Let's hope it was a closed casket ceremony
1679
Bayern
Royal Palace
“Herr Heinz,” called Lord Augustus IV, from his private chambers. He was glowing, as he had been for three years. His companion was basking in this glow, glowing herself but in a figurative sense, as she had been for about twenty minutes now. But it was time for him to get back to work.
The Lord of the Gluttonic Knights and Regent of Bavaria emerged from his room in a robe while yet another admiring young maiden made a discreet exit. Though this halo of illumination was inconvenient at times, it certainly had fringe benefits. It was good to be the Regent.
Duncan Heinz, (Augustus had forgotten which generation, there had been so many), was completing arrangements for the march eastward. It had been almost 350 years since mad King Ernst first established the Order of Gluttonic Knights, but now Augustus had to stop and admire the past king’s brilliance in what had seemed like pure folly.
“If you just give everyone the same name,” Augustus IV realized, thinking back to the king’s decision to knight all of the leaders of this order as “Augustus” regardless of their real name, “then it really doesn’t matter who they are, they still respond. Pretty handy trick when you tend to outlive your servants.”
That gem of insight, however, led to the more pessimistic realization that, as King Ernst surely could not have been expecting to live for centuries that he must have estimated the average combat life span of those leading his holy quest to be very short indeed.
“Hmm, or maybe the old bugger was just mad,” the Regent concluded.
But kings had come and gone and Lord Augustus IV was now only decades away, he predicted, from achieving the ultimate goal of his Order, conquest of Far Cathay. Yes a few decades might seem like an imminent victory, but having been on this earth as long as he had, Augustus had learned to take the long-term view.
However he had calculated everything precisely. At his current rate of conquest, even if the government of China stabilized itself, it was only a matter of time before China’s ultimate fall. It was inevitable. Bavaria’s manpower and superior combat techniques were unstoppable. The Blintz-kreig was feared across Asia. Most of that far continent was best with chaos and rebellion. Panic and bowel-shaking terror had paralyzed all resistance in the interior, or the area Augustus himself referred to as the “in-continent”. The troops movements, declarations of war and peace negotiations were already planned. Victory was assured. It was based on actual math.
Now was the time for him to finally head to the East. Sir Connery had arrived back from the Americas and had already led a contingent of men to Astrakhan to prepare for the coming invasion and to investigate reports of a lone warrior, also illuminated it was said, wrecking havoc along the border with the Ottoman Empire.
“Sir, I’m afraid we must abandon all hope,” said the Regent’s advisor Duncan Heinz, (Duncan Heinz V probably, though the scholars seem to be unsure themselves) pulling Augustus back from his plot-convenient review of the military situation. “It appears that our beloved monarch King Ferdinand Maria is lost!”
“Who?” asked the Regent.
“You know, sir, the king,” answered the minister.
“Sorry, not ringing a bell. Fat man? Bad odor?”
“No sir, average weight. Well, average for a Bavarian. Austrian born? Kind of, how shall I say this, delicate in his manners? You placed him in charge of, er, that is to say, you directed the king’s interest into colonial affairs. He was working his Herr Meier to colonize Siberia and, well, our best reports suggest that he was eaten by a wayward polar bear migrating south toward Tibet. However he had succeeded in establishing new trading outposts in Zima, Irkutsk, and Tannuloa.”
“Oh him? A bit swishy, right? Yeah I do remember him,” Augustus announced once everything clicked, “A polar bear you say? Near Tibet?”
“Well actually sir, the accounts are a bit sketchy,” came the reply, “There are some claims that he was, in fact, trampled by a herd of snow cows and badly wounded, which is why we was weakened and his blood attracted the polar bear.”
“Snow cows, you say?” Augustus had to think whether there really were snow cows or if that had been simply another brilliantly clever marketing ploy to sell Brahman steer from their Mughal lands at a premium price through out Europe. Then it occurred to him that there might have been some real snow cows, but that didn’t stop the marketing of the Brahmans under that name so long as some legal mumbo jumbo and an asterisk was included on the packaging. “But aren’t snow cows rather docile? And, barring that, aren’t they tremendously slow?”
“Well, if you want to far enough back, sir, there was another incident which wasn’t directly tied to his cause of death, but was probably a contributing factor. You see, an aide to the King discovered the infected bite of a snow tick, and while the boreal parasite was removed, the Ural Mountain Fever spread through the king, causing delusions, vertigo, and a loss of motor skills. There was really no way for him to avoid the stampede,” explained the Regent’s advisor.
“So this was, in fact, the result of the bite of a snow tick, you say?” probed Augustus, a bit skeptical.
“”Well, to say it was the result of might be a bit strong,” Duncan Heinz offered, “but you see the king was exposed to snow ticks after a rather scandalous encounter with Siberian Yetis, more specifically a female of the species which was put off when he . . .”
Augustus quickly changed the topic.
“Ferdinand Maria, eh? Real ball-buster of a sister, too. Katrina Maria, right? Gott in Himmel, you don’t suppose she’s the queen now, do you?”
“No sire, though she is contesting this and trying to produce a child heir for her brother we believe succession will pass next to Duke Maximilian II Emmanuel,” Heinz explained.
Augustus paused to consider this: though he pretty much ruled Bavaria at his whim through the broad powers granted to him as Regent, the wrong king could make decision making rather difficult and be an obstacle to the ultimate, and imminent, completion of the Holy Quest of the Gluttonic Knights. And that would be a damned shame.
However, the Regent had actually heard of this Duke before. He was a military man himself who eschewed the Knights for the king’s royal guard - thereby ensuring a more rapid rise in rank based on privilege rather than the time honored tests of mettle, courage, and flatulence which guaranteed advancement among the Gluttonic Knights. However he had proven himself confident and could actually, Augustus predicted, be a pretty good king.
The Lord of the Knights took the lead in this charm-offensive, and sought out to meet Duke Maximilian Emmanuel himself, prior to his coronation, to win him over to the true cause. The Duke, as it turned out, was quite an engaging fellow. He had an unusual interest and passion for all things French, which was quite unexpected in a German, but Lord Augustus was able to take advantage of this by relying on his past experience with L’Eminence Grise. A few tales retold that he had learned from the Gallic Ghost and the Duke was prepared to follow the Regent across the Rubicon, which actually wasn’t even asking that much when Augustus hoped to be crossing the Yangtze in a few years.
As expected, when the remains of the former king were recovered and, to the satisfaction of most, positively identified from the polar bear stool in which they were discovered, Duke Maximilian II Emmanuel was in fact named King of Bavaria. And he chose to continue to honor the Gluttonic Knights with “the trust put in them by past kings” and let Lord Augustus retain his broad powers as Regent. He would content himself with any military operations against domestic rebels and to continue to build and promote Bavaria dominance of commerce across the globe. He was quite gifted in this, succeeding in pulling in ducats from the most unlikely sources, including his unorthodox success marketing little figurines of the Illuminated Gluttonic Knights with their heads on small springs that bobbed and weaved when they shook. His “Über Explodieren Kopf”
“About-to-Explode-Head” dolls were quite the rage, but they sold better when replaced with the more popular name of “bobble heads”.
Confident the nation was in competent hands with the new king, Lord Augustus assembled the finest escort that could be mustered from the Gluttonic Knights, and ordered the finest sandwich with the finest seasoning which would be mustard for the long trip, and rode south to Astrakhan to join up with his second in command and lead the ultimate death-strike against the Chinese.
