Ota's Tales

King and Poor - Everything ends, Rudolph stays

Days passed. Weeks passed. Months passed. Years passed. Everyone grew older, except for Rudolph, who remained the same. If he ever had any friends, they were now going down a different path, the posthumous one.
People made all sorts of assumptions about how the king could remain unchanged. Some thought it was God who had given him the power. Others saw it the other way around.
"It's not God who gives that power, it's the devil," they said in their circles, because they couldn't proclaim it publicly. And only a handful of people tried to find a real reason. But even that handful became smaller and smaller.
As is the way of life, when we don't know the real reason for a thing, we either make up stories or blame it on a higher principle. I don't know why we simply can't admit we don't know.

And the days went by again.

Neighboring kings had a whole network of spies in the country to find out the reasons for his not aging. There wasn't much stopping. The alchemy workshop was gone, most of the workers from that time were dead, and all the documents had been reduced to ashes. The only option was to question random people. But each group had slightly different theories. And so the mystery remained hidden and unbreakable.

Rudolph still enjoyed his reign. He enjoyed his unlimited fame and renown. He knew well that he had become famous throughout the world of that time because of his immortality. But as time went by, his way of reigning got worse.
People wanted change. They didn't enjoy the fact that the same person was always deciding their fate. But the reason was the number of changes that were taking place at that time.

When we're young, we adapt easily to change, so we don't notice it as much. But over the course of our lives, we become less and less tolerant of change. Rudolph's problem, then, was that he didn't adapt so quickly to change. Moreover, his mind was overwhelmed. The body was immortal, but not the soul. He still kept memories that had been around for over a hundred years. Then how can you have room in your head for novelty?

He wasn't so quick in thinking. He was also very old-fashioned. He thought he could do everything on his own, but his work was no longer so easy to do. It was over his head. The worst part, though, was that he didn't even realize it. Life began to feel like the flow of a river, speeding up for him. He felt he couldn't stay in the flow forever. One day the water would erode him. Like everything.

To the west of his kingdom, huge states had formed that he could no longer compete with. They were ruled by men of the time. Rudolph was known to be immortal, but that was not true of his ponderous kingdom, which was hard to adjust to the times. No wonder, then, that others wanted to gradually steal territory from that land.

Wars broke out in which people didn't want to die for a swathe of land. The army of a weary kingdom had no power to face anyone. The various technologies that the land possessed were obsolete by comparison with others.

No wonder, then, that less than a few years later, there was only a tiny portion of that land, whose inhabitants more and more often expressed their indignation at his rule. He was certainly not celebrated, nor praised, as he would have liked. It was quite the opposite. No one cared about his immortality at that special time. Rudolph had to adapt to the people. But he did not. It was for this reason that the commoners took his seat by storm and won their privileges. The kingdom became a republic. The king was deposed. We will let him live out his days in seclusion.

He was given a castle at first, where he could complain about the difficult times that had taken everything from him. He hoped to show these people. He firmly believed that the day would come when they would need a ruler like him. But nothing of the sort happened. The people elected their own ruler, the president, and Rudolph was moved from the castle to the manor, so as not to take up so much space.

He became withdrawn into himself and gloomy. He lived alone, separated from all the people because he had no one. His children and his wife had not been in the world for a long time. And the great-grandchildren of his great-grandchildren had rolled around the world. And who knows. They probably wouldn't have cared for him anyway. To the others he was no one. He was just good enough for textbooks and books, where he was described as the longest-reigning ruler. It became a report in school, which the children told themselves to enrich themselves. It became a story that had once happened, but was no longer a reality.

"Who lives in that mansion?" the people in the pub asked as they passed through a village with a common name. "That one?" the innkeeper pointed to the hill where the former king's mansion had been. "They say it is haunted by King Rudolf himself. Would you like to see it? I can show you around for five crowns," announced the innkeeper, who had turned the story into a profitable business. And the tourists agreed, and in the evening they went to the manor to have some adventure.
When the door was unlocked they saw countless cobwebs and dusty furniture. "He must be hiding somewhere," the innkeeper would always tell the tourists, without ever seeing him. But Rudolf was no longer there.

The unexpected visits drove him away. He began to wander the streets of his beloved city, remembering his former glory. People thought him a fool, but they left him alone for his manners and strange clothes.

As he was admiring the cathedral in which his coronation had taken place, a man lying in the street spoke to him from behind. 'Hey, you there, I know you!' he shouted in a voice a little irritated. Rudolph turned with a look of incomprehension on his face. Who could have known him? This bearded man in ragged clothes? Highly unlikely. 'Excuse me, but I don't know who you are,' Rudolph told him, and was about to leave.
'You'd better know who I am, King,' he laughed aloud.
'Who are you to mock me?' the King demanded.
Bogdan straightened. 'You're not the only one here for eternity. I was the one on whom the elixir of life was tested. Bogdan is my name.'
Rudolph tried to remember, but there were so many memories in his head that he stopped.

'Come, sit down,' he urged, 'I wanted to talk to you so much. But when you were King, they wouldn't let me near you. And then you were gone.'
Rudolph, who had nowhere else to go, sat down beside the man. After all, nothing mattered anymore. 'So you've lived as long as I have?' he said. 'How do you manage it?' he asked the man in the street.

Bogdan laughed. 'First of all,' he said, slightly reproving Rudolph, 'you mustn't want others to adapt to you. If you want people to respect you, you have to adapt to them, and secondly,' he mused, fumbling in his coat. 'Secondly, to keep myself from going mad with immortality, I live only in the moment. People like me, they invite me to eat now and then, I've got used to it. I've got this harmonica.' He put the harmonica to his mouth and began to play a familiar old tune.

Rudolph didn't know what had led to it, but he began to hum a song he had sung a long time ago, when he was a little boy. And after a very long time, he felt happy and at peace.

What the two of them have been doing since, I don't know. They couldn't tell me. Before they could tell me the whole story, they took out the harmonica and the guitar and began to play the familiar old song. And even I didn't care much about the story then.

Maybe I forgot to tell you something. So, if you want to hear the story from their mouths, I think they often hang around the Prague Castle. Don't be afraid of them. They may look like scarecrows, but after all they've been through, I think they have a right to. If you ever meet them, please tell them I said hello.