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In the uncivilized world there is an intimate, facile beauty. Wrought with both God's temperance and wrath, undeniable and made to incite humility.
There is blood which bends about the river’s edge, compelled to assimilate into abundant creeks. And there are corpses left to rot the sand, each an affront to the florid faces of Zion's prodigious sandstone. But it is sanctity which seethes from the cracks of lithified sediment, mingling with the canyon heat. Salient and absolute, assuring them they are home.
Joshua is reminded, at this moment, that there exists a breathtaking grace within the inherent violence of man. A product of double-edged autonomy, granted to every frail creation. Born off fickle, living breath, and thriving at the heart of all the Lord’s woeful children. So much that he might feel it within the weight of his gun, and see it now along her neck and mouth, present at the cage of barred teeth.
He observes her, wrangled forcibly atop a White Leg bastard, the zealot’s weapon in her prevailing hand. Barely visible, then, amid the struggling in and over sloshing waves. Desperate thrashing as painted hands seek fumbled purchase at her throat, flailing across her jaw, at her collar. Insistent until she brings the tomahawk down past the river’s surface, rearing back and down again in repetition, performing an almost melodic cadence.
From her brutality persists superlative wonder, another decisive gift of providence. It is fleeting; momentary when Joshua bears witness down the barrel of his gun, rapture within each upheaval of water. With residuals catching bits of sun, pellucid and scintillating, the smallest drops of divinity pulled from their proper place to open air.
She kills with familiarity — like memorization of prayer, domestic and ingrained. Jaw tense on a feral sound of frustrated exertion, red debris speckling her face, spraying through unruly hair.
The profligate beneath her finally idles after a conclusive, forceful cleave. The gradual calm of the water is a comfort. The whole of her frame heaves desperately for oxygen, urging her to lean back on haunches and exhale to quiet sky.
There is a moment, then — of stillness, of holiness. Where her relief gradually comes through in a hesitant smile, the slightest laugh as she catches breath. It allows an overdue understanding in his mind — that she's assimilated as well as the blood. Seeming almost native to this burning land, now an integral part of his persistent war.
But their current coexistence is a result of displacement, be it his own or the warring tribes. And specifically hers, he knows —a courier of all things— brought to him off that well-worn path of reprisal. Forcibly removed from her life of complacency, misremembered and ill-defined.
She rises from the shallow water with trembling knees, adrenaline visible in each limb and disposition. At her feet the corpse seethes, vivid color being carried by the river further south, mingling with the other lines of red left behind by their culling. And her better hand is trembling about the dead man's weapon, all bone and sun-worn leather, held unnatural where her rifle typically lives and thrives.
She looks to Joshua where he’s idled, still taking cautionary aim below the water. His gun eases back to its holster, the last White Leg only meat and bone, distorted beneath unsteady waves. He meets her focus, then, all clarity within the temperate brown of her eyes. Prominent through the smears of red and matter, honeyed by sunlight and that residual vigor.
The tomahawk is discarded to the water when she approaches, footing unsteady along the rocky shore. With the Narrows pouring from her sleeves and in thick lines from braided hair.
She grins in response to his weighted scrutiny. Then laughs briskly again once her breath is caught, as though this chore of survival had left her only frustrated, abashed. A playful unsteadiness that strikes him oddly — a nearly imperceptible shift in existence when she tucks tangled hair behind a bleeding ear.
He finds solace in it — this definable moment of vulnerability, her sun-kissed countenance and the embittered crinkle at the corners of her eyes. Innocuous, strangely, as if she'd not intended the severity yet succumbed to the need of it.
This, of all her volatile idiosyncrasies, he deeply understands. And in that empathy arises meaningful feeling.
Something exists here, in everything and all of it. In the truest result of fury, in ability and God-given exhale; the sweat and blood and self-made purpose. Then his heart may strain, just barely faster at the realization — that he has never wanted like this.
But the residuals of past ambition are not lesser in comparison to what he feels now. Retribution, holy land, repentance. They reside within him equitably, though differently; an amalgamation of all his wrongs which sets him in pursuit of resolve. They are distinctly more important, historic and far-reaching and by the will of God.
There is work to be done.
And whatever he wants from her now does not carry moral responsibility nor righteousness. More alike to temptation, holding hostage the lowest parts of his lungs, weighted as if filled with pitch and smoke and aged regret. With his stomach knotted in old, forgotten nervousness, remembered only from reckless youth. Irresponsible, almost, and inconsequential to everything else, certainly.
But still there is an insufferable ache within the marrow of his fingertips as he yearns to touch. A nostalgia, almost, of when things had been calm.
Sensibility may have left him —it tends to when the prey is within arms reach— because he steps into that shallow shoreline with bold inelegance. Takes the courier roughly by the arm with his dominant hand. Perhaps too harshly as she jostles forward nearly off her heels, the shifting rock beneath her soles forcing her further to him.
His hold on her is a self-inflicted hurt, keenly aware of damp skin, palm aflame beneath the soaking bandage. Scalding at his nerves, his sense of propriety.
She looks up with a sort of uncharacteristic startle, but is met by tentative inaction as he assesses her. Realizing, with scrutiny somewhat fonder than the first day she'd meandered into his conflict, that she’s presented a knife to caution at his chest. And in his opposite grip is her wrist, reactive and keeping it at bay.
Stillness, again. Quiet in this violent place.
He'd intended something —doesn't know what— having pulled her too close, too forcibly with that impetuous longing, hand burning with decisive purchase. Her occupied fist is settled firm to his pectoral, blunt edge of the blade just barely touching kevlar; only that slight pressure inflicts an echo of trivial pain.
She has never found peace beside him — is still withheld despite her superficial civility. Justifiably fueled, he knows, by the atrocities committed within his history and current requisition. He has no right to her amity or ardor when he's already been allowed forgiveness by grace and faith.
And this distrust is no worse than what he’s held to himself, really. It has been reasonably earned, none of it misplaced.
Now she's looking up through lashes speckled by blood and water. A sheepish, apologetic thing that does not compliment her sense of self-preservation. With a smear of diluted red from her split lip, the edge of it spilling over and down the column of her neck, following her second most prominent scar. Where he's certain there is sanctity and absolution, steadily collected within the soft lines of her physicality and the weight of guileless eyes.
“How many more, Joshua?” she asks, in this sparing way that murmurs and guilts and truly haunts. Crawls restless beneath his mottled skin and makes itself invasively at home.
He releases her wrist carefully, and she tucks the knife back into her waist.
“Until there are none,” he says, then turns away.
“Will there be others, after there are none?” she asks, days later on the precipice of war. The continuation of a conversation long deceased, having had a hundred others ever since.
“There will always be others,” he says. Because Joshua knows her well by now. And wants that bit of her that is both innocent and thirsts for blood.
He's made the effort to understand her; finds concern in the ease of it, in his ability to infer her capriciousness. Moreso in their regularity, how normal her perpetual place in his shadow has become. Allowing him to piece together her frenetic behaviors and good intentions — volatile, generally unfocused. The likely catalyst concealed within her hair, the edges of that scar reaching across her temple.
There's a momentary quiet as they walk through the camp. She contemplates, often taking the needed time to formulate an articulate response. He finds he cannot look at her when she thinks. When her fingers toy with stray strands of hair and her teeth press near-fatal to her lower lip.
“I'm going to kill Caesar,” she says, listless. As if there'd been debate of it at all. As if she hadn't determined this at the foot of the tyrant’s pieced-together throne.
Joshua slows to a stop, turns to face her. Suddenly very aware of the dirt and gravel beneath his soles. The weight of his tongue in his own mouth. “I know.”
But she’s here now, not at Caesar’s throat. Standing placid within their camp, bathed in the monolithic shadows of the canyon, with her life placed gently in his greedy hands to demand and direct. She floats through existence, he believes. In this strange, frenetic way — like apparition, like the residuals of someone long dead.
But she's helping. And that’s important. Potentially an answered prayer, as convoluted as the Lord's intent may initially present. And she's willing — the term he cannot find understanding in, cannot wrap his mind about no matter the hours he pours into careful thought and worship.
They are the same, in some respects. Equally they are notably different. Died once. Born twice. Lost themselves in the resulting spiral, the whiplash and the lack of meaning. But he is seeking redemption, and she self-proclaims that she's only seeking fun.
Fun is not the word, he knows, whether she'd intended the term or not. She pursues a sort of nonexistent freedom, a lack of responsibility allowed to only the Lord's less sentient creations. Deprived of any perception of self, the awareness of her place within the whole of everything; what she’s supposed to do, how she’s supposed to feel.
But it's most evident that she's angry, all bottled up and held beneath the surface. A perpetual frustration he can identify in those moments of frail restraint. It might rival his fury, this injustice she faces and holds so close to her bleeding heart. And it burns like hell, like pitch and hate and vengeful ire.
"Your shoes are ugly,” she bites out, sourceless and with a dramatically scrunched nose.
He pauses, glances down briefly to confirm. "It's good, then, that they’re mine and not yours.”
There's an unidentifiable look on her face, incredulous maybe, that tells him she's affronted by his dismissal. A warning, really, that demands he properly acknowledge and reciprocate her acrimony.
His gut writhes.
It’s unsettling to behold her negative emotions, as they’re often conglomerates of other issues she perpetually ignores. Alike to him, again, in perhaps the worst possible way.
And there’s a somewhat pitiful humor in seeing how she struggles to verbalize emotion, given she wears it so openly to be perceived. She’s upset, but cannot proclaim it, and instead must find some afterthought of an insult to prod with like a petulant child.
“You're bothered,” he surmises aloud.
She huffs, looks away and up at the variegated colors along the cliffs, stripes of red paint and handprints that depict the sun. Her fingertips scrawl invisible lines along the surface, shapes and faces and the number 38. “You call this holy land — a living temple.”
“The Lord exists in each of these cliffs,” he says. “As He does in everything He’s provided.”
She scowls at that, fingertips following the delinations of old sediment, brown eyes dark within the shade. “As much as God exists in your book? Or Mars in Caesar's head?"
“It’s a matter of faith alone, Courier.”
Her nose scrunches again, because that's not her given name. But it keeps them apart, he thinks, and distance is good.
But there's a clear listlessness that follows her annoyance, present in her waning disposition, the softening cut of small shoulders and the loose cross of defensive arms. She is vulnerable again, and has allowed him to perceive it. Open just enough to make him forget his reservations, that he'd wanted to be properly apart.
So he takes a step to meet her, arduous and rigid. A give to his own lack of will and abundant weakness.
The Lord is close to the brokenhearted, Joshua knows. But wonders what he must do to follow in the footsteps of that same deific righteousness. Aware of how she grips the pieces of her heart and mind with marred, unsteady hands. And holds them out for show, so others can see for themselves how to piece their own back together. All the while she spits damnation; holds him accountable for old sins that will never settle low.
And here she is now, those hands out with all her fragility and fervor. Showing him her pieces and her resentment, inciting something deathly bereft.
Then he eats away the distance again, toes the precipice at the edge of a craving. Greedy and as close as he'd been in the Narrows, where he might count her lashes and memorize scars. Nearer now when she cranes her neck to find his eyes, that scrutiny still akin to absolution. She does not step back.
"I'll help you kill all the White Legs,” she decides.
And he wants to ask if she’s certain. But thinks it best to be silent in the wake of the good Lord's generosity.
“Until there are none,” she adds, and smiles in that fickle, unserious way. Knowing he will hang them off the rocks by their necks, bleed them out in the valley sun until it looks like prophetic art. “Then maybe you'll see God in your hands, Joshua. And you can tell him it was all his own intent."
Still resentful; unapologetic.
But he's gradually becoming used to the way she haunts — the way his name sounds off her mouth and how it makes his pulse unrested. Finding that it is her own sort of holiness, her own indirect tie to faith. A method of judgement and violence, all of it beautiful in her unrestrained animosity.
His fingers ache again with that undignified want to touch. Heartbeat loud, skin aflame. Joshua only thanks her instead, then steps away to repress it.
Chapter One.