Warrior, Survivor
by Jonathan Quince
Saturday, February 26, 2005 09:30:36
The wind shrieked, driving ten thousand razor-blades of cold rain into her flesh. Her thin clothing gave no protection for skin battered by the elements, no comfort for muscles burning weary with exhaustion. Through walking endless miles o’er hill, wood, and plain, nights of frigid chill and days of merciless heat had taken their toll on her body, but not her spirit; though she felt tight as wires holding bones, and hazy red hung before her eyes, her mind was sharper than the wind and harder than the stones on which she slept, her will honed like a sword to a point of steely determination.
Of food she had aught, for pickings were sparse and she needed always to scavenge what she could. But bereft as she was of fuel for her aching body, she had weapons, and she kept them sharp, loaded, and ready. Nature’s fury was a test of her survival, but almost an old friend to her; it wished her no harm, but did unto her as it did unto all. Nay, her greater worry was of eyes that watched the roads and fields with malice.
Murder was in the air at every turn; but she spat back at it, scorning its power as inferior to her will. As she watched her surroundings with every step she took, her level gaze pierced the shrouding darkness with keen understanding. The glint in her eye, calm and dangerous, bespoke the secret that she had no fear: Dangers of man, beast, and weather alike were naught but challenges for her conquering; death itself was a lover she would gladly dance with if fate so required; but life, rather, and the game of her survival were what held her attention, her fascination, her highest respect.
She was hard enough to mark steel, yet sensual in her own intriguing way. When sleep came, light and alert, as she nestled in a bed of rock and thistle, she surrendered to her suffering and made love to her pain. Through dawn and dusk she was on the move, each fiery point of injury and exhaustion an ardent caress that made her smile and sigh in spite of herself. The taut curves of which she was formed held promises delicate and obscene; for forged as she was in the heat of the lifesblood pumping through her heart, she was a weapon of pleasure and a tool of continuance from one sunrise to the next and beyond.
Purified by the torture of her choice to live by spiting fate, when she reached the mountain-top, her laughter rang like bells of steel in her wild mania.