The Kingdom of the Damned

by Mario Garrido Espinosa

  "Maybe you do not remember him, but surely you know his daughter: a blonde with big tits like barrels," the man could not help but chuckle at the thought of those two formidable breasts. “The one you left pregnant in the Alpurria del Campo, remember?”

  Mario immediately associated memories and ideas and despite the regrettable situation, he was happy about what happened. He did not know if it was true what they told him or if he had just been held the baby, but he liked the idea that the woman who ordered and mistreated him was awarded by his own seed. “This is how she will learn,” he thought as if he had acted more nobly than she did that day.

  "I have never been in that place before and I have not gotten any woman pregnant," he lied.

  “Of course you've been to La Alpurria and of course you've been with the little Irene. We have all tasted her, or rather, she has tested us all," Severus corrected smiling.

  “I tell you I do not know that woman.”

  “Do not pretend to be a saint. There is no God or man who resists such ‘large-boobs’...”

  The two men laughed at the joke.

  “I am telling you again that I've never been...”

  “Don't be a liar! Whoever has been surrounded by such boobs never forgets it. They are the biggest and most appetizing of all Gurracam!”

  “I do not know any woman like you describe... What I would give to meet such a woman...!” Mario explained, unconvincingly.

  “You are very modest! Also such a liar. By the way, they consider you a hero in the village," Sabine informed him. “Everyone walks with the gossip of your adventures from house to house. They say it was a matter of time someone left her pregnant.”

  “If they saw what he really is: A puppet climbed a tree.”

  “To tell the truth, we will make a great mercy to your son, because at this point you are already a father, to prevent him from knowing his father's unfortunate.”

  The two men laughed, this time, fiercely and sonorously.

  “Well, it is enough. Get down from there!”

  Nevertheless, suddenly and incomprehensibly Mario Toulon took a little courage from God knows where and upholstered his sword, more rusty and bent than ever, and threatened:

  "Come and get me if you dare!"

  Sabine and Severus watched the comic stamp for thirty seconds. Then they looked at each other and could not help but laugh so hard that they fell off the horse. More than laughter was mockery. Severus cried a tear between laughter and laughter.

  “Have been seen!” the taller of the two exclaimed, and rising from the saddle, took him by the foot and spurred his horse.

  Mario Toulon released his sword in time and clung to a branch as if he himself were part of the oak —almost as if it were the bark of the tree— holding the pull while clenching his teeth and begging asking not to tear his leg of rennet. The man ended up releasing his foot, because he saw that at any moment he was going to fall from his saddle.

  “How the bastard grabs!”

  "Do not worry, I'll end up with such nonsense right away," said the shorter one, who seemed to have the worst character. Then, from the saddlebags of his horse, he took a Barne pistol with a long cannon and a spent trigger, and aimed directly at Mario's body.

  “Get down or I will shot!”

  4

  Mario Toulon made the gesture of holstering his sword but saw that the weapon was on the ground. He got rid of her to cling to the tree and not fall because of the pulls that man gave his leg. His companion kept pointing at him with that enormous pistol. He had no choice but to prepare to descend from the oak, but he realized that he did not know how to do it. Suddenly his twisted ankle began to ache more sharply than before and the slight tips of cold sweat that flowed from his forehead were now huge drops of panic. He wondered, invaded by nervousness, how the hell he had climbed to such a high altitude. He explored the trunk of the tree well in search of a bend or hole to lean on to go down, but found everything flat and terribly vertical.

  “Come down!” one of the Barne Repealed.

  “But, but I do not know how” Mario acknowledged, looking left and right, beginning to have vertigo and to seriously fear for his life.

  The two men laughed again, they seemed to enjoy it a lot and the one with the gun, without warning, fired a shot into the air. Some birds, who wandered around stealing seeds through the fields, took off in flight, bewildered. Mario Toulon was frightened —as much or more than the birds of his same guild— by the tremendous rumble produced by the Barne. He really got scared. He did not know if the bullet had been aimed at his body, and in his confusion he lost his balance slightly, but enough to fall to the ground, carrying in one of his hands a twig with six green acorns and one rotten. He collapsed on a mattress of dry holm oak leaves, which cushioned the blow a bit, though he stuck several of them into his hands and face; and, in the height of bad luck, one of his knees, the one that preceded the wounded ankle, hit a pebble —which certainly seemed to be put there on purpose—. Immediately a bloodstain began to appear on his clothes, at the height of the beaten kneecap.

  “You see how easy it was to go down.”

  “With a little goodwill everything is possible.”

  Severus and Sabine laughed for the umpteenth time and then, after descending from their respective horses, left them with the reins loose so that they could freely graze the little or no grass they were able to find.

  "Now we're going to play a very funny game," Severus explained.

  The man who did not wield the gun snatched the bundle from the thief and tossed it to the side of the oak base. Then he tied his feet and hands by the wrists, with the same rope, in such a strong way that almost did not pass the blood to the final parts of the extremities. If he pulled his hands, he also pulled his ankles, and vice versa. Any movement a little brusque would make him lose verticality. The position was very uncomfortable, and the man who had left him like that knew it on good authority.

  “The game is called ‘The fall of the bale.’ You will be the bale and we will cause the fall. It is very simple! It wins the one who makes the bale fall more times, before it becomes unusable.”

  “Have you understood the rules?” Sabine said, pulling Mario's hair. “Your role in this game is to be a good bale. So you can see that anybody can win here, you will say how many falls you have to resist. If you hold them, you win with all the honors. How many falls do you like?”

  “Release me, you cowards!”

  “What a pity! You have lost your chance. Now we will choose. What do you think about thirty falls?” Sabine asked his partner in brutality.

  “They are few. You have to be fair. Fifty.”

  “It's okay. But let's not put more, lest we end up bored all three.”

  All this cruel irony was not new. The two men had repeated it word for word before, at least, with twelve bales before Mario. They did not ignore the fact that to disclose certain details of the beating that they were going to give to a person, caused greater suffering in this one. For all this, they tried to delay at the beginning of the game, although it is fair to say that lately they had become more impatient and this part of the torture was executed with greater urgency than when they were younger.

  "Very well," said Sabine to Mario Toulon, and repeated the evil mechanism of the game: "We will make you fall fifty times. Twenty-five each. If after the last fall you rise again, you win. Understood?”

  “And what did I win, you bastard?” the bale wanted to know.

  "Then you can ask for whatever you want, if you can talk," Sabine said after thinking for a few seconds, for this was the first time a bundle had asked him that question.

  "You can even ask for your life and your freedom as a reward," Severus advised, although in no case they would let him go.

  “Let's start. The best you can learn is playing.”

  “You will see that we had a good time, although be careful with my friend. He is a very bad loser... And sometimes cheats.”

  Ano
ther laugh rumbled in the silence of that sown.

  The game began.

  5

  A fist at high speed was to be stamped on Mario's face, making a gap in his left cheek. Some finger on that fist should have a ring or something. The thief lost the vision of the eye closest to the open cheek.

  The bundle fell.

  “Up!” Sabine shouted. “Now it's my turn. Here we all have the right to play, don’t you think?”

  A collection of wild laughter was heard again.

  Mario tried to get up by leaning his back against the tree. It was useless. In the end he had to be lifted by the two men because, thus tied, it was impossible to get back on his feet.

  “You're really clumsy, Lord!” Severus joked as they put the thief upright again. “Anyway, do not worry, because as you can see we help you in whatever it takes...”

  “In the beginning it is difficult to understand the role of each one in the game, so for the moment we will put you in your place delighted, but make it clear that this is going against the rules.”

  Another brutal laugh again scared the few crows that were already in the vicinity.

  Mario Toulon’s left eye seemed to recover the vision, although it was not very pleasant what he would see later.

  A terrifying kick was struck on the bound man genitals’.

  The bundle fell again, this time writhing in pain.

  “Come on! Up!”

  But this time Mario chose not to open his eyes and remain motionless —despite the pain of his crotch— waiting, perhaps, not to receive the forty-eight more blows that remained. Then the one with the worst character put the mouth of his gun between Mario’s eyes and insisted again:

  “You're still conscious, bastard. Up I said! We are going to continue the game. Now it's my turn and I do not want to lose.”

  When Severus put him back on his feet, Mario Toulon could see someone watching them from afar, from the road. Blurred, but he saw them.

  “Heeeeeelp...!” He cried, choking on his own request for help.

  The two men saw the one who was watching, who, seeing himself discovered, started to run.

  “Go get him!” Said Sabine to Severus. “I'll take this one” he pretended as if Mario Toulon could escape by being tied up the way he was.

  Severus mounted swiftly on his horse and in a very fast gallop reached the height of his pursued. It was not difficult to crush the poor peasant with the animal with strong legs that transported him. He was a person who would have had as many years as Mario Toulon had to endure if he wanted to win the game. His face was wrinkled by the sun and the wind. He must have been a neighbor of The Rocky Road who was returning, probably, to work in a nearby land. He was accompanied by an ass full of killings, which did not change in the least when Severus got off his horse and gave an accurate and bestial hit to its master at the nape of the neck, using the butt of his pistol.

  “What do we do with this one?” Severus asked his companion when he arrived at the oak tree.

  “We must make him disappear. For now, get off your horse and register him in case he has any money. You never know. Me, meanwhile, I will go to see what there is in the saddlebags of the donkey that you left on the road.”

  Sabine came back with a very sharp sickle. He kept it in his horse's saddlebags, because it seemed to him that this might be a weapon that could do him good service in the future. He also brought a hoe spent for the use. He untied Mario and giving him the tool forced him to start making a hole.

  The thief was not for forced labor, but he dug for the account he was bringing. Meanwhile, Severus and Sabine waited sitting in the shade of the oak, without neglecting the gun, and rushing the bale.

  The poor peasant woke up once, laying his hand on the nape of his neck and showing a dazed face, but with the butt of the pistol, using the weapon for the second time as a hammer, Severus returned to knock him out of action.

  At least two and a half hours later, when the hole was deep enough, Mario Toulon was released from work and the peasant was put inside.

  At the moment, as if nothing had happened, they tied the thief again and resumed the game. Now the bale was not standing because of the fatigue and the damages received previously, so, although the game lost showiness, decided to support him in the trunk of the oak.

  Ten minutes later the bale was for the eighth time ready to receive, but before he vomited everything he had in his body, which was not that much. The last blows had been directed to the pit of the stomach with studied ferocity, but the next one was going to explode, again, in what was left of the crotch... And in this way the wild parade of aggressions took place, prepared in time for reach the greatest hardness, until Mario Toulon, finally, in the number twelve blow of this second and most abundant round, was left without knowledge. He had lost thirty-six blows before the game conclusion. Sabine and Severus settled for an honorable draw with seven knockdowns.

  6

  "The Fall of the Bale" game had —according to Severus’ father who always said and was probably the one who invented this barbarous practice— two serious deficiencies. The first was the difficulty of choosing a volunteer to do the bait. Only when the volunteer was obliged, as in the case of Mario Toulon, this cumbersome problem was eliminated. The second inconvenience had no remedy: the game lasted very little, so that Severus and Sabine had a much shorter time than they would have liked. Taking into account, in addition, the experience of the players, the fact of agreeing fifty falls was, to put it mildly, to be very optimistic.

  “He will not be dead?” Sabine said.

  Another drawback: it was difficult to control the fact that the bale, after one of the blows, fell dead to the floor.

  "No, not at the moment, but from what you can see, it will not be long," Severus answered, placing a hand on the area of ​​the body where the hearts of the people are housed, although after such beating this organ could be in the navel, in the same way as the stomach in the neck.

  “Well, register him in case he has a coin.”

  The man obeyed with pleasure. Sir Higinio had given them a good amount of Alexandrians when they left La Alpurria, but they had managed to increase the amount thanks to their mischief by the towns. They could suspect little that Mario Toulon was loaded with all the money from his latest thefts.

  Severus undid the thief's bundle. Inside he found old clothes, dirty and very used, a rusty razor but still in use, a piece of mirror with whose edges you could cut if you were not careful, half candle, a muffin nibbled by one of its edges and a half-bound book. He threw everything under the tree, unaware that the book could be worth a fortune. It was a copy made by several Franciscan monks of the anonymous "Book of Apollonius" and that was translated into the Gurracam language. Mario Toulon had stolen it from a monk many years ago. These were times when he was very hungry and he did not care as much about getting money as taking something edible in his mouth. The pot-bellied monk, riding on a donkey with his tongue out and full saddlebags, crossed his path. Thinking, not without logic, that the clergy always walked well of food, assaulted the good religious, pulling his saddle, including saddlebags, and then hitting him with a green stick of birch on his head five times, while the donkey fled in terror emitting braying of freedom.

  To his disgrace, in the cleric's baggage —who was badly wounded, lying in the middle of the road over a pool of his own blood— he found no food. Only books of poems and romances copied and exquisitely illuminated with miniatures and drawings —some in gold—. While he searched the monk's belongings, he got up, but instantly gave him a dizzy spell and fell back round. The bump on his skull made his head even bigger and from the two gaps that surrounded his bald, little by little blood flowed.

  The thief was very angry at not finding food, but then, more calmly, he thought that maybe he could trade with one of those books. He took the least heavy and uncomfortable to transport, which turned out to be the famous poem written in the first half of the thirteenth century. The rest he hid them
in the vicinity. If the business was good with this first book, he would come for the others; but evidently, he could not sell the adventures of the Syrian prince Apollonius of Tire, for they stank of robbed on all four sides. Nobody, no matter how foolish they were —and there were very strong and willing to be one— could believe that this was from a ragged and starving boy, when the only ones who possessed such things were the inhabitants of the abbeys and four powerful families badly counted. The young Mario Toulon invented a thousand stories in which he assured himself that the book was his and that now, when going through bad times, he must —very much in spite of himself— get rid of it. However, there was no way to convince anyone. Besides, why did they want a book in the towns where he was roaming? Nobody could read or write. For some, when the thief offered the book secretly, it was the first time they had heard of something like this...

  Over time he took affection, became accustomed to its weight and what is more extraordinary: he began to read it in the frequent periods of inactivity given by not having any trade.

  Mario Toulon had a few notions of reading that his father had taught him before he died and abandoned him to the goods of God. Canuto —for such was the thief’s father’s name— had been a clergyman and by a slip with a not very pretty girl with black hair, from whom Mario was born, had ceased to be so. His mother died in childbirth and Canuto was instructed to teach his little applied son what he learned during his life. Nevertheless, he did not teach him much because when Mario was nine years old his father was killed by a creditor with little patience.

  At first, Mario Toulon took about three minutes to finish each verse of the book, which did not understand anything that was told and tired immediately after reading. Over the years he ended up beginning to finish verses with a certain ease and, with more dexterity, the poem was finished from the beginning to the end, at least on seven occasions throughout his life. This did not make him learn it, not even somewhere, because Mario Toulon was thin and very poorly trained memory —especially for what things— but in the end he turned out to be one of the few poor and vagrants who could read reasonably well in all Gurracam, something that, frankly said, did not help him to develop his trade or improve his life.