The shadows covered the mountainside, hiding the cavern entrance from view.
MOTE prompt
When the war came, they didn’t know what to do.
A column of men rode horses up the road from Sarpedon, carbines holstered on the saddles, holding lances with small pennants in their hands. Flat helmets low around their ears. The archon came out to complain that they had trampled a field of growing wheat, and didn’t they know there was a famine? People were upset—
They shot him dead.
Then people ran back and forth, horrified, trying to help him, their hands red with blood, but he stared at the sky and did not appreciate their help. His wife came running and fell down and got up. And knelt by him, and she screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed until the nurse came running from the clinic and gave her something, and she fell silent, lying over him, which was probably good because a man on a horse looked like he wanted to shoot her as well.
The man leading the column said he was a cornet. They were going to need food and any money they had, and five young men were required to volunteer. This sounded stupid because these people had just killed the archon, and they were supposed to join them now? Was this a joke?
It was not a joke, and the men on horses took a fancy to some of the girls, and that was not a joke either, even after the girls told them the feeling was not mutual. The screaming did not end, in fact it increased, and a house burned, and then another.
Very quickly, people found reasons to leave the vilaĝo. On foot, in the backs of trucks and pass-lorries. Running while men rode after them. There was more shooting, more screaming, more silence. The cornet, frustrated, had the kitchens rummaged and the pantries emptied. A body fell down the market well, and then twenty more. Smoke rose, shaky, and bent east.
She took her son and carried her daughter and ran over the collective fields toward the side of Mount Espero.
“Maybe if I join them, Mama, they won’t be so mad,” her son said.
“No,” she said. “You’re six. We’ll go to the caves. We’ll go to the caves and we won’t go back.”
There were too many people to follow them all, and all of them were trying to figure out what war was. They hadn’t had one. They had come to Iphigenia get away from them. What did you do?
The caves were lava tubes. Half a billion years ago when there was still sea here, lava blasted out of the depths of the planet, leaving crystals the size of fists and heads behind in tunnels and chambers that went down and down and down, and she and her husband had brought the children there to stare open-mouthed at them. Now her husband stared open-mouthed at the sky as evening fell, gripping a scythe but not getting up.
The invaders milled around. Two of them had died anyway, even as ineffective as the defense was, so the cornet made an example of anyone left, except some of the women they took back to Sarpedon. The screaming had subsided to weeping, to stunned faces, to bruises and blood.
She sat in the cave, holding her son, nursing her daughter.
The shadows covered the mountainside, hiding the cavern entrance from view. Her boy looked at the falling night, playing with a stick. He pointed it. “Bang!” he said. “Bang! Bang! Bang!”
“Milos,” she murmured. The cave was cold in the dark.
“Bang! Bang!”
The smoke could not be seen against the night sky, but the vilaĝo was hot with flame for hours.
This week’s prompt challenge was from Padre: The shadows covered the mountainside, hiding the cavern entrance from view. My prompt went to AC Young. See all the challenges and responses over at More Odds Than Ends!