The Hill-King's Bride: an Allegory for the Modern Church

Survival

Gardener Howe paused to wipe away the sheen of perspiration from her brow. The midsummer breeze ruffled at her hair but did little to relieve the soaring temperature, exacerbated by a cloudless sky and absence of any shade trees near her allotted crop land. It was the same ground that her father had worked before her, ground begrudgingly assigned by the village elders to a stranger who'd chosen to settle near the village with his wife and young children.

Life in the new land was hard for the strangers. The lessons in survival harsh and intolerant of mistakes; mistakes which none of the native villagers seemed willing to help the newcomers avoid, even after they'd learned the local language. Howe and her parents had learned to watch the shadows of the forest for the silent predator that the locals referred to as lothos.

Benign during the day, the fur-covered lothos hung from trees or cliff faces by their long claws, resting in the warm sunshine; at night they turned deadly, moving with lightning speed. It was at the expense of Howe's youngest brother that the newcomers learned that, after the sun moved beyond the horizon, the seemingly-harmless creatures would attack anything that moved in order to assuage their hunger.

It was the next-oldest boy that learned with his dying breath that the same predators would also attack during daytime heavy cloud-cover and rains. One by one, Howe's family members fell victim to one peril or another until only she remained in the little cabin her father had built just beyond the village.

Still, Howe had learned to survive. She had learned from each loss; to avoid the forests if the sun wasn't brightly shining, to lock the door before the first star came out, never to fetch water unless nothing moved near the water-hole. She knew which flowers made the best dyes, which herbs were good to eat and the best ways to use them, how to make her own clothes, how to tame wild birds, trap pigs, attract mountain sheep to the grassy lowlands. She'd even tamed a wild ox once, but it had been confiscated by the village elders for 'land dues', as many of the animals she'd tamed were.

Either way, the land wasn't going to till itself and there was no one else to do the work. Howe applied herself to the work at hand. No matter how well the ground produced for her, it never seemed to be enough after surrendering what the elders demanded. If Howe wanted to tighten up the cabin before winter, she'd have to barter for the lumber before the elders arrived to collect their due, and that would take some doing.

That night, Howe got home and locked the door just after the first stars appeared in the night sky. She was pushing it, she knew, but with all that needed doing, what choice did she have? Without her father to arrange a suitable marriage, to vouch for her moral character and to argue a reasonable dowry, Howe had little hope of any kind of marriage beyond near-slavery. As time went on and with every passing birthday, that meager hope dwindled further.

While Howe ate a dinner she barely had the energy to chew, her door rattled, reminding her why the heavy oaken bar was so important. Honest folk were never out after dark and if they were, they found refuge with someone else at dusk, calling aloud as they banged on the door.

If Howe were to enquire, no one would answer her, and if she opened the door, it would mean suicide unless the body outside were a necromancer, in which case she would find herself longing for a death that might never come. The nighttime hours were ruled by Undead.

Hastily, Howe finished her dinner and blew out her torch, hoping not to attract more attention to her aging cabin. Slipping into her bedding, Howe could only pray the walls would remain sturdy against the perils outside.

Summer heat waned into autumn warmth, until the cool night air grew chill and the vegetable crop completed the growth cycle. As with every year, Howe had saved the best vegetables in order to save seeds that had been sorted into tiny cloth pouches and then sewn into a pocket of her dress at the time of the harvest, lest she lose the all-important seeds to some disaster before spring. She sat aside the chosen seed-potatoes in dry sand, which had been placed in a hole in the ground under their cabin for that purpose.