Not at all related to the last story I posted here. The setting is technically fantasy, but the fictional kingdoms all have historical inspirations which I hope are self-evident to readers. In a sense you can consider it a retelling of the old "Emperor's New Clothes" story, but with a twist and a climax.

The Sun Queen's New Hairstyle

Holding a bronze mirror to her face, Neferkah plowed through her hair with an ivory comb. Over the flooding season that had passed since she last shaved her scalp clean, the hair had grown out from sparse peppercorn tufts into one black bush denser than any jungle. It might have cushioned her head against her bed's headrest or the many crowns she had to wear as Queen of Akhiptu, but it would also draw in swarms of head lice. The dusty grime slathered over the comb's teeth attested as much.

At least all that hair hid the scar cutting across her scalp.

"Preparing yourself for your new hairdresser, Your Divine Radiance?" It was Huya, Neferkah's Vizier, who popped his pudgy head into her dressing chamber.

Neferkah dropped both the comb and mirror down on a counter. "I never called for a new hairdresser."

"True, you've been swamped with more important duties of late. That's why I took it upon myself to refill that gaping vacancy in your retinue." A smirk creased across his face as if employing anyone without his Queen's permission was cause for pride.

Underneath her dark brown skin, Neferkah's cheeks burned hotter than a brush-fire. "And it should have stayed a vacancy. Have you forgotten what the last hairdresser did to me?" She pointed a finger to where her scar had been cut. "That marked the final time I let anyone else near my hair!"

"My Queen, please be reasonable. You cannot dismiss an entire profession based on one individual's incompetence. Like it or not, every Queen needs a hairdresser."

"Why is that? I can take care of my own hair." Neferkah picked up her comb again.

"What if I told you our new man has a special trick that will make taking care of your hair easier? At least that's what he claims..."

"Then let him surprise me."

"Very well. Allow me to introduce you to Philon of Mykenos."

The Vizier stepped away to reveal an olive-skinned Ellasian youth in a sleeveless tunic who lugged around a ceramic brazier. Firelight from inside the brazier flickered on his dark hair, which had much looser curls than that of Neferkah or any other Akhiptan people.

"So you hired an Ellasian," Neferkah said. "How would he, of all men in the world, know how to do hair like ours?"

"My lovely Queen, your concern is understandable but unwarranted," Philon said. He set the brazier aside in the dressing chamber and bowed before Neferkah. "In all my years of experience, I've worked with hair of all textures and colors. I have no more difficulty with Akhiptan wool than the piss-yellow manes of northern tribesmen."

Neferkah cocked her eyebrow. For such a well-traveled hairdresser, this Ellasian sure had developed the sensitivity to liken southern ladies like her to sheep. "The Vizier said you knew a trick that would make taking care of this 'wool' easier. Ever since I cast out the last hairdresser, I've had to cleanse it myself every morning."

"And no matriarch of the world's greatest empire should have to inconvenience herself so. Not only will my little trick ease that burden, but it shall also bestow upon your hair a...uniquely radiant quality. So radiant, in fact, that the Sun itself shall blaze its full brilliance on your every strand!"

Neferkah grinned. Her subjects already complimented her regal beauty, but they had done the same to all Akhiptan rulers. If she could reflect the light of her ancestor the Sun on her hair, then she would stand out in the Akhiptan annals like no Queen before her. Nothing could better suit a monarch of solar descent.

"Does your trick involve that brazier you brought in?" Neferkah asked.

"Yes, and it also involves this." Philon fished out a bronze comb with a long neck attached to a wooden handle. "All I need to do is heat this comb up, and then it shall work its dazzling magic on your hair. But first close your eyes, and don't open until I say so."

Neferkah obeyed, wobbling her shins in excitement. Her subjects would pour an unprecedented flood of praise onto her once this was over. So would the other rulers of the civilized world, from the mud-brick castles of Nyani to the west to the sprawling red palaces of Zhongguo to the distant east. Legends of her newfound radiance might even reach the heavens themselves, from whence the gods and the spirits of her ancestors would beam upon her with pride.

Warmth like the Sun's rays at noontime washed against the back of her neck. Afterwards this heat cascaded down her hair strand by strand, pulling it down with every stroke. Neferkah could have sworn she felt something start to tickle her neck and shoulders as the combing progressed.

"All finished. You can open your eyes now, my Queen."

Neferkah picked up her mirror to examine the results. It trembled in her grip, but not from giddy anticipation. True, the hair did reflect the fire from the brazier like it never would have before, but not in the way she had expected. "It's so, so...straight. I mean, it's even straighter than your hair, Ellasian. Is this really what you did?"

"It'll take some getting used to, I grant you as much, but trust me when I say it'll make you stand out. Most of your subjects will have never seen anything like it.”

“At least not on someone of their own race,” Neferkah brushed her own ivory comb down her newly straightened hair. “Though on the other hand, it might be easier to keep clean. Will the hair stay straight like this?”

Philon nodded. “Nothing in this mortal world can reverse it, I swear by all the gods.” He picked up a blue cylindrical crown from a rack next to the counter. “Why don't you invite your courtiers over for a surprise?”

##

Queen Neferkah strutted into her throne chamber with her hair tied up and hidden inside the blue crown. Jewelry fashioned from gold, copper, and precious stones glittered around her neck and limbs. Her skin too glistened like polished ebony from perfumed oil, and the linen kilt hugging her hips was a purer white than the Sun itself. Neferkah had always made sure to reflect her heavenly ancestor's light at court, but this afternoon she would dazzle her people with a new source of brilliance. Or so Philon had promised her.

When Neferkah took seat on her gilded throne, the court musicians announced her arrival by throbbing their drums, rattling sistra, and chanting praises to her name. Between the chamber's towering limestone columns stood her audience of courtiers who murmured among themselves while gazing at her. All had styled their hair into braids, dreadlocks, cornrows, or even big bushy balls, but all of it was kinky in texture.

Neferkah smirked. Philon had not lied when he said her new hairstyle would make her stand out among this crowd.

Huya the Vizier waddled up to her from the audience. “Pardon me, Your Majesty, but what was that Philon fellow's 'special trick'? He never told me.”

“That's why I brought everyone here today,” Neferkah said. “It was a most special trick indeed.”

“It better be,” one of the courtiers behind Huya muttered. “Of all the matters affecting this kingdom that need addressing, you've brought us here to check out your newest fashion statement?”

“Not to mention it's about your hair,” another said. “I know we Akhiptans take national pride in our unique hair, but this is ridiculous.”

“Is our 'unique' hair so worthy of pride though?” Neferkah said. “Is it not hard to comb? Is it not brittle and dull in luster? Thankfully for me at least, the new hairdresser I have recently employed has rectified all that with his 'special trick'.”

She took off her crown and untied her hair. After it fell down onto her shoulders, she swung her head sideways so that the hair flew about, catching the light of the Sun from windows between the columns.

“What do you think, my dear subjects?” Neferkah asked. “Has my hair not earned the Sun's gleaming touch more than before?”

At first the entire audience stood there speechless and staring at her. Even the musicians silenced. Only the wind blew into the chamber from outside.

“It does look, um, shinier than before,” Huya said. “But...”

“It looks like the hairy coat on a baboon,” a courtier said. “Or maybe a chimpanzee, or a gorilla.” This prompted snickering from those next to him.

“Ooh, I've a better one,” another courtier said. “It looks like the hair of a barbarian, from the north or east! Next thing you'll know, she'll dye it yellow as piss…and paint her skin white while she’s at it.”

“How could she sleep with that kind of lank hair?” yet another said. “If it's not bushy and springy, she could feel her headrest right through it!”

And then another quipped, “She said our hair was hard to comb. Her hair looks like it’ll be even easier for lice to climb into!”

A wave of giggling swept across the audience. Even Huya had to hide an amused grin under his hand.

Neferkah’s face was burning up again. She pointed her finger like a spear at the mass before her. “You all will show the proper respect you owe your Queen, Daughter of the Sun and Mistress of Akhiptu!”

“Not if she spurns the hair all Akhiptans are born with,” a courtier said. “What are you going to do? Put your entire court to death?”

“Maybe she could strangle us with her new hair,” the one next to him said. “Why, she could wrap one lock around my neck like a rope!”

The whole court exploded into deafening guffaws that rebounded between the throne chamber’s columns.

“Stop it! Stop it, all of you! I command you!” Neferkah shrieked. She stamped a sandal onto the floor.

The crowd still did not silence. Those that did not continue whooping like hyenas chanted names more vile than anything Neferkah had ever heard from her childhood at scribal school:

“Monkey mane!”

“Wants to be a barbarian!”

“Self-hater!”

“Huya, can’t you tell them to obey me?” Neferkah said, kneeling at the Vizier’s feet.

“I would, except they honestly have a point,” Huya chortled. “What can I say? It is ridiculous!”

“Then let me be excused.” And with that, as her court cackled and jeered, Neferkah shrunk away from her throne and sprinted out of the throne room.

She switched to a storming pace down the hallways of her palace until she returned to the dressing chamber. She tore the door open, snarling Philon’s name.

No one else occupied the room, nor was Philon’s brazier even present. Only a scrap of papyrus with black writing on it lay on the counter. The message, scribbled in the Ellasian alphabet, read:

“Your sooty ass got pranked big time, Your Divine Radiance. Courtesy of Philon of Mykenos.”

The crude image of a sneering monkey’s face had been doodled underneath the text.

##

Streams of tears washed down Neferkah’s cheeks. She buried her face in her arms as she squatted among the papyrus reeds that grew along the Iteru River. She had cast all her jewelry off, and the floodplain’s dark soil mottled her kilt with black spots. Her hair hung down in disheveled locks. Whether or not it still shone from the Sun’s light, Neferkah did not give a single grain of care.

The time had come for the Sun’s westward descent towards the earth anyway. Already half of it hung behind the distant peaks of the great pyramids where Neferkah’s ancestors, the great Kings and Queens of Akhiptu’s past, lay entombed. Inside one of those mountain-sized structures would have rested Neferkah’s own mother and father. How would their spirits, looking down from the starry heavens, feel about their heir in this degraded state? The last thing Neferkah had promised her father on his deathbed was that she would uphold their kingdom’s sacred traditions like all her predecessors.

Instead, by giving up what all Akhiptan people were born with, she had spat in the face of those traditions and disgraced herself before the people she was supposed to lead. And all in the name of vanity.

On a reed raft out on the river, a young commoner with a clean-shaven scalp was spearing at the water with his harpoon. When he raised his head from his task, he waved to Neferkah and shouted out to her. “Yo, it’s me, Merkha! What in the gods’ names has happened to my Queen’s hair?”

Neferkah gulped. Merkha had been her hairdresser before Philon, the hairdresser she had fired for scarring her scalp. The guilt was wringing her heart. “I hired someone who treated it worse than you ever had. Had I foreseen that, you’d still have your job.”

“No need to apologize, my lady. You bought me more time to practice my skills.” Merkha pointed to his scalp. “Did my replacement have a heated metal comb with a long neck on him, by any chance?”

“How did you know that?”

“I know that trick. It’s called a hot comb, and it’s used to straighten hair out. You sure got pranked real nasty, didn’t you?”

“That’s an understatement if I ever heard one.” Neferkah wiped a tear away. “He told me nothing on this mortal earth could reverse it.”

From the river behind Merkha’s raft poked out a gray fin shaped like a curved blade that sliced through the water’s surface towards him.

“There are a few things you can do,” Merkha said. “For one, you can shave your hair off and wait for it to regrow, kinky as before. I’ve also heard that you---”

Neferkah pointed to the speeding fin. “Merkha, look out!”

He had not even turned his head before his raft jolted with a bang. It turned over after another bump, knocking Merkha off into the water with a splash.

Neferkah sprang off the bank and dove in after him. Through the cold green murkiness of the river’s depths she plunged towards the fuzzy dark outline of a sinking man. As she followed him deeper into the water, its darkness pressed harder against her body from all sides. Neferkah stretched one arm underneath Merkha’s, wrapped hers around his, and launched herself back towards the surface.

Another, larger form zipped after them with a fin sticking out from its back, swishing a forked tail behind it. Double rows of jagged teeth glinted from the maw of this river shark. Neferkah kicked her legs in a frenzied hurry, hugging Merkha’s body against her breast, but even this could not surpass the fish’s natural speed. It reached within a hand’s span of Merkha’s side and gaped its jaws open, ready to bite off a mouthful of his flesh.

Neferkah rammed her fist into the shark’s snout.

Its hide, coarser than sand, scraped her own skin so that it let out clouds of blood. The fish did not recoil in a daze from her punch. Instead it brushed past, arcing around and darting back for her. Throwing Merkha upward out the shark's reach, Neferkah whipped her foot into its gills.

Her lungs were caving in. She pushed herself towards the surface, fighting against her body's desire to sink. The shark was circling below, rising closer to Neferkah with each cycle. Behind her swept a strong current against her back that almost spun her around. With it flashed another massive shadow at her sight's corner, but it vanished when she turned her head to check for it. As if she already didn't have enough to fear!

The shark's teeth grazed along Neferkah's calves. She butted her heel into its eye. This time, after one downward yank, the beast plummeted tail-first into the depths, leaving behind a storm of blood clouds.

With one more sweep of her arms, Neferkah broke herself through the river's surface. She sucked in a torrent of air to refill her strangled lungs and then cried Merkha's name.

“I'm all right!” he called from the riverbank. “But look out behind you!”

The shark's head splashed out, but it did not come for Neferkah. The whole fish thrashed and gushed blood between the wedge-shaped jaws of an even more immense crocodile. The gargantuan reptile rattled its prey as a dog would its chew-toy before letting it slide into its throat.

After paddling herself to shore, Neferkah crawled onto the mud wincing with pain. If she had thought the scarring on her scalp was an unpleasant experience, it could not compare to this bleeding that could drain her exhausted strength away. She collapsed onto the floodplain.

Merkha lent a hand to pull her back onto her feet. “Thank you for saving my life, O Queen.”

The papyrus reeds surrounding them rustled. From them emerged the servants and courtiers whom Neferkah all recognized from her palace. Even Huya had jogged up to embrace her.

“I'm indebted to fate itself that you're alive, Your Radiance!” Huya said. “Your entire court was praying you'd come back.”

Neferkah smiled. “Even after what they said about my hair?”

“I speak of all of us when I say we duly apologize for our childish cruelty,” one of the courtiers said. “We'll gladly pay you the compensation you're due. Besides, no hairstyle could ever warrant death!”

“Speaking of which, your hair has...changed again since we last saw you,” Huya said. “Look in the river.”

Neferkah staggered back towards the water's edge and examined her reflection. No longer did her hang drop down straight from her head. Instead it grew out into a dense, kinky bush as Akhiptan hair was supposed to. Philon might as well have never touched it.

“That was what I wanted to tell you, before that shark interrupted me,” Merkha said. “If your hair ever gets straightened by a hot comb, all you need to do is add water to it.”

“There's nothing in the mortal world to reverse hair damage like water, is there?” Neferkah laughed. “Have any of you seen Philon this afternoon?”

Huya shook his head. “You want his head brought before you?”

“Still attached to his body, mind you. But it should still have hair attached. I have something special in mind for that Ellasian jackal's bastard..”

##

The court drums rumbled like the thunder of an encroaching wet season inside the throne chamber. Linen bandages covered Neferkah's wounds, but she still wore most of her royal attire while seated on her throne. The only article missing was her regal crown, which she had eschewed so she could display her restored hair in all its kinky glory. All the courtiers laughed and jeered with fiendish joy, but not at their Queen.

Palace guards with spears and animal-hide shields swaggered up to her, dragging with them a squirming Ellasian man in a ripped tunic. Blue and purple bruises spotted his face, with blood dripping out of his flattened nose. His hair had grown into a greasy mess of a mop, which would give Neferkah ample material to work with.

The guards dropped Philon at Neferkah's feet. He knelt before her with wobbling limbs. “You've caught me, O Queen of Akhiptu. Please, I implore you, show me some mercy...”

“For how you violated my hair?” Neferkah held out the papyrus letter with the monkey scribble. “Never mind these kind words you gave my 'sooty ass' after your departure.”

“But I would have never gotten away with it had you not let me. Remember, you thought I could make your hair reflect the Sun!”

“And you promised nothing in the mortal world could reverse it. Look at what a little dip in the river did to your special style. Furthermore, even if our hair doesn't have the glossiest luster, it still grows up towards the Sun, not down to the ground like yours.”

“I guess that is another way of looking at it. So what are you going to do to your lowly captive?”

Neferkah flashed her teeth in her broadest grin. “I've a mind to throw you to the crocodiles, believe me. Or the leopards, or even those flesh-eating scarabs everyone thinks we Akhiptans keep. Yet I believe your punishment must fit the crime, and I have a very certain punishment in mind for you.”

She fished out of her hair a bronze tube. A servant handed her a burning brazier which she held the tube over.

“What in the gods' name is that?” Philon asked.

“You thought you could make a joke at my expense with your hot comb. Two can play that game. Before I send you back to rejoin your countrymen at Mykenos, I shall give you a little taste of this curling iron!”

Her maniacal cackle echoed over the drums within the throne chamber's limestone walls.