Chapter 7: The Tale

These were the dark years. The forces of greed and corruption had unleashed a chaos that even they themselves had not been prepared for. Fear fueled violence and violence spawned fear, fires raged and blood flowed, destruction reigned, and when finally the fires had gone out and the blood had seeped into the ground or flowed away with the rivers, a formerly prosperous country was lying in ruins.

The Queen had not been able to protect her people, nor to protect herself. The walls of her palace were broken down, the roofs collapsed in the fire, those who still lived were disarmed and dragged into the gardens, or what had been the gardens, where the men died, and the women screamed for days and nights until they died, too. The charred and mutilated corpses lay strewn on the ground, their meat prey to the scavengers, winged or quadruped or sometimes walking on two legs, limbs were torn or cut off, bones were dragged away to hidden feeding places, cracked by sharp teeth, the remains diligently picked clean by insects, and finally, as the years went by, they sank into the earth they had come from, and which took them in again. There was no question, after the worst of the rage had exhausted itself, of ever identifying any of the bodies, whether to gloat over their demise or to give them a decent funeral, and for years men died in drunken brawls over boastful claims of who among them it had been who had raped the Queen in her vagina, ass or throat, cut off her breasts, slashed her sides, made her scream, had heard her beg for her life or beg for death, seen her die, or finally killed her themselves. And of those who knew that she would never have screamed nor begged, those who still lived did not dare to speak.

Many had died in those days of fire and blood, and of those who survived, many then died of hunger and disease, and many of those who still survived killed and were killed in fights for power, dwindling resources, and territories of scorched earth. But eventually those fights came to an end, and a new order, or what passed for order after the rampant destruction, emerged. The country, once peaceful and united, was fragmented, the pieces ruled by feuding warlords, the people at the mercy of their lords and of the murderous bands of roaming mercenaries those lords lacked the power and the will to control. But still, time passed, and people lived, and survived, and worked, and built, and loved, and had their hopes, and dreams, and desires, and defeats.

And in this time the events had occurred that I had heard told about.

There was a man, a solitary man, not young anymore, his business had gone badly, he saw no prospects for himself.

There is a legend, which the man had heard, about a distant country in the North, which abounds in jewels of unrivaled beauty, which would be of enormous value in the country where the man lived — if he could make the journey and return, he would be set for life. If...

Others had tried before — some had never returned, some had returned broken in spirit and body, some had returned bringing a few pieces of value, but it had turned out that they had acquired them in other places — stolen them, or robbed them, or even earned them through hard labor, but no one had returned from that mythical place — no one still alive at that time, that is. In times long past, a few had made the trip, had brought jewels that now grace the treasure boxes of the court and of a few wealthy merchants and warlords, and they had brought back the knowledge of that place — what had been knowledge, long ago, but now, by the relentless workings of time, had been blurred, reduced to a rumor, a legend, a distant tale.

He knew that his chances were zero, but what had he got to lose? He sold everything he had — little enough — and set out, on foot — the path over the mountain range he had to cross was too narrow and steep for a horse, and he had no need for a mule, not having any baggage to carry but what fit into a bundle on his back. And if indeed he found the gems, what he could carry home in the pockets of his trousers would make him rich far beyond his needs.

He must have walked for months, if not longer — as I’ve said, I hadn’t heard the beginning of the tale — and he must have encountered setbacks and hardships and ill fate, and had lost his way, lost his confidence, lost weight, lost most of his hope, when he came to that village where he met the woman.

He didn’t go into villages often, the depopulated but fertile country offered most of what he needed without him having to give of what little money he carried, but some things he wanted which nature and deserted ruins couldn’t give him, and the occasional human contact was among them. When he wanted to enter a village, he slept at a safe distance, then walked into it in the morning. As a rule, the people he encountered were neither hostile to him nor friendly. The times when people had traveled, had exchanged merchandise and news, had been eager for the foreigner to trade with, to exchange tales and freely share their houses and food and drink and, often enough, their bodies with them, were over. Commerce with the outside world, for what little they needed from it, was done by trips to the nearest town, a few days away on decayed roads, by groups large enough not to be easy prey to bandits but not so large as to deplete the village from all who could defend it; trips undertaken on foot, with a few donkeys to carry grain and meat and cheese and raw hides to the town, and iron and fabrics and glass and leather back. The peoples’ needs were simple, though, and most of what they needed, they made themselves. Tales they no longer had to tell, nor wanted to hear.

In this village, on the day he came to it, was market day. Groceries, livestock, tools, clothes, pottery, the usual stuff, little of which, except for what was edible, was of interest to him. Trade was mostly done in barter, but also in coins, still valid because people still accepted them, even though gold and silver held little practical use. Copper more so, but for this the coins were too small. Most of the goods were simply sold, but some were auctioned, and these — he had seen this in other villages — belonged not to individual villagers or traders, but to the village as a whole. Fruits that had grown on trees on public ground, fish that had been caught in a nearby stream by collective effort, things that had belonged to people who had died without next of kin, or the occasional object that no one wanted to claim ownership of, out of misgivings, superstitious or real. He was already leaving, carrying the provisions he had bought for himself, when, turning his head at the sudden silence behind him, he saw that the last one of those objects to be auctioned was a girl.