Metaphorical Cities

K. David

 

Solomon Thinter was escorted into the king's royal chamber, and began his tale of the city of Kroy, with one word: "Justice."

He spoke this one word nearly inaudibly, and then he lowered his eyes to the ground and waited. Though he was not looking at him, Solomon could tell that the king was growing uneasy with the silence that followed; he heard the creaking of the ornate wooden chair, as the king shifted his weight in restless agitation and he felt the intensity of his penetrating gaze. Five minutes passed; five minutes which drifted as easily as a fleeting daydream for Solomon, and five minutes, which for the king, lingered nauseously like the tense moments spent gulping for breath in anticipation of inevitable bad news.

As he raised his head, and elevated his eyes to meet those of the king, the muscles of his face slowly contracted, producing a smile which the king thought revealed that his mind had traveled a great distance through time and space; as though what Solomon was seeing, was part past and part future. The smile grew larger as Solomon grew more distant, and he continued his tale as he had started, repeating the word he had spoken moments before: "Justice."

He told the king of the desert city of Kroy. This city was very old, and its inhabitants had only memories of happiness. The stories they told of the beauty of the city and the aroma of the lush countryside were not their own. These stories were the tales of their long dead ancestors; and although they told them with pride, a passerby could often read, in their postures, a sad longing for the beauty of the long vivacious days which none of them had ever personally known.

Though the dust blew through the barren landscape, and the scarcity of food magnified the already penurious atmosphere, the inhabitants nourished themselves, and shared with their neighbors, stories of lush green farmland and fruits and vegetables so plentiful that enormous feasts were prepared each and every day. When they told these stories they would smile, exposing their toothless grins and wrinkled eyes, as they told Solomon, how well fed even the animals used to be.

But for each story of happiness which they recited, as if memorized from the pages of some long vanished tome, there were stories within their lifetimes of the hardships and anguish which their people had endured, as successions of warrior klans marched through their city to lay claim to the architectural edifices which stood there. Although, for many generations, these ancient governmental monuments had ceased to represent anything more than intentional accumulations of brick and mortar, they continued to beckon men lustful for power as if they were as sexually animate as a woman's body. The people living in this city had suffered a lifetime of woe for merely having been born and raised, by generations of their ancestors, in proximity to a named city that wars were fought over; the wars that had enabled ruthless men to take captive a geographical space that was but an empty metaphor of power.

But by the time Solomon Thinter had arrived in the city, a war had been fought that would end all wars. There was a great scourge of justice delivered across the land by a power so great that even the mountains seemed to tremble. In the wake of this war, as a result of the elimination of the greedy and lecherous men that had so thoroughly ruined the fertile soil and minds of the inhabitants, a calm descended. As the people looked out across the empty barren landscape, they could no longer imagine the stories of happiness and joy on which they had subsisted for so many generations; suddenly, they realized that those stories were lies.

But now, these lies took on an entirely new presence. They were not lies of deception, they were merely false dreams of desire. Dreams that had been created and sustained by a community of men and women, so that they could rationalize their continued existence during times which had nearly extinguished their desire to continue as individuals and communities. These stories began to represent the limitless possibilities which the future might hold for a people who had, until recently, no reason to expect that their dreams might ever come to fruition.

As Solomon left their city, to return to his own home, he witnessed the first few tentative steps toward realizing a prosperous yet uncertain future. A series of small houses had been erected on the old foundations of a conglomeration of long abandoned ruins. A few men had begun the arduous process of preparing the raped landscape to receive the first new seeds of agriculture which might take root in the land, much as these new dreams were already germinating in these men's minds.

And at the end of the story, as he stared up at the king, Solomon repeated the word that he had started with, "Justice." But this time, he followed it with another word: "Hope."