vercingtorix
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T
hough I think you are looking for something.I already know I will not find it, as we step toward the city that I do not trust to be real. Damascus’s cries change to something that reflects the complicated emotions within myself; his path of flight straightens, and his tremendous shadow envelops us as he flies directly overhead and then is gone.
No, I think.
Whatever I am looking for I will not find.
(This I accepted long ago, and still cannot explain why I search—)
I want to be sharp, or clever, to her disbelief. Everyone feels fear, the words form on my lips, but I do not speak them. Are things that live in fear not the most terrible of all?
“What are you most afraid of?” He asks me, and beneath the question is an undercurrent of tension. I remember—I remember, now, that the night before Dagda and I had drank so much that we lost ourselves in each other’s bodies.
It was the way of things, back then, of our companions.
But I remember the fury that covered Bondike like a storm.
It is not often sunny where we live; but this afternoon it is. The dull thuds of practice swords resound in the training ground; cracks, and the hollow noise of wood-against-flesh. We are sparring, a tangle of bodies pressed closed and then pulled apart.
He had always been the more philosophical between the two of us. The first to speak. Bolder, more sure of the profoundness of words. Today, his words are electric; they are stinging.
I was so young.
I was so, so young.
I laughed. “Nothing,” and my practice sword collided with his temple.
I remember he nearly retched. But when he regained his balance, he threw all of himself at me and we collided into a heap of limbs.
My eye, afterward, was so swollen I could not see from it. And he had a concussion from my blow. We were both bloodied, and furious, and he spat at me:
“I’m most afraid of losing you.”
Monsters exist, Elena, because men do.
“Then let’s go.” My voice is harsh, but not because of her; it is because I am staring at something terrible, and I am afraid. She is warm again me, warm and both familiar and unfamiliar. I find I do not mind the contact, strangely—and unbidden, I think:
It would not have been so bad, to love a woman.
I cannot think it. I cannot give that thought power. It would ruin me. And so I swallow it back, as one would a mouthful of vinegar. We begin to walk forward, step-by-step, across the remainder of the bridge. And then we are within the beginning of the city, risen up like earth that has decided it would like to be something more.
The city is eerily quiet.
Her words come back to me, from only minutes ago.
Because we remember what it is like when there is no pain—and we go through hell to try and get it back.
I cannot remember a time without pain; I nearly admit that, aloud. But instead I focus outwardly, on the darkness that is absolute aside from the strange, from-within type of glow that the stones around us emit. We walk among daggers; stalagmites and stalactites kiss all around us, and between them something ominous creeps. Neither of us look like ourselves in this place where there is no longer sky, but only earth, only the archaic silhouettes of buildings wrought of stone.
We are in the city proper by the time I decide to answer.
“I think it is because we don’t know how to be without pain. Maybe we don’t feel alive.” I know it is a lie even as I say it; but the answer is the only one that seems right.
And then:
“What is the most monstrous thing you have ever done, Elena?”
When I look at her, I know it is with the look of a man clinging to salvation.
