by B W Powe
The whirlwind rose.
The eyes darted like fireflies in the dark and beamed images of the knight and the children in shafts of yellow, smoke-swirled light.
All through the camp the toons watched the screens. They laughed and pointed, deriding what they saw: people weeping, pleading, arguing, bargaining, offering rewards, some calling for lovers and friends, many calling for their children.
The human world had become a vast cartoon for the delight of what had once been dream-creatures. And the toons watched, and hooted, jeered and provided withering critiques, and passed comment cards back and forth among themselves, and commented acidly on the clothes and hairstyles and makeup and wrinkles around the eyes and mouths.
The smoke in the light beams was a trace of the wizard.
Every toon knew he was always in their midst.
*
“It’s getting so dark,” Gabrielle said.
“Shhh . . . ” Tomas said.
“I’m afraid,” a little girl said.
“Shhh . . . ” Santiago said to her, echoing the firm gentleness with which Tomas had spoken.
They stepped carefully through the woods over the fallen branches. Tomas had the impression that the branches had fallen recently, and that some trees had been razed to the ground at the same time.
“They’re feeling the war,” he thought. “They know something’s come.”
He realized again that he was beginning to read the world. Still he wasn’t sure about many things.
“Watch where you put your feet,” he said to the line of children. Each child had a hand on the shoulder of the child before her or him.
Slowly they came out of the forest and into the valley. A screaming froze them.
“Toons,” Santiago said. “They’re running somewhere.”
“No,” Gabrielle said. “It’s worse. They’re following us.”
“How do you know?” Tomas asked.
“I heard the trees start rustling and leaning away. The trees have never been afraid of us. I know the toons are after us.”
“They want to get to the castle too,” Santiago said.
The children whimpered.
“Keep moving, and shhh . . . ” Tomas said. They moved on into the valley.
*
The eyes flashed images of the knight and the children.
“They’re close to where they want to go,” the wizard rumbled from the mist.
“Shall we stop them?” one of the knights asked. He wore the tunic with the red mast too, but the mast was turned upside down.
“He has no sword,” the voice like burning wood said. “He’s lost his shield. He’s unarmed. And the mast on his tunic has been turned around.”
The eyes showed how the knight didn’t say much. Yet the images on the screen-tent revealed through the quietness and the slight gestures and the determined movements and the even breathing of the children that they trusted him. They were holding on to one another in what looked like a ribbon of humanity. He led them, but he didn’t need to scold them or give many orders.
“They believe in him,” the wizard wheezed.
“Shall we snatch them?” a flying monkey said.
“Shall we trample them?” an elephant with massive ears said.
“Let him lead them. I’ll tell the remaining humans, and those poor children, who he really is.”
*
“There’s a shadow.”
A little girl pointed to the top of the hill ahead.
The hill was capped by jagged dark outlines.
“Shadows,” Gabrielle said. “I see so many rising.”
“I see a darkness rising,” a little boy said.
“I see dark mountains moving,” the little girl said.
“Is it a trap?” Santiago wondered.
“The shadows are growing,” Gabrielle said.
“The mountains are moving closer,” the little girl said.
The shadows were rising like smoke.
“The mountains are burning,” the girl whispered.
“The sky has lost its stars,” another boy said.
The children, murmuring and groaning, bunched up together, and stopped.
“Hush,” Tomas said. “And listen.”
Soon they heard voices coming from the shadows.
*
“Is it you?”
“Can it be you?”
The voices were human, and the shadows became turrets, walls, spires and a gate.
Behind the children the howling echoed. Ahead of them they saw the castle and people ecstatically rushing out through the gate, and across a bridge, down to the slope that dipped into the valley. They were holding torches high.
The children broke from the line and the protection of the knight, and ran towards the adults and the torchlight. Some of the grown-ups called out names in recognition, and their children, crying and laughing, dashed up the slope towards them. They all ran, except for Gabrielle and Santiago.
“Why don’t you go?” Tomas asked.
“Our parents won’t be there,” Gabrielle said.
“We never knew them,” Santiago said.
“Brother and sister. You’ve always been orphans.”
“Yes, so far as we can remember.” Gabrielle was matter of fact. “We lived with uncles and aunts, and sometimes godparents. All of them were taken at the start.”
She stared up towards the castle, never wavering in her gaze. Santiago looked up to the castle too, then to his side at Tomas, then back again at the castle, and the children and the adults who hugged them and whispered their names through laughter and tears. Even if the castle wasn’t familiar to the children, with so many of their parents there it was now home. A few of the children didn’t recognize the adults, but this didn’t seem to upset anyone. Human greeted human.
“They’ll adopt the ones who lost their parents in the war,” Santiago said.
“They didn’t die,” Tomas said.
Suddenly he had the attention of the two children who remained beside him.
*
“You know so much. How is that so?” Gabrielle asked.
For the first time Santiago withdrew a step, and then another, putting a small space between himself and the knight.
“Images keep appearing to me. I guess they’re memories. I’m not sure. It’s like watching a story in my mind coming in bits. And never coming in an order I can predict. They’re like flashes on a wall somewhere.”
“What happened to the other children and grown-ups?” Santiago asked.
“I can see them. It looks like they’re in a picture that moves. Now I know. They’ve all been taken up into screens. They’re confined to that realm. But they’re not dead.”
“Can we free them?” Gabrielle asked.
He paused, seeing the picture of the humans sprawl across his mind.
“Yes and we will.”
Gabrielle and Santiago reached out to the knight and each child clutched a gloved hand.
“We named you, you belong to us,” Gabrielle said.
They squeezed his hands gently, and moved closer to him.
*
In a whirlwind the wizard cried out. The eyes had emblazoned the images of the two and their knight.
Everyone watching the screens stepped back from the wizard’s rage.
“This won’t last. This will not be.”
Throughout the encampment the toons saw the same pictures: a castle where people still lived, a valley and a high hill, the joy of the humans, and a figure, familiar to them, embraced by two children.
The whirlwind cried out again, and a silence descended over the camp.
“Cut it off.” His hiss was like the crackle of dry leaves on fire.
Everywhere the screens went blank.
But soon the toons howled for their entertainment. And soon the screens came back on, with their pictures of imprisoned humans and their flat concerns.
*
“Who is this?” a man said. He had
stepped briskly away from the group of celebrating children and grown-ups.
“Tomas . . . ” Santiago said. “He led us out of the woods.”
The man nodded, but watched the knight suspiciously. He eyed him up and down. The mast on his tunic was turned in a direction familiar to any sailor but not familiar to anyone who had fought the image army.
“Where’s your sword?” the man asked.
Others started to gather.
“I don’t have one.”
Murmurs.
“You look like one of them,” a voice pressed from the crowd.
The man frowned and reached down to his scabbard where he had a sword. With his other hand he began to reach inside his tunic.
“Wait,” Gabrielle intervened. “We found him in the forest and he helped us. Why would he lead us here if he was going to harm us? He was lost too but now he’s with us.”
“He belongs to my sister and to me. And we to him.” Santiago blurted this out. He was surprised by the words and by his gathering courage. He’d always thought that his sister was the braver of the two.
The man let go of the hilt of his sword, and withdrew his hand from the inside of his tunic. The crowd appeared to be calmed.
“Yes,” a little girl said, “He brought us here. He made us feel strong.”
“Welcome him, please,” a little boy said to the man who had come forward.
*
“So we shall,” the man said. “Thank you for our children.” He extended his hand.
Tomas, silent and watchful, backed away. He was afraid of the handshake. The men in the crowd reached for their weapons.
Immediately the children intervened and touched his tunic and his arms and his belt and his empty scabbard, and Gabrielle and Santiago clutched his hands fiercely and stood straight beside him.
“I can train you,” Tomas said, expressing one of those thoughts that felt necessary to the moment. The words came to him in the same way the wind moved the leaves of a tree and so allowed people who could read the leaves to tell what terrible storm or calming weather was coming.
“I can show you what to expect and how to move on them. I know your friends and families aren’t dead.”
The murmuring grew.
“What’s happened to them?” a woman shouted.
“They’ve been absorbed into images, where they’re being watched by what you call the toons. We can get to them and free them.”
“How do you know?” the man asked. His hand was still extended towards the knight. He seemed ready to either embrace or attack him.
“Don’t ask me how. But as I brought you the children, so I’ll bring you the knowledge of how to fight the terror.”
“We trusted him in the woods,” Gabrielle said. “We can believe him now.”
“It appears,” the man said, letting his hand drop slowly, “the little ones have learned a lot in their wanderings. If they trust you, I will too.”
*
Howling from the darkness pierced up so powerfully that those who stood on the slopes of the hill were silenced.
“It’s time to get inside the castle,” Tomas said. “They’ll be coming for us soon. We must get ready.”
The man nodded, and turned, and gestured to his people, and turned to the children who stood near the knight, and smiled again at their courageous devotion.
“My name is Cyrus.” It was important to tell the knight his name. It was part of the code that the people in the castle had hurriedly developed and written down. Naming had become a test. So had touching. The feel of skin confirmed humanity. Once more Cyrus offered his hand, but Tomas had already brushed by, leading the children towards the gate.
Cyrus hesitated, slivered by worry. What were they admitting into their domain with this strange figure? Could he be believed? Maybe he was a spy.
He sighed. Tomas had brought the children back to them – though Cyrus himself had no children – and had done so with a swift goodness of heart. They’d taken Tomas to themselves, and, Cyrus thought, so must he, for now.
*
The children and the people in the castle had already been captured.
The myriad of floating eyes had been sent again to store up more images. Discreetly they had zeroed in on the knight and they had recorded the paths, the valley, the hills, the gate, the walls and the towers. Now they were preparing to return to the encampment. They would relay to the wizard this surveillance, and image for him the many paths that could lead his armies to those who thought they were safe.
They had caught their data. It was only a matter of time until they caught their essences and flattened them forever on glowing white surfaces. All humanity would be on screens, and the living shadows would be their audience.
Toons made good captors and critics. They had listened to humanity for a long time. The sound of children’s laughter had echoed in their ears. They had known the shut off, when they were suddenly left in the freeze-frame of the dark and silence. Their power had often been ignored or dismissed. Mocked, and studied, they had rarely been honoured, and seldom feared. It had come to the point where they themselves doubted they could influence anyone. Yet sometimes they saw that they could fascinate and compel, and they had watched back, and they had learned.
The wizard gave them permission to break away.
“Humanity is a worn-out dream.”
His voice issued through the static of the screens like the sound of a column of fire in a desert.
“Isn’t it time to take vision away from them? Isn’t it the moment for another creation? You have powers they don’t comprehend. Take from those who have fooled themselves into believing they are the only gods. The flat ones are humans who never saw how much there is to the universe.”
So images leapt, vaulting out of their limits.
*
But the mind in the smoke wondered. The last humans had found a castle that had once floated in dreams.
They had taken possession of an illusion and turned it real on their plane.
They had admitted the knight, and done so without questioning his identity.
The smoke became a column of air. Every toon in the encampment felt a strange sensation of a breathing down their necks. The breath made a tingling sound that seemed more, to some who heard and felt it strongly, like a strangling gasp.
He whipped into a whirlwind of dust, pondering his command, at the command of nothing else, and yet he couldn’t think deeply enough into the reversal he saw. Humans had made a toon castle theirs. The illusion realm was being turned around by their imagination and will. How could outmoded beings keep ahead of images? How could such creatures, trapped and inhibited by flesh, leap ahead?
The whirlwind thundered.
The thunder was so strong its violent vibration bent trees and cracked branches far away from the encampment.
The thunder came to the castle walls and sputtered out like a wave against a tidal barrier.
Then the thunder fell back to the whirlwind, its echo diminishing.
He stirred around in thought, encircling himself.
A few knights, who dared to observe him directly, considered this gusting inward. It was as if the wizard had turned his back. The cloud spun in a silence that stunned them.
*
“The castle looks like the forest,” the knight said.
Gabrielle gazed at what he saw.
“The towers are like trees.”
“It rises like trees,” she said, and nodded. “It gives shade and protection like a forest,” Santiago said.
The two children didn’t want to venture far into this new enclosure without him. The other children had scattered towards the quarters of the adults.
The castle appeared to be made out of wood and stone. So it stood with the auras of the earth and the forest. It was massive, and seemed to extend in many directions. There was no electricity, so the grounds were lit by torches and candles. Eerie firelight flickered everywhere.
“It belonge
d to the toons. It was a castle we imagined,” Cyrus explained. He wasn’t sure he should let Tomas walk around without his company. “They left these . . . dream places for their own camp. Somehow it’s become . . . real.”
“Their camp is a city of tents,” Tomas said. “The tent surfaces act as screens. It’s on the screens that you’ll find your people.”
“You’ve been there,” Cyrus said.
“I saw it.”
“Why did you leave?”
“I don’t know,” Tomas said. “Sometimes I see clearly. Sometimes I don’t. When I don’t it’s all smoke. It’s as if the smoke becomes the world.”
“This is very strange.” Cyrus felt twinges of concern again.
*
Cyrus became bold.
“You must understand the code of flesh and blood. We’ve written it down. When we saw that nothing of ours would stop the toons – when we fought them, they simply reformed themselves into shadows and became their original forms again – we had to find a way to identify the human. We were fighting streams of air and mists and shades and illusions. Nothing worked against them. They came from the screens onto our level of existence and they mocked our weapons and strategies. They’d obviously come to know a lot through careful observation over the years. Who’d have known images could learn? Who’d have guessed the images had a life separate from us? It looked like a power had taken hold of them. They had a power we never knew existed. We’d come to believe that all there was in the universe was our perception of things. How we saw was everything. We were wrong. The images wanted revenge. Some came to believe we were being punished for not recognizing we’re the shallow ones.”
“What is the code of flesh and blood?” Santiago asked. He would never have asked a question of a stranger before. But being in the presence of the knight emboldened him. He heard in himself a voice he didn’t know, saying: “Don’t be afraid.”
Santiago saw that his sister smiled proudly at him when he spoke up.
*
“I’ll tell you the code,” Cyrus said.
When he answered he looked into the knight’s eyes.
