The Tessellation Saga. Book Two. 'The One' (42 page)

‘Ahh, dear boy,
you are a living god, and, you belong to me, my own personal angel
of pleasure,’ he said as he reached his hand toward the young man’s
perfect form. Darnel’s short toga left nothing to the imagination
as Gath lifted the garment and feasted his eyes on his muscular
legs, his large flaccid manhood and his delicately sculptured pubic
hair. Darnel cringed inside, how he hated this man, this man who
had taken his tongue and his honour, he knew his sister was so far
unharmed but he also knew as soon as she grew up, Gath would have
her just as he had him. He cursed his parents for dying and leaving
both of them to Gath’s mercies, he had no life, no friends and his
only personal possession was a small black pearl trinket box,
holding a shrivelled and dried piece of meat.

‘A reminder,’
Gath had said, ‘so you remember what you could have lost and be
eternally grateful to me that you didn’t.’ Gath had been referring
to the choice Darnel had made, to lose his tongue or his penis.
Sometimes, alone in the dark when Gath was asleep, or away on
affairs of state Darnel would remember the horror of that night
once more, he would see the young boy with his throat exposed to
the sharp blade. The blood spurting across the filthy dungeon, the
look on Gath’s face as he finally made his choice and stuck out his
tongue and the metallic rusty taste of the dead boy’s blood
mingling with his own as his tongue was cut away. Sometimes...
sometimes, he wished that he had chosen differently, at least then
he and probably his sister would both be dead now and journeying on
to meet their parents.

Darnel cringed
inwardly as his king cupped his manhood in full view of the
soldiers and their women followers, in his head, he could hear
their laughter, the cruel jibes of the men and the pitying looks of
the women. Finally, as Gath let the toga fall and took Darnel’s
hand in his own he felt cold comfort in knowing that although the
king was taking him away from the prying eyes and the pitiful
looks, he was going to be with him in his bed, alone once more.

Suddenly Gath
turned back toward the mountain and stared hard, all thoughts of
Darnel and his own personal pleasures’ gone from his mind.

‘Do you feel
that?’ He asked aloud, concentration clear on his face, ‘does
anyone feel that?’ He said louder. Gath walked a few steps nearer
to the mountain and continued to look up into the dark recesses of
the rocky crags. Darnel also looked up, under the night sky; the
face of the mountain looked unscalable and darkly eerie. Pockets of
total blackness occurred here and there where the moon’s pale light
could not reach and the small plants that grew from rocks and
crevices moved softly in the breeze blowing across the plain,
making moving shadows of the tentacles and feelers look as if they
were alive and crawling across the cliffs rocky surface. He
shivered once more under the strange feeling of tension in the air,
cocking his head to one side listening intently and thought he
could hear something, something compelling. Involuntarily he took a
further step forward. Soft gentle music, strange music filled with
strength and healing, it called to him, since he had lost his
ability to speak his hearing had become more acute and he found the
strange music soothing. Suddenly out of nowhere a loud noise
reverberated across the plain, it assaulted his ears and he quickly
covered them with his palms to protect them as the noise continued
to echo around the pass and explode again and again, like a mighty
thunderclap, filled with the promise of rain on a hot and close
afternoon. Darnel shivered as he watched Gath’s men along with
their wives and followers leave their tents and gather, they too
stood staring up at the dark mountain before them as the noise
finally moved on and died.

In the silence
that followed, the worried and superstitious women re-lit fires to
ward off any lurking evil spirits, while their men folk awaited
orders.

‘Assault the
mountain... now,’ Gath hissed, as finally Darnel felt what Gath had
felt moments before. His skin itched and crawled and the stub
inside his mouth tingled painfully as if stung by a wasp. Around
him, he could see where others were affected too, more than a few
were scratching or rubbing their skin,
magic, someone is using
magic,
Darnel thought, knowing the feel of a spell well, having
witnessed Gath using magic many times.

Gath watched as
his men scurried toward the mountainside, for some reason he
thought of his escaped prisoner, his creature, the man from the
Bleak and his intriguing tattoo.
Home,
he thought
I will
get home.

Gath had felt
the presence of the wall, the great barrier, as soon as he entered
the pass and in the light of day, he had fully intended to climb
the mountain to view the marvellous structure.
This expending of
power, so much power… by ‘The Journey’ tis an omen,
his
thoughts continued.
It began here… And it will end here…
Abruptly he turned and walked the few steps back to his tent
without giving Darnel a second glance, quietly Darnel hurried away
to the semi-privacy of his own small dwelling space, a side tent
attached to Gath’s but kept apart by a wall of soft linen. Still
easily accessible to Gath should he require Darnel’s services
during the night but somehow Darnel thought that this night, he
would probably be left alone and for that, he thanked the gods.

After the
morning communing in his rooms with his newly recovered book and
becoming reacquainted with the language of his birth, Thaddrick
spent the afternoon walking along the bank of the river before
finding a secluded shady spot. Sitting on the lush green grass to
compose his thoughts, he absently began piling small stones in a
heap beside him. He knew the small Green Home group would be
waiting for him this evening to tell tales and make plans as they
had been want to do over the last few days but he needed time alone
to think.

He gloried in
the warmth of the sun shining on the clear clean river and the
fleet fish glinting like molten silver just under the surface as
they rose and fell catching the myriad of tiny flies and insects
skating on the thin skin of the swiftly moving body of water that
in this time did not have a name. At some point in the future, he
knew something significant would happen here for the river to be
named the ‘Beaut’ but although he had ventured, via a gateway into
the future of the Green Home Forest many times, he had never yet
found the particular place in time or the reason for the great
river’s naming. Regardless, it mattered little to him whatever its
name; he had always found this river a great source of solace. It
had been on one of his trips into the great forest of the future,
the forest so like the forests of home, that he had met Jed,
Gideon’s father for the first time, a small boy as lost and alone
as he felt himself. He had silently followed the boy as he played
at survival and been impressed by both the lad’s respect of the
flora and fauna around him and his care to leave the forest
unspoiled. He remembered seeing the child fall from a tree and lay
stunned on the earthy floor and the wild beast that had decided Jed
would make a good meal, as he lay unconscious and the fight the
wolf had had protecting the child. The boy had trusted him from the
start and Thaddrick, as the wolf, had visited that time on many
occasions over the years telling himself it was just to see how the
boy was faring. Eventually he had grown to love him, both the child
and then the man.

During the dark
time, when Jed watched as his wife and child died in a fire and he
had fled to the comfort of the forest the wolf had stayed beside
him and tried to give comfort to the man he had grown to think of
as a beloved son. On the night Gideon was born, he had been with
Jed in his cottage trying to sleep beside the hearth. Even in his
wolf form, he had known something was happening at the root of the
magic, all day he had felt it, a disturbance in the very air, like
a hot close day waiting for a storm to break, the signs of ‘the
one’ had all been there but he had not noticed them. The girl
Lydia, Gideon’s mother had even tried to tell them before she died
that the Gatherer was the man after them, after Gideon.

‘Gath,’ she had
said, ‘he wants my baby, save my baby.’

‘Did I know
even then Themos?’ Thaddrick asked his dead brother, would I have
acted differently if I had known that he was the one? He questioned
himself. I could have brought him here, taught him from infancy the
control and the histories he would need to know...but Jed...
without the child, Jed would have never known the joys of
fatherhood and Gideon would never have been the man he has become,
the man he was been born to be.

Thaddrick
picked up a stone from the now large pile and after considering it
a moment he tossed it into the swiftly flowing water, it
disappeared quickly with a small splash, leaving no trace, not a
ripple to mark its passing.
Jed would have been like that stone,
disappearing in a sea of pain with no one to love him or to mourn
his loss...
he thought, knowing then, that he had done the
right thing.

The river sped
on, gurgling and chuckling as it raced away through the valley; the
river, it had always calmed him, helped him during his periods of
darkness and despair and over the long years and there had been
many of those. Thaddrick, as the wolf had for an inordinate length
of time watched helplessly as the great barrier he and his fellow
mages had orchestrated, disintegrate piece by piece before his eyes
as the pull of the void ate away at it. He had watched as the last
of the Guardians had perished or had given up and walked away from
the task before them. Behind the wall, he had helplessly been a
witness as the beautiful valley died, the trees turning brittle and
brown and the once fertile land turning to dust. His feelings of
guilt and inadequacy as the barrier began to fail and the seemingly
unpreventable death of this, the host planet plagued him, this
planet, intended to be a salvation to the peoples of Arotia. All
they had given in return was death, unless of course he could close
the gateway, if he could not, well, then he and his brother would
be to blame.
We came up with this plan to save the life we knew,
not to be the engineers behind another world’s destruction!
He
thought as in his mind, he could hear Themos even now, extolling
the virtues of the earth and it being the perfect choice for
colonising and possibly mixing with the indigenous people.

‘To a degree
Themos, you
were
right,’ Thaddrick said aloud, again
speaking to the brother he had not seen for centuries, ‘by mixing
with the human inhabitants, civilisation on this planet has
advanced tremendously, but to what cost?’ In his mind, he saw once
more the dilapidated state of the once magnificent impregnable wall
and he saw the strength of Sonal as he struggled to repair the tear
in the magic’s fabric.
Sonal,
he thought,
your act was as
dangerous as it was courageous.
The spell had as surely
announced their presence and continued existence like a morning
sunrise across a dark sky.

He smiled
sadly, as he remembered the song Sonal had sung and his own
surprise as the wolf in him had joined in. In all the long years he
had masqueraded as the wolf, he had never so much as ventured
inside the wall despite its many tears and rents. Brave Sonal had
humbled him, pushing on through into the mouth of the dome and then
returning and singing his spell of healing so valiantly. He had
felt the rush of blood as the music of the root and the patterns in
the magic’s fabric reminded him of long dead friends, friends who
had elected to stay behind to guard the boundary between life and
death. Their strength and sacrifice had flowed through Sonal,
bursting out of him and reaching into Thaddrick’s soul, buried as
it was inside the wolf and suddenly he filled with hope.
Generations and generations of past Sonal’s, those men and women
whose sole purpose in life was to add strength to the barrier.
What did we condemn our children and our children’s children
to?
He wondered sadly, as he thought of the families who had
grown old and died maintaining the wall whilst his people, the
people who had come with him to
this
valley had lived on in
safety and peace.
Sonal, so brave…
he thought,
and the
Guardians’. They who struggled and died in vain, just waiting for a
relief that would never arrive, eventually not even knowing why
they did what they did, just blindly fixing and repairing, day
after day giving their lives as Sonal had given part of his for a
wall that should never have been needed in the first place!

A lump burned
in Thaddrick’s throat threatening to choke him and he swallowed
hard.
Sonal,
he again saw Sonal and the new white streaks in
his hair as he used himself as the balance for his song of
repair.

‘Themos, what
did we, no, what did
I
condemn them too?’ Thaddrick cried to
the illusory figure of the man beside whom he had grown up as the
tears silently began to fall.

As the tears
slowed and finally stopped, cramp in his leg caused him to move and
the book hidden beneath his robes stuck into him awkwardly. Wiping
his face with his sleeve he took the book from the hidden pocket
and flicked through the pages once more, seeing the ghost of his
brother sitting beside him and scribbling into a book very similar
to his own as they debated some point or another hotly
and
beside a river, just like this one,
Thaddrick remembered.
Perhaps that is why I love this river so much, because it
reminds me of home, home and Themos and family.
Abruptly
Thaddrick knew what to do, in seconds he was on his feet, his aged
appearance belying the fitness of the man he was. He gathered his
few belongings and began to hurry back along the way he had come, a
slow smile spreading across his face.