The baths in the oasis city were engineered for solitude, for a clever kind of twilight privacy. A series of shades and veils shifted the hues of dismal light to the twilight of onsetting rest. Those alcoves of poorly heated water, for even in the closest thing the wastelands had to a metropolis wood was scarce, created one of the few refuges to slow one’s thoughts.

Lucius discovered them only several days into his work, preparing the thrall army. Without the cycles of day and night, the boy was working himself ragged. He had no measure of time. No sun, no candles, no regular meals. The cocks did not crow on any schedule. Time merely slipped by like the oozing flow of a droll canal.

Only by the raging of his own internal clock, the little biological mechanisms that begged for sleep and for wakefulness and wanted to synchronize to a proper schedule, by those did he pick his time to put down his chalk. He hung up his cloak and turned down questions, drilling, practice, inquiry. Then, he melted his body into the lukewarm waters and fantasized about warmth, about comfort, about alcohol and the company of women.

Here, his former warden waded in with him, clad in nothing but a sheet to cover her body. Lupa crossed the stone floor on silent feet like the padding of a predator, then sank her body into the water. It was the rising of the bath that dragged my pupil’s fatigued brain back to the moment. She sank herself down, till her hair splayed out like a halo on the water and her body was hidden by the shimmers of the surface. By virtue of the size of the bath, not even their toes were close enough to touch, but there was no mist to obscure. This was no hot spring to feign decency.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“I was scouting on camelback and sand was in my hair,” she answered, diffidently not meeting his gaze.

“There are at least four of these baths and there aren’t even four people with brains,” he said, but his accusation lacked strength.

Lolling her head on the rim of the bath, Lupa said, “Your friend will recover soon enough.”

“And you thought it fine to mingle our dirty clothes, is that it?”

“Well, we gave you that thobe. Shouldn't you be back in your armor?”

“I will be soon enough. Shouldn’t you be fleeing? You’re not indebted to Anubi, are you? You’re not his priestess, nor his temple… maiden. Don’t tell me you went to war to capture me for no reward.”

Lupa sank a few inches deeper into the water, till almost her nose banished beneath the surface. After a moment, she rose to speak. “Is the north better?”

Lucius laughed. He matched her previous posture, lolling his head back and staring at the shadowed arches above them. Within the darkness, he let his imagination manifest and play out his memories for him until a yearning taunted his mind. “In some respects yes, in some; no. Too many people is a problem the north has. It’s hard to explain. Even here, when I walk among hundreds of these… husks, it lacks that something; that alienation. You’ll feel it in the cities. The countryside is more welcoming, or perhaps I should say there is less pressure on the soul in rural villages. It feels like you can be the master of the countryside in a way you can never master a city. Can you even imagine being surrounded by not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of strangers? Most too close to starving to even think of what behavior is proper?”

Lupa huffed, leaning to the side and in effect, moving herself closer to Lucius. “I can’t imagine that, no. Can you truly imagine what it’s like to be one of a dozen people for as far as you can possibly march? That should you feud with them, you would have perhaps one? Perhaps two people to be with?”

“You like Luigi then? The priest?”

Again, she submerged in the water and ruminated. “I have to, don’t I? He isn’t offensive and it’s childish to want more than that, is it not?”

Lucius looked at her. “How old are you?”

Lupa looked away. “I wouldn’t know. Lord Anubi says you northerners measure by the year, which is measured by seasons, but we don’t have those. We don’t have days and nights either. How could I tell you?”

“You look old enough to not be a child, but young enough to be stupid… like me.”

“I’m not stupid!”

“Yes, you are.”

“If you mean to call me ignorant–”

“No,” Lucius said, partly rising from the water to raise his voice. “You’re stupid. I’m stupid. Just about everyone is stupid. Anubi might not be stupid, but I’m too stupid to know what he wants. I just know what he’ll likely do in the immediate future. I can guess; nothing more. That’s the difference between humans and gods, you know? We’re like children riding atop a camel, yeah? We might think we have the reins but the camel goes where the camel wants and all we can do is pretend that we’re in charge. That’s why we’re stupid. And I’m not even talking about the pressures of society yet; the tide of history.”

“Camels, huh? Is that your attempt to sympathize with me or something?”

Lucius shifted closer. “Living this way is getting in my skull.”

Lupa sighed. “Aren’t you eager to go home? You have a family don’t you? Like a flesh and blood one? The thralls fornicate and act like parents for a time, but it’s just an imitation of what you northerners do.”

Lucius, may I remind you, had no contact with his blood family for nearly ten years. Instead, his mind went to Aisha, to the life inside her. There was a great unknown dwelling within her belly; an act of nature he had committed without understanding.

He recoiled from the thought. His mind shrank back to the familiar confines of muscle and violence. The boy set his eyes upon the hungering wolf beside him. Self-blinded as he was, he did not comprehend the fear that drove her, how it ravaged her sleep and left her cringing from every footstep in the sands. She lived in a world with no family, no blood, no trust. Even her god saw her as nothing more than a particularly well crafted statue for his garden. In Lucius, she saw the proper life humans should lead.

He saw in her weakness and beauty intermixed and that stirred his masculine spirit. He embraced the primeval will. “You subjugated me.”

Lupa recoiled. “If we had come any later, we would not have been able to. It was the confusion of your arrival we subjugated.”

“You tried to force me to your will.”

“If your will was so easily bent, it would have been right to force you. We would have delivered you to Anubi and been granted the weapons we need. There was no way we could have foreseen how he would welcome you.”

Lucius shifted toward her, his eyes locked on hers. “Well, it seems that I am your weapon and from here on out, I will be directing the marches, ordering your mob, and defeating your enemies. Are you willing to put your life in my hands?”

Lupa sighed and turned her gaze once more to the ceiling. “You’re not a very tender man, are you?”

Lucius recoiled. “What?”

She shook her head and slid back to the far side of the bath. “I suppose they don’t call you the gambling lion for nothing,” she said as she pulled herself free of the cool water. She wrapped herself in a cloth and left him there.

Lucius stayed in the shadows, silent and shocked and truly alone. He had not one friend for hundreds, perhaps a thousand miles. That left him nothing but his thoughts to reflect against.

After a restless night wherein he spent more time staring at a wall than sleeping, he sought out the priest. Luigi had settled into a workshop, sacred only in a scientific sense. The wastelander surrounded himself with wood carving tool and the scraggly detritus of the desert, attempting to fashion roots into arrows. He delicately sliced, whittled, and carved, rendering the twisted shapes into shafts all while listening to the echoing plucks of a thrall with some crude stringed instrument.

“Shouldn’t you be doing some kind of religious service?” Lucius asked.

“Shouldn’t you be training an army?” the priest retorted. Luigi did not take his eyes off the shaft of wood. He ran his thumbs across it and whittled away rough edges before twisting the point of his knife against the end. He bored into it slowly.

Lucius glanced about the room when he realized most of what surrounded him was gold, or perhaps gold-plated. Instruments and mechanisms and parts of mechanisms. The twilight of the room glimmered like some forgotten treasure hoard, but not one piece of jewelry or coinage could be seen. “I’m technologically limited.”

“Only technologically? From what I heard, you’re rather morally limited too.”

Lucius snorted, flicking an array of prongs fit for a music box but without a cylinder to read. “I don’t want to hear anything about morals from you.”

“Could you have such a discussion even if you wanted to? There doesn’t seem to be any reverence in your soul. You speak to my god like an insolent child expecting a pat on the head,” Luigi said, at last turning to fix my pupil with a stare. “It’s revolting.”

“He’s not a god.”

“Isn’t he? He is one with his tao, older than the desert and wiser than any human. He can reshape us apes to fit his purpose and yet does not impose upon us.”

“No? But he does slaughter those he deems lesser for the benefit of the others.”

“Such is the way of the tao, the teleos, the logos, the way of the world. Lord Anubi sees beyond the shadows. You see nothing but flesh.”

Lucius’ face colored. His mind veered with the memory of Lupa’s body almost within reach. “I need a horn,” he said, using the words to clear his mind.

“A horn? What would you need that for?”

“Signaling.”

Luigi shifted around before realization struck him. “Oh, that kind of horn. A metal one. I thought you wanted a goat horn. Those are only good for carving dice. There, you may take that amplifier,” he said with a gesture to an elegant but unwieldy blossom of brass.(1)

It took a moment for Lucius to disentangle the instrument and more time still to fashion a proper mouthpiece to it. Before he could leave however, the priest stopped him with a question, “Aren’t you spending too much time here?”

“Marching with an unfit army will just get them killed.”

Luigi set his wooden creation aside, along with half a dozen other shafts just like it, but of varying lengths. “You aren’t the only northerner in these wastes. Didn’t you come here to fetch that woman?”

At this time, Bishop Jean de Jeamaeux was a week’s travel away, in the ley mine Raymi had excavated.

“The other tribes, the ones that followed us and attacked, they should be coming here, shouldn’t they? I was preparing to meet them in the city, to turn irrigation canals into trenches and fortifications.”

Luigi chuckled. “If they were going to attack you here, they would have done so already. This is sacred land, even to the mindless. You’ll need to move fast to catch them now. Jumping from waterfall to waterfall in a land you know nothing about. You don’t even have the sun to guide you.”

“Name your price, priest,” Lucius said, cutting through the man’s suggestions.

“Freedom, citizenship, positions and titles, anything you can give as you bring me, my sister, and my brothers–remade as they must be–to your land beneath the sun.”

“I cannot,” Lucius said. “Your god ordered me to kill them.”

“Remade! When they die, the lowly creatures will feast and awaken. They will be as my kin. It is them that I want you to take north. Promise me that and I will guide you across the desert. I will even play your horn, I can’t imagine you can do so in the middle of a fight. I don’t see how your friend could take you across the desert in his current condition.”

“I must speak with Anubi.”

“Funny, I must as well. I finished the mock-up of your ley cannon,” Luigi said, holding up a wooden replica of a ley bolt.

The sono-phone Lucius salvaged from was not one of Anubi’s projects, but a gift from long ago. The sentimental value had been overwhelmed by the distaste of the memory, so pilfering it proved to be most welcome. Perhaps in the future the sono-phone may be brought back from the obscurity of history, but it would take a good deal of effort better put elsewhere.