The Journey

With each step, I began to appreciate more of the world around me, not simply as a move north but as a new journey. More than aware of my fall from grace, I felt every rung that I had hit on the way down. My position is now the lowest of the low among the tribe, slave to an unscarred warrior. Not one of those around me treated me with anything other than acceptance of the woman within. There was where I found a peace, an inner quiet. It was from here, this place that I could turn my eyes, my heart and my soul upward. With that lift of my chin came a deep rooting of my pride. It spread within me as if it sought to grab hold of the tiniest of nutrients so that it could soar ever higher.
I had a run in with a fish at the stream that gave the morning a more than comical effect. One of the Mistresses said she wanted to see the re-match when I warned it that I was far bigger than it was. Perhaps I will one day, when we return south, when he is there to defend his territory and I remember there was a challenge. Why is that small window of time so important? The crystal clarity of it was not from behind frore coated glass. All that mattered was the laughter, the feel of sharing the moment and that we each had turned our focus to the future. We made plans to meet up along the way, offer parts of our selves, and be there if another needed.
Seeing one of them riding in the distance across the plains became a glory. Seeking one with an answer for a grease spot on leathers started an adventure. Watching exchanges of gifts from the heart was precious. The tenderness of a kiss on the top of my head was far more than a balm and crawling up on the top of a wagon to unfurl a banner spread the entire world out before me in a splendor I'd never witnessed before. I am awed and I am humbled. I am inspired and grasp hold of an arrogance that runs so wide that I turned to where the walled city may be over the horizon knowing it could never encase it all now. Not to be able to see the sky, to feel the wind or to hear the bosk ... would be not to live. Those words spoken aloud did amuse one of the elders. He said I was becoming quite a little tuchuk slave. I held my head up, turned to him and dared to contradict that. I was 'not' becoming one ... I already was ... the little larl one, one that even the Toorians should fear. Shhhhhh, can you hearing them trembling?
I kicked a little mound of dust so that it plumed upward in a spiral, then wafted into the wind behind us. I was not simply going to walk forward among the others. I was going to dance with them every step of the way to the beat of different drummers.
This is my first passing of the walls. It only took seven for those of Jericho to fall.