Testimonium Regis - Part 1 of 5

By joekuhlman

Thu, 13 Feb 2025

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Snapping through the ribs was Aldus’ least favorite part of any procedure that called for it. While he was not a squeamish man, this being part of the reason he found himself in the garb of the barber-surgeon, the sound of a rib cracking alone was enough to turn even his stomach. More than the sound, though, was the resistance, the anticipation, before the rib was cut. This is what he hated most. In those seconds (maybe two, maybe three) of resistance before the crack, he remembered that this meat on the stone slab before him was once alive. That it walked, talked, dreamed, hoped. The sturdiness of the rib reminded him that it was not meant to be severed the way it was. In his worst reveries, he always feared the owner of the body would spring to an upright position, grab the tool and scream in protest. “I’m alive, you old dolt! Could you not tell my bones do not wish to be broken!?”

Now, in his old age, he found himself having to exert ever more strength to sever ribs, adding a fresh, sour flavor to the process. It used to be worse. Before he experimented with and now favored the shears, he used a more traditional saw. That was more intensive. More intimate. The shears were suitable, but in Aldus’ fantasy, ribs could be plucked from the chest like stalks of wheat. He placed the shears on the slab beside him, breathing heavy, and rested his fingers on the ribs before him. He ran his thumb along the length of it to the sternum. His gaze circled the flesh and organs trapped within. If he kept his eyes here, where everything was shared among men, he wouldn’t have to look up at the face. The king’s - former king’s - face. The boy was one day dead now. No springing up for him. He had thought of covering the king’s face with a sheet, but he felt it would be disrespectful. Now he couldn’t look upon the face at all. He was two ribs down. Too many left. The Testimonium Regis was looming over them.

“Sir Aldus,” a voice chimed in from behind him, “have you need of something?”

Aldus had been lost in thought again. Another symptom of his aging mind. How long had he stopped? He caught his breath and responded to his apprentice.

“No, Hugh. Just catching my breath.”

“Would you like me to he-”

“No. I’m nearly done”, Aldus lied. He wasn’t sure why he lied. Hugh was as good a surgeon as any and knew they were nowhere close to done. He didn’t push, though. He had relegated himself today, at Aldus’ request, to observation. The boy would have plenty of time in his life to cut open a king or two. Boy? Ha! He’s almost twice the age you were when you became the apprentice.

When Aldus was told by his superiors that he had delayed picking an apprentice long enough, he picked Hugh from a pool of four eligible barber-surgeons. It was an easy decision. Hugh had served as the surgeon on several warships. He’d sewn up sword slashes and pike wounds during tempests and rolling waves. Despite the rugged and impressive resumé, however, Aldus saw a certain tenderness and care in Hugh’s eyes that was the cause for his hiring. That was only a week prior. Only a week prior when Hugh learned that he would become the master of the most important ceremony in the kingdom’s history: the Testimonium Regis. The same ceremony Aldus had overseen for sixty of his eighty years. The ceremony he swore he would not have to oversee again after the baby - the sweetest child - was crowned king. It didn’t even cross Aldus’ mind that he might outlive the child. That he might have to perform the operation on his royal highness, King Jerome III. He could have Hugh do it. Hugh could cut into the boy he knew while he, Aldus, wept in his chambers. He could, but he wouldn’t. Aldus needed to do it himself.

“Sir, forgive me for saying, but if it’s the king’s ribs that are giving you trouble, I could -”, Hugh started as he rose.

“Sit back down, Hugh. I only need a moment.”

Hugh obeyed. Sighing, Aldus turned, wrestling himself away from the maw of the boy’s chest cavity. “I don’t mean to be short with you, my boy, you know this.”

“Not short at all, sir. I only wish to be of service.”

“You have and you shall.”

Hugh nodded, his gaze turning towards the corpse on the slab. He grimaced. “What is it, Hugh?” Aldus asked.

He made to reply, but his words seemed to stop short at his teeth. He gestured to the dead king. Aldus hesitated but conceded, stepping to the side and allowing Hugh to approach. Hugh stood and circled the slab, intent on the open chest. The incision started from the king’s clavicle and ran down to his pelvis. The skin and muscle across the torso was peeled back. Underneath and behind the ribs, the damned ribs, were the king’s organs. Taken out and inspected, they’d prove to be the same as anyone’s. Perhaps healthier than average as this was a well-fed and well-exercised youth, but ordinary organs nonetheless. Hugh leaned in, his face inches from the ribs. He peered between them, bobbing his head up and down, left to right, like a carrion bird.

“Finding everything to be in order?” Aldus asked.

Hugh flashed a wry, distracted smile that retreated back behind his surgeon’s grimace: all furrowed brow and taut lip. When finished, he stood straight and rubbed the back of his neck. “In truth, Sir Aldus, and forgive me for saying it, but I thought you were jesting.” Hugh concluded. “I’m sorry to have doubted you.”

Aldus didn’t need Hugh to clarify, nor was he offended. The secret of the Testimonium Regis was a bitter ale to swallow, even for learned and practical men. Aldus himself thought his leg was being pulled when he was first told as well, all those years ago.

“You expected his heart to be of gold.” Aldus said.

“Aye. I did.”

“It simply isn’t so. I’ve known several kings in my time, Hugh. Both of our land’s line and kings of others through ceremonies and diplomatic gatherings. I can assure you, none have had hearts of gold. I’ve…rooted around now in more kings than anyone. Four, now, to be exact. I am quite sure of this fact. These are men.” Then, forgetting himself, he quipped. “However, if any of them were to have had one, a golden heart, it would have been our young Jerome, here.”

Though he wouldn’t admit it out loud, Aldus held his breath when he made the first incision on the boy half-expecting, half-praying that a golden sheen would peek through and unveil itself as his scalpel glided down the length of the torso. This, of course, didn’t happen. He was simply cutting into a dead child on a slab in a castle’s cold corner tower that bore no windows and only one locked door for what he did was to be done in secret.

Aldus didn’t know for certain when or how the Testimonium Regis as they knew it began. There were myths, of course. The most common history being that at the now-ancient Battle of Bexhill, when the first king of the current line rallied the peoples of the mainland to retake the island throne, his breastplate was struck by a flaming, golden stone cast from heaven. The king fought the battle from the front lines with the stone lodged in his chest, so they say. He fought with the fervor of a hundred men and felled a thousand on the battlefield, for his heart had been replaced with some manner of divine engine. After the engine gave out and he collapsed, having won the battle, he demanded that his wife be brought to him in his war tent to lay with him. Once his seed was spilt, he died, thereby passing the golden heart through his blood, so they say, to the newly gestating child. When the next king was on his deathbed from sickness forty-three years later, he demanded that he be cut open to see if he indeed inherited the golden stone. He was cut open and the court did find, so they say, a heart cast in gold. This was proof that the blood of the king passed the golden heart down and that this signified a divine right to rule the land. While the stone from heaven was lost to time, the heart of the second king was presented to the people in the first Testimonium Regis. So had every king’s heart since.

Aldus had no proof a real golden heart had ever existed. If they did exist, they were no longer inherited. In these times, as likely in olden days, the secret that the golden hearts were forged by an appointed blacksmith, that these hearts were placed in a dead king to be presented later for the ceremony, was kept so close that no more than ten living men knew of it at any one given time. The Lord Blacksmith, the Lord Surgeon, their respective apprentices, a high priest, and a handful of viziers. The Lord Surgeon was a rather daring addition some hundred years ago to widen the circle of trust. The keepers of the secret felt that experienced hands were required to both extract the old heart and transplant the new, lest the royal corpse be mangled in the process. Thus the Lord Surgeon, picked from the best man-cutters in the land, was instituted. At first, this barber-surgeon had to be of some noble blood himself to be considered. Nowadays, given the talents of noble blood were often limited to drunkeness and fox hunting, a surgeon was picked from groups of ones that had proven themselves capable. Aldus himself had a heart cast of clay and straw and was refined only in his craft.