Gregor The Cripple

There was a face on the tree. A big one, with eyes and a nose and a mouth. Though it didn't seem to be a living face, not in the way that most things with faces can be called living, but neither could it reasonably be called dead. It bore too many of the artefacts of a lived life.

Wrinkles, asymmetries, droopy bits, moles, pockmarks. It was like a person turned to wood – though that was quite unlikely, being that the rest of the tree looked like a tree and not a person. And no extremity of brilliant skill could have carved the face, because all of the wood still had a thick layer of bark.

It was as if the tree had simply grown a face, like that was a perfectly natural way for a tree to behave.

As far as Mildred knew, that was not the case, which meant that some strange magical nonsense must be afoot.

It was however the case that Gregor, who served as her barometer for oddity, made only an interested hmm at the sight of the thing, then nudged his horse onward. She thus judged that it was only regularly abnormal, which wasn't very abnormal at all as far as she was concerned – and certainly not abnormal enough to waste effort on worry, because Mildred had by now seen things that were far stranger, and Gregor's presence had turned them all eventually benign.

This thing, odd as it was, could not compare.

Continuing on, they found the trail steadily becoming something that looked just well-enough travelled that it must receive some form of regular use, and so it was no great surprise that they soon rode into view of a little woodland dwelling, snug in the lap of two large swelling mounds that rose up from the otherwise gentle swell and sink of the woodland.

It had walls of stacked stones and a roof of sod that stretched contiguous between the mounds, such that vegetation was free to grow across the top. Ivy particularly had found a home atop the home, and draped down leafy and lush over the lichen-crusted walls.

Low shrubs and little trees had obviously been cleared from the immediate proximity of the dwelling, and a shockingly nice wooden table and chairs had been set beneath a large break in the canopy, seeming by marks on the ground to be often dragged through the leaf-litter in pursuit of the light from above.

Though appearances might indicate the abandonment of this hut-in-a-hollow, a little old man sat painting at that nice table. The strange subject of his art being a wheelbarrow not too far away, posed with a few logs and branches that were arranged just-so.

Like him, it was very old, though it lacked his long grey beard and scruffy clothes and proved upon close inspection to also lack a face. He had a face, and it was wrinkled and wise, though it was notably not the same face as the face on the tree.

Despite the old man very probably not expecting the company of a wizard, or of anyone at all, he did not seem to see the intruders as objects of overmuch interest. He simply flicked his age-yellowed eyes between them, then offered a belated nod in greeting and returned to his work, unperturbed.

Mildred looked to Gregor, and Gregor shrugged, so she shrugged herself and decided to break the silence. "Um, hello. Good morning," she offered, tentatively certain that she'd done well with the accent, but much less certain that it was actually still morning.

He looked back, squinting and making one of those excessively curmudgeonly hmming sounds common to the otherwise-occupied elderly.

"Who're you?" He asked slowly, pronouncing the words with a particular weighty attention. "Not poachers, I think."

"Uh… no. Not poachers."

"Usually-" he coughed twice, "-my visitors are poachers. At this time of week, at least. If you're not poachers, are you lovers, perhaps? Freshly eloped and hoping to find some spot of wooded seclusion? 'Been a few of those, lately. This spot's taken. It's all mine, I'm afraid. You'll need to find another."

This gave Mildred pause. Did people… see them like that? They might. It wasn't impossible. It wasn't… unreasonable… she didn't think. Though, it wasn't something she'd really ever thought about… That is – she'd never thought about the small matter of how other people might see their arrangement. "Um…"

After pausing for just long enough for it to feel awkward, she hastened to speak, and found that her command of the language was rapidly declining. "Poachers come to these woods to poach, do they? Must be a good place to, um, hunt... animals." She finished, crashing and burning. Contrary to Gregor's assertion, languages are hard.

Halting his painting, the elder set down his brush to stroke his beard.

"As it happens, this is a good place to hunt animals. Unfortunately, hunting cannot be done here. This is a private estate, you see, and the landlord does not permit free hunting, meaning that all the people who hunt in these woods anyway are not actually hunters. They are in fact poachers, though they do nothing materially different from hunters. Thankfully for them, the landlord's prohibition of hunting does not seem to prevent poaching, which makes it a rather good place to poach."

Mildred blinked. "If there's a landlord, does that make you a squatter?"

The man began again to paint as the pair trotted across the clearing, happening to stop nearish behind his wonderfully interesting wheelbarrow.

"I am a garden hermit, which means I'm permitted to be in the garden, which might as well be where we currently are, though I do nothing materially different from someone who squats."

"What?"

"I am an item of fashion, foreign girl. Strangely, poachers never became nearly so fashionable as we squatters."

"Um, Gregor," Mildred whispered to her side, "he's starting to sound like you when you get a little mad, and I don't think I'm linguistically competent enough to follow along."

"At some point," the hermit continued, "it began to seem appealing to have a font of wisdom on hand to tap, and thus wealthy men of a mind to care for social fashion began to hire wiser and older men than themselves to live as hermits on their estates, so that our wisdom could be consulted as necessary. Or at least, so that they could enjoy the idea of having easy access to our wisdom, as well as the very popular aesthetic of being so cultured as to want it."

"Very aristocratic," Gregor remarked, taking the reigns of the interaction. "I seem to recall aristocracy falling from local fashion."

"Do not be surprised, young wizard. Your people may have been overthrown, but the trends of the wealthy are all generally similar, and the revolution made many wealthy men."

"They are not my people, old druid. They would have been impossible to overthrow if they were like me, so they cannot be mine."

"Consider," the hermit croaked, "that they likely would have thought the same."

Mildred, sensing that diplomacy might have become necessary, interjected with as topical a thing as she could muster, "Oh! You know, my aunt had a man who lived in her garden."

Thankfully, if Gregor's murderous inclinations were aroused by the (supposedly) wise old druid's words, he did not act upon them. "The gardener, perhaps?" He quipped.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Maybe, but he looked very wise."

"The elderly have an unfair predisposition to looking wise."

"Some of us earn it."

"Some, probably," Gregor shrugged, and tugged his horse to turn in the direction of departure. "We must be going. With you being a pet of the landlord, I assume that this path leads very usefully to his manor?"

It did, and they departed – though not completely. An artefact of their presence remained as an indelible mark upon the hermit's painting.

He hadn't had the time to sketch the pair perfectly, but his memory was good enough, and soon after they were gone, two enigmatic figures still sat mounted a small distance behind the wheelbarrow. He proceeded to decorate them with little strokes of paint.

In the years to come, 'Les Touristes' would be sold at auction by the estate's landlord, purchased for exhibit by a gallery in the capital, where it would gain a small measure of notoriety for both the quality and rare subject of its composition, being that wizards are usually solitary beasts and are very rarely depicted in calm contexts. Once the figures in the painting were connected to their real-life counterparts, however, it became an object of very significant historical value.

***

"I enjoyed him." Gregor announced after departure, ignorant of his new artistic legacy. "The idea of him."

Glancing away from the path ahead, Mildred delivered a distinctly incredulous "Oh?" Followed by "Are you sure? It isn't like you to like things, you know."

"I see why your aunt kept one."

"Old men are not pets."

"In this case, they're fairly similar."

"They really are not."

"That old man's owner," the wizard gestured, pointing to their rear, "houses him, feeds him, and keeps him nearby as a ready source of amusement, which is exactly the arrangement of a pet. Generously, you could perhaps liken him to a working dog, if you see the wisdom that he provides as being a function of his servitude. That man is a human pet, and I should like one of my own."

Sometimes, the words that came out of Gregor's mouth were very frightening to Mildred, not because they were violent or disgusting or disturbing or insane, or otherwise frightening in any other conventional sense, but because he had a strange way of making his ideas seem sober and well-reasoned despite possessing those qualities.

"When I eventually have a tower again, I think I'll keep one. Maybe two. I might even breed them, and have them compete in competitions of wisdom. That would be a good sport, I think."

"Gregor, I will never forgive you if you start breeding hermits."

"They'll turn out fairly well, I'm sure."

"At the risk of implying that laws might actually affect you, I respectfully submit that perhaps there is a good reason for something like that to be illegal."

"Laws can affect me, it's just that they don't."

"Really?" Mildred asked, somewhat more incredulous at this statement than all those previous. Not because she questioned whether or not laws could affect Gregor, but rather, she questioned the far more shocking reality of him accepting that they could.

"It's just a matter of the base nature of laws – they categorically do not exist as anything other than theory if they are successfully ignored. Thus, the base requirement for the existence of law is a local monopoly over force, such that people can be coerced into following them. Laws do not affect me because my presence necessarily disrupts any such monopoly. However, this is not to say that such a monopoly is impossible in my presence."

Mildred responded with a furrowed brow and pursed lips, "Yes it is. That is almost exactly what you just said."

"Clever Mildred, consider your earlier statement. You said you'd would never forgive me if I started breeding hermits. I do not want that to happen, thus, I must never begin to breed old men. By offering this social consequence, you have essentially negotiated me into agreeing to not disrupt the monopoly. In this same way, your aunt's laws will probably affect me, because excessive infringement there will certainly bring me into conflict with her, being that she is the ultimate avatar of force in her land, and conflict with your aunt will sour my relationship with you, so I will strive to avoid it. Through compulsion of this nature, laws can affect me if I want to let them, which I presently do."

"This," he continued, "is a softer kind of force than the threat of violence that supports most legal systems, but it is still force, and it still works in this context upon the same fundamental mechanism as violence – it is the presentation of a consequence, the avoidance of which necessitates capitulation and the adoption of specific behaviour. This is the essence of all law, and the bedrock of civilisation."

Though Mildred knew that Gregor was in fact using the narrow context of their relationship as a rhetorical foot-in-the-door to explain (for whatever reason) the broader totality of legalism and the mechanics of civil compliance; and even though she was intellectually capable of extrapolating the trajectory of that metaphor beyond his strange words about force and monopolies, she was instead caught up in their more immediate implication.

"You mean…" she began, suddenly becoming quite flustered. "For me… you'd even follow the law?" It was touching, to say the least.

***

Ten minutes was all it took for them to pass from wood to manicured lawn, which was a variety of landscape that Mildred had very rarely encountered. Her aunt had palace gardens, but no palace lawn, and there certainly weren't any lawns on the Shard, so she had only ever seen them briefly when her aunt escorted her from place to place and was obliged to call upon whoever was locally important to secure decent lodgings, being that the Queen does not camp, and that it would be politically awkward (and wasteful) if she visited an inn instead of an acquaintance.

Outside the shelter of the wood, snow fell moderately, dusting Mildred's hair and Gregor's hat and the heads of their horses, and the biting wind numbed their noses and ears and lips, curling fingers up into sleeves and making Mildred draw her coat tight in idle reaction.

She was hardy and mountain-seasoned, and Gregor had his enchanted cloak, so the cold wasn't too much of a bother, but it suggested inexorably the approach of mean weather. No storm could actually be seen, but neither of them counted that as a blessing.

Taking advantage of the opportunity to practice the language some more, Mildred obtained directions from the staff of the grand manse. Overtly, they expressed very little in reaction to the sudden appearance of two very strange people, attempting poorly to conceal their unease at the presence of the wizard and the foreign woman who seemed to be his interpreter. They were cagey, and said only that there was a town ten miles hence and relayed that the railway strike had yet to relent, a fact for which they expressed neither satisfaction nor displeasure.

From this reaction, it occurred to the pair that whoever owned the place was probably some variety of important, and depending on the precise identity and station of this person, their sudden appearance at his home might look rather suspicious. Inconvenience might follow, and so they left rather quickly in the direction of the town called Langres, arriving just in time to catch the evening paper leaving the printhouse.

Reading as they rode, Mildred and Gregor wandered in search of a room for the night.

The front page still bore as its sole fixture the message to Mildred, which perhaps wasn't so surprising, but which nonetheless she found to be a captivating marvel. Flipping through after a period of absorption, she and Gregor found indeed that the strike was still going strong – and apparently, there was quite a measure more afoot than simple class struggle.

As might be expected, the government had been trying very seriously to restart the railways without capitulating to the demands of the mob. As response to their efforts, a prominent voice had risen to cry foul.

It was a known rabble-rousing politician, as claimed the paper, 'through whose seditious acts and words anti-government sentiment has spread amongst the goodly patriots of the nation, as like cancer corrupting a body'. And now, as a direct result, other unions were joining the strike in a growing wave of national paralysis.

Intentionally or not, a movement had started, and they had found their figurehead in one Général Revanche. He must not have been an unfamiliar character to the public at large, because the paper didn't bother explaining who he was meant to be, except to but decry him as a greedy saboteur, which confused Mildred quite a lot.

"A… saboteur?" She mused. "A general who makes… shoes?"

"That is a very impressive misunderstanding."

Mildred unfortunately never received clarification on the matter of her linguistic mishap, because a polite-sounding voice interjected at that point from the side of the road, speaking in a language that was far less troublesome, "Miss Mildred?" Asked the man, though it wasn't really a question. Their heads turned sharply in his direction.

At first glance, he was rugged, with a ratty top hat. His boots were muddy and the leather was scored, and his felt coat was patched and thin at the joints. However, his eyes were sharp and his voice was smooth, and a starched collar and silver cufflinks poked out from beneath cover.

"I am here as a courier, I suppose," he remarked, raising a brow as he looked down at himself. "And I have a letter addressed to you, Miss Mildred, penned by a certain special someone who, I am told, eagerly awaits your reunion."