DESPERATE  MEASURES

PART NINE:

(NOTE: This is a short chapter, written to describe the picture above that I made

a week or so ago.  It seemed to me to be a piece unto itself somehow and I decided to

let it be what it was, ending it where it was right and not dealing with any matters

other than the single picture.)

Maximus sat on a large piece of driftwood in his cove, slowly eating another of his

newly-discovered fruit, and watching the endless crashing of the waves, one following

on the heels of another.  He'd not spent much time in his life near the sea and the sound

of it so constantly was new to him.  He had a sudden longing for Argento, wondering

what it would be like to ride him along the edge of the surf.  Would he...ever...feel a

horse between his thighs again?  How long had it been?  Not since his brief ride in the

arena in Rome.  Not since then. 

Standing, he tossed the large seed far out into the water, watching the waves take it,

toss it, play their games with it, dragging it here, pulling it there, until it finally

disappeared from his sight. Still he stood, gazing at the far horizon where blue faded

into blue.  Prisons, he mused, did not always have bars.

The desire for more than this small crescent of sand took him and he strode rapidly

around the headland away from Sid's camp. He'd not walked this particular stretch

of shore before and continued his quick pace until he'd covered several hundred yards.

Stopping then, he looked back the way he'd come.  Nothing was there but his own boot

prints, the closer ones filling with water, the more distant being washed away by the

low waves that came the furthest ashore.  He pressed his lips together, watching for a

long time until nothing that showed his passage was left.  His life was like that now. 

All trace of him wiped out.  Where had it gone?  All that he knew...where was it?

He walked far down the beach, away from his cove, not looking back again.  Clouds

began to gather low in the sky as evening came on and the sun, sinking to its rest,

colored both cloud and sea shades of lavender, blue, and pale yellow.  It was simply...

beautiful, and at last he stopped, wanting to go no further, not wanting to go back. 

He stood there on the wide stretch of wet lavender sand, filling slowly with a deep and

pervading sense of sadness.  He did not belong here.  He was...out of place.  But had he

not been out of place since the moment he'd awakened from his nap at Quintus' summons

to attend the Emperor?  He'd not belonged, not anywhere, from that moment on.  At least

in Zucchabar, despite its ugliness, he'd known where he was, when he was. Here, in all

this beauty, he was lost, utterly, utterly lost. 

He looked briefly back down the beach, knowing that beyond the headland, Sid and

Brianna were together in his shelter.  He wished they were not there.  Their presence there...together...only served to magnify his own aloneness. It would be better, easier,

if he truly were alone. 

Putting one knee down into the flowing purple wetness, he gathered a handful of the

sand.  In this wide section of beach, not a shell, not a stone, not a twig marred the smooth perfection of its surface.  The sand was wet and would not sift, so he let it fall from his

fingers in small, clinging clumps that were instantly spread away by the gentle flow of
the waters. 

He gathered the earth when there was fighting to be done, when he needed the earth

tactile against his palm, earth that might know his blood, would know his sweat, might

receive his body.  He needed to take the measure of the land so that as he stood upon it,

battle-ready, it would provide the harvest required of the coming moment.

Now he traced his fingertips back and forth across where his clods of sand had melted

into their mates.  There was no one to fight, not here.  There was only endless nothingness

...and a beauty so extreme that it held a mirror up to the emptiness that it colored in

shades of lavender and blue.

He lay down where he knelt, folding his arms over his face, blocking out the sight of it,

waiting for the night.

ON TO PART 10

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