vOYAGE:O'Side

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by Francis Kroncke

CHAPTER 8

  Home.

  Frak jerks awake as if from a frightful dream...soon calmed by his rising awareness that he is...Home. Just as Jerd had come to him in a flash, one moment turning and there he was, so does the word home...memories flood him like standing under a waterfall...more, he can smell home...a fragrance, one seductive—florally sweet. “Happy and smiling”...his memories turn to reality as he looks about at the land and the faces...remembering his kin and his feeling one with the land as happy and smiling.

  Yet, not everyone is smiling nor happy...for here also arrives Frak—High Priest.

  Frak watches Frak cup his hands. Watches his eyes moon about and his jaw slacken and a deep inhale pound the sails of his chest...knows that he has traveled a great distance only to come back to this shore. It is a shore he had left, yearning to return....but not so for Frak.

  Frak now more than ever understands King Benjamin...far-sights as King Benjamin has peered...clearly grasping the revelation that this world is not Home!..is not even real... all a matter of dreams... all a ritual of dreaming.

  It is Frak who cups his hands and in so cupping swells his heart with the felt knowledge that this is all that there is. All—it will wash over him, engulf him, penetrate his every fiber...he feels good—“happy and smiling.”

  For Frak’s dream had been back then only about...Darlm is the land...the land upon which the moon shines. She a moon child and a moon goddess and a moon mother, but only as she is also Earth, the dirt land—all that kisses the wet.

  Brok has shared that same dream, so for him all victory would be simply take away. Which, as Frak knows, is just the simple act of moving land—things and pieces and stuff from one place to another. It is a take away which merely takes away to another spot, another land...this place called home.

  Frak knows that only he has the map to the true home...it is skyward...out up there...beyond the Earth...beyond the moon...beyond the stars. And the map which will take them there...all people, kin and gen, this home was “X” on the map of the Nephi Restored to Perfection. To sail towards that home Frak knows that Frak’s land must be destroyed.

  Frak monitors Frak. It is rightly queer that Frak cannot watch Frak watching. Maybe this is all that Frak can do—be within his own small world. His own paltry dream. For as he watches he sees Frak’s dream. Of his return to Darlm. Of his exuberant and hip-hop and skip and kick-the-dirt over-excited run and bounce and throwing his arms around her, she as startled as a doe as the bush limb cracks...there, Darlm—Frak infuses her with all of his ardor...picks her up, swings her off her feet, lifts her into his arms...strides slowly and methodically and unstoppably to his lodge. Not pausing to touch and infuse himself with the potency of the harj bear skull, just assuming its blessing, the rightness of it identifying his lodge. Inside—there for their dream to commence, once again. The dream of lovers. Of the Earth and the Moon.

  Hovering in the background Frak senses Magx and Lon; shades.

  All about them he hears the voices of Frak’s kin, chattering and shouting and whispering among themselves—mystified, baffled, astonished and fascinated. It is their Frak come home. He whom they had long ago given up for dead. But here, what he now knows to be seven years, but which Frak counts only as uncountable moons...marking them simply against the gray strands in his beard...here Frak is now...and as he is home, so are all of them home—happy and smiling.

  It is not something the kin could talk about or understand even if he tried to explain. Frak knows this...they will never...could not even...grasp the words Brok taught him. Frak knows, more, that one Frak is back home that he himself will soon forget how to speak sentences. Forget about the maps which are the Will of Our Father. Forget about the dreams of the Nephi. He, simply, will forget all...only to dream his voyage but as nightmare! Magx and Lon would have it no other way—they employ all their magic to erase his memory...thoughts and images which they knew were wicked, evil—Dev!

  Frak’s course of action is clear. Frak has to die—be Sacrificed.

  Upon beaching, the High Priest Frak sets about destroying Frak’s dream. He steps upon the land...stomps, kicks, spits upon it—curses it. He curses it for it is a curse, this as revealed to him by the Nephi. It is just dirt, the dirt upon which Our Father spat to make man, and upon which the serpentine Deceiver was condemned to squiggle and squirm till the Final Day—the Latter Days.

  Once more, Frak curses the land. With knee bent to the ground he fervidly and ardently prays to Our Father, imploring Him for His blessing...so that he may be courageous, that he may prove to be a worthy Son—a dutiful High Priest.

  As Frak stands he finger-scrapes the sandy rock encrusted beach...lifts up clumps and holds open his palm in oblation, lifting up the land to Our Father.

  “Thou shalt not have strange gods before Me.” And he casts away the demonic earth—Mother Earth!

  It is then to them that Frak goes. Blowing into their lodge like a hurricane wind, slapping open and breaking the three-planked door...knocking down the harj bear skull—it cracks and splinters...stomping in with such a suddenness that Frak and Darlm are caught in the midst of a breath—it is his last...for he catches Frak by the nape and with a slash of an ivory-tusk blade slits his throat from side to side...there is stench and there is a gurgling, sucking sound...acting so swiftly, so fearsomely that Darlm has not blinked.

  Then Frak is gone.

  Within two screeches, Magx is standing inside the hutch—frozen; shocked. It is the disbelief of the blasphemed...of the sight of desecration...of the feeling of desolation.

  For what was Frak all these years but the mighty warrior-of-the-wet in Magx’s story of how the moon had come and taken him into the big big harj shad wet so that Frak would become the next Wiz?

  What is Frak but all that Magx’s dream could be?

  He never doubted that Frak would return.

  He had dreamed dreams and seen visions. Not that he understood all, but he knew that Frak was becoming a powerful Wiz. A Wiz endowed with the wet’s magical and powerful grok.

  Now?

  Slain by the moon—How could this be? How can this be?

  Darlm is Lon’s daughter. All three have waited, anticipating Frak’s return.

  Frak’s absence has been the bond of the kin, near and far. The story, the special story, told to all passing gen.

  Frak, Wiz of the Great Wet.

  Slain by the m-o-o-o-n—Darlm!

  Frak walks up the beach towards the village. He knows well all the changes the years have brought without asking. It is as Our Father Wills...that he have this clear and complete knowledge of the past as well as the future. The kin is now a village clan...a permanent gathering. People who do not roam about...this is good.

  His dress, he knows, fascinates them—with a tinge of a mighty fiercesomeness.

  In his eyes he carries the death of this once Frak. As he looks at each creature he meets—man, woman, child, goat, pig, friend, stranger, old, young...he peers and within a blink conveys the new story: “There is no God but Our Father—Praise, Yahweh!”

  Frak speaks to their collective mind, without words, of Yahweh, Elohim, and of the Messiah and Christ.

  Yahweh is Our Father—Frak stands before them and scrapes all tattoos of kin and gen off his body...bleeds before them...washes himself, binds his wounds, then kneels and prostrates himself—not towards the Sun, not towards the Moon... he is humbled—they are baffled...“Yahweh is my strength,” he proclaims...shouts, spitting dust as he yells. “His enemies are my enemies,” he utters as he rises and stands before them. “There is no God but Yahweh who is Our Father.”

  Darlm rushes to greet Frak, picks up the hem of her skirt and plunges through the air towards him. All this after overcoming the shock of seeing him. Not just his new dress, his odd luminous clothes, but of his presence. She felt him coming for a long time. Beyond the recent moons...but she is still rocked when Frak’s eyes beome her true eyes.

  Frak flaps and flares op
en his robe—arms wide and cloth flapping like sails in a vigorous breeze. She comes to him. He swallows her—to all about she disappears.

  But then she reappears...and so to their mere senses is Frak/Frak truly there—at home.

  Darlm takes Frak to her house—brand new—fresh smelling timbers. Pulls open the hinged doorway. Steps in behind and tosses thick pillows onto the bed: theirs—four posted, large with a feather soft mattress and rolls of blankets. There where she wants him to recline. And so he does. And so Darlm serves him. Some strong herbal brew. Some sweets. A freshly cooked side of rabbit.

  Frak reads her desire. Hears her dreaming aloud in the silence of her wakefulness.

  It is a power he has long ago ceased to parse or ponder.

  He sees her full-bellied with babies. Many babies. He sees himself in the field pressing the plow behind a trice of horses.

  He sees her full-faced as the Moon.

  Peers and sees her seeing him and being Mother Goddess and so he Father God.

  Kill her!

  Our Father commands.

  It is she who still talks with the serpent. The serpent who crawls the Earth. Who is the Earth. It is the serpent whom she worships as her own body. Kill her!

  Magx enters, drawn here by a dream.

  Magx who looks at Frak and is dead-frightened in his tracks.

  Looks at Frak but Frak does not look at him. Not engage his eyes.

  Magx sees Darlm shining like the moon. The room is bathed in her presence.

  “Why then,” they ask, “did she kill him?”

  Why did she seduce the old Wiz and cut his throat?

  Why did she slice off his genitals and stuff them in his mouth?

  Why did she do this and then say she did it because she loves Frak?

  Why did Frak protect her?

  “Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone.”

  They still hear Frak’s incantation.

  Mystical words which move them to unusual dreams.

  Dreams which only the men share with Frak.

  Dreams which Frak teaches them to ritualize.

  New word for their women—“Wife.”

  New status for their women—“Possession.”

  New power for the men—“Dominion.”

  Frak’s dream is vivid to them in daylight and moonlight. So vivid that there ceases to be moonlight.

  For he dreams with them and for them the dream of the chosen son, not the sun.

  Of the far-away heaven, not of the dirty Earth.

  Of the future, not of the present nor the past.

  Of a Latter Day...The Final Day.

  Frak speaks to them of the world as exile.

  Of all which has to be dominated—has to be conquered.

  He speaks of the Chosen People and the not-Chosen Enemy—Satan’s children, sinful children—Dev Dev Dev!.

  Frak dreamssd for them the design of ships. The play of the sails. The thundering heart of the in-your-throat excitement of submitting. Not to his ritual embrace of Jerd. No, that Frak keeps as sacred truth for the special few—those who will become High Priests like himself.

  No, for them, submitting is to remain all about slaying....the ritual of Sacrifice.

  Sacrifice—the destruction of strange lands. The slaying of people of strange tongues. Of people of the Old Ways—the ways which had been of Lon and Magx. Ways which the people painfully will soon struggle to imagine in their minds...words which all want to forget—moon words.

  Under Frak’s spell, Darlm fully and absolutely submits to him and he prospers.

  Many children do they have...children of children.

  Never once, ever again, does Darlm leave his side. Nor venture outside his house.

  Never once is she dressed but blackened...fully robed, totally shrouded, engulfed—her face not to be seen, for she is to be seen as only his...Frak’s alone.

  In the blink of an eye, all the other women follow Darlm’s example—fully darkened and cloistered within their husband’s homes.

  Married. For their family to be, the women know it their sacred duty...Our Father’s Will!...that they submit to their men—husbands, sons, brothers-in-law, grandfathers...submit fully and absolutely in body, mind, and soul.

  His alone—Dominion!

  So has Frak come where the map took him.

  Come to a place he knows he once had known, but knows now that he only now truly knows.

  Revealed—home as one stop on the map...a way station, a solitary port...from where and whence Frak will wait until the Latter Days...till The Final Day...then, to sail away through the final passage on his vOYAGE...so becoming —Restored to Perfection.

  PART 2: DAGMAR

 

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