As promised to the players in my game:
The Last Testament of Krizlop Prekreme
If you are reading this it means one of two things—either I am dead or I have been forced into hiding by the tiny minds, stunted intellects and anile sensibilities of my "fellow" men.
The Beginning
When first I was given to the Order of The Blessed Sannabis Kativa, I had no choice. I have come to learn that my parents were simple farmers with too many mouths and too little porridge to feed them all. Brother Garlann told me when I was young that my father had put one over on the Order when they came through my village when I was a lad.
It seems that the custom then was that the Order would progress through the Duchy every third year seeking out candidates for the Order as they tested all the boys aged five, six or seven. Boys that did well on the tests were declared to be "Beloved of Kativa", whereupon the good Kativans would seek out the parents of the hapless boy and essentially buy him. They didn't call it that, of course. They "inducted" him into the Order while at the same time assuring the parents that they were "blessed" by having created and raised him, and pounded into them how "lucky" they were to be losing a son to such a noble calling. Ancient custom held that they then gifted the parents with one half of the child's weight in silver. The luckless (or lucky, depending on the pecuniary plight of the parents) gamin was given ten days in which to say his goodbyes before another Brother would be by to pick him up in a wagon for the long journey to the Temple.
Social convention held that the honor of being recognized as "Beloved of Kativa" was so great, and reflected so highly on the family that the accepting of, and keeping, the silver was "just not done". Apparently no one thought to tell my parents, newly arrived in the Duchy not four months before the good Brothers arrived and never even having heard about some deity called Kativa, that there were certain expectations of a family so "honored". So, in the ten day farewell period, my father went out and bought a tidy cottage with a few acres of apple trees and a large sounder of semi-feral swine that he planned to fatten on the acorn mast in the nearby forest, take to market the next spring and therefore ensure his family's survival for years to come.
When the enormous coach of the Order rolled into his village ten days later pulled by a team of eight superb horses the likes of which the locals had seldom seen, I was resigned to my fate and determined to make the most of it. To say it did not start out as well as one might wish would be a tragic understatement. Brother Duroc, a very corpulent Kativan with little piggish eyes, had the temper of the swine he specialized in. My parents were also apparently unaware that local custom not only decreed that the "sale-price" be returned, intact, but that they were also expected to provide a large hamper of food to accompany the "chosen one". When the perspiring porcine practitioner pulled into the village square he was less than pleased to find me and my Mum standing near the village well, sans hamper and sans silver. After an hour of waiting while I fetched my father from the woods where he was driving his new sounder with the help of Claude, our hitherto useless dog, it took another hour to convince the morose monk that no one had told them of the "prevailing customs" and that they had been very new to the area when I had been selected. My father volunteered that it wouldn't take more than half a day to round up all the pigs if the good brother wished to have them back, but he wasn't sure how long it would take to find a buyer for the cottage, and after much more such hemming and hawing, as well as questioning what kind of religion "pretended" to give gifts, he finally drove Duroc to capitulate. And so, I became a Novice in the Blessed Order of Kativa, I was on scant rations until we reached the Chapter House, and my father went on to become the pork impresario of the Duchy. I'm not sure which of us ended up happier
The Novitiate
The mission of the Order of Kativa is the welfare and husbandry of animals. Their guiding ethos is "A happy, healthy animal tastes better." It seems that The Blessed One was prone to converse with wildlife while he was alive. This is a remarkably handy skill when it enables one to ask the cow what hurts. His copious notes, 111 volumes in all, recorded every treatment he ever performed, every symptom he ever observed and every efficacious anodyne or roborant he ever concocted. He also left notes on which of these could be safely administered to humans.
I soon found out why the Order liked to get their aspirants so young; it was positively horrifying when I learned where I was supposed to stick my arm in certain circumstances. The only time a Brother ever struck me was when I absolutely refused, the first time I was so instructed, to stick my arm up the birth canal of a horse that had been trying to foal for the better part of a day. Brother Roan dealt me such a buffet that I did exactly as I was told, and the Brave Sir Robin's prize destrier was delivered of an iron-grey colt of surpassing form and grace.
I soon found myself attached to an arm inside a cow's rectum, clearing a constipation problem, down the throat of a dead ox to fetch out the wolf-snare it had inexplicably eaten thus sealing its doom when the
foul device opened and lodged in its throat. Further joys such as poking a straw up a duck's nether orifice to determine sex was not too messy, just insufferably noisy as the ducks protested the indignity of it all. Determining the sex of baby chickens was quite easy and I seemed to have a knack for that. I also developed a very youthful interest in the potions, tinctures, distillations, poultices and tisanes that the order prepared to use in treatment.
Tending to pets was one of the better aspects of my novitiate. A wealthy household would own a prized hunting dog and insist that a member of the order be on hand for the whelping. Younger initiates got the task after they had reached a certain age and shown at least some small craft. If it meant a day or two staying in the servant's quarters or barn of some fine house and being fed while there, well, that was a blessing. Almost any house you would find yourself in ate better that we did.
Somewhere in one of those 111 volumes written by our Beloved Founder, he briefly touched on food and in so doing doomed the palate of every future member.
"The sole purpose of food is to nourish our body so that we might endeavor to care for our animal brethren. It need not be special or unordinary, merely sufficient."
It was in answering the call sent out from one of the Houses (reputed for the skills of its kitchen) for a "dog boy", that I came to recognize the dog as the noblest of all the "lesser" creatures, and discovered what truly inspired cooking could do to common ingredients.
The Dowager Countess had one of the finest staghound bitches in the whole kingdom, as fierce and ferocious as any male of the breed. The Dowager was not at all happy to find the bitch pregnant, having kept all possible sires at bay, or so she had thought. As she came near her time to whelp she grew larger and larger, causing the family to think she was carrying a prodigious litter and send to the Chapter House. I was selected to make the overnight trip, and told I might be away for a sennight, or possibly s long as a fortnight. I could not believe my luck, nor could I realize what a tidal shift the experience would cause in my own philosophies.
After laboring to divest herself of the offspring for over 8 hours before I got there, I determined that she was carrying but one monstrous pup, and that pup was determined to enter the world backwards. Much maneuvering and several hours later the bitch finally dropped her pup: a monstrous male that showed every indication of having been sired by an Oyrish Wolfhound, the largest and most fearsome member of the canine family, and the only breed even possibly capable of jumping the enclosure. The bitch, whose name was Griselda, seemed to recognize what I had done for her and seemed absolutely devoted to her pup and to me. When I attempted to leave two days later, a page from the castle caught up with me less than two hours after I had set out and insisted that I must return forthwith as Griselda had set up a fearsome din and seemed a bit crazed. She immediately calmed upon my return and the Dowager Countess insisted that I stay until the dog was ready to be separated from me. Such was the respect the Dowager commanded that the Chapter House sent back word that I was to stay until she deemed it wise for me to return. Those began seven of the most interesting weeks of my life.
I physicked all of the animals during my sojourn there, but still had much time on my hands. As it was getting into early winter, the warmest and most inviting place in her household was in the massive kitchens. The Dowager employed an entire staff of nothing but the very finest cooks. None of these worthies was ever loathe to answer my questions nor unwilling to show me their secrets. Until that time, I never knew food could be so good.
While I spent time with each of the cooks, the one I found most willing to share a lifetime of secrets was Tassel, the pastry cook. She shared a lifetime of secrets with me, as well as the techniques I learned to use in my own cooking of pastries. She taught me that a dish need not be made of expensive or exotic ingredients to be ambrosial. Her culinary magic culminated in one of the simplest foods: fired dough. Fritters, johnnycake, spear cakes (a field expedient used by armies in the field for centuries), confections—all were delightful when prepared by her. It was Tassel that showed me how to tie knots in the dough before frying.
Shortly after my idyll there ended and I had returned to the Chapter House, lightning struck the thatched roof of the chapel and set it alight. In the ensuing efforts to fight the fire, Brothers Isaak and Leon were burned and unable to perform their kitchen duties. The Abbot was puzzled when I immediately volunteered to replace one of them but acquiesced.
There then ensued six weeks that changed the Chapter House. I started slowly, with just a little seasoning in the morning gruel. Within the week I was introducing some of the dishes that I had learned from the cooks of the Dowager Countess. During the first month in the kitchens, the Abbot was gone on pilgrimage and the Adjunct Abbot was quite pleased with the improved cuisine. I even started introducing fried dough in various forms.
When the Abbot returned early, he came into a meal that I was quite proud of but quite horrified the old monk. He immediately quoted the Blessed Kativa; "The sole purpose of food is to nourish our body so that we might endeavor to care for our animal brethren. It need not be special or unordinary, merely sufficient." Some of the older brothers made the argument that the quote did not forbid good food, but were overruled by the anile abbot. I was sent to the sheepfolds high in the hills, where I labored for the next four years. At least we ate well; no one there shared the sainted Abbot's philosophy about food.
At the end of that four year penance, it was decided that the Order needed to expand. The Order had been offered an old but quite serviceable castle high in the Hellgate Mountains.
The deed came with one stipulation; as the prospective chapter house lay squarely on the border between the ancestral holdings of the Griichi and the Usukro clans, who had been conducting a blood feud for some 46 years stemming from the time that Gump Griichi sneezed at the wedding of the Usukro shaman's very ugly daughter. The Usukro became so enraged by this breach of social etiquette that they promptly disemboweled poor Gump and four of his kin too slow to escape the outraged wedding party. They have been stealing each other's livestock, burning each other's crops and gleefully kidnapping or slaughtering any members of the rival clan whenever they could ever since. The Hellgate House, as it was to be called, lay squarely athwart the only feasible rout connecting the two swathes of tribal lands; it was their charge to try to diplomatically keep and enforce the peace.
The senior members of the new hierarchy had been selected; it was now up to them to fill out their small band of pioneers. Despite my tender age of 15, the brothers wanted me to be part of that select group and be their cook. I leapt at the chance.
I was free to cook to my heart's content and became a specialist in dogs. It was during this time that I perfected my knotted fried dough, which became fairly well known to travelers and neighbors alike. We soon discovered that we could provide lodging and meals to travelers for a "donation" and soon were turning away would-be gourmands while filling the coffers of Hellgate House.
Shortly before I was elected Abbot by my brethren, a singular traveler appeared at our door one day who would have a profound effect upon the House as well as the rest of my life. His name was Solstag, and he was an extraordinary posologist and distiller. And let's not forget very persuasive and smooth.
His philters and potions were found to be most efficacious in treating both animals and people and soon we had a steady stream of people from both sides seeking treatment. Our coffers overflowed from the donations from the cured. It was much later that I discovered that the common ingredient in a great many of his nostrums was uisghe, a potent distillation from rye grain that he had learned from an old Kelt shaman.
Brother Solstag's greatest creation was his Shepherd Tea, as he called it. He later related to me how he had heard of the marvelous beans. It seems that a shepherd observed his sheep eating the beans off of a new shrub in the high alpine pasture of the Khufeen Mountains to the south. The sheep were friskier, jumping and gamboling about like lambs. Collecting some of the beans, he added them to the shepherd stew omnipresent in ovine operations. While the flavor was none too exciting, the restorative effect of the beans was quite marked. By trial and error and much experimentation it became known that if the beans were roasted over a fire and then ground up, one could make a wonderful "tea" that had all of the energizing qualities. No one knew about the addictive qualities until much later.
About this same time, Solstag gave me a clear decoction that he said would help preserve my fried dough for up to two weeks if I added it into the glaze I had developed for them. At the time, I had no idea of the other properties of the decoction, and it did just what he said it would; it preserved my pastries.
There came a time when we simply had too many brethren at Hellgate House. It was Solstag who came up with the idea of a new type of brother that went among the people wherever he found need of his skills. It was decided that they would be known as Itinerants. When the call for volunteers failed to elicit results, the other properties of his glaze preservative were called upon.
About this time I was stricken with a recurring illness that laid me low for days on end for the next year or more. (I now suspect that Solstag was dosing me with a substance that debilitated me.) During that time that I floated in and out of reality he was feeding me suggestions of behavior that I apparently complied with; it is all very hazy. He also came up with the scheme that eventually nearly emptied Hellgate House.
As I pieced together the facts later, I came to believe that whatever he was supplying me with for my glaze had more properties than simple preservation; ingesting large amounts made the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. He came up with a regimen of sleep deprivation, large volumes of his Tea and generous helpings of my fried knots, coupled with a vision of Eternal Torment which proved to be a complete illusion. The newly minted Itinerant was subjected to the suborning process, given enough flasks of his Tea to last up to two weeks, a similar supply of my fired dough and pointed in a random direction with the charge to go out into the world and make animals taste better. They would stagger out, eyes glazed and muttering to themselves as the Tea and the glaze did their work. Until their supplies of tea and fried dough were consumed, they often remained in this condition. It was this artificially induced state that soon earned them the somewhat derisive nickname of The Guild of Itinerant, Crazed Clerics. It was later that I learned that he had been planting suggestions in their unconscious minds to respond to a code that he would send them to go on a killing rampage.
I have no idea where the dogmen and mandogs came from; they were simply here when I awoke from one of my lengthy spells of incapacitation.
When I began to comprehend what was going on, I knew I would be blamed and disgraced. When I confronted him about it all, his oily tongue worked hard to convince me otherwise. I remained unswayed.
If you would seek out Brother Solstag, I suggest you search the Dog Run; carefully examine each pile of excrement and you will probably find several containing bits and pieces of the late brother. It seems he went to the privy and the dogs ate him.
