Empire

by Michael R. Hicks

  The weather that morning was magnificent, the sunrise breaking over the mountains to fill the valley below with the promise of a warm day under a clear magenta sky. The cool air was crisp and filled with a cornucopia of scents that Reza had come to subconsciously accept as the smell of home.

  As he rode beside Esah-Zhurah, towering above her on Goliath’s back, he found that he could hardly wait to get away from the suffocating closeness of the peers. They treated him with more respect than they had when he had first come among them, but he was still the lowest form of life on this planet, lower even than the simpleminded animals raised for meat. Ironically, it was Esah-Zhurah who had consistently proven the most difficult to sway, her arrogance virtually undiluted from the day he had first awakened to her scowling face.

  Yet, he was increasingly unsure if her behavior was entirely sincere. Sometimes he awoke to find her staring at him, her eyes flickering in the glow of the low fire they kept to ward off the night’s chill. The look on her face was always thoughtful, contemplative, rather than the perpetual sneer he was used to seeing during the day. But always, as soon as she realized he was watching her, a cloud passed over her eyes, and she would roll over, turning her back to him.

  The way he had seen her interact with the tresh also made him wonder. As the months had come and gone, she had become less and less tolerant of the other tresh making derisive comments about Reza or bending the rules in the arena just far enough to try and do him serious injury, something he had thus far managed to avoid. For just a moment he would think – or at least wistfully hope – that she was acting on his behalf. But the hope died as soon as he saw the look of conceit on her face or heard the arrogant tone in her voice, and the anger and loneliness that were his heart and soul would pierce him like a white-hot knife. Hot and cold, hard and soft, she was at once one thing and yet another, gently applying a bandage to a wound one minute, brutally punishing him the next.

  “What are you thinking?” She asked, eyeing him closely. “I have learned that expression you now wear, that tells of your mind contemplating alien thoughts.”

  Her thigh brushed his as they rode side by side, and he felt a sudden rush of heat to his face. He reflexively guided Goliath on a slightly divergent path.

  “I was thinking about you,” he said.

  “Oh? And what great thoughts are these, human?”

  “I was wondering,” he said, “if you really care as little for me as you would like me to think? Is all of your conceit and arrogance genuine, or just a façade to conceal your true feelings?”

  He suddenly found himself talking to empty space. He turned around to find the girl and her magthep stopped, her hands clutching the bridle tightly, her face as still as the eye of a hurricane.

  Touché, he thought.

  She was quiet for a long moment, her expression completely unreadable to Reza, who had never before seen her like this. Had she been a human, he thought, she might have been about to cry.

  “I applaud your powers of deduction, human,” she told him quietly. “But what I feel, and for whom, is not the business of an animal whose existence is measured in terms of the charity the Empress has chosen to bestow upon you. Never will there come a day when you shall be privy to the workings of my heart and mind.”

  With a less than gentle kick, she started her magthep walking again.

  Reza bowed his head to her, bringing Goliath alongside her mount, reining his beast in slightly to match the smaller animal’s slower pace. He claimed the round as a tactical defeat against himself, but a strategic victory of sorts. Despite her emotional screen of anger and, perhaps, embarrassment, he knew that he had touched on a nerve, and could not resist one final thrust. “Among my people,” he said, “there is a saying: Never say never.”

  “My eternal thanks for the wisdom of your people,” she replied acidly, kicking her magthep in the ribs and pulling away from Reza and Goliath at a gallop. “Follow if you can, animal!” she shouted.

  Reza took up the chase, disappearing into the cloud of dust behind her as the two of them raced away from the thinning caravan of tresh, heading toward the distant mountains.

  * * *

  The sun had just passed its zenith by the time they departed the great plain on which the city and most of the forests stood, and began to move into the range of mountains that lay beyond. Reza had never imagined he would find such color or beauty here. When viewed from the kazha, the mountains always seemed shrouded in darkness, their details lost in the distance and an ever-present crown of water-laden clouds that obscured the jagged peaks for all but a few precious minutes of nearly every day. But the deep purple granite around him sparkled and shimmered as the rock’s tiny facets reflected the sunlight like millions of tiny diamonds. The ancient canyon walls, severed and shifted by eons of irresistible pressure from beneath the planet’s crust, revealed bright mineral veins that wound their way through the host rock like glittering rivers. The ground that passed beneath the magtheps’ feet was virgin soil, for all Reza could see, the hard earth revealing no signs of any previous traveler’s passage.

  As they rose higher through the canyons toward wherever Esah-Zhurah was leading him, Reza saw tiny oases of startling violet flowers whose petals waved in the air, beckoning to the insects that hovered and flitted near the ground, that they might bring life-giving pollen to the flowers.

  Still higher, the violet flowers gradually became a seamless background to the other species that began to appear. Reza saw everything from tiny lichens clinging tenaciously to rocks, to enormous ferns that towered above the two riders on their animals, their house-sized fronds waving ponderously in the light breeze that swept up the mountainside.

  “How much further is it?” Reza asked, his eyes wide with wonder at the sights that surrounded him.

  “Not far,” Esah-Zhurah called back as she maneuvered her magthep through a particularly dense stand of vines and ferns. Behind them, Goliath plowed straight through the plants, his muzzle snatching occasional mouthfuls as he went, a bad habit that Reza had not yet figured out how to cure.

  “Here!” she called at last, reining her beast to a stop and smoothly dismounting onto a carpet of iridescent orange moss that had appeared like a welcome mat.

  Reza nudged Goliath to a stop as he gawked around him. They were on a ledge, halfway up one of the mountains of the range that ringed the plain. Through the ferns and moss-covered boulders he could just make out the shimmering spires of the city far in the distance, and the forest in which lay their kazha. To the other side, a mountain lay very close by, like a wall that rose straight up as far as he could see, disappearing into the clouds that danced in the winds. Everywhere the purple granite had disappeared, replaced by the vibrant greens and oranges of the plants and mosses that were dominant here.

  “It is beautiful,” he whispered in awe.

  “You have not yet seen beauty,” Esah-Zhurah said quietly. “Come. Gather your things, for we have not yet reached our destination.”

  The two of them stripped the magtheps of their riding gear and released them to wander and eat as they pleased.

  “Will they run away?” Reza asked as he let Goliath go.

  Esah-Zhurah looked at him. “Why do you ask? Are you afraid of walking back?”

  Reza frowned, not enthused at the idea. But watching Goliath devour the nearby plants eased his mind. Unless something frightened him, he would stay here where there was plenty of food.

  They left the saddles in a convenient enclave of dry rock and forgot about the feasting animals. Hefting the packs of supplies that Esah-Zhurah had made up for them, they began to climb higher up the mountain face, scaling their way along a natural stairway in a huge crevice that split the mountainside like a mischievous, toothy grin.

  They had climbed only a few minutes before they came to a tunnel that disappeared into the mountain. Esah-Zhurah waited for Reza to join her before she stepped off into the near darkness of the tunnel, feeling her way along, her talons
lightly scraping the tunnel walls. Reza was fascinated by the echoing sounds of their footsteps and the smell that is peculiar to ancient stone places that have never seen the full light of day. But after a few paces his ears pricked at something new: the rushing sound of water.

  “Esah-Zhurah…” he said tentatively, a trace of fear in his voice as his mind conjured up an image of the two of them being swept down the mountainside by a sudden torrent of water erupting from the mountain’s bowels.

  “We are nearly there,” came her voice from the darkness, and Reza felt her hand take hold of his forearm to lead him along; she could still see clearly in the dark, while he could barely see a shifting shadow where she might – or might not – be.

  The rushing sound grew into a roar, and Reza was opening his mouth to speak again when suddenly, as if dawn had broken within the tunnel, light began to return.

  He found himself standing on a ledge overlooking paradise.

  “My God,” he whispered, his eyes lost to the wondrous sight before him. Esah-Zhurah overlooked his comment in his old tongue, forgiving him as she herself embraced the scene.

  They stood overlooking what had once been an ancient volcano. It was a tremendous crater whose walls rose nearly vertically to a height of hundreds of meters to the clouds that swept along the crest. Mosses and lichens covered the walls like tapestries of fire, their reds and yellows swirling like the surface of a gas giant. Leafy green plants also flourished, clinging insistently to the ledges protruding from the sides like tiny green outposts in the midst of a desert of rampant color. And on the far side from where the two of them stood was a waterfall that roared its existence, born from the tap of a stream far above them to fall into a crystal pool that lay at the bottom of the ancient caldera, forming a beautiful grotto. The surface shone like the shimmering mirror of some great telescope, the falling water leaving behind a gentle mist that floated in the air as if by magic.

  “Come,” Esah-Zhurah said, tugging on Reza’s arm. Had he looked down at just that moment, he would have seen the trace of a smile on her face as she saw the wonder on his, but it passed swiftly, as if stolen by the steadily setting sun.

  He wordlessly followed her toward an enclave whose overhang kept the rock within dry.

  “This,” Esah-Zhurah said as she set down her things, startling a small lizard that disappeared into the vegetation, shrieking, “shall be our home until we return to the kazha, and the Challenge.”

  * * *

  Reza awoke the next morning to the sound of a group of lizards, perched somewhere high above, trumpeting their territorial claims to one another like a brass ensemble gone mad. The sun had not yet risen high enough to reach the bottom of the caldera, but it would: on this day, unlike most, the clouds that normally concealed the grotto’s inhabitants from the piercing rays of the sun, leaving it instead in a soft glow of filtered light, had parted. Already some of the more adventurous – and boisterous – inhabitants had gathered to await the arrival of the warmth that would come from above.

  He was reluctant to shed the musky skins that had protected him from the slight chill of the night, but his stomach was insistent. Dinner had been light the previous evening, as neither he nor Esah-Zhurah had wanted to spoil the sunset and twilight with cooking chores, and both of them had gone to bed early, lulled to sleep by the steady roar of the waterfall.

  Reza listened to the tumultuous sound of the water and thought that it would be nice to see if he could manage a swim later on in the pool below. Reluctantly, he tossed aside the covers and began the ritual stretching the tresh were taught early on to perform, readying his body for whatever lay ahead during the day.

  “Late do you rise, my tresh,” Esah-Zhurah called from a few meters away where she was cooking him something to eat. It was a seemingly incongruous task that she took upon herself, despite his protestations.

  Perhaps, he thought cynically, she only does it so she can burn the meat.

  “And soundly do you sleep. The lizards,” she pointed to a place high on the far side of the grotto, “have long been calling to you.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, starting to pull on his black pajamas, as he had come to think of them, “they were simply keeping me informed about what you have been doing while I slept.”

  Esah-Zhurah looked at him, then at the lizards, a look of considered suspicion on her face. “Is such a thing possible?” she asked him finally.

  Reza shrugged, trying to keep his face straight. “It is something for you to think about, is it not? You believe I talk to magtheps. Why not lizards, as well?” He sat down next to her at the fire, quietly enjoying her mental squirming as she tried to figure out if he really could talk to the animals.

  Finally, she looked at him sharply. “I do not believe you can speak with the beasts,” she said. Then she paused, unsure. “Can you?”

  Finally, he could stand it no more, and he burst out laughing at the serious expression she bore. “No,” he admitted as he saw her face cloud over with anger for laughing at her, “I cannot. Please,” he told her, bringing his laughter to a swift end, “forgive me. I did not mean to make you feel a fool.”

  In reply, she only scowled at him before turning away, thrusting his meat deeper into the coals where it sizzled and popped, then finally caught fire.

  “Here,” she said, thrusting the stick that held the flaming meat into his face. “Eat.”

  Dodging the flames, he took the stick like the baton in a relay race, snatching it quickly from her hand before she dropped it or impaled him with it, and then blew out the torch that was his breakfast.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. “Esah-Zhurah,” he said after a moment. She paid him no attention, focusing herself on paring strips from the raw hunk of meat that was her own morning meal. He reached out and gently touched her arm. She did not pull away. “Please forgive me,” he said quietly. “I meant you no harm. It was only meant as humor, a joke, nothing more.”

  “Do not do it again,” she said after a moment of silent consideration, her eyes still focused on her food as her talons tore it to shreds. “I do not like it.” Reza nodded, letting her go. “I forgive you,” she added softly.

  Reza sat back, stunned, his mind seeking a precedent for this development. There was none.

  After a few moments he asked, “What would you like to do today?” He was unsure if the free time before the Challenge brought with it some kind of unannounced itinerary.

  “Today I would bask in the sun, as do your lizard friends,” she said. “To lay upon that rock,” she pointed to a peninsula of moss-covered stone that jutted into the pool, “and become one with the earth is my sole desire for this day.”

  “A more noble ambition there has never been,” he said, tearing the meat with his teeth.

  It was not long before the sun’s trace began to work its way down into the grotto. The chorus of the lizards – dozens of them now – grew louder as the sunlight dropped deeper into the caldera. He and Esah-Zhurah were finally compelled to put their hands over their ears as the animal shrieks reached a shattering crescendo. But then, as the light reached the bottom and struck the pool, almost at once the trumpeting and chirruping ceased, the animals now mollified by the sun’s warmth.

  “In Her name,” Esah-Zhurah breathed, “such a noise they make!”

  As she made her way down to the pool, Reza went and opened his pack, rummaging around near the bottom for what he sought, his hands curling around a thin-skinned case that was roughly as big around as his chest, but not nearly so thick. Pulling open the top flap, he looked to make sure that everything inside was as he had put it. The old armorer, Pan’ne-Sharakh, had given him his own palette of dyes and brushes, and he had eagerly taken up dye-setting – painting – as his escape from the brutal life he had been forced to lead. He used whatever metal he could scavenge for canvas, usually damaged backplates that the armorers deemed unworthy of salvage. He hammered them as flat as he could and put them to use for his own designs. The ima
ges he had made did not have the texture of real paintings, being dyes on metal, but his interpretation of the Kreelan art lent them a depth and perspective that made the images almost three dimensional, surreal. He did not consider himself to be a modern incarnation of Monet or Da Vinci; he was content to be himself. It was the only thing he had that, for a few moments of each of his hellish days, allowed his soul to go free.

  Turning around, the satchel in hand, he saw that he would not have to search far for a subject. Against the backdrop of a misty rainbow born of the waterfall, Esah-Zhurah lay nude on the chaise of stone that protruded into the pool, her blue face to the sun, her braids hanging toward the pool below like ebony streams. Her eyes were closed; she was probably already asleep. One hand was draped over her torso, lightly cupping her left breast, and the other lay at her side.

  Reza’s heart suddenly thundered in his ears as he looked at her. The hot pulse sent a jolt up his spine as he suddenly found himself smitten with the beauty of this alien girl, this young woman, who was at once his ally and his enemy, his savior and would-be killer, all rolled into one. In that blink of an eye, he wanted to reach out and touch her, to hold her against him. He wanted to feel her warm lips on his, remembering how it felt when Nicole had kissed him goodbye when she left Hallmark. He could remember that kiss like it was yesterday. But he could barely remember what she looked like now.

  He tore his gaze away. He knew his body was on the edge, or even through, the age of puberty and all its attendant changes, and resolved to blame this treacherous feeling on the hormonal pranks of his growing body. Still, he could not deny the heat that blazed in his core at the thought of how closely he and this alien girl lived together, despite how far apart they would forever remain.