don't fix my smile, life is long enough
we will put this flesh into the ground again
-- freelance whales.
we will put this flesh into the ground again
-- freelance whales.
15 Glade 394, Age of Sundering
There is an old woman who the cook at the crossroads where we regularly stop lets sit near the ovens. She rocks forward and back and forward and back for hours a day, the fine linen provided for her embroidery a shock of white in her lap. Tangled knots and jagged lines of silk thread cover it like a puzzle with ornate stitching littered in with the bad, bright colors clashing without concern for design or an artist’s discerning eye. It looks as if a child had a tantrum with it and no surprise for she holds the needle with arthritic hands. They shake when she tells me of the antique tablecloth tucked away in a cedar chest, one they bring out for only the fanciest of fais do-do. It will steal the breath right out of you with its beauty, she once told me, voice thin with breath. The tablecloth was embroidered by the master seamstress she once was and only sometimes recalls.
I am told that she is witless, all her memory fled with the pigment in her hair and the blush of her youth; and yet when I speak to her, she smiles a knowing, toothless smile at me as if she has seen me before. As if she knows me, and only me, the solitary through line of her forgotten centuries.
She certainly has seen me. I used to steal through the kitchens of her keep leagues to the rising thrice a season when foul weather and dread mists drove us out from beneath the broken skies to seek sanctuary in the strongholds. That was in earlier hours of the Age of Sundering, when crystal and scorched black sand still spilled with me from bed whenever a nightmare woke me from it in a cold sweat. The gods knew I had already survived more than a few waking horrors when our insurrection slammed into the overwhelming folly that was the Godspire, when Time tossed me into the maelstrom and I still imagined that it was a solitary event, a one time tearing motivated by that infernal Clock. Before I could even imagine that Time would take me again, and again. Forward and back.
The still huddling survivors of the keep would welcome us readily as the sun – any sun – for the blood in our wrists and strength in our bones. After all we were always been willing to shed steel in defense of those who sheltered us. I would borrow the day old bread too broken for trenchers from Clio’s mother and blow puffs of carefully horded flour at her like smoke until she shrieked with laughter and shooed me out the door. Cheeks flushed. Dark eyes slanting with promise. Yet now my Clio is this honored crone, one who cannot recall so much as where she placed her shawl an hour ago, let alone remember the name of a hopeless wanderer like myself. I had been a ghost for too long, vanished without warning in the wolves hour of a summer storm that blew all of the remaining apples out of their trees and Clio met her husband that winter when he smiled at her over a steaming mug of cider. That husband, now long laid to rest, was remembered far more by Clio than I. Yet here I was, a ghost come crawling back from the fields of her youth. When I sit with her now, watching as she rocks, telling her all of the old tales she used to know so that might fall in love with them all over again, the both of us go forward and back – Clio to anchor her aged body, and I in my mind, rocking again and again in ceaseless motion with no discernable destination.
Memory is what allows me to say here, here is where I was foolish and this, this is when I was free. There was I naive and over here I was proud as my people raised me to be. There was that time when I was clever and another when I was silly and there, there in the back hiding behind the others, is where I met the terror that changed all of my days.
Clio rocked forward and I rocked back – she would need more room to absorb my stories, I recalled, as she never wanted to be crowded. And my tales tended to be too dense with the irrevocable and strung all together with prayer knots and bits of blood and bile and bone. I determined I would find her a more promising one.
* * *
It was said the esdraelon-mémère had not slept since the dawn of the Clockwork threat. Tirelessly, she worked to save as many of the people as possible from all of the ill consequence of a devouring conquest. Her efforts shifted seamlessly and as the dead piled in the north she grew only taller, stronger, and capable of emanating more and more comfort and reassurance. It was not for lack of trying on her part or that of the court of princes that Sol’Valen continued to shudder, swamped with hot disaster and its rebellious consequences, nor for the lack of solid and in touch leadership. But the darkness just grew deeper.
When it became obvious that they could not stop the tide, the scion of Esdraelon turned the bulk of her efforts towards alternative solutions. They ranged from consolidation to migration and everything in between. Countless letters were written by her to political leaders and leaders of powerful, non governing bodies, eloquently stating the case and seeking aid. No one stood up. Nobody opened their or held out their hand without the other lying in wait, reading to reap and rape and profit from the proud elves inevitable fall.
Still, they struggled. Sol’Valen was not giving up. They were a collection of souls largely accustomed to insurmountable odds, considering Ilixidor’s great folly, and they had a person at their front who provided an example of refusal and faith. Despair sprouted all the same, impossible to avoid, and for weeks Camille had been little seen. She was always going somewhere or coming back from another. She was pacing the rooftop gardens or digging trenches for the dead alongside the lowliest of her servants, unafraid of losing status or dignity. After all, all of her nobility came from actions taken and not a drop of it from her blood or otherwise handed to her by another. When she was not in the front lines she was bent over her desk or locked into conference with this person or sometimes queer strangers. She kept her own counsel, tongue locked behind her teeth, and let the less competent courtiers scream at each other as she walked out and let the high strung court wonder if the time had come that even the nearly noble esdraelon-mémère, first made infamous as the mercenary putain who had once crawled across glass for a single piece of gold, had given up. Sol’Valen was on the brink of chaos, the storm of the approaching empire about to tip over the crest of efforts and hope into a dark inevitability. It held the sort of momentum not even the proud hytori princes could hold back for that they were held beloved and feared by worshipful masses.
Camille had her closest advisors and most necessary friends of the court summoned. It was late at night, though not beyond reasoning, and the gentle glow of lanterns had led them to Camille’s fortress in the forests. The mossy parlor was where they would find her, pacing in front of the gold flecked marble of a fireplace carved from the hollow of a mighty sequoia tree, barefoot and wearing riding leathers that slung low on the swell of her hips and a comfortably worn chemise. Thick rugs scattered and held down by low divans. the balcony doors were closed to the cool night air and there was whiskey and wine on the sideboard, guests welcomed to it with an absent gesture. She herself was not drinking. A large table was in the far corner of the parlor and looked very much like a secondary office, though Camille certainly made excuses that she had no need of an office, for all the gaming halls in the world were her domain. Nevertheless, this smaller, miniature version was strewn with books and maps, the writings of a determined women who, when broken, had risen so very much stronger than ever before. It was Camille’s son, of course, who would spark the flames of rebellion with his words in ink within a few hundred years. It was proof that the work of this would follow the esdraelon-mémère everywhere, even into the grave, the weight of her responsibility to save the people she had convinced to fight themselves into better standing amidst their own kind haunting her.
Tacked to the wall adjacent to the hearth and so well lit up by the flames was a great and detailed map of Sol’Valen. All over it were notations and numbers, a copy of the great strategies of their royal ruler. Deep blue ink circled the city of Silfarnor fiercely and, alongside it was penned: Approx.60%.
When the last of Camille’s inner circle slunk in and found a seat, she spun about on her toes to face them and closed the little book in her hands sharply. Dark and gold eyes found them, face by face, the gears of her strange and ambitious brain turning visibly. In a sleeveless, fitted chemise, the ink of all her former trials was bare to see. She usually wore long sleeves as she had been advised to long, long ago by those who understood the power of mysteries and compulsion surrounding ambitious upstarts. Not tonight. There nearly half a dozen, probably more, that started at her shoulders and slid down either bicep before eventually they stopped at her elbows or just past. There was no singular artist, no overarching design. Some of it was rough and others beautiful, depending wholly on the proclivities of the former master whose sigil it was. Or, rather, had been. Few had had as many markings as she. Troublemaker. Upstart. Punished and punished and sold and punished over and over and yet she never stopped. She kept on, shoving forward, oft times crawling, until the cold day her sister whom she had house-hopped to hunt was sold out and she was forced to crawl over the corpse of her lover. The last person to have really known Cammilei at all, it was said.
Ancient history. Yet there it was, writ forever into her skin, a broken, disgustingly beautiful series of all those who had tried to make her theirs. Maybe it was clear now that this was not a woman who had ever, really been owned. Not, at least, until tonight, when the claim of her people had cinched her tight.
Silence settled and stretched until Camille nodded to herself and took a deep breath. The book lowered, dangling from one hand and she made her announcement in clear, certain terms. "I have found a way out."
Relief and disbelief were both palpable, shown in sideways looks and expelled breaths. Before anyone could voice their questions, Camille opened a hand in a quick, low cut to silence them.
"I have found a way out." The repetition made it at once more real, but also boded the shadows behind it. "But I need you to agree to it. To throw in with it and to not look back. I need you, all of you, behind me in this. Else I fear it cannot be done."
She whacked the book lightly against her open palm. She remained standing. That was not unlike her. She, like her son, was a prowler by nature, hard to pin down, to keep down. To hold. She watched them, frowning thoughtfully.
"If we go the route our court is leaning, that is to war, then many of us will die. Most of us will die. The casualties of our armies will be unprecedented. We will not win. We will give up almost all of our land to mass grave sites and starvation. Those of us lucky enough to flee will have left behind nearly everything we know. We will be hated. We will not be welcome. We will be the enemy occupiers until we can blend with them enough to be but just one people again. And that is only if we can stay alive long enough to assure our ultimate rising." A beat. “And I highly dout we will.”
Finally, she smiled and flung an arm toward the map of Sol’Valen. "So with that exciting thought, allow me to introduce to you your new home – the Clockwork Empire." She paced toward it, leaving the book behind on a little table. "You’re very familiar. Land of plenty. Bread basket and teeming shores. Leagues of green and iron rich mountain ranges. They hate us." A shrug spilled through her shoulders. Now and again she pointed to some number or statistic on the map, a route here and an idea there to illustrate her words. "They are lysanrin. So they have good enough reason to hate us, of course, and I don’t intend to give them even more. Here's how."
Thick stacks of papers were passed around, detailing all manner of strategies and policies and plans. She talked for an hour, maybe two, ceaseless and brilliant and fervent. She showed them all of the court’s research and her own consultation with the brightest, sharpest minds of their people and of others too whom she had managed to compel to consult with her. War generals. Agriculture experts. Judiciaries and tradesmen, historians and diplomats, pirates and courtiers. In the end she had made what amounted to an instruction manual on how wage a defensive war against a massive empire. How to do it, how to maybe even win it, and how they absolutely had to stop it from happening at all. Their job, Camille’s aim, was not to continue to fend off the Clockwork Empire. Nor to beat them. She was determined to rescue the heart Sol’Valen – the people – by convincing the most prideful creatures of the elven court to kneel.