I guess it could all come down to the fact that he had decided to trust me. He felt alone and, although publicly he always appeared sparse and severe, the truth is that he had a sweet and vulnerable side. Without a doubt it was the day he showed me his body when he gave himself totally to me. He shared his secret with me, on the condition that if I ever revealed it he would sacrifice me, despite his great love for me. He was so sure that I knew perfectly well the nature of his feelings that he did not doubt that I understood the seriousness of that promise. He made me swear and perjure before the altars of iron. He led me to the bedroom where I now sleep, and for the first time since I knew him (seven years ago) he undressed completely before me.
It didn't surprise me. There was a rumor in the harem that he was impotent. But I suspected that was not it. He kept his body from me with such discretion without seeming to have any good cause for it. We had already spent a lot of time sharing intimacy. I knew very well that our relationship did not go through the crotch, but even so I had always felt that there was something more, because Aythor often made timid references to a distant time when he seemed to have been someone else. It was as if something had happened that had marked a before and after in his life. He never told me about it, but years later, even before he died, I had enough pieces from his little comments to piece the story together.

At some point, probably when he was a teenager, conquerors had invaded his village just as they had Duga. Aythor's village was in the mountains. They had destroyed everything. They burned the village and killed all the old people. They took those who had the strength to work to the mines where I also spent my time in captivity. What was admirable about Aythor as a ruler was not his ability to generate a kingdom. In fact the kingdom already existed. Aythor had also arrived as a slave to Tojé. Tojé back then was not the magnificent city it is now. The walls already existed, but only because the walls of Tojé were built thousands of years ago to house another city. Inside the walls there was nothing but ruins and some adobe houses that the invading people had begun to build a few years ago. Aythor knew how to recycle himself. When they took him out of the mine he dedicated himself to medicine. Thanks to this occupation he managed to gain the trust of the people who controlled the government. He learned medicine from machines. It was there when he began his relationship with Emsilar, which was already selling data. After dedicating himself to medicine for ten years he became part of the council that was below the city government. It was then that he organized the coup d'état and imposed himself as ruler. People trusted his ability to maintain command. It was said that he was as cruel as he was a strategist. These were two characteristics that the majority tended to have disproportionately. A good strategist who was not cruel enough could be dismissed when a worse but more cruel strategist arrived. Someone extremely cruel, with a lack of strategy, could be quickly removed with a relatively simple strategy. But Aythor was adorned with both qualities. He was relentless, he kept a cool head at all times. He never got angry. His hand did not tremble when it came to executing whoever had to be executed. He could do it by his own hand. Immediately the people feared and respected him.

“That's when I decided to become a soldier,” he used to tell me. It had been when he had established his rule in Tojé as ruler, that he realized that if he wanted to maintain it he would have to learn new skills, and that he would have to try to expand the kingdom. Because otherwise the fear and respect he commanded could begin to weaken. Furthermore, he had to get people to do something besides working the mine and the land. He had to continue with the same tradition thanks to which he had managed to govern. If the invading peoples had engaged in plundering and slave trading, he would have to do exactly the same, multiplied by five. So he began to conquer towns, kill old people and kidnap those who could work, mutilating those who showed leadership qualities, as they had done with him. If he had become interested in medicine it had been precisely because he had had to learn to care for his own wounds. And so that there would be no new upstarts who, as he had done, would organize a coup d'état against him, he built himself a palace like a fortress, and only allowed people who had been stripped of any political personality to approach him. It was, indeed, a very lonely life.

​

Although Aythor loved the palace gardens and was personally in charge of their planning, because this hobby was what he liked most in the world, he rarely went down to them. Normally he limited himself to observing them from the balconies and galleries. He gave orders in the harem for a group to walk through one of them, and he observed the people as part of the landscape of the garden. In an arid land like Tojé, the care and maintenance of the gardens represented a great cost. Their exquisiteness was a display of power, and although the people could not see them, Aythor commissioned the councils to spread images and poems about the enormous variety and fragrances of their plants and flowers. Each garden had its name, just as they had in the palaces of the past. There were even trees in the gardens, the tops of some of which towered over the profile of the palace and could be seen from the city in the distance. Also the style of each of the gardens was different. Aythor admired the geometric gardens of ancient Baroque Europe. He adored the exuberance of romantic gardens, imitators of nature, the empty elegance of zen gardens, and the extravagance of maharajah gardens. He just created a mix of all of these styles. The gardens were eclectic, but balanced. Everybody admired them.

The interest he took in the maintenance and creation of the gardens meant a real seed traffic. The wealthy merchants of Tojé, who were a handful of clans, were busy trading seeds from very distant parts of the planet to Aythor. In fact, it was this trade that first began to reopen the ancient trade routes that had been interrupted over the centuries of technological development. But now, lacking airplanes, large ships or fast trains, merchants sought information in machines to know the ancient routes, in the hope that something of the ancient layout of towns and cultures still remained on the roads. This was partially successful, because in fact the merchants found that, just as in Tojé or Setúbal, nothing remained of the ancient cities. They had all been abandoned, and their inhabitants had lost their memories, skills, and technology. Also on all the routes there were a few machines that kept some memories of how this whole process had occurred.

However, there were some things that not only had not been lost, but had improved over the almost two centuries that had passed since the cities died. Vegetation had grown everywhere. Many of the trees, shrubs, plants and flowers that had once been produced by human hands still existed and had spread. Since Aythor showed his interest in plants, the merchant clans had carried out several missions to very distant lands and had managed to create links with local people who had very willingly sold them the seeds of the most varied and difficult plants in exchange for technology and iron. It was a great business because for local people the plants were just there. Thanks to the merchants, they had begun to pay more attention to them and take better care of them. They soon realized that they could ask for more iron and more technology, because they were too far away for the trading clans to try to enslave them. This backpollination once again encouraged the idea of profit among the towns along the trade routes, just as it had done in Tojé thanks to iron and slavery. Tojé became a long-distance capitalizing agent, all or in part thanks to Aythor's exotic tastes. It is quite possible that Aythor was well aware of this, and that what seemed like an eccentricity was actually part of his economic program. He was very smart.