Aboli
(Les Chroniques infernales)
(Les Chroniques infernales)
Esther Rochon
(Excerpt: p. 3-10)
The Shed
Once emptied, the old territory of the hells became a desert of darkness. King Rel, the son of the last king of the hells, who had betrayed his father by refusing to allow his country to be used any longer as a penal colony, was the friend of the judges of twilight, who oversee the fate of the dead. Rel, like most natives of the old hells, had a very long life expectancy, a few thousand years. A few centuries had gone by since the ritual immolation of his elderly parents on a wheel of fire, and Rel had established himself as a mysterious sovereign. He reigned over the lowest of the worlds, a kind of huge, dark cavern, which was no doubt beneath another world, but no one really knew which one.
The united limbos, which now shared responsibility for accommodating the damned while they served their sentences, were also obliged to refurbish the territory of the old hells. However, King Rel had dithered, doubtful whether he should make his realm just like any world on the surface, with a sky and a sun. He was happy to have "stars" in the "sky," that is, fragments of mica shining fleetingly on the ceiling of the dome now that the concrete coating was showing signs of wear. He loved the "wind" over his realm, in other words the drafts blowing through the cavern. He loved his queen, Lame, who had been able to talk to the terrifying judges to get certain sentences reduced. He was devoted to his people of monsters and creatures who were less and less misshapen now that they were no longer tormentors.
Powerful floodlights had been installed where the ground was fertile. Many former torturers had taken up farming. The floodlights revolved and changed intensity, imitating the movement of a sun, and sunflowers followed their movement in season, while the russet corn, the beans and the tomatoes grew. In this great depopulated land, irrigated by canals of desalinated water from the sea in the northeast, the crops were enough to nourish a sparse population of beings endowed with prodigious longevity and frugal desires. A sophisticated hydro-electric plant was located on the shore of the northeastern sea, taming the constant movements of the waves to produce electricity for the floodlights, stoves and everything else. The desalination plant beside it provided drinking water.
Rel had stood up to his allies, who had protected him from the destructive fury of his father, and who would have loved to make the old hells a model site, an underground paradise, a kind of "never again" museum. Many were proud to be administering a modern, more humane underworld, and would have liked to have kept a few traces of the old methods of torment, for public edification. For Rel, however, his realm was of a different quality. He didn't really want to attract tourists or school children for guided visits. He wanted to ensure a presence in the remotest depths of the world, but a presence that would assert itself for its own sake, instead of merely granting the good wishes of allies and distant relatives, none of whom, in any case, had any intention of immigrating so deep, so low.
After a century or two, his neighbours finally threw in the towel. Their own worlds were being transformed by the disruptive presence of infernal quarters in their territories, and they felt overwhelmed. They had no more energy to convince little King Rel to let them change his dusty shed into a pretty educational garden. They offered him a small fortune, amassed through secret taxes on the worlds that have their damned citizens punished in the hells. In exchange, they were freed from their obligation to refurbish his world. This is what he wanted.
He thus reigned over a world that was dark and crude, certainly, but prosperous.
He no longer lived in the former castle where many people and many animals had been tortured and murdered. He moved into a gloomy stone house at the edge of a field, an hour's walk to the southeast from the former capital, Arxann. The farmers in the area lived in similar dwellings, often closer to the light. His was a little bigger, with a roof over most of the rooms. There was a room for the computers and another for telecommunications. He also constructed a small cabin, farther away in the dust, at the edge of the night, where he could go and collect his thoughts. The king bore the grief for the old hells.
The king and queen were the saddest people in the land, because, for them, the memory of the past remained the most vivid. The former tormentors and the reformed monsters had a vital energy so great that, under their influence, the desolate, grey plain was now studded with verdant gardens dotted with flowers and fruit, filled and bounded by slow-flowing canals. Along the banks, they lived in simple houses, often without doors, without windows and without roofs, because there was neither rain nor thieves and it was never very cold. These houses, built of tightly fitted stones, defining a private space, looked like old graves when their curtains were open and no light shone inside. And yet they housed living beings, adults with powerful, confident gestures, and young people full of spirit.
These creatures, wizened or gangling, were happy where they were. Anywhere else, they would have been rejected for being ugly or weird. Here, they were among their own kind. The land they cultivated, the animals they raised for their milk nor their companions were ever offended by their appearance. Most of them had big nocturnal eyes, and their last born were more and more human in appearance. They loved to learn and no longer depended on others for medical care or education. It was over this nation of autonomous, resourceful beings, full of the joy of life, that Rel reigned.
He was one of the oldest inhabitants of the realm, even though he remained young in appearance. He was quite handsome although a hermaphrodite - the only one in the old hells. He was quite slender, with black hair and dark skin. He really loved communicating with the other worlds and keeping up to date with what was happening, always remembering the hell that had been established in this world for millennia. A little of the pain of all those who had suffered here remained in him, as if in this way he was trying to protect his subjects, and sometimes he has strange reactions to this. As for his wife, Lame, she had not forgotten her previous life on an earth full of indifference, nor her years as one of the damned, the secretary of the soft hells. Her mind was largely at ease these days, but not totally. The horror could resurface, even in this world that had been bulldozed to strip away every trace of past torments. However, meanwhile, she was taking the time to live.
Lame and Rel loved each other, with a love like a flame on a stick of wood, which sometimes seems to go out, but is always rekindled and burns on. The passing centuries never really dulled the pleasure that they found in living together. Lame knew how to paint. She had learned before her marriage, when she had had to live in what was now the cold hells, and which at the time was a rather rich limbo, where many artists lived. Her stay there had not been very pleasant; however, towards the end, she had worked as a servant for the painter and engraver, Franz Saktius, who had taught her the rudiments of his art. This truly beautiful experience had permitted Lame, later, to share her knowledge with the people of the old hells, which had contributed to their rehabilitation, especially given that they had considerable talent for the arts. Lame also loved to sing and play the lyre, which most of her friends appreciated much less. So she didn't push the matter.
She was gentle, vivacious, and had the big eyes of those from below. Her black, curly hair hung down to her waist; her hands were strong and dextrous. She knew she was loved, and that would give her bearing a confidence that only grew stronger with age. Her former companion Vaste had died of old age a long time ago, as well as her old friend, the Terran Roxanne. But she had made other friends among those that were formerly called monsters, and who no longer looked like monsters.
She could go off with them to the dark hills east of the world, talk to the larvae buried there since the time of the soft hells, some of whom were still alive. Sometimes she would feed them a little, these creatures with only their mouths emerging from the ground and whose huge bodies were kept alive by ants that had built their galleries in them, in a horrible and very sustainable symbiosis. Sometimes she would travel afterwards, always into the shadows, towards the foam-fringed sea and join her husband there, who sometimes had access, in those places, to visions in which the judges of destiny spoke to him. She would then take care of him and bring him back, making sure he was all right, to the dark house where the couple lived.
"We should have a child," he announced to her one day.
Queen Lame knew she was sterile. Her body, acquired under rather unusual circumstances, had many advantages: beauty, longevity, strength, health. But it could not procreate.
"I could be both the father and the mother," Rel continued.
After all, he was a hermaphrodite, even though he had finally chosen a male identity.
"Could I help you raise it?" she asked.
"I wouldn't have it any other way."
So Rel got himself pregnant. Since he did not want to complicate the lives of his subjects and he wished to keep the image of himself as a man in their minds, he confined himself, once his pregnancy began to show, to the isolated cabin he had built, and Lame soon joined him there. No one invaded their privacy. After a few months, their child was born, with Lame helping her husband with the birth. They thus became the parents of a little girl who, strangely enough, look more like Lame than Rel. She grew slowly, as befits a creature that will live for a millennium or two, and she was full of charm and smiles. Her parents doted on the girl they had named Aube. She took away much of their sadness and their feeling of bereavement. Now the life of the three of them was divided between their big "downtown" house, which was a kind of meeting place and centre of communication, and their little cabin at the end of the field, where they were alone.© 1996 Éditions Alire & Esther Rochon
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