Seb looked at the scenery. It was idyllic. He remembered the version of Richmond Park he had shared with Seb2 and Seb3 when he had first been given Manna. That had been a scene recreated from a strong memory. This was different. The place Seb was looking at didn’t exist anywhere outside of his own imagination. Until now.
He took a step forward. His feet were bare. The ground was soft, mossy, and yielding. The air was cold and fresh, but his body felt warm enough, despite the fact he was only wearing jeans and a T-shirt.
Seb jogged down the slope to the edge of the lake. Kneeling, he scooped up a handful of the perfectly clear water and splashed it onto his face. It felt just as ice-cold, shocking and refreshing as he had expected. He scooped up a few more handfuls and soaked his face and hair. Then he stood and shook himself like a dog. He felt incredibly alive.
He looked at the cabin and changed his mind about how he wanted it to appear. Under the current circumstances, a need for privacy—or protection from the weather—was unnecessary. The roof and outer walls disappeared, leaving a single room exposed to the elements. A simple wooden table with five chairs around it. A rocker in one corner. An upright piano. A wooden bed with a simple cotton cover thrown over it. There was fresh coffee brewing; Seb could smell it. He jogged up the three steps leading to the deck and walked into the room. He poured the coffee from an old-fashioned ceramic pot on top of the range. He drank from a thick china mug. The coffee was perfect. He sat down at the table and sipped, looking slowly around at the scene he had created.
It looks like a modern theater set for an edgy, contemporary take on The Waltons.
“Night, John-Boy,” he said. “Don’t forget we’re taking Pa to Alcoholics Anonymous tomorrow and we need to talk about those gender reassignment leaflets we found in the dresser.”
After a while, he looked back at the table. Five chairs, including the one he was sitting on. Why had he conjured up five chairs? Why not just one? If more than one, why not four, or six? Five seemed a strange number to arbitrarily put round the heavy oak table.
It was at that moment that he first became aware he wasn’t alone.
5
At first, Seb wondered if he was imagining things. Then he remembered that the entire scene was—effectively—a product of his imagination, and laughed, slightly uneasily.
He scanned the area anyway. Around the tops of the trees, there was a slight sway as a light breeze passed through the upper branches, but there were no birds or animals. Evidently, Seb’s imagination had neglected some of the details. Even as he considered this, there was a sudden eruption of sound and movement from one of the trees as a peregrine falcon took flight, swiftly climbing until she was a brown speck against the deep blue of the sky. Seb watched her fly, then his attention was caught by a second movement at ground level.
He stood up abruptly. He was right. There was someone out there.
Seb was sure he’d seen a figure dart behind a tree. He got up from the table, jumped lightly down from the decking and strolled toward the edge of the clearing. He was used to the lack of fear, but now he wondered if being scared might have its uses occasionally. After all, he was a long, long way from home, in a place created by his own imagination, and something was here that didn’t belong. It was as if an author had suddenly found a character in her book that she hadn’t consciously created. And yet his primary reaction was curiosity.
As he reached the first trees he stopped, listening. For a few seconds, he heard nothing. Then, distant birdsong began to fill the silence, as his subconscious continued to add details to the scene. Seb stood very still, waiting. He knew he hadn’t been mistaken. He had seen something. Someone.
He waited for whoever it was to show themselves.
Eventually, he heard something. A few yards away. It was a giggle. More specifically, a child’s giggle. Seb’s eyes widened. He looked for the source of the sound but saw nothing. He took a few steps forward and entered the forest. As he did so, there was a flash of yellow and red as a small figure launched itself from behind a nearby tree and sprinted uphill and out of sight.
“Hey!” called Seb, and followed, jogging up the slope. He lost sight of the colorful figure a couple of times and stopped, only to catch another glimpse before setting off once more. After a few minutes, he thought he’d been outrun and stopped to catch his breath. Then he remembered that breathing was just a habit he hadn’t completely lost, stopped panting, and stood in silence.
A tiny sound to his left—a twig snapping, perhaps—made him swing round. The figure was climbing a tree, as fast as any squirrel, darting round to the other side of the trunk as Seb watched.
“Gotcha,” said Seb, and walked over. He placed his palms on the trunk of the tall hemlock. Hundreds of millions of microscopic barbs sprang out of his hands and hooked into the bark. The same process repeated on his bare feet as he climbed quickly upwards. Toward the top of the tree, about twenty-five feet above him, he could make out the small figure crouching behind a screen of branches.
“Who are you?” He peered upward. There was no answer.
Slowly now, he climbed the last few feet that separated him from the mysterious interloper. He reached forward and gently moved aside the branches obscuring his view. There was no one there.
Seb frowned, and eased himself onto the branch below, sitting with his back against the gnarled trunk. This vantage point gave him a great view of the clearing, the cabin and the lake beyond, sparkling in the sunlight.
A streak of color flashed below him as the child—it was definitely a child—flashed out of the trees below and sprinted toward the cabin. The sound of breathless giggling reached Seb. It was such an infectious noise that, despite the bizarre circumstances, he also started to laugh. How was he ever going to catch this imp?
A memory flickered through his mind. A CCTV image of a woman using Manna to transform her shape somehow. Not quite flying, but gliding. The woman in question had just tried to kill him, but that hadn’t stopped Seb admiring the trick she used to make her escape. He’d never tried it himself. Now seemed as good a time as any.
Seb hurled himself away from the tree. The branch he had leaped from was over forty feet from the ground, but the power behind his jump took him an additional twenty feet into the air before gravity (gravity he had created?) kicked in, and he began to fall. Immediately, he spread his arms and legs wide as he’d seen skydivers do when wearing a “flying squirrel” suit. Unlike those skydivers, Seb could increase his gliding prowess by lengthening his body and bones while decreasing his weight. When his arms and legs were eight feet long, a skein of thin tight skin now connecting wrists to ankles, he angled his body downward and skimmed through the air like a paper airplane, aiming directly for the cabin.
At the moment he had jumped from the tree, he had momentarily lost sight of his quarry. As he shot through the air on his makeshift wings, he looked for the child but could see no one.
Ten feet short of where the front door of the cabin might have been in a real building, Seb snapped his upper body upward, simultaneously opening his arms and legs as wide as possible. This induced a stall, which brought Seb to a dead stop twenty-three feet in the air. The subsequent drop would certainly have broken both ankles, if not both legs, if he hadn’t been able to alter his own physical makeup, as well as that of the ground, cushioning the impact as he landed. Not that he really had ankles and legs, he reminded himself.
I’m gonna have to start accepting all of this at face value, otherwise I’ll drive myself crazy.
He stepped into the cabin’s single room and looked around, listening intently. He thought he heard a quickly stifled giggle. He smiled and sat in the rocker in the corner. He was yet to father any children of his own, but his friends had provided ample opportunities for him to experience the world of what Mee referred to as “ankle biters.” Although his visitor was surely not an actual child, it was behaving like one, so Seb decided to play along.
“Hmm,” he said aloud as
he rocked, “this is all very interesting. I thought I saw someone in the trees, but now I’m not so sure. I got fairly close, but all I saw was a strange looking monkey.”
Another stifled giggle. Seb pinpointed the sound. It was coming from under the bed. He pretended he hadn’t noticed and carried on rocking and talking.
“Yes, definitely a monkey,” he said. “Probably looking for bananas. No bananas in those trees, though. I keep all my bananas in my boots, like everybody else does.”
This time the giggle was louder, and no attempt was made to smother it.
Seb walked over to the piano. A pair of boots had now appeared on top of it. He picked them up, held them upside down one at a time, and shook them, before replacing them.
“Oh, no. I’m all out of bananas. I’ll have to play the banana song.”
Sitting at the piano, he played the version of Chopin’s Death March that used to reliably reduce Mee to tears of laughter. By simply taking the key out of the minor into major and speeding it up, the somber melody was transformed into a happy, carefree tune.
When he’d finished playing, Seb stood, picked up a boot and looked inside.
“Aha!” He reached into the boot, pulled out a banana, peeled it and began to eat noisily and appreciatively. “Mm, yum,” he said. “Delicious!”
Reaching up for the second boot, Seb peered into it and sighed loudly.
“Another banana,” he said. “Too bad I’m not hungry anymore. If I knew where that funny monkey had gotten to, I’d feed it. Oh, well, guess I’ll just leave it here, then.” He placed the boot carefully on the floor between the piano and the bed. He started playing again but looked back over his shoulder.
After a few seconds, a small face appeared. It was that of a small girl - eight or nine, perhaps. Her head was shaved, and her features were Thai, perhaps Vietnamese. Although, Seb conceded as she crawled out from under the bed, his guess may have been influenced by her clothing. She was wearing the saffron and red robes of a Buddhist monk or nun.
She crawled as far as the boot and sat up, legs crossed underneath her body. She giggled again when she saw the banana sticking out of the boot, then reached in and took it. Without stopping to peel it, she took four quick bites in succession, grinned happily while she chewed, then threw the last piece after the rest, even the stalk.
She looked up at Seb, her brown eyes wide and unblinking.
“Hello,” said Seb. “My name’s Seb. What’s yours?”
She swallowed the rest of the banana and looked at him quizzically, before shaking her head.
Abruptly she sprang to her feet like a startled cat, took two brisk steps toward Seb, put her hand on his face, and felt the contours of his features just as if she were blind. Then she took a step back and smiled broadly. Seb smiled back at her.
Her voice, when she finally spoke, was exactly how Seb expected it to sound. In this place, he wasn’t sure what he was responsible for creating and what was outside of his control. He certainly hadn’t consciously created her, but the voice conformed so precisely to his expectations that he couldn’t help wonder if he was behind it.
“You’re young,” she said. “This is going to be so much fun.”
She turned and ran to the edge of the cabin’s wooden floor, before looking back over her shoulder at Seb.
“I’m Fypp,” she said and jumped lightly to the ground, which yielded like water. She sank out of sight and vanished.
6
The People had no guards watching their southern border. There was no need. Less than half a mile from the meeting circle, the increasingly patchy vegetation yielded completely to sand, rocks, and the occasional patch of scrub. No enemy had ever attacked from the Parched Lands, and no one from the People had ever returned if they ventured further than the Last Mountain. The little water that was available vanished along with the southernmost blacktrees, no more than a few hundred yards past the mountain.
At midnight, Sopharndi and Cley walked together in silence. Cley had even abandoned his humming, perhaps—somehow—sensing his mother’s tension. No one else would have noticed anything amiss in Sopharndi’s manner as she walked. Her head was high, her eyes looking unflinchingly ahead. Her hard, muscular figure cast a sharp-edged shadow by the light of the Sisters, the tight cluster of stars which lent summer nights such as this a silver-blue radiance. The three moons were almost aligned. This would usually be considered an auspicious sign, but Sopharndi allowed herself no unrealistic feeling of optimism.
The Parched Lands stretched as far as the eye could see, the emptiness eerily beautiful in the night light. That beauty would become a deadly landscape by day. Dehydration would kill you within a day and a half unless you found water, and that water was usually jealously guarded by deadly creatures. Not so deadly that they couldn’t be easily dispatched by an average fourteen-year-old. But Cley was far from average.
Sopharndi slowed as she reached the edge of the desert. She turned to her son and wiped the corner of his mouth. He didn’t look at her. He never really had.
A small group had gathered at the edge of the Parched Lands. Six, maybe seven figures watched from the shadows of the last few trees. Sopharndi wasn’t expecting to see anyone but showed no outward sign of surprise. Then a familiar voice called softly from nearby.
“It’s a shame, Sopharndi. Such a warrior cursed with an idiot child. The Singer chooses a strange way to honor our First, does she not?”
Sopharndi didn’t even look up. Cochta may have hoped for a reaction under such circumstances, but she would be disappointed. Sopharndi was too good a fighter to waste useful anger by allowing herself to feel it now when it might usefully be channeled into a killing blow later. Cochta’s confidence was a weakness and–when she finally dropped the taunts in favor of issuing a challenge—Sopharndi would exploit this knowledge.
She looked at Cley’s face for a few seconds. He looked so like his father, the hard skin ridged pleasingly around his deep orange eyes. Beautiful eyes, but empty. No hint of his father’s passion. A Blank, no more. As recently as Sopharndi’s grandmother’s day, Blanks had been driven out into the Parched Lands as soon as their condition became apparent. Some had barely learned to walk. To Sopharndi’s secret shame, she had sometimes wondered if that might have been the kinder outcome. If not for Cley, for her. The dark moments when such thoughts had surfaced had been few, and she had responded by loving her son more fiercely than ever as this might save both of them. Now came the reckoning. Now she had to watch him go, a boy who couldn’t even feed, let alone defend, himself.
The watchers from the trees were silent as she whispered in Cley’s ear.
“Go to the Last Mountain. Stay for two nights, then return. Find shade in the day. Take water from the roots of the blacktrees or the small pools you will find on the mountain. Snakes and smaller lizards can be driven away, but keep your distance. You cannot outrun a skimtail. If it attacks, you must kill it. The flesh of its throat is soft, and its blood will sustain you.”
Cley showed no sign he had heard her, his head moving a little from side to side as it always did. Sopharndi knew he couldn’t understand her, yet still she spoke.
“On my Journey, I killed an adult skimtail and its blood told me what I would become. I left home a child. I came back a warrior. Now I am First.”
Sopharndi searched his face for any glimmer of understanding. She didn’t know where this desperate, pointless hope came from, but it was there. Even now, she had hope. It seemed to her, at this moment, that nothing was crueler than hope. She raised her voice as she spoke the traditional words of parting.
“You are my son, Cley. It is time for your Journey. Leave us only to return. We will wait for you. Listen to the Singer, for She will lead you.”
Cley looked ahead, seeing nothing. Sopharndi gently poured the last of the liquid from his waterskin into his mouth. He swallowed automatically and didn’t react when Sopharndi kept the skin, instead of looping it back around his shoulder. No supplies
were permitted for the Journey, other than a knife, and flints to make fire. Enough to ensure any normal adolescent would survive the experience.
When he didn’t start walking immediately, Sopharndi took his shoulders, faced him directly toward the Last Mountain and gave him a tiny push. He moved then, walking steadily away from her, one foot after the other.
The observers made their way back to the settlement, but Sopharndi didn’t move. She stood utterly still, her red-flecked pupils focused on Cley. She watched her son for over an hour until the wind that moved across the land disturbed the sand enough to make the plodding figure vanish completely. Only then did she turn and quietly make her way home, a mate-less warrior who had just sent her only child to his death.
7
Hours passed, but Fypp didn’t come back. Seb wondered if she ever would. He had created everything else in this place, wasn’t it possible that he had created the playful child who’d visited him, too? He toyed with the idea for a while before rejecting it. Fypp was just too unexpected, too unpredictable, too solid to be a product of his subconscious. Although he wasn’t sure if solid was the right word to describe someone who could disappear, passing through the ground like it was mist.
I thought I was the only one who could do that.
Seb looked at the patch of earth where Fypp had vanished. He stood in the same spot for a moment, then sank into it as she had done. He found himself in blackness again, disembodied. He opened his eyes back in the cabin. He shrugged. Whoever she was, whatever she wanted, he felt sure she’d be back.
There was a prayer stool propped against the piano. He took it onto the stoop and knelt, quickly deepening his attention and allowing stillness to envelop him. The stillness, the silence underneath the surface, was always there, and Seb found he needed to be enveloped by it just as much now as he had when his body was regular flesh and blood. His practice hadn’t changed much—if at all—in the decades since he’d started. It simultaneously grounded, humbled, and moved him just as it always had done. Naturally, it also still alternately infuriated and bored him too. He sometimes questioned why he still kept this ancient practice at the center of his life. Sitting still, back straight, in silence. And yet he kept coming back to it. It was the only surviving remnant of his upbringing in a Catholic orphanage. No dogma, no ritual, no community. Just this sitting in silence.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 98
