The Palace Sweeper
an excerpt

Celebration

It was later said that the day of the coronation was glorious and bright, that the sky was a cloudless blue, that the breeze was crisp and refreshing, that Almighty God himself had sanctioned the King from the heavens.
Fremont remembered the day differently. He remembered a grayness, either real or perceived, that permeated the Kingdom. He remembered a sick feeling in his stomach, a nausea that persisted until sundown. He remembered his mother, smiling, laughing, cheering. His sister, with her arms full of flowers, celebrating, singing with the other girls. He remembered the wrongness of it all, the charade of the spectacle.
Years later, these memories would hit him at unexpected moments and bitter tears would spring in his old brown eyes. But there were no tears on the day of the coronation. Only a disquieting awareness that all was not well.
“I saw him! I saw King Klaus!” Gretchen gasped at her brother.
“What did he look like, child?”
“Was he handsome? Is it true about his hair?”
The girls and women crowded Gretchen as she described the boy King. It was true about his hair – it was white blond. And his eyes were blue, so blue, so very blue…now handsome and noble he looked! She sighed and related his garb. Fine velvet, satin robes, the crown…oh the crown…
Fremont slipped from the women and maneuvered through the jubilant crowd. The closeness of them, the joyous villagers, celebrating the exaltation of a boy his age, a boy who had never slaughtered a pig or cobbled a shoe or done anything useful…it was all so foolish. He preferred the quiet and calmness of his own family hovel. He would have no more of Good King Klaus that day.

_______________________________________________________________
The boy with the golden curls kissed his mother on her forehead. Ten years mad, unable to recognize her son, unable to accuse those who marred her and destroyed her sanity.
“Today is a good day, Mother.” He smiled and fingered her scarred hand.
“Mmmmmmm….”
“Water? Would you like some water?”
“Mmmmmm….” The woman clinched her fist and flailed her body and groaned unintelligible groans.
Nurse shuffled the boy out of the chamber with a brisk efficiency. “It is not a good time, Sire.”
No, his mother’s good times were dead and gone, along with her mind, her beauty, his father and brother and the boyhood happiness he once enjoyed. He slipped the crown off and returned to own cavernous room.

It Was You
The hut smelled of grease and sour ale. Woven mats covered the dirt floor, simple chairs, constructed by his father so many years before were the only furnishings. Fremont stoked the hearth before tending to the pigsty.
His home, squalid and plain, was typical of the lane. Thatched roofs lined the trodden path between the houses. Pigs, chickens, cows and other livestock were crudely penned to their prospective huts. Ruddy children tottered around the animals, barefoot and filthy. Fremont could only grimace and get out of their way. Was he ever so disgusting? Did he ever run through the village with mud caked into his hair and face? Did he ever eat his sausages with hands so black that his fingernails were unseen?
He did not remember. He felt repulsed by the children and compelled to wash up at the well.
The others would return soon. He only had minutes to himself before the women would be squawking of blond curls and splendid robes. He returned to the house and removed his precious parchment paper from the simple box in his corner. He retrieved the quill and ink from beneath his sleeping mat.
August 16
Today was the coronation of Klaus, son of Heinrich and Gerta. Gretchen and Mother were unable to contain their adoration. Tomorrow is a holiday in honor of ‘Good King Klaus’…how can they call him ‘good’ when he has only been king for a few hours? How can any king be good…

The women were scuffling at the door. Fremont carefully replaced his ink and quill and tucked the parchment into his tunic.
“Where did you go, boy? We were looking for you!” His mother tussled his hair and checked the fire in the hearth. “Ahh…thank you for seeing to this. I’ll get the sausages.” The rosy woman cut the sausages while Gretchen prepared the cabbage. Aunt Ilse sliced potatoes as she sang the anthem of the day.
Praise to King Klaus
The noble, good, glor-i-ous savior
O Praise to King Klaus
My undying loyalty never shall waiver

Fremont winced. The whole household was warbling.

Praise to King Klaus
Let all other nations drop dead and dee-caaaay
I love you, King Klaus
I love you, I love you, I love you al-waaaaays

The last line always made Fremont laugh. The Kingdom was not known for its poetry.
“Is something funny, Mr. Sourpuss?” Aunt Ilse gestured a potato indignantly.
“At least he’s laughing, Ilse…it’s good the see the boy laugh. Leave him be.” His mother winked and continued the singing. Fremont pecked her cheek and helped Gretchen with the cabbage.
The family’s simple dinner evolved into a post-coronation party. Neighbors, friends, cousins, the whole village it seemed, stopped in to share in the wine and celebrate the good health of a new king.
“Eins, zwei, G'suffa!” Everyone took a drink.
“Prost! To the King!” Another drink.
“Long live King Klaus!” And another.
“Eins, zwei, G'suffa!” They forgot someone said that one already. One more drink.
“To blond curls!”
“Hoch soll er leben!”
“To the Kingdom! And King Klaus! Again!”
The din was deafening. Jostling bodies, romping children, even the domestic pets were participating in the ribaldry. Fremont slipped out the door when the dulcimers and rauschpfeifes were produced. Another asinine lyric to the new anthem rang in his ears before he was twenty steps from the hut.
A clean, cold brook ran along the outer edges of the village. It bubbled and flowed all summer and fall, some spots only a running leap across. Fremont retreated to the brook, his brook, almost daily. He didn’t know why he was drawn to this frothy haven. The water was clear enough to watch the occasional fish or frog beneath the surface. The rocks, some jutted and angular, others smooth and flat, moved the water in unexpected ways. He would sit on his log and watch it…sometimes churning, sometimes unhurried, always moving forward. Leaves and twigs would travel with the waters…down the slight descent…away from the village…passed the Palace…away from the Kingdom…away…away…away…
The moon was not bright that night, too dark to watch the fortunate travelers. Fremont sat and listened instead. The bubbling, running, churning, the freshness of it all…he was finally calm. There were stars out. He could see the constellation his father had once shown him, Antinous. He lay back in the cool grass, hands folded behind his head, and closed his eyes. If only his whole world was this quiet and simple.
“Mmmmmmm….” A voice, a woman’s voice was moaning in the distance. Fremont leapt up.
He scanned his horizon, opaque with the hidden moon.
“Mmmmmmm….” Nothing. He could see no one.
“Hello? Who’s there? Are you all right?” He instinctively reached for a rock, then braced his stance. “Hello?” Damn his squeaky voice. Fourteen was hardly a year for battling invisible moaners.
“Mmmmmm….” She…she? was getting closer. There! A whiteness was several yards away.
“Do you need help? Stay where you are, please. But do you need help?” She was so pale, or her dress, rather, was so pale, Fremont was unable to escape ghost images and poltergeists stories from his childhood. Maybe if he could see her face…but did he even want to see her face? “Stay there, miss. I’ll…I’ll go get someone from the village to help you…” It was at that moment that the woman noticed him.
Before he could distinguish the features of her face, the white of her hair, the discrimination between her pale dress and her pale skin, she was upon him. “YOU! IT WAS YOU! IT WAS YOU!” She tackled Fremont to the ground and ran her wiry hands around his neck. Her face, he could now see, was not pale, it was scarred into an ashy white. Her eyes, blue and brilliant, were mad with hatred. Her mouth was snarled as she screamed and cried and groaned and growled all at once. “IT WAS YOU! YOU! YOU! I HATE YOU! I’LL KILL YOU!”
She gripped his throat with fearsome viciousness. His light, his air, his consciousness was dimming and all he could do was stare into the face of his mad attacker. Was he dreaming?
“Here! She’s here! Good Lord! Quickly!” Horse feet were rapidly approaching. The sound of the voices awoke his lust for survival. Fremont grabbed his enemy’s white hair with both hands. She screamed and loosened her grip, giving the boy the opportunity to kick her in the stomach. She crumpled, pathetic and frail, to the ground. Her guttural cries shook him, even as he inched away from her.
“Halt! Stop where you are!” The horse’s men arrived, almost as pale as the woman. “What did you do to her? What did you do?” One dismounted and grabbed the boy while the other blocked his exit from behind. A third assisted another woman, an older woman from his horse so she could attend to the crumpled mass.
“She attacked me! She choked me! Look at my throat!” Fremont tugged at his collar as the men held torchlight dangerously close to his face. In the light he could see that the men were palace guards. “Who was that? How did you know she was here?”
“You’ll do well to watch your tongue, boy. And you’ll be lucky if you aren’t spending your evening in a dungeon.” The bigger guard exchanged glances with the other as they peered at the boy’s emerging bruises.
“SHE ATTACKED ME! She kept saying, ‘It was you!’ and the next thing I knew she was on top of me…she tried to kill me! When’s the last time you imprisoned a kid for getting attacked by a mad woman?”
“Hold your tongue, I said!” The brute reached for his sword. Fremont looked at him, then the groaning woman, then the other guard.
“Who is that?”
“Not your business, lad. We’re just holding you until…” Both guards knelt to the ground as a massive horse with a diminutive rider arrived. The rider alighted and tended to the woman first. He brushed back her hair and held her hand. He spoke in soothing words with the woman and the nurse, then kissed the woman’s forehead. A rough arm jerked Fremont into a kneeling position.
“What happened? Who is this?” A voice was speaking above him. A young voice.
“Uhhhh…your Highness…it appears….she…uhhhhh…..”
Fremont stood up.
“She attacked me. That woman choked me. I was forced to defend myself.” Fremont lowered his collar once more, revealing the now redder bruises. It was at this moment that he realized he was eye to eye with a boy. King Klaus himself. Both kneeling guards tugged his hand. He didn’t budge.
“She did this to you? How could this woman attack you? Look at her…she’s barely able to stand.” Klaus waved his hand at the guards. They let go of Fremont.
“She didn’t just choke me, your Highness. She screamed at me. She kept…”
“She what?” Klaus’s eyes widened as he looked back at the woman.
“She screamed at me…she kept saying, ‘It was you!’ over and over again. Who is that? I deserve to know who attacked me, and why your guards threatened to send me to a dungeon for defending myself!” He placed his hands on his hips and inched closer to the king. Once again, much slower, he repeated, “Who…is…that?”
Klaus stepped back. He looked at the woman, then back at the boy, particularly the boy’s neck. She was moaning and rocking back and forth as the older woman wrapped her in richly woven tapestry. In the torchlight Fremont could see Klaus’s eyes moisten.
“I have to go. Send him home.”
The woman fainted to the ground,
The King rushed to her side.
Fremont ran home faster than he had ever run before.

A frailer boy might have rushed into his mother’s arms, sobbing and hysterical with fright. Fremont was not such a boy. Telling his mother of the attack would be futile.
To begin with, all talk of a ghostly psychopath nearly choking him to death would be forgotten as soon as he admitted to meeting the king. And then the next few days, if not weeks, if not months, would be spent retelling of those minutes in the presence of King Klaus. ‘Yes, his hair was blond. No, it was too dark to see if he had any freckles.’ His two minutes with King Klaus would become his identification to the entire village, perhaps for the rest of his life. No, Fremont could not let his mother or sister or anyone else define him as the boy who was once eye to eye with Good King Klaus.
Nor could he be the boy who was nearly killed by an ethereal attacker. He squatted near the pigsty and let the large male nuzzle his hand. The evening’s events, as terrifying as they were, belonged to him and no one else.
“There he is!” Fremont winced. “Mama has sent out Aunt Ilse and Herr Baldwin and the little boy with the chipped tooth…”
“Ancel.”
“Yes…Ancel and she thinks that the wolves have eaten you. Get into the house before she dies of a broken heart!” Fremont was used to his younger sister ordering him around, he usually didn’t mind humoring her. But tonight was different.
“In a minute, Gretchen. Tell Mama that I’m fine and I’ll see her in a minute.”
“Is the pig more important than your widowed mother now? Is that pig going to cook your sausages and launder your tunics and keep you sheltered until you are a man? Because if that’s the case, then I’ll just go tell Mama that she doesn’t need to worry about you because you’re in love with a magical pig who requires your utmost attention!” The fiery girl crossed her arms and smirked.
“Ja, Gretchen. Tell her about the magical pig and let her come to me out here. I can’t think with all those people trampling around the hut. Tell her the pig summons her.” The girl huffed back into the house before she could hear her brother chuckle at her expense.
Party stragglers and concerned neighbors wandered back to their homes, shaking their heads and clucking their tongues at the boy who disappeared from his mother. Some were staggering from the beer, others were still singing old Kingdom songs. But most were pointing discretely at Fremont and whispering of his thoughtlessness. If they only knew, he thought.
“Who is this that demands that his mother meet him at a pigsty instead of in her own home? You are not too old for a whipping, Fremont Brandt. If your father was here, I’d make sure your rear was red before you laid your head down tonight, mein kleines.” Fremont put his arm around his mother’s shoulder and kissed her forehead.
“I heard you thought I was eaten by the wolves.”
“It could have happened. When I was a little girl…”
“…there was a boy who was eaten by wolves. I know, mama. I just needed to get away from the crowd for a little while. And with the music and the people…it was too much. I’m sorry.”
“Just like your father, you are. Moody and quiet. No one knows what’s happening in that head of yours, Fremont. The other boys, they were at the celebration today, laughing and scuffling and pulling the girls’ braids…why weren’t you with them?”
“I think they’re stupid.”
“Stupid? What about me and your sister and our friends, do you think we are stupid, also? Your father, God rest his soul, he was just like you. Always wanting to be alone, never enjoying his life. Just like you. And now he’s dead. Kaput. So there.” She was done. No fanciful stories of vindictive ghosts would change the fact that he had left in the first place, or that he had been avoiding his family all day.
The only thing to do was to let her take his arm and go back into the house.