When The Lion Wakes - H. C. Turk (a court of thorns and roses ebook free .txt) 📗

look ahead and focus on the mass. Those people waited for a new beginning, but in nature, the purest beginnings are generated by sudden ends. Slaughtered animals feed the young. Fires kill disease, allowing fresh growth. Violent surges are eliminated during war, making way for new societies.

The autocar passed walking people. No one shared salutations. Alex felt that he was dragging his feet or pushing the car with his legs. He could not move slowly enough to delay the outcome or move quickly enough to end the anxiety. He knew his sister was safe. Now for the nation.

During this time travel of evolving transportation, the autocar passed horse-drawn wagons, a supposed improvement over shoes in the way of conveying people to their destinations. Their destinies. Though Alex could not bear to focus ahead at those thousands, he felt an urge to rush out and run, joining them in a new beginning that he would provide not with courage, but with zeal.

Alex and Willem began walking past parked cars. Those people ahead, wearing all types of clothing, evinced informal reverence in their poise. He noticed no weapons. His feet crunched against the gritty surface, initiating his hearing, as though he had been deaf, unaware. A bird squawked, but he would not look up from the path. Someone had been singing. The tune might have been an ancient chant or a modern melody.

In the moment of their turning, Alex believed that he had become a target again. On the street, kill the false prince so he would not attend the ceremony. But he did attend. They looked, all of them, and some spoke his name, a guilty sound compared to the exuberant announcing of Prince Willem’s arrival. Young sisters spoke, their calls as bright as birds. Willem returned their view if not their smiles. They were part of the path. Alex would not look. His sister was not present. The sound of his name did not fill him with pride, but with terror. Yes, he must be the one.

Attendance was the ceremony’s grandest activity. No merrymaking or dancing would commence. People came to contemplate, not revel. In all those preceding generations, no one had constructed a stage, only a stone circle with that massive post and iron loop at the center. No trace of the original rope remained, though some said it had been a chain. A chain was required to restrain the lion. A mere rope was enough to secure the victim to the drugged animal’s chest. Face to face, and what of its breath? Somnambulant, snoring? A chain, connected links. Break one, break the bond. Two links make a chain, but how far can it reach? Across a nation?

Standing at the post with Willem, facing the crowd, Alex saw a man who had tried to kill him that morning. He no longer seemed the enemy. Had Alex succeeded already?

Willem stood perfectly upright because he was the genuine prince. But his posture was exaggerated, too pridefully erect, perhaps because he wielded no political power and felt the need to emphasize his position, which was mere appearance. Did any politicians attend this ceremony of the ineffectual, the attendees representing not the factions of this land, but the people?

Alex had to sag. His slouching was not caused by injuries, but by ignorance. Despite his lengthy expectations, he did not know how to face the lion.

They stood shoulder to shoulder. When Willem began speaking, Alex smelled meat on his breath. He might have been eating the enemy.

“Only two events are expected in war: you kill and you die.... How to kill the war except by dying? ...Some wars never exhaust themselves.”

Alex became sick of his speech. Willem implied profundity, but Alex felt himself the fool. These men were too small to matter in the world, in their nation, in this ceremony. Greater forces would mock their poor solution. Though the dead are blind even to solar flares, and newborns are thrilled by fireflies and moonlight, the sun shines equally on babies and corpses. Alex could not judge if he feared failure or success.

His anxiety precluded clear consciousness, leaving him in a harassed stupor wherein his nerves twitched but his perceptions sensed vaguely. Willem continued. Alex hated his words, but did not want him to stop. He knew the end. At the end, he would awaken.

“...Only two things must be done to end the war. Stop killing, and stop dying. Do not demand defeat, but settle for rejection. Do not wait for the war to end—end it. Do not surrender, but cease. Do not defeat the enemy, defeat the fighting. Our country began here, and here the war can end.”

When Willem went quiet and turned to his counterpart, Alex was able to release his nausea, his emotions spewing out, the war inside him ending.

“Some people think it never happened. No one in our country could be so cruel. At that time, the country was yours, and our people were the invaders. But nothing has changed. Everyone is amazed that friends are killing friends. You tell your son to join the forces that destroy the next street with mortars, then wonder why your neighbors shoot your children. You expect it to stop when the other side stops killing. You blame it on your leaders, who follow your wishes. We’ve tied ourselves to the lion and now are looking for a knife to cut the rope. Maybe we should cut our own throats and not bother the lion. The situation is insane, because the lion is our life. Only madmen make sense of insanity.”

Willem knew to reveal the hand grenade at the moment of madness. Being mad, Alex nearly laughed aloud in relief that his sister would not see the ceremony. With all of his spirit, he longed for her to see how to end the war. As he reached to hold the grenade with Willem, he felt surprise that the moderate audience became agitated, staring with painfully wide eyes at the silent speakers, trying to run away but tripping on fear, crawling along the sand while looking at the madmen whom some would call genius, and all should call kin.

In the last moment of his journey, Alex felt disembodied as though already dead, all of his anima released from the creature. Having suffered from the lion in prediction, he found that the body of his living would harm him no more, but expend itself on education, providing a history that his nation would not forget, the demonstration that the greatest horror in war is not killing or dying, but both. Though he almost felt sorrow that he would not see his family again, he knew his sister would surpass him, and they would meet again in memory.

As he pulled the pin, he felt a rush of joy, finding the answer to a question few people could confront with their living.

Smile when the lion wakes.
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Publication Date: 03-31-2010

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