Historical setting: 602 C.E. A cottage in the Vosges
Charlie takes me aside to talk. He said he saw Greg riding with the landowner’s guards.
He explained, “The fellow who will be the lord of the castle when it is made was reading edicts to all of us who were gathered in from the woodlands. We were standing in a crowd. I couldn’t just talk to Greg. So I made my way through the back of the crowd to a place near his horse. I pretended not to be speaking to him, looking away and saying it to the ground. I just said, ‘Simon drowned in the creek.’ Then I moved back to the place with my family.
“I looked at Greg. He was wearing one of those iron heads of a soldier. He bowed his head and pulled down the iron mask to hide his tears. But he was shaking with sobs.”
Before the sun set last night, the hunters left. We were so few then, just six of us, Ana and I, and our four small children on a full farm with animals and fields and gardens, when the village of our neighbors are seeing their forests cut and parceled into small patches for planting. Those, who are hunters are “endowed” the dux says, with the opportunity to make our noble lands into gardens and grain patches.
Our own pain in grief is spread wide and thin with empathy, hurting for their loss of all they’ve ever known of a way of life, without even a war to take it from them. We’ve known for a long time that the varieties of critters for the hunt is dwindling as the forests have thinned with so many generations of people taking from the abundance. And these hunters knew they would be planting fields soon. But now the ones calling themselves landowners, lords, have come to cut the trees and build the castle.
It’s only a few days now and Greg and another young fellow arrive on horseback. I knew one day we would see this — our oldest son dressed in smelted iron as a soldier. I thought he would have a few years yet as a child in training. But here he is, riding with the guard of aristocracy. This other youth he is with here, is long fingered, a pale and delicate son of wealth.
Greg dismounts from his horse and is standing in the place where only flowers may grow when Ana and I go to greet them.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 