In a quite corner of the bustling medieval town, far from the palace, lived Garret, an unremarkable man of modest means. His house, a humble timber structure at the edge of the fields, was warm not because of its hearth but because of the love of his family. His wife spent her days tending to their small plot of land, and I mean really small, 15 steps was all that took to cross it, but she did wonders with it, most of their food came from this little farm of theirs. Their eldest, a teenager, worked diligently as an apprentice carpenter, crafting spear shafts, barrels, buckets and other wooden things for the kingdom’s armies. The younger two children were too young to do much but scamper around the fields and keep their mother company.
Garret was not an ambitious man.He only sought to provide for his family, to keep the roof over their heads and the bread on the table. Life was predictable, sometimes difficult, mostly during winter time without his wife’s vegetables, but always steady. Then came the day when Garret found an opportunity, a position as a guardsman at the palace. It wasn’t a glamorous post, but it paid regularly, and unlike the fickle harvest or the risky toil of a smithy, it promised stability.
His job was simple, stand at the door of a minister, silent and still. He didn’t need to know the minister’s business, didn’t need to understand the palace intrigues. He only needed to obey orders and say, “Yes, Minister, Sir” when sent on an errand. It was monotonous work, but Garret didn’t mind. The pay was enough to sustain his family, even if just barely, and the job kept him out of the cold winds that swept through town.
Each day, Garret awoke one hour before down, trudged to the palace, donned his plain armor, and took his place by the Minister’s door. His world shrank to the small corridor where he stood, day in and day out. He perfected the art of thinking about nothing. It was a quite life, repetitive, but steady. He had no complaints.
It was on one such uneventful day that everything fell apart.
The duchess arrived in a flurry of silks and furs, her voice loud, cold and sharp, followed by her formidable retinue of royal guards. The moment she entered the corridor, the air grew heavy with tension. Garret dared not move, dared not even look directly at her, but he hard every word.
The minister, a pale and trembling man, knelt before her as she read aloud the words of a parchment. The words tumbled over Garret like stones, the words he could understand: conspiracy, treason, exile. He couldn’t comprehend much of the lofty language of the nobles, but one thing was clear, the minister was finished.
Garret barely had time to register the events as they unfolded. The minister was dragged out. But then, with a short nod from the duchess, four royal guards turned their attention to Garret and the other guard stationed by the door, his silent and nameless work-friend.
“You served a traitor”, one guard sneered. “You’ll share his fate.”
Garret opened his mouth to protest but found no words. He was just a door guard! He didn’t know anything about treason or plots. He didn’t even know what the minister job was. But his surprised and terrified expression, his ignorance on the subject, meant nothing to the duchess or her soldiers. He was shackled and thrown into a carriage alongside the minister and the minister’s family, his fellow guardsman, and a few frightened servants.
The journey to the desert was long and grueling. Garret sat in the cramped, stinking carriage-jail, staring blankly at the barred windows. His thoughts churned with worry for his wife and children. Did they know what had happened to him? Where they safe? How would they survive without his meager earnings?
As the days passed, the reality of his fate settled over him like a shroud. He had done nothing wrong, yet he was being punished as if he had conspired with the minister himself. The desert loomed ahead, a barren wasteland where exiles were sent to rot for the rest of their lives and die forgotten.
Garret clenched his fists, his heart heavy with despair and a growing flicker of anger. He had been a simple man, did his job as instructed, never complaining, never questioning, never missing, and now his life was in ruins, simply because of his workplace and his boos. He didn’t deserve this. None of the guards did.
—————-
The story is over, no happy endings for the protagonist, because Garret is not the protagonist, this short story is supposed to tell the life of a random guard that appears on all Movies and Books and Stories about heroes against villains, the protagonists are the hero and the villain not the guard, but most often then not the guard, or servant, or any random employee was there just doing their jobs, unaware of any plot happening on higher levels, are killed too.
And this does not feel right, when I was younger, like much younger, those random people meant nothing to me, my mind was focused solely on the heroes or the villains, everyone else meant nothing. But that is not nice, now I catch myself disliking Saviors, and sometimes the entire story, because too many people is killed, or accused, or imprisoned, even though they are innocent. Just a random person hired to do a simple, normal, legal, job.
The media loves its tidy lines of distinction between good and evil, but they conveniently ignore the collateral damage to innocent workers. They are not evil, they are just there, working.
Do the heroes stop to think about that? No, of course not. They kick down the doors, swords blazing, powers flashing, declaring justice for all while leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. What about the guy hired to guard the gate? What about the cook in the kitchen? Do they deserve to get obliterated because they happen to work for the wrong employer? What about all the non-combatant people on the Death Start? I’m sure that spaceship didn’t operate with soldiers alone. And I am extra sure most of those people never even saw Darth Vader.
It is infuriating. It is lazy storytelling. Sometimes I grow sick of movies and stories that ignores the non-villain worker (fantasy or based on reality, they are all the same in this aspect). I’d like to see a hero pause, hesitate, ask the terrified guard why they are there, or investigate the circumstances before throwing them into a wall. I would like to see a story where someone says “Wait, maybe this isn’t the villain’s accomplice. Maybe it is just some poor bastard trying to make ends meet, ignorant of what is going on above in the hierarchy”.
As I said in a previous post about books and movies, “Writers, please do better”.
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