Returnings




We won.
Even when all thought our situation was hopeless, we won.

They had our fortress surrounded. The sweat of their men and horses wafted over our gray walls in counterpoint to the angry calls of hateful voices, and all we could see, when we dared lift our eyes above the sheltering stone, was the rolling sea of a thousand thousand men, black shapes despoiling our beloved land, consuming our farms and orchards and livestock.

But we had a weapon they never expected, and we were plotting its use even as they began to batter at our gate, firming our resolve even as they called dark promises at us of what lay in store after the fall of our stronghold. Our priests and leaders agreed, and the plan grew in the heart of each and every one of us, as if it were a sunflower or some other fast-growing, hearty, nourishing, weed. We would lose the fortress, lose our names, but we would survive. Our people, our nation, would survive. And, eventually, we would win.

Thus it was that we walked out to the very walls of our besieged home, each of us carrying all that the enemy had coveted. The best of our jewels we cast to them from the parapets; the most beautiful of our belongings we offered them with courtesy and open hearts. They howled in angry response, cheated of the opportunity to take and despoil. We smiled warmly into their anger, and offered more--when they ripped apart our most treasured possessions, we fought away our tears and tossed jeweled daggers to them with the suggestion that, if such activity pleased them, they might welcome the gift. The roar became deafening, as our Queen herself appeared. Smiling as broadly as if the event were only yet another regal reception, she lifted her crown from amid her lovely tangle of auburn curls, and lowered it to them with all the grace she had exhibited since her very birth.

They were cheated, cheated of the freedom to take what we had given freely, cheated of the chance to loot and pillage and find among the charred remains of our lives some bauble or trinket of great worth; we had shown them that these things were only things, and robbed them instead of what they had never thought could be taken. It was this outrage that caused them to call with renewed hatred for our blood, vulgarly claiming the right to our women, promising that we would come to know humiliation and great pain.

But of this, too, we cheated them, for the lovely jeweled daggers we had given them were not the only weapons we had. And, in fact, we had a resource in our unity and love that they did not, a weapon of resolve and patience that could never be used by such as they. They surrounded our stronghold, were so certain we could not escape, and would never have believed we had the means to evacuate so close at hand. But leave our stronghold we did, together, turning the last of our daggers upon ourselves and fleeing even the fortresses of our own flesh, offering them the meaningless ruby drops of our blood that they had claimed to crave, and knew now were only symbols to them of our souls. But, our souls, our selves, we preserved, and stayed together as we slipped lightly through their frustrated, useless graspings.

We fled together, abandoning to them the meaningless rubble of stones and gold and jewels they had given so much to win, knowing that we would be reborn among our own people, grow strong again in the embrace of our villages, even as the enemy festered on its own greed and pride. Together we suckled and flexed new muscles and tested the agility of new tongues, while, without our presence to fight, their unity withered, and they fell into the trap of politics and suspicion and hatred that has always been their legacy.

As we grew again among the love and strength of our people, we learned that those others had not even accepted the gift of our rubble, had in ignorance decided that our selves still haunted its ruin, that our escape had in some way tainted all we had touched and made it dangerous, unknowable. Like animals they were frightened, and stayed away; like animals they knew only what they could see, and were uncomfortable when they could sense any purpose beyond the tangible. But we knew that nobility is not a matter of crowns and jewels, but a thing of the soul, and would not be destroyed so easily as flesh or stone. And so we regained ourselves among the common people of our land, nourished ourselves with the simple fare of community and common purpose. Our priests had worked their duties well before we fled, and, slowly, we began to remember, and welcome each return as it was recognized, and to plan again.

They thought it was simply the passing of time that began to erase the fear from the heart and stomach of the hungry common man, that the foraging of the ignorant peasant among the leavings of the accursed dead would lead to his destruction. But they were wrong, for the common man who began to dig among the rubble of the past was only reclaiming what was his, and the simple village wife who found a glimmering jewel smiled quietly, and pressed it to her bosom, where it rested as naturally as her beating heart.







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