The Tower
A sentinel stood at his post on a lone tower, stained green by lifetimes’ worth of creeping moss, on a slope beneath the mountains, tall and gray. The tower, reinforced by rotting lengths of flaking timber and a roof of pale straw, had guarded the gates across the mountains for generations, and would, the guard himself hoped, for generations more.
Dawn broke on the other side of the valley, where the mountains loomed taller and whiter, with the snow of the winter drooping from them, and the dawn cast orange and yellow beams of fearful light across to the tower. The valley woke from its slumber then and there, and all was illuminated in glorious gold, awash in a sea of daybreak which now crawled across the peaks on the sentinel’s side of the valley. Sunrise had come, ripe and predictable, but ever surprising.
The sentinel leaned on one of the spindly poles holding up the roof, his coat made of pieced together skins and furs, and his fraying pants hid his skinny legs, and his arms were exposed except from a series of belts keeping them warmer than they would be, like two needles hanging out from his torso. He thought of how astounded he was that the sun rose, but then again, why should it not? The gods themselves had placed it around the disc of the earth, with its sole purpose being to endlessly spin. Truly a magical thing, that the world kept working and life went on.
He remembered a story his grandmother had told him once, about the times when the sun always stood above the earth, and there never was night. He remembered how he had remarked how that didn’t sound so bad, how dark the night was, after all, and how scared he was of it. But she beat him back, and told him of how people had to hide in caves for fear of being burnt to cinders, and how nothing could grow, and all animals except for those used to the tunnels of the earth could prosper. The god of life saw this evil and sent down upon the earth a child, who glowed with the light of a tenth of the sun, and once he had reached maturity he went outside into the light and climbed the mountains. He went to the sun and threw it beneath the disc of the earth, and he and his daughters spread throughout the night darkness, becoming the stars which shine at night, him the star father. The goddess of light was much displeased, and came to the god of life in fury, and to the heavenly courts she took him, dragging him by the beard and hitting his head on every step of the way up. All of his grandmother’s grandchildren had laughed at that part. So against the judges of heaven, the god of life said the sun could return, but instead it had to equally share its time with the night and the daughters of the star father. Then, one of the daughters of the light goddess invented the blue lid of the sky to keep the light from scorching the disc of the earth. And so, everything was set as it should be, though the sentinel had forgotten exactly how the moon was created.
Anyways, it still surprised him that time kept moving, that things kept themselves in order, that things didn’t collapse at the snap of a finger, that even when he felt like things would fall apart, they didn’t.
The sentinel righted himself and found the stairwell of rickety wood which led him down from the tower. His watch had ended, and it was someone else’s turn.
The Market
The merchant watched the great white temple, lined with mosaics of the gods and scenes from the histories of the valley, and its doors, swinging open, their richly carved wood telling the story of the journeys of the first princess and her foundation of the regal line which ruled the town. In a grand procession first flowed the incumbent princess, the fourteenth of her family to bear the name of the first, her cloak dyed royal blue, followed by her retainers and three husbands, all in drab gray and wearing ceremonial chains indicating their fealty to their wife. The richest people in the village followed: gaudy merchants, learned scholars, flattering nobility and envious members of collateral lines of the princely dynasty. Then the common people walked out, and before them all was the market.
The merchant, busying herself with arraying her goods, closely watched the potential and pious customers flock to the neighboring stalls. She herself had not joined in the temple gathering, having already participated in her weekly duties of piety the day before. Much groveling to wooden statues, she thought, as the dust of the street picked up in the commotion, the princess long having departed to her palace on the other side of the town.
It was early morning by then, all the worshippers having filed into the temple just before dawn and now enjoying the sunlit world. Surrounding her booth were the many tokens she sold, figures of the great princesses and princes who had ruled the town, and the deities which ruled over the heavens. She sold a great many of the birch crafted statuettes of the first princess, who, it was said, many many generations ago, emerged from the local river, her body made of mud and her hair of watergrass, and deposed the petulant child prince of the previous ruling family. She had then walked back to the river after having ruled the town for a thousand years, and innumerable princes had ruled after her.
Each one was given the arm belt of the princes in the shallows of the river, a thing of wood masterfully carved to resemble the flowing river, and then walked out of the waters. And when they died, each one, excepting perhaps some whose lives had been cut short in some violence and were never given a proper farewell, had been put in a raft of seagrass held together by mud and given to the river, which flowed down into the falls at the western side of the valley, dropping into a deep lagoon. One of those rulers whose body had never fallen down into the deep lagoon was the merchant’s own father, who had rebelled against the high king who dwelt deeper in the valley and was stripped of his post. He died in shame, and left her nothing but the claim of bastardy she would surely be killed for if she claimed it. There were no figures of him.
One of the pious customers approached the stall, and inquired about the deeds of one of the figures, a princess of the town, holding a great ax. The merchant explained, as she often did, with great theatrics, how this princess had felled seven giants and fourteen lesser trolls, and conquered the many towns of this stretch of the river. The customer asked, in jest, what had happened to this wide domain. The merchant smiled, and explained that the gods cursed the grandson of this princess and sent his lands to a watery grave (this part requiring the merchant to sweep her hands across the table like waves), for this prince had cursed the gods and had wedded himself to forty women and forty men, which broke the amount of marriages allowed to one mortal. The customer looked curious and gave the merchant two coins of crumbling copper with the high king’s visage stamped on them, and the merchant gave her the statue. She looked down at the coins, at the king who had deposed her father, and put them in her purse.
The Library
The aged scholar leaned over his desk as the lesser librarians sputtered throughout the room, a small enclosed and cavernous private office within the bowels of the growing library. They were leaving, yes, their brown robes wrapped around their hunched bodies, but they were taking far too much time to do so, hauling between them the ancient, wide tome he had been arduously poring over for the past week. He felt the crude paper with his thin skin, the heavy binding of this even more ancient tome. By then, all the assistants had left, and the high king’s brother was left alone to ponder the histories, and to compare.
As the last son of the previous high queen, he had never been in line to inherit anything, so instead devoted his life to the texts of history. He was writing a chronicle, completing one, really, which he had started years ago, and whose chapters were not chronological but based on which region it covered. His book, an annals plundered from the greatest temple of the northern slopes of the valley, would help him begin his section on the history of that area.
The previous tome was a more general history which mentioned, in passing, a genealogy of the princes of a town on the edge of the region. The scholar looked over these crumbled annals and searched for the names of those princes which he had noted on another paper. He spotted the name of one, the seventeenth prince and legitimate son of the previous princess, on the genealogy, but here reckoned as a usurper who slew the daughter of the previous princess and took the throne of the town. The year was said to be the fourth year of the reign of a king of the great temple city from which the annals were taken. As this higher king held suzerainty over the town, he sent his armies there and, in the fifth year of the king’s reign, the supposed usurper prince was thrown from a cliff.
The scholar paused here, and read the next line of the annals, where it was declared that the usurper was replaced by a cousin of the previous princess, who became the next princess. What caused the scholar pause was the lack of any mention of her in the genealogy, instead a daughter of the usurper was listed as the next ruler of the town. The scholar scanned the next few entries in the annals. The reign of the conquering king came and passed, to be replaced by a niece, who was replaced by a son, who, on his death, had a list of achievements embedded in the text. The conquest of the town was listed, and the deposition of someone called a bastard princess, who appeared on the genealogy as the granddaughter of the usurper, succeeded by her sister.
The scholar began scribbling notes on this, which, by his calculations, happened a thousand years prior to the current date, which he deduced from the lengthy annals. He skipped forward to the end of the annals, where during the fourteenth year of another queen it recorded the disturbance of peace by the high king from the center of the valley. That was the last entry, the only mention of the scholar’s royal line in the whole book, previous entries only listing periods of peace and prosperity ushered in by the young queen, despite the scholar knowing well that her reign was reviled by her subjects and that her mother’s reign had seen the territories of the temple city shrink to just the center and its hinterlands.
The yellowing annals could not be trusted, evidently, but neither could the genealogies. He sighed, and looked at his hastily scrawled notes once more. There was one more document that could solve the confused chronology of the princes, a contemporary document penned by one short-lived princess who recounted her prestigious ancestry. The scholar turned to that tightly rolled scroll, and began unfurling it.
Epilogue
The great library in the heart of the valley in the city of the high kings was burnt with the rest of the valley by mountain peoples who overran the land and slew the last high queen.
The body of the scholar, the brother of the third of the twenty-two high kings and queens, many of whose names were lost, who would rule over the valley before their domain’s ungraceful end, had been interred in the royal tomb, but by the time of the fall of the city his inscription had faded and only the faint outlines of half the letters could be read. No matter, as the entirety of the royal tombs were felled by the raiders and the tombs looted, the skeletons themselves ground down into magical powder and sold, or their teeth pawned off as divine relics of the long gone god kings. All that remains of both the library, burnt during a second series of raids, and the tomb, are a series of foundation stones on which now rests a dump for trash and refuse.
The history which the scholar was compiling, which was never completed, had been lost to a lack of copyists even before the fall of the city. The texts he had been consulting were stripped of their valuable illuminations, if they had any; their bindings removed for more utilitarian purposes; and the papers mostly tossed into the river, which ran black with ink, so it is said.
The temple and market of the town of the merchant also suffered less severe raiding, but were mostly affected by a great flood which drowned the temple, the doors flowing down the falls of the river into the great lagoon. Many of the common peoples of the town, who owned the precious wooden figures sold by the merchant, who it must be noted was found out as a bastard daughter of the previous prince,was exiled across the mountains, buried their most precious goods below their houses. These troves of coins and statuettes survived the subsequent war and chaos, though the sands of time rendered them largely unrecognizable, and the poor coins eroded into the muds. Still, pride was felt by the villager who, when digging an irrigation trench, found an ax-wielding wooden figure and recounted from it a story of a great princess who had killed many tall men, unearthed from his memory of an old story of the previous heroes of his town.
The tower, sitting on the edge of the valley, sustained raid after raid, and was reinforced by the successive generations into a larger wall for a small village. The sentinel, who lived a long life and told his grandchildren stories of gods and suns, was buried on a nearby hill and later inhabitants assumed it was the grave of some demigod king. They still told the story of the star father, his daughters, and the trials of the gods, and especially the story of the steps up to heaven.
So the sun set on the valley, and all were surprised when it rose again.