The queen suddenly appeared leery. She looked across at me from the corner of her eye. “And were you presented with a choice?”
“Oh yeah,” I answered, “between Tsaeb, a woman and two guys conjoined at the hip.”
She shook her head gently but with sadness.
Sophia sat twirling her little fingers around a shredded piece of fabric from the blanket, unconcerned and riddled with boredom.
“And you did not choose the woman?”
It had already been made perfectly clear which of the three I had chosen, but the queen’s inquiry was as if making sure she heard me correctly. Maybe there was still a chance, or perhaps I was only joking, or, quite simply mistaken.
“No, I chose Tsaeb....”
The queen sighed and softly shut her eyes. The silence even made Sophia look up from her finger-twirling long enough to listen, shrug and go right back to it.
“You should have chosen Eve,” the queen said.
My chin spun around. I eyed the queen harshly.
“Eve—you’re telling me that woman in the alley was Eve? The Eve?”
The queen nodded.
“Ha! Ha! Looks like you screwed up from the start.”
“Stop it Tsaeb!” I shouted. “I mean Sophia! Don’t even start with me.”
Great, I get rid of Tsaeb for a while and just end up with a female version of him.
“You will need a woman whose mind is open to the Outside and who understands your task to help you fulfill it, one willing to do what has to be done—Eve has been waiting for this chance to redeem herself since The Fall.”
“I can’t believe this....” I thought about it and then realized why Lucifer, in a roundabout way, tried to influence me into choosing the woman. “There I was thinking I was making the right decision by not taking a woman, thinking she was there as a distraction, and—doesn’t surprise me; I’ve always been wrong when it comes to women.
“I’m such an idiot!” I added.
“Not-a-word, Sophia!” I glared over at her knowing beforehand I had stuck my foot in my mouth and she would take full advantage of it. “Not-a-word.”
She grinned smugly.
“God damnit!” I stood abruptly and paced back and forth over roots and vines and dirt, and then stopped in the center of the dais.
“What is done is done,” said the queen.
“But why didn’t he tell me? I’m so sick of these games!”
“They are part of the rules, Norman,” the queen began, “and there are certain things that you, as the one chosen to fulfill The Task, must do on your own. You must be willing to do some and have your wits about you to figure out others. Not everything can be handed to you.” Her expression shifted from serious to soft as she smiled down at me. “Indeed, if it could be made easy, a task with no rules, Lucifer would hand it all to you and be done with it. But to strike such a deal with God naturally will come with stipulations.”
I clenched my fists together angrily and ground my teeth until it hurt. I was more angry with myself for knowing the queen was right, than I was angry at anything or anyone else. Still, I hated it. I hated it now even more because Sophia was right; I made an enormous mistake before I ever got started.
I hit my forehead in the palm of my hand twice, hard.
“You made everything more difficult by not choosing to take Eve, yes, but you have not failed.”
“Uh huh,” said Sophia just after spitting out a chewed-off fingernail, “you’ll prolly just need to find another woman, or something.” She stuck another finger between her teeth and started chewing that one too.
The queen said, “It will be simple to find willing women, but difficult to find one that is not a follower of Lilith.”
“How do I know the difference?” I went to sit back down, but never made it that far. I just stood there on the dais, one sandaled foot propped on a long, twisted root.
“That is why things will be more difficult,” the queen replied. “I suppose you will have to trust your instincts on that one.”
“Oh, then he’s doomed,” laughed Sophia, spitting out the last fingernail. “Man, this is too funny—hey, can I get a cup o’ that tea?”
“That’s enough!” shouted the old woman and me at the same time.
“Please,” the queen said to the old woman, “take our little guest somewhere she will be more appreciated. I have yet a few more things to discuss with the son of Adam before he leaves us.”
The old woman bowed respectfully and met Sophia halfway, who was more than ready to get out of the chamber. The two of them, one waddling, one strutting, disappeared under the trees. There was a rumbling moan as the chamber door opened and closed shortly thereafter.
The queen turned to me then. “Men are always given a choice in the beginning. They choose from Past, Present and Future. Eve was the Past, Tsaeb is the Present and the twins were the Future. Though you did not choose the one that would be needed more at the end of this task, still, all three choices were of equal advantage in their own ways.”
“Yeah, I could see how the twins would be useful now,” I said, as if still talking more to myself than my company. “They would’ve driven me crazy, but knowing what to watch out for around the next corner could’ve kept my ass out of a lot of trouble. Having Eve, the one that could’ve saved me a lot of trouble I know I’ll get into along the way with women—I already have, actually—would’ve been great.” I paused, sat deeply in thought, brows tightened. “But how does Tsaeb help me at all?”
“How does the present ever help anyone, Norman?”
I looked across at the queen, uncertain.
“In the present, one always has a choice,” she began, her words soft and sweet. “The present is usually what you make of it, and it often presents many different opportunities. Yes, the Past could have saved you time and trouble, but it is already written in stone, and the Future, while beneficial for obvious reasons, can hinder your ability to think for yourself. It can make you forget that regardless of any predicted outcome, you still have choices that need not be dictated by the obvious.”
It all rattled my brain a bit, but as I gave it more thought, I understood and wholly agreed.
“Hmmm,” I said looking up again, “now you’re talking like not picking Eve was a good thing.”
The queen smiled. “As I said, all three choices were of equal value in their own way—for your peace of mind, I am merely focusing on the one you chose.”
I thanked her quietly for that, because after all, it did help.
I still had yet to stop blaming myself for passing up my only opportunity to take Eve with me through Creation. I brought up my hand and rubbed my forehead and around my eyes with my fingertips. I sat again finally, slouching against the back of the chair, hands folded loosely in my lap.
“Women will be drawn to you,” the queen said, “and most of them will not know why, but old, young, beautiful and lame, good and wretched; they will be drawn to you in different ways.”
“Like the creature in the Forest of the Cursed,” I thought aloud suddenly. “That’s why she acted so strangely when I was inside the tree trading items. That’s what she meant by trading for anything. She wanted me to trade something for her.”
I was amazed by this belief that I knew to be true.
The queen nodded slowly, agreeing and then retracted several vines that made up her hair and extended them upward into the trees above. Leaves fell gracefully like feathers to the dais floor; a few acorns and strange nuts of sorts bounced off the queen’s root legs and tumbled down the dais steps. A skittish squirrel with a bushy red tail dashed over and snatched one of the nuts and scampered into the trees.
A vine came down from the queen’s hair and slithered and swayed toward me. Wrapped in its end was an oval-shaped mirror with a painted wooden handle.
“Are you ready to see The Way?”
The mirror swayed like a charmed snake in front of me. The glass was turned away so that all I could see w
as the back, which had been finely chiseled to create a picture of a tree in full-bloom. It sat alone in a field with only the sun behind it.
I looked up then. “No, if you want to know the truth, but sure go ahead and show me. I’m getting pretty used to having to do things that I don’t want to do.” I didn’t mean to sound so rude, it was just that I liked the previous conversation much better, and now I was back to facing the reasons why I was here.
“Perhaps your luck will change.”
“I doubt it,” I shook my head, “I doubt it....”
“This mirror will show you how to get out of Fiedel City,” she began, still holding the glass away from me, “and in the right direction first to the Tree of Truth and then toward the Center of Eden where the Tree of Knowledge awaits you.”
I listened carefully; I could not afford any more mistakes, though I was sure I would make them anyway.
“You may take it with you, in case you get lost, but let no other look into the glass for it will consume them, turning them into the thing they desire the most.”
“And that’s bad?” I could hardly believe something so absurd.
“Oh, yes,” she answered with severity, “desire is a dangerous thing.”
I reached out my hand and took the mirror by the handle, almost afraid to turn it around and look into the glass at myself. I wondered exactly how it worked; why a mirror worked more like a map and why she didn’t just give me a map instead. I wondered why I would be able to look into it and no one else.
“Vanity,” said the queen. “The way to the Center of Eden must be hidden. If anyone that wanted could find it, Lilith would be there waiting. She would surely stop you before you completed your task.
“It was my idea,” she added with a proud, but innocent smile, “to hide The Way inside Vanity’s Mirror—you should have seen how angry she was; Vanity, that is. It was marvelous!”
The queen’s excitement gave me a much-needed chuckle.
I never asked, but assumed I was able to look into the mirror because I was from the Outside. Maybe I would’ve eventually asked to know for certain, but my time with the Tree of Life was running out, and the unexpected change in the atmosphere from passive to anxious, was a sign that I would be leaving soon. All other questions were about to be cut short.
The chamber rumbled and moaned. The floor began to ripple as if a giant serpent moved beneath it. And then the queen’s roots, monstrously thick and enormous, burst through the floor. Animals scattered and fled, birds rushed out of the trees in a loud flapping wave. The dais cracked and broke in half, sending me tumbling from the chair and down the steps, which were now nothing more than a broken, uneven heap of gold and marble. I scrambled to my feet, tripped over her growing roots twice and fell on my face, busting my nose before making it to temporary safety. Quickly I fumbled Vanity’s Mirror into the front of my pants.
The Tree of Life had not finished growing.
I only wished that she had at least warned me first, or said a proper goodbye. Her roots and branches moaned and wound upward toward the dark ceiling. Vines crawled the walls, quickly covering them and gripping them into a collapse. And when the ceiling started to fall, sending stone pieces larger than the size of my head down all around me, I knew it was time to get out of there. I ran for the exit, dodging falling stone and rampant animals and dashed toward the first set of stairs I saw. But the stairs were crumbling under the weight of the queen’s crawling roots. The entire fortress was giving way and I was losing hope in getting out before it all came down on top of me. I dashed down several flights of crumbling stairs, glad I was able to run faster than the stairs could be destroyed, and I found my way back into the great hall. The people weren’t so calm and snooty anymore, but I didn’t have time to stop and gloat.
“What did you do?” shouted Sophia as she ran up wearing a new dress. She took my hand and dragged me to follow.
“Get us out of here! Which way? Sophia!”
“This way!” she shouted over the sound of the thunderous, collapsing fortress and the screams of those that lived inside.
Sophia was strong as she dragged me along like a Pit Bull would a ten-year-old boy on the end of a leash. I thought she might succeed in ripping my arm off, and it was more difficult to keep up with her when I had a foreign object stuffed down the front of my pants. Blood from my busted nose steadily ran into my mouth, sweat into my eyes. Amid all the screams, I heard an array of shouts, but could only recall bits and pieces:
“The queen—”
“...an assassin must’ve got in!”
“The queen—”
“...a witch turned the queen into a tr—”
“Someone cursed—”
“We’re all doomed!”
“Run for yer lives!”
“Get out of my way!”
And while most did just that, a few used the opportunity to grab things that surely did not belong to them before joining the smart people and looking for a way out to avoid being flattened. Sophia and I made it to an exit and dashed outside. We kept running to get as far away from the fortress as we could. I hoped Tsaeb had done what he was told and went back to the tavern to wait for us.
People were frantic in the streets. The farther away Sophia and I got, I noticed people were stopping to watch, all of them looking upward toward the sky, as the Tree of Life grew taller than the fortress that once protected her. All signs of her human-like attributes were gone.
We were back where we started in Fiedel City, where Gorg’s carriage had left us. The ground was still thick with mud, the streets still thick with people, some of them clearly new, and this was a sight that I had a difficult time tearing my eyes away from. Such a decision. The Tree of Life and her beautiful destruction, or these people who clearly came from the Outside? They looked around as though lost, while others ran toward the winding black roads that led to the outskirts of the Field of Yesterday, trying to get away from an extraordinary sight that confused and terrified them. There was a woman holding an infant in a bloody blue blanket, the woman’s hair matted and sticky with something I did not want to know. Her face was bruised and her free arm dangled grotesquely at her side, broken. She cried out softly to passersby for help, but no one cared. “Please,” she said, “I don’t know where I am and this...baby looks sick.” And the woman, who clearly had already forgotten that it was her baby she held, disappeared into a thick crowd of onlookers.
They forget everything when they die.
It made me sad. I thought about myself, how I was clinging to life right now on the Outside. How long would I last? Would I too forget everything I had ever known once I was dead? I briefly hoped that perhaps I, being the one sent on The Task, would be exempt from that rule, but something deep down told me that was unlikely.
“In the Name of the queen!” shouted a greasy, toothless man as he jogged by. “What in Creation happened?” And he too disappeared into a crowd.
“I think she stopped growing,” said Sophia pointing.
I tore my eyes away from the new arrivals and looked up. The Tree of Life was as tall and thick as a skyscraper; her great limbs stretching for miles it seemed, snaking and winding perfectly to form a dome-like shelter for her massive trunk. The black mountain behind her served as a formidable wall; its height barely taller than her own, its thousands of trees like miniatures compared to the giant.
Fiedel city suddenly appeared calmer, brighter. It was still a city of filthy, wretched people, dark streets of murder and cannibalism, but from the Great Tree, a sort of new life spilled out over the city below. Nature slowly crept its way from the Tree in the form of fresh grass, animals, flowers and vines. The people in the streets noticed this, stopping to look at a patch of clovers and testing the feel of grass under their feet. It was like watching a child who grew up in a place that never saw snow, study the magic white dust with awe his very first time. Others were afraid to get too close, pulling their children away from flowers as if the flowers were evil
and dangerous.
I saw from the corner of my eye a blond midget running toward us. Tsaeb pushed his way through people, carrying my backpack on his back.
“Stolen! All of it!” he growled. “The door was ripped off its one hinge and the room ransacked! All my gold, all my jewels, gone!” Tsaeb slung the backpack off and tossed it in the mud with a splat. I had never seen him look so distraught. “But they left your bag of crap—we still have plenty of crap!”
Tsaeb didn’t care much about what was going on with what used to be the great tree fortress. He didn’t care one bit that he was close and personal with the man that probably had everything to do with it. “Crap,” he added with a snarl. “What are we going to do with this stuff?” He kicked the backpack.
“It’s called survival,” I answered, too tired and mentally overwhelmed by what was going on to give in to Tsaeb’s belittling this time. I bent over and lifted the backpack out of the mud, adjusting one strap over my left shoulder. “We’ll get by.”
“Oh look,” said Sophia with a snarl, “it’s you.”
“Great! Just great!” Tsaeb shouted. “My shit gets stolen and to make my day worse, you still have the imp!” He threw his hands in the air. “Can we get rid of her now? I mean, seriously, Norman.”
“No,” I said simply while rummaging around in the backpack.
“No?” said Tsaeb.
“No?” said Sophia.
The two actually agreed on something. A fucking shock.
“That’s what I said,” I answered, looking up from the bag at my side, “and don’t ask why, let’s just go.”
“But—”
I threw one scolding glare at them both and they froze.
We went west, leaving the center of the city behind, and traveled through the valley at the base of the mountain. The Tree of Life could always be seen in the distance.
I knew I couldn’t go much further without taking the mirror out of my pants. My walk was awkward and the curious glances from my company just as much. I wanted my consultations with the mirror to remain a secret.
Dirty Eden Page 15
