The Prophet and His General [4]

"I-- no lay and eat only, anymore."

The weary demand battled to form itself, writhing out from between dry, awkward lips. It screeched over the stone walls of the cavern, and then clashed with the longsword hanging over the exit. Even the lanterns overhead seemed to flinch, their ruddy glow abandoning the speaker for the briefest of instants to the dark of the subterranean, the leagues of mountain overhead threatening to bury him.

His companion, however, met him with a face of indifference-- sardonic indifference, which was to say that a pale brow quirked itself at his mangled string of Yggdraeil. The brow belonged to an uncanny woman. She was angled, her bones poking from her white skin, but she possessed a graceful figure that men with proclivities opposite that of her ward would have appreciated in more than an aesthetic sense. When the foreigner below had spoken she had shifted, a worn cloth dress little too big slipping to bare her other shoulder as she surveyed his brittle, sweat-soaked form, the unnatural flush clinging to his cheeks.

'It has only been a few days, fool," she spoke superciliously. Her voice was every bit as sharp as her frame. "You are addled by exhaustion because you are not yet well. If you move you will regret it. I should doubt if the muscle in your back is even strung back together."

"I... no time-- have," he gritted out, recalling the verb he was in search of only at the last minute. Nevertheless, the truth of her words stung. Even clenching his fists caused the tendons in his back to shift over the furs beneath him, caused a wave of stinging, burning sensations to spill down his spine.

"Give it another day," the Yggdraeil woman replied, rising to her feet and crossing to a stolen thermal. The brassy, coiled instrument was turned on its side on the stone floor, its grill in the air that it might be used as a makeshift stove-- those things always had possessed the capacitor lifetime of a khacking god. In any case, it was where she was cooking more of the thin stew she'd ladled into him the first evening, and which he'd later been forced to imbibe in unpleasant quantities. "Maybe by then you will sound like a toddling rather than an infant, and inspire more confidence in me."

Her tone grew sharp with mention of her confidence, and it stilled Lyle.

Her confidence was, after all, his only ally in this pox-forsaken hole. It was the reason he lived.

It was a long story, and he hadn't heard all of it yet. Mostly because she insisted on showing him. Showing him had to wait until he could walk. She would not let him walk. She would not even deign to help him sit up. For a woman of the Yggdraeil she was awfully imperious, and Lyle could only believe this the fault of one man...

"Are you still nursing the cancer, Vacteari?"

Speak of the void.

Lyle tilted his chin to gaze non-plussedly at the old man in the door. The elder stared back, his wrinkles grave and more than a hint baleful. He gazed upon Lyle the way prophets back home would stare at a piece of empirimantic dribble spitting in the face of their ancestors’ revelations: as though, were the world turning properly, the heretic foreigner would be leprous with the poison of his dedication to life. Of course, Death was wise, so the heretic's rotting demise would be construed as a device to help him repent and see the wickedness of his prior course, but Lyle digressed. That was all so many semantics.

Culture was a collection of semantics. Different words, different practices all meant to excuse or check man's base and common desires-- excuse, usually.

Lyle never had quite felt at home with any of them.

"Our toddling thinks he'd like to walk today," remarked Vacteari as she turned and glanced at her father, the softness of her tone the closest to a warm greeting the Yggdraeil exchanged.

"Hmph," grunted the old man. "Perhaps he shall learn. The body is life's servant, and it always betrays."

"Almost as often as man betrays himself," remarked his daughter wryly.

The elder didn't comment, turning to the foreigner instead. There. That was the whole of the problem. Somehow, some way, the craggy Yggdraeil was an indulgent father. Indulgent enough to forgive his daughter a complete denial of all he believed in. Oh, they fought. They fought night and day. But neither condemned the other. Somehow, this made it hard for Lyle to hate them-- that, on top of the fact that they hadn't slaughtered him yet.

"Hello wheezer," Lyle greeted in a strained voice as the old man took his place sitting cross-legged beside him. The elder frowned. His black eyes flashed as he took down the hood of his leather overcloak.

"What is this 'wheezer' in your tongue?"

"Closest-- 'old one' in your tongue," replied the lieutenant. His face eased from its scowl.

The old man grunted cynically. There was a moment of silence, then, with more eagerness than he meant to, Lyle asked:

"You-- teach more, this night?"

The old man regarded him with an inscrutable expression. "You ask only so you can argue against it, defile the truths I give you." He adjusted the furs around his purpled abdomen, trying to drive off the near-constant chill nipping him. It was more an admonishment than a refusal or objection; every acolyte loved to preach, and preaching was little fun when your audience had heard it all before.

Lyle knew wordplay was mostly lost on the Yggdraeil, regarded as prevarication, and while normally he appreciated that due his limited knowledge of their tongue, in this case he couldn't resist. "If I no--"

"Do not," corrected Vacteari sharply.

"If I do not," the soldier began again, awkwardly, "Ah, no say--."

"Do not say."

"Do not say yes, do not fight..." He reached up with his hand, asking for a better word.

"Do not challenge," posed the astute young woman. Eftier.

"Then--," he pressed on.

"No," she barked. "Do it over."

Lyle growled frustratedly.

"If you do not speak as a man then you will not be heeded as one," she returned sharply.

Lt. Kristoff clenched his jaw. "If I do not challenge, then I do not learn," he grated. Vacteari turned away without comment, which was admittedly the most gracious sign of approval she could grant him, but the elder was smirking at the foreigner's predicament. Vacteari was one who chafed under authority, and consequently exercised her own wherever she had space to. Nevertheless, Lyle's words did seem to brush the elder, because he crossed his arms over his chest and gazed up at the ceiling. It seemed to be the Yggdraeil's equivalent of stroking one's chin.

"What questions will you have of me this night?"

Lt. Kristoff thought a moment, and then: "People-- m...my people say you... don't like-- like--." He pointed about the room. "Things like light, stove..."

"Ah, you mean technomancy." Utlisse, spoke Vacteari.

"Yes, but you have... Utlisse," Lyle finished.

The old man grew sombre with thought. Lyle could only imagine it was difficult, putting words to those obvious truths that saturated one's day to day life, but then, he suspected also that Vacteari had been full of such inquiries when she was a toddling.

"Some technomancy is better than others, less... dangerous," answered the elder. "Some is useful, just an extra comfort. But your people use it to make themselves complacent. They numb all pain and don't appreciate... pain is--." He used a string of words unfamiliar to the lieutenant, who looked askance.

"Will to live," clarified the elder.

Lyle nodded, something sparking behind his neutral expression as he prepared his next question. "Good. Understand. Also, women bad for... are life-givers. But you...always... making child. You-- don't see bad."

"Poorly worded, but to answer simply it depends. You know we don't chose to die from the first because warring with twisted life is what conditions the soul to go unto death, God. God has many souls to condition. Better the children are born in the clan and conditioned properly than their souls given elsewhere-- but the ritual of the thing must be right for it to be worth it. Making love can be diseased as a life giving ritual. But if done right as a ritual to God, between sworn man and woman, it comes with... pleasant exhaustion, a deep sleep close to death. It's the same with birth. A child born to unworthy parents, or where parents cannot take care of him or her... that child is more likely to be twisted by life. So often they are killed before corruption, as a mercy."

"You speak in coddling words of it," spat Vacteari by the thermal, face hidden where it was bent over the stove. "Anything sounds fine in pretty thought-clouds."

To Lyle's surprise, something of discomfort squirmed through the elder's frown, twitching at his jowls. There was an oppressive quiet that the lieutenant sought to shatter by blurting:

"I-- one question... again?"

The Yggdraeil both flashed him glances that pitied him for being a fool. Nevertheless, the elder did not object, which was for the best because Lyle had been leading up to the inquiry, but he could already feel himself nodding off again. His wounds bled him of strength.

"What happens... heretics die?"

The Yggdraeil had some vision of the Southerner’s Aagyre, a paradise where they would live with their God and presumably find pleasure, seeing as they didn't have to second guess every sensation as a perversion of life. But Lyle had never heard of a Zekkar among the cave-dwelling worshippers, a void where derelict souls were banished—or, he hadn’t save for in the hypothetical, what would become of the universe if Life had its way.

The elder cocked his head at the foreigner. "Their souls stay tangled with the bodies they served, of course. And they rot into oblivion together."

Somehow, hearing the atheistic perception of death from this preacher, and put so bluntly, caused Lyle to wince.

"There is, in fact, a story," the elder went on, seeming not to notice. "The most common legend of the Yggdraeil: The tale of the Twin Curse. There were two men who lived through the first invasion of your people in the southlands. They were standing on the battlefield in the midst of the horror, and God took pity on them. His reapers offered each of the weeping mourners a wish. The first was a virtuous man, and he wished that he could kill anyone at will, that he might give peace to all the tortured, broken souls moaning on the sodden plain and grant them mercy. But the second was a fool. Because his comrades had died that day he wished that he might bring them back to life. God never goes back on his word, and he knew already that the granting of this wish would be as a curse. The people that the man brought back to life couldn't remember what they once were, and they were all either soulless or twisted and miserable, bereft of God. They cursed the man, and so too did his people once he returned to them. We have many tales afterward of his rancor, of the vengeance he tried to reap and the village leaders who vanquished him. However, the curse was passed down through his children. It is said now," the Yggdraeil chuckled, "That he dwells among your people, pulling their strings."

"Hmmm..." Lyle settled back drowsily, into the furs beneath him. His eyes wandered over the marbled surface of the cavern ceiling, their lids steadily falling.

"What are you thinking, little cancer?" the elder asked, in a good humor suddenly.

"Is strange," the foreigner mumbled. "Much of things you say... make sense..."

"Am I going to convert you?"

Lyle grimaced wryly, but only barely before his breathing steadied. Vacteari and her father kept a respectful silence, then. And slowly, ever so slowly, the thin line of sight beneath the foreigners lashes closed to welcome the bare, black sanctuary of slumber.
***

He woke to pain-- a legion of nettles rippling through the flesh of his back. Someone was shaking him, but his limbs were too leaden to shove the bastard away. It was only by fits and starts that he managed to wrench his eyes open, to observe that his tormentor was, in fact, a bastardess.

Vacteari's face had all the sympathy and expression of the stalactites thereabouts. "Father said to let you sleep; however, now that he's gone I think that you will gain more strength by eating."

The lieutenant half-growled, half-moaned. His opinion wasn't accounted for-- instead, a bowl of the thin stew that was becoming his staple was forced on him. Scowling, he made the herculean effort of raising himself by his elbows so that she could push a rock behind him and mound the furs on it. By the time he settled back down it felt as though there were atri burrowing into his spine, but he managed to take his nutritious fare from Vacteari and settle in without whimpering.

Vacteari and he didn't say much. There was nothing much to say, as there was little she would divulge before she showed him whatever it was she had to show him. Unwilling to drive himself mad again contemplating her enigmas, Lyle tried to remember the last time he'd been so khacking tired... it wasn't long ago, he had to admit. Just the night before he'd come here, the night he'd shared his vigil with Maulta.

Maulta, that impossible Prophet...

Change things, the man had said. He wanted to change things, change the government, as though through all of human history change hadn't been the bloodiest, most troubled rite ever to be passed. You couldn't speak a word like that, 'change', with starry eyes or simplicity. And yet--.

"What are you thinking of? You aren't eating."

Lyle blinked in surprise, mostly because it was not Vacteari's way to initiate conversation. Then, blowing on a scoopful of the stew, he mulled over how best to answer. When he found it he lost his appetite, and he set the bowl aside, stared out into the gloom of the cavern. He knew he must seem pitiful lying there, dark circles under his swollen eyes and his face pallid and gaunt.

"I'm thinking," he replied in a whisper through his parched lips, "Of maybe… the only man who remember me if I die in this Rue-forsaken hole."

"A friend?" Vacteari asked wistfully, to his surprise.

He shook his head regretfully. "I don't know-- no-- we spoke only one time. But-- he will-- he remember anyone, if I judge him right."

"You speak tenderly of him."

"...I know, damn it." Lyle flushed and averted his eyes. Dread of the end was making him sentimental.

For the briefest of moments Vacteari didn't make a sound. Then, in a tone softer than any he might have imagined she could possess, she said: "...we'd remember you, too."

The foreigner turned his head to stare at her. She did not look away, but met his gaze proudly, chin tilted haughtily to match the absolute certainty her words held.

Swallowing, Lyle was the first to break their stare.

"Kind people do, always."

Then, because kindness had never been a virtue of his, he leaned forward to retrieve his stew and pretend the conversation hadn't happened at all.