by B W Powe
“Tomas,” Gabrielle said simply, and for the first time he heard trembling in her voice.
“Who is this?” Santiago asked. He could see nothing but the billowing cloud. “Is it God or the Devil?”
“Neither,” Tomas said. “Just something that thinks it can be one or the other. Or both.”
The smoke blew upwards towards the castle walls, the smoke casting as if caught in a flue, tossing up with a hiss that reminded the people on the battlements of the wind’s passage through the trees in the forest at the bottom of the valley. Into their ears the cloud uttered the words, “Ask him who he is.”
*
Suddenly Tomas and the children were released from the whirlwind.
The three stood on the green slope before the castle gate.
They saw no trace of the storming cloud.
“Great special effects,” Gabrielle said.
Santiago agreed. “But I’ve seen better.”
“Working on a small budget,” Gabrielle said.
“Running out of ideas,” Santiago said.
“And time.”
“All puffed up.”
“Blowing hot air.”
Tomas gazed fondly at them, proud of their humour.
But when he turned to look back at the gates, he saw the gate had been opened, and people poured out, and in their faces and their walk and in their voices and their postures he saw and heard worry and doubt.
Cyrus led them, his scowl as black as the storm which had absorbed Tomas on the hill.
Tomas would have to tell them the story. It was now there in his mind.
While pictures formed in his mind, in a series, one right after the other, he saw Adina hesitating by the gate. She was waiting for him to speak too.
*
They gathered near the forge.
By this fire many times the humans had spoken to one another and made their plans. And though they had been reluctant to bring the knight back into the castle, they knew that Gabrielle and Santiago wouldn’t leave him, and if they had abandoned him, they would have had to drag the children in, and none wanted to do this.
But the fire in the forge unnerved everyone. Its loud crackle sounded like the crackle of the cloud that had coiled in their ears, insinuating, “The knight belongs to me.”
And as bright and clear as this day appeared to them, the whirlwind had promised the fate of absolute absorption. Everything was darkening.
*
“I’ll show you who I am.”
Tomas raised his hands, and it looked to them like he was beginning a scientific demonstration. He peeled off one chainmail glove then the other. One hand was flesh. The other glowed and shifted like a cartoon image.
Everyone in the crowd gasped, except for Cyrus, who stood, arms crossed, feet apart, staring down into the knight’s face. Adina was the only one to come closer to Tomas, feeling warm and sympathetic, feelings that she couldn’t control.
The cartoon hand glowed like the flash of a silver blade. It began to change. Each finger extended, lengthening to become sharp points of steel. Then the steely fingers softened and the hand’s outline became softer and the length withdrew back to a smaller size and each finger lost a portion of the glow so that it looked like a pen and ink sketch. There seemed to be empty spaces between the lines that formed the hazy outline of a hand. Then the hand vibrated again and became a great webbed fan, brilliant with colour. The hand became a tiny rainbow and instantly – so quickly no one caught the transition – it became candles and the wirings of a tiny bridge and settled back into the black and white impression of a hand. Everyone saw veins in it, the veins becoming a network of intricate illuminated cords then a delicate net like a spider’s web. It glowed again becoming white, the hand of a contemplative saint, then glowed again becoming ruddy and sturdy, the gnarled hand of a worker in a field. Once more it lost its glow, and it returned to a sketchy outline, the vapory hand that could become anything.
“One hand belongs to you, one to the images.”
Tomas looked over the crowd to see if they were ready for more.
He felt the eyes of Gabrielle and Santiago on his shadow hand.
*
“I was born to a human woman. I don’t know her name, but this is what I was told. The one you call the wizard loved her. But he found he couldn’t control her emotions and thoughts in the way that cartoons can be drawn. Because he couldn’t control her his love turned to rage against the human world. I’m told she died giving birth to me. But I wouldn’t be surprised to find that she’s trapped on the flat surface of the screens too.
“I served the wizard, and learned that it was best to see him in a cloud. His fury was such that smoke obscured him. He wanted only what he could control. Yet he himself had the power to shift in the forms of a mist or a storm. His contempt for humanity was enormous. But as his contempt grew, I found myself becoming sympathetic to people and their struggles. I found I could turn from one side to another. No one else knew this. I kept my hands covered.”
He held his human hand before him with a sort of reverence. After a moment of contemplation, he stared down at his cartoon hand with a look of sad wonder.
“I was trained in secret by the knights who’d turned. The wizard had worked in secrecy for a long time, planning his revenge on complexity. He studied black art and white magic. He read your forgotten books. From alchemy he learned about power. He’d seen that in the underground histories of humanity there’d always been the desire to shape shift. He transferred that desire to the toons. He spoke through the static from the frames of the screens, between the phosphor dots. He whispered about changeling power and becoming greater than human. Why the toons? They were close to children. He knew the grownups wouldn’t be paying attention to anything they didn’t think real. Children know better. They live in many worlds. So he whispered in the toons’ ears about a second creation. It would be a world of images, and the images and shadows would speak back to the human. The creators could be confined to the flat spaces where the toons had been condemned. He spoke in absolutes about a revolution of images. His whisper was static carrying everywhere.”
*
Santiago walked forward and touched Tomas’s human hand.
Gabrielle came forward and held the cartoon hand.
Adina overcame her fear and stepped beside Gabrielle and held the girl’s hand. They moved towards him because their feelings had surged, and they felt they must be with him while he spoke.
“Love baffles the wizard.”
Tomas trusted his words. They were coming freely, and his thoughts and emotions were one.
“So he turned to old ritual knowledge. What he’d found in black magic and forgotten books. Yes I remember books everywhere. What was the knowledge? Sacrifice. The most brutal knowledge. At the core of existence there is the need for sacrifice. Many religions try to channel that cosmic law by turning to symbols of sacrifice rather than sacrificial actions. But the demand for sacrifice has never left the world. He learned this. Sacrifice yourself to the higher order. Don’t live for yourself. That was what he told them.”
The children shifted uneasily. They didn’t understand what he said. But the adults were riveted. They knew of what he said, remembering all the times they had been asked to give something up, even if it had just been money, or a dream.
“What had to be sacrificed this time? The human race,” Tomas went on. “A way had to be prepared for the toon world and their generations.”
*
“How did he do this?” Cyrus asked.
“He clouded our eyes. Worlds crossed, and our forms were floating. The images gained strength because we’d gained bodies.” It was noted by many that Tomas had said “our” in a way that obscured who he was talking about. They weren’t sure who he meant by “they” or “we” either. Did he mean toon or human, symbol or flesh? To whom did he belong?
The people of the castle were restrained by the presence of the children, and by his voice, wh
ich carried a sorrow they understood. His voice rose too, gaining in its melancholy power. It seemed the more he spoke the more he knew, the more he could reveal, even to himself.
“He made his form like smoke and his voice like fire. All sides would fear this because the memory was deep inside our stories. To the toons his voice was like the static that reminded them of the power that ran the screens.”
“He’s nameless?” Cyrus asked.
“No. He wants to resemble the nameless by having no distinct form. But he has a name.”
Tomas paused, searching through the scenes that composed his memory.
“Pluta. That name may not be his true name. The clouds are a cloak obscuring his essence.”
“He has those special effects,” Gabrielle said nonchalantly. “That helps.”
Some people smiled for the first time in many days.
“And we have Tomas,” Adina said. “He’s telling us about this. We know more because of him.”
The others nodded, though their suspicious guard hadn’t been relaxed.
*
At the uttering of Pluta’s name, the fields and hills and valleys and forests around the castle had reverberated. The sound carried the cries of the people who had been captured on the screens.
In the encampment of tents, the smoke curled around the gathered toons, spellbound by the images of people still struggling to be flesh again. It appeared to those few toons that bothered to notice the curling smoke that its enormous snaking form looked like a smile.
The smoke rose over the camp and became a cloud again. Inside the cloud Pluts’s thoughts swirled addressing the knight across the fields in telepathic waves.
“The sign you wear on your tunic. You think it’s a sea mast. Do you know what it means? The insignia of machines. The emblem of technology. An antenna. Sign of order and disorder, symbol of the rising to grab the power humans couldn’t see but sensed everywhere. A sign of the holy new order. You’re imprinted. The antenna is the tattoo proving your service.”
Over the encampment the cloud folded into a smile again, like a grey rainbow turned upwards.
*
Tomas’s mind seethed with messages. But he concentrated and shut most of them out. He had to keep clear, in spite of the waves that kept infiltrating him, trying to take him from what must be said.
“One day I fell from his domain.”
He said this softly. Adina sensed what was next.
“I met a woman. And I was moved by her humanity. By the incomplete quality humans have. Their terrible loneliness. I was moved by the hunger for love that never seems to leave people. I was dazzled by how people are moved by the energies in their flesh.”
For the first time he seemed to speak more to himself than to others.
Gabrielle and Santiago held him more tightly than they had before. They knew he was about to tell them how he came to be lost.
“I was told by Pluta that if I fell in love with a woman then I must be prepared to give up my shadow side. That part of me which belonged to the other side of the human. I didn’t care. There was something special about her. It was the way her eyes glowed when she looked at me. I thought this glow is where I want to be. But how did I appear to her?”
He looked up and saw in his mind who watched him. He saw the floating eyes that the wizard commanded. They were recorders. In another flash he saw that human eyes had provided the model for the recording eyes. It was all inter-related. What was found in one realm of being was mirrored or reflected or adapted or heightened in the other.
*
“I wasn’t like people she knew. I was a knight. I was proud of this, and didn’t fear showing it to a person. Like all knights I was devoted. I became devoted to her.”
“Who could resist?” Adina murmured to herself, but Gabrielle and Santiago, close by, heard her and turned to her, and shared a secret smile. Knights had long held a special place in the imagination. To have met one in the forest, or anywhere, would have impressed anyone.
“I broke my pledge to Pluta. In a terrible storm he told me to break my sword. Then he began his war against humanity. He’d lost love and he’d lost me. All that he had learned was marshalled against what he hated. I fled his camp. And I went to her. If I broke my sword, I’d leave the world of the toons and join the world of people. I turned to this hand.”
He held up his right hand, flesh and blood, and turned its palm open to the people gathered around the forge. They had been silent for a long time. Even Cyrus, much given to interruptions and questions, stood reserved and attentive.
“With this hand I broke the sword.” He paused again.
“When I broke the sword I severed a part of myself from the images. So I went to her and told her I’d crossed over. I’d left my sword in pieces.”
He saw the steel pieces curved on the ground, flashing under the bright crescent moon. The moon was like a silver scimitar in the sky.
After, he’d thrown the hilt to the trees.
*
“What did she say?” Gabrielle looked up at Tomas.
“She asked for your sword, didn’t she?” Santiago said.
“Yes, she asked what I’d done with it.”
He gazed upwards summoning painful memories.
They unfolded like TV and movie stories. In jump-cuts, zooms, dissolves, fast-forwards and freeze-frames it came to him: the look of horror on her face.
“Miranda.”
Her beautiful skin was so aglow that Tomas had first thought that she possessed the luminescence of the brilliantly lit beings that waltzed or mingled or glided or whirled around at transcendent balls caught in celluloid or phosphor dot fantasias, ballroom scenes that gave people a precious glimpse into the hidden oceanic, deep wells of ecstasy.
How much he’d wanted to touch her. How much he had needed to stop being a bystander, locked out between worlds. He wanted to serve her dancing glow. It was his destiny to be at the beck and call of curves, the clothed mysteries of her flesh.
He was the entranced one. Miranda’s aura mesmerized him.
But she had looked at him with shock and disgust when he told her that he was moving from the realm of images towards her.
*
In the encampment the raging cloud blazed. The screens snapped from technicolour to black and white. On the flat plane the humans choked and stuttered. They looked at themselves turning from colour to grey shades. Light was a background halo. People moved in soft white beams.
The toons, silent at first, showed their appreciation with hoots of gloating pleasure.
Luxuriating in his power, the cloud tinted the images first with mauve, then with a scarlet that resembled a morning disturbed by impending storms. Then he turned them back to black and white.
*
Tomas felt the cloud’s transforming.
And he knew that he’d fallen into a trap when he had been stunned by Miranda’s glow. The trap was seeing only the appearance, not through to the heart. Appearances were staggeringly seductive. This is what the toons knew. Apparitions had rare audacious power, the magnetism of the surface. But could toons pierce through to their own shadow? It seemed to be a human quality to straddle many realms, to deal with many qualities, visible and invisible, at once.
Yet when he had crossed the threshold into a share of the human, he had made the mistake of thinking that all people had a heart.
Some people were already edging towards the cartoon side. Some humans were on their way to becoming flat without the wizard’s intervention. This must have been why so many had been easy to absorb onto the screens.
*
Tomas snapped out of the trance of images and memories. He saw that the grownups and children were restless. They were still attentive. But they were eyeing him and muttering questions about his withdrawal into what seemed like a possibly treacherous privacy.
He said: “There was no love in her, not for me. That’s what I found. She was fascinated by a picture. A saviour knight. Somethi
ng that came from the depths. We’d been entranced by each other’s image. And when I stepped into this plane of things, she was horrified. I saw she’d taken a step into the shadows, and I was lost.”
He had felt like neither a toon nor a human.
So he started to wander, a dazed exile from the battles that had begun to squall.
*
“My shock made me forget. There was a wound where my heart should have been. All I heard was war.”
“That’s when we found you,” Gabrielle said.
Her voice brought him back to the castle, and to the people who watched him. He felt her sympathy.
“It seemed like you’d been waiting for us,” Santiago said.
“Maybe so. Some part of me had gone to sleep. But in that sleep I was waiting for the call to wake up again.”
“When you wake up after that sort of sleep you can never be the same person again.” It was Adina who spoke. “Now you’re here.”
“Here,” Tomas echoed. He was oddly touched by this. When he looked at Adina he saw the human glow. But this time the glow came from the keenness in her eyes. What she said was luminous too. The human code wasn’t to be found only in touch. It had to be found in qualities that weren’t easy to see at first, even if you trusted that you could read the world. There was the world, and there were the inventions. If you studied both, you would have to become aware of the space between the world and what people made, and the pathways that only seemed invisible between them. Neither appearance nor touch told the whole story.
*
“Look at his hands!” Cyrus shouted. “How can he be trusted? He’s on both sides. Where do you stand, Tomas?”
“Here,” Tomas said again.
“Positions change. Where will you stand when everything changes?” Cyrus pressed, speaking on behalf of the crowd, so he thought.
“With us,” Santiago said, adopting that matter-of-fact tone that he had observed in his sister’s voice. That tone always seemed to make her bold. He noticed that once he spoke, most of the people there, before the forge, looked impressed. Only Cyrus looked skeptical.
