On The Run

Beyond the door I see my family is looking on with bewilderment as my new family all scrambled to get ready to leave. As I stride swiftly for the stable Plautia and Grandpa come along side me.

“Quin. What happened?” Plautia says, keeping stride beside me. “Cassia was telling a story and suddenly Rosa called…”

“There’s too much to explain and not enough time.” I say. “Just get everybody in the houses. Stay there and stay together until you hear the birds sing.”

“The birds sing?”

I stop and turn. Dropping the packs I pull my favorite cousin into a strong hug. “Take care of yourself, Plautia. And watch Mom for me.”

“Uh…” She stiffens in my unexpected embrace before returning the hug. “Sure Quin. I’ll do that.”

“Now no more questions. Go!”

“Gods damn, boy. You’re runnin like you got every magistrate and lictor in Italia hot on your heels.” Grandpa grumbles, striking closer to the truth than I liked, as Plautia hurried to begin corralling confused family members toward the buildings. “What kind of trouble you stir up out there? I KNEW you was in trouble the moment you showed up with these foreign types.”

“Nonno, I don’t have time.” I turn and scan the hill beyond father’s oak. From Rosa’s description of the thing on our trail I wasn’t even sure I’d see it if was slinking through the shadows.

“Boy!” He grabs my arm in that claw-like pincer grip that used to leave bruises when I was young, now it barely felt like a pinch.

“GRANDPA!” I spin to face him and stare him down. I roughly pull my arm out of his grip and say. “I don’t have time for your bullshit!”

“Bullshit!?” He exclaims, stunned the lack of respect.

“You’re the gods damned pater familias, fucking act like it for once!” I let out a frustration twenty years in the making. “Now is not the time for tearing down family but protecting them. Get in the FUCKING house and watch over the women and children.”

“You…impudent…!”

Taking up the packs I leave him sputtering in my dust. Confusion turns to a controlled panic as my family, my mother included, all converge into Nonno’s house. I hear fear in their voices as the men collect what weapons they could improvise with a fragile courage. To hear my loved ones afraid wounded my heart. These were farmers, not fighters. Near the fire Collywaddle stood next to Rosa, her pack already set on her shoulders one of her small knives clutched in her right hand.

“Where is it Rosa?” I ask.

“I don’t know. Danae’s on the run.” Rosa says, her hand tightly gripped to Colly’s pack. “But you can be sure it’s getting closer. It was definitely hunting and following our steps.”

“Maybe we should fight it.” I say, with a guilty look over my shoulder toward my sheltering kin. “My family…they’re not ready for such things.”

“Neither are we. We don’t even know what it is.” Rosa says, her voice shaking with fear. “Remember the minotaur. Aristocles and Toke. My parents. You are mighty, my love, but some foes take their toll in blood no matter what we do to stop them.” Her voice firms, her fine chin raising. “If it’s been tracking us it would have come through that village and Tiro’s. It can’t be slaying everything in its path or the magi or military would have converged on it. It might not even be here to fight us, only to find us. The real enemy might come after. If it knows we’re here or stayed here…if it sees that this is your family…”

“Okay, then we run.” Feeling a need to do something, anything, I kneel and grab a handful of earth. Closing my eyes, I pray. “Mighty Ceres. Protect this family. Keep what is rooted in this soil safe from harm.” It strikes me with no small impact that the people I prayed for were a part of my past, not my future. My own roots may have grown here but I was now apart from them. A seed on the wind. “Look after your people, mighty Ceres, and I shall accept what comes my way.” I stand an call into the stable. “Cassie! Leave Catalus.”

“NO!” Cries Colly.

“Colly, he’s better off here than…” I begin to say but Cassie was already stepping out with our stallion bridled and in his simple harness. “Okay. He’s with us. Move!”

As Rosa catches the others up on what chased us all of us naturally settle into our marching positions as we strike out from my family farm, this time with Colly scouting, Cassie leading Catalus and me at Rosa’s side so I could keep an eye on our rear. Passing the final fence post we leave the homestead to the eerily quiet land beyond. As I pass it I touch the rough, dry wood of the post, marking my final physical memory of this place.

This was not the goodbye I wanted. I hadn’t even gotten to say a tenth of what I wanted to say to my mother before I left these lands forever, to let her know what she and my father really meant to me, to say nothing of the rest of my kin. And Grandpa! It’s not that he didn’t deserve my angry words, because he certainly did, but for those to be the last thing he remembered me by weighed on my heart. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. But the time for regrets would come later. Right now we had a hound on our trail to stay a step ahead of. I look back over my shoulder one last time at the little farm that was once my whole world…then turn back and focus on our next steps.

Currently we were striking West across the stubbly plain of a recently harvested field, directly away from the hound but with no destination. “We can run for a time but we need a plan.”

“Where’s the nearest town?” Cassie asks.

“If that thing is from Lydia we can assume there other Imperial wizards that are watching for us. There’s tales of them having ways to communicate even faster than pigeon.” I say. “I’m not sure a town would be safe.”

Rosa mutters, more to herself than me. “I’m not so sure thing is from Lydia. It feels…wrong.”

“Who else?”

“Whatever it is, we lead it away from the farm and fight it.” Cassie says. “An ambush.”

“How do you fight smoke and moonlight?” I ask. “Will our weapons even work on it?”

“We could hide.” Says Colly from a short distance ahead. “Or jutht keep runnin. Embrathe pleasure, avoid pain. That’th what old Mathter uthed to thay. If it want-th to hurt uth then we thtay away from it. Forever. Thimple.”

“Until it chases us into the sea? Who knows if that thing even sleeps. I don’t think Aristocles’ Cyrenaicism is gonna help us much now.” Colly’s reference to her old master however did get me thinking about his and mine philosophical debates, which invariably lead him to attempting to undermine the lessons my more Stoic father had instilled into me as a boy. My eyes drift northward toward a trail I knew as well as my own hands. In the fading evening light I could almost see a tall man and his son walking back home with poles in their hands and a string of trout held between them. “A river remembers nothing.” I whisper.

“What’s that?” Rosa asks.

“Something Dad used to say. A lesson.” I say as happy memories of my father and I talking by the sunlit riverbank plays out in my mind. Along those banks he had taught me so much more than just how to hook a trout. “A river. You can’t step into the same one twice. It’s always changing. The same river everyday, but different every second. That hound is following the earth’s memory of us. Our scent, our presence, the impressions we’ve left behind. But a river has no memory because it’s a different river every moment. It could buy us some time at least.”

“What are you on about, Quin?” Cassie snaps.

“Muddled thoughts. But useful ones.” I say. “Thank you Collywaddle.”

“Uh…you bet.” My goblin gives me an enthusiastic thumbs up, though she hadn’t a clue exactly what she’d done. “Alwayth happy to help, Mathter.”

“We go this way. There’s a trail that runs along those bushes.” I say. “We make for the river north of here.”

I look back again toward the farm in the distance and scan the open plain for a ‘wisp of smoking moving against the breeze’, but all I see, just like my father did all those years ago, is the home I would never return to.