CHAPTER 17
Off another coast: another oceanside, again, one unfamiliar but then not. For certain, others had been here. Frantz knew. The Captain discussed all which had been passed down. They adjusted their course from what was on the maps to what their eyes could see; correct.
The land was claimed on many parchments as suffused with “Citees of Golde.”
The map’s markings indicated many wild animals, unknown beasties, high mountains, thick jungles and many types of dying: high fevers, eyes consumed by worms, blackened sores, rotting flesh, tongues of purple on witness-less mouths.
The sailors had their own stories; lore—they feared and they were lured.
Days of pounding, offshore winds had kept them at bay. Instead of sailing straight into the bay, their ship had looped more northward than originally planned.
Then had come the stilling calm.
Stilled their hearts.
Stilled their minds.
Stilled their souls.
They floated as if pulled by a windy, whipping fishing line...all sails were flat, no flapping; the sea was calm, almost icy smooth.
Stilled.
Inland the foragers had come and gone. Several trips. In different directions. Up from the beach the land took a slight rise, and there were low mountains to be seen in the east. Mapping their trails, they had checked off in each direction and even come circular to where instinct had led them...but no one found pure water.
At night all they could burn was the skinny bush. Plentiful, but thin of branch—oil of residue...harsh smelling smallish leaves. It was unkind to the eyes to draw too close to the fire. The cook used long handled contraptions to manage the skillets and pots.
Yet there was color. Flocks of yellow flowering bushes. Like birds set far apart, on a land which offered few seeds. Sparse but lifting the suffering of the land to a simple height of pleasure: a seductive smell Otto had crushed desire to reject so often, of that fruit brought back as a prize of the Crusaders: lemons...now no longer Otto he wished for these flowers to bear this fruit, to quench his thirst, to suffocate the miserableness of this barren wasteland.
No one wanted to stay here; camp not another day.
“Geographer,” whispered.
“Do you have a course?”
Frantz could not move the stillness in his throat, but he knew the Captain heard the Executioner sharpening his axe.
Then, on a calendar-less morning, the rabbits appeared.
Sitting there. Immobile as rabbits can be, only moving their noses as if smelling words, sniffing thoughts.
Hundreds. Captured and cooked and eaten beyond the bones: some vomiting the fur they sucked—for whatever reason Frantz could not countenance.
Rabbits. Then the cactus.
Not that it was their word, no, needle-bush. Several different kinds were evident even to the stupidest among them.
Somehow—as discovery is always made, so mused Frantz—in violence of anger and desperation and frustration, one had been hacked.
Amazing. The treasure was inside. Like unlatching a leather purse. They hacked at the base and found a meaty softness: watery—crushed and dripped into their throats; sucked and chewed and spit out.
Frantz’s first insight: This land is what it is not.
Then the visions. None calling them such for all were within such delirious hallucinations when the visions set upon them or rose up from within them or….
The little people came out from behind the rocks. Stood up; squatting behind bush. Seeped from the mountain like a stream trickling. Tiny people; childlike. Clay skinned, like the cinnamon from the fabled Indies. And eyes: darting, like birds in flight, dark, pitch—as if light entered would never exit.
Serving him. They came to serve Frantz.
Cook for him.
Bathe him.
Sleep with him.
Delight him.
Frantz was delighted; purely.
“The time is near.”
A voice. Not theirs. Neither cinnamon tongued. Who?
“This is the land. The Promised Land: O’Side.” A kingly voice. Regal.
“Behold!”
And Frantz sees the hills, now golden with homes and buildings: glittering gold, and sparkles of precious stones, and bands of people—angelic bands, floating above him—faces and faces, of joy and jubilation: all wafted to him upon a rosy odor… he is floating with them, above the land which he sees as Endless, within the gaze of uplifted faces which he sees as Boundless…he awakens, stilled in his heart, stilled in his mind, standing before a throne, from which this voice speaks, has been speaking.
“The time is near.”
Was it the stench?
Was it the rattle of the snake?
Was it the dry wind blasting hot from down the mountains?
Later, he struggled with this moment of awareness—of the calamity which had befallen them. The Evil of the place: only salty, oceanic water...The Devil’s Thirst.
The scraggly bunch which had been spared buried all the others. Spared? In his mind, Frantz could not reconcile what had happened with the bountifulness of Divine Providence. The confidence with which he had faced the wet void has now been shaken to its core. More, he did not know where to go. How to move.
As he cast the dry stony sand down upon the Captain’s body—read slowly and unsteadily from his Bible: “The Lord is my Shepherd…”—so he knew that he was now their leader, if not Captain, at least leader: they simply looked at him—twelve left—and he knew; they knew.
vOYAGE:O'Side Page 19