by Amy Neftzger
It was a lot to think about. Most of these ideas were new to them. It had never occurred to any of them that there was more than one theory on how to make a miracle. They had just assumed there was one way and it was a secret. Jovan’s mind was still spinning through these concepts when Nicholas spoke.
“What do you believe?” he asked, looking at Taro. At that moment, it was important to him to know what Taro believed. After all, the Pontiffs were now listening to him when they hadn’t paid much attention to him before. Taro briefly studied their faces before responding.
“I think there may be more than one way to get a miracle,” he said. “I don’t believe there is one formula that can be followed. People like rules they can follow, but I don’t think that miracles follow rules, or if they do, they have rules of their own. Part of what makes a miracle unique is that it defies structure. No two miracles look alike.”
“Like fingerprints,” Jovan said with a smile.
“Yes,” Taro agreed. “They’re unique just like every person has individual fingerprints that don’t look like anyone else’s. But there’s more.”
“What’s more?” Nicholas asked.
“I also think it takes more than one person to create a miracle,” Taro said. “That’s one of the things that make my approach different from all the other mentors.”
“But Nicholas was by himself today,” Maggie protested. “No one was helping him. Jovan and I were at the other end of the table.”
“Still,” Nicholas announced with conviction. “I think Taro’s right.”
“Then who helped you?” Maggie demanded. Nicholas looked at both of his friends. He knew that they were across the table and weren’t even close enough to see what he was doing when the alleged miracle appeared. But he also felt as if someone or something else had been there, some sort of force or phantom. Perhaps miracles had spirits, or other spirits helped in the process of creating them. He wasn’t sure, but something about what Taro said felt right to him.
“I don’t know,” Nicholas admitted. “But I don’t feel as if I did it by myself.”
Chapter Twelve
The Desert
Kelsey, Silence and Megan came out of the thick pine forest and stepped into a dry wind brushing firmly up against them, as if attempting to sweep them back into the woods. Breathing was difficult with the hot air pushing into their faces like a thick blanket. Only a few steps out of the forest, the air had already lost the scent of pine and it smelled of old, dusty earth. Kelsey looked to her right and then to her left to see the tree line fading off in an irregular pattern in both directions. In less than a mile, the path they were walking upon would dissolve into sand, and they would be in the desert Megan told about.
Just before everything turned to sand, there was a small trading post tucked in among the sporadic trees. Kelsey squinted into the arid wind, but she was unable to see much of the tents that made up the post. It hurt to keep her eyes open for too long, so she turned away from the sun and heat to look at her friends.
Silence paused to remove an old scarf from his satchel. He artfully wrapped it around his head and neck as protection from the glaring sun. Kelsey wished she had known about the desert before she left home so that she could prepare better for the trip. She didn’t even have a hat with her, and she knew that she would need to spend more money at the trading post in order to get supplies for crossing the desert. Aside from protecting her skin from the sun, they would need to carry water with them. She would have to buy vessels for all of them if they wanted to survive the trip.
“You don’t happen to carry any water with you, do you?” she asked Megan.
“I’m not a camel.”
“I know, but you might be carrying some in a container.”
“I don’t have pockets,” Megan replied stiffly. “That would make me more of a kangaroo.” She turned her head away in disgust, as if the suggestion was humiliating.
“Don’t get upset,” Kelsey admonished her.
“Are you carrying any water?” Megan asked skeptically.
“Don’t be silly.”
“It’s not silly. You have a backpack. At least you have a logical place where you might be carrying something. I, on the other hand, do not have any pockets in my fur coat, nor do I have the thumbs required to open and close bottles.”
“I’m sorry,” Kelsey replied. “I was just hoping that maybe you did.”
“I understand that it would be convenient if I carried water with me, but reality is full of inconveniences. Fear is one of the greatest inconveniences.”
“I’m not afraid,” Kelsey said with conviction.
“You’re afraid of running out of water. You’re also afraid of the unknown journey on unfamiliar terrain.” Megan stared into Kelsey’s eyes with a look of challenge. Kelsey met the stare with a cold expression.
“I said I wasn’t afraid.”
“I can smell fear, you know.” Megan said. “I can smell it coming from you.”
“OK, maybe I’m a little afraid.” Kelsey stared off to one side.
“I can also smell how much fear. The smell becomes stronger as it grows,” Megan paused long enough for Kelsey to think about what she was saying. Then Megan suddenly caught a breath of sand in the air and sneezed, which caused the ground beneath them to shake for a moment. She quickly shook her head from side to side to remove any remaining sand and continued, “Your fears are only as big as you allow them to be. If you stand up to them, they won’t prevent you from moving forward, and before you know it, your fears will be behind you. That’s how people become brave.”
“Easier said than done,” Kelsey snapped back. She glanced at Silence to see that he was off to the side of the path and birds were flocking to him again. Some of the birds were colorful, but most of them were gray or white doves. “Thanks for the lecture, anyway.”
“With fear, timing is often everything,” Megan continued as she ignored Kelsey’s attempt to end the topic. “If you react too quickly, you may be impulsive and lose the wisdom and perspective that comes with time. However, wisdom always overcomes fear if you take the time to develop it.”
“We don’t have time.”
“Then we don’t have time to be afraid. Fear grows quickly. So unless your goal is to develop wisdom, the best course of action is to move faster than your fear can grow. Then you’ll become brave. But if you wait long enough, fear is capable of becoming bigger than you. It will swallow you.”
“Nice lecture,” Kelsey remarked with irritation. “Are you finished?” She didn’t think it was helping.
“No. The smell of fear is a fascinating topic. I could go on for days about the rate of growth and how wisdom develops over time.”
“As I just said, we’re short on time.”
“Then the best thing to do is to move out of the situation. It’s like your experience with the bad memories and the pepper melons. The longer you allow the fear to grow, the stronger it becomes and the likelier it is to kill you. You have to keep moving.”
“Silence told you about the pepper melons?” Kelsey forgot her irritation in her embarrassment. She wished the story would die.
“It’s a great story,” Megan said, chuckling.
“It doesn’t need to be told,” Kelsey replied indignantly.
“All good stories need to be told,” Megan replied seriously. “Just be glad that Silence spoke of you nicely when he told it. He could have made you look really foolish.” Kelsey believed there was no way she could not look foolish.
“He doesn’t speak at all,” Kelsey said as she watched Silence motioning with his hands to the nearby birds. As she watched him with the animals, she began to reconsider that last statement. His movements were smooth but deliberate. There was something about them that made sense. It could be like speech, she thought. His movements weren’t like conversation to her, but neither was the chirping of the birds. There could be ways to communicate without words.
“Or maybe he does.” She conti
nued studying his motions and the way the birds moved about him. It was odd how much the birds maintained eye contact with him. Kelsey watched the way they turned their heads and scratched with their feet. “Are those normal birds?” she asked.
“I don’t know how to define normal for a bird,” Megan answered. “Do you mean normal tasting? Because while those look pretty good, I prefer eating crows.”
“Crows?”
“Yes. They put up a good fight. I respect a meal that struggles.” Megan licked her lips. “When the thing you’re eating wants to live so much that it scratches your throat on the way down, you know you’ve got a good meal.” Megan sighed dreamily.
“I prefer my food with a little less kick,” Kelsey stated in disgust. She put her hand to her throat as she turned away. The thought of anything struggling and scratching her throat as she was eating it made her feel uncomfortable. “I think we should be going.”
They made their way down the remainder of the path to a small area just before the desert where several clusters of tents made up a trading post. The fabric on the tents looked new despite the constant bombardment from the desert wind. Kelsey wondered whether this post had always been here or was new.
At the entrance, there was another woman who looked very similar to the one outside the gate to the city in the rocks. This woman, however, had deep blue eyes the color of sapphires. Her elegant dress was made from silk the same hue as her eyes. The garment fell in an organized pattern of folds about her ankles. She held a parasol in one hand that shielded her fair skin from the sun while she played with the long strand of pearls about her neck, slowly running her fingers up and down the beads. There was a velvet pouch near her feet, and some of the people passing by were throwing coins into it.
“You have beautiful eyes,” the woman said to Megan, staring directly at the cat without any fear. When she heard this remark, Kelsey suddenly realized that this was the first person to acknowledge Megan. Perhaps other travelers found her intimidating. She was rather large, after all.
“She’s a snow leopard,” Kelsey announced awkwardly.
“I know what she is,” the woman replied without any warmth in her voice.
“She’s also a healer,” Kelsey added.
“I said that I know what she is.” The woman answered in a slightly colder tone. Kelsey decided not to offer any additional information. The woman in blue turned to Silence. “Hello, Pumpkin!” she said sweetly. She looked like she wanted to reach down and pinch his cheeks, but she simply smiled adoringly at him.
Silence blushed as he smiled back at her and waved shyly. He didn’t speak. He didn’t have to, yet for some reason he was instantly loved. It just didn’t seem fair, Kelsey thought as she brushed her growing irritation away as she decided that Silence must have previously passed through this way. After all, he already knew how to prepare for the desert, and if he had previously traveled this route, that would explain a lot. Despite his young age, he had more knowledge of traveling. He was what some people call “street smart.” In that context, Kelsey felt inadequate to be the boy’s protector, even temporarily.
“You look like the woman at the eastern gate of the city in the rocks,” Kelsey remarked, looking back up at the woman in blue. “But your eyes are of a different color.”
“We’re sisters,” the woman replied. “And both of my eyes are the same color.”
Megan leaned in closer to the woman. “I didn’t say she was bright,” Megan whispered.
“Obviously.”
“She asked me if I was carrying any water.” At this, both Megan and the woman in blue chuckled as they exchanging knowing glances. “She asked if I had any in my pockets!” This last statement caused them both to burst out laughing. Kelsey felt her face turn bright red.
“What I meant to say was that your eyes and your sister’s eyes are not the same color,” explained Kelsey, attempting to redirect the conversation and save some of her self-respect. She placed her hands on her hips and tried to hide her frustration. It felt as if everyone was misunderstanding her on purpose.
“Both of my sister’s eyes are the same color. They’re lavender,” the woman replied. She exchanged another knowing glance with Megan before continuing. “And both of my eyes are the same color. They’re both blue. The same shade of blue.”
“Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.”
“Trying and doing are two different things.” The woman turned to thank a pedestrian who dropped a few coins into her velvet sack. She was still fingering her pearls with her free hand as she nodded pleasantly to the travelers who acknowledged her.
Kelsey noticed the way some of the travelers avoided the woman in blue while others were drawn to her and even gave her money. It was the same way that people had treated the woman’s sister. Whatever it was, Kelsey thought that it must be genetic. She wanted to ask, but she was afraid her questions would only cause Megan and the woman to laugh at her expense again.
“We have a desert to cross,” Kelsey announced with conviction. She began walking and didn’t wait to see if the others were following her. She’d had enough of the woman in blue. She was beautiful, but for some reason, conversations with these sisters felt humiliating. She had not gone far when the woman in blue called out to her.
“You should work on your attitude.” She had a voice that cut through the wind despite the distance. “You never know when you might run into someone important that you need to impress, like the king or one of his officials.”
“Well, he’s not here and neither are his friends,” Kelsey replied without looking back. “I’ve gone my whole life without running into the king, so I’ll take my chances and worry about it when I see him.”
“I wouldn’t wait that long. It might be too late.”
Kelsey continued walking away. For all she knew, the king himself wasn’t real. She’d never seen him with her own eyes. These sisters were strange creatures, anyway, not to mention annoying. It was suddenly clear to her why some people thought these women should be avoided, and it didn’t help that they loved Silence so much. Every interaction with them left Kelsey feeling irritated.
She looked around at the canvas tent sides flapping in the dry wind. Each tent belonged to a different merchant offering goods or services designed to assist with the desert crossing. Kelsey looked at the hand painted signs. Some of these were worn and splintered, while others were new and brightly colored like the tents. She went first to the tent advertising water for sale. Whatever else they needed, being able to carry water with them was what they needed most.
“I’d like to buy some water,” she said.
“Where will you put it?” the man asked. He had large ears and a small face, which made him look a bit like a small animal. The more Kelsey stared at his face, the more the man’s beard appeared to very slowly shrink and then grow again, as if it wasn’t sure exactly how long it wanted to be. The growth was inconsistent with sections of it getting longer while other parts were getting shorter. It gave the man a shifty appearance. How do you trust someone who can’t even keep all his facial hair the same length for a short period of time?
“Don’t you sell water in containers?” Kelsey asked. Just when she managed to stop staring at his beard, one set of his eyelashes began to grow too long for his face and they weighted down his left eyelid. He paused long enough to snip the lashes with scissors and then continued the conversation.
“We’re not licensed to sell containers. We can only sell one thing at a time. It’s the law.”
“What law?”
“The law requires merchants to have a single focus. It protects the consumer from buying too many things from one place and being taken advantage of by dishonest vendors.” As the man stopped speaking, his mustache scurried across his upper lip and merge into a sideburn, making it twice as long as the one on the other side of his face.
“So I need to buy a vessel in which to put the water that you will sell me?”
“Correct,” he
replied as one side of his beard grew disproportionately longer. When it touched his collar, it reversed direction again.
Kelsey left the shop and went across to the container store, where the merchant told her he couldn’t sell her a vessel unless she could prove she already had water to put into it. She glanced over the shelves of bottles and skins in various sizes and colors and wondered if he ever sold anything if people were required to prove that they already had water that needed storing. From the looks of the overflowing merchandise, she thought that perhaps he had never sold a single container.
“It’s the law,” the merchant explained, shrugging. He looked a lot like the merchant across the street, but his hair stayed the same length throughout the conversation. Kelsey thought about Megan’s description of the sorcerer’s curse and wondered how much of the law or the merchant’s interpretation of it was real. She breathed a sigh of frustration and went back outside the tent. When she turned the corner to face her friends, they were both looking at the ground.
“You knew about these laws?” she asked them.
“What’s important, is that you know about them now,” Megan said with sympathy.
“Are the laws real?”
“It doesn’t matter whether they are or not if the merchants believe that they’re real.”
“So how do we get around this?” Kelsey asked in frustration as she looked up into Megan’s clear, blue eyes. The leopard swallowed but didn’t immediately offer an answer.