Sand Storm

A storm was coming.

Arid heat turned the world into a shimmering haze over the scuttling throng of a dust covered crowd. The breeze was as hot as the air itself and it kicked and tugged at colourful pennants and banners which snapped and rippled in contribution to the buzzing noise of the crowd below. Even with the wind, an odd pressure hung over the desert city, building in the ears of the citizens and weighing them down as they tried to go about their usual business. Occasionally, the cry of a monger or the laughter of a small group would break the otherwise monotonous drone, but even these fleeting contributions failed to create the illusion of productivity.

Business was not why the people on the streets scurried haphazardly. Their haste, and the building anxiety that continued to press down into their sinuses, was the faint blur on the horizon that smudged the sky smoothly into the earth.

A blur that grew larger as the wind continued to blow.

The only reprieve from the sun and the heat and the slight grit of the wind lay in the shadows of the colosseum. Against a sky bluer than a god’s eyes and desert more golden than Midas’ empire, the travertine stone stood blisteringly white. A cold juxtaposition to the crimson spray that covered the sands of the arena within.

If the noise outside of the colosseum was a din, the noise within was a belacost blare. Eight thousand voices chanted and railed in unison, swinging around the arena like a wave. Fists pumped the air and open hands flailed like drunken birds mid-flight, the movements punctuating the smell of sweat covered by the heavy musk of perfume and the the unmistakable scent of offal and death.

They knew nothing of the storm that lingered on the horizon. If they had, they would not have cared.

The men within the arena screamed as loud as the audience, fearful and fearsome.

Forty-seven men had entered the amphitheater, announced as the day’s entertainment.

Seventeen remained, but the crowd only screamed a single name between them:

“Argenis! Argenis! Argenis!”

The man who answered to that name stood tall and lithe compared to his adversaries, and while they carried longer swords and spears, he wielded the shorter, more wicked khopesh favoured by the Egyptians long ago. Despite the disadvantage of his weapon, it was not his own blood which covered him.

“Argenis Aurelius slays Titus of Carthage with a mighty blow to the head!” The announcer’s voice somehow cut through the noise of the crowd by sheer, bombastic force. “His seventh kill today!”

Here, the golden haired warrior flung one hand, then the other, blood flecking the ground on either side of the body over which he stood.

Was it an act? Bringing his khopesh to his mouth and licking the blade? The crowd did not care. Their feet drown out the sound of the wind from beyond the colosseum walls. Their war cries rose to that bluer than blue sky, pierced the atmosphere and might have been heard by the gods themselves.

Or perhaps by something else.

The wind blew. Sand clung to the already dirty hair and sweating skin of the crush surrounding the arena, creating a thin crust on bare arms and legs.

A storm was coming.

Sixteen gladiators looked at the carnage that surrounded them in the arena. Each of them had contributed to the dead among them, but none so much as that of the golden haired man who squared off to face them.

Gray as the first clouds that touched the edges of the sky, the golden gladiator’s eyes burned. His teeth were red as he smiled and under the rush of screams and white noise of wind, he said to them: “I see you.”

It should not have been possible to hear the words over the wind and the crowd. But they did. Each warrior; each occupant of the stands; they heard.

The wind heard, too, and like the crowd and the warriors before him, the wind screamed his name.

The sixteen men gnashed their teeth. The crowd did not see the way their pupils dilated, nor the electric hate that coursed through the men in the arena. They only saw sixteen men descend on the seventeenth: a pack of hounds falling atop a wild boar.

The air vibrated as the eight thousand mouths boomed the same delirious cry when Argenis caught the hook of his blade against the exposed skin under one gladiator’s helmet.

He was there and gone before the first spray of arterial blood could hit him.

“He’s quick!” The statement undulated across the amphitheater’s perimeter, under delighted shrieks and screams of encouragement as the announcer declared yet another dead.

The odds of sixteen to one should have been disastrous, and fifteen to one was not much better, but Argenis’ expression was serene and calculating as he stepped out of the reach of one blade and then another. His weapon was not made to parry, instead, the golden-haired gladiator slipped nimbly between one attack and the next. They closed ranks even as he continued to retreat toward the body of a fallen adversary who lay sprawled across red-stained sand.

And the wind blew.

It cut through the colosseum, weighing like unbroken thunder over the arena. Ozone and electricity raced under the crowd’s skin. It coated their mouths and made the fine hairs on their arms stand at attention. It promised violence in the same way that the men in the arena promised violence as they stalked toward Argenis.

Sand stuck to sand. Crust on skin became a thicker bark, and those roars and wails and sirens’ screams took on the sound of the wind itself.

A storm was coming, and the crowd salivated in anticipation of the bloodbath they perceived would follow.

“He’s good,” they said amongst themselves, “but he isn’t that good.”

And Argenis, recognizing the smell of the ozone and the lightning and the weight of the thunder and the grit of the sand, smiled. A promise more feral than the wind itself.

The wind that scraped through the arches of the colosseum, bringing with the sound of a dreadful wailing.

Wailing of people caught on the far side of the colosseum walls, trapped in the storm as it rolled over the desert city.

The crowd within surged, heedless and uncaring. The gladiators threw themselves forward, occupied by a threat more pressing than the swirl of the storm.

“Argenis!”

He ducked under a spear, khopesh catching one man’s tendon.

“Argenis!”

He rolled, grabbing a long discarded and bloodied shield as he passed. Sword bit into wood, caught, and was pulled from his attacker’s hand. Both were used to batter into the chin of the next man as he stood.

“Argenis!”

A foot connected solidly to the center of his back and pitched the golden haired warrior forward. He recovered, but not fast enough to avoid the blade of the gladiator.

The crowd hissed as the first of Argenis’ blood flicked into the sands that rode the currents of the wind. The sound was not sympathetic. Like everything else, it was hungry. Desperate. Almost angry.

No one was sure how the man circumnavigated the point of the second man’s blade, but disappointment was palpable: from the gladiators; from the crowd. The only thing better than a hero was a dead hero.

The wind screamed in lieu of the crowd as Argenis unhelmed his closest opponent and sank his blade into the soft side of the man’s jaw.

Eye to eye with his opponent, the surviving gladiator looked into the slack pupils of the sand caked fighter. Again, he said, “I see you,” and grim understanding contorted his mouth.

His voice echoed, clearly as the announcer’s by-blows had—the announcer who had gone oh-so-silent—loudly as the crowd’s roars. The sand coated crowd who now stood still in the gritty gail, watching the same slack pupils and darkened eyes as the man who hung on Argenis’ khopesh.

Wind whipped wheat blond hair around the gladiator’s face as he dropped his arm and pulled his weapon from his adversary’s throat. The blue sky disappeared behind golden whirls of sand that compacted in the air and turned the world black for their trouble.

The storm rolled over the colosseum, turned the world into a red haze, filled nose and mouth and ears with particles of dust and the deep, consuming static of a gail. The air was hot. The wind was hotter, and it sighed around the form of the golden gladiator like the tumultuous breath of some great ophidious beast.

Sheet lightning flickered high above. From somewhere to the right, a dark, bipedal form flung itself out of the clag, slinging around Argenis like a monkey around a branch.

They rolled on a wet earth, iron clashed against iron. Red sparks in a redder world.

This time, the fight was dirty. Twelve men stood in the invisible arena, caught between sand, lightning, and wind. The khopesh was discarded. A broader blade took its place. Something with which he could attack and defend.

The wind screamed.

Something screamed.

Something as electric as the lightning and larger than the storm itself.

Something hidden in the sand.

The world shifted.

The wind blew harder.

The scream became that of a dozen men.

And a red world turned black.

Silence.

A sky blue as god’s eye and stiller than glass stretched over an empty golden empire.

There was no city. There was no colosseum. There was only silence and an endless stretch of desert in any direction.

The world was still for a long time. The sun crept in degrees across the arch of the sky.

Then the sand shifted. A thimble-full at first, shifting in what could have been the wind, if any wind was left to blow. Then a wide, thin sheet as something rolled and moved under its weight.

The hand that burst to the surface did not reach triumphantly skyward. It landed firmly, followed by its companion, and then pulled.

From out of the earth, the gladiator emerged. Sand fell from his mouth, his golden hair, from inside of the joints of his leather armour.

His first breath was a long, solid expulsion of sand from his nostrils. Then, he sat back on his heels and looked up at a now cloudless and perfectly blue sky.

Silence. Absence.

The storm had passed.

A hand scrubbed sand away from his forehead, and then moved to unbuckle the pieces of his armour.

“That,” he said to the empty world, “was excessive.”

Bit by bit, the armour fell away, leaving the man less protected from the sun and substantially less coated in sand.

“A sand storm is fair enough, considering the location.”

Hands scrubbed through shaggy hair and more sand fell. “Burying the whole city, though?” Grey eyes studied the emptiness surrounding him.

Despite the words, he would admit that he felt satiated. Pleasantly full, in fact.

He grinned and left the sentiment hanging in the air as he moved to his feet. The world stretched out before him, a slab of lapis lazuli, all blue and golden, forever to the end of time.

The gladiator strode into that wide emptiness, knowing from the scent on the wind and the taste of the horizon which direction would bring him to the next city.

Eyes as grey as a coming storm marked the horizon while golden sand and a faint wind danced in the footwells he left behind.