LJ Idol S11 Week 6: Solviture Ambulando
There is spittle in her hair. Amenanta is standing over her, made hazy by her blurred vision and the swirling red dust. She looks like a god, smug and powerful.
“Walk it off,” Amenanta says from above her, arms crossed over her chest, and Heilia feels something boil in her belly. It’s red hot, and it wants to crawl out of her, and so she lets it take over. She rolls onto her knees and rises, slowly so she won’t faint or throw up as her body protests strongly. But then she’s standing at her full height which is taller than Amenanta by half a hand, squared up feet to hips to shoulders to fists.
“Do you want to taste dust again?” Amenanta is so sure, so pleased with herself, that the hot live thing in Heilia’s belly roars up and takes over her fists and she slaps Amenanta’s pretty face with her left hand and then swinging in hard and fast and heavy with her right, balled up in a tight hammer strike to the cheekbone.
The hit doesn’t land. It’s a good punch, but Amenanta is fast and out of the way like wind, and putting Heilia down into the dust like wind, too.
She doesn’t remember landing.
“When I say walk it off, I mean it. I will win every time.” And Amenanta is gone, sauntering off into the wheat to have a nap, most likely.
It’s a clear day and Heilia spends a moment looking up at the sky. It’s a pretty blue, so different from the iron-red dust that now covers her sweaty skin. Different, too, from the grey-gold of the wheat fields that stretch across the horizon. She likes it when days are like this, warm and clear and windless. It’s easy to breathe, and the fetid smell of death from the river doesn’t come down the valley like usual.
Eventually she has her breath back and no longer feels like vomiting, and so she stands and walks.
She finds Amenanta, as expected, sprawled out in a confident stretch of skin against flattened wheat, soaking the sun and her victory both. The wheat is starting to droop heavy; there is no one to harvest it enmass like people used to.
“Someday I’ll kill you,” Heilia says. She doesn’t sit or lay down next to Amenanta. She wants to, but the thing boiling inside her won’t allow it. It wants to find something sharp and stab it into her eye. It isn’t right. She shouldn’t want this, but she does, she wants it so badly it pulses in her like a second heartbeat.
Amenanta cracks a single eyelid, one that Heilia envisions bloody with ease, and says, “Maybe. But not today. Go walk, little dry husk, and find somewhere else to sleep, or you won’t wake up this time.”
If she strikes out with her heel, Amenanta will catch her by the ankle and she’ll just end up in the dust again, this time with wheat poking into her or maybe dead. So she stands tall and walks, turning her back to Amenanta with incautious confidence.
Her own bed-down isn’t far, a crack in a big dead tree that bisects the landscape, but she doesn’t want to go there. She wants to run, and so she does, until her feet are nothing more than the sensation of stabbing pain and her chest burns with the need to stop and breathe, and Amenanta is gone from her vision, if not her mind.
She can’t go up the valley, and down the cracked-dry river bed is unknown and dangerous. Unlike Amenanta, who is dangerous but so very known. With every step the hot boiling part of her calms. It never leaves, but it recedes until it is in her mind, not her fists, and she can think clearly again.
She finds a change in the landscape, a dip where the wheat never took root and instead hearty wildflowers speckle the monotonous land with blue and white. She doesn’t know what they’re called, and she accepts that she never will because anyone who knew is dead. But she brushes her calloused fingers over their petals and smiles.
She picks a fat pod of seeds. She knows a little about plants; knows what to chew raw, what to throw on the fire. Mostly they, people who are scattered through the wheat fields and survived, eat the wheat. There is more than enough for their small numbers. She might be able to cultivate these flowers, though, and call them hers. She knows people used to do that.
Heilia snaps the pod off at the stem and breaks it open by pressing her thumb into the flesh until it splits. Seeds, wet and unready, spell out and she lets them fall onto the dry ground. Maybe they’ll make more flowers. Maybe they won’t.
She goes and finds a stick, one of the few remnants of the trees that used to be more than a rarity here, and a rock and goes to sharpen it.
Maybe the flowers will grow, or maybe she’ll kill Amenata. She’ll see what tomorrow brings.