Forced

Sometimes I wonder where we would go if we were to fly with the clouds. Would we reach the end of the earth like so many people believe we would? Or would we just continue endlessly, floating away, timeless and spaceless into another realm?

I do not have the answer, and I doubt anybody has but I know for a fact that if you follow the warm wind heading north you would stumble upon a gem of a country, my country.

Its lands are filled with exotic animals and beautiful vegetation. The water runs blue and pure down the freezing glaciers, the dense forests are covered in eternal snow. The grasslands are greener than any other countries, the wastelands that separate it from the south are dryer than any other in the world. The water in the sea up north is the coldest in the whole galaxy. Or so I believed.

The king was fair and kind, he separated the country in eleven states and allocated to each of them one of his closest and most trustworthy advisors, they were called the senate.

These senators were ranked in order of the most trustworthy and important to the king. They were supposed to run the state and the five seigneuries that lived in the state.

At the beginning everything went well. They revelled in the trust that the king had given them and made the best choices for their small portion of land. They loved their people like children and took care of them to the best of their abilities, they were also careful to leave things to do for the seigneuries.

The seigneuries were little groups of rich people who ran another little town full of peasants and were elected by them.

The seigneuries weren’t necessary but it was a way for the king to make the rich people do something other than killing each other.

The people loved the king and worshipped him. It was all good, and everybody was happy. But it was too perfect to last long and everything had to change.

With time the senators became greedy for power and began to only care about their benefits and even put the lives of the people who had been put in their hands on the line. As the king himself started to become greedy he also became very unsettled. He was scared of a coup and decided to take measures for his own security.

So a rule was made that the senators or his entourage were not allowed to travel out of their grand estate without direct order from the king to limit corruption from the outside.

With generations the kings became so self-centred that rules were tightened and the peasants were left to obey them or die. Oh don’t get me wrong the king was still proclaimed great and worshiped in public. But I for one know that when the curtains were drawn and the night was at its darkest, when children were asleep and the patrols were far away, out of ear-shots, people talked, they told each other about the horrors that somebody had endured or a body found.

" He disappeared!”

“We found her body by the river.”

“He has been put in the dungeon just because he had tears in his eyes at the last execution.”

“I heard that the head of the third seigneury’s principal is going to roll.”

“He can’t even hope for a clean death.”

People shared the news, the real one about the people’s representative who mysteriously disappeared after disagreeing with the royal family at the last meeting or the woman who fell pregnant without the permission from the from her seigneury who was found dead on the side of the road.

The seigneuries became ruthless, enjoying making life hell for the lower classes. They were even said to enjoy making each other fall in ruin. The senate was too bothered by other things to even consider that this was deemed punishable, so the seigneuries continued their war.

The fifteen senators who backed up the royal family were often seen as princes, to enter a senator’s household was no small feat for a peasant. They were respected by other people as they could talk and be let in the presence of a member of the royal family.

The royal family had a reputation to take the course of action which profited them the most. To add to this growing reputation a law had been made a few generations back that the country would take the name of the king, meaning that it would change every fifty years or so.

The country was well placed geographically. In the south huge wastelands protected from invasion, in the east huge mountains held off enemy armies and in the north the sea stretched as far as eye could see.

That left only the west unguarded as they were the grasslands, as a solution to this problem the king had decided to construct a huge fenced wall, as tall as ten meters and as long as six hundred kilometer. I had taken them fifty year to build this structure and it was a great pride for the citizens. They did not understand that the fence was not only for keeping the enemy out, it was to keep the citizens in.

The fence was to keep the citizens in, the walls of the estates were to keep the senators in, most of the population was trapped, knowing or not knowing. The country lived under a form of government that did not leave space for their choices, unfortunately or fortunately however you see it, a small group of peasants realised that and decided to take action. I only learned this years after they created themselves.

You might be wondering how I know these secrets, how I was able to learn all these hidden facts. Well I guess it’s time for me to tell who I am. My name is Irene and I am the daughter of the second senator.