From the front of the prayer hall every week, the man stood firm, and reassured a shrinking population of neighbours that the war would end soon, that this impoverished island of peace in a roiling ocean of war belonged to them by divine right. That, however hard the forces of the enemy might crash against their walls, they must not yield. He raised his arms to heaven, giving thanks for the gift of life and the promise of peace to come. As they filed from the hall, thin and grim-faced, he placed his strong hands on each shoulder, kissed each cheek, and blessed them with the protection of god of peace.
For the most part, they chose to believe him, clinging on to the comforting solidity of his words, their unchanging message, heart-felt. They parted at sunset, returning to their homes for another seven days of scavenging or coaxing from the earth enough food and water to feed their children, seeking cover in the wreckage of their homes from ordnance, bullets, ferocious gales of fire and crackling electricity, and praying for the end. Over the past six years, as the conflict advanced on their homes, the front line oscillating to the north and south, they had abandoned their once prosperous town in droves. Whether they made it safely to the south, to seek shelter among their own people, or heading north as refugees in the prosperous nations bordering their aggressors, or whether they perished of starvation, disease or violence on the journey, those who remained did not know. This tiny community of a hundred or so, comprising seven families, huddled about their priest, and would not be moved from their homes.
He returned to his own home with a weary sigh. The light from the sky was dim, and the searing desert heat was quickly disappearing, so he knelt on the floor in the centre of his one surviving room - once the second bedroom of a small but comfortable terraced house - and lit a fire of structural timber beams and dried cow dung in an improvised hearth. In a bronze bowl, he washed his hands, feet and face, running water and a comb through his hair, and then sat back on a thick rush mat, which doubled as a seat and his bed.
Before the war, he had been a moderately wealthy man; the vocation of priest was well-paid. He had been healthy and strong, digging his own land and spending the cooler evenings with other young volunteers, rebuilding the town's fortifications, still in rubble from the first desert war. Now at thirty, he was tired and sinewy from years of restricted food and water, and from worry for his fragile congregation. How much longer could the conflict go on? How much longer could his community survive? The summer had been long and hot, without sufficient rain to replenish the wells. Every day, they dug further down, chasing the diminishing water table. Unless this changed soon, there would be difficult decisions to be made - to give water to the crops or to the animals? To the animals or to the people? To wash, or to have enough to drink?
His anger was futile. He dreamed of striding across the contested zone, and confronting the enemy with the evidence of their crimes; the starving children, the perishing livestock, the sickly, hopeless men and women. In his darker moments, he dreamed of joining the young men who took up arms and charged at their aggressors, in the certainty that they would die, their only hope to take as many of the white devils to hell with them as they could.
He did neither of these things. Outlast them, he told himself and his congregation, we have god on our side. Survive, just survive for another day. This was the thought in his head as he laid it down to sleep. The rumble of continued bombing and gunfire was mercifully distant tonight. Perhaps they would not even come within range of the town walls. An uninterrupted night's sleep was a luxury worth savouring.
The curtain covering the hole in the wall that had once been a door twitched, and moved aside to reveal a young woman. His brother's wife, at nineteen, was shapely and soft, in spite of her starved condition. Her eyes were large and black, fringed with thick lashes, and bright with intelligence. Her lips were full, and quick to smile. Her hair, now loose and tumbled down her back, was thick and dark and smooth. He loved to kiss it, and to tease it apart with his fingers.
She came to him, with a customary smile, sat down on the floor next to his mat, and put her arms around him, placing her head against his broad chest.
"Your mother has the children for the night," she reported, in a low sweet voice, "and Malek is sound asleep. I had to see you."
"You take such risks. What if he wakes and finds you missing?"
She shrugged, and brought her lips close to his ear to whisper; "I'll say I couldn't sleep, and I went for a walk to check on the animals."
He stretched his arms around her back, feeling the individual knots of vertebra through her thin dress.
"Are you calling me an animal?"
She grinned, and pulled his shirt up to run her hands over his stomach and chest.
"Yes. You are an oryx. You can survive for years and years without sustenance from anything but heaven, and you lead the rest of your herd through the desert to safe pastures and cool waters."
He smiled, and kissed her mouth, hungrily.
"Then you are an owl. You hunt at night, and fly so softly that your prey does not know you are coming until your talons are in his back."
She laughed at this, delighted with the idea, and climbed on top of him, wrapping his hips with her thighs.
"I love watching you speak to the people. You are the only thing that keeps them from wandering off into the desert, and dying in the sand or on the end of an enemy rifle."
He lifted her dress over her head, and ran his hands down her naked body, the bones of her throat and shoulders, her small breasts, still full from feeding her newborn, her ribs and hips. Between her legs, she was already wet, and her hands scrabbled eagerly to pull his trousers away.
"You are a wicked woman," he informed her, only half joking.
"I am," she smiled against his lips, "I love this better than anything else. But god made me this way, perhaps to give pleasure to his favourite servant."
"Why didn't you marry me?" he asked, redundantly, for the hundredth time.
She was bored by the question, and raked her teeth across his left nipple in punishment.
"A certain respectability is expected of the wife of a priest. This is not the case for the mistress of a priest."
"You don't care about damnation?" he asked.
She laughed again, and ground her hips closer against his, as he grew harder and harder.
"I would rather be damned than bored and frustrated. Nothing in this life or the next can be known for certain, but I can find heaven on earth in a couple of hours with you."
He clasped her breasts in his hands, and drove up into her. She was tight, and squeezed him expertly.
"I adore you," he gasped.
She trailed kisses like honey along his lips, and then sat back to allow him to bring his mouth to her breasts. She peaked with a delighted cry several minutes later, and he followed close behind. They lay together afterwards, she curled into the crook of his arm, her body gloriously naked, hugged by firelight. He marvelled silently at the beauty of her golden skin.
"Why are we at war?" she asked, without bitterness. She had been a young girl when the conflict had restarted, and women and children were not typically included in the political discussions of the men, which took place over black tea and backgammon during the hot hours of the day.
"You must first understand the concept of a war," he said, stroking his hands idly along her arms, "Wars are not abstract phenomena that happen in a separate world. A war is really a gathering of the tiny individual wars that men wage in their own heads. Every man goes to war for his own reasons, and these determine the war that he fights, or doesn't fight. Take the army of the enemy. They kill our people without knowing them personally, and often without looking them in the eye. Does that make them evil? Not necessarily. They come to war because they perceive their home to be under threat by a tide of asylum-seekers, or because they have been offered a steady wage at a time when their town is in poverty, or because they think that by doing so, they can be a hero in the eyes of their mothers and wives."
She frowned, unconvinced, so he continued.
"Why did their nation declare war on ours? Because their leader is new, and wishes to cement his power by manufacturing an existential threat. In this, he has been successful. His people collectively know little about our people; if he tells them that we are wicked men who sacrifice our children to a bloodthirsty god, and throw unbelievers in the fire, they will believe him."
"Now, why do our men rise to the war? Remember that many of us are the orphans of parents killed in the previous war, living among the ruins of the previous war, haunted by the ghosts and the remembered rage of the previous war. Twenty years ago, the Amestrians brought the war onto our territory, making a grab for reserves of oil and minerals. Victorious, they were able to leave the war behind and return to their homes. We could not do so, because our homes were destroyed. Our men who march in this war feel that they have nothing, and for this - with some justification - they blame the Amestrians. Their rage gives them a ferocious strength and ruthlessness, which plays directly into the Amestrians narrative of our barbarity. After all, by the time their armies reach peaceful settlements like this one, they are generally abandoned."
She nodded, her expression serious.
"Then why do you still have hope that the war can end, my love?"
He kissed her forehead.
"I must believe this. War cannot go on indefinitely. They will be unable to conquer us, so eventually they must retreat. They will claim victory, and our men will claim victory, and then we can bury our dead and continue with our lives."
She clung on to his body, as she clung onto his faith.
"I hope you are right. I so want to believe you. If you ever decide that you must leave this place, I will run with you. The children are yours by right anyway, we could begin a new life together."
He pressed her to his chest, and replied gently; "I will not leave my people, and you must not leave your husband. Survive. Raise strong children who believe in the possibility of peace."
Some hours later, she kissed him goodnight, and wandered back through the rubble-strewn streets to her home. Before dawn, a task-force of ten State Alchemists entered the city walls, and murdered virtually every man, woman and child where they slept. The priest survived by hiding for hours, still as death, in a disused well. Corpses were thrown on top of him, burned, dismembered, beaten. At sunset on the following day, he climbed over them to emerge in the silent town.
Wordlessly, he stumbled through his brother's house, carrying the bodies of his brother and children outside to burn them on a pyre before the carrion birds and jackals could find them. Of the woman, he could find no sign. Perhaps she had run some distance before they caught her. Perhaps hers had been one of the bodies over which he had scrambled, damaged beyond recognition.
Watching the tiny bodies burn, he tore his clothes, thumped his fists hard against his chest, cut at his face with a sharp knife, trying to break through the red fog, to feel something. He left as soon as the pyre burned to ash, walking eastwards into the desert, as far away from all people as he could.