💾 Archived View for tanelorn.city › ~vidak › old-blog › 2009-08-13-putsch.gemini captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:14:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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generator: pandoc
title: '2009-08-13-putsch'
viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'
---
You know today I saw some
men walking down the street with a big gun. They had clean clothes, and
they had boots. They had new boots. They were black and I swear I saw my
face in them. I saw the clouds and the sun and the sky in those boots.
Ten boots.\
\
.\
\
Their gun was big and black, but it was greasy. It was enormous, that's
why they needed five of them to carry it. I've seen the guns they carry
around the mines. Miners are worked very hard, you know. Mining teams
spend weeks underground and get very bad food. Ever since I've known,
everyone's always known that its just a matter of time before there's a
breakout. A young man, an old man, two mothers and their daughters -
they use the big guns to punish the whole team for their disunity.
You're unlucky if you live from being shot at with all that shrapnel,
you might lose your arm or your leg and still have to mine.\
\
.\
\
Its lucky we Gremano are so many - if the northerners decided to kill as
many of themselves as the Leaders do, their world would end, surely. I
think we like the taste of gunmetal. A man once held a gun to my mouth
while I slept. I woke up because I realised two of my teeth had been
knocked out that that I was bleeding onto my arm. The warm blood woke me
up, I thought I was swimming in a hotspring. I opened my eyes and I saw
his long rifle in my face, my mouth powdery and metallic. I didn't feel
like dying so I gave him all my money.\
\
.\
\
The bank was down the street. My feet moved after the gun, and I lazily
followed the dust cloud of the hurried carriers. The bank was closed,
the leaders were dead. The carriers put the cannon down on its stand,
loaded it, and fired. It took only a moment for this to happen, and the
bank facade crumbled, and the ground shook. My ears rang almightily, the
five men moved into the rubble, re-emerging soon after, as the dust
settled, the sky dissolving back into blue. They were laden with gold
and paper money, and they loaded it all into an iron steam-carriage that
arrived at the scene of the rubble the moment the heavy men stepped into
the middle of the street.\
\
.\
\
The steam-carriage groaned into gear and it hissed angrily into gear as
the five men took their leave. They'd have a long trek through the
jungle in the direction they were headed - steam-carriages don't turn
without a loss of speed that takes hours to build. I heard stories of
men murdered near the Great Impassible Jungle. I was told it might've
been the local Lords, or the purposeless High Guard maurauding the
borders, waiting for them on a manor's rumour.\
\
.\
\
Or it could've just been another miner's breakout. People die all the
time, mostly by the sword, these days.