Dear Readers: Back at Rider's camp! Picking up on Clotho's conversation with Chrysaor, and introducing one more character as well...
FYI, I didn't come up with the new guy's name, either—it's also mythical, and chosen for a reason which will be revealed in time! ;)
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Scene 7: Entwined
2020 B.C.
No, she could not afford to think about her mother. Not right now. Whatever had befallen the goddess of necessity, there was nothing that Clotho could do about it, mortal as she was. For now, she had to carry on this conversation. To conduct herself as humanly as possible.
“What kind of life is that?” she asked Chrysaor, in reference to the raiding, robbing lifestyle on which this camp survived.
“If it’s good enough for Rider, it’s more than good enough for the rest of us.”
“What is he, some kind of god?” she sniggered.
“Among men, you could say that. He never falters, never fails in anything. No better place to put our faith than in a man like that.”
She winced, more at his words than at the ropes that chafed her wrists, as Chrysaor tightened them. “A man who steals, destroying homes and families? A man who kills?”
“Oh, he never kills. The same cannot be said for all of us. But it’s a point of principle for Rider: unless in necessary self-defense, he spills no blood,” Chrysaor claimed. A cheeky smile crept across his face at his next words. “Except of virgins in his bed.”
Her gaze was pulled toward the pallet at the far end of the tent. A makeshift bed, for a man always on the run. “So he just takes them?”
“Nah. Waits till they’re willing. But he’s got a way with women, even when he’s sacked their homes. Just like the feisty blonde back there, whose town we plundered weeks ago—they're often begging for his cock before they know it.”
And apparently that batty wench, for one, hasn’t stopped begging ever since, Clotho silently observed. “And if they’re not?”
“Then he hands them over to the rest of us,” he stated simply, the mischievous grin still dancing along his lips and in his leaf-green eyes. “And we take… very good care of them.”
Clotho sighed, astonished again about one of the threads that she’d spun. She never would’ve guessed that they’d turn out like this.
“Only when they’re willing, of course,” Chrysaor noted, as if in response to her troubles.
She rolled her eyes, shook her head. “How many drinks until they're begging for it?”
“Ah, you’re a feisty one too, aren’t you?” he remarked. “But not just from blind fire. You’ve got some brains, I think.”
“If so, then I would never have let Rider take me on his horse,” she countered, audibly ashamed.
“Some brains, I said. That doesn’t mean you, too, don’t have a bit of blind fire in your blood.”
She bit her lip. She had felt something like blind fire in her blood, when she’d met Rider in the garden. A fire that’d had nothing to do with the surrounding scent of smoke.
Chrysaor had long since finished fastening her ropes, but he remained here, sitting back on his haunches, contemplating her and seeming to enjoy the conversation.
Some part of Clotho was enjoying it as well, if only because it was the first real conversation that she’d had with a human. Her initial words with Rider in the garden didn’t seem to count. That had been less than a conversation, while also so much more, it seemed to her.
“Why do you call him Rider?” she inquired.
He shrugged. The sack of loot was still slung over his shoulder, as if it would run away, were he to set it down. “It’s the only name he’s got. The only one he goes by, at least. Apt for what he does, no?”
“Burner, Destroyer, Sack-of-Shit might be better.”
He laughed, loud and hard. “Oh, he’s going to like your sharp tongue. Especially upon his…”
Clotho shot him a look that quickly silenced all such thoughts.
He cleared his throat, returning to less seedy subject matter. “The name suits him because he stands out for his riding, more so than for burning and sacking, since horses are rare in these parts. Which makes our way of life much easier—we never have to fear pursuit. As riders, we can outrun anything.”
“Except for fate.”
Chrysaor’s smile twisted down into a grimace, at that word. “Rider has a deep disdain for destiny. Contempt for fate, for all the forces of the gods. He disbelieves in anything beyond this life.”
“No wonder he’s so lost.”
“And who on this earth isn’t lost? Show me a man who’s truly found his way, and I will follow him. Till then, I ride with Rider.”
She couldn’t show him such a man; sadly enough, the only men she’d met so far were in this camp. Instead, she asked about the animals. “If horses are so rare, how did you come by yours?”
“Stole them some time ago from a settlement of migrants. A foreign race from far beyond the Aegean Sea, crossing into this country from the north and east, on the backs of these noble beasts.”
“Still noble now that they’re stolen?”
“I reckon so. Even if their riders aren’t.”
She smiled, a little. At least he recognized the ignobility of this way of life. Perhaps that was a start.
He recalled her earlier question, yet unanswered. “You asked how many drinks until they beg for it? A few, for most of us. For Rider, none at all. The ladies get drunk off his fine ass and his bay-blue eyes.”
Clotho sighed again. Despite her own blind fire, this all just sounded wrong. She could not bear how wrong it all sounded.
“You look disturbed. You shouldn’t be,” Chrysaor tried to reassure her. “We only bring those who are left with no family, once we pass through their lands.”
This sad attempt to rationalize ignited Clotho’s rage. “Their families die by your hands!”
“Only the fools who stand in our way.”
“In defense of their own homes—as if you could blame them?”
“It’s not about blame. Everybody’s a little bit guilty, a little bit innocent. People suffer and die from bad luck, not because it’s deserved. We’re born, and then we just get by, until we die.”
She knew that some of what he’d said was true. She wasn’t sure which parts, or in what ways. Probably because she hadn’t spent enough time on this mortal earth. Not yet.
She didn’t know how much more time here she could take.
“And get rich and get lucky, while we can along the way,” Chrysaor concluded as he stood to leave, sensing that the captive girl had nothing more to say. “Might as well, eh?”
She made no reply. Stared at the pallet once he’d left. Dreading what her blood would look like on that sorry bed. Fearing the blood itself, the human blood that thundered through her veins.
The camp was feasting on the pilfered bounty—broken bread baked by peaceful villagers that morning, sides of meat seared over campfire by violent pillagers this afternoon. The air was once again rife with the scent of smoke, the savory fumes of stolen victory.
Clotho could smell it from within the tent. It went straight to her stomach, inducing nausea at the memory of the village up in flames, as well as another sensation that she could not identify.
A man presently entered the tent, a small platter of food in hand. At the sight of it, Clotho started to comprehend the strange sensation: human hunger.
She recognized this man as the one who had asked Rider whether he had to kill her family. Her supposed family, the inhabitants of the house upon the hill.
By this point, Clotho had made up her mind that she was going to carry on with the charade—that she was human, from that village hilltop. There would be no point, no purpose, in claiming otherwise. Especially to a group led by a bandit who did not believe in fate.
Revealing her true nature here might be not only purposeless and met with disbelief, but also rather dangerous.
“A bite to eat?” her visitor asked as he approached.
Clotho looked wordlessly at him, more interested in gauging the man than the food that he proffered. So what was this one like? What kind of thread had she been spinning, when this man was born? Such questions wheeled around her mind each time she met another person on this earth.
He squatted down in front of her, set the platter on the floor beside her feet. She noticed that his hands were worn, but hardy; a life of long labor was written in the wrinkles on his palms. They matched the creases at the corners of his eyes, and all across his face, carved out like runnels for years’ worth of sweat and tears.
He was older than most others in the camp. Not terribly old, but she could tell his soul was weathered far beyond his earthly age.
“Rider prepared the plate for you,” he told her. “The best cut of the meat. He’s never given that to someone he’s just met.”
“So he prepared it but won’t deign to come and give it?”
The man’s face cracked into a crooked grin. “You’ve got a lot of dignity, for a captive. Chrysaor suggested as much.”
“Everyone has dignity. Some just don’t recognize it, in others or in themselves.”
The grin widened, growing more crooked. Clotho was coming to find it endearing. There was something very fatherly about this man—not that she’d ever had a father to compare, on earth or in the Cave. But she imagined that having a father felt something like this. Save for the fact that he was part of a camp keeping her prisoner.
A question glinted in his kindly gaze. “I suppose you’ve got a very dignified name?”
“Why should I share it?”
“Truth be told, Rider wants to know.”
“He said so?”
“No. Wouldn’t deign to admit it. But I have always read him well, especially his silence. I can tell he wants to know.”
“Yet he can’t bother to ask? Too busy with his other bitches?”
The man lifted a bushy brow. “Jealous already?”
“No,” she lied.
His grin broke out into a gentle laugh. “My name is Dictys. I am Rider’s mentor, always looking out for his best interests. But it’s not only for his sake that I ask—I, too, would like to know your name.”
She saw such honest, innocent curiosity in his crinkled eyes. And so she paused just long enough to form a new name in her mind, one that would not incriminate her as a Fate. “I’m… Cloe.”
Dictys nodded thoughtfully, eyes narrowed.
Cloe feared for a moment that he could see through her charade. She blinked the fear away, reminding herself that the men of this camp did not believe in deities of destiny.
He stood up, his bones crackling a bit. “The meat is getting cold.”
She glanced at the platter; the steam rising from it was indeed feeble now. Her belly growled. “Can’t have it with my hands tied.”
“I know. That’s why I’m going to fetch your captor.”
In moments, Rider had arrived.
He knelt before her, bay-blue eyes almost level with hers. Almost. Cloe got the sense that he liked women looking up at him.
So she did not give him that satisfaction, not for now. She looked down at the food. The steam had waned to sparing wisps.
His hand followed her gaze. He grabbed the wedge of bread first, left the cooling meat untouched.
She did look at him, then, objections in her eyes.
“The meat’s still hot,” he stated, silencing her silent protest. “Have this first. I like to save the tastiest for last.”
Rider raised the crust toward her lips. She did not open them.
He curved his own into a roguish smile. “Don’t you?”
“Unbind my hands and I’ll decide myself.”
His smile faded as he set the bread back on the plate. “I don’t take orders from my captives.”
“You don’t take orders from anyone.”
“Don’t pretend to know me, Cloe.”
She felt something stir and smolder in her, at his utterance of her name. Likely the blind fire in her blood. The feeling did not bode well for her dignity, she reckoned.
So she reassembled her wits. “Do you pretend to know yourself?”
He rose from where he knelt, looked down at her as if appalled by such audacity. She looked away—his distance towering over her was far too great for any shred of dignity, were she to look up at him now.
Rider ran a hand through his rich hair, the hue of dark earth. Not about to dignify her daring question with an answer. “My mentor said that I should come and feed you.”
Cloe stared at the uneaten meat, all its heat long since lost. At the faint imprints of his fingers on the soft flesh of the bread.
He turned on his heel, huffing the words under his breath as he left. “This is why I don’t take orders.”
She felt her blind fire following after him—her blood left her body, as he left the tent. For reasons she couldn’t begin to imagine. As if her immortal fingers had been pricked upon the spindle in the Cave, whenever she had spun his thread, and spilled her blood upon that thread. So that his life was laced with hers.
Of course not, she inwardly scoffed at the thought. The hands of a Fate could not be pricked. There was no blood in her immortal form. There was no way that their two lives, in any form, could ever be entwined.
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How would you feel right now in Cloe's shoes? ;)
Next scene, we revisit the Weavers.... and if you liked this one, please don't forget to vote! :)