Keeping the Fire: The Foresight of the Jealous or the Wise

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The road up Fortress Edgar was built to exhaust an advancing enemy army. It was a five mile long stitch of switchbacks broken throughout by gates. A gate at each bridge, a gate any turning wide enough for a tower, a gate at each rising platform where wagons and people could be pulled up on a platform by ropes so as to skip a long drop. Those gates were open and the way had been made into a fine and well repaired road, but even on the downward journey it left the feet bruised and the will spent.

Polena had set out that day with the Djaught Mehethe, his soldiers, and a few of his staff. The journey to the tomb would take only about a week, but the Djaught wished to make it in five days and kept the pace brisk. Mehethe and his Ministers rode, but upon seeing that most of their company was on foot, Polena chose to walk and lent her steed to one of the Djaught's slaves. It was a Luminary's way to walk, to lift up the oppressed. If the Ministers and slaves noticed, they kept their confounded whispers quiet enough that she could not hear them. She was certain that the soldiers did not comment on it, and least of all of them the Djaught. To her, on that first day of their journey, he gave so little attention that it seemed like he did not see her.

From the switchbacks Polena was afforded many views over the Dehali Valley, and while gazing into that place had been her pass time before, it seemed a novelty, for her window looked out to the west and the road trended south and east. The day was a high overcast, and the hills were often shrouded in cloud. In the distant forests below them one could see the drifts of fog, the tops of them jagged as if reaching up to claw their way higher. Due south of them they could see the city of Dehali, old enough that people had forgotten whether the valley was named for the city or the city for the valley. It folded up against the lake called Rainera's Garden, its buildings small but sprawling wide along the plain. Nearer to the fortress the land was forested, but in the lowest and flattest part of the valley the places where people made their homes were plain. The fields, most in fallow this time of year, were brown wastes amid the scattered green of trees, the grey of stones peaking out from hilltops, the glitter of streams and rivers. Looking down upon this calm scene Polena was given to remember the words of a Poem:

The scent upon your hair; you were out riding,

Share that burgeoning joy; a secreted smile

I know the way you went; wondrous to behold,

Let free with the crop.

It was a simple poem calling up images of travel, of riding through the wilderness and the joy of the endless expanse it offered, endless even to the traveler who has journeyed it many times. But it was not by Djasho, but by Yashika called Shapfo. You could tell it from the true reading. Shapfo who Knew True Love was a witty poet, but her love was also a jealous one. Clearly she liked the ambiguity of being brought so much joy by a person you are willing to give up all sense for them, yet feeling so covetous of them as to think it better to hurt them than risk losing them. There was a whisper of violence in that poem, a hint of an affair unseen and an anger burning below the surface. When she looked into the valley of Dehali, she could see it there too.

South, along the road there would be ambushes and pickets, but no one could hold it and it would change hands many times..There, by the hill crowned with silver boulders, that is where they would put a camp the flags of captains and banners of warriors held high and mocking to their foes. And the river, the widest and shallowest part of it where you could see no fens, there someone would try to cross and someone would stop them. She could see it now, almost, as if she was high enough to see tomorrow. She could see where the bodies would lay, where the earthworks would scar the land, where the fields and farmhouses would burn. She could see how war would butcher this valley. The thought of it filled her with anger. It was all the worse to think that her own People might be one side of that war.

The switchbacks on which they toiled the whole of that day had been made for the long pains of war. The valley which they came to at nightfall, was not. No matter who fought over the People of the valley and no matter which side won, it would be those innocents that would taste defeat.

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