The eyes of your enemy

On Varion’s wedding day, three marble goddesses should attend the ceremony. He should display his heart in a temple garlanded with roses and lilies, warmed by a dozen hearth fires that breathed their fumes into a clear sky. But instead of hearing cheering people, as he conjoined with his betrothed, he contained his tongue, prone to affront. His lungs did not fill with vows, but with sandy air. His lips did not find his woman; he tasted salt and sweat. He fought back tears and an enormous lump in his throat.

He swallowed, bile fighting in his stomach. Strife was ingrained inside of him, his elements at odds. And it was all the same cause. His ambition to leave behind his status of a vagrant and become a legal citizen so he could marry the woman of his choice and rid himself of his sobriquet. Varion had failed.

Ariella was gone for him. In her stead, a phalanx of Ashlandic hoplites lingered before him like a pack of wolves hungry and desperate for the kill. Beneath the distant sky the shade tilted back on a house.

The hooded man squatted on one of the thatched roofs in a neighborhood of ramshackle huts that was slightly higher than its ugly cousins, and nobody seemed to bother. Varion couldn’t stop to survey the blue hood, the black leather pants, and tight boots, which bore such a resemblance to certain depictions he’d seen. The tug of familiarity that had initially drawn Varion’s view from the present danger toward the figure was slight, barely existing. Still, it had haunted him enough to give in. In return, the hooded man’s view appeared to be focused not just on the grueling scenery but precisely on the convict.

It was quite a spectacle that he was witnessing.

“This is the trial of the metic Varion,” declared prosecutor Maron under the midday sky, an assembled company, beasts of steel and leather, at his back and a tribunal of magistrates at his side. The town’s walls followed behind, and surpassing them, the Sharp Cliffs rose and cut through the adjacent sky like the giant claw of a monster. But it was the fur of wolves, the circle of soldiers around him, which posed a more life-threatening instance. “You are accused of disturbing the magical environs, you are accused of laying waste to our country, and you are accused of quadruple murder. Each is a crime punishable by death. How do you plead, Metic?”

The prosecutor left enough of a break to emphasize Varion’s status as a vagrant. The liverish aftertaste that came with every reduction of his persona would have usually lit up his moods, but Varion was distracted and famished. They had carried him away from the topmost claw of the mountain. They had imprisoned and starved him for days until they had decided to thrust him before soldiers, villagers and magistrates, all eager for dirty gossip and a show. He hardly remembered any of it, his skin looked feverish, and he had a pounding headache.

He took this last glance for himself and stared again at the hooded man. Watching a person squat on a roof as if this were a play somehow reassured him that the pain striking his heart and lounging in his intestines was not his ultimate fate. There had to be a way out.

Villagers, that scattered between pockets of soldiers, reviled him, whereas the white-cloaked magistrates in the vanguard considered punishment for the stray without the intricacies of a trial. The people who were supposed to be his unit–his shield brothers and sisters–scattered aside and honored him with their silence. All their faces were like toxic gas to him. It was like rehashing the air from his lungs to his trachea and biting the dust.

But he believed in the human state. It was not like in a monarchy or worse, a tyranny plagued by the whim of an absolutistic ruler, where he could not rely on law. Here, the law was the absolute, no matter what the prosecutor thought. It would not fail him.

“You have nothing to say for yourself?” Maron’s blank arms sculpted thickly, packed with muscle like the typical Ashlandic warriors, and he bowed on his stool to press breath from his lungs. Where a grey cloak hung from his shoulder pads in a frayed fashion, just like his bits of scrubby hair, it shook as a maniacal laughter escaped him. A long scar defined his forehead wrinkles–a mage’s gift–and even that went into shaking. “Now we see what happens when we grant outsiders a chance to rise. Honored by the chance to speak to rightful subjects of the state, your silence condemns you, Metic.”

“You have no proof.” Bad strategy, he urged himself and opted for another path. As if this boob would let a simple thing as proof come under his way. File for a delay. It would be better to have any solicitor from the city, who actually understood the norm, treat his case than this provincial bureaucrat. “May I remind you that it was you,” Varion flung his hand across the tribunal and realized a few villagers and soldiers flinching back at the gesture, “who sent me into the woods?”

Guards, villagers, and the officials bickered like a pack of hyenas. Prosecutor Maron shouted, “To survive! Not to kill our warriors-in-training who were also passing the ordeal.”

“I couldn’t have killed them as I do not command fire.”

“You do!” repeated Maron. “All mages think they can lie and get away with it. Not here, not in this state.” He drummed his finger on wood.

Meanwhile, Varion’s mind went to work. It was panic, angst, solution and analysis that fueled his thoughts. He asked himself repeatedly how to dispel the doubts, how to clear his name or if he could not achieve that, how to leave unharmed. He would figure things out with Ariella then. Step by step. First, he needed a shot at survival. “What am I then? Mage, metic or madman? Your accusations are taking on ridiculous measures, lawman.”

Another drool of savagery went through the crowd. The barks of hanging turned into commands of gouging out his eyes and cutting out his tongue. The people hassled him. Kept in check by the spears and shields of the hoplite force, they demanded his execution.

The prosecutor pounded his fist on the table to keep the people from raging and resumed only once they had settled. “You are all of those things. A metic for failure of proper breeding, a mage for the color in your face and a madman and criminal, for you butchered a beast, lighting what is ours aflame, and forgot to veil the evidence listed in your face.”

The soldiers muttered curses, but he didn’t let them distract him. “In your first part, you condemn me a metic–a stray, when we know for a fact that mages do not grow up on streets but in palaces. In another sentence, you brand me mage, when we know one must be born with the curse. Your accusations are filled with demerits. Left and right I gape at its holes. I am Ashlandic!”

The villagers, unbothered by the insights of a formal education, didn’t acknowledge the workings of theurgy. They didn’t know the ancient craft and how mages used it to subdue the world. They had no idea that, although an art form, some things weren’t feasible even with magic and as ignorance was always one of the great gate openers to fear, they charged him guilty, bleating their opinions as if they were of substance.

At the very least, the white cloaked magistrates, followed by the hoplites of Inaea, who were the true judges of this trial, appeared to be estimating the value behind Varion’s reasoning.

“Word twister,” reciprocated Maron. “We should’ve known that the man who enticed the archon and his daughter uses foul tricks. The fact remains that you marched into the woods, soon thereafter a fire swallowed a third of the ancient sylvan and killed four sisters and brothers. And somehow you left without a scratch!”

“Strangle him!”

“Better still, torch him!” yelled a villager, pushing himself in front of the barriers of wood.

Varion did not kindle their panic any further by responding to their threats. If Maron would mask his prosecution in menace, he would clad his explanation in serenity. He pursued the magistrates, maintained on the fires, the infinite heat, and the beast which had haunted him. In his narration, he remained precise without overfeeding them with details so he could retain room for movement at all times.

“If what you’re saying is true, then why do I see our enemy written in your face?”

“My eyes have changed, aye,” said Varion, “but it is you who imposes disparity. I am the same man who entered the forest. Torching and killing, I committed not. Give me back my fledgling and let me leave with the things I’m wearing. Ashrain is the only city able to condemn me.” He needed to get her back. His animal, his chicken, was too pristine to survive alone.

The way Maron bowed over his table terrified Varion. It was not because he lived in fear of the man but because he saw the same ambition sparkle in his gaze that fueled Varion to commit follies. To Maron, this play was more than a trial. It was his ticket into higher tiers, into a city that ruled with economic and militaristic faculty over a network of civilization mundane. The strongest polis humans had ever built for themselves: Ashrain.

“Do you believe us stupid? We know exactly of the gifts of the Xeldar! The moment we leave you out of sight, you will disappear and ridicule our grace. No!” He drummed on the table. “I will have you confess right here of what you did.”

A dozen yards to the right, the man on the roof seemed intrigued if not amused. He slung his arms over his knees and teetered on his heels back and forth. Then Varion could’ve sworn that the hooded man made an exultant gesture from afar, and light erupted from his fist. The Ashlander kneaded his eyes, skeptical of what he’d just witnessed. His head still hurt.

The magistrates leaned over. They seemed to be heading in Varion’s favor and ordered more time to clear the evidence, to inspect the carcass of the large lizard and to connect the death of such a beast to the escape of a lonesome warrior. Maron did not like it.

“Fine,” he said. “One last thing, though.” He returned to the convict with that wolfish grin that caused more furor in his head as if to say, I know what happened, even if you don’t.

A gust of wind carried some of the haze that erupted from a giant column of smoke into the hamlet and repeatedly shaded it from the sun. As it settled, the prosecutor snarled, “Show us your back.”

“W-why would I?” stammered Varion. His stomach twisted, and he remembered fire so dark a bat would call it home dashing him, clearing every evidence of his past and forcing ash on his pores so that he had looked as pale as a northerner. Only the chicken, shriveled and featherless, had posed a more destitute appearance.

The prosecutor swung his hand, confident of victory. “Because everyone is privy of the upbringings of a true Inaeid. Show us your back!”

He shook his head, took a step back. Maron went past the table, but a female magistrate stepped forth as well, furrowing her brow. “You must know the gifts of Inaea, Goddess of Victorious Battle, don’t you?”

“Every Inaeid does,” Varion answered as if ordered to. “They are stark, permanent, and the tools through which boys are forged into men and girls welded into women.”

She nodded. “Then do as the prosecutor commands.”

“This… is uncanny.”

“Warrior, what do we endure!”

Her command was steady, causing something in him to awaken, pushing itself before all that built up motion in his head. The furor was no longer troublesome as instilled discipline overrode him. He lifted his chin and aligned his spine.

“Pain,” he recited.

“And how do we endure it?”

“Succinct.”

“Then. Show. Us. Your. Back.”

He lifted his shirt above his head, and everyone, including the magistrates, recoiled.

There was just light brown skin covering flesh and bones. The ash had been scrubbed off, but it had robbed him of his past. It was appalling. Not a single scar was to be detected on his thin appearance.

Maron was gloating. His palm penetrated the table with success, for those who had started to doubt the prosecutor were now amongst the loudest voices that insisted on the convict’s damnation. Like callused hammers of punishment, he rested his knuckles on the wood. “What did I tell you? Soft as one of them,” he spat.

“That is a palace-boy, aye,” said a soldier.

“He’s prettier than the whores of our brothel!”

The crowd rebelled with laughter.

Whereas the hoplites, wearing red bristle helmets, steel cuirass, silver bracelets, and leg armor, locked spears on their former member, the regular infantrymen kept watch over the villagers, who were beginning to mirror the smoldering haze that protruded from their oldest boscage. Planks of wood that functioned as weak pretenders to barriers crackled under the growing pressure of the villagers. Soldiers raising steel shields stepped in between, commanding them about, their barks uncompromising.

The well-heeled officials stuck their heads back together around Maron’s table. While they conferred their next steps, Varion put his shirt back on, ashamed.

He sought a new way as he had not given up yet. A ring of soldiers surrounded him, then came the villagers, then the barracks and poles. Even if he could surmount these obstacles, and he had no clue how, there still were the Sharp Cliffs, the home of a feathered monstrosity. Most importantly, he had to fetch the anchor that kept him sane in the midst of this chaos, the reason he had not broken loose and fled when they had imprisoned him. He needed his chicken.

Searching for helpful ideas, any idea, he followed the inner tug and scanned the roofs again. The hooded man had disappeared as if he, too, had been insulted by the smoothness of Varion’s skin. Perhaps the hooded man had been an imagination, a manifestation of company in a lost cause. The woods, the fire, the eagle screech trumping a bear’s roar, how could one person alone attract that much bad grace?

The open skies meshed with the stone claws of the mountains, his last taste at freedom.

“Before we declare our decision–Silence!” Maron pounded his fist again on the podium which must’ve been built with the last robust timber this place had to offer. “Any heresies left, Metic?”

Think, think, think! Pleading for mercy? No, he was certainly not the type for that. Asking forgiveness? He might as well admit to everything at last. The more he thought the more hamstrung he was left. Varion gnashed his teeth.

“Very well,” the judge resumed. “You may not be guilty of murder, as we cannot proof a motive, but you did torch a forest–where your face is proof enough. This then resulted in the death of four peers. We strip you of all accomplishments and property, we expel you from the Inaeid order. Your bond with the archon’s daughter is hereby lifted. You are evicted and excluded from our society. Additionally, for tricking us fifteen consecutive years into believing you are of human origin, I sentence you to a life in the mines, bound by shackles of holy marble.” He crammed out white handcuffs with golden intarsia and aligned his subsidiaries. Flashing in the sun with each step the prosecutor took, small prisms embroidered the inside of the shackles that were meant to flay his joints.

Varion took a step back. Soldiers came closer. What’s happening? His heart faltered and he started sweating. The twist in his stomach resolved only to boil the blood in his veins. His throat bobbed and his temples palpitated. Adrenaline rushed; he saw a flash of sparks dance through the air. Would he lose consciousness now? “You show me instruments of the human kings, the wickedness of their methods? I demand–”

“Demand!” Maron blurted and reached for him. “You have lost all claims, Metic. Your only demand is our judgement.”

The female magistrate interceded but it was of no avail.

Four hoplites, full-fledged citizens and warriors of Inaea neared him down. The red cloaks which hung from their shoulder pads wafted in their haste as they closed in on him. He felt like he was squeezed between a canyon about to swallow him.

“If there is any dignity left in you, you will disgrace us no further.”

Silent submission? Execution was sweeter! He would not work his life as a prisoner. This was the last drop to burst the fully crammed barrel of his temper. Condemning him, they should, and he would revolt!

The soldiers grabbed him.

He shouted, raged against the superiors, and refused the hoplites’ clasp, his voice that of a roaring Isengrim. “I am disgracing you? This is the first among the human states. A state of law. And you are condemning me to a life in the mines?” He clamored to the magistrates. “You’re a fucking disappointment!” Varion pointed his finger at them and the villagers flinched again. He decided to lie then. “Don’t come closer or I’ll leash you!”

The guards laughed about the crude threat, for every Inaeid knew theurgy–or magic as the commoners called it–did not work that way. Varion’s tongue lost whatever caution was left, and as he discovered a whole new vocabulary of revile, four arms grabbed him from behind. A third pressed a bundle of cloth inside his dirty mouth that squashed his tongue. He tried coughing it out or biting the guard, but the only result was that he pushed the fabric deeper. Varion stirred his spine like a dwindling snake, cursing in his thoughts while his saliva plugged the textile, but the guards’ grip was firm.

A source of sentience, different to his mind and yet located at his brow, went berserk. He felt it rail as blasts so swart no moth would seek comfort in it. He pushed himself free, the guards stumbling. They punched his midriff and forced him on his knees. Varion rose and rammed his shoulder into a guard to the left. Striking armor, he freighted the guard on his back. One of the hoplites kicked the hollow of his knee and thrusted him back on his shins. No kneepads protected Varion, as his armor had burned to ash, so he felt every pebble scratching open his skin. Two more guards kept him down.

They pressed his arms under control, and Maron rose the shackles on his wrists. Just when they were about to riddle his flesh, he stopped. A haze of blue sparks seemed to carry the words and disappeared as quickly as the sound waves. The voice of a man resounded in the rear, hovering above them like a bird. Not one of glee but one of prey.

“You there,” he spoke. Varion could not descry whom he was addressing, as he was prevented from looking back, squinting at whirls of dust. “If I see these instruments of oppression go anywhere near him, I am going to kill you.”