Mistification

by Kaaron Warren

  I leaned back to allow the sun to reach the box, and with a small sizzle, the seal I had not seen was opened. Impatiently, I threw open the lid to see my treasure. In that split second before I fell prone I realised the final clue was a warning. Inside the box was a mirror which reflected the light into my eyes with such intensity the retinas were burnt. Take the dark to the light, I thought. Wear bloody sunglasses.

  I woke in the cathedral, in terrible pain but with my wits. I carefully closed the lid of the box and felt for my haversack. I thrust the box to the bottom, under my clothes, my books of history and my maps. Then, again, I collapsed.

  I awoke under a doctor's care. After time, I was released, with my new cane, and some dark glasses. My treasure, I established, was undisturbed.

  I sold it for more money than I imagined existed. My friend the historian had found a splinter from the manger of Christ, an authenticated piece, carbon-dated. Some peasant, present at the door of the barn, had sensed magic at the birth and had carved this piece of the manger into a tiny baby Jesus.

  #

  "I know the story of this carving," Marvo said. "A first-person account two thousand years old, memorised by each one of the owners of the wooden baby. It was a condition of ownership: that the man who carved it was remembered. There were three wise men and one idiot who tended to their needs. He baked their bread, rinsed their clothing, rode his little horse wildly to keep up with them. He was not used to talking, because they never spoke to him. He could listen to their conversations, at night when they thought he was asleep. But he could not talk about himself with ease. His story had changed through the centuries; the human desire to make a story better than it is had given him more intelligence, made him wiser than the wise men, a victim of circumstance. He was a good man, but not clever. So he did not analyse how he felt in the barn where the baby was born. He allowed himself to sink into wonder. His story:

  Baby Jesus

  The manger was old, made from a tree God intended to last forever. There was large splinter peeling from one side and I thought, "The baby could get hurt by that." I couldn't imagine doing anything else with my life but protecting that child. As he lay there, a spider spun a web over him preserving his life by screening him from all the dangers surrounding him. I stayed with him when others were sleeping, and his little face became precious to me.

  The splinter was within my robe, and I had a small knife with which I prepared food. I began by carving his face into the wood, but then I saw how dear his arms were, his legs, his little hands.

  So I made a copy of his whole self so I would never forget it.

  #

  The blind man nodded. "That's a good story to tell a person who is lost."

  "You?"

  "No! But I know many who are. One was lost in a jungle, found by people he considered pagan, primitive, but he did not realise that he had lost his mind as well. He felt that he was out of place, which he was, but he felt newly that way.

  The Dying Man

  Around him, in small shelters, the people stared at him. He was small, and his skin was diseased. They had never witnessed illness, and their children near puberty were taller than him. They found his flesh, his size, shocking, amusing. They were scared to speak to him because he was so strange.

  To him, they were huge, fleshy, though not fat. He had always been frightened by health – he knew with what disgust healthy people viewed those who sicken easily.

  He looked from one to the other, seeking a face like his, a face which did not pity him.

  He laughed at their ways, their rituals. Until the day a young woman spoke to him. "You may sneer, but our knowledge is great. Long before white magic knew, one tribe scratched smallpox fluid and gave it through the skin to a healthy person. The healthy person sickened, then never had smallpox again."

  He saw that each had a necklace identical to all the rest, dried stretches of leather. They told him it was their own navel cord.

  Only an old man, who lay in the sun, his bones protruding, did not have the necklace.

  The lost man waited till nightfall, then crawled to the old man. He found he could speak to the old man in his own language.

  "Why are you left here alone?"

  "It is my time to leave. I have nothing more to give this life, nothing more to take. I lie here under the stars which have guided me and I will go knowing my people are safe."

  The lost man said, "But where is your leather necklace?"

  The old man choked and cackled; the noise frightened him. The old man was laughing.

  "Buried, buried. Born with it, protects me all my life, and it's buried now I want to leave. You don't have one? You sicken, you will not grow without the navel cord."

  The old man died three days later.

  The lost man was given a chore. He helped the women grind grain.

  It was not a man's job. In the city, he had hidden his physical weakness behind a desk, within a big office, with a loudspeaking phone. Here, there was no hiding.

  The children still watched him as he worked. They asked if he was to die soon because he did not have his navel cord.

  No one came to rescue him. Months passed; babies were born, their navel cords severed, desiccated, twisted, knotted. He saw the cords as his answer. He could not recover his own, so he stole one from a child.

  He lived forty years once he had made it back to the city, a journey which took a year. He had a pang, every now and then, an alien pang, and he wondered if he was feeling the death pains of the child he thought of as his twin.

  #

  Marvo was impressed by the blind man's attention to detail (especially the tiles, the way he looked so carefully, so long) so he removed the mist from his eyes.

  Marvo did not lose contact with the blind man. He pretended to be him, sometimes.

  The blind man, no longer blind, took him to meet other historians, people with book knowledge, deep understanding of the past. There are many good things in this world which become bad things. Marvo studied his ancestors and saw this lesson.

  One older woman, all grey in clothing, skin and hair, told him:

  The Festival

  It was a very important festival. If it was unsuccessful, the year for the town would be bad, like the last year. Mothers had died in childbirth, children had been stricken, men crippled and unable to work. It had been a very bad year.

  All work ceased but that of the festival. A group were selected to remain apart and pray for clement weather. Another group would tend the pigs to grow them enormous for the feast. The children learnt dances, chants and prayers.

  The night sky was black; no sunset lit orange the faces below. The township retired early after the sun had gone; all but the weather prayers. They would sit up all night and perform acts of a placatory nature.

  One would eat salt food and not drink water.

  "We do not need water on this day."

  Another would swallow small pebbles the size of hailstones.

  "I remove all stones from the soil."

  Another would stand naked behind the town, cold beneath the moon.

  "I absorb all cold so that only heat will be radiated."

  The horses wore brass charms, crescent-moon-shaped, because the crescent moon is a symbol of the moon goddess and is a most powerful protection against the evil eye and witchcraft.

  The last burnt small creatures over the fire, sacrifices to the sun, begging it to be strong.

  The morning sky burned bright, the sky pink and clear. The festivities began, dancing, eating, revelling.

  All went well.

  The parade ran through the streets of the town in a long rectangle so that everybody passed everybody else and could have a look, everybody in the town parading, all jumping and singing and moving through the town.

  Then John Smith stopped short, causing bumps and bangs and shouts of pain.

  "Why stop? What is it?" came shouts.

  "I felt a drop of rain," said John Smith.

&nb
sp; "He said he felt the rain. It's raining. The gods are angry with our feeble placators. Where are the placators?"

  As the rain began to pour, saturate, paper streamers to sag, paint to run, food to spoil, people ran to shelter, the placators ran to hiding.

  It was another bad year for the town. Four good citizens lost (two killed by an angry crowd – you failed to save us. Two vanished into the hills, alive or dead).

  It would be a good year next year, though. The sacrifices ensured that.

  #

  The woman was a descendant of John Smith. She felt great anger towards failure, and towards unorthodox religion. Marvo gave her enough mist so she didn't have to see it.

  Marvo saw that a once magical and protective belief could become evil over a long time, and he understood that this could happen.

  He wondered if the bad can become good; by the laws of equality this should be so. He saw life from this view, that good can become bad and bad good. He was rarely disappointed and never proven absolutely and irrevocably wrong.

  When the blind man left, Marvo felt strangely lonely, as he did other nights when true emotion crossed his path. He could control the physical world, but could not change the way a person thought, simply by wishing it. He went to a pub, where he drank alone, perversely disinterested in company. Next to him at the bar, there was a man (there is always a man) who marked in a diary each time he drank a beer.

  "Six hundred and eighty-five," he said, imagining a question. "Instead of naming the names of God, I will drink the incarnations of one god. Then the world will end." Marvo could not leave without such a story.

  "Which god do you mean?" he asked.

  "There was one god, a gardener, a tenderer. Then his slave, Atunda, rebelled. Over, perhaps, unsatisfactory dining arrangements. He rolled a huge boulder onto the god while he was tending his garden. The god shattered into a thousand and one pieces – all of which became gods. When I have finished a thousand and one beers, the world will end."

  "Is that your wish? For the world to end?"

  "It's my purpose."

  It was quite a good story, so the magician provided a boon.

  The man finished another beer.

  "Three," he said. He would be drinking beer for the rest of his life.

  Doctor Reid proved elusive; the stink of her escape clouded Marvo's vision. He considered asking for help from the other magicians, but they did not look kindly upon failure. Marvo traced his enemy to a small village, a secluded place which retained a mythology, religion and law all its own.

  There were the villagers who lived clustered around the village square, living above their own shops or not far away on the farms that produced the milk and eggs. And there was the Araby family. They lived in an enormous home, a mansion. The sight of it brought back to Marvo a memory of his childhood; a glimpse back, as he ran. His only view of the home he had grown up in.

  The shopkeepers were happy to tell him the story of the Araby family, each adding a detail, proof. If it wasn't for the family, the town might not exist. All of them were glad to talk about the Araby family, about why they were so rich, and everyone else so poor.

  The Araby Family

  The nine members of the Araby family lived in the big house. They only ever left to find a partner to bring back to the nest. The other residents of the village grudgingly filled all requests, be they goods, or physical favours (the young master, it was said, was not satisfied easily).

  The Arabys were once a good family. Just as bad becomes good with time, so can good become bad when people don't understand, or misunderstand.

  Roland Araby came into the world upside down, squalling and desperate to begin. He was born at home, in an ancient bed, surrounded by servants, all hissing. They hated his mother because she had been one of them and she had risen; now she paid them to be her servants. They hissed at Roland Araby's mother as she laboured, and they told her the scrawny, crying baby could not live. They said, "He cries so much because he wants to have a lifetime of talking out before he dies. He's talking his way through life. Would've been a noisy bugger if he'd lived."

  Roland did not die; nor did his mother. She told her husband about the hissing by the women who used to be her friends and he sent them all away.

  There lay the beginnings of an evil reputation.

  Roland grew with much love. His parents taught him of his own superiority but he saw that not everyone believed that. He was treated badly at school; a lot of the children belonged to the hissing women.

  He worked hard at maintaining his superiority, and it gained him a reputation as a cruel person. Someone to be feared.

  This was the next step in establishing an evil reputation.

  He never moved out of home. He travelled only once; to a city, where he found a wife to return with him.

  This woman had not had a good life. Roland picked her because she had an absolute belief in her own inferiority; her feeling that he was better than her made him feel complete.

  This feeling of hers (caused by a stream of people who had told her so, told her she was no good, pathetic, ugly) gave her a recklessness she may not have had otherwise. She felt that she was useless, everyone hated her anyway, so who cared what they thought? She followed her desires and instincts and enjoyed a complete life.

  She married Roland because it seemed like such a different life, but she soon realised he was not much different himself; he was self-interested, and a self-serving, lazy lover.

  They spoke daily of his high birth and her low one (she was born in a government hospital with many hundreds of others) and of what he knew that she didn't.

  She came to realise that he hated her; that the more he hated her the more he loved her.

  She began to seduce the men of the village when they delivered vegetables or fixed shingles or milked the cows.

  The ones she didn't seduce felt rejected; they started to talk of her as a witch. The ones she did seduce, being mostly married, agreed with the talk, so as not to appear guilty.

  By the time their children were grown (their fatherhood secretly debated) and had children of their own, the Araby family had been landed with the reputation of the evil eye, and were considered dangerous to cross. The Araby clan on the hill all had the evil eye so strongly they could wither crops at a glance, wither wombs with a stare.

  The lot of them are related to the Devil by blood. Poor things. Can't envy them their spot in life; keep away from them, that's all.

  In every shop, blue beads, bright blue strings of glass to ward off the evil eye, were free. Anyone could pick up a pair from any shop; they sat in baskets, hung over benches to be collected and worn.

  There were many things the Araby family saw thrust at them, to ward off the evil eye. Charms shaped like horns, painted red (the witches' colour) hung over the butcher's shop door. The Arabys had their meat delivered. Tigers claws, boars tusks and lobster claws, mounted in silver, were others.

  The glass beads were also used to protect the children from throat infections and chest ailments. A string hung around a baby's neck kept it safe.

  #

  Marvo rewarded the shopkeepers by buying enormous amounts of goods, paying city prices for inferior products. They couldn't understand how he would fit it into his car, there was so much. But he draped his rope in the boot of his car, with the edges dangling over, and without concern or hurry, piled the goods in. Then he tied the rope around them and shut the boot.

  Marvo only saw one Araby in the town, and he did indeed look evil. Frightening. But how else could he look? He had to hunch over to avoid the thrusting of amulets, the tossing of words, of stones. He had to keep muttering, to keep himself company. He had to keep his hands thrust deep into his pockets, not shake hands with anyone, to stop their twitching and flicking.

  Marvo thought it must be a terrible life.

  It was an unusual town. Marvo put a show on for the children, because he heard so many stories he felt unable to pay them back individually.
He pulled rabbits out of hats and gave them all a toffee apple, and they were very happy.

  He spoke to one of the mothers after the show.

  "Lovely show, dear," she said. She smiled at him. A drunk man staggered past them.

  "Oh, that's Canman. He'd better watch out, he'll drown one of these days. He's got to cross our little bridge to get to his old hovel. Have you seen it? Horrid place to call home. No woman wants to go out there to look after him, and that's a fact. Knowing him he'd drown face upwards too, and then we'd have to bury him as Canwoman!" She laughed and laughed, though the joke was obviously an old, well-used one. Marvo did not understand. The woman stopped laughing and said, "Left your sense of humour in the pocket of your cape, dear?"