The conquest

There was once a big forest.

It stood at the edge of fields and pastures, tall and dark like a citadel, so vast that it blocked out a whole section of the horizon. In the shade of the forest stretched fertile plains, and these plains were inhabited by a people whose name history has not preserved. These people cultivated their lands, raised flocks, obeyed customs, loved and died according to the common law. To the north the forest, to the south high mountains separated them almost entirely from the rest of the world. They knew of the neighboring countries only what the rare visits of lost travelers or bold merchants revealed to them, and did not wish to know more, their soil being fertile and sufficient for their needs.

The forest gave them plenty of wood for homes and buildings; the wild beasts which escaped from them came to be caught in their traps and provided them with venison. She thus ensured both their rest and their wealth; yet they avoided ever penetrating further than its edge, where the spaced trunks allowed them to still see behind them their fields and their houses, and its mysterious depths were a source of terror to them.

It so happened that their king died, when his only heir was still a very young boy. The little prince grew up in peace, surrounded by tutors and regents; but his closest friend and his best adviser was a foreigner, come long before from the countries of the South, which extend along the sea. ; but although it was - he admitted it himself - less cheerful and less fertile than the country in the shade of the forest, he spoke of it with so much love that the young prince remained under the spell in it. listening.

It depicted long processions, horsemen, teenagers and young girls, who climbed singing the sacred hills; temples crowned these hills, grandiose and delicate sanctuaries where the statues of the gods and goddesses were sheltered, so beautiful that one guessed them not from vulgar images, but indeed the visible proof of divinity. He also described the long arenas surrounded by bleachers where the young men practiced, the patient labor by which they prepared for the games, and the incessant care which, after long years, earned them the odes of poets, the acclamations of the crowd and the honors of the cities.

The young prince never tired of asking for these tales again, and the stranger could not tire of repeating them, evoking to his eyes the bodies rubbed in oil, twisted in the horror of the struggle or huddled together for relaxation, the crowd waving in the sun, bare feet flying across the sand. He had naturally conceived the desire to repeat these prowess and, as soon as he was sixteen, he began to practice.

He already knew that coarse foods, heavy venison and fermented drinks should be avoided; he also knew the beneficent influence of frequent baths, which keep the skin healthy and relieve fatigue.

He learned to run, to wrestle, to jump, to throw heavy stones away, to leap over walls, to clap with both hands, to train young horses, to swim across rivers. He knew how to pursue half-wild foals through the meadows, how to approach them secretly, surprise them with a leap and hold them by force, tame them by fatigue. He went among the woodcutters who lived on the edge of the forest, and wielded the heavy ax. In the midst of the hunters, he cleared the tracks and followed all day long the lost or injured animals. But he understood above all that each of these exercises was only an unimportant game, one of the means which give perfect balance, and this state of harmonious force which makes one like the gods.

At twenty, the prince was of a splendid beauty. As he rode the plains of his kingdom on horseback, clad only in leather gregues and a fluttering woolen cloak, women and girls watched him pass with bated breath. Equally noble of face and body, in action as at rest, full of grace and measured power, he kept in the midst of effort the unconscious concern for pure attitudes, and the least of his gestures seemed benefits.

When the time came to choose a wife for him, the Stranger roamed the kingdom in all directions, for he had made the young king understand that he had to set aside all distinctions of rank or caste, and not to marry than a young girl who was his equal in beauty. They would thus found a race of mortals who would bring back to earth the grace of the exiled gods. Yet neither among the nobles, nor among the merchants, nor among the laborers could there be found a virgin so blameless.

Full of sadness, the prince thought painfully of his lost beauty. Finally one night, some god allowed him a dream. He saw himself penetrating to the heart of the great forest, and discovering a woman sleeping among the branches, lying on a bed of moss. All graces adorn it. The next day he questioned the woodcutters: they told him that, according to a very old legend, an Enchantress was asleep in the center of the mysterious forest, waiting to be awakened.

Immediately the prince summoned to him the best and most enduring among the hunters and the peasants, among the vagabonds and those who pursue them, among the soldiers trained in long marches and the messengers hardened to fatigue. All were alike, lean and strong, with hollow sides and deep chests, tempered by simple life and hard work, tireless, full of cunning and courage. The prince told them that he charged them to bring back the Enchantress; he promised them money and honours, provided them with provisions and sent them into the forest.

After a year and a day, seven of them returned, emaciated and naked, empty-handed. “Prince,” they said, “the forest is too wild and too big: no man could penetrate to its heart. »

However, that night, the prince dreamed again that he saw the Enchantress, even more beautiful than the first time.

So he brings together in his palace the woodcutters, the blacksmiths and the stonecutters, those who carry heavy burdens, those who handle heavy tools, those who work in quarries or erect the columns of buildings, all those finally who fight with inanimate things. Some of these stood tall and straight as oak trees; others, on the contrary, huddled together short, stocky, and gnarled like willows; but all had broad chests and heavy shoulders, thick loins and muscles, with wrists like bundles of cables. And they were more than a thousand. So he assembled them, gave them axes, and ordered them to carve a road through the forest that would cross it from one side to the other.

They attacked the forest together, working day and night and striking with such force that the clash of their axes on the trunks filled the plains like an incessant rumble of thunder. But the felled trees were growing again behind them, and the grasses and brushwood were growing back as soon as they were destroyed, more numerous and denser, drowning out the road they had begun. At the end of a year and a day it had not advanced a hundred paces.

Disheartened, the prince ordered the work stopped. Then, having dreamed for the third time that he saw the Enchantress, whose charm and radiance no human words could have depicted that night, he went away in secret the next day, without consulting anyone. , and went lost, all alone, in the forest.

He walked for a year and a day, feeding on fruits and roots. Thorns tore his feet; sharp branches wounded him in the face; he suffered alternately from the crushing sun and the icy breeze, thought he was going to die of hunger, thirst and fatigue. Once, leaning over a spring, he saw himself emaciated, ragged with scars, chapped lips, all miserable in short. Despair then knocked him down at the foot of a tree and he wept for a long time, because he felt exhausted. But on the evening of that day, having fulfilled the order of the gods, suffered and labored himself to obtain the one he loved, the only virgin with whom he was to found a divine race - on the evening of that day , he discovered the Enchantress.

I hope you enjoyed this story. I look forward to reading your reactions in the comments.