But then, as you already know, the rose leopard was a special creature. As well as being heavenly beautiful — which I’ll tell you about later — she had exactly the right qualities for a Keeper of the Garden of Replenishment. Keepers of the Gardens need to be gentle. They need to care about every living thing, all of the time. They need to speak softly and touch everything as if it is as delicate as the tears of a newly born moth. But most of all they need to have a certain light in their eyes. The Eternals call it the Enlightenment. If they look into the eyes of a creature and see the Enlightenment, they know that the creature is special enough to become a Keeper.
‘I’ve got a question,’ says Milo.
‘Me too.’ Otis waves her hand importantly.
‘I was first.’ Her brother scrunches his face as he searches for the word, then asks: ‘These — Eternals. Who are they?’
‘Keepers of the Universe,’ I tell him after a moment’s consideration. ‘Kind of like the big bosses. Then they have other Keepers beneath them — Keepers of the Gardens and the Seas, even Keepers of the Seasons’
He nods, seemingly satisfied.
‘Otis?’
‘I don’t understand the light thing,’ she says, very serious, very intense. ‘In the rose leopard’s eyes. What does it look like?’
Hard question. I stretch out, shake an ache from my shoulders.
‘I know you won’t remember this,’ I say carefully, ‘but the very first time your Mum held you in her hands, when you were the tiniest of babies, when you were all bunched-up and glowing pink and miaowing like a kitten, at that moment she had the Enlightenment in her eyes.’
So, the Eternals held a huge ceremony and the rose leopard was appointed Keeper of the Garden of Replenishment. She was given a magic cloak made of love, lace and sunshine; whenever she wore her cloak she could travel the Bright Universe and communicate with anything, be it animal, vegetable or mineral. But most of the time she stayed in the Garden, watching over the flowers and the trees, raising her own children to understand how to care for all living things, how to speak softly and touch delicately.
Now, there was at this time another different Universe, further to the right, through a tunnel or two and up some stairs made of stone and misery. There were no Gardens in this Gloomy Universe, and everything there was blanketed beneath a shroud of darkness. There were huge cold oceans full of wild waves and sharp-teethed cannibal-fish, planets made of rock and shadow, a mysterious black ice that oozed like lava, unlit stars floating aimlessly around and bumping into each other. The Gloomy Universe was a horrible place and no one wanted to live there — except for the Swicks. The Swicks loved darkness. They were strange beings — they had no faces and no bodies but you could still hear them at night-time, swishing and whipping and screeching mad things at each other. Sometimes you could feel their presence near you because they were so cold and clammy and they made you shiver. Sometimes they left a thin smoke-coloured vapour trail that smelled of sulphur (like rotten eggs) and quickly evaporated. Sometimes their squealing, whistling voices penetrated your mind, interrupted your thoughts and left you feeling strangely unhappy. They were malignant, like a seeping, creeping mix of poisonous gases … and because of the way they had been created, they were jealous of whole-bodied, living things like people and plants and animals. They preferred … um, Death over Life, and they were also really ambitious. Having spent a few millennia exploring and destroying their own Universe, the Swicks got bored: they wanted more, and quickly. So they decided there was only one thing to do.
‘They’ll attack the Eternals,’ suggests Milo. ‘Try to take over their Universe.’
‘And destroy the Garden,’ adds Otis decisively. ‘They’d hate a nice place like that.’
‘Right, both of you.’ I glance at my watch. ‘And it’s nearly bath-time. You want to continue this later?’
There is a rapid-fire exchange of looks, the instant telepathy of siblings.
‘Now,’ says Milo, the eldest.
‘Now,’ agrees his sister.
What I haven’t told you yet is why the rose leopard was so heavenly beautiful. You see, on the day she was born and the Eternals sought and found the Enlightenment in her eyes, they knew that she was going to be special. They also knew that the day would come when those nasty, marauding Swicks would invade their home, the Bright Universe, and they wanted to make sure that there was a leader, a creature who was pure enough to resist the Swick darkness. So they blessed the rose leopard with the greatest, most refined beauty ever known — because, as everyone knows, Swicks detest beauty almost as much as they detest light. The Eternals hoped that one day the rose leopard would become the saviour of the Bright Universe.
Anyway, their suspicions were right — the Swicks did come. At first no one really knew they were there, just the nights seemed a little colder, the sun shone a little paler. That’s how Swicks operate, of course — they’re sneaky. If a breeze is blowing off the water then a Swick will drop into it, make the air go snappy, push the breeze that little bit harder so it stings people’s eyes and makes their ears go frosty. If there’s a summer thunderstorm then a Swick will hover about, wrap itself around a lightning-bolt like a scarf and divert the lightning onto someone’s house or TV aerial. If sleeping children leave their window open then a Swick will creep into their dreams, twist them all about and turn them into black, horrible nightmares. In fact, if the Swicks hadn’t got so greedy, no one would have known for centuries that they were even invading the Bright Universe.
‘What happened?’ Otis shouts. ‘How did they find out?’
‘Sssh!’ Amelia taps her on the knee.
It was the oldest, most experienced Eternal who first worked it out. Her name was Sibyl and she had been an Eternal of the Bright Universe ever since it first happened. She was wise and magnificent; everybody respected her views when she spoke at Council. They had been discussing the need to get an extra Keeper for the Mighty Mountains, because the original Keeper was becoming too old and frail to tend the snow-covered peaks, when suddenly Sibyl banged her staff on the ground in a bid for silence. All of the Eternals were immediately quiet.
‘The Swicks are here,’ she told them in her slow, powerful way.
No one spoke until eventually Dragmir, one of the younger and more aggressive Eternals, turned to her.
‘How can you know that?’ he asked.
Sibyl stared at him a while before answering. Thousands of years as an Eternal, putting up with brattish behaviour from young know-it-all whipper-snappers like Dragmir, were beginning to tire her.
‘Open your eyes and clear your mind,’ she commanded him. ‘And when you have done that, look out upon the Farthest Reach of the Bright Universe and count the stars.’
Silly old coot, thought Dragmir — she belongs to the distant past. But, to humour her, he did as he was asked. He knew that there would be exactly thirteen million and twenty-eight stars in the Farthest Reach, as there always had been. Eternals are blessed with an extraordinary number genius: they can scan a whole library in a nanosecond and tell you how many books are on the shelves. Counting stars was a cinch.
‘No,’ thought Dragmir suddenly. ‘That can’t be right.’
He closed his eyes, shook away all thoughts and memories from his cluttered mind, and counted again.
‘Well?’ Sibyl was at his shoulder. The remainder of the Council had stayed silent, expectant.
‘I need to count one more time,’ he squeaked, not daring to meet her piercing gaze.
Once again he closed his eyes, shook away all thoughts and memories from his cluttered mind, and counted.
Sibyl permitted herself a dry, hoarse laugh before turning to the hushed Council.
‘No doubt Dragmir will confirm my mathematics,’ she rasped. ‘As we speak, there are twelve million nine hundred and forty-two thousand, seven hundred and eighty stars in the Farthest Reach. No doubt if we count again in a few minutes, there will be less. I repeat, the Swicks are here.’
All eyes turned to Dragmir who dropped his head, grimaced, then offered a tiny nod of agreement.
Of course there was great consternation at this. Everyone had heard stories about how Swicks could surround a star, wrap themselves tighter and tighter around it — with the strength of a thousand boa-constrictors — and squeeze the light from the star until it was nothing more than a hollow, an empty lightless space. But to have this actually happen in their wondrous Bright Universe; some of the younger Eternals began to chatter nervously, to race about and show signs of panic.
‘What can we do?’ they fussed. ‘How can we stop them?’
Once again, it was Sibyl who stepped forward and banged her staff.
‘For many years,’ she intoned, ‘we have been suspicious of the possibility of a Swick invasion. Accordingly, there are plans in place. We can guess that the Swicks will soon become bored with the Farthest Reach, leave it alone and come for the Mother Star. Once they extinguish Her, and thereby all of Her subsidiary stars, they may well feel that their job is done. They may feel that the Bright Universe is no more, leave us in their tainted darkness, search for another place and time for their devastating havoc to be wreaked.’
Another ancient Eternal, Charyb, hobbled forward.
‘There is, as you should remember, only one amongst us who can ensure the eternity of the Bright Universe. Only one such creature is so heavenly blessed.’
They stood and listened, then nodded as one.
Charyb turned to a Minion waiting expectantly on a nearby cloud.
‘Fetch the Keeper of the Garden of Replenishment,’ she commanded. ‘Immediately. Go. Fetch the rose leopard.’
There will be more of our story tomorrow. For now, the house is asleep (with all windows closed to the Swicks) and I am alone, wandering, pondering, stalling what I must do. I pad around the lounge, go into the kitchen for a glass of water, drink it in nervous sips, pass through the TV room, walk down the panelled hallway, palms out to let my fingers touch the pictures and photographs, return eventually to that final place which, I realise, I have been both afraid of and compelled to see again.
Inside I spy familiar shapes — an oval family portrait on the western wall, the oak bureau with its silver-backed brushes and intricate collection of jewellery, an antique tallboy streaked by my amateurish attempts to apply varnish, the old chair in the corner with its appliquéd cushions, thick blue curtains descending in broad silent corrugations, a haphazard pile of second-hand thrillers teetering on the floor. Then I see our bed, see its bowing convex ends and small jutting posts filmed with dust, sit hesitantly and remember this soft rectangle where we made plans and children, where we loved in mad tangles, wrangled over politics and modern life, cosseted our sicknesses, celebrated our riches, swapped stories, beliefs, fluids, interiors. And finally I am broken, wracked with vast painful gulps of emotion, my body shaking uncontrollably, tears flooding my face, a strange contorted cry creeping from my lips. I roll forward and lie like a slain bird, knees drawn and shoulders curving as everything shivers. I am bleeding, I think, not blood but life itself, a past that I can no longer keep. Our deep and complicated histories are seeping relentlessly from me and they have nowhere else to go.
And so I cry and ache and bleed until there is nothing more, nothing but the lingering scent on her pillow which reminds me of those old petals and the faint whiffle that drifts from their sepia husks: fine-veined and still fragrant, they are pressed forever between the pages of a favourite book.
Three
Stories, the tales told of the line cleft between birth and death, symbols, rituals … they underpin all that we do, and help us to make sense of the evanescence of life.
My family is back in the barn because our new ritual demands that the story of the rose leopard cannot be told anywhere else. A long golden light draws longer shadows. The day’s breezes have cleaned the once-fetid air, given it freshness and neutrality. My two smaller children squat contentedly on the ground, a bum-hop and arm-lean away from Amelia, who is hunched against a pair of old forty-four-gallon drums.
And so I begin.
When the rose leopard arrived, she was wrapped in her magic cloak. Although she had never visited Eternity before, she was unafraid. She had known long ago that she had been selected for an important mission, and she had been aware that the mission could come at any time. As her journey concluded she held her breath and remembered the essentials: I am a Keeper and I have lived for centuries with the Enlightenment in my eyes. These things dispel fear.
She left the Minion’s carriage and bowed graciously before the Eternals, keeping her head down as both Sibyl and Charyb approached.
‘Rose Leopard,’ said Sibyl gently, after a moment’s appraisal, ‘let me see your face.’
When the rose leopard lifted her eyes, she saw Sibyl’s thickening shadow and knew that the ancient one was nearly ready for the Adumbration. Like all of us, Eternals are given an episode of life; when it is completed they filter into the Void where only the imprint of their goodness remains, left to inspire all other members of the Bright Universe. The Void is an infinite library of imprints; they are like memories, as light as scent and as delicate as the unfolding of petals. It can only be accessed by Eternals who can use telepathic scanning techniques to find whichever imprint they want. Anyway, early in their life-episode Eternals have no shadow but as their time continues so does their shadow develop — it darkens, creeps higher and eventually claims them so that they are no more. This is known as the Adumbration and the rose leopard could see that Sibyl was close to her moment.
She felt the eyes of the ancient one upon her and knew that the Eternal was looking within, searching the core of her being as she explored beyond the Enlightenment. It was a strange feeling — Sibyl’s thoughts and inquiries flowed through her like water rushing through a deep gully — but she knew that she had to remain steady and calm.
‘She is still the one.’ Sibyl banged her staff then turned to Charyb. ‘Tell her what she must do.’
Charyb nodded, moved forward slowly.
‘Rose Leopard,’ she said, ‘since the origin of time we have known that the Swicks would one day leave their gloom and invade the Bright Universe. You have heard of the Swicks?’
‘I have.’ The rose leopard held the Eternal’s eyes. ‘Bodiless creatures intent on the creation of evil and a never-ending darkness. Our only true enemies.’
‘Exactly. You have heard, too, of their capacity to strangle stars … to extinguish all light?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Rose Leopard, the Swicks are here. We know because we have seen their mischief in the Farthest Reach. How many now, Dragmir?’
‘Eleven million, eight hundred and ninety-three thousand, four hundred and sixteen.’ The younger Eternal’s voice was gloomy.
‘Thank you, Dragmir. Rose Leopard, the Swicks will not be content to stay in the Farthest Reach. It is not in their nature to remain in one place for long. They thrive on new challenges, new ways of causing evil and darkness.’
The rose leopard thought hard.
‘That’s right,’ intervened Sibyl. ‘We believe — no, we are certain — that the Swicks will eventually abandon all other activities, and they will come for our Mother Star.’
There was a gasp all around.
‘And if that happens’ interrupted Dragmir impatiently, ‘then there will be no Bright Universe. There will be a massive supernova followed by destruction, emptiness and a giant black hole. The gardens, the seas, your mountains and forests — everything will be gone! Even Eternity … Eternity will be gone!’
‘Dragmir!’ Charyb’s voice whipped through the air. ‘You forget yourself.’
‘Supernova?’ Otis has squirmed forward. ‘What’s that?’
‘An exploding star,’ I tell her. ‘Very bright, very powerful, very nasty. Enough oomph to turn the galaxy upside-down, inside-out and roundabout backwards.’
‘Will the Mother Star be supernova�
��d?’
I lean across quickly, ruffle her hair.
‘Not if the rose leopard has anything to do with it, my precious. Now, where was I?’
‘So — to your mission.’ Sibyl spoke once more. ‘Years ago you were chosen to protect the Bright Universe from the Swicks. Now your time has come, Rose Leopard. You must travel to the Mother Star; and then you must save Her. We cannot tell you how — because the simple truth is that we do not know. But you must find a way. You must listen for a Voice, seek an Enlightenment. Then you will know.’
The rose leopard nodded gravely.
‘I am honoured,’ she said and all of the Eternals waggled their wings and stared at her with so much admiration that no one even noticed Dragmir quietly slinking away.
‘Traitor!’ Milo’s whisper snaps like a stock-whip. ‘I’ll bet he’s a traitor’
After the rose leopard had said goodbye to her children, whom she loved more than life itself, she wrapped herself tightly in her magic cloak and began the long journey to the Mother Star. It had always been the most wondrous star of all; its light the most pure, its shine the most entrancing. It was called the Mother Star because it nurtured all of the other stars in the Bright Universe. Without its light and the warmth that it generated, they would soon die.
To get to the Mother Star, the rose leopard had to cross three deadly hazards. The first was known as the Mazes of Madness.
Rose Leopard Page 17