Empire of Ashes

Chapter I - Chains and Bones

Near my toes, a pair of beetles fought over territory. One was grey, and the other was metallic blue. After days of staring at the boots of the slave in front of me, I found myself engrossed by their tussling. They must have placed great importance on those few inches of dirt, but it looked so very insignificant from up here.

Soldiers began pulling men and women from the lines. They had to unlock their chains to do it, so it was time-consuming. The chosen were loaded into a wagon at the end of the lines, and I couldn't help noticing that they were the youngest and comeliest of us. A girl with beautiful ebony hair was pulled from next to me. A boy no older than sixteen joined her a moment later.

"That one," the captain would say, always accompanied by a pointing finger.

He had reached the count of eleven when he stopped his horse in front of me. I hardly dared to breathe as he reached down with one gloved hand and seized my chin, lifting it so he could see my face. For a long moment, he stared at me while I stared resolutely downwards.

The beetles seemed to have killed each other - at least, neither of them were moving anymore. The grey one lay belly-up, legs twitching. I moved my boot a fraction to squash him and end his misery. That was ... if beetles could even feel misery.

"She will have to do. Clean her up."

He released my chin and strode onwards. But the instant he had gone, another soldier came to unfasten my chains and tug me out of line. If I hadn't been shackled still, I might have tried to grab the man's sword-hilt. He might have gotten angry enough to kill me, after all, and that was exactly what I wanted - to walk in the garden of the gods with my family, to hear my father's booming laugh and see my mother's smile again.

My filthy, vomit-soaked shirt was cut away, and they emptied a skin of freezing water down my front. A single shiver wracked my body from head to toe. They had a fresh shirt for me, itchy and much too big. It must have belonged to one of the soldiers.

To don it, the shackles had to come off for a moment, but I was held so tightly that I could only writhe and earn myself a lazy backhanded blow. I licked a few drops of blood from my lips and used it to wash my pride down. It was a taste that was becoming all too familiar.

Under ordinary circumstances, the feel of clean cotton against my skin would have been a reassurance. Today, it felt like my last, flimsy defence had been stripped away. The first night, when the soldiers had come looking for girls to warm their beds, I had shoved a finger down my throat and thrown up over myself. It had worked ... after a fashion.

A young man with a faceful of stubble took my arm and loaded me onto the wagon with the others. It was so cramped that there was scarcely room for my hips on the end of the wooden bench, but the luxury of sitting down made up for that. It rattled into motion a few minutes later, the cart horses breaking into a grudging trot. The newcomers fell in around the wagon.

We were going south, away from the column, which quickly disappeared from view as we rounded a hill. The captain and two of his men were following us, to my surprise. They kept a careful - almost disdainful - distance from the warriors.

The driver whipped the cart horses into a steady trot. They were all skin and bone, nothing like the plump cob my family had used for ploughing. I felt a stab of pity for them. These animals didn't deserve their indentured servitude any more than we did.

But the newcomers' horses were different. They were lithe geldings with the muscle to carry their masters day and night if need be. Their coats had been brushed, their manes untangled, and their reins hung loosely. It told me everything I needed to know about their riders. And more importantly, they hadn't helped massacre my family. My standards for mankind had plummeted in the last week.