Tales from The Children of The Sea, Volume 1, The Last Wooden House

by Jann Burner

Of the four major rivers that separate the awesome forest of Content from the dense jungle of the Imagination, the Elin was the largest. At its widest, it stretched over twenty-five miles before encountering another shore. The river ran from all the way in the North to all the way in the South and served as the Western boundary of the approximate square that constitutes the bulk and body of the forest.

  Though he found himself at the narrowest part of the river, the current was much too strong to swim, and by the end of the day, he was unable to find any material with which to construct a raft. Beneath a full and trembling moon, the darkness of sleep finally settled upon a very sad and tired questor. But he rose with the sun and optimistically continued his search only to grow more and more depressed as the day wore on. By evening of the fourth day, sadness was in his heart, despair was in the air, and the whole world began to reek of sundown.

  By dawn of the ninth day, he began to seriously question the beating of his own heart. As his mind began to throw up grotesque images, his mouth would form the taste and soon the smell of his increasing anxiety began to seep along the shore like an ever thickening haze, threatening to block out the light of his inner being. Strange thoughts came in his mind, disturbing thoughts like the curling edge of a dream which refused to lay flat. All night he lay awake considering his options. By morning, he was positive that his only remaining expectation was sure to be a slow death, and with his last few remaining threads of hope he tried to visualize the possibility coming swift and soon. To linger on in this parched outback would be a fate truly worse than death.

  With his mind thus centered about the grisly imaginings of his own demise, he spent the morning hours aimlessly stumbling along the river shore in a generally southern direction. He shuffled one foot after the other, listlessly observing the isolated clumps of bulrushes, the outcroppings of large rock and the small smoothly polished stones scattered about. The encroaching expanse of white, hot sand gathered about him like a slow, evil thought radiating its intent. Woe is fear that comes, not as a spy in the night, but as a whole battalion, shrouding the sun at its height and making the day a grim and dismal place indeed.

  Like an army of ants, his worries and nameless anxieties began to swarm over him constituting a steadily growing irritation that threatened to engulf and consume him. Blotting out the sun, his emotions began to construct their parapets across his mind until light itself was more a memory than a source of illumination. He could not control the defeat that he felt, that he inhaled through his living heart, any more than the earth can protest against the rising water after a hard rain. He believed in The Quest and now only its completion would complete him.

  He fell. An imaginary predator lunged at his neck as he fought to rise. Another snapped at his rump. He jerked his head around to confront his new tormentor only to feel a stab of pain at his flank. He tried to get up. He could no longer see. Flies, like buckshot, pelted the raw opening wounds in his psyche as he went down again. He no longer noticed the pain. He no longer fought against the outside threat. He staggered and fell. He struggled and staggered and fell.

  As the sun began to draw low on the fourteenth day, he decided to hang himself from the very next tree. Too weak to swim, he hoped the tree would appear before dark, for to die by one's own hand at night, would be a pitiful thing indeed.

  As he passed beyond some large rocks, he spotted it--the tree. It was a tall, lovely, strong-looking tree and in his excitement to be rid of his burdensome envelope of flesh, he began to run. And as he drew closer, he began to run even faster, even as a man dying of thirst might run towards water or a man in love might run towards the object of his affection. As he ran, he laboriously unfastened his belt and held it forward as an offering of great worth. As he drew closer, his eyes seized the tree and his mind began to devour it, branch by branch and leaf by leaf. The trunk was strong and thick and grew out from the river's bank into many strong limbs, any of which would be more than suitable for a man to hang himself. And the leaves; never had he seen such a veritable forest of soft, fragrant green.

  The ancient wooden ferry with its sails hanging slack, lay waiting by the shore of the river, not thirty feet from the trunk of the tree. The aging ferryman sat at the very edge of the boat with his great goat-like feet dangling in the clean, clear water watching the setting sun's last light spread out over the river.

  Harry had began his climb up the trunk of the massive tree and was well on his way toward his final dangling place, when he noticed the boat. He wouldn't have noticed it at all, had it not been that in order to get a firm grasp, in order to place his foot correctly, so that his belt might be wrapped around the proper limb, he had to take one last look at the water. Quickly he averted his eyes. Even as the ferryman stood, turning in his direction, still he remained intend upon his depressing task.

  Random Cause stood casually with his hands on his hips, looking up at Harry with a slight smile, his now fifty-year-old face thoroughly lined by time and the river and yet still open and compassionate.

  "So old, so old..." was all Harry could say as he looked down upon his friend

  The ferryman nodded and smiled, "You stand there with paradise in your eyes, counting the leaves upon a tree in the forest of Content and speak to me of age?"

  Random turned and began to throw off the ship's lines in preparation to sail.

  Harry suddenly fell to the sand like a piece of overripe fruit, leaving his belt hanging from the limb in the tree

  Random extended his hand and a shattered young man crawled on board.

  "Do not be so impatient to die, my young friend," said the old sailor, "the world will offer up many opportunities on its own."

  As the old ship began to move slowly away from Content towards the Imagination, Harry squatted upon the cracked planking of the wooden deck and slowly rocked back and forth, staring at Random Cause.

  "You are afraid now-and tired..." said Random finally. "You are afraid of me. You think me a god or a devil and you are embarrassed for yourself and the thing that I witnessed. But look--" he said, pointing first ahead and then behind. "We have departed the forest and now we move through the darkness of the unknown across the abyss toward the jungle of Imagination."

  He leaned closer to Harry and spoke slowly in hushed, gravelly tones. "These two extremes form a conceptual pole, which this small boat slides across. This conceptual pole balances on a very thin line of time which spans this gorge of fear...and you are the point of balance, my friend." He sat back and seemed to slump slightly. "I am just a man and what you see in me is but a projection of yourself. We are moving now into a totally different reality and in the coming reality, you will have to use your most subtle inner senses. You will have to become as aware of your inner self as it is already aware of you."

  The rays from the emerging stars that whorled overhead helped Harry focus and reintegrate. His breathing gradually became steadier. He felt stupid, but grateful, and relieved. He had come quite close to doing a very dumb thing.

  "But Random...I feel so ashamed."

  Random silenced him with a short sweep of his hand.

  "Your embarrassment, Harry, is vanity and while vanity may be a useful device in the forest of Content, it has no place within the jungle of Imagination. Reflect upon your recent source of embarrassment..."

  The boat moved slowly. Random tied off the rudder to a post and stood. He walked through a small hatch to a cabin below and shortly returned wearing a white hooded robe to ward off the evening's chill. He handed Harry a similar cloak.

  "Your recent attempt to take your life was but a conspiracy between you and your inner self, Harry. Why do you think you selected that specific tree behind that exact rock? Didn't you pass twenty such trees which would have been just as suitable to your purpose? As soon as I discovered your absence, I took my boat to that certain spot and waited for your arrival, for it was obvious what you were eventually going to do..."


  "But I had no plan. I merely wished to escape. I was afraid that you were one of the distractions the Geni of Desire had warned me of!"

  Random nodded and turned up his hood against the wind until it covered all but his deep-set eyes. As Harry stared into Random's face he could not remember if Random was a young man suddenly grown old and grey, or an old man that had somehow given the initial impression of youth.

  "That is only partially true, Harry, for both of our inner selves were aware of the purpose behind our initial meeting. Distractions are also opportunities and the boat was only a matter of time. After all, I am the ferryman, but you could not sail into the void until you somehow managed to conquer or discredit your essential vanity."

  Harry sat for a very long while in silence, watching rust form on a wide iron band wrapped around the base of the mast of the ancient boat. Gradually, the water became as smooth as silk with no visible wind, and the ferry sat stationary in the darkness with sails slack. He listened to the creaking of the wood and felt totally and absolutely alone in the void; poised at the very edge of some perilous abyss.

  Random hunched over and began coughing.

  Harry glanced up, but his cough abruptly ceased.

  "In another time and in another place," Random said, "I found myself in much the same position as you. And then, one day, while walking through the dense inner ring of Imagination, I made a startling discovery. As I passed by one of the many green, brackish memory pools that dot the landscape in that specific region, I happened to glance down and within the subtle reflection of my own eye I, discovered something quite miraculous! Suddenly the 'reality' of it hit me and I began to roll on the ground, or inside myself, or perhaps the universe rolled while I, in my most innocent trust, witnessed the exact moment of transition--from winter to spring. Quite without warning, I found myself, like Narcissus, a captive of the pool."

  "And then...what happened?"

  "Well," said Random Cause, "I would still be a prisoner, had it not been for a storm that came along and stirred up the surface of the pool enough to eradicate my image. At the moment I was grateful, ecstatic, for the release and the relief. 'Finally,' I thought, 'I can continue my journey.' But the memory of the realizations I had found in the green pool kept pulling me back. I would get no further than a mile or so, when the pull of pure memory would draw me, like the moon draws the tide on the river Elin.

  "But something had changed. It no longer held me, and yet it would not let me go. I would hover over the pool, watching my face and staring deep into the reflective mind for hours, and hours and yet--nothing! No realizations, no insights, no mighty earth movements!" Random hesitated to cough and clear his throat. "You see, it never was the pool, not really. What initially held me was the vision, the Mandala, the eye, of another...on the quest! Once I was no longer on the quest, the pool cut me loose." Random coughed once again and then leaned over and looked directly into Harry's eyes.

  He could feel the old man's hot breath on his face.

  "Do you understand the meaning here?"

  Harry swallowed and nodded.

  Random sat back and tried to smile, "Good. And so..." he continued, looking away for the first time in a long while. "Since I could not progress any further through the dense jungle of the Imagination, after what I had realized, and since I could hardly return to the forest of Content, I became the ferryman at the causeway and swore to live out the remainder of my days half in Content and half in Imagination, hopefully to become the connection between the two. This ferry is now my prison, friend, and you are now--my pool..."

  Harry felt sad recalling what Desire had said about those who were to become Shaman and markers. At that moment, a rending flash of light creased the sky and he glimpsed the other shore in the distance.

  "Perhaps it is time for you to continue with the quest," Harry said. "Perhaps you are to go on with me..."

  "No, no," he said, dismissing the idea as ridiculous. "I am just a sick old man now. Soon I will die. Besides, no two people can ever go on the same journey."

  "Surely you are as young as you ever were?" Harry said. "You told me that age was only a projection. I see you! You are ageless. You are as young as you ever were. I have heard your words, Random, and they are the words of an adventurer on the quest!"

  Random smiled slowly and gently clasped Harry's shoulder.

  "That is because of you, Harry. For these past few days I have had the privilege of seeing it all again through the eyes of youth. I thank you for that."

  He began to cough once more and at that moment, it began to rain; a drizzle at first, and then the wind rose from the North tightening the sails. "Here," he said, placing Harry's hand on the tiller, "...steer for the shore." And then he moved forward to trim the sails.

  "But there is still time," Harry shouted into the wind.

  Random returned from the bow and took the tiller. "No..." he said, "there is no time. Time is an illusion, possibly the GRAND illusion. It is a parade, my friend. It takes only as long to pass as it takes and you are, at one and the same time, the curbside observer, the drum major, the major-domo pompously standing high atop the reviewing stand and the last street sweeper to pick up the final bit of rubbish on the following day. It all happens at once."

  He moved forward again as the old ferry neared the shore of Imagination and asked Harry to assist him with the lines. By the time, they had the ferry securely tied to the shore, the storm had increased in intensity and Random appeared to be quite ill. Harry succeeded in helping him to a small thatched hut not far from the shore. Inside, he found a small cache of food, a fire pit, and a straw bed. Random smiled feebly and asked to be put to rest.

  Outside, the world grew quiet once again. The rain dripped listlessly, creating furrows in the earth. Inside, Harry kindled a fire and brewed some tea.

  "Listen, my friend, things grow quiet once again," said the sick old man.

  Harry nodded in agreement for the storm had indeed grown still. He brought the tea over to Random's pallet and set it down.

  "Shush...listen to the sound of silence, Harry. Do you know what that is? It is time slipping through our fingers!"

  Harry sat at his side and sipped the fragrant jungle herb tea.

  By dawn, Random had grown weaker and had begun rambling on incoherently, speaking of himself in the third person. For the first time in days, Harry had succeeded in getting a good night's sleep. He looked forward to departing on his journey, but faced with Random's worsening condition, he could not force himself to leave, at least not until the old man regained some of his strength.

  "He is hungry--" said Random in a pitiful whine, "a little nourishment and then with full belly he will die peacefully and quiet..."

  Harry nodded at the old boatman and prepared porridge from oats and freshly picked blackberries that grew on the hut, but Random was not satisfied. He rejected Harry's efforts like the doting mother of the man instead of like the man himself.

  "No! No!" he said, raising himself up from his bed on one elbow. "This will never do! He can not eat such things!" He looked up at Harry with an expression of utter disdain and turned the bowl of porridge upside down on the dirt floor. "These things are for animals, not for man! This man needs meat and strong coffee and then perhaps...something to smoke?"

  Harry looked closely at Random, suspecting perhaps a game or another lesson, for though he did look old, frail and a little crazy, he did not look to be on the verge of death.

  "Now, get him a fish!" said Random with the harsh brittle tone of command.

  Yes, a fish, Harry thought. That could be done.

  As he moved down the path to the river, he looked around and experienced a great joy. Until then, he had not fully realized that he was, in fact, at the very edge of the awesome jungle of Imagination. The light was clear and warm, but with a definite bluish cast and the fragrances that oozed from this wet, wild world were alarming to his senses. Yes, th
e jungle aura was spectacular and a bit ominous.

  Kneeling at the water's edge, he quickly trapped a large green fish with small, darting orange eyes. Back inside the thatched hut, he fried it over the open fire on a stake.

  "It smells so good, Harry. Yes, yes, you have done well. This is what he needs! See how he will eat it!"

  As they began to eat, Harry put some coffee on the hot coals.

  "How is he doing?" Harry inquired, humoring the old man.

  "Oh," said Random, distracted by the process of digestion, "oh, quite well."

  Harry leaned forward. "Good. I am so pleased for him. Tell him then, that I will be going soon. If there's anything further that he needs..."

  "Oh my!" said Random suddenly sitting up. "You mustn't leave. You can't leave...not yet! He would surely die. We need you. He speaks very highly of you. Without you, he would have no reason to live!"

  "Surely you exaggerate. He is, as you say, old and I might add, very wise, but we have only known one another for a few days."

  "Seventeen days!" said Random sharply, "Seventeen days! You forget you slept for three days in the sand while I, I mean he, watched carefully over you."

  "But, even so, " Harry said, "what could a person as young and inexperienced as myself possible be able to offer a man as wise and experienced as yourself?"

  Random's eyes glowed over the coals as he saw that Harry refused to fall into his trap. "You owe me, Harry! I ferried you across the river. I saved your life TWICE! I fed you and gave you knowledge. You owe me something."

  Harry looked at him. He was shaken by Random's intensity but not really surprised. Cagily, he asked, "What do I have that you could possibly want or need?"

  The old man settled back on his bed of straw. "Let us not bicker, Harry. I am old and soon will die. I do not need anything except perhaps a friend and companion in my final hours."

  Random's words were spoken with such sudden and honest emotion that Harry felt his defenses drop.

  "I think I need medicine, Harry."

  "All I have is my smoking mixture given to me by Desire; you're certainly welcome to that."

  Random shook his head. "I'm afraid I need something stronger than that, Harry." He turned his head and wistfully gazed out the small window opening. The rain had stopped. He motioned with his hand for Harry to approach closer. He looked at the old man and moved to his side, for somewhere deep within he suspected that Random's cause was fair and just and he further suspected that one day, he might find myself in a similar position.

  "The universe smiles on your passage, Harry. It is a generous universe. I feel sure you will reach your goal." He patted Harry on the arm and continued to stare out the window. "Please forgive me. I know I must appear ridiculous in your eyes. But forgive a sick old man for his craziness, for his old man's stench and uncommitted yearning."

  He turned his deep dark eyes, that seemed somehow to focus on eternity, toward Harry and grasped his arm tightly.

  "It is painful, my friend...waiting to die..."

  Harry reached into his pouch and slowly withdrew his hand. In his palm rested the small, clear capsule given me by Desire. "Take this Random. It will make you well and strong again." he said.

  Random retrieved the clear capsule from Harry's hand and quickly looked away. "You cause me to feel embarrassment, Harry..."

  Harry cut him off with a short movement of his arm. "Your embarrassment is vanity, Random, and as I've heard tell, it has no place within the jungle of Imagination."

  Random looked up at him and smiled for the first time in a long while.

  "You have reflected well upon your recent source of embarrassment my friend. I am sorry, but I feel very tired now." He placed his right hand melodramatically over his heart. "I feel like the last gasp of a frail sparrow being slowly crushed beneath the evolutionary wheel of realization..."

  Harry laughed, "Yeah, I hate it when that happens. Well, I think that you are well on your road to recovery." As he stood, he noticed that the clear capsule was no longer in Random's hand.

  "You really don't have to go, you know..." he said. "This is a pleasant spot and there is still much I could tell you of places and time."

  "Yes," Harry said. "But those are your places and your times. I must go now before it becomes dark again." He began to leave.

  "But..." said Random Cause, slowly getting to his feet, "surely another day wouldn't..."

  Harry turned in the doorway and interrupted him. "To me, it is no longer merely another day."

  The old man gathered his long white robe around him and feebly followed Harry outside onto the path.

  "So...my impetuous young friend, like two rafts approaching over a rough sea, the forces that drive us together eventually form the wash that precludes our touching..."

  Harry appeared not to have heard, and continued down along the path into the jungle, smiling. Finally Random turned and began to make his own way back down the path toward his boat and the river.

  They both silently walked the path in opposite directions, but eventually they turned for one last look; for in the final analysis, love is a duel. Random was now a youthful looking man again in clean white robes. Harry was not surprised, for what he saw was but a reflection of his innermost self. This was, after all, the jungle of the Imagination.