Lady of the Wasteland

by Jon Jacks

  *

  Viviana couldn’t remember how she’d ended up here either. So she found herself sympathising with the poor bear’s plight.

  It could only be a dream, after all. Not that she could recall falling asleep.

  She looked about her now for some means of helping unchain the bear, reasoning that a dream bear could never hope to do her any real harm.

  And this was what she sensed she had to do; to help the bear.

  There was a dull sparkle of metal amongst the nearby grass and, when Viviana drew closer, she discovered a discarded sword. It was in a terrible state, such that when she tried to use it to hack through the chain, she found she lacked the strength to make any impression upon any of its links.

  Chuckling bitterly at her own foolishness for attempting such a thing, she moved to hack instead through the obviously more fragile post; but the bear raised a paw, stopping her from landing a blow against the post even at the risk of losing his own arm.

  ‘Please, no,’ he gently reproached her, adding as he held out one of his great paws, ‘Maybe, though, I have the strength to sever the chain?’

  Viviana wasn’t sure that the bear would be capable of grasping the sword, yet he seemed to manage it surprisingly well. Raising it high, the bear brought it sweeping down upon the binding chain: and with a piercing clang of colliding metals, a link snapped, along with the blade of the sword.

  Thankfully, once he was released from the post, the bear made no attempt to attack Viviana. Rather, having cast aside the shattered sword, he gracefully and gratefully thanked her as he wiped the honey away from his snout.

  He reached up towards the many leaves surrounding them, bringing one close to his mouth, drinking in the last of the dew before the sun dried it all away.

  He shook his head, as if disappointed by the experience.

  ‘Oh dear: not one of mine, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Not one of yours?’ Viviana repeated, frowning in confusion.

  ‘It’s Aurr,’ the bear explained, ‘the dew, I mean: our memory of yesterday. But that, unfortunately, wasn’t one of my memories.’

  Now the bear was the one who grimaced bemusedly.

  ‘But then, I’m not sure who I really am: and therefore how would I know which were my memories, and which were those of someone else?’

  Far below them, where the sun’s rays hadn’t quite reached yet, there were many other leaves, each with their own covering of dew. The droplets ran off these leaves, plunging even deeper through the tree’s extensive branches, striking other leaves and dislodging their own droplets until it all fell like rain towards unseen roots.

  ‘Then perhaps you’ll find your memories down there,’ Viviana said, pointing off to where she believed the bear would have to travel if he was to remember who he really was.

  *

  Chapter 6

  ‘Viv? Are you okay?’

  ‘Hmn? What?’

  Aden was looking down at her as she lay in the wet grass beneath the tree, his face full of concern.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ she said, sitting up, silently cursing herself for falling asleep on such damp ground, ‘I must have drifted off.’

  Aden grinned.

  ‘I saw you storm off, through the school gates.’ He briefly looked back towards where the school stood. ‘I thought I’d better follow you: make sure you were all right.’

  ‘Sure, yeah: I’m fine. Just that idiot Barn – winding me up.’

  ‘He’s good at winding anyone up.’

  He offered her his hand, helping her up from the ground.

  ‘I heard you’d had a bit of…well, trouble’s not the right word, I suppose.’ He gave her an admiring smile. ‘But we know what he’s like: he’ll want revenge, hit you when you’re not expecting it.’

  She nodded in agreement.

  ‘I’ll take care; keep an eye out for him.’

  ‘I heard the new kid tried to take a hand.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘Yeah: not much use though, other than being around to see I didn’t need his help.’

  Aden chuckled.

  ‘That’s my girl!’

  ‘Who is he?’ Viviana asked. ‘The new kid?’

  Aden shrugged.

  ‘Scott someone or other: only been here a few days. Why the interest?’

  She shrugged: she wasn’t quite sure why this new boy had pricked her interest. She seemed to recognise him from somewhere; even though, of course, that had to be impossible, hadn’t it?

  ‘He was staring at me really weirdly when I…when I got cramp, down the pool.’

  ‘Weirdly?’ Aden repeated doubtfully. ‘He seems okay to me, if a bit drippy.’

  Viviana laughed, throwing her arms around his waist.

  ‘Everyone seems drippy to you.’

  ‘Everyone seems drippy compared to me,’ he corrected her with a mischievous grin, wrapping an arm about her, drawing her closer.

  *

  Aden’s eyes widened, his gaze focused over her shoulder towards where the road skirted the green.

  ‘Police.’

  He said it simply, calmly, with no hint of panic or apprehension.

  Turning her head a little, remaining as calm as he was, Viviana looked back towards the road.

  The police car was slowing, the officer seated on their side studying them closely. Working out their age, figuring they should be at school.

  The car slowed all the more, turning in towards the kerbside, the officer opening his door even before it had come to a complete halt.

  ‘Run!’ said Aden with a gleeful chuckle, taking Viviana’s hand in his.

  *

  Chapter 7

  ‘You take me to all the most romantic places!’

  Viviana laughed as she and Aden ran, hand in hand, through the narrow, meandering ginnels that threaded their way between the closely packed but otherwise randomly positioned houses.

  The police were weighed down with heavy equipment, cumbersome uniforms. They should had been easy enough to outrun. Unfortunately, one of the officers was obviously new to the job: still eager, still in good physical condition.

  ‘I’ll draw him off,’ Aden cried out, noticing that this particular officer wasn’t prepared to give up easily. ‘You head that way,’ he added, letting go of her hand as he indicated with a nod of his head that she should make for the dusty lane heading off towards the park.

  As they split up, the pursuing officer briefly appeared to consider going after Viviana, perhaps viewing her as the easier target. But whether it was because he thought of boys as being the more likely trouble causer, or because Viviana had broken into a surprising display of speed, he decided instead to continue in his pursuit of Aden.

  Even though she had seen that the officer had chased after Aden rather than following her, Viviana didn’t slacken off from her running: she couldn’t be sure that the second officer hadn’t spotted her peeling off, in which case he might continue his own pursuit after her.

  The lane was just one of well-trodden dirt rather than anything intentionally paved, one of those tracks that served more as a shortcut for the locals as opposed to an officially designated path. It ran for most of its way behind a wall of haphazardly joined wooden fences, each one of which had been raised by a homeowner to split off their backyard or garden from a wildly overgrown ditch.

  The ditch, despite being quite shallow, was to be avoided, the stream coursing down its middle more rust than water coloured, a dumping ground for old pushchairs, toys, even broken chairs. Bushes and small trees grew on each side, a tangle of uncared for buddleia, elm and brambles, a dark wood in miniature.

  Almost as if he’d abruptly slipped out of that darkness, the new kid was suddenly blocking Viviana’s way along the narrow path.

  He was directly in her path, unmoving, displaying absolutely no intent to get out of her way. He was unnervingly glaring at her, however, much as he’d seemed to do that day at the pool.

  Without thinking
any further about it, she ducked into the snarled maze of the ditch.

  *

  As soon as she’d ducked into the jumble of chaotically intertwining branches, Viviana remembered why everyone tended to avoid it.

  The wildly crooked stems snagged at your hair, caught on your clothes, dragged at you. The thorns were even worse. No one ever came out of here without either torn clothes or ripped flesh.

  It was always so surprisingly dim and cold in here, the ceiling of a virtual wickerwork of stems blocking of most of the sun’s rays. It meant, too, that there was hardly any colour down here, even the leaves of the bushes being a filthy, faded brown.

  Within this dirge of washed-out tints, however, there were the incongruously tinkling bells of pure white snowdrops. Viviana found this out when, tripping over a fallen, half-rotten and hidden tree trunk, she was sent sprawling through a mulch of old leaves and mud, her nose ending up only a hairsbreadth from being buried beneath another disintegrating log.

  And it was so cold down here, so free of the effects of the sun, that the snowdrop still delicately glistened with morning dew.

  *

  As if the situation Viviana had found herself in wasn’t miserable enough, it began to rain: a rain of the finest drizzle, one that could seep through even the matted ceiling of twisted branches.

  Rising unsteadily to her feet in the wet, slippery mud, she groaned when she saw that her clothes were covered in a filthy sheen. Her hair was matted, tangled; she wished she’d kept it tied back in a ponytail.

  The rain had made everything lying at a distance from her darker, while even the bushes relatively close by appeared hazy, as if she were viewing them through a freezing fog. The track down here rose and fell, even twisted a little, all far more than she recalled it doing last time she had made her way along it (but that was ages ago, when she had been a kid). It even branched a few times, which she definitely couldn’t remember it doing.

  The rain was beginning to turn to ice upon the innumerable stems and twigs around her, solidly linking them together, hemming her in. It could have been a maze, a maze of icy mirrors and glass.

  Although the passageways she found herself being directed down began to widen, the thick coating of frost remained, even when the wickerwork ceiling finally opened up, revealing a grey, wintery sky.

  It wasn’t a clear sky, however. Far from it.

  Arching above everything was another, more distant wickerwork, this one of thick, curling branches, rather than of thinner stems. It was similar in many ways to the vast tree she’d found herself in within her odd daydream earlier, only this one was completely devoid of leaves, and far more snagged and intertwined: more like, in fact, the snarled roots of a tree.

  Amongst these crazily intertwining roots there were flares of movement, the tinkling of disturbed icicles, the crunch of trodden, frosty earth or bark. They could have been men, men who were themselves covered in frost, yet it was difficult for Viviana to determine their true size as they all, thankfully, remained some way off from her: thankfully, that is, because she seemed sure that they were giants, far larger than any real man.

  The monstrous roots were elsewhere so closely packed and tangled that she was effectively in a clearing, or at the very least the largest open space she could see anywhere else close by her. As she walked more towards the centre of this clearing, the freezing fog cutting her vision down to little more than a few yards, even the all-enveloping roots appeared to vanish, such that she could have been in an endless, silent haze.

  Then, ahead of her, she saw a headless giant blocking her path.

  *

  Chapter 8

  The giant’s head lay upon the floor.

  His body, however, remained standing, even moving a little.

  The head, too, blinked, and talked; talked to his own decapitated body.

  ‘…and the hawk you saw sits between the eyes of eagle of awareness, who sits within the tree’s highest branches.’

  ‘Yes, I saw the hawk: but how do I find this eagle?’

  Viviana recognised the second voice: it had all the guttural effects of the bear she had met in her earlier dream, the voice of someone not quite yet used to speaking. And now that she was closer, she could see that the bear had only appeared to be headless because his already low-set head was bowed towards the talking head, such that his massive shoulders had hid it completely from her view.

  ‘Follow the squirrel,’ the disembodied head replied in answer to the bear’s question, ‘as he carries messages – insults mainly – between the eagle and the dragon lying deep within the roots of the tree’s past.’

  The bear’s fur was encased in jewel-like droplets of ice, just about matting it all together. Despite being no longer tied to his post, he seemed to Viviana to be in a worse state than ever, as if he had been travelling for a long time, existing on little or any food.

  She hoped that the bear hadn’t been the one who had cut the giant’s head off. She feared, as she drew closer, that she might see the giant’s headless body lying across the frosty ground. Instead she saw a well, one that remained remarkably free of the worst of the freezing frost.

  And then she realised it wasn’t a well at all, but a hole, a crack, in a sheet of ice.

  ‘Is this someone else seeking a question of me?’ the head asked her, seeing her approach.

  The bear spun around slowly, to see whom the head was greeting.

  ‘Ah, the girl,’ he said, with what might have passed for a smile. ‘The girl who rescued me,’ he added, turning back to talk to the head.

  ‘Then she has no question of me?’

  The head glanced up towards Viviana, giving her the opportunity to ask a question of him.

  She shook her head.

  There wasn’t anything she needed to know.

  ‘And you’re sure that you yourself can’t tell me who I am?’ the bear desperately asked the head once more.

  ‘My well is the well of reason, but self-knowledge – which is something different entirely – comes from the eagle.’

  ‘Why do the dragon and the eagle despise each other?’ Viviana asked, recalling the head’s description of the squirrel helping them trade insults with each other.

  ‘Hah, so you do have a query after all?’ The head grinned. ‘Self-knowledge desires recognition of our better selves, potentially a jumping off point to a higher self, yet fails through its reticence to acknowledge the darkness of our past. Those who live in the past – as the dragon does, eating away at the roots – believe all previous encounters provide our solutions, refusing to recognise anything as being individual and unique.’

  ‘Then if the dragon is devouring the roots of the past…’

  Viviana glanced the bear’s way, hoping that he would realise the urgency of preventing the last of his memories of whom he really was disappearing forever.

  The bear nodded miserably, indicating that he understood the problem he was facing.

  How could he seek awareness if he remained ignorant of his past?

  ‘Ah, I see,’ the head exclaimed elatedly. ‘You aren’t seeking to find out who you are – you need to remember who you were!’

  ‘These are different things, of course.’

  This was a new voice, a woman’s voice.

  A woman was standing by the well, drawing up water from its depths, using a bucket and a long strand of rope.

  ‘How much does our present contain of our past or our future?’ she added, using the drawn water to nourish the snowdrops edging the well’s sides. ‘Our present attitude to the second will determine the third.’

  But of course, it wasn’t really a well. It was a crack within a sheet of ice.

  As the woman appeared to endlessly draw on the water, the ice cracked all the more, trembled, as if about to completely shatter.

  It wasn’t just the covering of ice upon the lake that was shaking, however. Within the grey sky of far off tangled roots, there was also a rumbling, a moving, such that
the whole of heaven and earth could have been quaking fearfully.

  Shards of ice plummeted down from those far off branches. One fell directly into the bear’s hand, granting him a sword. Another, a wider piece, positioned itself along his other arm, becoming his shield.

  Still others cascaded about him, latching onto the frozen beads already enveloping his fur, hardening about him into plates, into greaves and arm pieces, into a resplendent breast protector, a bright and shinning helm.

  Within a moment, he was arrayed in a full complement of glistening white armour.

  And, to anyone who didn’t know the truth, he could so easily have been taken to be a man.

  *

  It was a dark knight, one wearing completely black armour, who was scornfully staring down at Viviana.

  She was, she abruptly realised, still lying in the cloying mud. Still lying by the rotting log and delicately flowering snowdrop.

  The ‘knight’ was no such thing: it was a policeman, wearing near-black body armour.

  ‘I thought I saw you duck in here,’ the officer announced proudly, reaching down to grasp Viviana’s arm, possibly to help her up, probably to ensure she didn’t make another run for it.

  Not that she was going to get very far if she attempted it: her hair was badly snagged upon the surrounding twigs. It would take a while to free herself.

  ‘My partner says you’ve had a couple of warnings about skipping school before…’ the policeman began, his monologue fading as Viviana concentrated on untangling her hair without pulling on the roots too painfully.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Viviana said, when the policeman’s tirade finally came to an end. ‘Please don’t tell mum and dad: they’ll kill me.’

  As she pleaded for mercy, Viviana put on a suitably miserable face. She also let her shoulders sag despondently, an act that wasn’t too difficult to accomplish as she really was a complete mess with her mud strewn clothes and wayward hair.

  The policeman glanced at her doubtfully, pouting as he considered what the best course of action might be.