The Year of Approaching Storms

“Now. This story takes place over a thousand years ago. In a desert that separated two warring cities. The kings of those cities were extremely stubborn, bitter men who’d lost most of the things they loved in life. They lost women and riches and ships and armies. They’d lost their city’s most important philosophers, their most skillful poets. They lost the men who stayed up all night with eyes to glasses that magnified the stars. These were men who drew up battle plans for the conquering of nearby planets. Men who pointed, furiously, at the alienated moon. These were frightened men, whose sleep was chased by fears mortality would soon do them in. So they welcomed me . . .

“As I said, these kings were monumentally stubborn. They sent wave after wave of armed troops into the desert, to advance against the other man’s kingdom. And the desert is an unforgiving place. The least forgiving of any environment. For a soldier in the desert, there’s no place to hide. Or every place to hide, if you become one with the desert, as some have done. To do this you must begin the process of erasing yourself, as the most exulted desert warriors have known, you must reduce yourself to a reed, to a wave, to something next to nothing. You begin by emptying your mind, and ridding your body of feelings. You empty the arms and torso and legs. In the end you empty your root, the part of you tied most inextricably to the cosmos. But you don’t let go of your heart. Your soul, of course, the soul is always arid. But the heart will draw you along. I know of many warriors who’ve crossed the desert alone drawn only by the sense of their heart, which led them, infallibly, to the side of their sleeping enemy.

“The kings longed for these kinds of warriors, but in the end such warriors abandoned their service. They could never fight in the employment of men who only obeyed the dictates of a wild and intractable mania. So the kings were left with the worst kind of army, sullen, brutish, men who argued among themselves and gambled each month’s salary and stabbed each other in the darkness, men who destroyed women rather than marrying them and raising the babies they’d crafted through seduction and words of the dark. These men crossed the desert complaining and bitter, spitting in the direction of the moon, they cursed the local gods, as well as the one true God, who’d made them to suffer such unbearable and pointless servitude. For they had nothing else, these men. So they marched into the desert from the direction of both decaying kingdoms, as the final prophets and the last of the soothsayers and the remaining practitioners of sortition declared that these were the final days, the end-times for each reign. And this is why the kings of both kingdoms had the prophets declared heretics, and the soothsayers hung, and the diviners buried alive with their lots in the desert.

“They marched, of course, toward their doom. For none of them was skilled enough to survive inhospitable places, or other angry people, or the appearance of abject fear. They crossed the desert in thirst and oppression and most of them fell before the first month was over, or fled from the column in any direction and were left to the scavenging of beasts (it was however whispered that a great sorcerer lived in the desert, a man with the power to change the direction of winds, and according to the grumblers who muttered this he welcomed any traveler who’d abandoned a powerless king . . ."

From the author of The Grotto and Aquitaine.