Chapter 14-
“I-I’m Janna, Janna Halloway; n-nice to meet you…?” Janna’s voice quivered with a degree of politeness. Staring into her innocent eyes, Sonsee couldn’t feel anything but embarrassment for her jumpiness.
“Hi,” she replied, pulling back and twisting her spear, causing it to break apart and retract. “My name is Sonsee-array, n-nice to meet you.” She held her hand out in a feeble apology. Janna, obliged and not unwilling to move past this first impression, took the offer in kind.
“Oh-” the word slipped out from Janna’s mouth as she shook her hand.
“Is something the matter?” Sonsee asked, curiously.
“Oh, it’s just that… I’ve never met a woman with rough hands,” Janna explained.
Sonsee paused for a moment, surprised, before bursting into laughter.
“Have you ever met a woman who killed a coyote?” she said with a sudden dead seriousness.
Janna was shocked. “You-??”
Sonsee burst into laughter again, breaking her composure. Janna didn’t quite know how to react.
“I’ve never killed a coyote before, I’m not quite that tough…” Sonsee explained, still wringing the laughter from her gut. Only later would she contemplate that as they spoke, Janna had an incredible knack for making her feel more comfortable.
Janna looked out into the waters of the Spring.
“You don’t seem to be put off by this place,” the woman noted.
“I’ve been coming here every few days, my house is right outside that little stump that leads here,” Janna explained.
“Oh?” Sonsee replied, “You live in that little farmhouse?”
“Mhm,” Janna affirmed. “Just me and my dad.”
“No brothers?”
“Nope…”
“So,” Sonsee began curiously, “your hands aren’t rough like mine? Do you do any work with your father?”
Janna averted her eyes, not shamefully, but rather annoyed and wishing not to direct her feeling towards Sonsee.
“No, he won’t let me work…” she explained.
“Really?” Sonsee replied, taken aback, “And why is that? It seems like he would have a lot of work cut out for himself.”
“It’s a family thing…” Janna said with a resigned tone. “The place we’re from- my parents, I mean, it’s a little country in southern Klouve; it’s called Nujabe. Nujaben women don’t work with men, it’s a tradition for a daughter to be chosen to get an education. When my mother died, I was their only child, so it was passed on to me. Dad mostly works the fields, but it’s getting harder for him…”
As she spoke, her face slowly betrayed her guilty conscience. For years, watching her father toil away as she was treated like a princess had built up quite the feeling of helplessness.
“... Janna?”
“Huh?”
Sonsee smiled at her, kindly. “Your father is doing what he thinks is best for you. That education will let you rise much higher than he could being a farmer. Your father seems like a good man, I think it would depress him more if you threw away your future just to ease his suffering for a moment.”
Her words sat in Janna’s mind for a moment, she sifted through her feelings before turning away and closing her eyes.
“Feeling good in the short term, it’s an easy trap to fall into…” she added.
“I just don’t see why he has to be so stoic about it,” she said, not wanting to hear everything that was said to her.
“I don’t disagree with you, stoicism can be bad for your health,” Sonsee laughed, and prompted a smile to wriggle its way out of Janna’s own stoic face.
“What are you studying, anyway?”
“Well,” Janna answered, “I don’t quite have a regimented study, because there’s no school in this town, and no teachers, so I mostly read on my own. There’s a little bookstore on Main Street; they mostly have practical books for farming or repairing equipment, but there’s a great back-catalog of texts on medicine that’s really great, some of it goes over my head, but it’s so cool to have all of it right here…”
“You want to be a doctor?” Sonsee asked.
“Yeah,” Janna smiled. “I think it would be great.”
“Where did you get that idea?” It wasn’t a patronizing question, it was more well-meaning.
“Well, when I was five or six, I got really sick with some kind of fever…” Janna explained. “Back then, it was unheard of for a child to survive that out here, my dad got super anxious, he told me about it.”
“What happened?”
“There was a new doctor in town, his name was Dr. Love, he had just arrived from Fenway, where he’d had some kind of apprenticeship. I remember being in the sickbed, I could barely even stay awake...”
Janna fell deep into thought about the events of that time…
“Do you think you can do anything, Doc?”
“...”
“Please, there has to be some-…”
“...I’ll do my best, Mr Halloway.”
“...”
“We just need strength, strength like a horn, Mr. Halloway, so that it can resound inside of her as well…”
“Dr. Love was a pretty nice man…” Janna rambled, before her eyes snapped out of her reminiscence. “So then, what brings you here?”
“Mr. Jepta needed a guide through the desert, so I responded, simple,” Sonsee replied.
“No,” Janna said, a little smirk reaching her face, “why did you really want to come here? It was for this, wasn’t it?” she motioned outwards to the waters.
Sonsee laughed, “I don’t usually try to tell my life’s story to every little girl I meet…”
“Well, you felt comfortable enough to tell Mr. Gallow and Mr. Jepta…” Janna retorted.
“You-” Sonsee was thrown off guard. “You were listening the whole time??” Janna laughed cutely at this. “You should be a lawyer, not a doctor, you little liar! You knew the whole time!”
Janna was thrown into peels of laughter by Sonsee’s mock-anger.
“Don’t try to ask me all innocently when you heard it all!” she dug in.
“You know what a lawyer is, and your speaking is pretty good, so you must have spent some time in a city or somewhere then?” Janna asked.
“All those books must have made you pretty intuitive, huh?” Sonsee asked rhetorically. “Don’t think I’m some kind of savage like you’ll see in those regional guides they hand out to tourists,” she said, with a degree of pride. “After I lost my tribe,” she continued, “I went to the nearest town, a little place a few miles from here called Wrin. There was a school there, and a school mistress who was kind to me. That was five years ago…” She drifted off into thought.
“Is that where you learned about society and all?” Janna questioned.
“Hm? Oh, yes,” Sonsee broke out of her thoughts. “She taught me how to speak well, and how to do some arithmetic, and a little about this country and its history, and how it was founded by some Klouvians looking for a new business venture.”
“So, how did you end up here?”
Sonsee paused for moment, articulating her thoughts. “There’s an old story in my tribe, you heard me mention it before. It’s about a Spring, whose waters could heal any illness or injury, that would renew your spirit, and…” she looked out at the waters again. “Where the dead would go to rest…”
Janna studied the profile of her face, it wasn’t sorrow in her eyes, it was a little more complex than that. A sense of sadness, maybe, but also peace, and a hint of happiness. It felt like, gazing into her heart, she could see a tumultuous mess of emotions.
“I suppose I’d call it,” she thought, “a kaleidoscope melancholy.”
Sonsee turned back to Janna.
“Do you want to hear some more of our stories?” she asked.
“...Yes, I think I would.”
They passed the hours sitting beneath a tree in the Garden. Sonsee told her about the Atamape people’s legends, about how there were two coyotes in the moon who were the light and dark, about the soaring petrichor that led the founder of their tribe to the stream that saved his life in the desert, about the man with a snake’s tail and hawk’s head who lived behind the sun and danced to keep it shining during the day.
---
“Hey, Clarke, is there a place to rest in this town?” Gideon asked.
“Yeah, and, hey, I don’t mean to be rude, but it isn’t Clarke anymore,” Gallow remarked.
“Oh, you’re going by some cool nickname, now?”
They walked back into town, only half an hour had passed since they had first entered the Garden, and Gideon’s body was tired from traveling all day, not to mention discovering the existence of another world in a tree stump.
“I haven’t gone by my birth name since I left your unit; it’s Gallow now, no last name.”
“It’s pretty funny to hear you mention desertion so casually,” Gideon spat. “You know I’m *this* close to hauling you back to the army and throwing you in jail again, no Redemption law is going to save your ass now that you’re an adult.”
“God, God, you’re always on my back about stupid things, aren’t you?”
“Desertion is a serious crime, ‘Gallow,’” Gideon said the name with a mocking lilt. “It’s a cowardly thing, as expected of a rat like you.”
“I don’t know why you hate me so much, Gideon,” Gallow retorted.
“It’s Captain Jepta.”
“Yeah, yeah, maybe to one of your soldiers.”
“This is just like old times,” Gallow thought. “Right down to him not enjoying a moment of it.”
“I don’t like you,” Gideon replied, “because we are nothing alike. You don’t have any understanding of resolve.”
“Oh, there’s that word again…”
---
Five years ago, a defeated-looking young man lined up with a group of slightly older boys in a training camp located somewhere on the East coast. It was a gray morning, the first day of boot camp, when out of his tent, a man with olive skin emerged in full uniform, saber at his side.
“Good morning, boys,” he said in a booming voice which, despite its nasally undertone, still managed to demand respect. “Today is your first day in the pit with me, my name is Gideon Jepta, you will call me Captain. No ‘Captain Jepta,’ no ‘Mr. Jepta,’ and sure as hell no ‘Gideon.’ Let me introduce you to myself.”
The defeated-looking boy’s chin began to drop; he hadn’t gotten much sleep the previous night. His jaw did not pass below 70 degrees before he suddenly found the edge of a blade resting comfortably beneath it. Survival instincts took over his body, and he gasped, jumping back.
Captain Jepta, whose hand held the handle of that blade, swiftly lowered it and returned it to its sheath.
“My name is Gideon Jepta, I am twenty-nine years old, I’ve served in the military since the age of seventeen, I fought in the first Andeidra-Demeena War, I have over a hundred and fifty confirmed combat kills, I have never fired a gun.”
“What a character statement,” Ajax thought.
For those eight weeks of boot camp, Ajax was never able to escape from the eye of Captain Jepta. When his uniform wasn’t securely fashioned, he was scolded; when his facial hair grew out a little too far, he was forced to dry-shave; when his aim was off by more than a quarter-foot, he was instructed to clean every rifle while everyone else ate supper.
On one such occasion, the rest of the class left to eat, while Ajax stayed behind to clean their weapons. Captain Jepta wasn’t very hungry that evening, so he remained to watch over him.
“Why do you hate me so much?” Ajax asked, quite bluntly, as he ran a cloth through the shaft of a rifle.
“I don’t hate you, Clarke.”
Ajax shot back a look of disbelief and annoyance.
“I just understood, from the moment I met you, that you were nothing like me,” he continued.
“What do you mean by that?” Ajax replied, with a hint of hostility.
Captain Jepta paused for a moment to articulate himself.
“You have no resolve.”
“What?”
“Your whole life has been controlled by your fear, I can see that, just from looking at you. Most people are the same way, but that’s why I don’t like most people.”
Ajax had never heard anything like this before, and certainly not directed towards himself.
“What do you mean by ‘resolve,’ Captain?” The title was said with a mocking inflection.
Gideon stared at him for a moment and looked down, chuckling.
“Herron!” He called, directing his voice behind him to the dining hall.
Isaiah Herron, the rifle instructor, emerged from the warm light of the building and into the evening, illuminated by a few gas lamps. As Captain Jepta was the “Saint of the Saber”, Isaiah was likewise the “God of the Gun,” and specially selected for his incredible ability with firearms.
“Herron, I need you to demonstrate the Death Horse for Clarke here.”
Isaiah nodded. He was a man of unimpressive stature and possessed a pale face dotted with freckles, topped with black hair that had already begun graying.
“Captain, do you want me to set up the targets, in that case?” his voice was stalwart and respectful, but obviously familiar with Jepta.
“No, your target isn’t out there,” Gideon said, unsheathing his sword.
“C-captain- you aren’t-” that same stalwart tone began to falter in Isaiah’s voice.
Gideon smiled devilishly: “Your target is me.”
Isaiah digested the command, and after a moment, all the worry left his face.
“Of course” he thought. “This is Captain Jepta we’re talking about…”
After loading them up, Herron picked up two rifles, holding them by the upper shaft. He attached two more to a heavy belt around his waist, so that the barrels crossed in an ‘x’ behind his back.
Gideon assumed a position at the other end of the firing range, saber gleaming in the moonlight.
“Now, watch closely, Clarke, to see what true resolve is!” he hollered at Ajax, who stood a good ten feet from the stretch of land that separated the two combat masters.
“Herron, GO!!”
At his command, Isaiah’s hands threw the rifles up, grabbing them at the triggers and squeezing each, launching two bullets in Gideon’s direction. He spun halfways, letting go of each gun and, hands faster than lighting, pulled the bolts of each one to reload, catching them less than a second later and firing another two rounds.
“What the hell?!” Ajax’s mind screamed, because his mouth could not possibly form words.
As the bullets hurled towards him, Gideon began his approach, steadily walking forward, his eyes had no fear, they were only filled with an intangible golden light ahead of him. As a bullet came near, his body seemed to effortlessly dance away from it. Watching him move, it was like time had slowed down.
Isaiah, having fired five shots from each gun, Isaiah easily threw them into the air and spun around, bending his knees and reaching his arms behind his back to grab the two other rifles. He performed the same incredible technique of reloading, and a torrent of lead was shot at Captain Jepta.
Jepta, still without hesitation, lifted his blade with the ease of the wind, and struck across the air, nailing each bullet cleanly away. He weaved through the lines of fire, seemingly unstoppable, until there were only a few feet between him and Isaiah. The hail of gunfire cracked away in vain.
“There’s a bluebird I keep caged up in my heart…”
One foot closer.
“When I dance like this, I’m dancing to its song…”
The blade pierced through Isaiah’s jacket with an incredible force.
“Gah!” Ajax cried, shocked that he would attack his own colleague.
A moment later, Gideon pulled the tip of the saber from Isaiah’s chest, the sound of cracking iron tickled the air. The scene was still, still enough for Ajax to see that Isaiah had been wearing a protective metal layer of armor beneath his blue military jacket.
“W-what the hell-? Does he anticipate this happening or what?!” he thought. In truth, Isaiah always wore some degree of weighted clothing to better adjust his body to strenuous work, years of which had resulted the physique that allowed for the Death Horse technique, so called because the sound of gunfire was like the pounding of horses’ hooves in quick succession. Gideon was aware of Isaiah’s armor, and had factored it into his attack, both of them were aware that he could have easily shattered it, perhaps even struck into his heart, if he had really gone for a killing blow. Isaiah’s respect for Gideon was not purely based on rank, he had long acknowledged the Captain’s superior ability.
“Well, rat?” Jepta asked, turning his attention to Ajax. “Do you think you understand a piece of what I mean now?”
“I-...” Ajax could barely speak. The display of combat ability had been awe-inspiring, mythical even.
“I don’t think I understand a thing about what you mean…”
“Hmph…” Gideon scoffed, looking back to Herron. “At least this was an enjoyable exercise.”
“Likewise, Captain,” Isaiah replied. “I haven’t gotten the chance to show that off in a while, I’m still a little rusty at it,” at which they both chuckled. Suddenly, Captain Jepta’s head snapped to Ajax’s direction.
“Clarke, I want these rifles cleaned in ten minutes,” he said with a no-nonsense timber.
“What-” Ajax almost protested.
“You heard me; if you’re lucky, you might be able to eat before the mess hall closes,” Jepta called as he and Herron walked off to eat dinner. The demonstration had worked up his appetite.
“Aw…” Ajax groaned, looking back at the long row of guns left to clean, on top of the four previously unused ones Gideon had specifically instructed Isaiah to show off.
As he worked silently under the cover of night, Ajax could not help but reflect on what he had seen.
“This resolve…” he thought. “It’s all… some sort of fantasy power, isn’t it...?”
Crickets chirped, men ate.
---
“Anyway, I’m tired of arguing, where’s the inn here?” Gideon snapped tiredly.
“Hm?” Gallow replied, having been lost in thought for a moment.
“The inn? The hotel? What do you people call it here, anyway? You know what I mean…” Gideon’s words faded off before he could begin a rant, he was too worn for that right now.
“Down there, take a left onto Main street, you can’t miss it, it’s a small town,” Gallow answered. “Oh, and say hi to the owner for me.”
“Yeah, yeah…” Gideon replied. In all the time he had known him, Gallow had never heard Gideon Jepta, of all people, say something as apathetic as that.
“Guess he must really be beat, can’t blame him, I guess. Must be a long day,” Gallow thought. He looked off into the distance as his former superior trudged off.
“Resolve… the meaning of that word…”