I woke up dreary in my bed of straw in our hut. My father was sitting at my bedside, his face concerned. It was day and noon. I knew this because of the light shining through the hut’s ceiling.

Almost immediately, he smiled. “Asha’rai, like a hero of old, you have woken up. The chief himself has you to thank for his life, and even he says so.”

Confused, I asked him, “What did I do?”

“Well,” He smiled, “As I said, you saved the chief’s life, and you also saved that of some of the best tribesmen.”

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I did it. What else did I do?”

He frowned and I smiled. “I was joking, father. But what has happened when I was out?”

“Well,” He said, “They announced right after the hunt that you are to marry his son if you wake up. They said will bear the future chief of this tribe.”

“Alright,” I said, not feeling as overjoyed as most of the girls in the tribe might have been. I had one more question that decided if I was going to be happy with this life. “I suppose there is only one other question I have to ask. That is, will I have any other husbands?”

“No,” He said, “You will only lie with the future chief you will only bear his sons and daughters. You only deserve one person, none of this business with many husbands that the tribes like to do to young girls.”

“Good,” I said. I had always agreed with my father on this matter, “I only want to love only one man anyway. I don’t want to share my body around like something for them to use.”

He smiled. “You have my side of it. I should tell you about the night that your mother left us, now. I suppose you are old enough.”

“It was the day that I caught her sneaking out to lie with other men, without marriage. Even the most giving of chiefs ban that. I immediately reported her to the chief and he whipped her. After that, I tended to her wounds, loving her even when she was cruel to me.

“When she woke up, she told me that I shouldn’t have tended to her wounds, even though I am her husband.” He sighed. “I still am, even with her leaving me and all since no one’s allowed to divorce. I told her that even if she did not deserve it, it was what God decreed. You may have seen her looking injured when you saw her arguing with me, well, that is the story behind it. She pushed forward with her craziness that she was to give birth to a child that would lead us out of this…barbarism. I have never understood it, but I married her all the same when I was young…young and stupid.” He gave a grim laugh.

“If you had been a boy, this would be the time that I would tell him to never love because of looks. I made that same mistake myself, and I ended up with her. But I will tell you that there are men out there a lot like her. They are crazy and men can be worse…men that think of only the material pleasures. If you think for one minute that the chief’s son, Ani’sja, is one of them, back out of that relationship immediately. I do not expect him to be, but you cannot judge a man or a woman by what you have seen of them when they are in public. You can only judge them by what they are like when you see their true face when they are at their worst. Because when things are going wrong, that is when the true man or woman comes out, not when things are going well.”

He sighed. “Live your love life by those words, Asha’rai, and it will never disappoint you.”

“How would I end a relationship like that? I would be stuck in it forever because the chief has the power of life and death in this tribe.” I asked.

But my father only smiled. “Not when you can get away from this tribe. But anyway, to use the old way of speaking again, I am getting off track. Your mother argued that she would give birth to a son that would be the one who would control the world. I finally broke and told her that it was crazy to think that. She continued to rave, and I told her that she had already borne enough children and she didn’t need more from other men. Then, she found that you were listening and our argument ended—for that moment. Later, our arguments resumed. Finally, I told her to go, and that I had ended our marriage in all but name. If she was going to cheat on me with other men. You must remember that these other men pushed the limit of men that a woman can marry. I told her that I would have her flogged if she did not go now.”

It was at that time that he looked down.

“And she left. She packed up every single one of her belongings and left. I felt a deep sense of longing, for the days when there had seemed to be love. The days when she hadn’t left me to search for other husbands, as was the custom with women like her.” I saw tears forming in his eyes, tears that trickled down his cheeks.

“Father,” I moved to comfort him, moved with pity. Such a poor man, but those were what these times were. They focused on the good of everyone above, not everyone below.

We hugged for a while. I had never expected this, never expected that he would not be the one comforting me and that rather I would. In the stories that Shantu Triamen told me, the father was always the mean one and the mother the nice one. The father was never the one who the mother broke. But that was because real life is very different. In the stories, a wife might comfort her husband, if only rarely. A hero, though, a hero never comforted their father, especially not a girl.

When we finally stopped hugging, the tears had stopped, but they still stained my shirt.

My father stood up

“I will go get the chief’s son,” He said, “He would love to see you awake. He is quite in love with you, I will say.”

Then he took off.

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In only a few minutes, he was back with my future husband, who was a brawny man my age, but ugly and with a beard. He smiled when he saw me, those brown eyes glistening in the light.

“Asha’rai,” He said, “Have you heard? I am to marry you! And only I, for I am a future chief.”

I managed a smile. There was something about him that was off.

“What is it, Asha’rai?” He asked.

“Nothing,” I told him, but it was a bloody lie.

He took me in his arms and held me. I saw my father smiling.

“Please,” He whispered, “Tell me. You can trust me.”

“No,” I whispered.

He sighed and let go of me. He took out his spear and rammed it into the ground and knelt to me.

“You can trust me. I vow it on my life.”

“Please,” I motioned for him to get up, “You’re embarrassing yourself.”

“No,” He said, then someone ran up to him and whispered in his ear.

“I’ll be there when you return,” I said, sensing that he was going.

“No,” He said again, “Come with me, Asha’rai, you are one of the greatest fighters in this tribe.”

“No,” My father said, “A father should allow his son to fight if need be. A young woman…should not. She is too precious to me and I would not allow a son to go with you if you were a young woman.”

He sighed. “We’re not going for a battle. We are going for a declaration of battle. An enemy wants to meet us on the field, and my father wants us to help decide whether we should accept it.”

My father sighed. “Fine, but do not allow her to fight. If I hear that you allowed her to fight, well, I will have you flogged, future chieftain or not.”

The meeting was a meeting of the chieftain, me, Ani’sja, and his most trusted members of his family. The meeting was in the house, which was only a large hut. It had a large meeting room made almost all out of sticks which had a large hole in it where below it was a table. On the table, there was a war map featuring all the different tribes and their latest known movements.

“Let me start this by saying that we do not have the numbers to contest the other tribe on the field.” The chieftain’s mother said, opening the conversation.

“But we do have the warriors,” the chieftain’s brother, a man named Anpa’sja, said, “She—” He pointed to me, “Is a prime example. When even one of the women in the tribe is a great warrior, the tribe must be great indeed. Usually, the women are the ones that do not fight, but when women fight, we can have twice the numbers on the field.”

“My father said that I should not fight,” I told him. For the first time realized that my body was still aching from the fall.

“And you do not need to.” He said. “Not that much, anyway. You need to show them that even our women fight. Shantus say that when women fight, the tribe on the other side cannot win. That is not without merit. It means that even our best warriors must be good and they will think that you trained under us. It sounds logical, doesn’t it. You could have trained under us because we had nothing else to do in peace.”

“Still,” Ani’sja said, “Her father does not want her in danger and I see the sense in that, for she is still recovering from a fall.”

“And so are most of our warriors that went on the hunt, and so I do not see your point. It has been a week since the hunt, and in that time, we have healed most of them with Anti-Rias from the villages.” Anpa’sja told me.

I nodded, even though I did not agree with him. “But you should also remember that most of them are not allowed to fight. I myself am not in any condition to fight right now.”

The chieftain sighed. “You will be in a week, I expect, for that is when, if we go into battle, we will go into battle.”

“Father,” Ani’sja said, “What about challenging their chieftain yourself. You could declare it a fight of honor; whoever who wins this duel will get a prize. The prize will be a fourth of all the warriors in this tribe.”

The chieftain nodded. “The other chieftain is old and weary, he should not be much to defeat.”

“Is it done, then?” I asked.

“Yes,” The chieftain said. “On the morrow, I will send a messenger saying that, instead of a battle, I challenge their chieftain to a duel. He cannot turn it down unless he wants to usurped. Even if I lose, we can still win by less…honorable ways.”

“But you’d never do that, father,” Ani’sja said, “I trust that you would never.”

“And if I win, which I should, I will not.” Chieftain ‘Sja told his son. “But the tribe must endure. If we lose one-fourth of all our warriors, it will be disastrous.”

Later, Ani’sja led me back to my hut and he said goodbye to me.

“She will not fight, I assure you.” He told my father then I went to kiss him goodbye. If I was going to have only one husband, I’d better make sure that he thought that I loved him. This was an opportunity that most girls would never get. Besides, my father had always told me to count my blessings and use them to my advantage.

That night, my father told me of the old world again. He said that all that my mother had said was true, even when it had seemed that she had been lying.

“It was a cruel world, yes, but this world is much crueler. You must remember that, in that world, a woman could choose—yes, choose—if she wanted to be with many men or only one. Every world that humanity has ever lived in has been cruel to the weak and nice to the important. But that is how the world works, and how it will work onward, until the end of time.”

“Father,” I said, with childlike awe set in my eyes, “Tell me what the end of time will be like and how it will be after them.”

He smiled. “You don’t want the golden days, anymore, do you, Asha’rai? You think that they were evil. They were not, but if you do want a story about the end times, I will do my best to give you what you want.”

“The end times will be times where both men and women have great greed and vanity. People will not care about their neighbors, only about themselves. The devil himself will take over half the world for a time that will be years on end. Before this, men and women will have access to weapons that can do huge damage to the human race.”

“Like the bombs?” I asked. “Or will the weapons be worse?”

My father sighed. “Oh, they will much worse. The Shantus call it a false Armageddon, World War Three, and so if that was false, well, the weapons must be worse. Anyhow, you don’t need to worry about that. The stories always imply that humans would all be in civilization, many, like the times before the war.”

“Then,” I said, “If you are not going to tell me much of the end times, tell me what will happen after it.”

“Well,” He said, smiling. “After the storm of the end times is over, judgement will come on whether certain people go to heaven or hell. After that, everything will finally be peaceful, the devil himself defeated forever. Whole generations will be born without any sense of hardship, the world a fair and—to use an old term—a freer place. With evil destroyed, there will be no rape, no murder, nothing like that. I have heard Shantus tell me that we will not need to hunt or grow food… But how anyone will be able to unify the tribes and convince them that a civilized way of life is the way to go is beyond me.”

“Father,” I said, noticing that his hands were twitching, “There is something that you are not telling me, I know it.”

He sighed. “There is. And it is about humanity becoming a civilization again, a plan to make sure that we are a civilization again. Think of it like going back to the Golden Age of Humanity.”

“What is it, then?” I asked.

“Nothing that is ready for anyone’s ears but mine.” He said and I frowned, “But you should know—that if I should die—do anything possible to rebuild humanity.”

I nodded, not knowing what else to do, and not knowing what I was to do if he died, how I would rebuild humanity.

But I nodded, all the same, sealing my fate.