The Princess, King Pepper, and the Intractable Nature of the Hunter

A flour-and-sugar king with a peppercorn nose

A fairy tale about a princess. When it was time for her to get married, she was introduced to many – let’s say hundreds, thousands of suitors. But none of them was good enough for her. So she made herself one, out of flour and sugar with a peppercorn nose. Kneaded for six months, destroyed and remade, sung to for another six months, he finally became a walking talking humanoid. She called him King Pepper. He was not a human, not exactly the stuff most princess’s dreams are made on. But he was hers, entirely hers, because she had made him. You’d think that that was that, but then he was stolen from her. It’s hard to believe that a creature like King Pepper would be stolen. The most beautiful boy in the world, who appeared in a reflection in the moon, from that other fairy tale, you can see how he might have generated more interest.

But King Pepper? A flour man, who didn’t look, even, like a real man? What could you do with him? What could even the princess do with him? It didn’t matter, the story didn’t answer, but it was clear that she was happy with him. So, resourceful princess that she was, she set out into the forests at night to look for him.

The lesson I got from this story at the time was that even our most idiosyncratic desires might, once achieved, be taken from us. King Pepper could only make sense to one person – his maker. Most little girls don’t grow up dreaming of marrying a baked man with a peppercorn nose. And yet, he was stolen. It can happen to anything, it could happen to anyone. King Pepper hadn’t even achieved enough sentience to know that he was stolen, back when he was stolen.

Hide it under a bushel

When I was a child, I got the idea that if I wanted to keep something safe, it had to be hidden. Since I didn’t have access to too much privacy back then, my way of hiding things was to not allow them to go out of my head. Not to be spoken, not to be put on paper. 

I had lots of King Pepper-like imaginary friends. I didn’t let them out into the world, never, because they needed to be protected. If they disappeared, I’d have no one. They did disappear, every few days, anyway, but I always made new ones. I did the same with me. I kept me safely hidden, because that would be the only way to protect me.

Like the princess, I found that there is no real safety, not in invisibility or in idiosyncrasy.

First they suck the juice out

Clockwork Orange is famous for its ‘ultraviolence.’ That’s the kind of thing that looks good in a movie, that keeps teenagers inclined towards cults and code slang, the kind of thing that paints the page in big red slashes. I always remembered an orange. A human being, he said, a thing full of juice and sweetness. He wondered whether it could ever be trained, made into a clockwork entity.

I looked very closely at oranges after that. They became something else, to me. Fruits of light. Representatives of life. Things of juice and sweetness. Before I read this, I thought of oranges as sour and luridly coloured things that your parents forced you to eat. But Burgess’s orange stayed with me for a lifetime after. 

Imagine, now, if all that juice and sweetness and light could be sucked out of you. Like the Stepford wives. The humanness is drained, and its shell can be replicated, but what is inside, the thing that makes you you, this can be taken out.

Like King Pepper, there is nothing, that cannot be taken from you. However, this thing of juice and sweetness and light, this bit of human that cannot be accessed from the outside, can it be lost?

A love story becomes a hunting story

Like so many other princesses, this one too had to head out on her horse into the night. Even though hers was the most domestic of romances, a kitchen-love with a cookie-man, it didn’t get to stay there. You have to slay some dragons and talk to some witches (or wizards) and collect some talismans and race the North Wind to gain anything in this world.

Princes, princesses and protagonists have, so often, to turn their love stories into hunting stories. They become trackers, and the road is always marked by dangers, helpers, deceit and darkness. No one bothers to make stories about people who sit at home, because that’s not what stories are for. Stories are maps for soul-travellers and hunters.

And then when she finds him, he doesn’t recognise her

Or something to that effect. When Princess Maker finally meets King Pepper, he doesn’t recognise her. I had no doubt that he wouldn’t, because, really, what can you expect from a man who’s not even aware that he’s been stolen? But you must root for the baker, the hunter and now the classic princess-disguised-as-humble-seller. Which means you must pummel this fool into recognising her. That is what happens – King Pepper is drugged, of course, and sleeps through all her singing and weeping, and is finally (ironically) harangued by the prisoners in the building next door to stay awake and listen.

So he finally manages to stay off the drugged wine, stay awake, recognises the princess, reveals that he was under a spell and they ride off together. (To be fair, you must call it a second spell, for wasn’t it a spell-chant that gave him the power of speech in the first place?)

Making, losing, hunting, finding, recognising

I didn’t forget, from the beginning to the end of this story, that the princess made King Pepper. The story is called The Handmade King. King Pepper says and does very little in the story, and in fact it is a gust of wind that gets him lost in the first place, so it’s very easy to remember that he’s more a creation than a person.

You might say, he was fashioned by hands, breathed into life by words. It didn’t happen in a day, even though it is magic. It took a year and a half, perhaps, if you count the making of King Pepper 1 who was melted back into his origins, because he was unsatisfactory. 

I shall shut myself up in my room with my misery, and I don’t want to hear another thing, said the princess. It’s really so tempting, when you lose anything, to stick with your misery, a familiar, friendly companion. Not tempting so much as desirable. The grave’s a fine and private place, said Marvell. The blanket’s a safe and warm place to be under, as well, but about as lonely.

After only a day of shutting herself up in her room with her misery, she was out hunting. I imagine that the night is unpleasantly chilly, the horse a little cranky, because that’s how you always feel when you’d like to stay safe and warm and are pushed out by an unstoppable force within that insists that you get uncomfortable and go out there and find your thing.

There is an old woman behind you and an old woman ahead of you in every story, said the old woman in A S Byatt’s The Story of the Eldest Princess. There are three old hermits in this story, as it is a post-religious fairy tale, and the princess proclaims herself a good Christian at the door of the house in the woods. So the door is not opened by a friendly forest witch, but never mind, friendly forest witches will disguise themselves as kindly old men if they really want to help you. The hermits give the princess a chestnut, a walnut and a hazelnut. If you receive a gift from a kind stranger, let it be small, unassuming and infinitely mysterious. Each nut cracks open to reveal a golden maid with a golden loom, weaving gold. I take a moment to be dazzled by these pieces of clockwork art, but the princess is uninvested in others’ ingenuity. She sells each for one night with King Pepper.

After all this trouble, all this heartache and recovery, you’d think that King Pepper would, well, allow himself to be whisked off into the sunset. But of course not. He’s too drugged too sleepy too bewitched and above all too clueless to even recognise his rescuer. Fairy tales have happy endings, but they are short, it takes only a sentence about a night of crying and singing to describe the terrible fatigue of this moment of bleak despair.

Eventually, the two whisk each other off, but I really understood, at the end of this story, that in a sense, the work of a princess is never done. You can’t rest on your laurels, your losses, your crown, your cake, your walnut, your magic or even the person you love. There is voyage after voyage after voyage to be taken. There are forests and nights to cross. There are miseries to lock yourself up in, there are witches and hermits to meet, there are terrible lapses of judgement to not judge, there are victories to be triumphant about. 

The answer is no

You don’t get to wallow, you don’t get to sleep on this one chilly night, you don’t get to hide, you don’t get to shut out the sun through your curtains. I don’t ask myself the existential question that Burgess does, about the human, the free will, the god, the automaton, the bit of clockwork, at the time.

But it’s hard to say why, when a fruit can be so easily crushed, you would choose to be an orange. Possibly because it simply couldn’t be helped.

It’s hard to say why the princess chose to breathe life into King Pepper, when it would’ve been so much easier to keep him in the kitchen where he wouldn’t fly away, to keep him hidden, to keep him stuck like a piece of clockwork. It would be nice to say that it was an act of letting go, but possibly more honest to say that he would simply be less fun to play with, then.

It’s hard to say why you can’t accept that a thing is lost when it’s lost. Possibly because, actually, this cold night and this waiting truculent horse are calling you. Because the night itself brings with it a hunting call, a mating call, the sound of a train threatening to thunder into the station at the very edge of dawn, the sound of a lonely elephant’s trumpet. The sound of a blue whale looking for companionship in the deepest of oceans.

Everything in the world puts you to sleep, and everything in the world demands that you wake up, all at the same time. Everything is lost, and everything can, potentially, be found, if you just get up on your horse and head out into the night.

I found the story of King Pepper in Italo Calvino’s Italian Folktales. The Handmade King, page 489.

Author: Priyadarshini John