The crowd had gathered there, around the platform. Everyone wanted to see, and everyone needed someone to blame. War had torn a bloody path through the township of Hundan, and the people, though barely recovered, were more blood thirsty than ever.
Jac looked out at them from the platform, their faces bruised, mottled, and leering. Some smiled, others glared, but each watched the platform intently without looking away. The strangest part was how silent the crowd was, they all wanted to hear the words, and the man standing next to Jac was about to deliver them.
The man, who Jac knew to be called Nahum, projected his voice across the crowd with a boom, “Jac the drunkard is hereby deemed guilty of treachery, one of the highest offenses! He stabbed one of our own in the back, and as a foreigner, as one of the sources of all our grief, he shall be redeemed only in death!”
On the platform, between Nahum and Jac, there sat a wooden block sullied with the rusty stains of those who had been previously redeemed. A firm set of hands on Jac’s back, surely those of his executioner, pushed him forward towards the block, and Nahum looked at him with a grimace.
“It’s your right to say a few last words, a remark, a prayer… whatever spittle your misbegotten lips can muster,” Nahum muttered.
Jac stood silent, his eyes focussed interminably on some fixed point in the distance. A mixture of shock and hesitation flooded through him. He didn’t want to die, and he didn’t have any gods to make peace with. He couldn’t think of the words to say, and he took some comfort in knowing that the people in the crowd likely mistook his anxious silence for one consisting of stalwart resilience and dignity.
⧪⧪⧪
Eann hadn’t been to The Crone in a long time. It was a small bar on the outskirts of Eann’s hometown of Hundan, it featured a meager selection of food, but always had cheap ale and seldom did foreign folk rear their ugly heads there. It was a long walk, but Eann wanted the comfort of familiar faces, especially considering the coming storm of battle that loomed overhead.
Eann heard a while earlier there was an enemy force seen marching only a dozen miles from Hundan; it was a sizable host from the two kingdoms, no doubt they had their eyes set on besieging Hundan. The city that Eann called home had recently begun expanding its influence across the western peninsula and the lowlands, ending the centuries long tradition of open borders and migration, and the people of the two kingdoms didn’t take well to this. Eann cared little for the sentiments of such lesser individuals, those who lived under the boot of the kingdoms, and from that lack of care sat the seed of Eann’s fears. He, like all good men of Hundan and her lands, feared immensely the threat of the foreigners. They sought entry into his kingdom, to partake in the harvests of the lowlands, and the protection of the mighty men who kept Hundan safe.
Hundan was a young city, it was established only within the last century, but it grew fast. It broke apart from the kingdoms after a period of rebellion some fifty years before Eann’s time. That was the time of the first Potentate, a man named Jon Hundan. The Potentates were like kings, except they were better, Eann supposed. They had all the same powers, and they seemed just as wealthy, but instead of their legitimacy being forged in blood, they were selected into the role by the Hundan city council.
Eann reached the door of the bar, pushing his way inside where he was met with a torrent of bellicose laughter coming from the round table in the back, a crowd getting up to leave. A lone man stayed behind at the table, and Eann was sure that it must be Old Jac, the one who didn’t sleep, and the only one who could stir up a laugh like that.
As Eann approached the table he could see Old Jac grinning to himself, a hand resting over his cup and a small crown over his head. Eann knew quite well what the ill-fitting wooden crown signified, and it wasn’t that Jac was Potentate. At The Crone it was a tradition that whoever had drank the most would wear the wooden crown, and many times that honor fell on none other than Old Jac; The Crone was his domain.
Eann pulled out a chair from Old Jac’s table, smiling at the fool in his crown, “Jac, I’ll buy you a pint if you make me laugh half as hard as that fellow I just saw wheezing his way out the door!”
“Oh, my boy Ain! You haven’t been by to share a cup with me in an age it seems,” Jac chuckled back, “word of the town is that these cups might be our last.”
“You can’t truly believe that,” Eann said, his laughter only slight this time. He didn’t bother to correct him.
“Oh, not for an instant, my father… well… this town- it has endured worse,” Jac said, looking up towards the bar, “I just hope she can stop poking her own denizens for long enough to focus on the enemy at the gate.”
“You old goats, always bleating on in riddles.”
“Well it isn’t a bloody secret that Hundan’s been too busy purging it’s own people out of some fear of an ‘enemy within’,” Jac’s voice lost its humorous tune, “Anymore it-”
Jac’s voice was swiftly cut off, as a man from the bar barked over, “best you don’t listen to him, son, don’t you know Jac’s one of them?” The voice was that of Nahum, the day commander of the city watch and the nightly commander of empty cups and slurred speech. Eann didn’t mind him as much as Yosef, the evening commander of the city watch. Nahum continued, “He’s from Gnys, he’s just as much an outsider as any other enemy at the gate.”
Eann turned back to see Jac’s characteristic smile faded. His face betrayed the truth of what Nahum said. Eann felt a sinking feeling in his gut.
But Jac looked up at Eann and said, “When they’re at the gates you’ll be happy to have my sword beside yours,” and the slight smirk returned to his face.
Nahum called over, “that’s bollocks and you know it Eann, he’ll cut you down just as well as any other foreigner.”
⧪⧪⧪
Each time Nahum was on the battlefield, he felt youth flood back into him. The adrenaline hid the pain of his tired bones, and he moved with an alacrity his age had long since deprived him of. Everything seemed to move slower in the heat of the moment except for himself.
The opposing army made it up to the city swiftly, and at the last moment the city council of Hundan had decided that it would be best to meet them on the open field – they had the numbers, and a siege would be too costly. The two kingdoms would pay for meddling in Hundan’s affairs and infiltrating their population with a ceaseless horde of foreign invaders.
When the battle began, Nahum led members of the city watch at the front of the defensive force. They surged forth through the mud laden lowlands that surrounded Hundan, and they hit the opposing army with an unexpected force. Nahum and his comrades fought on foot while the force they met rode in on horseback.
That was their folly.
It was quick work for Nahum and the others to pull the riders from their horses, as unstable as they were. Many of the riders dressed in cumbersome armor that served them poorly in the filth that surrounded the city. After slinging the men to the muck, they jabbed them in every crack and crevice of their armor with their daggers and their swords. An inconsequential amount of horsemen had slipped past them in the frenzy, surely they’d be brought down by the forces in the rear.
After that initial assault, Nahum and his men fell back and allowed the conscript force to replace them and continue the defensive push. Nahum was battered and the reprieve was nice, but only for a moment. He was met with a horrific sight. Eann, a young lad who Nahum thought fortune had bestowed with blessings of strength and mind, was laying in a pool of his own guts and gore, laid low by none other than the man with whom he’d shared a drink with mere hours earlier.
⧪⧪⧪
The call had come late in the night, Jac remembered. He replayed that fateful night in his head as he slowly approached the block. He remembered approaching the frontlines and standing besides the boy from the bar. He only realized at that moment outside the wall that he had not removed his wooden crown. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on him.
As he put his knees onto the deck of the platform the internalized replay continued. That boy and another man argued about how none of this would’ve befallen Hundan if Jon Hundan hadn’t insisted on raising his children away from the city in secrecy; that if it functioned like any good monarchy, Jon Hundan’s son would be keeping the city in check.
How ironic.
He remembered seeing the boy run through by the spear of some horseman. It ran clean through his torso and into the ground behind him, propping him upright as he vomited all the innards, those which weren’t skewered in place, onto himself. He died there in the black of the night, and Jac broke the boy’s body loose from the spear with his sword. Jac cut him down as a courtesy, but that was not how others saw it.
He thought about all this as he placed his cheek firmly into the wooden block. The executioner raised the sword high in the air. Jac finally thought of his last words, that perhaps he should finally reveal why he was raised in Gnys, why he returned to Hundan as an adult, why he hid behind a wooden crown and a wall of drinks.
He opened his mouth to finally say to the world that he was Jac Hundan, son of Jon Hundan, and that the Hundan dream of democracy died with him, the only sound that escaped the platform was a loud thud of the blade biting deep into the block.