Authors: Stephen Zimmer
“What is in there?” Lee questioned in a low voice, stepping up to Gunther’s side.
Gunther’s eyes remained riveted upon the small chest for many minutes, and the two with him did not press any further for answers. He was grateful for their respect, as he was wrestling with his own emotions at the sight of the carefully hidden chest.
Finally, he answered Lee in a voice that was just above a whisper. “These are some very special belongings of mine. They are the kind that I could not afford to keep out in my home … if a day like this ever should have come. Such a day has indeed come to pass, and it seems that I judged well to have buried this chest.”
Gunther stopped and took a deep breath. Slowly, he looked over towards the others, and gestured at the outer door.
“You might as well get a few breaths of fresh air. The area is safe at this time,” he told them. “We might remain long underground after we return, or we might not, but you should take advantage of the moment that is in hand. The future is never for certain.”
Lee looked towards Lynn, who nodded silently back to him, as an understanding passed between them. He looked to Gunther and replied gently, “Might as well take advantage of it while we can, like you said.”
His words said one thing, but Gunther could tell that both had been perceptive enough to realize that the woodsman needed some time to himself. Gunther appreciated their keen awareness greatly, even if he did not express his sentiments.
The two filed quietly past Gunther and headed outside. Gunther rose in silence, and looked beyond the front doorway, just to make certain that the two foreigners were not alone.
He could see that there was another small contingent of Unguhur warriors gathered amongst the trees outside of his dwelling, all armed with the type of spear that was commonly used by their kind.
Though obviously alert, the Unguhur body language was just as relaxed as that of the warriors down in the cavern below. They came to a slight start as the two humans walked out into the dappled sunlight around the dwelling, but clearly recognized them, eased, and resumed their quiet watch.
Taking a few steps back into his abode, Gunther dropped to his knees before the chest. He reached down and ran his finger along the latch of the container. There was small keyhole on the iron padlock that secured it, to which a barrel-key in the pouch at his waist fit. He fit the stout key into the lock and turned it, the sharp sounds of the lock’s release rising to his ears an instant later. Gunther then opened the chest, carefully lifting the lid of the container.
Inside the receptacle were items that spanned the course of Gunther’s life. Coins of silver, and a few of gold, some gleaned from the wide travels that he had made with his father as a youth, lay randomly inside. A couple of small silken weavings were neatly folded, and tightly packed to one side, saved from places that still remained very near to his heart.
A small, wood-carved figurine of a Jaghun brought some wetness to Gunther’s eyes, though nobody was there to witness the surge of emotion overwhelming the stoic man. An uncle had given the finely detailed figure to him during his youth. Neither Gunther nor his uncle had known how portentous that gift was to be, for what was to come later in Gunther’s life.
It had been carved by his uncle’s skilled hand, based upon a male Jaghun that he had once seen, which had been purchased by a castellan knight from an old Sunland trader in Paleria. The creature was an absolute rarity, brought from far to the east, where the trader had acquired it in the Sunlands.
Paleria still held a significant population of followers of the Great Prophet, who hearkened from times when their ancestors had once conquered the island kingdom. The rulers of the island kingdom following that age had been Avanorans who had been led there by a mercenary adventurer. The Avanoran kings of Paleria had then given way to the blood of Ehrengard in the person of the Sacred Emperor. Despite all of the changes in rule, the Prophet-following families still endured, having survived throughout the many bitter struggles. They had also maintained continuing ties to the east, which was what enabled the Sun Land trader to bring a living Jaghun to Paleria, to be purchased by a knight of the west.
Gunther remembered how he had often listened in fascination to the tales of the Sun Lands, including stories of birds of incredible size, oil lamps with spirits dwelling in them, and many other fantastical tales that concerned a particularly brave sailor. Yet it was the old trader that had brought the most amazing and wondrous sight to his uncle’s eyes, the resonance of which had continued in Gunther’s life from the day that he had received the carved likeness.
He remembered his very first friends among the four-legged race of Jaghuns, as if those times of many long years before were the present day. Gunther was swiftly taken on an interior journey, as a recollection of the past paraded before his mind’s eye. He did not waver in the face of the swell of memories and images, even as more recent wounds were opened fresh, to bleed once again.
Triker and Jarka had been the most beautiful and loyal of creatures, from their discovery as a pair of vulnerable cubs in the Shadowlands, to the day that they breathed their last in Saxany. Gunther wished bitterly that the Jaghuns, like all of their kind, had a lifespan long enough to outlive the years that the Almighty had granted to the woodsman.
It was almost treacherous, in his view, that the years given to most beasts, especially the ones that were close companions to humankind, were so relatively scant. The creatures that showed friendship to mankind possessed lives so much shorter than those afforded to humans; at least those men and women who managed to avoid disease and violent death.
Gunther loved his first Jaghuns in a special way, as virtually a brother and a sister to him. The deeper sense of kinship and affection had steadily expanded as time went on, once kindled with Triker and Jarka. It had built up stronger with each successive Jaghun that had entered his life. The relationships blossomed in a shining continuum that led right up to the majestic animal that had recently been slain in the forest, Mianta.
The unfettered, enthusiastic love and loyalty shown to him by Mianta, from such a young age, had contrasted mightily with the human world that whirled in seeming chaos all around the woodsman. The impressions made by the starkly contrasting experiences were profound in their impact upon Gunther.
In his life, he had witnessed cutthroats, liars, cheaters, thieves, and countless other disreputable men and women, many of whom were held in popular esteem, and possessed of comfort and wealth. His travels had taken him far across the face of the world. The various lands that he had visited were all consistent in that nobility were so very rarely noble, either in deed or spirit.
As Gunther had gotten older, he had come to recognize more and more of the contrasts between truth and facade among the merchants, ruling classes, and even prominent religious figures, until he was firmly convinced that the human world was plagued with a malignant disease that was only getting worse. More often than not, a beautiful edifice adorned with gold and jewels masked a diseased and corrupt interior, among both groups and individuals.
A kind of maxim had taken root within Gunther, a metaphor for the living reality that he could testify to; a splendid and ornate tomb was still nothing more than a container for a rotting, dead organism.
The ways of humankind had changed much even in the course of his own lifetime. A sense of honor and a tendency for looking out for one another were rapidly becoming nothing more than mere words, which once spoken dissipated in the wind.
A world of tranquil villages and farmsteads was giving way to the power of ever-larger cities, as families were uprooted and dispersed. Gunther had strongly come to believe that the people flocking to the cities were chasing phantoms, fleeting and ephemeral delusions of hoped for wealth and comforts that would never be realized. The truth was that most were chasing after a wealth that would always concentrate itself in the great guilds of the west, and the nobles and rulers that chartered the towns that they occupied; powers that effectively controlled the lives of the urban populaces with an ironclad will.
The Unifier’s precipitous rise to such great heights of power had been one of the final events that had pushed Gunther to go into the east. He had sought escape and seclusion in a part of the world that he had hoped was not yet fully tainted with the decay that he saw so prevalent in the west. That hope had been naïve, for he had quickly discovered that the same forces flowed in the east as in the west. Even more dismaying, his sojourn had led him straight to his most onerous, soul-wrenching experience of all.
Gunther could never forget the last, long journey that he had undertaken. He had finally departed the east, broken-hearted and weary, working his way through a meandering journey back to Ehrengard. He had then taken the overland route to the east, reaching the edge of his homeland, then crossing over the borders of Saxany.
He had found nothing to help alleviate the heaviness in his heart, having held a sliver of hope that at least some things would be different in the storied land. The Saxans were good enough as a people, but the disease that he had seen in the other lands was beginning to show itself there too.
Though King Alcuin and many respectable thanes still stood tall and strong upon the foundation of the values that they, and those before them, held dear, a malignancy was indeed present among the people. Many in the populace now openly whispered their desire that the realm look to the ways of the western lands, and seek relations with the Unifier, in order to secure more prosperity for themselves. Those subtle murmurs, Gunther knew well enough, could easily transform into shouted advocacy in a very short time.
During his first months within the new land, Gunther had traveled all about the kingdom. News and tales had come in with the merchants that traded with the edge of the western kingdoms, and Gunther had heard a host of opinions, as conversations bandied about the burhs and greater towns of Saxany.
For every individual such as Aethelstan, there were three others who harbored a reluctance to oppose the Unifier, in Gunther’s final assessment. Those kinds of individuals seemed to hold freedom in very light regard, as something not worthy of struggle if, by accepting the Unifier’s will and authority, they could fill their bellies and coin pouches easier.
Gunther had promised himself then to hold little pity for the latter types of people, if the preeminence of the Unifier ever fell upon the Saxan lands. He had come to the rueful conclusion that there was no mistaking the eventual course of things, in that the Saxan lands would fall by conquest or acquiescence.
The kind of people propogating across the world, who had started to define what was evil as good, and what was good as evil, were woefully incapable of seeing below the surface of such a powerful, cunning entity as the Unifier indeed was.
Gunther had come to Saxany with initial thoughts of living around a village or town, but his further disgust with many of its inhabitants had pushed him to embrace the idea of a largely solitary existence. At the end of it all, he only desired a hideaway deep in the woods, far removed from the travails and storms encompassing humankind. Only then, in such an isolated environment, did he think that he could begin to heal.
The dark stream of thoughts caused Gunther to close his eyes for a few moments. The madness that was gripping mankind was only getting worse in a world turning itself upside down. Gunther found that he could hardly stomach what he could never even begin to truly comprehend.
Looking back into the chest, his eyes went from the Jaghun figurine to a golden arm bracelet. The look on his face softened even further, the very instant that his eyes alighted upon the bracelet. The wetness in his eyes swelled, until a lone tear escaped, and ran along a slow course down his right cheek.
Irene.
She was perhaps the greatest reason that his faith in people had been almost completely shattered. She was the prime reason why he had essentially fled the east, with such an aggrieved, disillusioned heart.
Irene was the first and only love that he had ever had. To him, she was so perfect, beautiful, and eternal. As a younger man of twenty-six, filled with new hopes and aspirations as he arrived in the east, he had thought that the whole world was ahead of him. After his life had intertwined with hers soon after, he had thought that he had found everything that he was looking for, and that she would always be by his side.
He was certainly of a marriageable age, and his mind and heart were fixated upon only one person in the entire world. Gunther vividly remembered how he had always been captivated by her warm eyes and soft smile, a look whose memory now evoked only pain within his heart.
Gunther had found his true love in the heart of distant Theonia, or so he had thought at the time. It had seemed that a great blessing had come into his life, in the form of the daughter of one of the Empire’s authorized dyers of purple silks. In Gunther’s eyes, the precious, regal color, derived from a highly valuable, rarer breed of sea snails within the region’s oceans, was unfit for his own beautiful empress.
The young woman’s father often visited the vast and ornate palace complexes within the Empire’s great capital city of Theonium. Gunther had gotten to know him well, and had felt confident that he had the man’s favor, in the courting of the merchant’s youngest daughter.
At the end of each day, when Gunther was banged up with the effects of an education by trial and error concering the ways of the world and fighting arts, Irene had always performed her own little miracles upon him, lifting the aches and pains away. Often, it was accomplished by merely her close presence to him.
She had soon professed that she would be there for him forever, and he had promised the same in return. Irene had been the one who had lied, as it was not long after that she had broken her vow.
Unbeknownst to him, a local officer, in one of the native units of the central, elite Tagmata force, had caught her affections. Gunther had no indication that the relationship with the officer had developed so strongly and quickly, until Irene had abruptly informed him one day that their courtship was over.