Part VI: The Great Escape
Chapter 10: The Skin Mask Trade
Timeline AO 295
Baldur’s bride Gawain had just torn her face into shreds!
Hecla pulled back her pony in shock, but when the Secret Servants recovered from the horror they began laughing at the scene that was taking place before them – a cruel symphony of scorn that filled the tunnels. Their taunts were laced with venom, each word a deliberate barb aimed at the fallen queen.
Meanwhile Gawain’s maid Willa quickly pulled the curtain closed, “My lady, you mustn’t do such a thing!”
“Is everything all right in there?” Hecla was annoyed, yet curious, and rode her pony close again. Hecla’s heart pounded with a mix of irritation and curiosity. She felt a perverse desire to pry into the carriage, to see the aftermath of Gawain’s madness.
The dim light from the torches cast long, sinister shadows inside the rikpull, making the small space feel even more oppressive.
“Yes, yes, we’re fine,” Willa hurriedly replied, trying to muffle Gawain’s continued screams.
One of the guards made a show of himself around the coach, “Baldur’s whore is probably just excited about the prospect of seeing him again. Ooh. Ahh.”
Amused at the prospect and recovered from the macabre sight, Hecla replied, “Yes, let her enjoy the thought.”
Yet on this occasion Hecla was far off the mark, for had the Drokka maiden taken the time to open the curtain she’d have seen a truly gruesome scene inside the coach. As it turned out, Gawain actually had ripped off her own face – or at least the skin mask that covered it.
[Oh, you don’t know about Derkka Skin Masks? Well, they were quite an incredible invention by my intelligent Babelonions. As I told you already, because of The Glamour, anyone else who beheld a Babelonion like Gawain would consider her beautiful beyond compare, however the people of Babel could not escape the torment of seeing their own ghastly appearance. Tired of looking at their personal deformities, my clever Babelonions invented skin masks – pieces of flesh designed to cover their flaws. It was thus ‘only’ the skin mask over her face that Gawain had ripped away and not her real flesh – sorry to disappoint you].
After pulling the mask away, the Derkka princess had thrown it on the floor of the carriage — Willa picked it up and tried to give it back to Gawain, while at the same time trying to avoid seeing Gawain’s true face.
“I don’t want it.” Gawain cried inside the coach, slapping the piece of floppy flesh out of her maid’s hand.
“I don’t understand, my love,” Willa whispered, trying to protect her mistress’ privacy. “Is something wrong with this one?” And here the maid subconsciously touched the mask that covered her own face, while still trying to get Gawain to put her mask back on.
[The mask Gawain wore covered her face from neck to forehead, attached with an adhesive substance called kolla at the hairline, around her ears, and various other spots. It had been expertly crafted to allow for Gawain’s lips to fit through perfectly, for the molded nose to sit properly, and for her eyes to see through unfettered].
For her part Hecla had no idea about Gawain’s deformity — that disease of the flesh that plagued her maid Willa, her guards, and every other Derkka — therefore she knew nothing about Gawain’s mask.
[What’s that – you want to know more about these skin masks? Did all Derkka wear them? The answer to the latter question is NO – for the less intelligent “Common” Derk who lived outside of Babel (and who the Babelonions had stopped intermingling with) had long since accepted their deformities and happily wallowed in their ugliness. Like the rest of the Babelonions, who had that touch of the Amorosi beauty in their blood, Gawain worked hard to enhance her appearance and hide her deformities. The Derkka princess regularly used all the standard wares that both the men and women of her day employed to hide their shame – vermillion for her cheeks, kohl for her eyes, mulberry juice for her lips, along with a host of lesser products. In fact, the use of artificial coverings was big business among the people of Babel, as rich and poor alike did everything they could to look beautiful — for despite their misshapen faces and bodies (or perhaps because of them) the way a person looked was ironically of utmost importance in their culture – as you can see, little has changed with your kind – even back then, appearance was everything].
Would-be baron that she was, had Hecla known about it, she’d have been jealous – for the skin mask industry that became the height of commerce among the Babelonion power-brokers. Some of the wealthiest in Babel, and even a handful of the Derkka Parliament (to include the family of Marge of the Thatches), were individuals who had made their fortunes from the skin mask trade. And those fortunes ballooned when they accepted help from some of their fellow elites on the Drokka’s side – the Gaatz merchants found ways to cut costs and improve the sales process and the Rukstinz gave them the capital to expand their operations tenfold.
As you can guess, the poor people in the Babel society were at a disadvantage and the poorest of the poor simply wore veils to hide their shame. Yet such had never been a worry for Gawain — like others in the ranks of the city’s high society, the wealth of her family had always given her access to the best options available to alter her appearance – and even better than cosmetics was the use of a skin mask – for while makeup colored over deformities, a mask actually made them disappear! As a result, the Babelonions used masks not only for their faces but also other parts of their bodies as well.
And yet, nothing in life comes without a price – in the case of skin masks, what nobody talked about was the pernicious little fact concerning their creation – the skin used to make them had to be harvested from somewhere…or rather from somebody.
Most masks were made from skin that was taken from the recently deceased via a procedure in which a Derkka medicine man would remove the upper layers of the dead person’s skin and then preserve that raw material in natron for later use. Afterwards various (and mysterious) treatments were performed upon the materials to keep them supple and flexible, so they’d be able to withstand the wear and tear of daily use, and then the skins were sold at mask shops throughout the city. Yet the masks used by Gawain were not made in such a common-place manner. All of Gawain’s were custom masks — made with living flesh — harvested from girls of similar appearance while they were still alive.
Lest you think that this was appalling, understand that, at the time of their creation for Gawain, when word first went out that the princess was seeking a new mask, girls from all over Gor had volunteered for the honor (read: they had been volunteered by their families in exchange for a pretty price). Naturally the Skin Barons advertised this as the ultimate honor – the chance to be famous by having your face worn by a royal- and naturally the poor of Derkka society clamored to be first in line for this great opportunity. (I wonder, would YOU volunteer for this? Laugh if you must, yet here is yet another example of the wisdom I’ve been trying to teach you, my readers. The poor are merely the pawns of the rich – at every level. Nay, the poor are less than pawns even, they are naught but meat for the slaughter, coins for the machine, cogs in the system). And what a beautiful system it was!
Hecla also didn’t know that Gawain actually had a facial mask for every day of the week, as well as a varied assortment of different skins for other parts of her body – one for her left hand that provided back the two middle fingers she’d been born without, one for her right buttock, and another for her hollowed out right thigh. Additionally there were the miscellaneous ones that covered a whole host of skin tags, folds, and stubborn wrinkles all over Gawain’s body.
What Hecla never knew was that Gawain desperately wanted to hide her deformity — in her entire life, none save her nurse maids and perhaps her mother very early on had ever seen Gawain’s true appearance. But that changed when Baldur saw her true self in the Mersian Mirror. For a Mirror from Mersia never lies — it even overcame my Glamour spell.
[Although this flaw in the system was something I had intended all along – for surely you realize that the ‘situation’ that happened between Baldur and Gawain was no mere accident, right? I mean surely you are smart enough to know by now that this was but yet another string in my web, eh?]
Hecla had no idea about the true nature of the Derkka skin masks or the horrifying reality of Gawain’s appearance beneath it. She believed she was delivering Gawain back to Baldur as a trophy, unaware of the devastating secret that Gawain carried. Hecla thus rode ahead, satisfied with her perceived victory, yet she could not have known that this gruesome scene marked only the beginning of a much darker revelation. The true face of Gawain was just one of many secrets waiting to unravel, each one poised to shake the foundations of her own world.
All the while Hecla thought that Gawain was just upset about being captured, or perhaps about the prospect of being taken back to Baldur and having to endure some foul treatment, what she didn’t know was that Gawain was really upset because the king knew her secret — Baldur had seen enough to know that Gawain was not who he thought she was. For Gawain was not the most beautiful woman in the world as the king had always believed – instead Baldur saw the flabby bag of bones he’d been making love to the past few years – and it sickened him.
[And that sent him right back to Helca – exactly as I intended].
And so we come to something else that Hecla was wrong about – she thought that she was bringing Gawain back to her father to reunite them as a couple — but what Hecla didn’t know was that Baldur no longer had any desire for Gawain.
Instead the king had a new object of infatuation — or rather he wanted to rekindle an old flame — and that was none other than Helca herself.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 