What planet did I suddenly land on? First the chase by the creature and then the cat eared boy. Was that something like a catkin my father always told me stories about?
For a moment I looked at his ears with incredulity and realised the irony, I must have been an interesting scene myself standing in my birthday suit. I could only thank my lucky stars the catkin wasn’t female, what a storm that would have been, not that my situation was much better.
I might not know where I was, or what creature he was, but I could understand poor when I saw it. His clothing was tattered and full of patched holes, at least someone was trying to hold the clothes together. He was talking to me, but I couldn’t understand a word he was saying. Shaking my head, I said,
“Sorry old chap, I don’t understand you.”
“Mumos.”
I still didn’t understand, but it sounded eastern, almost Japanese. I spoke English but I understood some Japanese since my mom was Japanese and my father, Japanese American. I think the little blighter called me hairless.
“Hadasa.”
I swear that kid called me naked. He sighed while shaking his head. The cat boy stood up and motioned for me to wait,
“Matsu.”
No translation needed there. He ran off towards the main street and disappeared around the corner. He must have been about ten years old. Sheesh, I could really have done with some clothes about then, I felt pretty vulnerable standing around with breezes in personal spaces where there shouldn’t be any.
While I waited, I reflected on what was happening to me. Two possibilities came to mind. One, I’d been transported to some other world where catkin people and huffing monsters lived, or I was dreaming in which case that same boy reappearing around the corner carrying clothing under his arm for me, was just a brilliant figment of my imagination. Regardless of whether I was experiencing another world or an extremely vivid dream, I gratefully accepted his offer of rough well-worn brown pants that ended above my ankles and sported complementary patches on the knees. He also handed me a stiff blue-material long-sleeved shirt that buttoned down the front and at the cuffs. The pants fastened around my waist with a cord or thin rope. I still didn’t have any shoes or underwear, but I was the last to complain even if the pants chaffed me silly.
“Fuzoku, fozoku.”
He motioned to me again but that time it was different. His hand faced downwards, like those blingy luck cats in the Chinese fish and chips shops, and he urged me to join him. So 'matsu' meant something like wait, and 'fozoku' meant come. It seemed simple enough. It was enough musing from my side, so I quickly followed him onto the main street of a small town. Judging by the practical Victorian-styled clothing of the human folks walking through town, I felt pretty underdressed. We didn’t linger in town and crossed the dusty main road lined with varied businesses, but I didn’t have time to dawdle. Following the boy, we passed a multi-storey building that looked something like an inn. All the buildings in the town were raised by about half a level for some reason. The bottom levels looked like functional rooms only used for basic storage, like my grandfather’s old farm shed with all the farming implements. All the shops seemed connected by a common terrace above the road except where roads intersected in which case gangways led to street level. I realised that on the other side of the businesses, residential houses backed the shops. We continued travelling along a dusty road through a normal-looking residential area to the far end of town and entered a patched-up house in a neglected area. Thinking back on it, I didn’t recall seeing a single tree anywhere in that semi-desert expanse. The area may have looked run down, but the people seemed friendly enough. Some folks waved to the boy as he greeted them all in turn smiling along the way. He kept talking to me as if I could understand him. Weirdly enough I swore I could make out the gist of his long-winded speech, as if I were trying to remember it from a long time ago.
The two-bedroom house we walked up to was more like a well-kept shack, someone had at least tried to look after it, but the work was patchy at best. The lack of glass windows was apparent to me living in the modern age and the use of wooden shutters on the outside windows confirmed my rationale. Come to think of it, I didn’t notice any glass windows in the town either.
Somehow, I stepped into some middle-earth world, and even worse was it seemed to be in some Middle Ages where technology hardly existed. The boy knocked on the open door once we climbed the front stairs.
“Tomu.”
A middle-aged woman greeted us at the door while kindly rubbing the catkin on the head, her hair tied back into a bun and wearing a pale blue one-piece dress with a front apron. The boy seemed pleased with himself. She didn’t have cat ears, so I assumed she was human. If she wasn’t a catkin then how was she related to the boy, I wondered? Was Tomu’s father a Katkin and the woman his mother? All I could surmise was that she was the source of my clothing and that my hero, Tomu, must have run back to ask her for these clothes before he handed them to me.
“Tomu?”
I asked aloud. He nodded and pointed at himself.
“Tomu.”
He then pointed at me smiling and said,
“Mumos.”
For saying that, he got a stiff clout on the head from the woman. If I recalled correctly, that was the first word he spoke to me. My suspicions were justified, I could swear he called me hairless. I could give as easily as I received, so I smiled and called him…
“Hadasa.”
Which was the second word I originally learned from him. That got me a stiff look from the lady, and another clout handed out to the boy’s head. She was obviously a no-nonsense type of person. I decided not to use those words in everyday conversation. Apologising, I bowed to the woman.
“Sorry, I didn’t want to offend you before I even got to know you and thank you for my clothes.”
I pointed to my shirt and pants. She seemed to understand my gesture. She took my arm, ushered me in and shooed the catkin boy back outside. I had a moment to look around the basic insides of the house. There was a rough but solid wooden table with two elongated benches and two stools on each short end, placed in the middle of a kitchen. A bench with a wooden bowl, for washing things in, stood in front of a window overlooking some bushes a few meters away towards the back of the house property. On my left two doors led to what looked like two bedrooms and on my right, a small walk-in cupboard or scullery packed with various items, but not food. The woman motioned for me to sit down on one of the stools then started to prepare a meal, that from the looks of things, I could only assume was a late lunch or more likely dinner. While still pondering about kitchen semantics, a small wooden cutting board appeared in front of me along with a well-worn knife.
“Huh?”
She ignored my confused look and produced a purple vegetable out of the water from the bowl and placed it on my cutting board. The vegetable root reminded me of a potato tuber but that’s where the similarities ended. With hand signs and some words, she indicated for me to skin the tuber and chop them into pieces. I mean, it wasn’t that I didn’t know what to do. My father’s survivalist excursions taught me long ago how to prepare and cook food. In fact, from his many fairy tale descriptions during those trips, I could swear I was looking at a vegetable called windroot the staple of the common people in my father’s fantasy world.
The woman drew my attention as I noticed the aged lines around her face and her calloused hands making her look older than her true age. My father passed down a small manly secret, a way for men to see the true age of a woman by looking at their elbows. From my vantage point, I only needed one look to see she was still relatively young, at least in her thirties, which meant she lived a hard life. She was going to put some water on the fire to boil the windroot when I realised what she was about to do, I asked her to stop.
My father explained to me that windroot shared similar features with potatoes, but one particular characteristic made them far tastier, they had a pleasant creamy texture, were sweeter than potatoes with a honey aftertaste. The conundrum was that boiling water destroyed the sweet outer layer of the windroot removing the sweetness whereas roasting them turned the windroot hard as a rock. There was a method to get the best of both worlds. Before she could put the pot on the fire, I picked up the windroot and tossed them into the hot coals. In a loud voice, the lady scolded me and made to pull the tubers out of the fire with a wooden stick she previously used to stoke the fire. I stepped in front of her and held out my arm, keeping my eyes locked on hers.
This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.
“Matsu…matsu.”
I said to her and she stopped with a puzzled look in her eyes. I gently took the stick from her hands and used it to turn the tubers in the fire, making sure to get good coverage of the heat. The trick, my father said, was to allow a quick burst of high heat to penetrate the thick skin of the tubers which would allow the sugars in the upper layer of the tuber flesh to caramelise. After a minute or so, I dunked them into cold water in the cast iron pot and allowed them to come to a boil while still in the skin.
She looked flummoxed but didn’t say a word. I smiled and sat down again. Either I had just created a crème de la resistance, or that would be the last time I would be invited over for dinner. The other glaring thought in my mind above everything else, was just how the blazes my father knew about windroot?
Two hours later I saw the full horde they called a family turned up for dinner. Eleven poorly dressed snot separators, and a stern-looking elderly sister formed the troop. There was no way all those children were related to that lady. Most of the kids seemed to be around the same age, which was only possible if she had the serious misfortune of having sextuplets one after the other, which was unlikely judging by her slim figure. By the looks of things, I could only assume she was running an orphanage. But where all the little kids slept, heaven alone knew. That issue paled in comparison to what it took to feed all these children, and they looked like they could hardly afford even that.
Dinner that night was a subdued affair, the food we prepared earlier hardly spread between the fifteen of us. The woman’s husband joined us just before we sat down to eat. He had brown hair and eyes with short spiky hair and a rough beard already a few days old. He had a leather bag over his shoulder which he unceremoniously dumped at the door and was welcomed by a chorus of voices eager to hug him, all vying for his attention. I think dad had arrived home. Once the hubbub quietened down, he greeted me with a warm voice. His wife then spoke to him, no doubt introducing me and explaining my circumstances. He only nodded after her talk, then sat down at the table showing me to join him on the chair next to him. His wife sat opposite him at the end of the table with the eldest girl next to her. The children squeezed up on each side of the long table. He then spoke a few words while everyone listened attentively and when he finished everyone spoke a few similar words. I supposed it was like a thank you.
The lady then got up and proceeded to ladle some of the vegetable broth in the pot over the fire into wooden bowls and then onto the eldest girl sitting closest to the fire. She passed it on and so on until the man got his food, and so the food was passed first to eldest then to youngest, but when I looked at the amount of food, it was almost the same volume per bowl. I felt shattered that I was selfishly taking some of their food that night. That left a large impact on me. I can’t ever recall a single night as a child where I ever went hungry, yet I was willing to bet some of these children were not strangers to hunger. The chit-chatter on the table abruptly ended, no one was eating anymore even though there was still broth in their bowls. The man asked his wife a question and she responded while smiling and looking at me.
Had I created a pot of death I wondered? No flour added to the pot was going to save me now.
Meanwhile, in the royal palace of the capital city, Shimmerstal, situated a few days travel to the east, two people participated in an abrasive meeting. King Leopold, the prevailing ruler of the kingdom, sat facing the aristocratic noble, Lady Hull of the Hull Estate. They met in his personal office, a less ostentatious room compared to the royal throne room with its red carpets, chandeliers, and gold trimmings designed to impress foreign dignitaries and local guests. He felt far more comfortable sitting on a couch than that hard, flashy chair everyone referred to as a throne, but to which his body called a torturing device.
The king’s bearded face had visibly aged over the years, although his muscular strength still showed through his apparel. Lady Hull, the most powerful of the noble aristocrats, was the spokesperson for the Aryonne noble faction, someone thirsty for power and in strong contention for his crown. She dressed in a single luxurious white garment that draped from over her head to her feet; the flashy jewellery she wore testified boastfully to her wealth. King Leopold wasn’t looking forward to the meeting and started at once with the point at hand.
“You are fully aware Lady Hull that the royal family can no longer ignore the merchant’s complaints concerning constant attacks of monsters on the kingdom’s trade routes?”
Lady Hull, already well advanced in age herself, was no greenhorn to the wiles of kingdom politics. She knew well that the royal palace had insufficient forces, or money to afford hiring mercenaries, to help stop the constant monster attacks throughout the kingdom trading routes. She had no intention of helping the palace either. She knew just as well as the king, that the monster attacks were reaching plague proportions and news of merchant deaths were daily occurrences. For her, the financial strain on the kingdom was perfectly acceptable as a means to an end.
“You say you are a royal family, but when will we have a male heir to crown the throne when there’s no queen to grace your chambers? Will some wench claim her son as your illegitimate heir? I’m not making an accusation but if we wait much longer there’s a risk that rumours may start. As a prince, my grandson Eugene is more than capable, and you’ll find fits all your requirements admirably.”
King Leopold never enjoyed those regular official visits with Lady Hull because her words always overflowed with her own dark agenda. He knew her well enough to know those concerns about his succession were only a distraction and certainly not for his welfare or the kingdom’s. Ever since the tragic disappearance of the queen, she knew too well the issue of an heir was a sensitive one for the crown. That she detracted from his original point showed she was at least comfortable with the continuing monster attacks on the trade routes. He felt hobbled because the attacks happened within noble’s territories where he only interfered at risk of escalating the worsening situation with the nobles. It was painfully obvious Lady Hull had no intentions of improving the situation. In fact, as if adding more fuel to the fire and stirring dissent, she purposefully started a rumour amongst the aristocrats that the royal family were doing nothing to improve the situation and were rather allowing the situation to force control over the merchants.
“You know very well of my position on the royal succession issue, Lady Hull. Even if the Hull estate could help resolve our issues, we would first look to the other country's princes as potential suitors.”
He sighed. That never stopped Lady Hull from reminding him every time they met.
“I understand you have offered your grandson as a royal candidate to marry Amelia, but I have also been clear on this. A marriage between the royals and the nobles would bear no benefit to the kingdom.”
Princess Amelia Leopold, his only remaining family and daughter who was now coming on marrying age was eligible to marry an outsider prince. Princess Amelia would not hold the power of the crown once she married, that right would shift to the new king. Since most kingdoms wouldn’t likely relinquish their first or only prince to a foreign kingdom even if it were for a crown, it would only be a second or third prince. The only kingdoms with eligible princes were the Kusian kingdom to the northeast and the Entwine kingdom to the east. Both kingdoms were not in good relations with Aryonne and a royal marriage between the two would be fraught with difficulties.
Despite that Lady Hull’s granddaughter was significantly younger than him, he didn’t have to mention that a union with the Hull Estate would forever dig the grave for the Leopold family name, something he would never allow. Besides, the resulting political power shift to favour the nobles would be irreversible. From before the last war in the kingdom’s history, the balance of power between the nobles and the royal family always remained stable. It allowed peace to flow within the kingdom because no one faction totally controlled affairs of state. That, however, changed during the unexpected war with the eastern kingdom of Entwine. The Aryonne royal family facing vastly superior enemy numbers sued for military aid from the nobles. To save the kingdom, the king, forced to sign a non-interference agreement with the nobles, set in motion a power shift in the kingdom favouring the nobles.
“I apologise your majesty that we cannot agree on this issue. However, I will endeavour to investigate the problem regarding the monsters. After all, the kingdom cannot suffer any more financial difficulties as it wouldn’t bode well with foreign kingdom relationships if we cannot pay our debtors.”
Another political knife ruthlessly stabbed the king. Recently the royal family launched an investigation into a disturbing find. A routine inquiry into rampant bandit activities around Shimmerstal unearthed an unexpected hoard of counterfeit small gold coins. What concerned the palace, was that the bandits didn’t intend hoarding the coins as normal behaviour but slated for purposeful distribution replacing legal tender. That meant the primary actions of the bandits were not just to swap legal gold coins with counterfeit, but to dismantle the Aryonne financial system and destroy the kingdom financially. The implications were that big players were involved in the counterfeit scheme and that its scale would prove to be widespread and already rampant. He couldn’t prove it, but the nobles were undoubtedly involved.
“True. Please prioritise the issue.”
There was nothing more to say and the brief meeting concluded with no change to the ever the downward spiral for the royal family.
“What did you think of her comments?”
To the casual observer, it may have seemed as if the King was speaking to himself. However, a bodiless voice answered his question.
“It's the usual rhetoric, we can expect things will accelerate from here.”
“I agree. When do the nobles meet again?”
“A few days after the rising of the moons.”
The King sighed; an important part was missing out of his plans. He needed a catalyst, something that would accelerate the situation, but outside of the noble’s control. King Leopold was a patient man, he could wait. Unknown to both royals and nobles, a development to the west of Shimmerstal was about to throw the balance of power clearly in favour of one of them.