The Poisoned Throne

Chapter 4

Thomas

 During his travels, Thomas had seen so many different people and cultures that it grew hard to separate them. From Hi’taab, he had travelled through a scorching desert with a tribe of tall cattle herders that barely wore any clothing above their nearly black skin; from there, he had descended from a great plateau, along a waterfall, to large rice fields whose farmers had thin slits as eyes and wore large hats as protection from the sun.

 From there, he had gone up the mountains again - this time, they were dark and grey rather than a yellow, sandy color, and covered in deep green, healthy plants. Here, he had climbed down into a moon cave with toga-clad and feather-decorated women to bathe in crystal blue, luminous springs. Here, tiny crabs that glowed in a pale green shade crawled on dripping cave walls.

 They had lived there for a while, he and William, in bamboo cottages built into the steep mountain walls, connected only by thin, frail-looking bridges that had been there for thousands of years.

 And they had travelled through a forest of bamboo, roofed by real trees that were far taller than any Thomas had seen in his life. Here, a tribe of short, wiry people had hunted them away. William was hit by an arrow in his ankle, but it only troubled him slightly. After having the poison sucked out by a more friendly tribe, he was able to walk normally again.

They spent some time there, resting - not so much from the effort of traveling, which they had gotten used to, but from the effort of experiencing. For every new place they went, they grew more exhausted in their minds. Taking in all the beauty and diversity was tiring, and more and more often they had to stay in one place just to be ready for the next adventure.

 From then, they went north, until the mountains had flattened and become barren from the rich life that had inhabited the ones to the south. Here, everything was as vast as it had been in the desert. The silence was so all-encompassing that it crushed you, and the loneliness and greatness of it all made you feel no bigger than a grain of sand. The mountains were a rumble of stones covered with moss, and below, you could see a plain stretch out for miles until more mountains rose; and behind them, another plain, another row of mountains…

 The plain was a dull brown from what they could see atop the mountain, cut by white bonds of foamy grey that could be nothing except for large rivers. And there, just by them, were a few black dots, too big to be humans, but just big enough to be horses with humans atop them.

 Thomas looked at William to check if he had seen them, too. William looked at him. “Let’s get down there, shall we?”

 When the sun began to set and it grew harder to see, they set up camp. One of their tents had been lost during the journey, so they now shared the only one they had - something they had been happy about in their travels over deserts, where the temperature dropped drastically once the sun had set.

 William sat by their fire, heating up some of the stew they had brought with them from the tribe that had saved his leg. “Have you gotten around to some composing yet?” he asked.

 “Not yet,” Thomas admitted, crawling out from the tent where he had been laying out their beds. “I think I need to get away from all this… this beauty in order to comprehend.”

 William turned to look at him. “Aren’t you afraid of forgetting?”

 Thomas furrowed and shook his head. “I don’t think I could forget.”

 “Well, I am,” William muttered, rummaging in the flames with a stick. “Constantly.” He pulled out the stick and blew out the little flame that burned at the edge of it. “But I’ve gotten some composing done. A little bit from everywhere we’ve been. I hope it’ll help me remember, at least a little.”