The King’s Hypnotist: Chapter Three
“Pottery for sell!” shouted a woman’s voice. “Finest pottery on the planet! Just look at the fine details!”
“Busts! We make busts!” roared a fat man as he pounded his table with his big fists. “Fathers, babies, figures from history! Made to your liking!”
“Clayware!” announced a younger male’s voice over the dim. “Cheap, easy to clean, great for that not-too-special somebody you don’t really care about!”
“Did you just hear that?” giggled Tiberius.
“Yes,” said Hector, as he pulled his drunk friend through the crowd of shouting stola merchants, debating gourd traders, busy craftsmen, starving artists, working slaves, fruit vendors, and cheap prostitutes. “Which is why we are heading over to this table.”
The table in question was covered in tourist crap. Tiny models of buildings of import, small busts of the Royal Family, collectable silver spoons, tiny Sphinx dolls, cute teddy bears, pun filled postcards, and out dated tour books.
“Oh, gentlemen!” said the bearded man behind the table. “You have come to the right table! I sell the best stuff, very cheap! Nothing on this table is more than five Deben!”
The man smiled at them with huge teeth. Like the rest of him, from his simple grass sandals to his cotton robe and brown cloak, they were worn but clean. The beard added a touch of honesty and experience to an otherwise boring face. He gestured with a wave of both hands towards his table as if inviting the men to judge this statement with their own eyes.
Tiberius tried to remember how much a Deben was in his head while his Greek friend nodded and fingered one of the items on the table.
“Very nice,” said Hector. “Good likeness of the Queen of the Gods, Mut.”
“Maat?” remarked Tiberius.
“No, Mut,” said Hector with a shake of his head. “Did you do no research before coming here?”
“At least I named an Egyptian Goddess,” murmured Tiberius. “I just wish this place wasn’t so humid.”
“My friend,” said the salesmen with a smile towards Hector, “do I detect an Athenian accent? I did not notice a fellow Greek…where is your beard? And why are you dressed like a native?”
“Beards are out of fashion back home,” said Hector, touching his clean chin with a shrug. “As for the native dress I work at the court. Wigs, jewelry, and cosmetics are the norm. Without my wig the nobles and book keepers would not know if they were to fear me or to order me about. To tell the truth I also feel more comfortable in this heat while wearing these simple linens.”
All three men glanced to the far off horizon where the nearest Moister Collectors flickered and blurred.
The Moister Collectors surrounded all farmlands, cities, rivers and lakes. They stood like giant statues, spaced out every few miles or so, they seemed to make the very air fold and move. Their job was very simple—they sucked up any water trying to escape the populated areas and returned it, via pipes, back to the farms, gardens, houses and public foundations. Not a drop was allowed to escape outside the borders of the cultivated landscape of the Kingdom.
Outside this giant fence of stone and machinery was nothing but death and sand.
All three men seemed to shudder and then everything went back to normal as Tiberius pointed to a tiny statue on the table and asked, “What in the underworld is that?”
“A three humped camel,” said the Greek vendor with a smile as he stroked his graying beard. His eyes seemed to develop even more wrinkles as he added, sounding somewhat amused, “They are said to live outside the barriers.”
“What silly nonsense!” exclaimed Tiberius, almost tipping over his own feet in his eagerness to respond to the man’s wild statement. “You have got to be joking me?”
“Oh no,” said the older man as he picked one up to display the three humps, “they have become the mascot of the city. Soon you will find them everywhere!”
“What?” said Hector, looking shocked, “three humped camels?”
“No, the statues.”
“Oh,” said both friends.
“How much?” asked Tiberius after a few seconds of silence.
The Greek merchant smiled, flashing two fingers, and added, “And if you buy four I give you another free!”
After Hector paid for the four statues of non-existent camels, getting another free, they returned to the litter.
“Now a bath,” said Tiberius as he checked to make sure he was been given the correct change.
“Yes,” said Hector as he folded up the ladder, stomped on the floor and shouts, “BATH!”
Hector adjusted his wig and sighed. “I wish they used something else to show rank and importance. Rings. Badges. Feathers. Why wigs?”
“Did he give me the correct change or not?” said Tiberius, thrusting his palms full of coins towards Hector and derailing his chain of complaints.
“Can’t you count?” demanded his friend with a frown after checking his eye make up in a tiny mirror.
“Yes,” said Tiberius with a shrug. “But I was using Denarii and Drachmas. So I don’t know how much I just paid.”
“You Romans are crazy,” said Hector tapping the side of his head with a finger.
“Shut up,” snapped Tiberius while putting the coins away. “It’s not like I have the exchange rate burned into my memory. As I have said before, it is hot, it smells, I don’t like going outside on this planet. At least I‘m not the one dressed up like a cheap whore.”
“What happened to the orgy going student and room mate I knew in Athens?” said Hector, almost with a whisper, as he shook his head in sorrow. “He would wear anything or nothing at all, while dancing on the table, drinking wine with one hand and playing the flute with the other.”
“If I remember right,” said Tiberius with a frown, “a certain room mate kept stealing my girlfriends and drinking up my wine money.”
“Oh yes,” said Hector with a grin.
The public bath house had been copied from the Roman style and, according to Tiberius, was therefore superior to any other bathhouse in the universe.
After placing their clothing into lockers, each received a bucket which held some washcloths, bottles of perfumed oil, and a strigil. Two female slaves escorted them to a private room which was full of steam and helped them slip into the small pool in the middle.
“Ahhhh,” sighed Hector as the girls joined them and started to rub the oil over their skin.
Tiberius smiled as his attendant’s hands rubbed the oil into his skin and then, checking to make sure there was no nicks in the metal, started to scrape the oil off with the strigil, along with all the dirt that had been trapped along with it.
Many cultures, on some of the fringe planet, used soap. And there was nothing wrong with that. However, Tiberius preferred the use of the strigil—it made him feel cleaner in the end.
The girls used the buckets to carefully pour hot water over the men’s shoulders, arms and head, removing the last of the oil. Then they repeated the progress again.
“Nothing like a civilized bath to make you feel alive,” mumbled Hector, in danger of falling asleep.
“Yes,” grinned Tiberius who was far from falling asleep. He did something under the water to make his slave girl whimper.
Hector enjoyed having his body cleaned before being escorted to the first pool of hot water. Tiberius didn’t get as far. He decided to have some fun with the girl. After all the slave’s services were already paid for.
So as Hector was moved from pool to pool, from hot to warm to cold, then got a wonderful massage from a huge, but skilled, male slave Tiberius had sex with his bath escort.
At first, of course, he had foreplay. Foreplay between a free man and a female slave is, mostly, lots of pinching, forcing the girl to pose and expose herself, and then bending her over to enter her from behind like she was a horse.
Course, she sobbed some, let off a few shouts of pain, and pretended not to like it, but Tiberius was a Roman male from a rich family. He assumed all women, and some men, wanted him. His young male ego was backed up by over two thousand years of Roman dominance over man, beast, and nature.
According to the laws there was no such thing as rape of a slave. In the eyes of society they were lower than animals. They were chairs, rugs, disposable plastic cups. Lower than horses, lower than pets, lower than computers that controlled a building’s climate. So even if he decided to pull back his veil of arrogance and stare at the naked truth that this was really rape, sex forced onto a woman who saw herself as a victim of his advances, he would have kept going. Like the noise a pig made when its throat was slit by a butcher the pain of slavery had become some kind of background sound modern people ignored to keep their souls clean.
So in the end Hector came out nice and clean, his skin perfumed and his hair combed. Tiberius came out with a big smile, messy hair, his legs dripping water, and his toga stained.
“Well,” said the Roman with a slap on his friend’s back. “I have plots to carry out!”
“But you need to come to my place for dinner!”
“Maybe another day,” said Tiberius with a shake of his head. “I need to see the King. Anyway, the cooks here use too many dates.”
“I have a proper Greek cook,” responded Hector as he unfolded the ladder from the litter.
“They use too much garlic,” commented Tiberius as he stepped up into the litter. “Just take me to the Palace. I need to talk to the King.”
“OK,” said the Greek as he followed his friend into the shadow of the litter’s interior. “But if you get your head put on a pole, don’t come blame me.”
His Highness, King Kemet, was in his public throne room. The blue one. He had over three dozen of them and decided on which one to use based on his daily horoscope.
He had the normal circle of noble kiss ups, military yes men, groveling lobbyists, whining wives, inbred princes, underdressed princesses, and even a few jesters.
So it was pretty easy to get through the crowd to the King. The reason for that was the King was trying to get away from the Royal Court, which he thought of as a Royal Pain in the Royal Ass, so latching onto Tiberius gave him an excuse to switch to Latin. He liked to use Latin because the court, as well as much of the planet, used Greek as the basic language. He SAID he was trying to learn the Roman language but really he wanted to keep his family guessing and wanted SOME privacy from the ears of the court.
“Tiberius!” said the King of the Nile. “Tiberius! My friend, I was just talking to you to one of my daughters. Which one was it…well, anyway. She told me this wonderful idea of using the device to build up her merits and decrease her flaws.”
“Yes, sire,” said Tiberius as he bowed and added, “I just need your permission.”
“Yes, of course you have it,” said the King with a gesture of both hands. “All of it. Educate them all!”
“All?” said Tiberius a tad confused.
“Well, just between you and me,” said the King as he pulled Tiberius closer, as if exchanging secret information. Which they were much to the annoyance of the people around them who kept trying to get the King‘s attention.
“Well, you see,” continued Kemet as he shooed at the circle of people trying to listen in on the conversation that they could not understand, “I feel my sons, wives and daughters are always out of control. Buying too much, trying to poison each other, blackmailing their teachers, having sex out of wedlock. You know, the normal problems you have in any family.”
Tiberius nodded and said, “And of course, you have…how many children?”
“Last count…oh dear me,” said the King looking up at the ceiling as if the answer was written on the tiles. “Four hundred?”
“And you wish me to use the Trance Induction Interface to correct their behavior?”
“Yes. I mean, really, I’m running out of food tasters and they chased off that poetry fellow. Oh, what was his name. The German one?”
“I don’t know my Germans,” said Tiberius, his smile kept under control. “When do you wish me to start on the members of the Royal Family, oh Great King of all the lands?”
“Oh,” said Kemet with a smile. “Already thought of that. Right now! I have five of my wives waiting at the Trance Center. Go! They are the worse of the bunch. One tried to stab me during intercourse, the cow. Go! Based on how well they behave tomorrow…well, we’ll see.”
Tiberius bowed and exited the throne room with a huge smile on his face. Things may be easier than he thought.
“Dive deep into yourself like a fish dives deep into a pond,” said the voice as the five women nodded.
“Yes, move into the depths,” continued the voice. “Move down, down, down, into the darkness. Deep into the pond you are safe. All your emotions and worries peel off, like layers of dirt being removed, as you stink deeper into the waters of your own mind.”
The voice stopped for a second for the women to respond to the voice, absorb the suggestions and feel more relaxed, more removed from real life.
“You are calm. You are protected. You have no fears or worries.”
“You are deep in the trance,” said the voice, as soft as a feather, as it guided the women to a deep, and peaceful place, within themselves. “You can not move, you can not speak, unless to answer a question or to follow a suggestion. You are passive, restive, and calm. You have no need to act. You will only listen.”
The women all nodded.
“You will stop being pests to the King,” said the voice to the five women who lounged about on the pillows, each looking ten years younger than they were in real life.
The women nodded and mumbled in agreement. The voice continued.
“You will stop trying to poison each other. You will stop trying to kill the other wives’ offspring. You will allow the King to decide who gets to sit next to him during feasts.”
The voice sounded a tad tired, and a tad annoyed, as it continued, saying, “You will STOP trying to kill nobles who do not agree with you. You will stop trying to kill generals who don’t agree with you. And you will leave the King’s pet monkey ALONE.”
The five women, the first wives the King had selected as the biggest trouble makers, all nodded their heads.
“And one more thing,” said the voice, becoming soft and smooth, and oh so careful, “you love Rome. You like the Roman culture. You delight in Roman art. You think Roman food is the in thing. The Roman Republic is the most powerful nation in the stars and YOU want the planet Nile to become a friend to Rome. Roman civilization is the best. And you want to make Romans your friends.”
There was a long moment of silence as if the voice was letting the information sink in. The women all seemed to absorb the suggestions like the earlier ones, with a nod and a mumbled, “Yes.”
“And Tiberius Tullius is the man who is Rome on this planet. Please him and you please Rome. Make him happy and Rome is happy. If you become Queen you will go to him for all advice and will listen to him above all others.”
The women nodded their heads and mumbled, “Yes.”
“One last thing before you wake up,” said the voice. “You enjoy being put in a trance. You want to be put in a trance at least once a month. And you think it builds character and helps develop good manners, so all your children and anybody else in the Family you have power over should ALSO try the treatments.”
There were five nods and five mumbled replies.
“You will wake up slowly,” said the voice happily, “but also you will wake up with a clear mind. To behave. To obey. To be loyal. To be good wives.”