We Three Queens

by Jon Jacks

  Through the pure white glow of the deer, Helen could still see the violently flailing branches lying beyond it.

  And yet…these branches were moving differently to all the other, surrounding stems.

  Quicker.

  Even more frantically than the rest of the encircling branches.

  That frenetic movement was increasingly more hurried too.

  It was a whirl. A blur.

  The dark stands were moving so quickly it was now all so much more like fluid, dark waters.

  Helen instinctively reached out towards these dark waters; even though the deer herself stood far away from her, while the branches lay even farther out of her grasp.

  She groped within the dark fluid.

  The darkness hardened within her hand.

  Became something graspable.

  She curled her fingers around this something.

  She withdrew her hand.

  She opened up her hand.

  And in her now opened palm, she was looking at a game piece: a tree, surmounted by a sickle moon, shining out from between its many branches.

  *

  Chapter 44

  When Helen looked up from the piece she was holding, she was no longer standing within the clearing.

  Or, rather, she was: but it was a far more abstract version of it all.

  Everything had been stilled: everything was motionless.

  The thrashing of the branches had come to a complete halt. The men standing about her were caught in mid-action, frozen in a stance of trying to calm a rearing horse, or spearing another branch’s attempt at re-rooting within the clearing.

  The goblin was in a similarly petrified pose, his eyes wide with terror and bewilderment.

  From both him and the men, multiple and incredibly fine black strands strung out into the air, as if they themselves, like the trees, had sprouted innumerable branches.

  They connected each man with everything lying about him, even coursing off through the surrounding trees and extending off to areas lying unseen beyond the forest. And yet the largest number of the threads from each man snaked through the trees as if the trees didn’t exist, the ends of the strands vanishing into the dark pelts of the besieging wolves.

  The men were connected to the presence of the wolves, Helen realised.

  Each wolf was a facet of each man: an animal level of each man, she reasoned.

  And so where was her wolf?

  Like her men, Helen had a mass of serpentine threads streaming through her body.

  And yet the majority of these weren’t connected to a wolf.

  They sprang out towards and linked her to the deer.

  *

  Like her, the deer was the only thing surrounding Helen that wasn’t motionless.

  The deer, somehow, was her: or at least, some constituent of her.

  A daemon.

  One of her Seven Daemons.

  And the wolves, and the men?

  These were their daemons too, but ones at a different level, a different stage,

  In the goblin’s story – if it were true, if it revealed the different levels – the wolves were a third level.

  And the deer?

  The sixth, if the hybrid creature she had been – like Uraeus had been the centaur in the story – counted as a fifth stage.

  So what was the seventh stage?

  *

  What stage could be higher than this ethereal deer, this personification of wisdom, perhaps even the soul itself?

  Helen attempted to use her links to her Chammah to find an answer to this question: and yet no new information came coursing back to her, no new insights flowed between them.

  How was she supposed to access this new level, this new stage in her development?

  The old empress had told her of the way the dark strands connected everything: passing through us daily, without anyone ever realising.

  These were the threads of life she had to learn to control. Using the finer links of her own consciousness.

  ‘Then you can dictate how a creature thinks!’

  A lacework of links, connecting each and every one of us, linking us even to the planets themselves.

  ‘The game detects these waves.’

  The board and its many, varied pieces appeared before her.

  And yet this wasn’t just a recollection of the game she had seen earlier: for she immediately recognised that it had changed in many ways.

  The pieces were different: they had moved, shifted considerable distances.

  She saw the pieces of the old empress, the crows, the serpents.

  And yet there was something about them that she hadn’t noticed before. For a fragmentary moon hung above them, just as it shone through the branches of the tree game piece she held within her hand.

  No, she realised; she no longer held it in her hand.

  It was now a piece standing upon the board.

  And the moon: it was different to the one shining above the pieces controlled by the old empress.

  Whereas the piece she had held showed a crescent moon, it was a horned moon, one lit purely from below.

  But the moon sparkling above the old empress’s pieces was a waning moon.

  The old empress, too, had a piece like a tree, the waning moon glowing from amidst its branches.

  And Fausta: she, of course, as before, could control the trees.

  It was the full moon shining above her pieces.

  Was she the one attacking them now in these woods?

  Helen had simply assumed it was the Land, or even Nature, taking revenge after being commanded to allow a road to pass through her very being.

  The full moon glittered above pieces representing hawks, portraying wolves.

  These were under Fausta’s control.

  But no: there was something else that Helen sensed when she stared at these pieces.

  It wasn’t just hawks and wolves that Fausta could manipulate to her advantage: these were also the lower aspects of men that she had influence over!

  And as for Helen’s own forces?

  Even her earlier glances at her own side had been more than enough to help her recognise that nothing on the board had changed more substantially than the layout and nature of her own pieces.

  That was partly why she had feared taking a closer look up until now.

  She took a closer look at her own side – and gasped.

  Lions.

  She controlled the lion aspect of men!

  *

  Chapter 45

  Centaurs: these, too, were graced with Helen’s glistening horned-moon device.

  And the deer!

  A deer leaping over an elevated, magnificent tower. No: not leaping over it – leaping from it, as if freed, perhaps from imprisonment.

  As well as the sickle moon, there was also an irregular triangle of three glittering stars nestled within the embrace of its antlers, one of the lower two glowing more brightly than the others.

  Glancing back towards the centaurs – the piece consisted of two centaurs, whereas the deer game piece had just the one creature – she saw the same cluster of stars hovering over them, albeit here it was the lowest one of all that glittered brightest.

  The number of animals on each piece differed slightly, as if they all represented some form of hierarchy.

  Three lions.

  Four wolves.

  Five hawks.

  Six crows.

  It was a reversal of the stages represented within the goblin’s story, where it was the deer that was the sixth level, the crow the first.

  Was that it? Was it something to do with fewer people being able to attain the higher levels?

  As well as the moons, there were also stars glittering above these pieces too.

  But it wasn’t the cluster of three stars.

  It was the double trapezoid form of the constellation of Orion. And a particular star shone more brightly than the others, differing with each piece.

  For the cro
w, the brightest star was the hot, blue glow on the east side of the hunter’s belt.

  For the hawk, it was the pale violet of the west side of the belt.

  It was the lower west star that glimmered brightly for the wolf: yet this suddenly dimmed, and it was the blazing red of the upper east star – the hunter’s shoulder – that now shone brightest of all.

  Similarly, two stars above the lions intermittently blinked on and off: the sharp white of the lower east becoming, in the blink of an eye, the watery blue, upper west star.

  Of course! As the humbled man had explained with his diagram, it was as if the lower trapezoid of stars had swung about the axis of the belt’s centre – the hunter’s midpoint, the crossing of his spine and waist!

  Helen glanced over the pieces, wondering if she might catch anything else that she had missed when taking her first glance at the board.

  The serpents: they had their own cluster of stars, a rainbow glow of red, blue and green.

  The stars of the eye of the lower trapezoid.

  Nearby, regally seated upon her throne, was the old empress herself.

  Snow flowed about her, snow from her own pieces, and from pieces lying farther across the board too.

  One of those pieces was the young empress, Fausta.

  And she was now only a few squares away from the old empress.

  *

  Chapter 46

  Helen glanced over the entire board, wondering if there was a piece representing her.

  If it was the piece she thought it might be, it wasn’t a very impressive one.

  There was little, if anything, regal about it.

  It was quite small compared to most of the pieces, particularly the two representing the empresses.

  She still had much to learn, obviously.

  Near to her was another piece, one of a clutch of warriors, no doubt symbolising the men she’d led into this trap.

  A small goblin was also included amongst the men.

  All about them were tree pieces that had stretched out their branches, branches that moved, as if alive.

  And one of those pieces was one that was supposed to be her own: the one with a horned moon shining from between its quivering branches.

  Now why would her own piece be helping constrain them within the woods?

  Because she wasn’t controlling it: and so Fausta had somehow drawn that unused piece into the attack.

  Amongst the tree pieces there was another one, one entangled with those of the full moon. This piece shone with the glow of the old empress’s waning moon.

  Yes, that made sense: hadn’t Helen thought that, amongst all the chaos of the thrashing branches, she’d seen some of the trees apparently warring with each other?

  And that, of course, was what her own piece should be doing.

  But…how?

  She had hoped that just realising that it should be attacking the other tress would be enough to set it upon the others. Yet it now simply appeared motionless (although, at least, that probably meant it was no longer taking part in the attack upon the poor, beleaguered men): why was that?

  Because, because, because… because she was still thinking in terms of pieces!

  ‘If it helps, think of how you would move the board, not the pieces.’

  Isn’t that what the old empress had said?

  And yes, yes: she understood all that now.

  Everything is connected.

  Everything is one.

  We are all one!

  She reached out for the dark strands emanating from her, the fine threads connecting her to everything else. She tried to grasp and pull at the strands, as she had seen the old empress do when she had demonstrated how everything was linked; how you could ‘use the wrinkles to alter things to our advantage’.

  Her hands simply passed through the black threads as if they weren’t really there.

  Of course, the old empress’s demonstration had been nothing more than that: it hadn’t been intended as a means of accurately showing how the connections could be manipulated.

  ‘It’s the world you wish to manipulate.’

  ‘The game detects these waves.’

  Helen could recall the empress saying all this: and yet she still didn’t understand how it all worked!

  *

  Chapter 47

  She was back in the woodland, standing alongside her surrounded men.

  The white deer still watched her curiously, hardly moving, and offering no sorely needed advice.

  The besieging trees were still moving, however, and more violently than ever too. Now their trunks, as well as their branches, were vibrating, frenziedly quivering.

  The trees were gradually ripping whole clumps of their roots free of the earth. They were intending to move in upon the beleaguered men: to attack them.

  Helen sensed the growing nervousness amongst her men. They clutched anxiously at their swords. The man left in charge of the horses was struggling all the more to calm them down.

  Some of the trees were now motionless: or, rather, rustling in the breeze as trees are supposed to do.

  These must be her trees, she reasoned.

  No longer lying under the control of Fausta. No longer attacking them.

  Yet still lying motionless and useless, because she had no idea how to utilise her powers.

  A little beyond the encircling trees, some of them were engaged in their own battles with other trees, their branches locked, being torn asunder.

  The old empress’s trees, taking the battle to those under the control of Fausta.

  Helen glanced towards the deer, glaring at her in frustration.

  Why aren’t you helping me?

  She screamed in silence at the unresponsive deer.

  The deer was little more than motionless, as if waiting to be called.

  As if she was waiting to be told what to do!

  Above and behind the unruffled deer, the tree branches writhed and thrashed, like so many interweaving threads.

  Like so many un-unravelable knots.

  So many Gordian Knots.

  And yes, Helen wanted to slash at those knots!

  To solve her problems quickly.

  To break out of here using might and strength.

  But there was no way to do that, of course.

  Even so, directly above the deer now there was indeed a Gordian Knot, some kind of vision of it being hacked at and breaking into pieces.

  Was it a sign that this was what she was supposed to do with the connecting threads of dark matter?

  Had the false Mary deliberately given her false advice, intending to hold her back from recognising something important?

  And yet: to hack at – to destroy – all these links?

  That made no sense at all, did it?

  *

  No; breaking all these links made no sense.

  She would be destroying all her connections to and with the outside world.

  It would be like cutting off her arms.

  Like destroying a part of herself.

  Because, of course, it wasn’t the ‘outside’ world at all, was it?

  The threads, the things in the world: they’re not just links, it’s not all just connected.

  It’s all one and the same thing.

  It’s all me.

  I’m it. It’s me.

  Helen looked towards the patiently waiting hind with more understanding.

  Of course she’s not doing anything!

  I have to use her.

  If I want to use a part of my body, even a finger, the finger doesn’t move just because I want it to.

  There are a whole range of muscles and actions that have to take part along my arm, throughout my body, for that one little finger to move.

  Move the board, not the piece.

  And the board itself? It doesn’t represent the landscape, as she’d foolishly assumed.

  Because if we move one part of the ‘board’, it affects the rest of the ‘board’, it
alters it.

  And that, of course, doesn’t happen with the land (unless that is the very thing you’re wanting to happen!)

  It does happen, however, with presence, with thought.

  With a field – or a sea! – of consciousness.

  (Consciousness? Where had such a word come from?)

  She had to be aware of the distance lying between her and the trees she wished to control, not dismiss it.

  She had to recognise the multiple linking connections, bring them all into play: like the struggles she’d witnessed when men who’d suffered deeply hacked limbs had to learn once again how to move a hand or a foot.

  A breath becomes a breeze, becomes a gust, becomes a storm; a hurricane that wrenches a tree’s branches into writhing action!

  *

  At first the awestruck men stared in astonishment as the surrounding trees began to ferociously tangle with each other: then they cheered when they realised they weren’t, as they’d originally feared, imagining it after all.

  Gremir glanced Helen’s way, nodded his appreciation with a grateful smile, his thoughts easy to read in his impressed and yet fearful expression: who else could have done this but her? The goblin too looked her way, frowning in a mix of relieved curiosity and puzzlement, as if he realised she must have had something to do with this abrupt change in the nature of the trees’ attack.

  The attack wasn’t completely over, of course. The trees themselves were still brutally thrashing at each other, huge clumps of severed and torn branches flying through the air and frequently landing in the clearing with an horrendous thump that had the men leaping out of the way.

  Helen grimaced with dissatisfaction.

  Yes, the situation had undoubtedly improved considerably – it no longer seemed wholly hopeless. And yet…the vision of Alexander’s hacking of the Gordian Knot still remained hovering in the air before her.

  She’d missed something: but what?

  Before she could attempt to work out whatever it was she still needed to deal with, an abrupt series of ferocious howls and snarls immediately reminded her.

  The wolves!

  The wolves were pouring through the gaps opening up between the warring trees.

  *

  Chapter 48

  The man left in control of the horses was used to responding to such urgent conditions. He had already brought the horses forward, rapidly handing out the reins to each man.