Chapter 59: The Place of Discarded Things
It was a litany of power, a string of titles so long and convoluted it was no wonder a boy like Jared, whose world was the gutter, couldn't be expected to remember it. To him, it was just the noise of distant masters. But for me, it was a treasure trove of clues. The Iberian Peninsula—that was the name of the landmass that had been Spain and Portugal in my old world. And Castile… that name, too, sparked a memory. The Kingdom of Castile, the precursor to the nation of Spain. But as far as I knew, there had never been an "Iberian Empire." Spain, even at the height of its power, had been a kingdom, ruled by kings, not emperors. So that was it. Not another time, but another place entirely. A parallel world. A cracked mirror of my own, where the geography was familiar, but the history, the technology, the very laws of physics, had fractured and re-formed into something new, strange, and terrifying.
“Do you know the names of any other kingdoms? Or empires?” I asked Jared, trying to piece together a map of this new world in my mind, a world that was both intimately familiar and terrifyingly alien.
“Uhm… I think I heard a sailor once talk about the Frankish Empire?” he said, scrunching up his face in concentration. “And the Holy Roman Empire? And… maybe the Kingdom of Portugal? And Morocco?” He dredged up the names from the depths of his limited, overheard knowledge, gems picked from the chatter of the city. The names were familiar. The Frankish Empire was likely France. The Holy Roman Empire, the precursor to Germany. Portugal, to the west of Spain, and Morocco, across the sea in North Africa. The map was taking shape, a twisted reflection of the one I knew. But Jared knew only the names, nothing more. The real information, the details, the context, it was all there on the notice board, printed in plain sight for anyone to see. But to me, an educated man from another century, the strange, spidery script was as indecipherable as the runes on the witch's torture device. The irony was a bitter, choking pill.
“Ah! I have an idea!” Jared suddenly exclaimed, his eyes lighting up as if he'd just remembered a hidden treasure. He grabbed my hand and pulled me along.
“Wait, slow down! I don’t have any shoes!” I cried, stumbling on the rough, uneven cobblestones, each sharp stone a fresh agony. He led me to the city's unofficial graveyard. Not for people, but for things. A vast, sprawling dumping ground for the broken, the obsolete, and the merely forgotten. It wasn't a place for household refuse, not the stinking, rotting garbage of the slums. This was a place for things that had once been useful but were now broken, worn out, or simply unwanted. The air was thick with the smell of dust, rust, and decay, and scavengers, bent and ragged, picked through the mountains of junk, looking for anything that could be repaired, reused, or sold to a rag-and-bone man for a few coppers.
“This is the old dumping ground, isn't it?” I asked, a flicker of Parula's memory surfacing, a ghost of a memory of spending long, hungry hours here. She had sifted through the refuse for anything of value for MacDuff.
“That’s right,” Jared said, a nostalgic glint in his eye. “We used to come here all the time, remember? What I want to show you is over there.” He pointed, and I saw it. A mountain range of paper. It was a sea of discarded newspapers, old books, and cheap, lurid penny dreadfuls, their pages yellowed and curling at the edges, piled high in a sprawling, chaotic heap. Paper, in any form, was a valuable commodity in this city. Many of the scavengers were here for it. But unlike the other junk heaps, where they would carefully pick and choose, here they would simply grab a thick stack and be on their way. Whether for cleaning oneself, for scrubbing a pot, or for starting a fire, paper was always useful. It was the one luxury the poor could afford to burn.
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