Joseph I

PA 0

The desert is a harsh place. During the day, the sweltering heat of the sun scorches the lands below, and at night the temperatures can fall below freezing. Water is scarce, and the few plants and animals that survive out there present their own dangers. For the unprepared, the desert represents certain death.

But not all of the desert is lifeless, nor empty. Hidden beyond the sea of sand lies a solitary river, cutting through the sands. A floodplain clings to the riverbed, flourishing with plants and animals of all shapes and sizes. But they are not the only ones who call the river home.

Running along the river are dozens, if not hundreds of villages, each home to a hundred people in turn. Primitive farms sprawl out from the mudbrick homes, growing crops such as Einkorn Wheat, Flax, and even the occasional Palm Date Tree. Boats of woven papyrus reeds travel up and down the river, trading surplus food and tools.

Hidden along this desert river, was something that could be described as the most developed, the most civilized place in the world.

However, recently, a sudden, drastic change occurred. Something new had arrived, something which immediately went about destroying the old order of things.

The God-Kings.

--

Joseph shuffled his basket to his other hip, making sure not to drop it. They couldn’t afford to waste any of their harvest, and he’d be damned if he of all people were to ruin it.

The thirty-four-year-old Latino had arrived a little over a month ago, being declared God-King of the village. And while that had made him pretty uncomfortable at first, his own comfort soon took a backseat to survival.

See, these people had developed agriculture recently, and the economic boom that had been created from that ended up also causing the population to boom. Now, this was all well and good, but there was just one problem. See, when he says that these people developed agriculture recently, he means recently.

As in, some of the oldest people in the village spent their time complaining about how kids had it easy these days, what with their fancy-shmancy farming and their animal husbandry! Why, back in my day, I foraged for my food! And I liked it!

But yeah, farming was new. And that was an issue that combined with the population boom. See, people were having more kids, because they needed more help on the farms to grow crops. And since they were growing more food, they though that having more kids wouldn’t be an issue. But their understanding of agriculture was fresh, and lacked some key components that they’d only end up learning later on. That meant that not only that harvests could fail, they failed commonly enough to be a problem.

So suddenly, every harvest was vital, and if one was lost then the whole village could be doomed.

Of course, normally if there wasn’t enough food to go around, people would just leave. Enough of the younger people—third sons or daughters, people without family, etc.—would leave the village for greener pastures, or the weak and old would go without food so that the rest could survive. This would allow the community and most of the individuals to survive.

Unfortunately, then came the ‘God-Kings,’ who ruined everything with their ridiculous notions of ‘citizenship,’ ‘borders,’ and ‘not letting the few starve to death for the good of the many.’

Suddenly people weren’t allowed to leave their villages as easily, as they might end up helping the enemy. Combine that with a steadily increasing population and suddenly bloodthirsty neighbors, and things had gotten dicey to say the least.

The raids had started up soon after.

It wasn’t even an attack on the kings and queens—the raids were almost solely for food. Small bands of three to ten warriors would charge into the village, stealing stored foodstuff along with anything else they could get their hands on. Others would sneak in during the night, stealing pots and barrels quietly, or even stealing the crops straight from the fields. The village had a few date trees that they cultivated, and all but two of them had been stripped clean in one night.

After the first raid, Joseph had realized something needed to be done to protect them. After the third, he realized they’d need to take drastic measures.

The village was made up of fifteen mudbrick houses set in a U-shape facing the river, with the fields sprawling out around them. The houses themselves were in a pretty defensible position already, but they needed something more.

So they’d put everything non-vital on hold and over the course of five days they’d constructed a massive wall around the village, made of the same mudbricks of their houses. Parts of the outer walls of the houses were incorporated into the larger wall to save time and energy, which allowed a pretty robust wall to be built. It was a little over two feet thick, and about thirteen feet high. The only entrances were two small holes just barely big enough for a person to move through on each side of the village, which could be easily sealed up when necessary. The wall was open to the river, to allow boats to leave and people to fish, but the ends of the walls went a fair distance into the river, being capped off with guard towers. A group of ten people (most of them too old or weak to work the fields) kept watch on top of the walls, a scaffolding set up on the interior to allow people to walk along them.

It was, all in all, an amazing accomplishment, especially considering they had to make all the bricks by hand. But it worked. They hadn’t had to worry about any raids for weeks, and Joseph had even managed to strike up an uneasy alliance with his closest neighbors!

The first few months had been pretty rough, but things were finally looking up.

--

Joseph groaned, crumbling into his bed.

The rest of the village was eating dinner around now, sitting with their families in their homes. They normally ate indoors, since bricks were common enough to allow everyone to have their own fireplaces, which meant meals were more of a familial affair rather than a community one.

Joseph on the other hand lived alone, in a smaller house that had belonged to a previous family that left a couple years ago. It was kind of run down, and barely bigger than his dorm room back in college, but it was actually pretty cold during the day and had a nice red and orange mural of the sun on one of the walls.

It’d been a long day today, as had every day for the past week of the harvest. Collecting everything from the fields, getting all the food into the walls, storing it properly to make sure it lasted… it was torture. The worst part about it, though, was the fact that he wouldn’t even get to eat any of it.

The village needed all the food it could get—there was barely anything to forage around here, and there was only so much fish in the river (in fact, lately it felt like there was less and less, though that might just be in his head). So most of their food came farms, which barely produced enough to feed everyone. Combine that with the previous raids and a flood in the northern farms, and they’d be tight on food until the next harvest. (Hopefully, only until the next harvest.)

They sort of had animals as well, but none in the village. There were some nomadic people who herded animals like Oxen around, and would trade with the villages for grain. But that wasn’t enough to feed their own village, and they had to compete with the other villages as well for the meat. Even hunting was getting hard, as during the harvesting season they didn’t have enough time to go out and hunt as often, and even if they did it was getting harder and harder to find their normal prey. There were large animals like hippos, antelope, and crocodiles, and smaller ones like rabbits—but with all of the individual villages fighting over food, even those resources were starting to get scarce.

They were probably overhunting, honestly, and that would also come back to bite them later. Yay.

The lack of food was part of the reason he needed to live alone. Normally the house would have been taken by one of the larger families, to give them more space, but he needed a room for himself, to protect himself from temptation. He couldn’t allow himself to give in and waste food on himself when he didn’t need it.

He hadn’t eaten any real food in three weeks. And unfortunately, while he didn’t need food to live, it sure as hell felt like he did.

His stomach growled, feeling like claws dragging along his insides. He forced himself to ignore it, reaching over to the nightstand beside his bed. He grabbed the cup of water (which was thankfully common enough that they didn’t need to ration it) and some bark and inedible leaves from the few trees around them. He chewed on the plants, wincing at the taste. It didn’t do much, but it’d sooth the aching for a bit.

Not that it helped much, as his stomach was still screaming out to him. He stared at the mural on the wall, forcing himself to think of anything else to take his mind of the pain. He recited Warhammer lore, as much of the Harry Potter books as he could remember, and even the Bible. Anything to take his mind off of the hunger pains.

It became less and less effective each day.

‘Come on, just—thing about something else. I hope the Cowboys win the next Superbowl. They’d fucking better do good this time. Not that I’ll ever be able to check. What else is there? Uh… oh! The presidential election! I wonder who won? Wait, I’d rather starve than think about that. Nebetta’s got an amazing ass, right? Wait, shit, she’s with Ahmose, isn’t she? Fuck. Come on, come on, I need something to distract myself with!’

“King Joseph!” Hsekiu shouted, barging into the room. “Trouble from the south! A massive force of people has been spotted marching towards the village!”

“Thank God!” he shouted, leaping up from his bed.

“My King?”

“Uh,” Joseph paused, feeling his face flush. “Er, I mean… never mind. What’s going on? People are invading?”

“Most likely. We spotted them on the horizon a few minutes ago. I came immediately to warn you!”

“Right,” he nodded, feeling his stomach drop. Shit, if this was an invasion he’d rather be starving. “Take me to the walls, I want to see this for myself.”

As he followed Hsekiu to the walls, Joseph began feeling worse and worse about what was going on. He’d set up a tentative alliance with the king to his south—not anything official, but they were trading and had stopped raiding each other. That had to count for something. So, either the other king had betrayed him, or he’d been conquered, and now an unknown force was making its way towards his village.

Both of those options were shit.

But it wasn’t something he had time to think on. A minute later, he was on the walls. His ‘soldiers’ had swarmed on top of the scaffolding, most of them armed with stone slings (the only ranged weapon they could mass produce, since wood was scarce in the desert). Over the distance, he could see the huge number of people charging towards his village.

‘That must be at least a full village’s worth of people,’ he thought nervously, sweat beginning to appear on his forehead. ‘We have the defensive advantage, but…’

“Wait, do you see that?” someone called out. “They’re stopping!”

Joseph looked out at the approaching people again, and saw that they had, indeed, stopped. As he watched, one person ran ahead, waving a vaguely beige colored linen tied to a stick over their head.

“Hold your fire!” he called out to his soldiers. “I think they're trying to surrender!”

“Surrender!?”

“Or they at least want to talk,” he amended. “Wait until that one man reaches the walls. If anyone else approaches, you have my permission to shoot! But hold on until then!”

His archers (slingers?) grumbled a bit, but complied, much to his relief. True, one man wasn’t that dangerous, but if this was an invading army, even just one casualty could change the tide of battle with their numbers.

Joseph turned back to the approaching man, squinting his eyes. It was hard to see from so far away, doubly so with the glare of the desert sun, but he could barely make out most of the man’s features.

And it immediately clued him into the fact that this man was the southern king.

It was his hair, mostly. He had dirty blonde hair, with fading streaks of blue running through it—he’d probably dyed it back before they’d arrived here. His skin was also much, much paler than the dark skin of their subjects in the desert. Combine that with some sort of dragon(?) tattoo around his left arm and the nose piercing, and he was the most blatantly foreign man around, even more so than Joseph.

Eventually the other man reached the wall, gasping for breath.

“Help!” he shouted up to them. “Please, please! You have to help us!”

“Slow down, and explain yourself!” Joseph called back. “What’s your name? Why have you brought so many people with you if you want us to help!?”

“I am—” he gasped, heaving. He probably wasn’t all that athletic. “I’m Kaiden! Kaiden Ackleberry! I’m from Canada! Uh, I mean, I’m from the village south of you! A week ago, I sent someone up to talk to you, about buying some wheat off you, right?”

“Yes, okay, that explains who you are,” he shouted back, vaguely remembering something like that. “But that doesn’t explain why you’re here. And with so many people, at that!”

“Right! Uh, right! We were attacked! By another King, further south! He wasn’t just coming to raid us for food—he wanted to conquer us! He tried to kill me! So I, uh, I… I ran. And everyone who could follow me did. I’m sorry, but… can you grant us asylum? Please!? Before the southern king arrives with his army!?”

Joseph, who did not have the supplies nor the space to house another whole village worth of people, could only say one thing to that.

“Fuck. Fuck! Fine! I’ll give your people asylum! But you’d better have brought your own food!”

“Thank you!” the other king shouted back, sounding close to crying. “Thank you, so, so much!”

9,963 God-Kings Remain