I remember a dull pain between my ears, accompanied by an incessant ringing, like a high-pitched flute played by a bard with unending breath.  Below that sound, I hear the low, deep thunder of hooves beating against the Plains.  I do not know how many hours, or even days, I have been unconscious, but my right eye is completely swollen shut.  When I manage to open my left, the world seems to have been turned on its end and all its colors washed together:  grey sky, yellow grass,  diffused splashes of orange.  I glimpse a pair of approaching feet, but by the time they grow near, I have already lapsed halfway back into nothingness.

I remember something pressing against my lips, and the cool salvation of water trickling down my parched throat.

When I come-to again, I am surrounded by the black of late evening.  I attempt to lift myself up, only to realize that my wrists are bound behind my back.  My ankles, too, are lashed together.  The world spins around me, though I can scarcely see it, with one eye useless and the other hindered by the dark.  Too tired to rise again, I begin to crawl toward the silhouette of the horizon.  Perhaps my captors won’t see me, I think to myself foolishly, with all the good sense of a young man half-battered to death.

Suddenly, I hear a young woman’s voice speak up behind me.  She barks two short words in a commanding, foreign tongue, and a few moments later, I feel a sudden pain against my ear.  This time, I do not lapse but lurch back into nothingness.

Weeks later, once my eye had begun to heal, I would spot her in my periphery from time to time, picking orange poppies or riding bareback on her dapple grey.  She couldn’t be older than sixteen or seventeen, I remember thinking.  She had long flaxen hair that reached the small of her back and eyes that were clear and blue as day.  Skin smooth, young, and fair.  Is that curiosity in her expression, I would sometimes wonder?  Or merely mild distaste?  Is she studying me, perhaps?  The young man with the dark skin and dark hair, who is far too tall to have come from Vandago…

And, just maybe, I remember being curious about her, too.