by Fuad Baloch
Men shouted as they jumped out of her way, her horse ploughing through with little care for what lay ahead. Ruma’s heart thudded against her chest as she kicked the horse again and again. Behind her, she heard horse hooves. She didn’t turn her head around, knowing Gareeb would be following.
Within a few breaths, she had left the outskirts of their temporary camp and entered the clear sands. Standing up in the stirrups, she raised a hand, shouted at the riders who had now encircled the two figures. “Keep away!”
Seconds passed, the distance between them shrinking fast. Not quickly enough. She heard a shriek. A woman’s. The men laughed, one of them leaning towards the shorter figure, who squealed.
Ruma thundered over to the man beside the woman and smacked him hard on the back of his head with the flat of her sword. Without making a sound, the man fell from his saddle and onto the ground.
“You…” said the taller figure. Ruma turned towards him, towards Sivan. “You’re here!”
“You fracking foreign whore,” growled another Traditionalist, turning his horse around, the curved sword in his hand glittering in the setting sun.
“The foreigner who is going to gut you alive,” snarled Ruma, pointing her sword at him. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, injecting a heightened sense of her own capabilities.
“Hey,” shouted Gareeb, pulling his reins to come up beside her. He was huffing, his long dark hair a mess of knots. “Step away from Mzi or you’ll have to answer to the Uniter.”
“Ruma, it’s you!” squeaked the woman behind Ruma.
“Go back to the camp,” barked Ruma, then pointed at the warrior holding onto the reins of a mule. “Leave all you snatched from these people!”
For a second, the men didn’t move. Ruma glowered at them. Finally, the first man spat to the side. “Yuam, let go.” He cast a glance towards their fellow who hadn’t moved since her attack. “He deserves that.” Motioning to the rest, he turned around, spurred his horse.
“And never come back!” shouted Sivan, raising a fist in the air. Ruma turned her eyes to him. Growing red, he shut his mouth.
“Ruma,” said Yenita once more. “Thank you.”
Ruma turned. Except for a rip in her blouse at the shoulder, Yenita looked just like she always had. Young. Innocent. Pretty. Memory of her naked, gliding towards her, floated up. Ruma shook her head.
“I… We would have stayed at the hills that night, but—” Sivan began, then fell silent once Ruma waved a hand.
“You could have stayed. They were the Traditionalists, not the Blessed monsters,” said Ruma.
Yenita barked a laugh, tilted her head to a side. “Their leader had wanted to take me away that night. Had it not been for the rumours of the Blessed lurking in the shadows, and had we not been lucky to lose them in the darkness…” She shuddered, her eyes not leaving Ruma’s face.
Ruma blinked, recalling how the men had been scanning their trail when she had arrived. She shuffled uncomfortably in the saddle. “Wars are terrible business.”
“Aye,” replied Yenita, casting a baleful glance at Gareeb. “You seem to have struck up a relationship with these monsters, though. Rapists at night, dacoits in daytime.”
“These…” started Ruma defensively, then shook her head. “I… I am not responsible for their actions.”
Yenita spat to the side.
Breath caught in Ruma’s chest. Something about her own words had struck her as familiar. A different world, a different cast of people, yet she’d replied as if nothing had changed. Hadn’t she been passing the blame all her life, deflecting, shirking responsibility?
Had she learned nothing?
“They are killers…” said Sivan, his words curt, a wary eye watching the Traditionalist beside her. “One of their generals gutted ten towns between Fanima and Irtiza just because they’d once given refuge to a Blessed general.”
“Animals!” barked Yenita.
“Stop your slandering!” shouted Gareeb. “It’s heretics like you who give our noble cause an ugly name.”
Yenita would have shouted right back had it not been for Sivan’s arm holding her back.
Ruma kept quiet, a heavy dread settling in the pit of her stomach and mixing with shame and guilt. In deciding to stick with one side over the other, she’d made a fundamental mistake, assumed one party was more right than the other. She treated both sides like the opposite sides of a coin instead of considering them both as extremist positions along a spectrum.
Could she really keep on living like this? Never learning from all the mistakes she continued to make?
“You can come with us,” said Ruma, biting her lower lip, hearing her words come from some far-off place. “We’ve got enough provisions to take you safely to the next town.”
“Hah!” chuckled Sivan. He shook his head. “How about you join us? We’re getting away from the holy cities. If luck holds, this will be the last army we bump into for quite some time.”
“Yeah, come with us,” repeated Yenita quietly.
Ruma considered the offer for half a beat. Gareeb stirred nervously on the saddle beside her. The offer was tempting in a way. No matter what she thought of the younger woman, a life away from the two sides Ruma now saw in a different light carried a certain appeal.
But… she couldn’t just walk away from what she needed to do, no matter the cost to her own mission.
All her life, she’d been following her own dreams, her own ideals, her worn selfish desires. Was that her fate no matter what else changed around her? Surely, this was the time to take a… leap of faith.
“Ruma…” said Yenita, extending a hand towards her. “Come with me.”
Ruma shook her head. “Almost all the Traditionalist forces are riding hard for the holy cities. You will not encounter resistance from them.”
She turned her horse.
“Ruma!” called out Yenita once more. This time, her words were softer, plaintive.
“If you don’t mind, I will take something from you,” said Ruma. She bent down, reaching for one of the mules she knew carried the vials the Kapuri siblings peddled to farmers.
“Ruma…”
Ruma straightened, kicked her horse hard. It bolted forwards. She continued to kick, not stopping even when they were galloping at breakneck speed.
Thirty-Five
Capitulations
“Mzi!” shouted Gareeb, a few paces behind her as they thundered into the Traditionalist host still resting before the long march.
Ruma dismounted the horse, anger blinding her thoughts.
“We have to talk!” he cried once more. She heard a dull thud, then the sound of boots as he ran towards her.
She held out a hand, eyes still cast directly ahead towards the coterie of soldiers blocking her way. “Walk away, Gareeb. This isn’t your battle.”
“But—”
Ruma whipped around. Gareeb stuttered to a stop. “You’re a good boy. You have flaws. A roving eye being one of them that will land you in trouble in this world sooner or later. But I doubt your God would find much to fault there.” She forced her words to soften. “Follow the better instincts in you and you’ll be fine.”
“Mzi,” he said, taking a step forwards, his voice dropping as more bearded warriors turned their heads towards them. “Don’t do anything without thinking through its ramifications.”
Ruma threw her head to the side, chortled. “For the first time, I am thinking straight. And you should speak like the young man you are!”
He didn’t look convinced, still not turning away, but he was far from being the first man to tell her what to do with her life.
Shushing him in a gesture that also dismissed him, she turned around, strode towards the warriors blocking her way.
“Move away!” she growled at the two stout Traditionalists who stepped forwards.
“The Uniter is resting at the moment,” replied the burlier of the two. “No disturbances, foreigner.”
“I am not a forei
gner,” she said through gritted teeth. “I was born here. In this very land. Ten generations of my family’s bones are buried in this land.”
The men exchanged a confused glance. Ruma rolled her eyes, then, shoving the one to her left with a shoulder, marched right through.
“Hey!” shouted the first soldier, but she didn’t turn away. She heard the two men bark at each other, moved her hand towards the sword in her scabbard, ready to strike if they did dare approach her.
They didn’t, and she continued forwards.
More priests than soldiers swarmed the area. Since the prophecy, even Bubraza seemed to have let more of these peddlers of faith into her inner sanctum. The sun hung at the horizon now, a tiny sliver of it kissing the sands. Ruma turned her chin eastwards. A dozen or so silhouettes were riding for the camp: scouts returning with word of what lay ahead.
A gust of wind blew over, carrying with it the odour of dried sweat and unwashed bodies. Ruma exhaled through the mouth, continued to march ahead, her eyes searching for the so-called Uniter.
“Mzi—” shouted someone behind her.
She strutted forwards.
More warriors formed a semicircle around a group of people she couldn’t see. Judging that to be her destination, she turned. When another shout came, she broke into a trot.
“Halt!” said a warrior, stepping to block her from piercing the circle.
Ruma shoved him to the side unceremoniously, ducked the jab the other beside him threw at her, kicked the third in the nuts when he tried to sneak up on her from the side.
Leaving all three yelling and shouting, she darted ahead and found herself staring into the beady eyes of Bubraza, Blessed Turbaza’s niece, leader of the Traditionalists.
“Foreigner, you seem to carry the gift of chaos everywhere you go,” she said, her tone brusque, the words cold.
“Three days’ hard ride to Salodia—” a scout was saying to a gaggle of older men behind her. When all eyes turned towards him, he fell silent. A man Ruma had seen before beside Baosad and Qaisan. Now he slipped away, ceding the ground to his betters.
“And your men seem to defile the name of Alf everywhere they go,” said Ruma. She was furious, expecting expletives to burst from her, slightly taken aback by the restrained words that did come out of her mouth.
Bubraza pursed her lips, her eyes narrowing. Ruma caught a glimpse of Brother Hadyan standing in the crowd of onlookers and shaking his head.
Ruma pressed on. “Your men are burning towns in their wake, unlawfully taking the property of innocent citizens. Raping. Pillaging. Destruction. Remind me again how your lot is better than those you oppose?”
She knew she’d infuriated the shorter woman and had insulted her publicly. But she had also put Bubraza in a corner. Furious as the woman was, she could ill-afford to not be seen responding to the very public challenge Ruma had thrown her way.
“You wouldn’t know the first thing about the difficulties of provisioning an army against a much better, entrenched enemy,” said Bubraza, her voice caustic, dismissive.
Ruma chortled. “Trust me, I do.”
For a long breath, both women stood in the centre of gaping men, neither saying anything. Breath came in hot gasps but Ruma maintained her hard stare. Even if Bubraza was a woman straight from the pages of history, Ruma had fracking interacted with the prophet himself and wouldn’t be the one to look away first.
Brother Hadyan took a tentative step forwards. If he had wanted to say something to placate both of them, his courage obviously deserted him, for he froze.
“What do you need, foreigner?” asked Bubraza. “Ever since your return from my aunt’s camp, you seem to have developed a particularly difficult strand of non-cooperation.” Heads bobbed at that. “Your previous contributions aside, one might wonder whose side you stand on at present.”
“I fracking stand at the side of all that’s right and noble,” Ruma shouted back, unable to keep her voice calm anymore.
“We’re the Traditionalists, inheritors of the bright legacies of both Blessed Turbaza and Blessed Dadua, and—”
“And I fracking speak in the name of the prophet you’ve all conveniently forgotten!”
Silence fell. Bubraza glared at her. The little seed of fear Ruma had been ignoring up until now swayed wildly under the winds. She had gone too far, laid bare the vulnerable underbelly, and stabbed it in full view of others.
“Hadyan,” Ruma shouted, pointing a finger towards the priest who cowered at the attention, “would the Gulatu Koza you know approve of the methods of this army?” Brother Hadyan dropped his chin. Ruma pointed at the other priests. “What about you? Or do you know of some other prophet of Alf? Would he have been alright with murdering innocents, looting the poor just so he could afford to pay your fracking salaries?”
No one responded. How could they? She knew the real man, the genuine article. A man who wouldn’t even shoot the fracking Yeth even as they posed a mortal danger both to himself and those he cared for.
Bubraza took a step towards her. “What do you want, foreigner?”
“I—”
“Kill her!” shouted the First in her ear.
“W-what—” Ruma stuttered, shook her head.
“Are you really so much in thrall of my aunt that you would not listen to the pragmatism that had drawn you to me in the first place?” asked Bubraza, waving her stubby fingers towards the crowd of onlookers. “Three days before our decisive attack on the infidels encircling the holy city of Salodia, you would sap the energy from these blessed men who fight with the blood of Alf coursing through their veins?”
“Kill her and return to your world!”
Ruma blinked, took a step back. No matter how hard she shook her head, she couldn’t relieve the mounting pressure against her temples. A thick liquid growing heavy, viscous within her skull, thrashing against it like tides under the thrall of a hurricane.
“You’ve well and truly outlived your usefulness,” said Bubraza, her words coming in from a distance now.
“I…” tried Ruma. The world swayed. The men were turning away from her, their heads bobbing as Bubraza continued talking. The woman knew how to talk, how to captivate an audience, how to appeal to their baser instincts and convince them to lay down their lives for what she thought was the righteous path.
“First, what do you want?” whispered Ruma, slapping her temple with the palm of an open hand.
The Pithrean went quiet, or if he did say something, it was drowned out under the bellowing as men called out to Alf, to Gulatu Koza, to other prophets long dead, siding with Bubraza.
Ruma stumbled back.
She had gone too far. And lost.
What was the right thing for her to do now?
“You can ride with us until we get to Salodia,” said Bubraza, “for we are far better than you accuse and won’t leave a mad woman in the middle of the desert to die of thirst. Then our paths go apart.”
Ruma raised her hand, let it drop, knowing she was beaten.
Thirty-Six
The Shard
She floated in a sea of black so dark it seemed to obliterate memories of her own self.
“Where the frack am I?” Ruma cried out. Her own ears failed to hear the words that the darkness swallowed up greedily.
To her right, a faint blue light flickered. Ruma turned just as it winked out. Another burst to life to her left now, disappearing just as she turned her attention to it.
Ruma screamed. She was back in the nightmarish world of the Pithrean. This time, though, something felt oppressively wrong. A pressure on her neck that threatened to strangle her.
The desire to flee overwhelmed her when she seemed not to have even a corporeal body.
“First!” she bellowed, once more not hearing the words.
Below her, a distance her senses couldn’t compute, hundreds of faint blue lights came into being. Like distant stars twinkling in the night sky, they formed haphazard lines, their dim light doing little
to dispel the darkness except to call her attention.
She tried to move towards the lights, found herself rooted in her frame, as stuck as a statue.
“Answer me!” Ruma screamed.
Like old pilgrims hobbling to a holy site, the lights limped along, leaving a burning after-image that lingered for half a beat before fading away. Ruma squinted. Something about the figures was familiar. Through the light, were there silhouettes? Tall, lanky figures, tree branches sprouting from their foreheads, their bodies making a clanging noise she couldn’t hear but somehow sensed. Figures wearing blue stoles she’d seen Brother Hadyan and the other Alfi priests wear.
What in the seven hells was she seeing?
Ruma swallowed the panic rising in her gorge. If she could remember the world outside of this nightmare, then she was still in control of her mental faculties. A good sign.
Could she use that to anchor herself?
They’d been riding hard over the past two days after her altercation with Bubraza. Another day or so before they would be outside the walls of Salodia and she’d be shunned from the Traditionalists for good, left powerless to change anything in the world.
Another thought rose.
If her mind showed her the blue tunics and stoles of the priests, was this evidence of her waking world seeping into this private sanctum she knew wasn’t meant for her kind?
“First, are you here?” she called out.
The First didn’t respond.
Ruma bit down on the urge to call out once more. Again, she had no way of knowing for sure, but it was possible that either the First didn’t know she could trespass into this universe or, if he did, was unable to do much about it. The latter was possible on account of the weaknesses she’d seen seeping through the Pithrean race, something her intuition held as true.
There was another explanation. One far more terrifying. The First wanted her here for some reason.
Why?
Could she use that somehow to her advantage?
