“They’re willing to make peace? Who cares? Their word’s worthless. As soon as it suits them to do so they’ll declare war again.”
MOTE prompt
The drought had eaten the soil, the soil that had taken generations to build. Nematodes, gone; bacteria, gone; viruses, gone; protists, gone; roots, gone. A wall of brown soil blew up the valley from Clytemnestra, carried away to settle uselessly in the vast plains of unterraformed, and unterraformable, salts, or onto the Upper Plateau.
The Naiadara River had dwindled to a stream, then to a trickle. Now it was baked, cracked mud. The fields at Vetulonax were raked of their loamy flesh, the red bones of the world pushing out, the orchards gasping.
Hunger walked through Vetulonax, laying a pale, powdering hand on every doorframe.
People said it was better at Hipassus, up in the Valley. People said there was water there before it withered on its way south and west. The polis nomarch sent delegates to see or themselves. There was some water. The fields weren’t all dead.
“They can spare nothing,” the delegates told him.
“Did you tell them children are going to die?”
“They said if they save our children today, theirs will die tomorrow. They apologized.”
“Apolo—!” The nomarch’s face reddened. “Apologize to their graves!”
Everyone met in the open-air theatre, the pride of the town. Women held limp children who fretted. Skinny men paced angrily, talking in groups.
“We have to eat!” the town baker shouted. His flour was long gone. “Would they have us die?”
“We must be more persuasive,” the nomarch said.
So they sent a party of young men with a few guns, to be more persuasive, with the town constable to lead negotiations. Most of them returned in a week, mostly intact, with some food and the nomarch of Hipassus’s daughter.
“As a bargaining chip,” the constable said, his arm in a sling.
She spat in his face.
Twenty men from Hipassus showed up at Vetulonax polis the next week with fowling pieces and three fast trucks. They burned five houses and damaged the town agora. Two people died. The nomarch’s daughter was not rescued, but a bag of oats was taken.
The fighting went on, a little here, a little there. There was no farming to be done—no activity indeed other than watching your family get thinner and the necropolis fill up—so there was plenty of time for Man’s oldest trade to be relearned on Iphigenia.
Vetulanax was hit by raiders from the south, shepherds whose flocks were dying. Hipassus also had unfriendly neighbors, in dying Three-three Mill and in Tyreme. Hipassus proposed a truce.
“They’re willing to make peace? Who cares? Their word’s worthless. As soon as it suits them to do so, they’ll declare war again,” the former town baker said. He’d replaced the constable, shot dead in some ravine, who knew by whom. They called him their captain, with ensign-captains under him.
But the nomarch shook his head. “There’s other troubles,” he said. “There’s these men in Aulis, and their provisional government. We must be wary of them also. And there’s the hill-raiders. If we can have peace with the Hipassus bastards for just a few months, maybe the rains will come back.”
So they had their peace, and only a couple of more men were killed by raiders. But in a few months, there were armed men from the Provisonal Government in the town agora, and some food shared from Clytemnestra, and a new nomarch.
An uncomfortable peace settled on the frontier, and the Biosphere Corps tried to repair the damage to the soil.
Other damage, however, lingered. The guns were kept clean.
This week’s prompt challenge was from AC Young: “They’re willing to make peace? Who cares? Their word’s worthless. As soon as it suits them to do so they’ll declare war again.” My prompt went to Fiona Grey. See all the challenges and responses over at More Odds Than Ends!