Story: Chariot

In my grand LARP-week tradition, here’s a story that I wrote years ago:

The arguments rise and fall and rise again, like waves coming in with the tide, like fire roaring on the hearth: we must have and we will not. Sometimes we could try or perhaps we might. Rarely. Very rarely. Not, praise the Seven Wandering Stars, as rare as they were at the beginning; the sharp edges have been worn down, melted, softened. Two weeks have done that.

Two weeks of…treating? It makes a strange verb. One treats a wound or a disease, treats a horse or a hound kindly–or not–treats a subject lightly or seriously; there’s little mention of treat in the abstract, the usage that means putting down the weapons and putting on the best clothes and talking about how to go forward. How to stop fighting. How to do something else.

In a way, despite the meetings and the sub-meetings and the little clumps of people talking in hallways and on staircases, the specifics don’t even matter. Young folks–and some of the older ones–raise their voices and speak of honor and insults. Old people–and some of the younger ones–talk for hours of wisdom and complications. On all sides. On every side.

And you, who were a mason’s daughter and apprentice before time and wars and plague made you queen, you listen to the words and the tones under the words, and you think that alliances are much like buildings.

At least, the good ones are. Just as the good friendships are, or the good marriages, or the good apprenticeships, at that. It’s a metaphor that keeps coming to your hand. You may be biased.

Yet it works, for people; it works in all of those situations; because under the words are the same two impulses, pulling against each other: I want to be part of something more. I want to stay myself. It’s rare to see a man or woman or country who’s willing to melt like metal in a forge, who wants to enter into alchemy and become someone else, something else. Most of us know who we are and like it, or have made our peace with it, and don’t want to give that up.

So, then, buildings. Finding the compromises you can make and still stay yourself: things you don’t discuss, things you don’t expect, things you can give away. Lovers. Land. A day off. A day remembered. A song. A flag. Bricks remain bricks; wood remains wood; they lose none of their essential nature for being placed in a framework.

And yet you don’t talk about bricks or wood, but about houses. Fortresses. Cathedrals. Greater things. Things that serve a purpose: things that do what bricks and wood, on their own, cannot. There has to be a structure.

So you wait. You watch; you listen. Then, in the silence that falls after the latest round of arguments, a silence that will be a brief pause for water and regrouping if you let it, you stand up and speak.

This is what will be.