“No, listen,” slurs Cedar, “listen.”

“I’m listening,” says her barmate, with just a shade too much humor in her voice. “Go on, then!” Cedar darkly suspects her of sobriety.

“The thing you have to remember about Alcibiades—Alkibiades? oof, that can’t be right—the thing about Alcibiades was, dude was horny. He was cockthirsty.”

“Whomst among us—”

“No, I mean, seriously. Dude wanted the D. And your boy Socrates—Sokrates?—Socrates, he wouldn’t give it to him. He was a tease.”

“The philosopher?”

“Yeah, shut up, of course, that guy. Socrates—”

“The weird bald dude with the potato nose?”

“Yes, are you even paying attention? Hemlock, soldier, ran for miles without breaking a sweat, corrupted the youth, jackass at parties, cocktease—”

Her barmate puts her hand on Cedar’s, and she loses complete track of what she was saying. She hopes to god it’s charming, but she’s too sweaty to say for sure and too drunk to really care.

The men had outraged them, so they rose up against them and cast them out, beyond the city walls, beyonds the fields, into the forests and the wild spaces and the mountains. Some went with them, who can say, what does it matter.

In their wake life went on much as before. Bread was baked, books were sold, cigarettes were smoked over small dark cups of potent coffee. Your hands might shake, your joints might ache: coffee like that.

Cedar comes to their city in a quiet October chasing a long dry summer. The fields beneath the city walls are dry as gold, yearning for some careless spark: she dares not smoke.

Children, children they worked out amongst themselves. It wasn’t as difficult as they’d thought. Life went on. She learns this in some crowded basement bar, squeezed between two cheerful drunks, a radio blaring politics.

It’s been a bad year for her, all roads and no rest, her stories stale, her breath bad. She drinks, laughs into her collar, pleased to listen, to take it all in. The beer is good, the room is loud and dark, she has nowhere to be. Outside they rush through the city streets, clash bronze axes on bronze shields, a time of politics and prairie fires.

After the jobs have gone the towers remain, the wide geometric cylinders that the town is named after. Like ramparts. Everyone flows down river, for work, for people, those who can find either; the rest stay at home, growing strange, growing damp, breath sweet with moss, hair tangled with eagle’s feathers.

Cedar has been here before, or someplace as near to it as makes no nevermind. She bunks down in the ruins of an old high school, abandoned now, half converted into a false castle by someone with more time than sense. The halls are empty, and echo with the slap of possum tails and the heavy, resentful voices of crows.

She is hooking up with a townie, bones resting on bone, his eyes the vague noncolor of river water. He talks, but she hasn’t learned the language yet. She nods, smiles, gasps; he seems satisfied. They’re both someone new, something different, a brief widening of scope before summer chokes the river dry.