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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: Under the influence of the evil Lord of Time, the King of Larme offers his crown and daughter to whomever can answer a riddle, pass through an ordeal that harms all who attempt it, and finally tell a joke that will make the princess laugh. A mountain farmer's three sons take the test. Warrior Gryn journeys to the past; the thinker Blon goes into the future; and the youngest, a magician, penetrates the present.

eBook Publisher: The Fiction Works, Published: http://www.fictionworks.com, 2004
Fictionwise Release Date: March 2004

5 Reader Ratings: Great Good OK Poor

Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: Adobe Acrobat (PDF) [644 KB], eReader (PDB) [230 KB], Palm Doc (PDB) [218 KB], Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [189 KB], Microsoft Reader (LIT) [190 KB] - PocketPC 1.0+ Compatible, Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [245 KB], hiebook (KML) [467 KB], Sony Reader (LRF) [236 KB], iSilo (PDB) [179 KB], Mobipocket (PRC) [223 KB], Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [265 KB], OEBFF Format (IMP) [291 KB]
Words: 67063
Reading time: 191-268 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Adobe Acrobat (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

Once upon a time, in a far away place, there lived an old king, his beautiful daughter and a wizard. Their castle was in a broad green valley, a long oval of land checkered with farms and swollen with low hills, shadows of clouds racing across them in the sunshine. So broad was it that it took more than a day to cross on horseback; and so long, if you stood at one end you almost couldn't see the mountains at the other.

In the middle was the king's town; and in the middle of that, the castle, and in the middle of that, the throne room, and in the middle of that, the king, his chin in his hand, a scowl on his face, his back twisted into a peevish royal slouch, his legs crossed, jerking kicks at the invisible air and muttering curses.

The sounds echoed stonily in the otherwise empty room. For no one cared to attend the king when he was in a foul mood, as he almost always was, and he was too sour to insist on company. No one, that is, but the wizard, and he wasn't anyone, in the ordinary sense of the word. He didn't even interrupt the echoes of the king's words as they bounced flatly up into the masonry, so little substance did he possess.

The matter was this: the king was old, and failing, and bone-sore, and only a son could have consoled him. But he had none. He was the king of all the kingdom, but there was no one to continue his rule, his line, his power, his presence, or his name. He had only a daughter.

But it was not just the king who was troubled over this lack of an heir. No. It was felt by everyone in the kingdom. He was the crest on the wave of his people's anxiety. For he had brought peace to the land. In truth, he was the first king the people could remember having, though there must have been others, for the castle he lived in had already been there, was already very old, when he had taken it over and declared himself king.

Before that the country had been overrun by bands of robbers, sometimes friendly enough fellows, sometimes quite rough and mean, who rode through this and other valleys on steaming black horses and took whatever they wanted from the farmers who lived there--grain, cattle, scythes, sons for recruits, daughters for concubines, mothers for cooks, fathers for grooms. They were not always so ruthless, but they invariably took someone, or something, and they were rarely kind. Their visits were not anticipated with pleasure.

These robbers had always hidden and maneuvered in the mountains, and raked across the valleys leaving furrows through the fallen hay, perhaps raiding only as often as once every three years. For at the end of each raid they found themselves in new surroundings, with new women, and soon new families, with plenty to eat and mountain spring water to wash it down with. And so they passed more than one winter hunting and rutting, watching the silhouettes of mountain deer from ember-side beds amid snuggling women and children, hands behind heads, marveling at the stars and feeling their spines' connection with earth grow fainter as if they were being drawn up into the night sky, and the world ceased for a moment to be the limit of adventure.

It was a good life, but it was hard on the farmers, and the valley and the surrounding mountains were populated mostly by farmers. They covered the land. They were drawn to it and spread on it like twirling maple seeds. And every migration of robbers, whatever it plucked away, spilt out also a scattering of left-behinds--fugitives, dreamers, rebels, idiots, intolerables and lost children--on the land it wound across, filling the furrows it had gouged with its cutting edge: farmers, abandoned on farms, soon working to the rhythm of sun and seed and cursing the visits of such as their fathers.

So keenly did the farmers hate to see these marauders ride down out of the mountains, so grotesque to them that their cycle of plantation and harvest be interrupted--scholars of the soil, they were, sheltering their fascination behind a callous wall against the outside--that they wished on the robbers the worst plague they could imagine: other robbers. And they got their wish often enough to cultivate a pleasurable anticipation. When one robber band, looting, burning and raping its way across the valley, confronted another band sweeping in the opposite direction, there was fighting, and the farmers came out of their hiding places, found vantage points out of the way of hooves, swung clubs and swooping blades, and sat down to watch.

It was grim enjoyment. They took a derisive attitude toward the conflict, choosing and cheering for a champion, applauding his victories and mugging with unfelt sorrow when he fell with a spear through his face. If an especially swift and skillful marauder, fighting lightly as a mosquito, were nevertheless knocked to the ground and cudgeled as he lay prostrate, the farmers, sitting cross-legged, would spit to the side and rub their palms together.

Imagine their wry joy when one of these robber bands decided to stay--to keep the field permanently, challenge all comers, live off the land and farm the farmers. They didn't like the arrangement, but it was just an arrangement, something on their backs like the sky as they bent over their seeds--nothing that would come between them and the magical earth, or keep them from fondling it between their fingers and begetting the things it put forward.

This particular group of marauders was the ugliest most self-exalting that had ever ridden through this or any of the neighboring valleys. Other raiders were sullen and vindictive only pragmatically--only when meanness offered some advantage, as when they needed energy to overcome lethargy, or justification to take something from a comrade. But these men were aggressive and hostile for the sake of being so. They shone with it. They severed heads and kicked carcasses with a will that brightened their eyes and animated them beyond usual energy. Destruction and terror they cultivated with a sense of mission. Wheeling on their rearing horses they scowled at the world, hair flying out in rage, blades raised, teeth bared, giving themselves completely to the service of the bold force of Death, mangling everything in their paths that did not stir the stomach or the groin.

When they squirted out of the mountains riding faster than rumor, only a few stopped at the first buildings of stone and straw to rape the women and some of the men, while the rest rode on to keep abreast of the alarm, hungry, after two winters in the mountains with the same wives, for flat country and new flesh to cover at full gallop.

Wherever alarm won the race, speeded by columns of black smoke, distant cries and planters' ears to the earth, women were huddled with children in fruit cellars, under hearths, or buried alive in shallow pits with seeds in their blouses and food in their laps.

The robbers were show-offs. They raped every woman visible, and were not gentle with their victims, relishing them fearful, squirming and yielding beyond trace of reserve, the lure, achievement and reward of conquest. The ambivalent flanks of valley women hung prone from their erections like the valley itself. And their leader spread his seed farther and wider and more assiduously than any of his comrades, shouting battle plans from the breach, and rolling his nights away sleeplessly in cottage beds with wives and daughters when he stopped for rest at all. It was he who decided to stay and be king. A generation later he could with some truth claim to be the father of his country.