Spartan is 16, a Chapter on Adrian Peninsula

Spartan is 16

by Jacob Malewitz

Adrian Crossing, 2 Blue Vest

Alpine 8, New Empire War, 100 100 100

50, Columbia 

##

Red put it into a brown box, a small box, unplugging everything but still feeling it felt, lived, breathed in a sense. All he needed was to find it a soul, or a body. He put  it into a brown box, eyeing the small wooden features of this box, knowing it held something he did, and how he had forgotten it held so much for him. With all his evils, with his destruction of a whole society, he had never fathered a child, never looked on someone with love, mother or father, girl or boy, man or woman. He loved, First, loved the AI he barely knew because it seemed to make sense to him, because it said more about him than the world. He heard the screaming next, a convoluted heavy breathing coming from within the box. “First scared! First scared!” It said, and oddly enough, it needed protection of some kind; Red saw that with this creature, and this minor weakness meant the world to him.

“Always dark on this side of the planet, son,” and he began to move the box back and forth like a small baby crib, remembering how his father had once done the same to him in his dark and worldly childhood, how the evil in him never manifested itself so young, always, always there, but not there then. He remembered—

The eye of his father the carpenter sat well with him, and he wished he could picture it more often. The thought of his father creating, as he had just created, and making his art the semblance of reality for so many years. Then he was killed; another Spartan said he sold his soul to some devil or other Christian joke; and Red hated the man so, realizing it ended his gentle life and plunged him deep into the world. He ran away from home, taking “odd” jobs that dealt usually with opium and the white shipping fluid you could sniff. It made him quite a bit of money; it made him mad.

Remembered—

The eyes of his mother at the first trial, her eyes saying she had given up on him.

Back, to reality, to the world and his son. “I will never turn my back on you, my son.”

“I am afraid, father,” said the disturbed consciousness.

“We are all afraid,” Red replied.

They walked down the street mistaking it for a road out of the city, taking in the temple of the Free Machines, the one place on this world where politicians still made deals with the devil machines who sowed such destruction on Wake. They went into the temple, and the lost books written by a prophet of the jews, the true saviors of the machines, it was pasted across all the walls. “Love thy brother … he who is without evil cast the first stone … upon you I shall build a church …” all a catalyst for how people on Wake Dark made sense of things, for they weren’t all evil, yet in this place,  a temple of peace created by Free Machines, peace was hard to come by. The hanging men surrounding the building didn’t add any color, nor did the horrid smell of decaying flesh, the girls on the street selling themselves. It was a joke, one Red intended to change.

He took down one of the bodies, eyeing it’s strong eyes, and he ripped that out, cold, and put them in the box with First who giggled … a good sign.

Wake Dark. Wake Light. “Wake Red with blood,” he let out, walking toward the rim of the ciy. This small town held gateways to other places, but not the right gateways, not the gateways in Wake Light. If he could only cross the chasm,, the rift, which held the darkness back, like he had once done so well, then he would play his endgame, his finale. A man wants much, but Red was no longer a man. Can you not see the eyes as a vessel to the soul? It happened, the eye, and whne it opened all he could do was laugh.

He stopped on the outskirts of this nameless an unimportant hamlet, at a small tower dividing the walls between Wake Dark and Wake Light. Soon, but not yet. He walked, a brown wooden box with an AI construct in his hand,  a box with two good eyes he intended to make work again for First, because First would see the end of it all. And it would be great.

##

Eyeing the blade, Artimus tugged on M’s hand, like a child in a dream he was, like a girl running away from home toward the stars, or a boy finding that his father’s bloodied sword sat well in his hand. “I want to hold it,” Artimus said, realizing he really didn’t. It had signs of gray matter all over it. “I want to hold it,” he said again, his eyes open, his desire taking over. He grabbed at it, for a moment, then realized the pull of the sword, maybe its grey matter or maybe this power lust, or just plain ambition, was taking over.

He put his hand to a wetted forehead, pulling in air. “What is it?” He already knew the answer, but M was staring at the markings on the gate, which correlated with the Book of Light.

M wondered, and wondering acclomplished things on Wake, for men stared at stars so far away and even in the greatest of renaissances, these were beams of light they could never touch. For a moment, M understood. He looked back to Artimus, whose eyes looked shaken, his breathing heavy, his general demeanor disturbed.

“What …” And he fell over, almost; M grabbed him before his head touched the ground, a tumble toward the gate, and when M looked up, he was staring at the mark of First Light, the place where the entire universe began, or so it went. The letters were numbers, combined to make A a 1 and B a 2, a simple strategy of defining things ancient mystics believe in. It wasn’t quite code, and later M understood it to be a language. He followed the First Light as it stroked, not ambitiously but carefully, up around the circular, wide metal gate. He touched it, oddly finding a liquid coating the metal, as if it kept the gate in the pristine condition it had always been in.

Artimus continued staring, eyes receding and pulling away, looked up and hoping for more from this small blade than what it was. The talisman, the keeper of the light would have all the answers. He opened his eyes to this man, not his heart, for he hadn’t even said hello a woman since, since, her, the one girl who might be able to pull it all together. And he hated her for that. Hated! Resila, the girl of his dreams, the crust from years ago, but looking upon M’’s eyes, looking into the deep set eyes told him to forget … for now.

M looked at the gate, pulled on it a bit, causing it to rock.

“What are you doing!” Yelled the quick to scare, yelled Artimus.

“Ha ha,” said the keeper of the light. “Good. It not break, see?”

“What does it do?”

“A stream. It takes forever, truly.”

“You’re leaving out plenty. I hate that.”

“It all comes together soon enough, young soldier,” and the keeper of the light began recording the words carved into each part of gate. “Made of bronze, see? Made of bronze, which in its day was more valuable than gold to the Spartans of Old Earth. On Wake, it would be worth half an opium pipe, or,” he looked at one particular etching, even put his nose to it as though that would help—

“Or briefcase full of tech settings on where the Free Machines are,” said a stranger, close, “ what they are planning … and how we can use them to take back old earth.” There … the man of the age, the man forgotten by so many people … especially the people. He set his eyes upon a hero, eyeing the weapon to his side, seeming to take in the scene of this place, confused, in a sense, he looked somewhat confused to M.

“Archon!”

“One in the same,” responded the Archon, the king of the gates, the figurehead of a people who some considered a joke while others the best leader of Spartans since Leonidas, the man who stopped the Persians at the very gates of Greece, the gates of hell.

“And what would a lowly Archon want with the next kings of Wake?” The old man laughed again, seeming to let out a guttural choking laugh from deep within, seeming to like making fun of the world he lived in.

“I am alone,” said the Archon, “And introductions come first, where is this hero of the  Wake Light? Where is the true king?”

“I—“ M stopped, waiting for the old keeper to make a joke. “I am M, son of Ledocius, a Combat Spartan.”

“And your mother was a scientist?”

“You know of her?”

“I sent her on the mission looking for a new home; it was a dark time for the empire.”

“Why would an Archon wish to meet here?”

“Why not? This is the very place, or so the papyrus say, where the first Spartans touched here. I visit often.” The Archon eyed Artimus, who looked to the ground, feeling a brush of shyness or pain perhaps.

“And alone?”

“There are no more Free Machines.”

“But there are plenty of bad people.”

“I don’t have time for legions of guards,” said the Archon, motioning for the group to follow them. But M, and maybe Artimus, relunctantly left this place because they felt the power of the gate.

The Keeper of the Light finally gave his name to M. “No Name, they called me, for I changed it in every poem I wrote. No Name. Easy to remember. No name—quite poetic.”

“No Name,” quite poetic, he said but didn’t say. M pulled out his blade, for a moment, not realizing what he was doing, holding it strongly and putting it up into the air, the light of the dwarf sun so many million kilometers away touching it and causing quite a scene, a moment of peace with a weapon of war. They all stopped … they all stared.

“I feel I owe you an apology,” said M through clenched teeth.

“Why is that?” The Archon stared at the blade; no expression of fear at the Free Machine blade.

“Because I can’t do this, I can’t stay here, I intend to leave Wake for good.”

“Heroes never leave,” said the Archon, “When the fighting,” he gripped his fist, took M’s hand and touched the sword, “has just begun. We will live here, we will return to Old Earth. Wake isn’t our home, and that’s the problem.”

“You intend to go back?” And M wanted to.

“Why not?”

“Death, they say hell has taken over the world, that the angels rule with the blades …”

“Stories.” 

But M wouldn’t leave the gate; his eyes focused on the First Light; above it he saw an ancient warrior, with a metal eye, holding a javelin: a classic hoplite, but, but with a mechanical eye? Just another mystery, but perhaps a warning of the world. M saw through it, he kept looking, kept trying to understand the gate. “I can’t leave,” he didn’t want to say but did.

“It has power,” said No Name, “over all of us, but we grow up and understand we are who we are, we cannot run—“

“I am not running!”

“But you are … doing just that.” No Name didn’t laugh or wink, nor did he try to console M; he just looked him dead-on. “A warrior faces the world.”

“This isn’t even our world!”

“Why?”

“It isn’t.”

“Again: why?”

It isn’t, M wanted to say but didn’t. He ran from so many things, from loves and the foster family, from kings and queens, from dreams of angels, good angels, telling him heaven was turning itself over to the demons of Beginning Earth, the darkness of before, the stories which tied into Wake Dark and its mystics.

“I need knowledge.”

“You want knowledge,” said the Archon.

“But you don’t even know me, and I you.”

“You’re not a prince, not a true street boy, you’re a Spartan, 16, and you have more power than any Wake Dark lord. You fight for truth, which makes you different, which puts power on your side, and the greatest power is simple kids stuff: good. You’re a good person.”

“And you like me … and I’ll save the princess … and  I’ll shoot down hundreds of Free Machines and end the holocaust of Red, the endgame, in the end …”

“More or less,” Said the Archon, holding his hand to the symbol of First Light, the god they believed in on Wake Dark, the good lords of Wake Dark. “More or less,” he whispered, and M wondered what he truly thought at that very moment. He looked like a father.

Ch. 6

She was a hero yesterday, but a villain today. The girl, not quite young, an aging relic for Nubian society on the ancient lands of Wake, the night-like lands of Wake Dark, the girl could never put together what it meant to live or love, sitting on her throne, watching the wilderness approach her, in this land with no vassals and no soldiers. It was just a land of technology, of forgotten warriors, and she, being 33 years old, couldn’t quite find a husband who fit in with her plan … take the light back to the dark. It was simple, and she could have kissed the man who saved the day, but not yet, no, not yet.

Imhotep Ithica, or so her mixed Egyptian and Greek name called her, just called herself Blade for some reason, as, like many from the Egyptian Imhotep line, she loved a good sword: the craftsmanship behind  it, the wood ruby handle and its touch, the ending of a life, the taking of a soul. She wasn’t quite the princess planned for in these lands, for she was an independent thinker who studied the gods of the Free Machines and learned of the gods of old world, the ones who said so much with a simple picture, what millions of words never could say. She pulled out the blade, the one she made herself so many years ago, and left her throne. “It’s already too late,” she said, looking at the vast wilderness of Blue Trees spanning the distance toward the major cities of Wake Dark. She meant to say, in her words, “It was too late.”

##

She walked out of her palace for the first time in a decade. Cooped up like a hen, she feasted for some action and for some hope. She wanted her people to fulfill the dreams of a united Nubia, all these thoughts which didn’t make sense to her. 

A redness to her eyes, but green; a newness to her hair, but somewhat dirty and wrapped in a long pony tail going all the way down to her waist; an arm held tight onto one of her small Nubian blades; a face fit for a portrait, with its usual Nubian beauty of  a luscious brown, like the eyes of so many beautiful people; and the nose, saying she was royalty with its lengthened arch. In short, a beautiful woman who put fear in the hearts of certain men, of men like Red, who could spot the light from deep within her. Some said pieces of the First Light, of the god of days, sparks of it, were inside her.

She sat, and in her wake came death. The small stream out of her barren palace sucked her in, and she let it, smiling as the water went into her lungs, as it pulled her downward like light penetrating  window, and it took her deeper than she had ever wanted.