by Aaron D. Key
“You are in a mess.” As I stood beside the man he did not look as tall as he had at first. I could not understand why in his face there was strength when he was fairly obviously someone else’s tool. Yet there it was. I, who had seen many worlds and many faces, found his expression difficult to place. It was as if he had struggled for a long time and without success against a power that was too much for anyone and it was that struggle that had left him too weak to fight against this last enslavement.
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“I don’t remember … but I think that you ought to change out of those clothes. The smell is overpowering, and Elena will object. In fact, even I object. Take your boots off.”
He took my sack and coat, dropped them carefully but with some disdain against the door.
“In here,” he instructed me and I followed him. It was unnerving talking to him because he was not all that he should have been. Someone called Elena ruled his soul. I assumed this was the person who expected me.
I wondered with some doubt what I had hoped to gain from this digression and thought guiltily about the point of my journey. Was it the tower the power had directed me to, or was this all an irrelevancy?
We walked through a door in the wall that cut the tower in two and turned under an archway. There was a large, deep bath full of steaming water.
“This is strange,” he said. “Just what we needed and here it is. But I did not know that you were coming until the bats warned me.”
He looked around puzzled. “Here are some clothes for you to change into, you see. Elena must have known. Come on, get undressed.”
I waited a while and saw there was little probability that he would go away even if I insisted, and my own smell was heady enough to make me feel drunk on it. So I finished undressing and sank into the deep water with real pleasure. He still sat gloomily watching me, only half there …
“What is your name?” I asked to divert his attention.
His face wore a look of concentration for a moment that ended in frustration.
“I don’t remember. What’s yours?”
“Damon Ich,” I answered as I splashed water onto my face.
“Damon Ich,” he repeated. For that second it seemed his conscious self was striving for a memory. I stared into his face, trying to find the answer from the tumbled mass of thought behind the blankness. There was only confusion there and bewilderment like the effect of drugs. I felt anger for whatever had reduced a man to this. It wasn’t right.
The effort made him silent for a while but then he asked, “Why are you here, Damon Ich?”
“I am looking for Aeth’s murderer,” I replied with no guile. “Do you know who they are and if they are here?”
“I’ve never heard of Aeth. I don’t know. I have forgotten many things since I came here.”
“You remember my name though, don’t you?” I persisted as I stepped out of the bath, into the outstretched towel he offered me. “You have heard of Damon Ich?”
He began to dry my shoulders with another towel.
“You told me that that was your name, I remember that.” His hands grated over the bones of my shoulder like solid reassurance. I did not speak for fear of distracting him from memories. I could feel his breath on my neck as I dried my face and arms.
“This reminds me of something I had forgotten, something just on the tip of my mind hidden behind so many levels of forgetfulness. I suppose it was my friend, Herai.”
His smile made me want to smile. It was so genuine, so full of pleasure and love.
“Who is Herai?” I asked quietly, trying not to disturb the direction of his memory.
“A friend,” the man told me, still smiling. “You have the same youth and even the same look of constant trepidation.
“I miss Herai and I hate this place, this prison. How long have I lingered here, barely half a man? We should leave now. Quick, while we are both still whole!” He started towards the door and tried to drag me with him.
I tried to calm him with a steady hand.
“I need to get dressed first.” I laughed at the thought of appearing before Aeth’s murderer completely naked. As if anything else was needed to make my lack of confidence worse.
He smiled too as if realising the same thought.
“Do you remember my name still?” I asked, quickly grabbing the new clothes provided for me and shuffling them on. “It is Damon Ich.”
“You are Damon Ich! Yes, I came here to find you but not here in this tower … This was not the plan …”
“Monta!”
The voice came from the archway and cut through Monta’s memory like a sword detaching the soul from the body. The man’s reanimated face disappeared behind sullen reticence. I finished dressing myself and turned to the newcomer.
This, I guessed, was Elena. She was the one who had laughed at my inactivity, I could tell, but she looked upset and troubled as she looked at me.
“You are Damon Ich? You are Rael’s descendant? I read their feeble hopes and I was expecting you.” She smiled. “I was just expecting someone different … Still, you are here and I need your help.”
Her hair was blond and twisted around her head in plaits. She seemed young, about the same age as Ann in physical appearance. She was the woman that Rael had met by the river, Rael’s wife. Why was she here?
Her appearance complicated the train of my expectations.
“I am looking for Aeth’s murderer.” I tried to stay on track and not be diverted by her request for help. My experience of using the power had not prepared me for mind games. Usually the task I was there for was simple and obvious. I had never needed to wade my way through deception and intrigue. It was hard for someone to plead their innocence with the evidence of their crimes laid out before me.
“I remember Aeth,” she said in a distant tone as if it was nothing to do with her, “from a long time ago. I didn’t know he had been murdered. Let’s eat and we can share stories in comfort.”
“Aeth was Rael’s friend.” I tried to feel my way into questioning her and ignored her suggestion. “Did you know Rael too? He died a long time ago.”
She looked at me and laughed silently.
“Are you saying I look as old as a dead man? I will not take it amiss, but why don’t we sit down to some food? It’s better to talk over food.”
I did not need to eat. I was not hungry. The delay irritated me because I was eager to hear her story but I ate out of politeness in an attempt to hurry the explanations that she seemed reluctant to give. Monta served the food but now again he was a faceless, thoughtless slave scarcely vital enough to be called a man.
“I did know Rael,” she said as she wiped away an invisible crumb from the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “I was once married to him but it was a long time ago.”
Elena ate very little and I was suspicious at first, remembering the glowing embers of memory in Monta’s face silenced by her voice, but I could feel no evidence in her thoughts that the food was dangerous. I did not understand what she was telling me. Rael and Elena hadn’t split up, as far as I knew. They had always been together. What she was saying didn’t make sense. I had more questions, but I was struggling to ask them.
The remains of the meal were taken away. We walked through a small archway and sat down on soft couches, beside the comforting warmth of a glowing fire. The luxurious images made me uncomfortable, as they reminded me this was not where I was supposed to be. I thought of the desert outside and wondered where the wood had come from for that constant consumption, just as I had wondered how such a selection of ingredients had been gathered from the desert and prepared by no one but with the greatest of perfection. The fire was an illusion, I concluded, as the food might have been. It was as well that I did not rely on either to sustain me. But the fire felt real – too hot. And Elena was real. As
she leaned towards the fire, her skin glowed too with a reflective heat. For a second I was aware of her physical presence. I was aware that she was trying to attract me. I felt like a lump of stone and she could feel this too. Her attitude changed. She became less languid and more purposeful immediately.
“Why are you here, living in this place?” I asked my most immediate question.
“I have been trapped here for too many years. I do not remember how I came here or what I have done in the years that have passed except for eat, drink, and watch these mindless fools who blunder into the tower and are absorbed by its power, grow old, and die.”
“Like Monta?” I asked with a frown.
“When he first arrived, he seemed to have some purpose. I thought that my waiting was at an end. But he grew witless like all the others.”
“He said he had come into the desert to find me,” I said.
“It’s not very likely, is it? How would he have heard of you? How would he know how to find you? I think it is more likely that in his confusion he heard your name and thought the memory was from much further back than it was. He gets confused like that. Some days he knows me. Other days we meet again, as if for the first time.”
“Perhaps it will affect me too?”
“You know that it can’t. You have fed from the power all your life. It can’t affect you.”
“What do you know about Aeth?” I asked again, trying to sound patient.
“He fell out with Rael, I remember that. And he left Herron and walked across the desert with a group of friends. I was one of them. I remember that, but it was so long ago,” she said, looking straight into my eyes with a painful integrity that made me suspect that she lied. “I think I was left here and I have been here ever since. I hoped that you could help me leave without ageing. I thought that you were going to be my answer but I see now that can’t be …”
I was happy to be unhelpful. I was trying to remember that I was there to look for and tackle Aeth’s murderer. Elena could be the person I was looking for. She seemed harmless but was annoying me by trying to waste my time, so I said, “I don’t know if you can leave. It depends on how you have survived all these years and how old you really are. How much is illusion and how much is real? The power would be corrupted if you used it to extend a life already claimed by the universe. It wouldn’t end well.”
“And yet you speak as if it should be easy. As if I should be willing and eager to let go. I am brave enough to take the risk because I have no choice … but I need time to steel myself to the leap.”
“Why do you try and convince me? I am not coercing you.” I knew I sounded aggressive and harsh. I wanted to get on.
“I wanted sympathy, I suppose,” she replied. “And you do coerce me. I can feel your urgency to be gone. And if I am going to come with you …”
“You can’t go with me now,” I said quickly. “I am going somewhere that isn’t safe. I don’t know whether I will ever return.”
“Then why do you go?”
I thought it would be difficult to explain a whole lifetime of experiences to someone who had bypassed it all. I was suspicious still, keen to keep my purpose to myself.
“Someone whose judgement I can’t question told me that I should,” I tried to explain.
“If you do not return I might never escape. So I think I will come with you wherever you are going to. It can’t be any worse than the fear of dying here.”
“If death is the alternative, you have nothing to fear,” I said. I was trying to put her off. I didn’t want to be saddled with an untrustworthy companion at this stage of my journey.
“You want me to come with you?” She smiled.
I sighed internally. I was too subtle.
“I would if I was going to a place of safety,” I replied with more caution.
“You have power and I have some power. It seems that there is little that can threaten us.”
“Where did you get your power from?” I asked, suddenly suspicious.
“I think it was from Aeth. When we first left Herron he loved me, and he was happy to share. Then he changed and he grew wary. I think that was why I was left behind, because he grew afraid that I might challenge him.”
“And with the power to do anything or go anywhere, why did you stay here?” I asked again. Her story didn’t ring true. I was deeply suspicious.
“I have watched the world and I considered joining it,” Elena said slowly. “Some things I have seen clearly and some have been obscure. The power seems to be muffled by the desert. I was scared to venture too far in case I could not return to safety. You didn’t ask, nor seem to wonder, how I knew your name. That was because you were part of the clear vision, and another part is the man I think you go to seek. His name is Glant, I think.”
“Why do I know nothing of you then?” I was confused.
“The desert is a strange place. But I had hoped you had seen me, and this was why you were here.”
“To rescue the maiden locked up in a tower?” I said with a weak smile.
“Was that foolish of me?” she said as if embarrassed and with a residue of the charm that she had first attempted, but then she remembered and parried. “And I am not a maiden. I was once Rael’s wife.”
“But I don’t understand.” I tried to press the point. “Rael grew old with his wife. They weren’t parted until they died, after a long and happy life. They were buried together near my home.”
It didn’t make any sense for her to be here.
“I don’t know who he grew old with but it was not me,” she said and she sounded bitter. “I was never able to give Rael the son he knew he was destined to have and so I left him. I remember that part of my history well. Nothing has gone well for me since, but I acted out of the best instincts. I wanted him to find contentment without me, as he could not with me.”
For the first time I felt that she was not acting a part. There was real sorrow in her voice. But her story still didn’t make sense. Unless Rael had married two women called Elena and not mentioned the loss of the first one in his diary or to anyone who might have passed the story down.
Elena stood up suddenly. She was looking at something behind me with an expression that I could not read. I looked around. Behind the couch, Monta stood staring at us. In his face there was a look of great concentration.
“What is it?” Elena said quietly, and moving towards him took his hands. Did I imagine it or was there a surge of power in the room directed at him that seemed to rock him slightly?
He shook her off and I stood up to stand beside them.
“Damon Ich.” He said my name as if it hurt him. “I remember now why I came here. It was to find you and to take you back. I got diverted. They said I should stick to the desert path and I meant to heed them.”
“Who sent you?” I asked.
“We decided to follow Rael’s advice and I was chosen but … I can’t tell you now.”
Suddenly the pain and confusion in his face disappeared.
“Go to bed, Monta, I do not need you.”
Monta left in the same assured way he had first greeted me.
“He will kill himself if he fights against the power. He must be confused. Rael isn’t still alive, is he? You said he had died?”
I was beginning to be suspicious of Elena’s involvement in Monta’s loss of memory but I did not want to alert her to my suspicions. I wanted her to believe that I trusted her and was no threat to whatever she was planning. Also, I did not want to share everything I knew with her.
“Yes, Rael has been dead for years. Perhaps we could help Monta though, between us?”
“I wouldn’t know how to start such a thing!” She sounded confused and I was uncertain too. I had only suggested it to see how she felt about the idea.
There was a tiny pause, barely noticeable, as if she searched
for further proof of my intentions in my expression or mind. In an attempt to deflect her searching, I partially let down the guard I had on my mind to allow a second or two of mental intimacy – while swiftly seeking a clue, any memory or information that would allow me to understand her better.
I felt as though I had been slapped in the face and then thrown against a wall. Not with resistance – I don’t think she’d even noticed my trick – but for a second, I had a glimpse of a personality so full of energy, power, and vigour that close contact with it would scorch and wither any normal human. Not an evil force but one so wild and uncontrolled it felt like being whipped up by a tornado or tossed out by an exploded volcano.
I was bewildered and numbed. How did a person become like this? My bewilderment showed in my face or the remnants of my now safeguarded thoughts.
“I frighten you,” she said with frustration and the hint of tears in her eyes.
“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, trying to pretend that nothing had happened.
“Monta.” She said it so quietly, I would not have taken it as a command had I not felt the rush of power. Monta appeared at the doorway. “Find Damon Ich somewhere to sleep,” Elena said. She looked at me. “It’s dark outside now. I imagine that you will want to wait until the morning to carry on your journey.”
I was too relieved to be angry at her disposing of my time. Elena was gone before I turned to answer her.
I followed Monta out of the door and up some shallow and thankfully spotless steps onto the next level. It was not so luxurious in this part. It reminded me of my own room in Herron with the same exposed stonework and regular windows. There were some plain wooden beds padded with something like heather and a selection of blankets. I lay down – wondering what else could I do – sinking deep below the level of the wood like a body in a coffin. But it was comfortable.