on princely pursuit

“Oh how he pines for me, my Eastern prince,” wrote princess Yahuala in her diary, of which but few pages remain intact. She is referring to Chagatai Khan, son of Genghis Khan, whom she and some of her handmaidens had discovered, bested, and captured. “Always sending gifts this way,” she continues, ”tiny songbirds chirping happily in intricate cages or curious beasts with tails at both front and rear, many of them not surviving the journey up and over the Krukuv pass. Against my better judgement, I keep them, and secretly cherish each one, hoping for his return and pining for the day when his fierce eyes will flash at me and his strong hands will spread me open once more.” On this public forum, the Grigovian Genealogical Society for Discovery and Exploration is loathe to post the rest of the excerpts, but suffice it to say that young Chagatai was quite skilled in the sexual arts and would soon return to cement the bonds between the Mongolian Empire and that of the Yündlennd royal family with a basket full of young cheetahs, a formal Entreaty to Marriage, and fertile loins.

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

reunion bears fruit

During the course of the 2013 Rovend-Yest family reunion, Grigovia's erstwhile representative at the United Nations Erya Rovend discovered that she is not only a princess of the Krukuv line but also descendent of Gengis Khan himself, through one of his sons. In the 12th Century, the younger Khan had fought against and became enthralled by the leader of a band of ferocious teenage girls. The girls, who at the time were out healing edible herbs for a nice bath, had come upon the prince and a detachment of his men while the men were trying to circumvent the upper defenses of Krukuv pass by scaling a rock face. The princess split her redolent entourage, sending a few handmaidens hurrying down to a spot below the invading group while pelting the scaling party with sharp and pointy rocks. After capturing Chagatai Khan, the young lady escorted him back to her father's battlements. Chagatai then sued for peace with the Grigovian people and asked for the hand of princess Yahuala in marriage, claiming, according to the historical record, that “she was the most beautiful and ferocious person he had ever met, a bride fit for the Ruler of the World.”

mentiri factorem fecit – 場黑麥

the young stranger

(Grigovian fairy tales 4)

It was the Week of the Lit Windows. As was their custom, the townspeople had placed candles in the windows that faced the road and gone to bed with their doors unlocked. Unlike the year before, however, winter had arrived early, furious blizzards piling the snowbanks high and keeping everyone but the most hardy inside. All hoped that someone would bring a change in the monotony, that a visitor would arrive to enliven the dark and dismal evenings.

Sure enough, one evening, a strange young man burst through the door to the Kiergoyast household. He stamped the snow off of his boots and leaned his wood-framed pack against the wall in the small foyer, where it dripped onto the polished floor. Iyoan Kiergoyast and his wife, Baruwvel, showed the stranger to his quarters and invited him to dinner. They pulled out his chair for him, the place of honor at the far end of the table, next to the youngest children. The young man told tales of crossing the high mountain passes and fleeing bandits in the sun-drenched valleys of far Hinntia, which, he claimed, lay many weeks' journey to the south, and to the east. After dinner, he shared a pipe of fine czabtyip with Iyoan and told the children stories of magnificent foreign beasts before he excused himself and went to bed, falling asleep promptly. No one heard or saw the young man leave, but the next morning, to their delight, the children found small carvings of strange animals sitting in their wooden eating dishes. The eldest girl, however, a maiden of 16 years named Opol, said she had awoken in the middle of the night to find the strange young man standing in the foyer, dressed only in his underthings and leaning mightily against the door whilst holding a knife in his hand. She claimed that his eyes had flashed with an unusual inner light and that he seemed convinced something was trying to come through the door, although she had heard nothing but his frantic panting.

Some months later, during the Festival of Life's Reawakening, a neighboring family told a similar story. A strange young man had come to their house near the end of the Week of Lit Windows; he had carried a traveling pack of unusual construction; he had given the children small wooden figurines; and he had roamed throughout the house, late at night, with a knife in his hands, although he had not brought to anyone harm, nor had he violated either of their beautiful young daughters. The village seer, an white-haired old woman named Uulanthia, said she'd had a dream in which the young man revealed himself to be the long-lost son of Queen Pylta Pyltandyennd, and that his nightly vigilance had paid off when he thwarted a group of prince-killers, who had been indeed following him, by waiting for them into the wee hours of the morning and dispatching them with swift thrusts of his blade as they came through the door.

mentiri factorem fecit © 場黑麥