Cheshire Cat Smile: Leave because it is time

(firelight maple leaves handcuffs escape)

I dropped the cuffs they'd used to bind my hands, after I asked for the key.

No man may deny me.

There were fires all around, there would be no surprise attack with so much light. They weren't worried.

They should have been.

Walking away, the leaf litter concealed my tracks. The brilliant autumn leaves swirled around my feet, red, gold, orange, and brown.

Here is a wild place, but it is not mine.

...

I arrived in Gallia at the back of a Roman legion. Camp follower? Me? Sort of. More of a fortune teller, a laundress, slop cook...or high end bed-warmer--whatever suited me, I did. My favorite though, was a common legionnaire named Marcus, rugged and nondescript, utterly Roman; I told him I'd be going soon, just to tell someone.

"Where?" He laughed and gestured carelessly toward the trees, who heard everything, "This place is barbaric, no place for a good Roman woman." A polite fiction, can't have the men know you actually love a low-class Greek, a stranger.

"You know perfectly well I'm no Roman," I said, and glanced toward the trees with a little more reverence. I could see thousands of back-lit eyes that the Romans would never notice. I also felt the malice rolling off the trees, normally fairly fatalistic things, at the encroaching eagle standards. They'll come around in time, I thought, trees usually do. But they'll never defend these people, not for hundreds of years at least.

"Nobody's perfect. You'd never make it back to Rome without the army." Without me, he thought. Oh dear, more foolish love. When I was younger, this sort of thing amused me no end; I even loved a few back. Definitely grew out of it when the not-aging or dying always got in the middle of things. A girl can only take so many broken hearts.

"What makes you think I'm going back to Rome?" I kissed his eyes when he slept and took to the woods, after previously promising I'd see him on the morrow. I told him to watch his back, and he laughed. Who listens to women? Besides, his formation was full of veterans and had never broken on the end of an enemy's collective blade.

Some time later, I took myself to the barbarians' sacred fire, and made myself known to their druids. I told him what he wanted to know about the new invaders, nothing more, nothing less. Maybe he whispered somewhat of it to a local clan chief; I cannot say, because I don't remember.

I kept apart at a smaller fire, squatting to warm my hands and savor the heat. Crackling, crystalline voices of pine cones whispered secrets as they slowly burned, then spit at my cheek so I'd forget. In later years, I'll say the sound is like minuscule bits of glass being ground into concrete by a shoe. One last look back at a larger fire where people dance heedlessly with all the mirth and joy of the short-lived, and I take my leave the way I always do, fading into the background until no one remembers the girl with feathers in her hair.

...

They came at dawn, but the Romans were ready. A spectral warrioress watched over the affair on behalf of the pagans with her steed, a thousand times more beautiful than the hazily posturing, grunting Mars. No need for detail, it's perfectly simple to imagine a blood soaked battlefield. I picked my way through the aftermath, holding up my hem, though my clawed feet soon gained a rusty hue. I found my Marcus lying on his belly, a battle axe in his back, fate sealed. I removed the vicious thing with a sharp tug, spoke a word to slow the flow for a minute or three, and turned him over gingerly.

"Who...?," he rasped, terrified, dying eyes staring wide; he spasmed and his eyes scrunched in pain as he struggled to breathe. I could tell when his vision cleared because he closed his eyes. Rome may have renamed the gods of Hellas, but they never had the same fervor, the same viscerally deep belief. Maybe some of Bacchus' followers...but mostly they wanted a good time. The name of a god can make a lot of things happen, sometimes.

"Shh, meet Death with open eyes, love," I Spoke. He opened them. "You know who I am, though I wore a mask." I wiped the bloodied loam from his face with a taloned hand, and leaned in for a last warm peck on that fine Roman face. His eyes reflected mine, a wine-dark sea far from this abattoir. "I will see you to the gates of Elysium."

"I'm Roman," his last words were a sigh, raising a bloody fist to his struggling heart.

"Death won't mind," I said to the air, and vanished. My poor soldier's body stayed in the field, coins in his eyes and a clean feather in his fist. After paying my respects to Persephone, I gave Cerberus chase and found myself heading towards the light, out of a cave and back into a now-Holy Roman Empire.

...