by K. T. Tomb
She flew up again and soared, flying ever higher and up into another world. She saw giants and shining elves and busy dwarves and lost souls in the dark. And then she circled to where she knew she would go. She saw the Other World again and she found the island and the hut and the foal and she dove down like a bomb. She hurtled toward the ground and slammed into the sleeping body of the cat.
Cash woke with a start and found she lay on her side. She reached behind her and felt Paddy was still on her back. There was nobody else in the hut. The fire had died down, leaving only small embers. But the hut was warm. There was light outside and she got up. Paddy smacked his lips as she did. He laid his arms around his mother's neck again and hugged her in his sleep. “Cwtch,” he mumbled softly. Cash smiled and laid her hand on his shoulder, rubbing it gently and affectionately. She pulled her hand back and she looked at her palm. There was a big round scar on it. It was a large scar, one that should have alarmed her, but it didn’t. She knew she would cherish that scar and what it meant. She knew she had pierced herself as she had pierced the veil between the worlds. She knew that she could fly and soar.
She stepped out of the hut and found the world was bright and calm. The sea was stormy further out, but the world in the small dale was calm. It was as calm as she felt.
She had not felt this calm at any point in her life. But something had fallen into place and she knew it. She knew she had found the wings that allowed her to stop running. She had found the Falcon Cloak.
Epilogue
Cash didn’t answer Tim's questions about what she had done or what she had found. She refused to answer his concerns about what she had been doing with Paddy and how she had been about the festivities without it being bad for him. She smiled and kissed him gently on the cheek. It was answer enough, she reckoned. He would not understand what she had found or done.
But she knew she would never say goodbye to him. She would never stop being near him, loving him and caring for him as he cared for her.
She was happy staying at her home now, telling stories to her son and making it a priority for him to thrive. She didn’t rely on technology or other people to raise him, instead making sure she could give him what she knew she could give him. She could raise him to be free and to find all the worlds, rather than be trapped in one.
For the first time, she felt like she was free. She felt like she was free to stay or go, free to fly and to be. But she would not run any more.
The cat sat contentedly at the side of the clearing. The falcon was hovering over it. It never left her side. It was never so far away that she couldn’t find her when she needed her. By her side, the foal frolicked. It jumped and ran, stopping and standing, finding his hooves and running as only it could run.
The boar sat by the side of the cat, but the cat saw the eyes of the boar were not seeing what she saw. The boar saw everything, but he was not aware he was where he was. But the cat was aware of it now. And it felt good to be part of that world.
For a moment the cursor on the screen blinked. Then Cash closed the window. She had wanted to write down that story, but she could not. She knew she could not. It was not a story she could tell. It was a story people had to live, not one they could read.
It was not a story she could tell Tim or Paddy either, but she had found her tongue. Every day she sat by the fireplace and told Paddy stories she made up. A lot of evenings, Tim sat there as well, lying or sitting on the ground by her seat. He listened carefully to the stories she told about animals and giants and spirits. She told of ancestors and spoke of Torkil and Torcuil and Pádraig. She told of Paddy, the boy who would become a hero and she told of worlds none had seen.
Tim would listen, intrigued, but he would listen and stay where he was. But it was not to set him free that she told the stories, it was for Paddy's sake. She knew the stories would mean he would remain in a world he had seen and he would stay there for the rest of his life. And he would join the Eagle and fly with the Falcon. He would be free to come and go… just as she would find the strength to do soon. She didn’t know what it would be that would call her away from her paradise by the Severn Sea but she was resolved within herself that whatever it was, it would call to her, and when it called she would have the strength and the will to go after it.
Cash finished that night's story about a Golden Woman, a boar and a giantess and she kissed Paddy's forehead. She handed him down to his father and Tim got up. He kissed her cheek and brought the boy up to his bed.
Cash looked at the scar on her hand. It was still there. The outline had faded a little, but it was still there. It would always be there. A hole in her hand to remind her of the wings she had and which she would hold on to her until her line was finally cut.
And she knew above her was a Golden Woman looking at her and smiling at her. That Golden Woman smiled because there was a Wild Woman who had not been tamed, but who had stopped running and channeled her energy and wisdom into other discoveries and into creating a world that was her own. It was a woman in a Falcon Cloak.
The end.
Cash Cassidy returns in:
The Jaguar God
A Cash Cassidy Adventure #5
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THE
JAGUAR GOD
A Cash Cassidy Adventure
#5
by
K.T. TOMB
The Jaguar God
Published by K.T. Tomb
Copyright © 2016 by K.T. Tomb
All rights reserved.
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold.
Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The Jaguar God
Chapter One
“Don't go out on the beach alone, Paddy,” Cash Cassidy shouted to her young son. Paddy was toddling around the terrace of the little cottage Cash and Tim had been holidaying in on Lesbos. He was walking already and could even manage to negotiate the stairs if he wanted to. He still went down them on his bottom and he went up them crawling, but he could navigate them.
The house belonged to Tim's parents. They had gone down there just before Christmas for a brief holiday and it was already a week after New Year. Tim had left them there on New Year's Day to go back to work at the university. Cash and Paddy had stayed behind. The weather in Wales was bleak and dreary this time of year and now there were floods all over the United Kingdom and Ireland. Of course, there were problems in Greece as well, but the weather wasn’t one of them.
In a way, she had not wanted to go to Greece, given what was taking place there, but Barry wasn’t her favorite place to be over Christmas. She had spent her early childhood having Christmas in the sun. When they had moved to Wales, Christmas had still been a time to travel back to Oz, or to go to the Alps or Pyrenees. Since then she had spent quite a few holidays in Wales as well, but with everything dark, rainy, cold but not freezing, and everything turning to mud, she wasn’t too fond of doing that.
Paddy was a worry for her at the moment, though. He was way too fast in everything. He had picked up his first words just before they left, and he was managing to string some of them together already. Sadly for Tim, they were in Cymraeg. Cash had insisted he go to a Welsh language nursery school and she intended for him to attend the local Welsh primary school after that. She had picked up the language over the years, though she wasn’t as fluent as she wanted to be, but Tim had never picked it up. The big problem now was how mobile Paddy was and how much he resembled his mother. He wanted to explore everything, and now he was able to do so as well.
Tim had spoken about how he and his siblings would go down to the beach on their own and it was great to play there in the clean sand and the clear water of the Mediterranean. With Paddy, that simply wasn’t possible. The “migrant” crisis meant there were strange people roaming the beaches from time to time. At any moment, a group of them could wash up on the shore and the
beach was littered with all sorts of crap. Sometimes literally crap. One of the big problems Cash had discovered both on the Lesbos beach and in the towns was the smell of feces. It wasn’t a problem she had ever thought about while watching the news, but when she asked a local about it, she couldn’t think why nobody had addressed this problem. The refugees were barely being put in tents or under any other sort of roof. There was little sanitation available for them. Cash herself never minded going without a shower for a week, but she had hardly thought about the problem of relieving one’s self. There were not enough toilets for the transient people and not enough public conveniences either. So they just ended up relieving themselves in the streets or on the beaches; where Paddy would easily handle it and perhaps, if he was in a curious mood, try to taste it.
Cash sat at the desk in the study of the house. The desk was by the window, which faced east. It looked out over the elevated terrace, which had low fences all around it, so nobody could wander down into the abyss unwittingly and little tykes like Paddy couldn’t just disappear. Tim had installed a childproof gate to stop the boy from going down the steps, but Cash wasn’t fully convinced Paddy couldn’t open it.
If she looked beyond the terrace, she could see the Anatolian mainland rising in the distance. It did her good to be there in that place; it relaxed her. But she was stuck. She had no idea what to write about, and another project was due. Her editor was breathing down her neck, demanding new ideas; meanwhile, she had none.
Cash veered up suddenly. Paddy was nowhere to be seen and when she looked out, she saw the little gate at the top of the stairs lay open. The boy had managed to unlock it.
Smart little bugger, she thought as she ran out of the room.
She rushed down the steps of the terrace and looked around. Paddy couldn’t have gotten far either way. She looked down and saw the little footsteps heading down to the water. She followed the tracks and found they headed right just before the floodline. She looked over and saw her son sitting and splashing happily in the small waves that lapped up on the sand. A blonde woman squatted just beside him.
Cash ran a few paces in their direction and then walked. She could hear Paddy explaining something to the woman.
“Dŵr,” she heard Paddy say happily. “Tywod!” he said, slapping the sand as a wave retreated.
“I'm sorry,” Cash said as she came closer. “He slipped out. He managed to open the gate.”
The blonde woman looked up at her and waved away the apology. “No worries. Clever boy you have here.”
“Yeah,” Cash said as she squatted down beside her son. Paddy looked up and smiled broadly at his mother. “Mam!” the boy cried as he grabbed some sand in his small fist. “Tywod!” he shouted happily before throwing the sand into the waves.
The blonde woman frowned. “What language does he speak?”
“Welsh,” Cash answered, rubbing her son's small shoulder. “We're raising him bilingually.” She half picked up Paddy and looked at him. “Paddy, remember we try to speak English when there's people who don't understand Cymraeg?”
“Daddy!” squealed the boy happily.
Cash laughed, nodding. “Yeah, Daddy.”
Paddy wriggled free from his mother's grip and turned to the blonde lady. He picked up another handful of sand. “Sand!” he crowed.
The woman laughed and extended her hand to the boy. “And you're Paddy? I'm Laura.” Paddy gave her his hand and began shaking it vigorously.
Cash extended her left hand, so Laura could take her hand as well. “Cash,” she introduced herself.
“Not Welsh, though. Judging by your accent,” the woman said.
Cash shook her head. “Australian, but I spent my teens in Wales.” She had been listening to the woman speak and detected a hint of Sydney in her voice, but she was clearly not a native English speaker, or a Greek or Turk for that matter. “What about you, Laura? Got a bit of an Aussie twang there.”
Laura laughed. “I went backpacking in Australia and New Zealand some years ago. Eventually settled in Sydney for a year.”
“Where are you from?” Cash kept interrogating her.
“Belgium,” she answered. Anticipating the next question, she went on. “I studied the classics at Leuven. Been coming here for years to study Sappho. When I heard about the problems here, though, I volunteered to help.”
“What are you doing on the beach then?” Cash was slightly puzzled, figuring she would be in one of the camps to help then.
Laura shrugged. “There's only so much misery one can endure. I just needed to get away from it for a moment. And recite Sappho in my head.”
There was something about the way Laura smiled at Cash that made her think Sappho had touched a nerve with her more than it did with Cash.
“We're just up there.” Cash gestured up to the house. “It's about lunch time. Do you want to come and join us?”
Laura thought about it for a moment. “Sure,” she said eventually.
Back in the house, Cash put Paddy down in his high chair, from which there was no escape for him. She gave him a few cars to play with and then rummaged around some of the drawers, eventually coming up with some wire. With that, she secured the gate on the terrace. Paddy would never be able to undo the new locking mechanism.
Then she went to the kitchen to prepare some lunch. Laura looked in and joined her at the counter. “Is there anything I can help with?”
“I’d be grateful if you could help make some sandwiches.”
“Sure.”
Laura took over Cash’s spot at the counter and grabbed some slices of bread. She began spreading butter on them while Cash sliced cucumber and dug things out of the fridge to spread on the sandwiches. When done, they went to the table in the dining room, only to find Paddy half asleep. He had dropped his toys and instead of crying to demand his mother return them to him, he had begun to doze off.
When Cash picked him up to put him in the playpen to sleep, though, he woke again and began babbling incessantly. He pointed to the cars and wanted to go down to grab them. Then he saw the sandwiches and reached for those.
Cash put him back in his chair, got some wet wipes to clean his hands, then handed him one. He had been eating solids for a while now, even though he still got formula twice a day as well. He was as hungry a boy as he was a curious one.
“So what do you do?” Laura asked Cash.
“I'm a writer,” said Cash.
“So, are you here to write or to get inspired?” asked Laura.
Cash grinned, swallowing a bite of her sandwich. “Both of course, but the inspiration needs to come first.”
“Should be a much more inspiring place than Wales at this time of year.” Laura grabbed another sandwich and drank some of her tea. “I spent some time in Cork as an Erasmus student; dreadful during winter. We get more rain over a year in Belgium, but that winter, it just seemed like it was raining all the time. Wales can't be much different.”
“No, it isn't. That’s why we came here for the holidays,” Cash said.
“So, got anything to write about yet?” Laura leaned forward a bit.
Cash shook her head slowly. “Not really. Maybe it's just all the trouble around here. Not as peaceful as I would have wanted.”
“I'd imagined peace and quiet might not always provide inspiration.”
Cash laughed. “You're right about that. I usually do something to actually get the story going. But it's in peace and quiet I get the ideas about what to do in the first place.”
“And there's really too much going on here?”
Cash nodded. “Kind of. Though my main problem is that little troublemaker.” She pointed to Paddy, who grinned broadly at her, his face covered in jam. Cash grinned too. She pulled out a wipe and leaned over the table to sweep away the mess. Paddy recoiled and looked disgusted at his mother's attempt at cleanliness.
Laura leaned back again and sipped her tea. “I think maybe that young boy and the refugees have something in common.”
Cash frowned at her.
“They both know there's heaps out there and they want to find out what it is. They want to discover and make more of everything. The moment they find out there is more and they can make more of it, they won't stop. No matter what other problems it can cause.”
“Unlocking secret after secret and problem after problem,” Cash mused, looking at Laura.
Laura nodded. “Like Pandora's Box.”
Suddenly it was like a light went on in Cash's head. She leaned back too and looked at a joint between the rafters and the plastered wall. “Pandora's Box,” she muttered. Then she gave Laura an intense look. “Pandora's Box.”
“I knew a girl at school called Pandora,” began Laura. Cash smiled as she recognized the joke from Notting Hill. “I never got to see her box though,” Laura finished and they both laughed.
“Now there's a story in that too!” chuckled Cash. “A good one.”
“True story too,” Laura said. She didn’t blink or blush.
“Is it?” Cash asked. She had kind of suspected it. “You're a sapphist in more ways than one then?”
Laura grinned at the pun. “Yes, something like that.”
After lunch, Cash put her son in the playpen. She knew he would play for a bit and then just lay down to rest. When he did, she could cover him with his blanket and just let him sleep. Then she could go and do something else.