by Greg Curtis
Then had come the nights. Especially that first one.
Without a word being uttered they had stopped that night in a small clearing, beside a large set of boulders, and he’d begun looking for firewood. Sherial’s communication system, he’d reflected, was weird. The more he became familiar with it, the stranger it became. Instead of voicing her thoughts aloud it was as though she spoke directly to his subconscious, so that often he knew what she wanted without ever knowing how he knew.
It was a troubling system, and one that perhaps a mere human would never master. But even so his distressingly coarse voice and painfully limited words seemed like the most primitive grunts in response. Sherial and he were two people with a chasm so vast between them that they could barely communicate. Still they did, and it was enough. It had to be.
Besides, what he didn’t learn from her was perhaps insignificant compared to what he did. Things he hadn’t asked about, he knew the answers to. From the start it had been so. That first time she’d communicated, he’d learnt more about her than he’d known about any other human being in his entire life. He knew - no he felt - her goodness, her purity, and while it unnerved him, while it made him feel as a cockroach in the presence of a queen, it still told him enough to know that he could trust her, no matter how much his paranoia railed against it. Of course it, like the rest made no sense.
Sherial wouldn’t, no she couldn’t lie to him, and she didn’t mean him any harm. She couldn’t intend him any harm. She simply could not intend harm to anyone. It was not who or what she was. There was danger ahead, yes, but it was danger she believed he had to face, and risk she believed he could overcome. That was why she had chosen him. But neither did that mean he would succeed, and neither would she lie to him about that. If this mission scared him, it scared her at least as badly. But for different reasons.
Naturally what she did tell him was, as always, stranger than what he imagined.
First up, how long would it take? Sherial herself didn’t know, though she told him it would take exactly as long as it needed to. How far was it? Precisely the same answer. What exactly it meant he had no idea, but equally he had no choice other than to go with it.
Then there were the risks. They were travelling to hell to fight with demons, yet the dangers she seemed to fear most were the risks inherent in him. In his very nature. Sherial feared more for his soul than his flesh, and she was also fearful of his mind and where it might lead him. At the same time he gathered, the body and soul were also very nearly the same thing to her. It made no sense to him, yet it was the only way he could interpret her thoughts, and he had enough grey cells left to know she saw and knew so many things far more clearly than he did.
His life, his spirit, his beliefs and his attitudes were she explained to him, everything that made this venture possible, and at the same time, everything that made it perilous. If that confused him he suspected that it also confused her.
At the heart of her concern was that Sherial didn’t approve of his life, of his actions, and yet neither did she totally disapprove of them either. It was more as though she believed he could do better. He perhaps disappointed her, and that hurt. But she was also pleased with him in other ways.
He was a mixed bag. His skills, his abilities, those things she had surely come for, she was at least satisfied with, while his godless life was a deep disappointment. But his self discipline techniques and martial arts training she admired, and his dedication to helping others and seeking justice was by far his greatest virtue. That more than anything, she believed or hoped would get him through.
His curiosity was something of a two edged sword. She was pleased with him always being determined to see new things, to go new places, to learn and to understand the unknown. But equally she was scared for him. Curiosity would lead him to places that he might not be able to return from, and she didn’t mean physical places. Curiosity taken too far and too rashly, could lead him straight to Hell. Which when he thought about it was slightly ironic, considering where they were going. He didn’t share that thought with her.
If he’d been a tree, he guessed, Sherial would have been disappointed that he hadn’t grown quite straight, but pleased with how strong he’d become, regardless. A passing grade anyway, but he could do better.
Of greater concern to him was the feeling he had developed that she wanted to straighten him, and more troubling still, the suspicion that she could perhaps do it. Crooked or otherwise, Mikel felt quite comfortable as he was. He wasn’t always proud of what he did, but nor did he live in shame. His life might not be perfect, but it was his life.
Mikel understood from Sherial at least a little of what straight was for her, and it was something he knew he could never be. For a start there was the vegetarianism, not because of dietary or health considerations, nor even for environmental reasons, but simply because living feeling creatures should not suffer for the greed of those able to know and do better. Perhaps he could endure that, certainly he wasn’t suffering too much so far after the first few days of rumbling guts. But for the rest of his life? He didn’t think he had that much strength. At least she allowed dairy, though only because she knew the animals didn’t suffer for it. If they had he guessed, it would have tainted the food and she would have known.
Then there was honesty, something he couldn’t afford, and something he’d never really known. His entire life was a tissue of lies, beginning with his thousand and one names, and ending with his latest burglary. He simply could not afford the truth. Angels on the other hand couldn’t lie. But it went further than that. They not only couldn’t lie they couldn’t give half-truths, or evade direct questions. The most they could do was refuse to answer.
However, the truth that Sherial sought from him, wasn’t the precision of his words. Words were as nothing to her. What she ached for was the total openness of the soul. As time had passed he’d discovered he could even joke with her, almost as though she were human. He could tease her, even try and fool her, as long as his heart and soul were true.
Honesty, he guessed, had its plusses, for as Sherial told him it was both the reason that angels spoke with their hearts and minds instead of words, and also the necessary condition for them to be able to do so. Humans couldn’t communicate that way. If people one day learned total honesty, perhaps they too would learn to speak in the language of angels. Of course then they wouldn’t need him around. The world would be a perfect place, and he would have been dead for many centuries.
One thing Mikel knew above all else, for him that day would never arrive.
His theft too was a sin, but not quite in the same way as his lying. For if angels didn’t steal, they also didn’t have much of a concept of money or property. The entire act therefore became more than a little cryptic to Sherial. What she did see was that when he stole, he stole not so much for himself as he did for justice, and that gave him a little leeway. In giving for the needs of others, he redeemed himself further in her eyes, a long way further. But the part of the stealing he did for himself, that he did for profit, or for the challenge and excitement, or for revenge was wrong, completely wrong. It undermined the rest of the act in her eyes. Yet still he argued, he had to eat, and he was only human after all.
His disbelief in God was also a terrible failing, perhaps his greatest. It was something Sherial could not and would not understand in him. Something she could never accept. Her thoughts continually seemed to run along the lines of ‘Are you completely brain dead?’ At least that was his interpretation.
It was also a belief he himself was having a hard time maintaining in the face of a living angel. But if God existed, it left Mikel with some serious questions. Ones like if he was all seeing and all knowing and good, why was there evil in the world? Why were the strong and greedy able to trample all over everyone else? Where was the justice? The fairness? The love?
Sherial had tried to explain it to him, but on some horribly deep level he found himself unable to understand her. Was he
so fundamentally different that he couldn’t even understand her? He suspected he might well be, and it scared him. Not so much because he thought he might be too much a sinner to see the truth, as because he thought she might finally realize his limitations and leave him alone. Already he knew that life without Sherial would be hard. If she left him because she had no hope for him, that would be torture.
Then there was the anger, which seemed to be growing in him by the day. For if God did exist then he had a lot of explaining to do. Thus far Mikel had kept his rage in check with his discipline, but he feared it, especially as it continued to grow by the day. Rage had powered him for many years, but he had always known that if he let it consume him he would become what he most hated, and he had fought against it. Now he had a new fear. He was terrified that it would take control, and that it would drive Sherial away.
Sherial, he feared, was determined to iron out some of the faults she saw in him, seeing him as a human with great potential. He could do better, and she wanted his best from him, but he wanted something else. He couldn’t equate her goals with what he knew of the world. He couldn’t be what she wanted and still be who he was. And he desperately wanted to be who he was. He was a thief and a liar, but he was also Mikel. And he always wanted to be that.
Should he change millions would suffer for it, and he told her so repeatedly, every time her thoughts returned to that well-worn path. The sheer force of his pragmatism and his years of paranoia and anger held her faith at bay, for now, but it was a battle far from over, and they both knew it. Still he didn’t regret it, what was life without a challenge? And it was nice to have someone who cared.
For that was the most wonderful truth of all; Sherial cared about him. Not perhaps as a man, nor even perhaps as a friend, but at least she cared. Whether her decisions were right or wrong for him, whether or not he could accept them, they were still motivated only by her desire to help him. For that reason alone he knew he would follow her to hell and back. Literally.
That first evening he’d gathered the firewood from a small tree that had fallen over sometime in the previous few years, and had a small blaze going within minutes. And that too had been strange. He’d never had much luck lighting fires, usually having to blow and poke, re-light and blow again until fortune finally favoured him. This one just seemed to light at the first touch of his match, and more strangely the wood didn’t seem to burn down very fast either. A few small brands had lasted the entire evening.
While he’d been setting up the camp, Sherial had been out gathering food, fruit, nuts and berries from the nearby bushes. Also some ears of corn, and rice from the nearer fields, and too follow, some milk and cheese from a nearby farm. She hadn’t told him that was what she was doing, but he’d known never the less. It was almost as though he could see her gathering the foods through her own eyes. That too had scared him. How could he know such things without being told in some way? It smacked of mind control, of invasion of privacy. He had no secrets with her, a terror in itself, but now it seemed he couldn’t even keep her out of his mind.
Shortly after they’d set up camp that evening, they’d sat down and talked, or rather he talked and Sherial sometimes communicated in return, sometimes not. It was one of the differences between speaking and whatever form of communication it was that angels used. If they’d used words he knew, he would have been far better able to learn the things he wanted. But at the same time he would have been less well informed.
Mikel had learned far more her way than he’d ever imagined possible. For when she answered one of his questions he didn’t just learn the answer, he experienced it, all of it. There was an old saying, - if a picture paints a thousand words - well in this case his experiences told him far more.
When he’d asked where they were for example, Sherial had done far more than simply tell him the name of the place; she’d shown him. He’d seen, smelled, heard and felt a world of lush forests and mythical creatures, huge oceans, deserts and plains, and all filled with life. He’d immediately seen that this was indeed an entire world in its own right, and that somehow every point on it corresponded to some point on Earth. For a moment he could almost see the way in which the worlds connected, but not without her understanding in his mind.
More strange still he’d been shown that this was an ‘innocent’ world, one where concepts like civilization, cities, pollution, poverty, exploitation and a million other similar terms had never arisen. At least that was how he would have described what he was shown. Sherial saw it differently. For her it was a world well on its way to maturity. It had its problems perhaps, but great virtues as well. It was hard to understand a world so clean and pure and yet he knew it to be true. The one thing he didn’t however, learn was the name of the world, if indeed it had one. A name is a word, and Sherial didn’t deal in words.
The few humans he’d seen here, and there were some, lived in harmony with nature, as part of it, little more advanced than animals. And yet despite their lack of technology he knew they weren’t savages. They walked erect, used some basic tools, and communicated in the same insane angelic manner as Sherial. Once he had thought her tongue simply too complex for human vocal cords. Now he knew some humans had the same vocal cords.
Then again they also weren’t truly human either, though they were very close. If nothing else their skin marked them most as being from another world, being a mottled piebald mosaic of browns and gold. It was strange, yet it looked perfectly natural on them. Then too, the hair on their heads was closer to fur, running down their necks and backs like a lion’s mane. There was something in the shape of their cheeks and eyes that also marked them as alien, but not being an artist he couldn’t quite pin it down.
The locals were a tall people, averaging well over six feet, but perfectly proportioned with it, and none of them showed any sign of awkwardness. In fact they moved with the natural grace of dancers. Any one of them would have made a great basketball player. Above all there was a certain ‘rightness’ in their form that said they were no mutant or alien. They were designed for this world and were in complete harmony with it.
For all the differences between them and him, Mikel also knew they were perhaps the truest embodiment of humanity in their hearts too. They knew and understood love and joy, lived in peace, and made friends with their fellow humans and animals. So perhaps if he as a so-called civilized man looked down upon them as primitives, they too could rightly look down upon him. Of course they were far beyond that, which left him feeling more than a little ridiculous.
When they’d occasionally met a travelling man or a family, he’d studied them with intense interest, trying to understand everything about them. How they could survive as simple nomadic primitives and yet seem somehow so far above him at the same time? How they could live in such a paradise and not spoil it? What path had they chosen that the Earth hadn’t? Or more probably what path hadn’t they chosen?
It was a fruitless investigation. He’d found to his surprise that he couldn’t even begin to understand them. They spoke with Sherial in the same strange tongue and seemed to understand everything she said, yet he picked up nothing except her responses to them.
Sherial’s side of the conversations confused him perhaps even more than theirs. For while they greeted Sherial as an honoured friend, she too greeted them as such. It was as though they were all on the same level, one so far above him that he could only watch and stare. Yet Sherial was an angel, while they too were just human beings. Couldn’t they see that, he kept asking himself?
This then he’d finally decided, must be the Garden of Eden. What Earth was like before the fall. The people here so innocent that they had no conception of the order of the heavens, and perhaps so pure that it didn’t even apply. But when he’d asked Sherial she’d said no, and typically explained nothing further, simply adding to his confusion.
Mostly that first evening, he recalled, she’d sang. A wordless song, full of music and light, sung with the most delicate o
f bird song and purest flute. It was a song of love, not mortal love or lust, but rather pure love, that which only the soul can know, and it moved him deeply. He’d heard her singing before, often accompanying his stereo and completely outclassing it, but that first night here was different. Something in the air, in the world, in his distance from everything he called home, made him perhaps more susceptible. But then too her singing was always miraculous. When Sherial sang, the very mountains were surely moved to their knees. How anybody could have such a voice was beyond him, but then so was everything else about her.
As he’d chewed on the last of the fruits and nuts she’d brought him, he listened and watched, entranced, as he had been since the beginning. And so when darkness finally fell, and she rested for a while, he’d found himself shocked by the passage of time.
Looking around in the darkness he’d first spotted eyes, yellow eyes glowing in the reflections of the fire light. Yellow eyes of all different shapes and sizes, at a variety of different heights, and completely surrounding them. He started only a little, he should have expected them.
