Everywhere you looked there was lice and disease, hunger and pain.
Starvation was a constant bedfellow. Some had turned to cannibalism.
They murdered their children, and abandoned babes, and consumed them.
Some cut down the executed, some dug out fresh corpses. All to stave off
the ever-present hunger.
The lice, and diseases they brought,
drove men to madness. Some stood on the corners, or sides of the road,
cupping their hands to receive water that never came. They preached the
end of the world and often killed themselves in a public display of
self-loathing. By the next day they were nothing but glistening bones
and dust.
Long had we been forced to live in these conditions
while the king and queen drank clean water and ate to their fill. We
stood in the recesses of the castle at night as the king made love to
his queen on golden fabrics and lice-free beds.
Even though their
people starved and went mad all around them, they seemed oblivious to
everything, but themselves. That night we took our places in history,
rebellious revolutionaries demanding our dance with fate.
~
On
that night, I caressed the queen's quivering form. She did not glare at
me in hate, her only expression was that of confusion. She must have
wondered who I was. I kissed her passionately as the gilded blade slid
inside of her. It has been said that there is no lover as beautiful as
death and her knife. Her eyes fluttered only a moment before they
closed. A true patriot, I had saved her.
The king did not die so
easily. One thousand black crows decided his fate. Each one hungrier
than the next for their morsel of tender flesh. Judged and found
wanting, they pronounced a punishment fit for a man called tyrant. They
tore him apart, piece by piece, until all that remained was his
shattered skull. He had been eaten alive by a crowd that had once
worshiped him.
~
Then Israel stood up, his eyes bright in
the birth of a new dawn and a new nation. His white dreadlocks created a
halo around his dark face so that we saw him as he was. Our saviour.
"My
people," he cried. "this night we have wrested freedom from the hands
of tyranny. We have labored through the birth of a new day. We have
given life to the revolution and paid the prices due. Now is the dawn of
our new age, given with blood and tears. Celebrate your new freedom!"
The
crowd roared with consent, a deafening ocean of voices rising as one to
his ears. They had died, killed and shed many a tear for this new era.
Now their new found god, their new tyrant, called them to dance and make
love and drink in the halls of a murdered king.
And they did so with relish.
~
I
stood beside him as he spoke, the blood of my beautiful queen staining
my lips and hands. He kissed those bloody lips when he was done. He gave
my new name to the hungry crows, as they reveled in the filth they had
created, a name to eclipse any other. I have been called many things.
"This
is my queen. My Jezebel." He spoke my new name as a caress, said it
with pride and fear. He had crowned us king and queen, undisputed before
the crowd. With those perfect lips, and a poisonous tongue, he
pronounced our doom.
I stood with him the day our names were
called. There was a price to be paid and we must pay it. We stood on the
scaffold, as a king had before us. Israel, unbelieving, stared out at
the same hungry crows that had devoured the previous saviour. They
called for his blood as they had for the tyrant before. They meant to
have it.
They tore at my dress and my short hair, declaring me a
witch and a pixie. The nakedness only served to frenzy them. Israel
cried out, "Save me, save me!" In the end he was just as weak as any
other man of flesh and blood.
And, just as the Jezebel before me, I was devoured by the wild dogs.
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