by Greg Curtis
Did he understand the inherent dangers involved? That he could be killed or worse? That Sherial would not be able to accompany him in? Must never be allowed to go even close? Did he even have the faintest idea of what he was getting himself into? It was like being interrogated by an army with a single voice, as the titan’s thoughts raged through him, a deafening crescendo of power. Yet Mikel knew Atal was trying to be gentle, whispering in his thoughts.
Mikel didn’t answer, he didn’t need to. The titan had already seen in him everything he needed to see and everything else besides. In a split second the titan had probed down to his tiniest molecule, examined his entire life moment by moment, interrogated his every doubt and then dismissed him.
Mikel knew why Atal let him be. He had decided he had to go through with this insanity on that afternoon in his garden when Sherial had shown him hell, and angel or no angel, he had decided to do it because he couldn’t stand the thought of them suffering like that. Leaving them to their captors’ mercy was simply intolerable. He hadn’t changed his mind since, he couldn’t.
The titan knew that. Atal knew everything about him, and especially why he couldn’t back out, with or without Sherial. Moreover, he accepted it as valid. For Sherial this might be a wayward venture, but for Mikel given his limited human nature, it was only normal behaviour, and given his beliefs and values, the only course he could take. He was too immature to know a better way.
But there was more. For a brief moment the titan seemed to waver as he looked into Mikel, hesitant for perhaps the first time in millions of years. Though quite what he was unsure of he didn’t say. Still Mikel, through Sherial’s eyes, picked up enough to know Atal had suddenly discovered something new in the mix. Something that told him the venture was a terrible gamble. More so than he had thought before. Yet Atal had also seen the prize and accepted that while the risk was higher than he’d first thought, so was the pay off.
In the instant he had scrutinized Mikel he had seen something. Something that changed his perception of the entire mission, yet perversely something that didn’t change things a single iota. Mikel was naturally intensely curious, but not game enough to ask. It was all he could do simply to hold himself together in the presence of the titan.
Atal didn’t care to pass whatever he’d learned on to them, nor did Sherial ask though she surely had the right. Sadly, Mikel was beginning to realize, Sherial was possibly the most trusting person in existence, and she trusted the titan’s judgement without hesitation. If he had meant for them to know what he had seen he would have told them. He hadn’t, therefore it was for the best that he didn’t tell them. Which left Mikel’s curiosity raging. But not for long.
An instant later Atal left him with a smile, if that was the word, a feeling of warmth in his heart, not a human warmth, but still something good. The titan too told him he thought that the little pebble showed promise. Mikel couldn’t bring himself to feel slighted by the titan’s belief; after all he had some conception of just how powerful this creature was. Besides, Atal also left him a gift. A present of knowledge, lodged deep within his mind.
And then he was gone. Vanished as if he had never been. And Mikel fumed slightly. Why did everybody tell him he had promise? It was enough to drive him to drink. If he would ever have allowed himself to drink. But he couldn’t fume for long, not when he started examining the gift he’d been left with, and understood its wonder.
It was a map. An unbelievably detailed map of this entire world, and most especially their target. Yet those human words didn’t do it justice. It was also an encyclopaedia, a tomb so large it couldn’t have been held by all the computers on Earth. Like everything else lately, it wasn’t written in any language, but painted. Perhaps sculptured was the right word? In the angels’ own divine form of communication. Mikel didn’t so much read it as live it.
It was knowledge far more massive than anything he had ever imagined, far too large for him to hold in his mind. Atal had clearly understood his limitations, and Mikel knew intuitively that it would unfold for him as he read it, as he needed it. All he had to do was think of anything they had passed, anything they were going to, or anything else on this world, and instantly it was there in his minds eye. In the same way as he concentrated on anything in the real world, if he focussed on anything in the map, it enlarged and he saw more detail. And more detail without end should he choose.
Mikel sat down, staggered by the wealth of what he found in his mind, while the world around him disappeared. His understanding of it didn’t compare to the titan’s understanding unfolding in his own skull.
Curious, disbelieving and fascinated, Mikel retraced their journey from the moment they had entered this world, studying their every footstep, and wondered how he could have missed so much about it. How he could not have noticed the special rock formations they’d passed, the gullies and the water flows, the hills and valleys all perfectly placed. He saw and understood the natural processes that had shaped them to be everything they were, and even a little of what they would become with time.
He’d walked on a forest trail older than Europe and never even realized. Now he could know it, could feel the history of the path, relive the people, the animals that had walked it before him, watch how their feet and hooves had worn it smooth over the centuries, all that knowledge held somehow within his own tiny mind.
He’d seen animals and plants by the score along their path, yet he’d never really seen them for what they were. Each and every one of them the product of millions of years of careful evolution, perfectly suited to their environment. Looking at each of them in turn he saw how they were all perfectly adapted for their life in this world. He understood their role in the ecosystem, their niches. He knew their history, their creation, their evolution.
And then as he looked deeper he finally understood evolution itself. How it operated, and how different it was from everything he’d learned as a child. Everything he’d been taught, or that mankind believed. Natural selection, - what a joke. For how, he suddenly wondered, could any have been so blind as to think that species evolved by chance? How egotistical to believe that one-day mere men could understand it? Control and manipulate it? For everything from the tiniest bacterium to man and the entire world itself was carefully guided in its progression. Nothing was left to the chance of natural selection.
Time went by as he lost himself in the wonder that had entered his mind, and it wasn’t until Sherial pulled him out of his revere that he realized the sun had set, perhaps many hours before.
Even as he became once more aware of his surroundings, and discovered that his limbs were stiff, the air was cold on his skin, and his stomach was grumbling furiously, he was almost angry for having been pulled away. But quickly, seeing her anew, he found himself once again drawn back to reality and her. He could never be angry with her.
Mikel slowly pulled himself back to the present, and joined her by the fire that she had carefully lit for him. The usual congregation of woodland creatures surrounded the camp, yet all had left the food she had gathered for him, untouched. They would do anything she asked. So would he.
As he sat and listened and watched her, for the first time in all their time together he found himself able to concentrate on something else. Yet he didn’t ignore her. He simply had so much going on inside him that he couldn’t truly focus on anything else.
As each of the creatures approached for their daily blessing, he saw them in an entirely new way. He saw their beings, their structure and function, the way they fitted into this world’s ecology and their entire evolutionary history. It was like instead of being given a name, he was given an entire encyclopaedia at every glance.
How he wondered, could the world have been so flat before?
Then he looked at Sherial again, and gaped, his so-called logic only catching up with him much later. For when he looked at Sherial, he saw Sherial. There was no history attached to her, no place in the world’s ecology, no evolution, not even a trace
of knowledge about her functioning. There was only one answer. Sherial was completely outside of this world. She was completely outside of every world.
Everyone had always said that angels were not of the Earth, but it was only at that moment, looking at her through the titan’s gift, that he understood the full depth of the difference between her and terra firma. Yet she was still beautiful, still a being built of pure love. She was still a flesh and blood woman and a winged beauty he would trust with his life. How could any of this be?
In time he was sure, the wonder of his gift would pass, as would his human failings return, and Sherial’s charms would dominate him again, but for the moment something larger and closer possessed him.
For that as well he was grateful.
CHAPTER EIGHT.
“She was good as she was fair,
None--none on earth above her!
As pure in thought as angels are:
To know her was to love her.”
~Samuel Rogers. 1763-1855.
Jacqueline. Stanza 1.
Mikel was sitting on a small moss covered rock overlooking the valley below when he heard the sound, so close behind him. The most dangerous sound in his entire known universe. His very soul recognised it instantly. An exquisite temptation that simply ripped right through him. A bolt of fear lanced through him straight after as he fought desperately for control.
Not again! Not so soon.
It was only the splash of the water as she bathed, the mesmerizing sound rising above the gentle babble of the trickling brook, surely the most innocent sound possible, but he knew absolute terror. It was the sound of his doom. He knew he shouldn’t look, that he couldn’t afford to look. On the most fundamental level he understood that if he did, if he ever saw, he was lost. His mind, his body, his soul would be lost to her, - forever.
It terrified him, - almost as much as it tempted him. Mainly because it tempted him.
‘Why did she do this?’ He asked himself the question once more, as perhaps he had asked a thousand times before over the past few weeks. Why?
Sherial knew, - she had to know, how he felt. How little self-control he had when she did things like this. When she did exactly this thing. He was only a man, and she was female perfection. How could he feel otherwise? He tried to console himself with that and knew dismal failure. It didn’t matter what she was, only what he wasn’t, - in control.
Time and time again he’d tried to explain, not having the foggiest how to, and terrified that he might drive her away with his pathetic human lust. But he’d never quite managed to choke the words out. How do you tell an angel you lust for her as a woman? The very thought was sacrilege. And whenever he tried she just smiled at him, a smile that told him she loved him unconditionally. The most wonderful and desperately sad smile in existence.
It wasn’t in the way a man and a woman love, he knew. He would have given everything for it to be so, if he couldn’t kill himself first. It was as a priest or a saint loves all men, regardless of age or sex or anything else so prosaic. It was as a mother loves a child, or as a teacher loves her students. Sherial also loved the animals, as they in turn worshipped her. She loved the trees, the forests, the world and God. Sherial loved.
It was his own fault he supposed. He was a man, just a man, but least ways not a mindless beast in rutting season. He knew what he longed for, and he could resist it. Or rather he should be able to. In reality his resistance was becoming more and more desperate by the day. Who really ruled this body anyway, he kept asking himself, him or his hormones. But each time he mastered himself, he rediscovered just how incredibly strong his base desires were.
It was embarrassing, humiliating, and degrading. He should have had far more control. At the very least he should have had some. Instead he was like an adolescent schoolboy with his tongue hanging out, and he hated himself for it. Decades of training in mind over body and yet still he was unable to control the wild animal dwelling within. Hatred simply didn’t go far enough to describe his self-loathing. He tried to hide it from her, cursing himself for his stupidity as he did so. Sherial knew. She surely had to know. But she said nothing, and he said nothing. And so the stupidity continued.
But this time it was different. Harder. Even worse than the last time. Where had his rage gone? For so long it had held him, not secure perhaps, but still at least shielding him from the true devastating power of her charms. At first he had tried to tell himself it was simply his control protecting him. But now the truth was becoming more bitterly clear by the day. That anger, that rage had been all that had protected him.
But somewhere, somehow, bit by bit it had vanished. Sherial had worn it down with her love and infinite understanding until now there was so little left it was next to useless against her charms. Without his rage to power his will, his mantras, all his self-control was failing. And there wasn’t a thing he could do. He was completely powerless before her. And still he knew that even the concept of power was false when thinking of her.
Her beauty had entranced him from the start. Her grace, her gentleness, her love had affected him so deeply he knew now he would never be able to love another. He would never be able to feel lust for a mere human woman. Humans, people were so clumsy, so loud, so imperfect, so full of hate and anger, darkness. Even though he was one himself, how could he ever return to them, live among them, love them again? Sometimes he couldn’t even stand to look at himself in his own small shaving mirror, appalled at his own clumsy form.
Yet he knew he desperately wanted to keep what little was left of his humanity. It was all he was, all that remained to him. To gaze upon her even for an instant would destroy that. It would finally remove him permanently from his own humanity. What he would be afterwards, how he could live, how he could even endure he didn’t know. But for all that he ached to gaze upon her with a longing forged of case-hardened titanium.
“I live. I strive. I win.”
The mantra helped, but it wasn’t enough, as it had been thus far. What was different? He knew what had changed, but he didn’t want to accept it. All that mattered was that somehow all his meditations, all his control, every last scrap of his iron will he had held out for so long against Sherial were now nearly gone. The power, the rage was missing. It had been running down for a while as she exhausted it simply with her presence. But now he was suddenly running on empty, and his will power simply wasn’t strong enough without it. Yet even that wasn’t enough to explain his weakness, surely. He was a strong man, not a weakling. All his strength, all his power surely couldn’t have been based on rage. But no matter how many times he told himself that, he was still kitten weak before her.
In desperation he fell back on an adolescent ploy and tried to imagine the scene. Himself coming upon her, and being rejected, as he knew he would be. He tried to experience the pain and the humiliation in his thoughts, and even though she would hopefully do it with the greatest kindness as she did everything else, knew it would be worse than anything else he would ever experience in his life. To be rejected by Sherial would truly be hell, and it was the only possible outcome.
Stronger still as a weapon was the fear, which he drew on for support. The fear of what his punishment would be, for he knew absolutely that angels had not been placed on Earth by god, for mankind’s pleasure. Least of all for his. What punishment would be meted out to him for such desecration? For desecration was the very word for what he was imagining. The only word. The despoiling of innocence. And what guilt would he know for his debasement of this angel so pure? Even to allow himself to think of her in such a way was corruption. He couldn’t allow it.
“I live. I strive. I win.”
And then there was her husband, for he was sure she must love another. How could she not? What would her man do to him? An angel would make a powerful enemy. An angel like Donnell would be truly devastating. And despite what he knew from Sherial about her own nature, the other angels were nothing like her. They were terrifying. Powerful, majestic, an
d deadly, like a tornado. He couldn’t hope to survive against one.
“I live. I strive. I win.”
There was a war raging in his head, as he struggled to retain control. Muscles locked rigid as he forced himself to gaze only upon the tree in front of him, concentrating on its thick, knotted bark, studying the whirls and lines of it as a policeman would a fingerprint. And for the longest time he thought he was going to win the battle once again, as his sense of self-preservation fought his hormones to a standstill.
“I live. I strive. I win.”
Then she laughed. The sound golden and musical, tinkling like the most impossibly beautiful music and birdsong all rolled into one glorious concert. The beating of his heart responded instantly. His head started turning automatically and in a last desperate effort he squeezed his eyes shut and prayed. Ironic for someone who’d never believed in God, but the only thing that came to mind as her laughter echoed around him, enticing him like heroin to a junkie.
