You turned when I was mere paces behind you. “If you were out of breath, why didn’t you tell me?” you asked while I struggled the last few steps.

I leaned against a cedar to take the weight off of my trembling legs.

Ahead of us, your men stood in the thick foliage, enveloped by the fog. They wore bronze breastplates and thick felt greaves that loomed darkly out of the haze like tree trunks. Their swords emerged from the obscuring whiteness as they swung, metal clanging against metal as blades found each other. The soldiers seemed a ghostly rank of dismembered limbs and armor that appeared with the glint of moonbeams and then vanished into nothing.

The blunt of a sword crashed against a man’s breastplate with a sound like thunder. I cringed. Tears of fright welled in my eyes. I felt exposed beneath the vastness of a sky nothing like the ceilings I’d lived below for most of my life.

You were watching me, your eyes focused on my face instead of on the wonder before us. “I told my hequetai to lead the men in exercises. The fog came up, and look! I had to show someone.”

I tried to give you what you wanted. “It’s marvelous.” My voice quivered with fear that sounded like delight.

“I have an idea,” you said, a wicked smile nestled in your beard.

You scavenged through the leaf fall with rustle and crunch until you prized out a branch the length of my forearm. You tested its weight against your palm and gave it an experimental swing.

“Try this,” you said, presenting me with the branch.

Tentatively, I placed my palm against the bark.

“Go on.” You pointed impatiently at your men battling through the fog. “Pretend you’re a warrior.”

I waved the branch back and forth, the way I thought they wielded their swords. It rattled in my hand.