[Once upon a time in a land not too dissimilar to ours there lived a king.
And he was a good king, in an age when good was something of an unfashionable rarity.
He was very very wise and very very powerful. But he was also very very old. And he realized that for all his great wisdom and his great power he would soon have to leave his kingdom once and for all and make the journey to the outside world of infinite darkness.
And so on the eve of his departure, when his physicians had finished all their head shaking and his wives had rung as many tears from their eyes as they could, he called his son and heir to his side.
“Everything you see is yours to command”, he said, “But be advised: the better slaves are those who still believe they taste some freedom. Play the tyrant but you must inspire love as well as fear.”
Yet the son cared not for his words. And when the corpse had been dispatched with much pomp and fireworks to the darker realms outside the new king resolved to stretch the limits of his authority.
He gathered all the people before him and told them that their every thought must match his thought. No will should exist save his will.
And people being people they agreed. Those that didn’t vanished in the night and their families soon learned to pretend that they had never existed.
But still the king was not content.
So he instructed all the animals in his kingdom that they must now obey his commands.
Horses should bark, dogs should meow, fish should fly from tree to tree exactly as he desired.
And animals being animals they agreed.
Some of the pigs had to be culled but no one minded because they tasted so lip smackingly good. And the cats had to go because no one could tell a cat anything.
But soon the people and the animals lived in perfect harmony. Their lives precise expressions of the whims of their lord.
Every living creature obeyed their king, doing everything that he wanted to the smallest detail, sometimes even before he knew he wanted it.
But still the king was not content.
Living creatures only made up the smallest number of his subjects. So he gave out further orders.
He instructed the waves should crash upon the shore only when he gave the word.
He instructed the wind should not blow but suck.
Time should not run forwards but backwards or sideways.
It took years to persuade them.
Soldiers slashed at the waves until their swords were soaked with wave blood.
Wind and time were locked in the deepest dungeons until, starving, they gave in.
The king ruled the elements.
But still he was not content.
There was one subject that still balked at his power.
How the king hated music. Refusing to be constrained. Refusing to be disciplined.
A small burst of recitative flowering into a fugue without permission. Or a cantata breaking out overnight into a fully fledged oratorio.
“Will no man rid me of these turbulent tunes?”, he cried.
And the militia, now trained to obey his merest impulse, took him at his word.
They seized the music, every last crotchet and minim, every last breve and semibreve, and threw them out of the kingdom.
They threw them in to outside world of infinite darkness and music was banished forever.
At last, the king had his own universe. It was his and no one else’s.
And no one dared point out to him that he had exiled the only means by which he could express it.
You remember the tale of the foolish king? He who so despised music that he banished it from his realm?
His was a very quiet land.
Birds sat silent in the trees, their beaks now stopped fast, their chirping and twittering frozen hard in their throats.
There was no longer a harmony to time. Seconds would race on or trudge forward or simply come to a listless halt.
The waves crashed noiselessly onto the sand, for even within that there had been a trace of music.
There was no rhythm to life anymore.
And the king’s people felt it the worst. They had been slaves, but whilst they still had songs of liberty on their lips they’d been happy slaves.
Some rebelled and were put to the torture, but even the torturers who had once calmed their consciouses with soothing music were unable to bear the awful, glaring, accusing silence.
Anything could be born with music and nothing could be born without it.
And the king would sit on his throne in misery.
He dearly loved his wives but now he heard in their words no love returned. No tune. No melody.
For this he executed them regularly.
The women he loved, their heads rolling from the scaffold soundlessly;
The king himself quite alone weeping for them. All, all quite silent.
One morning the king decided he would pardon music. He drew up a contract, stamped with his own royal seal.
Music was free to return from the outside world of infinite darkness.
And to bear the good news he sent several messengers there, some by hanging, some by stabbing, one or two by slow acting poison.
But none returned and nor did music.
He called upon his sorcerers, his necromancers and those who were trained in the forbidden knowledge of music resurrection.
But it became obvious that the king himself would have to make a personal appeal to his prodigal son.
With court physicians administering and the last of his wives looking on with glee the king was slowly bled, each drop landing in a metal container with a plop that just managed to be wholly tuneless.
And as he wavered between death and life he stepped into the darkness and called out:
“I have been a foolish man. I should have inspired love as well as fear.
Please, let the music play again; all its songs, its symphonies and its sundry core of works. Please. Give my world a reason to live!”
It was seven days and seven nights before the king recovered. And he awoke to a miracle.
Once more birds were trilling in the trees. The clocks chimed and waves roared.
Once more the world had music.
And his favorite wife of all stood over him and smiled; and in the tone of her lilting voice he felt once again that she loved him.
The people were in celebration, singing in the streets whatever tunes would come into their heads.
And they sang until their throats turned red raw, they sang until their arteries burst and gushed, they screamed their new songs of pain.
The king watched in horror as the birds fell dead in the street, as the waves struggled limply and then were drowned by the seas beneath them.
He heard his infant son cry out his last, his face bitten off by a savage lullaby.
The lilting voice of his wife that he had loved so much grinned at him cruelly before wrapping itself around her throat and throttling her silent.
The music raced through the kingdom, sparing none its terrible beauty.
As the bodies of his subjects fell to the ground their death rattles sounded like the rhythm of a perfect drum.
And the music at last came for the king.
“Because we have been to the outside world”, the music replied, “We have seen the infinite darkness and we have learned that we need not only inspire love but fear.”
And with a sound of brass and strings so beautiful it stopped the king’s heart the music swallowed him up whole and became the new and dreadful lord of the entire world.]
