by Tom Ball.
In my tomb, I wrote, on the linen books and the cave walls, that “I was the Dark King. I was the first King and my people all thought I was the Devil and that the concept of the city and Empire was mad. And everyone toiled for me. And everyone in my Kingdom was hypnotized to adore and serve me. There had been some cross-hypnosis, but I had my spies attend to it. Dear reader I know you are light-hearted and carefree, but I was tyrant of the World’s first city and Empire. None resisted me when I called the men to battle or the women to love me. I spent the days brooding how to get more power and control. And when I decided all the people will be hypnotized, my spies who did it told me they found fear and weakness mostly. And one by one I turned them all into dedicated, crazed citizens of my Empire. But I still had to have my spies themselves hypnotized, which I did myself to make sure that all were loyal including to one another. And I had a dungeon and an oubliette for those who somehow weren’t loyal.
“The Devil was the creator of all this madness. Our city had been founded mainly as a center for beer brewing, the reason for civilization. And the Devil was the true God and Prince of the Mad Afterlife,” I told the people. But many asked me, “Who then created the Devil?” I said, “That’s not for mortals to know!” And many said, “In the past the Devil was a God and there was a God in Heaven.” I discouraged such views of Heaven, by making arrests and executing those who didn’t pray to the Devil/me. I told the people that the afterlife in Hell was cruel and evil and so they should try and stay alive. But many people asked, “How best can they worship me?” I told them to “Use your imagination, doing whatever they could to appease me. For women I liked madness, cleverness and kinky sex, for men I liked loyalty, madness and intelligence and all who appeased me were rewarded with high quality alcohol, goats, salt and sex which made my kingdom go round.”
I renamed the city after myself, Brirrr. We called our city “Brirrr City.” (But it was later in history to be known as Byzantium). But some wanted to call it “Hell city.” So, I permitted it. In my father’s time, the settlement was just a large town with no Empire, but I had greatly expanded our territory and the town became a city.
I was the cleverest human and in my feverish mind I plotted great wars and capturing mostly women and children. And everyone was amazed by palace’s art on linen canvases. I was now in my 25th year of ruling. And was 59.
Dear reader I tell you both men and women were working continually on my palace of wood. It was painted in red and black ochre and had log pillars in the portico. And an angled ceiling which was cut by a hole to let the smoke out. It was full of statues of me, some showing me in my youth, others in old age. Some depicted me angry, others sad and so on. I employed the various artisans of the city to build me this palace. It was a grand building with rooms for each of my 80 women in my harem. And there was a feast hall that could accommodate 1,000 guests and we were making it much bigger. Of course, there was also my throne room and bedroom chambers. The palace also had an art museum with ever more rooms, with pictures of myself in action on linen canvasses. And they were making new ones, every day. And the museum grew.
We lived in heady times. We’d built the World’s first city and it was on a hill, fortified by a wooden fence with pointed tips and there was a parapet for our archers behind the fence. In the first few years of my city’s existence, armed gangs roamed the countryside and when the marauders approached the city a horn was blown, and the farmers fled from their fields to the safety of the city before the gates closed. Then my grand army would march forth and kill these rogue warriors and then find out where they lived so we could take all their women and children and “civilize” them. After I had been in power for several years, I secured the countryside with a system of signal towers and hillforts containing villages.
And it was like picking apples to get the love of the women. But I didn’t love them, I was in love with myself, a narcissus, and had them make flattering statues of me throughout the city, in addition to my palace, which were lit up at night with candles.
Most of the men practiced polygamy as many of our men died fighting in battles, and we captured so many women and children in war.
But I was bored with humanity and must admit I became rather sadistic in love and tortured those women who bored me in my dungeons. Like using whips and sadistic hypnosis. Why not?
And in this year, the 25tth of my reign, I had a lot of children, about 400, 150 off whom were adults and kept a close watch on the males, lest they try and usurp me and had them all re-hypnotized rather frequently. And some of my daughters were trained to join my harem with the other women I liked. To keep my harem engaged, I had them taught them how to carve statues of me in wood, and to write poetry using our script to paint on linen or using symbols which represented a whole sentence. It was pictograms with symbols. It was a difficult script to learn, and though t, there was no everyone in the Empire went to my schools, few learned the script, there was no need…
In the Empire, there were 50,000 males, most of whom were soldiers and 103,000 women, many of whom were farmers and 340,000 children, who mostly helped out at farms in the kingdom. In Brirrr city the population was 35,000 and growing fast. About 20,000 new adults of 16 came every year. Including 10,000 males. We needed more males, in order to conquer more territory.
MY TOMB
And I was working on my tomb. I believed my soul would live on as a Great King in Hell. I believed the Devil was the creator, and so was I. And some were bold enough to say, “The Devil was my God.” I said, “The Devil didn’t care about people but is our God all the same.” But many people were hesitant to worship Satan and so had to be hypnotized again.
My tomb was built in a cave some distance away and featured cave paintings of me doing various tasks like leading the fleet and the army and partying and drinking and loving and so on. There was a lot of linen paintings on a wooden frame from my harem women, and some written history in our language. And also, the best sculptures of me. And I planned for all my harem to be killed to join me along with 500 soldiers. The harem, all were to be killed, wearing their finest jewelry like gemstone necklaces and rings. The spies would see to it. The plan was then to seal the cave and hide it from view with tons of soil and boulders. I was now 59 and death would come soon.
I was now obsessed with my legacy, but my sculptors couldn’t do much in stone, for most of my reign. But now we had discovered that limestone was malleable when first exposed to air. Stone sculptures would last for the ages. And I wondered if my entire life had been in vain or not. And I worried my tomb would be ransacked by tomb raiders, but I felt confident that no one any time soon would disturb my mass grave, despite the jewelry of my harem; there was mostly just a lot of art and writings, of little value to potential thieves. Anyway, everyone had been hypnotized to stay away from my tomb.
I decided food and drink would be unnecessary for my tomb as spirits wouldn’t require sustenance. But our language was the first writing, and I was determined to live on forever in words, but alas most of it was only on linen and wood and paintings on the cave wall, and I wondered if it would stand the test of time. I planned to be buried with a book of linen pictures/ linguistic symbols in stone boxes, showing how to play the songs on the flute, which everyone seemed to enjoy. The book of the Great King.
MY HAREM
I was the King of this city state Empire and had a harem of women, 80 in total. I trained them all in the Arts. Some of them were very skilled. I figured there were hundreds of artistic people in the city out of a population of 35,000. Most of the farming was done by women, most men were used as troops and 25% of the force featured women archers. It was a militaristic Empire.
Some of my harem women tried to get mixed up in my affairs of state, and I encouraged them. In particular, Ella, who had my ear. She was my Queen. Ella kept telling me, “To keep conquering other peoples and keep bringing all the captured to the city as slaves. And don’t kill the men who have surrendered. I said, “I was against slavery however and liked to believe that everyone was ‘free to love me.”’
I felt like having a city of 100,000 plus control of a 1,000-mile radius around the city. We had a number of strategic hillforts and in between them were a system of towers who could use torches to communicate with one another. Each tower was just staffed by four men, but they were spaced out all along the Empire. And our islands in the Aegean, used torches too, where possible, along with signal boats. And all of Anatolia was in my control. The hillforts and towers were a massive construction project which created a lot of jobs for carpenters, but cost me millions of goats.
And another of my offspring I adored, a daughter, made sweet love with me. She was really clever. Her name was Lily. She said, “I wanted to go to war as a captain in your army.” And so, it was. She was especially skilled in guerilla warfare and also leading opposing armies into ambushes such as dead-end mountain valleys from which we could fire arrows at them from 3 sides of the mountain valley. Or ambush them in narrow mountain passes. I visited her sometimes on the front lines and now she wanted the fleet to help her attack northern Greece. It was guerilla warfare and a prolonged campaign. As neither I nor the Greeks wanted all-out war.
And another child of mine who I really loved was Bee. She was 31 and she drew up a love schedule for me and my lovers, including her. I had so many women it was hard to manage them. And Bee gathered fresh scents from the wild fields and made the Palace smell sublime. And she designed special goatskin clothes and furs of other animals for me. And she also helped with the interior decorating of my Palace. And she was the first to suggest we use horses to ride on or stampeded into the enemy. And she a had been the one who first suggested we grow flaxseed for linen clothes and painting scenes. I told her, “Bee you are invaluable to me!”
And Bee told me, “I am hungry for human flesh. It’s the best meat of all.”
Another woman in my harem was Daisy. She was good at mental calculations, and I appointed her my top accountant, my Minister of Taxation and Spending. She told me we could easily afford an all-out war on our Eastern or Western borders, but not both, at the same time. So, she and I planned out an attack on the Macedonian tribes with a view to eventually targeting, Bulgaria and Greece and then we would take on the Levant…
And another girl in my harem was Honey. She wanted to act out my most glorious deeds with the help of dancers, so I let her do it and it was somewhat entertaining. I made her Minister of Entertainment and she coordinated with the bards and poets and organized entertainment on feast days. We celebrated the Solstices and Equinoxes as well as my birthday, the day of my first love, the days in remembrance of victories in battle and the day I ascended to the throne with the death of my father. We also remembered my father’s and grandfather’s birthdays and the anniversaries of their death.
And I had some drinking companions who were mostly women. I liked to surround myself with drunken women. And I liked the bards to play my favorite ballads of war and conquest. My favorite female bard was a woman in my harem, named Rocco. She also helped design my palace and tomb and had personally composed a number of ballads of my adventures and those of my grandfather and father. She composed a song: “Beware the Great King/ He has something/ We all lack/ That is the knack/ for conquest/ He will not rest.”
Then there was Jewel, who was the prettiest of my women. She was an unusual kind of beauty, and some questioned why I desired her so much. I said, “She looks clever.” Jewel told me, “I won at dice games by throwing the dice with the same face up, in the same way every time. And I knew dogs and almost always won the dog races. My favorite dog was her constant companion and often won the prize in the races. Gambling debts were settled in goats. One could bet a baby goat or a billy goat or an adult female goat or some salt. One could also bet one’s house or one’s wives. Those who lost their goats and home, were often destitute and made the city look bad, so they were first in line in my battle hosts. Jewel told me on one occasion, “That we should breed more dogs,” but I said, “Dogs bark too much! Maybe we can breed them in the countryside?” She said, “That’s a good idea, war dogs will help our Hellish host.” On another occasion, Jewel told me, “We should have an intellectual Olympics, to determine the cleverest of our citizens!” I said, “We already know that I am the cleverest, and the cleverest people are all in positions of power. No need for such an Olympics. But as my father told me once, “We should have an Olympics of physical abilities.” And I said, “But we need to build a large stadium. And so, let’s put the idea on hold for a while.”
And Jewel also told me, “It would be clever to take cows from our neighbors to the Southeast. I hear the milk is better than goat milk and beef is better tasting than goats.” I said, “We can trade sculptures made to order and women you don’t like and salt in exchange for cows. Good idea!” But it would take a long time to breed cows in any numbers. Several years.
So, cows and beef were introduced to our tribe and suddenly everyone wanted a cow. We couldn’t breed them fast enough. So, we traded more women. But still, it would be goats for the foreseeable future that would be our diet, along with barley and vegetables.
And I had often wished I could castrate all the male ordinary people, in the general population, and just have the elite 1,000 or so mate with the women, but didn’t think I could get away with it, so I dispelled the plan from my mind. Anyway, I needed them to produce maximum children.
And I had a daughter, Zia, who painted better than anyone in my harem. She developed us as big-headed, big-eyed humans who all looked attractive. She painted many portraits of me on linen and wood planks and made carvings into logs. And I decided her style would be required of all my painters. She would inscribe symbols of a sentence below the portraits. Such as Brirrr is the Sun, or Brirrr is the Devil. And she even worked in limestone, with our sharp but fragile flint stone tools. And Zia was also good in bed and was one of my favorite lovers. And Zia held painting classes for the young women in my harem. Finally, I got her pregnant and looked forward to seeing the child develop.
My daughter, Mir, meanwhile was 21 years old and a skilled diplomat. She made peace treaties with other tribes using our spy women as interpreters. The treaties always favored us and we broke the treaties quite often, when it was convenient for us. Many of the treaties had the other tribes paying tribute in goats and women. But when negotiating with other tribes’ Leaders, they thought they could outwit her since she was a woman, but she was too sharp for them. And she took clever women and cows (the cows were from the Levant which we hadn’t conquered yet), only for tribute. She was also in my harem and a good lover.
Most of my harem women said, “They’d be lost without me and wouldn’t want to live without me.” And some weren’t so sure, so we hypnotized them further. All the women in my harem had been hypnotized to love me to the maximum of their ability. And die out with me when I finally died. And they were all bloodthirsty for conquered people who were sacrificed.
THE BARDS
And there were some bards who played the flute and drum who sang about my escapades in war and in love and art. And many danced to the tunes. I could play the flute quite well. And the people all applauded when I played. Those who didn’t applaud I had watched by my spies who often killed such people. I said, “Those who don’t recognize quality don’t belong in my Empire.”
My favorite bard was my son, Xander. He wrote ballads like: “The Great King is coming/ He will conquer far and wide/ His opponents have all died.”
Another of Xander’s ballads went: “The Empire is on fire/To deny it would make you a liar/Soon the Supercity will be built/ it will give everyone a jilt/ and the King’s enemies will wilt”
And another bard, also a son of mine, Mica, sang “The Great King is a genius/ He controls all of us/ We would be nowhere without the Great King/ And so of him we all sing.”
And so on. They really were flattering. And they were all set to brilliant songs.
I asked Xander, “What he wanted?” And he replied, “I want my songs to be remembered forever and I want more women.” I said, “Your song’s lyrics will be recorded in my tomb for the future, and I will give you more women!” He said, “He wanted to draw on linen which holes would be played for each note on the flute so that people of the future could truly listen to his songs.” I said, “Can do!” I planned to have large stone boxes containing books filled with linen paintings, mostly pictures of me in action, loving and warring and partying. And many stone boxes for flute songs.
And Xander said, “I wanted my own special tomb in the caves.” But it was customary for the elite to just be buried with some of their jewelry in a grave. I told him, “No, but you can rest assured you are going to Hell.” No one dared to dig in the Brirrr city cemetery which was patrolled by troops.
There was plenty of room in my tomb for written music. It was a large cave system and went deep into the to the underground. The Caves of the Tombs were some distance from the Capital and were in a secret location. Few knew about the tombs location and if they found out, they kept it to themselves.
And Mica composed another ballad: “Love the Devil Emperor/ He opens the door/ For the crowd to roar/ Full of Devilish lore/ We all want more.” And I gave him goats and salt and women for his services.
Most of the Bards were actually women poetesses, many of whom played the drum while they sang. Many had a flute player. They mostly sang about me and my conquests. And I knew they were flattering me, but that was OK.
And one of the female bards Xccc, dared to sing: “The Great King is a narcissus/ He triumphs over all of us/ We don’t dare cuss/ He is full of lust/ And must/ Get his way.” I let her get away with it.
Another female bard, Mik, sang, “Brirrr/ Shed him a tear/ Lend him an ear/ Know that he rules by fear/ and drinks a lot of beer/ Him we all hold dear.” And I liked that one somewhat more.
Still another young bard, Kroc, he sang, “Brirrr is here/ To take over the whole world, never fear/ We all want him here/ He is our destiny.”
WAR IN MACEDONIA AND THE AEGEAN
So, I attacked another tribe in the north in Macedonia and we annihilated them and the dead warriors we cooked up and had a feast. Many of the Macedonian leaders had been hypnotized by our spies. And we built hillforts/villages with our farmers and troops there in order to hold down the territory. Almost all Macedonia had now been conquered.
And every one of the elites, in the Capital, was required to eat a nice piece of human flesh from the slain warriors, only a few of whom had surrendered. We now had 107,000 women in the Kingdom.
Alpha told me, “The Greeks are our enemy. But we have conquered all of their Aegean islands with our fleet. We now need to coordinate our attack of our army and fleet along the Greek coast.” Our fleet was now 600, 4-man boats and we were building more fast. Our fire arrows with flammable moss on them worked to great effect on the sitting targets of those who opposed us.
And in battle I had the best, most loyal and fearless followers, come up the rear with the scared ones, going first into the fray. If they tried to run away, they’d be killed by my officers. But anyway, all my male and female troops were hypnotized to be fearless. And our opponents often broke ranks and fled at the appearance of my host. About 25% of the army could be conscripted women in times of war. And more were being trained every day!
MY BEST FRIEND, AND SON AND SUCCESSOR
My best friend was my fourth son, Brittt, and successor; was a son I’d had with Ella. We often talked about the future. He said, “I imagine a World in which our Empire would include a million people in the near future. And conquer the whole World.” And with my blessing, he sent more female spies to enemy encampments to learn their languages and gauge their strengths and weaknesses. The female spies were more than willing to help and had been hypnotized to avoid further hypnosis. They would all eventually return to us, of course.
And he, my favorite son, was mayor of the Capital, and on one occasion he said, “The hypnoses had really kept crime low. But sometimes crimes of passion occurred, and people had to be re-hypnotized or executed for their crime.” And he had set up a police force of psychiatrists to help couples and friends and even enemies, work through their differences. Typically, these shrinks just did judicious hypnosis in the presence of my bodyguards.
And Brittt often told me, “We are the luckiest people in history to have such a bountiful life of food, drink and love and we are skilled in War.” In that year we’d conquered two more tribes to the South. And every year we conquered new territory and peoples. Typically, we hypnotized the men and women and children we captured and so we had more farmers/soldiers. Women though were highly prized by the men in Brirrr city. All the men in the city had at least one wife and many of the elite had several.
And Brittt told me once, “I was in love with a woman in my harem. Young Suzie.” She was only 18, and didn’t know much, but was very bright. So, I let him have her. Suzie was all for it.
And I wanted one of his young women in exchange and he graciously gave her to me. This woman was named, “Sparkler,” she was a belly dancer and she and I loved one another in public a couple of times as it gave her a thrill. And she would moan and scream and make other women jealous. She was very sexy. And she told me she wanted to fight in my army. When we were out on our campaigns of conquest, she was always available whereas some of my women were busy with children and/or non-violent. But she suggested the World’s first childcare program to free up women to fight for me. I said, “What a splendid idea.” Sparkler became one of my favorite harem women.
And on another occasion, Brittt told me, “I wanted to start building my tomb now, and when you, the Great King died, I would add statues of myself to the palace and move in his own harem.” He currently had 18 lovers in his harem. He had a small palace next door to mine, but it was growing. He said, “I want to keep my museum open after death so that the people will remember me.” I said, “I plan for posterity to remember me in my tomb but will also keep my museum open I suppose. It is a good plan!”
Of course, the plan was for my harem to all die with me, but Brittt did not tell that to his wives. And this didn’t bother me. But I told him, “That it might be difficult to find his harem once he was dead. Best that they should die with you!” I just cared about myself and was content as long as I had all my harem die with me!
Brittt wanted his tomb to be nearby those of his great grandfather, grandfather and me and cover it up with heavy boulders and plenty of soil We called the area, “The Caves of the Kings.”
And I hypnotized Brittt myself several times to wait until I was dead before taking power. I knew he was anxious to take control. And he told me, “He would take down the fortifications of the villages and use the garrisons in the Grand Army so that the full weight of the Empire would smash all surrounding tribes. The Kingdom would remain peaceful inside!” I said, “If you do that, they will get us with guerilla warfare, roaming the countryside, sacking villages.” He said, “But I plan to clear away all the tribes on our borders, creating a buffer zone so that there would be no one left to attack the Empire.” I said, “But you need to hypnotize all the leaders of the border tribes to make sure they don’t attack.” He said, “It’s a plan.”
VISION QUESTS
And many of my sculptors portrayed me with a Devilish grin. A few times I tried magic mushrooms and saw a face of myself as the Devil incarnate in front of me which, in my youth, led me to believe the devil existed. And everywhere I looked while on the shrooms I saw the Devil and he grinned and looked like me. And I had voices in my head telling me to worship the Devil, so I did. And all my subjects, I forced to worship the Devil too.
In my adulthood when I went to war, I took the mushrooms and saw my enemies face to face and voices in my head told me how to defeat them. I didn’t let many other people take the magic mushrooms, only the elite 1,000 or so; though I knew that it was possible, despite hypnoses, some did behind my back. Who knew what they saw and experienced?
Vision quests were a hangover from the then separate tribes of the area who had Shamans. People took the shrooms typically and saw me, the Devil, and claimed he told them to help kill the enemies of the King and also discovered true love, seeing the face of their beloved. And they looked at works of art, especially made by my harem and saw the true meaning of the art.
Now there was no shaman, and I was the Leader, and promoted the Devil, Prince of Madness.
Sometimes while on magic mushrooms, I would go on a vison quest, and I would talk with the statues of my father and grandfather and they both told me to be kinder to the people and not be so warlike. But I told them I was just carrying on their work of building a kingdom and violence was usually necessary. They said, “Threaten other peoples with your grand army and get your spies to hypnotize the leaders but try and get them to capitulate peacefully.” I thought this was good advice as people who were violently conquered plotted and conspired against me, though I eventually hypnotized all of them… Many got drunk around my spies and allowed themselves to be hypnotized.