Masters Of Puppets - Chapter 1

Masters Of Puppets


Chapter One: To The Land's End


"With Heaven's aid I have conquered for you a huge empire. But my life was too short to achieve the conquest of the world. That task is left for you"
Genghis Khan


"...England, doth it not please you to listen?"
England startled, chocking on his sip of red wine and started to cough, avoiding by a hair to make a fool of himself by spitting in his glass.
The queen waited patiently (but with a little smirk) for England to finish getting out the sweet nectar of the grapes from his lungs to make her question again.
"Thou were not listening to me." No, this time it was a calm statement without chance of appeal.
"Ah, my most sincere apologies, your gracious and merciful majesty. What wouldst thou have me hear?" England attempted, trying to look firmer by straightening the starched collar of his shirt.
The queen snorted in a not very regal fashion.
"Thy flattery makes me question thy sincerity."
England tried to tell her with a glance that he really meant those things, as trying to speak them out loud would prove to be awkward, but when the woman just raised an eyebrow, he gave up.
"I will admit that my mind strayed for a moment, your majesty. I beg thy forgiveness." England apologized politely, with a half-bow from his armchair, with a refinement many courtiers his senior would have envied him.
"For many days, you have been distracted. Are there happenings in my kingdom that it might please me to know of?" The queen asked with outward lightness, but casting him a probing glance.
More than once she had been able to ward off emergencies thanks to her nation's personification, so she had learnt not to ignore his seeming bad moods or uneasiness.
England toyed idly with his crystal chalice, making the red wine in it swirl, trying to put in words what his Nation senses were telling him.
"I do not believe that it is anything serious. It is merely that something unsettles me… Something new to my lands, a presence I have not sensed before."
At the queen's nod, he went on, less hesitant.
"I know not what it is, yet it is not something that I fear. It feels as though it is a strange Nation on my soil, and yet as though it is a part of me."
The queen frowned, in deep thought.
"Wouldst thou compare this feeling to that which you associate with Wales?" She asked, remembering what she had been told about nations' "senses".
"Not exactly, your majesty. I can feel Wales' lands and his people, but I cannot physically feel my brother. This feeling is entirely contrary. I can feel only its own presence with a vagueness not common of Wales."
England was silent for a moment, without tearing his eyes from the ruby red waves of the wine, as if he could read all his questions' answers in there. In vino veritas...
"This individual… calls to me, I feel, and I must go to it. It is a cry that I cannot be made deaf to."
The queen flattened her frown and looked at him with amused curiosity.
"And can you be certain that this call is not one to lead you blindly into malady?"
England shook his head firmly.
"Not certain, your majesty, but true enough. I feel that it means no harm."
"Then you had better ask me my permission of your own will before I order you to ask upon your knees." The queen said with a little smirk, and England placed his still half-filled chalice on a table, stood up with a graceful movement and bowed deeply in front of his monarch.
"Your majesty, might I humbly ask of you that I be dismissed from your presence and your court? There is business which greatly requires my attention in Cornwall."  England asked in an exaggeratedly pompous tone for that informal meeting, kissing the queen's hand and looking at her with his emerald-green eyes shining with amusement: if there was something that France had been able to pass on to him, it was the love for those kinds of games of double meanings, pretence.
"We shall grant you this, fair lord." The queen said, following suit, her solemn expression spoiled by a little rebellious grin, while England straightened and made a gesture to a page to hand him his overcoat.
But tell me, England, how long dost thou think this industry shall keep you?" She asked then, coming back to rest against the back of the armchair and letting a lady-in-waiting pour her some wine.
"Perhaps a fortnight; three weeks at the most, I should think."  Said England as he hooked the buttons, preparing himself to fend off the autumn cold.
"It is thy belief that it shall take you far?"
"I fear, your majesty, to perhaps the western point of Cornwall – to the very end of our land itself." England joked, putting his hat on and bowing one last time to the queen before parting.
"Then may God's blessing go with you, England." Was Elizabeth Tudor's last goodbye before her nation turned and exited the room with a swirl of his coat.


~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~ . ~


England breathed in deeply, held it for as long as he could and then breathed out slowly, feeling his chest quivering.
He loved the sea's scent.
He loved the salty taste maritime air left on his tongue, he loved the shrill calls of seagulls, the changing whistle of the wind, the dull rumble of the sea breaking against the cliffs, and many, many other things he couldn't quite list right there and then.
He loved the sea, simply.
He breathed in deeply again, and then mounted up once more and let his horse choose the path it liked the best in the moor, feeling the smell of ozone and the electricity in the air foreshadowing a storm fill him to the brim.
He had been travelling for a week, and finally he had arrived to Land's End, the western point of his island, where he still could feel the presence that bugged him.
England pulled his hood further down over his eyes to shade them from the sun which, even if faint, was preventing him from seeing the horizon, and scanned the landscape, from the flat moor to the cliff's edge: his prey had to be somewhere nearby: this wasn't exactly the most suited place to hide and ambush someone, after all.
But then again, the one who had called him there didn't seem like it had any intention to hide.
England set his horse at a trot and started to follow the coast's outline, keeping just at safe distance from the cliff: it was near, he could feel it...
As little by little the strong wind pushed forcefully the black clouds towards the shore, hiding the sun and letting a gray dusk fall, to England time seemed to dilate until losing its meaning, so much that when he spotted the hooded figure sitting on the grass near the edge of the cliffs, he wouldn't have been able to say whether an hour or just a minute had passed.
His horse seemed to feel his excitement, as he straightened his ears and quickened his pace to jog gallop, heading on his will towards the stranger.
For the briefest moment England wondered whether it had been the grass-muffled sound of the hooves to make the figure turn, or if it had felt his presence in the same overwhelming way in which the British Nation was feeling the stranger's, but the question lost importance when the person stood up, brushing dust and grass from his mantle.
At a few feet's distance, England stopped his horse and dismounted, mindlessly pulling back his hood while the other approached him slowly, completely wrapped up in a royal blue mantle.
England's slack grip on the reins tightened suddenly until he was almost driving his nails into his palm when the stranger copied him, raising his hands to lower the hood, showing something that made the Nation's heart skip a beat.
Short ash-blond hair, uncombed by the increasingly stronger wind, bushy eyebrows, high cheekbones, not heavily squared jaw with just a shadow of as-much-blond beard, thin lips stretched in a smile of ferocious happiness that lighted also those eyes as green as the moor.
"Good evening. I'm glad you came for me." That carbon copy of England said, his voice filled with an emotion the other at first wasn't able to distinguish, but that softened a bit the spark in the others' eyes, similar to a flame hardly kept by the glass in a lantern.
"Who are you? A trick of the Fae?" England asked as soon as he had his voice back, but the harshness of his own words had a bitter taste on his tongue. Too straightforward for his liking.
The other noticed his reaction and laughed.
"No, they don't have anything to do with this. Can't you feel it? I'm part of you."
England made a face hearing that emphasis on that "feel", but despite himself he nodded.
Yes, he could feel that stranger.... That stranger was not, though, so much that he imagined a dog must have felt that way when sniffling at his own scent.
From the person in front of him, England could perceive a jumble of feelings, tangled up like threads of a ball of wool, changing from excitement-satisfaction-relief to agitation-restlessness-worry, but he felt them like they were his own emotions, so much that he had to concentrate hard to prevent them from overwhelm his mind.
"I feel... Something. But not... I don't know what it is. What you are." Was in the end England's hesitant answer, looking the other in the eyes as if forcing him to tell him the truth.
His "copy" snickered, with just a touch of malice towards himself.
"Everything is confused, isn't it? It's like that also for me, I assure you. It's like... I wasn't completely formed yet." He glanced at his hands, almost expecting to be able to see through them, as to both they seemed so incomplete, like everything else of England's twin seemed to be.
His smirk melted into a melancholic smile that make England's ache with sympathy, and went on, as if lost in his own thoughts.
"Which is probably right. After all, I was born not long ago... A newborn, really. I still need to get it myself."
At that comment, England tilted his head sideway, unsure about the link that his mind made between those few fact he had collected.
"A new... Born? You... You're a Nation too?"
The strange blue-clad character smirked and nodded, his cheek quickly growing as he held out his hand to England, who took the cue and shook it.
"My name is England. Hu.... Nice to meet you...?" England introduced himself, a little uncertain about the sincerity of the second part, getting a new laugh from the other.
"The pleasure is all mine, England." Who knows why, but those words had an ominous, almost prophetical feeling when they came from this man.
"My name is Britannia. Or at least, this is the name they'll give me. I am the British Empire."
England opened his eyes wide, until his eyebrows almost reunited with his hairline.
"British what-? But I don't have any-"
"You will. I told you, I've just been born, give me some time!"
Britannia turned to look out West, watching the thunderstorm come closer and closer, rumbling like an unstoppable avalanche, but to England it seemed like the other was looking for something beyond the blanket of black clouds.
A long silence lingered as they, unblinking and unmovable like two twin menhirs, watched the far lightning cross the dark sky like livid scars, until the growl of the first thunder came to their ears.
"And so... The new world?" England whispered, knowing the other would have heard him anyway.
"Aye. You didn't know what you set in motion when you allowed those colonists to sail to America." Britannia nodded without tearing his gaze (if not physical, mental) from his newborn lands in the West, but he was anyway able to catch the greedy look surfacing in the other's eyes.
"A new world... An Empire, all mine."
"Aye, England. It'll be all yours, it'll be all ours." Britannia took England's hand in his and held it, noticing with pleasure that the other didn't recoil in the slightest.
"And the seven seas?" The English Nation asked, with the amazed petulance of a child not able to believe his own ears.
"Our navy is the best of the world: the Atlantic is already ours. We just have to let those bastards in Europe acknowledge it. And also the other oceans will soon be ours."
"And the East?"
Britannia stroked tenderly the palm of England's hand with his thumb, somehow proud the other had asked before of the seas and then of the East. Blood tells, after all. They both were born from the sea to love the sea.
"Even that will be ours. And, why not? Maybe all the world will be ours."
Finally Britannia turned towards his twin and, discovering the other's wonders-filled gaze was on him, beckoned him closer.
"I swear to you." Britannia said, taking advantage of their same height to lean his forehead against England's, putting his hands on the elder's shoulders
"You gave me birth, and I swear I'll make you great." England's green eyes bored into the equally green eyes of the new Empire, and the promise he saw, of such a greatness, of such splendour, made his heart beat faster and took his breath away.
"Ours will be the biggest Empire ever created by men. Bigger than Rome's, than Alexander the Great's, that Genghis Khan's."
In that moment the front of the storm hit them, and the howling wind blew the first drops of rain in their faces.
"Yes, Britannia. We'll be great." England said with an identical smirk, every uncertainty forgotten.
"But now, come with me. There's a queen I want you to meet." He continued, turning around and bringing two fingers to his mouth to give a call-whistle to his horse, who had wandered away, unnerved because of the storm. Funny, he hadn't even noticed he had dropped the reins.
"The queen of my Empire? Oh, I'd surely like to meet her." Britannia laughed, heaving himself up the saddle behind England, surrounding his waist with his arms.
"I believe you'll like her, too." England grinned, before digging in his spurs and turning his back to the West and the thunderstorm chasing them, their hoods down to feel the rain on their faces, like Heaven was giving them the extreme blessing.
If only they had known how many times that same scene would repeat itself...