Title: The Bones of the Desert
Date: 2006-08-07 01:47:45
Type: Stories
Synopsis: An event of the arcane salvaged from the personal journals of Warlord D------ Tor.
It was moonrise, as I said, when I first saw the girl. The latest skirmish
was over with the passing of the day and she stood there, a forgotten spoil
among bodies. My Scorpions, with a discipline grown lax and shameful with
the sorrow of loss, straggled behind, breaking rank to crouch by their fallen
comrades. I would attend to them in a moment; first, the girl. She
had a message for me. Similar slips of paper saying much the same as this
one would arrive in the hands of others over the next few hours, for the
commanding Blues would trust nothing to the way of the mind. Not this
time. Not this war.
She looked small and soft amid the shadows and the jagged pikes and broken
arrows which stuck haphazardly up in all directions among the dunes. This
was an illusion; the tribal was as wind hardened as any desert dweller, and
only her youth and surroundings gave the lie to her appearance. How she
was forced into service, I never thought to ask. Likely she was the
closest non-soldier to hand near the increasingly barren encampment, two
leagues off. Barefoot, she crouched in the bloody sand by a fallen
Scorpion, naked curiosity on a naked face.
“You’ll die for that,” I said, snatching the folded parchment from her grip
with my free hand. The rustle of paper sounded loud in the hot moonlight. I
had my orders, then, and sand sprayed as I wheeled towards my broken unit,
shouting to the nearest soldiers. The girl was still here, I was
preventing her from running.
“That was a stupid thing you just said.”
Indeed, the dune shadows seemed to
hold a deeper intelligence, a base cunning and hunger, and did we not lose as
many men to the sands and the heat as to the northern forces? If there
was a third army in this war, the earth we fought on was candidate
enough. The ground shifted and trembled beneath my feet, causing cries of
consternation to rise behind me. The child struggled like a bird in my
grip, still intent on lunatic backtalk.
“It will come for you
too, if you are weak!” Enough of this. Lack of sleep and water made
me paranoid. I raised my sword to cut her down, but with unnatural,
frightened strength she wrenched free of my imbalanced grip, running for the
dunes she worshipped and controlled.
“The sands take you then, you little
desert monster!” I yelled, and then I had other things to worry about.
++++++++++++++++
When I saw her next, in the arena stands, the war had been over for five
years. I had not forgotten her, for her pronouncement had been eerie
enough to stick in my mind – though the thoughts I spared her were few
indeed. I’d assumed her long taken by the desert, as she had said that
day. She was very much alive, grown tall and slim and pampered. Her
dark hair hung in long, neat braids. But a suede collar wrapped her neck, the
clasp a familiar wyvern, and her eyes were still as blue as the day I stared
into them on the battlefield, ready to snuff their feral hauteur. Today,
she wasn’t mine to kill. But I remembered her secret.
I took her chin, turned her face from side to side. She did not stop me,
though we both knew I insulted the Lord Borsail by touching his slave without
invitation. Still, he had other things to occupy his mind, and she was
there to entertain. Besides, I was about to do him a favor.
“I remember you,” I said, and released my grip on her face. The late
afternoon sunlight filtered through the haze of dust in the still air.
“Yes.”
“How did you...”
“War prize.” She lifted her
shoulders helplessly. The halting sirihish she spoke sounded like
music. “It matters not my people did not fight, still, I was brought back
to city. It was this, or...” She touched her collar, motioned to the
sands below. "I was lucky to catch his eye." The roar of
the crowd nearly drowned out her words.
“It suits you,” I said, turning my
attention back to the fight. Her next words were bleak, sarcasm bordering
on dangerous, as the gladiator’s battle against the captured anakore staged
below us drew to bloody completion, the arena sand a wash of mottled reds.
“I am not the only desert monster
tamed by city walls.” I turned back to study her, my voice dropping
low. Her young Lord laughed melodically two seats over, oblivious to
our conversation.
"Your position is a dangerous
one. If they haven't found out yet, they will soon. The sand can't
save you here, girl." And then she was as frightened as I'd ever
seen her, even with a sword at her throat in the middle of a war.
"You will tell."
"It would be a crime not
to."
"That is not
yes." With an impatient motion of my hand, I affirmed what she
didn't want to hear.
"Give me one week,
please," she pleaded in my mind.
"And let you harm the Lord
Borsail?" I answered in kind. Then,
aloud, "No." She was too lovely altogether, with refined
looks which would produce an expensive line of slaves. I hated to do it
for reasons other than the waste, and the certain anger and embarrassment of
the Lord C-------. But duty and honor are creeds by which my family lives
their life, and by my duty and honor would she die. She was white with
fear beneath brown skin, a leather leash round her ankle and attached to the
balcony rail preventing her from running as I could see she wished to.
"I will take one hundred of
your people with me," was her whispered pronouncement, even as I
discreetly called for the attentions of the necessary authorities.
++++++++++++++++
She is gone now, and I am old.
But I do not forget the way she died, the way her master's face drained of
blood with his rage, the way she followed, passively, until the very ground
beneath our feet betrayed us, throwing us by tens from our feet. The road
split into two, three parts, buildings crumbled on the heads of the
soldiers. She fed the hungry earth with the blood of an entire unit who
had gone mad with the fear of that wild desert which was unable to be shut out of
the city completely. Perhaps the sands would have remained passive if I
hadn't threatened their child. Perhaps I should have said
nothing. Perhaps many things.
She died, eventually, or so it was
said. Never to my blade, or the blades of the soldiers, or to the power
of the Highlord which took the sight from her wild eyes, but to the city street,
the earth which she begged to end her. There was nothing left afterward
but a drift of sand, a chasm, and a ruin. No body. Perhaps she is
beneath us still.
No, she wasn't weak. She did
not take quite one hundred, though it was close. But she didn't kill
me. To this day I wonder why. To this day I have slept with less
ease in my bed, for deny as I might, I know the sand outside blows against the
walls of Allanak. Patient, gradual, inexorable, ever hungry, the
desert waits with the wind to take us back into itself. In the end it is
the desert we return to. I have seen it done, I have heard it said.
The desert comes for all of us. Even me.
Ocandra, the 142nd day of the Descending Sun, Year 47 of the 21st Age