by Jon Jacks
Chapter 27
‘Yet if this is a legend of the first Stone People,’ Tesetra asked, as the woman finished her story, ‘then how could there be other people there?’
‘Perhaps it’s not a legend of the time when they populated the Earth on their own,’ the woman replied. ‘Perhaps it’s of a time when some of them had survived into another age, when people were also around.’
‘Yet it seemed to us that the trembling of the earth has only just brought the Stone People back to life once more.’
The woman paused while she considered Tesetra’s point. She looked to her friends to see if they had an answer.
No one could offer a solution, apart from an unconvincingly uttered, ‘Legends are always a falsely remembered memory.’
‘Then the legend that says the Rain god lives this way?’ Tesetra asked uncertainly, even a little anxiously. ‘Is that only a falsely remembered memory?’
‘Ohh no, of course not!’ the woman declared assuredly.
‘The Rainbow People live not too far from here now,’ one of the other women said.
‘Though it would be quite easy to miss them, unless you knew how to get there.’
‘Isn’t it just straight on from here?’ Degrat asked. ‘Don’t we just keep heading towards the west?’
‘If you’re seeking them, then it’s lucky you arrived here!’
‘For to just continue heading west, as you propose to do, will only lead you to the very edge of the Earth!’
‘Then if you know where these Rainbow People live, could you please direct us there?’ Fandran said.
‘Ah, I’m afraid you can only direct yourselves there!’
‘But we can show you where you must start off from!’
*
The Evening Star hung like a glowing rock in the sky.
Its copper-like glimmer dimly shone across the far end of the games court, where the Corn People had provided both beds and small tents for the three of them to stay the night in.
The beds and tents had been placed beneath the glowering face that graced the court’s wall. The face’s gaping mouth was an obvious draw for a line of spiders that made its way up the wall towards it.
As Tesetra chewed on the corn seed that had also been provided for them, a rumbling of thunder gently shook the sides of her tent, making them tremble. Little light came in through the tent’s sides, yet there was enough for her to recognise when the dark storm clouds settled around them, plunging them into an almost complete darkness.
It was as if they’d been completely cut off from the rest of the world.
Is this what it felt like to be immured in the ground? she wondered.
Where were her sisters now? Her parents?
Were, as her father had hoped, were they all now making their way up through the Thirteen Heavens?
Were they making their way down through all nine levels of the Underworld?
How did it all work?
Did it work at all that way?
Did it, in fact, even work in any way?’
What exactly happened to us when we passed on?
Did we simply cease to be? As if we had never, ever been here on Earth at all?
To think that way…it all seemed so bleak, didn’t it?
So pointless.
She rose from her crude bed.
Feeling her way carefully through the darkness, she made her way to Fandran’s tent.
*
Chapter 28
Throughout the entire day, she had relished the memory of their coming together the previous night.
Yet the memory, no matter how wonderful, no matter how careful drawn on, would always be an unsatisfactory substitute for the physical reality. In fact, the memory only made her desire the reality all the more.
Her skin, even her mind, had tingled at every recalling of what had passed between them. All day she had felt the urge to draw nearer to him, to sense the strange power of his close presence, to reach out and touch, to hold, to caress, kiss, taste…
How could it have such an effect on her?
This sensation that every part of her sprung into life when she was with him?
And until that moment, everything inside her was dead. Lifeless.
Or, at the very least, not expanding – not exploding – to its true potential. Its true sense of ever-glowing life.
She slipped beside him, beneath the sheets of woven leaves. Bare skin against bare skin.
So soft. So warm.
So made for each other.
Her malleable curves against the relatively angular hardness of his.
She couldn’t believe her eagerness to caress those curves, to feel him caressing hers.
She embraced him softly, gently, warmly, willingly, urgently – as if, as ridiculous as it seemed, her very life depended upon it.
How crazy was that? For her life couldn’t surely depend upon it, could it?
Everything from both of them was now freely given.
Everything was freely taken.
For in such an act, it is only when all things are equal that it is truly beautiful.
Then there comes the dissolving of the individual. The merging of the two.
Our skins evaporating, our very souls apparently mingling.
We expand. We explode.
And we cry as we reach the Thirteenth Heaven.
*
The Morning Star was every bit as coppery as it had been the previous evening.
Its light rippled across Tesetra’s skin.
Skin that had once been silvery, and of tightly-lipped, minute scales. Now it glowed red in that strange light.
Like the skin of a serpent.
And yet, even in this pink light, Degrat’s skin retained the silvery sheen of the Water People.
He glowered in disgust at Tesetra.
‘So this is why you’re attracted to him, not to me! The priests saw you for what you are! You’re the serpent’s egg: placed beneath a bird for her to hatch and provide the child’s first breakfast!’
‘That’s impossible!’ Tesetra snapped. ‘It’s just a redness to my skin–’
‘I went to your tent last night!’ Degrat glared at her. ‘To save our people!’
Fandran had now also risen. He calmly observed Tesetra’s changed skin, noting curiously the faint maze-like lines of black and white meandering crazily over the red.
‘Perhaps it’s my – our – people who will be saved.’ There was a snide tone to his voice as he talked to Degrat that not even Tesetra liked. ‘There’s just one of your people, it seems.’
Degrat launched himself at Fandran. They clinched with a punishing sound of hard flesh and muscle. Both unbalanced by this, they toppled together to the ground.
The ground rumbled aggressively, trembled worryingly as it had done only a few days previously.
‘Stop this! Stop this now!’ Tesetra raged at them both.
She was flattered by the attention she was receiving from both of them. She was tempted to make more of it, to use it so she had power over them both. Make them do anything she wanted.
Yet that would only make her as ridiculous as them.
‘We might be the only three people left, and you two are arguing!’
‘People?’ Degrat sneered up at her from his awkwardly splayed position upon the ground. ‘You’re not of the Water People! You’re one of his – a snake amongst us!’
He indicated Fandran with a sharp, disgruntled nod of his head.
Fandran ignored his anger, getting back to his feet, wiping the court’s dust from his hands.
The rumbling of the ground had fortunately eased off. It had only been a thankfully brief quake after all.
Looking beyond Tesetra, he saw that the huge face portrayed on the wall was now gawping at them.
‘The doorway,’ Fandran declared calmly, indicating with a nod of his own head that Tesetra should turn around. ‘It’s opened up: just as the Corn People said it would.’
*
Chapter 29
It was a path leading beneath the Earth.
They followed it, passing deeper into the darkness.
The Corn People had provided them with what they had called planting sticks, cornstalks that should be lit from the embers of the previous night’s fire to light their way.
Along the way, they passed masked figures placed in either standing or seating positions to either side of the path. They were the mummified bodies of past kings and queens, there to greet them to the realm of the Rainbow People.
After only a short while, they came to a small, cubed room, with jars of water in each corner. Each represented a different kind of rainfall, the Corn People had warned them: one would bring a good harvest, another a dried-out one. A third would rot the harvest, the fourth would freeze and pound it flat.
Beyond the small room, there stretched a vast cave, one full of plants and trees, like a spring-time paradise. There was also a long lake, lit like the plants as if by an invisible sun.
The Corn People had also provided each of them with a small, empty pitcher. Holding these nervously, the three of them peered into the water-filled jars, seeing only their reflections, as if in a dark mirror.
‘How do we choose which to fill our pitchers with?’ Fandran asked.
‘Degrat?’
Tesetra glanced his way hopefully, hoping he would recall something from his vast store of legends that might provide them with an answer.
Degrat shook his head morosely.
‘Does it matter? Can’t we just walk through?’
‘The Corn People said we had to make a choice: they wouldn’t say why.’
‘There are three of us,’ Fandran pointed out, moving from a jar he’d stared into with a disappointed expression to one that seemed to give him more to smile at. ‘We could each make a different choice. The chances are, one of us would get it right.’
‘And if those who get it wrong die and end up staying down here?’ Degrat snorted irately.
‘Still,’ Fandran answered coolly, raising his pitcher in readiness to dip it into the jar he was staring into, ‘we can’t just stand here forever like these mummified bodies, can we?’
*
‘Choose wrongly, and you might well join those who are mummified here.’
Fandran’s pitcher hovered unfilled over the top of the water.
A boy of about their age had entered the small room from the direction of the large cave.
At least, they all assumed it was a boy, as he appeared to be about their own height. It was hard to be entirely sure, however, as he wore a huge, resplendent mask of rainbow-coloured feathers. The beak, bizarrely, had fangs, while the eyes were overly large.
‘You’re one of the Rainbow People, yes?’ Tesetra asked exuberantly.
The boy nodded, the feathers rippling and fluttering.
‘How many more of you are there?’ Degrat asked, trying to peer beyond the boy into the cavern stretching out behind him.
‘You didn’t see them?’ the boy asked, staring to lift the mask clear of his head.
‘We haven’t entered yet…’ Degrat began to impolitely point out, his voice fading out as the removal of the mask revealed that he was talking to a girl.
‘I meant on your way down,’ the girl said. ‘Surely I heard you say you saw the Rain People on your way down here?’
‘The mummified bodies?’ Fandran asked edgily.
The girl nodded.
‘They’re all that’s left of my people. The time of the Third Sun is long over.’
‘Yet we’ve meet people from other ages on our way here.’
The girl nodded once more, this time as if she understood that this was highly likely.
‘And yet we all know they were not supposed to survive.’
She looked towards each of them curiously, for they were still standing by the jars they had thought of withdrawing their water from.
She moved closer to Tesetra, peered into the jar.
‘Ah, water in abundance!’ she declared excitedly.
Tesetra smiled, both pleased and relieved that she had made the right choice after all.
‘Far too much for crops, of course,’ the girl continued calmly, moving away from Tesetra and more towards Fandran’s jar. ‘They would be dashed to the ground, and rot in the fields!’
She smiled as she looked into Fandran’s jar.
‘A rainfall that would be too light: the wind would carry it away, then dry out the soil.’
She moved towards Degrat next. He smiled, confident that he must have made the right choice. Hadn’t he seen Fandran disappointedly peer into the only other remaining jar?
‘And this would freeze, just as the jaguar freezes his prey in fear before devouring him!’
She stepped towards the remaining jar, the one Fandran knew contained hardly any water.
‘Ah,’ she sighed blissfully. ‘This one, this one is perfect!’
Fandran frowned in a pained mix of bewilderment and annoyance as he quickly strode over towards the girl. He gawped at the plentiful supply of water in the jar in surprise.
‘But I just–’
He stopped trying to explain why he had doubted her when he saw that water was pouring from her hands into the jar.
She grinned happily at him.
As she turned away from the jar, looking back once more into the room, she let the water rain from her hands, let it splash upon the floor.
‘Each jar is like a mirror, reflecting our personalities – and talking of mirrors, why hadn’t you considered using yours to try and work out the solution to this problem?’
She fleetingly looked towards them all in turn as she said this.
How could she know of the magic mirrors? The three of them exchanged puzzled glances.
‘Our mirrors wouldn’t have helped us make the right choice,’ Fandran said in answer to her question.
‘Not yours, certainly,’ the girl agreed, as she spoke lifting her arms so that the rain coming from her fingers now had farther to fall. ‘Nor yours, either,’ she added, glancing Degrat’s way.
‘Then the mirrors wouldn’t have helped us,’ Degrat said sourly, wondering why she had raised the potential of the mirrors, only to say they would have been useless after all.
Before the girl, however, the rain was now being played upon by the sparkling rays of an otherwise invisible sun. It began to glisten, to shine, to display a gorgeous rainbow surrounding mirage-like images.
It was a mirror, a third magical mirror.
‘Ah, but what of the Fourth Mirror?’ the girl said, showing the image of a perfectly round mirror that had appeared within her own.
*
Chapter 30
All four of them observed the circular mirror that hovered in the mirror of rain.
‘What does it do, this Fourth Mirror?’ Tesetra asked.
‘You really don’t know?’ the girl asked.
She brought her hands down, bringing the rain to an end, snapping out of existence both the mirror and the mirror reflected within it.
‘What of your mirror?’ Degrat asked. ‘How did you come by it? Why did it show us this Fourth Mirror? What are its powers?’
‘So many questions!’ the girl chuckled richly. ‘My mirror reflects that which is hidden from us.’
‘But…isn’t that the most fabulous mirror of all?’ Tesetra gasped. ‘If you know all the things that are hidden – then you know everything!’
The girl chuckled again.
‘You might think so; and yet I have decided to only rarely use my mirror–’
‘How can you not take advantage of such an amazing gift?’ Degrat snapped in irritation.
Perhaps he should tell her the tale, he wondered, of the foolish fisherman who threw away a most remarkable gift, simply because he didn’t understand how it worked.
‘It may show me that which is hidden; but not that which isn’t hidden,’ the girl answered placidly, obviously hard to anger. �
�And so that leaves me in the same frustrating position as the man with the Six Wise Heads.’
*
Chapter 31
The Six Wise Heads
Men have always sought the solution to how the universe works.
They toil endlessly away at their tables, bringing together this fact with that fact, this solution with that solution; seeking that moment when everything will at last fall into place for them, and they will understand everything that man needs to know.
Yet, equally endlessly, the answer always eludes them.
Whenever they feel close to an answer to their questions, they find it slips away as if from their fingers, as if only just out of their reach, if only they could stretch out that little bit farther… The fingers of their minds can’t close around that elusive thought, which slips away from them in the silky waters of the mind like the flash of a slinkering little fish that never wants to be caught.
Now one such man, hard at work one incredibly dark evening, his candles burning so ridiculously low, started in surprise when he realised a man was peering curiously over his shoulder.
‘What? How did you get in here?’ he furiously demanded of the stranger. ‘Who are you?’
‘Why, you asked me here, didn’t you?’
‘I most certainly did not! I don’t even know who you are! So I could hardly have called you!’
‘Oh, but indeed you did! Didn’t I just hear you mumbling only a moment ago that you would sell your soul to attain all human knowledge?’
The man’s eyes opened wide in understanding. Because, of course, he was far from being a foolish man. He was, he believed, the wisest man on earth!
He knew immediately that this man standing before him would indeed be capable of granting him all he wished for. Provided, of course, that he paid the required price; and that, naturally, would be his own soul.
Perhaps, on realising who he was dealing with, the man should have been scared. Perhaps he should have told this trader of souls to depart, that there had been some dreadful, horrible mistake.
And yet – wasn’t he the wisest man ever to have been born?
If he wasn’t capable of thwarting this man, this trader, then who on Earth was?
All he had to do was to beware the choice of words the man would use. To make sure it was a fair deal, not a trick.