Winter in the Mountains Ch. 06

I watched the captain at work. He really was a great leader of men. The men would do anything for him. I guess it helped that he wouldn't ask them to do anything he wouldn't, and that his commitment to the mission was clear. He hardly rested; in fact, I had to chase him down to see him, but I insisted. He didn't have sex with me again, but he liked the massage and coming in my mouth. I was disappointed, but if that was what my master wanted, then I would be happy.

When the soldiers relaxed in the evening, they were actually pretty good company. Every night, around the fire, there would be music and stories. Some of the soldiers had bought guitars or pipes, and I learnt to sing for them. But their favourite art was story telling. Sometimes the stories were lore, mainly war stories, but often, they were simply tall stories. These stories all started with the same sentence, "This is how it really happened." Gong or Sock told the story of how they got the bath up to the camp several times, each different but all equally unlikely. I never found out how they really did it.

Good food, company and great sex, with a clear mission and purpose, what more could I want?

On the fourth night, I found out. The captain came to me, and asked me to come with him. We went outside, and sat cross-legged outside in the cold, facing each other, but still in the light of the fire. "Do you know what the Amartis effect the wizard cast on you is?" he asked me.

I had wondered, but I had never felt able to ask. I was too scared to know, I think.

He took my silence as an answer. "The Amartis effect is a fairly advanced spell. It awakens the inner sight of a person, so they can see and hear things with their mind rather than just their senses."

"Is that why I heard Edina?"

"Yes, that's why. And that's why I believed you as well."

"So what about you?"

He nodded. "Yes, I've had it too, but it differs for each person, how much they can hear. Usually it only works close up. The Wizard did it for you, so that you could be trained to avoid being tricked again the way you were tricked the first time."

I didn't understand. "How does that work?"

"With proper training, you can tell what intent people around you have, and you can detect and even resist magic if they use it against you. But the fact that you heard Edina suggests that you can see at a distance. I want to know how far you can see. The further you can see, the more useful it will be to us."

"But I can't see anything."

"Of course not, you need to be trained, and we're going to do that now."

The captain told me to close my eye's and relax. To clear my mind and think of nothing for a minute. I tried to do this, and then I wondered, "Why me?" This consumed me. Why me? How come he had plucked me from prison, from a death sentence, and given me a new life?

"Did you clear your mind?"

"No, I couldn't, there's something I need to know." I had wanted to know since that first day, but the time was wrong, or I had been too afraid to ask.

"What?"

"Why me? How come you knew to find me? Why did you pick me? How did you find me?" The questions just poured out of me now that I had asked.

The captain gave me a rueful smile. "Well, I suppose you had to ask eventually. And I guess that I have to answer." He paused, and thought for a while.

Finally, he drew in his breath and started to speak. "It was Holly who found you."

Holly? Holly? No. It couldn't be.

The captain saw my amazement. "Yes, it was Holly. See, when I got given this mission, we both knew it was going to be tough. I went and read the records, and found out for myself what the past history of missions like this was. So I spoke to Holly about it." He noticed my sceptical look. "Yes, I told you she was my soul-mate, of course we talked about it. She said that the men needed a woman to keep them going. I laughed at her, but she was serious. I said there was no way that we could take a woman with us. But I couldn't tell her any reason why, except that no one would want to come."

"She got a little smile on her face, and then we didn't speak about it anymore. But a week later, she asked me about it again. I hadn't thought about it anymore, but she told me she thought she'd found someone who'd want to go. When I asked who, she told me that it was a young girl who was working as a prostitute because she was addicted to seed. She even had healing training – and I had complained to her that they hadn't given me any one with healing knowledge."

"I told her that there was no way I'd let a prostitute come with us, but she said that that was exactly what we needed to come with us. When I asked her why this girl would want to come, she told me about being a seedie."

"But how did she know that?"

"I don't know. Holly has a broad education, she has many servants and she's very down to earth. She introduced me to that old healer woman, and the three of us worked it out. So here you are."

I thought about that. "So is that why you kept the men away from me before I was off the seed?"

"Yes, the old women said if I let them touch you before then, the karma would be all wrong."

It still didn't make sense to me. "So, you're telling me that Holly set all this up? But what about you and me?"

"Yes, I worried about that. But she knows I'm not a virgin, and she told me that she trusted me to do the right thing."

Wow. "Umm, have you?"

"I think so. I'm not convinced, but I've written to her and told her what happened."

I began to feel that Holly was casting a long shadow over me. Only one thing I still wasn't sure about. "So, you guys knew that I would come?" I thought that I wouldn't have come at all, except for my death sentence. I stared at the captain hard. "You got me arrested!"

He looked at me. "I wonder whether you'll believe this. I was very sceptical that you'd want to come – it was just too desperate and I didn't think you would do it. Of course, I hadn't met you, but one of Holly's servants checked you out and he thought you'd go for it."

Great. I imagined this Holly virgin princess getting a blow by blow account of my performance.

"Would you have gone for it?"

I didn't know. Obviously, it would've been the best thing for me to go for it, but I doubted that I would've made such a big decision. I shrugged.

"So I still hadn't decided whether to talk to you or not. I had done some preparation – got you a horse and stuff – but I still didn't know whether I was going to talk to you. Then Holly sent a messenger early that morning to say that the vizier had found out that Tom was giving money to one of the kings enemies, so they decided to use the prostitution laws to take him down. When they had found one of his girls doing seed, they had enough to sentence him to death, all clean and above board. We were just lucky that you were the girl, you had to be sentenced as part of the grounds for Tom's death. So I came and talked to you."

Well, that made sense. I had wondered why Tom had been raided, when the city was full of brothels, and why I was the only girl jailed, even though all the others were the same as me. "How come brothels are illegal? There's so many of them, and the soldiers use them all the time. How can they be illegal when the king's army is selling slaves for sex?"

His face went dark. "It's the king. On the one hand, he says that brothels are bad for society and families, so he wants to close them down. On the other hand, he wages war on the enemy and takes slaves. Then he sells them so he can continue fighting – it's an expensive business, war. But the vizier doesn't care about the brothels, he just uses it as a convenient way to bring people down. So everyone's happy except for the slaves. But it's hypocrisy, we shouldn't tolerate it. Still, what can you do?"

"So you don't agree."

"No, I don't. They wanted to send me out on a slave gathering mission. It was a way to corrupt me, and it wasn't even a proper mission, purely slave gathering. That's the problem with war, you start it, and then it gets out of control and you lose sight of your goals and you're just reacting, and making things worse."

"You told us that that thug had come over to rape and murder till he died. I don't understand why he would do that? How can we not fight against that?"

"Well, what I didn't say was that what he really wanted to do was find his younger sister who had been taken as a slave. If he could find her, then he would try and escape, otherwise his life was too bitter to live."

I thought of that young girl I had seen in the square, forced to display herself to the crowd. Maybe that was his sister? Probably not, the timing was wrong. My brothers wouldn't come looking for me. "So why did we call him a thug? Wouldn't you do the same?"

"Yes, I would, but my sister was killed, not taken as a slave. But now, since we started taking slaves, she would be taken as a slave. If he had come over the mountains to just find his sister, then I might even have helped him. But he raped and killed, so I burnt him live instead."

"So how can it end?"

"Well, it doesn't. We just go on killing each other, taking slaves, making everyone hate each other more."

"You said that you'd give your life for this mission. But you don't sound very convinced now."

He sighed. "Yes, I'd give my life for this mission, we are defending our people and our land. This mission is a simple compelling one."

For the people and the land. I nodded. He had been very open and honest with me. "Thanks. I'm surprised you told me all that. I'm sorry about your sister."

He shrugged. "You need to know, if you're going to help me."

So I started my training. I started with a simple task, to close my eye's and describe where each of the soldiers in the camp was. Mostly they were just inside, and I could actually remember where they were sitting. One of the soldiers, usually Junior, when he wasn't out on two day patrol, sat in the door and told me whether I was right. Once I got good at remembering where they were, they started moving around. I was thrilled when, on the third night, I felt them moving in my head. Every night for an hour or so I would sit there with my eye's closed, meditating, and gradually extending the distance that I could feel the locations of living things.

I felt as though my eye's had been opened. I became aware that the camp was just part of a greater community. I could feel the trees, the horses, the fish, and the birds in the trees. I became aware of the men, how they were feeling. I could feel them in the camp. The most amazing part was how much more aware of their feelings I was when I made love to them. It lifted me to a whole new level; I could feel the desires that they didn't even know how to express, and often I could anticipate them. And when they came, I shared in the explosion of pleasure in a completely new fashion, and doubled my enjoyment.

In the third week, the men had found a big party of the enemy thugs coming through, so several of them missed out on their rest day. I was left behind, alone, at camp. I realised that this was the first time since I arrived in the city that I was properly alone. In all that time, I had never even slept behind a closed door. I spent the morning in a frenzy of cleaning, and then treated myself to a long hot bath at lunch time. After lunch, I sat outside and felt my surroundings. The camp felt so quiet and peaceful, compared to its usual state, since there was no men or horses around. I realised that for the first time, I had the opportunity to escape. When I thought about it, I knew that there were two main reasons why I wouldn't try to escape. The first was that I knew that there was no way I could actually get away from these men, and secondly, I couldn't think of anywhere I'd rather be than right there right then. So I just relaxed and enjoyed my peaceful break.

When the men came back later in the afternoon, I was still asleep, but their presence woke me as they came close. Some of them had minor scratches and bruises, mostly from crawling through the bush, but none of them were seriously injured; the ambush had been complete. But since they were tired, I volunteered to cook for the first time.

I went all out. I felt that I was on display. I remembered one of my favourite recipes from when I used to cook at home that I could make with the dried meat, one that softened the meat and brought out good flavours from the meat. That night, for the first time, all eighteen of the soldiers sat around the fire at the same time, and we shared the meal I had cooked.

I sat in circle, watching them eat. Would they like it? They ate in silence while I fretted. Why didn't they say anything?

Gong was the first to finish. He burped, and grinned. "There was something wrong with that meal."

There was a silence. Oh no, they didn't like it. My heart fell.

He smirked. "It ran out. That was good."

The squad burst into laughter at the expression on my face. Gong had got me good.

Tin Man said "Why do we have to cook? Zia can cook, she's a woman, she should always do it."

Again, there was silence and my heart dropped. I really didn't think that I could face cooking every night as well as everything else. They all looked at the captain.

"Well", he said, "it's certainly true that she's shown herself to be an excellent cook." He turned to me. "That was great. But, you know, there's only so much that she can do in a day, and somehow, I'd rather she focused on her other duties. I'd hate to get you guys to share those duties."

They all burst into laughter. I looked around the circle, at them all laughing. I think, again, that I'd had my leg pulled. They probably planned it while I was cooking. I looked at the happy faces, and felt a thrill of pleasure. These were good men, and their happiness was my doing. I felt so lucky. But I felt sure that it was too good to last.