It was still early morning, and Tenmu was going to Tembe Field. It was their duty to tend to the wounded soldiers. At the field they were met with the bodies of the fallen, soldiers and dissidents both, strewn over trampled flowers. Some of the slain soldiers were already covered with the gold and brown cloths laid out by the clerics of Hamadou.

These clerics walked about the battlefield, from one body to the next, they would stop at each mound of white and blue cloth, assessing the injuries of the soldier, and leaving a stick  with a little flag of red cloth next to the ones worth treating, and one with a black one next to the ones that were not. They carried out this grim triage with a solemn calm, as if there was all the time in the world. Teams of stretcher bearers moved back and forth across the field like ants, fetching the injured bodies worth saving. Carrying them to the tents of the medics - Tenmu’s station. The clerics would bypass the dead and the suffering dissidents; Since they were no longer considered an extension of the great body of the empire, their corpses would not return to the soil, it would be taken from them by a feathered gibbering mass, now presaged by the slow clockwise circling overhead.

Tenmu wanted to care for all of them.

As a child, Tenmu had often gone to Tembe Field together with the other children and the caretakers, playing among the clusters of vivid blue flowers. They would often reminisce about playing there with Isubo, how he had made them a wreath of the blue lilies. Back then, they didn’t know that this flowered field had once been a battlefield, and before that, a village with children just like them. Through the flowers, Tenmu had once seen these children playing at a distance. Back then, Tenmu hadn’t known that these children they saw were memories of the land.

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Two days before going to Tembe field, Tenmu and Isubo attended a small gathering of Isubo’s friends and comrades. They had all once been soldiers. The faint tint of blue could still be seen around their necks and chins, a mark left behind by the blue uniform of the Amali army, a reminder that their bodies had once belonged to it.

The blue cloth was an important part of Amali tradition. The dye was extracted from a particular blue lily that grew wherever the Amali saw victory, and was thus called ‘Victory Blue’. The pigment from the dye would seep into the skin of those who wore it, settling in the pores around their throat and shoulders and giving this area a distinct blue shading.

That day they had all abandoned their duty as soldiers. Save for Isubo, all of them had marched up the military office and thrown their white-blue uniforms at the door in protest, proclaiming that they would no longer be the hands of a butchering empire.

Isubo was supposed to go with them, but at the behest of Tenmu, he had given his uniform to his friends and asked them to throw it along with theirs. Tenmu had feared the consequences of desertion for their beloved, and for themself if he then were to be seen with them. Even going to the gathering was risky.

The gathering took place in the secluded basement of one of Isubo's former commanders, Hikumdo. Tenmu knew most of the people there. They had met several times throughout the years following Isubo’s conscription, some they had even been to Tembe Field with as children. There was Homet, Tippas and Seb’an, friends from birth, playing their flute, drums and mandolin in a quiet yet joyful symphony. Jamaruu, always exuberant, had brewed mint tea. He had also opened bottles of delicious plum-wine, which he served gladly. Netau was telling stories of old days to a crowd of both keen first-time listeners and overbearing old-time friends. His tales got seemingly ever-grander with each retelling.

In one story he and his men had marched through the deserts returning from a campaign, and, upon finding respite at an oasis, had encountered beautiful women, who tended to their wander-sore feet, and balmed their dry skin. He and his men stayed for the night, but in the morning, they found no women and to their even greater dismay; the gold they had won in loot gone too. They had told the officers that they had been assaulted by remnants of the enemy they had previously defeated. On this retelling, he wondered if maybe the women had been orisas of the desert; perhaps guardians of the Kaluda, the people whose insurrection they had been ordered to quell. The Kaluda hadn’t known they were settled on lands destined for the Amali Empire. Neither had Netau and his men.

Tenmu enjoyed this company, it had been like this in earlier gatherings as well, back when they were all a part of the same hand on Amali’s body, though it had never before been as tense as it was this day. There was a certain feeling of liberation, from having thrown away a now detested color, but also a looming anticipation as to what would happen now. Tenmu could sense it on their skin.

Hikumdo, who was sitting in a corner of the basement together with other former soldiers whom Temnu could not recognize, called Isubo to him.

“He’ll probably like to talk to me about my absence during the protest” Isobu whispered to Tenmu, close to their ear as to cut through the brothers’ music.

“A scolding?”

“Maybe.”