“I suspect he is counting on Tiegal being motherly and protective towards Namnum when they force her to work too hard with a paint brush in her snout and exhaust her. This of course means Tiegal will almost certainly release her special energy in response, which is what Atla is sure to be hoping for.
“Now, this scenario creates two ideal ingredients for our plan. First, they will have to let Tiegal wear her Derado during the match. It is the only way they can extract her energy. And second, they will have to let her near some water. They won’t sacrifice the essential needs of the animals, particularly not elephants.”
Rinzal paused, eyeing them all in turn to check they followed his reasoning.
“There really could not be a better time, or place, to make this happen, and Atla has set it all up for us. First, he will wind her up emotionally for us. Sorry Tiegal but it’s just part of the process. Then she will be given her Derado to wear. And, even better, there will be water all around her! I couldn’t have written a better script.
“Now, the only thing we all have to do is make sure we are there, ready to release Cezanne’s vapour, and at just the right time. Can you have it ready Ochrani? And are you absolutely sure of the date Indramia?” he urged them.
Ochrani nodded her head three times.
“Yes! I have Cezanne’s scent in the perfume oil I just made, and I will make sure I have placed it in a small enough dispenser that I can hide somewhere close to her,” she said.
Indramia waited for Ochrani to finish and then focused her eyes on Tiegal’s. Her pupils pulsated more frantically than normal, as though she were willing Tiegal to accept the location she had identified for her.
“I am one hundred percent certain of the time for you to get back to them,” Indramia began. “In 1869 another rough diamond will be found near the river where your family live. A 47.69 carat diamond they will call the Star of Africa. It could have been named for you. A shepherd boy will find it and will then sell it to one of Johanne’s neighbours. I saw it all happen when Cezanne’s scent swirled around the ceiling in the Iris. It was quite magical to behold!
“I assure you, it’s the perfect timing to get you back. And, Tiegal, it really is the only way. It seems that you cannot connect to a diamond discovery more than once. You managed to find your way via the Eureka diamond both times it was discovered, first in 1865 by Johannes, and then again, the following year by the other boy you told me about, Erasmus.
“If you think about it, you’re incredibly lucky that another diamond will be found on Earth so soon after this, and in the area that you wish to go to.”
Tiegal didn’t hesitate in her response, nodding at them all through her smile and tears. She understood it all now. The reason why she had to be patient. It was just as Johannes had suggested, that they had connected to something bigger in their discoveries of each other.
You can be hard work sometimes, but you’re worth it!
That’s what he had told her. It was not the first time he had prophesised far and beyond his age and experience. Johannes, as always, was right, more now than ever. It was going to be hard work getting herself back to him, and to their daughter. Everything had to be aligned, all the conditions had to be just perfect.
And yet, despite all the obstacles – and the magic they would need to conjure - she knew it would all come together, as incredible as that seemed. It had to. And it would, because it was all worth it if she could be with them both again.
33. Pain
Pain had become his friend. Johannes invited it into his life now. It was easier, safer, than trying to avoid its inevitability. He had left himself vulnerable to life’s blindsides too many times before. Not anymore. Now, he expected life to hurt him. He waited for it to arrive at his door.
As he thought about this new philosophy - his conscious resolve to prepare for disaster - he dug his nails further into the palm of his hands. It did not take long for his blood to seep out between the creases of his clenched fists. At the sight of it he let out a long, slow, sigh.
“Release! That’s what you are!”
The mirror in front of him, the same one in which he had first stolen a glance at Tiegal’s naked body all that time ago, now taunted him with his sorry reflection. A sallow-faced shell of a man stared back at him, who wore clothes that hung off a dangerously fragile frame.
“What do you think Tiegal? Do you think I’m right? Is this another way of releasing your inner colour!” he asked the man in the mirror, even though the question was meant for her, his love, who he had not seen for over a year.
“What are you asking the ghost of Tiegal now then?” Annarita challenged.
He didn’t even flinch at the sound of his sister’s voice, nor at her words. Having heard her approaching the bedroom, he had already anticipated her attack. The heaviness in her footsteps was always an easy tell; the warning that she was ready for a fight.
“She is not a ghost! Tiegal is alive. Just not in this world, or this timeline,” he argued, in his practiced monotone. It was the same response he always gave Annarita.
“I don’t know why you keep trying the same tactic either. I’m not wasting my energy by raging, or crying, or thrashing out any other emotion you keep trying to draw out of me!” he persisted.
“So you keep saying,” Annarita sighed. “But as I do keep reminding you brother. I miss her too. Every day!”
His body stiffened at the sound of her sobs, muffled by the arm that he knew without looking at her she had placed over her mouth.
“Cry if you must,” he grunted in response. “But tears won’t bring her back. You’re just draining yourself of energy.”
He shot her a look he hoped would encourage her to leave. It didn’t surprise him when she stared back at him. And by the way she stood at his doorway, her hands on her hips, he knew she had no intention of moving.
“Crying is better than deliberately hurting yourself! I can see your bloody hands you know!”
“Leave me alone!” he shouted back at her, hiding his hands behind his back.
“I don’t want to cry anymore. It doesn’t change anything. It won’t bring her back! She vanished, okay. It happened. Again! Just as we knew it could. We took it too far thinking we could be a normal couple. A human couple, who do normal things. It was stupid and dangerous, and we paid the price!”
Annarita threw her hands up in the air.
“No! That is such a wrong way of seeing this. You didn’t pay the price at all. You have a baby! A miracle. No, correction, she’s more than a miracle. Cezanne is a gifted, beautiful, little girl who needs her daddy.”
Annarita moved herself from the door to stand in front of him, blocking his view of the mirror, her hands gripped on the fleshy handles of her hips.
“Do you hear that noise Johannes? Can you hear that sound of your daughter giggling downstairs? You are missing all these moments. You should see the things she can do already! It is amazing. She doesn’t just walk now. She runs around the farm. She is even faster and more coordinated than Henri! And he’s more than twice her age!
“And she can dance too, Johannes. You need to see it, it’s simply magical! The other day she was watching me in the kitchen and she just walked over and said, ‘I can make a beat!’
“Before I could ask what she meant by that she picked up Ma’s old saucepan and a wooden spoon and began drumming away. I thought it was sweet at first, and not so shocking for a one-year old, but then she got a towel and wrapped the saucepan around her waist and started dancing along to the beats. Her timing, the rhythm, and the way she moved her hips and shuffled her feet. It was perfect! I’m not sure you could teach that kind of instinct to anyone. It was just coming from somewhere inside her!”
Annarita’s voice trembled with emotion.
“Tiegal was just like that,” Johannes managed to respond. He couldn’t bring himself to look up to her.
“Another tooth came through this morning and she is talking in full sentences already, sayin
g words that I don’t even understand, but Frederick looked them up and they are real words! She is a little genius and you don’t even know her. I’m going to say it again, Cezanne needs her daddy!” Annarita shouted.
“Another tooth hey? That’s nice!”
It was all he could manage. The shame was too heavy for him to clear his mind adequately, to form a more acceptable response. Instead, he just stared at the triangular shape Annarita had made with her arms, hands resting around her waist at either side of her.
It reminded him of a conversation he had once shared with Tiegal on one of those nights when they had woken restless with desire, unable to resist the opportunity to explore their bodies’ mutual hunger to connect together again.
“You know what it feels like when we make love?” she had breathed her question into the hairs on his chest.
“Well, I hope it feels amazing? It does for me!” he had replied, nervous all of a sudden, momentarily afraid that he had scared her by taking it all the way this time, finally releasing himself into her.
“It’s more than amazing. It’s like the perfect alignment. I’m not in a bubble when we do this. I am like a triangle, the pavilion of a diamond. And, you are my crown. We just fit perfectly! You make me disperse my fire when you connect with me. When we come together it feels like our two journeys – the roads we have both travelled before meeting each other, and the experiences that have cut and shaped us – have finally aligned, like the perfect cut of a diamond.”
He had laughed at her then.
“You and your diamond philosophy. It always comes back to diamonds.”
He remembered her frustration at his response. It had flashed across her perfectly symmetrical face. But it hadn’t taken long for him to understand what she was trying to say. She had been made for him. She had been made to love him, and he her.
“I hoped you would understand,” she had complained. “But then you don’t know how diamonds, and people, can be shaped so they shine more brilliantly, so they can release their light. It hasn’t happened yet on your world. Well, not fully. You are yet to experience that kind of star light. It’s only just being discovered.”
He had pulled her into his arms and squeezed her tight, alarmed by a ripple of fear that had shuddered across him. A foreboding memory of how easy it can be to find something and then lose it all too easily.
“I think I do understand Tiegal. It’s like you said. We connected to something bigger when we found each other. I think I may be the first man on Earth to have discovered the light you are talking about. Which, makes me wonder if perhaps we should keep making this perfect connection over and over again?” he had suggested hopefully, his fear of losing her driving his desire for her even further.
“I think we already made it! Just now!” she had answered him in her soft whispery voice.
“What? Does that mean no more? One time only?”
“I wasn’t just talking about perfect love making symmetry… I mean it was perfect…but I think we just made a beginning. A new, perfect creation. Something that has never existed on your world, or mine, before.”
She had touched her stomach then, circling the area around her star and whispering something about the light that we cannot see.
Recalling her beautiful face, Johannes blinked away his tears, pushing the heart-wrenching memory of her sweet voice from his mind.
“Brother, please, look at me. You’re scaring me! You look like you’ve gone into a trance again. Did you hear what I just said? About going for a walk with Cezanne?” Annarita shook his shoulders but he shrugged her away.
“Cezanne is perfect. Too perfect. I can’t even look at her.”
“What? Are you going to say it’s too painful to spend time with your own daughter? I thought you liked pain! You must do, or why else would you make your hands bleed? For what other reason would you starve yourself the way you are? Anyone would think you are trying to vanish now too! But, you can’t!
“Listen, Johannes, you don’t get to just sign out when you’re a parent. Don’t you think I wanted to wither away and die after Ma and Pa died? But it wasn’t an option. Henri needed me!”
She sounded close to tears as she paused to tap her bottom lip with her index finger. He could almost hear her debate with each tap she made, how she was questioning how far she could push him.
“What would Tiegal think if she saw you now? How devastated she would be if she saw you like this Johannes!” she finally cried out.
He closed his eyes and growled, preparing himself to order her out of his room, but was stopped by the sound of a little voice that sounded out from the hallway.
“She will come back soon.”
“Cezanne! How did you get up here? I bordered up the bottom of the stairs. Sorry, Johannes. I didn’t organize this or anything…”
Johannes placed his hand gently on her sister’s arm to quiet her. His eyes were locked on the tiny little girl standing in front of him. Her emerald green eyes that stared at him expectantly.
It was the first time he had allowed himself to look into them, to fully focus on the intensity of their colour. And now that he finally was, he could hardly breathe. They were identical to her mother’s, the human version.
“What do you mean?” he dared to ask his daughter.
“I see her sometimes. I think she wants to get back to us, but she has to wait for the next star to shine,” Cezanne replied.
Johannes gasped.
“Annarita!” he managed, barely able to speak. He tightened his grip on his sister’s arm.
“How can she talk like this? She is only one year old?”
His sister sniffed above him. She cried so easily these days.
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you Johannes. She is gifted. Tiegal left you a miracle.”
He put his arms out to his daughter. Cezanne took two steps back from him, her tiny chest heaved up and down.
“Oh! S-s-sorry. You don’t really know me. I…” he stumbled, awkwardly folding his arms around his chest.
“Your hands Johannes! Think!” Annarita hissed at him. Coughing away his embarrassment, he scrambled to find a handkerchief in the pocket of his jacket that lay wrinkled in a heap on his bed.
The pain he had been expecting had now arrived in full force. This sudden unveiling of his shameful behaviour, how he had abandoned his daughter to the care of his sister, felt like being pounded by a flurry of punches. He had to hold his breath to prevent the screams he could feel fighting to release from inside him. Everything about her reminded him of Tiegal. The way she cocked her head to one side as though listening to his thoughts. The little smile that twisted to one side. Even the kaross shawl that she wore attached to the back of her little dress like a cape, the same kaross she had been found wrapped in on the day she was born, reminded him of Tiegal. The last time he had seen it, it had been covered in blood -Tiegal’s blood. Now, it was gleaming white!
The memory of her birthday, the horrific bloody scene and the screams that had filled the house, made his body shudder in awkward jolts. But then, his little girl made a move forward, towards him. Her tiny hands covered the ragged cloth he was still trying to wrap around his cut skin.
“I don’t mind the blood. But I don’t want you to hurt your hands.”
He gasped at the sound of her voice, now so close. It was soft, yet deep, like a cello. The kind of voice that belonged to a wise, experienced woman. It made no sense coming from the tiny, baby lips that glistened in front of him.
“That’s the voice she uses when she is explaining her emotions. It changes,” Annarita explained in a whisper. Johannes nodded, as though this were a normal thing to hear about your child of only one year.
“Cezanne. I’m sorry.”
He didn’t know what else to say. There were so many things he wanted to say, to ask her. What did she know about her mother? Had she really connected with her in some way? Was she happy? Was she lonely?
More than anything, he
felt an overwhelming urge to pull his little girl into his arms.
“I’m so sorry Cezanne. I should have been protecting you. I’ve just been so sad!” he blurted out, realizing too late how absurd his excuse must sound. How his explanation would confuse a child of such a young age.
“I am happy,” Cezanne replied. “And I can wait for her. And so can you. It won’t be long now.”
Her smile was wide, full of perfect little white teeth. She looked straight at him, her gaze intense, but relaxed. Her shoulders bobbed up and down as though she were laughing inside. He watched her in fascination, waiting for a hint of a sound to erupt from her. A few seconds passed before it finally did - a flurry of musical giggles, tiny bell chimes that were filled with innocent wonder.
He glanced at his sister and nodded. Annarita was right. His little girl’s voice was an instrument she could tune to the song she wanted to play. Her own emotional song sheet.
Her laughter was so infectious he felt compelled to join in.
“There you go! I told you she was magical.” Annarita laughed along with them.
Johannes jumped up from the bed, finished tying up the handkerchief around his palms and held his hands out to his daughter.
“Would you like to go for a walk?” he asked her.
Cezanne clapped her hands and then placed them both in his. Her warm skin radiated through the bloody cloth and he breathed a sigh of relief. Just feeling her touch was healing.
“Don’t be sad anymore. It’s my birthday,” she pleaded, her voice older and more instructive again.
Not holding back this time, he pulled her into his arms and lifted her up so she could sit on his hip. Without hesitating, Cezanne rested her head onto his shoulder. Her breathing changed in an instant and he glanced down to see her eyes were closed and she was already in a peaceful sleep.
“Happy Birthday baby girl,” he whispered into her soft blonde hair.
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