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Old 03-11-2004, 01:57 PM   #136
piosenniel
Desultory Dwimmerlaik
 
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Rôg

The wind picked up a little, the last gasp of a dying storm. Rôg and Aiwendil pulled the blankets up about their heads again and lapsed into a waiting silence. The younger man’s eyes were narrowed and he chewed on the inside of his lower lip as he turned his companion’s words over in his mind.

‘It is this place,’ the old man had said. ‘I would see us leave here as soon as we can.’

Now what had prompted this? As far as Rôg knew, this was the first time his companion had been to the south, to the desert . . . to this place where those men from years long, long gone had built this stonework fortress as proof against what must have seemed a hostile land. How did the old man know of them?

These men - they had come from across the Great Sea, or so he had heard in old tales. How different must that have been for them; how treacherous this sea of sand must have seemed. He cast his mind back to his younger years, before his clan had traveled south. There were only a very few tales of the tall, fair men that he could recall the story-tellers weaving round the nightly fires. Other tales he did remember vaguely, tales of a far gone time when other men pushed east toward the Red Mountains . . . evil men . . . from whom his little clan had hidden. And before them, long before, were the Shining Ones, the Beautiful . . . The Nimir . . . yes, that was how they were named . . . all gone now.

Sadness tinged the voice of his companion . . . not simple sorrow, but a deeper melancholy edged with regret as he spoke of those men who had done evil by doing nothing. ‘This fortress was filled with such Men,’ Aiwendil had continued, his voice a little hoarse from the sandy debris, his eyes cast downward. ‘. . . those who failed to speak or act when darkness threatened their neighbor.’ What memories of things undone haunted the waking mind of this ‘old dreamer’? What did the old fellow think he could accomplish?

No, not what “he” could accomplish . . . Aiwendil had used the word “we”, again.

Rôg rubbed his parched and roughened lower lip with the pad of his right thumb, a nervous gesture. He was beginning to feel trapped, hemmed in by the constraints of his upbringing and the needs of his companion. He had grown very fond of the old man, but the need to keep safe his family and his clan overshadowed the ties that had formed between the two travelers. Sighing, he shook his head slightly, wanting to shake all the pieces of his thought into some comfortable pattern. His right arm had fallen back into his lap, and in an unconscious gesture his left hand had come up to finger the small stud in his ear.

The wind dropped away at last; the sand settled back to the desert floor. Rôg shrugged the blanket from his shoulders and stood up, offering a hand to Aiwendil as he sat blinking in the quiet calm, his own blanket lying now in a dusty heap round him. With a firm grip he pulled the other man to his feet, steadying him with one hand on his elbow as he rose. ‘Come,’ he said, urging the camel now onto its knees. ‘Mount up, Aiwendil, and we will hasten to that encampment that I saw.’ Once the old fellow had settled in securely on the saddle, Rôg pressed the beast to stand up, and assuming his small bee-eater form, flew up to perch on Aiwendil’s shoulder.

He shook out his feathers and took his time preening them as they clopped along. The old man seemed distracted and kept his thoughts to himself as the camel plodded through the sand covering the hard baked clay. For his part, Rôg, too, was quiet as he turned his thoughts over and over again.

‘No easy solutions to this, is there?’ he murmured, half out loud. His beak clacked a little in irritation at his continued quandary. ‘Still . . . I suppose I can help out to a certain point . . . like I thought before.’ He flapped his wings a bit, then settled them in smoothly against his sides. ‘I can get him to where he needs to be. Can’t be any harm in that, can there? Don’t know what he thinks he can do once we get there, though.’ Rôg picked a sand-flea from the tuft of hair that bristled from the old man’s ear and dispatched it in a single gulp. ‘Right, then,’ he said nodding his little feathered head decisively. ‘I’ll just see him safely there . . . and mind my own business while he goes about his . . .’ Satisfied with this last bit of reasoning, he turned his attention to a question that had been brewing in the back of his mind . . . something again from what Aiwendil had said during the sandstorm.

‘I’m curious,’ he began, tapping his beak lightly against the old man’s ear lobe to gain his full attention. ‘That land you spoke of, the one a far distance across the sea – do you recall its name, by chance? What was it like? And what sorts of birds did you see there?’ The little bird cocked his head, his bright black eyes looking up at the man’s face. ‘Would it be a place we might travel to?’

Last edited by piosenniel; 03-29-2004 at 12:33 PM.
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