Beauty of the Beast

In a fecund land ripe with reachable riches, in which the ever untroubled natives need only extend fingers to pick the sweetest fruits of overgrowing abundance, or their arms into the overflowing rivers to pluck fat fish for their dinners with their bare hands, life is entirely carefree. The robust, sun-kissed boys and girls run and play all day upon the lushly green, flowering hills, and hide and seek with the hares and hedgehogs of the sheltering forest, knowing no fear. Their fathers and mothers too are much as their children, as the little work to be done not completed by nature is done by noon each day. Thus, making merry, drinking their wine early and often, imitating the wild rabbits in the frequency of their lovemaking, many a break is taken from the pleasure of the bedchambers, whereof new children are sprung in troves, that the pleasure of youth may be mirrored by even the aged, all ages running and whooping and laughing, knowing only the moment’s joy, not what the advanced nations call maturity.

But then the beast comes. A foul, monstrous thing, half lion, half bear, with eyes as deep wells of menacing red, fangs striking its survivors with an ultimately fatal fever, and a densely matted hide as thick as an elephant’s. Mercilessly does the beast raid the village, destroying the peace of the people, killing at will all whom it crosses, for the natives have never known the need of defense. Only after many a creeping and carnage, a slashing and slaying, a cleaving off of limb by its razor-sharp claws, do the besieged become well enough steeped in the pain rendering ever unlearned lessons lost, offered in vain.

Their most clever of craftsmen fashions the first spear of the land, and their fire-starters light torches, tying them to pillar and tree. But when the beast grows less bold, driven oft away and fearing to strike by day, it begins to stalk at night, making off with the babes, and any women foolishly wandering alone. And the natives curse the beast, decrying it the scourge of absolute evil, for without cause has it killed their once universal happiness. In fierce determination are deadlier weapons fashioned, the first forges invented from readings of eastern scrolls, ore smelted for the purpose of iron readily piercing all flesh. A corps of guardsmen is commissioned, and equipped with the new armament. Massive trees, once untouched, are fallen for the erection of great walls, upon which ramparts are made for the new guards to patrol, and tall towers for those of the keenest sight to stand in protection of terrified kin.

And yet still does the beast persist, its burdens seeming unending. It turns its malice toward the gifts granted by the woods, and the freely swimming fare from the rivers, slashing at the vines, tearing at the roots, and gorging on fish for far past fullness, apparently for not but spiting the natives. And the naturally forming flocks to which some of the native gatherers tended, for their task was too easy to call them hunters, the assemblies of wild goats and feral pigs, these does the beast now decimate, gutting without eating, driving the survivors far away from the dismayed cullers, most of whom now stay within the rising walls for fear of losing their own lives. Thus, the natives begin to know hunger for the first time, and to birth far fewer offspring, and to concern themselves with their usefulness. They despair over the sour sense of starvation, vexed by the newfound notion of the impossibility of procurement.

Daily bitten by the teeth of terror, their scribes call for new apprentices, and they pour over the foreign writings once read by but the few, those once considered fools for their pondering, with so much pleasure to be had. A sketch of a projectile weapon is unleafed, and the once alien ludicrousness becomes the basis for the first bow and arrow known by the natives, so as to train the first hunters to shoot the fast fleeting game, and to beat the beast back from afar. And the larger dogs are bred into packs, and trained for ferocity and vociferousness, and forced to roam the diminished surroundings so as to keep the beast from killing what game may remain, and to call out the warning of its approach. And with the apprentices now numerous, lending manifold hands for the search of any and all salvation, one of the elders is given the chance to return to an old experiment, recalling the accidental renewing of a plant by burying it following its season of growth and fruition. By his once foolish works the natives soon know of agriculture, and within the walls enough is bore so as to stave off the starvation of most.

Then something happens which none, not even the elders, have ever known. An unseasonal, persisting cold and dryness befalls the land, and the forest and the hills, already ravaged by the beast, lose the last of their power to bequeath the sustenance of life, and become brown and barren. Many perish in the turning of the climate, and yet the agricultural efforts are doubled, and most survive. And the sightings of the beast become infrequent, and soon the beast is believed to have died or fled for want of prey. Yet still does the corps stand guard both night and day, and are the walls heightened and reinforced, and are the weapons kept sharp and at the ready, and are the arrows produced by the once languorous, now determined to be industrious, and are the leaning dogs kept to roam the beleaguered countryside as sentinels, for the natives have lost too many to ever again be naïve of need for defense.

That’s when they come. The horde of hordes, the black-bearded, unkept, scarred and muscle-bound barbarians of the mountains. The dogs spot them first, and howl their warnings from near a mile away, permitting the natives the time to take up their arms, and see to their defenses. And where once the barbarians would have cut through them with ease like the scythe to dead stalks of grain, and would have easily extinguished all of native blood, here they meet a force of resistance they’ve never known. Nearing the fortifications they’re repulsed by arrows from on high, and by spears launched through slits in the walls, and bewildered by loud blasts from horns fashioned to warn of the beast, beaten back by the leaner and meaner villagers, freed of fat, unburdened of their blithe. And though many natives perish in the fray, for the barbarians are battle-tested brutes, and though the once berried woods burn in the background, yet the natives know triumph, driving the horde’s remnants back into the mountains.

They congratulate one another on the wisdom of their defense, and on the prudence of the gardens growing within their walls that saw them through the scarcity, the now fruitless forest choking with ash. While many days’ journey away, in a land none of the natives have known, but which is native to the beast itself, does the beast dwell in its rough den once more, licking its wounds in the cave beside the river, and wondering at the ways of its maker, at the purpose for which it was provoked to stalk and ravage and be so beastly so far from its home. There does the beast beseech its glowing, aching heart, and, looking up into the sky emblazoned with the scarlet and orange of the setting sun, softly it growls:

“I did what you demanded of me, thou great, brutal, beautiful beast of the forever beyond.”