The Beautiful Side of the Moon

by Leye Adenle

  Both sides were equally matched in magic, so they used weapons and bare hands instead of spells and magical weapons. The occasional trick was tried but the opponent would often know it as well and play the counter trick or a greater one, and occasionally a magician was turned into rock, or spontaneously combusted, or made to use their own sword on themselves, all the while trying in desperate agony to stop the limb that had been taken over.

  Both sides were suffering great losses.

  We got close to the carnage. I put my hand on Ali’s shoulder and we stopped. He looked at me. I shook my head. He would not go further. Too many good people were already dead.

  I entered the battle slowly, looking around and taking account of where the magicians on my side were. I saw Adesua fighting with her bare hands against a man who wielded a wooden club with spikes of steel. I saw my mother thrust a sword into the belly of a man who was poised to strike her with a longer sword held over his head in both his hands.

  The magician’s blood dripped from the blade of my mum’s weapon, which now protruded from the attacker’s back. Titus Titus was gleefully swinging his sword and slitting multiple throats with each swing. I flew towards him. He saw me coming and commanded his companions to fly to me.

  The magicians surrounded me, with their weapons at the ready. I floated in their midst, keeping my eyes on Titus Titus through the throng. All of a sudden they charged at me as one, and my heart was filled with great pain and sadness. I did not want to kill anyone. I stayed as I was and let them thrust their daggers and swords into my body. They attacked my body again and again and continued until they were exhausted. When they stopped to assess the damage they’d caused, I let them see that my body was still whole and their weapons had only hurt my feelings. I hoped they would give up but they attacked again. I took a sword from one of them, and in a flash I had slain them all. Pieces of my attackers fell from the sky.

  Titus Titus, looking at me, grabbed a magician, sliced her throat, and left her body to fall. As he fled my advance, he caught magicians at random and killed them. It did not matter if they were on his side or not. By his action he was telling me to stop following him, and he was killing a token few to illustrate how many more he was willing and able to destroy. His ship rose from the valley and hovered above the battle. It sent a beam of light down to him but he still managed to grab one more magician from a duel and slice his head clean off his body.

  He escaped into his ship and flew away across the sky, then up into the clouds and space beyond.

  I could go after him. I could outfly his ship, but all around me lives were being lost for nothing. I’d had enough.

  I had seen Adesua do it. I split myself into two, and each of the two into two more, and on and on, and each of me joined a fight. I experienced each of my selves and each of the battles that I took over, and there was no com- promise to attention or ability. I was me, a thousand times in a thousand places, fighting a thousand battles, and yet I was the same person in all those places at the same time, facing a thousand different opponents and making a thousand different decisions at the same time. I was not divided. I was multiplied. I was in many places at the same time.

  Each of the others had to fight me and the person they had been fighting before me. They had no chance. They saw me everywhere and realised what had happened. They saw their members falling dead from the sky. One by one they dropped their weapons. Some of them flew away while others stayed and offered their necks. I did not allow any surrendering magician to be killed.

  When all of the others had either fled or stayed to join us, I brought myself back into one body. One by one the magicians descended to the ground, where the remains of our fallen friends and foes lay on soil red and wet with the blood that had rained down from the war above. To see the ground littered like that, with the limbs and torsos and gutted bodies of magnificent men and women who could take to the sky and fly, broke my soul. I managed a few steps through the carnage then I fell to my knees, buried my hands in my palms, and wept.

  Chapter 60 E Pluribus Unum

  I cried into my palms. My tears fell through my fingers onto the ground below. The blood-soaked soil gave up what it had drunk. The blood of the fallen seeped up through the ground, gathered around me and crawled up my body. Their blood covered me up to the crown of my head and dripped back to the ground below. Their voices wailed in agony, filling my soul.

  I looked up. The magicians were standing around me. ‘God help us,’ someone said. ‘He is going to kill us all.’

  Everyone looked up to the sky where the magician pointed.

  As I stood up, the blood washed off me and sank back into the ground. I followed the other magicians’ gaze and I saw it too. It was nothing like I had ever seen before. It was a colour I had never seen before. It was a shape I had never seen before. It was as big as an entire city block and it must have been as heavy too, yet it sailed gently in the air towards us, the clouds parting in front of it long before it even reached them. On top of it, Titus Titus stood like an ant on the back of a whale.

  The thing was a ship, but it was not from the Earth or the moon, and the beings inside it must have been the size of several dinosaurs.

  I realised what Titus Titus had done. He had gone to another dimension only he could access, and he had brought back its inhabitants against whom our weapons were ineffectual and for whom our magic was non-existent. If he couldn’t conquer the Earth, he meant to destroy it.

  My mother made her way to the front of the crowd and stood between Adesua and Professor Ochuko.

  ‘It has no shadow,’ I said.

  She looked under the thing at the valley it crossed, where its shadow should have been. ‘What does that mean?’ she asked.

  ‘I know where it’s from,’ I said.

  At that moment I understood that, during my time in the wilderness of the moon, and as I lay dying alone in a crater that would be my grave, it had not been an hallucination when Titus Titus took me away and showed me all the wonders I could roam and master, if only I would be like him and join the others. When he took me to all those places he hoped I would forsake my side of the divide for, we also came upon a place where shadows did not exist. It was to this place that he had gone to bring this entity that we were powerless against. All I had to do was find its antithesis which must exist in one of the countless universes that a magician such as Titus Titus could fly his ship to.

  I stepped into a passage that was on my left. To the magicians watching me it would have appeared as if I had stepped halfway into an invisible door. They would have seen half of me still standing and the other half vanished. And then they would have seen the rest of me flatten like a board and fold back lengthwise, and the outer part of the fold would have vanished as well, leaving a slice of me that was flat, and only as wide as the measurement from the tip of my nose to the edge of my eye. And finally this slice of me that remained unsupported in the air would have folded in half and the two halves coming together would have vanished.

  I had entered into not one, but several passageways all at once, as I had only seconds to find the thing that could defeat the shadowless beast before it got to the magicians. I had countless places to go in only a few seconds.

  In one dimension I found a world where shadows were the past and the future, depending on the time of day, but this was not the thing I sought. In another place I found a world where it was the shadows that cast the beings, and not the other way round, but it too was not what I was looking for.

  I searched a million places and discovered a trillion new things, but I did not stop until I found the one thing that could win the war for me, and the magicians, and all the lifeforms on Earth. When I found it I took it back with me. I led it down from the sky behind Titus Titus atop his shadowless being. Had he been able to, from where he stood atop his alien, he could have looked down and seen a shadow the size of a city, crawling over the hills and into the valley, gaining on his beast whose colour could not be describ
ed.

  When an unstoppable force meets an immovable object, they slide together into a place where their meeting is possible; where the one cannot exist without the other. When a shadowless thing is matched with a thing-less shadow, together they become of the world where a shadow belongs to a thing and a thing has a shadow. They become of our world.

  The shadow without a thing and the thing without a shadow aligned, and in an instant they became one thing and its shadow. And in that same instance gravity found the new thing, because on Earth, a mass the size of a city could not sail through the air.

  It dropped from the sky and crashed into the valley below. The ground trembled with the force of several earthquakes, and a plume of dust several miles wide rose from the valley.

  A blurred figure flew out of the cloud of dust. It was Titus Titus.

  I decided to show him what I could do.

  I walked towards him where he hovered in the sky. Each step I took made me bigger by two, and as I grew, my human body transformed and I became the black void of the universe, and in me were all the galaxies and all their stars and all the planets and all the comets and everything else in all creation.

  I stopped growing when my face was level with where he stood in the sky. My head was the size of his entire body.

  ‘You cannot do anything to me,’ he said. ‘I know who you are. I will say the word and you will let me go.’

  ‘Go,’ I said. Only he heard it.

  A hole opened up behind him. Its edges were like flowing water, entwining and morphing, and its centre was deep and black with the darkness of a place beyond planets and stars.

  He cast his face to the right, to the fading glow and the orange rays that fanned out and coloured the still clouds, and his nose twitched.

  ‘I never like this place. It’s the smell of your sun. I can’t stand it,’ he said. ‘It makes me want to kill and destroy.’

  He looked at me. He floated backwards into the hole, to a place far from anywhere he thought I might already be waiting for him. The hole collapsed onto itself and van- ished, and he was gone.

  I turned and walked back to the magicians, reducing by half with each step until I was my normal size once more, and had changed back into my human form.

  Professor Ochuko walked up to me and stood in front of me. He squinted as he looked into my eyes. He seemed to be searching for something. Then his face brightened with shock and with recognition and he said, ‘E pluribus unum.’

  The other magicians also looked at me as though they had discovered something profound. They were silent and their hearts were filled with awe. They made way for me as I walked through the gathering to my mother and Adesua who stood side by side holding hands. They also looked at me with uncertainty and fear. I embraced them.

  Chapter 61 Splitting Atoms

  The sun set.

  We formed a circle around the slain and held hands. I was happy to see Brother Moses on the other side of the circle from me. He was holding my mum’s hand. My mum was holding Adesua’s hand – I had left the two women to go and talk with Professor Ochuko who wanted to know where I’d been and what I’d seen there. Brother Moses smiled at me and winked, and I nodded in response.

  Professor Ochuko raised his hands and, along with them, my hand and the hand of the magician on his other side. In two waves that swelled out from us, all the other magicians raised their hands as well.

  Professor Ochuko began to hum a slow and mourn- ful melody that all the other magicians knew. Sparks of fire danced across the bodies in the circle. The tiny sparks multiplied and formed a brilliant waving blanket of light that covered the departed.

  The blanket of light rose slowly as we continued to hum and the bodies, now whole again, lifted off the ground with the light, and were carried up past our faces and up above our heads, and they continued rising as one solid body of beautiful, densely packed, brilliant white lights.

  They rose up into the sky and kept rising, on and on, past the Earth’s atmosphere, becoming a sparkling dot amidst the stars as they sailed on into space where great magicians are buried.

  We all returned to the glasshouse. Not one person was injured, because magicians are efficient in war and always manage to kill.

  Reginald the cat was holding court in the middle of a group of magicians that were laughing at his stories. For the first time I could hear what he was saying. He looked at me. He had felt me hearing him. He winked. I smiled and winked back. Brother Moses and my mother were listening to an old lady who I hadn’t met.

  Adesua was standing alone. She saw me looking at her. She turned and walked out into the night and I walked after her.

  The full moon was radiant in the night sky. I spent a few moments gazing at it.

  ‘We took Rachel home,’ Adesua said.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘She didn’t want to go,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  She stared at my face. She still showed no emotion. ‘I’m not afraid of you, you know,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Stop doing that. I don’t want you to know. I just want you to be you.’

  ‘Ok.’

  She studied my face.

  ‘He will return,’ she said.

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘I lost something that belongs to you.’

  ‘If you go, you might not return.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I don’t want you to go.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Does it matter why? Would it make you stay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I will not tell you.’

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘So, what now?’

  ‘I will go and get your soul back, and when I return we will continue to perform wherever we find an audience.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Just like that.’

  We both stood still and silent for a while. She looked over the valley upon which the other worldly thing lay destroyed and covered in shadows, like the humps of a mountain that had always been there.

  She had asked me not to, so I did not know what was on her mind.

  ‘Adesua,’ I said, ‘don’t you find it strange that the day after the syzygy, the rest of the world went back to life as normal?’

  ‘They were told it was a solar flare.’

  ‘How did my mother know we were in trouble in Faka fiki? She just happened to fly over?’

  ‘Brother Moses called her.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘When Titus Titus held his leg. He had his phone on the other side. And he just happened to have his phone?’

  ‘What are you getting at, Osaretin?’

  I wasn’t sure myself. It was a nagging feeling that I was still missing something. Something I’d not yet learned about myself, about magic, about Titus Titus. That there was more to everything that had happened than I yet fully understood, but when she said my name I smiled. She looked puzzled. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘That’s the first time I’ve heard you say my name,’ I said.

  She looked away as if she didn’t want me to see her smiling. She dug her hand into her pocket and took out a coin. She held it up. ‘Remember this?’ she said.

  I nodded. It was Brother Moses’ coin. The smile was still upon her face. It reminded me of when we first met.

  She tossed the coin and hid it in her palm against the back of her hand.

  ‘Heads,’ I said.

  She checked and she smiled even wider. She tossed the coin again.

  ‘Heads.’

  She checked and chuckled. We were like two kids playing our favourite game.

  She tossed it again. While the coin was still spinning in the air I called it, ‘Heads.’

  She caught the coin and checked it. Her smile wavered.

  It thinned out into a parted-lip uncertainty.

  B
efore she picked the coin up again I called it. ‘Heads.’

  Her fingers shook as she picked up the coin and tossed it. It landed heads on the back of her hand.

  She looked at me with eyes that were both in awe and terrified.

  At that moment I saw her with a clarity with which I’d never seen her nor anyone before. It was a clarity that began in me, filled me up, and radiated from me, illuminating everything around. Her brown eyes yielded to me and let me see through to her mind and into her being. I travelled through every molecule that she was made of.

  I saw her beginning and her end, and her every beginning and her every end. I saw all that she was and all that she could be. I saw her secrets, her fears, her hopes, her wishes, her past lovers, and her future lovers as well. I knew all of her weakness and all of her strengths. She could split atoms with her mind but she didn’t know it. She once sat next to a master of the universe but she didn’t notice. She would be cured of cancer before she was even diagnosed with it. She would continue to love me, then one day she would begin to resent me. The taste of vanilla ice cream would be the last thought on her mind as she died several decades away. I knew her from before she was born. From before her parents were born. From before she was formed in the womb.

  I looked past her to the magicians in the glass house. Their secrets were open to me as if they had always been open to me. I looked around. Everything and every being revealed their pasts and their futures to me. I entered her mind and looked at myself through her eyes and saw what I was and what I had become. I wasn’t myself any longer. I was the son, and I was my father, and I was something else as well – something that could go away and defeat death and bring back her soul even before I left.

  Something that could call things that were not into being. Something that created universes and everything in them. Something powerful and awesome. Something magnificent and lonely.

  I remembered everything. From the beginning and from every beginning I had created.

  I once walked amongst humans. I wanted to know what they had become. And for a short while I forgot who I was, but that was also part of my plan.