The Secret King and What He Stole
By Nathan Thomas
Dark was the night and long was the road, deep was the sky, and heavy, the load.
Benjamin Koen set the handles of his wooden cart down at his tired heels and took the hand of his wife, Erith. Together, hand-in-hand, they looked up, up into that deep sky –so full of stars that it looked like it was swirling with silver fire– and the caress of the wind was strong and still sweet from an afternoon of whipping through the tall grass of the flats. No prophecy led them here. The planets had not aligned in any particularly mystical configuration, no dice had been cast, nor runes carved from a dragon’s teeth; the tarot deck lay untouched. Instead, there was only Benjamin and Erith Koen, clothing rent to rags, gaunt with famine, fragile in the dark and silver night, together, speaking Old Words, softly, “Baruch dayan ha’emet.”
Those words, like all the Old Words, hold locked within them worlds of meaning: stories and mysteries, and old, deep, secret magic. Baruch dayan ha’emet: the greatest of storytellers can scarcely approach how intimately Benjamin and Erith knew it and how they had dwelt within the holy and despairing depths of the ancient phrase. But to begin to unravel that Great Mystery, we must start here, with these travellers at the end of a long, dark journey. Their hearts were full of sorrow, but still they might yet trust. Erith had decided: their spirits were broken, and still they may yet stand. Benjamin decided: their feet will walk; their hands, work. Still their spirits were young enough to reach out in the night to the Great Wild Knowing, and still by night, their arms reached out to one another. So, when two such travellers speak “baruch dayan ha’emet,” a vulgar but well intentioned translation may be, “Our devastated hearts, torn open, might now be wide enough to let inside some secret, quiet Truth.”
For two full seasons, shadows chased the couple far along a strange and perilous road. Monsters had pursued them on foot and horseback, through field and forest, through cities, towns, and wayward camps. There is no refuge from the beasts who stalk, torment, and taunt their prey by day and night. Some wore fine clothing, some were of blade and cross and brigandine, or were servants of The Book Which Always Thirsts, or of a golden crown, or gold itself –the Réal, Mark, and Guilder. The wanderers believe that every monster to the last would learn, too late, the true name of their lord was hunger. Hunger was the secret king of all the southern lands, and to it, every knee was bent.
Grand histories recall the mighty hands that clutched at lands beyond the western seas, whose sight could penetrate the heavens, who stole and tasted nature’s secrets. They were wondrous birds in gilded cages, singing praises of mankind to please their patrons: the great, fat heirs of heaven and of earth. So glories were gutted from marble, splattered in plaster, pigment, parchment; and all proclaimed the race of man renewed, and resurrected, and ablaze. They named mankind the measure of all things, and they crowned him king, with fingers poised to touch the very hand of God– that same divinity who chose the masters to burn brightest, and to leave the rest abandoned in the ashes.
Those were hunger’s children in the cinders –a million, and a million million more unnamed, unnumbered faces, souls, and memories– all swallowed in his maw. Every street and doorstep that the two travellers passed, every empty pot and sack were tracts in hunger’s bitter kingdom. But the ghetto was his bastion, his cathedral, where they saw every soul work under hunger’s ever-present eye, and pray in hunger’s echo, and sleep inside the hollow of his palm. Every infant born there is a child born to bondage, to be silently devoured in the neverending gnawing, in the emptiness of ‘not enough’.
That king-in-rags was ever a companion to the Koens, gnashing its teeth and taking all it could swallow; so they starved. They starved, and they walked, losing much along the way. Bit by bit their coin was spent or stolen, then their freedom, dignity, and nearly all that might bring hope: a secret in Erith’s silver locket; the Holy Name in delicate filigree emblazoned on a cylinder of brass; Benjamin’s precious books of old stories, on the secrets of clockwork, and all the Old Words; but dearest, and cruellest of all, their own flesh and blood.
It was hunger that ripped the child away from Erith’s bosom, for whom Benjamin, with his round spectacles broken, and Erith, with her braided hair cropped short and crooked, together ripped the ragged threads across their hearts in sorrow. It was hunger still that drove them on along the exile’s road, and far to the North, to glowing pinprick windows of Röric; and food, and rest, and solace, at last. Röric was a whispered call among all of hunger’s children, and would soon draw out the Tamer of Devils, and the Blazing Ones, and the wayward doctor, and the long-dead alchemist who’d soon split the world wide.
Baruch dayan ha’emet.
(End Part I)
