everywhere she goes she takes her war zone with her
The icy voice cuts through the sounds of a battlefield infirmary.
"Doctor Maya Kazari? I need you to come with me."
Maya doesn’t even look up from her patient as she winds bandages around his bloody head. "I'm busy."
"Now, Doctor Kazari."
"I have patients that need my care."
"I can see that. Leave them to the other doctors. You need to come with me."
Maya rolls her eyes, but doesn’t so much as turn around to whoever is presumptuous enough to come into her infirmary and give orders. Maya is the commanding officer here.
"Sir?" her patient asks, his voice slurred with painkillers. "Sir, I think you should listen to her. Sir…" Maya attempts to continue her ministrations in silence, but her patient starts to squirm in agitation. "Sir, you should listen," he repeats.
With an exasperated sigh, Maya spins around to face the intruders. "What?" she snaps, and instantly regrets her curt tone.
The two women before her wear the standard-issue hooded cloak that hangs down past their knees, and the standard-issue leather holsters around their hips stocked with guns and knives, but the rest of their clothes set them apart. Sleeveless one-piece suits, fitted through the bust and waist before swelling out into wide, almost skirt-like pant legs give the women compete freedom of motion in battle, and flat, simple shoes allow them to walk in complete silence on almost any surface-the women are clad in the garments of death.
Youngbloods, Maya thinks, primal fear spiking in her gut. No wonder her patient had been so insistent on Maya's compliance. He must have been terrified of them, even through the drugs he'd been given. The Youngbloods are human weapons, trained since girlhood to fight brutally, without fear, without pain, and without failure. Officially they hold no rank in the general military, but everyone knows they take orders directly from the War Priestesses, who are themselves appointed by the Warrior Goddess. An order from a Youngblood was not disobeyed by anyone, even if it contradicted orders received from one's own commanding officer.
The freckled young woman on the right, the one who had spoken, is unfamiliar to Maya, with her brown hair cropped about an inch from her scalp and sticking up every which way. Her ears, each one pierced with a handful of silver rings, just out from her head like a monkey’s, and she wears a sniper rifle slung across her back. The brown-skinned woman on the left, Maya sees with relief, is someone she could not forget even if she tried. The woman has the same white headband wrapped around her forehead that she'd had as a teenager, her unruly dark curls still trying to break free from the fabric's hold. Her sword hangs in a sheath by her side, as it always had, and she rests her hand on the hilt as, she’d always done, a habit picked up by a young girl always expecting to be ambushed, a habit that not even time and age could take away.
Allowing herself a smile, Maya places her hands on her hips, leaving bloody handprints on her already dirty medic's coat. "Zsuzsa van Zandt. It's been a while."
The woman inclines her curly head in greeting. "It has."
"You haven't changed a bit."
"You have." Maya is taken aback by the Youngblood's words, but she tries not to show it. "But the change is subtle. It's in the dull of your eyes, the sag of your shoulders. You look as if everywhere you go you take your war zone with you."
Zsuzsa’s words are like punch to the stomach that sends Maya’s mind reeling back to days long gone. A crying voice, a killer’s eyes, a pair of hands sticky with half-dried blood. ‘I am nothing but a weapon. Everywhere I go, I take my war zone with me.’
Maya shakes her head, trying to clear the memory. “I-” Her voice cracks when she tries to speak, so she must clear her throat and try again. “I spent some time on the front lines. I guess that took its toll.”
The freckled woman scoffs, finding weakness in Maya’s words; Zsuzsa nods absently, her face betraying no hint of emotion.
There’s a stint of silence before the freckled woman resume’s her “You need to come with me” bit.
Maya obeys without enthusiasm.
Outside the infirmary, War is queen. Gunshots cut through the air. Dust clogs the lungs. Everything feels soaked in blood, from the stagnant air that forces it’s way down Maya’ throat to the muddy ground sucking at one’s feet. Maya’s strangled memory surfaces again. ‘I did it. I killed them all. I felt their screams in my spine even as they died in silence. My shoulders have sagged with the weight of each body I have had to carry across that river of blood. I am death, and yet I do not die.’ Maya squeezes her eyes shut, willing the frantic girl’s hurricane of words to stop to leave, to be forgotten. ‘I am a nothing but a weapon. Everywhere I go, I take my warzone with me.’ There’s a tug at Maya’s consciousness, and she grasps it like a drowning sailor might grasp at a chunk of driftwood.
“Doctor.” It’s the freckled woman, the one high on her own arrogant authority. From the tone of her voice, she’s been trying to get Maya’s attention for a while now, and when the doctor looks around, she sees she has been brought to the stables. Maya notices with curiosity that the horses here are not the large, muscular warhorses that the Youngblood ride into battle. These are some rather small, scruffy looking packhorses, the kind used to climb the mountains terrain. She also notices that only two of them have been saddled.
“Where are you taking me?” Maya asks.
“Up,” is the only reply she gets, courtesy of the freckled woman.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Zsuzsa tells the freckled woman. “I will escort the doctor the rest of the way.”
“But, Captain-”
“Are you questioning a direct order?”
The freckled woman’s eyes widen by the tiniest bit. “No, sir. I shall await your return here.”
“No need,” Zsuzsa says, opening the temple gates. “You’re dismissed.”
The lieutenant nods and snaps off a salute to her superior. Then with a last quick suspicious look at Maya, she leaves to go about her duties.
Zsuzsa swings herself onto the back of one of the horses, gesturing for Maya to climb on the other. Almost immediately the horses make towards the beaten dirt path that heads directly up the mountainside.
“I apologize for my lieutenant’s…” Zsuzsa searches for a suitably diplomatic word. She finally settles on "brusqueness.”
“Surely it’s to be understood. She’s a Youngblood. You’re the best warriors there are. I’m sure she was less than happy to be pulled out of the fight to babysit a doctor.”
Zsuzsa smiles. “This is true.”
The pair continues on in silence, though not necessarily a voluntary one. Maya wants desperately to reach out to the woman riding on the path beside her, to reach out to the girl she once knew. But the words just won’t seem to come.
Finally Zsuzsa pulls her horse to a stop and Maya’s horse halts automatically. Before them a set of bright red curtains hang on the mountain’s gray face, the fabric motionless in the still air.
“The War Temple,” Maya breathes, her words nearly soundless in her awe.
Zsuzsa slides down from her horse and then offers a hand as Maya dismounts as well. Once both women are on the ground, Zsuzsa brushes the red curtains aside, revealing a dark passageway that stretches cave-like into the mountain. She gestures for Maya to step inside.
“I don’t have clearance to go into the War Temple,” Maya says. Only Youngbloods and their young initiates have access to the building in the mountain.
Zsuzsa arches her eyebrows and jerks her chin towards the darkness beyond. “Your presence has been requested by Head Priestess Kyris.” Maya blinks in surprise. Kyris is the Head War Priestess, selected by Goddess from amongst all the Youngbloods for both her exceptional combat skills and her insatiable bloodlust. It was said she had a body count that stretched to the stars. “Best not to keep her waiting.”
Maya enters the War Temple. Zsuzsa follows behind, letting the curtains swing shut behind them. The walls of the passageway are lined with candles, but their meager light can’t compare with the brightness of the sunlight outside, and Maya is engulfed in the darkness as her eyes struggle to adjust.
A familiar hand gently touches her shoulder. “This way,” Zsuzsa says, leading Maya down the passageway. Maya lets herself be guided. The warm fingers bring back more memories, pleasant memories, memories of shared secrets and stolen moments, of a curly haired teen coming into the medical training clinic with feigned injuries, of kisses cloaked in night, of the sunshine warmth they had stirred between her legs. The hand falls away, breaking Maya’s consciousness.
“You carry pain,” Zsuzsa says. The Youngblood woman had always taken comfort in the protective illusion that darkness has to offer
“It is pain I carry for someone else.” Her curly head bowed in fear, her face consumed by tears. ‘Everywhere I go I bring my warzone with me.’ “I carry her fear so that she does not have to.”
Maya can just make out Zsuzsa’s wan smile in the darkness. “I’m sure that person is grateful.”
More wordless quiet, punctuated only by the sounds of Maya’s footsteps reverberating through the cave; Zsuzsa’s feet are, of course, as silent as ever. A flickering brightness appears ahead, the passageway widens, and Maya finds herself in a giant, high-ceilinged cavern carved into the mountain’s heart. A group of woman sit cross-legged in a ring about a blazing bonfire that bathes everything in a red-gold glow, though the unsteady light cast by the flames create shadows the shimmer and dance and lick at the women’s faces.
“High Priestess Kyris,” Zsuzsa calls out. “I’ve brought Docotr Kazari.”
“Bring her to me,” a deceptively girlish voice calls out a voice from the other side of the fire. Maya is afraid to move, but Zsuzsa nudges her forward, around the circle of the seated war priestesses until she is standing before the most powerful woman in the land. Maya drops to her knees and hangs her head in supplication, as is expected. “Don’t waste my time with your formalities,” the High Priestess snaps. “Get to your feet.” When Maya is standing the High priestess looks her up and down. “You were apprenticed to Priestess Alix, correct? The last of the Seers?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re not a Seer, though.”
“No, sir. Priestess Alix took me on when it became apparent to her that she would not live long enough to train the next Seer herself. She didn’t want the art to die. She went to the grave claiming that the Wise One had shown her the birth of the next Seer.”
The High Priestess purses her lips and nods. “What I am show to tell you is highly classified,” she says, turning her gaze to the fire. Then, with voice raised as if to address someone on the other side of the room, the Priestess calls out “Bring him out.”
Two Priestesses step from the shadows, carrying a struggling lump between them. As they draw closer, Maya is able to make out the shape of a person, feet dragging on the floor, hands bound behind his back, a sack over his head. The Priestesses drop the figure to the ground in front of Maya’s feet, and High Priestess Kyris tears her eyes away from the fire and removes the sack from his head. A teenage boy looks up at Maya with dark eyes wide with fear and light hair aglow with the fire’s light. He says nothing.
“This is Amir,” the high Priestess says. “A Seer.”
A few noises jump out of Maya’s mouth, but none of them manage to coalesce into actual words. When Maya finally regains the use of her tongue she manages to say “That’s not possible.” Everyone knows that the Seers have always been women. A male Seer is virtually unheard of.
“I can assure you that this is most definitely possible. He was born in the Rukonshi District seventeen years ago, not long after the death of Priestess Alix. As you know, that district was annexed twelve years ago. We’ve made inroads to recapturing the territory, as there are plenty of people in Rukonshi still loyal to the Goddesses. One of our contacts told us about him,” she jerks her head towards Amir, still sitting on the ground. “He was attempting to use his Goddess-given skills for the benefit of the enemy. Naturally we had him captured.”
Maya can simply stand slack jawed as she takes all this information in.
The Priestess turns to fixcarries on. “Due to your training, you have been selected to teach this boy how to control and understand his visions. You are to take him to the Main Temple in the Sacred City. Captain van Zandt has volunteered to be your protective escort in this endeavor.”
“Um.” Maya’s tongue has stopped working again.
“That is all. Captain, escort the doctor and the prisoner out of the Temple.”
“Yes, sir.”
And with that the High priestess resumes her seated on the floor, once again fixating on the jumping flames before her.
xxx
july 2012
I’m in a writing mood lately, but I’m still stuck with that perennial writer’s block thing I have where I can write out scenes but I can't string them together in a plotline. I’m kinda like blah right now. I have a whole bunch of scenes all jumbled up in my head, but getting them all out in words is just too daunting a task. So occasionally I sit down, get one specific scene out, and then abandon the whole story to the realm of my daydreams, where it is free to mutate until the scene I’ve actually got written down ceases to be of any relevance to the story now in my head. Yay.
Also, a note on the language of power: It fucking sucks that, as an English speaker, I’m stuck with masculinized words for power. Those are not the words I’d like to use for this story, but fuck it, it’s what I’ve got.
"Doctor Maya Kazari? I need you to come with me."
Maya doesn’t even look up from her patient as she winds bandages around his bloody head. "I'm busy."
"Now, Doctor Kazari."
"I have patients that need my care."
"I can see that. Leave them to the other doctors. You need to come with me."
Maya rolls her eyes, but doesn’t so much as turn around to whoever is presumptuous enough to come into her infirmary and give orders. Maya is the commanding officer here.
"Sir?" her patient asks, his voice slurred with painkillers. "Sir, I think you should listen to her. Sir…" Maya attempts to continue her ministrations in silence, but her patient starts to squirm in agitation. "Sir, you should listen," he repeats.
With an exasperated sigh, Maya spins around to face the intruders. "What?" she snaps, and instantly regrets her curt tone.
The two women before her wear the standard-issue hooded cloak that hangs down past their knees, and the standard-issue leather holsters around their hips stocked with guns and knives, but the rest of their clothes set them apart. Sleeveless one-piece suits, fitted through the bust and waist before swelling out into wide, almost skirt-like pant legs give the women compete freedom of motion in battle, and flat, simple shoes allow them to walk in complete silence on almost any surface-the women are clad in the garments of death.
Youngbloods, Maya thinks, primal fear spiking in her gut. No wonder her patient had been so insistent on Maya's compliance. He must have been terrified of them, even through the drugs he'd been given. The Youngbloods are human weapons, trained since girlhood to fight brutally, without fear, without pain, and without failure. Officially they hold no rank in the general military, but everyone knows they take orders directly from the War Priestesses, who are themselves appointed by the Warrior Goddess. An order from a Youngblood was not disobeyed by anyone, even if it contradicted orders received from one's own commanding officer.
The freckled young woman on the right, the one who had spoken, is unfamiliar to Maya, with her brown hair cropped about an inch from her scalp and sticking up every which way. Her ears, each one pierced with a handful of silver rings, just out from her head like a monkey’s, and she wears a sniper rifle slung across her back. The brown-skinned woman on the left, Maya sees with relief, is someone she could not forget even if she tried. The woman has the same white headband wrapped around her forehead that she'd had as a teenager, her unruly dark curls still trying to break free from the fabric's hold. Her sword hangs in a sheath by her side, as it always had, and she rests her hand on the hilt as, she’d always done, a habit picked up by a young girl always expecting to be ambushed, a habit that not even time and age could take away.
Allowing herself a smile, Maya places her hands on her hips, leaving bloody handprints on her already dirty medic's coat. "Zsuzsa van Zandt. It's been a while."
The woman inclines her curly head in greeting. "It has."
"You haven't changed a bit."
"You have." Maya is taken aback by the Youngblood's words, but she tries not to show it. "But the change is subtle. It's in the dull of your eyes, the sag of your shoulders. You look as if everywhere you go you take your war zone with you."
Zsuzsa’s words are like punch to the stomach that sends Maya’s mind reeling back to days long gone. A crying voice, a killer’s eyes, a pair of hands sticky with half-dried blood. ‘I am nothing but a weapon. Everywhere I go, I take my war zone with me.’
Maya shakes her head, trying to clear the memory. “I-” Her voice cracks when she tries to speak, so she must clear her throat and try again. “I spent some time on the front lines. I guess that took its toll.”
The freckled woman scoffs, finding weakness in Maya’s words; Zsuzsa nods absently, her face betraying no hint of emotion.
There’s a stint of silence before the freckled woman resume’s her “You need to come with me” bit.
Maya obeys without enthusiasm.
Outside the infirmary, War is queen. Gunshots cut through the air. Dust clogs the lungs. Everything feels soaked in blood, from the stagnant air that forces it’s way down Maya’ throat to the muddy ground sucking at one’s feet. Maya’s strangled memory surfaces again. ‘I did it. I killed them all. I felt their screams in my spine even as they died in silence. My shoulders have sagged with the weight of each body I have had to carry across that river of blood. I am death, and yet I do not die.’ Maya squeezes her eyes shut, willing the frantic girl’s hurricane of words to stop to leave, to be forgotten. ‘I am a nothing but a weapon. Everywhere I go, I take my warzone with me.’ There’s a tug at Maya’s consciousness, and she grasps it like a drowning sailor might grasp at a chunk of driftwood.
“Doctor.” It’s the freckled woman, the one high on her own arrogant authority. From the tone of her voice, she’s been trying to get Maya’s attention for a while now, and when the doctor looks around, she sees she has been brought to the stables. Maya notices with curiosity that the horses here are not the large, muscular warhorses that the Youngblood ride into battle. These are some rather small, scruffy looking packhorses, the kind used to climb the mountains terrain. She also notices that only two of them have been saddled.
“Where are you taking me?” Maya asks.
“Up,” is the only reply she gets, courtesy of the freckled woman.
“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Zsuzsa tells the freckled woman. “I will escort the doctor the rest of the way.”
“But, Captain-”
“Are you questioning a direct order?”
The freckled woman’s eyes widen by the tiniest bit. “No, sir. I shall await your return here.”
“No need,” Zsuzsa says, opening the temple gates. “You’re dismissed.”
The lieutenant nods and snaps off a salute to her superior. Then with a last quick suspicious look at Maya, she leaves to go about her duties.
Zsuzsa swings herself onto the back of one of the horses, gesturing for Maya to climb on the other. Almost immediately the horses make towards the beaten dirt path that heads directly up the mountainside.
“I apologize for my lieutenant’s…” Zsuzsa searches for a suitably diplomatic word. She finally settles on "brusqueness.”
“Surely it’s to be understood. She’s a Youngblood. You’re the best warriors there are. I’m sure she was less than happy to be pulled out of the fight to babysit a doctor.”
Zsuzsa smiles. “This is true.”
The pair continues on in silence, though not necessarily a voluntary one. Maya wants desperately to reach out to the woman riding on the path beside her, to reach out to the girl she once knew. But the words just won’t seem to come.
Finally Zsuzsa pulls her horse to a stop and Maya’s horse halts automatically. Before them a set of bright red curtains hang on the mountain’s gray face, the fabric motionless in the still air.
“The War Temple,” Maya breathes, her words nearly soundless in her awe.
Zsuzsa slides down from her horse and then offers a hand as Maya dismounts as well. Once both women are on the ground, Zsuzsa brushes the red curtains aside, revealing a dark passageway that stretches cave-like into the mountain. She gestures for Maya to step inside.
“I don’t have clearance to go into the War Temple,” Maya says. Only Youngbloods and their young initiates have access to the building in the mountain.
Zsuzsa arches her eyebrows and jerks her chin towards the darkness beyond. “Your presence has been requested by Head Priestess Kyris.” Maya blinks in surprise. Kyris is the Head War Priestess, selected by Goddess from amongst all the Youngbloods for both her exceptional combat skills and her insatiable bloodlust. It was said she had a body count that stretched to the stars. “Best not to keep her waiting.”
Maya enters the War Temple. Zsuzsa follows behind, letting the curtains swing shut behind them. The walls of the passageway are lined with candles, but their meager light can’t compare with the brightness of the sunlight outside, and Maya is engulfed in the darkness as her eyes struggle to adjust.
A familiar hand gently touches her shoulder. “This way,” Zsuzsa says, leading Maya down the passageway. Maya lets herself be guided. The warm fingers bring back more memories, pleasant memories, memories of shared secrets and stolen moments, of a curly haired teen coming into the medical training clinic with feigned injuries, of kisses cloaked in night, of the sunshine warmth they had stirred between her legs. The hand falls away, breaking Maya’s consciousness.
“You carry pain,” Zsuzsa says. The Youngblood woman had always taken comfort in the protective illusion that darkness has to offer
“It is pain I carry for someone else.” Her curly head bowed in fear, her face consumed by tears. ‘Everywhere I go I bring my warzone with me.’ “I carry her fear so that she does not have to.”
Maya can just make out Zsuzsa’s wan smile in the darkness. “I’m sure that person is grateful.”
More wordless quiet, punctuated only by the sounds of Maya’s footsteps reverberating through the cave; Zsuzsa’s feet are, of course, as silent as ever. A flickering brightness appears ahead, the passageway widens, and Maya finds herself in a giant, high-ceilinged cavern carved into the mountain’s heart. A group of woman sit cross-legged in a ring about a blazing bonfire that bathes everything in a red-gold glow, though the unsteady light cast by the flames create shadows the shimmer and dance and lick at the women’s faces.
“High Priestess Kyris,” Zsuzsa calls out. “I’ve brought Docotr Kazari.”
“Bring her to me,” a deceptively girlish voice calls out a voice from the other side of the fire. Maya is afraid to move, but Zsuzsa nudges her forward, around the circle of the seated war priestesses until she is standing before the most powerful woman in the land. Maya drops to her knees and hangs her head in supplication, as is expected. “Don’t waste my time with your formalities,” the High Priestess snaps. “Get to your feet.” When Maya is standing the High priestess looks her up and down. “You were apprenticed to Priestess Alix, correct? The last of the Seers?”
“Yes sir.”
“You’re not a Seer, though.”
“No, sir. Priestess Alix took me on when it became apparent to her that she would not live long enough to train the next Seer herself. She didn’t want the art to die. She went to the grave claiming that the Wise One had shown her the birth of the next Seer.”
The High Priestess purses her lips and nods. “What I am show to tell you is highly classified,” she says, turning her gaze to the fire. Then, with voice raised as if to address someone on the other side of the room, the Priestess calls out “Bring him out.”
Two Priestesses step from the shadows, carrying a struggling lump between them. As they draw closer, Maya is able to make out the shape of a person, feet dragging on the floor, hands bound behind his back, a sack over his head. The Priestesses drop the figure to the ground in front of Maya’s feet, and High Priestess Kyris tears her eyes away from the fire and removes the sack from his head. A teenage boy looks up at Maya with dark eyes wide with fear and light hair aglow with the fire’s light. He says nothing.
“This is Amir,” the high Priestess says. “A Seer.”
A few noises jump out of Maya’s mouth, but none of them manage to coalesce into actual words. When Maya finally regains the use of her tongue she manages to say “That’s not possible.” Everyone knows that the Seers have always been women. A male Seer is virtually unheard of.
“I can assure you that this is most definitely possible. He was born in the Rukonshi District seventeen years ago, not long after the death of Priestess Alix. As you know, that district was annexed twelve years ago. We’ve made inroads to recapturing the territory, as there are plenty of people in Rukonshi still loyal to the Goddesses. One of our contacts told us about him,” she jerks her head towards Amir, still sitting on the ground. “He was attempting to use his Goddess-given skills for the benefit of the enemy. Naturally we had him captured.”
Maya can simply stand slack jawed as she takes all this information in.
The Priestess turns to fixcarries on. “Due to your training, you have been selected to teach this boy how to control and understand his visions. You are to take him to the Main Temple in the Sacred City. Captain van Zandt has volunteered to be your protective escort in this endeavor.”
“Um.” Maya’s tongue has stopped working again.
“That is all. Captain, escort the doctor and the prisoner out of the Temple.”
“Yes, sir.”
And with that the High priestess resumes her seated on the floor, once again fixating on the jumping flames before her.
xxx
july 2012
I’m in a writing mood lately, but I’m still stuck with that perennial writer’s block thing I have where I can write out scenes but I can't string them together in a plotline. I’m kinda like blah right now. I have a whole bunch of scenes all jumbled up in my head, but getting them all out in words is just too daunting a task. So occasionally I sit down, get one specific scene out, and then abandon the whole story to the realm of my daydreams, where it is free to mutate until the scene I’ve actually got written down ceases to be of any relevance to the story now in my head. Yay.
Also, a note on the language of power: It fucking sucks that, as an English speaker, I’m stuck with masculinized words for power. Those are not the words I’d like to use for this story, but fuck it, it’s what I’ve got.