Category: Fantasy

The itinerant storyteller was old and gray, but while they showed the wear of travel, is clothes were of good quality, and he carried a sword and bow that were much above the average in the village. Such was expected of a successful storyteller.

So there was a huge fire that night in the center of the village, along with a fine feast, and a certain amount of beer, one of the products of the town. With the certainty of a law of nature, the visiting storyteller was invited to tell a story.

The children gathered near the old man, while the youth and adults crowded around, pretending they were less interested, but making sure they could hear.

“It is well-established that nobody can go through Entehrenac, which you may know as the pass of demons, during the months of winter,” he began.

He paused, waiting for a response. “Of course,” said an older boy. “Everybody knows that.”

“It is possible,” said the storyteller, “for everybody to be wrong.” There was a gasp from the crowd. This sounded like a dangerous statement. But storytellers were given great latitude in their culture. Besides, if this man would break with custom, the evening would be far more interesting than normal, say, if the storyteller told a traditional tale demonstrating the importance of living according to tradition and the decrees of the town elders.

“Long ago, so long ago that I had not even been born, a young woman lived with her family in a village just south of Entehrenac. Her name was Imeril. She was in her mid-teens and was a very unremarkable girl. She kept to herself mostly, other than helping her mother keep their house and care for younger brothers and sisters.

“Her father was a rich man. Some said this was because he was blessed by the gods. Others said it was because he was just plain lucky. Some admitted he had a way of finding gems and gold nuggets in the streams around their town. But others said he was a violent man and a thief, and that his riches were the result of theft, but nobody had been able to prove anything for years.

“Then one day an accuser arrived to claim that Imeril’s father had entered his house when he was not there, robbed him of gems he had stored there, and assaulted and killed his wife.

“The people gathered around the town shrine — it was much too small of a town to have a temple to any particular god — and the town priest, was asked to consult the gods. Nobody actually recalled how the man had become a priest, nor anything miraculous he might have accomplished, but it was well established,” the storyteller paused here for a moment, “that he was a priest and could, at need, determine truth.

“The priest required the sacrifice of a goat, which he examined carefully, and also rattled some bone dice around and read them with a knowing look on his face. Then he announced that the gods had spoken clearly in multiple ways, and they, the gods, declared Imeril’s father guilty as a murderer, thief, and also a rapist.

“Some further augury was required, this time costing two chickens.”

At this point some people noticed that the local town priest was looking frightened. Well, perhaps it was blasphemous to say the priest was frightened. Even in their thoughts, people changed that to “concerned.”

As well he should be! This way of describing priestly rituals was likely to cause people to question the value of the village priest. If they did that, they might question his rulings. If the did that, they might question the gods themeselves!

But the storyteller continued.

“Once the entrails of the chickens had been duly examined, and the dice again rattled and rolled, the priest announced the sentence. ‘This man and his entire household must be burned alive in the town square so as to cleanse our village of this evil.’ Some of the people were disturbed, wondering how it could be that a man they had known all their lives, even if they hadn’t really liked him, could be so evil that his sin must be expiated in such a dramatic and nasty fashion.

“But most of the villagers considered that the proper forms had been followed, and that the gods must have spoken, and almost immediately set about seizing the convicted man, his family, and even his slaves, of which he had two. The priest informed them that they were to create a huge bonfire just outside the town and burn the man and his household alive. This was, he told them, the will of the gods and what was required by tradition.

“Now Imeril, as a girl child, was supposed to be waiting for the results at home. In fact, a guard had been left to make sure nobody could escape, or, more importantly, carry out any valuable items from the house. She was certainly not supposed to hear the ceremony.

“But Imeril, though often quiet, was intelligent and observant. She thought this was not going to go well. She packed some things that might be needed in order to run, just in case, and then she took her six-year-old brother, a favorite of hers, climbed out a window in the back, and found a hiding place from which she could observe.

“It is, I must add, a very bad comment on the guard that she could do this. It says something about how alert the village people were that she could observe and listen with nobody noticing. It says something about the trust of a little brother that said brother remained totally quiet.

“When the verdict had been rendered by the priest, Imeril took her little brother, went to where she had hidden her supplies, and fled the village. It was winter, though spring was near. She decided the safest option was to go through Entehrenac, despite its reputation as the pass of demons, and the established fact that nobody could go through the pass in winter.

“It was perhaps, though not certainly, unfortunate that she was not as good at hiding her tracks as she had been at the other parts of her plan. A girl was not expected to learn how to travel quietly through the mountains while not leaving a trail.

“The people of the town gathered the household into the town square. Some of them were hesitant, but it only took a few mentions of the curse of the gods if they didn’t do precisely as those gods demanded to shut them up. The mob was getting quite stirred up enough to burn an entire household alive.

“Then suddenly someone noticed that Imeril was missing. They must have the entire household! If anyone escaped, the town would be under a curse. Nobody was sure whether the priest started this story, but he certainly agreed to it when asked.

“So a group of men from the village grabbed their hunting bows and hunting knives–swords were unknown in that village–and they proceeded to hunt for Imeril and the little boy. They almost missed some of the obvious clues that Imeril had left due to her complete lack of experience at traveling through the forest.

“Soon they realized that she was headed for Entehrenac. There was some discussion. But in the end, they decided they had to continue. After all, it takes considerable anger–real or contrived–to decide to burn an entire household.

“Imeril was well up into the pass by the time they caught up enough that she noticed them. While she was inexperienced, she was in good shape, and she moved fast. She was, I must add, very much motivated!

“She could tell that her pursuers were gaining on her, even though she was pretty sure they hadn’t noticed her yet. She was also slowed by the burden of a six-year-old child. She never considered leaving him behind.

“Then she saw her chance. There was a rock, the remnant of an earlier rock slide, that was near the edge of the path, which looked like it was about to fall in any case. Using a handy branch, she set about to send it over the edge to the trail behind her, which meant ‘below’ as well, to stop her pursuers. She was really thinking of blocking their path.

“But rocks in mountain passes that are subject to avalanches may have unexpected effects–never forget that should you be in a mountain pass–and it was just at the start of spring. The rock went over the edge almost as soon as she touched it with her branch, and it bounced against several other rocks and trees. At the end, it hit a log that was the last thing holding back tons of snow, rocks, and dirt, and set off a spectacular avalanche.

“The ground shook, and Imeril thought they would be carried away. In fact, the path a hundred feet behind her disappeared, but the path where she was and ahead of her remained in place. When the noise and shaking stopped, she could see nothing of her pursuers.

“She nearly died from cold crossing the rest of the pass, but a teenage girl emerged, barely alive, to find refuge with a farmer. The people on the north side of the mountain, as you know, are generally farmers.”

The storyteller paused, and let some of the children work themselves up to say, “Don’t stop there!”

Some of the adults hoped he would. They wished he had never come to town. Good stories were supposed to reinforce obedience and good behavior. Sure, the sentence had been harsh, but if people started arguing with the gods, where would it end?

But the storyteller was not finished.

“A few weeks later, some of the regular summer merchants got together the first expedition to go south through the pass. There they would bargain with the mountain dwellers for gold, silver, and gems. The first passage was always difficult, often requiring making new sections of trail, especially if there had been particularly bad avalanches.

“The merchants had heard of the girl who came out of the pass, but she had hired on with a merchant caravan weeks before, and besides, most of them didn’t believe she had come through the pass at all. It was an established fact that that was impossible.

“So they traveled through the pass, and they came to a place where they could see signs that the a stream had been blocked by an avalanche and then the blockage had been removed when enough snow and ice had melted. It looked bigger than any such catastrophe they had seen before, but they didn’t really understand just how big.

“Not until, that is, they got to where the village had been. That village was simply gone. They found just a few remains that might have been part of a village, but they might have missed them if they hadn’t been looking diligently.

“When word of this got back to people who had heard Imeril’s whole story, there were quite a number of explanations.

“Some people believed that Imeril’s father had been falsely accused, and thus the village had been cursed, and Imeril had miraculously survived.

“Others thought the village had been cursed by their carelessness in allowing someone under the condemnation of the gods to escape punishment.

“Others maintained that the entire story was made up.

“There were a few oldtimers who said, ‘Why do we need to invoke the gods? That’s the way villagers, village priests, mountains, snow, avalanches, and floods work. It’s a tough universe.’

“Imeril’s brother became rich and famous and is known as Galdor the Sailor.

“Imeril always tried to reenforce the first option, that her father had been falsely accused. It was the one that had kept her alive.

“But when I was old enough to understand my mother told me that was all nonsense. ‘Your grandfather was indeed a murderer, thief, and rapist. I escaped because I knew that, and assumed the gods would declare him guilty.”

It was a good thing the storyteller had such a good sword and knew how to use it.

This story is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any persons in the real world is strictly coincidental. Copyright © 2024, Henry E. Neufeld. The featured image was generated with Jetpack AI.

This is a sequel to Have You Tried Going Around?. You might want to read that first.

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When a mysterious lady arrived on horseback from the north, there was quite a stir in the city.

She was accompanied by a young maid, who radiated innocence. In some big cities, the maid might have created some suspicion. People might not have believed such innocence could exist. But in this city, they believed in the innocence of young girls, and so were simply pleased to see it clearly displayed—finally.

She also had five guards. The guards looked quite competent, provided one assumed they were intended to stop pick-pockets and petty thievery. Besides, what more could a lady need? Nobody would assassinate her, since she was, after all, a lady. The duke’s guards who watched the gate were, in fact, comforted by the presence of guards. They indicated normality. They were so obviously suited to their function that one would never assume they were anything else.

What was so mysterious?

All sorts of things. The lady arrived from the north, after all. Only the bravest of merchants and travelers tried the pass through the mountains to the north of the city. It was, in fact, regarded as impossible for carriages or wagons. It seemed odd, at first, that a lady should show up out of the mountains on horseback. She was strangely dressed as well, with very colorful, but clearly well-worn clothing, a face that had probably been beautiful before she’d aged, and more than one bag that probably contained some of the makeup she used to overpaint her face.

There was nothing definite, but people started to expect her to show up in the marketplace and begin telling fortunes. In the city, fortune tellers were generally rather ordinary looking and had a pack of cards, or some simple crystal ball. As long as they didn’t tell any fortunes that annoyed the duke (and nobody wanted to annoy the duke), they were regarded as harmless. It was, in fact, unlikely that people were right about the visitor from the north. Public opinion is so untrustworthy.

But in this case the odds were quite wrong. Madame Peony showed up the very next day in the marketplace with a canopy and curtains. She paid the price of a market stall, which was unheard of for a fortune teller. Normally they occupied whatever space was unoccupied and didn’t cost them rent. Madame Peony broke the mold. This could have been dangerous, but she did it with such grace and style.

Besides, her customers were women. Almost exclusively. It seemed that men were not anxious to spend time in a tent in the marketplace with someone named Madame Peony. It seemed like a way to be accused of unfaithfulness without the benefit of time with, shall we say, a paid companion. Not to mention they’d rather have spent that sort of time with her maid. Here maid, however, was distinctly unavailable. She’d listen, she’d flirt, but she never put out. Contact with her was so, well, innocent.

And time she spent. Lots of it. With the ordinary fortune teller you paid a few coppers, then she (or he) dealt out some cards and provided a vague response. Madam Peony spent time with each person and listened. She was a bit steep at 20 coppers per session, but the sessions! She’d spend as much as an hour with a client, and they always left with a look of satisfaction.

She quickly became a favored stop of the rich and famous. Women, that is. Now if it had been rich and famous men, someone might have gotten suspicious. If the Seneschal, the treasurer, the chief justice, the commander of the guard, the chief jailor, and dozens of other officials in the duke’s castle had all been going to see some woman—from the north, no less—there would have been more than suspicion. There would have been action. A summons from the duke would be likely, and such things were unlikely to go well.

But who cared if the wives of all these men wanted to spend money on what was probably a fraud in any case? It wasn’t that people in the city weren’t superstitious or didn’t believe in magic. It was just that a fortune teller in the marketplace filled a known role, and that role was harmless entertainment. Nobody actually believed that sort of thing.

What the men didn’t know, and wouldn’t have cared about if they had known, was that Madam Peony not only told fortunes; she gave advice. In fact, she gave good advice.

Weeks went by, then months, and Madam Peony became a fixture. Her origins faded and became just a subconscious support for her mysterious and valuable capabilities. Nobody could remember precisely what she’d done. At least nobody who was talking.

And then … Nobody ever really untangled what happened.

The treasurer, who had once recommended that a northern merchant be arrested and his property seized, became quite certain that the Seneschal and the chief justice were plotting against him. Some rumors said he had heard this from his wife who had heard it from somebody, nobody was quite sure who. There was even a rumor that Madam Peony had seen the plot in her crystal ball, but everybody knew Madam Peony was just entertainment for women, and there was actually no evidence she possessed a crystal ball.

Since the treasurer was quite unpopular, and generally believed to line his own pockets at the expense of other officials, it was not considered surprising. What was never rumored, though it was true, was that the wife of the chief justice had informed him that the treasurer was about to extort some more money from him in order to protect him from the duke, who had heard that the chief justice had actually arranged that someone the duke had wanted condemned be acquitted. The rumors became much more complex than this.

In the middle of the night a prisoner was actually located in the bowels of the dungeon and led outside the city. Why this happened was very unclear. But it was rumored that, in exchange for this deed, the wife of the treasurer (or was it the chief of the guard?) had acquired some magical potion that would kill the chief justice and the seneschal when they had lunch together. Well, not kill them during lunch. Rather, it would kill them hours later when nobody would suspect their lunch. But these rumors only circulated among the upper class women, so nobody who mattered cared.

There was no rumor, but the chief guard of the duke’s dungeons was having an affair with the wife of the city guard. There was a rumor, largely among the wives of high officials, that something scandalous would be revealed about the chief guard, probably by the chief justice, but also perhaps by the commander of the guard. The commander of the prison was not unhappy to hear that both were dead. Oh, and some months after the events here related, he married the bereaved widow.

There was never a rumor that the prisoner had escaped. The chief guard was an old hand at this. The dungeon census, faithfully maintained and about as truthful as a romance novel, remained the same, and the extra supplies were sold, increasing the net worth of the chief guard.

The Duke believed in the rule of law. Most particularly, he believed that when he ruled, it was law. In fact, since the duchy was so isolated, he had come largely to believe that what he ruled was reality as well.

The problem, however, was that when one trains one’s staff to fake reality, they can actually become rather good at it.

Madam Peony disappeared from the marketplace. She and the imprisoned merchant traveled north through the mountains. Nobody pursued, because there was nothing to pursue. At least nothing important. The upper class ladies were distressed, but they got over it.

Oh, and Madam Peony replaced her colorful clothes with light armor, a dagger, a short bow, and a rapier with which she was regarded as without a peer. She was a troubleshooter for the merchant guild, and nobody better. As it turned out, she could do quite a bit of harm.

(Copyright © 2018, Henry E. Neufeld. Image Credit: Openclipart.org)

It wasn’t the merchant’s fault that he approached the city from the north and entered the northern gate. Geological processes had decreed that the city was largely surrounded by mountains. These mountains were higher to the north and northwest, though there was a pass, open perhaps 5 or 6 months out of the year, that led north-northwest from the city. There was another pass, generally open all year, that led to the southeast. The merchant approached from west-southwest. And that created the problem.

When he emerged from the southwestern pass with his train of mules and two wagons, he noted that the area ahead of him and to the right looked pretty much deserted. There wasn’t even that much agricultural land. The city was a bit to his left, meaning a bit north of east, and it looked like things got more civilized that way. To the merchant, that meant a place to sell his goods. He was, after all, exploring a potential trade route.

So he turned to his left, and then as he came parallel with the city, he veered to his right a bit, and met the road that headed north-northwest from the city into the mountains. It was summer, and so there was occasional traffic, though not the sort of traffic the merchant expected from a road leading into a city. If his geography didn’t fail him—and he was pretty much a geographical genius—there were some quite populous places to the north and he would have expected more trade, assuming there was a road. As it was, there was no alternative to heading into the city to check things out, and this he did.

Northern good were prized in the city, and here came a merchant, claiming to be from the north, driving two wagons and a bunch of mules down the northern road (one tended to ignore the westward lean), headed into the city to the marketplace.

Perhaps I should explain. The reason this was so remarkable was that the northern route was well-known to be impassable to wagons. Mule trains yes. Wagons no. It. Could. Not. Be. Done. It was so remarkable that word of the merchant’s arrival got to the Duke. As a result, the Duke invited the merchant to bring his wares to the castle and discuss the situation.

“How did you get your wagons to our city?” asked the Duke.

The merchant assumed that the Duke wanted to know, so he said, “I came through the pass to the west-southwest.”

“But you entered the city from the north.”

“Well, there is no road coming from the southwest, so I circled the city until I came to a road.”

“So you are not, in fact, from the north, are you?”

“Actually I am. I traveled south through the western foothills of this range and then blazed a trail through the pass to your city. I offer you trade in abundance!”

For years the Duke and his duchy had been quite isolated from the empire. As long as his tax trains made it to the southeast, nobody bothered this area. It had become quite well established that the only way through the mountains was the northern pass. This made for a scarcity of northern goods, which were well known to be superior to those from the south.

“The northern pass is the only way through the mountains to the north,” said the Duke.

“But why haven’t you gone around?” asked the merchant.

It was the wrong question. The Duke dismissed the merchant from his presence and ordered his goods held while he considered the situation.

After some discussion among his advisors, one of them offered a solution. The merchant, he explained, was actually from the south, but he wanted to sell his goods as northern goods. He was thus deceiving and defrauding the people of the city.

The Duke looked doubtful.

“In that case,” pointed out another advisor, “his goods should be seized and become your grace’s property.”

The Duke found that a convincing argument. So he declared that indeed the northern road was the sole way through the mountains to the north and the west, that the merchant was a scam artist here to defraud the city. He threw the merchant into his dungeon and seized his goods.

The Duke believed in the rule of law. Most particularly, he believed that when he ruled, it was law. In fact, since the duchy was so isolated, he had come largely to believe that what he ruled was reality as well.

Since nobody could actually tell whether goods were from the north or the south, except by observing how they had arrived, the seized good were quite valuable and made a quite comforting addition to the ducal treasury. Oh, I don’t think I mentioned that the main reason northern goods were valued was that they were more rare. This had become, in some peoples’ minds, an indication of quality. Well, actually pretty much everyone accepted that. So the goods were laundered, so to speak, and became northern again, which they actually were.

It would likely have been better for the merchant had he been executed rather than thrown in the dungeon. The idea of release from the Duke’s dungeons was so distant a memory that it had become a matter of legend. In fact, it had progressed beyond that to provide one of the reasons one could not believe any stories of the past. Why if someone could get the idea that someone had been released from the dungeons in the distant past, then one might believe anything! So ignore all those people who teach history. They don’t really know, after all!

It took months for anyone to check for the merchant, but eventually the consortium of merchants who had sent him to blaze the trail began to wonder what had happened, so they sent an investigator to check. In due course the investigator and his guards arrived at the eastern end of the same pass through which the merchant had arrived. It had required no major effort to follow the merchant. He had, after all, been marking the path for future use.

The investigator, really as part of his job description, was a suspicious sort. When he realized that he had arrived at the city without so much as encountering a bear or a mountain lion, and without seeing any evidence of battle or ambush, he decided the problem must lie in the city ahead. He was pretty sure the merchant had made it that far, based on the evidence of the trail marker on which he as resting his right hand.

So he chose to enter the city from the southeast. He wasn’t entirely sure of the merchant’s path, considering the amount of time that had passed, but he guessed the merchant’s logic with some accuracy. So he used a different route.

In the city, he began to ask questions. As he listened to the answers he began to be very suspicious. When the Duke sent some armed guards to “invite” him to the castle, he was quite convinced. He was well acquainted with the sort of rule of law and view of reality held by the Duke, based on the answers he had gotten.

So being sneakier and tougher than anyone in the city imagined, he knocked out the Duke’s guards (an impossible task, according to the Duke), bound them, gagged them, and hid them where they might, if lucky, be found alive. Then he fled.

The Duke considered the possibility that the investigator had come from the north, but he dismissed it. There simply was no passage in that direction, not to the north in any case.

Why hadn’t they gone around? Because it was impossible. That was why.

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(This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of any of the places, characters, or events to anyone in real life is strictly coincidental. Copyright © 2017, Henry E. Neufeld.)

(Featured image credit: Openclipart.org.)