Chapter Ten

It was well into the second week of our passage through the foothills when I noticed a subtle shift in the way that Lightning looked at our surroundings. As always, there was that razor keen awareness, even sharper than before since our encounter with the snake. How she managed to keep so alert in the face of that soul killing wind, I'll never know, but somehow she did. And it was a good thing too. More than once she led us up along a different path when she spotted trouble up ahead, usually in the form of the one of those giant snakes just lying in wait, or else unstable terrain that might've looked okay, but probably would have crumbled the moment we set foot on it.

But apart from that almost inhuman alertness, there was a knowing look to her now. It was almost as though she was counting off the landmarks that we passed. To what purpose, I could not be sure, but I had a feeling that she'd been this way before and that whatever lay ahead must somehow be very important to her. Sometimes too, she would look at me and mother and father, and I wasn't certain that she was seeing us. It was like she was back in another time with other people and from the bittersweet smile that sometimes ghosted on her lips, I got the feeling that maybe she was remembering things and that the remembering both hurt and healed her.

I was tempted many times to ask her about the writing I'd seen on her sabre. It was a custom back in those days to write on weapons like that, usually to indicate which group it belonged to. I guess it was pride that made people do things like that, and from what I'd seen that sabre do, it was a weapon to be proud of, and Lightning was more than worthy to be its wielder.

One day, when Lightning was again staring with a kind of nostalgic look at a great spire of rock that rose, tall and thin, to the east of us, I asked my father about her sabre.

"Father," I asked, "Do you know anything about the Bodhum Cavalry?"

My father started badly, and I thought for a second that he might fall off the wagon. He managed to right himself and then he gestured for me to lower my voice. Then he whispered, "Where did you hear about them, Hope?"

I shrugged. "It was written on Lightning's sabre."

A knowing look came over father's face and he nodded a bit to himself. It was a very long while before he replied, and when he did there was a mournful air about him. It was like what I'd told him made him all sorts of sad, although whether it was for himself or Lightning, I couldn't say. Finally, he spoke. "I can't say I'm too surprised, now that I think about it. It might explain a few things or more about Lightning."

I tilted my head to one side and urged Sunny to slow down a tad. With only three chocobos to pull his wagon, father was going along a little slower than before. It wouldn't be too bad, Lightning said, but it was noticeable just the same. "What do you mean by that?"

Father looked sideways at Lightning and studied her for a couple of moments as if to make sure she wasn't listening in. I thought that was silly. Whether she looked it or not, Lightning was always listening in. Besides, the wind meant that we couldn't really whisper, although since we were downwind of her, at least we didn't have to worry about it carrying our words over to Lightning. "It happened while you were still young, Hope."

"What did?" Father wasn't usually a tricky man to talk to. Most times, when he had something to say, he'd say it straight. Sometimes he used big words that I didn't understand until he explain them, but he wasn't normally a shifty fellow. "Please, father, tell me."

And then he sighed, a long and heavy sigh, like he had the weight of the world on his shoulders. "I guess I could, but you have to promise not to let any of this slip to Lightning. Some of what I'm about to tell you I saw with my own eyes, other parts I heard from people I met, so I can't be sure that everything is right." He took a deep breath, steadied himself, and then began. "It started just before you were born. You see, when people first started settling in these parts, they mainly settled back east along the coast. There were a couple of tribes there, but they were mostly nomads. Once our cities and towns got too big for them, most of them just up and changed where they roamed to pass us by.

"The trouble really came when we started pushing out West. People wanted their own land, Hope, and when things got to crowded back east, the West was the only place they could get it. The problem was that the tribes in the West aren't like the ones back east. These lands belong to them and they stay here all year round. The tribes didn't mind at first, when it was just a few settlers heading way out West to where nobody lived, but then people got to thinking that the tribes had some pretty good land themselves and wasn't it a waste for a bunch of savages to have it when civilised folks could put good use to it?" Father saw the look on my face and gave me a bitter smile. "I know, Hope, that's fool talk. People have a right to what's theirs and those lands were the tribes' fair and square, but the chance for a big profit can do funny things to people.

"At first people tried to buy the tribes off, often with cheap stuff, trinkets really, because they thought that the tribes were stupid. But the tribes weren't stupid, different sure, but not stupid and they got mighty offended when people tried to cheat them. After that, people tried to buy them off, some of them even offered fair rates for their land, but that didn't work either, because the land wasn't just dirt and grass to the tribes – it was home and that isn't something that you can take from people, not with money.

"So when you were about four or five, people finally got tired of trying to do things business like. If the tribes wouldn't move, they'd be made to move. The fighting went all over the West, although I heard it wasn't so bad on the plains. However, it was really bad just south of here, and by bad I don't mean just that there was a lot of fighting, no I mean the way the war was fought was bad. See, Hope, there are some things that people shouldn't do, not even in a war. There were reports up and down the West that the army, and even some of the settlers, weren't just going after the tribes' warriors. No, I heard they were going after women and children too, and that's just not right.

"But the tribes weren't pushovers and it got to be so bad that the government way back east in Sanctum finally had enough. They made a law so that all settlers in the West had to send whoever they could to help fight or else they'd lose the land they'd settled in. It was a mean trick, because that land was theirs by law, so long as it wasn't overlapping with anyone else's, or so the government had promised when they'd first gone out there. It made some people plenty angry too, because there were settlers who'd had enough of the war, especially the way that it was being fought, or who'd made their own peace with the tribes. Still, when the government made that law, they had no choice but to fight.

"Now the Bodhum River runs right through the Archelyte Steppe, which is where we're headed. Most folk who live along it just say they're from Bodhum. When the government's law was made, there were already a fair few families living out that way and they'd already had things the hardest. It was they who'd taken the worst of the tribes' attacks, being all isolated and all, and a fair few them were pretty vengeful minded, for all that they were decent folk.

"So those who could fight joined up and got their commissions and it wasn't long before they had a cavalry unit going. They got to be pretty famous too, because riding out in those days meant you had to be pretty good on a chocobo and a fair shot with a gun too. They did pretty well in the war, inflicted more than their fair share of casualties, but they were pretty decent. Their leader, a Captain Amodar, I think he was called, was a good man, and he made sure they never crossed the line when it came to killing. Warriors were one thing, but women and children were off limits. Things changed when Amodar got killed. Their new leader… she must have been called Captain Nabaat or something… well anyway, she was a different sort. The way she saw things, as long as someone was part of a tribe they were fair game. It didn't matter if they were a kid or a woman or anything, she'd have them killed just the same and you can imagine how the tribes took that.

"The war dragged on a few more years until finally both sides got pretty sick of it. In the end, the government and the tribes signed some treaty and just about called it quits. But Nabaat wouldn't have any of it. I heard she went mad, led the Bodhum Cavalry up into the heart of where the Yun tribe lived. You don't hear too much about the Yun anymore, what with them living way up in the mountains, but that was the last anyone heard of Bodhum Cavalry."

Father fell silent and I was quiet too, mulling over his words for a long time as I urged Sunny to take me up ahead to get some space to think. I'd heard about the war. Everyone had. Only, what I'd learned at school back east seemed mighty tame compared to what father had told. Supposed to be, there were only a few skirmishes and a pitched battle or two, before a treaty got signed that opened up the West. I guess my father saw things differently, but I believed him. He'd worked out West a spell before I was born, helping to build the bridges that led into Midgar Town. He'd met mother then, and even if we'd already been living back east when the war was at its worst, he must've kept in touch with people he trusted back West.

Still, I had a hard time believing that Lightning was involved in all that war business. For one, she didn't seem old enough. If she'd have fought, she'd couldn't have been much more than my age when she did, and that was only if she'd fought in the later parts. Fact was though, they didn't make sabres like hers much anymore, and I couldn't see her robbing a grave for one. Honestly, I wasn't sure what to think, but there was no way I'd ever ask her.

The restless that was in Lightning grew with each day until it finally came to a head just as we reached the end of the foothills. There was a vast, wide pass where the foothills met the mountains, and it was the last real stretch of open area. It was striking sight, framed with soaring walls of rock on one side, and a deep, plummeting ravine filled with water on the other. Standing just right, I could see the rest of the foothills spread out before me, bumps in the skin of the earth, all loose gravel and hard rock. At the same time, if I looked the other way, I could see the mountains up ahead. They were huge, so big that they seemed to go on forever, so high that it made me dizzy just to look at them. The tallest of them were ringed with white – snow, I realised – and you could all but feel the cold, majestic glory of them strike you like a kick in the guts.

But all of those things paled before the stark beauty of the graves. There were perhaps one hundred of them, arranged into neat rows and columns, fifty on one side of the path and fifty more on the other. My mind whirled at the thought of all the effort that it would have taken to dig proper graves in these parts, to cut six feet down through the solid rock amidst the howling wind.

"We should stop a moment," father said, "Pay our respects."

Mother nodded and I hopped off Sunny and walked over to the closest of the graves. At the head of each grave was a simple mound of earth and rocks and despite looking for a few minutes, I couldn't find anything that could tell me who was buried where. The only things to distinguish between the graves were the weapons driven into the piles of earth and rock. For about half the graves, the weapon was a sabre, and as far as I could tell each looked just like the one that Lightning had. For the other graves, there were an assortment of weapons, from spears to knives, all of which looked to be of tribal design. Looking closer at the sabres, I had to bite back a groan of disappointment. The savage wind had all but stripped the writing from the hand guards of the sabres. Even though I could tell that there had once been writing on them, there was no way that I could read that writing now.

Mother and father stayed real quiet as I wandered amongst the graves. Lightning herself said nothing, but then I saw her take her sabre from its place in her saddle roll and walk over to the first of the graves. She bowed her head and raised her sabre in a salute. I thought she might stop then, but she continued, walking from grave to grave, her eyes locked on to something that no one else could see, her mind in a place too dark for folk like my parents or I to ever fathom.

It must have been hard work, and tiresome too, for she bowed her head and saluted with her sabre at each grave, but she kept at it and she did not seem to distinguish between the graves marked with sabres and the graves marked with other weapons. The whole time, neither mother nor father said a word. They just bowed their heads and held hands. I backed out of the graves and stood beside them, feeling somehow that we were intruding on something very deep and very private that was Lightning's alone.

Finally, when she'd gone to all the graves, Lightning turned and nodded once at us. For a moment, I thought that her eyes might be wet with tears, but then she was herself again, beautiful and peerless in the absolute totality of her control. She got back up on Velo and waited for all of us to get ready again and then we left.

As we left the graves behind and headed into the mountains proper, I looked back one last time. At first glance, the graves seemed odd and poorly matched, yet the longer I looked the righter it seemed that whoever had buried these people had not distinguished between them.

X X X

Author's Notes

First of all, I neither own Final Fantasy, nor am I making any money off this.

In this chapter, we head out of the foothills and into the mountains. We also find out more about the war that Vanille mentioned in Chapter 8. If you're wondering why Hope doesn't seem to know too much about the war, there are a number of reasons. As Bart makes plain, the war was mostly a Western affair. Back east, where Hope was raised and educated, most people didn't have a way of finding out what was really going on. Only those like Bart who had been out West and knew people there had a chance of learning what was happening.

You may also be curious as to why Vanille's account (although brief) of the war to Hope seems to be much less horrible than Bart's. The reason is that Vanille's clan was spared the worst of the war. Because of their location and the danger they presented (not much) they were never really affected as badly as some of the other tribes. Indeed, as Vanille implies in Chapter 8, their relations with the settlers have at times been friendly.

Overall, the only ones who can possibly know just what the war entailed are those who fought in it. Thus far, none of the characters that have provided their points of view can meet this criterion.

As always, I appreciate your feedback. Reviews and comments are appreciated.