“What’s your name, boy?” Pali called out again, continuing the questions in rapid succession. “What’s your story? Where’s your people? They on their way here too? You know you got yourself in quite a predicament here.”
Rather than answer Pali, the young man slowly turned around and directly faced Machi, who had been ready to launch. For a second, Machi’s aggressive posture slightly subsided, as he was surprised the young man knew he was there. From the center of the opening, blades of grass hugging his legs above the ankle, the young man slowly turned back toward Pali and methodically raised both arms with his dirty palms upward beneath the overcast skies. The brothers watched intently. They were not quite sure what was going on or what his next move would be. The young man lowered himself to the ground, placing one knee in the grass. Still holding his palms up, as if to signify his submission, the young man put his other knee beneath him.
The brute and unforgiving force that came from behind was so swift and overwhelming that when the young man hit the ground, he folded like a blanket. He could barely catch his breath. With Machi on top, pinning him to the ground, Pali rushed in with a violent kick to his side.
“When I speak to you, you answer. Do you hear me, son? Do you understand what I’m telling you!” Pali screamed.
The young man’s mouth opened and closed as if there was no oxygen available in the atmosphere around him. He could not answer for gasping. Pali kicked him repeatedly, each time with more unrestrained brutality. Realizing there was no longer any threat from the young man, Machi slowly released the armbar from behind his neck and pushed his head into the unyielding ground as he stood over him in dominance. Pali and Machi looked at each other and smiled in accomplishment. But they quickly looked back to the ground, as there were many questions their enemy needed to answer.
“You have a lot of explaining to do, boy,” Pali barked. “So whether it’s here with us, or in front of the council, you’re gonna start talking. You’re gonna tell us exactly how many of you there are on this island and what you people want.”
The brothers understood the nuances of personal and social interaction, but they always operated at the lowest common denominator when faced with conflict. They only understood the Patridian way of peace through strength at any cost. This mantra was on full display as the brothers took turns conducting their physical interrogation with more violence. As more dark clouds ominously moved into the area and blanketed the clearing, the young man grabbed handfuls of the long grass and struggled to breathe amidst the pummeling. Pali and Machi wanted answers, but without air to breathe, no words materialized from their prisoner’s mouth.
Bloodied and tattered, the young man turned his head haltingly to one side and looked up at Pali as if he was attempting to say something to him. With blades of broken and dried grass pressed into his face, a single drop of blood crept slowly from the crease of his mouth into the hair on his chin. The brothers mistook the young man’s gaze as something in between resentment and contempt. Realizing no answers would be forthcoming, Pali raised his rugged, wooden staff in the air and struck their enemy in the head, knocking him out.
CHAPTER 1
Thura stood alone, quietly cutting fresh bread and aged cheese, as she had each afternoon for nearly ten years. The long, narrow room in which the young woman made preparations for the evening’s council meeting welcomed a soft, gentle light through its northern window. This room contrasted the adjacent council room, which was dark and windowless. Thura’s increased awareness of this light and dark dichotomy and how the latter appeared to be eclipsing the former in Patrida weighed heavily on the bondservant.
“Do you need anything else before I go?” A teenage voice called out from the shadows of the council room. “I finished pushing in all the chairs and straightening up the room, as you asked.”
“Thank you for your help, my young friend. And thank you for delivering this bread,” Thura said with a delicate smile. “Would you mind lighting the lamp on the table on your way out? And please, take this extra loaf of bread with you for your family. There is always so much left over after these meetings.”
“Thank you, Thura,” the young servant girl said, taking the hand- woven basket with the extra loaf of bread. “Are you counting down the days yet? The other girls have been enviously talking about you.”
Thura turned abruptly back to her work and continued cutting an already cut piece of bread into even smaller pieces without responding.
“I’m sorry,” the young girl said, realizing her question was not met with the excitement she expected. “I didn’t mean to say anything wrong. I will light the lamp on my way out and see you again tomorrow at the same time.”
“Thank you. I look forward to it,” Thura responded, as she listened to the young girl light the oil lamp and then run down the wooden stairs back to the Monon.
Thura was different from others in Patrida in many ways. Her waist-long, fiery red hair, which she braided to one side while she worked, stood out in a community with either dark or graying hair. But it was more than her red hair. She did not share the same sense of duty and honor as the other young women who anxiously awaited their arranged marriages at the end of their forced service. While the others counted down the days anticipating their emancipation, Thura counted them as days remaining until her final death sentence. This deviation in her thinking was not an accident. An old, imprisoned woman named Sophia, to whom Thura had delivered a nightly meal since her service began as a thirteen-year-old, secretly seeded this divergence in perspective.
Thura had been born on the island a couple of years after her family’s arrival. She spent most of her early years like everyone else, reverentially and faithfully following every stringent rule and strict expectation handed down by the Patridian Council. But she always did it gladly and without question, desperately wanting to please her parents and anyone else in authority. As a young girl, Thura was always the first person to arrive at each evening’s mandatory community gathering in Sanctuary. She always sat in the front row waiting for the rest of the town to arrive. But as she grew older and began taking the nightly scraps and leftovers to Sophia in prison, Thura’s perspective and understanding began to slowly change along with her eagerness to be at each evening’s gathering.
During her first year delivering food, Thura would drop the scraps in a small, rickety wooden bucket and hang it below the prison door’s window. But introverted eye contact turned into simple pleasantries. Simple pleasantries became small talk. Small talk evolved into deeper conversations. And deeper conversations led to Thura taking her meal with her and sharing it with Sophia as they talked.
Through this decade-long gradual transformation, Thura learned that sharing a meal with another person humanizes them, even a person the community has locked away for nearly two decades. She also learned that the beliefs one has about another can change over time, especially when you look them in the eyes as a human being and listen to their story.
For these reasons, Thura’s previously distorted image of the old woman began to change from prisoner to person. It was also how she ultimately discovered that Sophia was not quite the monster everyone painted her to be. Thura found her to be a sage woman who could speak to the depths and essence of another person’s soul with the most profound kindness. Developing this intimate relationship with Sophia first opened Thura’s eyes to her town’s harsh realities. It also kindled a spark within her to begin asking wise and insightful questions about who she was and what she wanted in her life.
Staring blankly out the northern window, Thura watched despondently as men, women, and children moved about the Monon. She saw her fellow servants in their obsidian black dresses circling from place to place in vain attempts to finish their unending work. She watched as married men sauntered along in their gaudy, handmade suits, walking with their subservient wives in their homely, servant-sewn, white frocks. Even the children appeared monochrome, running aimlessly in their own circles. But for the childr
en, Thura’s heart ached. She watched them move amongst the people. They were oblivious to the imprisoning structures surrounding them and the subconscious messages their malleable, impressionable, young minds absorbed.
The Monon was a meticulously constructed cobblestone road cutting directly through the heart of town. But it was more than a way of getting from place to place. Patrida’s leaders designed this thoroughfare as a symbol of orderly civic and religious life. It was a showcase of Patrida’s most prominent and influential.
Their houses and businesses, systematically lining each side of the central passageway, were constructed with sourced stone and wood. They were uniformly painted flat white with no visible color or contrast. There were no flowers, no plants, no decorations. Everything along the Monon was whitewashed and perfect. And it continually reminded the people of Patrida’s supposed virtue.
Branching off the Monon were narrow and gravelly side streets and alleyways that formed a grid-like configuration with smaller houses lining each side. These side streets told a story about Patrida’s hierarchy. The closer one lived to the Monon, the greater their notability and influence and the whiter their house.
Each step away from this main thoroughfare in any direction was a step down Patrida’s social ladder, with the bottom rung being Patrida’s uneducated, poor, and imprisoned. Their houses were on the margins and edges of this small town in their deliberately gray and black houses. As one might imagine, this kind of intentional stratification and ingrained division led to significant friction and conflict among the people over time. For as virtuous and upright as the people of Patrida may have appeared from the center of town, another fractured reality surrounded it. While movements throughout the segregated grid of Patrida told one story, movements east and west along the Monon told quite another.
On the far western end of the Monon, the imposing criminal’s gallows were hauntingly and intimidatingly displayed. At the center of this large, wooden structure were thirteen steps leading up to a modest, rectangular platform. A rugged and sizable support beam adorned two nooses directly above two drop floors. This dark and sinister visual, constructed purposefully to impede a view of the ocean from the Monon, reminded the citizens to follow the rule of law or meet a swift death. For those in the Patridian Council, their small community’s moral fabric was held together by adherence to religious law backed by swift, decisive justice.
Facing the gallows on the eastern end of Patrida, hugging the forest’s edge, was an area called Sanctuary. At the center of this communal gathering place was a venerated freshwater spring. Beautifully ornate rocks, which almost entirely encircled the spring, created a small pool around it that opened on the backside for water to flow freely as a creek into the woods. Enshrining the spring stood four limestone arcs placed equidistantly from one another. Each arc’s base was set outside the decorative rocks, with each one rising to meet the others triumphantly over the center of the spring. Planted firmly at the conjoined arcs’ apex, the Patridian flag flew high to ensure everyone could see it. This magnificent shrine, their holy sacrarium, elicited the awe, reverence, and allegiance of all who gathered there for worship each evening.
A slow-moving ceiling of slate gradually moved inland over the choppy, westward waters, joining both the humidity of late afternoon and the people of Patrida pouring out onto the Monon. Thura pushed aside her wooden tray of freshly sliced bread and aged cheeses and mindlessly reached for a bottle of sweet, red table wine to open. The young woman continued to watch the Monon from above, taking inventory of every preoccupied person under the darkening sky.
Thura imagined the men quietly discussing the latest chatter and political fodder surfacing from sources close to the town council. She thought about how their wives must be searching for any reason at all to smile. She pretended she could hear the conversations of others standing in front of their homes and businesses, gossiping about those in other homes and other businesses. Thura passively rolled her eyes at the dedicated few rushing along the cobblestone and down the center aisle of Sanctuary, as she once did, to territorially secure their seats before the evening service. Lining the outer perimeter on each side of the holy sacrarium, the Patridian guards stood stoically at attention.
As Thura’s eyes wandered, she began to follow her white-dressed servant girl who had just delivered the basket of freshly baked bread to her. She watched as she weaved in and out of the masses, attempting to make her next delivery. But as she tracked her young friend, Thura began to notice the maze of movement and the general hustle and bustle along the Monon had suddenly stopped. Every head began to turn eastward. Although her window was closed, Thura could hear urgent and resounding male voices cutting through the concerned people’s chatter.
Nervously taking off her apron and opening the crosshatch window, Thura placed her hands on the sill and stuck her head out to see what was causing the commotion. The faithful who had already assembled at Sanctuary sat in deathly silence without a move. The Patridian guards moved from strict attention to a defensive posture with their staffs held in front of them at the ready. The calls continued to grow louder and began to overtake everyone on the Monon until they hushed to whispers and then to complete silence.
Everyone nervously stared at a narrow opening close to where the spring flowed from the sacrarium. This particular opening into the woods led down a series of manmade and natural steps following the creek before fading into an endless array of game trails choked off by dense black pines. The people knew if someone approached Patrida, they would likely exit the woods through this opening near Sanctuary.
The men’s intense shouts accompanied decisive movements from the brush, which finally convulsed a dirty and unrecognizable man. Emerging with a length of rope tightly secured around his abraded neck and dried blood smeared across his swollen face, the man took a few staggered steps forward to the edge of the scrub and then summarily paused and looked at the people.
While the first few humble steps toward Sanctuary were those of the captive, Pali and Machi moved ahead and pulled him aggressively by the neck toward the Monon. The prisoner clutched the rough rope with his hands but was too weak to offer any resistance to the brothers’ brute strength. The face of each person who watched the embattled prisoner stagger along behind the men conveyed utter disbelief. But disbelief soon became uncertainty, and uncertainty devolved into fear, as the unthinkable became an undeniable reality.
A foreigner was walking among them.
Patrida’s paralysis and paranoia grew with the disheveled prisoner’s every labored step. Fearful citizens began to consider what eyes might be watching them from beyond the tree line. Their collective panic birthed out of what they did not know. It then manifested into speculation about the enemy’s intentions and fear for their lives and freedom.
One by one, every man, woman, and child began to nervously follow the enemy’s procession in silence along the cobblestone road. But nervous silence was soon broken by a lone voice belonging to a tall, lanky mustached man with a black, receding hairline who began to scream at the top of his lungs while lunging threateningly at the prisoner.
“Who are you, boy!” the man shouted. “You’re not from around here! Speak up! Where’d you come from! Where’s all your people! Hidin’ in the woods! What do you want from us!”
With the prisoner doing his best to look at his feet as he walked and not engage, one man’s screams became a chorus of screams and shouts throughout the crowd erupting into a more riotous roar.
“There has to be more coming for us!” one suited man shouted, pushing others out of the way to get to the brothers at the front of the line.
“I heard there are hundreds, even thousands, coming for us right now!” another white-suited man shouted as his terrified wife buried her face in her hands and cried.
“You are not going to destroy this town and take everything we have!” screamed a mother holding her baby as she smacked at the prisoner with her free hand before grabbing a hand
ful of his shirt and ripping his left sleeve.
Patrida had been a tinder box for quite some time. But all it took for anger to blaze into a raging wildfire was igniting it with fear. The vicious mob suddenly became more frenzied and hysterical as the more bold and aggressive ran toward the prisoner and continued to rip at his clothing, venomously spewing their threats and hateful epithets.
Unfazed and without any show of emotion, Pali and Machi continued to march forward, unflinchingly dragging the object of scorn behind them along the Monon toward the jail. As Machi unlocked the door and Pali threw the man into the cell, rioters continued to incessantly grab and rip at his soiled shirt and hit him with their closed fists. The people of Patrida demanded answers the young man was unwilling to give them.
Thura watched the unholy procession and unquenched blood- thirst of her fellow townspeople the entire length of the Monon. Not a single person tried to stop the madness, she thought. No one thought twice about this man or what they were doing to him. Staring in sadness at her prematurely calloused hands placed on the wooden countertop in front of her, Thura closed her eyes and considered the words Sophia shared with her a few days prior.
Living daily in shadows keeps us from seeing ourselves and others as we truly are. In darkness, we obscure our fundamental humanity, which keeps us from discovering greater depths of relationship and experience.
While Thura did not always understand Sophia’s words, she could see that shadows had become real life in Patrida. It was the only life anyone knew. It was how they saw themselves as individuals, how they related to one another, and now how they treated an outsider they knew nothing about. Thura’s heart ached as she looked out the window one last time and surveyed the crowd. Not a single person standing on the Monon could ever imagine another way of dealing with conflict, or relating to others.
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