The Good King: A Medieval Thriller by George WB Scott

Author:George WB Scott [Scott, George WB]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Black Rose Writing
Published: 2023-09-13T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Máj—The Time of Flowers

Duke Václav regularly traveled around his lands, sharing his laws and the words of Christ.

Podiven and the rest of the duke’s retinue would pack horses and carry food and seeds and cuttings of plants. Václav shared the best types of crops for his people.

He saw to the planting of plum and other fruits, including grapes. His grandmother Ludmila had brought the vines to the Czechs, and Václav continued to improve their cultivation. He helped people in their harvests, to grind wheat into flour with the quern he carried, and to bake it into wafers representing the flesh of Christ in the service of mass.

Václav exemplified the Christian life, and converted many of his people to his religion by their witness of his good works and hearing the loving message of Jesus.

***

Despite the dark future I was letting myself be led into, I continued to hear confidences from my older brother.

Václav told me about one of his travels in spring. He woke from a night sleeping beneath the hovering stars of a clear sky, floating as in endless communion with the heavens.

He felt the presence of God.

He stood and saw a shining full moon surrounded by a hazy halo near the horizon, over an evening lake. Its reflection mirrored off the water’s surface, and the scene displayed two great orbs and spangles of stars scattered in the sky and on the water. The vision he saw lay before him like an altar of many candles.

The duke walked forward. He stepped onto a trailway decked in gems of evening dew, and passed from forest to a field where sheep grazed quietly in predawn darkness.

It was the first of May, when animals and birds sing to each other and speak of love. Doves made soft calls, and scents of pine and sweet mosses filled the air.

Podiven woke to join him, to watch dawn begin to warm the misty horizon, lifting into a bluing sky.

They heard a faint sound through the flowering trees of a woman weeping, perhaps in a secret pain, hidden in the forest.

As they stepped out of the woods, the sun sent its first low beams of light onto the sacred lake, where they penetrated the surface and lit the waters and fish below. Václav turned his eyes around the horizon to see tips of huge beech trees reaching upwards as if to embrace the growing light of day, and eagles spiraled above.

Light grew, and a distant shepherd waved his hand in greeting. Václav replied, and saw far to his left a gray-robed figure retiring into the forest by an enormous oak. The crying woman?

Podiven and Václav turned to see her better, her gown flowing in an early morning zephyr, and they saw bleached remains of an executed criminal, a scattering skeleton lashed to an instrument of punishment, a breaking wheel. The bones were broken in many places, and his fleshless head gazed up at the sky, his mouth open as if begging heaven for mercy.

Freshly picked flowers lay below the shattered skeleton.

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