by Adam Bennett
“I would, but I’d have a hard time keeping him away from that circle. He likes the idea of being set in stone. See how he’s enjoying the stares of the crowd?” Ulrich sighs; adulation is a matter of indifference to him. “And what of Yusuf? Does he learn?”
Daya bridles, the Zenatan champion has been irritating her, recently. Before the look of annoyance, however, unhappiness passes like a cloud’s fleeting shadow across her face. Ulrich sees it. Wouldn’t have, a week ago, but does now. Easily.
“He is Ramah al-Din. The spear of God. He will suffice.”
While Daya speaks, Ramah al-Din almost restarts the war when he arrogantly refuses to shake Wolfram von Ehrenreich’s hand. Daya leans forward, gripping Ulrich’s leg.
“Steady, Wolf,” Ulrich hisses under his breath. “Steady for God’s sake.”
The moment passes. The champions exchange their respects. The pact is sealed, and the condemned gladiators bow to the crowd.
Daya and Ulrich both exhale. Ulrich’s shoulders are too wide for their chaise so he drapes them over the back. When Daya slumps backward she ends up in the crook of his arm. Not strange, or unwanted, or even unwelcome. The ceremony drones on. Ulrich starts nodding, and wakes with a start when his chin hits his chest.
Daya has half fallen asleep on him. He can smell the pleasant musk of her hair. Some spice he can’t name from a place he’s never been. Moving from a doze to dreaming, Daya almost slips into his lap, and wakes with a start of her own. Ulrich blows out his cheeks. Daya blinks.
“Can our glorious leaders see us from up in the royal box?” she asks. Ulrich cranes his neck.
“I doubt it,” he says.
“Then may the Djinns laugh and the desert swallow them. I’m too tired for this,” Daya says. This is Ulrich’s last chance, and he knows it. He could get up and walk away.
“So sleep,” he says instead.
Daya curls up with her head in his lap. Ulrich places a hand on her hip and runs the other through her hair. She sighs unselfconsciously and goes to sleep. Ulrich lets the curve of her neck burn itself into his mind’s eye, and then lets his own chin dip.
They wake together an hour later when trumpets sound the end of the ceremony. Daya shoots upright and Ulrich snorts.
“You were snoring,” she says.
“How would you know?” he says with laugh. The coliseum crowd bustles and watches the processions leave. The ethereal glow of the planets is visible now, even during the day. Mars glows faintly, high in the sky. War himself watching them preen and posture. No one pays the two seconds any mind.
Daya stands and rises on her tiptoes. Thrown into silhouette by the sunset disappearing behind the great curved wall, she stretches her arms as high as she can above her head. Her cotton shift is conservative, but there’s a split in the back to let in the air. Through it Ulrich sees the curve of her spine, as graceful as a cathedral arch. For a moment she is a caryatid, an immutable representation of beauty, balance and permanence.
“You’re perfect,” he thinks, and says it out loud without bothering to check himself. Daya drops suddenly from the stretch and turns to look at him. Their eyes meet, and in hers is the only moment of vulnerability he will ever see.
***
When the chronicles are written, they will count the day before the convergence as war’s last throw of the iron dice. A day of treason and high politics. They record that Zenatan spies poisoned Wolfram Von Ehrenreich so that the best of the Teutons could not fight. That the Teutons anticipated treachery, and made preparations of their own.
Like most histories of war, the scholars begin writing before the battle is fought. Though they all predict the outcome, none divine the result.
***
The convergence comes to the sky above Ninive like a dream descending a moment into sleep. All the planets are visible, like a line of shooting stars, and they bathe the last day in a strange light. It is a day worthy of prophets. A day designed by the heavens to tie-off off fate, decide the destiny of empires, and make lovers miserable.
Amidst great fanfare and ceremony, rumours spread like wildfire. Poison, treachery, betrayal. As if there had ever been any way to impose rules on war. The coliseum fills to its very brim with timorous hearts and expectant souls.
When the trumpets finally die the two gladiators bow to one another in the auroral light of the alignment. Teutons and Zenatans alike fall into awestruck silence. The only noise is banners fluttering in the wind.
The Knight dismounts his armour and the Witch lets her ceremonial robes slip. They look at one another in a convergence of their own; love and honour and fate and dread. Their eyes meet. Hers violet and his blue.
“I was never second,” Daya says, her lips barely moving.
“Nor was I,” Ulrich replies.
***
Every clash of their blades tears hoarse cries from fifty thousand throats. High above the sky glows with a queer light.
Wearing the Saksa Ordenis armour Ulrich is invincible. No blade has yet been forged that can pierce Merseburg runes. He lunges and wheels with the great spear, but cannot touch Daya with its razor point any more than he could knock the stars from the sky. The Furusiyya war witch is a ghost, a faint whiff of sandalwood and a flicker of cotton. The sands of time crash back and forth in her hand.
They fight until their breath rasps and their bones ache. Neither can win; they know each other too well.
Daya breaks the impasse by breaking her hourglass. She throws a fistful of glittering sand onto Ulrich’s armour, and rust spreads across the runes like an infection. Ulrich has to scream his incantation to break the armour open. As he does, he swings a mailed gauntlet into Daya’s midsection. She tumbles across the sand with a wail. Ulrich dismounts and draws the giant’s sword from its sheath before the rust can afflict it, too. Daya spits blood into the dust and rises to face him, unwinding the cord from her left hand. She tosses the broken hourglass aside and blood drips from her fingers.
The air shimmers and the crowd roars. The line of planets will soon become a single shining star. Like every pair of lovers in history at the break of light, Daya and Ulrich are out of time. Their blades lock together, as naked as their souls.
“We can run,” Ulrich hisses, “bury these blades in the sand and let them turn to stone instead of us.”
Daya is a prophetess. In a frozen instant she sees the future he suggests. Flight and happiness and home. A cottage hidden amongst the alpenaster blossoms. They could do it.
If Daya lacked courage, she would blink. She does not, and so her ethereal violet eyes perceive the dark margins of the dream. She sees the war reignite. Hardly a tragedy for the warriors they were, but a cataclysm for the lovers they are now.
“I want to follow you,” Daya replies, “more than I thought it possible to want anything.”
“Then damn fate and let us go!”
Daya cannot close her eyes, to him or to anyone else.
“I will not create a monument to abdication!” she screams.
In her voice Ulrich hears cities burn and children cry. Hears his future.
“I have never faced an enemy as terrible as you,” he says.
“Nor I. Now fight.”
Stripped of magic, their courtship reaches its climax. They discover each other’s quirks. Ulrich flourishes after every parry, like a squire picking up his first blade. Daya lets her hips turn every feint into a tiny dance. It is not the bed of straw and rose petals where most trysts end, but it suits them. Neither wants to leave it.
Moments away from the alignment, there is no still victor. There never is in love. Daya and Ulrich kneel opposite one another, drenched in blood and sorrow.
“Last chance, Daya,” Ulrich says desperately.
“There is no life after war, Ulrich,” Daya says, and savours the harsh sound of his name. “So let us show these fools what we learned.”
Ulrich gazes at her balefully, and sets his feet for the final charge. Blood and bitterness drip from Daya’s aching limbs. T
he crowd, the air, and their hearts all stand still. Their sword tips touch the arid sand of the coliseum floor.
“I won’t hold back,” Ulrich growls.
“I could hardly love you if you did,” Daya hisses through clenched teeth. Celestial light bathes the air. The moment has come. They charge. The sky tears and thunders as their swords strike home.
The lovers stand, eye to eye, transfixed. The pain they share is staggering, so they lean on one other in a fatal embrace.
“You do not cry,” Daya says. She does, freely.
“It would obscure my view of you,” Ulrich replies.
“You will close your eyes,” she says, “if I want you to.”
Daya grasps his neck and raises her lips to his, and the coliseum fills with light.
***
Every year, a ceremony takes place amid the whisper of leaves and the sweet smell of blossoming flowers. The coliseum is a great garden hung with vines and sunlight, a place of peace and reflection.
At the centre of the old ring is a statue. In smooth, perfect stone, two lovers die on each other’s blades, lips pressed together in a kiss that will only end when the world does. Garlands hang from each sword in colourful rows, wafting gently in a summer breeze like algae underwater. It is the role of older brothers and sisters to boost young Zenatans and Teutons up to hang their flowers.
Two soldiers walk down a corridor of trellised alpenaster toward the monument. They take their steps with great ceremony.
One of the two is fair-haired and blue-eyed. Her carriage is perfectly erect and her manner as cold as the glinting cuirass that covers her chest. The other is dark and handsome, clad in billowing robes of red and bronze thread. A small hourglass hangs from a leather loop around his neck. His eyes are almost black, and his face as hook nosed as a raptor.
She is tall, and he a little short. Both move with the supple ease of born warriors, but there are no incantations or flickers in time. The crowd gathered around the garden and up the mossy tiers falls silent as the warriors turn to face each other before the statue.
The Knight Captain of the Saksa Ordenis looks up at Ulrich, his hands still supporting the Zenatan witch.
“A man of rigid honour,” she says, “who knew when to let it bend.”
The southerner glances up Daya, her fingers forever locked around the knight’s neck, drawing his lips to hers.
“A great beauty,” he says with a hint of a smile, and then, more seriously, “who understood beauty, and what it cost.”
The tributes are different every year. The warriors compose them afresh, and like flowers that die and grow again, the simple beauty of the message remains the same.
The two soldiers turn to face each other, and the wind drops away. Each draws their blade. Hers a glinting long sword, his a wickedly curved sabre. They step forward to let the blades touch, ever so gently, so that the contrasting metals sing. As they draw close, the crowd takes in its breath.
In their movements is the entire history of war. Sharpness and intimacy and shared breath. At the last possible moment the two soldiers stay their weapons and embrace, each edge lain at their opponent’s vulnerable back. Their eyes are close.
“They show us who won, and who lost,” the Teuton says.
“So, let us follow their example,” the Zenatan replies.
The inscription at the base of the statue is carved in the old speech. It does not feature the word Teutones or Zenati, only Amat Victoria. Victory loves.
The Zenatan smiles.
“Amat Victoria,” he says.
“Amat Victoria,” his adversary breathes in reply. She thinks of herself as cold, but this Zenatan is handsome. She lets her lashes drop. The southerner is less reticent. He willingly subjugates his pride before the northern beauty. As soon as they embrace, warm summer air rustles the creepers and petals rain from the trees. The kiss lasts a long while and the crowd surrounding them sighs.
The Witch Next Door
Amanda R. Woomer
Agnes’s big brother, Toby, didn’t believe the stories. He also didn’t believe her when she told him their next-door neighbour, Mr Rogers, was a witch.
“Boys can’t be witches, Aggie,” he informed her matter-of-factly. “Boys are wizards and girls are witches. Everyone knows that. And besides,” he added, his tone far too snarky for Agnes’s liking, “there’s no such thing.”
Despite her brother’s inability to believe in the extraordinary, Agnes was incredibly certain about two things in life: one was that Mr Rogers was a witch, and the other was that her friend dancing in the moonlight each night was as real as any of the old stories.
Agnes lived with her brother and Uncle Charlie by the Bristol Channel on the outskirts of a town called Swansea. Their home was small—just big enough for the three of them—but it was a happy home. As happy as a family could be after the sudden death of Agnes and Toby’s parents. The three of them had lived together on the beach in their little cottage for three years—Agnes now twelve and Toby fifteen—and it was Agnes’s midnight friend that made her life by the sea magical.
Uncle Charlie had told the girl stories of the creatures living just below the water’s surface.
“Mermaids?” Agnes had asked in wonder.
“There’s no such thing as mermaids, silly girl!” Uncle Charlie had laughed, shaking his head. “No… Swansea has something far more real than mermaids in its waters. We have selkies.”
At first, Agnes listened to her big brother who informed her that there was no such thing, no matter what Uncle Charlie’s wild stories might claim. She would watch the waves roll in and out along the sand in the hopes of being lulled to sleep, the water sparkling in the moonlight and hypnotizing her. But one night, as she watched the waves, something broke through the surface, catching Agnes’s eye and capturing her imagination.
She watched in awe as a trio of seals climbed out of the surf and shed their chocolate brown skins to reveal the milky white forms of the most beautiful women Agnes had ever seen.
“Selkies,” she whispered to herself, her voice quavering, as she spun around and ran down the hall to wake Toby. Maybe if he saw them with his own eyes, he might believe too.
As Agnes sat at her window now, sketching the selkie she had deemed her friend, she thought back to the first night she saw them. Of course, she and Toby had arrived back at the window too late, the women had vanished with their seal skins, and he just turned to look back at her.
“See?” He had said with a cocky grin on his face. “There’s no such thing.”
Agnes hated those words. She had lost count of the number of times she had heard her brother say them to her, and yet they made her skin crawl every time. It was torture knowing that there was such a thing and it appeared outside her bedroom window every night.
But something else had begun to loom outside her window, too.
Mr Rogers.
Agnes wasn’t sure how many nights he had lurked behind the boulders dotting the beach, but one night, about a month ago, Agnes saw him for the first time.
At first, she was horrified. The selkies were dancing around the beach with nothing but their long seaweed tangled hair covering them. As a fellow lady, Agnes had felt no shame in watching the women dance, but to have a man—and an old man at that—was too much.
Each night, she watched him as he stared intently at the selkies. He was focused on one in particular: her friend. His lips would move silently as if he was talking or singing to himself. But after a while, Agnes could tell exactly what he was doing. He was uttering some sort of incantation if the blue glow of his fingertips was any indication.
When he first appeared at the moonlight dance, he kept his distance—no doubt afraid of scaring the women right back into the sea. But as the month wore on and the full moon waned, he grew bolder and began to move closer to the dancing ladies. It was the night of the new moon—when the sky was at its darkest—that the witch finally made his move.
Agnes sat in her windo
w, the sea breeze rustling her nightgown as she focused intently on her latest sketch of her selkie friend, just as something caught her eye. The three selkies were silently dancing, smiles on each of their faces, as Mr Rogers crept closer and closer to their pile of seal skins. Agnes held her breath as he glanced once more at the women, no doubt scheming.
“Hey!” she cried out, pointing an accusing finger at the old man as the three women froze in their dance.
All eyes turned to look at Mr Rogers who hovered over the skins. Without a second thought, the old man reached down and grabbed one of the skins before running back into his house and locking the door.
The sound of the selkies’ cries tore through Agnes’s chest as she darted from her room and ran down the stairs. Their screams were the most heart-wrenching shrieks she had ever heard—it was even worse than her own sobs when she found out her parents were gone forever.
Agnes grabbed her jacket and threw the door open, looking out onto the beach as the wind and waves masked the selkies’ screams.
Ignoring the chilly night air, Agnes ran to the shore, her eyes searching for the women who had been dancing on the beach. She blinked, trying to force her eyes to adjust to the darkness around her, and slowly, she could see two seals peeking out of the water before her, their cries continuing to fill the air.
Agnes spun around, trying to find where the third one might have gone.
Holding her breath and closing her eyes to listen carefully, she followed the sound of someone crying softly in the distance until she made her way past the boulders and stood before the crumpled form of her friend, the raven-haired selkie that had been dancing joyfully only a moment ago.
As Agnes knelt before her, the woman let out another of her horrible shrieks, causing the hairs on Agnes’s arms to stand on end.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Agnes tried to assure her, wondering whether or not the selkie could understand her. She slowly took her jacket off and placed it over the woman, trying to shield her body from the night air… and Mr Rogers.