Chapter 1351: Memories(1)

That night, Enkilae remembered

He dug through the silt of thirty years, pulling up the memories of where he had come from and the ghost of how it all used to be. That was nothing new for him. After a brutal, skin-flaying day labor, he had always retreated into his own mind. He did it awake, staring at the dark canvas of the salve pen, or in the brief, fitful slumbering rest he was occasionally allowed before the overseer’s horn blew.

He always marched back to the tales of his youth. It was a simple thing: that was the only time in his life he had ever been happy, so he did not mind recalling it. Enkilae could not remember a single drop of joy after the iron collars went on, but his mind clung desperately to the days when the Uthahia still strode the endless northern plains on their great horses, bred their prize mares and their fat sheep, and occasionally served the oil-fucking emperor in his foreign wars. Back when they were free even when they were not.

Of course, if he were being honest with himself, he remembered very little of the grand things. He had been too small to ride with the vanguards, too weak to fight , and far too clumsy to breed the skittish war-mares. All he had done was look over the sheep and the stubborn goats.

That was the task given to the runts of the tribe. Yet, it hadn’t been a bad life. He had loved leading the flock into the vibrant green valleys, trailing behind lambs that he personally fed with fresh milk. He could still remember the trick of it, drilling a smooth, neat hole into the hollow tip of a cow’s horn, filling it to the brim, and letting the tiny, soft-nosed creatures drink their fill, for those lambs that were refused by their mothers and left to starve elsewhise. They would always come back to him afterward when they were sheep grown, curiously munching on his wool tunic and licking his fingers.

During the first bitter years of his bondage, he would conjure up the phantom feeling of those tiny, chewing mouths and cradle himself to sleep, his face wet with silent tears.

But tonight, sitting in the heart of Yarzat, a strange realization washed over him. He was free.

Well... relatively so. And he found he wouldn’t mind raising up goats and sheep once more. He wouldn’t mind sleeping on the thick green grass with the flock lingering around him, perhaps with another curious lamb nibbling at his clothes. He wanted his tribe around him again. A tribe to share fresh milk and sharp cheese with. And, of course, the feasts.

Oh, the feasts.

How they used to feast. Every important family would gather under the great hide pavilions, bringing their sons, daughters, and loudest cousins. Once a week, they would all sit down to break bread with the tribal chieftain. The women would emerge from the cooking fires bearing massive wooden bowls heaped high with roasted meat. They didn’t bother with fancy manners; they simply hacked the flesh into great, dripping chunks with their skinning knives and stuffed their faces with their bare, grease-slicked hands.

Whenever you finished gnawing on a bone, you didn’t leave it on your plate. You hurled it straight at the packs of half-wild stray dogs nesting between the benches. Half the fun was throwing a bone or a slick lump of fat right into the center of the dirt floor just to watch the hounds descend into a snapping, snarling brawl for the prize.

They sat on long, splintered benches, except for the patriarchs of the most respected families, who were granted the rare luxury of a proper chair. It was always the chieftain who decided who got a chair and who sat on the wood. They dined on rough-hewn planks of timber that they could barely call tables, almost every inch of the wood scarred and pitted from men playing drunken games with their finger-knives.

And there would always be singing. Hundreds of voices roaring the same ancient verses in unison. They were rarely in tune, their throats thick with sour wine and fermented mare’s milk, but they had fun. Sometimes, men would shout good-natured, biting insults across the fire at one another, a dangerous game, but a hilarious one. Of course, that only happened once the chieftain gave his nod and his blessing for the revelry to begin. That was the only real rule. In fact, back then, there weren’t many rules at all.

Enkilae had no idea what the rules were here in the south, but he reckoned they were endless. He had never been invited to a table he was not anything other than a piece of property, but he knew that if the northern lords had a thousand strict rules for how a slave must walk, they must have a million more for how a free man must eat.

The food here, at least, was a spectacular marvel. In his tribe’s old feasts, you got goat-milk porridge, roasted mutton, and perhaps some withered wild fruit if the season was kind. Here in Yarzat, there was a literal embarrassment of choices. There were dishes placed before him whose names he couldn’t even begin to pronounce, but the moment they hit his tongue, he fell desperately in love.

There was one peculiar thing, a little, short yellow stick that looked remarkably similar to the polished leg-bone of a young goat. A passing servant told him it was made of nothing but ground grain and eggs. Enkilae had chewed it with a look of profound disbelief; he had never thought something so utterly magnificent could be fashioned by the hands of men.

The exile was made to seat at a long, polished table in a side hall. There were a dozen of them gathered there, six to a side. He realized almost immediately that there would be no singing tonight, nor would there be any bones thrown to the dogs. Yet, the hall possessed a warm, positive glow. Each man, woman, and child sitting around the wood seemed comfortable, leaning in to share quiet, soft whispers with one another like they were trading beautiful secrets, their faces breaking into easy, frequent laughter.

Rarer still, the people at the table would occasionally turn to him, throwing a polite question his way between one steaming serving and the next. They had all presented themselves with grand bows and bright smiles at the start of the evening, but Enkilae had never been good with names. Thirty years in the pens taught a man to remember faces and whip-hands, not titles. So, he mostly chose to remain silent, nodding quietly, speaking only when he had to answer to a question of his own to whisper into the warm, fragrant air.

Sometimes, he would raise his eyes to look toward the head of the long table, watching the two figures he knew for a certainty were the King and Queen of Yarzat. They wore no glittering crowns to distinguish themselves from the other lords, but it was there in the sheer gravity of how they conducted themselves, and how every eye in the room naturally drifted into their orbit. They were powerful and beautiful, he realized, an arresting pair of monarchs with hundreds of thousands of souls answering to their nod, and the proud Romelians bending to do their bidding.

And Egil... Egil had apparently been the King’s brother. Or, at least, the King had named him so with a raw, bleeding honesty in his voice.

How in the great plains had the rogue managed that? How had a crude boy from the plains ever crossed paths with a monarch of the south? Had Egil become his slave first, slowly earning the King’s fierce friendship and iron respect through years of shared trial? Or had he escaped the pens entirely, finding service as a free man beneath the royal banners?

Enkilae had a thousand questions to ask him. A lifetime of them.

But the dirt had him. Egil was dead.

He ruly did not know how to feel. He knew that holding a grudge against the dead was a useless, hollow endeavor, and sadder still when it was family you were spiting. Yet, he could not deny the heavy reality of it: in the end, it was his younger brother’s service that had shattered his chains and delivered hundreds of their tribeskin from the agony of the empire. That, he had to respect. That, he had to acknowledge.

It was a strange, humbling reversal of the world to know that the elder brother was now in a permanent debt of gratitude to the younger. But that was life, he suppose, as strange and erratic as a young horse’s manners.

As he chewed on his thoughts, Enkilae caught a gaze drifting from down the table.

Sitting a few paces away was a young man no older than thirteen, staring at him with an intense, quiet curiosity. The boy possessed a striking, unblinking pair of eye. The Prince of this kingdom, Enkilae supposed. He was the mixed soup of his mother and father, clearly.

Enkilae returned the stare, his joints stiffening as decades of survival instincts suddenly flared. He wondered frantically if he ought to look elsewhere. He was being treated with immense luxury tonight, and it was entirely clear Egil had been deeply respected in this court, but that did not guarantee a slave would be tolerated if he looked a prince in the eye for too long. He began to lower his gaze, ready to slip back into the safety of the shadows.

But before he could look away, the young Prince offered him a soft wide smile.

Enkilae blinked, thoroughly bewildered by the lack of malice. Flustered, he tried to hastily return the gesture, only to completely forget that his mouth was currently crammed full of the yellow egg-and-grain sticks. As his lips parted in an awkward grin, a small, thoroughly munched chunk of food slipped right past his teeth and tumbled ungracefully onto the polished wood of the royal table.

A wet and yellow paste.