The Tale of the Foolish King

The Tale of the Foolish King was a fairy tale which the Eighth Doctor at some point recited. It told the tale of a tyrannical king who outlawed music. (AUDIO: Scherzo) It was later appropriated by Light City as a propaganda broadcast. (AUDIO: The Natural History of Fear)

History
At one point, the Eighth Doctor recited the tale out loud. (AUDIO: Scherzo) Later, when the Eighth Doctor, Charlotte Pollard, and C'rizz visited Light City, their memories were copied and used in an experiment. One such memory that was taken was this tale, which was used as one of the broadcasts which the proles were obligated to view. (AUDIO: The Natural History of Fear)

Story text
"Once upon a time, in a land not too dissimilar to ours, there lived a king. And he was a good king, in an age when good was something of an unfashionable rarity.

He was very very wise, and very very powerful. Be he was also very very old. And he realised that for all his great wisdom and his great power, he would soon have to leave his kingdom once and for all and make his journey to the outside world of infinite darkness.

And so on the eve of his departure, when his physicians had finished all their head-shaking and his wives had wrung as many tears from their eyes as they could, he called his son and heir to his side.

"Everything you see is yours to command," he said. "But be advised that better slaves are those who still believe they taste some freedom. Play the tyrant, but you must inspire love as well as fear."

Yet the son cared not for his words. And when the corpse had been dispatched, with much pomp and fireworks to the darker realms outside, the new king resolved to stretch the limits of his authority.

He gathered all the people before him and told them that their every thought must match his thought; no will should exist save for his will.

And people being people, they agreed.

Those that didn't vanished in the night, and their families soon learned to pretend they had never existed.

But still the king was not content. So he instructed all the animals in the kingdom that they should obey his commands. Horses should bark, dogs should mew, fish should fly from tree to tree exactly as he desired.

And animals being animals, they agreed.

Some of the pigs had to be culled. But no one minded, seeing as they tasted so lip-smackingly good. And the cats had to go because no one could tell a cat anything. But soon the people and the animals lived in perfect harmony, their lives precise expressions of the whims of their lord.

Every living creature obeyed their king, doing everything that he wanted to the smallest detail, sometimes even before he knew he wanted it. But still the king was not content. Living creatures only made up the smallest number of his subjects, so he gave out further orders.

He instructed the Waves should crash upon the shore only when he gave the word. He instructed the Wind should not blow, but suck. Time should not run forwards, but backwards. Or sideways.

It took years to persuade them. Soldiers slashed at the Waves until their swords were soaked with wave-blood; Wind and Time were locked in the deepest dungeons until, starving, they gave in.

The king ruled the elements. But still, he was not content. There was one subject who still balked at his power: Music. How the king hated Music; refusing to be constrained, refusing to be disciplined. A small burst of recitative flowering into a fugue without permission... or a cantata breaking out overnight into a fully-fledged oratorio.

"Will no man rid me of these turbulent tunes?" he cried. And the militia, now trained to obey his merest impulse, took him at his word.

They seized the Music; every last crochet and minim, each breve and innocent little semibreve, and threw them out of the kingdom. They threw them into the outside world of infinite darkness, and Music was banished forever.

At last, the king had his own universe. It was his, and no one else's. He was happy.

And no one dared point out to him that he had exiled the only means by which he could express it.

You remember The Tale of the Foolish King? He who so despised Music that he banished it from his realm? His was a very quiet land. Birds sat silent in the trees, their beaks now stopped fast, their chirping and twittering frozen hard in their throats.

There was no longer a harmony to Time. Seconds would race on or trudge forward, or simply come to a listless halt. The Waves crashed noiselessly onto the sand, for even within that, there had been a trace of music. There was no rhythm to life anymore.

And the king's people felt it the worst. They had been slaves, but whilst they still had songs of liberty on their lips they'd been happy slaves. Some rebelled, and were put to the torture. But even the torturers, who had once calmed their conscience with soothing music, were unable to bare the awful glaring accusing silence.

The fact was clear. Anything could be borne with Music, but nothing could be borne without it.

And the king would sit on his throne in misery. He dearly loved his wives, but now he heard in their words no love returned, no tune, no melody. For this, he executed them regularly. The women he loved, their heads rolling from the scaffolds soundlessly. The king himself alone, weeping for them, all, all quite silent.

One morning the king decided he would pardon Music. He drew up a contract, stamped it with his own royal seal: Music was free to return from the outside world of infinite darkness.

And to bear the good news, he sent several messengers there. Some by hanging, some by stabbing, one or two by slow-acting poison. But none returned. And nor did Music.

The king was desperate. He called upon his sorcerers, his necromancers, and those who were trained in the forbidden knowledge of Music Resurrection. But it became obvious that the king himself would have to make a personal appeal to his prodigal son.

With court physicians at ministry, and the last of his wives looking on with glee, the king was slowly bled, each drop landing in a metal container with a plop that just managed to be wholly tuneless. And as he wavered between death and life, he stepped into the darkness and called out:

"I have been a foolish man! I should have inspired love as well as fear. Please, let the Music play again. All its songs, its symphonies, and its sundry choral works, please... Give my world a reason to live."

It was seven days and seven nights before the king recovered. And he awoke to a miracle.

Once more, birds were trilling in the trees. The clocks chimed, and Waves roared. Once more, the world had Music! And his favourite wife of all stood over him and smiled. And in the tone of her lilting voice, he felt once again that she loved him.

The people were in celebration, singing in the streets whatever tunes would come into their heads. And they sang until their throats turned red raw, they sang until their arteries burst and gushed, they screamed their new songs of pain.

The king watched in horror as the birds fell dead in the street. As the Waves struggled limply, and then were drowned by the seas beneath them. He heard his infant son cry out his last, his face bitten off by a savage lullaby. The lilting voice of his wife that he had loved so much grinned at him cruelly before wrapping itself around her throat and throttling her silent.

The Music raced through the kingdom, sparing none its terrible beauty. As the bodies of his subjects fell to the ground, their death rattles sounded like the rhythm of a perfect drum. And the Music at last came for the king.

"Why?" he asked.

"Because we have been to the outside world," the Music replied. "We have seen the infinite darkness. And we have learned that we need not only inspire love... but fear."

And with a sound of brass and strings so beautiful it stopped the king's heart, the Music swallowed him up, whole, and became the new and dreadful lord of the entire world."

- the tale, as told by the Eighth Doctor

Behind the scenes
The history of the usage of this tale in Doctor Who is slightly confusing from a strict in-universe perspective. When it first appeared, in Scherzo, it was split up into four parts, each one serving as a "cold opening" for each of the four episodes of the story. There was no indication towards the context of why and to whom the Eighth Doctor was actually tellling this story, nor to the in-universe source of the story itself, and indeed it would have been an entirely reasonable assumption for a listener at the time to take that the tale segments were not supposed to be taken as having literally occurred in-universe, but were rather simple thematic and non-diegetic complements to the story and to the Divergent Universe arc in general. In other words, that, in these sections, we are not hearing the Eighth Doctor, but Paul McGann, effectively reading an original short story, whose purpose is primarily as a metaphor to illustrate certain Divergent Universe concepts. However, shortly afterwards, the tale was featured in an explictly in-universe context of having been drawn from the Doctor's memories in the audio story The Natural History of Fear. This retroactively confirms the narrated portions of Scherzo to have "actually occurred" in the DWU, but the context to any of it is still unclear. Whatever the case, however, the actual content of the story itself can be safely taken as fiction (that is to say, fictional even within the context of Doctor Who), and one should not assume that, for instance, the reference to "Time [being] locked in in the deepest dungeons" constitutes a genuine description of events involving the Eternal of the same name.