The Kingdom of the Damned

by Mario Garrido Espinosa

  "Let's see if it's true," Sabine said, frankly annoyed by such an uncomfortable and intricate question.

  “Sir Higinio is an old man. Maybe he has ten or fifteen years left. Maybe less. When he dies, what will you do?”

  Sabine did not know how to respond.

  "I'm waiting for your answer," Severus said.

  “Something I will have saved... With that I will be able to live the rest of my life,” Sabine said, although he knew that it was impossible. Before Severus told him to do so, he told him to keep quiet, joking and putting a finger to his lips. He thought to hear an unusual noise. They were silent for a minute trying to hear any sound. Everything seemed normal, but there was something that the two sinister assassins did not count on.

  2

  Sabine proposed to stay first on guard, since he barely said he was sleepy. He said he wanted to think about everything they had talked about and his friend found it normal. He waited patiently for Severus to fall asleep, while diverting his thoughts to matters related to the last days. Suddenly the captain’s face, the cheating merchant of the ship, came to his head and he wondered if he would keep his word and take the barrel to Africa, considering that they had killed one of his men with one shot. Actually, nothing mattered no more. The unhappy man inside must have been dead.

  A while later he began to reflect on something very dark that had been ruminating for a few days. He studied pros and cons for the umpteenth time. He knew he had to carry it out before he reached La Alpurria, but he had not considered doing it right now. In the conversation taken placed a while ago Severus had upset him and thought that maybe that's why he wanted so badly to execute his wild animal plan at that moment. Actually, it was the place. The surroundings of that castle, where the Devil had lived, or so it was said, upset the people and acts that they would never have dared to do, ended up perpetrating them right there, on the outskirts of Fuentebabila Cabins.

  Sabine, as if he was driven by an uncontrollable energy, got up and walked towards the horses without making a sound.

  A thunderous snore was the last thing Severus Galván Ronquillo de Brizuelas did in this life, before his buddy cut his neck with the same knife with he had left Mario Toulon's skull in the air.

  Sabine no longer needed him, especially now that he was thinking of leaving his side to throw his money in his dreams of a village innkeeper. From this moment, the reward of Sir Higinio would be all his. With this and five more commissions, the retired military man could die peacefully, since he would be well covered with Alexandrians.

  On his arrival at La Alpurria del Campo, he would say that Severus had died during the course of the search, and with the friends that had always been, it would be very strange for him to be accused of his death. And what matters if did they accuse him? Soon he would become a very rich man. Doubly richer than he thought he will be when he left his town. However, he had to be careful with his money. "You and I know that they are spent really fast" were the words his companion had said to him a few hours before, referring to the silver Alexandrians.

  At one point, he felt sorry for what he had just done. Then it passed. In spite of everything that had lived together with his friend Severus, without a doubt, money was the most important thing for him.

  He started to dig a hole to bury the person lying on the ground. Although he was an unscrupulous man, it seemed wrong not to leave the one who had been his friend for so many years underground, as any "good Christian". Besides, he hid the corpse, perhaps forever.

  While he was working —awkwardly using the peasant’s hoe who had been buried alive between Newvillage from Navalhill and The Rocky Road— he thought he heard another noise that was not normal. He looked at the fire, saw the crackling of the flames, and heard the slight explosion of a pinion of some pineapple that was hidden among the half-burned sticks. He glanced in all directions, but could not make out anything. Only the sounds of the fire were heard, which were not, by the way, very reassuring, to which were added, from time to time, the messages of an owl located far away.

  He added another log to the fire and kept trying to drill the hard ground.

  "Now you're going to be scared by the darkness, Sabine. What is the matter with you?” He mumbled, almost trembling.

  When the burial was finished, he threw the dead man inside, grumbling at the weight of his inert body.

  “You were fat as a bull, you bastard!” He said to himself. “Good innkeeper, you would be!”

  When he was about to start pushing the earth inside the tomb he felt a sharp blade of metal pierce his back.

  3

  Sabine, at first, did not perceive any pain; only the terrible anguish of having the absolute certainty that he would die without being able to do anything.

  The blade came out of his body to re-enter. Then, without strength, he fell to the ground next to the grave he had just finished for Severus, while his life leaked through the bleeding hollow of his back.

  Sabine had been stabbed by the pirate they had left alive, who thoroughly checked the two bodies, even going into the grave, and stripped them of all the valuable things he could find. Afterwards, he left the two corpses in the hole, which was only intended for one, and without casting a single grain of sand, set sail for the boat taking the two Severus’ and Sabine’s magnificent horses, who were undoubtedly the best of Sir Higinio’s blocks.

  He was tempted to leave with everything stolen —which was no little thing— but he knew that Captain Alexander Cliff Withers would find him eventually and was not known by the nickname of “The Hands-Cutter” without enough reasons for it. Besides, no matter how much money he had stolen, it would not last forever. Thinking about all this he was when an icy wind arose that did not seem normal. The pirate got the biggest chill of his life. He got off his horse and sat under a tree which crown was as tall as a pine tree. In the background was the silhouette of the Cathar castle. Actually, it was almost the only visible. The wind whistled now as if it were a superhuman voice. The man curled up in his cloak, adopting the position of a scared child. Everything was dark around him. He had lost sight of the horses and the trees on the road. All he could see were the distant and ghostly flashes of Severus and Sabine’s fire. It began to shiver and he shrugged as much as he could. Drops of cold sweat dripped down his forehead and he had to scratch his hands because he felt like they were filled with pimples for no apparent reason. At once, he saw that he was trembling because of a kind of unexpected sickly fear. But fear of what! He did not see the fire anymore. To his left, the castle seemed suddenly inhabited. Through the shattered windows and the centenary holes caused by the catapults of the "true Christians”, he thought he saw the light of distant torches in movement. The wind now seemed to neigh like a runaway horse, and it enveloped him like a tornado. The darkness was beginning to be complete. The ghostly torches of the castle suddenly went out. The pirate, after hearing a loud sound similar to which would make a huge bone to be broken, found that he no longer saw his own hand placed in front of his face. He screamed, but the wind returned his cries multiplied by ten...

  Maybe Fuentebabila Cabins people did not have that much imagination.

  Chapter 12

  The beast hunting

  1

  D

  esiderio Muelledes Martin had lived in La Alpurría del Campo all his life and immediately realized that the damage that, in the worst case, could provoke a normal boar, did not remotely resemble those he observed —perplex and containing the rage— leaning on the threshold of the door of his property. It seemed as if ten demented buffaloes had been rooting around and causing damage to anything or animals that were in their way... However, the marks on the ground, the walls, and the torn pieces of wood and the wounds of their poor beasts indicated, without any doubt, that the cause of that disaster could only have been a boar. In addition, entangled mats of hairs were frequent here and there, and that man had removed the skin of too many wild boars to not recognize now, at first glance, that kind
of fur.

  Desiderio Muelledes was probably the best who know in all La Alpurria del Campo those animals with murderous fangs. He had observed them many times throughout his life. When he was a boy he could study them while his father looked at them and besieged them, and thus, being still very young, he became the best hunter in the area. That is why he knew their habits and was tired of killing them while they chewed on tubers, roots or fruits... On more than one occasion, he had seen them eat bark from the trees and one, fat and stubborn, he killed while it was dispatching a green and big lizard... but he had never heard of anyone who, like this one, approached chickens, roosters, ducks, pigs and cows. Other animals, such as partridges, hares and mountain rabbits were easy prey for a boar, and following them came to see the little work with which they found nests and burrows, thanks to their powerful smell... but never came to look for food by the surroundings of man's possessions.

  This was the first time that something like this had been seen throughout the region.

  He was leaving when he heard the cry of his dog Caiaphas. It was in a pool of blood, cornered against one of the walls and surrounded by the cow Clodovea, who, lying down, gave it warmth with its immense volume. Desiderio made the cherished cow —which had the best udders in the entire region— move away and she protested with a moo.

  “What have they done to you, Caiaphas?” He asked his dog as he stroked her head.

  However, this time the dog did not respond with a cheerful and affectionate bark, as it always did when his owner spoke to it. It just licked his hand and moaned.

  Its spine was split in two and it was unable to move.

  Caiaphas was until that day a faithful dog, restless and very robust. Its parents had been a mastiff and a bitch of prey, so —like its parents— it was noble and obedient to his owners but distrustful of strangers. From it was little seemed to join a strange friendship with the Clodovea cow. The dog slept at its side and only for reasons of zeal was this custom lacking. When this happened, the cow gave worse and less milk.

  Desiderio’s wife gave the biblical name to it, since it was a very naughty puppy and at the fourth trial, she compared it unceremoniously to the Jewish high priest who in his day persecuted the apostles and condemned Jesus Christ. Although the dog's wanderings did not mean much, Desiderio was amused by the sudden simile that his wife invented and the dog was forever with the ostentatious name.

  “You tried to defend Clodovea, didn’t you?” Desiderio guessed with regret.

  The Clodovea cow approached to the dog and licked it in one ear. Desiderio sat up and tied the cow away from Caiaphas. After a while, he returned with a gavel of several kilos and ended the suffering of his poor dog. Clodovea moaned, as if it knew exactly what was happening.

  2

  Desiderio Muelledes agreed with his two neighbors, Celedonio Butcher and Candid Cabrera, to go out that morning to hunt the animal, because they could not guess what that beast could be capable of if it continued to roam around their houses.

  “You have seen that!” Desiderio exclaimed as they crossed the stonewall that, more than fifty years ago, had been built to separate the last houses of the village from the land occupied by the Burnt Willow forest. The wall had been fabricated by raising two rough stonewalls, inclined toward each other and joined with mortar of clay and mud. The inner hollow had been filled with earth. In the upper part, a row of large and thin slabs with irregular edges was placed. In its day the slabs had been pressed against the surface earth to fit. Now the herbs protruded between the slabs and the stones of the walls, forming a very strong wall and at the same time so adapted to its surroundings that it did not seem to be manufactured by the hand of man.

  "The bastard has jumped and carried away part of the wall," Celedonio lamented as he helped his friends put back the heavy slabs on the top.

  Once the protective wall was recomposed, the three friends went into the Burnt Willow forest. They tracked well all day and looking, especially for the places of greater undergrowth, they found normal boars —some with a litter of young piglets playing by their side—, that in no way could be the one they were looking for; and seeing that there were few hours of light, they decided to try again the next day.

  “Don't worry, Desiderio. Tomorrow that animal will be dead," Celedonio Butcher assured his friend, in an attempt to reassure him, before saying good night.

  Nevertheless, the three men knew that that was not going to be a good night, because the animal could go back to any of their houses. As a result, none of them slept well. They closed their eyes, but their ears were alert to any out-of-the-ordinary disturbance.

  The brutal animal went into Celedonio's yard, alerting with its noise to the owner, before it went back into the forest, moving like the crazed beast it was, he managed to stab it in the side with a hunting knife, not without put his life at serious risk.

  When his two neighbors arrived shortly, Celedonio was looking at the damage of the corral, which was destroyed. Luckily we only had to mourn the death of a few animals, which happily were not the best.

  “If that turned on bastard is not dead tomorrow, I, myself, will remain of guard all the night,” Candid Cabrera said firmly. “But that son of a bitch does not come back into our houses.”

  "As far as the corral, do not worry, because if we could fix my stable among the three of us, we can put all this damage back in its place," Desiderio said, kicking out one of the wood and straw roofs.

  "It is two or three times greater than any boar I have ever seen," Celedonio described with a slight tremor of legs and arms. “His fangs are like damn scythes and it acts like it's completely crazy.”

  "Do not worry about its size," Desiderio said. “Now, let's go to sleep. We must rest because tomorrow, whatever it may be, I want to see with its guts outside that turned on devil.

  3

  The next morning the three men armed themselves to the teeth to enter for the second consecutive day in the thickets of the Burnt Willow forest. They were totally convinced that this was the last dawn in the life of the monstrous boar.

  “My brother-in-law lent me Brutus; surely it suits us," Candid Cabrera informed his neighbors.

  "No, leave it here," Desiderio ordered. “With the death of Caiaphas is enough. It is not worth risking the lives of any of our dogs. They are very valuable.”

  “Man, but Brutus is the best. We do not know how many wolves it has already killed.”

  The dog barked in that instant, seeming to feel underestimated. Desiderio calmed it down stroking his huge head and the strong shepherd dog accepted the caresses satisfied.

  “Do not insist Candid, remove the barbed collar from the neck and leave it at home while we are away. Brutus must continue to kill wolves for many years.”

  4

  “Where in the hell could it have come?” Celedonio asked after starting the road.

  "Maybe it's a bug like the one in my bone..." Candid ventured, exposing a possibility he had thought about last night.

  Celedonio and Desiderio immediately denied with a head gesture the fantasies that Candid Cabrera offered them.

  -It is a boar. I can assure you that it is neither a dragon nor an ogre," Celedonio Butcher said who had seen it the night before destroying his corral and was convinced of knowing how to distinguish between all these real or invented beings. “Maybe it's the proportions of a brave bull, but it's a damned boar.”

  “Are you sure?” Candid asked.

  “Completely.”

  It had been at least two years since Candid Cabrera stored an enormous bone in his hayloft that he kept as if it were an oriental treasure.

  It was on a spring day that he was looking for firewood in the woods to use it in the next winter, when he stumbled over the part of the trochlea of ​​what looked like a giant humerus. He ran to his house for a tool to unearth his find. After a job that only a person as greyish as he would have culminated in such a short time, he found a bone almost one meter long and a considerable
thickness, which undoubtedly belonged to a dinosaur. Maybe it was part of a carnosaur or a steganoaurus, who knows? but Candid —unaware of these antediluvian animals, like everyone else at that time— assured his friends in the first place that it was a from polyphemus or an ogre’s skeleton, and in the end convinced himself that it belonged to one of a dragon of four or five heads’ necks, thus leaving no doubt about the millenarian belief that in the Burnt Willow forest they existed and placidly lived all the beings invented by the imagination of man to date, and any other that had to well invent in the future.

  The crowd that, with wide eyes, contemplated the fossil, thanking God for being able to see one of the supposed hidden wonders of this world, questioned Candid Cabrera's theories, but in such a way that they aligned their brain to the same level than the steganoaurus’ to which, surely, the bone belonged.

  "That place is definitely a graveyard of dragons," Candid said to those who came to check the existence of that bone never seen.

  “Maybe you're right. You've been very lucky that none of them passes by there and crushes your head, without realizing it, with one of its huge legs.”

  “Now that you say it, while digging I heard grunts...” Candid made up.

  "That's nonsense," a neighbor said from the La Alpurria northern part, in a tone that left little room for any doubt.

  “What?”

  “The dragons’ graveyard.”

  “And why? We'll see...”

  “There are no such graveyards.”

  "I'm with you Romualdo," a tall, cross-eyed, skinny villager admitted. “Most likely, an ogre ten or more meters high killed this dragon, and after devouring it, he abandoned some of the bones there.”

  "You are ignorant," Candid said. “An ogre eats everything, including bones.”