Goat Foot and the Faraway King
The alaleishos know the difference between what changes and what remains. They know the days flow one after another without great breaks in the rhythm, gentle as waves in the sand, but that sometimes, things happen. Surprises. Strange things, unexpected, that can disrupt the old story.
It might come to pass, for example, that an unforeseen proposal comes our way.
This happens to Goat Foot one afternoon, when she wakes up from a nap and learns a messenger is approaching on an albino camel.
Even from afar, she can tell the animal is like no other of its species, with a rabbit’s violet eyes and a stoat’s silky coat.
Its hooves, wide and soft as slippers, raise great dust clouds along the path.
The rider, worn by thirst and fatigue, is a messenger from a distant king.
He leads a tied donkey bearing a chest full of gifts for the crowned sovereign of these lands and peoples, the queen known as the Black Lion of the Desert.
“Tell that messenger I’m neither a black lion nor a queen, nor anything like it. If that’s what he’s looking for, let him go to Mamlakat Aldam, my lady mother’s Red Palace, thirty-two days’ travel from here. She’s the true lion, escaped from the cage and everything.”
Goat Foot spurns gifts and promises. Let no one try to impress her with white camels and other rarities.
She’s satisfied with what she has and doesn’t want anything more.
Far from the pampering and cruelties of her own mother’s royal court, she’s not about to get entangled with delegations and offerings from kings in other lands.
Following these instructions, the messenger arrives in Mamlakat Aldam, knocks on the gloomy palace’s doors, and fulfills his mission of delivering the chest along with a message: The great Solomon, also known as Suleiman, Chief of the Hills and magnificent monarch of a wealthy faraway realm, asks for the hand of Princess Goat Foot.
The guards take the chest and make him wait outside. After traveling a vast labyrinth of halls and rooms, they kneel before the Maiden’s throne and give her both the present and the message.
“Who says he wants my daughter’s hand?” she asks suspiciously, or perhaps with jealousy.
“A king by the name of Solomon, or Suleiman.”
“Hmmm . . . and the messenger . . . is he impressive-looking?”
“To tell you the truth, no. He’s ragged and battered after such a long voyage across the deserts.”
“If he comes from such a rich kingdom, he should at least flaunt a golden shield and silver spear. Ragged and battered? I’m not convinced, not one bit.
Let him return the way he came, and let him understand that here we distrust all foreigners, and, also, that around here there is no marriageable princess.
Tell him he can leave the gift, it’s not worth his carrying such a heavy thing the whole way back. ”
After confiscating the chest, the Maiden orders the locks broken and the lid opened in her presence.
If it’s true that it comes from a great king, it must contain gold and precious jewels or some other kind of unimaginable riches, so unique they wouldn’t yet have a known name.
Her disappointment is great when she sees the chest contains only old, moldy rolls of skins, entirely scratched up with scribbled lines.
“Pure trash,” says the Maiden, staring with disgust.
She won’t even touch it, and orders it thrown into the palace garbage.
From such a stingy gift she infers that the sender, some guy called Solomon or Suleiman, must be a simple shepherd king, the kind that lives off rancid cheese, onions, and turnips, and whose whole army consists of a cluster of bellowing men armed with sticks, whose riches consist of a few flocks of placid sheep, and who wears a sad ring of laurels for a crown and a ram’s hide for a mantle.
In fact, his own messenger refers to that Solomon as Chief of the Hills.
Chief of which hills? It sounds pretty insignificant.
“Unlucky is the man who asks for my daughter’s hand,” she says scornfully, but after that first disappointment, an idea lights up her gaze.
She suddenly sees that an opportunity presented itself on that albino camel’s back, not in the chest with its pathetic gifts, but in the messenger’s mouth and the proposal of which he spoke.
“Curses haven’t managed to destroy Goat Foot for me,” she muses aloud, “but perhaps false blessings will.”
The Maiden puts out feelers through her spies.
She learns that Jerusalem, the city where Solomon sits on his throne, is little more than a village without aqueducts, bridges, or great works of architecture, and that instead of public buildings it’s crammed with rickety houses with dirt floors.
Its residents eat with their hands or, in the best of cases, with sticks for spoons.
So some shabby monarch wants to marry Goat Foot?
An insignificant king from some remote shepherds’ land?
All the better. The more awful the suitor, the humbler his origins, the better and better it is.
Marry Goat Foot? Why not. That poor devil trying to court her could be the right husband for her savage daughter; they’d be made for each other.
If he were to take her far away . . . the Maiden daydreams, already seeing herself getting her hands on the rich goods and businesses Goat Foot would have to leave behind.
The queen’s informers appear to her again, with new information to shore up her plan. It’s been learned that Solomon, the king of Jerusalem, already has seven wives and a harem of thirty beautiful concubines.
“All the better,” the Maiden repeats, licking her lips.
“Goat Foot will occupy the unfavorable place of eighth wife. She’ll have to share power with the other seven, and share the man’s bed with the other thirty, a thankless and exhausting job, enough to take her down a notch, drain her strength, and keep her far away forever.
“Call Goat Foot!” she orders. “Have that scruffy woman come to me immediately.”
In the sewer, down in the detritus, lies the chest with its rejected gifts: priceless rolls of prophetic wisdom, immensely rare texts, treasures of future codicology.
Which prove once again that the devil is in the details: The Maiden wasn’t one to appreciate such a present, but if it had arrived in Goat Foot’s hands, this would have been a much shorter story, because she, in her wonder, would have wanted to immediately meet the generous sender of such manuscripts, so he could initiate her in their meanings.
Solomon, king of the Jews, is a seasoned reader and owns a magnificent library from which he chose these incredibly special rolls to please a young lion like Goat Foot.
He’s more interested in her than others because he’s heard of her fame for having a good mind, reading avidly in several languages, and descending from the erudite female dynasty known as the pédauques.
“Can’t you hear me?” the Maiden’s icy voice rings out. “I’ve told you to call Goat Foot! Have her appear before me right now!”