KINGDOM OF THE STONE -- a Wattpad featured novel

Bonus Chapter Two

Eleven years before the founding of the first kingdom

"But Madra, I'm hungry!"

"You're always hungry. Go outside while I cook this chicken that the good man Ventra brought us."

"But I'm hungry now!"

"Listen to your madra." The well-dressed Ventra gave Andral a stiff smile that only half covered a complex sneer of disgust, disdain and irritation. Ventra seemed to be good at sneering. "And leave us adults alone to do adult things."

Andral looked at his mother's worn expression. She stood in the doorway of their cramped one-room apartment wearing a stained and tattered dress. Most men came to visit his mother quietly in the night when he would have to pretend to be asleep or be kicked outside. Ventra, in his fancy new clothes, had come in the morning while most men were going about their business. Andral looked back at Ventra trying to puzzle out why he was there. "Are you going to be my new adra?"

Ventra's indulgent smile disappeared faster than the cuff to Andral's head could land. "Obey your elders," Ventra snapped as Andral hit the floor. "And don't talk back."

Andral looked up tearfully at his mother, his face stinging, but saw only a weary accusation in her expression as if it were no more than he had deserved. He got up, sniffing, and went outside.

"An-dral. An-dral. An-dral."

Andral looked around the ground outside their building. Half a dozen shiny, dark, green-black beetles crawled towards him from the shadows of the surrounding trash and weeds. The insect chirping seemed to call out to him, which amused him. He scooped up as many as he could hold in his hands and went looking for a long sharp twig.

"Save us! Save us! Save us!"

Andral found a skinny twig and impaled his beetles on it. Fortunately the baker next door had already fired up his ovens and, though he preferred an open flame, Andral laid his squirming stick on the hot bricks of baked clay and waited for the beetles to swell and burst their glittering shells. When they had finished cooking, Andral gently pulled one steaming insect from the stick, pulled off its head, pinched off its legs, removed the wing casings and carefully ran a thumbnail along the crack of its split exoskeleton. Pulling out the tiny white meat, he popped it into his mouth. He thought it tasted a bit like prawn and a bit like something else he didn't know but thought of as the flavor green.

"Ai! Bug eater. What's the matter? Does your daddy not feed you?"

Andral faced five local boys. Most of their fathers worked at the nearby docks or as laborers and so had no trade to teach them. This left the boys free to run around the streets of Mari during the day looking for easy entertainment.

"Oh! I forget. You don't know who your father is. He could be anyone. He could be everyone!" The leader laughed. He was a wide heavy-set boy with a nose that seemed to be a low hanging extension of a ponderous brow shadowing two small inset eyes. His lip was perpetually curled upward as if it had given up trying to cover his large buck teeth. "Maybe that's why you look so funny. Your mother took the seed from every man of the city and made it into one really ugly boy!"

Andral was nearly of a size with the five bullies, but his six years of experience had not prepared him to deal with their kind of cruelty. He lowered his own heavy brow threateningly and warned them away with a look, like a dog guarding a bone. He hurriedly plucked and peeled another beetle.

"Ai! Give that here, you glutton." Their leader snatched Andral's stick away and held it out of reach. "Did you not think someone else might like a bite?"