Revelation
Year of the Golden Gilled Boar, 1983, Kliloln, Mosp 3rd
Hanni was stuffing daggers on her baldric by the time I woke up. It wasn’t a baldric however, she just made it so. If was a belt with a wide pouch that had spaces between the stitching. She sheathed and unsheathed each knife to test if they’d come off. There was four of them.
“How long was I asleep?” I asked, groggily.
“Long enough.” She answered.
In a place without means to tell the time, I wasn’t sure what enough meant. After the incident of the discarded attire, I found it hard to engage her in conversation so I busied myself with deciding which weapons I should keep on the ready and which ones to stuff into the bag. That proved to take all but a few minutes. Left with nothing else to do, and fighting the urge to ogle, I took one of the bedrolls she had dusted and spread it on the floor.
Sleep came late though I pretended my best to appear so. My mind, after getting tired of the cycle of picturing Hanni and forcefully tearing my thoughts away from her, picked a most convenient topic – failing to rescue Jibel. I must have gone through a hundred different variations of the same scenario before sleep finally took me. I was fairly certain she was still awake when I dozed off.
Does this woman ever sleep?
“You should have awoken me as soon as you were up.” I walked to an artificial waterfall and began washing my face.
“We are in a hurry, but not so that we should allow our bodies to give out when we need it.”
I drank my fill and went about rolling and tying the bedroll, the bundle of wood inside it. Hanni had already done hers. She had also already folded the clothes I had washed and drying on the benches. A pile of them lay beside the backpack. I stuffed all the knives and daggers we weren’t going to use inside the backpack and placed the clothes over them. Next, I tied the bedroll to the bottom of the bag and fastened the collapsible shield to its front.
“Put this inside if you still have space. We might need it later.” She handed me a roll of leather from the bedroll she had cut up.
I took it and unfolded it, folding it into as little a square I could make it. The folded coat went on top of it and into the bag they both went. I watched Hanni as she took her makeshift bandolier off to tie her rolled coat on top of the wide pouch. Unlike my approach, which was to stack as many a loot as I could find, hers was straightforward it seemed, everything within reach. The bandolier had daggers, the front of her belt had two knives and two daggers. She had a sword on her left and a hatchet on the right. What used to be my hatchet, that is.
I grinned. She honored our wager and I was now the proud owner of a cool-looking hatchet. I put on my belt and put the throwing knives inside the left and rightmost pouches. They were of different designs yet I was only able to fill each pouch with eight of them. Deciding against packing it full, in case I need to use them in a hurry, I put the excess inside the backpack as well. Standing up, I slid the scabbard of my sword on the right and the hatchet on my left. I gave the back pouches a jiggle, just to feel the spikes and the polished balls in there.
My very own utility belt, I thought as I picked up the haversack and slung it over my shoulders.
I’m Batman!
~0~
What people say about losing the magic of wonder as one gets older must be true for me. Not in the body I somehow reincarnated in but in the mind and experiences that followed me to this world. The final tunnel we went through was certainly impressive. It had the same make as all the other areas we have explored but the walls had one uninterrupted artwork depicting scenes of gods and men in the same vein as those of the murals in the oval room. By the time we have been walking for around five minutes, I’ve already lost interest in them.
We filled the time by occasionally engaging in small talk, none of which went nowhere. Before long, we’d fall silent again, walking steadily, Hanni on the lead. We stopped twice; both were because of the statues.
On both sides of the walls, we came across the first set of statues. They were on a recessed portion, wider than my outstretched hand and on a raised platform. They almost reached the ceiling. While Hanni only paused, I stopped to regard the statues. If I didn’t know better, I would have easily mistaken them to be made of porcelain. They were made of the same stone that lined the walls and the ceiling. In the same manner the shades and colors were used on the images on the walls, it was used to full effect on the statues.
Of the two, the one that looked as if it was about to hurl an oversized arrow at whoever stood before it caught my attention. The statue appeared as if it was frozen mid-action, the other hand at the back holding an equally oversized bow. It had on a striking armor, ornate details carved out on all sides and given life by a masterful application of colors beneath the stone. Its expression was that of intense hatred. Compared to the figure opposite it with the sad, almost sorry expression, pulling on chains with one hand and holding up what looked like a gem on the other, the figure with the bow easily commanded attention.
A long duration after, it was Hanni who stopped next, but only briefly. It was a figure holding both hands at the same level with a blank expression on its face. Both of its hands held on to a flat circular shape, hollow in the middle, replete with engraved symbols. One hand held it up by the palm, the other gripped the circle, palm facing down, crushing it.
Opposite this statue was another holding two globes on each hand. Its eyes peered down on the larger globe on its left hand, with the index finger seemingly pointing in the direction we were going. Briefly, I wondered if the statues meant anything, or if they had any connection with the images on the walls. Having paid no attention to the images and already walking a fair distance, the thought fizzled out from my mind.
“Do you miss it Jorj?” Hanni asked, another attempt at small talk. “Your life, in your dream?”
“Sometimes.” I answered, lying. The truth was, it was always on my mind. Even if I wasn’t pointedly thinking about it, many facets of this new life, this simple life made me think of the things I took for granted that were painfully lacking here. “It was just a dream, but it felt like I know more about that world than this.”
“If you didn’t wake up here, with all the wealth you said you had, you would have married and had children, yes?”
Uh, where is this coming from?
“Maybe. Would have been nice but probably easier just to have kids than go through all that courting and sizing up each other before getting married. Still might not work in the end. Wasted time, if you get what I mean.”
“How is that possible? To have children without getting married?”
It wasn’t practiced in this world. Either children went into the care of the church, who may or may not be kind to them, relatives, or they ended up in the street, fending for themselves.
“You adopt. The kingdoms, most kingdoms, have an arm that looks after abandoned or orphaned children. All you need to do is go in there, prove you are capable of taking care of a child, and the kingdom makes it official.”
“Ah!” she exclaimed, “You become like an orphanage for one child.”
“Or two. Or three. It depends. Usually all you have to prove is that you have coin.”
“And no marrying. No girl… friends?”
“None of that, if you choose to. Why do you ask?” I inquired, aiming to reverse the flow of questions.
“I was just wondering what it would be like in that world. I did not expect it possible to be a parent without a man or a woman. People have certain… desires.”
I could not suppress it. I let out a short laugh.
“Oh, that!” My turn to exclaim, “It’s tricky and varies between kingdoms. Some allow it, some don’t, but there are certain people, or establishments that serve to such needs.”
“Like that bright haired woman at the beach?”
Oh man.
“Yes. Exactly like that.”
“I suppose that is an acceptable way if one does not want to have a spouse.”
“True. Some kingdoms make it a crime though. If you’re caught, straight to jail with you.”
She slowed down and looked back at me. Not far from where we were was a darkened area, another room, I assumed.
“You have shared much of that world, some of them I find foolish, but that is most foolish of all.”
“What? It’s not foolish. Just outdated. Most of the places that prohibit such practices do so for cultural reasons. Or religious ones. Something they’ve held since before their kingdoms were founded.” I reasoned. In a place where it was practiced and treated the same like any other job, I understood her logic.
“It’s foolish.” She insisted. “What of the men and women who don’t want to get married? Like you? How are they supposed to express such desires? And what of the bored, married people? Who’s going to entertain them?”
“The what?” I just about lost it. I burst out laughing. I got where she was coming from, I just didn’t expect it.
“Is that so strange to you?” She asked, unbothered by my hearty outburst.
“No, no. Not at all.” Several things did come to mind but I decided not to bring them up.
We walked in silence for several minutes and I was left wondering why, of all the questions she could ask, she chose to ask those. An exercise in futility considering the woman I was with. I decided to poke around the same subject as we neared the darkened opening.
“What of you, Skyrock? Have you ever thought about marriage?”
She paused just before the opening, darkness in front of us. She appeared to consider her next words, and our next course of action.
“I had a wife once. Husbands too, long ago.”