Hatred Lights the Way

“Oh heavens, please! Don’t cha have no heart? My little ones would starve! Have mercy on us!” The woman had wailed desperately for the last half-hour, feebly struggling in the dirt against a cordon of bored dragoons. Gods, what a foolish waste of time.

“As per the Chancellery of the Great Empire of Kharz, sanctioned by the Revered Emperor himself, this year’s food tax on the rural populace has been increased by 20%. It is to be collected by any means necessary and with no exemption”, Kozminsky proclaimed in a loud and confident voice to an audience of frightened peasants. Usually, this rat of a man was about the least imposing person on the continent - short and hunchbacked, his eyes perpetually squinted as if he was constantly looking at the enormous pink mole on his nose. Yet the ruthless decorum of official business and the bureaucratic impassionance of the proclamation’s language made even him seem authoritative.

Of course, when you have twenty soldiers with swords drawn adding weight to your words, you can deliver your speech stark naked and juggling chamber pots and it would still have the desired effect. It is not a hard job to be an Imperial Tax Collector.

Laurent eyed the crowd of peasants gathered to listen to the tax collector on the “village square” - a plot of wet mud near the only well, surrounded by flimsy, lopsided huts. Anyone who has ever been outside of a city could tell you that they did not have a good year’s harvest - a good year of anything, really. The winter has not even started and the people are already pale and thin, extending visible effort just to remain upright. Most were women too, save for a group of kids and the elderly. No wonder, as the majority of local men were far to the west, similarly starving and exhausted, fighting in one of the Empire's many wars. The hunted, somber look on the peasants’ faces was enough to tell Laurent the obvious reason for this sorry state of affairs - since all the men were conscripted for the war, they could not plant nor harvest their crops in time, and now they don't even have enough food to see themselves through the winter. You would think that such an outcome would be quite obvious to virtually anyone, yet the Imperial Chancellery had an uncanny ability to defy expectations. A bitter sneer crossed Laurent’s face as he remembered the dragoon officer’s warning to be careful in case of “resistance”. These wretched souls could not resist a strong gust of wind, much less a disciplined cavalry charge. No, it is not a hard job to be an Imperial Tax Collector.

That was what Laurent counted on, really. Having never met his father and his mother sick for as long as he can remember, Laurent learned to be pragmatic from a very young age. While his peers and friends dreamed of being army heroes or successful merchants, Laurent knew that a middling bureaucrat's career was his best bet. Get a decent education, don’t make trouble, don't aim too high but also don’t settle for too little, earn enough to live and support your mother and in forty to fifty years you will get a pension and a burial spot, all at the Empire's expense. His life’s plan seemed obvious and foul-proof, getting off to a good start - he scraped enough points to pass an Imperial Administrative Examination, and the lottery assigned him to be a Tax Collector, one of the more enviable positions in the sprawling and unwieldy Imperial bureaucracy.

It fell apart very quickly, however. Laurent remembers that moment well, the day he was assigned a mentor to teach him his duties and get him familiar with the district he would operate in. Chief Tax Collector Kozminsky. Fifty years of exemplary service. Before he met him for the first time, Laurent heard different rumors about him. Some said that, at the beginning of his career, Kozminsky was something of a rebel - he forgave taxes for poor villages, made frequent exemptions, and downplayed cases of resistance in his reports. Then he was squeezed by the government and, apparently having learned his lesson, became the exceptional Collector he was today. Others simply said that he was a miserable old wretch, a gray, bland, sad little man who could spoil milk by merely looking at it. 

When Laurent got to meet him, he immediately recognized that it was the latter rumors that were true. After Laurent briefly introduced himself, Kozminsky had just one question to ask of him - why did he become a tax collector? Seeing nothing wrong in his reasoning, Laurent answered honestly - he needed a respectable job to make a living, and it did not matter what the job was or what it entailed. Kozminsky just stared at him for a minute with an expressionless face. Evidently, something in that answer he did not like, for ever since that day, Kozminksy made Laurent’s life unbearable.

It was nothing that he did, to be clear, nothing overt. Kozminsky took Laurent along to every inspection and collection, diligently teaching him the job. Too diligently, in fact. Laurent knew, of course, that a Tax Collector’s job included a lot of instances of resistance and enforcement, and sometimes harsh measures had to be taken to ensure compliance. He expected those, and considered himself ready. He could never have imagined the reality. Kozminsky was hell-bent on squeezing every village dry, and he was prepared to do just about anything to ensure it. In the first collection Laurent participated in, one of the soldiers found a hidden sack of potatoes stashed away in a haystack. Kozminsky, now convinced that every household was hiding possessions to skirt tax obligations, ransacked the entire village and burned half of it down, arresting the village chief and his entire family for good measure. All Laurent could do was gape helplessly, as pleading mothers knelt in front of him, begging him to intervene. What could he do? He was a rookie, and Kozminsky was his mentor. He was not there to restrain him in his measures - he was there to learn them.

The very next collection, the villagers could not fulfill their quotas of the food tax. They pleaded and complained that it was the local lord’s fault, that he forced them to toil his fields and they had no time to tend to theirs. A waste of breath. This time, Kozminksy found it prudent that it should be Laurent who dictates the punishment. A learning exercise, as he put it. Laurent suggested confiscating a quarter of their livestock - a steep punishment, to be sure, for without their cows, chickens, and horses, the village would be in deep trouble. Kozminksy confiscated half, and ordered Laurent to continue, for the punishment was insufficient. Laurent offered the village elder to be whipped for his mismanagement. Kozminsky had all men whipped, and the village elder lost his tongue for slandering a noble. He told Laurent to continue, for the punishment was still not enough. It was only when Laurent, shaking and crying, suggested that some of the children could be taken away to work in the Royal Mines, that Kozminsky seemed satisfied.

If Laurent was deeply horrified by these experiences, he had to adapt to them rapidly, for they were the norm rather than the exception. Whoever started the rumor that Kozminsky used to be a champion of the people must have had a twisted, sick sense of humor, for he was anything but. The man’s pettiness knew no bounds; he was also, without a doubt, excellent at his job, able to sniff out any misalignment with the tax obligations, intended or not. Good Gods, the amount of villages they burned over missing potatoes! Laurent’s mother, in the days when she was feeling better, used to make him a dish of potatoes in cream sauce - his favorite ever since childhood, the only happy memory of his mother on her brighter days. Now, Laurent felt physically sick when potatoes were served to him. He knew where they came from, and what price was paid for them.

Laurent hated all of it. He hated Kozminsky and his sadistic dedication to his duties; he hated the soldiers who accompanied them, capable of playing with the local children one moment and butchering their fathers the next, bored and indifferent throughout it all; he hated the peasants, who stoically accepted their fates with quiet consternation, with only endless sorrow and reproach in their eyes betraying their true feelings; he hated himself. How many times had he prayed in his soul for the peasants to scream at him, to curse him for what he’d done, to spit and punch and howl and scratch his eyes out; they never did. 

In this atmosphere, his training was ending - his last inspection with his mentor was taking place today. Tomorrow, Kozminksy would retire and Laurent would take over his duties, and would go on to terrorize the peasants for the next five decades. He would have to - his mentor collected a lot of tax, and if Laurent’s numbers slipped, he would be the one the higher-ups would have questions for. Five decades of pleading eyes, desperate wails, and blazing villages.

Lost in his dark thoughts, Laurent did not notice the change that occurred on the “village square”. No longer were the soldiers and peasants gathered here - the collection had begun, and peasants were at their huts with the soldiers, watching their meager possessions and doubtful chances of surviving the winter dwindle and wither into nothing. Most certainly, many an elderly would wander off into the surrounding forests in the depth of winter to face a quicker death, all to ease the burden on their families.

Snow started to fall. Huge white flakes descended like an invading army from the low-hanging, lead sky, and in an hour's time, the whole area would be covered in a white shroud. Far away from here, in the cities, joyous screams no doubt fill the air - children are celebrating the arrival of winter, and adults can almost taste the upcoming festivities. Here, it was a herald of the coming doom, and when this snow melts in five months’ time, few would be there to witness nature's rebirth.

Laurent wrapped himself tighter in his black uniform coat, and decided that he might as well participate in the collection. This was his life now, after all. A painful spike of anxiety that jolted through him at that thought made him forget the cold temporarily, and sent him angrily stumbling into the first house he could see. There, it was business as usual - an empty, cold hut with mud floors, clean yet hideous in its poverty; a family huddled in the corner, a mother and her five children, all crying inconsolably as they instinctively sense the terrible specter of hunger already lurking in their home; their father, timidly standing in the middle of the room, clutching his cap in his hands and staring into the floor, mumbling some desperate, useless appeals; and a soldier, slowly, rhythmically slapping sense into him, without a shred of malice in him, a routine action that is as much a part of his service as wearing a uniform.

“Please, sire…” Slap. “I am an invalid with six mouths to feed, sire…” Slap. “Not enough food as is, sire, the army took too much…” Slap. “Any more and we won’t have enough to plant come spring, even if we manage, sire…” Slap.

He was right, of course. Laurent could explain to him that the soldiers are starving and have it even worse, that this food would go to them, maybe even to his brother or a neighbor, all in hopes that they can hold the fronts through the winter, and that they will starve so the soldiers don't have to. Or Laurent could tell him how there should have been enough food for the army, yet incompetent and corrupt administrators and generals had let it rot or be stolen, and how the Chancellery, instead of punishing the criminals punished the peasantry, using some abstract statistics to justify that the extra tax was within the peasants’ abilities. What would it change, though? The peasant cannot understand high matters of state just like bureaucrats cannot understand what hunger truly means. 

As quietly as he entered, Laurent left the soldier to do his job. He was infinitely better and more useful at it than Laurent was, and there was nothing to be said or done. Hearing commotion from the next building over, Laurent made his way over there.

It was a communal barn. Judging by its enormous size, this village used to have much better days; used to be prosperous, even. Now, its rotting walls, leaking roof and, most of all, its dreaded emptiness all suggested just how bad things really were. Strangely, only two people were inside the barn, causing all the commotion by loudly arguing - Kozminsky and the village elder, a frail, withered old woman, with a defiant look in her eyes. 

“...and I must tell you again, Chief Collector, this here is for spring sowing, we cannot give it, no way in hell can we give it…” “I shall line up every man in the village and have them shot, you old hag, you hear me?...” “Oh, you should not say things like that, sire, I am only telling you how it is, and that you will kill us all if you take this as assuredly as a firing squad, and we cannot give this…” “Oh you cannot, then? Well, let us see if you mean it! Laurent! Tell the captain to gather everyone up…”

This, too, was business as usual. Countless times had Laurent witnessed peasants tell Kozminsky that giving away their last food was a fate worse than death, and every time Kozminsky proved them terribly, hopelessly wrong, inventing torment that the poor people could not imagine possible. What happened next, however, was anything but business as usual. 

With a terrible cry, the old, frail and withered woman showed she had strength in her yet, and charged at Laurent with a pitchfork pointing at his belly. Where did she produce the pitchfork from? Why did she choose to do this now, after a lifetime of injustice and hard toil? As Laurent stood there, transfixed, shifting his gaze back and forth from the three rusted blades pointing at his belly to the terrifying, frenzied eyes of the old woman, he found himself with one feeling in his soul - satisfaction. Finally, here was that most natural reaction, the first he had witnessed on this blasted job, a moment of justifiable wrath unleashed at their actions. One more feeling lingered in him - relief, relief at the thought that he won't have to endure a lifetime of all this horror. 

To Lauretn’s astonishment, as he peacefully awaited for his release, hypnotized by the woman’s delirious, burning eyes, another figure entered his line of sight - a crooked, twisted, pathetic figure of Kozminsky, who jumped in front of Laurent at the last moment and got skewered in the belly in his place. The woman, seeing the deed done, collapsed lifeless on the dirty hay floor. Undoubtedly, she mustered all the strength and rage left in her for this final act of revolt - a foolish, pointless, and glorious revolt. Laurent fell on the floor, unable to stand from the shock.

Kozminksy was not yet dead. Blood dripped from his lips and belly, life seeping out of him with every shallow breath. Sitting next to him, Laurent felt he should say something to the man. What was he to say, though? Thank him? Ask him why he saved him? Ask him why he lived the life that he did? 

He sat in silence for a while. Hay covered Kozminksy’s uniform, so Laurent swept it away just to do something. Snow was falling through the cracks, steadily covering Kozminsky under a white shroud, signaling his death the same way as that of all the villagers. Finally, seeing that Kozminsky was about to breathe his last, Laurent parted his lips to speak. 

“You know what, Mister Kozminsky. I don’t think I am cut out to be a Tax Collector after all.”

To Laurent’s surprise, Kozminsky smiled. Not the crooked smile he flashed when finding hidden food. Not the sneer his face contorted into when distressed Laurent watched children taken away and fathers whipped. No, a genuine, human smile. 

“Good, my boy. I did a good job mentoring you after all”, he answered with his last breath. In that split second, Laurent saw everything in his eyes - he saw a kind, honest man who took up government employment to better his country; he saw his futile attempts to be fair and kind to the people, and the terrible pressure of his superiors and colleagues that broke his spine and left him an empty husk instead of the man he once was; he saw his final act of revolt, at the very end of his life, to show a young, foolish boy that it does, in fact, matter what the job is and what it entails, all to spare him a fate that once crushed him. For everyone, it turns out, revolts in their own ways.

As Laurent stepped out of the barn, confused soldiers and scared peasants surrounded him, each awaiting his order and its implication - waiting to kill and to be killed. Laurent paid them no mind and wandered off, anywhere his legs took him. The lead sky abruptly stopped its assault and parted the clouds to reveal a brilliant, bright Sun, which seized its opportunity to embrace nature in a final goodbye. Laurent, bathed light and fleeting warmth, smiled for the first time in months. His life’s plan, that seemed so rational and foul-proof so recently, now lay in tatters at his feet. He was going to be fine, though.