their illumination. From the ground it was now impossible to see a single star. You’re lucky if you get to see the moon these days, the architecture critic for the Urbs-Ludus Guardian wrote. You’ll be seeing the moon and the stars when I knock the crap out of you, Fracassus tweeted in response.

At get togethers of the Fracassites ‘Knock the crap out of him replaced ‘Chuck him out’ as the cri de rage, no matter that there was no actual person among them to rage against.

Some time towards the end of his third series of Stoppit! the producers called Fracassus in for a serious conversation about its future. ‘If you’re planning to axe me I’ll sue the shit out you,’ he announced before he’d even taken off his coat. They weren’t planning to axe him. Quite the opposite. So good were the viewing figures for Stoppit! that they’d been searching for a follow-up show. As ever, it was finding a good title that had held things up. But now they had it. The mystery was why it had taken them so long. Starttit! How good was that? Starttit! – in which young entrepreneurs, some of them perhaps reformed malfeasants from Stoppit! (television loved to recycle) would confide their business hopes and dreams to Fracassus and he would show them how they could be realised. Who knew better about starting a business than he, a penniless child from the shadow of the Wall who had clawed his way out of obscurity to light the sky up with his name? Everyone knew that Fracassus was born a Prince and given his own ziggurat every birthday, but the lie was so preposterous it was charming, and besides, everyone wanted to believe it. The lie that the Grand Duke Fracassus had made himself out of nothing allowed the people to believe that they could make thmselves out of nothing too. In the flagrancy of the falsehood they found a new spirituality of material hope.

And this was not a Sunday morning spirituality, gone when the working week began. Believers could now watch Stoppit! on a Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, and Starttit! on A Wednesday, Friday and Saturday. Meaning there would be only one day when he was not on the screen – Sunday, the day of lesser faiths, the day the people rested from Fracassus and missed him.

The one disadvantage of Fracassus’s new show, viewed from where he stood, was that he’d have to speak more. He called back Professor Probrius who’d prepped him for his address to the Plasentza Chamber of Commerce. Could Probrius remember any of the things Fracassus had said on that occasion. Professor Probrius consulted his notes. ‘You advised, Your Highness, to aim high, think big, stay focussed, never quit, push hard, laugh at retards, and pay no tax.’

‘That,’ the Grand Duke Fracassus said, ‘should get me through the first series.’

Soon, between Stoppit! and Starttit! there was little else on television that anyone wanted to watch. Fracassus himself wondered what he’d be watching if he wasn’t watching himself. And then, in the best spirit of reality shows, television broke a story about itself. Halfway through a live breakfast programme a gang of masked men and women burst into the studio – the very studio in which Stoppit! and Starttit! were made – narrowly failing to kill Fracassus. In fact they invaded on his day off, so strictly speaking they didn’t narrowly miss killing him at all. Nor were they carrying any weapons to kill him with. But the implication was there for anyone to see. Fracassus stood for free speech and these brigands stood for the opposite. Exactly what happened was not clear, no matter that the entire Republic watched it live, but the short and the long of it was that the masked raiders shouted ‘Bang’, ordered the presenter and the studio manager to put their hands above their heads, and took them and a young make-up artist hostage.

Who they were; where had they come from; how they had breached security; what they wanted; who shouted ‘Bang’ first; what could have been done to prevent the attack; what could be done to prevent it in the future – these were some of the questions to which the people, watching the event unfold before their eyes, demanded answers.

Nothing of this kind had ever happened in Urbs-Ludus or any of the other Republics before. Had the toy gunmen been nationals their motives would have been easier to fathom. Everyone was angry about something. Everybody was trailing in the wake of someone else. The entire population was but a breath away from marching into a television studio and demanding justice. But these belligerents were not nationals. They had dark skin, black hair and even when they only shouted ‘Bang!’ they shouted it in an alien tongue that made the blood curdle. Once accept that they were foreigners and there were still more questions to be answered. The Republic was peaceable to the point of docility. It had no weapons, no history of colonial adventurism, and no international ambitions beyond inviting visitors to go up and down in lifts with golden doors. It had made no compromising alliances, and to tell the truth had no foreign policy of any sort.

Half an hour into the raid, the attackers took off their masks, revealed themselves to be artisans and demanded, if they were to release their hostages, an end to the opprobrium in which they and their families were held. It wasn’t so long ago that they’d been applauded into the country. Now, the same people who had cheered them at the railway station, were booing them in the street. Even sales of artisanal breads had slowed.

See the matter from their side and they were victims. See it from the point of view of frightened hostages and viewers expecting to catch the news on television and they were common criminals. Knock the crap out of them, Fracassus tweeted.

Whether, with that one tweet, Fracassus – the best known television personality in the Republics and the owner of the twelve highest towers – taught the people what to think, or whether he simply found himself in accord with the popular mood, is a distinction that only history can make. Suffice it to say that he at once became the mouthpiece for a party that did not as yet exist. Whoever believed that the artsans should be arrested for betraying the trust and hospitality of their hosts, water-boarded, horse-whipped, humiliated and shot by firing squad knew themselves to be of the party of Fracassus and that, by the mathematics of anger and vengeance, meant the majority of the people. The Prime Mover of All the Republics, sensing public anger grow but conscious of his government’s obligations to international law, sent in a soft force to break the seige. The artisans surrendered without a fight. They would now be tried in accordance with local law. Should they be found guilty of affray – and the Prime Mover was prejudging nothing – they would be returned to their countries of origin, always provided, of course, that their countries of origin would deal humanely with them on their return. The statement was ill-timed. On the day of its issue, the young make-up artist, though now released and at home, suffered a belated panic attack. Fracassus put out a numbered series of tweets.

(1) Justice in our time? Some justice!

(2) The guilty sent home like heroes.

(3) The victims returned to their loved ones in body bags.

That a body bag was coming it a bit thick as a description of someone prescribed mild anti-depressants, only a few literalists bothered to point out. The Republic’s blood was up. People who had been tweeting Chuck ’em out had suddenly to rephrase their outrage. Keep ’em here, they tweeted, so we can knock the crap out of them. Then chuck ’em out.

On small events rests the fate of nations. The artisanal invasion of the television station was one of those hair-spring moments when you could hear history teeter on the wire. Fracassus felt something even bigger than history – fate, destiny, the hour – run like fire through his veins. The Prime Mover must have felt the same thing drain clean away. There were angry demonstrations outside the Executive Building. People made effigies of him – no matter that no one knew what he looked like – and set fire to them in public parks. Every rioter found common cause with every other. They wanted different things but more than anything else they wanted something. For every tweet supporting the Prime Mover there were a thousand – many, it is true, written by Fracassus – calling for him to resign. So one day in the dead of Winter, perspiring heavily, resign was exactly what he did.

Outside the Palace of the Golden Gates, demonstrators calling to disband all working groups on climate change joined demonstrators calling to raise the age of consent for homosexuals and together they called for Fracassus.

He appeared briefly on the Palace steps under a canopy of gold. ‘We’re going to Muck Out the Pig-Pen,’ he promised.

‘You are the Pig-Pen,’ someone shouted.

Fracassus located him and pointed. ‘Retard,’ he told the crowd, shaking his head as though to ask what could be done about a world that had such retards in it, and then, to their delight, he did his old imitation of a spastic marionette.

Watching from an upper window which no sound could penetrate, Dr Cobalt guessed Fracassus had finally gone too far. She couldn’t say she was sorry.

Professor Probrius, standing behind her, kissed the nape of her neck. ‘I see the nature of the electorate still eludes you,’ he said. ‘The word retard is a great bonder.’

Had she bothered to look out of the window again, Yoni Cobalt would have seen five hundred Fracassus supporters all being spastic marionettes.

CHAPTER XXVII In which Fracassus proves he is no longer in love

Mighty would be the pen, and nimble the hand wielding it, that could do justice to the speed of events that now overtook the Republics – not only the physical aspects of a dissolution and the setting of dates for an election, but the invisible perturbations: the turbulence felt in every breast at the prospect of they knew not what, the wild gossip, the recriminations, the horrid prognostications on all sides, the told-you-sos from people who had told no one anything unless reading the extreme weather as an earnest of troubles ahead could be called a something. Now add to this the foment into which the intellectual life of the Republics was thrown, first by the news that Fracassus had, indeed, as was expected, tossed his hat into the ring as a House of Origen Independent, and then by the rumours that an unknown PhD student called Sojjourner Heminway would stand for the Progressive Party on a platform that embraced equally the desire for something different and the need for everything to stay the same. Everyone had heard of Fracassus. No one had heard of Sojjourner. And yet somehow everyone felt they had. Heminway… Heminway…. Ahead of any formal announcement, the news was leaked that she was the great, great grandaughter of someone else no one had heard of at the time, but who turned out to be the great, great grandaughter of The Republics’ very first Prime Mover. Prime Movers of All The Republics were rarely seen and never remembered, but a Prime Mover was still a Prime Mover and the fact that Sojjourner Heminway had the first Prime Mover’s blood in her veins lent to her challenge, if and when she made it, the gravitas of continuity. Soon, if and when became yes and then. But simultaneous with confirmation of her candidacy came the announcement that she was launching a campaign to save the Artisanal Seven as they were now to be designated. They had play-acted their protest, she argued, in deference to the frolicsomness of Urbs-Ludus. It had been a prank with a purpose. They had voiced their grievance in a public place, in a spirit of fun, and while they didn’t seek to absolve themselves of responsibility for distress and injury, none of that had been their intention. In its own way, too, their demonstration highlighted the cultural impoverishment into which a sequence of illberal administrations had allowed the nation to fall. One of the charges brought against the Artisanal Seven was that they disrespected the Republics’ prime source of entertainment and information. But it was they, the artisans who deserved our respect, firstly for the changes they had wrought to the culinary arts in Urbs-Ludus – both as to the taste of food and as to its appearance – and secondly for the mellifluous languages that could now be heard pleasing the ear in every corner of the once mono-lingual Republics. What was television to this? Television, with its endless repeats of cheap programmes bought from outside the Walls and even cheaper repeats of reality programmes whose only beneficiary was the ego of the millionaires to whom it gave prominence. She spoke of millionaires in the plural so as not to personalize her argument too soon, but everyone knew to whom she was referring. The election had not begun and already it was turning toxic.

Fracassus was thrown into confusion by the re-appearance of the only woman ever to have almost touched his heart. His widowed mother believed this reappearance of the wickedly Élitist witch to be an omen, and warned her son to withdraw from a race which, in the way of mothers, she didn’t think he had a cat in hell’s chance chance of winning. He told her he could barely remember who Sojjourner was and resorted to Twitter. May the best man win, he tweeted, by way of allusion both to Sojjourner’s gender and her trousers, but Caleb Hopsack, making a sudden re-appearance, advised him against too early an assault on Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance. It would be politic, in his view, for Fracassus to keep his powder dry and not accuse his rival of lacking a dress sense appropriate to the position of Prime Mover until much closer to polling day. That would be the best time, too, to insinuate the suggestion that only lesbians never wore dresses. She would be tired and emotional by then and less able to defend herself. Fracassus didn’t have to be told twice. He had seen enough fights to know that the real killer blows were those landed in round fifteen. I agree with you, he told Hopsack and tweeted Anyone think she has the stamina for this? I don’t, I don’t.

The other thing he did, to let Sojjourner know she was fooling herself if she believed he thought about her still, was to find himself a wife. This he achieved by travelling incognito to the Nowhere Palace and selecting the croupier who looked most like his mother, reasoning that whoever looked most like his mother looked least like Sojjourner. He wrote her name down on a piece of paper so that he wouldn’t forget it and married her by special decree the day after. Caleb Hopsack, whose wardrobe Fracassus still longed to emulate, was his best man.

Not wanting the grass to grow beneath his feet, Hopsack followed up on his advice regarding Sojjourner Heminway’s appearance with a visit to the Palace, in the first place to offer Fracassus his condolences – Fracassus could not at first remember what there was for him to be condoled about – and in the second to volunteer his services as Campaign Manager with Special Responsibilities for Twitter which, as anyone with political nous now understood, had grown to be as significant in the the winning of votes, if not in the changing of minds, as the stump speech and the rally. Fracassus had embraced his old mentor, wondered where he had been, didn’t listen to the answer, installed him in the very position he’d requested and asked him to be his groomsman. Hopsack accepted and had himself photographed again outside the Golden Gates. It was while he was fumbling for the ring that he learned of one limitation to his power. ‘I want Philander to share responsibility with you for the media Campaign,’ Fracassus whispered, before turning to the marriage officiant and affirming, ‘I do.’

Caleb Hopsack expressed reservations about Philander at the reception. ‘You never know where he’s going to be or what he’s going to say,’ he said.

‘I see that as an advantage,’ Fracassus replied. He had chosen waxed cord trousers the same canary yellow as his hair, and a brown and purple window-pane check jacket with four vents, to be married in. Unsure of Palace protocol, Caleb Hopsack had come in tails.

Fracassus emailed Philander under the table while his new wife was making her speech. Need you.

Accipio cum gaudio, Philander emailed back.

Caleb Hopsack stole a look at Fracassus’s phone. ‘Ordinary people are not going to be pleased with too much of that,’ Caleb Hopsack told him from the side of his mouth.

‘Then there’s your first job,’ Fracassus said. ‘You stop him.’

‘You’ve just started him.’

‘I know.’

Fracassus had hatched a plan. He was going to be an enigma.

Fracassus had not met Philander since the time he came down off the bus and told him to believe every word he said – that’s to say to disbelieve all of it – not because it was true but because it wasn’t. For his part, Philander had no memory of that meeting. ‘I forget everybody I meet,’ he confessed, when the two men got together at the Palace, ‘because I’m not interested in them.’

‘I am exactly the same,’ Fracassus said.

What he wanted Philander to do was organize buses to tour the republics making promises that could never be kept, those being the sort of promises the populace preferred. Philander flicked the hair out of his eyes and made a salute. ‘Roger,’ he said. Then he made a joke – ‘Mind you, I’m not promising.’

Fracassus who had never got a joke, didn’t get this one. But he trusted Philander to let him down. In his eyes the campaign was now well and falsely up and running.

Artisanal seven! Fracassus tweeted. Losers.

Hopsack texted his dissatisfaction. Public want action not insults.

Artisanal seven! Fracassus tweeted. Chuck the losers out.

Not quite there yet, Hopsack tweeted. Something more definite required. Public wants assurances there won’t be more.

I will build a wall, Fracassus tweeted. And when I build a wall no one gets over it.

Better, Hopsack texted . But ‘no one gets in’ would better. ‘Over’ suggests athleticism and ordinary people like that. ‘In’ suggests invasion and ordinary people fear that.

But by that time the wall had gone viral. Build the wall! Build the wall! twenty thousand people tweeted in ten minutes.

Sojjourner’s team tweeted that there already was a wall.

Oops! Fracassus retorted. They think they’ve got me. Well I’m gonna build a higher wall.

In another ten minutes another twenty thousand tweeters. Build a higher wall! Build a higher wall!

Sojjourner was not above tweeting below the belt herself. Inanity can do as much damage as malignancy, she posted. And followed this with a caricature of Fracassus, Hopsack and Philander posing together in front of the Golden Gates. Money, imposture and humbug, she tweeted. The Three Wise Monkeys of Urbs-Ludus. Screw The Economy, Screw The People, Screw The Weather.

Fracassus couldn’t have been happier. The words Sojjourner used were too long. Inanity! Malignancy! Imposture! Who ever kept a friend, never mind won an election, saying imposture? He practised pronouncing it in front of a mirror, pouting his lips as though to kiss an old lady from the other side of the room. He looked forward to using it in the forthcoming television debate.

She accused him of profiteering, sexism, mendacity (another one), racism, incitement to hatred, isolationism, and bad spelling.

He accused her of inexperience, Liberal élitism, political correctness, man-hating, minoritymania, and softness on terrorism. She was not a person, he went on, to be trusted with her finger on the nuclear button. ‘Finger’ was the only word in that list that was his.

She accused him of not knowing that The Republics didn’t have a nuclear button.

I wouldn’t worry about that, Caleb Hopsack texted him to say. The Ordinary People’s Party have been campaigning to maintain our nuclear capability for years. They won’t want to be told we don’t have one.

Philander sent Fracassus an email from one of the neighbouring Republics, he wasn’t sure which. Confusion all confounded this end. Electorate don’t know what to think so I’m telling them not to think anything. Regarding nuclear button, press the young harridan on her ignorance of defence issues. Say there is button but only you know where to find it. Bonam Fortunam.

She accused him of being in bed with the military.

He accused her of being in bed with no one.

Don’t go there, Hopsack texted.

Fracassus amended his tweet and accused her of wanting to be in bed with him.

No! Hopsack texted.

She accused him of toe wrestling with foreign autocrats.

He accused her of xenophobia, a word Philander had emailed him.

Again no! Hopsack texted

She accused him of putting the interests of his business empire before the interests of the country.

He accused her of confusing the country with her class and of giving succour to extremists. (Philander again.)

You’re falling into her trap, Hopsack texted. Stick to words of one syllable or she’ll pull you down with her.

Like Leander enticing Hero, Philander added by email.

Dr Cobalt entered the conversation, contesting that version of the myth. Hero swam to Leander of his own accord.

Professor Probrius agreed, but thought the story open to innumerable interpretations.

Start opening that door, Dr Cobalt argued, and there was no saying what moral and behavioural relativism wouldn’t amble through it next?

Losing plot, Hopsack texted. Get rid of those two.

Fracassus was surprised to discover himself sentimentally attached to his old tutors and fired them on the spot.

CHAPTER XXVIII A brief treatise on buffoonery

Though Philander knew better than anyone that life was a sore trial and man’s tenure of it brief, he was still taken aback when he too was dismissed from Team Fracassus. Though Caleb Hopsack had always been against Philander’s appointment, he wasn’t the person directly responsible for the dismissal. Whichever way one looked at it, that person was Philander himself.

It began with a picture in a newspaper – it doesn’t matter which, since it appeared eventually in all of them – of two otters whose recent acquisition by Urbs-Ludus Zoo caused greater interest than it might otherwise have done on account of their extraordinary resemblance, both in body and in face, to Fracassus and Philander, after whom they were instantaneously named. In the photograph, the Fracassus otter had his head to one side, much as Fracassus would incline his whenever a subject beyond his comprehension arose and he wanted to show his disdain for it. Despite the reputation for cuteness enjoyed by the species, this otter showed his teeth in unexplained fury. When his mother saw the photograph it brought immediately to mind Fracassus’s expression the time he came into the bedroom she shared with her dear late husband, turned his mouth into a trumpet of hate, and said ‘Fuck, nigger, cunt.’ The other otter, forever to be known as Philander, possessed the original’s genius for looking at once serious and amused and delighting in his capacity to be both. He was carrying a fish in his mouth, boastfully, as though no other otter in the sea had ever fished as well as he had, and this too reminded people of Philander. The photograph was captioned Maccus and Fracassus – Maccus being a character in a popular children’s movie of long ago, a villain with a head resembling that of a hammerhead shark, and Fracassus being Fracassus.

Philander, being Philander, felt the need to go into print at once, firstly to show that he got the joke and enjoyed it, and secondly to discourse on the name Maccus which went back a lot further than The Pirates of the Caribbean, first apearing as the designate for a stock figure of ancient Roman farce, not to be confused with Buccus who, in Philander’s view, was funnier. Perhaps without his actually knowing it, the journalist responsible for the otter story had started a conversation about the nature of buffoonery as differently understood by the ancients and the moderns, indeed as bearing widely differing interpretations today. To note a resemblance between the Grand Duke Fracassus and him was inevitable given their close political connection, and without doubt flattering to himself, bearing in mind his subordinate position. But while they were both buffoons, the buffoonery of the one was not to be confused with the buffoonery of the other. His own, if he would be permitted to say so, was entirely self-aware – an act of conscious self-disparagement aimed at puncturing his own and society’s pomposity and preventing people from confusing levity with falsehood – whereas Fracassus’s proceeded from too deep an engrossment in the cares of office for him to notice he was being ridiculous or be concerned about it. Where he, Philander, was the author of his own buffonery, Fracassus was its victim. But let us not despair! The great Plato, it should never be forgotten, had abhorred a sense of humour in a ruler, by which logic, as a person entirely lacking in one, the Grand Duke Fracassus was a more natural leader, Platonically speaking, than he, Philander, would ever be.

Called to explain this, Philander pleaded loyalty. What else was he saying but that Fracassus was ideally suited for the role of solemn majesty that awaited him? But wriggle on the pin head as he might, Philander stood accused of calling the man whose election he was meant to be working for a clown. And an inferior clown, at that, to his accuser. He had to go. Acta est fabula, he wrote in his goodbye email to Fracassus. The play is over – though it wasn’t so far over that Philander had no further part to play in it. Before the day was out he was working for Sojjourner Heminway.

CHAPTER XXXIX The speed of lies

Grievous as Philander’s defection might have been, it wasn’t. Nor was he the only recreant in the months leading up to the election. Of Fracassus’s original team, only Caleb Hopsack remained. Ideologically, Hopsack felt at one with Fracassus. The Grand Duke and the Leader of the Ordinary People’s Party – it was a marriage of converging interests made in political convenience heaven. Hopsack attended the Palace every morning, was photographed with or without Fracassus in front of the Golden Gates, and brought news from the remotest corners of The Republics. Good news and bad, though it was easy – as with the Philander affair – to confuse the two. It was Hopsack who, as a politician incapable of inspiring loyalty himself, best understood why the people loved those whom no one else could. Where the Sojjourner camp took comfort from the spectacle, as they saw it, of rats deserting a sinking ship, the populace saw a beleagured leader betrayed by inferior men. Fracassus had promised to Muck Out the Pig-Pen. Well, these were the squeals the Pigs made when they resisted eviction. Rats, pigs – who needed them? The fewer influential followers Fracassus had, the more honourable they believed him to be. Other politicians could boast their lickspittles and cronies. Fracassus stood alone. His isolation proved his authenticity.

Authenticity became the word of the campaign. At least he says what he means, Hopsack’s people tweeted. And saying what one meant became more important than meaning what one said.

Sojjourner no sooner secured Philander’s services than she wished she hadn’t. What she’d hoped would be a public relations coup turned into its opposite. Was she so desperate that she needed Fracassus’s cast offs? Was she so lacking in integrity herself that she was indifferent to its absence in others? Quick to see her mistake, she sent Philander to tour the remotest corners of The Republic on a bus, from which he made exactly the same speeches he’d made when he was working for Fracassus.

Otherwise, Sojjourner’s operation appeared to be on track. ‘Appeared to be’ in the sense that pollsters showed her enjoying a healthy lead over her opponent, no matter that her rallies were less populous and ecstatic. The website Brightstar, which had been on Fracassus’s side ever since his birth, read the polls as a Liberal conspiracy to keep Fracassus out and saw her unenthusiastic rallies as the true measure of her unpopularity. She was too dumpy to be liked, it said, too small to be seen, too shrill to be listened to, too cold to excite hope, too excitable to calm fears, too assertive to be womanly, too remote from the struggles of ordinary people, too close to a pampered elite, too ambitious, too pushy, too ready to play the woman card, though, frankly, anyone less like a woman… and much else in that vein.

If it didn’t say that she was too clever for her own good it was only because it didn’t want to invite comparisons with Fracassus who was definitely clever enough for his.

With only a few weeks of the election left to run, Fracassus believed it was time to mention her trousers. Those trousers, he tweeted.

That jacket, Sojjourner’s people tweeted back.

But the trousers were more telling.

Professional commentators wondered if she’d turn up for the televised debate in a slit skirt and stilettos. There was little doubt that this would put Fracassus on the back foot. It was well known that a slit skirt could induce catalepsy in Fracassus. Only on the right woman, he tweeted, when this matter was raised publicly. Whatever his protestations, who could say, if Sojjourner were to wear a skirt, that Fracassus, guided by a power greater than himself, wouldn’t attempt to slide his hand under it?

Sojjourner scotched all such expectations in advance by insisting that while light entertainment, or whatever name he gave to groping women, might be his field of operations, serious politics was hers. Election watchers called this her first mistake of the night. At a stroke she took the fun out of the debate and showed that she was out of touch with the times. People, even of her class, had grown weary of gropee victimology. Frankly, no one cared where Fracassus put his hands. Her second mistake was to mention the glass ceiling. So what if no other woman in history had ever made it to be Prime Mover? People weren’t going to be gender-bullied into making her the first. Her third mistake was to invoke diversity, a concept interpreted by voters to mean people of every sexual orientation and colour but their own. To be white and straight in Urbs-Ludus, when Sojjourner was at the stump, was to feel neglected. Her fourth mistake was to use the word ‘imposture’, enabling Fracassus, who couldn’t believe his luck, to purse his lips in imitation of its prissiness and make as though to kiss an old lady from the far side of the room. Looking directly into camera he mouthed the words ‘Stop It!’, at one and the same time mocking his opponent’s verbosity and reminding viewers that it was he who owned the medium that fed their fantasies. Her fifth mistake, which could be said to encompass all the others, was to oppress viewers with her mastery of argument and comprehensive grasp of affairs.

Watching on a television in Yoni Cobalt’s apartment, Kolskeggur Probrius savoured the delicious irony of it. In the days of the Great Purge of the Illuminati, Sojjourner Heminway had been one of the students instrumental in getting him removed from the University for demeaning those he taught by teaching them too well. Now here she was, falling foul of just such contempt for knowledge herself, only this time the judges were the common people not the privileged élite. The great purge of the purgers had begun.

Yoni Cobalt sat with her head in her hands all through the debate and kept them there as the first verdicts on the candidates’ performances were delivered.

‘I won’t say I told you so,’ Professor Probrius said. ‘But I did long ago predict that those who tell the stories run the world.’

‘Stories! What stories? He doesn’t have anything to tell.’

‘My love, that is the story.’

Thus, without saying a word, and in losing the debate by every known measure, Fracassus was deemed to have won it

Greatest margin of victory in any televised debate in history, he tweeted.

And then again, an hour later, Time to send sad Sojjourner on a long jjourney.

CHAPTER XL The end of days

It has been observed that mankind plays at life and only realises the seriousness of what it’s done when it’s too late.

In the days immediately preceding the election a baffled stillness fell on The Republics, and on Urbs-Ludus, the play capital, in particular. What, of all that had been said, did anybody mean?

There’d been a change of mood after the debate. Fracassus had won by not winning but didn’t act or look like a winner in the days following. He oozed belligerence in his tweets, but on his person an unaccustomed softness could be discerned. Caleb Hopsack grew concerned. It seemed to him that Fracassus had suddenly developed an interior life, a dangerous black hole that could suck in self-doubt and second-thoughts. Caleb Hopsack might have been a joke that only the smartest people got, but to himself he was certitude or he was nothing. Without it, the ground he walked on felt like the surging sea. There was terror in his tweets. Beware the backsliders, he tweeted, not just once but a hundred times. If the world slid back he would be the first to be engulfed. He pictured himself face down in the landslipped mud, where he would lie uncorrupted by change for a hundred thousand years until some fresh-faced archaeologist found him and wondered what function such a creature, strangely garbed and grimacing, could ever have performed.

Fracassus visited his mother in her chocolate factory and fairy room. She too thought there was something different about him. For a moment she even saw how it might be possible to like him. She asked him how his wife was handling the pressure. He looked bemused. He had forgotten he had a wife. He surprised her by enquiring about his brother. Had she heard from him recently? Normally he referred to Jago as ‘It’.

Today Jago was his brother. It was a self-centred enquiry, but it was an enquiry all the same. Did he say anything about the election, he wondered. ‘I cannot lie to you,’ his mother said. ‘He will be voting for Sojjourner.’ She was surprised that Fracassus was not angered by this. ‘I don’t blame him,’ he said. ‘I’d do the same in his position.’

On his way out he tried guessing how many tranpersons there were in The Republics. He reckoned he could afford to lose them all and still romp home a comfortable winner. But he didn’t tweet to say so.

Whatever had softened Fracassus, softened the populace. Not to the point of persuading those who hated Sojjourner to change their minds and vote for her. A change of mind is a rational decision and hatred of Sojjourner had nothing of reason in it. It was fed from wells of poison too deep to fathom. But it was as though belief in Fracassus began to blow away, like leaves that had only ever rested on him lightly. An hour before they’d been at the pantomime shouting ‘She’s behind you!’ Now that they were back out on the street it was as though the pantomime had been watched by someone else.

Though they were frightened to disrupt the stillness, the yesterday men and women of Fracassus’s diatribes – the educated, the knowledgeable, the sad, the losers, the Metropolitan retards – dared to let hope penetrate their bunkers. It had all been a fiction. Even Fracassus didn’t seem to believe any of it really. All men have some goodness in them, don’t they, let it only be an inadvertent mote blown out of someone else’s eye. It was a salutary warning. Fracassus had been sent to frighten them out of their complacency. This thing could happen. I’m behind you. Mind your backs.

Very well. They’d learnt their lesson. They were listening. The people had given them a second chance. In the darkest hours, it was always the people who shone the brightest. Look, and you could see a streak of light. Listen, and you could hear sanity returning to The Republics like water returning to a dried up river bed. The sad bought in extra champagne. The losers invited their friends around to party. The retards danced their little disjointed dance.

But then the wind seemed to turn again. Leaning out of Yoni Cobalt’s window on election night, Kolsgekkur Probrius wet his finger.

Yoni Cobalt felt the muscles in his back tense and then relax.

‘What?’ she said.

He didn’t turn around. He didn’t have the heart to tell her what he knew.