[A.N. I'm not pretending that this is anything original, after Barbara Hambly's Ishmael, but who can resist Spock in a period setting? Please don't expect swiftness. I'm rubbish at swiftness at the moment.]

1.

All in all, he was a man. That much he could tell straight off. The dark hair that spidered across his flat chest, seen through the rips in his tattered shirt. The stubble on his jawline that rasped on the soft skin of his palms. Yes, he was a man, standing in a dark place in dry air that felt curiously refreshing to his lungs. Whatever he was beyond that, he didn't know. Didn't remember. Couldn't pull into the active areas of his memory. It frustrated him like the feeling of an insect bite that he couldn't quite locate and scratch. It was a hot, insistent feeling.

The most obvious thing to grope for was his name, but it seemed that had been taken too. His name, his origins. Every label, every definition – all was fleeting, hanging on the outside of his consciousness, just out of reach. His mind felt as dark as the night around him.

That was something to grab onto. There was dark night and the quivering light of a lamp somewhere, close enough to light up his body in discreet shades, far enough away not to dazzle his eyes. He had a headache, he realised. There was a kind of band that was tight about his forehead and temples and the low back of his skull. It ached and pulsed. There was pain in other places too. His forearm stung, and touching it he found his sleeve was wet and dark with blood. His ribs felt bruised. A large portion of his body felt bruised.

He was holding something in his hands. Something dense and irregular that he couldn't make out properly in this light. Something black with coloured protrusions on it. It was important. He didn't know why or how, but it was important.

He thought back to what he remembered. His life seemed very short, it seemed. Lying sprawled on dusty ground with a scent of plants and dirt in his nostrils. Taking in the wide dark of the sky above, points of light that showed stars burning unsettlingly far away, a crescent moon hanging as a dazzlingly bright sliver in the dark around. Feeling the dry earth under his fingertips, and then pushing himself up on bruised knees, and finally getting to his feet like a new-born creature, clutching this dense black object that he still held now.

He looked around, trying to take better stock of where he was. There was no before-time, it seemed. There was only now. There was that light burning, the light harsh and quivering, atop a wrought iron pole. Beyond it there were more. There were the outlines of roofs and chimneys. Smoke rising. Somewhere an animal barking and a shout cutting the quiet, and then everything dying away again into silence.

Instinctively he turned away from the light. Beneath his black-booted feet was a road or some kind of track, lightly rutted and dusty. He walked along it, finding that his left leg was painful to walk on, but that with a kind of intense concentration he could push the pain away and walk almost normally. He felt an urgency to get away from that place with houses and people, but he didn't know why. He felt hunted. He felt vulnerable. He couldn't remember why.

After some time his ears caught the soft sounds of water to his right. The road he was on was bounded by stone walls. He'd passed a gateway some way back, but unless he intended to double back the most logical option was to climb the wall. He managed it with more difficulty than he was comfortable with, his arms and ribs aching with pain as he did so. He landed on the other side on thin, soft grass, and his ankles protested at the impact, his left one in particular.

In the almost-dark he had to rely more on his ears than his eyes to find the source of the water he had heard, but eventually he found it, limping across a pocked field until the ground rucked and sloped downwards to a stream that was running low in its bed. There he sat on damp gravel and carefully put the black thing down beside him, then drank, and swept up water to wash blood from his wounds and dirt from his hands and face.

After that, he felt rather more normal, whatever normal was. He had to admit that really there was no normal. He didn't know where he was or even who he was, and that was far from normal. Surely it was not ordinary for a person to have no idea of their name or their origins? He sat on the edge of the stream looking into the dark, wondering, and trying to remember.

It was no use. There was something fleeting at the edges of his thoughts but he couldn't bring it any closer. He was tired. He realised that now. There was an aching tiredness rimming his eyes and making his limbs heavy and dulling his mind. Perhaps with sleep he would remember something. Perhaps things would become clearer.

He moved a little further from the stream to a place where the thin grass was soft and dry, and lay down. With his hand pillowing his head and that dark object held against his chest, he closed his eyes and let himself slip into sleep, and dreams.

His dreams were dark and tangled. His arms flung up over his head. Trying to hide. Pain, and trying to push it away. Men or creatures or armoured things, running at him. Something flying at his head and striking him to the ground, perhaps. Lights and colour and sounds that screamed in his ears, and running, running, trying to get to the gate...