The last Question

Read the last Question if you must, it's one of the most awe-inspiring stories I've read out there.

So there was a time when people thought it waz ok to poke around people's house, check if they have some spare sugar lying around, scoop it up in your pouch, make some tea for the guests, and after they leave, go to the market, get some sugar, and put it back into your neighbor's locked sugar trunk in the basement -- why are your neighbors so careful with their sugars anyway-- without anyone ever batting an eye over it. People would say things like 'Howdy mate, you tuk sum Sugah' no probleme ye olde matey, lets makey somme rumme!' and everyone would be the best of friends, unless they were enemies in which case they'd be robbed, raped, pillaged and murdered but lets not get ahead, and everyone would live happily ever after.

And then one day you would get a knock on the door from a short-ish guy with a long scar running from under his eyes to his neck, claiming he was the King's man, and the King demanded a certain annual tribute. And you'd happily invite him into your house, and serve him all sorts of delicacies and juices and rummes which would confuse him quite a bit because the taxxe manne be de moste loathede creature of alle timme. And then you'd prepare bed for him, convince him to enter the room, which would cause him to fall into the spiked pit, right along with last elevenne taxmen, the greengrocer, the door-to-door salesman that wanted you to buy the new dictionary because he's just a young student trying to make money for the University, and dear sire, would you please buy the cheape version which he is selling, because that would allow him to go to the University?

And then there would be searches, like every year. Don't they ever think of keeping track of what houses a collector's  going to, specially after 11 of them have disappeared in the same general region, you'd start wondering. The 'detective' would come to your house, like every year, and you would say, like every year, that you are just a lonely old lady living on your own, no family or kids, your husband himself was a tax collector whom you dearly miss who himself disappeared some 12 years back, and you pray to the Gods that they find the tax collector at the earliest and that he'd doing all well and good, and if there's anything you could help them with, you would love to. Would they perhaps want to come in for somme dinner? Maybe juices and rumme? No? And then you wish them all the luck and they go their own way, and you are done for the day, so you go to bed.