Why watch those who watch?
‘Help me!’ howled a person, grasping at the iron bars of the small window. From a distance the jester heard the cry, and looked impassively on the towering, black monolith in which the window was carved near the top. The person tried to scream once more, but someone behind him pulled him from the window and all was silent but for the whipping wind in the mountains. The jester stood for a time longer looking up and around at the road leading toe the dark gate and the burning torches bracketed on the outside of the tower. Looking at the road, the jester saw a caravan of large flat wagons coming slowly down the road. For safeties sake he urged his horse off the rise on which he had been watching the procession and hid behind one of the many far flung boulders on the landscape. He carefully watched the wagon pass, the cargo of wholly dilapidated humans looking in horror at the approaching building. The jester stayed until they had been taken within the dark heart of the tower, and then he pulled his horse out from behind the rock. Sitting tall in the saddle he rode forward toward the gate, watching for any movement inside or outside. The brooding black gates loomed above him, and he saw no way to summon them to opening. He was just about to try knocking on them when, for reasons of nothing more than dramatic tension, the gate swung open seemingly of it’s own accord. The jester stood on the threshold of the dark place, hearing in the distance both above and below him screams of pain within the walls. He took one step inside the inky darkness and stood in silence. He held his bells in silence because their noise would not have made the dark place more bearable for the souls trapped there, and any man working on the other side of the bars long ago dismissed beauty to the far reaches of the mind with sunlight and laughter. In the jester saw the glow of a flame coming towards him, and stood fully away that he was trapped inside a place clearly meant for the trapping of people.
The group of three guards came around the corner of the corridor which their torches threw into the existence. The jester sighed when he saw that they were to a man clad in dark chain mail with long, wholly dysfunctional pikes. He had no doubt that they would speak harshly and probably not use too many syllables in their conversation. But he knew what a sarcastic tone would get him, because though the pike were dysfunctional for battle they were fully capable of piercing him in the confines of the tunnel.
‘I give you greetings,’ he said, and they looked at him from beneath large black helmets.
‘What d’you want?’ said one of them.
‘Nothing more than you can provide, good sir. I wish to see whoever claims responsibility for this large and seemingly impenetrable incarceration institute.’
‘What?’
‘To whom do you answer when in your more zealous actions you break those who you are charged to watch and no more?’
‘What?’
‘High in this tower, where dark birds must fly for any dove would drop from the sky on seeing such a place, there must reside a being who has leadership over this place, and all those therein. It is to him I wish to go.’
‘Uh?’ The guards spoke to one another in guttural syllables and eventually came out with a concerted action of pushing the jester towards a dark opening wt their pikes. He obliged, and was roughly guided up flights of black stairs until he as set before a door which by it’s very nature brokered a challenge to life. When the jester looked back to see whether he should resume the lead of his own life and enter the room, but the guards who had so closely guided him up the stairs were no longer living up to their title.
The jester stepped forward, his loosed bells voicing his presence. The door swung open, but nothing except the shade of darkness changed. From within the high pit a voice which was the verbal partner to the door gave permission for entry. The jester did not see reason to refuse, so he was quickly stood before a large black table in a room dominated by a fire of hellish proportions. He looked around himself and reflected that, should a place be made with the express intention of providing a physical representation for the suffering of the morally corrupt, then he was standing in it’s heart.
‘Speak,’ said the darkness behind the table.
‘I wish to know why you keep men captive,’ said the jester, trying to ignore the howls which seemed to echo out of specially constructed holes in the walls of the room.
‘I keep men captive because men who may be kept captive should be.’
‘Should be by what law?’
‘The very law by which all men survive. If a man is imprisoned and does not escape then the prison is where he belongs.’
‘If this is so, explain the torture which your guards are plying on the poor wretches.’
‘Encouragement.’
‘Truly courage is needed to endure such treatment.’
‘On the contrary. Courage is required to make it so that there is no need to endure the treatment. I have no complaints when a man escapes from this place, because then he is a man in his own right. Equally I have no compunction when the bodies of those who have given in are wheeled from this place.’
‘I see the sense in this. I saw a new group of those cursed to your care being delivered to this place. I wondered on whom out of the populace you choose to make your residents?’
‘Of late our cells are filled by people who should escape with speed by virtue of their military training. They are captives of the war, delivered hence by agents of he who is opposing them in the battles.’
‘These men are prisoners of man’s greatest failing. This is fitting. I shall leave you. Good day.’
‘It is so, and I knew as soon as I saw you that by your dress you would see as I do. I hope ever to see you again.’
‘As I you.’
The jester turned and walked from the screaming room, quickly down the flights of stairs and out of the black place without a nod to the guards. He mounted his horse and trotted slowly away, while from the base of the building a wagon so recently loaded with doomed life was sent to it’s doom laden with the shells of men who broke under the pressure of darkness.
