Prologue to To Serve a King
Fellow Scientists,
This story is going to seem very strange to you, but please, bear with me. Since it was all of you who put me up to this, you should read it in its entirety before you make up your minds as to my conclusion. Please, I emplore you—read with an open mind. This journey has been as much a conviction for me as it has been a reward of my hope and faith—and it is those two elements, humble conviction and divine hope, that comprise faith: the Whole Truth we’ve been arguing about. Come with me now on my journey, if you’re willing. After all, my hope exists for you.
Now, read. Read, and consider as I do, this issue to be settled.
Your Comrade,
Deodatus
P.S. Thanks in advance for letting me keep my job.
Chapter 1: Emeris
A sinister column of black smoke stretched across the western sky like the neck of a dark dragon. Somewhere beyond the family of ancient elms that made its home on the afternoon side of Boreal, probably south of the yellow bedrock ridge that cut a line across the prairie, a zealous fire burned. At this distance, the smoke plume appeared to the girl like a black segment of rope, hanging from the clouds above, frayed at the top. The base of the smoke plume glowed a frighteningly florid orange. It was, perhaps, because of the immensity of the blaze that Emeris could not tell exactly how far away the fire burned.
The girl had nervously lingered to gaze at the smoke plume—she’d been removing her father’s dry laundry from the line and folding it in the yard outside their house. The smoke, though a great distance away, prompted her to hurry. So she resumed her folding, quite a bit faster now—no matter if the shirts were sloppy. Emeris turned her back to the distant blaze and pressed her arms into the woven laundry basket, forcing it to bulge.
What glowed in the west was no forest fire. Nor was it the random evidence of a one-in-a-million lightning strike that trips a flame. Nor the consequence of some careless drunk that fell asleep with his pipe clenched, still burning, between his lips. No, quite the contrary: this fire, which burned within site of the girl’s hometown, also threw sparks upon the dry leaves swirling in her heart. The goings-on of the west country smouldered, promising to perfume the girl’s life, and those of the people she came to know.
But before I can share with you all that I know about the girl, I have to tell you about her family and upbringing.
Until this day, the effervescent village girl lived a quiet and nearly placid life. She’d never been far from Boreal, being that the golden rule of her childhood was: If you find yourself somewhere and you can’t see the wind vane on top of the barn, you’re too far from home. During her childhood, Emeris’ father had taken her as far west as the cider mill at West Ridge, a crossroads that had once been surrounded by the richest apple orchards on earth. For a youngster, the journey to West Ridge was arduous, even on horseback, but there was no better news to hear from Dad than the announcement of an upcoming trip to the cider mill.
“Come on, Em’,” Dad would say. “Come and get some cider. Your mother loves this stuff, doesn’t she? Not thirsty Em’? Got to drink it now, because it won’t last the trip.”
Emeris had been about eight the first time Dad had taken her into West Ridge—and the thought of that fresh apple cider still made her mouth water even today. Indeed, the sweet apple production on the plateau surrounding West Ridge was world-famous. Caravans outfitted for hauls much longer than the distance from Boreal had forever carried cargo to far away lands for the Hexon apple industry.
That was before the Scribes had bought all the traders out of business. Now, West Ridge was little more than a Scribe military barracks, and folks from Emeris’ family’s village had no want or need to go there. The cursed ground didn’t produce sweet apple trees any more, so there’d be no point in pressing cider anyway. Pressing the apples that grew in West Ridge today would only yield a repulsive, sour pulp—you would think it was poison and spit it out reflexively.
I counted Emeris among the lucky. Until this point in their lives, they’d not seen the great press house of West Ridge in its transformed state—that of an army lodge for Scribe surgeons and their attending officers. The men who did business in the cider mill today weren’t farmers and apothecarians like the Hexon apple buckers of old, but warmakers—the greatest in the world. Today, the old cider mill was a ghost of its former self, churning out strategy for the eastern front of the Scribe army.
But the smoke rising in the west appeared to come from some place closer than the old cider mill. The only other town between West Ridge and Boreal was the trading post of Leefsted. Emeris knew this town mostly as “the place were Dad buys beer,” for every man from shore to mountain lusted its pilsner, and every unmarried man lusted the women who served that pilsner. Though Leefsted was barely a rural crossroads by the standards of most, people flocked from east and west, from West Ridge and Boreal, to enjoy an overnighter in the bridge shacks that hung on the bedrock ledges of Leefsted. This was the place for beer. Nobody really lived there except for the tavernkeepers and the girls who served that beer, save for a half-dozen ranch families that kept everybody fed when they were in town. Rye farmers, barleymen, and their dads and granddads worked the farms on the outskirts while the Leefsteders who were too old to work just drank beer and traded stories with tourists about their comings and goings.
Despite Leefsted’s reputation as a brewery town, there was something more to this crossroads than beer. There was also a huge farmers’ market. The apples from West Ridge were exchanged with the grapes from the slopes of the Aggrerian, and the beef stocks that fattened bellies on the south shore were sold to people from the north, those skinnier, more resourceful types who considered beef a celebratory, once-a-year delicacy. For a thousand generations, Emeris’ dad had told her, the farmers and ranchers of Leefsted hawked their corn and apples, corralled their horses, and brewed their ales and ciders, purveyed almost competitively by the local daughters in tawdry after-dark taverns. Leefsted fed a steady supply of food and drink to the Hexon people across the eastern countryside. The town had stood for some time as the last free market in the whole of the Hexon lands. The barley and oats came free of tax and free of inspection. The coin that passed the coffers of Leefsted had never been split with the Scribe tax man, and it had never borne the images of Scribe royalty. Leefsted had not yet been overtaken by the Scribes, or at least not prior to today.
The girl suspected that the source of the smoke column—the burning at its base—was indeed Leefsted. Not just a single dwelling in Leefsted. Not a bale of overdry hay, nor a scrap heap of compost. To have drawn such a smokey black archipelago in the sky must have required the entire town to be ablaze, in the girl’s estimation. Some incidiary malediction had licked Leefsted, burning it so completely that the smoke could be seen here in Boreal, three thousand fathoms away.
She was no expert on these things, though, being only a week more than seventeen years old. Map reading, estimating distances, and geometry weren’t among Emeris’ talents. Arithmetic eluded the girl, and she was in no hurry to learn it. She figured math had too many rows and columns. It was not a beautiful thing, that math. Numbers didn’t address the things she cared about. Numbers couldn’t describe the gurgling stream that ran across her father’s acreage or the waving of the unopened wild tulips at dawn on a crisp April morning, and they couldn’t offer a song of welcome to a friend who’d recently returned home from a hunting trip. Those were the things that mattered to Emeris. Neither science nor numbers can relate those things to the human heart, can they?
Mathematics in Boreal was rudimentary anyway, and village economics was downright simple. If you could stack four silver coins in the palm of the stable master’s hand, you could ride away with one of his horses as your own. It cost each household with children two pellets every year at harvest time to buy new linen and leather to equip the newest members of the field patrol (households without children, of which there were only two in the village, paid only a pellet) with an axe, a jacket, and a badge that was plated with gold from the west. (Such a gold-covered trinket would’ve fetched an absurd amount of money in other places, but not here in Boreal, where village economics didn’t permit for anything to be expensive, even if it was of exquisite quality.) Four copper pellets would buy you a set of horseshoes or a skin of milk, and if the milk farmer couldn’t make change from a nickel, he ought to instead give you a wedge of hard cheese to nibble on during the walk home. A wedge of cured cheese was worth maybe a pellet, though you might get two wedges if their rinds were moldy. Boreal was the only place west of the Aggrerian Mountains where a golden necklace was cheaper than a set of horseshoes.
That was just about all the math a girl such as Emeris needed (or wanted) so that she might carry on in the village of Boreal. Anyway, excessive cerebration was something most Hexon villagers frowned upon. Most couldn’t figure out why you would ever want to own something made of gold when you could own a horse or a bundle of dry fatwood over which to cook that day’s supper. Life in Boreal was mostly about seeing your friends, singing songs with them, eating a nice greasy piece of fatback, or picking flowers from the endless hilly prairie in the stretch from here to Leefsted.
Emeris’ gaze remained fixed upon the west, the dark plume rising like some kind of sky-borne, windblown snake. If Leefsted was indeed burning, there could be only one reason why. Emeris may not have been a mathematician, but she wasn’t ignorant to the ways of the world. Her father had made damn sure of that, protective and paranoid as he was.
Dad had told Emeris, when she was little, that the countryside (which was now as grey as the lips of a dead man) had once been sweetly fruited with pears and apples, laced with ribbons of lion-fur wheat, and rumbling with a thousand wild head of cattle per man. Though she strained to imagine a time of such a extraordinary blessing, Emeris knew her dad wasn’t just reminiscing bitterly about how “it used to be”. He wasn’t some stodgy old malcontent repeating a tall tale that seems stale to everybody but him—the one old man everybody avoids. No; he wasn’t that at all. In fact, all the old-timers had a very real longing for the color, fertility, and goodness of the land of their youths. They all recalled the way “it used to be” and lamented the way it had become. They weren’t just complaining. The land really had become rotten.
Over the years, something had changed in the earth, they said. The world was different today. Sadder. Poisoned with the threat of death. The water in the ponds was low and murky; rainless clouds hovered watchfully over every acre most days. And these weren’t the rolling, protean clouds of years past. No, these were deep, quilted clouds that always looked the same: as if they would unleash a blinding downpour… except the rain almost never came. The clouds never inched torpidly along the sky so that children could say they looked like a rabbit or a house; they just hovered, an ever-present quilt that made gave everything an uncertain shade of grey.
The fruit trees and vines had turned bitter. There was no wine any more, and the cattle were bereft of choice meat, skinny and pathetic. The countryside was like a raped virgin, all sense of worth and innocence fleeing irreversibly from the heart of the land like old wealth from the gambling hands of a foolish heir. Even the wild daisies drooped in a lament of the earth’s putrid poisoning.
And so, Emeris knew that today, as the plume bellowed upward into the distant prairie sky, Leefsted was at the mercy of the people of the west, the Scribes. For it had long been warned, at least among the fathers and grandfathers in Emeris’ village, that the Scribes were moving their forces east, spreading out from their capital in malignant, marauding brigades. Emeris’ father had heard stories of the Scribe advance from the travelers heading to and fro over the last several years.
There was a sense of inevitability to the notion of the Scribes taking control of the Hexon lands. This was something the old timers talked about openly and the young adults couldn’t even grasp. “It won’t be long until West Ridge falls to the Scribes”, the fathers would say. But the sons would attribute their comments to the cynicism and stodginess of old age. To the youngsters of Boreal, the Scribe threat just wasn’t real. Somehow only the old timers could see this doom simmering.
A messenger had driven a stagecoach between Boreal, Leefsted, and West Ridge twice a day ever since Emeris could remember, bringing parcels and messages back and forth. Since Emeris could not read or write, she did her best to draw pictures for her cousin in Leefsted. These pictures, which Emeris drew using char from pieces of half-burnt firewood upon leftover canvas scraps from the coatmaker’s shop, were delivered to Emeris’ cousin by the stagecoach driver. Emeris’ cousin would also draw pictures and send them back to Boreal. Then, one day, the stagecoach failed to appear in Boreal, and the old timers said, “You see, West Ridge has fallen!”
The young men would laugh patronizingly, saying things like, “Dad, West Ridge has not fallen; don’t go getting carried away—the messenger probably just lost a wheel.”
Of course, when West Ridge did indeed fall to the Scribes, the fathers weren’t satisfied, not even in some small way, that they’d taught their sons a lesson in wisdom. There were no punctuations of “I told you so” on the day West Ridge fell. But quite a few young Hexon men (and at least one young Hexon girl—aye, one who never again received another drawing from her cousin) gained a new appreciation for their father’s counsels that day.
With the West Ridge lesson in mind, Emeris now realized that she looked upon the doom of another Hexon town, one much closer than West Ridge to her own beloved village home, where she sat now, folding laundry. As she sat in her dad’s yard, Emeris wondered if perhaps the Scribes were watching the burning from the opposite side of Leefsted. Were those men soldiers with axes and burning arrowheads, like in adventure stories? Were they mindless agents of death for some sinister powermonger of the Scribe territory? Maybe, as the old-timers here in Boreal had long rumored, an advance on Boreal itself was being planned. (“You know, it won’t be long before Boreal falls to the scribes”, they’d often say.) Indeed, perhaps Leefsted was to become the base camp for the Scribe army’s next thrust.
Whatever the reason for Leefsted’s burning, Emeris was afraid. The girl suspected that, should she come face to face with a soldier, she would be terrified. Should she be asked to pledge allegiance to the mark of the Scribes, she would feel sick. Should she be forced to leave her home, she would rather die. Suddenly, as her mind processed the many possible meanings of the message in the western sky, the girl became angry. There came a bitterness inside her chest that she wanted both to feed and yet to suppress—she hated the smoke plume here and now, and she hated what it might mean in a few hours, in a few days. She knew western soldiers were coming.
Emeris plucked the last article of the laundry from the line into the basket, and hustled back to the house, glacing back over her shoulder at the distant warning.