Holy City Part Three: Chapter Seventeen

Three men emerged from the desert. They were greeted with M30 rifles. There was a fence, a guard tower, guards, a closed border. Green-eyes stepped forward, his friend and V stayed back. Green-eyes walked up to the gate. A soldier emerged. He had an M30 like the soldiers in the guard tower. It was pointed at green-eyes.

Green-eyes said words to the soldier that V did not understand even though he could speak Lyonesse fluently.

The guard said those same words back to green-eyes. Then he lowered his weapon and the two men embraced.

They were led through the gate and into a large detention center. They were not put into a cell like V was becoming accustomed to. They were escorted into a beautiful reception room that had teas and cakes and drinks that were in clear glass pitchers waiting to be poured into clear glass cups.

Brown-eyes ran to the first pitcher, it was of lemonade, and filled one of the cups. He drank quickly, first one glass then a second. Green-eyes stopped him before he could pour a third. “You will get sick. Only a little now. Then a little food. That is all on the first day. Then a little more the next day. By the third day, you should be back to normal. If you go too quickly now, the body will reject the food. You will get sick.” Green-eyes took the cup and set it down on the table.

V realized this had not been green-eyes first trip through the desert. Green-eyes poured two cups of water and handed one to V. “A toast,” he held his cup out. V held his cup in the air. Green-eyes touched his cup to V’s. “To survival.” Before they could drink, the doors of the reception room swung open and a group of military men entered. All had medals on their chests and bars on their shoulders. The biggest military man with the most medals and the most bars walked to green-eyes. They embraced. “You made it.” Green-eyes nodded and gestured to V. “Only because of this man. He saved us.”

The military man shook V’s hand as V spilled his cup of water. “You are a true friend of this Kingdom.” V did not say anything. The military man stood in front of him smiling a satisfied smile. Something had been accomplished, that much was certain, only V could not be sure what that was. In due course, the military man and green eyes and all of the military men left the reception room.

V and brown-eyes were left alone with the teas and cakes and lemonade. It looked like they were the last ones at a party that had long since finished. They were seated in chairs across from each other. Every now and then brown-eyes’ brown eyes would look over to the glass pitchers of lemonade, tempted to ignore the hard-earned wisdom that had been relayed to him.

V did not look over to the lemonade, or to the teas and the cakes or any of the other food. He studied brown-eyes. He wondered how much he knew. Was he friends with the military men as well or was he a friend that green-eyes had made in Vitesia? Maybe it was all more calculating than that and he was merely useful to green-eyes at some point, he was needed for survival in Vitesia or for survival in prison. But green-eyes stayed with him even when his injured leg was slowing them down. He was reluctant to leave him to death in the desert. Whether he was a real friend or a useful prop, green-eyes showed him genuine concern, even loyalty. Because of that loyalty, maybe it didn’t matter whether he was a friend or a prop. Maybe only the actions mattered.

They waited for a long time in that room across from each other, brown-eyes looking at the food and drink and V looking at brown-eyes. It was twilight before anybody came to retrieve them. It was a junior military man of some sort. He did not wear the medals and bars the other military men wore on their uniforms.

“We would like to thank you for your service to the Kingdom of Lyonesse,” he said. “Accommodations will be provided. For this first night, we request you stay on the base so your health can be monitored. Please follow me to your rooms.”

They followed the junior military man down several non-descript corridors until they were in front of a non-descript door that looked like a door to a closet. The junior military man opened the door. It revealed a tiny room with bunk beds and a door to a bathroom, the type of room that one would usually find on a ship at sea where there is limited space. The junior military man guided brown-eyes into that tiny room. Brown-eyes stopped for a second and looked back at V. They didn’t know what to say to each other. V wanted to smile in that moment but he did not. Brown-eyes looked at him one last time and then entered the room and the junior military man closed the door from the outside.

V was led down the corridor several more steps to another room with a slightly larger door. This was a slightly larger room. There were no bunk beds. The room was big enough to have a bed placed on each side of the room, although there was less than a body length of space between them.

The room was spare. A military quarters meant for two soldiers, a narrow cramped room that had no decoration and only two tables placed at the head of each bed, lamps on each table. The beds were hard and thin, military cots of dark green, suitable for camouflage in a dense forest, even though their current use was on a military base far from such forests.

The junior military man escorted V inside.

“You will find everything you need in the bathroom,” he said, then left, closing the door.

V heard the click of a lock on the outside of that door. He was locked inside for the night. He went into the bathroom and found a shaving kit, shower supplies and an extra set of clothes. The clothes were not military clothes. They were the clothes of a civilian.

In Lyonesse, only those that have been through the rigors of boot camp could have the honor of wearing a military uniform. The prestige that accompanied that honor was only reserved for those men who showed the courage and valor to serve in the Lyonesse military. This was in contrast to Damasia, where it seemed everyone, men and women alike, and even children, wore a military uniform in service to the nation and also in contrast to Vitesia, where the uniform of the military is treated no differently than any other garment worn for a job, whether it is in the service industry, the construction industry or the businesses that work in the high rises.

V took off the prison uniform from Vitesia that he had worn through the desert and stepped into the shower. The shower was a small cylinder. V could barely fit his body in and once he did there was little room to move. The water came out in a direct spray that was as strong as a firehose and pricked his skin as it hit. The water was cold. The shower was painful. It felt like penance for sins he had committed. The dirt and dead skin from his time in the desert wasn’t washed away so much as blasted off his body. When he lifted his arms to wash his hair his elbows scraped the walls of the shower. When he turned his body, his knees hit those same walls. He kept the shower short to reduce the discomfort and stepped out after only a couple of minutes and put on the fresh clothes.

He laid down on top of one of the military cots and pulled up the sheet of dark green over his body. There were no windows in the room. V turned off the light next to the bed and hours passed by.

In the very early morning, the outside lock of the door clicked and a man entered the room and sat down in the bed across from V. The man felt at home in this room and on this base and that comfort was obvious in his movements. He flicked on the table lamp next to his bed. His green-eyes watched as V laid on his back, his eyes closed. After a few minutes, as the first rays of the morning sun pierced the nighttime sky outside the fences of the base yet making no difference to the light in this windowless room, V opened his eyes and sat up with rigid posture to face the man across from him. He turned on his table lamp to add to the dim light of the room.

They stared at each other like mirrored images from parallel universes. Green-eyes was the first to speak, breaking the silence.

“I’m afraid this may be the last time we see each other.”

“Are you going on another mission?”

“I would like to thank you for what you did in the desert, it saved Abraham’s life.” He had not answered V’s question.

“Abraham?” V marveled at how he had journeyed through the desert near death for many days with these two men and did not know their names. He was glad he now knew the name of one of those men. He was under no illusion he would ever learn the name of the other one.

“I have told Harold what you did for us. You will be rewarded.”

“I did not do those things for a reward.”

“That is why you will be rewarded.”

V knew what he was in the presence of. For some, circumstance determines their fate. It determines the reason they fight. For others, circumstance does not matter. They are a fixed creature, immune to the winds that blow most men and women about. The man seated before V was a soldier. No matter where he had been born or in what time he had been born, he would have found a way to fight; as a soldier, as a spy, as a scout, he would fight under different names, under no name, for his sect, for his society, for his nation. V looked down at that man’s hands. Those hands in the shadows of the barely lit room, darkened from the blood of how many lives. Then he looked up into the eyes of the man across from him.

“Do you not have a desire to stay in your homeland now that you have found your way back?” V asked.

“I have another fate.” The man across from him said. “It is not to stay here.”

He reached out and patted V on the knee. “You need rest. Stay. You have found a new home in Lyonesse.” He stood above V.

V looked up but could not see the green of his eyes, the man’s face was in complete darkness as he said his last words. “I doubt we will see each other again. Thank you for saving my life.”

V watched in the dim light as the man left the room, the hallway light appearing and then disappearing as the door opened and closed. V laid back onto his hard military cot and closed his eyes for another two hours. When he opened his eyes again he looked for signs that another man had been in his room and the morning conversation was not just some dream or hallucination. V found no signs of anybody else. Perhaps the conversation was only a dream. Perhaps it was a mirage, a hangover from the time in the desert.

Previous Chapter: Chapter Sixteen