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Fiction Bedtime Christmas

King Delbert III was a good king…his subjects were happy and he treated them very fairly, for a King. The Princes of the realm, the Earls, the Squires, most of the Dukes enjoyed going hunting with him, the lavish parties…the tournaments that were held every Christmas on the dot; and they admired also his beautiful Queen, the flower of her realm, a fresh rose in the spring, a blossom of summer, the radiance of fall and the glowing light of winter. The Kingdom of Excelsior was just about the most cheerful place among all the kingdoms on the continent. He was, as we say, a good king, beloved, and happy.

If he can be claimed to have any fault, and which of us have no faults?...it would be his great passion and you might say compulsion, obsession, with jumping. Never had there been such a King for jumping! He spent hours every day away from his privy council outdoors, doing every kind of jumping imaginable! He did standing jumps, long jumps, stationary jumps and moving jumps. He ran and jumped to get onto his horse. He jumped over barrels, over haystacks, over wagons, over sticks, rivers, mud puddles. At the tournaments, he insisted on every kind of jumping game that you can imagine, and many that you probably never thought of in your life. 

Nobody knows how he started into jumping…that knowledge seemed to have escaped memory. Even his oldest tutors, even his old nurse, did not remember a time when he wasn’t jumping! And so, it may have come natural to him, or maybe his nurse dropped him when he was a baby and he bounced! If anybody who was anybody knew anything about King Delbert, it was that he was a King who loved jumping.

The farmers in the field would look up to see King Delbert jumping over a fence. The lads out fishing on the lake saw him jumping into and out of a boat. The grooms saw him jumping onto and off of a horse. He jumped.

And it was definitely the thing to do, as far as Delbert was concerned, to have every kind of jumping sport at the tournaments. In fact, Delbert created many of the jumping sports that we often see even to this day. There was the standing broad jump, the long jump, the jump out of the pit, the jump over the puddle, the jumping obstacle course and many others. It was a great matter to him that he should win these events, and hence, the more events he created, the more he became involved in the practicing of them, and the less time he spent with being King, and he began to neglect some of his duties to a woeful point. But, jump he must.

King Delbert was a monarch with modern ideas, and he did not think it amiss that anyone who claimed to great jumping ability should be at his tournaments, regardless or rank or standing. Even Bobo the Court Jester competed very well in standing jump and over a puddle. But the king played a trick on Bobo after he practiced jumping over one puddle. Prior to the tournament, Delbert had the puddle made bigger. The King sailed over the new puddle (he practiced with the new size) and poor Bobo went down into the mud, much to the amusement of the court and the people. But afterword, Delbert gave a handsome piece of coin to the Jester to atone for the practical joke, and the jester was as silly and as funny that evening at the Great Hall Dinner than ever he had been, and more so!

Delbert and his Queen Carolyn had one son and heir, Prince Christopher. He was raised with all the benefits of a fine education of those days for a Prince…He went to the best schools, became a fair hand with the sword and lance, and learned to dance the courante. But he had no interest much in these things; He was more content to read books, and spent a great amount of time in the Royal Library, where he learned to read and write from the scribes who worked there. He also lost tone because he preferred not to hunt or do games, but instead to study, and learn sciences, mathematics, astronomy. But a jumper he had never been. Maybe he was not dropped by the nurse and bounced. Maybe the ability skipped his generation. He was not a jumper. Oh, he tried, in order to please his Father, but no, he could not jump more than a foot off the ground for all of his trying.

Jumping ability was a matter of great pride to the King, and a wonder to the people. Delbert worried that they would not respect a future king who could not jump. They would not know what to make of him, and even though Prince Christopher was a passing good swordsman and fair at jousting, it was like pulling teeth to convince his son to participate in the Christmas tourneys. Thus, lacking enthusiasm, Christopher never figured very highly in them, although he was a dab hand at feasting...and as for the jumping games? Oh well...

King Delbert was getting on in years. The result was that, as much as he practiced, his jumps had become a little shorter, his puddles a little smaller, the obstacles a little lower, the distances not as long. Even so, the King would win, but he was not such a fool as to think that the younger, stronger jumpers could not have beaten him, had they tried not to lose to him, because after all, he was the King. He knew that the charade could not go on much longer, and he wanted desperately that his young son should learn to be every bit the jumper that Delbert had been. So he put Prince Christopher through a program of training, in order to bring out the jumper that Delbert felt sure was dormant inside of his son.

Years ago, the King heard that if someone stood barefoot inside a barrel full of ants, and the ants crawled on his feet and legs, that person would be able to suddenly jump away from the ants and higher than ever he could before. Into the barrel Prince Christopher must go, and the ants crawled all over his feet and legs…but it did not improve his jump. It only gave him sore legs and feet from being bitten all over by ants.

After he recovered from the bites, Christopher tried something else Delbert wanted him to do. Delbert believed that if someone were confronted by a speedy river rushing in a torrent to a waterfall, then great fear would make the person jump the river easily. So Delbert had a large enclosure fenced in with only one opening, at the river. Into that enclosure he put Bruno, the biggest, meanest, man hating bull on the King’s lands…and also Christopher. The idea was that when the bull began to chase Christopher, the gate by the river would be swung open and fear of being gored by Bruno would impel the Prince into jumping the river to escape. You might not think that such a plan makes sense or would work at all, but two parts of the plan did work: The Prince was frightened and was chased, raced in fear for the gate the keeper opened the gate for the Prince to jump the river. But he did not jump…he sort of skip- hopped, because he was also afraid of torrential water running to a big waterfall. Of course he tripped then and fell into the river and was whisked, sputtering and flailing, down the cataracts toward the falls, only saving himself at the last minute by grasping a branch which fortunately was stuck there, and stayed there until he could be rescued.

The only thing left that Delbert could think of involved walking over hot coals. The King certainly believed that anyone with hot coals underfoot must jump. Prince Christopher had no interest in walking on or jumping on or over hot coals, but try he must. He ended up getting his feet rather scorched, resulting in considerable application of herbs and aloe to soothe the pain of the burns for about 3 weeks.

The King had a great deal of consternation, and spoke to the Queen thusly: “What can he do? He cannot jump! What will the people think of him? He a passing good swordsman and decent with the lance, but he hates the tourneys, and worst of all is producing an heir that cannot jump, while I am known far and wide as the greatest jumper in the Kingdom. How can he follow me as King?”

Now the Queen to tell you the truth, although she would never let her husband know it, Did not think as highly about Delbert’s jumping ability or the fame that came with it as he did. She was a smart Queen, and also content to be all that she was by nature and nurture…the rose of spring, the blossom of summer, the radiance of fall and the glowing light of winter. She did not admire so much her husband’s jumping as she did his spirit in wanting to strive to be the best. Yet she also was concerned, as were many at court, that Delbert’s obsession with jumping distracted him too much from the work he had to do as King. But that was the nature of his spirit…he was competitive and a striver. Surely the son upon which she doted and whom she loved even as much as she did the King, had his own spirit that would emerge later. And so she counseled the King, “Suffer not from worry dear husband King, for Christopher has his own ways, and will make a fine King.” But Delbert was not convinced, and so he fretted over his son and heir.

Delbert went on until he was at the age where nobody could imagine that he was a great jumper anymore. Now the privy council said, “even he knows that he must stop jumping, now he will do more work”. Not so! Aware that his son would never be a jumper, Delbert started a school for jumpers, and, if such a thing were possible, he spent more time on the school than he did on the jumping itself.

Too long now the council and matters of state were neglected, and suddenly there was an unexpected shortage of money. Lord Caspar had always collected the taxes and revenues and kept the accounts. He was appointed to that lofty position by Delbert’s father, King Emil, long ago, and King Delbert was so wrapped up in his jumping that he just kept him at it. But now that things were not looking so good, the King thought he should try to investigate what was going on…but he didn’t have the skills! He was too busy jumping to be a good steward of the treasury. He was too busy jumping to learn his math, or even the finer points of reading. He asked Queen Carolyn what to do about the situation. “Why not let Christopher look into it! He is smart at his math and he can read very well, and has studied many subjects! It is just the thing for him.” 

King Delbert thought about this. Prince Christopher couldn’t even jump, so how could he help solve this problem? But with age he had grown to distrust his other courtiers, so eventually he agreed to let the Prince investigate, much to the pleasure of his mother; “You won’t regret this my dear husband King,” she assured him. So the King turned the investigation over to Prince Christopher and returned to his jumping school.

Indeed, the King was never to regret this decision, because Prince Christopher very soon discovered that Duke Caspar was, and had been for some time, embezzling large amounts from the treasury, and that indeed he was only weeks away from scurrying off to a far flung province with his ill- gotten gain! In the nick of time, Duke Caspar was caught, much of the money recovered, and he lost all his property and holdings to the Crown to boot. His involuntary and permanent departure from the kingdom was required immediately, thank you very much. Christopher had saved the Kingdom! And he could not jump at all.

Christopher had used all of the skills he learned from his tutor and his studies in the Royal Library to go through the accounts, and figured out how the money had been stolen, and by whom, and the King was overjoyed to learn what his mother knew all along…that Christopher had a lot going for him, and could very well run a Kingdom. So King Delbert retired to enjoy time at the jumping school and to take some vacations with his wife the Queen, and thus began the reign of King Christopher, who never cared to jump but did not mind the odd joust or swordplay, and always kept a wary eye on his retinue and on the books, for the duration of his very successful and happy rein.

The end


December 22, 2020 06:22

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2 comments

Wow!! Very cool story here. Must have taken you a while, but this was so worth it. I usually don't read stories that lack dialogue, but this story was very different from what I usually like so I loved it :) Great work!

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John Carpenter
22:38 Dec 31, 2020

Very nice, I am glad that the story brought enjoyment to you!

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