Indomitus Est (The Fovean Chronicles) (2 page)

     In his way, the man in the white robe and the salt-and-pepper hair met the stallion’s brown eyes with his own, and conveyed something of what he knew, through eyes so profoundly steeped in sorrow that they could break the proud beast’s heart.

     No happier, the beast accepted his mission and went south.  In a few days the mares would find another stallion to replace him. His seed would live on, although he would never be welcome back to the herd.  In their eyes he was worse than dead.

     And in the man’s eyes, he might be a savior.

 
     When I was seven years old my grandpa bought me a GI Joe.  I had to ‘be good’ for a month for it, and let’s be clear here: ‘be good’ kind of wasn’t my thing at seven years old.  I was a Colchester, Connecticut farm kid and, at the time, ‘be good’ to me was more “don’t push your cousin out of the hay loft before warning him (or her)” than actually doing chores and, well, let’s face it: tricking my sister into eating worms.

    
After thirty days with a clean face and ears, not bloodying up any cousins and my sister being on a diet of store-bought food, I was ready to bust and, when grandpa took me down to the department store and actually
bought
me that GI Joe, well, it was Christmas in July.

    
It wasn’t even twenty-four hours later that the Barnesly boys down the road had come over, saw me with playing with a new toy, asked to see it and then decided that they needed it more than me.

    
I could have called my mom, and she would have called their mom, and their mom would have beat those boys for stealing and made them give me back my toy, but I just knew that the moment I walked away they were going to beat the
hell
out of that GI Joe, and then it would be ruined and every time I saw it, all I’d think about was how they got over on me.  All of my life, my father had told me, “Be a man, be strong, stand up for yourself.  Don’t let the rest of the world push you around.”  When those three boys took that toy, I could hear those words as plain as if my dad were standing right there, so I screwed up my courage and straightened my back, stood up to the biggest one of them (who was all of ten) and squared off on him.

    
“Give it
back,
” I demanded.  My voice wavered and my hands shook; I had wanted
so bad
to cry.

    
“No,” the other boy said, confidently.  As he spoke, one of the other boys knelt down behind me so that his brother could push him.  The last of the three stood back and laughed.

    
We were in my front yard – the house being one of those that crouched up close to the road so that as much acreage as possible was useful for the farm.  Once in a while a pickup truck or an old car would rumble down our road, and it wasn’t uncommon to see someone on horseback, but you
never
saw a pedestrian because all of the kids knew all of the shortcuts between the properties and the adults were just too darn busy to do much walking, and so it really stuck in my mind that a dark-skinned man was watching us from across the street, standing in the shade of an old elm tree, dressed in a trench coat and a wide-brimmed hat.

    
I even thought to call out to him, because when you’re seven all adults are omnipotent to you and they can fix any problem, but that’s when the oldest of the three boys pushed me. 

    
I distinctly remember the hands on my chest, the pressure of the boy behind me as the backs of my calves hit his mid-section, the fear, the humiliation and then the anger that this was happening to me.

    
And then something went
click
, and all I remembered was the color red.  Where I should have fallen, I recovered and, in fact, had the peace of mind to drive my heel into the fingers of the boy behind me, breaking three of them.  He screamed, I rolled, my back against his for a second, and I was on my feet again and facing off against the larger boy.

    
That boy straight-up attacked.  It should have been an easy victory but he fought one-handed, wanting to protect his prize.  I went berserk – straight up, black-Irish crazy like a true son of
Cu Chulain
.  I don’t know if it was an Irish thing where genes dormant for generations were awakened by the actions of an outsider, or if it was dad’s voice telling me to stand up for myself, or the pent of anger of taking crap off of my cousins, but I launched myself at the larger boy, all thought of toys forgotten, and I remember that it wasn’t going to be good enough to beat him, even to get the toy back – that boy needed to bleed, to have scars, to bear a mark for having put me in this situation.

    
Fight for what is yours.  Be a man!

    
The next thing I knew, my mom was pulling me off of that boy and
his
mom was screaming.  The one who’d been behind me stayed on the ground and the third had run.  I had blood in my blonde hair, my face, my hands, and my clothes, very little of it mine.

    
The general understanding was that one had stood against three and won. 

    
The figure from across the street was gone.  I don’t know what he wanted – maybe he just got off on the fighting, or maybe it’s him who went for help, though the adults never mentioned it.  It would be a long time before I saw him again.

    
Nine years later I was standing on a soccer field, waiting for starting whistle, facing off against the team from the local Catholic High School.

    
I’d come straight from a fight with my girl friend, something stupid had got me to accuse her of cheating on me.  She’d denied it, but earlier that week
her
best friend had informed me that she had gone straight to one of
my
best friends after school for three days, a boy who went to this same Catholic School.  I felt like I should have known!  No one who said they loved someone like she claimed to love me
really
did.  I’d really liked that girl, and here she was, cheating on me with one of my best friends.

    
Be strong
, I’d told myself. 
Fight for what is yours
.

    
The whistle blew, both sides charged.  By this time I was pushing six feet and one hundred and eighty pounds, all of it farm muscle.  I had this maneuver where I’d plant my foot on the ball a second before someone else would kick it, and they’d trip and fall.  They made that maneuver illegal in my honor because you could break someone’s ankle doing that.  Their center didn’t break his ankle but he snorted about a yard of sod as I blew past him for the goal, the crowd cheering.

    
Give you one guess whom their goalie was.

    
I drove down the field, took a check on the hip and forearmed another kid.  Our schools were rivals so no one expected a clean game with All State coming up.  I remember that kid grinning from the goal.  He was short where I was tall, he was classic Italian with black hair and brown eyes and olive skin, I was more Irish fair-skinned and blue-eyed with blonde hair.  We were different and we were the same – before he’d gone to Catholic he and I had played this game all year round, to the point where I could
think
of him being where I needed him, and he’d be there; where I’d
sense
that he was in a jam and my feet brought me there.

    
I think that all of that just made it worse.  How could he be seeing my girlfriend?  How could
she
put the two of us in a position like this?   

    
In a corner, beneath the bleachers, a dark figure in an overcoat was watching the game.  He stood out the way that someone who is trying too hard to blend in stands out.  I caught him for a second out of the corner of my eye.  Same overcoat, same wide-brimmed hat, same dark skin.  He had some kind of long nose and his eyes seemed almost yellow to me, but I’m sure that’s just a trick of the light, or having sweat in my own eyes, or something.  I looked at him, then I looked back at the ball, and once again my world turned red.

    
I slammed past another defender, then I had a bead on the goalie.  He grinned at me – I actually remember him smiling.  For some reason I thought of the older Barnesly brother smiling when he had my GI Joe, thinking I could never get it back.  That kid actually lost part of his ear that day, and I had nightmares about the fight for a month.

    
It’s like something took my brain in its fist.  The goalie turned larger than life – a monster in a green soccer uniform.  I got within four feet of him at a dead run, right to the edge of the goalie’s box, and I kicked that ball as hard as I could.

    
I didn’t try to get it past him, I drove the ball straight at his face.  He could have had hands made of steel and he wouldn’t have been able to stop that ball with that much force behind it.  It bent back his thumbs and forefingers and caught him square between the eyes.  He did a back-flip and the ball actually got stuck in the net behind him.  Our side of the field cheered and their side booed.  The ref didn’t flag me – in retrospect he should have had me arrested.

    
They had to rouse the kid with smelling salts, then he had to leave the game.  I heard later that he was seeing double and it wouldn’t stop.  I didn’t hear it from him.  The Catholic school lost that game and so did I from another perspective, though I didn’t know it at the time.  My friend never spoke to me again and his parents went broke trying to find a way to get his sight fixed.  Last I heard he was selling men’s clothes because you can do that with bad eyesight. 

    
The guy in the trench coat stayed and watched the whole game.  He never said a word to me.  I went looking for him afterward and he was gone.  No one remembered seeing him, either, which is strange because this was a high school game.

    
As for my girlfriend – she became my former friend’s girlfriend.  The girl who’d told me about her became mine.  Turns out that she’d made the whole thing up.  The two of them
were
seeing each other, but it was totally innocent.  When I found that out, I spent a year cheating on her and getting her to take me back, so that I could cheat on her again.  It became kind of a joke around the school, culminating in me taking someone else to prom when I graduated.

    
It was a pretty crappy thing to do, and I’m ashamed of it, but there’s a part of me that keeps telling me she had it coming.

     In another reality, a dark being sat his throne atop a cold mountain, the wind whistling past him from nowhere to nowhere else.

    
Before him, the god Anubis imagined an artifact that would change another world.

    
Together they watched their blond protégé fail through the next part of his life.  They watched him go to college on a soccer scholarship, and sent him a woman who would break his heart. 

    
When he loved the woman they took her away.  When he rose up from the heartbreak, they crushed his academic dreams. 

    
When he didn’t become despondent over failing at college, they sent him a woman to love him with all of her heart, and they watched as he destroyed her.

    
“He is heartless and cruel,”
War commented.

    
“As you required,” Anubis countered.

    
“And you have done everything you could to beat him down, to make him fail?”

    
“You know the truth of this,” Anubis informed him.  “Other boys cannot beat him.  Women who love him fill his heart with venom.  Failure forced on him only encourages him to be more ruthless.”

    
W
ar nodded, much as he did not have a body.  Unlike Anubis, who had form, War existed as a concept in reality, not a man or beast.  His power was the force of his being.

    
“I think one more test for this one,” War hissed, “to prove that he is, indeed, your invincible warrior.  Then you must turn him to your cause.”