After Ivan the IV defeated the Tar Tars at Kazan, he rode on horseback to survey his conquest and wept at the sight of the heaps of slaughtered women and children. He said, "they may not be Christian, but they are people like us." Today distant and detached commander in chiefs view the results of the mechanized slaughter they unleashed through the sterile medium of field reports and they dehumanize their victims with the clinical term "collateral damage."
The river was like a massive indigo snake coiling in the shadow of the canyons its eternal flow cut out of the very earth. Somewhere along the watery corridor, settled human life grew out of the muddy banks. The tribe sustained itself on the arterial river, steadily expanding and contracting with the rhythm of its flow like a beating heart. As far as anyone in the tribe knew no other arrangement had ever existed. The river had birthed them, molding sand and clay into flesh, and infusing the husks with its life-giving waters. Life under the desert’s smooth turquoise sky seemed safely stagnant. There was no inkling, no deciphered omens, absolutely no hunch of the approaching cataclysm lurking just out of sight obscured by the landscape’s jagged ridges. Not far from the isolated patchwork of green and brown earth settled by this tribe, the scion of ancient god well into his twilight years was on the cusp of fulfilling his divine purpose. Harmakar was sitting in the dust staring into t