There is no king in Hesioch, for what tyrant, what monster, what man could be so evil as to fit the legacy of Hesioch?
Hesioch is the king-eater, the grim-grey gerontiarch of the barren heathlands, the gaunt general of an ancient desolation, his crippled castle still staggering against the wind, his crumbling curtain-wall still sloping over bone-choked dykes. He stands alone amidst the bleak and wind-pared heathers, his villages gone graveyard, his towns plague-barren, his roads bereft, his way stations slouched down into their courtyards, horse-bones bared by wind-fingers amidst century-dead straw. He stands reviled, cursed by the unknowing who till the soil on the very borders of his wasteland, cursed for his blighting and his withering and the sickening winds that reek of Hesioch's feculent marches. None now recall the tales of Hesioch's terror, his conquests, his fall. All is now fireside mumblings, his name a curse-word, blackening tongues that know not his place, his memories, his meaning.
Even the gibbets of Hesioch go hungry.
The road to Hesioch was last trodden five hundred years ago, by the last soldiers to flee the siege that ended with the uncovering of Hesioch in all his filth and nakedness. The stones have lifted up in humps, have overturned and shifted, sidled into ditches and begun to burrow down into the turves. The ragwort shivers in the moor's wind. The skulls of mules rattle, nailed to their milestones. Overhead, cold-ash clouds mutter like a toothless old man.
Hesioch rises from the moor as if vomited up, as if his unspoken wretchedness choked even the earth. The ruins of cottars' houses huddle amongst the black yews and the shrunken pines, dark doorways scowling beneath cracked and tipping roofs. The fields are ragged like battle-torn flags, black-maggoted with ergot, the last posts of fences staking down the skulls of hares the size of dogs. The common green is the colour of a dried-out cistern, lush only in its profusion of hog-bones. The uncoppiced fruit-trees hang down their withered boughs, running bony branches against soil parched of living green, sighing with brittle leaves and mourning their forgotten ruin.
Only they mourn for Hesioch the fallen.
Three kings marched on Hesioch before phalanxes in glittering armour, before legions in polished brass, before forests of spears. They came to Hesioch and entered within his walls, never to ride out again. Three kings rode to Hesioch, eater of men, and three kings never rode forth again. Three armies camped on downs that bear a harvest only of arrowheads, watered horses in a river buried beneath black marsh-slurry, severed tree-boughs for siege-engines torn down for corpse-fires. Thrice times thrice times thirty men slaughtered amongst the villages at Hesioch's heels, and thrice times thrice times thirty men swung from thrice times thirty trees about the walls of Hesioch.
Hesioch, grim-grinning, his grey teeth bared over the slaying of soldiers, laughing upon kings as they dealt out judgement, ordered armies, and marched men into the dewless fields of Hesioch's battlegrounds. A deathly king ruled him, infallible in his stillness, unfailing in his silence - a king buried in the zenith of state, anointed and mailed and bound to his throne.
Hesioch, king-eater, held carrion his king.
The wall of Hesioch, the wall that held out the armies of three kings, has crumbled in the kindly hands of time. The great grey stones litter the deep ditches, unwanted gravestones for long-forgotten soldiers. The towers of the gate have perished like blasted trees, only the teetering stacks of their blackened chimneys remaining. Of the gate there is no sign but the hinges, still reaching out, thrust out towards the besiegers to welcome them, as the besieger's pikes welcomed the people of Hesioch on their final day.
The air still smells of ashes.
Hesioch's main street, that never ran with blood nor saw the passing of slaves in convoy nor the parade of triumphant soldiers, is upheaved. It is as if the earth - not content with having retched forth the hill of Hesioch - seeks ever and again to thrust the city higher away from itself. The houses of Hesioch lie down like dying horses, the bones of walls covered by a skin of soil, pierced through by impertinent weeds that die before blooming, buds bursting with ochrous bile. The streets of Hesioch are empty, even of vermin.
At every junction is piled a bitter cairn, untouched even by lichen.
Over this waste, this barrenness of stone and bone and wind-shook soil, sneers the castle-mount, the pinnacle of Hesioch, the summit of the reviled and unspoken. It is black against the dimming clouds, black like teeth bared in disdain. The spear-thick wall of the castle has fallen, great stones crashing down upon the clustered houses as the disgusted judgement of the Hesioch's rulers fell on their people and drove them out into the steel-tipped arms of three armies. The foundations are raw and open, the ulcerated gums of an old man.
The road crawls about the castle-mount, even the spine of Hesioch avoiding the skull of Hesioch, but at last it must come to that barrier, that threshold that says unto all comers, here is the line that must not be crossed.
The tall stones stand askew, two pillars of stone twisting apart, held together only by the last unfallen lintel in Hesioch. Beneath this lintel the road becomes a stair, and the stair leads up to the castle of Hesioch, to the door to the hall to the chamber to the pit to the vault to that which we are not permitted to know.
I am the lintel of Hesioch, is the sooth of this stone, perched awry atop pillars seeking to fall. I am the gate to the unspoken, needing no key but courage, unguarded, with no challenge. I am the threshold beyond which lies the answer, beyond which lies the doom that cursed the name of Hesioch for five times five generations.
Pass beneath me, and know that which Hesioch knew.