"Okay, Guido," I said, scribbling my signature across the bottom of the scroll. "You've got it.
Just be sure to keep me posted as to what's going on."
"Thanks, Boss," he grinned, taking the scroll and looking at the signature. "You won't regret this."
It hadn't occurred to me at all that I might regret it ... until he mentioned it. I mean, what could go wrong?
Chapter Six:
"Money is the root of all evil. Women need roots."
D. TRUMP
THOUGH THE VARIOUS administrative hassles of trying to straighten out Possiltum's finances weighed heavily on my mind, there was another, bigger worry that ran like an undercurrent through my head whenever I was awake.
Should I or shouldn't I marry Queen Hemlock?
Aahz kept saying that I should go along with it, become the royal consort with an easy (not to mention well-paying) job for life. I had to admit, in many ways it looked more attractive than having her abdicate and ending up holding the bag for running the kingdom all by myself. I had that "opportunity" once before courtesy of the late King Roderick, and really didn't want to repeat the experience.
So why was I dragging my feet on making my decision?
Mostly, my indecision was due to my reluctance to accept the obvious choice. As much as I was repelled by the known quantity of being king, I was as much or more terrified of the unknown factors involved in marriage.
Time and time again, I tried to sort out if it was the idea of getting married that scared me, or if it was Queen Hemlock specifically that I couldn't picture as my wife.
My wife!
Every time that phrase crossed my mind, it was like an icy hand grabbed my heart hard enough to make it skip a beat.
Frankly, I was having trouble picturing anyone I knew in that role. In an effort to get a handle on my feelings, I forced myself to review the women of my acquaintance in that light.
Massha, my apprentice, was out of the question. While we were close enough as friends, as well as teacher/student, her sheer size was intimidating. The truth was, I had trouble thinking of her as a woman. Oh, I knew she was female all right, but I tended to see her as a friend who was female ... not as a female, if you can see the difference.
Bunny ... well, I supposed that she could be considered a candidate. The problem there was that she was the first woman who had made a solid pass at me, and it had scared me to death. When her uncle, Don Bruce, first dumped her on me, she was all set to play a gangster's moll. Once I got her straightened out, however, she had settled into being my administrative assistant like a duck takes to water, and the question of anything intimate developing between us never came up again. Thinking of her in terms of a life partner would mean completely restructuring how I viewed her and worked with her, and right now she was far too valuable as my assistant for me to rock the boat.
Tananda ... I had to smile at the thought of the Trollop assassin as my wife. Oh, she was friendly enough, not to mention very attractive, and for a long time I had a crush on her. It eventually became apparent, however, that the hugs and kisses she bestowed on me were no different than those she gave the rest of the team ... including her brother Chumley. She was just a physically friendly person, and the affection she showed me was that shown for a co-worker, or maybe a kid brother. I could accept that, now. Besides, I somehow couldn't see her giving up her own career to settle down keeping house for me. No, as much as I loved her, Tananda would never fit as my wife. She was ... well, Tananda.
That left Queen Hemlock, who I had no real feeling for at all except, perhaps a sense of uneasiness every time she was around. She always seemed extremely sure of herself and what she wanted ... which made her almost my exact opposite. Of course, that in itself was an interesting thought. Then, too, she was the only one who had ever expressed a desire to be paired with me ... and seemed to want it badly enough to fight for it. Even Bunny had backed off once I rebuffed her. I had to admit that it did something to a man's ego to have a woman determined to bag him ... even if he wasn't all that drawn to the woman in the first place.
Unfortunately, that was pretty much it for my list of female acquaintances. Oh, there were a few others I had come into contact with over the years, like Markie ... and Luanna ...
Luanna!!
She had almost slipped my mind completely, but once I thought of her, her face sprang into focus as if she were standing in front of me. Luanna. Lovely Luanna. Our paths had only crossed a couple times, most notedly during my adventure in the dimension of Limbo, and the last time we met the parting hadn't been pleasant. In short, I really didn't know her at all. Still, in many ways, she epitomized everything that was feminine in my mind. Not only did she radiate a soft, vulnerable beauty, her manner was demure. That may not seem like much to you, but it was to me. You see, most of the women I work with can only be called aggressive ... or, less politely, brassy. Even Hemlock, for all her regal blood, was very straightforward about stating her mind and wishes. Bunny had cooled it a bit, once I got her off her moll kick, but had replaced her blatant suggestiveness with a brusk efficient manner that, at times, could be every bit as intimidating as her old sex kitten routine.
In contrast, Luanna always seemed very shy and hesitant in my presence. Her voice was usually quiet to a point I sometimes had to strain to hear her, and she had a habit of looking down, then peering up at me through her lashes ... as if she felt I could bully her physically or verbally, but trusted me not to. I can't speak for other men, but it always made me feel ten feet tall ... very powerful and with an overwhelming urge to use that strength to protect her from the hardships of the world.
Thinking of her while trying to appraise what I would want in a wife, I found myself dwelling on the image of finding her waiting for me at the close of each day ... and realized the image wasn't all that objectionable. In fact, once she surfaced in my memory, I found myself thinking of her quite a bit whenever I tried to sort out my current position, and more than occasionally wished I could see her again before I had to make my final decision.
As it turned out, I got my wish.
I was in my room, making another of my feeble attempts to make head or tail of the stack of spreadsheets that Bunny and Grimble kept passing me on an almost daily basis. As those of you who have been following these adventures from the beginning may recall, I can read ... or, at least, I had thought that I could. Since undertaking the task of sorting out the kingdom's finances, however, I had found out that reading text, which is to say, words, is a lot different than being able to read numbers.
I mean, we were all in agreement as to our goal, which was to eliminate or lessen the kingdom's debt load without either placing a staggering tax burden on the populace or cutting so much off the operating budget that the necessary administrative operations became non-functional. As I say, we were all in agreement ... verbally ... with words. Any time there was a disagreement between Grimble and Bunny on particulars, however, and they came to me to cast the deciding vote or make a decision, they would each invariably support their side of the argument by passing me one or more of those cryptic sheets covered with numbers and not much else, then wait expectantly as I scanned it, as if their case had just become self-explanatory.
Now, for those of you who have never been placed in this situation, let me offer a little clarification. When I say I can't read numbers, I don't mean that I can't decipher the symbols. I know what a two is and what it stands for and how it differs from, say, an eight. The problem I was confronted with in these arguments was trying to see them in relation to each other. To do a "word analogy," if the numbers were words, both Bunny and Grimble could look at a page full of numbers and see sentences and paragraphs, complete with subtleties and innuendos, whereas I would look at the same page and see a mass of unrelated, individual words. This was particularly uncomfortable when they would pass me two pages of what to them was a mystery novel, and ask my opinion on who the killer was.