The Phantom Trousers of Aachen

The Emperor Charlemagne possessed a majestic beard, twenty-two sovereign titles, and the cognitive gullibility of a fat barn owl.

This was precisely why Barnaby, the Imperial Fool, had survived four separate palace coups without ever having to learn how to juggle.

It was two hours past midnight in the damp limestone octagonal vaults of Aachen. Charlemagne was pacing before a roaring fireplace, gnawing on a salted mutton haunch and waving a grease-stained papal bull in Barnaby’s face.

"Three centuries, Barnaby," the Emperor whispered hoarsely, glancing nervously at the tapestry behind them as though the Pope himself were hiding in the embroidery. "Pope Sylvester and Otto and I have consulted the astrolabes. History is too long. If we leave all these miserable, empty centuries lying around, the Holy Roman Empire will look tardy. We are cutting two hundred and ninety-seven years from the calendar. Poof. Gone."

"A sensible municipal trimming, Sire," Barnaby murmured, jingling the solitary copper bell sewn to his velvet cap.

"There is one problem," Charlemagne hissed, leaning down until Barnaby could smell stale mead and boar fat. "The evidence. All those future calendars between six hundred and fourteen and nine hundred and eleven. They must burn. Tonight. In absolute secrecy. Take the imperial branding torch to the lower archives and reduce every one of those years to cinder."

Barnaby blinked once. He tilted his head.

"Sire... forgive my peasant arithmetic, but have those years actually occurred yet?"

Charlemagne narrowed his eyes with terrifying imperial solemnity. "Do not get clever with me, fool. If you don’t burn the future calendars, how will anyone know not to live them? Go!"

Barnaby bowed until his bells scraped the cobblestones, retreated backward down the stairs, and ducked into the pantry.

There was, naturally, nothing to destroy. One cannot burn a Tuesday that has not yet been invented. So Barnaby toasted half a heel of rye bread over a tallow candle, scorched a fistful of dry leek skins to produce an impressive cloud of acrid black smoke, and waited forty-five minutes before marching back upstairs, his face tastefully smudged with soot.

"It is done, my Liege," Barnaby coughed heroically, dropping to one knee. "Two hundred and ninety-seven years have been incinerated. Time itself has suffered third-degree burns. We are officially in the year eight hundred, and not a second earlier."

Charlemagne let out a chest-rattling sigh of relief, crossing himself three times. "You have saved Western Christendom, Barnaby."

Barnaby smiled dutifully, but beneath his motley tunic, his heart was hammering against his ribs in sheer, cold dread.

The trouble with lying about the fabric of spacetime is that you occasionally convince yourself. Barnaby was reasonably certain he had fabricated the burning, but Charlemagne had spoken with such booming theological authority that Barnaby was now privately terrified he had accidentally wiped out his own past. Specifically, two irreplaceable memories:

First, his mother’s hundredth birthday party in Burgundy, an emotional milestone where seventy-four grandchildren had gathered to watch the old woman blow out one hundred spitting beeswax candles on a turnip pie.

Second, the legendary links-golf weekend he had taken along the dunes of Brittany with three Flemish mercenaries, hitting leather-wrapped pebbles into rabbit burrows with a bent willow cane.

If the seventh and eighth centuries never happened, Barnaby agonized, clutching his belly, where in God's name did Mum have her turnip pie? And what about my birdie on the ninth dune?

Before he could spiral into a full existential seizure, Charlemagne froze. The Emperor’s hand dropped from his beard to his waist, patting down his royal tunic with growing distress.

"Barnaby."

"Sire?"

"Where are my golden drawers?"

The room went dead quiet.

"Your... drawers, Sire?"

"My golden silk undergarments! Spun in Byzantium! Blessed in Ravenna! The ones with the gilded gusset!" Charlemagne glared across the hearth, his bushy eyebrows knotting into a thunderhead. "They were hanging right there on the cedar clothes-horse yesterday morning!"

A delicate situation.

Barnaby had, in fact, stolen the Emperor’s golden underwear. He had pinched them last Thursday while Charlemagne was distracted arguing with an abbot about tithes. Underwear theft was, unfortunately, Barnaby's primary vice. It was an open court secret; ever since that riotous fortnight in Marseilles where Barnaby had gotten blindingly intoxicated with an eccentric wandering merchant who claimed to be King Solomon, Barnaby had developed an uncontrollable compulsion to pilfer high-born unmentionables. Half the dukes in Bavaria kept padlocks on their laundry baskets when the royal retinue rode into town.

And besides, Barnaby reasoned privately, it was hardly a crime against the Crown. The Emperor mislaid two or three pairs of drawers every single time he and old King Solomon went on one of their legendary mine-shaft benders — three days deep in the Harz silver tunnels, singing psalms at the stalactites and wagering duchies on cave-rat races. Charlemagne always came home short of trousers and long on stories. Blaming a hole in time was barely even a lie. It was practically tradition.

Charlemagne took a menacing step forward, fists clenched. "Barnaby... you didn’t take them, did you?"

Barnaby looked at the empty clothes-horse. He looked at Charlemagne. Then he drew himself up to his full, dignified height and gasped in utter horror.

"Sire!" Barnaby cried, pointing a trembling finger at the vacant cedar rack. "Did you feel that draft just now?"

"Draft? What draft?"

"The temporal suction!" Barnaby seized his head in his hands. "Oh, by the Virgin's tears! What have I done?"

Charlemagne blinked, bewildered. "What did you do?"

"Sire, the chronological blast radius! When I incinerated the two hundred and ninety-seven phantom years down in the vaults, the vacuum was too violent! The vortex must have reached right up through the floorboards!" Barnaby grabbed the Emperor by the velvet shoulders, shaking him gently. "Tell me, Sire—when did you commission those glorious golden drawers?"

"Last year!" Charlemagne stammered, his eyes wide. "Around harvest!"

"Last year!" Barnaby wailed to the stone rafters. "Precisely as I feared! 'Last year' was Year 614 of the phantom cycle! It never existed! The drawers occupied a timeline that has been entirely revoked by imperial decree! Sire, you didn't leave them on the horse—they collapsed into the chronological void right before your sovereign eyes!"

Charlemagne stared at the empty clothes-horse. His jaw dropped.

"Fell... into the void?"

"Swallowed whole by the calendar gap," Barnaby nodded solemnly, brushing a fake tear from his cheek. "Gone to the same place where my mother’s hundredth birthday and my Brittany golf swing now wander in eternal exile. You should be grateful, Sire. Had you been wearing them when the time-rip occurred, your entire lower half might currently reside in the seventh century."

Charlemagne paled, instinctively clutching his hips. He looked down at the floor, crossed himself again, and reached out to pat Barnaby’s shoulder with deep, paternal remorse.

"You risked your life down there, Barnaby," the Emperor whispered reverently. "Forget the drawers. Better the void take my gold-stitched silk than my imperial groin. Come—let us drink to the year eight hundred. It is a good year. A solid year. Nothing is missing."

"Nothing at all, Sire," Barnaby agreed cheerfully, discreetly adjusting the excessively soft, gilded waistband bunched up under his own woollen breeches.