I remember my name being marked and marred. My character was sullied, and they tried to try me for a crazy in front of the military psychologist, and the Military Police. Kept me in a small secluded box as I pushed against their claims. I fought them tooth and nail on that, and 'I'm not crazy.' I'd calmly get those words by.
Maliciously drove me to work hard in the night, whilst everyone else slept. Choked on my words whenever I was berated out-of-line. Specks of meat in my porridge, I protested my vegetarianism. I poured out little contents of my stomach for I ate little. The beatings continued in the back of the piss-house.
I began to feel little-to-nothing throughout my days at the bootcamp, and no one aided me in my rising from my foetal position. I could hear the gutter-rats squeak, but they squeaked nonchalantly.
Tomorrow I'd be officially discharged for being a Conscientious Objector whose crazy. They've already dragged me and my name in the dirt and mud. There was nothing else for a nobody like me, at least am not gonna be on the record, although this does slim my chances, especially coming from a military family.
'A military family of cowards and crazies training German Shepherds to gore necks instead of herding sheep...'
I think I'll try out that old job out east, maybe try and get my name changed and work as a First Responder or a Firefighter outback. At least in the far reaches of the North I can still save grace. Vegetables, fruits and water, as well as salted water, would be the diet of people like me who were to neglect meat and wine to save money.
Go to college and further my pursuits in Philology, and all things to do with Etymology as the root, when science is in its infancy, and done through religious means by religious scholars.
The lecturer would say, when we came to the Arabians first, we believe in historical context, we abandoned our religion to raise-up Arithmetic and Cosmology, in order to gain a better understanding of our very own religion's heuristics.
He'd continue on, saying we'd experimented with the effects of the two opposing food sources, the religious scholars would've concluded that vegetarianism has good side-effects long-term over a carnivorous diet, and then place me in that same diet conditioning me to civilised torture.
Thus, most of my kind were accustomed to savoury food found, food which were clear and sweet, to be unpalatable. Such a non-luxurious lifestyle is to remind the people that they were once slaves and that they could be slaves again. To remind them that they were redeemed.
The salted-water and the bitter mashed roots represented the tears from the toils whilst under the oppression. Tears which were bitter, in order to simulate their ancestors' suffering.
Even the bread which was broken was made to remind them of how better of they were now. Yet it still makes the academic ponder over as to why the word to describe the bread broken was named in Greek.
Even so, as former slaves they still had grieved for their oppressors, even if the Pharaoh had a cold and hardened heart, they still grieved for them. Grieved for them even though the Pharaoh's first-born son was murdered.
Inasmuch as over a millennia, we still ask the question question: of as to what-if our ancestors were integrated, and their traditions ingrained so deeply into the hearts of Romans in a dissolving Roman Empire?
When we had sheltered Roman citizens as their world was collapsing, and had given the Roman super-powers the crutches and shoulders to found the new world order. As to how deeply ingrained were our traditions and customs in the times of the Spanish Empire's rise?
What-of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish Inquisitions? What-of the now dissolved Roman Empire?
Are our ancestors' powers that be in the Roman Empire found itself now in the Spanish Empire?
These were the questions I asked myself in my dreams, as I lied awake suffering from my wounds and from my trauma. After the beatings in the back of the piss-house. When I could hear the gutter-rats squeak, but they squeaked nonchalantly, and now⸻⸻⸻
I could hear the bashing of flesh behind the red and yellow tents. The men had taken the women who had blotted their lips. I stood up from the pale bench and began my ascent into the sliver of out-pouring coats.
Would cast aside my humanity just for the simple act of attaining peace-of-mind, if it were not for the sobbing and shouting and the screaming, I'd have let it be.
I took out a limp blackjack from underneath the shadows of my coat, and began approaching the corner slowly, and methodically. I could hear a cold snap as the leather hit her back. I raised to ready my blackjack.
You would ask me. No. You Should Ask Me: Why Do This? Why incapacitate the perpetrators? And still enable them to continue with these heinous acts?
It's simple. I am not the system, and I cannot be the one to lay the law into them. I have no right to take the life of the two villains. And also, I cannot justify to the victims, the women who blotted their lips, that all men are alike, and that they should not store any good in each and every man.
Therefore, as an able-bodied and any enabling civilian would do, is to enable these women the means to enforce their own, how distorted or perturbed their outlook may be right now, the justice they all deserve. Even in the ever-equalising cover of darkness I still judge.
The blackjack found the napes and the now concave domes of the two soldiers, and I stood tall amongst all their stretching shadows. All of them were in foetal positions, while I still stood tall. I did not lower myself to help the women, all I could think of now was how to elegantly drag the two bodies across the floor and into the light of the brutalists' world.
As the two soldiers' bodies were brought into the sunsetting caress of the world, and as to the two women in their sorry sights crutched against the brick inlays, made us bandits to the section of Inland-Imperials wondering as to what the commotion was about.
I noticed the two heads of Military Police hover behind. Their surveying eyes stopped, and the glaze and the glint, and shine in their eyes died as they saw my face. All I could say was, sorry, I didn't mean for any of this to happen. It was just causality compelling me.
The Military Police, the veteran and his subservient lieutenant observed me nerved. They now judged my choice here-on-after, and therefore I had already pre-occupied myself in answering all the known questions which follows with these scenarios.
'They gave up their humanity to indulge in their Babylonian ways.' Is what I told the Inland-Imperials. The two Inland-Imperials with their own agendas in enacting justice smiled behind their masks, I would know their eyes squinted in two half-moons' idiot faces. This told me all I needed to know.
The two half-moons' idiot faces snapped the two suspects arms back-in-then-out behind their shoulder blades, and latched their necks into chainlinks, between them a cold, steel bar. As for the women who blotted their lips, they were escorted back home by cavaliers patrolling the area. All in their own parade in a parade of many in this labyrinth city.
'We would like you to come with us.'
I had just begin taking strides to remove myself from the scene, but I guess my showing of myself failed me, and now I was held up in a small interior the size of a college astro-turf.
'You broke a bit too fast back there. Any reason a Home Guard is walking around in tight pants out here. Getting a hard-on for doing our jobs for us?' Veteran's eyes didn't break away, so I had assumed he knew little of the peculiarity of my actual job.
His young lieutenant called him Jorge and I found this quite amusing, because it's a name I know is common here, special in this case because of the Spanish Empire, and the deeper integration of Spanish culture in Latin-American countries.
Jorge looked at me with eyes brimming with intensity. He knew exactly who I was and what my job entailed.
'Peculiar for a, former, lord captain of the Home Guard to peek his shaved head here at the Steppes of this labyrinth city.
I grinned, unknowingly. I came to understood that my timing, and positioning here would benefit Jorge, his lieutenant and myself.
My job entails many things, smooth sailings with the Military Police wasn't any of that, but there were some salvageable things here and there. Inasmuch as Jorge can tolerate his own kind, he tolerates me because I had done good for his citizens, and he was glad that I still practised civilian defense, and security.
Jorge's lieutenant whose badge read Morand, was a peculiar fellow, he was of average height, had a roustabout face, and had eyes of levelled intensity. Average height of 5 feet and 2 inches. Which was both advantageous and desired among men of this generation. If he was any taller, he'd hurt in the back, and be troubled on horse-back.
I guess the imperfections that define human existence is just one of the many blemishes, and beauty-marks in this ugly country brimming with ugly people, we call: The Inland Empire.
'What brings a former war hero here in the south-eastern hemisphere?' Jorge strokes his moustache, like any man with a charismatic touch, has a nice Hungarian-French appearance to maintain. His lieutenant Morand brought forward two soldiers who were patrolling adjacent of the perpetrators and were giving up good information.
'Those two soldiers...' I struck at the obvious.
'Yeah, those two aren't going to be popular back in the mess hall.' Jorge continued. 'Usually your kind'd have some money back home to fallback to, and usually most live in solitude out in the frontier. So why come here?'
'I haven't a clue…' I raised my head from observing the blemish of the ground, the shine of the moist mounds of mud. 'I just know that I had found someone here, and they offered me nothing to work with.'
'A girl?'
'A girl...And⸻⸻and a guy.'
Jorge laughs, truly it was business his face said. Then he said, that there was no way I'd not find any answers in a city where all roads lead to it. It isn't Rome, he added, but it was more than Rome could ever be.
'I had sent Dante Gabriel a means to get here earlier Capitan. Hope we'd settle on solid ground, and some good news?' Morand came around the corner after chasing after some more witnesses to do good by the good book. He tossed a small pouch towards an oncoming patrolling cavalier, and the cavalier just smiled and waved, and trotted back to his designated post.
'Your people are efficient. Too efficient.' I gestured to how different sections of different departments of his idolised government worked. How they just ebbed and flowed with another.
'I am proud of our government. The Empire's been federating a lot of us, and it's working. Just like the Janissary of old.' He chuckled to himself.
The lieutenant's eyes were drawn to a particular crowd oncoming towards the subjugation party. The two suspects were already separated completely from their victims. His murky eyes watched the crowd begin caressing the edges of the sprawl, the adjacent buildings' silhouettes were making way for the waves of bodies passing another.
'People, like water, just ebb and flow.' Tinsley thought to himself. Looking far yonder the open field, his imaginations shaped the world, and with wide eyes he weighed his decisions upon the game of logistics and fairing.
A cold dark line had been set against the horizon, and none other than his lieutenant understood as to why he had done so, to test the boundaries between borders may-hap? Or was it just because he deemed that whatever would be in the horizon should be of his people's colours?
One time, his lord had asked of him, 'Why are there colours of Kincaspen in my horizon?' And it were a shaky topic that. He wouldn't go against his own lord's wishes, even advising tactics in the form of intimidation would be seen as a sign of aggression, and yet his lord Garrett Graham told him that this shouldn't be a means to debate whether could or shouldn't, rather that this was an order, and if so be it he ran it against the Lord of Pained-Madness it'd be an edict.
'From the kettle, onto the coil.' The lieutenant understood and brought forth his favoured division. The directive was a horizon's length, the last two soldiers against the two opposing ridges of the valley before the key must have their soldiers literally touching the cold stone aggregates.
This may be an odd order to ask, any military company, private or a national fanatic's, must indulge their heads into the pools of the any man's desires who lords over lands. Meaning to give up all things that tonally split you to decidedly separate what is sound in order to desire what is unsound.
He remembered a lot of things from before the war. He remembers a lot of things before the break of dawn, and the hell ensued thereinafter. Inasmuch as a day could offer, the entire battalion set against the horizon were wiped out before first light. 'God…' How awful he tasted blood at the back of his throat. Hatred was too soft a word to describe how a red-line of men were a particular colour set against a bleeding horizon's edge.
Where has my passion gone? The former lieutenant, Tinsley, thought to himself, had I been blinded by the old, cold, pale light? Paraded many strange streets before, long after the world had had fallen before the Lord of Pained-Madness' edicts. Long before when there were three kings set against another and their eyes upon the throne.
'I now see the world in a different light.' Jorge broke the silence to engage in small talk. 'I used to fight with my bare hands. A decade before now I was fighting with a sabre, now…now I just fight against my men's own wishes.'
'Who broke first? The world or us? As the saying goes back home in Anda Liuga.' Tinsley passed his credential details to one of the checkpoint guards as all three were heading back to their posts and their place of rest. Cathro was already waiting in front of the old inn embracing a paper bag.
'The world I'd say, we've persevered all too well as a species. Although general consenus'd say otherwise.' Jorge's eyes fell past the deepness of the looming shadow of the checkpoint's wall.
'And none-the-wiser.' Tinsley added. Tinsley greeted Cathro before the revolving door, being a nuisance to oncoming traffic. Cathro shoved the paper bag into Tinsley's chest, and told him, look inside there'll be something of use for later when you meet with the Bactaggard. No glisten of a grin could lift up their spirits. Tinsley knew the contents were from the long mile beach from this afternoon.
'The boat didn't capsize as the maritime initially thought. Boat was found off the coast, breached in a key. Maritime couldn't get any closer because of the coral reef, but I suspect they'll have an airship hover over for surveying the key.' Cathro shoved another item into Tinsley's chest. 'A P052. A 9 millimetre handgun. Standard military issue, favoured by Military Police and Civil Support and Defence.' Wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead, Tinsley held his breath as he grimaced, and pondered.
'God...it's worse than we could imagine…' Both shook their heads in unison, in grief and in sympathy, the world was colder and bleaker come the after-dinner liqueur. 'Alex's death was predetermined, his death held little-no-influence in the surrounding keys, yet his death has caused a cascade.'
'You sure killed him…?' Cathro brought the iced whisky glass closer to his lips, and watched people parade into the evening. The colourful array of umbrellas hanging on fencewire above the arcade. 'You came into the old skipper's home, murdered him in the cover of darkness, yes in vengeance, but it proves that there was more to it. More than an old man transporting bundles of bodies from key to key.'
'Blackguards here in the outskirts of the town before the frontier are always looking for heads like Alex's. The stranger's body was done away by the sea. They won't expect me killing someone like Alex. Comes about maybe...that Alex has friends who'll avenge him. The people in the old Castille residence wouldn't know where to even begin.' I let my chin fall against my chest. I know that they'd be restless, that there was no other way to shove this mess under the rug.
I looked Cathro in the shades of purple and red of the night, the umbrellas absorbing and relfecting the lamposts littered across the arcade.
'I killed a man because I deemed his death to be an important milestone, and it was selfish, and it may have been a predetermined death to begin with, although the problem being that everyone was going out of their way to dispose of the man with means of gaining something from his death.'
I poured a dozen tablespoons worth of whisky into my own glass. I drank from my glass slowly. Breathed in slow to attack my sense of smell. I let the glass down, 'I killed Alexander McNaughton like he was just dirt underneath my boot. Like the scum of the earth he was. A lowlife if I were to write an autobiography about him I would have started the pretext with his death, and me killing him.'
A distinct light depicting the mood of the night surveyed itself against our tiny apartment room. The encased verandah of glass and metal fleurs guardrails were hit with by the opaque tinge, glassy shimmer of this pale blue light. Whiling away, Cathro took his whiskey glass, his vintage classic novel, and went into his own room to continue reading. I guess I spoke too much and too soon.
Even so, we killers too have boundaries we don't like to cross. It's not in the same light as, 'Professionals have standards.' No. It is in the same light of just trying to retain what little humanity we have left. Especially after the war.
As Cathro passed me by to return into the comforts of his own room, he said without pause: 'And at certain times they went out to hunt enemies; they called it the war of blossoms.'