The Kingdom of the Damned

by Mario Garrido Espinosa

The shack ramshackle door was opened, which was nothing more than a piece of cracked and blackened wood. A man of phenomenal height came in, wide back, very populated black beard, skin burned by the sun and a ring-shaped earring in the right ear. His name was Joseph King Street Nogoer, but from an early age he had been nicknamed “The Bull”, because even then he was twice as big as the boys who were as old as he was.

  Joseph “The Bull” carried two large lobsters in a net, with a very bright pink shell and very black eyes. Beside him were a couple of oysters and four dark green with blue spots lobsters. One of the lobsters lacked two legs, probably because they were lost in some fight, but the rest of its anatomy was in perfect condition. The giant of the earring in the ear had exchanged the eight succulent, precious and still alive animals for four medium sacks of mussels and conches. Before there was an interminable bargaining, after which it was probably “The Bull” that came out winning with the final pact, because some of the molluscs of the rid sacks had a rather small size, possibly not suitable for consumption. In addition, a few grainy shells, of maya and lattice, which he had captured without knowing very well if they were edible, were mixed with the other molluscs, in the central part of the sacks.

  Joseph left the oysters on a tree, supported by its concave part, so not to lose the little water that they had inside. Then he prepared to introduce the rest of the seafood in a saucepan. He put his hand firmly to catch the armored crustaceans. In a chilling way, as well as accurate, was catching the four lobsters, which were hooked to the network where they came with their long antennae and caudal fin and threatened with their claws open. The lobsters, expertly captured by “The Bull” by their carapace, opened and closed hard their tail, perhaps trying to catch Joseph's hand in one of the stakes.

  Everything was useless. Although they used their terrible mobile weapons with desperation, they could not avoid their capture. The four molluscs and the two lobsters ended up inside the pan in less than a minute.

  Immediately, Joseph “The Bull” put a plank over the container, leaving a small crack where the half-broken antennas of the lobsters came out. Finally, he deposited a rather heavy boulder on the plank. It seemed that the giant had handled seafood for many years.

  When he finished the operation of removing the shellfish from the net, he hung it on an iron projecting from the wall and, suddenly, noticed that Mario Toulon had been observing him in silence.

  “Ah! You have finally awakened," the man said in rather shallow English.

  “Who are you? Where am I?” Mario asked, dazed and with little strength. It had been an hour and a half since he awoke from his dream of many days. Because of the greatness of Joseph “The Bull”, he thought at first that he was one of the executioners that he had inside his most immediate memories. Then the friendly the seafood seller voice reassured him in part.

  “Well, you speak Gurracamese!” The Bull answered, in the same language in which Mario had asked the two questions, and could not hide his joy. “Are you from Gurracam?”

  Mario Toulon moved only his eyes in an affirmative way.

  The giant started firing. The first puffs of smoke came out through one of the holes in the thatched roof, mud and sticks, between two rotten wooden beams, infested with whole colonies of termites, and that always being on the verge of collapse, they continued year after year keeping their form.

  “You do not know how happy I am to know it! You're the first Gurracamese I've seen in I do not know how long," Joseph “The Bull” said, throwing small sticks into the fire. “My name is Joseph. They also call me The Bull. I was born in Forniche Rubies, a land of healthy and strong people, on the Fornichon river banks. An incredible place, full of giant trees, meadows and mountains...” the giant described smiling a moment to his own memories. “Not like this, which is a damn bare rock, where there are only four trees and a handful of strange plants that all they do is make the landscape look bad," he lamented, as if his hometown was the earthly paradise. “You, where in Gurracam were you born?

  Mario Toulon did not seem to remember that.

  “Well, it is OK. Do not worry. You'll tell me later. And name, do you remember your name?”

  “Ma...” he hesitated a moment. “Mario.”

  “Very well, Mario.”

  The man with the earring continued working with the fire in silence and suddenly, as if a torrent of words had come at him, he spoke again:

  “Blessed land Gurracamese! I miss it. I do not know for what strange reason you came here, because it had to be something very important— he reasoned, remembering Mario‘s state when he appeared on Holy Coral Marie the beach—, “but you will end up hating this place... If you came from another place... from France, England, I do not know. Maybe the difference is not so big. But like Gurracam there is no other place in this disgusting world...”

  Mario Toulon did not seem interested in all that information, and the chatty giant went on to give him more precise and important news:

  “By the way, you're in Moralnugno; very close to the King’s Island," he said, answering one of the questions the thief asked when he opened his mouth for the first time.

  “Where?” Mario asked, because he had never really heard of that place located right next to the Chamfrains Islands.

  “Moralnugno. An island. Rather, a mousetrap. A small mousetrap, from which you cannot get out," The Bull complained again.

  “An island!” Mario exclaimed with a chill. A damn piece of land surrounded by the sea in all directions. The sea!

  "Yes, a damned island," Joseph said. “Full of scorpions and vipers. Infested by its four sides of Portuguese frigates that when you are looking for shellfish, they sting you with one of their tentacles and they paralyze you with pain, daughters of bitches... Yes, a shitty island almost on the coasts of Africa. Too far from Gurracam,” he said, now, with some resignation.

  “In... God! How could I get here?” He asked discouraged.

  “In a barrel. The Bull laughed. “Curious ship. Someday, maybe I'll try to get out of here in the same way.”

  There was another moment of silence during which Mario began to take some awareness of what had happened and said:

  “Well, I guess I owe you my life. Thank you...”

  “No, no. Not me," he interrupted. “Her.” Joseph “The Bull” pointed to a hole that must have been used as a window, but that looked like the hole left by a stone thrown with an old catapult.

  3

  Joseph helped Mario to get up a little.

  “See?”

  “By the nails of Christ, I think I see it!” Mario Toulon exclaimed, not as much as the expression required. That sight seemed to have given him additional strength and he was somewhat better. Luckily, he did not bother to see the sorry state of his body, embedded in a paste of unreliable greenish tones. If he had, he would have died of fright.

  Mario could see through the hole in the wall a woman with very dark skin and very long black hair reaching down to her calves, gliding towards the ground as if it were a waterfall that shone because of the sun's reflections. There was not an ounce of fat on her body, harmoniously muscled, and her long legs seemed surprisingly strong as two ship's masts.

  At that time, she was totally naked, washing rags a thousand times patched. Mario, therefore, had no difficulty in checking that her breasts were flat and somewhat drooping, but the thief did not seem ugly about it. They must have been on the air for most of their existence and their skin was as tanned as the rest of her anatomy.

  He saw her face. He was astonished and marveled at the same time for the strange features of her face. Her features were very defined, almost cut by a chisel, but, they were so attractive, so different...

  “Oh God, I have not seen a woman like that!” He finally exclaimed, stunned. “Who is she?”

  “I do not know her real name. She says she's called Night Skin, but that's not a Christian name, right?”

  Mario Toulon did not answer, because he kept looking at the woman
with the endless black hair as if she were a goddess from another world. Even being on the doors of death, he was still an exaggerator with beautiful women; and this one was to a large extent.

  “I already find it normal, but she is like that, she does not feel any modesty,” Joseph clarified.

  “It's possible! I never met a woman who showed her charms in this generous way," Mario muttered, still not out of his amazement.

  The thief had heard of the existence of other races than his own, but never thought that women could be given equal or more beautiful than those he had known of his own race.

  “A color different from white on the skin is doomed never to reach perfection. Only the white color is capable of such merits," his father, the cleric with carnal deviations, had pointed out to him several times. “Clearly it says in the Holy Bible: God, in his infinite wisdom, has chosen as a reflection of His perfection the white race, and specifically the one that inhabits the Itálica and Iberian peninsulas, as these are the only ones that begin for the I of Iesus.”

  "But, father, we are from Gurracam," Mario had responded him on an occasion.

  "But your great-grandparents were Spaniards," Canute always reminded him, inventing the thief offspring origin. “Don't doubt it, Mario. Any other type of color is merely the sample that the Lord gives us of the imperfect and of the corrupt,” the conversation always went on, changing Catholic doctrines to his convenience in this way.

  Because of these bad teachings Mario Toulon formed a very poor idea of ​​those who were not the same as him. Therefore, he always took it for granted that individuals of other ethnicities would be very inferior in everything, including, of course, beauty.

  Today, he could see to what extent his head was full of nonsense.

  4

  Joseph “The Bull” and Night Skin went almost every morning to the rock of the northern part of the island to catch crabs, octopus, crab, mussels, urchins, periwinkles and all kinds of mollusks and crustaceans that were put in their path. The giant was an expert diver, capable of holding under water for more than three minutes. Although he counted on his mastery and the strength of his body, he could not avoid the fact that sometimes the sea stamped him against the sharp edges of the rocks sculpted by the waves. For this reason, he had even been in danger of death. His body, therefore, was a map of scars and cuts, but, distinctly from what had been usual, well healed, since Night Skin was personally concerned that the imposing Joseph’s anatomy, which she knew as perfectly as her own, always remains in good condition and in shape to continue marinating.

  The Bull hunted the animals and she picked them up monotonously day after day. When Joseph could not do his job, because the sea, fed up with that expounder of his creatures, had been especially angry with him and had spat on a rock knife; then she, without any fear, got into the cold salt water and did the fishing just like any man. For Night Skin that was their only source of livelihood and she could not afford luxuries any day.

  Some of the shellfish were sold and others —the best ones— they ate them. The sales that gave rise to the dubious trade of which Joseph and Night Skin lived was carried out next to the small abandoned island fortress, under the palm trees and the five rusty cannons, perhaps already useless by old men, which contemplated the area impassively. In this place, where there was no kind of surveillance, as in any other part of the island, you could leave with the money from the sale of your merchandise, or without anything, by frequent thefts.

  The monetary unit that was used was diverse and sometimes false. Being a place of passage, all kinds of coins were accepted. In general, Joseph “The Bull” always preferred to exchange his captures for other merchandise, discarding the money he did not recognize. From Gurracam, he had brought three bronze Alexandrians and one silver one that was missing a piece, as if someone had bitten it. He always carried them with him as the only memory of his land. He had not seen any of these coins since he was attached to that island, which he hated so much.

  There was a time when Joseph and Night Skin often regretted having to live in such a miserable and unforeseen way. They realized that would come a time when they would not be able to hunt the animals that made them subsist now, and that plunged them into constant depressions. Little by little they accepted the fact that they could not leave the island. None of the ships that docked at the Real Port would take them, since none was an honest boat. Moralnugno was a prison that looked like an island from the outside, and they both ended up recognizing it, despite themselves. They resigned to not thinking about it and letting time pass. Maybe one day, dragged by the tide, the solution to their problems will arrive.

  5

  Joseph “The Bull” set foot on the island of Moralnugno four years before Night Skin. The first reason he was there was something he himself did not know. He knew, indeed, who was to blame: General Javier de Bustamante and Tres Torres.

  Just enlisted in the army he ran into this general that a bad day in September was presented in front of Joseph and, almost without giving him time to say hello, he snapped:

  “Gentleman, your offense demands satisfaction. Tomorrow in this same place and at this same time my sponsors will agree with yours the place and form where the judgment of God will be asserted.” He looked up and down at his interlocutor. “Good afternoon.”

  Joseph “The Bull” was petrified while he saw General Javier de Bustamante walking away with firm steps. He never knew how he had offended this man.

  "Your grandfather used to say that a man's life only needs a moment to change completely," Joseph's father said when he learned what had happened. “Unfortunately, that moment has come for you.”

  “What should I do father?”

  "You'll leave here as soon as possible, and we'll all pray that you never meet that bastard again," he said sadly.

  “But father, that would be a desertion and...”

  "If you went to the duel it would be death," he interrupted sharply. “What do you prefer?”

  “That man is rather weak. I double him in size... It will not cost me anything to reduce him and...”

  “Two movements. Only two sword movements will be enough for that bastard to open your guts. Surely this is not his first duel and even if it were: what do you know about fencing?”

  That same night he left Gurracam, traveling as a stowaway on a ship supposedly used for fishing, but it actually was dedicated to less honest subjects. A few days later, in the Ahlborn Sea, there was a swell that caused the ship to capsize enough so that the hammock, where The Bull was hiding, let loose by a large wave and left abandoned in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. When he regained consciousness, the small rowing boat was several leagues from the ship of obscure occupation to which he belonged, facing the cliffs of the southern part of Moralnugno, which looked like the island where all the shipwrecked men of the world were going.

  Since then, the only ships that he saw docked on the island waved flags indicating their pirate symbols on one of their masts. There was no justice or law there. No decent boat ever passed the island. They dodged Moralnugno for fear of being looted.

  The islet was in the middle of the Pirates Archipelago; it was a place that Berbers and Arabs called Daffern and feared, because corsairs from all over the world were betting there. Gold pillages from the European money factories were frequent, but ivory, gum arabic and even ostrich feathers from Africa were also coveted. It was even said that the famous pirate Sir Francis Drake bet in Moralnugno with thirty ships of sail, then go to the Cadiz port and set fire to part of the Invincible Navy; and after this, he was seen four or five times more on the island, before he led twenty thousand men and with an impressive squadron he attacked the Corugna beach, where he was defeated by Marie Pita and all the other defenders . The pirate Jack Morgan Yanez also passed through the island, just after anchoring his four ships in the Two Primes Port to loot all the Gurracameses who lived there. Personally, King Bartholomew I went from St. Josafar to see the sorry state that was tha
t villa in his Kingdom, months before Gurracam definitely ignored the small island, which made so many problems —with no benefit—, and it will stop being part of its territory to become no man's land.

  Sir Francis Drake and Jack Morgan Yanez were not the only renowned pirates who had trod that land. All the heartless ones that the sea had given had done it or they would do it sooner or later. It seemed that Moralnugno was mandatory visit for any thief, murderer or scoundrel to rule a ship.

  Joseph always took care that all this riffraff, generally passing through the islet, did not come close to the fascinating and inaccessible Night Skin.

  6

  The woman who wore a night color skin finished washing her clothes.

  “Well, she does not have more clothes than the one she's washing, so she has no choice but to clean it like that” Joseph said, trying to give an explanation, which did not exist, to Night Skin’s null modesty.

  “Yeah, but she does not hide. And what a dark skin!” Mario said.

  “It's coming from the other side of the ocean. She came from the Indies. It seems that women there are like that. They do not hide their bodies neither before men nor before their Gods. Besides, it is said that it is very hot. That is why they are so dark.”

  “She is beautiful...”

  “She is. She seems made of a coal that had been polished to shine," Joseph “The Bull” described, saying something he must have been thinking for many years, but had not had the opportunity to transmit it to anyone, and even less in his native language.

  “Well, I would not mind crossing the ocean to live and roast, if necessary, among women who are so unsophisticated.”

  The two laughed and The Bull admired the will of that man, who still talked about living and crossing oceans, when death was the only trip he could presume he was going to do, given his lamentable state.