by Willow Rose
“Manolo! What is in your hand?” it asked.
At first he didn’t hear it, but the spirit tried again and this time it was like a wall of glass shattered inside of his head.
“Look in your hand!”
So Manolo did.
He saw the bronze shield he was still holding on to. With his last strength he lifted it high up in the air and as the shield hit the light from the moon it shaped a blue light, like a shelter that went all around Manolo’s body and protected him.
He stood still and listened. The voice was gone.
Instead, he now saw the truth about himself. He saw himself for who he really was. It was like falling from a stage in the middle of the show. He could do nothing but laugh at himself for acting so foolish, thinking these things about himself, being all high and mighty and important.
He saw Sara standing right next to him. She was talking, her lips were moving but no sound came out from her mouth. All of her body was frozen in the same position that she had been in when he left her. Her eyes were wide open and stared stiff into empty air. Her hands were reaching out as if she had been saying something important when a sudden freeze came upon her.
Manolo walked towards her with the shield. Then he went as close to her as possible putting the shield over her head. The blue light covered her body and her arms started creaking. Little by little it was like she thawed. First her fingers and hands, then the arms and legs started moving. Her neck made a huge creaking sound and she moved her head. She looked at him, blinking her eyes as if she saw him for the first time. And maybe it felt a little like that in the beginning because she had to get her memory back little by little, since the truth sometimes can be very hard to realize.
And then she burst in to a bubbly laughter.
The most beautiful enchanting laughter Manolo had ever heard. The laughter came because she now saw everything for what it was and realized just how silly she had been.
“Manolo?” she said.
”That’s me.”
”Wow,” she smiled and held a hand to her head. “You won’t believe it. I had the strangest dream.”
Manolo smiled. Not because it was funny, but because he did believe it. And he knew how she felt.
“Come on,” he said. “We’d better hurry up and get out of here.”
As they passed through the forest carrying the protective shield over their heads, Manolo blew a small fire to erase their trail behind them. Any smell or footprint was gone, and when the black bear a few seconds later reached the spot where the two had been standing, he saw the trunks and the moon in the sky, but there was no one in sight.
The trail he had been following was broken off and, try it as he might, he could not pick up their smell again.
14
THE CITY OF LIGHTS
Towards sunrise, our two travelers reached the end of Vamila. The high pine trunks stopped and they found themselves by a small mountain lake. The lake, however, had almost dried up and had become more like a bog. Clouds of mist drifted over them. It was said about that particular sort of mist that the Bog-Woman was brewing her magical potion. But that was just a saying. As far as Sara knew no one had ever really seen this supposedly bog-woman.
They were both hungry but they had run out of food and water. There was nothing left for them but to keep on walking. The sky was dark but every now and then they spotted their own cloud leading them through the bog.
Here and there they distinguished little clumps of trees as they walked through the muddy water. It was next to impossible to make out where there was solid ground. Step by step they tested the fitness of the ground trying not to sink in. The further they went into the bog the more sluggish became their movements.
How long they waded and waded no one knows, but the mist grew thicker and thicker making it almost impossible to see where they were going.
At one point Sara wanted to sit down, feeling ever so tired of all this wandering, fighting the heavy mud. She told Manolo that she just had to sit down for one second.
“Don’t!” he said.
But it was too late. She sat down in the mud, not caring about anything but to get a little rest. Soon after she sank in to her belly.
“Sara,” Manolo said. “You need to get up before you sink in too deep and can’t get up.”
She shook her head.
“I am so tired, Manolo. I need to rest.”
The mud around her seemed to slowly be swallowing her and Manolo grabbed her arms.
“Get up! You must not give in.”
Now, Sara too realized that she was sinking and started fighting it.
Desperately Manolo pulled both her arms.
“Help me, Manolo. I can’t get up!” She looked at him with great fear in her brown eyes.
Her arms hurt badly as Manolo pulled all he could. Sara tried to climb out on her own but as she did she just sank in deeper. And then she panicked and began to desperately fight against the mud that was grabbing and holding her body.
“Don’t move,” Manolo said. “It will just make it worse.”
He looked her in her panicking eyes and she thought for a moment of the stallion that they had lost in the Singing Cave. It too had panicked only making things worse for itself. So she calmed down, taking in a few deep breaths while the mud reached her neck. Her eyes looked at Manolo’s begging for him to save her.
“I am going to pull one big one now, okay?” he said.
She would have nodded but she couldn’t. She had a hard time moving any body parts. Only her head and her arms were above the mud.
Then she felt like her arms were being ripped off her body. Manolo pulled with all of his strength and slowly she felt the mud let go of her shoulders and neck. With a strange squashing sound that sounded to Sara like a great deep sigh, the mud gave up and let her body go.
With some cleaner water from a pond in the bog they got her almost cleaned up and continued their walk.
“You have to keep moving,” he said with great concern in his voice. “If you stop, you’ll sink in.”
For hours and hours the two of them walked the bog while the mist got thicker and thicker. It seemed to be wrapping itself all around them and at one point they couldn’t even see their own hand if they stretched it out in front of them, let alone the cloud in the sky they were supposed to follow.
They were on their own walking in thick water up to their waist.
At last, when they had gone heaven knows how far, they heard a soft sound in the distance. They stopped and listened.
The sound came closer. It was a singing voice, gentle and small and so very, very sad. Almost sobbing at times. This lamenting song felt like a warm breeze in the cold and moist air. Then it stopped in one place, rose and fell, rose and fell until it seemed to be all around them, moving in circles.
They stood still and waited.
Little by little, the circle became smaller and out of the thick mist emerged four singing girls, all pale and white as the cleanest sheet. They were dancing around them. Around and around. Spinning and turning, reaching out their hands trying to entice Manolo to dance with them. But as they turned, Sara and Manolo both noticed that the girls were hollow in their backs.
“They are elves,” Manolo said. “The saying is that they appear on the front to be lovely and beautiful but inside they are hollow and empty.”
Sara stared at the young women who were more beautiful than any human she had ever seen. Their faces were fair and white, the hair blond and light, swirling as they danced.
“They are going to try and lure us to dance with them. Once you do you will lose your mind. They will either dance with you until you drop dead of exhaustion or they will make you go crazy and take you with them to Álfheim, the city where they live with their king, Völundr, the ruler of the elves. In there you will be their prisoner.”
“So just don’t dance? Is that it?”
“Yes. By all means just don’t dance.”
The elves kept
on singing and dancing and little by little Sara began to understand the words.
Oh listen to us.
Listen to our song
We dance for you
All day long
Listen to us
Please be nice
Dance with us today
We will not ask twice
Oh come ye and dance
Please, it is for your best!
Or else before the rooster crows
Silver knives will put your heart at rest
The Bog-Woman is coming your way
She is cooking her potion as we speak
Look at the mist she is cooking up
Tonight she will have her greatest feast
Sara had to admit the song was alluring and a little scary. She had never heard of the Bog-Woman except for that old saying about the mist. She never thought it might be real.
As the women were dancing trying to get Manolo to dance with them, Sara suddenly saw some light in the distance. There was more than one light, and they were moving in different directions. First the light was up in the air, then shortly after it was on the ground. Then it disappeared for a while until it reappeared in a different spot. A few seconds Sara thought she had only been dreaming, but a little later she thought she heard voices. Small indistinct voices, as if a crowd of very small creatures were heading towards them.
As the voices became clearer, the light also became much brighter and out of the mist emerged a little flock of about seven or maybe eight small creatures that were lighting up the whole area. As they got closer, the elves stopped their singing and dancing.
“Hush, get away from here, you deceitful women” one of the creatures said while waving his arm at them.
Like cats, the elves hissed and withdrew throwing their long-nailed fingers at them like claws. Then they ran away and disappeared in the mud.
The small creatures came closer. They seemed to be made out of glass. Each of their foreheads had a light in it and lit up the whole area.
“Will-o’-the-wisps!” Manolo said. ”What a pleasant surprise.”
One of the small creatures waved his hand showing he wanted them to follow him.
“Come on before more of these women come out of their hiding between the trees,” he said.
“I thought Will-o’-the-wisps were mischievous creatures that by their light attempted to lead travelers astray,” Sara whispered to Manolo as they followed the small people made of glass through the water.
“That is the common misunderstanding,” he whispered back. “Actually, they are very nice people, a little shy, but often helpful to strangers.”
“So where are they taking us?” she asked and looked up in the sky, but the mist was still too heavy for her to see anything.
“We will just have to wait and see, won’t we?” Manolo said with a smile.
“So you trust these people?”
“They just saved us from the elves, right?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then why shouldn’t we trust them?”
Sara had no answer. She stared at the creatures and the faint light coming from their heads. Some of them were zigzagging through the bog, they stopped here and there, then crawled high up into a tree, rested on a branch and a moment later hurried on.
“Why do they do that?” Sara asked.
“Do what?”
”Walk all over the place.”
“Because they want to make sure that no one can follow us,” Manolo replied. “If anyone is behind us he will be unable to follow the light without being confused and eventually lose his way. Will-o’-the-wisps are very good at that sort of thing. They are incredibly agile and can change directions in the middle of a leap.”
“And you are sure they are not leading us to that Bog-Woman instead?” Sara asked.
“Nothing in life is sure,” Manolo answered. “Sometimes you just have to have a little trust.”
They came to The City of Lights as the day had almost passed. Suddenly, out of the mist grew fantastic towers that looked like they were all made of light, but it was in fact glass. The strong light came from the heads of the Will-o’-the-wisps walking around inside the city reflecting their light on the colored glass. Some towers were red, others blue and some yellow.
The Will-o’-the-wisps stopped at the gate to the city and talked to the guard. Then they opened this huge gate that was big enough for Sara and Manolo to enter the city. Everywhere they went there were high ceilings like cathedrals. They had to walk carefully though, big as they were, so as not to step on any of the small creatures. Because even though they did light up, the Will-o’-the-wisps were hard to see because they moved so quickly and unevenly, zigzagging their way through the town.
They washed and dried their clothes and gave them white tunics to wear while they waited. And then Sara and Manolo were presented to their king, a small glass creature just like the rest of the Will-o’-the-wisps but this one had a red light in his forehead. It made it very comfortable to talk to him since the light wasn’t so bright in Sara and Manolo’s eyes.
“So what brings you to this town?” the king asked as a young Will-o’-the-wisp dressed all in white gave them plenty of food and drink. Sara wondered why she hadn’t seen any women in the city yet.
“Your people brought us here,” Manolo said. “They rescued us from the hands of the elves.”
“Oh, those crazy women,” the king said and threw a fist in the air. “Well I am glad we could help.”
The king was served a cup of tea and he drank some of it before he continued talking.
“But I must say that my people also told me that before they found you they came upon some disturbing tracks around the bog. Those of a big animal that seemed to be chasing you.”
Manolo stopped eating and looked at the small king sitting on his small throne made of glass. Even his teacup was made of glass as were their plates and the knives and forks they used to eat with. There were a lot of clinking sounds in the entire city and the royal palace as you can imagine. Especially from the glass-creatures as they walked on their floors that were made also of glass. Manolo and Sara thought they were lucky the food wasn’t glass.
“We did have a feeling that someone or something was following us. What do you think it was?” Manolo asked and ate some more of that delicious cinnamon bread they had been served.
“I haven’t the faintest idea, but it was a creature of darkness, of that my people were sure.”
Sara and Manolo looked at each other with a hint of fear.
“Don’t worry,” the king said. “You are safe in our town. When the light is turned on, the darkness has to go.”
He smiled. Then he got up from his little throne and clapped his two glass hands. Immediately two other Will-o’-the-wisps appeared also dressed entirely in white and removed all of the food and plates.
The king looked at his pocket watch, which Sara found extremely peculiar since it too was made of glass and he could see right through it. There were no numbers or anything on it. It was just a piece of glass though it did reflect the light from his head in different colors. Out of that he must have been able to tell the time.
“We must hurry. We don’t want to be late for the show,” the king said and gestured that he wanted them to follow him.
“The show?” Sara said and looked at Manolo, thinking only about her brother. Their quest had already taken much longer than anticipated and she had become afraid that they were running out of time to save Marius. She wanted to continue as quickly as possible. “We don’t have time to see a show. We must move on,” she said.
“These people saved our lives and gave us food to eat. It would be very impolite of us not to accept the king’s nice invitation,” Manolo whispered back.
So they accepted it and followed the king through the streets of the whole bright city with its high glass pillars and mosaic tiles.
“What kind of a show is it?” asked Sara as they walked next to the glass ch
ariot in which the king was sitting.
The king looked out of the small window, which, strange as it seems, had no glass in it.
“Well, glass music, of course.”
Manolo and Sara looked at each other.
“Well, of course,” Sara said just as distinguished.
Glass music turned out to be quite an experience for the two travelers. For never had they heard such beautiful tones come out of anything made of glass. Especially the Glass Harp gave them great pleasure as it turned while the small creatures played with their fingers on it. The notes were crystal clear and inexpressively soft. Later followed musical bowls, a glass harpsichord, a man playing musical glasses, and finally a glass xylophone.
Every time someone put his finger on top of some sort of glass and made music come out of it, Sara felt enchanted. And for a short while she forgot about the reason for her quest. She forgot her troubles and worries about her brother. See, that is what music is capable of doing to a person. Real good music, that is. Sara had only tried it once before and that was when she let herself be spellbound by an interesting book.
“Why are there no women in this town?” Sara asked Manolo as they left the theatre after the show.
“Will-o’-the-wisps are neither male nor female creatures. Such a distinction does not exist among them,” he whispered.
“Oh,” she said. How very boring, she thought to herself.
The king stopped outside the theatre.
“Join me for a walk in the park,” he said.
They accepted the invitation and soon they were walking among what looked like elms and oaks, but was in fact artificial trees made entirely of glass. The king’s red light was reflected everywhere he went and made him sort of always walking in this red spotlight. He walked with a cane (of glass, naturally) that had what looked like a real blue diamond on top of it, but Sara guessed it was probably just cut out of glass as well.
“So tell me, my young travelers,” he said. “Where does that quest of yours end? What is the point of this traveling around?”
