A BED-TIME STORY.

A silly bed-time story concerning the ridiculous nature of ultimate power...

There was a solemn stillness about the land. Up ahead, where there ought to have been blue skies and endless sunshine, a dark cloud loomed. And all the little people lived their lives in dread and fear of the Mighty King, who ruled one and all with a rod of iron.

But it chanced, in that land, that whilst the people were all, to a man and a woman, under his sway, the beasts of the field couldn't care less. Their lives were relatively brief affairs (though they didn't know that) and they gave scant attention to the dictates of a human king even though he made their keepers miserable, which affected the willingness with which those unhappy people rose in the morning to milk them.

So the cows, aware that they were a kind of third force in the politics of the land, decided, to a Friesian and a Jersey, to go on strike. They needed thorough attention and they weren't having it and they were fed up. They refused to make milk and when their herdsmen came to milk them they hardly produced enough for a cup of tea let alone anywhere near enough for the land's buttery.

When the shortage of good creamy butter effected the King's breakfast table he went redder in the face than a very red radish and got close to exploding.

“What is this!” he demanded of the Cook, who was quivering and shaking in his kitchen clogs.

“There is no butter in all the land, sire,” stammered the Cook. “I have sent kitchen boys the length and breadth of the country and have failed to locate a single packet of the stuff!”

“Then we need a butter substitute,” declared the monarch, his face still beetling with rage. “Let it be known that the person who can produce a substitute for butter will be richly rewarded! Let it be known that fame and fortune and all that crap will be showered on them! Now go, and do my bidding!”

So the Cook clicked the heels of his kitchen clogs together and backed from the King's presence. A rider left the palace shortly afterwards, bearing a thick pile of papers (in A4) on which (in Microsoft Word Art) was printed the declaration that the king wanted a butter substitute, and he wanted it yesterday. Oh, and that a prize involving riches was somehow available to the right applicant.

The people in their kitchens started creating all manner of confections and one, with particular skill and fortitude and beauty, was the wench Dorothy. She mixed all manner of goodies in her biggest pan, putting in pinches of this and that, oils from the garage, greases from the marionette factory and noxious creams from the hairspray works. She added water, a very special emulsifier she found under a hedge - and when she had finished she had something that looked so much like butter it might have been the stuff itself. But she had been privy to what she had put into it and no way wanted to sample it herself. She had too much respect for her own digestive system for that!

On the very next day she took herself to the palace and joined a huge queue of fellow hopefuls, all carrying their tubs of butter substitute, though some looked so unlike butter they might have been anything. There were black tubs with green contents and green tubs with black contents. There were blue tubs with puce contents and puce tubs with blue contents. There were, in short tubs of every hue bearing greases the like of which neither man nor woman had ever seen before, and they waited in the queue for their turn to take their offerings to the king.

As the day began to fade towards dusk it was obvious that the king was getting increasingly angry as the provender placed before him failed to please him, and he began ordering that the inventors of the worst confections be separated from their heads. So the wench Dorothy found herself quivering inside as headless bodies were flung from the palace doors, swiftly followed by the heads themselves.

Then it was her turn, and, legs trembling and subtle bosom heaving, she stumbled before the King. She held her tub of butter substitute towards the king and he took it from her.

He sniffed it, and smiled. The smell was ever-so-slightly buttery.

He poked a finger into it and smiled again. The texture was exactly buttery.

He licked the finger. And he froze. He was about to declare, after a suitably regal fanfare had been founded, that the butter substitute was perfection itself when he fell flat on his back, stone dead. It might have been a wonderful creation that looked, smelt and tasted exactly like butter, but the assortment of ingredients the wench Dorothy had mixed into the tub was as toxic as a very toxic thing, and the king had fallen down dead, poisoned by his own petard (if you don't mind the sort of mixed metaphors that I love).

As you can imagine, nobody had liked the king, not even his nearest and dearest, and the whole land was delighted when it was learned that he was dead. The wench Dorothy was married off to the late lamented's oldest son, who became the new king, so she became the queen, and she spent the remainder of her days doing interesting things, like tending to the palace clockery (which she had plenty of time to do), tapping barometers (when the weather was wrong) with a delicious fore-finger and making exquisite loaves of bread in her spare time.

And all the cows in the land started producing milk again when it became quite clear to them that it was the right thing to do.

Reviews

[Elim]

This was written in a way that was comical and interesting, and the whole idea is really quite fascinatingly amusing. Although light-hearted, it explores many deeper, darker concepts, for example the nature of ultimate power, as you have already spoken of in the description, and the influence that any lesser mortal can have on such power. Dorothy, a delightful heroine, tops it all off as a truly exceptional story that anyone could enjoy. Well done. :)

[Peter Rogerson]

Ah, Dorothy ... I borrowed the name from my wife... Thanks for your analysis.