A Tale Without a Name by Penelope S. Delta Page B

prospered here. Many were the young men and the families who owed their livelihood to the State mines and quarries. You could see them going down the pits every day, like armies of ants, extracting the stones, andas many more would be busy in the workshops, where they would separate the ore from the rock. I was then managing one hundred hard-working craftsmen, we earned our bread lavishly, and there wasn’t a soul left without his beef stew or his roast chicken on a Sunday. Those days are gone and vanished, never to return!” said Miserlix with a sigh.
    “And why couldn’t the good days come back, I wonder?” said the Prince eagerly. “Why might not the work begin anew, with miners extracting iron, so you could make again arrow tips and spearheads?”
    Miserlix smiled.
    “And who would be paying for all the hard-toiling labourers? The King is up to his ears in debt. He does not even have food to eat.”
    The Prince bowed his head at this, heavy as lead with dark sadness. He needed florins! Where
could
he find florins?
    He remembered the lost treasure, and his heart felt quashed, strangled by an iron grip. He rose to take his leave of Miserlix and his daughter.
    “Come,” he said to Little Irene. “Let us go to the schoolmaster straight away.” But they had no time to go to his house, for they met him on their way.
    “Good greetings to you, my children,” said the schoolmaster, recognizing the two siblings. “Where are you going?”
    “I was coming to find you,” said the Prince. “I have a favour to ask, and I was heading towards your house.”
    “What a pity!” said the schoolmaster. “I was just now going to town, to see my brother who lives there. Could you perhaps explain while we walk?”
    “Why not? I too must go back to the capital with my sister, so we can talk on the way there. I have a proposition for you. I want to learn how to read and write. Will you teach me?”
    “Well done! But how much will you pay me? You know I am a poor man. I cannot teach for nothing—”
    “I have no money to give you, nor anything else of value,” interrupted the Prince, “but I propose the following arrangement. You only have some wild greens to live on, which the children cultivate on your behalf—”
    “Not wild greens, just tubers,” interrupted the schoolmaster. “I grow nothing but carrots, onions and the like now, plants whose yield cannot be seen. Otherwise, all is stolen from me.”
    “Well then. What I propose is to bring you a fowl or a hare or a rabbit or any other game I might kill for every lesson you give me. Do you accept?”
    “Do I? And how!” said the schoolmaster, overjoyed. “So many years has it been since I last ate meat that I have near forgotten what it tastes like.”
    They were walking through the woods.
    The schoolmaster took a thick dry branch, cut it and trimmed it into small squares, and scratched on each a letter of the alphabet. Then he sat down at the root of a tree, and spread them before him.
    “Come,” he said, “and I shall first teach you the letters and the sounds.”
    The schoolmaster had good patience, and the students were eager and keen to learn. And so, when the sun set, the three of them were still sitting beneath the tree, shuffling the wooden squares and sorting them out again, to form syllables and words.
    “This is good,” said the schoolmaster. “If we always work as well as we did today, you shall learn even more things than I know myself. Soon I shall give you books too, so you may read on you own.”
    They took again the way to the capital. As they walked, they talked of many things.
    “Had you passed this way during the days of Prudentius I, it would have seemed to you that the entire land was one great, busy factory,” said the schoolmaster.
    “What did everyone do then?” asked the Prince.
    “They built ships,” answered the schoolmaster. “And the master builder was my brother. They felled the trees, and carried them down to the