Breathe for Me Read online

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  For a week the guards shouted and thumped their spears whenever the slaves tried to speak to each other, and for a week Dormun turned the pieces of that night the way he would turn the shards of a shattered statue. Chaos: terror: lives turned into lumps of blood and organ. Mackervan and two others had died and Dormun wanted to kill everyone who kept them in chains. He wanted to kill himself. He wanted to do nothing.

  "You have to do something," the one-eyed boy named Jey had whispered to him their third day back in the trench.

  "Don't make it worse," Aker coughed.

  The guards shouted them down.

  They were chained during their rests. After dinner, they were herded straight for their tents. The first man who cried in his sleep was beaten and Dormun stared into the darkness and listened to the beaten man's moans and the shrieks of the birds. Neither made more sense than the other.

  The aqueduct inched through the clearing, a tongue of white stone, the lopped arm of a dead giant.

  No one asked him to breathe for them. In the sun-scalded trenches and over silent bowls of rice and beetles, they pierced him with their stares. He resented their want, their guilt, their helpless frustration. The days held no meaning, replications of weary hurt and hunger that blended like cups of water poured into a single puddle. Dormun turned the pieces in his head. A bad thing had happened. He tried to remind himself they always did.

  After a week, Warren relaxed his grip, letting them converse on the job again, take rests unchained, restored their pre-sleep free hour. Dormun spooned down his rice and found his small group joined by stout Boren and three of his friends, by Harolt and his bald friend, by three others he knew by face but not name.

  "I know you think spiroi have answers you don't," Dormun said to the ground in front of him. "But I see neither justice in vengeance or honor in peace."

  "He was our friend," Aker said. His cough had receded over the days, a dry wrack no longer spotted with blood.

  Jey clenched his hands together. "I don't want to be here anymore."

  "We don't belong here," Harolt said. "You see what it does."

  "What do you want to do?" Boren said.

  "See where the spirit takes me." Dormun met their eyes, one after another. "I'll need you to protect me tonight."

  The sun withdrew through the trees and they commiserated about the women of their youth and nodded when Aker praised his wife and they spoke, eyes downcast, about their children and the lives they wished to lead when they were free. One at a time, they withdrew from the circle to talk to their friends among the other slaves, yawning in the humidity, then returned to sit beside Dormun. Once stars scattered the black curtain of sky, he began to breathe.

  His veins hummed before the first colors touched the darkness. Cloud-like smudges, at first, and then a ripple that made them shimmer like the waters of a lake as wide as the horizon. Dormun breathed and his nerves burned like the fires of Olin's forge and the slaves and guards cried out as the smeared heavens defined into dozens of men in chains, terribly, impossibly huge across the sky, hips and collarbones jutting beneath their over-mended clothes, a pantheon of misery. One figure fell on his face, the meat tumbling from his skeleton, and spears as long as thunderbolts prodded his mourners. They gathered his bones and patched them into the white arches of an endless stonework.

  On the ground, quivers and armor rattled, guards shouted across the camp, dogs yapped. Slaves shouted back and took for their feet. They came to Dormun in ragged clusters, surrounding him in a solid ring of skin and nails, clutching stones and branches.

  Above, others fell and were troweled into the waiting masonry. Over the course of seconds the deaths trickled to a stop and the survivors leaned against each other, treetops rustling with the wind of their panting breath.

  Below, thirty pairs of feet thudded toward the circle of silent slaves.

  A spear reached across the skies and, with agonizing slowness, skewered the body of a man in black braids. A dozen lances prodded the others toward his bones.

  Two hundred men howled together and Dormun stood and sucked air into his lungs and howled with them. They jogged at the guards, feet thundering the clearing, a pandemonium of anger that ran like a single flesh. Bows thrummed and slaves fell and the survivors rushed through the firelight. Ten yards away, a single guard peeled ranks, two more on his heels, and their lacquered front shattered like a mirror as each one sprinted for the dark jungle.

  The figures in the sky dissolved into blurs, then smudges, then nothing. Those on the ground split into packs, leading each other down the brush-clogged paths toward the towns and families they'd been stolen from. Others disappeared by ones and twos to lose themselves in cities they'd never seen. Dormun met Aker's smiling wife and found the man's two boys looked almost nothing like the way he'd breathed them his first day in the camp. Years after the 'duct was done, he trudged along its white miles for days, threshing the brush for the black stone of Mackervan's grave, but the jungle had eaten it whole. Instead he turned the toy panther in his hands, then dropped it into the fog of trees.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  Hello, person I may well never meet! Thanks for reading. In case the wizard didn't tip you off, I'm a sci-fi/fantasy author. If you liked this story and would like to be notified when I've got a new book out, please sign up for my mailing list by clicking here: https://eepurl.com/oTR6j

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  In the meantime, I've got several novels and stories out there already:

  BREAKERS series (post-apocalyptic sci-fi/thrillers)

  - Breakers

  - Melt Down (coming October 2012)

  THE CYCLE OF ARAWN (epic fantasy series)

  - The White Tree

  - The Great Rift

  As well as some others. I apologize for the lack of direct links—turns out stores don't like it when you link to their competitors!—but if you just run a search for Edward W. Robertson at your favorite book seller's website, that should bring up everything I've got available.

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