The Kingdom of the Damned

by Mario Garrido Espinosa

  Especially in that strange conversation, arising from the Abbot’s chance and good drinking, Sir Higinio took all the essential knowledge he needed to forge his future business and fortune. In fact, that religious man did not tell him anything that was secret: the practices of the Church in Gurracam were well known and the retired military officer only applied them by blatantly copying them.

  "People have always lived on land, on cattle and, in short, on what is taken from these mountains," Abbot Marcelino Taruoca continued with his simple and clear vision of things. “One fine day, I do not know how many centuries ago, one of my brothers left his cave and, with others like him founded our beloved Abbey; I suppose that at first St. Benedict’s rule was followed closely, but time passed and the Most Holy Rule gave way to others more in line with our time and more beneficial for the Holy Mother Church, which after all, it needs any resource to not succumb and leave helpless to all these poor people... Poor, what would they do without us? They would become sinful beasts eager to fornicate all the time and end up creating herds like wolves, doing evil there where they stepped.” The Abbot made a silence, looked into his interlocutor eyes, and after verifying that either of them did not believe his last words, he followed the speech in the sincere tone of the beginning: “In short, what was of no one and of all, these mountains and their surroundings, began to be ours. Before people of the villages collected wild fruits without much concern; and they hunted; and pastured... Now they must give us an income every year for the right to do what their ancestors did free in these same places.”

  The Abbot belched between one phrase and the other but did not stop drinking wine. Between sips, his thoughts came out clearly.

  “It has been work of centuries, but now there is no one to move us from here. While these people are still a handful of illiterates, everything will be fine.” In addition, one last sentence was granted that let see its condition: “Of course with the help of God ... And that we do not lack.”

  Sir Higinio saw at once the similarity of the Abbot's comments with his imminent situation and thus began by enclosing the forests of which he was new lord. Then he imposed on the inhabitants of the area a rate of firewood and grazing, which was immediately found to be abusive. He lowered the prices but imposed the use of his own mules to transport the firewood, which ended up taking almost the same amount of Alexandrians. Nevertheless, those lands were not especially cattle raising and the wood did not end up being good business.

  The retired soldier, then, rented all of his farmland. The payment was made at the end of each harvest and consisted of three quarters of the product collected, always estimating a minimum amount of money for when the crops did not yield enough. Thus, the town peasants’ placid life changed radically, because until that day they had happily been outside the laws that a particular person could imposed, being the adjoining lands of free cultivation, although regulated by a royal decree of more than two hundred years ago, which, better or worse, allowed the coexistence of people of the place and, what is more important, their survival. Now things had sadly changed.

  It was inevitable that some years the drought would wreak havoc in the area or the hail would spoil a crop. On those occasions Sir Higinio asserted the document in which he was obliged to pay the lands rent with a sum of Alexandrians to the peasant; but this amount was always so disproportionate that no peasant —and there were with lifelong savings— could never collect all the money claimed. Then the former soldier left with impunity with the animals of his debtor: chickens, ducks, rabbits, geese, donkeys, pigs, horses and even cows, which he sold at livestock fairs in the north town of the region. However, the usual thing was that poor people did not own animals —at least with a sufficient value—, which did not give them back the land until they settled the debt one way or another. To this end, Sir Higinio used his so-called trusted men. These were a small army of assassins and bad people recruited in the vicinity. Everyone knew them and they tried not to get in their way. They were very well paid and had only one thing in common: they respected the old soldier; they even feared him, because even in that town he knew about Sir Higinio’s adventures when he was captain of the Royal Sheriffs’ of St. Josafar.

  The beatings, consequently, were the order of the day and sometimes, when Sir Higinio understood that he was never going to charge, he sent his trusted men to kill the debtor. The rest of the defaulters shortly knew about these murders, which caused poor people to do the impossible to pay. The bravest —or desperate— one ended up leaving the town, fleeing —putting their lives in danger— from a place where they had no land to work and in which they had to endure the constant Sir Higinio’s confidence men humiliation, who began to use authoritatively the gardeners’ young daughters’ or wives services, if they liked the last one. Sir Higinio consented to these practices, which became commonplace, because he realized that they produced more fright than the death in strange circumstances of any debtor peasant.

  Among the more than thirty men who could no longer bear the retired soldier’s outrages and tried to escape from the town, only half a dozen managed to escape. Sir Higinio did not worry much about catching them, knowing that there would be others who came looking for work, because the poor inhabitants of the Kingdom of Gurracam’s hunger was always the best ally of his fortune.

  Finally, the retired sheriff's guard took over of the lands that adjoined his, buying them —in general illegally—, with prices well below their real value and endangering their owners’ lives with threats and arson. Thus, he became the greatest landowner ever in that Kingdom —except the Church, which in a way was his mentor indeed— which caused his fortune to increase almost uncontrollably.

  6

  In less than twelve months since they arrived to the town, the Lopezosa Quesada stopped living next to the square, in a shack not very badly conditioned, for which they paid a very little amount of money. Sir Higinio bought from a family of marquises, who no longer lived in the place, the mansion in which he would end his days. At the time of its acquisition, it was a kind of ruin that seemed about to fall at any moment, but in just three years the new owner remodeled it to his liking and turned it almost into a palace. Thus, he carpeted all its walls with shields, raised tall towers on all four sides of the building so that he could scan to the end of his land, fortified the entrances of the house with doors of a thickness and unnecessary tonnage, and embedded screens in all the windows of the lower floor, to avoid the curious glances that walkers could throw inside the house. Without wanting it, he got that he and his daughters could not either even see the street from the ground floor.

  Given the harsh winter in the region, the former sheriff's guard had them build a complicated system of chimneys, which, distributed at strategic points in the mansion, induced any corner to remain reasonably hot. To feed the fifteen enormous chimneys, Sir Higinio stored between the stone columns of the interior courtyard —in any season of the year— fifteen to twenty holm oak wood stems of first quality, which contrasted with the humbler houses, where in the middle of winter was already starting to get cold.

  In the interior of the house important reforms were also made. Thus, the ceilings of the corridors were covered with noble wood beams, and those of the rooms were filled with coffered ceilings with different almost perfect regular polygons forms, being the best a magnificent Mudejar coffered ceiling that covered the ceiling of Sir Higinio's bedroom and that he had a suspicious resemblance to another that coincidentally—coinciding with the dates of its acquisition— had been burned in one of the interior rooms of the church of La Alpurria.

  In some rooms he hid the walls with costly tapestries brought from the Royal Factory of St. Josafar and that generally represented exotic battles of the times when the King of Macedonia Alexander III the Great extended his empire through Mesopotamia, Babylon and Persia. In addition, he recharged the rooms of useless furniture decorated to the silliness, of friar armchairs, dressers, lamps, mirrors, tables, inflated proportions beds
and even some Roman senator bust who never existed. On top of that, in all the rooms rested a couple of chest of thick wood, lined with leather or decorated with chain motifs. Most of them were empty and showed their hinges, locks, joints and completely new and shiny padlocks, due to little or no use. Together, all these objects and ornaments, gave more feeling of oppression than wealth and splendor.

  7

  Although life went smoothly while the retired military turned the ruin of the Hundred Fires street into a mansion with the appearance and resources of a fortress, there were times when his many debtors, aggrieved to the limit of their strength, they tried some skirmish against him, but due to the lack of skill for these things they always showed awkwardness, turning their action into something useless and what is worse, lethal. However, there was an incident in which Sir Higinio was about to lose his life at a peasant’s hands stultified by the many and fruitless hours lost tilling the land under La Alpurría sun. That man did not hesitate to put an end to the former bailiff’s practices just after hearing his young daughter talking about the terrible story of how three trusted men sent by the landowner had abused her and seeing, literally mad with rage, dried blood between her legs. The peasant waited patiently for two and a half hours hiding in an alley from where he could see the door of the mansion on the Hundred Fires street. With his eyes fixed on the wood of the door, which became dimmed a few times, but his right hand, from which he held an old but very sharp sickle, did not shake a bit. At one point, a servant came out, but the peasant remained quiet in his place. Only Sir Higinio’s presence would make him move. The tension in his muscles turned to pain but he did not want to know and he stood with his gaze fixed on the door.

  Suddenly one of the retired soldier’s carriages moved down the street and positioned in front of the door. Seconds later, Sir Higinio appeared, who, as always, turned two key rings in the lock of the heavy door that gave access to his mansion, more from habit than from fear, that no one would dare enter without permission, which no sane man would do even if it is left wide open; and then, just as he opened the door of his carriage, he was surprised by the peasant. The poor man, out of his mind, used his sickle to encircle his neck and try to slice it in one fell swoop. There was a time when no one had bet anything on Sir Higinio’s life, but he was only forty-odd years old and he kept his tricks for the one who wanted quarrels with him. With feline quickness, he drew a dagger from his cloak and with three sharp slashes in one side managed to get the peasant to let go the sickle and fall to the ground as weak and helpless as the day he was born.

  “Damn son of a bitch!” exclaimed in a low voice. Then he looked at the person he had just insulted. He was bleeding. He knew, since it was not the first time he had dispatched a person in this way, that he would soon start to throw up blood and suffer spasms. Before this happened, Sir Higinio unleashed four furious kicks on the man’s head, lying on the ground. The laborer was practically dead.

  “Are you okay, sir?” Asked the coachman, who hurriedly got off the coachbox when the haul, which occurred in a matter of seconds, was clearly in favor of his employer.

  "I'm fine," was the quick response. “I have been worse,” he emphasized, while he was feeling the fine wound that the sickle had left in his neck. Then he looked hard at his interlocutor. “In worse, but with better allies.”

  The coachman looked at the ground in a total submission attitude, expecting a blow, maybe two slaps, any kind of physical humiliation. He had not yet experienced any harassment from his employer, but he knew that the other servants had a few marked on their bodys.

  Nevertheless, there was no such.

  "Go find Hernando," Sir Higinio ordered. “He will take me today. Get rid of this garbage and then clean everything. I do not want to see any trace of this pig's blood in front of my door.”

  “Yes! Sir.”

  “When I go back I'll check your work. Do it well or else today will be the last day you will see sunlight.”

  8

  Being for fear of uncontrolled peasants or simple boredom, Sir Higinio, over the years, began to be tired of looking after his debtors and decided to use those hectares, which with so little effort had been able to gather, to cultivate for his own potatoes, beets and onions —which was the best growing there—, instead of renting them. The operation was very simple in fact: he made the peasants, who still had debts with him and his children of working age, to sign a document —on which the King had stamped his seal— by which the retired military officer forgave their debit, in exchange for working his land for the rest of their lives, earning a measly salary. Nobody would have voluntarily signed that pact, but the men of the retired military man’s confidence were dedicated to get the workforce so that no one could escape the clear line drawn by the plan of their boss.

  The peasants accepted their sad destiny because no one doubted that the retired military officer, decorated by His Majesty King Bartholomew III El Magnificent on five occasions and who had served Gurracam with honor and courage, had the almost divine right to do what he wanted in that forgotten town of God, of the King and almost of the Holy Gurracamess Inquisition.

  CHApter 3

  Market day

  1

  T

  hat morning was moderately hot, and the temperature, accordingly, quite pleasant. Maybe for this reason people were more numerous in the street market of every Wednesday. Since the beginning of summer it was the first time that the inhabitants of La Alpurria del Campo had crowded in that way and in such quantity to buy the several products that were sold in the different stalls located in a chaotic way anywhere in the Main Square.

  The disorder was absolute and the indescribable hubbub. People, some full of money to spend —although most of them went with four coins counted—, crowded into the retail stalls in order to get food, drinks, clothing, tools and even dubious cosmetics, perfumes and concoctions —supposedly aphrodisiacs—transported from God knows where. The grocery stores proliferated, selling all kinds of edible products, brought from across the sea by English, French and Dutch merchants, with the interesting property of being preserved without being easily altered. People of the place, and some of the neighboring villages and towns, were rubbing against each other to get some of these goods, to make room or simply to be able to pass through the narrow corridors left by the stalls, faced so close that if the products had arms and hands could have been touched... And thus, in the most absolute lack of concert, smells, voices and sweats from everybody were mixed with those of the genre for sale and its vendors.

  For Mario Toulon, who little imagined that the next day he would dedicate himself to climbing the walls of the Lopezosa Quesada’s mansion, it was the ideal opportunity to be able to steal without too much difficulty or danger. He greatly enjoyed this activity. In addition, in these occasional traces he drew his best boots. Among the large crowd, he moved freely and the bags of coins were easy prey for someone who, like him, proved to have an ability to subtract them without equal.

  “It is many years since I've been doing the same and, at the risk of being arrogant, I can say that I'm a genius in that,” he said, saying a great truth, one of the rare times he was drunk in his life to a potter companion of drinks of bad wine, that in no moment was in conditions to be able to understand what the next one said.

  Mario Toulon knew perfectly whom he had to steal. Thus, he benefited primarily from those people who were worried that no one would not snatch a certain item, or from others who were vigilant so that no one would slip in when making the purchase. All of them, fatally, neglected their bag of Alexandrians. On the other hand, it was inevitable that the thief's way of acting was suspicious, since he neither bought anything nor looked at the merchandise; but no one seemed to notice him, due, in large part, to the fact that his ability to sneak into people was, to say the least, diabolical.

  The business had not been bad today and when he was looking for a last unsuspecting buyer of useless trinkets to steal, he noticed a luxurio
us carriage like a prince's —pulled by two clean white horses— that arrived in the square and parked on a street that lead to the market. It was impossible not to notice her because she stood out from the rest of the landscape as a spider would highlight, moving its eight hairy legs, over a bouquet of freshly picked daisies. That seemed to come from another place, almost another world, where, at least, the economic level was much higher than that shown by the people of the market.

  At the door of the vehicle —which would later be found to belong to the property of Sir Higinio Lopezosa Quesada— the coat of arms which its owner invented when he was young and who served as a sheriff's guard was painted. Although it had nothing to do with his family names or history, he himself decided —without consulting anyone— that it would be his emblem and his descendants’. On the shield were painted two towers, a heart and a tree. There was no relationship among them. Surely Sir Higinio copied them from other shields he observed in the noble houses of St. Josafar; or he traced them without any more than a treaty of heraldry of the great, dusty and forgotten collection of books —formed by more than half a thousand volumes— of his beloved Scholastic Eugenie’s family.

  That incredible library was as big as little used. For anyone of the time it was impressive to be placed right in front of so much book, since it was a very rare spectacle in Gurracam. Sir Higinio could not escape this spell and, although he never intended to read a book, he stole half a hundred volumes, which he later forgot in St. Josafar. Nevertheless, this was not the worst event that happened to the library because, although it was one of the only ones in all Gurracam had a particular family, it was not preserved. It was sold and scattered while the dukes of Sotopontoso and Luciergapo resided in France, thus losing themselves forever.