//------------------------------// // Chapter 27 // Story: The Best of All Possible Worlds // by McPoodle //------------------------------// The Best of All Possible Worlds Chapter 27 “So, Human,” a very stressed Sky Shock asked Voltaire a couple nights later after they had all finished eating, “how have your kind handled revolutions?” The expedition was on the border of Trottingham province. “I don’t think humanity has ever faced a revolution on the scale of your own,” Voltaire replied with uncertainty. “We certainly have faced all number of calamities, both natural and human-caused, but not that particular one.” The griffon shrugged. “I should have known you wouldn’t have an answer for absolutely everything. Nevertheless, I am in the mood for a story. Could you tell us about a human noble who faced overwhelming odds? Because overwhelming odds certainly looks like what we’re facing now.” Sky Shock chose her words with extreme care. She knew full well that the Fates had picked this featherless bird to be an instrument for changes both good and horrible, but she needed change, she desperately needed change, or in a generation the griffons would be extinct—either at their own claws, or else by the will of the Princess for being a threat to Equestria. She only hoped by calling on the human’s fearful powers with such a small audience, that she might be able to in some way shape the results. It also helped that the dweeb had no idea what he was doing half of the time. “I’ve written historical epics about two human kings who faced overwhelming odds,” replied Voltaire cheerily. “Their names were—” “Wait!” interrupted Sky Shock. “Why kings? Don’t you have any good stories about queens? Or princesses? Or countesses, maybe?” “Look, humans have males running things by and large. If it makes you feel any better, you can flip all the genders in your head as I tell the story. Now where was I?” “You wrote epics about two kings,” prompted Cogs. Voltaire nodded. “I’ve written about two epic kings, Carl XII of Sweden, and Henri IV of France. Faced with invasion, King Carl fought off his much-more powerful neighbors to become a sterling example of how to go down fighting. Everything he ever believed in was eventually betrayed, but to the bitter end he was always true to his own, admittedly self-defeating, ideals.” Sky Shock grimaced. “Yeah, I don’t want to hear about King Carl. What about King Henri?” Translator’s Note: It should be noted that griffons can pronounce most human words without any of the difficulties that ponies have. It is curious that nopony has ever bothered to note and investigate this fact, or how a rigid beak could possibly pronounce for example the common Equine letter “M”. “King Henri settled a massive civil war with a minimum of bloodshed,” said Voltaire, “a civil war where he was on the losing side, the side that was massively outnumbered, but also the side that was in the right.” “By a civil war, I take it that you mean that not only the peasantry, but also the nobility was divided?” Sky Shock asked. “That is correct,” the human answered. “That sounds even worse in some ways than my situation,” the Countess said. “Please, tell us this epic of yours.” “I am rather proud of my Henriade,” Voltaire said. “It was my first truly-popular work (so massively pirated that I didn’t make a sou) and, as the first French epic in the poetic style, succeeded in having a major effect on my life.” “It’s how he quit being banished,” said Eveningstar with a grin. “I wish you’d stop using that phrase,” Voltaire sulked, “but yes, I was allowed back into France after the current King of France, King Henri’s great-great-great grandson, expressed his admiration of it. However, since it is a poem, I found it didn’t translate very well into Equine. Let me instead recite an essay about King Henri that I wrote at the same time as the Henriade, as a way of conveying its themes to the English. “Now the civil war was fought over which of two competing organized religions people would live with.” “‘Organized religion’?” asked Morningstar. “Who ever heard of an organized religion?” “Ha!” exclaimed Voltaire. “Perhaps this is the best of all possible worlds! Seriously, though, an organized religion is a thing many humans consider more valuable than life itself.” “So it’s a form of drug addiction?” asked Eveningstar. “Alright, I have two things to say in regards to that question,” Voltaire replied. “First, I’m disappointed you ponies know about drug addiction. Your civilization has officially dropped back out of the ‘best possible’ category. And second, I am not going to touch that analogy of yours with a 39 ½ foot pole. One religion was called ‘Catholic’ and the other ‘Protestant’; the Catholics for all of Europe were led by a single man known as ‘The Pope’, while the Protestants were divided by nationality, with the head of state also heading the religion. Just so you’ll know who to root for, King Henri was a Protestant.” Sky Shock, fully expecting that this story would magically fit into her own life, was already busy trying to analyze it. To this end, she asked, “Which one came first?” “Well the names should make that obvious,” replied Voltaire. “The Catholic faith was supposed to be universal, as that is what ‘catholic’ means, while the Protestant faith was a protest against Catholicism. The Protestants claimed to be pursuing a return to lost ideals dating back to the founding of the Catholic faith, but these in fact were an array of new ideas.” Sky Shock nodded. For Griffons, then, Catholics were the Poniests, established by Duke Thunderwing and centrally led by the royal family, and the Protestants were the Nativists, newly organized under a half-dozen universities and claiming to represent the pre-Thunderwing social order, despite the fact that there were no Griffish documents surviving older than Thunderwing’s naming ceremony. The Nativists eventually became the intellectual backbone of the Revolution. But wait, Sky Shock thought to herself. Voltaire said that the Protestants were the heroes and the side that eventually won. That can’t be right! Maybe the Catholics are Nativists, since Nativism is theoretically thousands of years older than Ponyism… “Would you like me to continue?” Voltaire asked, breaking into the griffon’s reverie. “Oh! Yes, go on,” Sky Shock said, deciding to hold back her analysis until she had heard some more. “Henri the Great, King of France,” said Voltaire, “was born in the Equestrian Year 6445, in a small town near the southern border of that country. His father...” At this point, Voltaire metaphorically dived head-first into a thicket of human names, families and genealogies, from which it appeared there would be no escape for anybody not fortunate enough to have grown up learning this stuff in childhood. What Sky Shock was eventually able to decipher was that there was this Valois dynasty that had been ruling the land of France for a while, but it was in trouble because a king died young and left only underage children to succeed him, children who kept dying mysteriously before they had the chance to give birth to heirs of their own. Brother succeeded brother, and the number of brothers left was running out. In the wake of this political vacuum, a cruel family called the Guises instituted a reign of terror. Because they justified their horrible actions behind the cloak of the Catholic religion, the Guise’s enemies soon converted to Protestantism. The future hero Henri was a member of one of these Protestant families, the Bourbons, who although poor were related closely enough to the Valois to be their possible successors. In Sky Shock’s estimation (and the fact that human males were equivalent to griffon females according to Voltaire), that meant that Henri was meant to represent herself. Well, either Henri or his father, who Voltaire derided as worthless because he kept changing his religion back and forth, and ended up turning Catholic at the time when the Protestant minority needed him the most. Sky Shock really hoped that Voltaire wasn’t saying that she was Henri’s father, and was fated to live as pathetic a life as he described. On the other claw, as she was reluctantly forced to admit, her mother was notorious for changing her position between the Poniest and Nativist positions more than once. But the critical difference was that Sky Shock’s family had all been academics, and their opinions had no effect on the duchy as a whole. This identification made all the more sense given that Henri’s mother (and therefore Sky Shock’s father) was a steadfast Protestant leader respected by her own side, and feared by the Guises. The animosity of the two sides in Voltaire’s story soon rose into the horror of civil war, a war that the monarchy was powerless to stop. This was a murky part of griffon history that Voltaire was unknowingly referring to, one noted for conspiracy and counter-conspiracy. Given the low status of her family at the time, Sky Shock found herself learning more about it from Voltaire’s story than she ever managed to piece together herself, and of course far more than than the rubbish peddled to the ponies and others as “the truth”. In particular, the story revealed the motivations behind the arrest of Sky Shock’s father for the crime of treason in 6749. It had happened during Griffonia’s entrance into the Diamond Dog War of Independence, and the so-called “treason” was the fact that he was a Nativist, which could be twisted into the belief that griffons were better off when they were under the influence of the dragons. Sky Shock’s mother had the written testimony of the father’s military service to prove his innocence, but she was tricked into handing it over to the prosecutor, Random Tally, who arranged for it to be replaced by a false court martial for abandoning his post. Things could have gotten really serious, except at that exact moment… “It seemed certain that he would be executed,” said Voltaire, referring to the human in jeopardy in his own account, “but at this exact moment the King died. Everyone at the time suspected poison, but this was unlikely, as only the saintly Catherine de’ Medici stood to gain by the death of her own son and his replacement by a younger brother who was much easier to control.” Despite her lack of knowledge of the inner workings of the Thunderwing clan, Sky Shock instantly realized the griffon counterpart to Catherine de’ Medici: Duke Cumulous, father of both Praiseworthy VII and Praiseworthy VIII. The crime that the human was implying Catherine was guilty of was exactly the same as the one that the Red Duke was suspected of. But that didn’t mean that all parts of Voltaire’s story made sense to the griffon countess. She had no idea who the Guises corresponded to, and the two leaders of the Bourbon family while Henri was growing up corresponded to no griffons that she could identify. (I mean, Griffonia was a landlocked country, so how could “Admiral Coligny” match up to anyffony?) By the death of her son, the true reins of power in France had been seized by Catherine de’ Medici, the mother of all these child kings. In the face of an unending civil war, the Queen Mother saw the power of the crown evaporating, and determined that the only way to save it was to ensure that the two sides decimate each other and then, when neither was powerful enough to dominate her, she would arrange for one side to be utterly annihilated. Which side was chosen to meet this fate was totally unimportant to her. By her manipulations and a share of luck, Catherine de’ Medici succeeded in seeing most of the leaders of the two sides fall in battle against each other. The leader of the Guises had been assassinated by an agent she had inflamed into action, and by naming the Bourbon leader in his dying breath, he set the remaining Guises into a blood feud against Admiral Coligny and his clan that wonderfully advanced her plans. At this moment, she shared her plans with the King and his brother (the last of the Valois), and they agreed eagerly. A false peace was proclaimed, to be sealed by the marriage of Henri with a Valois princess. For Henri was now a rising star of the Bourbons, most of the former leaders and his father having died. The marriage was celebrated, Henri’s intimidating mother died under mysterious circumstances, and all of the remaining leaders of the Protestants had gathered in Paris to celebrate their triumph. “At last,” Voltaire narrated breathlessly, “one night (which was the Eve of St. Bartholomew, in late Summer of 6484) at midnight, the signal is given. All the houses of the Protestants are forced open at once; the Admiral Coligny, alarmed by the uproar, rushes out of bed; a troop of assassins rush into his chamber; their chief thrusts his sword into the Admiral’s breast, and back-hands him in the face like a common thief. “The young Duke of Guise is at the foot of Coligny’s house, waiting for the assassination. He cries aloud, ‘Is it done?’ “Immediately the assassins threw down the still-living body out of the window. Coligny fell, and expired at the feet of Guise; the young man trampled upon him, crying ‘Revenge! Revenge!’ over and over again. “Meanwhile all the friends of Coligny are assaulted throughout Paris; men, women, and children are promiscuously slaughtered; every street is strewn with expiring bodies. Some priests are seen holding up their holy symbol in one hand, and a sword in the other, running at the head of the murderers, and encouraging them in the name of God, to spare neither relations nor friends. In the palace, Henri’s wife, the King’s sister, appeals in vain for mercy, as soldiers slew her husband’s Protestant servants around her, so that her bare feet are covered with their blood. “Some victims try to swim across the river that runs through the city. The King, seeing this from the balcony of the palace, picks up a projectile weapon and tries to kill a few of them himself. Catherine de’ Medici, undisturbed and serene in the midst of the slaughter, looks down from another balcony, encourages the assassins with her words, and laughs at the dying groans of the murdered. “The court reeking with the blood of the nation, tried some days after to palliate such a crime with the forms of law. They justified the massacres with a calumny; they imputed to the Admiral, a conspiracy which nobody believed. Parlement was ordered to proceed against the memory of Coligny, his dead body was hanged in chains at the gallows. The King himself went to see this loathsome spectacle, and as one of his courtiers advised him to retire, and complained of the stench of the corpse, the King answered, ‘A dead enemy smells sweet.’” “Voltaire, Voltaire!” interrupted Eveningstar. She had been trying to shout the human down for some time now. Voltaire stopped and looked around him. All of his listeners shared looks of the utmost horror at what they were hearing. “Are humans always this abominable?” asked Pensive Thought. “Oh no, these sort of moments tend to stand out,” explained Voltaire, waving a hand dismissively. “It’s just that we have a sort of perverse fascination for them.” “I can tell,” said Morningstar in disgust. “You should see the look of your face right now. Lady Sky Shock, if you are still interested in hearing the rest of this sordid tale, could we perhaps have a night or two to recover from this first part?” The Countess nodded mutely, thinking only of the images in her head of the Night of Unsheathed Claws. She was absent from the Aerie when it happened, but afterwards she was put in charge of the Bakery, which meant she was one of the very few that knew the fate of the half of the city’s population that disappeared that night. It was the beginning of her own personal nightmare, and here was Voltaire to provide even more of the unwanted details. Noffony dared to question Duke Cumulous after that night, and he convinced himself that the Nativist party in Griffonia was defeated forever. This delusion would prove to be fatal, for far more griffons than merely himself.