From Heaven Itself, They Fought by Alex Langer
3200 words, 16 minutes reading time
Issue 3 (Fall/Winter 2023)
The river sweeps before us, a slash of blue-brown water glowing like embers under the setting sun. The Peacock King’s chariots strut through our yellowed grassland, their signal banners fluttering in the breeze of the dry season. They’ve come from far to the south, too many for just a show of force. Theirs is an army of obliteration. The Peacock King means to break our stiff-necked people under his iron-scythed wheels, blot out our names and our traditions, claim our pastures and hills for his own, and send what’s left of us into the wilderness to starve.
You rest your hand on my shoulder, and I lean into your touch. I’m too tall now for an easy embrace, not like when we were children. But so much has happened, wounds have scarred over and left us here.
“No sense in watching them parade,” I say.
You don’t answer, although I see your shoulders tense. Once, I craved the burden of power that you carry. I would have killed for it, and I did, tearing our world apart in my lust. But now all I see is the agony that rulership brings you. And while war is an old and wicked friend to me, you hate it with every fiber of your being. You are afraid—of the death that lies before us, whether ours or theirs or both.
Of what happens if we lose.
Of what happens if we win.
I am afraid too. But I am with you, sister, and that’s what matters.
We return to the encampment. It bustles with our armies, adversaries uneasily woven together by bonds of necessity. We need every soldier we have. Our people have no industries of molten iron and hewn wood, no history of great warriors. Most fighting we did amongst ourselves, petty discord that allowed generations of Peacock Kings to yoke us and bring us here.
I walk in your wake as you talk to your soldiers, their copper skin shining, and their hair dyed with ochre and chamomile. They laugh and jabber, set at ease by your touch and presence. To me, they give nods of respect, limned and gilded with fear. Demon of the Rock, they once called me, and perhaps still do.
Our parents were not noble or even notable. We cared for the flocks of sheep like anyone else, even after they discovered that we had gifts, first you and then I. Your gifts were—and are—beautiful. The conjuration of pure springs, the power to speak to the bees and crows and other creatures of the world, the power to soothe and heal, and your innate wisdom too.
My gifts are not so beautiful.
We reach your tent, no different from any of the others. The thrum of the camp vibrates in our marrow, but I can still hear the chirp and rustle of the dry season’s birds. It’s as peaceful as one could hope for.
You turn and embrace me, wrapping your arms around my waist. “I’m glad you’re here, brother,” you whisper.
I hear the seeds of tears in your voice, matching ones sprouting in my own throat. I remember when the shadow that greeted me outside my cage was yours, not the executioner’s, and I remember the way you embraced me then.
There was a time when I would have shoved you away from my sight and touch, denounced you as a traitor to our people. Not anymore. Never again.
Then, with a quick squeeze, you scurry into your tent. I stand silent for a moment before finding my berth in the gathering dark, among the tents of my followers. Those silent hours have been when my doubts and curses gather, when the eddies and flow of the resentments I’ve felt and the horrible things I’ve done threaten to pull me under. But there is no time for that now.
When we grew old enough, our parents—proud of us but also scared (of me, always of me)—brought us to the assembly of elders. Our mother hurried us forward, voice whispering in our ears: you could be liberators, great warriors to shake off our people’s yoke.
And I believed her. I saw visions of my outstretched hand and the destruction I could wreak against the Throne of Feathers. I could hear the celebrations of our people, free from their exactions and chains, looking at me without fear but with pride. I would be praised, and loved, and trusted.
We hiked for three days, over the hills and across the dry streambeds, to the date palm where our tribes first swore oaths of fealty to each other. Since the days when we first arrived to this land, the elders met there to determine the tributes we would pay to this empire or that one, to resolve disputes, and to listen to any person’s petition. You held my hand tight as we cowered in the waiting tent, listening to the elders discussing what was to come, not understanding what they said and how our world would be changed. We promised each other in small voices that whatever happened, we would stick together.
I was presented first. I showed my gifts, the infernos and blizzards and quakes that splintered the earth’s bones. I did everything to prove I was worthy. Yet, while the elders were impressed, their terror was apparent.
Too wild, they said. Not this one.
It had been three generations since the elders chose a Custodian. But when you displayed your gifts, your kind smile and mastery of our ancestors’ wisdom, like all our elders before them, they crumpled at your feet. They lifted you up, even as you protested, and placed the crook of judgment in your hands. For the first time, as the crown of palm fronds touched your head, I hated you. Your breath, your touch, the way you carried yourself. They rejected me for you. If not for you, I would have been praised, and loved, and trusted. With that, my hate began to burn.
As I sit, older now but atop the same hills, I hear you coming. Years spent in the mountains and caves living like a wild beast made me light-footed, while your days spent beneath a date palm rendering judgments have left you clumsy, and I would recognize the intake of your breath anywhere.
I beckon, and you clamber over rocks to reach the flat stone next to me, a sheen of sweat across your smiling, worry-creased face. I feel your nerves from a yard away. We look down over the valley, Grandmother Sun crossing the horizon. Our camp slumbers, its patchwork visible in the colors of our tents. I close my eyes and hold my breath. I am thankful we are here, but our world is an eggshell, and I feel as though it will shatter if I exhale.
You reach out your hand and I grab it tight. As the sun rises, we don’t let go. For a moment at least, peace is something we know.
Under the canopy of your tent, we stare at the map together. Both your generals and mine line up beside us, their eyes glittering with suspicion, teeth bared in vicious smiles. Even though our hosts have combined, old wounds stitched and scarred over, they do not trust each other.
The Peacock King did not take the return of a Custodian to our confederation with grace. As he sought to break your power, his demands on our people grew. His captains sought more livestock, more gold, more corvee labour for imperial roads and watchtowers, and they held you responsible for their production. Our people chafed under the yoke, and some—the wrothful, the greedy, the molten-eyed idealists and shark-eyed opportunists—found in me a new champion.
False prophet, I called you. Traitor, I said, and the crowds that cheered my sermons grew. They knew I was your brother, and that gave my voice power. And for those inclined to follow me, the unshackled power of my gifts was further evidence that I was right.
One of your generals speaks now, bloviating and moving carved wooden figures around like toys to demonstrate his plan of battle. His accent, native edges sanded off by his time at the Peacock King’s great academy, stabs at my nerves. Not a traitor, I tell myself like a mantra, but I do not trust him, and I am losing my patience.
“Enough,” I say. “There’s no point to this. We should be out among the soldiers.”
The general’s lip curls. “A battle without a plan is like a fortress built without mortar.”
You give me a look that says stop. I pull back, but the bitterness of anger seethes on my tongue.
“Have the Sered and Yahleel arrived?” I ask. The eastern tribes have forever been malcontent, concerned only with their pearl fisheries and trading ships. But our legends say that, when the Custodian calls the tribes together, the Sered and Yahleel have always joined the fight.
You turn to your general. “Go, ask the scouts where our cousins are.”
“It’s a five-day march from the sea,” he begins to say, but you silence him with a flick of your wrist. He bows his head and scurries from the tent, red-faced behind his lush beard, and I grin. You may not rule through fear, sister, but you rule, even through this war.
This war. Our war.
We cover several matters before your general returns. When he does, he is out of breath, his breastplate heaving. “I’m sorry, Custodian,” he pants.
“What?” you ask, but we both already know his answer.
“The Sered and Yahleel are not coming. The Throne found their price,” your general says, and I feel my rage bubble up like water from a geyser.
I waged a war of terror against you and against the Peacock King. My soldiers sullied the earth with the blood of scores, then hundreds, then thousands. A campaign of ambushes and retaliation and knives in the dark. My war brought retribution from the Throne, strife between tribes, and yet more weight upon your narrow shoulders.
“Traitorous scum,” I growl. “The Sered and Jahleel are dead. I will wipe them from this earth if I have to.”
My hands touch the table, ice expanding across it in a sheet. The generals scatter, and you shout, “Brother, stop!”
A gust of freezing wind whirls inside the tent. Traitors. Pustules begging to be scorched with hot iron. Sons of whores. They will feel my wrath AND I WILL-
A sharp sting against my neck breaks my concentration. The wind stops and the ice retreats for a moment as I reach up and touch it. There’s no blood, but a honeybee falls into my palm, still in its death. You look at me, eyes flashing with fury, and for a moment I see myself as you see me.
The remainder of the ice vanishes as I flee from the tent, your cries of my name behind me. My strides eat the ground as I climb, rocks scraping my palms as I leap over cracks in the earth to reach the peak. The hot sun beats down, and I weep.
This time, you do not come.
It’s time.
From my unseen place by the river, I hear our soldiers forming ranks and arraying themselves on the hillside. Per your orders, they stay on the rocky slopes. Too close to the grassland, and the charioteers will shred them in moments. Even from the slopes, their spears are no match for the Peacock King’s armored infantry and sickle-swords, but our soldiers will fight to the death nonetheless.
For our people. For freedom.
For you.
I shrug off my robe and step carefully along the riverbank, finding a hidden place to wade. My gifts are enhanced by contact with the element they build on. Fire for fire, earth for earth, air for air, water for water.
This performance will require two.
My sandaled feet squelch as I wade into the water, sinking into the grasping muck. The river’s flow is gentle but insistent. Minnows and frogs brush past my ankles as the mud swirls. You did not tell me to go down to the river, nor did I tell you what I plan to do, but you knew, and you let me go. Despite everything, you trust me.
When we were still enemies, I saw each death, each blood-drenched morning as a victory in miniature, a demonstration of my power, a step towards liberation. But my insurgency achieved nothing but carnage. It built towards nothing and satisfied nothing, not even the howling void inside me. The vision that drove me, the wreath placed upon your head, was not dispelled. I did not understand how you held so much power and did nothing with it.
My rage grew and grew, feeding on my resentments and fury, like a flood destroying dams and unleashing ever-greater waters. My attacks grew bolder and more vicious. But when we seized a garrison and slew a nephew of the Peacock King, parading forth with his head on a spike, we crossed a boundary that the Throne could not brook.
It took my own hubris and a throng of soldiers to capture me. An ambush that seemed too easy, a rich target that was too soft. I struggled and fought and burned dozens of men alive in a whirlwind of blue flame but it was not enough. The last thing I remembered before the club struck my skull was a field of corpses. Both theirs and ours.
When I awoke in an enchanted cage, body aching and swollen, you came to me. With you was the Peacock King’s envoy, a man with cruel features and lacquered armor built for show rather than war. You sat cross-legged on the far side of the bars, wearing a simple dress and your crown of palms.
We were supposed to stick together, brother, you said.
I have nothing to say to a traitor, I replied, spitting the words like venom.
You said nothing in response. There was pity in your eyes, and I hated you more for that. Even now, I thought, you were better than me.
Kill him, the envoy said. The Peacock King tires of this thorn in his side. He would wipe the slate clean in these cursed hills, and begin again with a new people, but by shedding this one’s blood you could stay his hand.
You turned back to me, eyes creased and haunted. What would you have me do, brother, you asked.
Of course that was your answer, I thought. Even when faced with the threat of extermination, you couldn’t sully your own hands. It would be my responsibility.
Whatever you need to do, viper, I said. Remove the thorn. Kill me, if you want, if it will give you satisfaction.
I hoped you would do it. Then, I would be right. Then, you would have destroyed something too.
You stared at me, then leaned close. I’m sorry, brother, you whispered, so only I could hear. I’m sorry I could lead you to think that would ever give me satisfaction.
You turned to the envoy. No, you said with an iron in your voice I'd never heard before.
Kill him by your hand, or your people will be declared anathema, the envoy shrieked, color rising to his milk-pale face.
Tell your king that we are anathema then, you said and turned back to me. I heard your choice, but I couldn’t believe it. You were a coward. You would not fight for us.
You unlocked the cage and took me into your arms, the lilac smell of your hair against my nose, your tears against my cheek. My hands lay at my sides. They could easily wrap around your neck and wring you dead, or conjure fire and render your flesh a smoking ruin. You knew I had that power; you had every reason to believe that I would use it. And yet you embraced me without a second thought.
It was then that my hatred cracked and shattered. There was no rivalry but the one in my head, no struggle between us but the one I’d wrought. Our elders and our parents never recognized that my wildness fed on their rejection and fear. My rage was born from pain. Only you had ever loved me without regard for the fire within, not despite it.
I began to sob and you held me tighter. You had not taken a crown from me. There was never a crown that was mine, nor should there have been. Power belonged in the hands of those who would feel it as a burden and a curse, not those who lust after it. It was for those who seek to build, not to destroy.
But, in the service of those who seek to build, there is a place for destruction too.
I place one hand in the water and raise another to the sky as I feel the energy of the world flow through me. Creation and destruction are twinned, building up and breaking down in an endless cycle. I grind my teeth and shake at the power, but I hold the current steady. I look up at the sky. The blue expanse of the dry season fades in the blink of an eye, as furious clouds form and swell. They grow darker, and I smile as the pressure in the air drops.
The chasm inside me begins to fill. I shut my eyes and clench my teeth at the corrosive surge of power. The flow of my rage and resentment follows, and I try and fail to push it aside. Once, this had been terrifying, but later I found in it the joy of bloodied teeth and righteous carnage. Now, all I feel is a tired apprehension as the worst of me comes to life.
It should be ME–I DESERVE IT
I feel my body rattling. My fingers burn white-hot.
I will BREAK THEM
My tendons strain and my muscles tear. Tears squeeze from between my eyelids.
ALL will FEAR ME and LOVE ME and THEY WILL BOW
My raised hand crashes down into the river. The splash scares the fish gathering at my feet, but not more than the thunderclap from the sky. Rain begins to fall, a cleansing torrent, and the heavens are afire with lightning. I collapse into the water, knees hitting the riverbed.
Chariots are engineered to kill, an elegant tool of a society bent on finding ever-more sophisticated ways to destroy. But they aren’t perfect. Something as simple as a river’s muck can bring them to a grinding halt.
The river is already swelling, a flash flood that will sweep our enemy away. Those who survive will be easy prey for our army.
The rising water touches my lips. Through the downpour and the haze of my exhaustion, I see you.
You wear a cloak of purple-blue and a palm-frond wreath, standing out amidst the ranks of your cheering throng. You look like a queen, yet you slouch, apprehension on your face at the impending violence. Even the deaths of our enemies burden you.
I smile. My gifts are mine, and yours are yours. But victory, and a future where you might have the peace to build a better world, is my gift to you.