Slaves worked their substance into the earth. It was is if the crops were made of them, not the rain and wind. Every year they shrank as the crops grew, their bodies bending like weathered wheat. Harvested from distant shores, withering on the vine. Hulking figures striding heartlessly between them. Small men sitting in wide wicker chairs, whips coiled metaphorically like snakes by their sides.
Their stories were ending. They had begun in love, conflict, and hardship, plans, dreams, wonder, and bitterness near foreign shores or amber groves in the endless forest. Then, like someone cast from a cliff, their lives had taken a new, final trajectory and were hurtling towards the conclusion, unremarked by fate. How many would escape their silent, anonymous, unknown deaths here? One in a hundred? How many might have their names burned into memory's fate, carried beyond their lifetime in any way? One in ten-thousand?
It was a ghastly thing, like witnessing plague victims. A fate that was hard to contemplate when one still controlled one's own. Life had betrayed them, like someone waking to find himself riven by tumors.
The horror of bondage. You will rot before I do. In these lands, nobody who can help it works his farm without slaves. To be chained to the earth is to be half-drowning. To be nothing but a watcher of cows. To be a filer of metal, or a peddler affixed to his little rug. These things are living death. They're ameliorated by- what? A bit of cheese? A bit of honey? Sex with a woman who will take you rather than starve? To be drunk on a little beer, weeping over what's to come?
We will force others into fatal destruction before we will endure this. We will force others into the soil before we spend our lives gazing at it. We look to the sun, to the horizon, to the fearsome warrior screaming and rushing at us before we endure the soil, or its chthonic extremity, the mines.
In this life I have been carved like scrimshaw by swords, daggers, fists, falls, bites, and the sweet claws of women. I have suffered blows and gone to my death, yet still I've returned. I have seen many more maimed, their legs cut away, eyes cut out, fingers sawed aloft, guts out, faces off, blood pooling across halls and holy places. Like the slaves, most of them go into the ground unremarked, unnoticed, lost to their families, remembered only by their companions for the breadth of their lives. Ending beneath the soil, but a little better than working it. Beaten down, betrayed by fate. I know what this is, but life has never left me.
My betrayal has never been complete; always there has been a final respite. But fate, the great black gravity that draws men into the earth, I have seen it, and I have sent men there. This is the life of a warrior: your focus is less on treading men into the soil, day in, day out, like a farm proprietor. Instead you endure their blows, their snarling words, and you strike, laying them low or sending them sprinting, sometimes by perfect design, sometimes almost by accident. In your greatest deeds you're possessed by the god of war. You could not have done that if you'd tried. It happened.
This is the warrior's covenant. His gamble. You are dice placed in a cup. It is shaken and spilled. Some come up low and are removed. New dice are added. The process goes on.
There is joy in destroying someone. Joy in smiting them and seeing them lie. The joy of a secret fuck, the joy of a new sack of gold. A dangerous addiction, because every time you're just rolling the die. How many sides does yours have?
Mine has had many, or so it seems. Why? I've learned to blow on it as it falls, that's my only explanation. Why I'm here when so many are in the soil, or have left half their bodies in the soil. I am no great warrior, yet here I am.
I was a wildcat, then. A hellion. I rolled the die more than most, and my sides are damned shaven down now. If you rolled me, you'd be hard-pressed to see what number came up. I've tumbled in many cups, and what I can tell you is why men take this bargain. Everything the withering man dreams of, sleeping in his shack, is found in the world of flashing blades. In the destroyer's realm. The price is the fatal cut. Mortal terror. Horrific visions, anguish and regret. A body deformed by wounds. Its rewards are beyond the ken of the man bound to the field, like heaven to a damned man. The property, the sex, the beauty of distant places, the joy of gold and destruction. He is shut out of it and will die unless he can slither through lock and key. Why do you think men would rather die than be captured? Why do you think it is called a blaze of glory? Why do exiled lords and dethroned princes vie till their dying day to reclaim their positions? Why are they not content as courtiers in some foreign fort? Why not retire as monastics and eat carrots?
Why is the earth a slave pen and churning melee?
The soil is the shadow of the underworld. It is the outer glow of Gehenna. It drinks your soul while your body works, an automaton.
I had my fill of that as a boy. I knew what my days would be, day in, day out, until my mind followed my body into the earth. No, no, no.
I have carried my sword to foreign courts; as I saw the slaves, the first ones I hadn't grown up around, I saw what this world was made of. What the soil of the earth was. I swore I would not spend my days half-mired in it until I could no longer see the sun. I would have a little, real life and then go down kicking and screaming like so many, many had. Things have not gone wholly to plan, and now I know what it is to care about things beyond my own skin.
I found my way into the grandest dice games on this earth. I will tell you of the tournament. Take what you can from me.
