The Courtship of the Queen

The boy had seventy-five Horse Conchs of various sizes and seven species, and these did not include the Strombus family, of which he had three hundred specimens, among these at least four companies of Fighting Conchs of three species. The companies of Murex, Auger, Volute and Cowry were another matter entirely, numbering in the dozens as well. History and politics could not stress the boy’s resources, which grew each month as he acquired more specimens, and so, his parents knew, the Kingdom of the Ancient Sea would only grow.

The new Horse Conch’s intentions, naïve and inexperienced as the Princeps was, were foiled daily and in Byzantine course by the unflagging efforts of the Queen’s special agents, namely, the Juno’s Volute (Scaphella junonia), seductive in its whiteness and beauty marks, which had posed as a courtesan to obtain intelligence on the Horse Conch’s western and more vulnerable reefs; five spiny Mediterranean Murexes sent as moneylenders which had, with their squidlike dye, blinded a platoon of key Fighting Conchs in the Battle of the Gorgonaceans; and the great and bilious Tun Shell, sent as an emissary, whose fragile bulk (offering no threat to His Majesty, according to the Horse Conch’s key advisor, the Cameo Helmet), had actually hidden a small army of Flamingo Tongues (Cyphoma gibbosum), which overwhelmed and killed the Horse Conch’s second youngest son.

The Queen had calculated perfectly, of course. She was not without a heart, not without compassion, and yet for her people—the fifty thousand species and countless individuals who had lived in the Kingdom of the Ancient Sea forever and only wanted peace, a peace which Princeps and five generations of Horse Conchs had threatened—she would do what was necessary. Princeps loved his second son more than he loved himself and could not bear the boy’s death, and so within days he took his own life in the great Sea Fan Forest of the Eastern Reefs.

When the Princeps’ reign ended, and the weakest of the Filementosa line took his place, the Queen Conch ruled uneventfully for a time. The boy was twelve now, his arms and legs covered with the scrapes he had apparently received in the tide pools he so loved. If his scrapes—red and puckered though they were—did not bother him, why should they, his parents, make a fuss?

One day the King Helmet Shell, from the Indian Ocean, came to court the Queen despite her advanced age. His arrival and intentions were a

And yet (the boy explained, gesturing with bruised hands as his parents listened, their forks and spoons raised) the goal of lasting peace for the greater Kingdom, practical and enlightened though it might be, was not enough for the King Helmet. He could not, he had decided privately—out of vanity if not sheer jealousy—humiliate himself by marriage to an aging conch long past her years of beauty, especially one whose stature and legendary imperiousness would in the end, he knew, reduce him to mere figurehead. To be remembered in the history of the Kingdom of the Ancient Sea (for that is what vanity demanded), he would need to be more than her husband; and to be more he would, yes, need to gain command however he could of the Queen’s own forces—not only the Fighting Conchs, the companies of the Cyclopean Hexaplex fulvens (the Giant Murexes), and the even more numerous complements of Neptune Whelks—but also her spiritual advisors, the revered and powerful Miters.

But how to accomplish this?

At first (the boy explained a few nights later, arms folded in front of him, long shirt sleeves hiding them as if the scrapes now embarrassed him) the King Helmet was not sure. He had grown his own armies by the simple conquest of coral reefs where those who would become his soldiers farmed and hunted. He had acquired them by the sheer size of the soldiers in his first mercenary platoons, namely, other Helmets like him; and after that, by sheer numbers; and later still, by his growing stature and mystique in the Indian Ocean, Red Sea and China Sea. How to seduce forces already aligned with another?

And how, as he pursued this—the seduction of her army, its generals and her priests by whatever stratagems were needed—to distract the Queen so that she was unaware and would not interfere?

One night, as the moon (“my flashlight,” the boy explained), illuminated the sea around him (“my rug under the bed, Dad”), the King Helmet saw it at last:

The Queen had mentioned more than once, and wistfully, to her attendants and others, how much she wished she had had a child—whether boy or girl, it did not matter—a child to whom she could pass her kingdom; and how this was impossible now because, even though she occasionally received male visitors who were of her species and stature, her body had lost the ability to conceive.

The King Helmet was of enough stature to be acceptable as the father of her child, but he was not of her species. The latter was simple fact. And yet the King Helmet, as he pondered his dilemma in his guest quarters that morning, remembered a certain seashell he had once encountered, a beautiful and possibly useful one. She too was a conch, like the Queen, and one of the rarest and prettiest; but most importantly, she possessed the Queen’s great pink lip. She was a gorgeous creature—her lip crenulated, her body decorated with a red embroidery—and the Queen would, he felt certain, find in the smaller conch’s visage a mirror of what she herself wished to be. Rare . . . and beautiful . . . and young. If he used her carefully, she could be what he needed.

He would find this seashell, this Sinuatus conch. He would set his minions to the task, and when they had found her he would take her to the Queen and say, “As I have confessed more than once these past months of our courtship, Your Majesty, I too ca

How would the Queen react? Would she find in this lie the answer to her most profound sadness?

As the boy posed these questions to the air at di