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Kimberly Steele's Snow White, Part 2
Apr. 1st, 2025 12:32 pm
Winter passed mildly and without consequence and the denizens of the kingdom were grateful. All knew how cruel and bitter the northland winters could be, and how easy it was to run out of firewood and to have to mix barley with dust and wood shavings in order to stretch gruel for the rest of the month. No peasants froze to death, nor were they forced to shelter with their animals and children in the castle keep in order to stay warm.
Spring came early and with it, spectacular arrays of bugs, birds, and other animals. Those who live in this era have no concept of how flocks of birds literally blackened the sky upon sudden migration. Fields were so congested with various sorts of butterflies, there was no idiotic notions of catching them with a net — one was too busy stepping through piles of them like autumn drifts of leaves. Beauty was taken for granted in their time just as it is in ours, which is the fate of all beauty until it fades.
The Queen was emerging from her long depression. The King was gladdened from the depths of his soul to see discreet smiles emerge upon her lips whenever he made light of the comings and goings of various dignitaries and their knights. Her quiet moments of joy made his weeks of stultifying diplomacy ever more bearable. Her ladies in waiting, who had been similarly afflicted by the pall of depression for the long years in which the Queen mourned her infertility, shed their cares for gossip and laughter.
As it is often said, a woman catches pregnant just when she least expects it. Maria was gathering hen’s bit in the garden with Elke the cook and main castle maid when she leaned over and let out a tremendous fart. Elke jumped at the loud and sudden sound and this caused Maria to double over with laughter, clutching her belly and rolling on the ground.
“Liebchen, it’s good to see you laugh… but are you all right?” Elke asked in her stout, motherly way. This caused Maria to laugh harder, especially as she knew her basket of hen’s bit had been upturned.
“Oh heavenly Father, it doesn’t smell like roses, does it?”
“More like you ate too much garlic.”
Maria squealed, clutching her sides again and giggling. Birds began to stare at the spectacle before Maria calmed herself.
Elke righted Maria’s basket and picked up the stray herbs as Maria got up from the dirt path.
She brushed herself off, still chuckling.
She brushed herself off, still chuckling.
Elke gave her a knowing look.
“No, I doubt it. I’ve had false alarms before.” said the Queen, brushing a pebble from her cotehardie.
A few months later, Maria’s belly began to swell dramatically in tandem with late summer heat. This, along with the feeling of little feet kicking in Maria’s womb, cemented Elke’s surreptitious springtime prediction. The Queen, at long last, was with child.
The kingdom was alive with celebration. A retinue of jesters came along with the King’s cousins from the West. Summer rains ruined the fox and stag hunts, but the royal court took great delight in the antics of the entertainers, who performed skits and passion plays with plenty of music and dancing.
Though the King’s heart was much lighter because of the Queen’s pregnancy, due to the nature of human life, stress was never far away. On the same morning the actor-musicians departed for their next tour stop, the King paced the great hall, which was empty and clean, its oiled wooden table slightly glowing in the wan morning light.
The Queen looked around the open arch of the doorway, her large belly nearly preceding her face.
“Are you off to the training yards already?”
“Yes. How are you feeling?” He looked down at her abdomen.
“I’m fine. I am thinking you might have given me a son with the way this one kicks. It’s like I have a small horse in there, always running.”
“I will be delighted either way. Though I already have a fast horse.” She chuckled and he smiled. “Is the dispute over Frau Bolger’s cows settled?”
“Yes, but I had to send Heinrich and his sons to build a fence, so they will be enjoying some extra grain and chickens this winter.”
“Good. His sons need to be kept busy. They’re not going to be joining us unless…”
“Is it coming to that?”
“I am afraid so.”
For nearly a century, the King’s ancestors going back to his great-grandfather maintained peace and prosperity in the kingdom, which was a monumental achievement considering the battle-torn nature of those times. They did not maintain peace via pacifism. Johannes’s great-grandad, Eric, conquered the kingdom when it was a band of cannibalistic, incestuous forest people clinging to the riverbank and fishing when they were not dining upon the human flesh of unfortunate passers-by. Eric had mercilessly wiped the area clean of those backward folk in one brutal campaign, burying their bodies beside the fields of what would become his barley and rye fields, leaving no markers except an oak grove that many would not traverse because of its haunted reputation. Johannes’s grandfather, Eric the Second, gave the unruly peoples of the lands surrounding the kingdom two choices: take it or leave it. Those who disagreed and refused to leave were slain, often with his own sword. By the time Johannes I, the King’s father, took the helm, the land was rich and prosperous, with productive farms. Village parents could choose to enroll their children in the local farm school run by the brothers and sisters of the church. The castle was of modest size with a robust stable of knights. Johannes II, the King, was born to a half-Saracen mother who had been bought from a slave ship and served as his father’s concubine. Johannes was third in line to the throne. His wonderful, strong elder brothers went off on a crusade and never returned by the time Johannes was eight years old. He was married to Maria when she was all of fifteen, and via the marriage and the expansion of the kingdom, his humble and somewhat salacious birth circumstances were conveniently swept under the rug. They had been betrothed when he was ten and Maria was two so Johannes II could expand his kingdom to the lands immediately south of the river. In a completely random twist of fate, Johannes and Maria gradually fell deeply in love, which was unusual for most royal landowners.
Johannes had not inherited the taste for battle that had run through the veins of his male ancestors, yet he was utterly ruthless in many aspects. His goal was stewardship of his kingdom’s citizens, not the expansion of empire via ambition and greed. Johannes had become the rare and coveted sort of King that every regular person wishes to have as ruler: he saw and understood his subjects as fellow humans with needs for which he needed to provide. They were not to exist for his glory, for Christ and Christ alone was owed that honor.
He became known as Johannes the Fair, which was partly an homage to his Apollonian appearance, with flaxen hair that grew darker as he aged, and mostly an acknowledgement of his deft straddling of the precarious boundary between war and peace. Johannes did not fight unless you brought the fight to him, and if you did, you would be sorry. His father had seen to it that Johannes was fit to fight a Crusade like his brothers. His knights were put through the same grueling courses that he had been tasked with from the dawn of his puberty. They were taught horsemanship as squires and were trained to survive off the land by the monks as soon as they could speak and write. They were not indulged and coddled like the knights of more gentrified lands. When they feasted, they feasted well, but they did not do it often and their lives were not corrupted with frequent entertainment and debauchery.
Johannes the Fair would have not been half as effective a monarch had he been married to a bad woman. Queen Maria handled the kingdom’s budget and settled its disputes, often calling upon the wisdom of Elke the cook who raised her and who had come with with her and her dowry when she left the Southlands to be married shortly after her first menarche. Though Maria was renowned for her beauty, with dark hair, a high forehead, rosy cheeks, and eyes the color of cornflowers, she was eventually far more admired for her humility and reluctance to use the wealth of her kingdom to feather her queenly nest in gold and jewels.
“Do you need more from the treasury in case there is a battle?” Maria asked the King.
“No, it has not yet come to that. I don’t want rumors to give the nomads the idea that they can get a rise out of me and my men. They still think we are weak from the famine of two seasons ago and that is exactly the way I want it.” He stroked her beautiful, dark hair. “Don’t worry yourself about it, my love. And don’t work too hard managing the lower court. Elke is already angry enough at you for overexerting yourself.”
The King ended up sending his men into a massacre. Many of his best knights were slaughtered defending the border between his country and the lands east of the mountains, past the Great Forest. He and his men fought bravely and with great valor, but the empire to the East was determined to expand and to pillage and rape until their seed was sown all over what would someday be known as the country of Germany. Johannes, sorrowful and bitter, retreated back to the kingdom and began to recruit more fighting men from the edges of his kingdom and even some mercenaries from beyond it.
The birth of Snow White brightened those dark days when Johannes awoke before the crack of dawn to train his troops and consort with his minister of war and second in command, Adelbrecht, also known as the Cold for his icy demeanor. Snow White, although very fond of keeping her mother awake at night with fierce kicks while still unborn, turned into the sweetest, prettiest, most docile baby two parents could possibly wish for. The birth was not easy for Maria, who labored for an entire day and a half, but once it was over, she healed well because of Elke’s competent midwifery, cunning white witchcraft, and extensive knowledge of herbs.
Though in a precarious place, the kingdom was full of happiness like never before. Snow White was an early learner, walking at nine months and forming her first words around the same time. As her mother had once prophesied, she was born with a full head of raven hair and her skin was fair enough to be translucent, with her infant veins visible through her cheeks when she was fresh out of Maria’s womb. Maria was the happiest, proudest mother in the land, cuddling her baby day and night and lavishing her with kisses. Elke loved the baby too, and together Maria and Elke dressed the child in tiny gowns sewn by the loving women of the kingdom and wrapped her in quilts crafted by their daughters. They often brought Snow White into the village square so the villagers and the sellers could meet their future Queen. The little child stared up at the adults and their kids with large, cornflower-blue eyes with uncanny intelligence behind natural grace and sweetness. Everyone in the kingdom loved her.
All was well in the kingdom and it seemed good luck would never run out until one day, the castle was invaded and fortunate times came to an end.
