Tribe of the Mountains Chapter 10 — Love and War.

What leads someone to treason, rape, murder.
How deep can a man or woman fall into the trappings of self servitude and greed?
Why?

Of course these questions are important, essential even to an organized society.
But there are times when you must send it all to the depths and judge a person only by the consequences of his/her actions.
These times are always the darkest ones.

Anora the first.
Philosophical musings.

Anora Speaking:

Urk was my nemesis, the one guy responsible for most of the trouble in my last two years of life as a normal girl.
But I thought that he would have the decency of dying in a heroic charge as he had always preached to be the right way to die.
Nope, he proved to be completely indecent.

According to Erynia, a philosopher once said something like:
The poor have:
No food.
No health.
No home.

But it is the lack of clothes in young women that is considered society`s shame and the reason for the decadence of civilization.

Hypocrisy, together with pride and greed form a deadly combination.

Pride and greed I attributed to my enemy, not hypocrisy.
I was sadly mistaken.

As the reader of this account may remember, we drugged the people of our tribe so that we could escape.

Monkeys are by nature curious, when a camp full of humans stopped moving and the spirit of the woods that controlled them was too distracted or weakened to hold them back, they followed their nature and went into camp.

You must imagine the kind of mess that the people of the tribe found when they woke from their drugged sleep.

In short order they chased the monkeys away, but the curious beasts remained in the outskirts of the forest looking at the camp to see if anything interesting would happen again.

Looking at the monkey`s memories we could see Urk getting up and screaming with everybody. He soon put his little army of twenty or so tugs in order and started to check the camp.

When it was found that we were missing he yelled a bit more, then started to herd most women into a wagon and all young boys, even some that looked at him as an example into the other.

After this, with the people looking from the barred windows, he showed his true face. He lined the few old people that had not fled yet and killed one after the other, slowly, with his mace. Allowing the next victim a clear view of what he was doing.

He and his tugs then proceeded to dismount camp, they took the wagons from the circular pattern in which they were and lined them. Then Urk, the guy that always preached against magic and mages, took a magical device from his belt and talked into it.

Soon a group of men came riding in the direction of the camp, about ten knights and what appeared to be a mage. The lead knight clasped hands with Urk while still inside of the camp of view of the monkeys and they rode out together, with the heavily escorted wagons full of would be slaves right behind them.

When I saw the memories of the monkeys and pieced together what happened, my first question was: “Why did he run? Why not deliver us to our enemies while we were still close to the site of that last dreadful charge that he had praised so much?”

I do not know if it was my mind or Erynia that answered it to me, we were working so close together in this that our minds were probably working in tandem, perhaps what people in latter times called parallel processing.
The fact is that we understood it. He needed to wait until anyone with a scrap of intelligence left the main group, also, when he saw the forest he must have loved the idea of cornering the remains of the tribe between his forces and its darkness.

We could imagine other reasons also, after all, the leading knight was clearly his friend, perhaps even a certain member of our tribe that I knew was living in the cities.

How long had they planed this?

Well, it was our time to plan.
Where were these slaves been kept? How many would accept our goddess?

Erynia Speaking

In the sixtieth month of the year five hundred and thirty two from the foundation of Tebes, first year of the goddess by our tribe`s accounts I called my sisters, the only ones that had proved worthy of my love in many years, to give to them a piece of my past.

I showed the boy, older than me by just a little, in his wheel chair, a chair that he had designed to be able to move despite his ugly, deformed legs. A boy that was a blond barbarian from the north, sold by his own father due to his deformity.

This boy, named Stephen was very capable with his hands as I knew very well. This slave, powerful artisan, mage and scholar was also the first lover of my younger life.

Anora once said that, at that time, I was not capable of “fireball magic”. This is true, but I always had the potential.

And I know exceedingly well that I also have what others might call deformity caused by magic. People call it coldness; I call it seeing the world trough reason. But I know that there is something that I lack, a kind of connection with other people.

My sisters and Stephen are the only exceptions, but both proved reasonable partners to my rational mind before I accepted them as anything else.

Stephen was instructed to teach me the basics of reading and logical debate so that I could be a reasonable wife to the son of one of my father`s commercial partners. He taught much more, including a lot of things that his deformity allowed him to demonstrate with his tong and lips only. But I wanted him, inside me, and for this we needed a bed.

Of course, as the reader may deduce, being caught making love in one of the bedrooms of the Gynaeceum, the women`s quarters of my father`s house, was not a good experience.

Now I understand why I was not killed by stoning like it is said in the law. Or, since my father didn`t want publicity, simply drowned and registered as dead by accident, I know that my father never loved me I, of course, also never felt anything for him or my mother except for a vague gratitude. Gratitude tempered by the knowledge that both saw me only as a tool to be used and latter forgotten.

They should have considered that the tool was broken and discarded it, but working in tandem with my sisters minds I could now see why not. The reason was there, in the little details of father`s face when he pronounced his sentence, in the faces of the guards detailed to escort me to the city of Resistance where I would be kept away from my beloved books while waiting my fate. The five guards that had fled without offering resistance when twenty tribesmen approached. The easiness that the tribesmen had to find me in the middle of nowhere between cities.

All made sense now.

I was a tool to start a war.

But I doubt that Stephen was in it, after all, he was castrated in front of me and chained into father`s library. There he was when I last saw him doomed to study as ordered and use his ability to sense magic to help father escape deception by mages.

He was also bound to enchant devices, devices like the talking stone that Urk, the mage hatter, used in his final betrayal.

My sisters still fret about the “treatment” that Urk gave me before making me a gift for Anora`s father. No, I do not. I was a political weapon to them, they had to be sure that I would be so soiled, so desecrated that Anora`s father would never be able to return me to my people.

But, of course, even after a beating, the first man that put his dick in me got the worse plague that I could cast. I used all the destructive, corrupting power of magic at once. His dick literally rot and fell, followed by the rest of his body. It took two days for him to die.

Oh, they beat me after this, I think that Urk didn`t kill me only because a wiser member of his group reminded him that I was to be a “gift”. And yes, they broke my hymen, the one that I had not time to break with my lover. They broke it using a piece of wood. It was very, very painfull.

But I will always remember that their dicks, their manhoods never touched me.

Now as a servant of the goddess I had power.

In the bowels of the earth my creatures were digging. In the lakes and rivers our converted fish were taking more and more animals. In the valleys of the mountains our herds multiplied.

I wanted my first lover back.
And when she came back to me as a servant of my goddess I would finally be complete. To the despair of the world.

Thank you Sephrena Miller, again.