ornament

Early on, before the rebellion was anything more than a band of misfits and idealists who dreamed of a better world, when we were still too small to do anything but hide and hope, we took shelter in a ruined temple. They weren't quite so commonplace back then--most towns still tried to keep theirs operational, even if the rituals had largely been forgotten, the ornaments once so integral to their upkeep left to gather dust in some reliquary.

That first night, most of us were too exhausted to stay up, so it was just me and the princess on watch. I'd gotten used to not getting by without too much rest, and the princess . . . I got the feeling she tried to avoid sleeping these days. She probably thought nobody noticed.

The ruins had her in a melancholy mood. When I noticed she'd left her post, I found her in the main chamber, turning a broken earthenware pitcher over in her hands. "We don't even know what we've lost," she said when she saw me. Then she looked at me with that oddly intense look she'd get sometimes. "Would you restore them, if you could? All these lost places?"

I'd learned long ago that when she asked a question like that, there was a correct answer. Usually I'd just evade the question, but tonight we had nothing to do until the morning, and I had an . . . intuition that nobody would bother us. "I wouldn't," I told her.

"Interesting. Not the answer I expected."

"Eventually they ended up creating more problems than they solved. It'd be the same if you tried it." I shrugged. "That pitcher, for instance. They were supposed to make it easier to build new temples and expand your empire. They ended up allowing the very collapse you're now sulking over."

"So, you don't believe we can surpass our predecessors?"

"Doing better is only good if what you're attempting is worth doing." We continued like that for what seemed like hours. The discussion never seemed to go anywhere, but she seemed to be enjoying herself, at least, and at the time that's what seemed important.

Whatever conclusions she had drawn from our conversation, she kept them to herself. She took the pitcher with her, when she left, and went to some trouble to transport it with her for most of the war. I never did ask why--perhaps she simply liked the way it looked. Or perhaps it reminded her of something, some secret she unearthed, some decision she made--I knew as much about it in her hands as she did when it was in the temple. A ritual ornament I would never understand the significance of, and I was beginning to suspect that whatever it signified mattered a great deal.