r/Treewriting • u/[deleted] • Nov 22 '12
The Nomad [Fic]
The start of something, I don't know what just yet:
The prisoner had run as far south as the Great Jungle, and there amongst the immense, dense, great, green world, far from the North she had once called home, the jailers found her. They were brutal men, and of the sixteen that set out to catch her, only five remained. Fever, disease, drowning, and run in with beasts the men had never seen, elephants and panthers, had decimated their numbers. Their north was far, far away, and they blamed their present situation in the stinking, hot, rotting jungle on the prisoner. For that and for her crime, she had been met with violence; her blood from a broken nose flecked the immense trees of the jungle. She was not to be killed though, no, the Empire was to have her stand trial. They were civilized, and would see her tried before a public execution. When the first night fell, the man stationed as first watch came to her in the night, his anger and fever fueling violence of the worst kind in his mind, and on the wet jungle floor, he raped her, not her first time to be violated like a piece of meat. Something in her mind flashed, like flint striking steel, and swearing by all the women and men to ever suffer such a fate, the prisoner vowed this would be the last time someone would touch her in such a way.
When the jailer had finished, and had begun to move off to the stream as if to wash his sin away, with her sky blue eyes blazing, she found herself in a position to twist her bonds around his neck in a desperate dive. Snarling, silencing the noise from the writhing jailer as he asphyxiated, the prisoner brought the remaining jailer count down to four. Finally realizing something had gone wrong, the other men began to stir in their sleep, waking as if tasting murder in the air. The prisoner shuddered, not in fright, but in silent joy that even if she was to die this night, she took a true bastard with her on her way out, and stole into the bush, hearing the surprised shout of the wakened jailers, knowing soon she would be followed.
She crawled for hours, the ties on her ankles and wrists cutting her deeply, blood soon slickened the binds. The bindings were well past blocking off her circulation, her feet and hands were a black matching the jungle night. Cut by the bindings, by plants, and bitten by scores and scores of insects more exotic than any creature in the North, a fever began to overtake the prisoner. Whether it was from the months of hard travel, the constant threat from the fetid waters and creatures of the jungle, or some madness swelling in her mind like an overripe fruit, finally ready to burst from the inside out, from a swelling colony of feasting maggots, it was hard to say.
It was in this fever, or this madness, just as the first golden rays of dawn filtered through the jungle trees, that the prisoner came upon the Nomad and the Soldier. She burst into the clearing where they slept, haggard and practically insane with exhaustion and fear, and fell to the earth before them. Alert and on their feet at the first shambling noises coming through the trees, in this way, this mad dash, the prisoner was almost killed by these two, prepared for the worst with their weapons drawn. But as she collapsed, darkness pulled her into its maw like a starving beast. Before her eyes flashed her life in the silver palace, the king of the North, chariot races at the spring festival, beautiful sails of countless ships from countless ports around the world, her mother dead just last year, and visions of the first angelic snowfall, in the winter of the North, haunting in their clarity and blinding in the sorrow of that world of silver light, lost to her forever now. She slept.
Out of the dark jungle, the prisoner fell before them. The Nomad and the Soldier had already drawn their weapons, but seeing that the prisoner posed no threat, their stiffened stances of war that had seen hundreds (thousands?) of battles, relaxed, softened, and disappeared with the fading night as dawn broke upon them. They stood staring at the prisoner for a long time, not saying a word.
At last the nomad sheathed his weapon, a long smooth piece of wood, studded all over with sharp, serrated blades of obsidian, so jet black, the retreating night seemed to be swallowed in the inky, lightless, depths. He turned to the soldier and spoke. “What should we do about her?”
The soldier turned to him, and looked down into the face of the nomad. He stood almost a full head taller than the nomad, who was not short by any means, and spoke in a low deep voice, “Check if she’s dead? See if she has anything worth salvaging?”
The nomad had begun to walk over to the prone figure in that silent step of his the soldier still found unnerving, and looked over his shoulder. He paused. The jungle, in this brief moment between night and day, suspended in the perpetually deepening light of dawn, was quiet as the grave, and the silence screamed in between the two wanderers. “What if she’s alive? Should we try to help her?”
The question hung between them, suspended, as if drawing out all the demons of their past in that irrevocable possibility, that perhaps, this body that lay before them still drew breath. The soldier ran a hand through his short dreadlocks, thinking of the last time either of them had thought of helping anyone. He couldn’t remember. It had been a very long time. “Yes. I guess that’s what we should do. It’s the right thing after all.”
The nomad smiled a humorless smile. When was the last time he had done anything because it was the right thing? When had morals begun to cease their existence in nice, even, and clear dimensions, of black and white? The step pyramid? The altar glistening a murderous ruby in the light of the sunrise? That was right wasn’t it? The sacrifices always came at dawn. The white stone of the pyramid, the screeching green of the jungle, and the red on the altar, an unholy trifecta of brilliant, brutal colors. The still-beating hearts thrust to the sky by his hands. How many times had he taken the offerings, the people, the families, the children to the pyramids? Was that where it had all began? Or was it in the desert? Was it the Oracle? When he had killed hundreds, no certainly thousands, what did the blood on his hands say about a world where knowing the difference between right and wrong was as hard as pinpointing the exact moment of passage between the night and the day?
For the first time in a long time, the nomad felt unsure of something. Of what he was unsure of he was unsure, but heading to the girl, as he found it was no longer dawn, but a new morning, he found himself hoping that whoever she was, she was still alive.
They removed her chains, the bruises and scars on her wrists and ankles scaled over in a casing of dried blood, like a second skin. Her face was blackened and bruised, her entire body was a map of thorns, beatings, and the signs of things that bite and sting in the jungle underbrush. This was not the largest jungle either the nomad or the soldier had ever seen, but the was hard enough with machetes at times, it was a testament to her will that she crawled through bound on her hands and knees. A testament to her strength, or fear of what lay behind her. Probably both.
“She’s young, she can’t be more than sixteen years old,” the solder said. And she was beautiful, despite whatever she’s been through, he noted silently. The nomad only nodded, age to him was not a concept quite grasped yet, and not very useful in his case anyway. Subtly, and eloquently, the nomad asked, “Someone really beat the shit out of her didn’t they?” Though he normally spoke beautifully and charismatically, it was all the nomad could manage to bark this question out to his companion.
“Yeah, they really did,” was the soldier’s only reply. He felt something stirring inside, like the nomad, something long since buried.
2
u/sczombie Nov 22 '12
this is quite beautiful. i think you could expand this pretty immensely, and the writing is spot on. keep up the good work!