Chapter 1.- Which tells about my yoke at the hands of a healer witch and how I freed myself from that condition (Part I).
In the month of October of this year of grace, sixteen hundred and sixty, I, Sunray Dale, with humble hand and loyal heart, do inscribe these lines as a token of my deepest devotion to Her Majesty, Queen Winifred, sovereign of the Pink River Kingdom, under whose protection I have dwelled for the last three years, for which I will be eternally grateful and shall remember her with respect and submission at the moment when I must leave here in search of other adventures. I write this pages so they may serve as testimony to the unwavering fealty of her most faithful subject.
Within these pages lies the tale of my arrival in this very kingdom, for which I had to overcome enormous perils that no other human being should face, due to the danger such an undertaking would entail. Likewise, I will use this pages as a canvas upon I shall paint a portrait of myself, once such task is completed, I shall deliver these writings as a gift to Her Majesty, Queen Winifred, who will be in charge of safeguarding them as she sees fit.
As I say, my name is Sunray, although I never had proof that Sunray is actually the name that was given to me in the baptismal font, since I never knew my parents. The healer witch who raised me, who claimed to be a distant relative, started calling me Sunray since I learned to understand words because, according to her, it sounded good in people's ears, which was important when we went to sell, from town to town, the mysterious potions she bottled herself. If I ever had another name, I will never know, for it surely lies buried, along with my entire childhood, in some crypt of oblivion along with the names of thousands of little ones who did not even live long enough to find out their origins.
Since I was seven years old, the healer, who called herself Karelia, forced me to go through different paths to obtain increasingly strange ingredients, such as shrew teeth or black grouse eyes, with which she made extremely strange substances with attributed healing properties. People used to surrender to her arts without much resistance, because every time he came to a town she had a unique way to attract the people's attention. She arrived at night, lit a torch fueled with an oil of unknown origin that provided double, or perhaps even triple, the firepower of ordinary torches, raised it in front of the villagers and they, seeing how the night turned into twilight, became amazed. Then, after a brief speech, she handed me her little bottles to sell them, but she was not satisfied with that, but instead convinced the spectators to squeeze their bags until they were consumed.
The year I turned fourteen marked the end of the torchlight spectacle since Karelia's name had spread by word of mouth through many towns in the surrounding provinces, so she began to send me alone to sell the potions, sometimes almost all day, without worrying that I might be kidnapped or worse; in fact, she did it without caring about anything about me, her sole interest lay in the weight of the silver coins that would jingle in my pockets upon my return. However, she forced me to learn to read, for I could know the contents of each bottle without making a mistake, which, although it was the only useful thing I received from Karelia, in the end it turned against her, as you will read later.
The food she gave me was never tasty, because in all the time I was with her she never gave me anything sweet, a taste of which I had no idea. On top of that, she had me frightened with supposed hidden powers she claimed to have acquired when she was younger. Since she picked me up, Karelia had me convinced that she could find my young bones anytime, anywhere. Sometimes, when I was already on the move to get her earnings, she would cover her mouth and say, inaudibly to others but very clear in the air to me:
— I can smell your hair from here, Sunray. I can smell them like the perfume of the flowers I left on your parents' grave.
When the nights arrived, my owner counted the coins received so she could bury them every Friday in an unknown place, for which she undertook a trip every week that could be short or very long, depending on the distance. Sometimes she went south, other times she headed west, but that did not worry me because it was clear that I was not going to receive any of her treasure, not to say that she herself did not enjoy it, since she felt pleasure only in increase it more every day. On each trip, she carried with her a little white bottle, which surely contained something to provide her with the necessary strength to endure the journey, but which she never sold to the public, since she kept the recipe for that particular concoction as her second most precious secret after the place where he stored her useless fortune.
From time to time, after exploring the coasts and meadows in their entirety, we returned to our place of origin, the town of Questerlay, where Karelia had a cabin. There, the healer prepared her potions. The shelter, with the smell of wild mushrooms, was filled with containers, utensils and other things that could be used in their occult arts. Karelia kept a large book there, entitled A Treatise on Remedies and Supplements for the Body and Soul, by a certain Durius Stennard, a handwritten compendium of recipes and procedures, a book to which I did not pay due attention when I was little, not because the book was older than the North Sea, but because reading it would not have been useful to me back then. Finally, when I turned sixteen years old I decided to try it for myself. So, while Karelia was sleeping, I opened the book to examine it. I found all the apparent cures that he had me sell, remedies for things as diverse as English sweat, gout, hypopressia, until I found a page whose number I don't remember, which contained the instructions for creating a potion from which I had never heard. It was a drink capable of improving understanding. According to the Treaty, whoever drank it would have an enormous ability to solve problems and escape from situations more easily than the average person. Among the ingredients, apart from some common herbs, the recipe called for the following:
Thirteen bumblebee stingers,
Twenty-one heads of black scolopendra,
The right ear of a salamander, the kind of salamander people knows as the crested newt.
All this had to be mixed and then boiled in a small container, not in a cauldron as is commonly used. In a hurry, without the healer knowing, I memorized everything, because I trusted myself more than any paper that could be discovered. A short time later, in the first days of autumn, we set out towards the town of Hydefield, which we had not previously visited. The place seemed very bustling compared to most villages we had visited. The houses had massive roofs, as if prepared for some biblical plague; Likewise, the windows were long, shaped like stained glass windows in a church, although in reality they were made of ordinary glass. There we found an inn called The Gray Cat. We crossed the threshold, but at first we couldn't see anyone in charge.
— Who runs this place? — Karelia shouted, as if she wanted to wake up the rocks. A few seconds later, slowly pushing aside a curtain, a middle-aged man appeared, with deep eyes saturated with curiosity, who looked us up and down.
— Welcome to my humble inn, travelers. How can I help you?
— We need a place to stay for a couple of nights.
The man saw me carrying the bottles. He scratched his face a little, before saying:
— Are you perhaps the healer that the neighboring towns talk about? If you really are, I'll tell you something. The people of this place don't tolerate deception. There's no beating around the bush when it comes to miracle sellers, as these are rarely honest. If you're going to come out and promise to succeed where doctors have failed, I hope your remedies are really good, for your own sake.
The innkeeper insisted on saying that Hydefield was not like other towns we had visited, but Karelia, defiant, announced that she would stay not just a couple of days but a week, showing him the money. When we were alone, she turned to me.
— I should have told you this a long time ago, Sunray. Since I picked you up, I decided to carry you with me because you would be useful to me, because you have a blessed face and that helps to attract people, since in any business on Earth beauty is worth more than compassion. But at the sight of beauty, men begin to show other desires, and I have no doubt that one of these days some eager young man will want you for himself. But don't you ever think that I'll let any man take away my tool of sustenance; rest assured that you will continue to care for me, no matter how many years have to pass. Now look me in the eyes.
I did what she told me and she ended up saying:
— Perchance these varlets hold us in suspicion, yet attempt no flight, for I shall give chase and send ye to a cold embrace of the earth. Mark well, ye may boast the vigour of youth, but I hold the edge of my knives.
(TO BE CONTINUED)
© 2014, 2024 by Fernando Salinas.
