by Aaron D. Key
Books by Aaron D. Key
Herai
First in the
Wheel of Eight Series
Aaron Key was born in Peterborough, England in the days in which it was a sedate city on the edge of the fens. He has led a quiet life.
Damon Ich is his second book.
ISBN – 13: 979-8576377985
Copyright @Aaron D Key 2020
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the purchaser.
To
The One I love most
My wheel of Eight - most constant and faithful friends
With eternal gratitude to my editor, Sophie Playle of Liminal Pages.
Contents
The Gardener’s Tale
The Stranger in the Night
Saving Everything He Has Ever Known
Preparing to Cross the Desert
The Tower
The City
Avoiding Conflict
Trying to Impress Koa
The Two Sides of Glant
Back in Herron
Arranging One’s Own Conception
Elena Appears
Meeting Rael
A Dangerous Loophole
Winter in the Gardener’s Heart
A Trip to Scotland
Christmas and a Decision
Shopping in Scotland
A New Resolve and a Revelation
Memories
Explanations
Becoming Who I Should Have Been
Dealing With Aeth
The Gardener’s Holiday
PROLOGUE
The Gardener’s Tale
My name is, well my name is irrelevant. I felt that I should start by introducing myself as I might do if I met you, the reader, in person but I know really that I am not important. I will relate only a few small facts about myself to explain where the story I am about to tell you comes from. I am a gardener by trade. I have spent forty-five years, this being my age, being haunted by dreams and images of different places and people. Some people think that I am stupid; I see it in their eyes, but I do not feel stupid. I am a slow thinker but a deep thinker and my mind is often not where it should be: in the present, in its place with my body and my surroundings.
The wanderings of my mind give me pleasure and make the slings and arrows of fortune no more than bee stings to be brushed aside. At least I try and think so.
On the whole I have lived a happy life. I enjoy my job, although I often wish that I was in the garden of my dreams, not the real gardens I work in to pay my way. I was lucky when younger to have met someone who loved me in spite of my faults and we had many happy years together until their recent and premature death: another slingshot that ached more than most.
So now I work slower than I used to and my mind is patching together all the bits of the story that runs in my head like the continuous strip of writing along the bottom of the news on television.
Perhaps the grief has made me lose my mind. I do not feel mad, just divorced from the reality around me, and I find comfort in my story. The way the story is written here it looks as though my life has been nothing but one continual denial of reality, but this alternative life came to me in tiny pieces. Some when I was an unhappy child, some in my adult years, and more frequently and more clearly now in my lonely and desolate state. Each time I remembered a section, I wrote it on a piece of paper. For years I had a box full of scraps taken from wherever I was when the memory came: some on napkins, or diaries, or beer mats, or menus. Only recently I decided that I needed to shake myself out of the lethargy I had fallen into, and so I tentatively entered the digital age. Using a laptop, I stored and rearranged and played with all the fragments until at last this almost comprehensible narrative emerged …
CHAPTER ONE
The Stranger in the Night
Rael’s stars were in the sky. An unsettling occurrence, though fortunately rare. The crescent moon gloried in its coronet of diamond stars. I drifted in and out of troubled sleep – not even in my bed: fully dressed, feet up in a window seat – for an hour or so until I finally gave up.
I was troubled by something, and the only thing I knew I could do to relieve this was what I always did. I needed to get back to work to settle the unease within me. So I left the tower in which I lived, made my way down the spiral staircase glowing with stored sunlight, although it was night outside, and paused for a moment under a deeply shadowed archway to see the lawn stretching to the edge of the lake. Where the moon shone on it directly, the water was silver: completely calm and glass-like, enclosed on the far side by the shadow of mountains
Everything was still. There was no wind to rustle through the trees. Birds were hushed as if waiting. In any other world I would have said that it felt like snow was on its way with that strange ability it had to muffle the world even before it smothered the ground, but in Herron we never saw snow – in my lifetime, at least.
I lived in a blessed world, I mused as I walked along the edge of the lake towards the river. It was the most beautiful place: a Garden of Eden with everything that a person’s soul truly desired, except perhaps a sea, which was something I had searched for and never found, but after all argued this was just a little omission. I was the holder of my ancestor’s power, passed down to one of us at a time to protect our world and to help ease suffering on other worlds. My ancestor acquired this power when he came mysteriously to this world. A potent ability to do anything. He was a moral man, a trait perhaps borne out of experience, and so he passed down the power stripped of its ability to kill. I had never desired to kill so this limitation did not bother me.
I reached a stone bridge, crossed over and made my way towards Rael’s Hill; well, more of a mound than a hill, but still the view from the top was impressive. It was surrounded by a river, the marshland that formed the northern end of the lake, and the edge of the forest that separated the valley of Herron from elsewhere.
I climbed to the top with a sense of relief and entered the crowning circle of trees knowing that the work would make me forget myself, hopefully calm the nervous tension chattering through all my muscles. Sometimes it was the work itself that caused the tension: a job impatient to be done.
From this place I travelled to other places, other times where I could help, in a small way, some of the terrible victims of fate. I never knew where I was going or what I would see until I got there. “Never think of those you missed, who were left without help. Only think of the contribution you made to those you did help.” This is what my guardian had taught me. She had been the last protector before me. She should have been there still, and I, a carefree young man, but life was not perfect.
Each deed was of incredible importance to that one person or group of people … I tried to think and not of the abyss: the impossible task of reaching everyone that needed help. I thought it was this abyss she had fallen into and I was keen not to follow her.
* * *
I travelled, and sighed when I found myself in a dark, comfortless stone room with the smell of blood and sweat overpowering everything else. This happened to me too often, I thought with a wave of self-pity. Where were the protecting angels that assured me that humankind was worth saving, that this was not normal but just an occupational hazard for me?
What was unusual, I saw suddenly, and it did surprise me, was that the man who was trying his best to cause his pain was crying silently. There was no expression on his face except that of effort expended, but silently tears rolled down his face and cleared two streaks of pale skin. He was crying out of pity not for the man who was being beaten but for himself. He had a sense of loss, of anger inside him that meant he was enjoying beating the stranger in front of him. Realising his own enjoyment scared him, though, and made him pity himself for his loss of soul.
What was also strange, I realised, was that the man who was being beaten was drunk, almost senseless – not completely beyond the pain itself but beyond the fear and imagination that would have made it even worse. I wouldn’t have allowed that if I had ever wanted to torture someone. What would be the point? I often thought it was good that I had a conscience as I would have made a most effective tyrant.
There was also a discrepancy between the clothes of the two men involved. The torturer was dressed in rags of a handmade cloth-like linen. He matched his surroundings, which spoke of a pre-industrial, almost Dark Age existence. The man being beaten was wearing the remains of manufactured dyed woollen trousers and a shirt that had been stitched by a machine. There were metal trims on his jacket, which was lying on the floor beside him; a soldier’s uniform, I guessed. He had definitely experienced industrialisation and yet he was here in this time and space. This was not a normal situation – even for me.
All this confusion in my mind, all these questions were only prolonging the ordeal, I realised with a start. My usual practice was to provide an illusion in which the tortured soul had died and to allow the illusion to continue until their body had been disposed of in whatever way the protagonist had planned. This time the universe was nudging me, just like a mother rabbit nudges her blind young to guide them and keep them safe, and the nudging said that he should vanish from this place he should never have been in. So he did, with a sudden jolt of confusion from his torturer as a fist intended to meet solid flesh floundered in air and, by the sound of it, the man wrenched a muscle. I followed quickly with a sense of achievement and amusement.
* * *
We were back where I had started: on the hilltop inside a circle of trees burdened with red berries that blew in the wind as if determined to remind me how much blood a body had in it and how the worst place to see it was flying through the air in droplets. The moon within the circle of trees was separate from the moon outside and yet the sky also showed Rael’s stars, a double warning. I was able to see clearly the man slumped beside me, unconscious now. I hadn’t intended to bring him to my home. I had relied upon the universe to take me to the place the man should be in. I was fairly sure he hadn’t come from my world, but if the universe told me he belonged here I had no choice than to trust it.
Checking him, I saw that he was not too badly injured. He was covered in bruises and cuts and there were a few broken bones but no major internal damage. To a tiny degree I revised my opinion of the torturer. He knew what he was doing – whether he had only just started and was making sure that a corpse was not all that was left to receive his best work or whether he was doing a job as well as he could without maiming the man.
I mended his broken bones, healed cuts, and passed time through bruises so that their colour and shape danced in front of me and eventually faded. Then I washed his face and saw that what I had thought was hair was just streaks of grime; his real hair was cut closely to the bone. I stared thoughtfully at his face, hoping to find some answer, some clue as to what I should do next, and then a cold fear settled on me.
I shook my head to clear the insane thought that had crowded my brain. Was this man me? There was a worrying resemblance. We were not identical but allowing for the passing of time and experience, he could have been me. That would explain why he needed to be here too. Perhaps he needed to talk to me, to warn me of a future problem.
Time travel was troubling. I did not understand it completely. I only knew that it was possible because I did it all the time without thought, although it could lead to complications. My revered ancestor, after whom Rael’s Hill had been named, had spent a long and interesting life travelling backwards and forwards through time, eventually concluding that the human brain could not deal with this process except to start at the beginning, awaiting what followed – the normal way of things. He suggested a few rules of guidance that he hoped would reduce the complications. These were: never travel in your own time or place; and never to try to meet a future or past version of yourself or your relatives. I did not like the sound of complications and I so tried to follow his guidance.
In a state of uncertainty then, I moved myself and the man to my room. There were no other options unless I was prepared to wake people from their slumbers to delegate responsibility for my refugee. He was still unconscious. His mind had been through an ordeal from which it needed to recover. I left him on my bed as I ran downstairs to get leftover food in case he woke and was hungry. Then I returned to my position on the window seat, reclining with one foot on the ledge. At last I felt I could relax. The universe was finished with me. I had done what it required, and I pushed away the uncomfortable suspicion that my future was going to get complicated.
My body grew as light as air. I relaxed until I couldn’t feel anything supporting me as my mind gently mulled over the events of the day. It came as a sudden cold shock to be pulled out of sleep by a clattering crack – the sound of wood being broken.
I leaped to my feet. The only light was the moonlight that reached a sixth of the room and showed by contrast a dark figure blundering around, listing from side to side like a boat in a storm.
“Hello,” I said cautiously.
“Where am I?” a voice demanded, with the dry hoarseness of a desert corpse.
“We are in Herron,” I said. “Have you heard of it?”
The blundering stopped and the figure raised its head as if looking around. I looked back and saw the man who looked a lot like me walking into the moonlight confusedly, clothes hanging off him like a mummy’s bandages. His face was full of fear and horror. I tried to sense his mind and there was nothing there, so I also was afraid.
“I don’t recognise the name or the place. It’s not surprising. I haven’t recognised anything since I fell asleep this afternoon. Who the hell are you anyway? Where are you?”
He sounded angry and I quickly found the light.
“Did you torture me?” he hissed as he turned toward me swift as a pouncing cat.
“No, I rescued you,” I rushed to my defence, feeling not in danger but under fire. “I rescued you and brought you to my home, Herron.”
I repeated the name, hoping it would spark recognition if he was a future version of me. I didn’t really believe it anymore, seeing his face in motion. There was energy there and fire, anger and confusion: not the vague hopefulness I associated with my own features. He backed down a little and mumbled something indistinct.
I looked at him again and a halting realisation filled me with excitement, but this time I was careful not to leap to conclusions. Instead I walked to a picture I knew well and looked at it carefully. He followed me, his naked feet padding softly on the stone floor, and he stood staring with a look of horror at a picture of my ancestor, Rael, standing happily in the garden with his wife and son. There was nothing in the picture to inspire this horror – it seemed to be a happy scene, a spring day in the sunshine – but I could see his point. The stranger was a bit like me but an almost perfect replica of my ancestor, except for their differing expressions.
“Why have you got a picture of me and my wife on your wall?” he asked in a hushed tone.
&
nbsp; “I think you are my ancestor,” I said, knowing that I would not be believed. Who could believe me? “His name was Rael.”
“That is my name,” he answered with a solemn frown. “I don’t know how you know me,” he snapped, as if afraid I was trying to trap him into something he could not see.
I smiled happily now. I suppose the name could have been a coincidence, but it was rare enough to make it unlikely. He recognised the woman next to him as his wife as well. Surely that was proof. It was still a difficult tale to explain but I ploughed on regardless because I looked up to Rael. I trusted in his ability to understand my drivel.
“My name is Damon Ich. I am an ancestor of yours from your future. You are, I assume, a man of normal abilities. One day you will acquire the ability to travel in time and you will come here to live.”
“I am hallucinating! Nothing makes any sense.”
“Don’t try to understand it,” I said with impatience. “Just believe me. One day in your future you will live here. That is sufficient. I don’t know why you are here now. You are a figure out of history to me.”
Rael slumped down on a convenient chair and held his head in his hands. I dragged a quilt from the bed and covered his shoulders, trying to be patient and waiting silently. Minutes passed and Rael started to laugh in an unhealthy way. Then he was suddenly quiet as if dragging his mind back from the abyss.
“I have never been here before and I don’t have any children – yet? Are you saying that I am a ghost? I hadn’t realised that I had died, though I wouldn’t be surprised after my experiences today.”
“I don’t think that you’re dead,” I said earnestly. I felt a little overwhelmed and liable to talk idiotically. “You lived here, in this very room, for years and years. You’d recognise something, I’m sure, if you’d been here before – so I think that you must be Rael before you became the Rael I’ve heard of. You will live here, but you haven’t done so yet. I don’t know why you’re here now. I am the fifth protector of Herron after you, sir.”
