Roht Exodus [Archive]

Roht Mirage

09-16-13, 02:49 AM

An excerpt from "The Traveller's Way in Faroh"...

There are three certainties in Faroh: the mask, the spear, and the grave.

In her eighteenth year...

On a sharp plateau jutting from the heart of the Fallien desert to spear the crescent moon, she danced as a woman. The skin of her breasts and belly pimpled outside the baring bodice; her arms swept billowing sleeves about as teasing curtains; dark hair, long and deranged, swirled about her in its own wind-woven madness; and her long skirt clattered against the hiss of night's breath with reed tokens woven into the hem.

A Farohtian dancer does not clatter, Marra had told her. A Farohtian dancer moves so smoothly as to never produce a sound aside from the stirring of the sand. A Farohtian dancer does not lead with her rump. How indecent!

Bury you, Marra!

She led with with her indecent rump, stirring her skirts into a storm amidst the wind that buffeted her sand-topped spire. With her hands held aloft, she strummed the moonlight, pulling it to her chest as she carved wide circles with her bare toes. She drew petals in the sand and twirled as the center of the blossom, devouring the moonlight.

The lines of the petals... were not straight. Her ankles shook, crying for anything more nourishing than light and rapture, but they did not buckle. She could not fall. She was too free to fall.

A free woman. Two firsts in one blessed moment. Somewhere in the back of her parched mind, she knew this moment was near to her last. But, who could care when it was so wonderful? And who would dare interrupt?

“Set'Roh?” was the message that her dance partner of wind delivered to her.

Astarelle ignored it. She raised her arms high to cover her ears and swept her hips, shouting back with the t-t-tonk-t-t-tonk of her reed-laced hem. There was more sway than she intended.

“Set'Roh!” came the message, louder, more grating.

She slapped her hands to her ears and straightened her legs unsteadily. The wind danced on, alone.

“This is not your place! Go home!” she demanded into the night.

“Astarelle Set'Roh!”

Was her tormentor deaf? Another mirage? “Go home!” she repeated, her delirious authority slipping into a pleading wail.

“Sting me, woman. Marra was right! You have more butt than brains.”

Astarelle choked on whatever sound tried to wrench itself from her. She fell to her knees, and her voice fell to nothing. Even the wind's seductive whispers seemed to pause a moment as she crawled to the edge of her stage and looked twenty strides down onto the starlight-speckled desert. “She wouldn't say that,” Astarelle called down, too breathless to make it a proper argument.

A broad figure, his face indistinct aside from a thick beard, leaned back and laughed. “She didn't say it like that, of course. If those words ever left her mouth, she'd lay face-down in the street, naked, until her shame repaid your Roht honor.”

The last word carried the same tone. Another joke? How strange.

“Who are you?” Astarelle asked loudly. Though the man was a dark spot among the shimmering dunes, she had trouble focusing on him, or even determining how far he was. More worryingly, the base of her plateau seemed to waver between near and far so quickly that she had to flatten her midriff against the cool grains just to balance.

“I am Akashere,” he offered respectfully, then paused before adding, “A gatherer.”

A silence fell between them. The wind hissed impatiently.

Astarelle's eyes widened. “Have you seen other cities?”

There was more silence before Akashere spoke. “Yes, of course.” His voice wobbled as if her response surprised him more than the sight of a Farohtian priestess gallivanting above the desert.

“And other people?” she asked excitedly.

He seemed to regain his bearings as he snapped back, “Can't have a city without people. Now, if you please, Set'Roh, we should be-”

“Show me!”

So soon, he was off balance again. “Are you seri- No! I was ordered to bring you back.”

Astarelle rolled away from the edge and scuttled to her feet. She tried to walk to the other edge, but her knees wobbled. Why did she have to feel tired now?

“Don't make me climb up there!” he boomed.

She couldn't see him anymore, but she could imagine the heat in his eyes. “Would you throw a daughter of Roh over your shoulder?” she asked accusingly. Without thinking, she touched the divine mark on her forehead. Tonight of all nights, Roh would not be in a mood to answer her prayers.

“Like a bundle of firewood,” Akashere said with his earlier humor. There came a crumbling, scratching sound from below, then a heavy grunt. He wasn't joking!

Astarelle forced herself to run farther across the plateau. “Please, no! I'll be locked in the temple's heart for this. Bury me, I won't see the sky until I'm an old woman!”

There was more scrabbling and grunting. “I'll talked to Corina for you. Maybe she'll,” he grunted again, “be gentle with you.”

Astarelle froze with a gasp, then wobbled back toward the edge, her jaw dragging as much as her feet. “You called the Mar'Roh by her old name. What kind of sand-brain are you?” She reached the edge and immediately added, “You liar.”

Akashere still had one foot on the desert floor. With an exaggerated sigh, he pulled back the foot and hand that had made so much racket against the rocky face. “I don't lie, but I am tricky,” he said cheerily, “and you're hardly one to talk about disrespecting Roht traditions.”

Astarelle looked intently at him, though she still saw little more than hair and broad shoulders. Almost too quietly, she asked, “Why's that?”

He stepped back from the jagged wall and spread his arms wide. “Because there's nothing Roht about you!” he laughed, then clamped his mouth shut so forcefully that she could hear the click.

For a long moment, she left him in silence. His eyes, she couldn't see, but she could read them all the same. They said, “Too far?”

“My dear Akashere,” she finally said in a voice most royal, “That is the best thing anyone has ever said to me.” She gave a laugh buoyed with dehydrated glee, and she spun a giddy circle. Then, her ankle creaked, tipped, and toppled. She fell from the plateau, unable to recognize what the sudden rush of wind and the blurring of vision meant until she was halfway to the desert. It was too late to scream, but she managed one delirious thought.

That wasn't a bad last moment.

She felt sand touch her... gently. It cupped her like a mother's embrace, or what she imagined a mother's embrace to be. Gradually, her fall slowed until it was nothing of the sort, and she was laying comfortably on the desert floor. Her body, damp with sweat it couldn't bare to lose, felt cold.

“Do I have to carry you?” Akashere asked beside her. He was kneeling. His hands were buried to the wrist, and the sand around them still shifted from the power of his rizak. “Set'Roh?” he prodded, his voice almost as tired as she felt.

The priestess sighed. “Don't call me-”

“Astarelle,” he corrected immediately.

She gave him half a smile, then looked back toward the sky and mused aloud. The words sounded tattered and well-worn. “I can't live in a cage.”

He sighed and slumped back on the sand. “Our lives aren't always ours to control.”

“So you'll do what you're told? Drag me back and lock me up?”

He shuffled uneasily. “If I must, but I'll make sure that the cage isn't locked. I promise.”

She gave a wane smile to the stars and mumbled, “It's a nice promise, but I won't hold you to it,” before frowning deeply. “The cage is a metaphor, right? The Mar'Roh won't really... will she?”

“She's not an idiot. She must know that you'd tear Faroh itself down.”

Astarelle snorted. “With what?” she asked ruefully as she planted a palm against the desert floor. Grains barely shifted. Even the wind, hobbled in the shelter of the plateau, had more control over the sand than she could muster.

“Determination. I would never bet against a woman who, without a drop of training, managed to survive two days in the desert, climb that thing, and still, somehow, has the energy to be so blasted stubborn.”

For the first time, she gave him a proper look. He was as broad as a horse, as shaggy as a wolf, as dark as a sun-burnt lizard, and he smelled of tinderbrush. Yet, he had the softest eyes she had ever seen.

“You really do say the nicest things, Akashere.”