Letters to Cicero - Book 2

Letter 2

Dear Herodotus,

This is a story that was told to me by a travelling Gypsy from Macedonia. He claimed to have heard it from a disgraced member of the Macedonian Royal Family, who recounted this tale to him as he drank himself into a stupor in a bar in Amsterdam.

This is the true story of Sir King Kissalot, the unacknowledged brother of Alexander the Great.

“Sir King Kissalot?” You ask, somewhat doubting my story already.

“Why yes,” I reply, “That was his name. First name Sir, and his mother's family name was King.

The Kissalot part is what the story is about.

The story begins with a harp. You see Alexander the Great was a very skilful harp player as a young man, so much so that his father Philip, was ashamed of him, certain that such a useless skill would only lead to his degradation as a man, and the disgrace of the whole family. Philip forbade his son Alexander to play the harp, and so the instrument was given to the illegitimate son Sir King.

Sir King was raised in the palace with the Royal Family, but he was regarded as little more than a bothersome insect, and so he was left to his own devices most of the time. Having no one to teach him and no friends at all, he developed skills in many useless arts and crafts such as painting and singing and poetry and hat making and dancing. Dancing and harp playing were considered the worst of his vices, and his whole family were ashamed of him for it, so much so that he was only able to dance and play on those rare occasions when he was permitted to leave the Palace altogether. For such was his family's shame felt in his own heart, that he could not bear to dance or play in the same home as they, for fear that his disgusting vices would make them sick, or even infect them.

So on those occasions when Sir was out amongst the people, he discovered that he possessed yet another set of useless skills that his own family were seemingly unaware of. Sir was exceedingly handsome, perhaps the most perfect example of a man born in the world until that time, and his lips were of such a shape and colour as to make them irresistible to ladies of every class and station. So Sir King earned his nickname, Kissalot.

At first his talent was delightfully entertaining, but soon it became as troublesome as all his other skills, for the men of the town would become violent towards him as soon as they saw him, each man already suspecting his own wife of having locked lips with the bastard prince. So it was that Sir King was forced to live abroad and to hide his face from everyone, living in exile for many, many years in a lonely castle on the coast. Here he devoted his time to music and dance and hat making and all the other useless things which it delighted him to do. With no one to praise or shame him, however, he quickly lost the urge to create, and so, suffering from the boredom and depression resultant of his inactivity, he ventured into town to find some trouble to get into.

When a man goes looking for trouble, it has a way of finding him first.

Her name was Esmerelda the Hag Faced Elephant Woman, and she was not so ugly as her name suggested, but rather was just from a part of the world where people looked a little different in terms of skin colour and and eye shape...and facial tattoos. Her name wasn't really Esmerelda, that was just what the people called her, she was really Ninshubar and she had a magical power that was as much trouble as it was a blessing. Whenever anyone was around her, they were able to remember everything from their whole life, perfectly.

This generally caused in others an incurable madness, sometimes violent, sometimes catatonic. So Ninshubar the Woman From a Foreign Land, and Sir King Kissalot became good friends. For Sir King had another talent that only revealed itself when he was able to remember everything from his whole life.

Sir King Kissalot remembered that he didn't give a shit what other people thought of him.

You see, he had been away from his family for so long that he had forgotten to be ashamed of his dancing and singing and hat making, but when he met Ninshubar, he remembered that he had forgotten to be ashamed of himself. So, knowing everything he had ever done, Sir King chose to forget everything about his family. His family who had spurned him and burned him and spat on him and called him horrible names and ignored him and even went so far as to forbid him entirely from ever in his life engaging in flower arranging.

He forgot them all.

Of course, this made Sir King so happy that he wanted to be around Ninshubar all the time. She constantly reminded him to forget about his family and to forget about his past and to never ever give a shit about what other people thought about him. Sir King began again to paint and dance and to play the harp, and for a few years they lived together happily ever after, kissing each other everywhere they did go.

Only, not caring what other people thought of him, turned Sir King Kissalot into an asshole who didn't care about anyone or anything but his own happiness. So after three years of his intolerable, insufferable, smug grin, Ninshubar packed her bags and moved on.

Sir King went back to his castle by the sea, covered his head and tried to forget about Ninshubar.

He remembered his family, and the palace and his brother Alexander, and he missed them. Even though he remembered all the pain they had put him through, even though he remembered that he didn't care what they thought of him, he missed them all the same. So he went home, only when he got there, when he returned to the Palace, he found that his family where not there, for they had all moved away to follow the war, and none of them had returned. Alexander had died of chronic alcoholism by the time he was thirty two, having conquered the greatest empire known to mankind. His father was dead, his mother was dead, and so Sir King Kissalot was the only member of the family line living in the Palace. But nobody cared about him because he was the illegitimate son, so they all left him alone, while in distant lands the empire won by his brother was carved up between his generals, and very important men went on living very important lives, far away.

Sir King lived a long and healthy life after that. He had loves and triumphs and tragedies and failures. He was, as they say, a man. He made hats and songs and dances and poems, and he even arranged flowers, but in the two thousand years from his time until now, nothing is left of his useless life other than this story, told to a gypsy by a disgraced and drunken liar in a tavern in Amsterdam.

Now I've told it to you, so a little bit of him lives on even now.