How Alicet Brought Her Sins to Heaven and Sormen Found Everything He Could Love in Hell (A fairy tale of Heaven and Hell) by
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Alicet was a milkmaid and a slave, and so
she rose in the cold, foggy darkness each morning to attend to her
charges in the fields. Each morning after she finished the milking, she
skimmed the cream, set a portion of the milk aside to sour and curdle
for cheese, pressed the whey out of the curds from yesterday’s souring,
churned the cream into butter, and collected the rest of the milk into
pails long before the sun rose, so that every morning just before dawn
she might be found at the crossroads high in the dark, misty,
witch-haunted hills of Ib-Sata carrying her pails of milk or bundles of
soft cheese or butter south to the markets in Ib. There she would sell
these wares and then set out to return to the farm with the gold, and if
she were cheated at the market or robbed on the way, well, it would go
the worse for her when she returned to her master.
Sormen was a slaver and a prominent man
in Ib, and so he usually woke in the afternoons to stand at the auction
block for just an hour or two making a handsome profit as he trafficked
in bodies, and then he spent his nights amidst the brothels and taverns
of Ib. In addition to his earnings at the auctions, he collected rent
from peasants who farmed his lands north of the city, so occasionally
just after dawn he too might be found at the same crossroads high in the
dark, misty, witch-haunted hills of Ib-Sata intent on wresting gold
from his tenants to pay for a long night of debauchery. A single month’s
rent from his tenants could easily make a thief’s fortune, so he dared
not send a messenger or servant on this errand, but always saw to it
himself. If it happened, as it did this morning, that his fine horse
threw him and then bolted back to Ib, then Sormen would continue on
foot, cursing the beast and resolving to take a farmer’s horse to get
himself home, and the farmer could draw his cart or pull his plow
himself, so far as Sormen cared. After all, they lived on his lands,
they owed their very being to him, and they should be grateful for that.
They always acted as if they were grateful, anyway.
And so it happened that on this morning
Alicet passed Sormen as she stepped barefoot through the Witchwater
brook that rippled across the road that ran south toward the city and as
Sormen trudged along to the north, his face cast down and his fine red
leather riding boots dragging through the pebbly stream bed. Alicet
blessed the water for cooling her feet, and Sormen cursed the water for
staining his boots and he wondered why someone hadn’t built a bridge
over the thing, though the Witchwater was barely a foot deep and five
steps wide.
The witch-haunted hills of Ib-Sata are
not the safest district in which to loiter for the very good reason that
the witches do not approve of the city of Ib or its inhabitants, the
witches being, after their own fashion, strict moralists. And so it
happened that on this morning Liriel, a witch much skilled in the
majicks of fire and lightning, was sitting beside the brook watching the
rising sun and saw as this young man reached out and snatched a handful
of cheese from the milkmaid’s wares.
So Liriel decided to blast these two
wayfarers, the young lad because he was a thief and he figured in the
miserable life of Ib, and the young maid because she brought them food
who should be left to starve. As they passed in the midst of the stream,
Liriel raised her right hand to the rising sun, gathered its strength,
let fly with a furious chant of power, made a subtle gesture with her
left hand, and from her tongue flew a flame of fire and the two
travelers were instantly burned to ash, Sormen more quickly than Alicet
perhaps, as she was splashed with milk and brook water, and he was
filled with Geneva liquor. As a practical matter, however, it made
little difference.
The heat of the blast was so intense that
the brook was evaporated dry in an instant, but directly the waters
continued flowing down from upstream and, after boiling for a time as
they passed over the slowly cooling rocks, they bore the ashes of the
two travelers away, much as their souls had just been borne away and out
of this world. The maid and the lad were transported at once to the
land that lay between Heaven and Hell.
Now, the land between Heaven and Hell is a
fair, green mead, and there flows through the center of this mead the
river Lethe, through which the souls of the dead must pass until they
emerge to stand on the grassy banks. Then the souls must decide where to
go next, to Heaven, or to Hell. This river, the water of which is Time,
which heals all wounds, also removes all sin from the newly emerged
dead, but the water does not change the heart, for when the dead emerge
from the water, the spirit is not yet in Heaven, nor is it yet in Hell.
But very soon it will be. And so it came about in this way for Alicet
and Sormen. Continue Reading
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