Lucid Waking

Archive for January 18th, 2008

More than Gold: Arani

        Golden dust circled around the horse’s feet as it strained to go faster, the body stretched out completely in the air before it landed again and crunched upon itself to push off again. The man and his black horse were just out of reach, but if I shot at him, his horse would spook and change course. My mistake was in thinking that there was only desert and nowhere for him to go. With that in mind, I chased him straight into the growing blob of sand adobes and white cotton tents.
        Arani. If there was anywhere a stranger should go visit, it was there. The gargoyles were almost solid gold and people traded fruit instead of coins for value. Thieves ran rampant and the general police force cared nothing about it. The king was so corrupt that everyone except the townspeople seemed to know it but the only people depressed and ill were the princess and the poor. But no one else cared as long as it stayed that gold was stuffing their pockets. The rich were gold and the poor were mud and there was an abundance of all four.
         Ironically, the city lay in the middle of the desert, one of the more golden places on the planet. Also ironically, I found it by accident following a criminal for his bounty. The price on his head was too much to pass up; high prices guarantee harder work. The hard ones had the worst crimes anyway.
        There was no gate or walls; the city just sort of petered out once it was out of the shade and into the sun. Overshadowing most of the market place and residential district was the castle, a large stone building with gold doors, shutters, curtains, and gargoyles. The guards had gold armor and gold tipped spears and stood as perfect bookends next to the door. It was like the closer people were to the castle, the better off they would be and leaving the shade of the castle meant leaving the security of the king.
The market place started as soon as I hit the border of shade and continued in a semi-circle around the western edge of the edifice. My little victim had escaped in the mass of people and somehow had through without attracting too much notice as he ran through the throng of people.
        I got off my horse and followed the curve of the building as close as I could watching the bustle of people as I went along. It was fascinating, really; the yelling and shoving and bickering between prices as bags of gold and silver changed hands. The castle soon turned into a residential district with mud buildings making their own shade. The market place stopped at the steps of cheap crumbling apartment buildings on the edge of the district.
Between two of these buildings, a little ways from the castle a group of people had gathered around a street performer. The girl looked no more than fifteen but was more flexible than children half her age. She flipped upside down over the scarf she had tied to a plank bridging the roofs of two buildings, kicking her feet in the air in a single movement, and squeezed her muscles as hard as she could to stay perfectly upright. She watched as people threw coins into her hat and clapped. She climbed higher, tied herself up, and then let herself spin down the length of the scarf to the dust below. She bowed deeply, counted to three, and then stood up and held the already full hat for people to put their coins in. Money flew at her and she caught every coin nodding her head to the patrons she saw every single day.
        With a flick of her cap, the coins were gone and bowing again, she placed the hat upon her head. A simple tug and the scarf fell down from the rafter into her hand. The alleyway was empty, now, as all the people had left to tend to other things.
        “Good show.”
        She turned around to face a boy she seemed to know leaning against a building on her left. His brown hair looked black in the shadows, but his eyes were still a vibrant green of an unripe lime. He was tall, but slightly muscular and compact and in his hand was a bag of coins.
        “You got quite a bit of money,” he said.
        “People were just feeling really generous today,” the girl answered. “Something going on?”
        “The king is happy again. Probably some new source of gold.”
        “As if that’s what we need. You can’t really trade money for anything anymore.”
        “Except for food and that’s all we need.”
        “True, let’s go get—”
        “Hey what do you want?” The boy turned to address me, his eyes flashing angrily.
        “Information,” I said walking forward into the alleyway between the buildings. “Just information. Why so jumpy?”
        He relaxed a bit. “The king likes to arrest people who take money from the rich. No one but guards carry guns.”
        “We’ll I can assure you, I’m not a guard.”
        “I assumed that. What sort of information do you want?”
        “How about starting with your names.”
        “We don’t have to tell you anything,” the girl said. “We’re not giving you anything to put us away.”
        “Mi, shut up,” the boy whispered as he pushed her gently aside. He looked me up and down as he debated whether to trust me or not. I let him ponder; if he chose to ultimately leave me alone that was his choice and I’d respect that.
        “Miana and Tam,” he said pointing to the girl and himself, respectively.
        “I still don’t trust her, Tam,” Miana said whispering loudly in his ear, trying to pull him away. “She could be lying and we’d never know until it was too late.”
        “Trust me,” he whispered back to her. Then back to me: “What’s your name?”
        “Carmen Teasdale.”
        “Wait, the Carmen Teas—”
        “Yes. Now, tell me what’s the latest news with your king.”
        “Oh, well, I didn’t know I was addressing the lovely Miss Teasdale,” he pulled away from Miana’s grip on his shoulders and faced me again. “Sure, I can tell you what you want to know. King Edward is a greedy little brat and loves gold more than life itself. And so, he looks for new ways to acquire it.”
        “Doesn’t every king?”
        “Eh, sure. But he’s obsessed with it; the only time he’s happy is when he gets more of it. He buys things to be built and then the money goes in circulation or he keeps whatever statue he makes out of it and then has more than every body else. You’d think with all this money rolling around there wouldn’t be people like us having to perform for it, but prices keep getting higher these days…”
        “Naturally.”
        “Tam, we’d better go. You know what you’d get if they caught you talking that way,” Miana whispered tugging on his shirtsleeve.
        “Yeah, in a minute,” he said pushing her away. “How’d you come here to us, Miss Teasdale?”
        “There’s a bounty on someone’s head and his trail led here.”
        “Whoa, cool!”
        Miana was looking more and more nervous and trying as best she could to sink into the shadows and disappear. Tam however was the complete opposite of her, excited as a cat about to get a chunk of fish. I glanced around, but there was no one around us save Theirn, my horse. I trust his instinct more than my own and he was lying in the sand calmly swishing the flies away with his tail.
        “How old are you, kids?”
        “I’m fifteen and Mi’s twelve—”
        “And a half!”
        “—and a half. We’re not kids.”
        “You’re not over twenty; you’re kids.”
        “Is that how old you are?” Miana asked me curiously, coming out of the shadows.
        “What’s going on over there?” A guard came running over to where we were as soon as he saw me. Theirn stood up and moved to my side. I put my hand on his flank to tell him that it was all right. Tam and Miana were trying to slink out the other side of the alley, without success. The guard grabbed their arms and pulled them out into the light.
        “What are you rascals doing, now? Stealing again?” he asked.
        “There were just talking to me.”
        The guard glared at me. “I’d check your pockets if I were you; these kids are swindlers.”
        “I’ve seen much worse swindlers than a twelve year old acrobat,” I said.
        “I’m afraid we’re going to have to take them away. Whose word do we have but yours and you’re a foreigner.”
        “A silver tongued foreigner.”
        “What could you possibly say?”
        “I might suggest I’m related to these children and since they’re under aged, well…”
        He looked at me for a second before shoving them at me. “Fine. Have it your way.”
        Miana was trembling at my feet but Tam just stuck his tongue out at the guard’s back before picking Miana up in his arms and making towards the alley way.
        “Thank for covering our back!” he called over his shoulder to me.
        “You’re welcome.”