Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

Now, on this day, the new moon of the calendar part we know as September, when Alobar conducted his routine inspection, he looked into the mirror longer, more intently than usual. Something in the secrets and shadows of the imperfectly polished surface had caught his eye. He stared, and as he stared his pulse began to run away with itself. He carried the glass to an open window, where refracting sparks of sunshine enlivened its ground but refused to alter its message. “So soon?” he whispered, as he tilted the mirror. Another angle, the same result. Perhaps the glass is tricking me , he thought. Magic things are fond of deceptions .

Although the day was rather balmy, he pulled up the hood of his rough linen cloak and, blushing like blood's rich uncle, thrust the mirror into the hands of the nearest concubine, who happened to be Frol. The other women gasped. They rushed to relieve her of the precious object. Alobar left the room.

With some difficulty, for others tried to insist on accompanying him, the king excused himself from court and took the giant dog Mik for a romp outside the citadel gate. Circuitously, he made his way into the woods to a spring he knew. There, he fell to his knees and bent close to the water, as if to drink. Smothered under a swirl of cloudy mixtures, his reflection only spasmodically came into focus. Yet, among the bubbles, twigs, and jumbled particles of light and color, he saw it once more: a hair as white as the snow that a swan has flown over. It spiraled from his right temple.

Undirected — and unencumbered — by thought, King Alobar's hand shot out as if to ward off an enemy's blow. He yanked the hair from its mooring, examined it as one might examine a killed snake, and, after glancing over his shoulder to assure that none save Mik was his witness, flicked it into the spring, in whose waters it twisted and twirled for a long while before sinking out of sight.

Alma gnashed her semen-greased teeth in her sleep. Each distant owl note caused Mik to twitch. Between them, Alobar lay wide-eyed, his war-marked hands caressing the fur covers for comfort. It is with shame and fear that I rest tonight , thought the king. The way bewilderment lies upon me, I have no need of blanket .

In Alobar's kingdom, a minute city-state, a tribe, if you will, it was the custom to put the king to death at the first sign of old age. Kings were permitted to rule only so long as they retained their strength and vigor. Regarding its rulers as semidivine — god-men upon whom the course of nature depended — the clan believed wide-spread catastrophes would result from the gradual enfeeblement of the ruler and the final extinction of his powers in death. The only way to avert those calamities was to kill the king as soon as he showed symptoms of decay, so that his soul might be transferred to a vigorous young successor before it had been impaired. One of the fatal signals of fading power was the king's incapacity to satisfy the sexual passions of his wives. Another was the debut of wrinkles or gray hairs, with their indiscreet announcement of decline.

Heretofore, Alobar had not considered this tradition unfair. After all, were the king allowed to grow senile and ill, would not his weakness infect his domain, interfering with the multiplication of cattle, causing beet crops to rot in the fields, disabling the men in battle, and generally perpetuating disease, delirium, and infertility among those whom he ruled? And did not all intelligent peoples (which left out the Romans) hold this to be true? Why, in some nearby kingdoms, a slight blemish on the royal body such as the loss of a tooth was enough to bring about the death sentence. In Alobar's city, the execution was a ceremony of much dignity and aesthetic weight, the king's Number One wife bearing the responsibility for delivering to her husband's lips the poisoned egg. Among less civilized peoples in the region, the ruler was dispatched by the crude, though perfectly sufficient, process of being knocked on the head.

Heretofore, the ritual of putting the king to death had seemed to Alobar natural, inevitable, and just. But tonight. . tonight he cursed that cruelly traitorous strand, that hoary banderole of mortality that waved so thoughtlessly from an otherwise dark temple; that skinny, silver scroll upon which was written in letters bold enough for all of nature to read, an invitation to the burial mound. O most unwelcome hair!

From the lemony southern islands to the mountainous haunts of trolls, there was no honest person who could call King Alobar a coward. Numerous times he had risked his life in combat, exhilarant the cry of his charge. And why not, what was there in death to fear? Death was this world's tribute and the other world's bequest. To shun it was to cheat both sides. In yanking out the gray hair, he felt that he had betrayed his people, his gods — and himself. Himself? Self? What did that mean? Alobar pounded the pillow with his head, causing Mik to growl softly and Alma to flail both arms, although she did not surface from that sea without fish.

At first light, ere a rooster had reached the doodle part of his cock-a-doodle-doo, Alobar shook Alma awake, ordering her back to the harem and requesting that she send Wren in her stead.

“What are you grinning at?”

“My lord, I am merely happy to notice that you have regained your appetites.”

“What are you insinuating, woman?”

“Nothing, my lord.”

“ What? ” He seized her by her yellow braids.

“Don't be angry, sire. It is just that some of your wives grumble among themselves that you have neglected them of late.”

The king released her. Automatically, he raised his fist to the temple where the white hair had sprouted. Were another about to emerge, he would squash it in its follicle.

“Have they. . have they spoken of this to the council?”

“Oh, no, my lord! It has not come to that. To tell the truth, I think they are merely peevish because you spend your best seed in that clumsy little cunt, Frol.”

In the depths of his tangled beard, Alobar managed half a smile. Young Frol was pregnant again, and from the size of her belly, there developed therein a second set of twins.

Kissing had yet to be discovered in Europe, alas, so Alobar rubbed Alma's nose with his own. “My balls are so heavy I cannot leave the bed. Quickly, now. Fetch me Wren!”

As soon as she had gone, he arose and forced open the massive oak window. While Mik licked his feet, he uttered a succession of prayers to the rapidly diminishing sparkle of the morning star.

Those whom Alobar governed were a blond race, of such recent northern origin that snow-trolls and mystical red toadstools still figured in the tales the elders told around the fires, although the king himself, save for that morbid filament he had drowned in the spring, was on the dusky side. Wren, the daughter of a southern chieftain slain in battle by Alobar's predecessor, was even duskier. “The only dark meat in the king's larder,” some of the warriors joked. Her coloration was one reason he favored her. More importantly, however, he loved her good sense, although in that place in that time, “good sense” was considered no more a virtue in a wife than “love” in a king.

Alma's advance advertising must have been effective, for Wren arrived in the royal chamber already nude and lathered, wine in her cheeks. Thus, she was surprised to find her husband fully clothed, sitting with his hound on the great bear rug at the foot of his bed.

“I–I—I am sorry, my lord,” she stammered. The vintner in her veins pressed a more ruddy grape. “I was informed that you had summoned me.”

“That I did, dear Wren. Please come sit at my side.”

“Well, all right, of course. But first let me fetch my robe. I've left it in the anteroom.”