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The Wind in the Grass

At first, she could easily follow it; she, knee-high in the endless grass and it, showing it’s passage by the grass’ bending as clearly as if there were no grass at all.

Then the wind came. First, it was so soft it might as well not have been there, and she could still follow easily. Then, the wind picked up and the grass waved like water, but what she followed moved faster than the wind, and it was simple to pick out the difference between its deliberate path and the wind’s random swirling.

Now, though, the wind whipped through the grass and obscured anything less fierce. If her hair hadn’t been cropped, she would have been scoured by it.

The Thicket lay ahead, so dense and thorned no one could hope to get through it unless they had a guide. An animal, say, who lived in it or beyond it, an animal that could show a tracker the way.

This was the third time she had failed. Now she would be “retired” to field work or lesser tracking or, if the High Master were in a bad mood or got it into his head that she had failed on purpose to thwart him, to the grave.

As if blown into her head by the wind, she thought, What if I pretend I haven’t lost the quarry? What if I go on in the direction it had seemed to tend? The worst that could happen is that I would be retrieved and dealt with as the High Master orders. The best….

It was possible she would actually find what she had been sent to find. Her handlers would report success, they would be richly rewarded, she would be made over and spoilt, choice killers would exploit the breach she had found, and the High Master would extract the riches rumored to be beyond the Thicket. If the rumored riches turned out to be only rumors, she and her handlers and anyone the High Master thought he remembered having pressed the rumors would pay the price for his disappointment.

Three possibilities of destruction, two to her and one to other people.

She had had enough of personal pain and despair. The gamble that the lashes would land on somebody else for a change was too good to miss.

The wind blew from the trees behind her long enough for her to hear her handlers calling her back with snarls and curses.

She walked on, hesitantly, as if the trail were hard to see but visible to her.

Closer to the Thicket, the grass grew shorter and more stiff. She could actually see a broken stem. Had she played the game right? Had she found what she had been sent to find?

The thorny trees, thorny bushes, thorny vines, thorny undergrowth looked impenetrable as far as her eyes could see. She dropped to her knees, searching for a gap.

The earth next to her fountained outward as a strong torso burst from it and grasped her, pinned her arms to her body, and dragged her underground. The darkness was absolute, but her heels bumped over rock and clay as her captor pulled her through a tunnel that seemed to last for miles.

Light leaked around him, and the darkness around her grew light enough to show the shadow of her new captivity.

Then they were out, onto a path through a slightly less dense thicket than she had approached. Her captor threw her over his shoulders one arm hooked around her legs, the opposite hand clenched around her wrists. She had been carried so from the underling farm where she had been raised to the market where she had been sold, and from the market to the High Master’s tracker stable.

They threaded along the path until it opened into a valley, the grass trodden into the rocky clay, filled with huts and barracks, cook fires and fields of people testing one another with weapons, crawling, leaping from what had seemed to be innocuous parts of the landscape, and demonstrating how they would kill one another with their bare hands.

It was the High Master’s killer stable writ large. Writ massive.

Most of the people she could see were smaller than the High Master’s, thinner and shorter but with muscles like cables.

She was taken into a hut and deposited before a woman dressed in trousers tucked into boots and a tunic bound with a rope of what looked like hair.

The woman and the man who had brought the tracker spoke words that were almost understandable. The sounds hovered just on the edge of meaning.

Something like “trick”. Something like “follow”. Something like “soon”. “Victory”? “Invasion”? “Treasure”?

Whatever it was, they seemed pleased, and their good humor extended to her. The captor rubbed the top of her head as if he were a proud father and she were a clever child. The woman called an order and another woman extended a plate of food for the tracker to take and eat.

The tracker thought of her handlers, of the High Master, of the buyers and the sellers, of the killers and the courtiers, and wondered if they would be pleased with their plans of conquest when they were served back to them from the Thicket.

MY PROMPT TODAY: It just came to me, somehow.

MA