Thud. Thud.
The old man hobbled back toward the village, his cane striking the dirt with every second step.
The rhythm carried through the silence as Alpheo followed close behind him, flanked by Jarza and the thirty men he had brought inside.
The farms they passed were eerily still. No workers bent in the fields, no grain swaying in the breeze, no sheep bleating lazily in the air.
Only empty stretches of land stripped bare down to the stubble.
So. It is already stored away, Alpheo decided as his gazing came to an end.
That means the village warehouse must be filled near to the roof beams with the harvest. A comforting thought, that. Whatever happens next, at least we will not be starving.
But even with that small victory in hand, caution kept whispering at the back of his skull. There were men on their heels, and the road south was anything but certain, he had more things to despair from then taking joy.
He turned his head slightly and took in his own.
They walked with a restless energy, fingers twitching near their belts, eyes sliding toward the village huts and lingering there.
Alpheo knew that look intimately. He had worn it himself.
Frustration. A deep gnawing hunger that had very little to do with bread.
Years of deprivation, of living entirely at the mercy of other men's moods, had made something close to beasts out of them. Now that they finally held a measure of power, they ached to spend it. To take. To crush. To prove to the world, and to themselves most of all, that they were no longer the ones kneeling in the dirt waiting for the stick to come down.To remind themselves that , indeed, they were still alive.
To finally lay hands on a woman.
And Alpheo?
He felt it too, which was the part nobody would ever hear him admit. The thrill of it. The intoxicating knowledge that for once in his life he held the leash rather than wearing it. So many options with only the embarrassment of the choice.
But he also knew better than to act on any of it.
A man's desires are a rabid dog straining at the collar. Thrashing, snapping, desperate to be let loose. The fool slips the leash and tells himself he is free. The wise man learns when to feed the animal and when to haul it back, because a beast that runs wild eats its own master first.
He was grateful he had not brought the whole column inside the village. One unruly fool could have turned this afternoon into a massacre, and a massacre was the last thing in the world he needed.
Not out of kindness. The years had stripped that out of him fairly thoroughly. But because drawing the wrath of the local lords down on five hundred men with no walls and no country was a mistake he could not possibly afford to pay, especially since that bill meant being nailed to a piece of wood on the road to the Barsha...
Take what we came for and be gone. The faster, the better for everyone.
Now was not the time to be making new enemies.
Some clever man had supposedly said that on his deathbed, when a priest asked him to renounce the devil. A final jest from somebody whose wit had outlasted the rest of him.
Alpheo had always found it funny. He found it a good deal more useful now.
Once, long ago, he had been a person others trusted. A good neighbour. A helping hand freely given. That man was dead and buried, beaten and whipped out of existence somewhere along the road between then and here.
In his second life, kindness was simply another weakness waiting to be found by somebody looking for one.
He had no intention of ever being a tool again.
The old man stopped suddenly and as his bones creaked he turned to Jarza, muttering something in his rough tongue. Jarza listened and thought it over a moment before relaying it to Alpheo.
"He says we're to wait here while they bring out everything you've bought."
Alpheo nodded, his gaze drifting past the village to the green stretch of land beyond it.
The sight of growing things felt almost foreign after days of marching across barren sun-bleached waste. Where there was green there was water, and where there was water there was life, and life could be caught and eaten.
If he sent men out to forage they would likely come back with something.
He dismissed the thought almost as soon as it arrived.
Not worth the hours. Time and strength were better spent on the only thing that mattered now, which was being somewhere else by nightfall.
As the old man hobbled into the village and vanished behind the mud-brick houses, Alpheo felt Jarza's shadow settle over him.
"So. What's next?"
Alpheo turned to the towering man. "What do you mean?"
Jarza spread his arms wide, taking in the village, the rolling fields, the road running away south. "After this. Why do you want us marching as sellswords when we've gold enough to live without hunger for some years? A new start. We could find wives. Build houses. Raise families. For the second time, some of us."
Alpheo arched an eyebrow, amused. "Why the sudden interest? Cold feet creeping up on you? Want to become a family man? Get yourself a wife to grow old with and a few brat crying at your table?"
"I've held off asking until now. Some questions are better put to a man when he's alone else others get some strange ideas." Jarza shrugged his great shoulders. "I've made my choice either way, answer or no answer. But I'd still like to understand. Why risk your life fighting other men's wars?"
Alpheo laughed, which caught even Jarza off guard.
"Other men's wars?" he echoed. "You think any man ever fought his own? Wars belong to the people holding the power. The rest of us are just the shit they throw at each other across a field to make a point."
Jarza listened in silence. No doubt accustomed to these moods by now. There was always something unsettling in the way Alpheo spoke of such things, as though he had once looked down at the whole world from somewhere above it , taken a piss on it to see how it drilled down and then come away unimpressed.
"Have you ever wondered why war exists at all?" Alpheo's eyes lifted toward the sky, as though putting the question directly to whoever lived up there. "Do men with crowns and fine clothes go hard at the thought of expanding lands they'll never once set a foot on? Does the sight of spilled blood make them feel alive again?" He let out a breath and shook his head. "Or is it simpler than that. The sheer ecstasy of bending another man to your will. The old animal pleasure of standing over something and realise that your are superior? That you are better?"
Jarza said nothing.
Then that gaze snapped back onto him.
"You asked why I'd walk willingly into war when peace is sitting right there for the taking." His voice was quiet now, and had something dangerous threaded through it. "Because I want more than I was given. And war is the ladder for that."
He stepped in closer, so that the words would go no further than the two of them.
"I was wasted as a slave," he murmured. "I would be wasted on a farm counting grain just the same. There's something in me that will not let me stop at enough. I can do more. So tell me why I shouldn't? I have the skills and now I have the opportunity I was never given. WE were never given."
His voice dropped lower still as he decided to put the card down.
"I have ideas, Jarza. Ideas that could turn this world over on its back. It's hard to explain and easier to show, and even showing it is hard. But for any of it I need men who trust me, and whose backs I can stand in front of. That is why I did everything I have done.
It is why you followed me out of that cell, and why you are standing here now. And I meant every word I said on those cold nights. Every one of them."
Alpheo exhaled, steadying himself, and when he spoke again his voice had gone softer.
"I want to sit a throne and move armies with a flick of my hand. I want to set my enemies alight and carve out a dynasty that carries my name and my blood through to the end of the world. I want it whispered in every tongue there is, so that nobody anywhere has the luxury of not knowing who I was.
And I want to eat well every single day, and grow fatter and fatter as I grow older."
He paused there.
Then his expression softened, and he tilted his head toward his companion.
"That is what I want. A madman's dream, perhaps. It was mad a week ago when we toiled under other's whips. But now?
We are worm looking up and deciding it fancies the sky, and yet the opportunity to fly is in our hands." A smirk flickered across his mouth. "But you asked, and I've answered. And now I realise I have never once asked you. What is it you want?"
At the question, something shifted in Jarza's face.
Years of enduring, of being handled as little more than a beast of burden, had stripped him of the luxury of wanting anything in particular. Who asks a mule what it desires, beyond water and a bit of shade? Nobody ever has.
He thought it over.
"I don't know," he confessed at last, his voice barely above a whisper, letting a vulnerability show that he almost never allowed out of doors.
Alpheo cocked an eyebrow, his gaze sharpening.
"I don't know what to do with my life," Jarza said, and once the words started they came out all at once. "I expected to die where I stood. Some whip across the back doing a bit more damage than the last one, and that would be the end of the story.
I never thought we'd come this far. Truth be told, I thought the escape was only a quicker route to the noose." He looked faintly ashamed, admitting it. "I was tired of all of it and I wanted it finished, one way or the other. I went along because dying trying seemed better than dying waiting.
And now in truth I'm lost. There's nothing behind me to go back to and nothing ahead I know how to want. I don't know what to do with freedom now that I'm holding it." His voice trailed off, then found itself again. "Though if I had to name the nearest thing I've got to a desire, it would be this. I'm curious."
"Curious?"
Jarza nodded. "About you."
Alpheo sighed. "You want to see whether the worm dreaming of wings gets eaten by a frog somewhere along the way."
His tone was teasing. There was an edge underneath it all the same.
Jarza blinked. "Seems you already knew.Honestly I think you are full of shit."
Alpheo threw his head back and laughed at that. "Hardly a surprise. I'm perfectly aware of how mad I sound. Which only makes it the more endearing that I have your trust anyway."
He met the older man's gaze, and the intensity behind the words lit something.
"Stick with me, my friend, and I'll show you the masterpiece we're going to make of this life. I don't know what's waiting for us. But I know that we can now reach for things neither of us would have dared dream about on those cold nights, and that alone is worth whatever comes."
Jarza shook his head, a half smile tugging at his mouth. "It's good to know you're aware of how mad you sound. It may be your finest virtue, that. You make the rest of us look sane standing next to you. I suppose we need that in our lives."
"The whole world is mad," Alpheo said, turning back toward the village. "What's the use of drawing such fine distinctions when you are inside a madhouse?"