The Upper Side of Standard

The Last Kappolarian Prt. 1

2011-12-24T17:40:00.000-05:00

(The Last Kappolarian is Book Two in the Monasco Trilogy, containing twelve parts.)

Monasco: The Last Kappolarian

Part I

The New World

The once thriving cities of Calabrecia and Kappolaris were travesties of crumbling stone, buried in a catastrophic silence, all but for the plodding of horses that meandered through the debris. Four members of the Imperial Guard and a squad of eight Monascan infantrymen, including the newly appointed head of artillery, Lieutenant Arehlya Seguro, shadowed Empress Ogami in an exhaustive reconnaissance operation throughout the Kappolarian province. Monascan cavalry had seen its opportunity to lay the smaller city to waste, once Calabrecia’s walls had been breached. The troops certainly did their job, the empress thought, perhaps a bit too well. This twenty-fourth passing after the war showed little promise for survivors, only the need for another extensive, massive, reconstruction campaign.

As she trudged through the devastation, the empress found herself in a critical disposition over General Monasco’s tactics. Kappolaris had been inhabited predominantly by scholars, businessmen, and academics, the minds that fed Calabrecia with philosophy and trade strategies, hardly akin to the ideals of warlords. The Kappolarian military was sparse and poorly trained, having relied for three hundred seasons on the shield of her sovereign sister city. If the General wished to make a statement of the might of Monasco, he had already done so on the battlefield; this annihilation was entirely unnecessary, a fool-hearted consumption of time and resources and money.

The Kappolarian residential district endured less physical damage than it had the terror of the Monascan blade. Broken doorframes and fractured windows exposed an atrocity. Civilians resisted, attempted to fend off the inescapable. But conquest spattered the mud brick and coagulated in corners; it dried in mid-stream over thresholds and emanated into the streets, fermenting under the heat of twenty-four desolate passings.

Tai Ogami dismounted her steed and wandered along the borough, her hands clasped behind her back as she muzzled her indignation. The guards followed closely, carrying pistols for wild dogs and vultures as they strolled through a peculiar opus of a thousand flies against the rattle of armor. Most of what was left behind had already been devoured by predators that required no invitation to any abode; they’d come and gone, but for a single crow that squawked at them from the nearby frame of a twisted shutter.

Her senior officer drew his weapon and shot it, knocked it into a feathering tumult to the dirt.

“Stand down.” The empress held up a hand and glared over her shoulder.

He holstered his pistol.

She was focused on the cedar wood door to the next dwelling. It was splintered and shucked by the force of a battle-ax. Several blows made concave trenches which had driven it off its hinges and slammed it to the floor, whereafter it was trampled by foot soldiers on a mission to mutilate. She could see the blood-dried bootprints scuffed across the surface. But it was closed now, propped back into the jamb from the inside, snug and firm. The shattered adjacent window was also sealed by what looked like a painting, a portrait of a woman of similar descent to the empress herself. At the base of the door were claw marks in an endeavor to dig under and in, but whatever it was had given up and gone to find sustenance elsewhere. She placed a palm on the door and pushed. The guards brandished firearms and cutlery from behind. It was fixed tight, and so she went to window but hesitated at the dignified smile of the woman who reminded her of her mother. She wouldn’t damage the artifact any more than it already was, for she could see further attempts at entry pecked and scratched into the heavily matted canvas. She strolled back to the door, examined it again, then gestured to one of the guards to kick it in, and he did.

The pungency of death burst into the open as a swirl of flies took flight at the entrance and flurried about the darkness inside. Daylight cast a wide yellow column onto limbs and hair and shredded clothing, animated by a frenzy of tiny intruders, industrious enough to have surmounted the desert’s finer scavengers. Crimson had gone brown and pasted the walls, the tile floor, the ceiling. A man lay draped over a very small child, just a few paces into the kitchen area, and on a table to her right Tai saw clearly the face of the woman in the painting, upside down, gaping into the golden shaft of mid-day sunlight. She was on her back, her legs spread and dangling over the table’s edge, her dress torn away with a deep gash from sternum to womanhood crawling with parasites. Tai shut her eyes away from it, searched her memory for which unit had been deployed into this sector, for she would establish legislation toward rules of engagement the moment she returned to Monasco. Whoever was responsible for this would face execution without falter, and without the pacifist sway of the queen.

Then she heard a rustling toward the rear, beyond the sunlight’s reach. Her soldiers had no torches to illuminate the shadows, so when she heard another shuffle the empress tightened a grip around the handle of her scimitar and unsheathed it slowly, quietly. She motioned to her senior officer to remove the portrait that blocked the front window. He stepped around the ravaged woman and pried the picture away from where it had been forcibly jammed into the window border. Another amber stream fell across the interior as a trembling gasp escaped from somewhere around the partition between the kitchen and a larger room. Tai Ogami cross-stepped over a toppled dining chair, sunlight glinting off her blade, reflecting a dancing yellow disk onto the opposite wall as she crept. She hesitated, isolated the origin of the sound, then whirled around the partition and pinned the culprit to the wall at the tip of her scimitar.

She withdrew it at once. A child. A female child. The empress estimated her to be about eight, nine perhaps. The little girl regarded her with eyes wide as plates, a distinctive almond shape like the woman in the painting. A tattered frock hung from her narrow shoulders, stained with the burgundy remnants of all that had happened there, and she recoiled against the wall and shrunk under a worktable, drew her knees up to her chin and wrapped her arms around them tightly.

The empress cocked her head in bewilderment. She sheathed her weapon and stooped down to meet her at the eye. The child shifted her eyes from the empress to the guards, seized by a frightful recollection, which Tai interpreted quite clearly.

“Leave us,” she told them, but the troops dawdled, bound by an oath of provision for her safety, and so she restated the command, this time with a bit more fervor. They exchanged wary glances, then exited out into the city, leaving Empress Ogami alone with her discovery.

“What is your name?” she asked delicately.

The child responded with a whisper lower than a whisper, swallowed by gloom and flooded with sorrow. “Tàhti,” she said and watched the empress with a doubtful eye. She tucked her bare feet in close and made herself as small as possible.

“Well, my name is Tai,” Empress Ogami said with a brief smile. “Is this your home, Tàhti?”

The girl did not answer. She rested her chin on her knee and stared at Tai as though the truth might conjure another monster in the doorway.

Tai glanced behind her at the carnage and tried again. “Is that your family?”

Tàhti scanned the kitchen but said nothing.

Tai shifted her weight to the other heel, and when she did, the little girl flinched. “You don’t have to fear me,” she assured and inched back. “Nobody’s going to hurt you, not even those big soldiers outside. I promise.”

The girl was unconvinced, and she let out a tiny sigh as if waiting for the empress to state her business.

“How old are you, Tàhti?” Tai questioned, hoping to establish a sense of trust with a change of subject.

After a moment the little girl held up both hands and spread her fingers.

“Ten,” Tai confirmed with another smile. “Well, I’ll tell you what,” she offered. “I don’t think this is a place for a ten-year-old little girl to be living, do you?” She surveyed the filth and took a mental inventory of the dried beans, corn meal, and pekha juice on which the girl had apparently been surviving for twenty-four passings, too terrified of the New World to search it for assistance.

Tàhti shrugged ever so slightly, and so the Empress held out her hand.

“I know where we can get something to eat,” she coaxed. “There are some very nice ladies there who’ll get you washed up and into some new clothes.” And she waited for the girl to decide between the grisly sanctuary of a home no longer inhabitable or the hand of a stranger with a promise. “I’ll make sure those soldiers outside keep you safe from the soldiers who did this. I know they look the same, but they’re not. In fact, I’ll send them back here myself to gather your family for a proper burial, according to your customs. You won’t be leaving them behind. You have my word.”

The little girl bit her lip with deep temptation and contemplated the proposal. It was either the motivation of hunger or the certain notion of a hapless future that moved her to reach out and take the empress’ hand. Tai helped her up from the shadows and walked with her to the door.

As Empress Ogami emerged with the child, Lieutenant Seguro approached. She gave the girl a dubious glance and asked Tai, “What are you doing?”

Though she was Tai’s first choice for special operations, her casual posture had been slightly vexing. “I’m taking her out of here, taking her with us.”

“And what do you suppose we do with her?” Seguro questioned lowly.

“We’ll bring her to Monasco, that’s what,” Tai said. “She can’t stay here, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Seguro peered skeptically out across the desert, then settled a troubled gaze on Tai and spoke to her in confidence. “So, we take her to Monasco and then what? Put her up for adoption? Set her loose on the city streets? This isn’t our responsibility. We’re here to do recon, not to be good will ambassadors. Send someone else back for her, if it’s that important.”

“I’m taking her to the palace,” Tai told her as she tightened the straps of Stratigo’s saddle. “And yes, it is our responsibility. It’s my responsibility,” she insisted. Then she turned away from Tàhti and the others and suggested to Seguro, “Maybe if she was a Monascan child, you’d be a little more inclined toward ‘good will’.” She arched a perceptive eyebrow and ordered her back to the group to ride out.

“Have you ever ridden a horse before?” she then asked Tàhti, and the girl shook her head. “Well, that’s all right.” Tai placed a boot in the stirrup and swung a leg over. One of the guards grabbed the bridle and guided Stratigo to the ground and the child was lifted up onto the mantle. She placed the girl’s hands on the saddle horn, telling her in her ear, “You hold on to this, and I’ll hold on to you. All right?” And the stallion shook his head with an anxious bray. Then she maneuvered the animal around and addressed the troops, “This child will be under my care from this day forth. You will treat her as royalty, and you will protect her as you protect me. Is that understood?”

They responded with a unanimous, “Yes, Your Majesty” as the child glanced around at her with renewed curiosity.

With a spur of her heel, Empress Ogami goaded the stallion forward through the broken city, one hand on the reigns and the other curled around an orphan girl, destined to become the Princess of Sähm.

*******

The Queen of Monasco admired herself in a full-length mirror. She turned to either side, smoothed the neckline of a white silk evening gown, smiled at the way the hem swept gently across the marble floor as she moved. It was more of an eggshell cream than a pure white, she thought, as she gazed more closely at her reflection, an image she had seen most often in the Ylles River when the wind desisted. Silver sequins and diamond chips sparkled in the sunlight, embroidered into subtle arrays along the right seam. Queen Seraya Bahan could hardly wait for the moment in which this dress would render the empress helplessly spellbound.

Jun Ogami admired her own handiwork. She strolled around her new daughter-in-law in a broad circle, kept a reflective distance and nodded. Seraya possessed the ideal frame for elegant attire; the fabric--particularly silk--took well to the curve of her waist and the graceful arc of her shoulders. And the color blended richly with her light toffee complexion. She made quite an effortless vision of mere thread and cloth, Mrs. Ogami mused, surprised at how well she took to the refinements of civilized culture.

“Now,” Jun declared and draped the final accessory around Seraya’s shoulders. “Hold it out. See how it flows, how the design catches the light.”

Seraya extended an arm. Additional diamonds and silver, woven into the delicate mesh of a chiffon wrap, glistened and breathed in the blue daylight, and the Queen of Monasco felt less like royalty and more like a seraph of the High Goddess.

“I can’t keep any of this on, you know,” Seraya told her and glanced through the open window at the sun’s position, nearing the Ahagaar peaks. “Tai should be returning shortly, and I don’t want her to see this until next passing at the induction banquet. I want it to be a surprise.”

“Well, then you’d better let me hang it,” Jun chuckled. “I’ll keep it in my room until next sunfall.” And she removed the shawl and draped it over a suede-padded hanger. A procession of boots and armor then echoed through the hall, moving toward the royal suite. Seraya hurried out of the gown.

“I said shortly,” she muttered as Jun eased the delicate dress over her daughter-in-laws’s hips. “I didn’t mean this instant. It’s like she listens to my very thoughts at times.”

Tai approached the bedroom and dismissed the guards. She turned the handle and cracked the door, but her mother met her there with a nervous smile, barring entrance.

“Just one moment, dear,” she assured and shut the door in the empress’ face.

Tai blinked, her nose to the wood, and she glanced down at the curious little girl at her side. “That would be one of those nice ladies,” she said, pointing to the door.

Tàhti peered up at her, bewilderment moving through her huge brown eyes as she waited with her rescuer for someone else to reappear.

After a moment the door opened wide, and Seraya smiled brightly from inside, adjusting the waist of a wispy wrap-around skirt. She wore it with a sea green tunic and matching emerald bangles around her wrists and ankles, her mahogany ringlets gathered into a casual bun. She slipped into her sandals as Jun made a nonchalant attempt at concealing the diamond gown.

“Honey, I’m home,” Tai sang with a smirk, her eyes twinkling with suspicious amusement. She stepped inside with a smile for her mother and a kiss for her wife, then peeked around the door, looking for clues to their odd behavior, but they were riveted on the little girl in the doorway behind her. So, Tai persuaded her into the room. She took her hand and crouched beside her. “These are the ladies I was telling you about,” she said and gestured to them both. “That’s my mother, Lady Jun.” Then Seraya came closer, perplexed and intrigued. “And this is Seraya, the Queen of Sähm,” Tai told her. She looked to her family and said, “This is Tàhti, and Tàhti is ten. She’s from Kappolaris, and I’m willing to bet she’s pretty hungry right now. She needs a good bath and something clean to wear as well, and I thought maybe we could see about that for her.”

“Well, hello, Tàhti.” Seraya knelt to her with a sweet smile. “You’ve come all the way from Kappolaris, huh?”

The child did not respond. She gazed upon the face of the queen, fascinated by the Calabrecian slave’s brand that marred her left cheek, just a shadow of a scar but visible to anyone who stood as close.

“Well,” Seraya said, anyway. “That’s a pretty long ride. I’ve made that trip myself, and I know I was famished by the time I got here. In fact, if I were a little girl as pretty as this, I’d want a bath and to have my hair brushed and fixed, too. Would you like that?”

This time Tàhti nodded, and so Jun held out her hand, accepting the task. The little girl stared at it for a moment, then looked to the Empress.

“It’s okay,” Tai assured with a wink.

Tàhti took another moment to consider the idea, then grabbed Jun’s hand to be escorted through the halls.

Seraya had a puzzled frown as she watched them leave. “What’s happened to her?” she asked. “Where’s her family?”

It was more than Tai cared to divulge until she could sift through all the details with her advisors, and so she cautiously refrained. “She’s been through a terrible ordeal. And as far as her family, well, it looks like we’re it now. She’ll need something to wear. I thought maybe you and my mother might work on a wardrobe for her, if you would. But in the meantime she’ll need something to suffice. I’ll see if my mother has any old clothes of mine stored away. I’m sure we can come up with something. But right now I’ve got some business to handle that really can’t wait. In fact, you might have to do dinner without me. I’m not sure how long I’ll be.” She left her with a kiss and disappeared out into the palace.

After a hot bath, steaming with honeysuckle oil and ginger petals and a healthy portion of harira soup, Tàhti’s coal black hair was combed and braided by her newly-appointed grandmother, and she was presented to the queen to be tucked in to bed.

Seraya chuckled at Tai’s old pullover, which would substitute as a nightgown for the time being. “Well, this thing nearly drags the floor on you.” She tugged at it with a smile and inspected the tiny plaits pulled into a ponytail. “My mother used to fix my hair like this, too,” Seraya recalled. “Next passing we’ll tie it up in a nice bun for you, and maybe Lady Jun might have finished a pretty dress for you to wear. What do you think?”

Tàhti sat cross-legged on a feather bed in the guest room closest to the royal suite. She uttered not a word but gave the queen the slightest nod, and Seraya urged the little girl under the satin down blankets and pulled them up to her chin.

“I know you’re very confused right now,” she cooed. “All these strangers. This big palace in a far away city. But you know what? I know exactly how you feel. I’m almost as new to all this as you. But one day the empress showed up and changed everything, made everything colorful and safe. I have a feeling you and I are two of the luckiest girls in all of Sähm right now,” she smiled. “So, you sleep well tonight and don’t you be afraid of a thing.” And she lowered the flame on the oil lamp and began a bedtime story about the woman who was a commoner and became a princess. But this time she changed the ending, and the princess became the queen of her own land, grew old and content and smiled upon her children and grandchildren each passing. And with that the little girl fell asleep. Seraya extinguished the lamp, pulled the window shut and returned to the royal suite.

Two halls away in the war room, Empress Ogami, Prime Minister Lior, Captain Olanga, Lieutenant Seguro, and three members of the Imperial Council deliberated over the outcome of the soldiers in the Monascan 4th Infantry unit. Olanga produced a registry with the names and ranks of thirty-seven troops, each a member of 4th Infantry’s 2nd platoon, which, according to the Captain, had been ordered to secure the Kappolarian sector once the battle had ended. Nothing more. After what she’d seen that afternoon, the empress hadn’t enough compassion to consider the various interpretations of that order. And so she arrived at her decision without reluctance.

“Send a security squad in to Camp Vallone, immediately after this meeting,” she directed. “Arrest them and charge them each with disobeying a direct order, with dereliction of duty and a violation the Warrior Code. How many victims were there? Do we know?”

“So far there seems to be close to a hundred and fifty,” Olanga said.

The empress breathed an irritated sigh and leaned back in her chair at the head of the table. “A hundred and fifty,” she muttered. “All right. Then charge them each with one hundred and fifty counts of murder as well…and one count of attempted murder,” she appended.

“One count of attempted murder?” Lior questioned. “I’m not sure I understand, Your Highness.”

The empress gave him a faint smile and said, “I know. But you will next passing.”

Lior shrugged. “As you wish, Your Majesty.” And he noted the charges for permanent record.

“Once they’ve been detained,” the Empress continued. “Have them brought to the city and scheduled for execution by archery squad next passing. And I want it public. I want the entire city to bear witness, to be made aware that this regime will not tolerate martial impudence of any kind. This is my military now, and there are going to be some changes as to the way we conduct ourselves, laws that will be followed in a professional manner by soldiers and citizens alike. The only way we’re going to unify this region is through a common appreciation and respect for the tenets set forth here and now. This is a new era, and we’re going to enter it in a righteous and qualified fashion. Is that understood?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” the table resounded, all but the Captain who responded with a desultory nod to which the Empress took notice but said nothing. He had his orders as well, and she had very little concern for what he thought of her personally. Next passing’s events were to send a message to everyone in her charge, not discounting the individuals at that very table. She rose, and they rose with her. “I have some related issues to discuss with the queen before next passing,” she said and dismissed them for the evening.

Inside the royal suite, the lamp flames were doused and all the candles extinguished but one that flickered on the mantle. Seraya was tucked under the sheets asleep, and the candlelight threw amber shadows across her bare shoulders. Before the empress settled in for the night, she chose first to check on Tàhti, just down the hall. She shut the bedroom door softly and went to the next guarded room with her finger to her lips. The soldiers that flanked the doorway remained at parade rest as not to rattle the little girl from her sleep. Tai peaked inside to find her wide-awake, fidgeting with a rag doll, watching the moon through the stained glass window. She opted to leave her to her thoughts, rather than keep her awake with idle conversation, and so she left her be. She could remember her first few sleepless nights at military school, haunted by uncertainty, homesick and disorientated. It would be quite an adjustment period, but at least she would spend it in the care of the most gracious women Tai had ever known. And with that she gently shut the door and she headed back to the royal suite.

Seraya turned groggily to face her wife as she took a seat at the edge of the bed to remove her boots.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” Tai whispered, shedding her uniform. “I just wanted to check on Tàhti before I came to bed. She’s still awake, but I left her alone.”

Seraya frowned. “Well, when I left her she was asleep. Do you think she’s had a nightmare? Maybe I should go see about her again.”

“No, no,” Tai insisted. “She’ll be fine. She has to learn to trust the darkness.”

Seraya was unconvinced, but she settled back into the sheets and said, “It’s a bit rigid, don’t you think? To leave her alone in there. She’s only ten, and she’s obviously been through an awful time.”

“She’s fine,” Tai said as she kissed her forehead and took her in her arms for the night. “She’s a survivor, believe me. And speaking of, there was something I wanted to talk with you about, since you’re awake.”

“And what would that be?”

“I need a minister, a holy man from your culture to perform a burial ceremony. Calabrecians and Kappolarians share the same spiritual beliefs, so I thought maybe you’d know what to do about something like that.”

Seraya nodded and snuggled close to her. “Well, of course,” she uttered. “I’ll see what I can do.” Then she peered up at her with concern. “Is it for her family?”

Tai heaved a sigh, telling her, “For them and about a hundred and forty-seven other Kappolarians.”

Seraya held her breath as an awful notion fell across her face. “The war?”

“You could say that,” Tai mumbled. “There’s something I have to do next passing, something to which you’re probably going to be greatly opposed, but it has to be done.”

“Greatly opposed?” Seraya questioned. “Well, so far I think I’ve been very supportive of your decisions. What exactly would I be so opposed to?”

“An execution,” Tai told her flatly. The queen said nothing for several beats, and so her wife continued. “When the battle at Calabrecia ended, the General ordered an infantry platoon to make rounds through Kappolaris to look for survivors,” she explained. “And today we found them. Slaughtered. All of them. A hundred and fifty civilians in their homes, women and children, infants, elderly. It was senseless enough what was done to the city itself. But then a few dozen soldiers went in and eradicated what was left of an entire culture of people. All but one. And so, next passing they themselves will be put to death in the city square to ensure that this empire and its military have a clear understanding of the laws concerning the rules of engagement.”

“And I suppose those rules can be bent when it suits the regime,” Seraya countered quietly. “Murder them for committing murder.”

“I knew you were going to say that.”

“Then why did you tell me?”

“Because you’ve got just as much influence over this empire as I do, an equal stake. And besides, it’s a public execution. It’s not like I could hide it from you if I wanted to.”

“And there’s nothing else that can be done? Life imprisonment? Expulsion from the military? Nothing else? It must be a death sentence?”

Tai exhaled noisily and told her, “Under the circumstances, yes. I’ve got to make examples of these soldiers to establish some respect from the people and the army. In fact, they’re not even soldiers; they’re criminals who were left to govern themselves and made a massacre of Kappolaris in the process. There’s absolutely no honor in that. None whatsoever.”

The queen shifted onto her back with a sigh. “Well, you’re right. I am greatly opposed, however, it seems my influence only extends so far, since you’ve apparently made your decision.”

“This time, yes.”

“I see,” she breathed. “Well, I’m not going to be present for it, just so you know. I’ll take Tàhti and we’ll make a trip to Gaddis or to the Ylles for the day. I don’t think she should have to see that, do you?”

“No, I don’t want her to be here,” the Empress agreed. “It’s a good idea, Gaddis. It’s likely she’s never been there, so she might enjoy seeing the ocean.”

Queen Seraya’s response was indistinct, and she shut her eyes and tried to sleep.

“Will I still have your support for the burial ceremony?” Tai asked.

“Yes.”

Seraya said nothing more and turned to her side. Tai didn’t push. She expected this, and she hoped to avoid it in the future, to find ways to keep order that would make her queen happy. Perhaps next passing’s events would be the first and last of their kind, and then she might begin to build the utopia that Seraya dreamt about.

Tai turned to her and kissed her shoulder, but Seraya kept her back to her. And so she rested an arm in the curve of her sleeping form and invited the scent of jasmine in her lover’s hair to soothe her to sleep.
********
Tàhti awoke to a tender voice, bidding her good morning. Queen Seraya sat at the edge of the bed and smiled as she smoothed a hand over Tàhti’s braids, but her eyes held traces of disappointment that were not there last passing. In fact, sadness in any form seemed an unusual quality for this woman, and the little girl wondered if it had anything to do with the recent war. Tàhti herself hadn’t become quite so acquainted with gloom until all the fighting and commotion began. And it wouldn’t have surprised her if this Queen of Sähm had been touched by the turmoil as well, having come from Calabrecia where most of the chaos had taken place. She wasn’t even aware that there was a Queen of Sähm until last passing, nor an empress, and she pondered over their separate functions—an empress and queen over the same land. Where was the emperor?

“I was afraid you didn’t sleep well,” the queen said with an expression of sympathy. She didn’t. The moon made her anxious, and it had been glaring at her from just over the dunes like an all-seeing eye, not of the High Goddess but of something sinister, the way it spied through the cracks in the picture frame that blocked her window for so many nights. She took comfort, however, in that the wolves had gone and hadn’t followed her here. She took comfort in the downy mattress and the stone walls on all sides and in the blue gems sewn onto the face of her doll as the eyes. They had charmed the ill-starred moonlight and spun it into tiny sparkles, and now they did a similar trick with the morning sunshine.

The queen grinned, took the doll with a chuckle and toyed with it. “You like this thing, huh?” she remarked. “It used to belong to the empress, if you can believe that. To look at her now, you’d think she slept with a hunting knife instead,” she laughed and handed it back to her. “Well, we should get you dressed, little lady. I thought you and I might go on a trip today. Have you ever been to Gaddis?”

She hadn’t, and so she shook her head.

“Well, all the better,” the queen said. “Then it will be even more fun to take you. I’ve been once with Empress Tai, and I had no idea how beautiful a place could be. The water is breathtaking, endless, as blue as the eyes of your doll.”

And filled with monsters, Tàhti was always told. Fish the size of a dôcha with teeth like a carpenter’s saw. Bigger, even. Sharper. She wondered if they had the ability to walk on land, and if so, how often they breached the shores.

She climbed out of bed and was dressed in the empress’ old clothes, her hair twisted neatly into a topknot, adorned with a white lace ribbon. She took the queen’s hand and as they entered out into the hall, the guards at the door shifted to attention, giving her a start. They remained at the doorway and gave no chase, yet the little girl watched them cautiously until she and her new caregiver turned the next corner.

Palace workers chiseled at the walls and painted the borders. Then they suddenly halted at the sight of the queen and knelt to a knee with their heads bowed, and Tàhti wondered if she should do the same.

“No, no. As you were. Please,” Seraya insisted as if it discomfited her to be revered, and they all returned to their tasks, like a complex apparatus that had been shut down and then restarted. The queen stopped at a fresco in progress on one of the facades and admired it. The artist, a young man not much older than the queen herself, folded his hands against his chest and took a step back with a slight bow. She smiled at him and his work—plush trees with leaves of red and gold in a bursting canopy above a winding brook, over which was a red wooden bridge like the one at the palace entrance, and in the background stood an enormous blue and white mountain, bigger than any mountain Tàhti had ever seen. She was inclined to think this painter had quite an imagination until Queen Seraya grabbed an old picture book from a nearby worktable. The text was a series of symbols in a language unfamiliar to Tàhti, nothing like her native L’ghälii.

“Remarkable,” Seraya whispered, comparing the image on the tattered page to that of the young man’s work. “What has the Empress offered you for your time?” she then asked him.

“Twenty-five rikks, Your Highness,” he responded.

She nodded and laid the book in its place. Then she gazed up at the mural and told him, “Well, I’ll see that she doubles it. And your name?”

“Odion, Your Highness. Of third-colony-Monasco.”

“Well, Odion,” she smiled. “My compliments. And I’m sure the empress will agree. Carry on, please,” she encouraged him, a former slave who would go home with as many rikks as Tàhti’s father made in five passings as a school teacher. Her world had made a quite a turn while she cringed in the rancid darkness of her ruined home, and she took the queen’s hand to venture forth into more intrigue.

Drums soon resounded from the city square, a distant thunder that shot a flash of dread across the queen’s face, and she hurried Tàhti along.

“We need to move quickly, sweetie,” she urged with a brief smile. “There’s a carriage waiting for us out back, and we don’t want to keep them.” And she was whisked away through the halls in a rush.

They were greeted by five soldiers at the end of a long conduit that led from the rear of the palace to the outside. A horse-driven transport wagon awaited there, decorated with golden baubles and red silk fringe on a white sheer canopy. One of the soldiers held out a hand to assist his queen into the carriage, then he did the same for Tàhti, but she shrank away from him. The queen encouraged her forth, but Tàhti found her feet had turned to granite as she was struck with the sudden recollection of bloodstained iron and the wails of her infant brother. It was all revisiting her as if she had fallen through some crevice in time, flung backward to the final hours of the war itself. When she finally shook it away, her dress was damp with sweat and she was on the ground in a ball, trembling.

The queen had gotten out of the carriage and tried to soothe her with gentle strokes and pitiful words, but to Tàhti it was as foreign as Odion’s picture book, and she cast her off. She wanted her mother. She needed to feel the largeness of her father’s arms, lifting her from the floor into a cosseted embrace, but there was only this young strange woman and the rattle of armor and shuffling of boots. How had she gone from a fearless city girl with thick skin and a thirst for adventure to this cowering mad little imp? The question turned her fear around somewhat, and she stopped shaking. The reality of the present slowly returned, and she dared peer up at Queen Seraya whose face was a pale blank sheet.

“It’s all right,” she cooed. “Nobody’s going to hurt you.” She repeated that several times as she helped Tàhti to her feet, bewildered and cautious. She stayed with her, crouched before her with wide brown eyes that seemed to be searching for what to do or say next as the drums from the city bounced around the walls and crescendoed. One of the guards stepped close again, and Tàhti flinched at the broadsword that dangled off his weapon belt, which shot the queen to her feet with a stern and rather crude stipulation.

“Just back away,” she snapped. “Can’t you see you’re scaring her? Now, go! Move back!” The men obeyed and stepped away, but she still wasn’t satisfied. “In fact…” and she went over to horse closest to them and began unfastening its bridle from the carriage. “We can manage just as well on our own, I think,” she uttered. When the animal was free of its equipment, she held out a hand to Tàhti and beckoned her over. “Come on. Just you and me, okay? Just us girls. To the Ylles for the day? It’ll be closer, not so many strangers,” she promised.

The same soldier who’d sent Tàhti reeling into the past then spoke up. “Your Highness, I really wouldn’t advise you to go off on your own. The desert isn’t safe, and—“

“Has it ever been?” she quipped. The execution cadence rumbled in the distance as she secured the horse’s stirrups. “There’s certainly less iniquity out there than here, this passing. We’ll be fine. You’ll return to your posts in the palace and report to the empress when all this…” And she waved a hand around at the goings-on out in the city. “….all this madness is finished.”

The guards exchanged a wary glance and beseeched her once again, but she refused and ordered them to stay behind as she and Tàhti set out for the eastern Ylles River.
*********
The Monascan city square was packed with spectators, awaiting a mass execution, anticipating an appearance from the empress. Thirty-seven relegated soldiers trembled against heavy wooden posts, bound at the wrists and ankles, blindfolded and stripped of their uniforms. To each prisoner an expert archer had been assigned, positioned exactly ten paces off, and they tugged at their bowstrings and examined arrow tips for lethal accuracy as the drums thundered throughout the city.

Empress Tai Ogami gazed out across the red desert from the window of the palace watchtower. She lowered her eyes to the marble with a sigh and wondered if Seraya would return in time for the inauguration banquet, as she was quite poised to stand her up without regret.

“The prisoners are in place, Your Majesty,” Prime Minister Lior informed her from the doorway.

She nodded and lifted her eyes out to the empty sand as a reverie sailed through her mind; the banks of the Ylles; the horizon a spectacle of orange and lavender; a question hanging on the silver splinters of fading sunlight—what if you could be a queen?

Well, if I were your queen, there’d be no more war, no more bloodshed. There‘s already been enough of that.

Her lover’s eyes were glistening pools the color of molasses that passing, imagining this New World as if it already passed her by in a lifetime forgotten.

Ten hide beaters pummeled a death cadence to the roar of the crowd as Prime Minister Lior abided patiently at the door. “Your Majesty?”

The Empress nodded. She straightened the sash of her uniform and followed him out to the terrace.

The citizens of Sähm erupted as she approached the banister and gazed down upon a thousand faces. The accused were lined along the main thoroughfare, facing the palace, facing her. The executioners readied themselves on the opposite side of the concourse as citizens were ushered aside by security soldiers.

“Citizens and nobles of Sähm,” the event herald then announced from the opposite end of the terrace, and the crowd noise dwindled as the drums rolled softly. “You have all been called to witness the sentencing of these men and women for war crimes against the Monascan Empire.” And he read their names and ranks from a long roll, read them slowly with explicit pronunciation—thirteen corporals, nineteen sergeants, five lieutenants, and a captain. “For the crime of murder, one hundred and fifty counts, these prisoners are hereby sentenced to death on this passing, the eighty-first of Lumina in the season of one thousand and three. For the crime of attempted murder, one count, the sentence is also death as decreed by Her Royal Majesty, Empress Tai Ogami, ruler of the Monascan Empire of Sähm.”

Tai glanced around to find her mother had joined the terrace entourage, but Jun stood back and gave her daughter a vanguard at the railing and observed without interruption.

“Archery squad, draw your weapons!” the head of security then commanded, and thirty-seven assassins stretched their bows in practiced unison, pointed them toward a pale blue sky as the drums began to build.

Empress Ogami raised a hand high above her head, the preliminary signal to proceed, and the cadence quickened as the crowd chanted in resolute favor of death.

“Ready!” the commander bellowed. The archery line lowered their weapons and took simultaneous aim at their respective targets.

She had promised to use her authority to create a land undisrupted by hostility and turmoil, to make reforms that ensured a peaceable future, free of butchery and oppression. She was fully empowered with the option to pardon these criminals, possessed solely the fates of thirty-seven lives, god-like in that respect, tyrannical in the eyes of her wife. Three-dozen prisoners waited below for Empress Tai Ogami to honor her commitment to change as a thousand more lobbied for their demise.

She abided with stoic detachment, unwilling to display her conflicting emotions as she kept a hand held high in limbo. And as the rumbling death cadence strengthened, the Empress of Sähm sliced the air with the order to fire at will.

Thirty-seven arrows whizzed across the thoroughfare in an unmitigated instant and pierced the chests of their targets. Knees buckled, shoulders slumped, and heads hung. The crowd exploded and chanted her name, adoration for the merciless intolerance of their new leader. Then it grew quiet as they awaited an oration, but the Empress had little to say. She took a final account of the scene below, then turned away into the palace, hoping her decision would find her in better spirits for the ceremony at sunfall.

Captain Arturus Olanga shook his head at the spectacle. He strolled inside with the other officers and found Lieutenant Seguro who approached with a pall of disapproval.

“So, I guess we’re in the business of killing our own, now,” she muttered, and Olanga gave it an ineffective shrug.

“Well, we’ve got plenty of enemy soldiers in prison, ready to replace them,” he said as they walked together. “How many are there? Five hundred or so? All of them poised to give their lives, certainly not for Tai Ogami, but for their beloved and beautiful new Queen Seraya, I’m sure.”

“The beloved Seraya who hasn’t got the stomach to call them into battle, even if she had to,” Seguro said. “She wasn’t even present today. Makes you wonder what the Council proposes if the fate of this empire is ever left to that bleeding-heart dreg.”

Olanga smiled with a humorless chuckle. “Well, Seraya Bahan has more sway than either you or I care to contemplate, and I’m willing to bet her influence began long before this regime ever existed. How else could she have finagled her way into power? To have advanced from a slave colonist to a comfortable seat at the throne in…what? A season or two? Perhaps she truly is a force to be reckoned with,” he said with affected unease and a smile.

Seguro rolled her eyes. “I think the only force at work was Tai Ogami’s libido. She’s always had a weakness where women were concerned, and I’m not so sure that’s changed. Believe me, I’m all too familiar with it.”

Olanga gave that a smirk and laughed lightly. They had come to the main foyer, and he stopped and said, “Well, whether it was by lust or calculation, it certainly was no fluke that an enemy dreg found her way from Calabrecia to Monasco, into the Imperial palace, and into the arms of a Monascan deserter as our most gracious and noble queen.” His words were tinged with irony and defeat, but Seguro shook her head and stepped up close to him.

“Yes, but you see, Captain, that’s the difference right there,” she told him irreverently. “She’s not my queen.” And she turned away and swaggered out into the city, leaving him with his thoughts and queries.

*********
When they reached the river, Queen Seraya found a comfortable patch beneath a baobab tree for them to sit. The Lumina sun fanned out across the desert and sparkled the river plane, and Tàhti recalled her neighbor, Mr. Salaambo, a reed boat captain who used to fish along the Ylles and often brought her family fresh tilapia and butterfly fish.

“This is my favorite place in all of Sähm,” the queen smiled. “The empress and I had some very interesting conversations on these banks.” Then her smile waned and she said, “Seems longer ago, now, than it actually was. A lot has changed in a very short time.”

Tàhti leaned against the tree trunk and said nothing. She picked up a chip of limestone and drew circles in the dirt. The queen took no slight from her silence and continued the unaccompanied conversation, telling her, “I used to be afraid of them, too, you know. The soldiers. And for similar reasons. They came into our colony when I was a girl, not much younger than you, and they killed my father for no reason at all, really. I didn’t actually see it happen; my mother turned away and kept my face buried in her shoulder, and the next thing I knew they’d taken him, and then it was over. My brother suffered the most, I think. He watched it all and never really got past it, not that it’s a thing to get on with, but he’s had a fire burning in him for twenty seasons, and it’s been devouring him, little by little, each day since.”

Tàhti glanced up at her and wondered how she’d made such a remarkable leap in social status and what the empress’ role had been in that promotion. She thought back to when Empress Tai had brought her to the palace last passing; she met the queen with a kiss, a lover’s kiss, and Tàhti was beginning to suspect there was no emperor over this land. She couldn’t figure how their lives had intersected to a romantic extent, but she imagined a love between an empress and a queen was like any other. It seemed so, anyway. She took the stone and carved another design into the earth.

The queen said, “There’s going to be a formal burial for your family next passing. The empress and I are working together to see to it, for everyone in Kappolaris.” She gazed at her for a long moment and said, “I’m so sorry you had to go through something so awful. It was a different ruler then. You need to remember that, and things are going to be different now, I can promise you.”

They were kind words but futile still. It only brought back the recollection of her mother’s screams as they took her for pleasure on the kitchen table while her father lay unconscious with her baby brother crying on the floor next to him. He’d scooped him up in an attempt to flee through the back door, faced with the unimaginable choice between wife and children. But they knocked him cold with heavy iron weapons and gouged him through the shoulder as he fell. They presumed him dead, and so they left her brother, Leandro, to the same fate, sliced her mother open, and disappeared to wreak similar havoc on Mr. Salaambo’s home. All the while she herself cowered in the shadows, hidden away in a dark corner of the adjoining room. It took almost half a passing for Leandro to stop crying. But she didn’t move, never let a single breath drift across the room until the commotion out in the city finally fell silent and she heard her father groaning. She saw him move to get up and started over to him, but he held up a stern hand and warded her back to the shadows. “No. You stay put,” he wheezed, and then he pushed himself from the floor, lifted the cedar wood door that had been rammed off its hinges, tilted it upright, and forced it back into place with all the strength he had left. Then he slid to floor again, took Leandro into his arms and began to sob. And that was how he left this world, in tears with his murdered infant son in his lap. A formal burial in a sarcophagus of gold could not wipe that away—nothing ever would.

When the memory faded, she realized the drawings in the dirt had made their way to the flesh on her thigh where she had begun the first three letters of her brother’s name, and the queen saw it, too, and she snatched the stone from Tahti's hand with sudden alarm and an admonishment to match.

“What in the name of Méraah are you doing, child?” she scolded. She hurled the rock as far into the desert as it would go and regarded Tàhti strangely. “There’s enough blood drawn in this forsaken desert without us doing it to ourselves. You have to promise you’ll never do such a thing again. Ever.” She waited for a response, but Tàhti owed her no promises and no recants because she was no one’s child, anymore, and the sting of torn skin felt better than the throb of a broken heart.

Queen Seraya was growing flustered with Tàhti’s silence, and she said, “You can only keep your thoughts penned up for so long, you know. Eventually you’re going to have to set them free if you ever want to be free, yourself. And trust me, I know a thing or two about freedom and the lack of it. The way you’re going, you’re no better than I was as a slave to Calabrecia, except you’re bound by pain and loss, and there are no laws that govern that. Only the ones we create for ourselves.” She studied the bleeding cuts on Tàhti’s leg, shook her head with a deep sigh, and tore away a small section of the hem of her skirt as a bandage. Tàhti allowed her to dab the wound clean but remained quiet. She thought about their common sorrows and considered, for a moment, that perhaps she was right. But then it all made another resentful turn and Tàhti shut her out again.

They remained at the Ylles for most of the day as the queen prattled on in a one-sided dialogue. They watched the river boats and fishing canoes float along soft currents and snacked on date cakes and papayas that’d been stored in the horse’s saddle pack. Queen Seraya talked about democracy and an all-inclusive Sähm where every citizen had a voice and no one’s beliefs were discounted. She said it was the empress’ greatest and boldest achievement, the abolition of slavery, but capital punishment was an issue left unsettled between them. The queen’s father would have been opposed to violence in any form, and it was up to her to carry on that legacy, particularly having found herself in the unlikeliest position of power, a position that neither of them could’ve ever predicted. She spoke fondly of his memory, but her expression saddened at the mention of her mother. She glossed over that topic and left Tàhti with an abridged, disjointed account of their estrangement, saving the complicated details for when Tàhti was older. The queen talked and dreamt aloud until the sun rubbed against the mountainside with the reminder to head back to the city before dark, and so they packed up the horse and headed west.

The Ahagaar shadows fell across the plains quickly, and they had only come to what was once Calabrecian territory with another twelve miles to cover. The Queen goaded the horse into a gallop, trying to make up the time as she held Tàhti close around the waist. It was getting cold, and the wind was obnoxious and stole her breath on occasion.

And then at the far southern horizon they saw the silhouettes of four riders, encroaching rapidly. Queen Seraya kept onward but watched them with a cautious eye. They had a hundred miles of open wasteland in which to choose a course but seemed bent on that of Tàhti and the queen, and Seraya chose not to tempt disaster.

“You’re going to have to hold on to the mantle,” she said into Tàhti’s ear and placed the girl’s hands firmly around the saddle horn. “Do not let go, no matter what.” Then she snapped both reigns and gave the steed a kick and a shout that bolted him forth as if shot from a cannon. But the distant riders did the same and kicked up a black dust cloud as they took off in unmistakable pursuit.

There was nowhere to take cover, no ravines to delve into or dunes behind which to vanish, and the riders were able to take strategic routes that soon placed one on at each flank, one gaining at the rear, and another in a boomerang course around in front until the queen was surrounded without escape. When the gap was successfully closed, the five of them skidded to a halt in the center of Sähm’s vast empty tundra.

Seraya swerved the stallion in half-circles and braced an arm across Tàhti’s chest, her eyes shooting around at the faces of four men dressed in the tatters of nomads, armed with batliffs across their backs and khanjars on their waistbands. They hadn’t the appearance of soldiers, despite the military weapons on hand, but they were not arbitrary wanderers, either. Not entirely. They were some new amalgamation of paupers and mercenaries, too skilled at hunting games to be farmers, yet lacking the discipline of a professional army.

“We’ve got nothing of use to you. Just let us be on our way, and you do the same,” Seraya demanded.

The men said nothing. They settled onto their steeds and studied their newest catch with thoughtful consideration.

“I’ve got a child with me, for the love of Méraah,” Seraya insisted. “I would think even bandits have a code of some sort? What threat could she possibly pose? Just let us go.”

One of them wore a ragged bandana and a faded leather eye patch, and he guided his animal up next to the queen and said to the others, “Bandits?” He smirked at Seraya and said, “Well, now that’s a first. Been called many things, and probably fit the bill to most of them, but never a bandit. I kinda like it, though.” Then he reached across and touched a fingertip to Tàhti’s chin, like a sportive big brother, but she recoiled. “Bet you never gone that fast on a horse before in your life, have you?” he said to her. “Your mother’s quite a rider, the equestrian type, I bet, judging from all those pretty gems and trinkets around her wrists. Now, tell me, is that a pure chiffon skirt or the kind they make now with hemp linen to make it look real?” he asked Seraya.

“What do you want from us? My jewelry? Fine,” Seraya scoffed. She reached down and unfastened the emerald bracelet and held it out to him. “Take it.”

The one-eyed man studied the bracelet with a peculiar smile but did not reach for it.

Then the queen said, “If you want the skirt, well then I’m afraid we’ll have to get it resized, seeing as you’re at least my brother’s height, if not taller. And I’m really not sure green is your color, even in the moonlight.”

The man laughed aloud, a genuine hearty chuckle that evaporated into the evening air. One of his cohorts leaned in and said something in his ear about confiscating the jewelry as a means to fund their future ventures, but the one-eyed outlaw waved him away. “I think the lady is correct in that even ‘bandits’ have a code,” he said, looking directly at Seraya. “So, we’ll let her keep her wares. I mean, after all, what would a noblewoman be without her diamonds and gold? Funny thing what defines us, isn’t it?”

“I’m not sure I catch your meaning,” Seraya sighed.

The man shrugged and said, “Well, I’m sure you don’t. How could you ever know what it is to live in squalor and watch your oppressors reap the rewards of your labor? I wonder how many slaves died mining for those beautiful jewels that you so easily toss away to crooks, as you say. What do you think? Ten? Twenty? One?”

“I think you haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about and that your grievances are sorely misplaced,” Seraya told him.

He shook his head and sat up on his horse. “Oh, I wouldn’t be so quick to say that, madam. I’ve watched your kind all my life, had the best seat in the house, as a matter of fact. But you’re right. It wouldn’t be wise to take a thing from a helpless mother and child, out here all alone in the desert after dark. There are other ways to make a point.”

“Well, these two have got to belong to somebody,” the third rider then spoke up. He had taken the khanjar from its holster and was cleaning his nails with the tip, and it was through this exchange that Seraya realized her own anonymity. The pale blue half-light had obscured the scar on her face, and they had no idea to whom they were speaking, but the brandished blade still made her uneasy, if for no other reason than Tàhti’s safety. Then the man with the knife suggested, “We can take them with us for ransom. The Goddess knows we need the money.”

Calabrecians, Seraya then deduced, and so she looked for a window in the dialogue to lobby for their release. But the ransom proposal was met with the one-eyed marauder’s fierce distaste, and he spun his horse around to his comrade and gave him a heavy shove. “What kind of a cretin are you? That’s not what we do. That’s not how we’ve ever operated, and we’re not gonna start tonight.” And he turned away from with a scowl. “Imbecile.”

“Well, then what is it that you do,” Seraya finally interjected. “Because if it’s not thievery or kidnapping or cross-dressing or anything else of that sort, then you might let us be on our way.” Then she eyed the khanjar in the third man’s hand and added, “And you should know that a crime against royalty carries a certain penalty of death, particularly an assault on the queen and princess of Sähm…as I have not yet been able to convince the empress otherwise.” She raised an eyebrow and stared into the face of the one-eyed man with deadpan severity. He stared back at her, as if she had just grown a second head, and he sized her up again, taking another account of the fineries and gemstones and the black and red-fringed silk riding mantle that carried the Monascan Imperial emblem. And when the moonlight shifted, it revealed, at last, the faint shadow of a slave’s brand on her cheek.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he muttered, and a sly grin crept across his face that Seraya was unable to interpret. “It couldn’t be,” he said, staring narrowly through the darkness at an impossibility. He was turning something over in his mind that left him artfully astounded, and Seraya was beginning to feel like an insect in a jar. “So, then it’s true,” he uttered to himself, then said to her, “I thought it was the delirium of newfound freedom that started rumors of a Calabrecian slave at the throne of an empire. A Monascan empire, at that.” He maneuvered his horse around to get a better look at her and the child and said, “Who’d have thought that Seraya Bahan would stumble into royalty and that I would stumble onto her, all these many seasons later.”

Seraya regarded him with suspicion. She looked him over thoroughly but came to no useful conclusions, aside from the Monascan slave’s brand on the side of his neck, which made the previous Meraavian reference odd, she thought. “I really don’t believe we’ve met, sir,” she denounced. “I’ve never had contact with Monascan slaves prior to the war, which would limit our acquaintance to the last thirty passings, and I’ve never seen you before in my life.”

He gave her a thin, knowing smile but did not pursue the subject further except to say, “Well, Your Highness. That’s too bad. We might’ve been very instrumental in each other’s lives if things had been different.”

“This is a jackpot if I’ve ever seen one,” one of the others then announced. “If we’re ever gonna change our game plan, then now’s the time. We take the queen of Sähm, and there’s no limit to the leverage we’d have. And the child’s just a bonus. Think about it. It’s like chess,” he said. “You’re a chess man. Well, this is an obvious checkmate, friend. We’ve got to do this.”

The man with the patch couldn’t tear his gaze from the eyes of Queen Seraya Bahan. He considered his options with great care and quantity and said, “Or a stalemate.”

The queen tightened an arm around the little girl on the saddle and waited for his verdict.

“Let them go,” he ordered, and the others broke into a gale of discord, thought him crazy for letting the biggest fish of all slip the line and disappear into the abyss, but he ripped the batliff from over his back and swung his animal around at them with the blade sweeping past each man’s throat. “I said we’re letting them go!” he roared. “There’s a better way to get things done, and taking them prisoner is not it. You’re just gonna have to trust me on this.” He glanced back at Seraya Bahan and said to his men, “I know what I’m doing. Just let them go about their business, and I’ll explain everything later.” Then he held out an arm toward the west, granting them safe passage.

The queen nodded once with a polite, “Thank you.” And she spurred the stallion into a trot and headed out across the desert, leaving the one-eyed man to contemplate the encounter in befuddled amazement.
**********
The Empress sat quietly at the banquet table, watching the inauguration festivities with a troubled frown. It was the official celebration of the new sovereignty, and so far her queen was a no-show.

A percussion ensemble of taiko drums, darbukas, and bongos rattled behind veiled dancers as political dignitaries mingled with nobles and military officers, exchanging ideas on how best to organize the affairs of the new regime. Tai Ogami possessed absolute power in the war and conference rooms, yet very little in her own union with Seraya. The empress would give her wayward spouse until the conclusion of the Khintari performance, and then she would proceed without her.

The Khintari rumbled through the hall with a metallic thunder. Musicians traded smaller instruments for huge, elephant-hide taiko drums as acrobat dancers soared in lofty somersaults to splashing gongs and clanging bronze pipe bells. Guests stood around the main floor and observed the performance, shouting them on. Carousing fit for an Empress. An Empress with empty seats on either side. Tai let out a defeated sigh and glanced around the hall for her wife and Tàhti, but she found only formal dress military uniforms, old men in dignitary robes and their wives, raising cups, laughing, calling out kudos to the Khintari dancers. She sipped her wine, toyed with her napkin, fidgeted with her silverware, even engaged in small talk with Captain Olanga to pass the time.

One of the palace guards then approached the table. He came around behind the empress’ chair, and he leaned down and whispered in her ear. Tai threw her napkin into her plate and motioned for the Prime Minister and Olanga to follow her.

On the far eastern side of the city, a flaming kiosk raged as citizens and soldiers formed a water chain, dowsing the blaze one heavy bucket at a time. It had been a rug and tapestry stand, and the scorching fabric sent a pungent odor of charred camel hair through the city. A bolt of fear struck the empress’ heart for having no word on the whereabouts of Tàhti and Seraya, and she dispatched two soldiers into the city to look for them while the fire raged.

“Vandals,” Prime Minister Lior muttered as he and Olanga assessed the scene. “That’s all they are. Vandals, trying to send a message.”

“Well, it’s a point duly noted,” the Captain sighed and watched the flames claw the sky. “Duly noted for the third time, this season. Set the animals free, and they’ll certainly run amuck, won’t they?”

“And some who’ve always had their freedom are little more than animals themselves,” the empress remarked, keeping her eyes on the blaze. “I’m sure you know that as well as I do.” And she folded her arms across her chest and started to walk away but stopped and faced him. “And if I were you, Captain,” she warned, “I’d be very careful when voicing my prejudices, particularly in the presence of myself or the queen.”

He cleared his throat and nodded once. “Yes, Your Majesty.” But in his eyes were pyres of contempt as fierce as the fire before him. The Empress left him there and strolled away to speak with the Prime Minister.

Olanga straightened his uniform and surveyed the area on his own, silently scorning her. He kicked through stumps of charred debris and thought about the outrage that sparked this mayhem. He shared in the malcontent of it thoroughly. Ogami’s lofty aspirations would be problematical to say the least. And as long as this anarchy continued, her unified Sähm would remain the grandiloquent imaginings of a slave girl and her beloved renegade.

There was little that could be done about the incident. There hadn’t been any casualties, only the merchant’s lost property and revenue. And so it was logged for future review as the Empress and her entourage headed back to the palace with yet another disruption to consider.
*********
Seraya and Tàhti were met by a squad of security soldiers a mile outside Monasco, and they escorted them into the city where Jun was waiting at the rear palace entrance.

“Tai has been beside herself all evening,” she warned as she helped Tàhti out of the saddle. “We’ve had trouble in the city again, and no one knew if the two of you were all right.” Then she looked at Seraya straight on and said, “There’s a reason why there are guards assigned to your safekeeping. We can’t afford to have you put at risk. The desert isn’t what it was before the war.”

“No, it certainly isn’t,” Seraya muttered. She brushed herself off and added, “Not that everyone in Sähm had the luxury of a day trip without being run down and accosted. First it was military patrols, now it’s thieves and marauders. Can’t say what’s changed, actually.”

As she said this, Jun took sudden notice to Seraya’s torn skirt and the specks of blood that had seeped through Tàhti’s dress from the wound on her thigh. She looked to Seraya with alarm.

“It’s a long story,” Seraya said. “But we’re fine. Both of us are fine.”

Jun exhaled sharply with a look of reproach and checked over her shoulder for Tai. Then she took Tàhti by the hand and Seraya by the arm. “Come with me.”

She led them into the palace to a side chamber and shut the door. “What in the name of all the gods happened to you?” she demanded in a low voice. “This is precisely the thing that—“

“Do you have any idea how terrified she is of those soldiers?” Seraya said of Tàhti. “We had every intention of going in the carriage, but then one of them reached for her like a piece of baggage, and she…I dunno…she had some sort of episode.”

Tàhti withdrew to a seat at nearby table and watched and listened.

“What was I supposed to do?” Seraya continued. “I couldn’t keep her here, not with a public execution taking place just paces from the palace doors, and she was shaking like a leaf in the wind. She wouldn’t let anyone near her but me.”

Jun took it all into consideration, but she was bound to the statutes of her daughter, and she said, “There are few circumstances, if any, in which the Queen of Sähm should ever find herself miles from the city, alone and unprotected. Now, I’ve said my peace, and you can ponder it as you wish. And I suggest you do, for you own sake.” She went over to Tàhti to inspect the injury on her leg, then gave Seraya a mortified glare when she saw the nature of the wound.

“I think it’s safe to say that whatever she went through during the war is beyond anything you or I could understand,” Seraya told her. “And she still hasn’t said a word. So, we’re never really going to know until she decides to tell us.”

Jun cupped her hands under the girl’s chin and looked at her with dispirited sympathy. “What would make a child so broken?” she uttered. “You’ve got nothing to fear, anymore. You’re in a safe place, and you can have anything you want here. You can have all the toys in Sähm that you could possibly imagine, more food and clothes and games than a child could ask for. But the soldiers have to do their jobs, and the most important one is to keep you out of harm’s way. Do you understand?”

Tàhti lowered her eyes to the floor with a slight nod, which was enough to satisfy Jun Ogami, and she took her hand and coaxed her along to have a proper bandage applied by the medical staff. “Tell Tai I’ll have her back and ready for bed shortly,” she said as she left the room. “And if you don’t care to tell me what happened out there, then I’m sure Tai will be quite the avid listener.”
. . . .
When Seraya came to the royal suite, her wife was seated in the corner of the room, waiting for her. Seraya proceeded to the vanity table and let down her hair. There wasn’t going to be an exchange of pleasantries, so she readied herself for bed in a pensive silence as Tai watched, wordless, motionless. Seraya removed her jewelry and set it on the table. She rubbed jasmine oil into her pores and combed her hair with a peripheral view of the empress in the edge of the mirror, ruminating from the shadows. All that filled their silence was the crackle of the fireplace, and when it became too much to ignore, Seraya opened her mouth to explain but was cut short.

“I gave a speech tonight about the future of Sähm,” Tai announced. “About building a naval fleet for exploration purposes and preparing for the inception of global trade.” She remained in her seat and spoke with unsettling sobriety. “I denounced most of the old military training methods and initiated new ones, and I stood behind my decision to end slavery, which was when I intended to introduce you as a political leader, as my wife and the queen of a new empire. But,” she shrugged, “you were mysteriously absent, so I was forced to turn one of the most powerful women in Sähm into a side note. Not quite the way I saw that playing out, but I’m sure you had your reasons, and I’d certainly like to hear them, if that’s all right with you.”

“I had every intention to be here,” Seraya told her. “But as we were headed back, we were met by a group of gentlemen who mistook me for someone else. And after a very brief conversation, we went our separate ways, but not soon enough to return to Monasco and make myself and Tàhti ready for the banquet. And for that, I’m sorry.”

Tai shifted in her seat and crossed a leg over the other and said, “Maybe an apology wouldn’t be necessary if you hadn’t stolen away across the desert on a military horse and ordered the guards to stay behind, which, I might add, is an abuse of power that not only put your own life at risk, but Tàhti’s as well,” Tai said. “And a group of gentlemen in the middle of Sähm after sunfall have nothing good on their minds when stumbling upon the Queen of Monasco, alone.” The anger in her eyes faded as they traveled over Seraya’s dogged appearance and stopped on the tattered hem of her gown. “What did they do to you?”

Seraya pursed her lips. “Nothing. And if they had—I imagine you’d have them hunted down and crucified to the palace doors,” she chided. “They did nothing to either of us. They stopped us and mistook me for someone else. One of them thought he’d known me under different circumstances, but it was just dribble, trying to impress the others, I imagine. It’s nothing to get alarmed about. I apologize for not being here, and I only went alone because Tàhti was afraid of the soldiers. And I might be royalty in the wake of recent things, but you seem to forget, I lived a very different life until now. I think I can handle a few wayward rogues with chips on their shoulders.”

Tai shook her head and searched the marble floor for how to respond. Then she said, “I understand Tàhti’s afraid of them, and she has good reason, but she’s going to have to get used to them, one way or another. It doesn’t help to take her out of what she thinks is a threatening situation and then put her into one that actually is. I want you to promise me you’ll take the guards with you from now on. I have enough to worry about, and your safety isn’t supposed to be on that list.” Then she added, “And it was likely those ‘chips’ that burned down a merchant stand tonight, by the way. One man’s life savings incinerated before the sun could find its way behind the Ahagaar. You should be thankful they didn’t recognize you, or you and I might be having very different evening.”

Seraya turned back to the mirror. She lit a pinch of incense over a candle flame and let it smolder in a copper bowl. “Well, they knew exactly who I was when I told them. And as it came clear, whatever ill intentions they might have had were put aside for fear that you might have them drawn and quartered by elephants.”

Tai rose from her chair and crossed the room, perturbed. She unfastened the buttons of her uniform jacket and threw it to the bed. “And you don’t see that as reckless and foolish?” she insisted. She pulled off her boots and said, “There are times when your identity can get you killed, Seraya. I’m sorry, but it’s just the nature of things right now. I never intended there to be so much civil instability, but it is what it is, and until I can figure out how to steady the social politics, you have got to promise to keep security soldiers with you outside the palace at all times.”

“Yes, I promise,” Seraya mumbled to the mirror and finished her regimen. The nature of things had taken a remarkable turn in recent weeks, and she felt as confined as when the Calabrecian boundaries had her hemmed in to 2nd-Colony. It wasn’t what Tai had imagined for them. This, she understood. All the opulence and sophisticated grandeur of royalty was supposed to have released her from her daydreams and made them tangible, palpable, real. But it had all become so complicated so fast, and now there was a child to consider, a child with a frightening mystery at the tip of her tongue whose future was as uncertain as anyone’s at the present.

Tai let the issue dissolve into an awkward hush that followed them both to bed but kept her awake and brooding. She stared at the ceiling, hardly able to make out the mosaic through the waning firelight—a tiled portrait of Monascan deities intermingling with honored mortals like herself, offering blessed tokens of prosperity among the ossuaries of an oasis. It was a dichotomy that had narrated a thousand seasons of Monascan culture, a people anointed with all the gifts of greatness but at an everlasting price. And as the primary ruler of the first empire, what she valued most was worth more than anything that could be immortalized in stone. She turned and watched the gentle rise and fall of her wife’s shoulders as she slept, and she touched her face, grateful to be able to do so. She was just like her mother, fiercely independent and courageous without apology, but her naivety was a lethal factor which, if left unbridled, could bring all things of marble and stone down upon them in a cascade of ruin.

When sleep finally came she dreamt of fire and demons and the betrayal of close companions, the loss of her lover’s kiss, the collapse of a pantheon.

Monasco Part Two (revised)

2010-09-01T21:22:00.000-04:00

Part Two

The Inception

The desert had a fickle climate during the season of Abeya, and the night had grown colder than usual. The sandstorm persisted most of the way to Camp Vallone but was showing signs of reprieve in the final miles. Forty recruits had dwindled down to thirty-three as they trudged through the dunes in a trail of desperation, stepping over the fallen while the cadre ushered the rest along on horseback. Tai had been paired with Arehlya Seguro and a boy she knew only as “Driss” and together they’d hauled the dead man for an eternity. Cold as he was, he kept them warm. His listless remains, so much larger than they, shielded them from the wind and the stinging spray and the snap of the switch. But Driss was buckling under now. The weight of the man was like pulling an ox through a rabbit hole, and Tai could scarcely feel her own legs, couldn’t figure how they kept her up, limp as gooseberry vines. Driss took two more steps then crumbled to his knees and the dead man drove them all down with him. Seguro was tall and stocky for her age, and so she bore the weight until Tai could hook an arm around the boy and drag him to his feet again, and they pressed on.

She lifted her eyes from the path and saw faintly the smoke from a campfire at the horizon, then the tiny silhouette of civilization like a dark phantom resting in an ocean of sand. Driss spit up something black and bloody and vomited more of it down the front of his shirt.

“Just a little longer,” Tai breathed and hefted the corpse onto her shoulders. He was beginning to rot and she choked back last night’s dinner and told Driss, “We’re almost there. Maybe a mile. Maybe two.”

“We should cut him loose,” Seguro growled. She had a hold of the dead man’s shredded pullover, had it twined around her forearms for leverage; remnants of blood from a gaping wound at his throat had coagulated into the back of her hair. “He’s not gonna make it, and we can’t afford his weight, too. Just let him drop.”

“No,” Tai insisted raspily.

Seguro heaved the body forward in an angry huff. “You’re sympathy’s gonna cost us both,” she warned. “This is a test. Don’t you see that? Weeding us out. The strong survive, not the compassionate.”

Tai dropped an arm to grab at Driss and pulled him along, and the body toppled and the three of them were driven knee-deep again, buried in the dead man’s stench.

“You see?” Seguro wheezed as she stumbled for footing. “Let him go!”

“No!” Tai crawled around and placed herself at the rear, braced each of the dead man’s stiffening legs onto her shoulders and stood upright. She reached back to Driss, took his hand and lured him in close so that he could hang onto her waistband. “There’s supposed to be a code,” she grumbled and staggered forth. “You never leave a warrior behind. It’s written in the Hall of the Gods. You’re supposed to know that.”

“Well, I’m not one of the gods, and I’m telling you—“

A war horse plodded over to where they bickered, and Tai winced up into the face of Sergeant Muralii. She was at once beautiful and frightening, and she glared down at them as if to burn a hole right where they stood that would swallow them away, dead man and all. She flicked her eyes over the situation to asses it for consequence and saw Driss sprawled in the sand back behind them. Muralii dismounted. She went over and touched fingertips to the boy’s neck. When she rose her expression darkened with finality, and Tai heaved a dispirited sigh.

“Move out,” Muralii snapped. “Go.”

“I told you,” Seguro muttered to Tai as they steadied themselves in the sand. Then Sergeant Muralii produced a leather snakewhip from her weapon belt and slashed a bleeding welt across Seguro’s face and Tai cowered, awaiting a similar blow, but nothing happened.

“I said move out,” the sergeant hissed. She glanced at Tai, and her eyes were black wells filled with a complicated muddle of venom and duty.

The cadets obeyed and secured the dead man for the last mile. Tai wondered when Driss had actually passed because she thought he’d had a hold of her for several paces. She stole a glimpse behind her for a silent goodbye, to wish him safe travels on the heels of Numaih, but when the wind desisted and her visibility cleared, Driss was gone. She thought perhaps he had faked his death and was now skulking across the desert in an attempt to defect. She scoured the landscape but found no trace of him until Sergeant Muralii trotted past with the boy’s body draped over the back of her stallion, and she continued on toward Camp Vallone. Leave no warrior behind.

When they arrived at the training grounds, Tai sank to the earth like a boulder on quicksand but it was short-lived. The recruits were summoned into formation at the barracks; it was a haggard lot, thirty-one left barely standing, and the silence among them was eerie. The murdered slaves were heaped like firewood in the center of the camp where a hole would be dug in which the bodies would later burn. She thought about Driss and whether he would join them, but as she awaited further instructions, one of the cadre pulled a transport wagon up next to the formation. It was the same wagon that had carried them, bound and kicking, from Monasco out into the middle of Sähm. Only now it carried twenty-seven dead cadets, wrapped in treated linens for the same trip back to the city where their families could claim them for burial. That had been a tradition, one that Tai thought might have been abandoned with the rest of the old protocol as she stumbled over so many lifeless friends en route to the encampment.

The cadre went over a list of names of those who had lived to secure a bunk in the barracks, and then they were dismissed, at last, for a water break. Tai spotted Seguro standing at the wagon with blood in her hair and a swollen gash on her face, gazing into the pile of Monascan children with tired troubled eyes.

Tai strode up beside her and took a long hard look at it, too. She said a silent prayer and then turned to Arehlya Seguro. “See. I told you,” she uttered, then headed for the water bags.

**************

By the end of Abeya the cadre seemed less bent on eliminating recruits and had focused their efforts on survival training. Basic skills would be necessary to sustain themselves under Sähm’s harshest conditions, and so they learned to make fire from animal fat and a polished section of body armor. They learned how to hunt with a long bow and shot down red deer and antelope and jack rabbits. They removed the hides and dried them on spikes in the sweltering Lumina sun, extracted blood meal from the innards to fertilize small gardens where they planted leeks, radishes, and papyrus root, which they were forbidden to eat. After days of enforced fasting, limited rations of corn meal and flatbread were delivered from the city, but this was a luxury that pitted one recruit against another in sudden slapdash brawls, the spoils of which went to the cadet who was still conscious when it was finished.

Tai Ogami found herself embroiled with Seguro over a bowl of wheat gruel and throttled her with a flax rope until she turned purple and finally relented. It was calculated chaos, sanctioned by the cadre, a closely-monitored interface to establish leaders and followers. And Tai was making quick and solid headway.

On the eighty-first day of Lumina the cadets were called to formation. Two large wooden crates were placed before the group, and within them something moved and scrambled about like earthworms trapped in a mud hole. The recruits stood by with wary faces as their names were called, one by one, each summoned from the ranks into a single-file line for instructions on the next exercise in soldier readiness. Sergeants Kiraç and Siva pried open the lids with iron rods and threw them aside. Then Kiraç reached inside and produced a wriggling shepherd pup that couldn’t have been older than a season; he handed it over to Seth Broussard and ordered him back in line. And the process continued until thirty-one pups found thirty-one new masters. The cadets were delighted and bewildered. Tai’s animal was a male with a black saddle, huge brindle paws, and a wet black nose that nudged her neck and nibbled her fingertips. The recruits had consequently forgotten themselves and an eager chatter moved through the ranks, but it was abruptly squelched when Kiraç bellowed for them to be silent and brought them to attention with the pups milling about at the ends of their leads.

“These animals are not gifts,” he roared. “They are not a cuddly reward, nor a pleasant distraction from your training. On the contrary. They are a direct and critical part of your training, for you will be required to care for, groom, and condition these canines for military service, just as we are grooming you.” He strolled over to Seth, grabbed his pup by the scruff of her neck and held her up high for the others to see as he continued. “The dogs of war,” he announced. “These animals are future warriors that will serve a vital purpose in combat operations. They will learn to hunt, to detect foreign intruders a hundred yards off, and they will leap into battle without hesitation to protect those who have protected them. Sound familiar? You will learn as much from your canine as they will from you. Loyalty. Fearlessness. Perseverance.” He handed the dog back to Broussard and made a slow and deliberate circle around the formation while he spoke. “Your dogs are not your pets—they are your responsibility. Each animal will, in time, be a direct reflection of the warrior that molded him, and if he grows to be timid or unfaithful or disobedient he will be deemed unfit for warfare and will be disposed of…and so will his master. It shouldn’t take more than a few seasons to make that assessment, so I suggest you begin the bonding process now, as if your lives depended upon it.” He stopped in front of Tai and made direct eye contact for a long moment. “Because they do.” Then he lifted his eyes to the group and dismissed them to the barracks for the night.

Seth named his female Lyrah, after the goddess of good fortune, with hopes that doing so might exempt them both from certain demise. Seguro, after thinking long and hard, would call hers Nikos, after no such deity; it had been her grandfather’s name, now deceased.

“Sure that’s a good idea?” Seth mumbled as Seguro examined the dog’s teeth and paw size. “Might wanna rethink naming him after somebody who’s already dead,” he smirked.

“Why don’t you mind your own business?” she quipped. “And disrespect my grandfather like that again and I’ll cut your tongue out,” she snarled.

Seth made a preposterous sound. “Yeah, right. With what? Your wooden khanjar? They won’t let us have real blades for another four seasons, so I’d hate for you to splinter me to death,” he chuckled.

Seguro shot from her bunk with a hand around the boy’s throat, but Tai stepped between them and broke it up. “Knock it off!” she demanded. “This isn’t the time. You need to stop thinking about yourselves and figure out how to keep these dogs from running wild.” She left them be and dropped onto her bunk. “If they don’t start learning early, we’ll never gain their trust.” Her pup groped for footing to climb onto the bunk with her, and she firmly pushed him back to the floor where she felt he belonged. The straw mattress might prove too comfortable and make him lethargic and hesitant to one day leap at an intruder.

“Well, what’d you decide to name yours?” Seth asked. “You could call him Apaimah, after the god of war. Or Tahar, after your father’s horse?”

“I’m naming him Sargon,” she told him.

Seguro made a sour face and said, “Sargon? Never heard of that god. What kinda name is that?”

“If you read your Pre-World history books instead of looking for ways to bully people all the time, then maybe you’d know,” Tai mumbled.

Seguro rolled her eyes but had nothing to say, and Seth giggled. He stretched out on his bunk with Lyrah on his chest, pawing at his face and licking his chin. He smiled fondly at her and scratched her ears, muttered playful mantras under his breath. Then the barracks doors burst open and Muralii and Siva stormed inside with torches blazing and broadswords drawn. They clanged at the bedposts and made an alarming cacophony that sent Nikos and Lyrah tumbling to the floor as their masters bolted to attention. Sargon tried to shimmy under the bunk on his belly, but Tai fished him back out into the commotion and, with a firm grip on his lead, had him lay still and quiet at her feet. She found it easy to subdue him with fear but preferred if she could do so through discipline and respect. For now, however, fear would have to suffice as the training sergeants ordered the cadets out into camp for an impromptu round of evening calisthenics. They tied their animals together and did diving push-ups and ran in place, bringing the knees up to the chest until it was nearly impossible to lift their feet. They rolled in the dirt and used each other’s weight for resistance while struggling through an endless series of squats and wide-arm pull-ups. When the group was thoroughly spent, they were ordered back to formation and brought to attention, slouched and teetering, and there they remained until the cadre finally grew bored and, alas, returned them to the barracks to sleep.

This would become a daily ritual. They had lost only one more cadet to heat exhaustion, but the remainder flourished over the next two seasons, as did their animals. Sargon had grown into an eighty-pound brute and still had another season of growing left in him. Lyrah was affectionate and cunning; she loved Seth Broussard and it was evident in the way she watched his every move, waiting for command or a proud slap on the side. Nikos was protective. He didn’t need a leash and instead followed Seguro on his own, but if one stepped too close he warded them back with a show of teeth and a low rumble.

And this continued through the following season, and the season after that. Everywhere the cadets went, their canines followed. They tailed them up into the mountains where the most rigorous training exercises took place on rugged, ankle-breaking terrain. They crept alongside through mountain caves and sniffed the air for danger, investigated every crevice and crag and negotiated over three hundred foot ravines on tremulous rope bridges with no more fear than their young masters. They sat by with watchful patience while cadets crossed wooden broadswords in the cliffs, and they later ran through training exercises of their own. Each canine was fitted with an elephant hide vest and a spiked collar and deployed into mock prison camps to track their masters’ scents and neutralize ‘enemy guards’. Tai’s dog Sargon excelled at this exercise, tearing a bloody gash in a fellow cadet’s forearm who’d posed as a Calabrecian sentry and lunged at the animal with a pole ax. When the threat was defused, Tai played her part well and lay as still as death while Sargon clenched her uniform collar and dragged her thirty meters to a predetermined safe zone.

Nikos thrived on his function in hand-to-hand combat training. Sergeant Siva kept him detained and snarling, several yards off, while Seguro and Broussard grappled in the dirt. It was Seth’s job to subdue his battlemate and pin her to the ground, which he now did with ease at age fourteen, for his shoulders had broadened and his chest was filling out. When Seguro was satisfactorily restrained, Nikos was released. He sprinted for Broussard, leapt like a mountain lion, and knocked him into a tumbling heap with glistening fangs poised to take a piece of his throat. Seguro stumbled to her feet and called the dog back but not quickly enough for Seth who shook it off, then darted across the sand after her. But the two never made contact—their animals fought in their stead as Nikos charged the boy again in his master’s defense and collided with Lyrah who sprang from the rocks and took him down in a vicious tumult. The cadets called their animals off but continued their own confrontation.

“What’s your problem?” Seth demanded, stepping into Seguro’s face. “How long was it gonna take before you stopped him from ripping my head off!”

“That’s what he’s supposed to do! Where’ve you been for the last four seasons? And I called him back as soon as I could after you crushed my ribs back there! Could you give me a second to get up?”

Seth winced at her. “Oh, yeah right, Seguro. You waited on purpose, and you know it. You were hoping he’d do just enough damage to take me outa training ‘cause you’re jealous that I can beat you now. Just admit it.”

“Well, if I’d known you were gonna whine like this I would’ve brought you a bottle and a blanket,” she sassed. “You knew he was gonna take you down; it’s part of the exercise. You’re supposed to brace for it, dummy, and take the hit, not cry like a baby just ‘cause he scared you.”

“You’re the only thing that scares me, with that ugly face ‘a yours, Brutilda,” he snapped, and she laughed at him.

“Ohhhh, that really hurt,” she sang. “Real clever come-back. Been thinkin all season on that one, sissy boy?”

“Enough!” Sergeant Muralii then commanded. She strode up between them and brought them both to attention. Tai Ogami pulled Sargon in close to her, kept her mouth shut, and watched from a safe distance. She hadn’t yet lost a sparring match with anyone and found such competitiveness to be petty and trifling. Apparently, Sergeant Muralii agreed. “I’ve just about had my fill of watching you two bicker like a couple of old women,” she growled. “You can despise each other all you want…on your own time. But when you’re out here, in my training circle, you’ll keep your differences to yourselves. Out here, you better figure out how to the best of friends because out there…” and she pointed out across the desert, “….all you’ll have is each other. You wanna know why the Monascan army was so successful at the Battle of Buhari? Why we leveled the Nyians in just two passings? Because they were disorganized, and their infrastructure was weakened by dissention among the ranks. Too many generals and not enough warriors. No cohesion whatsoever. Instead of aiming their hostility at the army on the other side of the battle ground, they let personal disputes become a distraction that ultimately destroyed them. And I’ll be damned to the gods if that happens here.” She shoved them both back into the training group and said, “If I hear another word or even think I see so much as a scowl from either of you, I’ll have you strung up by the wrists and whipped until the flesh falls.”

For the next several passings each recruit was required to wear a cumbersome hemp jacket, lined with thirty pounds of sand. They were forbidden to take it off, even while they slept, and the cadets’ initially understood it to be a mass punishment, shared with Broussard and Seguro for all the infractions they had accumulated to date. The combat exercises also continued, without canine intervention but under the scrutiny of General Monasco’s military advisers instead. They made frequent visits and strolled through camp in formal-dress uniforms, stood at the sides of Sergeants Kiraç and Siva, watching the goings-on with severity.

On the fifteenth passing of the sand jacket sentence the cadre went around the training circle and confiscated each cadet’s wooden sword. Then they went around again and distributed to each a thick leather breastplate, heavy rawhide greaves for the thighs, and a handheld katar knife, filed sharp as the edge of an eagle feather. Tai turned the weapon in her hands and marveled at its craftsmanship. It was a promotion of sorts, to be offered the tools of a true warrior. The katar wasn’t much more than a hunting knife but lethal nonetheless, if handled properly. She looked at Seth who offered a smirk and an eager wink. They had all been waiting for this moment since the cadre dumped them out into the middle of that sandstorm, six seasons ago.

“This is the first and only blade you will be issued until you graduate to Corporal status,” Sergeant Muralii announced. “There are a variety of others with which you will eventually become very proficient—kendo swords, batliffs, khanjars, broadswords. But those will be introduced in due time. Until then, this weapon will become your best friend. Not your canine or your beloved battlemate, but this.” And she held hers up high for them to see. “You will keep it at your side in the same sheath that once held your training weapon, and there it will remain until death do you part. You will learn to make precision strikes at close range as well as how to eliminate the enemy from as far off as twenty meters.” She flipped the blade in her hand and flung it across the encampment with all the might and swiftness of a bolt of lightning, and it speared the trunk of a baobab tree behind the barracks. She dispatched a recruit to retrieve it and continued. “Cadet Ogami.”

Tai’s stomach soared. She brought herself to attention and stepped forward, her chest pounding. Muralii rarely singled her out, and Tai spent the past four seasons punishing herself with overachievement, defeating everyone who challenged her, honing her fitness and survival abilities, excelling in her classroom studies, all with hopes that Sergeant Muralii just might take notice.

“Cadets Ogami and Seguro will be the first demonstration subjects,” Muralii said, and Seguro came forth as well. “Suit up and take your positions.”

The new uniform was bulky and felt like she’d strapped a small child to her back, which now accounted for the sand jacket assignment. The breastplate was too big, though the greaves were adjustable and snug. She stole a quick glance at Seth who was suiting up as well, and she envied his masculine frame, for his armor fit quite well and looked good on him. Seguro wasn’t fairing much better than she but they tightened the buckles as best they could and faced each other in the center of the circle. The exercise was identical to those they’d learned with cedar wood blades, and they knew the maneuvers well. Cadet Seguro harbored four seasons and twelve losing bouts worth of angst toward Tai Ogami, and it was evident in her strike, wild and careless. Tai took full advantage of this weakness and with the protection of polished elephant hide she could make it a more intimate match. She lunged at Seguro with a quick change of hand and a half turn that connected elbow to jaw and lay Seguro flat on her back; Tai grasped Seguro’s breastplate and rested her katar against her battlemate’s windpipe and the bout was over. She looked to Sergeant Muralii for approval and could have sworn she saw a smile, ever so slight. Her confidence exploded. She held out a hand to help Seguro up but she batted it away and scrambled to her own feet, seething.

Tai chuckled lightly and shook her head. “Whatever. Suit yourself. So, who’s next? Seth? Wanna see if your reverse cut has improved since the last match?” she teased, twirling the weapon through her fingers the way Muralii had done in the desert at reception. It’d taken her two years to master it with cedar wood, and now she tested the skill with the new blade.

“I’m next,” Muralii then announced and an anxious murmur traveled through the training circle. She gestured for Tai to take her position, and suddenly the cadet had boots of granite. She fumbled and dropped the katar into the sand.

“Go ahead, Ogami,” Seguro taunted, dusting herself off. “We’re all on the edge of our seats, here. Show us how skilled you really are,” she smirked.

A group of the General’s officers gathered at the circle and looked on. They folded their arms across the medals on their chests and spoke amongst themselves, taking note of the newest training techniques.

Tai swiped her weapon from the dirt, gave Seguro a scowl, and readjusted the straps of her breastplate. She stood before Sergeant Muralii and took a fighting stance. She was solid and well-defined, like a sculpture of something from another time, and her brown eyes were sharp as any predator, yet sparkled in a way that moved Cadet Ogami to daydream.

Together they side-stepped slowly, cautiously, mirroring each other’s movements in a strategic limbo, waiting for the other to flinch. It made Tai uneasy. She expected Muralii to charge her and in one broad sweep, slam her to the dust with a boot across the back of her neck and a khanjar poised to take her life, the way she herself had leveled Seguro. But instead the sergeant just circled and stared, piercing Ogami’s eyes with the coolness of a hooded cobra.

And then she struck. It was so quick and flawless that Tai wasn’t sure it even happened until she found herself stumbling into her battlemates. They roared with the thrill of conflict and shoved her back into the circle. She could have blamed her sluggishness on the armor, but even if she were covered in fine silk, Muralii’s speed was astonishing and her technique unparalleled. Tai tossed the katar to the other hand, thought about attempting the same unorthodox maneuver that confused Seguro, then reconsidered and thought it wiser to toss it back to her strong hand. She watched Muralii’s eyes, searched them for a flicker or a glint that might warn of another strike. Muralii then glanced over Tai’s shoulder, as if someone approached from behind and Tai glimpsed back to secure herself, for she didn’t put it past Seguro to sabotage the bout for spite. Before she could refocus on Muralii, she was airborne. Her face hit the sand and somewhere in the toss her katar vanished and she heard a thunderous ringing in her skull and felt the dull throb of a knee between her shoulder blades. And then the roar of the others.

“Never watch your opponent’s eyes, cadet,” Muralii hissed into her ear. “Eyes tell lies, and lies will get you killed.” She released her and dropped the katar into the dirt at her face. “You might want that back.”

Tai lay there for several moments, staring at her weapon. She did not relish the idea of facing her fellow cadets after such a punishing display, but two more recruits were suiting up and needed the space to practice. She pushed herself to her knees and sheathed her katar. Seguro came over and gave her a slap on the back and told her not to feel so bad; no one ever expects the mouse to out-wrestle the python.

“Shut up,” she muttered and staggered to her feet. Then she made a promise to herself. From this passing, she would never lose another match, and before she left for her final rite of passage she would challenge Sergeant Muralii again…and win.

When the training was finished for the day and everyone made themselves ready for bed, Seth came to Tai’s bunk and eyed her strangely.

She pulled off her boots and returned his curious stare. “What?”

“How’d you do that?” he asked and Tai winced at him, befuddled.

“Do what?” She massaged her throbbing shoulder and peered up at him with a shrug.

“She charged you, full on, weapon drawn and ready to take a piece of you, and you made her miss. How’d you do that?”

Tai issued a breath of humorless laughter and told him, “I stumbled over my own two feet, that’s what. If she missed, it was because I just happened to not be in the wrong place at the right time. I couldn’t even get out of her way fast enough to keep from getting run over. So, I dunno what you’re talking about.”

He considered that for a long moment, then shook his head. “No. Well…yeah, okay. Your form was pretty wretched, and you looked like you’d seen a monster when she came after you. But when she made contact, you blocked and spun away with exceptional poise, it was like—“

“She tossed me into four cadets, Seth,” Tai grumbled refutably. “And they threw me right back into her path.”

“Yeah, but that was only ‘cause she got an arm around you after the fact and then gave you a shove. It was all she could do. I’m telling you. You couldn’t see yourself, but from my vantage point, it was awesome. Next passing,” he said. “I’ll show you exactly what you did. I dunno if I can do it the same way, but I’ll show you what I saw.”

Tai shrugged it off and stretched out on her bunk. “If you want. But whatever it was, I’m sure it was beginner’s luck. At least against Muralii, anyway.” Then she grinned and said, “Now, if I was sparring with you, then yeah. Totally intentional.”

He smirked and shook his head. “Hey, don’t get too cocky, Ogami. You know I’m taller than you now. And I have a longer reach, so just watch yourself. There’s a glorious upset in your future that’s gonna bring that undefeated streak to an end, so I suggest you be ready.”

Tai made a terrified face, then waved him away, and they bid each other goodnight.

***********

Over the next seasons Tai learned to feint and parry with a kendo sword. It was no accident that her abilities remained unrivaled, and regular reports of her progress were being dispatched to the general by his most trusted advisor, Lieutenant Arturus Olanga. But Tai had a secret. She had watched the schedules of the barracks guards until she had every shift memorized according who was on post and for how long. There was a brief intermission between shifts, and in those prized moments Tai crept from her bunk and out into the shadows of Camp Vallone. Each night in the officer’s pavilion Sergeant Muralii sparred with Sergeant Siva, and Tai had found a shaded corner from which to watch from the outside. She peered through the wall slats, transfixed on Muralii’s technique, and she committed to memory every rising cut, every thrust, every turn, twist, and block until her head could hold no more. Then she put it all into practice on her own time, spearing and gouging imaginary enemies by the droves until she fancied having slain the entire Calabrecian infantry.

By the age of fifteen Corporal Ogami could disengage her opponents with such alarming quickness that many of them refused to spar with her unless she was blindfolded. She took to swordsmanship like breathing and had developed a hand so steady that it advanced her toward the art of snake handling, as vipers were a common desert nuisance and showed little mercy for a noisy, trampling horde of military cadets. She learned how to creep up slowly and snare it behind the head as it struck, and in one swift twist, fracture its neck. She was bitten only once on the arm and transported to the infirmary in a heavy daze during which she caught glimpses of Sergeant Muralii from where she hung across the back of Muralii’s horse. Snatches of conversation, Muralii’s voice. Tai spent the next six passings in the throes of the most hideous visions until the wound seeped dry and finally closed. When she awoke, Muralii was standing over her bunk with a scimitar sword pointed at her chest. Tai scarcely issued a breath for fear the sergeant might slice her from sternum to midsection for some mysterious infraction. But instead she withdrew it and stood down.

“I have to leave,” she told her matter-of-factly.

Tai rubbed the grogginess from her eyes and sat up. “What do you mean, leave? I don’t understand, Sergeant.”

Muralii thought on it for several moments and said, “A classified mission. I just wanted to check in on you because we ride out at sunfall. Lieutenant Olanga will be monitoring the training with Kiraç and Siva until I return. Shouldn’t be more than a few passings.”

Tai could not put words to the weight of the situation and sat mute, blinking at Muralii with a gamut of possibilities swarming in her head. Perhaps she was a spy doing a tour in the desert to observe Calabrecian training tactics. Or maybe she had been chosen as a clandestine assassin to creep into Mirielle Delamere’s bed chamber and slit her throat while she slept. Corporal Ogami was delighted by the thought of either and further so that Sergeant Muralii would make her privy to such speculations.

Then she revealed the scimitar again. She slid it into a decorative black sheath, studded with ruby gems and silver etching, and she offered it over to Tai. “For your accomplishments,” she said. “It was given to me when I was much younger than you by Saidi-Saif, and it’s time it changed hands.”

Tai’s eyes grew wide as saucers as she ran her fingertips over the design and she said, “Master Saidi-Saif? You mean, the menguasai, Saidi-Saif, gave you a gift? I thought he was just a Monascan legend, dead and gone a hundred seasons ago, if he lived at all.”

A very faint smile flickered across Muralii’s face and she told her, “He is a legend, yes, but very much alive. He’s selective about who he instructs, sometimes no one at all for ten seasons, and then someone’s name drifts his way, and there he is.” She rose to her feet and turned for the door with a solemn goodbye. Then she stopped and said, “Oh, and just so it’s abundantly clear, do not brandish that weapon until you’re twenty-one. If you do I’ll cut your hands off.”

“Yes, Sergeant. And thank you!”

“Don’t thank me,” she said over her shoulder. “Thank the gods you’re still alive.” And she disappeared out into Camp Vallone.

***********

A few passings came and went and Muralii had not returned. Instead Lieutenant Olanga orchestrated the training exercises in a very rigid fashion. He oversaw the kendo matches and often assigned himself as partner to the less experienced recruits. It seemed he took a Machiavellian delight in defeating them in only a few moves, and Tai found it less like training and more like an overt display of supremacy. When he advanced to the older trainees, Seth gave him significant trouble. He had borrowed several maneuvers from those Tai solicited from Muralii and put Olanga in an exhausted state after the first round. The Lieutenant caught his breath and responded with a series of combat patterns that hadn’t yet been taught, and it threw Seth into a desperate windmill of defense that ended with a broken nose and two cracked ribs. He called Seguro forth, and though her skills had improved immensely over the seasons, she was no match for Seth and in turn took a punishing kick to the midsection from the Lieutenant. He made examples of all the advanced Corporals. He used his expertise to subjugate them, one by one, round after round, until it was indisputable who the alpha was among them. Tai stood by and watched her comrades falter and stumble, cough and bleed, and she twirled the katar between her fingers and paced like a panther in a cage, waiting for her turn with venom in her veins. But it never came. Lieutenant Olanga dismissed them to their classes and took his leave, having passed her over without the slightest acknowledgment. She watched him as he disappeared through the camp, unsure as to whether he had forgotten her or if he was just saving himself for a fight much deadlier than she anticipated.

“Thus is the man whose talent brings him prominence, but whose pride makes him a coward,” she heard someone say from behind. Corporal Ogami turned to face the frailest man she had ever seen. He was no taller than she and propped himself up on a knotted Blackwood cane. He smiled through a silver braided beard as he shuffled closer. “He fears you. And by leaving you to ponder his motives, he can disguise fear with indifference and turn jealousy into power.” He smiled at her again, fondly.

“I’m sorry, but I’m not sure what you mean,” she said. Then a sudden and startling realization hit her, and she nearly backed into a thorn tree. “Wait a second. You’re him, aren’t you,” she marveled. “You’re really him. The menguasai. Sergeant Muralii said you were real, but I didn’t believe her. By the gods, you must be as old as the desert itself.”

Saidi-Saif chuckled and said, “Older. Or so it feels at times. But you—you have many seasons in front of you and few behind. Inexperience is often a better teacher than I; it provides immeasurable opportunity, which is why we must get started without delay.”

“Started?” she gaped. “You mean, you and me?”

Saidi-Saif nodded once and told her, “I had the privilege to guide the late Lieutenant Ogami when he was not much older than you. Why should I expect any less from the daughter of an icon?”

Moved by the recollection of her father, Tai thought on those words at great length, then squared her shoulders and said, “You shouldn’t. And you won’t be disappointed.”

And so a new brand of instruction began the following sunrise. Master Saidi-Saif held great respect for the requirements of a burgeoning soldier and insisted Tai maintain her studies and that she not forego Sergeant Kiraç’s training agenda for his own. It filled each passing with a brutal inventory of philosophy and history classes, kendo katas, calisthenics, canine scenarios, and sparring bouts. When all military requisites had been satisfied, she came to Saidi-Saif each sunfall and balanced acacia leaves on her fingertips, counted water droplets in mid-air, and learned a myriad of acrobatics to surpass those in the city carnivals. The dog Sargon watched with ears pricked in bewilderment as she dug holes in the dirt with her bare hands and put the dirt back, as she carried stones from one pile, twenty meters to another pile, and back again until her palms cracked and bled. And after twenty-seven passings of this she hadn’t yet picked up a formal weapon or blade under the tutelage of Master Saidi-Saif. So, during each day of military schooling, Corporal Ogami was like a racing stallion bucking at the stall.

The other recruits were mystified by Saidi-Saif’s presence in the camp, for his prodigy as the most revered and elusive menguasai—or ‘spirit guide’—had made him a categorical myth, and so they were driven to all sorts of fantastical speculations. They deliberated over his function among the gods and wondered if his instruction was reserved for gods themselves. For every sunfall that Tai Ogami spent with him in the desert, she returned at sunrise a more dazzling combatant than when she left.

Lieutenant Olanga continued to pass her over. He paired her up for sparring with every Corporal in the training platoon, and she defeated them as if it bored her, and perhaps it did. But Olanga would not indulge her, still. It wasn’t long before the recruits became exasperated with his methods and longed for those of their true instructor, and one of them spoke up.

“When’s Sergeant Muralii coming back?” Corporal Ahmat Kabadi questioned after Seguro’s collarbone was fractured by the butt of Olanga’s broadsword. Casualties were commonplace in Camp Vallone, and fatalities were no less ordinary. But the trainees’ respect was quickly waning under the Lieutenant’s unbridled ego.

Olanga gave the young Corporal a detached gaze, sheathed his weapon, and told them all flatly, “Sergeant Muralii isn’t coming back. Sergeant Muralii is dead. So, unless you all would like to meet the same careless fate, then I suggest you stop pining for the past and learn to defend yourselves.” The group crescendoed with a flurry of talk, and he silenced them. Then he commenced the exercises again without ever returning to the subject of Sergeant Muralii again.

Tai Ogami thought she had been bludgeoned with an iron club. It felt as if something had reached inside and tore a hole in her gut and filled it with flames. And Olanga’s callous disposition only fed those flames, and so she broke rank and approached him with a defiant tongue.

“What do you mean, she’s dead?” she demanded, stepping into his space. “How do you know that? You can’t possibly know that for certain. What if she’s just…I dunno, detained? Or maybe she just needs more time to—“

Olanga’s sword whipped around from his side with a metallic swoosh and stopped Tai Ogami in her tracks. She stood at the tip of all his resentment as it pierced a tiny slit in the leather of her breastplate. She lifted a malevolent glare from the edge of his blade and met his eyes for the first time all season. The training circle fell silent.

Olanga said, “You’ll get back in line and stand down, or I will see to it that you and Sergeant Muralii have plenty of time to discuss her combat inefficiency in the afterlife…Corporal.”

The consequences for threatening an agent of the general’s court, if it were perceived as such, were expulsion from the Monascan army and life imprisonment, and he was baiting her, salivating for a reason to make that report. She wanted to slip a hand around his sword arm, snap it at the elbow, appropriate his weapon, and jam it into his throat. If for no other reason than the apathetic delivery of the news of Muralii’s death. He honored nothing and no one but himself, and in that moment of clarity, Corporal Ogami deemed him unworthy of the dust on her boots.

She uttered a begrudging, “Yes, sir.”

Tai took her place with the others as the subject was abandoned and the incident dismissed.

They practiced until they were offered a short meal break where they ate well. For having advanced to the rank of Corporal, they were permitted—and encouraged—to eat with the enlisted soldiers on the far side of the camp where cooks roasted wild boar over glowing hickory coals and shucked cacti and crushed maize for polenta cakes. They were no longer required to go hungry for the sake of endurance and elimination. It was important now that they maintain a robust physique and a vigilant mind because each season would become more combat-intensive until the final rite of passage at twenty-one.

Tai had no appetite. She took a cup of pehka juice to a remote seat outside the refectory and watched an eagle owl as it soared across the Ahagaar. Sargon lay at her feet and rested his head on her boots. A tangle of emotions twined around her heart and confused her, for she had never loved anyone before, aside from her parents. She loved Seth dearly, but that was something else. Inside she had always known that looking for affection from Sergeant Muralii was like hoping for the love of a wild tiger—capricious, unpromised, and hypothetical. It was forbidden, foremost. Military laws against fraternization would have made it a dangerous and impossible affair. And Muralii was fourteen years her senior; what would she have ever wanted with a lovesick Corporal whose life had been so systematically predesigned by her superiors. And what in all of Sähm had she done to get herself killed? Tai hadn’t considered that possibility, couldn’t envision her mentor taking a death blow. Mortality made her shudder—she despised death and all its black mystery. She knew all the promises of the Order Of Gods, studied the ancient texts and listened to the proselytizing of holy men and still could not reconcile the finite with the eternal. She wondered if Muralii’s death had been glorious enough to secure her place in Osyrion, the warrior’s paradise, or if it was all for not.

“Crazy passing, eh?” Seth approached with Lyrah and took a seat beside her. “Can’t believe that about Sergeant Muralii,” he said through a deep sigh. He peered over at her for a long quiet moment. “You gonna be okay?”

She shrugged. Tears welled in her eyes and threatened to expose her sensitivities, and Seth’s gentle understanding did little to prevent it. She swiped a stray tear from her chin and tried to steel herself. It was better to be hardened. “Well, whatever happened, it was probably her destiny, anyway, so it really doesn’t matter, does it? It’s not like we have any control over it, so why sit around obsessing?” She knew her words were weighted with cynicism and she didn’t care if it made her seem pitiless. She picked up a stone and skipped it across the sand. And then another.

Seth took it all into consideration and said, “Well, there’s nothing wrong with being upset. We’re human beings first, then soldiers, I suppose.”

“Not if we can help it.”

Seth chuckled. “Wow. Okay. Well, it’s good to see Sergeant Kiraç has rubbed off on you. He’d be very proud of such merciless devotion.” And he laughed again, hoping for a little levity, but she just shrugged it all off and flung another rock out into the desert. He tried again and said, “Hey, you better be careful or you’re gonna end up like Olanga. What a vulture he is. Mr. Brutality. It’s supposed to be sparring, not enemy combat. You know?”

“Yeah, well, he better be careful, not me,” she mumbled.

He laughed heartily and recounted that passing’s events with excited grandeur. “Oh, man! I thought I was gonna swallow my tongue when you confronted him like that! You’ve got elephant balls, Tai Ogami, that’s for sure. We all thought we’d finally see the ultimate match when he pointed that saber at you. I mean, what was that all about? He doesn’t mind cracking everyone else’s skulls, but when he had the chance to fight you, all he did was pull rank. What a blockhead. I mean, with everything you’ve been learning from Master Saidi-Saif, you had to be so ready to put him in the dirt. Seriously,” he told her, shaking his head. He stroked Lyrah’s fur and looked to Tai for response, but she said nothing. She gazed out at the Ahagaar, brooding, turning something mysterious over in her mind, and so Seth left it well enough alone. He sat with her in silence but could not bring himself to leave her side unless she demanded he go. Together they watched the sun make its approach along the horizon toward the mountains.

************

When she returned to Master Saidi-Saif the following sunfall, he regarded her thoughtfully as she prepared for their session. Her strict silence reaffirmed what he already understood, and so he left her to it and spoke without expectation.

“Absence does not unravel matters of the heart. You can remove yourself from every circumstance, ignore your commitments, disappear altogether, if you like. But antipathy is a thing you carry like a satchel, everywhere you go, and it only fills with more suffering until you put it down and leave it.”

Tai breathed a sigh and said, “Look, I’m sorry I wasn’t here last passing, okay? I just had something I needed to do. And I’m not ‘suffering’,” she insisted, then added darkly, “I don’t do that, anymore.”

“One cannot try to eliminate the anger experience,” he said. “The more you anticipate being separate from it, the more united with it you are.” She was balanced against an acacia tree, stretching her limbs for the punishing tasks ahead, and he shuffled across the sand and put a hand on her shoulder. “Sit.”

She indulged him with an eye roll and took a seat in the dirt. She peered up into his sun-weathered complexion, dark as ground chicory, his beard like sewn cotton. He stood before her for a long moment and leaned on his walking stick. Then he said, “There are three illusions that have upheld the human condition from the onset of the first season of seasons. The first is that of separateness from the Gods. Be it one singular god, a goddess, or a pantheon, this understanding has been man’s most significant source of doubt and the endless cause of his own demise.”

Tai exhaled sharply and said, “Okay, and so what does this have to do with me? What does it have to do with Sergeant Muralii’s death or Lieutenant Olanga’s arrogance or Calabrecian supremacy or anything else that makes no sense? It’s all the will of the Gods, and we don’t have a say in any of it because we’re human. Nothing on earth is of our own design. We just wait around for things to happen to us, whether we like it or not, and that’s that. Seems pretty clear to me, so I really don’t see where the illusion comes in.”

“Precisely.”

“Okay. And?”

“You don’t see the illusion,” he said. “Which is how illusion works, or else it wouldn’t be so.”

“Okay, you lost me.”

The menguasai grinned. “Your spirit is bright and fervent, but instead of being a sponge that absorbs knowledge and experience, you are in a state of devouring, of consumption. Everything that gets in is evaluated, judged, defined, and ultimately expelled as a waste of your energy. When you learn to simply receive information as it is and accept experience for what it is, the illusions will begin to fall away and you will be left with an elevated consciousness that will liberate you from such bondage. But until then…” and he reached around to a cloth sack behind the tree and drew from it a pair of iron shackles. He tossed them to the dirt where she sat. “You’ll wear these.”

Tai shot him a preposterous glare and said, “You can’t be serious, menguasai. You want me to wear these things everywhere I go? Well, that’s just ridiculous. How am I supposed to train?”

“In the very same manner that you’ve been training,” he said. “We are simply making it a more literal experience so that you can truly comprehend the magnitude of your circumstances. And further, Corporal,” he clarified, “it is you who wants you to wear them, not I. And so you will. Until you don’t anymore.” He gestured for her to clamp them around her wrists.

Tai Ogami gaped at him. She picked the chains out of the sand and gaped at those, too. “You have got to be kidding me,” she muttered in disbelief as she turned the rusted iron in her hands. “So, I guess I’m supposed to just trust you on this, huh?”

He shook his head. “No. Trust yourself.”

And so Corporal Ogami set aside her misgivings and placed her wrists in the cuffs. They were tight and abrasive but there was enough slack in the chain to perform general functions such as strapping her boots and sharpening her katar, but all other activities would be considerably hampered. “This is never gonna work,” she mumbled.

“And so it won’t.”

“Then why am I doing it?”

“Because it is necessary in order for you to be free.”

“I’m gonna find freedom with my hands in chains.”

“That is more like it,” he said. “Whatever you profess to the skies, the Gods throw back to you as truth but only if you believe it thoroughly. You must know that you know that you know.”

“Well, it was more of a question, really. But, whatever you say,” she muttered.

He turned from her and walked away. “Come with me.”

She and Sargon started after him, but he insisted the dog stay behind, and so she gave him the command to return to the barracks, and he obeyed and trotted off toward camp. She followed the menguasai through the desert, shackles jangling at her waist like a captive of war, and after a long trek he stopped at the Ahagaar foothills and beckoned her into a small cavern where he built a fire for light. She sat on the rocks and waited while he disappeared out into the desert again for a lengthy spell. When he returned he carried the cloth sack, and in it something twisted and stirred. He opened it quite carefully and dumped into the dirt a five-foot queen cobra. The snake spun around to him and flared her hood, and he waved the bag like a slow hypnotic pendulum while steering the snake toward Tai with the tip of his walking stick. She rose to her feet to put some distance between herself and the agitated queen, but Saidi-Saif forbid her that luxury. “Sit,” he insisted. “This is neither for sport nor a demonstration of your own ego. You’re going to learn something quite different than what you’ve been accustomed to.”

She locked her eyes on the creature’s movements and told him, “That’s all fine, but you’re going to have to take these shackles off, or else that thing’s gonna put me right back in the infirmary. And I have a feeling we’re a long way from Camp Vallone,” she said, backing out of the cobra’s reach. “So if you’ll just do me that favor, I’ll do whatever you ask.”

“The second illusion that afflicts man is that of superiority,” he replied. “You’ve no cause to fear this creature any more than it should fear you.”

“I’m not afraid of it,” she explained. “But I do know what it’s capable of, and I need two hands, two free hands, to catch it before it strikes either one of us. I know what I’m doing, menguasai. I’ve done this before. But you’ve got to take these off.”

The cobra made figure-eights in the dust as it vacillated between which threat to monitor more closely, the old man with the big black stick or the female whose intrepid scent promised it a swift and sudden death.

Saidi-Saif paid her no mind. “Sit,” he instructed again. “Only when you abandon your pride and the desire for dominance will you find your ki, the inner spirit directed outward, and for that journey to begin you must accept the reality of oneness.”

Tai lowered herself to a seat on the rocks and shook her head. She held her hands out in front of her and pulled the shackle chain taut with the notion that perhaps she could strangle the thing if it lunged at her. Then she said to Saidi-Saif, “Oneness with a queen cobra typically results with fangs embedded in your flesh, pumping poison into your veins. That’s really not how I wanna be one with the cobra.”

The snake saw her posture and stood up tall with its neck spread wide, mirroring what it interpreted as an attempt to appear large and fearsome, and she flicked her tongue with a low hiss, then delivered a quick warning strike but did not make contact. Tai flinched, unnerved by the physical impediment of the iron cuffs, but she was beginning to welcome this heretical challenge and remained in her seat while the snake danced between her and the fire.

Saidi-Saif watched from the other side and strolled the grotto as he spoke. “If separation from the Gods is not reality, then the very same logic must apply to all living things. If we are the Gods and the Gods are the givers of life and power, then all life is us and all power is preordained accordingly. The serpent is a reflection of you in the moment of now. Because she is you and you are her explains why she is so fixated on your gestures, your scent, your intentions. But what she understands that you do not is that there is only this moment. And she will exist within it and only within it because there are no expectations other than what presents itself in the now. You, on the other hand, are existing through the possibility of venom in your veins and the anticipation of not surviving a trip back to Camp Vallone, both of which are scenarios that your spirit already determined before it chose this life, in that body, which you are protecting so valiantly.”

The cobra delivered another warning strike, and Tai jumped.

“I want you to close your eyes,” the menguasai instructed.

Tai threw him a bewildered glance and frowned. “Close my eyes? Now? That’s crazy. Why in all of Sähm would you ask me to do that?”

“Crazy is a judgment borne of fear, and fear is a lie, another illusion that stems from the misconception of separation from self, separation from the Gods. Embrace these truths and you will understand that what you fear is all of your own design, and the only power it holds over you is the power you have already given it. Close your eyes.”

Corporal Ogami was at once fascinated and affronted by the notion of being at the mercy of her own fears. She thought, without having ever reconsidered, that she had left them the desert eight seasons ago, when she’d witnessed the deaths of twenty-seven friends and wallowed in the rotted remains of an enemy dreg. She had out-lived the fiercest woman in the Monascan Army and won favor from a demigod. Yet, to look death in its glassy, obsidian eye and shut her own took an extraordinary, unfamiliar valor, like stepping off the edge of a cliff toward the promise of an invisible bridge. The cobra swayed and studied her. Tai lowered her hands and let the chain fall slack in her lap.

“You have lived in this moment for an eternity and have decided upon every possible outcome and survived them all,” the menguasai said. “Even when you knew you hadn’t. It is the paradox of spiritual perpetuity, the difference between consciousness and oblivion. Trust the darkness and in it you will find your ki.”

And so she inhaled the mesquite of the wood smoke, exhaled all her consternation, and gave herself up to the Gods. The serpent faded into the quiet nothing. She could still feel it there in the space before her and wondered if it had drifted closer, encouraged by her vulnerability. And, in fact, it had; the forked tongue flitted across her cheek, and she felt the cool corrugated skin glide along the length of her calf. Her chest hammered. She wanted to open her eyes and for a moment she did, and in that moment she found the snake had retracted its hood and backed away, but it flared again at the sudden change in Tai’s cognizance, and the queen snapped at her with another warning. A cobra strike was significantly slower than that of a viper or python, and if the circumstances had allowed it, she could have destroyed the thing in an instant. But this game had a peculiar set of rules to which she was mortally bound, so she tried again to still herself and shut her eyes.

“The lack of knowledge of who we are has been an insurmountable crisis to man,” the menguasai explained. “It is the third and most significant illusion because it is the most difficult to accept. He has learned to consider the physical first, then the mental, then the spiritual, the order of which has led him toward unnecessary anguish and needless trepidation. In reality, the spirit controls the mind, which controls the body, but in reverse a human being is merely a pawn for the Gods’ delight and amusement. Helplessness is a figment of your imagination, Corporal Ogami, as is powerlessness. To be a truly effective warrior, you must understand that they are all intertwined—separateness, fear, and ignorance of self, and when you begin to look to your own spirit for guidance, your thought process will follow, and the body will obey whatever the spirit ultimately wishes. Do you wish to die tonight, beside the fire in a cavern in the middle of Sähm?”

Tai shook her head, listened to the dry subtle chafe of the serpent moving through the sand.

“The question is not whether your mind fears the destruction of the body and the mystery that awaits the spirit after,” he reiterated. “The question is whether you want to die this passing, you, the quintessence of the Gods that gives you life in this moment. You’ll have to look much deeper than the hiss of a cobra to find that answer, I’m afraid. When your fear is elevated, so is your heart rate. The body temperature rises, thus giving off the corresponding scent to a predator such as our good queen, and she, like anything that threatens your well-being, will react accordingly. Control the spirit, find serenity in the mind, and the body will follow. For the spirit already knows the manner by which it will leave the body to conclude its time as Corporal Tai Ogami. You already know whether tonight will be your last.”

These things settled in Tai’s heart like an unacceptable sickness. She struggled toward tranquility, needed to face these new ideas, but the queen cobra slid across her lap and around behind her, tasted her secret fear with another fluttering kiss, and growled with disapproval. Tai could not bring herself to a place of harmony between spirit and snake, and her eyes flashed open again to find the cobra at her nose, hood spread open for a strike that would put an end to her by sunrise. It reared back, and in a wisp of a breath and with a single sweep she leaned out of its path and snagged it by the neck as it brushed her left ear. She snapped its vertebra before it could whip around for another strike, and the creature fell limp in the dust.

“I’m sorry,” she uttered, catching her breath. “Guess I failed that test.”

Saidi-Saif smiled. “Another trick of the mind, failure. You answered the question, did you not?”

“Yeah, but I wasn’t really acting from my ki, was I? I was afraid, and so I eliminated the threat...barely. It’s all I know, I guess,” she sighed.

The menguasai chuckled at her and said, “You know more than you think. Your spirit was at work, whether you accept it or not. It is a truth that cannot be defeated because it is all there is.” He motioned for her to rise. “Come. Back to camp, so you can sleep now. Next passing we’ll try it again,” he winked.

And so she followed him back the way they had come, chains rattling in the darkness, her mind turning over the events of that evening. If she had not yet learned to conquer her fear, then she had certainly gained an unsettling respect for it. She wondered if the Gods were watching when she’d saved herself from the serpent’s strike and if they’d marked her as a coward. The notion itself frightened her further and placed her at a crossroads; from this passing forth, she would have to learn to eliminate emotion altogether if she meant to survive a lifetime as a Monascan soldier. She saw no other option for a future sewn with ambiguity and harvested by fate.

**********

          The remaining days of Abeya reinforced her notoriety, particularly among the established soldiers who marveled at her ability to maneuver a batliff blade with her wrists tethered in chains. Through her continued sessions with Saidi-Saif, she learned to slow the rhythm of her heartbeat and to internalize her emotions as if she had none. Her reputation traveled through the ranks, around the encampment, and up Lieutenant Olanga’s spine until it throttled him with envy. It would be his final season as a training officer, as his duties called him back to the city of Monasco for the inception of a classified weapons project, and he intended to leave his subordinates with an indelible contribution to their military growth. He called them out into formation and had them bring their animals.

“Take out your weapons,” he instructed, and they did. Each unsheathed his katar and waited for additional orders. Then he said to them, “As Monascans in an era so unkind as these past forty seasons, it is vital that the newest recruits understand the importance of your final training mission. You are all aware of what will be expected during that time, and if it is not carried out to the satisfaction of everyone on the Warrior Council, to the satisfaction of myself and General Monasco, your status in this army will be nullified. You will count for absolutely nothing, regardless of your time spent here, and regardless…” he announced, peering directly into the face of Corporal Ogami, “…of whatever popularity you’ve managed to garner from the troops.” He gazed out at the rest of the platoon and continued. “Failure to complete the rite of passage will not only disqualify you from military service—it will label you as combat inefficient, at which time you will no longer be of use to your city-state, and your public execution will be scheduled directly thereafter. That’s how it has been done for four hundred seasons, and it is not going to change for you. So, to be certain that you all avoid such a demoralizing fate, we’re going to have a little practice session, this passing.” His eyes swept around the group for their undivided attention, and when he was sure he’d captured it, he said, “Secure your canines.”

Tai and Seth shared a cagey glance with Seguro and the others, as it seemed they all came to a unanimous deduction, and Seguro gripped Nikos’ collar tight and stepped back. Seth frowned and backed away as well, and he said, “Wait a second. You can’t do this. These dogs are soldiers. Like us. Like any soldier in this camp. They’re not livestock, some wild things to practice on. We’ve done that,” he demanded. “What you’re suggesting now is treason, and I’m sorry but I won’t have any part of it, sir. No way.”

Olanga stood tall and composed and told him, “Treason is disobeying a lawful order, Corporal. Treason,” he clarified further, “is refusing to submit to your commanding officer. Now, secure that animal and take out your weapon, or consider this your last day as a Monascan soldier. I’m sure your father, the esteemed colonel, would be quite proud to bury his young son in a nameless grave for such reckless heroics.” He raised a cunning eyebrow and stared the boy down.

Then Tai stepped up to Broussard and met him at the eye. She stood close and spoke to him in confidence as Seguro took note. “Listen to me,” she said lowly. “Everything and everyone in this army is expendable. Including us. Especially us. They’ve got a whole new cycle of recruits in their first season, waiting to advance far enough to take any one of our places, if necessary. That’s never changed, so why should this be any different?”

“Yeah, but—“

“But nothing,” she insisted. “You wanna throw everything away over a dog, then that’s fine. But if you do that, then your fate is on his terms, not your own, no matter how much integrity you think you’ve got. You’re gonna have to just put your feelings aside and do this. It’s a game, Seth, a test. Play by your own rules if you want, but there’s a bigger picture than this, and you’re either gonna be in it with the rest of us, or you’re not.”

He smoldered, clenched his jaws at the boggling politics. “This is not part of the training,” he hissed. “Sparring fatalities are one thing, but murdering our own was never supposed to be a consideration.”

“Yeah, well, today it is.” She turned from him to take her place in formation. “Either your terms or his, Seth. Figure it out.”

He stood back from the group and deliberated over his choices. The first of thirty canines yelped from somewhere on the opposite side of the ranks. And then another. He glared out at Olanga with all the malevolence of his fifteen years compounded into one passing and stroked Lyrah’s coat. He knelt down to the animal and pulled her close, scratched her chest and spoke to her in a gallant whisper as another dog fell to its master’s blade. Olanga monitored the proceedings with a running commentary on loyalty and the desolate future of Monasco in the hands of traitors. He spoke of commitment to the Monascan ideal and promised them all a lifetime of security in exchange for ruthless detachment and tireless duty. He promised a utopia, washed in the blood of all who were opposed.

Seth weighed the consequences of rejecting Olanga’s orders against his father’s vision for Monasco, which wasn’t much different than that of the Lieutenant, except for a code of honor that Olanga seemed to have forgotten in his recent bid for succession to the General’s seat. General Monasco understood that code, as did Colonel Broussard, and then, of course, there was Tai whose ambitions toward the betterment of their people surpassed them both. And that, to him, was the biggest picture of all, the ultimate future in the making. Seth searched the ranks for her. She was on her knees in the dirt with blood on her shackled hands and Sargon limp in her arms, but he could see she was as troubled as he, despite all the noble talk.

Seth ruffled the fur under Lyrah’s collar. He smiled at her and let her lap his chin. Then he took the katar from his weapon belt and fixed his eyes on the cloudless sky. The animal struggled for only a moment, and then it was finished. He rose to his feet, disgusted and disillusioned, yet strangely empowered just the same. He walked away and left the dog for whatever disposal Olanga had arranged and did not return to the training circle again that passing.

The Lieutenant was stricken with a moment of good will at sunfall and allowed the recruits to bury their canines in the fashion of any fallen soldier. Corporal Broussard was the last to mound his animal’s grave. He packed the final shovel of loose dirt and let himself down into the sand for a rest where Tai found him much later in a sober state of reflection.

“Missed you at dinner,” she said and took a seat beside him.

“Not much of an appetite, I don’t guess,” he shrugged.

She thought for a long while on how to console him, then chose her words carefully. “If I was harsh earlier it was for your own good,” she confessed.

“I don’t doubt that,” he said. “That’s not what I’m angry about, so don’t worry about it.”

She took another moment to collect her thoughts, fidgeted with the wrist irons, which had begun to scrape away the flesh and had to be treated with vinegar and lard to prevent infection. She looked at him and said, “Those dogs were never meant to be ours, anyway, you know.”

“What makes you so sure of that?” he grumbled. “They gave us sole care, threatened our lives if we abandoned them. So, why wouldn’t they have been ours? Makes no sense.”

“Well, you gotta think about the timeline,” she explained. “We got them in our second season here, and they were all five years old last season. By the time we would be ready for service, they’d be almost eleven.”

Seth shrugged. “So?”

“Large breed dogs have shorter life spans,” she pointed out. “They’d have been too old for battle. The army’s not gonna put a canine into service that only has a few good seasons left. They’re gonna want dogs that are young and strong with lots of time ahead of them. No different than any other soldier.”

"Then why not just give them away to the veterans?" he demanded. "Why'd we have to kill them? All it did was waste time and eliminate valuable troops. What kind of insanity is that?"

"There's a canine unit already established, Seth, and they've been breeding those dogs since before you and I were born. They train more than a hundred dogs a season. Thirty canines sent to their deaths to teach some recruits a hard lesson is nothing in the whole scheme of things."

Seth was struck with the indisputable soundness of that and exhaled a foolish sigh. Then his expression darkened and he said, “So, they always knew, then. It was all just an exercise.”

Tai nodded and gave him a sympathetic smile. “From day-one. I figured that out when I saw them bring the new recruits in. That’s why I didn’t want you to get so worked up in front of Olanga and do something stupid just because you thought you were being honorable. It really was not the time to be virtuous. You’ve got a great future in this army, and I just didn’t wanna see you make a terrible mistake.”

He shook his head at all of it and scoffed, “Well, if that’s the way things are done, is there ever a time to be virtuous?”

It was a rhetorical question, but Tai indulged him, anyway. “I dunno,” she sighed. “I guess if I’m ever in a situation where I’ve got to make a choice between honor and military law, then I can only hope my head and my heart are on the same side.”

        Corporal Broussard took her words into full account as he rested his eyes on the desert horizon. She had, in fact, saved his life that passing, for if she hadn’t shaken him out of a dutiful rage, he would surely be among the walking dead, stripped of his rank and bound for the dungeons. There were many anomalies that he would have to put behind him, a surplus of indecision that would take seasons to dispose. He looked over at her as she studied the distance and found himself with only one certainty, and that was that he loved her.

        It had grown cooler and the daylight was all but extinguished as the sun leaned against the mountainside. They sat for a long while and talked a lot about nothing, and when the conversation waned they made their way back to Camp Vallone to face the seasons ahead.

Thicker Than Water Ch 2

2009-12-29T17:55:00.002-05:00

Chapter Two

I wasn’t sure my skates fit properly. Maybe they weren’t tied tightly enough because my ankles gave way, forcing me to grab Dad’s sleeve or risk another tumble. Ice-skating was an infrequent and unique outing for us, and it was not among my athletic endowments. It might have explained why I settled so comfortably into playing street hockey in a fresh, sure-footed pair of Pony’s.
“You have to distribute your weight,” Dad chuckled. “Like this.” And he demonstrated, gliding smoothly across the ice, leaving me a bit too far behind for comfort. “You’re shuffling too much, trying to walk in them,” he explained with a sympathetic smile. “They’re not shoes, they’re ice skates.” He was skating backwards now, examining my technique from ten feet off.
“Come on, Dad,” I whined. “Why are you way out there? What if I fall?”
He shrugged, giving me very little latitude for co-dependence. “Then you’ll get up and try it again. I’m not always gonna be around to catch you, ya know. You’re not a little kid, anymore.” Then he waved me off, saying, “With all those trees you climb and basketball poles you shimmy up? Homemade bike ramps. And wasn’t it you and your buddy Jonathan who were grounded last summer for leaping off Mrs. Barker’s second-floor balcony into the Hollis’ back yard?” He rubbed his chin, feigning very deep thought as he glided in skillful reverse, then nodded. “Yep. That was you guys. So, I don’t know why a little frozen water’s so scary to a ten-year-old daredevil like yourself.”
“Bike ramps are different,” I grumbled, stretching my arms out for balance as gravity fought back.
Dad chuckled. “Oh, really? And what about the high dive at Jordan pool? Remember when you were scared to death of it a couple years ago? And look at you now, the first one in line for it every time.”
I really couldn’t explain why a fall from ten feet with a concrete cushion or a watery grave at the bottom of a twenty-foot public pool had less impact than a stinging, frozen bump on the ass. I suppose it was the embarrassment, the humiliation of failure that would mark me as an uncoordinated klutz. I was the second-fastest runner among the girls in school, the all-time high scorer in gym class hockey, and once made twenty basketball free throws in a row, a feat never topped nor duplicated by any of the other kids. I had a lot on the line, a reputation to maintain, and the thought of wiping out at Ice Palace—of all places—wasn’t doing a thing for my concentration.
“I don’t think my skates fit,” I finally confessed, and Dad drifted over to my side.
“Well, why didn’t you say something an hour ago?” he scolded. “I asked you, and you said they were fine.”
I shrugged. “I thought they were at first. Guess I’m not used to them or something, but they feel kinda loose now.”
“All right,” he conceded. “I suppose we’ve gotten enough exercise for one day. I have an errand to run later, anyway, one that I have to do on my own, this time, so I’m gonna see if Jonathan’s mom can watch for you for a while.”
I frowned quizzically as he guided me toward the exit. “Where you going?”
He peered down at me and said, “That’s for me to know and you to find out, squirt. You’ll see.”
“Is it a Christmas present?”
“Don’t know.”
“Yes you do,” I giggled. “A Bruins jersey?”
“Couldn’t tell ya.”
I cocked my head in playful frustration. “Well, then is it food? Chocolate Soldier drinks? That’s what it is, isn’t it?”
“Never heard of ‘em.”
“Yes you have!” I laughed.
Dad shrugged and stood his ground. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Man, I hate when you do that,” I sighed.
“Yeah, but it’s still kinda fun,” he smirked. “Maybe not for you, but definitely for me.” And he laughed aloud, mussing my hair as we took a seat at the closest bench.
We traded in our skates and headed out to the car.
When we reached the house, Dad didn’t take off his coat. He put in a quick call to Mrs. Doyle, Jonathan’s mother, and sent me two doors down to their house as he headed out for the afternoon. Jon met me at the door, bundled in a blue parka and snow boots. His mother stood behind him with a brief smile and gave us instructions to stay around the neighborhood, close enough to hear her call.
“Olivia wanted to come along,” Jonathan said as we headed over to the playground. “But I told her no.” He was speaking of his younger sister who was two grades behind us and a shameless snitch. Nothing got past Olivia. She was a prudent, inflexible little rule-follower, the constant eye on our every move, and so we kept ourselves as far away from her as possible.
“Good,” I mumbled. “Why’d she wanna come along, anyway? She never wants to play the same stuff as us. She can’t run fast, can’t throw, can’t climb, and she complains all the time ‘cause she says we only play boys’ games.”
Jonathan shrugged. “She said she’s sick of staying inside all day, and her little friend Pamela’s away for Christmas in New Jersey with her family, so now she doesn’t have any friends but us.” And he rolled his eyes.
“We could see if Patrick’s home,” I suggested and scanned Park Street for his mother’s car, unaffected by Olivia’s plight. “See if he wants to play army.”
“You know he got a new Ghost Gun for Christmas early, right?” Jon mentioned. “Last week in school he said he wanted to take it over to the haunted houses and see if we could find a few ghosts and take ‘em out.”
I raised an eyebrow. “We?”
“Yeah, we,” he insisted. “What are you, scared?”
“And you’re not?”
Jon shrugged. “Not if we have a Ghost Gun, silly. It lights ‘em up and everything, has a special bionic light on it that can only shine on ghosts. Then you can shoot ‘em.”
We came upon Patrick’s porch and rang the bell. “Well, what if they see us before we see them, and they kill us first. What’ll we tell your mom?”
Jonathan eyed me sideways. “Well, nothin, then. We’ll be dead, dummy.”
“Well, yeah. And if that happens to you, then who’s the dummy. Not me ‘cause I’m not goin in there. Besides, my dad’s gonna be back soon, and I really can’t be dead when he gets here.”
“Chicken.”
“Why do I have to be chicken, just ‘cause I don’t wanna get slashed up and eaten by a monster?”
“I didn’t say there were monsters,” Jonathan countered. “I said ghosts. But there could be a monster, too. We don’t know what’s in those houses, really. Nobody’s ever been brave enough to go inside. But we could be the first ones, and then we’d be heroes. Like The Green Lantern or The Thing. And then you’ll be like…I dunno…Wonder Woman.”
I winced at him. “Why do I always have to be Wonder Woman just ‘cause I’m a girl? Maybe I wanna be The Green Lantern. Or Lucan, maybe. Yeah, I’m Lucan. You can be Wonder Woman.”
“Ha ha, real funny,” he mumbled as Patrick came to the door in his Spiderman pajamas. He let us inside where we followed him downstairs to the basement den. He had been watching Creature Double Feature. Today’s films were Attack of the Mushroom People and The Brain Eaters, a perfect segue for Jonathan’s haunted mission proposal, which he laid out in militaristic detail.
“So, we figured if there was three of us, they’d have a harder time killing us all,” Jon concluded. “More of us to keep watch, too. So, you still wanna go?”
Patrick was all for it. “Cool. Let’s get ‘em. Lemme just put some outside clothes on and tell my mom. And I think I’ve got a couple guns for you guys, too. You’re probably gonna need ‘em.” He ran upstairs and left us in the company of the Riverdale parasites as we collapsed onto the beanbag chairs to wait.
“So, why do we need regular guns again if we’re just gonna be looking for ghosts?” I asked, and Jonathan rolled his eyes.
“’Cause,” he insisted. “I told you. There could be anything in those houses, and me and you have to be ready for ‘em. That’s why. And you know old Mrs. Drukenmiller’s a witch, and I’m pretty sure she uses the one house to make potions and cast spells and stuff.”
“She doesn’t live in that house, though,” I frowned. “She lives down the block on Seventh Street.”
“Yeah, but who knows what kind of creatures she might have invented up in there,” he said. “She probably controls them through ESP and doesn’t even have to be there. Just trust me. My dad’s a cop and never goes after bad guys without protection. We need guns.”
Patrick trotted down the steps, dressed in a hooded Eagles jacket, green snow pants, a gray ski mask lifted up to his forehead, and his Ghost Gun slung over his shoulder. He handed Jonathan a tri-colored camouflage M16.
“Right here’s the safety switch,” he instructed. “It won’t make any noise unless you unlock it.” And he demonstrated, sending a skull-splitting rattle through the den as he pulled the plastic trigger. “And this one’s for you,” he said to me. It was an authentic Sixteenth Century Black Beard Buccaneer pistol. He placed a fresh roll of caps in my hand. “It’s already loaded, but just in case.”
We took to the neighborhood like The Untouchables. Kids called to us from the playground and invited us to snowballs fights and sled races, but we waved them off and turned down onto Utica, the alley that ran behind mine and Jonathan’s row into Morris Street. We could see the houses from the Utica alley as we approached, overgrown and neglected, set back away from the Morris alley by a large empty lot, strewn with rocks and litter and broken bottles.
“You guys better not be going to climb on Mr. Getz’s garage roof again.” Olivia stood in the middle of their backyard with snow piled onto a red wagon, frail and mousy in her pink satin, quilted, Disney princess coat and rainbow puffball beanie. “’Cause if you are, I’m telling Mom, and then I’m gonna go tell him that you’re up there.”
“Shut up,” Jonathan snapped. “You don’t even know what you’re talking about, so just go inside.”
“No,” she sassed. “You’re not Dad, and you can’t tell me to go inside. I’ll stay wherever I want.”
“And you’re not Mom,” Jon called over his shoulder as we passed. “So, stop trying to act like it, and leave us alone.”
“Fine!” she pouted. “You’re probably just going off to play something stupid, anyway! As usual! Let me find out you were on Mr. Getz’s roof again, and I swear I’ll…” and she trailed away as we rounded the Utica-Morris corner and stepped onto the haunted lot. Olivia was the very last person privy to our plans that afternoon, as our parents had forbidden us to set foot inside those buildings. When asked why, they simply replied, “Because they’re dangerous, and because I said so,” an ambiguity that only confirmed the ominous legends we’d shared all our lives.
We stood before the twin, three-story structures, built in the same Victorian style as our own homes. The one on the right was in worse condition than the other but more accessible. Virginia Creeper had all but swallowed the buildings completely, but the ivy had gone brown in the painful winter cold, and now it looked like fur, which had commandeered the concrete landing that led into the house on the right. It was a place where bats literally circled and dove around the roof spires at dusk, and the property itself was a heap of shattered glass and broken bricks, boarded up and teeming with rusty nails. The lot had always been a popular play area where we cleared racetracks for Hot Wheels cars and piled dirt mounds for Tonka trucks to plow. One summer we had gotten it into our heads that if we dug deep enough, we might unearth a gleaming buried treasure from a forgotten civilization, and there were still several shallow pits in the blue-gray gavel, pooling with icy slush.
Year after year, summer after summer, we made a second playground of this area, but there was a boundary. Approximately ten yards from those crumbling back porch landings an invisible line had been drawn. We hadn’t called a neighborhood meeting to agree upon it, nor had any adults deemed it so. We all just silently, wordlessly understood that it was there, and nobody ever crossed it for fear that a bloody arm would reach through the broken boards and drag you away to your nightmares.
Today those notions would be challenged and dismissed as Jonathan, Patrick, and I checked our weapons with glances over our shoulders for passers-by. When the alleys seemed clear, we crossed over into the forbidden zone, crept like a S.W.A.T. team up the concrete stairs, and stepped onto the weathered landing. Jonathan tried the door. The knob was locked, but the door itself was slightly unhinged. He shouldered it twice, and with a little effort it finally swung open. We stood for several moments at the open mouth of all things dark and sinister, fear turning our snow boots to ice blocks as the dank scent of abandonment drifted from within.
“If we go, we’ll be heroes,” Patrick reminded us.
“And we could ride that fame all the way through high school,” Jonathan mused.
“But if we chicken out, we’ll never live it down,” I noted.
“If we chicken out, no one’s ever gonna know ‘cause we’re never gonna tell anyone,” Jonathan glanced at Patrick and I with forewarning certainty.
I shrugged and nodded. “Well, yeah. Right. Our secret,” I stuttered. “That is, if we chicken out, of course.”
Patrick poked his head inside, warily. “It’s really, really dark. And it smells weird. What is that?”
“I think that’s death,” Jon whispered. “Death and ghost vapors.” He, too, peered across the threshold, pointed his M16 into the void.
“Well?” I sighed. “Standing here isn’t gonna get us any closer to fame. You guys ready to do this?”
Neither of them answered. We just stood there, a step away from courage, listening to the darkness, assessing only what the daylight revealed—the bottom of a precarious toppling staircase, strewn with sand and old newspaper scraps, scuffed and haggard hardwood floors, crumbling plaster that exposed wooden slats in the paint-pealed walls. It was colder inside than it was out on the stoop as I, too, stuck my face through the doorway, clutching the Buccaneer revolver in my coat pocket.
“What are you guys doing up there!”
We jumped like startled cats and stumbled away. We turned to find Olivia at the corner of Morris and Utica, mittens on her hips, smug with the triumph of having sabotaged our forbidden mission. We’d hesitated, and now the perfect opportunity for neighborhood glory was gone.
“I’m tellin!” she promised. “Mom told you guys never to go around those houses, and you knew that, Jonathan. And Shannon, you’re in trouble, too, ‘cause when my mom’s watching you, you’re not allowed to do anything Jon’s not allowed to do.” And we watched as she ran down the alley toward home.
“Aw, come on,” Patrick whined. “What is she? The freakin’ CIA?”
Jonathan threw up his hands and let them drop. “Well, so much for that idea. Great. Now I’m never gonna get a Huffy for Christmas.”
“Think your mom’s gonna tell my dad?” I asked, panic slowly rising in my gut.
He shook his head. “Naw, prolly not. She’ll mostly just yell at me.”
“Jonathan! Shannon!” Her voice traveled the neighborhood, around the corners, through the alleys, and over the rooftops.
We climbed down from the landing and dragged ourselves across the lot, thwarted, defeated, and in dreaded anticipation of confronting Mrs. Doyle. She was at the backyard fence as we came down the alley, one of her husband’s winter police jackets wrapped around her shoulders as if snatched from the coat rack in an exasperated rush.
“Jonathan Daniel Doyle,” she announced firmly.
“What?” he mumbled.
“What do you mean, what?” she snapped. “Why don’t you tell me…what. How many times,” she began in a direct, deliberate tone, “have we told you guys not to go near those buildings? They’re full of rats and glass and you could fall through the floor and break your necks. And Shannon, you know better, too. I swear, the two of you get together and one puts an idea into the other one’s head, and you’re like a couple ‘a nitwits. Do you have any idea how dangerous those houses are? It’s bad enough you guys play in that lot over there, and I wonder what you’re mother would think about all this, Patrick.”
The three of us stood at the fence, fidgeting with our sleeves, our eyes downcast and our mouths shut, made mute by the unspoken threat of an empty Christmas tree. Jonathan and I refrained from glancing at each other. Regardless of how serious the infraction or how dire the consequences, that glance would trigger a smirk that would stretch into a grin that would escape from our lips as a snicker until we were laughing aloud in his mother’s face. It was a foolish, irrational compulsion, but it happened on nearly every occasion like this, and so we kept focused on our shoelaces because he needed that red and black Huffy, and I would not be complete without that Bobby Orr jersey.
“Now,” Mrs. Doyle finally concluded. “Can you two just stay out of trouble so I can get the laundry done, or do you need to come inside and sit on the sofa with no TV for the rest of the day?”
“We’ll stay outa trouble,” we both muttered, peering up at her pitifully.
She pursed her lips and looked down her nose at us with a doubtful eye. “Hmph. That’ll be the day. Well, all right. Just stay around here where you can hear me, and do not go back over to that lot. Do you understand?”
We nodded.
When she disappeared into the house, we scrounged our spare change and went down to Eddie’s for Bazooka gum. Then we sat out on my back porch and watched the older kids smoke cigarettes on the hoods of their cars, parked along the playground curb. They drank beer and laughed aloud with their arms around their girlfriends’ shoulders, blasted Blue Oyster Cult, Black Sabbath, and Zeppelin from Big Jimmy’s jet-black ’75 Charger. He called it ‘The Shadow’ and spent much of his time revving the engine to full, rumbling throttle. Jon’s mom said they were all hippies and druggies and that we should stay away from them and, for the most part, we did. If a street hockey ball rolled up to one of their tires or a skateboard got away and stopped at their feet, we were lucky to get it back. We otherwise steered clear of their space, like puppies to a pack of snarling, junkyard alphas. They typically didn’t gather in such a large crowd during winter, but school was out for the next couple weeks, so we were forced to share that sidewalk until 1979 rolled in and offered it back. At least until Spring.
“So, do you wanna try to go back to the haunted house later this week?” Patrick suggested. It was a necessary proposal, important in that it concealed our deep and secret appreciation for Olivia having stopped us. None of us would have taken a lifetime supply of Tastycakes or even a ride in AJ Foyte’s racecar in exchange for the shameful truth: we were too terrified to cross that threshold. Too many summer nights watching bats whirl around the attic windows and rumors of hatchet murders, undead demon babies, and space creatures with suction cup fingertips that vacuumed the life from you in a single grasp.
“Well, I can’t,” I pouted. “I’m not gonna be here. Gotta spend Christmas with my mom.”
“Oh yeah, that’s right,” he said. “Your dad sent you away.”
“No he didn’t,” I frowned. “He just thinks it’s best that I be with my mom ‘cause I’m getting older now. I don’t see what difference that’s supposed to make, but whatever,” I mumbled with a shrug.
“It’s ‘cause you’re a girl,” Jon said. “And you gotta talk about…ya know…girl stuff now. And only your mom knows about that. Dad’s are for boys. Mom’s are for girls. That’s just how it is.”
I felt deeply slighted by his logic, and I scoffed, “Since when? I mean, that’s just stupid. It shouldn’t even matter. And I don’t even wanna talk about ‘girl stuff,’” I cringed. “I mean, who cares, right?”
Patrick blew a large pink bubble and it burst across his lips. “Hell if I know,” he muttered, dabbing gum residue from his chin. “Not me, that’s for sure.”
“Me neither,” Jon agreed.
“Well, that makes three of us,” I told them, popping my gum against my teeth. “I’m gonna be a professional drummer in a rock band when I grow up, anyway, and you don’t need much girl stuff for that.”
Jonathan then turned to me with the sudden insight of a bright idea, and he said, “Hey, we should start a rock band now.”
I looked to him with brewing interest, and so he continued.
“For real,” he said. “I’ve been taking guitar lessons for almost a year, and you have your drumset. We could make up our own songs and practice when you come here on the weekends.” Heart’s “Barracuda” rumbled from The Shadow as Jon played air guitar. I knew it well, having heard it on countless rides around town with Dad, and I slapped out the drum fills on the back porch banister.
Jon grinned, thoroughly excited. “See? We can both play pretty good, at least as good as Kiss.”
“Well, then I’m Ace Frehley,” I announced, but Jon shook his head with a wince.
“How could you be him when he’s a guitar player? You have to be Peter Criss.”
“Ace Frehley has better make-up,” I pointed out. “I don’t wanna look like a stupid cat. Plus, you know he’s always my guy when we draw them in school. I always got dibs on Ace, and you get Gene Simmons. That’s how it’s been since third grade.”
Patrick finally interjected. “Well, I wanna be in the group, too. My mom’s thinking about letting me take trombone lessons in school next year. I could do that. Then we could be like Earth, Wind, and Fire and Kiss put together.”
Dad’s mustard yellow Corolla then turned down onto Park Street, and my stomach whirled with excitement; there was a Christmas tree tied to the roof, and he pulled into a spot behind the alphas. Patrick’s mother called him home for dinner, and so he bid us goodbye with a promise to get together tomorrow as Jonathan and I ran down the porch steps to greet Dad.
“Hi Jon,” Dad smiled. “And hello to you, too, sport,” he said to me over the rumbling music. He gave The Shadow and the alphas an irritated glance. “Sorry I took so long, but I had to go to a few different places for the tree. Remind me next year not to wait so long. The selection is pretty lousy by the 21st.”
“But this one’s a good one,” I noted as he slipped the knots loose around the door. “It’s big.”
Dad nodded. “Oh, yeah, I got fairly lucky. Just had to do some searching, that’s all.”
“Ours is fake ‘cause we have carpet,” Jon said as the two of us helped Dad untie it and guide it to the ground. “My mom doesn’t like having to vacuum every day, so we just got a plastic one, this year.”
“Well, she’s a smart lady for that,” Dad said. “And I’d be doing the same if we didn’t have the hardwood, believe me.” Then he said to me, “Hey, why don’t you go and let Mrs. Doyle know I’m home while I get this thing into the house.”
“’Kay,” I said, and Jonathan and I headed over to his place.
When I returned home, Dad had the tree secured in the stand next to the fireplace, and the ornament boxes were spread around the floor beneath it. Though this was my first year knowing where my presents truly came from, warm butterflies still swarmed inside. It was a flutter that moved through me on occasion, often for no explicable reason, really. It was the deep, soaring sense that everything was as it should be, that the stars were rightly aligned, and the future rested comfortably in the hands of great optimism. And in those flickering moments I could see for miles. I was right where I was supposed to be.
“I thought since you’ll be spending Christmas over there, this year, we’d try to do a little something of our own,” Dad said. “At least get the tree up and decorated. Then we’ll do something with Memmy and Pappy at their place tomorrow.”
“Cool,” I chirped, standing before the tree with a creative eye. “What about cookies?” I then asked. “Can we still do that, too? Can we go get some?”
He nodded. “Sure. In fact, I beat you to it. I picked some up while I was out ‘cause I figured you might wanna do that tonight.” Then he peered down at me with a strange, expectant look, and smirked. “So, you notice anything different about the place?” he asked, then reiterated with a chuckle, “Well, besides the six-foot Fraser Fir that wasn’t here before,” he laughed. “But anything else catch your eye or seem…oh, I dunno…new or out of place?”
I inspected the living room. All was as I knew it; the old black and white TV, Dad’s armchair and brown leather hassock, his desk by the front bay window, the polished, mahogany, upright Steinway piano by the staircase. Then I turned to find his surprise at my back. Somehow, in my excitement over the tree, I’d missed it as I came in, and I went over to the card table set up against the wall. On it was a brand new Fischer stereo, worlds better than our old one--a shoddy turntable in a corny plaid box that folded shut like a suitcase. This had a built-in 8-track player, AM/FM radio tuner, two 14-inch speakers, and a glossy tinted cover like the ones on display at Jefferson-Ward’s.
“Whoa!” I breathed and ran my hands over it like the Holy Grail. I couldn’t refrain from testing the knobs and buttons, and so Dad stepped in.
“All right, hold on a second. There’s one rule,” He said sternly. “This thing is not a toy, understand? It’s ours, mine and yours together…but…until I feel confident that you know how to use it properly, the only one who touches it is me. Got it? I don’t even know what all it does yet, and when I get it figured out, I’ll be happy to show you. But even then, I don’t want you fidgeting with it unless I’m around. At least not for a while. Deal?”
I nodded. “Deal.”
He regarded me with a hint of suspicion because he knew me well, better than I knew myself, but he let it lie and said, “I picked up something else today.” He went over to his desk and revealed a Sam Goody Records bag and slid the contents into his hand. “I thought since we’ll be going to see the movie tomorrow, we could get a little taste beforehand.”
It was the Rocky soundtrack, the entire album with “Gonna Fly Now” and several other songs that I was curious to hear. He handed it to me and said, “One more rule. And that is, I get to choose the playlist because I do not wanna ‘boogy-oogie-oogie’ or do the hustle or shake my groovy thing. Got it?”
“I guess,” I muttered. It drained the appeal from the record playing experience, which was probably the point, another deterrent that might prevent me from pressing buttons that he couldn’t unpress.
He folded his arms across his chest and said, “Oh, now, don’t pout over it. I’ll be fair, I promise. And you’ll be free to listen to anything you want…while I’m as far from here as possible,” he chuckled.
I rolled my eyes. “My music’s not that bad, is it? I mean, you said you like Stevie Wonder, right?”
“Certain things, yeah, but I’ve also heard some stuff that just makes me wanna cringe.” And pointed toward the playground. “Like that out there. But nevertheless, we’ll do our best to compromise…within reason.”
There hadn’t been much music in the house for past few months. We let the Rocky album play while I watched him mix cookie dough in the kitchen. I cracked the eggs and spooned it into globs on a metal sheet, and before long the house was warm and sweet. We took a plate to the living room while he untangled the tree lights and replaced the faulty bulbs. He brought down a box of records and 8-track tapes from his third-floor office and made selections for the night; Simon and Garfunkel, America, the Johnny Mathis Christmas album. It was the one he played every year with Johnny on the cover in a red sweater, holding a pair of skis amid a wintry backdrop. Dad didn’t have any of his other albums, so when that voice filled the living room, it could only mean Christmas was drawing near. The smell of fresh pine and warm sugar. Green needles scattered on the hardwood. And Johnny’s “Oh Holy Night”. Everything was just as it should be.

Thicker Than Water (Part One) Ch 1

2009-12-29T17:25:00.005-05:00

Author’s Note

****The characters and events in this novel are very closely based on actual events and individuals throughout the author’s life. Though written as a fictional account, all events have been depicted to the best of the author’s recollection over an approximate, thirty-year time span. Some characters—whose names have been changed out of respect for their identities—are direct depictions of actual individuals (both living and deceased), and others are composites of various personalities encountered along the way. There are minor embellishments scattered throughout the book, which are for entertainment purposes and for the sake of narrative continuity.*****

Thicker Than Water

Part One

Chapter One

“All That Came Before”

It was going to be our year, or so it seemed. The Eagles made the playoffs again, the Sixers and Dr. J had done the same, our beloved Broad Street Bullies were head of the Patrick Division, and the Phillies won the division pennant. In Allentown, geography made most of us partial to the Philadelphia teams, but with Pittsburgh’s legends trading victories with ours, Pennsylvania might as well have been the only place in the world, that Christmas. I was a local sports deviate, having begged to find a black and yellow Boston Bruins jersey under the tree with the coveted number 4 on the back because I believed it would make me a better player, like Bobby Orr himself.

         Street hockey was year-round on our block and we played on foot, no skates, no helmets, and no pads, save for the goalie, which was fortunate for him because at ten-years-old I had developed a deadly-accurate, stinging wrist shot. I missed the game. There really wasn’t much of anyone to play with, anymore, but I stuffed my hockey gloves into my overnight bag and grabbed my stick and set it by the bedroom door, anyway. Practicing alone was how I had gotten so good, and if things at home ever changed, well, I will have secured myself as the number-one Park Street pick, come Spring.
        There was a familiar stillness outside, a peaceful silence that always accompanied the first snowfall, and I raised the window shade to find the school playground under a light blanket, amber-gray under the early evening street lamps. It fluffed the edges of the Stevens School rooftops and powdered the windshields of my friends’ parents’ cars. Condensation had turned the windowpane to a tempting finger-doodle canvas as the radiator baked beneath it, and I considered provoking one of Dad’s pet peeves with a dripping smiley face, or my name drawn backwards—n-o-n-n-a-h-S—just to remind the others that I’m not gone for good. At least I hoped not. And I suppose it was that flutter of possibility that put an index finger to the glass, and the trifling deed was done, left to dry in the dust where tomorrow’s sunlight might send a greeting to the neighborhood.
        Dad’s footsteps creaked the stairs, and so I lowered the shade and returned to the assortment of weekend clothes, the Slingerland drumsticks, the comic books and football cards, all strewn about the bed.

“You about ready, squirt?” He poked his head in the doorway, then took note of my sluggish progress and sighed, checking his watch. “You know, it’s after seven, kiddo, and the roads aren’t gonna be too accommodating tonight. So, come on, let’s get a move on.”

I nodded, and he disappeared down the hall to his room, which was adjoined to mine by an oak wood door that kept a single skeleton key in the latch under the knob. I took a seat on the bed and gathered my NFL cards into a neat stack, shoved my drumsticks and drum pad into the gym bag’s side compartment. Then I lost interest in packing when I remembered the Christmas village Advent calendar that was on the dresser. It had been an annual ritual since kindergarten, so much that many of the little paper shutters on its twenty-four secret windows stood slightly ajar from six years of tradition. Even so, I still couldn’t recall which pictures were behind what windows as I carefully peeled open day-14 to find the Star of Bethlehem, and I was mildly disappointed. I was getting a bit too old for it, so I placed the novelty back upon the dresser and finished packing.
Dad was as punctual as the sunrise, and he lived by a strict and often over-booked itinerary. Always busy. Always engaged in a project. For the past ten years I suppose his biggest project was me, and these new weekend visits were just another part of it. Things hadn’t always been this way, but he insisted it was for the best.
He kept yellow Post-It notes tacked to everything—the refrigerator, the dashboard, the vestibule doorjambs—each with a different reminder to stop by the Farmer’s Market or the gas station or the shoemaker. There was one on the railing at the top of the stairs, just outside my room, a scribbled note to check the post office box before morning. The post office was way out by the airport, and I enjoyed the ride because it afforded me the longest opportunity to listen to the top 40’s on WKAP. But I wouldn’t be able to make that trip with him tonight; we just didn’t have enough time.

“All right, sport,” he said as he re-appeared in the doorway. He wore a green LaSalle University sweatshirt, blue jeans, and pair of Adidas running shoes. “Let’s get on the road, what little we have left of it, anyway.”

I tucked the last of my clothes into the bag and hesitated. I opened my mouth to speak but after rethinking, I figured it was pointless.

Dad read my expression clearly, and he said, “So, what’s up? What’s that look for?”

I shook my head and shrugged. Then I allowed the weekly question to tumble from my lips. “Do I have to go back, Dad?” But this time the weather offered a stronger argument, and I said, “Maybe the roads are too bad tonight. I mean, they said we’re supposed to get, like, ten feet or something, right? We don’t wanna drive in that, and I bet school’s gonna be closed tomorrow, anyway. I could stay at Memmy’s, then maybe—“

He held up a hand with a knowing smile and stopped me. “Yes, you have to go back. That’s the arrangement. We agreed, right? And it’s ten inches, not ten feet,” he smirked. “I’m sure school will be waiting for you with open doors and open arms tomorrow. So, come on. Get your stuff, kiddo. It’s getting late.”

“I guess,” I muttered, shouldering my gym bag with a heavy sigh, and I followed him out into the chilly evening.

The Corolla was already running with the defroster melting a glossy circle at the base of the windshield. “Bohemian Rhapsody” played through the radio’s single speaker, and though I wasn’t entirely sure what the song was about, I found myself relating to much of it as we made our way up 7th Street.
We crossed the 8th Street Bridge and headed along Lehigh Street, sharing a comfortable silence. Snowfall shot out of the darkness like stars whizzing past The USS Enterprise at warp speed as the wipers thunked back and forth in time to the music We turned down onto Howard Street and pulled up to the curb, and Dad reached over with a hug and a kiss.

“All right, there, pumpkin,” he said cheerily, his mustache twitching beneath a warm smile to sweeten my sour mood. “I love you, and be good. I’ll see you next weekend, but I’ll call before then.”

I nodded, still shrouded in foggy disappointment. “’Kay. Love you, too,” I told him and climbed out into the snow. I watched him drive off, checking over my shoulder for his taillights as I lumbered up the walkway. I watched until the Corolla shrank and vanished for another long week.

Inside, the apartment was quiet. The TV was low, the end credits of a Disney movie. A thin layer of cigarette smoke hovered in the living room, and I could hear voices in the back office, which was supposed to be my bedroom. But my mother and her husband Gene were in business for themselves and couldn’t afford to rent office space elsewhere. It was a three-bedroom place; two rooms were set up as an office and a graphic design studio, and the third was their bedroom. So, I had been sleeping on the sofa for the past couple months, which was supposed to be temporary. I could watch television as late as I wanted and had the kitchen right there, so it really wasn’t all that bad. Sometimes, when they had company that stayed after midnight, I would sleep in their room, but it was untidy with just a mattress on the floor, which was always strewn and left unmade. I preferred the living room and managed to sleep fairly well there, even when they stayed up until dawn and left all the lights on, working on last minute advertising projects against pressing deadlines.
I dropped my overnight bag at the foot of the loveseat and shed my coat. The cat, Sequester, wandered over to greet me, and I scooped him into my arms and went to look for my mother. The design studio door was closed, but I could hear them talking on the other side, and so I knocked. The conversation stopped, and my mother muttered something disgruntled. She opened the door and stood before me with a hand on her hip and a Salem Light burning in the other.

“Yes?” she sighed.

I glanced inside at Gene who ignored me as he crushed a Pall Mall into the ashtray on the drafting table and pulled the fluorescent magnifying lamp over the cutout in front of him. “Just wanted to let you know I was home.”

Mom looked down her nose at me, quietly assessing my disposition after having spent the weekend with ‘the enemy’. “Is that it?” she questioned, her transparent blue eyes like gemstones, piercing and chilly with jealousy. She hated him, though I never understood why. My father had been good to her, but it was she who’d left him for Gene, four years ago. “No other news? No uplifting tales of your adventures with your father?”

I shook my head with another shrug and let Sequester down to the floor. “Not really. Just went to the museum, but that’s it.”

She nodded. “I see. Well, that was very cultured of him.” She took a drag from her cigarette, looked me over once more and said, “We’ve got a lot of work to do, Gene and I. The Lehigh University account. So, I’m sorry if we can’t entertain you tonight, but you understand. Fix yourself something to eat, make a sandwich or something. There’s ice cream, too, if you want it.”

“Will you be able to get up with me in the morning and see me off to school?”

“Yeah, sure,” she sighed. “Now go on. Go watch some TV, and don’t come knocking every five minutes. You can take care of yourself, can’t you?”

I nodded, and she shut the door.

It was ten days before Christmas and they still hadn’t decorated. Mom promised we’d do that together when the Lehigh project was finished, but it seemed unlikely they’d finish it this week.
I changed into sleeping clothes in the bathroom, took down a sheet, pillow, and blanket from the hall closet and set the alarm clock on the end table. Mom and Gene never came out of the studio, and I fell asleep watching Dick Cavett reruns.

In the morning, the studio room was empty and Mom and Gene’s bedroom door was cracked. I crept inside and tried to wake my mother. She asked me the time, and I told her seven a.m. She told me to go into the kitchen and fix myself a bowl of cereal, despite my attempts to rouse her into making eggs and bacon.

“We’ll do it tomorrow,” she muttered into the sheets.

“But you promised,” I insisted, trying to keep my voice down as not to wake Gene.

“Tomorrow,” she yawned. “There’s Wheaties in the cupboard. You’re gonna be late for school.” And she fell unconscious again.

I put extra sugar on my cereal, four heaping teaspoons more than anyone would have ever allowed, ate it on the couch in front of Good Morning America, then grabbed my jacket and set out for Jefferson Elementary. It was only a half-mile away, but it was bitter cold. My breath plumed white vapors into my path, and my cheeks had begun to sting. I considered turning back and telling Mom that I wasn’t feeling well. She’d call the school and tell them I had chronic bronchitis or an acute stomach virus, as she had often done over the past few months that I’d been living with her. But I’d missed too many days at Jefferson already, and they were threatening to make me repeat the fifth grade. I didn’t even remember my teacher’s name, or anything she was teaching us, so what difference did it really make? Maybe I needed to repeat everything, since none of it was staying in my head. I didn’t have that problem at Stevens. In fact, I was looking forward to the fifth grade. Mr. Michelson would have been my teacher, and he was semi-professional boxer on the side, like Rocky. You couldn’t get much cooler than that.

The day didn’t last long. Just before lunch, Mrs. Metzinger (whose name finally dawned on me during roll call) had a map of China rolled down in front of the blackboard. We were learning countries and their capitols, but I was distracted by Liz Straum, the prettiest girl in the class, or at least I thought so. I had been contemplating what her favorite rock band might be and how I could go about asking her when Mrs. Metzinger demanded the capitol of China, yanking me from my daydreams.

I knew, but it suddenly escaped me, and so I shrugged. “I dunno,” I told her from my seat at the back of the class. “I forgot.”

Mrs. Metzinger folded her arms and eyed me critically. “Well, Shannon, it seems as though you don’t remember much of anything, do you? Is that by choice, or is it some sort of deficiency you’ve brought with you from your previous school?”

The class giggled, and I shrugged again. She shook her head and turned to write my name on the blackboard for an extra chore after class, at which time I took the opportunity—or gave in to the impulse—to casually extend my middle finger.

Someone gasped. At Stevens I would’ve gotten a chuckle and a high-five because she deserved it, but here at Jefferson I had no allies, no loyal lifelong compadres, and a boy named Justin raised his hand for Mrs. Metzinger’s attention.
I was sent to the principal’s office where I remained until the end of the day.

“That’s so un-ladylike,” Mom scolded when I returned to the apartment, but Gene found it amusing. He was seated on the couch with an ankle propped across his knee, his gut peeking out from under a polyester scenic button-down, and he smirked at me through a long drag from his Pall Mall.

“So, did you do it to her face or what?” he asked with a chuckle. He had a perm. It started out as a white man’s pseudo-afro, but it was growing out now and looked like a headful of mouse-brown throw-cover tassels. “Was it like ‘hey, here’s what I think of China and you, ya old bitch’. Or were you a chicken about it and waited until she wasn’t lookin?”

“Gene!” Mom gave him an exasperated glare. “Why do you encourage her? What kind of people do you want them to think we are, anyway?”

But that was exactly the kind of people they were. Gene was genuinely delighted, and I’d seen my mother use the very same gesture, particularly while driving, and sometimes toward Gene, himself, if she was losing a heated argument. My mother was very good at putting on airs, so good that the line between reality and ‘show time’ had been permanently skewed, and she would play act for those who knew her better than she knew herself.
And so I called her out.

“You do it,” I said. “You do it all the time.”

“Well, I shouldn’t,” she sighed. “And it still doesn’t excuse it for you. And you’re in no position to criticize me, either, kid.” I had pricked a nerve. “So, don’t you worry about what I do, and just keep your little fingers in your pockets from now on. You got it?”

I gave it a half-nod and focused on the TV while Gene snickered at the end of the couch and told “Chinaman” jokes.

********

The following Friday afternoon I was dropped off at the corner of Park and Tilghman, and I raced into the house, skipping steps up to the porch, my backpack slung over my shoulder, hockey stick in hand. I shed my jacket and boots in the vestibule where I could see Dad through the beveled glass as he headed downstairs to greet me.

I threw my arms around his neck, lifted my feet off the floor, and hung there, peering up at him with a grin. “Hi, Dad.” I was getting a bit too big for that, and he grimaced through a weary smile.

“Okay, okay,” he begged, prying my hands apart. “Well, hello to you, too, heavy kid,” he chuckled and kissed my cheek. “Hey, go ahead and take your stuff upstairs while I make a quick phone call. Then we’ll figure out the plan for this weekend, huh?”

“’Kay.” I grabbed my bag and started up the stairs, but he called after me.
“Hey, you’ve eaten already, right?”

“Uh-uh.”

“No?” He pursed his lips and half shook his head. Irritation moved across his face as he checked his watch. “I mean, come on,” he mumbled to himself. “It’s after six o’clock. Can’t you feed her before you bring her? All right,” he then said to me with a decisive nod. “Let me make this call, and then we’ll see about getting some food into you.”

“I can eat cereal,” I suggested.

He eyed me coyly, straightening the papers on his desk. “No, you can’t eat cereal. That’s not food. We’ll just…I dunno…walk down to Yocco’s or something. Go put your stuff in your room, and then we’ll talk about it.”

        It was good to be back, if only for two days, and I went upstairs and dropped my bag onto the bed. I wasn’t sure how long Dad’s call would take, so I spent that time in the playroom, which was adjoined to mine. It had once been my brothers’ bedroom, but they were teenagers now, living with their father and stepmother in Reading. William was eighteen now, ready to graduate in June, and Clay was fifteen and learning to drive. Their lives were full of girls and rock concerts, muscle cars and college preparations. They had somewhat outgrown me and didn’t spend many weekends here, anymore, so Dad turned their room into my own creative sanctuary. It was a science lab and an art studio, a writing study and a music hall with a used, blue-sparkle, 5-piece drum set in the middle of the hardwood floor. A few years prior, when it still belonged to William and Clay, Dad had given them permission to paint the room whatever color they wished, and so they chose three. Now, the west wall was cherry red, the east was a bone white, and the north and south were royal blue. The only thing they left behind was a Steve McQueen Le Mans racing poster that was still tacked to the southern blue wall, and up until last year I’d puzzled daily over what ‘lemons’ had to do with auto racing or Steve McQueen.
       Dad had installed a low-level counter that ran along the west wall and served as a desk, and clamped to the edge was a metal swivel lamp with an articulating arm—cherry red, to match the room’s unconventional paint job. I switched it on, took a seat, and flipped through a recent issue of Mad Magazine that Dad picked up at Eddie’s Market. This one parodied the new Saturday Night Fever movie, and though most of the satire was lost on my fifth grade intellect, I liked the cartoons.
        I gathered from Dad’s side of the phone conversation that he was talking to his best friend Rob who owned a hair salon nearby and had just opened a new one across town. They had grown up together, like brothers, and when I was much younger Rob mystified me with his talking tree routine. He was quite slender, which made it simple for him to slip up behind one of the big maples alongside the house and ‘bring it to life’ in a surly, gruff voice that knew my name. He still tried it every so often but was usually betrayed by his green convertible MG, parked along the playground curb. And though I embraced the idea of an actual talking tree growing right up out of my own sidewalk, I knew better now.
       I could smell the scent of nicotine, drifting up from the living room. Dad smoked Merits, the gold pack. He wasn’t a heavy smoker, but it seemed the urge struck him most late at night with a cold bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon, watching old M*A*S*H* reruns, and during telephone conversations with close friends. He laughed aloud at something Rob said, then made plans for us to drop by the new salon later that evening.

“Hey, Shannon?” Dad then called up after me. “You ready, kiddo? I don’t think Yocco’s will be open much longer, so we should go ahead and make our way down there.”

I retired Alfred E. Neuman for the night, switched off the lamp, and trotted downstairs where Dad handed me my jacket. He thumbed through the few bills in his wallet and hesitated, but then stuffed the wallet into his back pocket with a brief smile. “Ready?”

The sidewalks had been shoveled and salted, but dusk brought a brisk chill that slicked the concrete in the most inconspicuous spots, so Dad insisted I take his hand as we walked. None of the other kids were out. In fact, nobody from Tilghman to Liberty Street saw fit to brave the cold tonight except Dad and me, and I glanced up at him, his breath billowing beneath his brown mustache. He was wrapped in a black wool scarf and matching beanie, wore an olive green Army field jacket and black leather gloves. He was a Vietnam veteran but rarely spoke of it, had no group photos on display like some of my friends’ fathers. All I knew of his service was that he carried a rifle and a camera, took pictures for the Army newspaper. When I once asked if he’d ever killed anyone, his face grew very dim, and he just shrugged, said he didn’t know and changed the subject, so I never asked about that again.

“So, how’s school going over there,” Dad asked. His voice seemed swallowed by the winter silence, as if we were the only two people in town, and I shrugged and kicked at a snow chunk in my path.

“It’s okay, I guess.”

Dad waited for more, but when I offered nothing, he said, “Well, that doesn’t sound too enthusiastic. What about your teacher? What’s she like?”

“Old.”

Dad chuckled. “Old? Is that it? No profound pearls of wisdom on Lewis and Clark or the Declaration of Independence?” he smirked.

“Not really,” I shrugged again. "She's old enough to have signed the Declaration of Independance, though. Maybe even met Lewis and Clark."

“Okay," Dad chuckled. "Well, what about your classmates? You making any new friends, these days?”

I shook my head, slapping at the railings as we passed. “Nah. I don’t really like ‘em much, I don’t guess.”

Dad frowned and said, “Well, I don’t know if I like hearing that. I mean, you’ve been there for a couple months, now. You should be making some friends. So, what exactly have you been doing with your time, then?” he asked, his blue eyes narrow with curiosity and concern.

“We watch TV, the Eagles games, mostly. Saturday Night Live, Johnny Carson sometimes,” I told him. “I listen to records, practice my drum rudiments.” And I shrugged the rest of it off because there really wasn’t much to report.

Dad winced, peered down his nose with disapproval that wasn’t aimed entirely at me. “Johnny Carson?” he questioned with a humorless chuckle. “Well, that show doesn’t come on until eleven. How late do you stay up during the week?”

I told him honestly, “As late as I want, I guess. Most of the time they don’t go to bed till it gets light out, anyway, and since I sleep in the living room I just stay up until I fall asleep there.”

We reached Park and Liberty, and Dad held Yocco’s door for me and gazed out into the neighborhood in deep, speculative thought. He said nothing more about it until we ordered and sat at a booth. He bought perogies and fries for me and a Coke for himself. He watched me eat for a long while, reclined against his side of the table. I wasn’t sure what was on his mind. Now and then he flashed a friendly grin, but I could tell he was pondering something of great quantity.

Then he asked, “That place has three bedrooms, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s what I remember from when I took a look around a few months ago.”

I nodded and popped a fry into my mouth. “Yeah. But one’s theirs, and then they use the other two as offices. They’ve got desks and worktables set up, lots of books and papers and stuff. There’s no room for a bed, so I just sleep on the couch.”

“Now, see. I wasn’t aware of that,” he grumbled. “In fact, I was told you’d have your own room and that one of those offices would be cleared out and a new bed would be provided for you. I was told,” he said, pointing to himself, “that was gonna happen within the first week of you being there. Just so you know, I’m not happy to be learning this. I’m not happy at all.” He must have noticed a shade of guilt in my expression because he appended that, telling me, “And hey, I’m not mad at you. Okay? This was something they were supposed to do a long time ago as part of the arrangement. It’s nothing you did. Understand?”

I nodded. “’Kay.” But I hated when he was angry because it burned a hole in our quality time, a huge black hole where all his smiles and hugs and jokes vanished until he finally shook it off.

He let himself cool for several minutes, sipping his soda in thought. “So, you’ve been practicing your drums?” he finally asked. “I take it Gus has been getting over there for your lessons every week.”

“Mm-hm. Gene doesn’t like him, though,” I said. “He says he’s a second-rate lounge player and that I should take lessons from the guy who was in his old band, Rick Ryder-somebody. Gene plays cassette tapes of his band, Tragedy, and says if I wanna be a real drummer, then I should play like Ricky. But I like Gus. I’ve been taking lessons from him since I was nine, and he says I’m his best student now. Well…except for this kid who’s fourteen. But me and him are his best students for sure.”

Dad rubbed his brow and shook his head, mumbling, “His band, huh? Why doesn’t any of this surprise me? Typical. Well, as long as I’m paying for them, you’ll continue taking lessons from Gus.”

“Oh, and I learned how to make scrambled eggs,” I suddenly recalled. “Now I can make them myself in the morning before school, and nobody has to help me.” I was proud of the minor accomplishment but, again, Dad eyed me skeptically.

“So, you’re cooking breakfast for yourself in the morning?” he said. “Hey, I’m all for you learning to do stuff like that, but where are they? I mean, how do you get up for school on time every day?”

I took the last bite of my perogie and sipped my drink. “There’s an alarm clock, the electric kind with the red numbers, and it beeps pretty loud,” I assured him. “I can get up. Don’t worry.”

“Mmm,” he mumbled, pursing his lips again. He had been doing that a lot, lately.

We left Yocco’s as they were shutting down for the night, and we made our way along Park Street, discussing plans for the next couple days. We decided a few hours skating at Ice Palace on Saturday and a movie on Sunday, following the traditional lunch at Memmy’s, would cover it for activities.

The ride to Rob’s salon was quiet. “The Things We Do For Love” played lowly as we traveled west along Tilghman, and as the neighborhoods improved, the Christmas displays became more extravagant. Dad and I had already done our evening drive through suburbia in search of the most elaborate scenes, another yearly tradition. Tonight there were red glowing starlight spheres and green and gold garlands burning rainbows into the night. Life-sized Nutcracker dolls and inflatable snowmen. Illuminated Santas and Nativity scenes beneath icicle daggers on black walnut boughs. It was our city at its best, an enchanting departure from all the busy monotony and industrial gray.
We turned down onto Cedar Crest Boulevard, around the next corner to Rue Vane salon, and we pulled into the side lot next to the MG. Inside, Rob wrapped a curling iron cord around the handle and placed it in his station drawer as he waved us in.

“Come on in out of the cold,” he insisted with a grin. He had the friendliest, most welcoming smile beneath a thick dark mustache. “I was just about to put on a pot of coffee, if you’d like a cup, Mr. Weber.”

Dad shed his coat and took mine, hung them both on the rack and pulled up a chair at Rob’s desk. “Sure,” he said. “If you’ve got coffee, then I’d be a perfect candidate for a cup, right about now.”

Ron smiled and came over to the coffee counter. He filled a filter with grounds and set the maker to brew, then held up a finger to me. He reached into the condiment tray and revealed a pack of instant cocoa with a wink.

“So, why do I get the feeling we’ve had a rough day today?” he asked Dad, a lighted cigarette dangling under his mustache as he spoke. He dropped into the chair behind his desk and tapped his ashes as Dad lit one for himself.

“Ah, man,” Dad breathed, leaning way back in his chair. He stretched an arm behind his head and said to the ceiling, “Well, let me see. It started out fine, actually. I had Shannon coming for the weekend, had some plans in mind for that, got plenty of studying done during the week to make time for her visit. Then I find out, oh, about an hour ago, that she’s got no place to sleep over there.” He shook his head at Rob with a defeated, agitated sigh, then added, “…and hasn’t for the past three months that she’s been there.”

Rob took a long drag with a knowing smirk. He blew a cloudy stream into the air. “Sounds like classic Lorraine to me. And I imagine there was an initial promise to make those accommodations but…” and he waved a hand in emphatic circles to imply that the rest was understood.

“Yep,” Dad said. “There most certainly was. And no, she didn’t follow through…as usual.” And he laughed aloud but not with amusement. It was for the utter disbelief that the terms of their agreement meant absolutely nothing, as if he’d been duped once again.

Rob then said to me, “If you’ve noticed, Shannon, I made sure the stylists left a little something for you to do before they left tonight.” And he gestured into the station area with a playful smirk. “I know you like to help out when you’re here, so the broom’s over by the shampoo sinks,” he winked. “I’ll let you know when your cocoa’s ready.”

       The salon was dimly lit by a single set of track lights glowing over the shampoo area. I grabbed the industrial broom and ran it around the styling chairs, cutting a wide path in a hodgepodge of butter blonde and onyx, auburn and chestnut, revealing the white glossy linoleum beneath. I took particular care of Rob’s wife Lana’s station, straightened the brushes and combs, wiped down the counter, untangled the equipment cords.
        Dad and Rob’s conversation was indistinct and sober. They spoke lowly tonight, foregoing the jokes and anecdotes for what I could presume was a discussion about my circumstances. Dad was not one to rush to a decision, and I wondered what would be his course of action, since he was so visibly displeased. Rob would likely give him sound advice. He was good for that. But I chose not to think on it, anymore, as we had a whole weekend ahead of us. I pushed the hair into a corner pile by the supply room and scooped it into a dustpan.
        Ron called me over for that cup of hot chocolate, and I joined them in the reception area where we spent the rest of our visit on a much lighter note. Dad had come to some sort of conclusion about the Howard Street situation, but he kept a tight lip as not to involve me unnecessarily. That was just his way.

Bone Cave Ch 1

2009-08-14T10:13:00.004-04:00

Bone Cave
By
Carole Wolf

Chapter One

The Arizona night sky crackled with iridescent currants that speared the Sonora desert at the horizon. Inside a Spanish mission-style adobe, splashes of bright white flooded the windows and lit up the house like midday as storm clouds dragged lazy shadows across the walls.
Kyla Price bolted upright from a deep sleep, tangled in damp linens, her crystal blue eyes alert, searching the darkness for reassurance as a nightmare replayed:

A man. Faceless. Standing over her. Darkness. Something in his hand. A knife, a dagger? Ready to thrust the thing through her chest. He rears back. Two hands, bearing down...

She shook it off, took a moment to rub away the grogginess, then swung her legs over the bed and went into the living room. Kyla dropped onto the couch with a noisy sigh and plucked a Marlboro Light from the box, held it to her lips with a tremble. She shook that off, too, unnerved at being unnerved. The adobe flashed and rumbled, the windows rattled. She blew a stream of nicotine into the shadows and ran a hand through her hair, quietly dismissed the recurring nightmare as residual angst over Loren’s death. The front porch light bled through the blinds and cast a soft yellow haze onto their recent vacation pictures, displayed along the fireplace mantle. Loren loved the mountains, loved to hike and to bike-ride at the edges of the earth. She rock-climbed and paraglided and camped out among the bears and timber wolves, infatuated with peril.
“Damned thrill seeker,” Kyla muttered through a lonesome chuckle. She propped her elbows on her knees, tapped her ashes and studied the photo on the coffee table.
The storm had begun to subside, and a stray flicker lit up Loren’s smile as she and Kyla embraced at the rocks of Yosemite’s Matterhorn Canyon, the previous summer. It was the last picture they had taken together. She thought six months might bring her closer to closure, but instead she rotated grief stages like socks in a drawer.
The desert boomed, and Kyla jumped. She let a quick flurry of butterflies settle in her chest, then scolded her uneasiness. She was thinking too much. A dream could mean anything and nothing, mysterious as death itself, senseless as a carjacking in Midtown Tucson that takes someone’s daughter, sister, lover. Kyla had been out on the road, working when it happened. All this paranoia certainly wasn’t going to bring her back, she thought wearily, though lately it seemed she was at the sheer mercy of it.
She took a final drag from her cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. She had a long drive to El Paso in the morning and needed more sleep than she was going to get. She went to the front door and checked the deadbolt, re-armed the burglar alarm, then went to the living room closet. She reached up to the shelf, felt around under a stack of spare blankets and took down the .357 Glock pistol, pulled back the slide and loaded the chamber with a single hollow-point round. Kyla Price returned to bed, stashing the .357 conveniently in the nightstand drawer.

****************

Twenty-four hours later, a hazy setting sun rested upon the ridges of the Cumberland Plateau as a southwesterly breeze lifted wisps of fog that gathered at the Appalachian peaks. The storm system had crept eastward, and a once perfect Kentucky sky was now swollen with ashen thunderheads that threatened to rupture with sheets of cold autumn rain. Multi-colored oak and poplar leaves shivered as the winds shifted toward the north, setting adrift the dying foliage in orange and burgundy spirals to the ground.
A few miles into the hills, a white-tailed doe raised her head at the creek from which she took cool sips and peered around toward the rustling woodlands. The animal stood frozen, then galloped into the brush as the scent of a dangerous storm pricked her muzzle.
Harmon Spivey dabbed his brow with a forearm and removed the filthy ball cap that had begun to give him a headache. He glanced up at the welted skies with disdain, as he hadn't yet finished carving the remaining meat from the carcass that hung from a rusted hook in the overhang of the back porch. He was then drawn to a crackling in the woods as he watched the doe spring between the trees, and he longed for the loaded rifle that was propped next to the fireplace inside.
"Dammit," he muttered as the doe disappeared into the thicket, and he slammed a razor-sharp butcher knife through the raw flank on the worktable, instantly shearing it in two. The sound startled one of seven hogs that milled around his legs, and the others squealed and scurried uneasily toward the far end of the pen.
"Aw, shut up, 'fore one a' ya'll ‘er next," he grumbled and hacked at the flesh between the ribs, separating one of the racks into two sections of four and one section of three, one for each member of his family. He tossed aside the inedible remains, which collected in a pile to his right. The smallest rib section would go to his young son Caleb, a frail ten-year-old who rarely finished what was on his plate, anyway. Harmon preferred the flank, himself, as it was more tender and filling. The remaining meat would be stored in the smokehouse to be cured for that week's meals, and later he would bury the dregs out in the woods behind the barn.
Once the body had been properly separated, Harmon gathered the waste pile and scooped it into plastic shopping bags, making certain he left nothing behind for his family to stumble across later, not so much as an ear or the tip of an index finger. This was his little secret, and though he took certain delight in keeping it from them, Harmon Spivey realized the significance of his handiwork. And God willing they, too, would one day understand it was for their own good.

Inside, an open hearth popped and cracked and filled the house with the scent of hickory. Avanell Spivey and her daughter Eve hurriedly shelled a pound of snap beans to be simmered over the fire. The area aside the boiling kettle was reserved for the fresh meat that her husband would soon toss onto the table for seasoning, once he returned from around back.
Avanell threw a hand-woven dishtowel over a loaf of fresh bread to keep it warm, and as she noticed the daylight beginning to fade, she twisted the knob to the kerosene lamp on the table where they worked.
"Go light the lamps in the great room, Eve," Avanell directed, wiping her hands on her apron. "Go on now, hurry, 'fore your daddy comes in an' pitches a fit ‘cause he can't see where he's goin."
"I'm goin, I'm goin, mama," Eve muttered and trotted into the main room of the one hundred-year-old farmhouse, turning up the flames on two additional lamps.
The great room, or 'sitting room', to which it was also referred, housed only a few pieces of tattered Victorian-style furniture and several aged photos of family members now deceased. Harmon's parents, Clayton and Sophia, posed stoically in a tilted wooden frame on the eastern wall.
Clayton's father had established the Spivey tobacco farm nearly a hundred years prior, and a hundred and fifty-two acres had been handed down from father to son for three generations. Over the past twelve years, however, the once lush and prosperous terrain had become overgrown with weeds and thorn bushes that choked the life from most everything else. Whether it would be well served in the hands of young Caleb to salvage was debatable. As of then, Caleb showed signs of severe emotional instability, along with another unusual handicap--he was a mute. He hadn't spoken a word in his life, and no one really knew why. But it was a blessing as far as 15-year-old Eve was concerned, for she could only imagine the words that would come from his mouth if they at all matched the obnoxious actions of which he was capable.
Avanell was the oldest of two daughters, born to Benjamin and Rayleen Dowdy whose photos were not displayed anywhere in the house. It was Ben Dowdy who refused Harmon the money for the hired hands needed to revive the Spivey farm when a harrow accident left him partially crippled. And as far as Harmon was concerned, his wife's family could rot in hell for a thousand eternities. Ben, who seemed to have predicted the farm’s fate, fiercely contested Harmon and Avanell’s union; he opposed the marriage with every breath until a heart attack stole from him his last. Rayleen followed behind only two years later, having collapsed from what medical examiners would have determined to be a brain aneurysm. But in the secluded hilltop community, Rayleen Dowdy died of 'natural causes' and was laid to rest nearly six months before Harmon ever mentioned it to his wife. Ben and Rayleen, particularly Ben, were topics not discussed in Harmon Spivey's household, and that had been silently obeyed for over five years. And now, the Spivey’s were all that was left of the mountain dwellers, leaving them nearly fifteen miles from the nearest neighbor and twenty-six miles from civilization.

In the kitchen Avanell instructed Caleb to help his sister set the table as Harmon pushed through the back door, cursing the sudden rainstorm. He had a distinct, irregular rhythm in his stride, a result of the grisly mishap while working in the fields at the base of the mountain, twelve years prior. The gears had jammed on the harrow that was used to till the tobacco fields. When Harmon jumped down to check beneath the machine for the cause, the mechanism gave way and bolted forward, accidentally swiping his right shin before he could roll away to safety. The limb was so badly mangled that the homeopathic remedies his wife concocted couldn't prevent the infection and gangrene that ultimately led to its amputation, which was performed by Avanell, there in the great room.
The lord of the Spivey house sauntered into the kitchen, announced by a startling thunderclap that drowned out the stream of obscenities, which filled the air between himself and his family.
"Dammit, Avanell!" he barked, dropping the ribs onto the table. "Will ya fetch me som'm ta dry off wit? Damn rain couldn't wait, could it? Couldn't wait just five minutes till I got that meat in the smoker! Hurry up, woman! Can't ya see me standin here like a drown rat?"
"Eve, git to seasonin those ribs while I git your daddy a towel. And do his first. You know how to do it," Avanell instructed and disappeared to the linen closet.
Harmon let himself down into the rocking chair beside the hearth and switched on the battery-powered radio atop the mantle. The third chorus to "Rock Of Ages" faded to a close, and an impassioned radio announcer recited verses from the book of Job to introduce a sermon on God's omnipotence. This was the only entertainment permitted in the Spivey home, and the silver-trimmed, black transistor radio was forbidden to everyone except Harmon. Avanell and Eve knew this well; however, it would remain up on the mantle, out of the reach of an often willful and mischievous Caleb.
Avanell returned with a towel and handed it to her husband as she snatched a raw snap bean from her son's hand. "Wait till dinner's ready, child. You know better 'n that."
Caleb stomped a defiant foot into the hardwood floor but caught himself as Harmon made a quick move to rise from his chair, and he locked eyes with the boy. The temper tantrum quickly subsided as the radio minister warned of God's reverence and the fate of those who dared test that power.
The rain battered the windows, and flashes of lightening illuminated the pores of the dilapidated farmhouse. Just beneath the rumbling thunder, the desperate howls of Eve's cat Midnight issued from front the porch.
Eve stared at the door, then glanced at her father, quietly surmising his mood. "Daddy?” she finally asked. “Midnight's gonna be stuck out in that rain all night. Can we let 'em in, just for tonight? I promise he won't git under foot. I'll keep 'em in my room the whole time. Can’t we let 'em in, Daddy? Just this once?"
Harmon bundled the towel and dropped it onto the floor beside him. He reached into the front pocket of his overalls for his chewing tobacco and stuffed a pinch into his cheek. "If that little beast trips me up one time, girl," he warned. "I'm gone personally climb up to the roof 'n tie it to the lightenin rod. You hear me?"
"Yessir," she muttered.
He nodded and motioned to the front door.
Eve cracked the entry as a stiff wind nearly wrenched it from her hands, and Midnight scampered into the great room, shuddering off the chilly rainwater, one leg at a time. She scooped him up before he could to flee to the forbidden territories of the house, and she immediately dropped him off in her tiny bedroom at the far end of the hall.

The Spivey table was quiet most evenings. Harmon felt it wasn't a time for chatter. The six o'clock sermon played during dinner, and nothing his wife or daughter had to say could have outweighed the importance of the Reverend's words. Bread was broken, the meat was sliced, vegetables were passed, and biblical verses were explained and deciphered in the silence of the early evening meal.
That silence was then broken as Avanell poked at the ribs on her plate. "I just don't know what it is sometimes 'bout this meat," she mused. "Maybe it's the feed we're givin those hogs, the kind with all the barley in it or som'm. Tastes bitter now 'n again, like--"
"You got a problem with them hogs?" Harmon gave her a challenging glare, a forkful of food suspended at his chin.
She suddenly realized that her thoughts had escaped her, and she tried to flash a diffusing smile as not to rile him. "No, darlin. 'Course not. I'm sure it's just me. Musta bit down on a pepper seed or som'm."
Harmon dropped the fork into his plate and sat up straight, his stare trained on her like the crosshairs of a rifle. "Naw, I wanna know. You tell me what you'd rather be eatin tonight, Avanell."
Eve's eyes darted nervously between her father and mother, but she remained quiet and took a bite of bread, choked it down with a mouthful of thickening tension as the radio preacher ranted: "His eyes are on the ways of men, and He sees their every step. There is no dark place, no deep shadow where evildoers can hide...because He takes note of their deeds and He overthrows them in the night, and they are crushed…"
"Sweetie, let's just have a nice dinner, all right?" Again, Avanell tried to extinguish her husband's fuse, and she patted his hand with another smile. "It was nothin, really."
"Mm-hmm," he grumbled. His cold, slate-blue eyes penetrated her from the head of the table where he sat, sucking bits of food from between his teeth.

And then he erupted, grabbed the edge of the table and up-ended it in his wife's path as hot food, porcelain, and glass flew in all directions with a clamor that rivaled the crashing rainstorm. And with the surprising agility, he was up from his chair and across the debris-scattered room in pursuit of his spouse, to teach her what it meant to be grateful for what she had.
A drinking glass whizzed by Eve’s ear, and she dodged it, grabbed her brother and shielded him from the commotion.
"...Can you pull in the leviathan with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope? Will he beg you for mercy? Will he speak to you with gentle words? Will he make an agreement with you to take him as your slave for life? Any hope of subduing him is false; the mere sight of him is overpowering. No one is fierce enough to rouse him. Who dares to open the doors of his mouth, ridged about with fearsome teeth? His snorting throws out flashes of light and his eyes are like the rays of dawn..."
Avanell's swats only roused her husband's fury and proved ineffective as one closed fist after another hammered the back of her neck, between her delicate shoulder blades, and down into her kidneys as she cowered on the littered floor, gasping for enough air to beg him to stop. For a moment she thought he might have grown tired as the beating took a brief pause. She managed to drag herself across the hardwood and turned onto her back, only to meet the mud-dried leather of Harmon's work boot. It slammed into the right side of her face with such force that her mouth filled with blood before she could even register the pain. And then it was over, as swiftly as it had begun.
"I will not be undermined, Avanell!" Harmon shouted. He kicked through the kitchen mess, shoved aside the overturned table. He was winded, massaging the old wound to his leg. "I know where I stand in this house, an' it sure as hell ain't at the bottom 'a the ladder, that's fer damn sure! Ya'll wanna test me, well that's fine ‘cause even Jesus Christ Himself said-- 'I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For a man's enemies will be the members of his own household.'-- You think I don't know that, Avanell? I put food on yer table an' you wanna bitch an' moan 'bout how it taste? As if you got some kinda choice as to what yer gone eat 'round here! How 'bout nothin? How 'bout you don't eat a good Goddamned thing 'till I decide ya can, 'til ya learn ya some humbility? Huh?”
He ambled over to where she lay, balanced on the makeshift prosthesis and kicked her once more. She let out a painful wheeze and nodded her compliance.
"Ain't nothin but a sorry sack 'a shit," he mumbled, peering down at her with contempt. "With a sorry ol’ bitch for a mama an' a worthless pecker fer a daddy. Eve, clean this shit up an' git yer mama off the damn floor, layin there like some friggin road kill. Christ."
Eve Spivey knelt at her mother's side, a position in which she found herself quite often over the years, and she brushed the hair from Avanell's battered face.
She could hardly believe how well her mother always healed from these spells, left with only a few minor but visible scars that never completely blemished her natural beauty. Eve figured it was something on the inside, an inner light that preserved her mother's loveliness, even when he tried everything he could to destroy it.
"Mama," she whispered in her ear. "C'mon, Mama. You gotta git up. We'll git you to the bed 'n put a cold rag on your face, git ya all fixed up, 'kay?"
She wrapped her arms around her mother's waist and assisted her to her feet. Avanell steadied herself against the counter as Eve stood close by to catch her. But Avanell Spivey stood upright with no further assistance from her daughter. She combed away the stray mahogany strands from her swollen face and shuffled around the toppled furniture toward the bedroom. And as Harmon watched her pass, he made not another move toward her as she seared him with a defiant, unabashed glare that told him he could vanquish her body, but her spirit would remain unscathed.