The Nameless Accounts: The Seeker's Life (7)
I was barely into adolescence when I was recruited for the Seekers, and by the time I was officially out of training, I was a young adult. Akor’mari and ‘mari in general don’t count seasons like humans do, so I’m not exactly certain how many years passed. I believe I spent my first century in those woods.
All in all, it was not a bad life. Being the first defense of Vuzsdin, we were given plenty of food – though not enough to get fat on, maybe. When you came home to Vuzsdin, sometimes having been out on patrol for half a year or more, you were celebrated and pampered like a celebrity— though never too much, in case we got soft. We would party and drink until the rest of the city was asleep, only to be out and on the move the next cycle. We learned not to party and drink so much after the first few times of stumbling around on our patrol routes with a sore head.
We were not allowed mates, and the patrols were almost all male, in the manner of the Tymaltian priesthood. The few females were segregated from the rest, given their own ranks and orders; many of them, I think, were secretly employed by the Althra’aste. It wasn’t just the brewing wars between our gods dictating such strict divides, however, but also the sense of battle. Maybe males fight harder when they have females to protect, but when all was quiet and the officers were asleep, they’d inevitably invite each other to their beds. There would be conceptions, and women couldn’t fight while they carrying offspring. So, we were kept separate.
Not that we didn’t do our fair share of dreaming and flirting — mostly dreaming. Traditionally, only the Blood-Seeks were the time for pairing off. In practice, there was many a scandal when a Seeker fresh out of the forest would find some charming daughter of a priestess, spend a cycle or two with her, and then the Clan would have new heirs in a year’s time. That may have been another reason we did not linger in the city between patrols: the girl’s mother would grouse and groan, but most of them were too lazy to hunt down the perpetrator when they were miles away, out in the dangerous wilderness of the Surface, especially when they could instead give the illegitimate children to the gods and be done with it.
Did I ever indulge in such things? I’m sure I did. I was plenty hotheaded when I was younger. I don’t remember any of the women I bedded though: their scents or their feel, or even their names. I certainly don’t remember any children or caring about whether I had them. It was so long ago, and you didn’t think about that much while you were on patrol. One cycle and that was it. What happened afterward was the woman’s business. A Seeker’s life was all about the here and now: the current wind, the current scents... your officer’s whip at your back.
All of that changed, at least for me, when our patrol stumbled across an exile called Sus’syri. I will speak of her on another day.
