She stood up on the nearest table and banged two mugs for attention.
“My village was burned,” she declared, those words making the inn fall remarkably silent incredibly quickly.
“I’m not giving another coin to one of those sob stories! Sounds like horse shite to me!”
“Shut it, Graxnar!” The barkeep shouted. He was a big, barrel chested bear of a man, and he ruled over the bar as a private fiefdom. Graxnar and all his woodcutting mates fell silent when he told them to, because there wasn’t another place in walking distance where they could get cold ale and good meat.
“Our village refused to give up our grain! We almost starved last winter, and we decided not to pay the grain tax this year. The king is not of this world, or any world close to us. We have never seen him, nor has any other person on this planet, that we know of.”
“YOU HAVE TO PAY YOUR TAXES! WE ALL HAVE TO PAY OUR TAXES!” Someone shouted at her. “RULES IS RULES!”
“For what? We starve so some distant king can live?” Iris flung her arms the same way the chief of the tribe had flung his when he first told them that they would no longer be paying the grain tax. “We did not owe any king any allegiance. So we didn’t pay. And he came. He came on wings of fire with furious retribution spewing from monstrous mouths.”
She was really beginning to hit her stride now. The words were flowing through her, taking her with them. She wasn’t saying what she wanted to say. She was saying what had to be said. The truth was using her as its emissary, and so her voice was strong, perhaps even strident.
“That king, the king we have never laid eyes on before displayed himself to us with vengeful cruelty. He laid waste to our homes. He destroyed every heirloom, every bit of clothing, every precious person. He murdered every soul in his path, and he did it for nothing but grain. He did not need our grain, he has food to last millennia, he has the power of the stars at his fingertips. We needed our food to survive. We grew it through our own labor. We tilled the soil. We bled when we cut ourselves on sharp rocks. We plucked the grains, we threshed them, we stored them. Not for some distant king with birds of fire who unleashes his rages on the weak and the poor, but for our own bellies. And we were right to do so!” She punched the air with a slight fist, her eyes burning with righteous fury.
RAWWWWRR! YEEESS! DOWN WITH THE KING!
The crowd agreed with a general foaming cry. None of them had ever been particularly fond of paying taxes to the alien king, but it was something of a tradition they had been born into and come to respect for no reason other than they had been told that they respected it.
Now that they thought about it, alongside the horror of a destruction of a village, it seemed particularly unfair and rather pointless. The collectors always told them that their taxes paid for the roads, but most of the roads were nothing more than muddy tracks made by goats, enlarged by deer and then finally crashed through by the broad withered horses which did most of the work.
“NO MORE TAXES!”
“DOWN WITH THE KING!”
“Are you all forgetting about the part where he burned everybody alive?” A voice came out of the crowd, rather deep and sonorous, the sort of sound which carried without trying.
“MAYBE SOME TAXES!” The patrons amended their chant. They were not brave, or even particularly rebellious. They were simply swept up in the excitement of what felt like a new idea, a promise for change.
Iris’ father had always said that much of human history could be explained by the fact that humans, as a general rule, did not care what change was promised, as long as something was going to be different.
A pack of minstrels struck up a rousing tune to accompany the mood. “OH HO HO, THE KING BURNED A VILLAGE! SMOTE IT WITH HIS WILL-AGE! HE MADE BLOOD DO A SPILLAGE!”
They were not terribly good minstrels, but the drinking meant it didn’t matter. The same modus operandi applied to the art on the walls, which had been done by the local society for women who painted with their forefingers. They painted with their forefingers because their hands were occupied with flasks of wine.
Iris was beginning to feel better. She had not expected to find allies so quickly, or so easily. But she had forgotten the appeal of a damsel in distress. She was a young woman, or at least, a young enough woman that men of all ages felt protective of her as well as interested in her carnally.
She had never been with a man. Not because she wasn’t inherently interested in them, but because having a father who used his axe to split the skull of the first fellow who dared to lay a hand on her as she was coming of age ensured that there had been no further suitors - and now that she was fully of age, she was far more acclimated to trapping and gathering than to searching out mates.
So it was that she had very little understanding of the corollary of the mood swelling in the bar. Where there is a damsel in distress, there must also surely be a hero who rescues her, and having rescued her, makes wildly free with her loins.
Every male in the bar besides Floyd the Fabulous, who was playing pipe to his fellow minstrel’s fiddle, was now thinking about fucking the maiden who had stood up and made such an impassioned speech about tyrant kings and taxes.
Now that the speech was over, Iris found herself still very much on the table, but much less inclined to get down and join the fray. There were hands snaking toward her out of the mass of men, big brawny, hairy hands with agendas she did not care for.
“Let the lassie alone!” The barkeep came to her rescue again, batting the revelers out of the way with a mucky towel which had wiped down the bar so many times it was verging on becoming sentient in its own right, colonies of bacteria forming civilizations of their own, perhaps even suffering under their own tyrant kings. One never knew.
Iris was grateful for his intervention, but she knew it was not over. Having stirred up one tavern full of drunk field laborers, she was hardly on the cusp of a revolution. Not yet. But perhaps if she went to a hundred taverns, and told her story a hundred times, perhaps then the people would begin to turn on the king. Perhaps the story would take on so much of a life of its own that she herself would not have to tell it anymore. Maybe it would spread of its own volition, much like the king’s fires had done as they tore through thatch, reed, and even daub to leave nothing but a smoldering cairn where her life had once been.
Chapter 9
Before embarking on any hunt, it was common courtesy to let the groundskeeper know. That was the only reason Archon bothered to return to Naxus’ ridiculous palace, where the general met him with his usual smirking insolence.
“Naxus, I have come to hunt my prey. I will need the full resources of your army. I trust you have spies?”
“You’re talking about the village girl, aren’t you.”
Naxus surprised Archon with his knowledge and indirectly confirmed that he had spies.
“I am. What do you know of my prey?”
“That prey is currently stirring what could amount to a global uprising,” Naxus drawled.
Archon turned to face the general, only barely managing to hide the sneer which tried its best to appear on his face whenever Naxus was in the vicinity. The general had been hospitable, but that in itself was a problem. Archon was not a noble to be hosted. He was the king of all he surveyed. He expected deference, not tolerance. Groveling, not hospitality.