The Soldier and the Gypsy

He grew up with the unpolished marble bust of the Emperor in his family's red veranda. He saw him on every coin and in every city square, hand on orb, divinely proportioned, a balanced stare. He'd never met him or saw him, but he loved his leader so honest, intelligent and spiritual.
One day when he grew very tall, very fast, his father told him his time had come to serve his military duty. He placed in his son's hands a small bronze pin of a flame he himself had worn during his own service. The boy cried, vulnerable under his father's gaze, knowing this was initiation.
After two years of training in weaponry, stamina, and strategy, he was sent to the Empire's mutable Eastern borders and in time, he found that he liked the life of a soldier. He felt elemental and strong. He knew war had always been and always would be and he formed an idea that he and the other soldiers were conduits for the gods, and he was to allow the inevitable, warring passions of Earth to work through him for the greatest outcome of all. Whenever he felt like he couldn't take another step, or felt dizzy with hunger, he'd say: Stay empty, empty, its an honor to host this transfiguring force.
The troupe reached their oriental destination on a windy starry night. They were greeted by a camp guard who related an atrocity that took place several days back with a soldier and a gnarled gang of rabid wolves that trailed in behind the wheels of the gypsy caravans that had just set up camp.
The boy unfastened the flame pin from his pocket and slept with it in his hands.
The soldiers started to work right away on building a proper encampment wall and spent their days hauling stone in from a half-demolished mosque to the north.
Days passed, working hard, eating little, idle evenings, and one particular night, a song.
They boy heard it because the wind was blowing just right and his curiosity led him to the source. He saw in a grassy clearing just next to the gypsy camp a fire, tickling the tiered skirts of a black haired woman twirling and singing. Her voice was an incantation and her many golden bangles flicked sparks from her limbs. He felt a chill of something chaotic in his blood, like when he first saw a hyena, that bristly, muscled opportunist, devour a carcass.
The following two nights he heard her out in the field again, along with two male voices. The third night, his head throbbing, he tramped over to the firelight and met her glossy black, kohl-lined eyes. Two men in leather pants held bottles in the shadows behind her. He asked her to please let Morpheus do his work.
She told him to leave in a series of shouts in her language and said she had always done exactly what she felt like doing.
And it was true. She once lived for four years in a cave alone, learning the secrets of mushrooms. She slept during the day and lived poetry at night. She had six children (she thought) and while others gathered around the table to eat, she scoured the earth for bird's feathers. She concocted hallucinogenic elixirs and she never took time to reflect or get too serious about anything.
He concluded that this gypsy was an incarnation of all that his dear temperate Emperor was against and prayed the gods would show her the virtues of duty and civility.
At daybreak as the men wiped the morning dew from their faces, the Sassanids struck, slayed them all, destroying their stone wall and reopening the border.
The gypsy woman traipsed through the military camp, stepping over bodies, still steaming with warmth, collecting whatever she felt like she wanted, things the Sassanids missed. She left with an urn of oil, a sac of flour and two stained woolen coats, all loaded into the bed of a shield that she pulled like a sled behind her, humming a Vedic melody.