tales of Suchita

This is a tale of how the furies were born.

Orest was an honourable man, just, brave and kind. He was the man his regiment could count on getting them home safely. Though they had an equally just, if somewhat ineffective, lover of the good life, king…for Orest’s regiment, he was akin to a king. It was he, after all, who clothed them, protected them and led them like a father his son.

Orest was content being a regiment leader, having no higher ambition than to discharge his duty with honour. It wasn’t until a particularly difficult battle where only because of the grit of his regiment did they manage to push back the enemy did he start hearing chatter that he should become the next king.

King Duncan was a mild ruler on most days, slow to anger, ever ready to distribute power and wealth where he deemed fit. It was perhaps this very nature of his that had prevented any civil war. But it was also this nature which had marked his kingdom for outside skirmishes.

Orest came to the attention of the king at the same time that he started to hear chatter of people wanting him to become king. Duncan had been suitably impressed with Orest’s leadership and regiment and on the advice of his wise-men, decided to promote him, thereby bringing him closer to court, and under his (or rather his wise-men’s) watchful eye.

As a result of his almost cruel sense of fairness and disarming charisma, the chatter grew louder the closer Orest came to court. And as Orest started to learn, understand and enjoy diplomacy, the first seed of ambition – of the good he could do with the power, of the corruption he could curb, of the little man he could uplift – was sown.

At the insistence of his wife, Orest went to the weird sisters, soothsayers who were known to speak in riddles, to get his fortunes told. Though he was only mildly optimistic – since he was not born of noble blood, nor did he have any claim to the throne – what the weird sisters told him watered the seed, which was looking decidedly green and healthy.

Here’s what the weird sisters had to say about his fortunes:

The kingship is yours, dear Orest
If you are willing to do what you must
Beware the shoot of ambition for
Every sweet-smelling flower comes with thorns
And if you go down this path
There is no knowing what you must endure
Or what you must lose in order to gain,
For heavy lies the crown, dear Orest
And a price it must extract before
Giving you your heart’s desire.

As the chatter reached a crescendo with his promoters trying to find loopholes in the ancient laws of coronation whereby Orest would be eligible to ascend the throne, Duncan and his advisors were hatching their own plot.

Though Orest had never publicly communicated his desire to be king, Duncan wasn’t ready to jeopardize his seat and power by leaving it to fate – for hadn’t he too visited the weird sisters and hadn’t he been warned of such an occurrence? And though the sisters had told him not to add fuel to the fire of Orest’s ambition, what did soothsayers know anything about running a kingdom?

So at the behest of his wise-men (who would rather have a fool on the throne than an arrogant fool), Duncan sent Orest on a mission and a special force of the most trustworthy soldiers, half of whom had been bribed to ensure he never returned home.

Thus dispatched, the wise-men gave one of the serving maids in Orest’s home two gold guineas, to poison the water supply. The family also taken care of, Duncan and his cohorts waited in anticipation for their plans to bear fruit and quell any further nonsense that Orest, a low born general of an obscure regiment, was fit to rule.

The plan was sound. The execution surgical. Orest was murdered by one of Duncan’s trustworthy soldiers and his family murdered just as the soldier was stabbing him in the back.

What nobody anticipated was the fury of the people…Duncan’s people…who had converted into Orest’s people at the show of violence. Duncan in his ill-placed fear lost the very thing he had been trying to safeguard, as the people rose as one against their own king, united as they had never been before.

The mob turned into a vortex of fury and revenge, bloodthirsty and demanding the head of the king who had gotten a universally-loved and just subject killed. The furies, however, did not stop once the king had been judged and lynched for his crimes. It was almost as if Orest and his dead wife and children had taken charge of the furies for the wrong they had been caused.

It swept the kingdom, killing, maiming, destroying everything in its wake until it was satiated, and there was nothing left to kill or maim or destroy. The ambition and crown had extracted its pound of flesh and the gods, in order to rein in the mindless violence, gave the furies a purpose – to avenge the wronged.

And that’s how they were born, the furies, and they rue the day for their purpose means they can never rest…for the unjust cannot be allowed to rule the world.

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This is 6 of 26 Myths and Legends. To know more, click here.