The King and his Axe: Part 1

The axe hung heavy in Cathis' hand.  At the end of the axe's hilt, a short chain bridged the gap between it and the manacle around Cathis' wrist.  Down at Cathis' feet, a similar, but much longer, chain coiled messily on the floor.  It's ends were attached to his ankle and the large, stone throne upon which Cathis sat.  The room was stone with a large vaulted ceiling and a deep trench in the stone between the throne and the door.  From the edge one could look down it and see a mile of sky below them before the blue sea glittered up at them.

The axe and the throne were of a similar style, each carved with great precision out of a white marble with black veins running throughout the stone.  Neither were ornamented overly, both of simple shapes that were both elegant and modest.  The axe was half a man's height in length and the throne a full man's height.  Cathis sat slouched in the throne with the axe in his right hand, not seeming to notice the weight with which it pulled down at his arm.

The room was silent besides his breathing and the whistle of the air from the moat.  Nobody came to visit the throne room, to talk with their bored king besides the weekly ceremony of sacrifice, and that had been yesterday.  The women were busy with their cooking or weaving, or tending to the children.  The men and boys were out tending to the animals in their pens or out in balloons hunting prey in the sky.  The children were in the fields with the crops, at least when they weren't goofing off.  When the children were goofing off, they did not visit the king because their parents either told them he was "too important to see them" or that "they should not play around in the throne room and were forbidden to go in."  So the door stayed shut.


Cathis' stores of food would last, as they always did.  He did not need to farm or hunt for his meals.  His robes would be replaced yearly at the harvest festival.  He would cut his own hair and beard, though he had not done so in months so that it lay in black locks down his face and his back.  Most of his days were spent pacing around the throne, keeping his legs fit, or swinging the axe in practice to strengthen his arms.  His mind was the hardest thing to exercise, he thought.  If he walked the ten paces forward to the edge of the moat he could stare down, perhaps to catch a glimpse of a balloon wandering across the sky.

He would wonder how many of the men and boys thought that the weapon of the city was the spear that they hunted with, long thin cord connecting the shaft to the side of the balloon.  Once he had thought so too.  Now all there was for him was the axe, and it seemed to be much more drastic a symbol than the spear had ever been for him.  The axe was the judgement of the city, it was the ritual of the city, and it was the burden of the city.

Back behind the throne was a ramp cut into the stone.  Down the ramp was Cathis' sleeping quarters.  Surrounding his bed and food stores was great furnace of the city.  Mostly it was a great metal wall that he could stare at, but the mouth of the furnace sat a few men's heights in length in front of his bed.  Actually created to look like a mouth, the fire inside danced and played constantly.  It had stayed lit for generations back so far that no man alive had heard of a time when it hadn't been lit.  All it took was a slaughtered animal, prepared on the alter right in front of the mouth and then thrust on through.  Once a week one animal was killed from each of the eight clans from the eight islands.

When Cathis had slaughtered the animal with the axe and tossed the remains into the fire, he would look at the respective tube tube, half a man's height in diameter, that led off to the sacrifice's island and think to himself "not today."  No tube had been cut since two kings back when one island had decided to stop paying tribute.  The supply of hot air to fuel their balloon had been chopped off and the island had fallen into the sea.  In the next king's rule another island had been woven together and hooked up to the newly fixed pipe.  So the cycle continued.  There could never be more islands than pipes, and there were rarely less.

In his early years as king, Cathis used to sit down near the furnace or sleep in his bed.  Eventually the nightmares and the feeling of eyes staring at him from inside the furnace had driven him out.  In the past weeks he had even taken to sleeping up on his throne, only going down the ramp with the sacrifices and to fetch up a bite of food.