Although Bogo found the princess's process for drafting the statement he would deliver to the city's major newspapers particularly agonizing—so far as he knew, there was very little difference between the words "cowardly" and "cravenly" and which one was used to describe the would-be assassin didn't matter—it was obvious to him that the task of writing up the statement had given her something to focus on other than her own fear.
It was therefore for her sake that he quietly resigned himself to sitting through the drafting of the statement; the only point he had any firmness on was to voice his complete disapproval of the princess's idea to deliver the statement herself. From the weary way the queen had shaken her head, Bogo suspected that Princess Isabel had made a similar suggestion prior to his own arrival, but the very idea of royalty giving a statement personally was appalling. The Corazóns of the city could aggrandize themselves in the eyes of the newspapers all they liked, but for any member of the royal family to stoop to that level would be an enormous breach of the unwritten and unspoken rules of conduct for the heads of state. The general public, so far as Bogo was concerned, needed the comfort and stability of an unshakable monarch that could be looked to in times of trouble as a bastion of stability.
He was therefore quite thankful when the princess did not press the issue any further, appearing to keenly note the disapproval of both her mother and himself, and at last completed the statement that Bogo would make for the benefit of the morning editions. With the message safely tucked away into an inner pocket of his uniform jacket, Bogo was preparing to return to his office in the lower levels of the palace and catch up on anything that had transpired in his absence when the queen spoke. "Captain General, a word please?" she said, and then, glancing at her daughter who was watching raptly, added, "You ought to get to bed, dearest."
The princess obviously knew her mother well enough to know that, no matter how gentle the tone, it was an order and not a suggestion, and she dropped a stiff curtsy before heading out. The statement drafting had been done in the queen's personal library, which could not be mistaken for the libraries of any of the estates of the wealthiest nobles due to the floor's soft cover of grass it shared with the other rooms of the royal suites and its massive size. The rows upon rows of shelving, filled with a dizzying assortment of reading material—from texts engraved on pages of beaten gold thinner than any paper and still looking new despite being hundreds of years old to crumbling codices of āmatl—loomed over even Bogo, and the very weight of the history and knowledge of Zootopia seemed to bear down upon him as the queen waited for her daughter to close the door behind her.
When at last the princess was gone, Queen Lana finally spoke. "You believe you can trust the information the prisoner gave you?" she asked, and whether her voice was quiet because she was afraid the princess might try eavesdropping or because she was doing her best to contain herself Bogo could not quite guess.
He had anticipated something along the lines of her questioning, but before he could so much as form a word the queen added, looking him dead in the eye, "Although you only asked him?"
There was no mistaking the anger in her voice for anything else, and Bogo answered bluntly. "A mammal will say anything to make torture stop," he said, and noticed that the insides of the queen's ears were reddening, although whether it was embarrassment or her anger reaching further heights he could not say.
She had never used the word torture in her instructions to him, but he saw by her reaction that it had most certainly been her intent. The queen raised one hoof, her eyes flashing, and for a brief moment Bogo thought that he might be joining Alfonso in the dungeons before she slumped back into her chair, her normally impeccable posture suddenly completely gone. "You're right," she said, and Bogo couldn't hear any anger in her voice, "I was..."
"Concerned for your daughter, your majesty," Bogo said.
The queen sighed, and waved one hoof to take in the library. "All of these books around us, you'd think I would have learned something," she said, "Did you ever learn what happened to King Oveja IV's daughter Eleanor?"
"No, your majesty," Bogo answered, after a brief attempt to cudgel his memory for a detail about something that had happened centuries ago and that he might have learned decades ago proved completely fruitless.
"She was the youngest child," the queen said slowly, "One who would never inherit the throne, of course, but still a princess. One day, she fell into a lake and drowned; she was only six and had never learned to swim. She had always been King Oveja IV's favorite, and eventually his grief turned to madness, seeing a tragic accident as a plot for the throne."
The queen paused a moment, seeming to look through Bogo as she continued her recitation. "He had his own brother tortured until he confessed to everything, naming co-conspirators at the very highest levels of nobility. The mad king had them all arrested and tortured in turn, until the ones who had been spared saw what the king no longer could. Do you know what they saw?"
The queen was, Bogo realized, turning the very same technique she used for teaching the princess on to him, but even though he couldn't remember learning about Princess Eleanor he knew there was only one thing that could have happened. "None of the stories matched," he said, and the queen nodded.
"They were..." the queen began, and after briefly trailing off she added, "Saying anything to make the torture stop."
She gave him a surprisingly rueful smile; protocol might prevent her from offering an apology to a commoner, even if he was the captain general of the City Guard, but Bogo understood her meaning well enough and he gave her a small nod. "King Oveja IV chose to abdicate the throne to his brother, if you believe he ever had a choice, and lived out his days in a private suite, if you believe it was a suite," the queen said, and Bogo knew what she meant.
The royal family ruled only with the support of the nobility, and the mad king must have pushed them dangerously close to civil war. Whether the choice to abdicate had been given to him at the end of a sword or not, the implication must have been obvious, and whether history called where he had lived the rest of his life a cell or a suite he almost certainly hadn't been permitted to leave. The thoughts of what might happen to her and her daughter had obviously occurred to the queen, and whatever bland words the historians would eventually choose to use to describe the events they were living through wouldn't change the reality of those events. "I would ask you not to let me stray again," the queen said, and Bogo bowed low.
"Of course, your majesty," he said.
Back in his office, Bogo pushed the conversation aside as he shuffled through the reports that he had been provided. His officers still hadn't managed to find the weasel who practiced a dubious form of blood magic, and it was still too early to expect the bear from the Middle Baronies to have been brought in, let alone to hear back from Phoenix about the wolf and the tiger. His stack of papers did, however, have a report from an expert alchemist about Jorge de Cuvier's torc, and Bogo frowned. He had completely forgotten to request it and found himself grateful for the foresight of his officers. Their attention where his own had failed, however, didn't amount to anything. The pattern engraved into Cuvier's torc had been altered in a peculiar and seemingly crude way, which the alchemist who wrote the report claimed to have never seen before. The alchemist, however, had been one of the physically larger court alchemists who reported to the pompous little mouse who had treated Bogo's injury, and Bogo grunted as he cast the report aside.
Any of the coroners who worked with the average citizens of Zootopia could have likely told the alchemist that mammals attempting to alter their torcs were hardly uncommon; the stupider thieves and would-be murderers thought that by scratching more symbols into their torcs they could avoid instant retribution for injuries they inflicted. The luckier of those mammals gave themselves severe burns to their necks and the less lucky simply died; Bogo had never heard of anyone successfully altering a torc. Jorge de Cuvier had likely tried, perhaps being too foolish to realize that whoever had put him up to the task of assassinating the princess had no expectation for him to survive the attempt, but he had obviously failed from the way he had suffered an injury identical to Bogo.
Tomas hadn't commented on it at the time he had examined Cuvier's body, but for all his ego the mouse was extremely knowledgeable about torcs and had certainly come to the same conclusion that years on the streets of Zootopia had helped Bogo make. It did help paint a better picture of the sort of mammal Cuvier must have been; any mammal who believed that torcs could be altered couldn't be all that bright. Bogo rubbed absently at the spot on his shoulder where Cuvier had stabbed him, which had absolutely no lingering pain, and began the slow and tedious task of reading through guard logs.
All of the guards in the palace were required to maintain logs for each and every one of their shifts, and Bogo hoped to try to figure out the route Cuvier had taken into the council room. Perhaps he had taken an unknown secret passage, as Cencerro had suggested, but if there was some sort of gap in the patrol routes he had set up in the palace Bogo wanted to find it right away. Although the palace was, at the moment, under greatly increased guard, it was far from a viable long-term solution. It would take months, at the very least, for him to have any kind of trust in the private soldiers that Cerdo and Cencerro (and, most likely sooner rather than later, Corazón as well) had given over to the City Guard, and extra protection at the palace meant less of it elsewhere. In Bogo's experience, the simple presence of uniformed members of the City Guard on the street was a powerful deterrent for petty crimes, and lacking that deterrent crime would likely spike.
Perhaps back to normal levels, Bogo mused, still feeling a nagging suspicion about the falling crime rates the council had been discussing immediately before the assassination attempt. It was more than possible that someone had consolidated power after Alfonso's arrest, but if there was a new gang of criminals, even one made from the broken remnants of Alfonso's, Bogo had heard no word of it. Bogo sighed, shaking his head as he went back to the interminable logs, trying to avoid chasing down the distracting thoughts that led him to anywhere but his current task.
In the end, after a few hours of careful study and comparison to floor plans of the palace, Bogo came to two very important conclusions. The first was that even accounting for the incredible speed the llama could run at, it just wasn't possible for Cuvier to have made it to the council room without being spotted unless he had one or more guards who had assisted him or had used a secret passageway Bogo didn't know of. The second, which Bogo arrived at as he stood up from his oversized desk and stretched, feeling his back pop satisfyingly as he did so, was that he really needed to sleep. He had already dispatched a message to his wife, hours ago, that he would not be back to the home they shared at his usual time, and Bogo considered whether he had the time to go back at all. His office did have, concealed behind a tapestry that depicted the seal of the City Guard, a small personal room with a cot and a bathroom that were both ever so slightly too small to be entirely comfortable to use. His position as head of the City Guard did not, unfortunately, come with a personal residence, and even on his fairly generous salary he couldn't afford an estate close to the palace. The idea of traveling nearly forty minutes to get to his own bed was made more appealing by the thought of sleeping next to Maria, but he still had to give his statement to the newspapers and had already summoned them to the palace.
Just as Bogo was about to resign himself to a night spent on the uncomfortable cot following an encounter with the mammals from the newspapers that was likely to be nearly as uncomfortable, there was a sudden and vigorous knock on his door. "Captain General!" came a voice he had not expected at all to hear; it was Cencerro.
"Captain General, are you in there?" she asked, and Bogo could hear the excitement in her voice.
"Yes," Bogo called back, and while he started walking towards his door he let one hoof ease itself onto the grip of the macuahuitl he still wore at his waist.
He didn't think Cencerro would be so foolish as to have him attacked in his office if she was behind the attempt on the princess's life, but it seemed unwise to discount the possibility when she was acting in such a manner.
"Good, good," Cencerro said, and her cheerfulness was almost alarming; Bogo had never heard the ewe so happy.
"My mammals found who let the assassin in," she continued, and if anything she suddenly no longer seemed cheerful enough; if she was right it was the sort of victory over Cerdo and Corazón that the pig and the lion would never be able to match or exceed.
Bogo relaxed his grip on his macuahuitl and unlatched his door, taking in the extraordinary sight before him. Cencerro was standing to one side of the doorway, looking especially pleased with herself, and on the other side were two burly rams, both dressed in the livery of Cencerro's holding, on either side of a jaguar Bogo recognized perfectly well. "Jamie?" he asked, and if his disbelief was obvious it didn't matter.
Jamie of the Tecuani Barony wasn't just one of Bogo's most trusted captains; he was the prince consort's significantly younger brother. Unlike his deceased older brother, Jamie had a tawny coat of rosettes as most jaguars did, but his eyes were precisely the same shade of yellow. Sometimes Bogo had seen the ghost of the prince consort in Jamie, from the way he walked to the way he spoke, little reminders of how similar the two brothers had been. It was his eyes that had been the most frequent reminder, but as the jaguar glared at him Bogo found them completely unfamiliar. Never before, either on Fernando's face or on Jamie's, had he ever seen such naked hatred and loathing. "Of course I am," he all but spat, and the two rams on either side of him tightened their grips on his arms, "Had to have Cencerro figure it out, did you?"
Bogo found himself speechless in a way he couldn't understand. It made no possible sense; Jamie had absolutely nothing to gain from the princess's death, as he certainly wasn't in the line of succession to the throne, but there was no denying that the jaguar was acting incredibly guilty. "You're losing your touch," Jamie taunted, and once more Bogo saw nothing of the jaguar he had thought he had known.
The words stung more than they should have, as though the jaguar had looked into his heart and seen his own secret fears that he was beginning to get too old and too comfortable in his position to be effective anymore. Jamie himself had been one of those rare cadets that had given Bogo hope for the city-state after he retired or died; Jamie had joined the City Guard shortly after his brother's death and his rise through the ranks had been so meteoric that Bogo had fully expected him to make captain general someday. "Why?" Bogo asked, and it took him a moment to realize he had spoken the word aloud.
"That little half-blood freak got my brother killed," Jamie said, and while he couldn't move his arms to gesture towards the royal suites many stories above their heads he still jerked his chin upwards, his ears flat against his skull.
Members of the normal City Guard, apparently alerted by the commotion of Cencerro and her soldiers, had shown up, and seemingly automatically Bogo directed them to take Jamie into custody, all the while unable to believe he hadn't seen it coming. Had he really been so distracted by the petty political bickering of the queen's advisers that he hadn't seen his protege's treachery coming? He had thought that both he and Jamie saw Princess Isabel as the last remaining part of the prince consort. Bogo, so much as he could while leading the City Guard, had taken an almost fatherly pride in how the princess grew and developed as she turned into a worthy heir, and he had thought that Jamie would have taken a similar pride in his niece.
But he had missed Jamie's true feelings so completely that he had endangered the princess; if the queen stripped him of his rank for his failure he would make no protest. He would have to—"Captain General?" Cencerro's voice came, interrupting his thoughts, "Captain General, did you hear me?"
"No, I—" Bogo began, and Cencerro smoothly cut him off, beaming up at him.
"I said, we ought to report this to the queen."
"Yes, of course," Bogo said, and his voice sounded feeble and foolish to his own ears.
As he followed Cencerro up the flight of stairs that led to the royal suites it occurred to Bogo that he had never felt older or weaker.
Author's Notes:
The earliest newspapers developed in about the 17th century in our world, due to the confluence of relatively widespread literacy and the printing press making it economical to produce and buy disposable printed material. However, early newspapers, and indeed even newspapers up until relatively recently, tended to be heavily censored by governments. Sweden was the first country to formalize the freedom of the press, doing so in 1766.
Many heads of governments, or their courts, saw speaking directly to the press as being beneath their dignity; in the US, for example, it was Woodrow Wilson who first held a press conference in office, and what transcripts exist from those meetings suggest that he expected a fair amount of deference from the reporters.
I therefore thought that it was pretty plausible that Bogo would be mildly appalled at the idea of the princess speaking to a reporter directly and would find it perfectly normal for the government to directly give a statement to the press and expect it to be included, without editing, by the city's newspapers.
Although Bogo dismisses it as unimportant, there is a slight difference between the words "cowardly" and "cravenly;" the word "cravenly" can suggest a lack of resistance. The subtle nuances between words, even ones that are largely synonymous, is a part of press releases that can be particularly tricky, as the overall goal is to communicate the intended message to the intended audience.
The distinction between morning and evening papers is an interesting one that our modern world largely lacks, the immediacy of television, radio, and the Internet having mostly supplanted print media, but in the days before those alternatives most major newspapers printed multiple editions a day. The morning editions of the newspapers were largely considered more respectable than evening editions (which included a number of somewhat tawdry papers intended for people returning home from work); it was for this reason that the physician of King George V, in 1936, deliberately gave him a lethal overdose of anesthetic to ensure that the king's death would be reported in the morning press rather than the evening papers as it would have been if the king had held onto life longer.
Making a book with golden pages would certainly be possible, if you could afford to spend the gold to do so. As previously mentioned, gold can be beaten to extraordinary thinness, and if you're writing one-sided you could etch it. As gold is naturally extremely corrosion resistant, it'd be a good material for making something intended to last; this is, for example, why the Voyager Golden Records were gold-plated. In theory, any alien civilization that finds Voyager 1 or Voyager 2 would be able to play back the record, assuming they can understand the instructions engraved on the cover.
The word āmatl is the Nahuatl word for a kind of paper made out of bark, and was widely used in the part of the world that is now Mexico before the conquering Spaniards banned its production. Now known as amate, it is still produced by local artisans, and it's more similar to papyrus than to Western style paper.
Tomas, the mouse who treated Bogo's injured shoulder in chapter 4, gets mentioned again here; I figure that the field of alchemy is sufficiently broad that it's not unreasonable for him to have a number of alchemists reporting to him.
Jaime of the Tecuani Barony also first showed up in chapter 4, although his relationship to the royal family wasn't mentioned at that time.
As always, thanks for reading! I'd love to know what you thought if you're so inclined to leave a comment.