Gideon awoke at the crack of dawn and immediately began preparing for the long journey to Kenan. In the frail morning light he explored the trashed tent, scrounging up the basics for long distance travel and survival from the possessions of his dead comrades: a bedroll, a rucksack, and a few sets of clothing, along with the smaller survival essentials that would fit onto his belt or inside his ruck. As he was searching through his father’s possessions, he discovered the looters had missed one of Dance’s folding buck knives that had been hidden in his locker. He took it and tied its holster to the shaft of his left boot, feeling amused at the idea that his father had ended up helping him in some way after all.
After some consideration, he decided it would be best to avoid the highway entirely and cross country south through the Kahn desert. It was a route he had taken before, and so already had the lay of the land. The main problem with going through the desert would be the normal problem with traveling through any desert: finding water. The Kahn had water, but it could only be found in specific spots, and for that reason getting to Kenan in time for the tournament would be difficult. Taking the route through the Kahn would be cutting it close, but he reasoned it would be better to be late for the tournament than to be dead in some random ditch on the highway.
Once he was ready, he exited the tent and stepped out onto the gangway for what he expected was the final time. The camp was already going through its morning routine; some men were waiting in line at the mess halls for breakfast, others were waiting at the armories to draw or deposit arms. As Gideon stood on the gangway, taking in the beginning of a normal day in the camp, it occurred to him that most of his life had been spent being part of scenes just like the one currently before him: a foul smelling pattern of daily tedium and misery sustained by rough men living a rough life.
No one so much as glanced at him as he walked down the gangway towards the south gate. After all, a soldier in full travel kit was hardly an unusual sight in the camp. But for Gideon, leaving on his own was one of the most unusual things he’d ever done. He’d be alone for the next two months, traveling between the Kahn’s isolated ponds and creeks in the general direction of Kenan. As he got closer to the gate he felt an irrational urge to speed up, as if the camp was about to close up like a clam and trap him inside.
Outside of the camp, the road forked in three directions: to the west, east, and northeast. To the north lay the remains of Forelia City, and Gideon saw Kennanite soldiers passing back and forth beneath the city’s great stone gateway, blackened with soot by the fire that had burned the massive portcullis to cinders. In all other directions, there was only green grass and rolling hills as far as the eye could see. He passed through the camp's south gate without stopping and continued on in the same direction. After twenty paces he had left the road behind, and once he passed over the first hill the camp, and the ruins of Forelia City, disappeared from sight for good.
The hills around him were marvelously green in the morning sunlight, and the grass was wet with dew. There was no wind, and the land was still and quiet, as if it hadn’t elected to wake up yet. Gideon absorbed the surroundings as he walked, and enjoyed the feeling of the wind blowing on his face once it inevitably decided to pick up. Before long he had no choice but to admit to himself that Forelia was beautiful. He had little doubt that it had been a grand place to live before the war.
He continued to take in the sights and sensations of Forelia’s gentle country as he hiked deeper into the wilderness. Before he knew it the sun had gone down, and the stars were coming up as he was bedding down for the night on the leeward side of a gently sloping hill.
As Gideon watched the stars wheel overhead he realized, not for the first time, that he loved being out in the wild. The unaltered land and life of the wilderness was indifferent to human beings, save for a single message: no matter how powerful humans believed themselves to be, they would never bear comparison to the colossal power of nature. The illusions of permanence that civilization organized itself around meant nothing at all to the world’s natural order.
He felt that most things people believed in were simply foolish, but in the wild all things were laid bare before the pressing needs of survival. Left to its own devices, nature stripped away all vanity from the image of death so that it could be taken whole, without human striving diluting its image. It was comforting, somehow, to glimpse death in its purest form, though he didn’t have the faintest clue how to deal with it beyond staving it off. There was no heroism or egotism in the wild, just death’s cycle in its natural, unblemished state.
If only survival was enough.
Gideon laid on his bedroll and watched the stars for a while until he fell asleep. In the morning he picked and ate wild blackberries before he broke camp and set off again. By the end of that day the green hills had flattened out into green plains, and the day after that the sun became noticeably more intense. Within a week, he had left the world of plentiful moisture and fair weather behind and entered the thirsty world of shrubs, cacti, mesas, and omnipresent heat.
The Kahn desert was what Gideon imagined being on the moon was like: an entire world of rock and sand consisting of the same tan and brown colors in all directions. It was a land beaten and brutalized into sameness by the pervasive heat and light coming from the sky. Nothing in the desert could escape the sun’s influence, or its notice. Even the blue sky had a tan tinge to it, and at the end of the day the tinge would give way to yellow, red, and purple colors that twisted through the sky, giving the sun the sendoff it demanded.
Most of the Kahn’s plants clung stoically to what little uncovered sand they could find between the boulders and crags, withering each day beneath the sun’s tremendous might. Only the cacti seemed capable of thriving, living in tight, clustered communities that made Gideon think of little human villages.
The intensity of the Kahn's summer sun only increased with each passing day he traveled, and within a few days the sun had become too intense for safe travel on foot in the daytime. He made the switch to traveling at night, getting sleep in whatever shade he could find during the day before setting off again at twilight when the heat began to die down. It got very cold at night in the desert, but the physical activity of constant walking helped to keep him from freezing.
The heat had a pronounced effect on Gideon's appetite, effectively keeping it suppressed for as long as the sun was up. Despite how it may have seemed, though, food was plentiful in the desert wilderness if one knew how to find it. Every morning before dawn, just before he settled down for sleep, Gideon would search for scorpion dens near his campsite and dig small trap holes in front of them, placing his tin canteen cup and glass containers at the bottom of the holes to trap the hapless critters when they emerged. Tin cups and glass jars were alien concepts to scorpions, and they had no countermeasures against them.
Checking the holes for breakfast became a regular part of his daily routine, and more often than not he had caught a few scorpions or occasionally some other tiny critter. Whatever was in the holes, be it scorpions, crickets, or even the occasional lizard, it always tasted fine after getting roasted on the campfire, no matter how unpalatable it might have once seemed. Cactus fruit was also plentiful, though he soon got tired of its bland melon flavor, and in some cases the cactus itself was edible once the barbs were cut away.
Water wasn't exactly forthcoming within the deep desert, but there was more of it around then one might expect. Gideon knew in a general sense where the watering holes were along the route, and collecting enough was never a major problem despite the continuous need for it. Boiling water as he got set up for sleep became the last part of his daily routine.
It would have been easy to lose track of time within the lonely monotony of trekking across an unchanging country had it not been for the moon. Luna was Gideon’s only companion as he walked every night across the dark and dehydrated landscape. The Kahn may have been a harsh and turbulent mistress, but Luna was calm and consistent.
Almost two complete lunar cycles passed within the blink of an eye. As always, Gideon marveled at how a long period of time like several months could feel like it had passed so quickly while at the same time the days felt like they would never end. He began to worry that he had missed the tournament, but on the same night his anxiety reached its peak he spotted something gleaming in the moonlight on the horizon ahead of him. He knew from the last time he had been in Kenan that the gleam could only be the statue of Kaan, the hermaphroditic god of the Kenanites, that towered over Kenan’s north gate.
On this night the moon was full, and Gideon was close enough to the city to gauge his remaining distance to it by how well he could see the statue. When he was close enough to see its right hand raised in the Kenanite hand sign of universal knowledge, he knew he’d be inside the city within the hour. Far off to his left he spotted the highway, and several caravans moving along it.
Despite having been somewhat lonesome on the way down, he felt disappointed to see signs of human life. It was the signal that his tranquil moonlight journey was over, and now he had to be on guard.
He diverted slightly to get onto the highway, and after another thirty minutes or so he was standing before Kenan’s north gate. The statue of Kaan seemed massive now, and Gideon could clearly see the statue’s male and female genitalia, along with the slave collar it held in its lowered left hand.
It was about midnight, and as he passed through the gate the tired looking guards on duty watched him pass but offered no challenge. He paid little attention to them as he scanned the street beyond for danger. It was not wise to be out on the streets alone at night in Kenan, nor was it wise to fall asleep without a strong lock on the door.
Kenan was a dusty city that gave an immediate impression of strict organization. Along its wide and well-maintained main thoroughfares, uniformly rectangular warehouses and businesses were packed side by side. Once through the gate, single story stores, stables, and saloons lined the thoroughfare, and their flashy signposts were the first things inside the city that travelers saw. All of the city’s residential buildings were exiled to the side streets that branched off from the thoroughfares, which made them feel like long bazaars stretching through the city. Occasionally the businesses along the thoroughfare were overshadowed by palatial multi story homes on the side streets beyond. The home-palaces towered overhead, intentionally distracting the attention of the pedestrians walking along the thoroughfares.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
At that moment, the street by the gate was empty, much to Gideon’s relief. He walked along the thoroughfare’s sidewalk with a sense of urgency, looking for a suitable place to stay the night before he drew too much attention. Within minutes he approached the only place he could possibly afford lodging at so late in the evening; a horse stable five blocks down from the gate.
The brown-haired stableboy who was seated on a stool by the stable’s tall door greeted Gideon with cheer as he walked up. When he got close enough to get a better look at him in the moonlight, Gideon noticed the young man had a slave collar around his neck, and that his mouth seemed to be twitching strangely at the right corner.
“Kaan’s blessing upon you, sir.”
“...Yeah. I need lodging. Uh…”
The young man’s face fell as Gideon stared at the twitch. “Pay it no heed, sir. My mouth has had a mind of its own since I was a little boy.”
Gideon’s gaze flickered from the young man’s mouth to his eyes. “When is the tournament?”
Now the young man looked surprised, and he let out a high-pitched laugh. “Why, it’s tomorrow morning, sir! You might be the only person in the whole city who doesn't know.”
Cutting it close indeed.
He gestured at the barn door behind the young man. “I’ll pay to sleep in there, if you show me the lock first.”
At that, the stableboy smirked. “Not your first time in Kenan after all, is it? Well, it’ll cost you. My master doesn’t like foreigners, and he’ll beat me if he finds out I sheltered one in his stable. Two denars for my risk. And you leave before dawn.”
Two denars was all Gideon had. “...Fine.”
The stableboy stood and directed Gideon to the lock on the stable door. He grabbed it and inspected every part of it closely, pulling on it to make sure it would only give way to the key or a loud effort. Satisfied within reason, he fished the denars out of his pocket and handed them over. He stood aside as the young man unlocked the door and pulled it open.
Instead of entering the stable, Gideon took a few quick steps towards the young man until he was close enough to smell his breath and glared down at him.
“If I have any unexpected visitors your fucking master is going to be the least of your problems.”
The stableboy's eyes widened, and his mouth began to twitch again as he shot a nervous glance up at the hilt of Gideon’s claymore. He nodded with emphasis. “You’ll be left alone. I swear it.”
Gideon stepped away from the young man and entered the stable, pulling the door closed behind him. Before moving off to find somewhere to bed down, he stood by the door and listened hard to the sounds of the stableboy setting the lock. With a sigh of relief he turned away and headed for the horse stalls, where he soon found an unoccupied stall with a bed of hay resting on the floor inside. He took off his rucksack and dropped it to the floor by the hay, and tossed his bedroll off into the corner. Eagerly, he loosened his claymore's sheath and swung it around to his front.
He laid back on the hay with a contented smile on his face. After two months of sleeping on a thin bedroll, it felt like heaven.
The next thing he was aware of was someone shaking him awake. On instinct, his right hand grasped the hilt of his claymore, ready to yank it out of its sheath until he realized who had woken him.
“Be calm, sir! It’s ten minutes to dawn. We agreed.”
Gideon sat up and glared with heavily lidded eyes at the stableboy. He rubbed his face to push the sleep out of it, then grabbed his rucksack by one of its straps and yanked it closer to him. As he searched through it for what he would need, the stableboy stared at him with open fascination.
“Are you a warrior? Whereabouts are you from?”
He shot him a look that made it clear he wasn’t going to answer either question, but the stableboy was undeterred. “Big men like you always show up around tournament time. Are you going to fight in the melee?”
Gideon stopped what he was doing and stared at him. “Asking armed strangers a lot of personal questions is an easy way to get yourself killed.”
The young man returned Gideon’s stare with a strange intensity. “Are you any good? Do you think you might win?”
There was not much Gideon actually needed from his rucksack for the tournament. He got to his feet with a tired grunt, swinging his sheath around from his front to his back. He strapped it down tight.
“Where is the tournament being held?”
“The arena, where else?”
“You can have my rucksack and bedroll. I don’t need them.”
He watched as the young man’s mouth began to twitch. After a few seconds of indecision he pounced on the rucksack and began to dig through it. Gideon stepped around him and made his way out of the stable. Once the melee was over his travel gear would either be irrelevant or he’d be able to afford better stuff.
When he stepped out onto the sidewalk he saw dawn's first light in the eastern sky over the building tops. Yawning, he scanned the street in both directions before setting off south towards the city center in a hurry.
The Kenanites had built most of their buildings with bricks of a glossy brown material that reflected the blazing desert sun, which helped to keep the interior of their buildings cool during the worst heat of the summer months. It was a good thing, if you happened to be inside, but for anyone who had the misfortune of being outside the gloss made the buildings give off an intense glare, making vision nearly impossible for anyone who didn’t own a pair of sun goggles. Gideon hadn’t been in Kenan in more than a year, but he knew the glare was coming and he felt an urgent need to beat it to the arena.
Kenan had grown outward in all directions from the giant oasis that was the city’s origin point. The king’s palace was there, along with the city’s forum, its most important temples, and the arena. The thoroughfares, laid out in the cardinal directions in strict accordance with Kenanite religion, all flowed into and out of the city center. As Gideon walked south along the north thoroughfare, the saloons and shops became increasingly better decorated and eye-catching. It seemed that competition for customer attention increased the farther one got from the gate.
Almost every third or fourth business along the thoroughfare was a slave market which, Gideon knew, were the true heart and soul of the city. The slave trade was so dominant in Kenan that some businesses seemed to be passing themselves off as combinations of slave market and shop, or slave market and saloon, and occasionally as a combination of all three.
Traders from all around the world came to Kenan to buy slaves. There were many things to hate about Kenan, not least of which was the very real danger of getting kidnapped, but Gideon saw the wholesale trading of people as the worst thing about the city by a mile. The Kenanites did not quite have a monopoly on evil, but he felt the gleeful breeding and selling of human beings as if they were cows or horses was one of the worst things people did to each other.
Even animals don’t treat each other like property.
Ahead on his right, he saw an open air slave market that was already drawing a large crowd. He slowed his pace as he walked past to see what was going on. A long line of Forelian men and women, bald and naked, except for slave collars around their necks, were standing on a stage in front of the crowd. They were being auctioned off one at a time by an immense Kennanite man with a gigantic belly and a double chin. At a loud bark from the man, the light skinned slave girl currently in question began to jump and dance, sparking an appreciative murmur from the crowd.
Gideon’s teeth were grinding as he tore his eyes away from the scene. At the same time, the morning’s first sunbeam struck the nearby buildings. His grimace only deepened as the resulting glare blinded him, and he cast his gaze down onto the sidewalk directly in front of him, squinting hard as he walked.
It wasn’t long after that he reached the city center. Still squinting, he lifted his head to look around and through the glare spotted what he suspected was the arena. He saw what might have been high off-brown walls and a tall metal awning protruding from them. In its shade were dozens of bulky figures loitering about. When he got closer, Gideon discovered the figures were armed men standing in a long line leading up to a flimsy wooden desk. Behind the desk sat a burly Kenanite soldier, who was talking to the man standing at the front of the line. Two young soldiers stood behind the desk soldier at his flanks, gripping the handles of their sheathed sabers tightly, as if they were eager to whip them out and sign up as combatants themselves.
To everyone’s surprise, the man at the front of the line shouted something and stormed off, snapping the rest of the line out of its bored stupor. All eyes were on the burly desk soldier as he lifted himself to his feet with a scowl.
“If you have no combat experience then fuck off! Nobody wants to see clumsy foreigners trying to kill each other today, we can see that here every other day of the week. Go on, get lost!”
An angry muttering went up as over half the line walked away. Gideon joined the line at the end after it had finished contracting.
For the next twenty minutes, he waited in line as the desk soldier conducted short interviews with the hopefuls ahead of him. He turned most away, but a few he sent on to the arena’s entrance behind him.
When it was Gideon’s turn he stepped forward and watched as the soldier shifted around a stack of forms. He hunched over it and spoke to Gideon as he began filling out the top page.
“Name?”
“Gideon.”
The soldier shook his head as he continued scribbling on the form. Once he was done with the page he leaned back with an irritated sigh and looked Gideon over. His expression seemed to say: what do you amount to, anyway?
“So. Why should I send you in?”
“I was a mercenary. A Singing Blade.”
The soldier thought for a second. “Singing Blades. I’ve heard of them. They were fighting for us, right?”
Gideon nodded.
“So why aren’t you with them?”
He sounded impatient. “They don't exist anymore. Most of us died in Forelia two months ago.”
The soldier frowned. “Hm. So you come here? Why not join up with someone else?”
“What’s it to you, motherfucker? Hurry up and send me in.”
“Relax, hero. How many men have you killed?”
At first Gideon was taken off guard, but his expression quickly changed to an icy glare. “Who’s to say?”
The soldier laughed as if he'd just been told a joke. “More than a few, then. So what about the boon?”
“What?”
“The boon, dipshit. You get twenty-five hundred denars and a boon from the king if you win. It’s like a favor with no strings attached. What are you going to ask him for?”
Gideon looked up as he thought about it. “...More money.”
The soldier pushed the form he’d been filling out across the desk. “Sign.”
He snatched the soldier’s quill out of his hand and scrawled out his signature. Once it was done he stepped around the table and entered the arena without looking back.