I Want to Live, Part Two

I remember I took all kinds of jobs; my first one was construction work. I ended up doing a lot of safety tests rather than any construction. My favorite job while working there was when I got to test if the arches in the large caverns were big enough for Zoltuce to walk through without hitting his head. I got to wait under each arch with a large, barely-alive spider just behind me in the cavern. It would take a whole hunting party just to find one and bring it back in Zoltuce’s favorite condition; not dead. As soon as I felt his electricity in a nearby tunnel, I would call out for him to come quickly, that we had caught a spider for him. This would make him come running and I had to quickly get out of the way and dive into a small tunnel so that I didn’t get eaten in the process of him testing the archway. Usually it was big enough, especially after he had crashed through in his excitement. I had always hoped that Zoltuce would appreciate my spiders enough to give me a name, but it never happened. ‘MoveIt’ like my uncle would have been great, or even ‘Outofmyway!’

After I had gone as far as I felt that I could in construction, I decided to try my hand at mining, also hoping that this would increase my chances of getting Zoltuce’s attention. At this point in my life, I was ‘you,’ ‘fella,’ ‘buddy,’ and a few more flattering nicknames like DumbAss or LittleShit, but those were more rare. I was a good miner, extremely successful too; I found loads and loads of a special gold known as pyrite. I brought buckets of it back to the lair; no one contributed as many valuable materials to Zoltuce’s lair as me. I do recall though that none of my pyrite was used in any decorations and I was never honored for all my hard work. I am pretty sure that damn Whatever foremen kept taking all my credit. If I haven’t made Whatever a PunishMent (get it? Punish and entertainment!) then I need to soon. In fact I will make that a law from now on, Punishment is to be pronounced PunishMent!

Back to my many jobs. After I was never credited by Zoltuce for all my hard work, I decided that mining wasn’t the job for me. So, I became a waste remover for about a day. That was the only job I got fired from; apparently moving the waste from one pile to another was not how the job worked. I had to put other Sckaens in charge of waste removal in my kingdom, because apparently the king of the Sckaens doesn’t know how it WORKS! I believe from there I moved to the profession of food delivery. That job I was sure would get me in Zoltuce’s good graces.

I was so excited my first morning, but the Sckaen who had the job before me, and had been dead, was caught faking. He was reinstated! That was a depressing day.

I changed jobs again, and this time I was sent into the records room. It was there that I learned to write and read, but now that I am King I don’t need to write or read anything for myself anymore so I don’t know how much it helped.

There I did the boring job of keeping the records in good condition, and if Zoltuce ever made a proclamation, I waited in the records room for the scribe to deliver the tablets with Zoltuce’s holy words, and then I helped her store and maintain them. The scribe saw Zoltuce at least once a month, she had been named Useful when she was a whelp. It was a bad name. Yuck! So, I worked away in boredom, worried that I would live my whole life in that room and die a question mark in every one’s mind. What does this have to do with changing the world? You might ask, and that would be an excellent question.

I recall the answer vividly. I had absentmindedly blown dust off of yet another tablet and was in the process of trying to wipe the spittle off before I stored it back on the shelf. I hadn’t quite learned how to stop blowing raspberries at the tablets yet, it is my one great flaw. Suddenly, Useful came in and told me to drop everything. Her facial expression and flicking tail told me she was upset with my response. I don’t know why; I did as I was told. Wasn’t that what she always wanted? Either way, Zoltuce wanted to see me. I bolted out the room, not needing her to tell me a second time.

I did return to the room, because I needed her to tell me where I was supposed to go to meet Zoltuce. The tablet had been fractured, and if I am being honest I was pretty annoyed with how long it took her to explain to me where I needed to go, because she insisted on picking up the pieces before telling me. It wouldn’t have been a problem if scribes learned to write on some type of unbreakable material, like iron. That is a good idea, remember to make scribes learn to write in iron. Then our words will be cast in iron, unbreakable, a weapon.

To be continued.