Forbidden Dreams (Two Word Challenge)

Most nights, they slept on silk over stone. Silk spoke of power and affluence; the stone, a reminder of the hard ground they would sleep on when fate tore these things away. They did this to honor tradition, but lately he insisted there be no sheet, they slept only on stone.

As Portuguese gunboats filed into the harbor and their world unraveled, he held Xiuxiu. To calm each other with humor, they whispered of the incident that brought them together.

On campaign, many years ago, he and a few friends amused themselves by playing pranks on the servants. He had taken notice of a young woman scurrying away from the ox carts to squat in the brush. As she hid there shooing flies, he whisked a rope off a cart, to coil out one end just beyond her - then he slowly slithered it back toward the wagons. She shrieked out of the bush holding aloft her skirt and everyone had a great laugh.

She had no position to criticize him, still when only he could hear she sneered that though the warlord's son could whip his snake he had yet to prove himself against the serpents that preyed on his people.

He should have killed her for that, but doing so would reveal that he had been insulted. Since she had cost him no face among others, he took her as his concubine for revenge, then fell in love with her.

Tonight, he spoke to her of forbidden dreams, of fleeing into the countryside and living out their lives in the jungle. He knew this was not to be, that in the morning she and her children would die at his hand then he would take his own life. The last thing she would know of him would be the horror of betrayal.

Still they had until the morning.