The Valley of Slaves

In the Valley of Slaves, three categories of people exist, but only one may call themselves such without being met with ridicule.

The first category consists of the Governor and his acolytes, the only ones who possess rights—only rights, to be precise, for no burdens of duty weigh upon their shoulders. The Governor was not chosen by anyone here. He was sent from above, from among RR’s men, and when the slaves arrived in the valley, they found him there, as if the throne he sat upon was an extension of his being, as if the whip he held in one hand—its hiss tearing flesh—grew directly from his wrist, and as if the register of the slaves’ duties—never rights!—was closer to him than his own heart. And above all, that grin, that insatiable, ravenous grin, which never seemed to fade, not even in sleep.

His acolytes have no fixed number. They are like shadows, stretching and shrinking according to the times—according to the Governor’s whims, the fresh batches of slaves brought from wars, the debts paid not in coin but in living flesh. They change, they rotate, they appear and disappear, but one thing remains constant: they believe they are above the slaves when, in reality, they are merely another face of the chain. They own nothing of their own, not even the whip they wield so effortlessly, not even the blood they spill with a ease that makes their eyes gleam. They are nothing more than tools, destined to be discarded when their handles are no longer firm enough in the Governor’s service.

Then come the free people. Or, rather, those who still call themselves free, even though their freedom is but a thin thread of sand slipping through their fingers. They are the ones who were here before the Valley had a master, the ones who were allowed to keep their lands, at least symbolically—though not always the same lands, for luck is a die that never lands in their favor. They were permitted to cultivate the earth, but not for themselves, only for those who rule over them. Rent is a whirlpool that slowly, but surely, pulls them toward the same fate as the slaves. After a year of toil, they count their remaining grains and find they are poorer than before, that they are in debt even for the bread they place in their mouths, that, in truth, they own nothing—not even the right to call their land “theirs.”

And then, at the lowest rung, comes the great mass of slaves. They are young, almost all of them, for the old, the sick, and the small children were left behind, under the open sky, until their bones whitened on the lands where they once had homes. Here, only those with strong arms were brought, but minds severed from hope, for hope is nothing but a burden in places like these. Any trace of rebellion was cut down before it could take root, beheaded and left to rot where it fell, food for crows, a silent testament that in the Valley of Slaves, there is no place for dreams.

And yet, the truest truth, the one whispered only in thought, without the courage to give it voice, is that all who live their days and eat their bread—or their cornmeal, as the case may be—in the Valley of Slaves are, without exception, slaves. From the highest in rank to the most wretched soul, all are bound by the same chains, even if some wear them unseen, shackled not by iron but by fear, by desire, by helplessness.

Everything, absolutely everything, from the tools that break their backs to the air that fills their lungs, belongs to RR, the king. And this dispossession does not stop at worldly things. It is only the beginning, the first step toward emptying oneself. Because here, in the Valley of Slaves, people are not allowed to have joys. They are not allowed to have desires. They are not allowed to have hopes. They have only labor—unceasing, exhausting, gnawing at their bodies and dulling their souls—a relentless exploitation with neither beginning nor end, a cycle that repeats endlessly, until even death no longer seems a release but merely another step in the same nightmare.

Bread, beatings, and toil.

It is all they receive and all that is expected of them. To eat just enough to avoid death, to endure just enough not to perish, to work until they no longer know where they come from or who they are.

Not even those who seem to rule are freer. Not even the Governor.

He, the local hierocracy, the executioner, the hand that holds the whip, the man who decides who lives and who dies, is himself gnawed by doubts, torn apart by desires he cannot quench. Because, although he is sovereign in the Valley of Slaves, in reality, he is nothing more than a pawn. He was sent here on a whim of power from the center, and he was not even the most intelligent among those who could have been chosen. He knows it, too. He feels it in every fearful glance he receives, in every silence that stretches too long when he enters a room, in every terror he inspires, yet which is never quite enough.

And he knows something else: he can be replaced.

Not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but when that day comes, RR will topple his house of cards without hesitation, without caring that he was, for a time, the most powerful man in the Valley. He will be cast down without fanfare, without outcry, without tears. He will be just another piece swapped on the board.

But until then… there is still time.

Not for power. Not for glory. But for pleasures.

Because the Governor’s true sin, the one that burns him more than fear, the one that pulses through his blood, is the fresh flesh of virgins.

He loves them. He loves their taste, the scent of their skin, the light in their eyes before it shatters, the exact sound of surrender. He loves most of all the ones who are not his, the ones he should not touch, the ones who know that their bodies no longer belong to them the moment he sets his eyes on them. And the more forbidden they are, the more he desires them.

If once this fear of loss was merely a worm gnawing at his thoughts in silence, now it is a vile tapeworm, growing in his guts, devouring him from within. Time is short, and his desires are too many. Too dark. Too insignificant for the one who will come after him.

But that does not matter.

Because in the end, in the Valley of Slaves, no one is spared from death. Only from deliverance.

For there are no priests here.

No one is deemed worthy of forgiveness. Not even those who beg for it.

…

Saturday is the day when silence is an unwritten pact, a code that everyone learns without being told.

No one whispers, no one grumbles, no one complains. It is the day when not a single sound of protest escapes the lips of the slaves. Not even a sigh. No matter how absurd a guard’s demand might be, it is carried out without hesitation, without delay, without so much as a glance that could be misinterpreted.

Because Saturday is the day when death is permitted.

The Governor, with his insatiable thirst for blood and beautiful women, has established this day as a privilege, a grotesque celebration where any life can be taken without consequence, without justification, without regret. If there are no reasons, they are found. Invented. The slaves are too many anyway. They multiply like weeds and deserve nothing more than to be culled.

Today is Saturday.

It is mid-February, and the ground is hard, frozen in some places, sticky in others. Too early for flowers, too early for leaves. But roots can be torn out at any time, and tree bark can be carefully peeled away. It is said that some of it can be eaten, that it can quell hunger—if it doesn’t kill you first.

NiNa knows this.

Though she wears the brown of the slaves, though her face and hands are stained with paints and soil, she is too alive, too luminous in the middle of the barren field. Her thick hair, tightly braided and adorned with colorful threads, betrays her. You can spot it from a distance, like a banner raised before the storm. And even if it weren’t so, Helmuth would recognize her anywhere.

He was given to the Governor two years ago, payment for her father’s debts. Since then, he has become her shadow, the only constant in a world that devours without blinking. One year older than her, he follows in her footsteps, watches over her without a word, always ready to place himself between her and danger. It is not a promise, not a duty. It is a fact.

Helmuth is a potter’s son.

An apprentice before he was a slave. He was raised with the earth in his hands, taught to know every texture, every scent, every subtle shift in color. He has shaped clay for as long as he can remember, and nothing prepared him for the shock of the Valley of Slaves.

Here, the earth is different. It is dead.

Everything—from the gaunt faces of the people to the wretched tents and the time-worn clothing—is brown. A brown unlike that of his beloved clay, warm, alive, full of possibilities. Here, brown is dry, burned, stripped of every trace of life. Here, it smells of despair, of tears cried in vain, of hunger that never ends.

Here, everything beats in the blackness of the abyss, though it appears brown.

So when Helmuth saw NiNa for the first time—her multicolored braids swaying in the heavy air of the Valley, her large, brilliant, unbroken eyes—he felt something he thought he had lost forever.

Hope.

Not great, not salvatory, not something that could overturn the world or break chains, but enough to keep him standing. Enough to give him a reason to breathe differently than a condemned man. Since then, he has followed his ray of sunshine with an almost absurd conscientiousness, whenever the chance arises, clinging to it as if it were the only living thing in a place where life is nothing but a postponed sentence.

Luck—or perhaps just a whim of fate—has arranged for Helmuth to be a potter’s assistant even here, in the Valley of the Slaves. Because of this, he is the one sent to gather the necessary materials for the vegetable pigments. So, from time to time, he is allowed to pass beyond the walls of the Valley, to step outside, to wander the fields. And most of the time, this means he is in Nina’s company because she works at the dyehouse, also using natural pigments, she is also allowed to go out into the fields to search for them.

Today is one of those days.

“Did you get enough of the cornmeal porridge this morning?” Helmuth asks.

He would like to protect the girl from all the pains of the world, to be her shield, to keep her body safe from blows and her heart from hunger, but he knows—he knows that in the Valley of the Slaves, there is no protection, only survival. So instead, he asks this, as if his question could change something, as if it could redeem even a fragment of the injustice here.

Nina smiles.

On her cheeks, stained with red, yellow, and indigo pigments, her freckles rearrange themselves into a playful mosaic, as if they have shifted position just to mock his concern, as if this wretched world still has the power to hide a trace of beauty.

“I had enough, don’t worry, my dear Helmuth,” she replies, and in her voice, there is no resigned submission like in the others, but something gentle and old, like a promise that she is still here, still whole.

She bends to move a few stones from the path of a root, and her hands, more accustomed to caressing leaves than human skin, seem like part of the earth itself.

“You forget that I always have healing herbs at hand and that some of them can be eaten.”

Helmuth remains silent.

Because he would like to protest. He would like to tell her that he knows. That he knows how food is taken from her as punishment for helping the slaves with her remedies. That he knows that even when, by some miracle, she is given her full portion, NiNa shares it with those who have less than she does.

And since in the Valley of Slaves there is always someone more destitute, the girl remains hungry most of the time.

But she does not complain.

She never has.

So Helmuth does not complain either.

At first, Helmuth did not understand why the Governor punished NiNa for healing the slaves. The logic was simple— the more of them there were and the healthier they were, the more working hands he had. In the young man’s mind, the workforce should have been valued, not punished. But that was before he understood the Valley of Slaves, before he learned that here, logic was not measured in efficiency but in terror.

As he began to observe more closely, he also began to see.

NiNa was not dangerous because she healed. She was dangerous because she gave hope.

And hope, in the Valley of Slaves, was a disease worse than the plague.

Because a healthy but resigned slave was a useful tool. But a healthy slave with hope could become something else. He could become a problem.

NiNa, without wanting to, without asking, without raising her voice or casting defiant glances, changed people. She made them lift their eyes from the dust, speak to each other differently, share their food when they shouldn’t, tend to each other’s wounds as if they had a future, not just a sentence. She made them remember that they were human.

And the Governor knew this. He saw it. He felt it.

He was afraid of NiNa.

He would have beheaded her without blinking. He would have brought her down in front of everyone, as an example, a warning, a lesson about what happens when you try to change the order of the world. But he couldn’t.

Not yet.

First of all, no one knew how to match plants like she did. No one could draw those majestic colors from the earth, from leaves, from bare stone. And the colors… the colors were gold in the Valley of Slaves. Entire bales of dyed fabrics left through the main gate every week, loaded onto carts, carrying whispers of her mastery far and wide.

And even if she hadn’t been indispensable to the dye house, there was still that other thorn that had lodged deep into her flesh.

The Governor was a man of extremes. For him, hatred walked hand in hand with desire.

He hated the girl.

And precisely for that reason, he desired her with a blind, sick passion he could not shake.

That was why he couldn’t make a decision. That was why he kept her alive but poisoned her existence. He wanted her suffering, weak, exhausted, so she wouldn’t lift her gaze to him in disdain, so she wouldn’t have the strength to ignore him. But he didn’t want to lose her. Not yet. Perhaps never.

And Helmuth saw this. He saw the fragile balance holding the Valley together, saw how each day the unrest grew, how the people looked differently, how thoughts began to sprout fangs. He saw the battle in the Governor’s eyes, the war between restraint and lust, between power and fear.

And he saw something else.

The Governor’s eyes pulsed like festering sores.

And that pus would soon seek a way out.

“Crocus heuffelianus,” said NiNa, and Helmuth flinched, snapping back to the present.

Only a few seconds had passed since he had drifted into thought, but she had pulled him back to solid ground. He looked at her, and without realizing it, quickened his pace, closing the distance between them, as if afraid he had missed something important in that brief moment of absence.

“What?”

“The crocuses,” she answered him as if speaking to a small child, a hidden smile in her voice. “The crocuses will bloom soon.”

She gestures with his chin toward a timid swelling that peeks through the still partially frozen earth, saturated to the brim with moisture. It is a small, pale bud, a fragile tremor of life stubbornly pushing through, a promise of color in a world where color means nothing more than a bargain with death.

“I don’t know how they manage to gather so much strength and confidence to emerge every spring, in this kind of cold. They’re so small!”

Nina’s voice is soft, contemplative, but her hands are decisive. She removes a few stones from around the bud, as if she could smooth its path to the light. As if, in doing so, the crocus might stand a better chance.

“I envy them, you know?”

Helmuth looks at her with slightly furrowed brows, his gaze drifting toward her hands—dirty with earth yet delicate, beautiful in their roughness, calloused from toil but never lost in it.

“Why do you envy them?”

“For their unconsciousness, I think.”

She answers without stopping, without lifting her eyes.

“Although I probably shouldn’t complain so much. I extract the most beautiful shade of yellow from them, and yellow...”

She stops, bites her lower lip, then smiles.

“Yellow is one of my favorite colors.”

Helmuth laughs, and his laughter is like a brief respite, a crack in the walls of the Valley of the Slaves.

“Which color isn’t?”

He gestures toward her feet, stained with pigments of every possible hue.

“Look, even your feet are smeared with paint, and you still love all the colors.”

Nina laughs as well. She leans back, then sits directly on the ground, unbothered by the lingering cold that still haunts the soil. She lifts her dress above her knees and examines her skin, speckled with multicolored stains.

“You’re right.”

Her hands are stained up to her elbows, and her knees are nearly black from the position she takes while preparing pigments. Her palms, burned by work and paint, look as if they were sculpted from living clay. On her neck and forehead, long streaks of color stretch carelessly, a testament to her hurried nature, her unchecked gestures, her lack of patience for details that others might care about.

Her cheeks are an explosion of pigments and freckles, a living mosaic that seems to have been painted onto her skin by fate itself—an unintentional yet perfect canvas.

Helmuth looks at her.

He looks at her the way one might look at an icon painted with blood and stolen sky.

He looks at her with reverence.

“You’re right, I love them all.”

Nina laughs lightly, and her laughter is a rare thing in the Valley of the Slaves, like a stray musical note in a concert of silence and suffering. Helmuth watches her, and he cannot stop. He doesn’t even try anymore. There is no point in fighting against what is already etched deep into his soul.

Though he is only eighteen, Helmuth is already a man. His fist has learned to grip the earth and endure, to wield heavy tools with the same weary silence seen in the slaves around him. But when he looks at Nina, his fist opens without him willing it.

He knows he wants her for the rest of his life. He knows that if she were not his other half, every day would be torment, a constant absence, a hunger that no food, no freedom could ever sate.

No one is like her. No one sings to his soul the way she does.

But things are complicated.

Helmuth is not a slave. Not completely. He is here for a period of three years, sent to pay off his father’s debts. Two years had already passed, only one remained, and then he would be able to walk through one of the access gates of the Valley of Slaves as a free man. As a whole man, untouched by the nightmare of this place—at least, that’s what he likes to believe.

But NiNa?

NiNa is a slave for life. A final sentence, without escape or hope. For her, there is no “just one year.” For her, the Valley is not a phase but an endless prison.

And slaves follow different rules. They are not allowed to love, to marry, or to bring life into the world. The Governor has no need for children crying of hunger and taking up space, no need for useless mouths to feed, nothing that does not produce labor and profit. Why nurture new generations when caravans of fresh slaves arrive regularly, replacing those who die of disease, starvation, or despair?

The life of a slave is intense, overwhelmingly harsh, and terrifyingly short. To be a slave in the Valley means to be nothing, a tool, a silhouette that vanishes without an echo. But NiNa is something else. Even here, among the filth and despair that crushes the others, she shines. She brings color, she heals, she awakens hope—and that makes her dangerous.

Dangerous to the Governor. And to Helmuth.

Helmuth longs with all his heart that when he walks out a free man, he will leave hand in hand with NiNa. That they will be two free people. The thought pains him. He sees her laughing now, pushing back a strand of hair smeared with paint from her forehead, unaware of how deep and impossible his dream is.

In the Valley of Slaves, a slave is worth less than a well-made clay bowl. But not NiNa.

NiNa is not for sale.

He knows this. He sees it in every glance from the Governor, in the heavy, hate-laden, desire-filled way he watches her every move. He knows that the Governor—the man who sees only numbers and relentless labor in the slaves—would rather see her dead than let her go. A girl like NiNa cannot be given away, cannot be lost. A girl like NiNa is either owned or destroyed.

Helmuth’s dream is shattered before it is even born.

And yet…

He watches her.

And he dreams.

A powerful sound tears through the air. An animal horn, guttural, like a bellow of pain, like the roar of a beast meeting its end under the knife. The sky freezes, the soul freezes, every trace of hope freezes.

The young people tense up, exchanging brief glances, heavy with silence. They know what it means. There is no need for words.

One bellow. Two. Three.

They stop counting. Three.

That means today, three slaves will die. Three people. Three shadows who perhaps still dared to hope, who perhaps dreamed last night of a world beyond the Valley, who perhaps loved, laughed, were something more than flesh destined for oblivion.

Three lives will be cut down as if they had never mattered.

The air feels heavier, as if that sound has laid an invisible but crushing weight upon the world.

“Filthy scum and their insatiable hunger,” NiNa mutters through clenched teeth, her voice low but filled with a fury that courses through every fiber of her being. She does not raise her voice, but she does not need to. Her words are a sharp blade, barely restrained.

“They never get enough of blood!”

She clenches her fists. Her eye narrows, and the corners of her mouth twist into an expression that should not exist on the face of a seventeen-year-old girl.

“One day, his turn will come too.”

Her voice fades slightly, only to return, sharper, stronger, charged with a fire that, if it cannot consume the Valley, can at least stand against it.

“And I will dance at his death.”

Helmuth watches her. He knows she means it. He knows the fury within her is not just empty words thrown into the wind. And he knows something else.

If that day ever comes… if the Governor ever falls…

Then NiNa will dance in blood.

And she will not be alone.