“Wars are always waged, and I have no interest in offense,” Archon growled. “Feelings are not a currency I choose to trade in. My mate will not come to me dancing and flirting. She will be conquered.”
“Sire complains that we have made it too easy for him,” Brimsley noted. “I could have had the girls set loose in the forest, or perhaps give each of them a shuttle and a day’s head start.”
“There is no sport in chasing those who wish to be caught.”
“So you wish to mate with a female who does not wish to mate with you. You eschew the well bred and willing for the notion of someone who will resist you?”
The old man shook with outrage and perhaps even disgust. Brimsley had served the royal house of Archaeus for as long as he had been alive. He was the son of the head maid of the old queen, she who had been dead for over fifty years, she who he regarded as being the last of the true royals.
The one who sat on the throne now horrified Brimsley. There would never have been one like him when Arasabella was queen. The royal house of Archaeus was once refined and genteel. Now, with a monster who had no respect for old customs wearing the crown, anything was possible.
“I horrify you, don’t I,” Archon smiled, not the least concerned by Brimsley’s judgement.
“Sire knows I have certain traditional opinions…”
“Yes. Sire does. But when it comes to my cock, Brimsley and where I put it, I have to want the female, and I find little appealing in one who is prepared to dance amid two dozen others in the attempt to get my attention. I will know the one I want when I see her.”
“A rather romantic notion for a monarch recently talking about taking women without their will…”
“I did not say without willingness. I said that it would be a conquest. One doesn’t stop the other from being true,” Archon replied.
Brimsley’s lips became very tight and puckered. “I confess, I do not understand you sire, not after three years. You are a very different king than your father…”
“Ah yes, my father, who chose females each and every year at the dance, and who bore sons who perished on the battle field because their flashy scales and bright fins did not do a thing for them. When I breed, it will be with a female capable of bearing me a son worthy of the throne.”
“There is a certain sense to your words, sire,” Brimsley conceded, reluctantly. “Shall I have a maid draw you an acid bath before you retire to bed?
“Yes. Why not,” Archon replied. He wanted to wash the lingering scent of two dozen perfumes from his body. He felt as though he had been utterly soaked in the stuff. Some of it was laced with pheromones, no doubt an attempt to chemically hijack him. Those females had come to be fucked by him, and they would have done almost anything to be fucked by him.
Archon had very different tastes. His women did not come to him because they were sent. The handful of lovers he had taken in the past were those he had clashed with. They were willful women, real warriors. They may have been able to dance, but they more often wielded weapons with lyrical alacrity. Archon liked brave, bold, dangerous women, and there was not a female among the dancers who fit that description.
“Anna! A bath!” Brimsley called for the bath maid.
The last female he would see that evening came bustling in with an arm full of towels. She had gray hair and eyes which appeared sunken because of all the wrinkles around them.
Anna had worked in the flying castle almost as long as Brimsley. She’d drawn more baths than she’d had hot dinners, but unlike the old courtier, she was not slowing down. Servants were not permitted to get old and weak, they had to remain sprightly well into their later years. Anna was like a little old tank, doing her duty no matter what. She nodded at Archon and Brimsley on her way to the bathing chamber.
Archon followed her. He was tired of the company of advisors and nobles, and even more tired of Brimsley himself. The old courtier was a relic who never tired of reminding Archon of what his father, a male Archon had never known, would have done in this situation or that situation.
He wanted the power of the crown, but none of the tradition which came with it. They thought he was a brute, but Archon was going to prove much worse than a mere brute. He was going to show them that he was a renegade, a complete maverick with no allegiance to history besides a tenuous genetic link exemplified in the scaling of his body.
Leaning against the bathing room wall, Archon watched the woman prepare his bath with more interest than he’d taken in any of the forced festivities below. She paid him little mind, focusing on the task at hand, donning thick gloves and picking up great big pitchers of acid which she carried across to the gently steaming bath.
When it was ready, he stepped into it and sank into the hot, sparkling water. The acid really worked nicely with the water, reacting with little mineral deposits to hiss and spit and generally chemically beat the hell out of his skin.
The bath maid remained close, in case he needed anything topped up. She averted her gaze from him, and allowed him the closest thing to privacy anybody in the castle had allowed him since his coronation.
“Anna.” He called her name. She was probably surprised that he knew her name, having only been in the royal household himself a short time, but Archon paid more attention than others gave him credit for. That was the only reason he was alive.
“Yes, your majesty?”
Archon ran his eyes over her soft but sturdy body, clad in a gray dress which was designed to make her look deliberately unremarkable. It was not flattering. It was not unflattering. It just… was. Archon was fairly certain that if Brimsley could have made the staff literally invisible, he would have.
“What species are you?”
“Human, your highness.”
That term sounded familiar. “Human. Is that a kind of Martian?”
“We’re often confused with Martians. But we come from a different planet, sire.”
“How old are you?”
“I will be sixty-four in the coming weeks.”
“Too old to reproduce, then.”
“Too old,” the wash maid agreed.
“They’ve had me looking at every single female they could dredge up from every corner of the kingdom,” Archon sighed, floating his fingers through the water. “All twenty-four tribes of my people, all of the women with their own agendas, trying to politically seduce me.” He let his hand swish through the acidic water. “I’m supposed to find that attractive, Anna. The desperate gyrations of what amount to concubines.”
“You know your own mind, sire,” Anna said, bustling about for a fresh bottle of hydrochloric acid. “You’ll know your mate when you meet her.”
“That I do. Why is it that a wash maid understands that which thirty generals, forty advisors, and endless lackeys do not?”
“I have a simpler life. Less to gain, less to loose,” Anna replied. “Do you want a towel?”
“No, thank you. I’ll drip dry.”
Archon rose from the bath, gently dripping acid from his massive musculature. It dissolved various parts of the flooring not worthy of bearing the weight of the king, creating a scarred and pocked rocky surface which served to exfoliate the royal feet.
In Archon’s father’s time, baths had been taken with water and soap in rooms sealed ceramic tiles. Archon had that all ripped out. Even if they were on a warship larger than most planets, there was no need to lose contact with the old ways. Acid baths, stone tubs, the gentle fumes of reactive material released to be inhaled into the lungs. It was all part of the experience of proper existence as far as Archon was concerned.