I was woken from my slumber by a sharp pain in my wrists. I moved to rub them but found they were bound. To my left, Edouard was similarly trussed. We were on our knees in front of four men with torches. My eyes struggled to adjust to the abrupt change in light. They were shadows behind the flames. They wore cloaks of a light material in dark greens and browns. They wore their hoods up and masks up to their nose, reminding me of my own library outfit. They spoke in guttural tones to each other in a language I didn’t know. We were hauled to our feet and made to march. They kept Edouard and I separated, with him at the front of the line and me near the back, with one cloaked torchbearer behind me.

They did not lead us to the road. We marched in the opposite direction, the welcoming undulations of river stones and plaster fading behind us in flickering torchlight. The thought that crept into my mind as we walked was the nature of these men. They shared something in common with the berries from earlier. They were not of our world in our time. We did not share a common history or understanding. As we walked through the night I went up and down the aisles of the twenty eighth floor in my mind, pulling books from their place, flipping through pages and returning them. Over and over I did this, my body an automaton in the night. I have no idea how long we had been walking when it clicked into place. My position as guide. My mental map of the twenty eighth floor. The books on their iron stacks. Just East of the Northwest corner, moving Southwesterly. I knew who had us.

“Edou–” I started.

All the air in my body was expelled. I had been kicked in the gut. Hard.

A few weeks after my discovery of the twenty eighth floor, I took refuge from the biting winter winds in Febril’s brick palace kitchen. I sat on a stool at a scarred, three-legged table shoved into a corner. The warmth of his ovens and conversation cured my chill. The ever present scent of fresh bread pervaded the little kitchen.I sipped the sticky goo that passed as coffee at Febril’s and listened to my friend extol the virtues of progress.

“It is, my young friend, what holds this world together.”

I grimaced after a larger than intended sip of coffee made it way past my lips.

“That’s a big claim. Maybe stick to the bread?”

“Bread is a part of it!” he said. “Do you think we crawled out of the swamps of the past with bread in our mouths? No. Bread is a part of progress. Just as much as roads and aqueducts and softer carriage wheels. It improves our lives. We weren’t meant to live in squalor, but to slowly climb out and into the light. We’re not there yet.”

“That I can agree with.”

“But,” Febril said, leaning his red face into one of his ovens. “I’m doing my part. One loaf at a time. Progress, my boy. Progress. Who could disagree with that?”

“The Ba-Hali,” I said.

“What’s this nonsense?”

Febril sat down on a stool next to me and I heard the old wood creak with the effort.

“Tribe conquered more than nine hundred years ago. Early holdout against the Empire’s efforts.”

“See. Proving my point. Don’t see them running around the streets of Quinze now do you?”

“Maybe not.”

I did not tell Febril that I learned about the Ba-Hali from one of the first books I took from the stacks on the twenty eighth floor. I had not told him about my discovery at all, but they were a fascinating people. They believed, as I explained to him over another cup of his putrid coffee, that the world began in a state of perfection, and humans were doomed to live out a finite number of days as the perfection slowly but inevitably decayed. They believed that any changes to the natural state of the world hastened the decay of the creator’s perfection. A Ba-Hali would have strongly disagreed with Febril’s example of bread. All cooking was a hastening of decay. Man should eat what was already available. Nuts and seeds and berries. Raw fish and meat. Neither did they believe in clothes or houses. They lived and ate and slept out in the open.

The early Empire struggled to deal with the Ba-Hali. It was a philosophical difference, the hardest type to bridge between cultures. There was nothing in common between the two cultures and the Empire’s roads first standard had the opposite effect on the Ba-Hali. The more the Empire’s roads impinged on their territory, the angrier they got. Each river stone removed from its proper place and used for other purposes was an assault against the creator’s intentions. The only weapons the Ba-Hali used were sturdy branches fallen from trees or struck down by storms. Even still, they were a constant nuisance to Empire troops. The tribesmen moved in utter silence through all territory, woods, open spaces, mountain ranges made no difference to the naked, branch-wielding ambushers.

For years, they caught troop encampments unawares and bashed in skulls and burned all they could while taking very few casualties. In their minds, they were embroiled in a holy war with the continued fate of existence hanging in the balance. The Empire’s relentless insistence on changing the creator’s works was an existential crisis. The leadership of the early Empire was incapable of distinguishing between the Ba-Hali and other conquered tribes, and painting with a broad brush caused the loss of many lives. Ultimately, Edouard’s ancestor Everard Cortes solved the problem the only way he knew how. There were few Ba-Hali survivors, as most who escaped the overwhelming onslaught of Empire troops chose to end their own lives.

It is only because of the few who survived and managed to assimilate that there is any accurate history of the Ba-Hali people at all. The writings of King Everard Cortes, when they mention the Ba-Hali at all, do so in the past tense and make no mention of the unusual loss of life or time it took to pacify the tribe. Progress continued apace.

My hunch about our captors was made stronger by their behavior when we reached their camp. We were deposited against a large trunk amid the roots and our captors disrobed with haste. They tossed the thin cloaks into a communal pile. They were more natural and comfortable in a state of nudity. It was only then that I realized two of our captors were women. The camp was organized. Groups of nude tribesmen and women were spread out across the meadow. Whispered conversations abounded.

“They’re talking about what to do with us,” Edouard said.

“Not necessarily. They don’t believe in speaking loudly. It disturbs the natural sounds around them.”

Edouard wriggled to face me as much as was possible.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“What are you talking about?”

“They’re Ba-Hali.”

There was a brief flicker of recognition in the Prince’s eyes, but a look of confusion returned. I expected that he was trying to remember something his tutor had told him but was unable to recall.

“Early Empire tribe is all I remember.”

“Keep your voice down,” I said, looking around. A few heads had turned and were observing us. “They gave your ancestors a lot of trouble. King Everard–”

Edouard snorts.

“That piece of–”

“Let me finish. Everard wiped them out mostly. Didn’t understand why roads first wouldn’t work. The Ba-Hali were not only unimpressed but angered by it.”

“He was a fool. I had to read his memoirs.”

“Yes. So we will have to avoid his mistakes.”

“How?”

I was still working on that. We had one thing working in our favor. They did not think we were soldiers as we were still alive. It was possible they were still deciding what to do with us, or if they could barter us for concessions from the Empire. While they were passionate and sure of their righteousness, the Ba-Hali were not stupid. There were a number of instances where brief treaties were made when it was in their benefit to do so. There were those among the Ba-Hali who believed in bargaining for as much land as they could get to keep it unspoiled and untouched by the Empire’s decay, but the hardliners were certain that decay anywhere was decay everywhere. As in so many societies, the hardliners won out.

But I was confident we were still a long ways from Everard’s genocide. There had not been so many seasons since first contact. I stretched my arms as best I could with my bound wrists, trying to keep up the circulation and stared at the pile of clothes.

“Edouard,” I hissed. “If I position myself behind you, do you think you could pull my cloak over my head?”

“I think so.”

“Do it.”

I knew we had an audience as we worked. That was the point. I struggled to get myself in place and make my body as limp as possible. It caught on my elbows and nose but Edouard was able to get it over my head. With my wrists bound, it was stuck on my forearms, but I was otherwise naked.

“Your turn.”

“Are you trying to make it easier to cook us?”

“They don’t believe in cooking, now move.”

It was harder than I anticipated. I gained an appreciation for Edouard’s dexterity. It took me much longer to get it done, but soon enough his cloak hung over his forearms as well. We both breathed heavily from the exertion. I noticed he wore an undergarment.

“You’ve gotta take it off. It’s a sign of respect. Trust me.”

It went against all of my civilized instincts. While nakedness was the natural state of the Ba-Hali and made them more comfortable and confident, it had the opposite effect for those raised in the Empire’s society of social norms. I felt exposed and vulnerable, like a defeathered chicken spread out to be disemboweled by a butcher. But a crowd began to form around us. It did not happen all at once, but whispers spread throughout the camp and our original captors group of four swelled to ten, twenty, forty Ba-Hali standing guard over us, looking at our pale nakedness with an undisguised interest. I said nothing and hoped my body language would suffice to keep Edouard quiet as well. I did not want to risk disturbing the silence with our voices at all. One of our captors walked towards us, one of the women. She stopped and squatted down nearby. I could tell from her squint that her vision was not good. There was no time to waste.

I held up my bound hands to her with the cloak over top of them. I did my best to speak through pantomime. I was not asking to be untied, but to have the cloak removed.

“Please,” I whispered, aware she could not understand Empire common but hopeful the tone would suffice.

Again I held up my wrists, and Edouard followed suit. The woman, much older than I at first realized, came closer to us. Her gray hair was tied back into two equal tails with vines and her body was an even-coated color of brown. In spite of her age and the situation in which we found ourselves, I could not but wonder at her beauty. It was an ageless grace of movement and comportment. She was unashamed of her body, her age, or her way of life and no words were needed to convey this to me. I had never lived a day without shame in my life and I sat in awe of what I would never truly understand. It was not my place to. Not really.

She took my bindings in her teeth and in a sharp motion, broke them. Blood flooded back into my arms as she moved to Edouard and repeated the motion. When she was finished she picked up our clothes and carried them to the pile. She laid them on top before sitting down where she had been before. We rubbed our raw wrists but still did not speak, did not disturb the sounds of the natural world around us. In time, the whispers died down and the interest in us died with it. We watched in astonishment as the Ba-Hali moved out. There was no packing or gathering of materials. They simply walked away from the clearing in an unbroken line. They left the pile of cloaks where it was. Our bindings withered at our feet.

We maintained our naked vigil for an hour or more, listening to the sounds of the forest around us. A boar snuffled nearby and finding nothing, moved on. Once it was clear the Ba-Hali were not coming back for us, we gathered our cloaks from the pile and were able to find Edouard’s pack nearby.

“They didn’t even open it,” he said, slinging it over his shoulder.

“Nothing in it but evil to them.”

“Why’d they let us go?”

This was a question I’d been pondering while we sat.

“I suppose our showing them respect made them reconsider however they intended to use us. That’s the best I can come up with.”

Edouard turned his head as if about to speak, but changed his mind. He started walking back towards the road so we could take our intended path from the day before. I could not help but think of how we had extricated ourselves from a tricky situation that Everard Cortes, King of the Empire had failed to solve for the majority of his forty year reign. Edouard was thinking the same thing.

“It can’t be that easy,” he said.

By this point, we were walking East along the road, the feel of stone beneath our feet a comfort I was unaware I had been missing.

“It isn’t,” I said. “The benefit of our centuries of knowledge. Don’t forget.”

“He can’t have made any effort to understand them.”

I was amused at Everard’s genuine anger at his family for behavior that any citizen of the Empire could have easily identified. I forgot at times, because of his good nature, that Edouard was a Prince and had been raised to rule. He had not grown up with any view of the royal family from an outside perspective. He had not spent much time with citizens outside of the court and its hangers-on. There was an incongruity here. A grown adult who did not grok the Empire’s history of poor leadership and unethical behavior. Still, his earnestness was charming.

“Maybe that’s the test,” I said. “Maybe this is the beginning. You can convince Everard to make attempts to understand the Ba-Hali rather than…his solution.”

“Do you think I could manage it?”

“I think you ought to try. You have a letter of introduction, right?”

We stopped for a moment to have a sip of water and Edouard dug in his pack for his letters. The sheaf was wrapped in string, and he pulled the top sheet through, smoothing out the rolled edges on his thigh. After reading it over, he handed it to me.

“I’m your valet?”

“Ah I uh…forgot to mention that bit.”

“Would it have been too difficult for me to have been a cousin?”

“Royals travel with valets. If you were my cousin, then we’d have two others with us as well. Didn’t want to march into the library with so many in tow. Not to mention the issue of discretion.”

I was not surprised, but was annoyed at the change in circumstance I would experience soon. I had grown used to being on familiar terms with my Prince as we traveled, something he encouraged, and I would have to put all that away once we started infiltrating the royal courts of the past. I had heard from Febril and others that the royal servants of our own time lived well and were treated fairly, but I was not at all confident that the same would hold true for the court of Everard’s time.