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Adventures Of A Flat Earth Mercenary
a dream by Paul Garner's subconscious

I trudged along the old roman road, weary and hungry. The armour was an unwelcome burden, and trapped the sweat against my skin. Even my old comfortable sandals didn't feel so comfy after walking all day in them. But mostly I was hungry. I passed an abandoned KFC restaurant, surrounded by a moat of carpark and its own microcosmic road network to direct hungry motorists 'thru' the drive-thru.

The road was busy during the day and its many pedestrians were more or less following the road code, with eastbound travelers such as myself keeping to the right. I was heading for the ill-defined border, where I expected to find some kind of fast food restaurant still staffed, or perhaps newly recolonised by enterprising Easterners.

It was mid-afternoon, the sun slowly roasting the back of my neck. Some people said that there actually was a place, a scorched hellish desert at the edge of the world, and a cave, a portal by which the Sun entered the Underworld when it set. Others said this was unscientific, a relic of prehistoric creation myths, and that the Sun was in fact more like a rainbow... however long you traveled towards her she would always be the same incalculable distance away. One thing was for sure, no one had actually been near the edge of the world, and I was inclined to side with the unattainable-rainbow theory.

My thoughts turned to the Easterners with all their wealth and technologies, some of which I intended to sample for myself. The mercenary existence had certainly been a meagre, not to mention dangerous, one. Of course the people we knew as the Easterners were certainly not the eastern-most people by any reckoning. I had, in fact, once been under the charge of a mercenary commander who hailed from one of the tribes from beyond the eastern edges of the Easterners' great empire.

I actually didn't know a great deal about this part of our own vast, proud, and admittedly rather crumbling empire. I'd spent most of my life growing up on the family farm, in the safe bosom of the mid-west, and then the last few years of my life as a mercenary, helping our North Western allies fight off encroaching barbarians. I'd originally entered into this career to seek adventure and excitement. I soon discovered however that excitement is a name for the enjoyment one gets from endeavours which feel life-threatening but aren't really. Genuinely life-threatening situations aren't exciting, they're just terrifying and stressful. After finishing what you might call a tour of duty on the northwestern front I was glad to take the opportunity to quit. I owned all my own kit and the success of the summer's campaign was the closest I was likely to get to a golden handshake. So, excitement? No. Adventure? Sort of, though it was more a case of the old 'join the army, visit exotic places, meet interesting people, then kill them.'

I was glad to return home to the farm, but only for a little while. I soon began to realise why I had been so eager to leave and risk my neck as a soldier in the first place. I spent most of my severence pay on a monorail ticket to the end of the line... a sizeable town of our own empire, on the Eastern border. Aside from vague ambitions of finding Adventure and Excitement in the east I also rather hoped I might find some way of making a living which was neither dull nor dangerous, instead both profitable and stimulating.

So here I was. The last fast food meal was long behind me now as I continued my trek through the barren yellow countryside at the edge of the Eastern empire. I was so tired, and hungry again, that I must have grown incautious. Unwise at any time, but especially so here in this unfamiliar place where I didn't even know what form the dangers might take.

The Eastern soldier ambushed me somehow. At least I assumed he was an Eastern soldier... some sort of border guard or ranger perhaps. He was working alone, rounding up illegal immigrants, as he seemed to have already captured a primitive huntsman of a tribe I was not familiar with, perhaps from the hill country near the border. This fellow appeared to be obliged to tag along while the Eastern soldier went about his mission, ambushing me and the like.

The soldier stood in front of me now, in his slate-grey Luftwaffe uniform, pointing his Luger pistol at me.

"You will come with me," is all he said.

Since for the time being I appeared to be outmatched, I followed as he requested. We trekked along the road for a while, among the bleach and detergent boulders, caustic sand grit and shimmering heat haze in the air bending the light into leering waves, as I examined my strange companions. Coincidentally we were going in the same direction as I had already been traveling, hence I did not perceive any great inconvenience to being captured. All of a sudden he stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for silence. He stared back up the road in the direction we'd come, and following his gaze I could just make out what must be a vehicle on the horizon. He seemed quite worried and hustled us up the embankment to our left so that we might hide behind a rocky outcrop. As we clambered up his other captive saw an opportunity, but instead of trying to escape he took his chance to have a go at me instead. Perhaps he figured that if he killed me the Eastern soldier would let him have my stuff. Fortunately old reflexes die hard and I had parried the blow almost before I realised I was under attack. That's about as far as we got with the scuffle before our captor trained his gun on us and confiscated our weapons, as he probably should have done in the first instance.

We huddled behind the rock, in all honesty not completely out of sight from the road. About this time the first car drove past... a family (of tourists?) in a blue Audi. For some reason we were all eager to avoid detection, and huddled down a little bit more behind our rock.

I started to form an impression that our captor was something of a second-class citizen himself, perhaps a vagabond bounty-hunter of some sort. An informal convoy of family cars started to speed by. I thought we'd got off without being spotted when a young boy of about eight or nine, staring out the window of a passing car, met my gaze for an instant. He started pointing and talking excitedly to his parents. I was relieved when they didn't stop, but they did slow down and this attracted the attention of the woman in the car behind them. She looked round to see what had got the people in front so agitated... despite our best efforts to make ourselves smaller than we were and squash behind the boulder, she'd seen us.

She quickly pulled off the road and our captor, obviously intending to make the best of it now she'd seen us, and since she looked harmless, led us over to her. She regarded us suspiciously. My captor was trying to convince her to give us a lift, all the while casting desperate glances up the road, as if the luxury tourist bus we could see off in the distance was a Secret Police paddy-wagon coming to carry us off the gulags.

I managed to gather that he, the woman driver, and perhaps even the tribesman, shared a common laguage and perhaps ethnicity. I didn't really follow the negotiation but in the end he prevailed and hopped in the front seat while his other captive took up the only available room in the cluttered back seat. I'd picked up on their sense of urgency, so I hurried around to the rear of her green VW Golf hatchback to get in the trunk... but before I could they'd sped off and left me. I felt rather let down, and a little betrayed, and wondered if perhaps the woman had been mistrustful of my foreignness even more than she was of the other two and their dubious situation.

I wasn't sure whether to fear the approaching tour bus, as my captor had, or to welcome it as a potential means of comfortable transport. I decided to hide from it in the end, to be on the safe side, but as chance would have it the coach pulled over not far from where I was crouching. It was clearly a rest stop for them as most of the passengers piled off and milled about 'stretching' their legs. After a few minutes of cowering I decided that everything looked so benign I should chance my luck and try and beg a lift.

As I approached everyone turned to stare at me. Admittedly I certainly looked a lot different in my Roman Legion get up. I hesitated, but a stern looking woman in a brown blazer who must have been the tour operator approached me.

"You'd better get away from us right now, barbarian, or I shall call the authorities," she said.

I wasn't sure why, but I knew that it would be a bad thing if she did that, and it terrified me.

"Please don't do that, " I begged.
"Give me one good reason why not!"
"I don't mean anyone any harm... and... I'm not a barbarian..."

All the passengers were hanging back, perhaps scared, except for one woman. She was a little scared too, but also perhaps fascinated by my alienness, and she watched me intently. The tour operator took a phone from her pocket and started slowly dialling, presumably the number of the 'authorities'.

"If you're not a barbarian what are you?" she demanded.
"I... I'm..." I started to speak, not sure of what I was going to say (who was I anyway?) ...perhaps a slightly indignant diatribe on the greatness of the proud old empire that had raised me.

To my surprise the young woman who'd been studying me stepped in at this point.

"He's my slave... er, my indentured servant, rather. He's been away out west on an important errand for me and I told him to wait by the roadside here... where I knew we'd be coming past. I trust there's no problem with him joining us the rest of the way? There are several empty seats."

She raised one eyebrow and looked commandingly at the tour operator, as if defying her to refuse.

"Very well," said the older woman, "but I'll have to charge for the fare, and he's your responsibility."

-----------------

Walking through Welsh mountains somewhere in Afghanistan, I came upon a valley. It was a beautiful valley, but even more beautiful was the night sky. It was so full of stars, full to bursting, like we were suddenly closer to the centre of the galaxy. It was so beautiful that I resolved to come back with my friend, who I must confess was most likely Amélie à Montmartre, as in the movie. We trekked across the Welsh countryside somewhere south of Uzbekistan, and I kept up the anticipation, telling her "Wait'll you see this!" "What is it?" she'd ask, but I'd just tell her it was something beautiful like she'd never seen before and we'd keep walking.

Eventually we came to a fence, and on the other side the path led over and down into a valley. Something stopped me dead in my tracks, just as we were about to cross the stile. A sound, off in the distance, that filled me with dread.

"Oh no," I said, "...listen."
"What is it?" she asked, but then she heard it too... a rumbling, squeaking, clanking sound, getting closer by the minute.
"The Army, " I said in despair, "they've beaten me to it... they must have taken over the valley."

The first tank came past and rolled straight over the fence, flattening a big section of it. I had to raise my vocie to be heard over all the noise.

"The valley... so many stars..."

How could I explain?

All gone now... hidden away behind a military cordon, trespassers shot on sight.


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Copyright © 2002 - Paul Garner.