by Jasmine Walt
Tiina looks up from binding his bleeding side. “Not good. We have got to get out of here.”
He coughs again and closes his eyes. “It bit me…”
Yudi shakes him awake. “Come on, Rai; you can’t sleep now. We have to keep going.”
“Can’t you use that for help?” Tiina points to the Isthmus still strapped to his wrist.
“I have no idea what this thing does; do you?"
They help Rai to his feet and, supporting him between the two of them, run out of the temple onto the road winding past fields of sunflowers. As they keep up the pace, Yudi turns back to the temple.
“Look!”
Simh is crawling out of the crater he had fallen into, dragging the now inert body of the Naga. He sits on the fallen ramparts of the wall and places the serpent’s long torso over his thighs and sticks both his clawed hands into the creature’s gut, and then tears it apart, again, again, and again. The Naga’s body jerks once, twice, and then goes completely motionless. Finally, he gets to his feet; shaking his head, he draws up to his full height, stamps his foot, raises his hands and his head to the stars, and roars in triumph. The last vestiges of the crumbling temple form a background to his conquest.
It seems as if molecules of power are radiating from him, cocooning him in a halo of energy, as his mane ripples in the soft breeze. The temple behind him then collapses completely, sending tremors radiating through the ground to where they are standing. Simh bounds towards them and, taking hold of the hurt Rai, places him on his shoulders.
“Let’s go. We don’t have much time now. Shaitan will not let the death of the guardian of the Isthmus and the destruction of his favourite temple go unheeded; we need to get Artemis to her normal size and out of here before that.”
Artemis, who is ahead of Tiina, enlarges, extending to its original spaceship dimensions. After parking in the middle of the road, she flings her doors open, extending the gangway to the ground.
From his vantagepoint on Simh’s shoulders, Rai sees Tiina and Yudi run the twenty or so yards up to the ship; a new sound, like the whispering of bees’ wings comes from the direction of the temple. It grows louder by the minute. Tiina and Yudi pause on the gangplank as it catches their attention, and he looks up as the night sky brightens, as if the sun is rising right next to them.
“That is him,” says Simh, and then grunts.
Agony whips through Rai, and he gasps, blood spurting from his lips. He has been hit from behind by a thunderbolt-shaped weapon, which has clean gone through him. Simh eases Rai down, and then, without a word, turns and walks back toward the source of the noise.
“What is he doing?” asks Tiina, her voice filled with panic.
Rai groans, but does not move from where he has been placed; his face pales. So this is what it was about. This is why I shared my Elixir with Simh. Our fates are intertwined.
“Come on, Rai!”
Tiina’s shriek jerks his attention away from the pain. Rai hesitates, looking from Artemis and his friends on one side and Simh walking back to face Shaitan’s fury on the other.
Coughing, he spits out blood, the sight of which helps him make up his mind. “I lied,” he mumbles. “I never took any of the Elixir. There was but a drop left, which is what has seen me through so far, I suppose.”
The temple complex fills with figures silhouetted against the sky. Shaitan’s army of Nagas has arrived. Their hissing, like a thousand murmurs, reaches out to him seductively. The poison rushing through his system makes him delirious. Through his already fading eyesight, he can make out Tiina beginning to go back down the gangplank to him. She struggles against Yudi, who has clamped his arms around her holding her back.
From far away, he hears her call out his name again. Rai gets up, slowly, and looks from them to where Simh has reached the temple. Lion Man flings himself over the broken wall into the army of Nagas, taking many of them down with him as he disappears from sight.
Rai raises a hand and yells in a voice alien to him, “Go!”
He sees Tiina break out of Yudi’s hold and start down the gangplank, but Yudi runs after her and, after picking her up, throws her over his shoulder before carrying her inside the spaceship. She struggles and hits Yudi’s back.
“Go!” Rai screams, hoping his voice will carry to Yudi over the short distance.
Then he rejects them as he turns back to the army of serpents ,which have slithered nearer. My life, my death, he thinks, muttering only half in jest to himself, “Go! Before I change my mind!”
He manages a weak smile.
24
Tiina dashes down the gangplank, intent on getting to Rai. She is rudely interrupted by Yudi, who slams into her from behind. Without bothering to argue, he picks her up and heaves her across one shoulder, then turns around and walks up the gangplank.
“Let me go, you big bully! Let me out. Rai! Rai!” she screams, hitting his back, punching him on his side, hating his superior physical strength.
She kicks him in the groin with her bowed knee and is satisfied to hear his groan of pain, only to feel thwarted when he wraps his hands around her legs, holding them down.
“You idiot! What do you think you’re doing?” she screams at him, but Yudi’s grip is vice-like.
For once, he does not budge, taking the brunt of her anger as he carries her inside. As they cross the entrance, she sees Rai raise a hand as if in farewell and thinks she can hear him yell for them to go. The bright light from the direction of the temple complex catches the medallion he habitually wears around his neck, illuminating his face so she sees his features clearly for a second, before it dies away.
And his lips move, maybe, though she’s not certain, and the words are lost in the distance between them. He smiles before he turns around. The gangplank closes, cutting him from sight.
Yudi throws her down in the co-pilot’s seat, but she jumps right back up, slamming into him. With another grunt, he slaps her, stunning her into silence.
Tears of frustration run down her cheeks as she collapses against the chair while he snaps her seatbelt in position. In silence, he walks to the pilot’s seat to switch on the controls.
So even Artemis has deserted me, she thinks, feeling sorry for herself.
Without a murmur, Artemis lifts into the night skies, out into orbit, until she is but a speck on Saturn’s cheek, before making a wide arc in the sky and setting on direction to Arkana.
Tiina stares straight ahead. That didn't happen. It didn’t, it didn't…she repeats to herself over and over again, as if by denying it, she could turn back time. The scene replays in her mind over and over again, revealing her last sight of Rai before the gangplank cut him out of her life forever. Her heart feels like it has stopped beating, leaving behind a numb black hole.
This can’t be goodbye, she thinks, remembering all the times he had been there for her, holding her hand whenever Yudi had broken her heart, whenever she had felt lonely. Her best friend, he had always been there for her, until the very end.
“You have to let him go.” They are the first words Yudi dares venture.
She barely hears him. “Why, why did he do it? Why did he have to be a bloody martyr?”
“He’ll always be with us.”
As Yudi’s softly spoken words penetrate her subconscious, her grief turns to anger.
“It’s all your fault!” she says in a low voice. “Yours!”
Yudi glances at her in surprise, then back to the console, ensuring Artemis is stable on her return path before he takes his hands from the panels and sighs. “Yeah! You’re right. I wanted him dead.”
At his rough words, all the bottled tension of the last few days of the journey rushes back. From the time when he had found her on Java and persuaded her to return to Arkana, to the emotional lows of the guardians’ test, to the startling discovery of finding that she still loved him, to the gory killing of her twin, and now to this, the final crushing guilt of leaving Rai behind. Everything races back, engulfing
her, crashing over her heart in a killer wave of contradictory emotions, until she is unable to breathe. She chokes, then gasps for air when the blood rushes to her head, pushing her over the edge into a rage so fine that she sees red, unaware of exactly what she is going to do next.
After snapping off her seatbelt, she throws herself at him over the horseshoe shaped control panel, and hits his chest with a thump that forces the air from him.
“So you want to fight? Do you?” he snarls, and after disengaging his seatbelt, he pushes right back at her so that they spring out of his seat, wrapped in a death grip as they hit the floor.
Yudi manages to twist around so that she lands on him and for the third time, he has his breath knocked out of him as she buries the edge of her elbow in his solar plexus. She reaches behind for her sword, but he is too fast for her.
“Oh, no, you don’t.”
To her fury, his long hand flashes out. After pulling out her sword, he flings it to the side so that it hits the back of the ship’s cabin and bounces to the floor.
“Let’s do this the old fashioned way,” he says, and he flips her over as easily as if she were a weightless rag doll.
She slaps him with her right hand, at which point he captures both her wrists with his left hand, making an effective restrictive bracelet and forces them above her head. With his legs around hers, she is his prisoner.
Incensed, she struggles under him. Even through the haze of her fury, she feels him getting aroused.
“Don’t you dare!” She is silenced when his mouth descends to her, plundering her. Desire curls in her lower belly, mixing with anger and something more. Refusing to give in to it, she bites down on his lip and has the satisfaction of drawing blood as he jerks back.
He brings up his right hand to wipe the blood from his lower lip.
As one, their eyes are drawn to the amulet with the turquoise stone on his right wrist. Reminded of the challenges they undertook to retrieve it and their promise to Mimir, the anger drains out of her. A fresh memory of Rai wells up and so does a tear, which trickles down her left cheek.
“Don’t cry,” he says, helpless against the onslaught of her misery. After bending his face, he gently kisses away the tear. His tender gesture undoes her, more potent than his earlier coercive force.
As he brings his lips back to hers, this time she takes from him, trying to replenish her hopes, her dreams, her love, frantic to rekindle the embers of the dying fire in her soul. With a strength born of the desperation of wanting to be reborn in a world where everything is as it had been, she heaves and pushes him over so that she is the one on top. She plunders to her heart’s content until she can take no more.
25
It is the first time she has been so aggressive in her lovemaking. Where earlier he had been the one hungry for her, this time it is she who catches fire. Ravenous, she consumes him whole, as if she had joined her soul to his and transfused all the energy, draining him and filling herself until she was replete and he had nothing left to give. He didn’t think he could move.
They lie on the floor of the spaceship, their legs still intertwined. Yudi pillows her head under his left arm. Her right leg is flung over his left. They had not bothered to remove their clothes before making love. Both of them had been so impatient to simply touch and feel her living breathing vitality that it was almost as if they had wanted to assure each other that after all that death that there was still hope, that life still went on. The taste of her fills his mouth, wiping away the flavour of loss, replacing it with something more heartrending.
Love. I am in love with her.
He hadn’t known Rai very well, but Rai had been Tiina’s best friend. Somehow they had understood each other, communicating on a level where he hadn’t been allowed to enter. Rai had propped her up emotionally when she had fallen apart after Yudi had cheated on her.
For the first time, Yudi acknowledges the consequences of his actions, understanding he had been wrong to do that, but perhaps one has to make mistakes to grow up. Mimir had been right. This journey was changing all of them.
Feeling Tiina shiver, he turns and puts his arm around her, covering as much of her with his body as he can. Burying his face in her neck, he breathes of that essence that is so uniquely her. He raises his face and sees her staring into his eyes.
“Shaitan will come after us for revenge, to take back the Isthmus.”
He nods, wondering what was going on in that mind of hers.
“You must avenge Rai. You must kill Shaitan.”
“An eye for an eye, Tiina?”
“Rai was innocent. He gave up his life for us.”
“He knew what had to be done for the greater good, for the mission.”
“And, what about Simh? Will you let his death be in vain?”
More disturbed than he cares to admit by her words, he retreats from her and lies back on the floor, his skin barely touching hers. His thoughts are in a twist; he understands Tiina’s need for revenge. As for him, he just feels numb, somewhat insulated from the reality of death. Is Rai really dead? Was Lion Man really my guardian angel? And if he is gone, who will look out for me now? Is it selfish to think of myself first?
Probably. He mentally shrugs, but then again, he was a selfish bastard to begin with, and topmost of his concern is how to take care of Tiina so that she does not do anything stupid. Adamant as she is, chances are she is going to do something reckless. Unless he promised her, told her what she wanted to hear, so that she would calm down.
He looks at the Isthmus on his wrist. Wearing it makes him feel responsible for his actions. It is as if he is being made to pay for years of being happy-go-lucky. Ah! To be able to act without worrying about the consequences. He wishes for a simpler time, when all he had to do was worry about where his next adventure came from.
“I will take revenge, Tiina. After all, Rai was also my friend. I promise that he did not die in vain.”
Her face is devoid of emotions, as if she has shut off, refusing to let him in.
Why can’t I tell what she is really feeling? Trying to get a rise out of her, he blurts out, “I love you, Tiina.”
When she does not react, his heart sinks. How stupid can you be? he berates himself. Her best friend just died and all you can do is tell her you love her. Obviously, she doesn’t feel the same way. Not after what you did to her. And then, only making things worse, he asks, “What are you thinking?”
“That I am too good for you.” She cracks a smile.
That wasn’t quite the answer he had been hoping for, but it wasn’t complete rejection, either, and he relaxes a little. “Stay with me, Tiina.”
“That sounds suspiciously like a proposal, Yudi. Are you?”
“What?”
“Proposing to me.”
Artemis, who has been quiet all along, makes her presence felt right then. The lights inside the ship’s deck flash on and off, changing from the earlier soft lighting to a glare and then to an angry red. The icons on the control panel flash erratically.
“Uh-oh! She’s not happy, is she?”
“You don’t have to sound so pleased, you know.”
Grief cracks her voice. “She is my only friend in the world now.”
“I am here for you, Tiina; I will always be here for you.” He wraps his arms around her and speaks to the general atmosphere around him, addressing Artemis. “I’ll take care of her, you hear? When she breathes, I want to be the air for her. I’d die for her.”
When he doesn’t get a response from the spaceship, he injects a note of pleading in his voice, “We can both be her friends, can’t we?” His voice breaks as he lets the grief trickle out. The events of the last few days finally catch up.
Adrenaline drains, leaving him exhausted. He closes his eyes and tightens his hold on Tiina, willing his limbs not to tremble, and decides to wait for Artemis’s mood to settle.
A few minutes later, when her lights restore to their original warmer glow, he sighs. Tiina snu
ggles into his embrace.
If she had been more conscious of her actions, less tired and unhappy, she would likely have caught herself doing so and pulled back. For now he is content to take what she gives.
26
The return from Saturn to Arkana is different from their expedition to the planet. Artemis uses the directions to the wormhole, which Mimir programmed into her system prior to their journey. She has them back in Arkana in two days. In the normal course, on the interplanetary trade routes, it would have taken them at least a full day to cross from one planet to the next. They have gone past Yudi’s adopted planet, Pluto. Thanks to Mimir’s shortcut, though, they take half the time to complete their journey.
They arrive to a muted heroes' welcome, Yudi having transmitted ahead both news of the retrieval of the Isthmus and of Rai’s death. On landing they are met by one of the administrative officials from the Academy of Half Lives, who tells them that Mimir is waiting for them in the Hall of the Great Mirrors.
Tiina asks to stay behind, wanting to spend time alone with Artemis.
In truth, Yudi realises that she is not ready to face the world, needing more time to come to terms with everything that has happened. Between the deaths of her long lost and briefly found twin as well as Rai, her innocence has been wrung out.
She looks exhausted. Worryingly, the only time she seems to come to life is when there is talk of Shaitan. Nothing else matters. With reluctance, he agrees to leave her and, accompanied by the official, is ushered straight into the Hall of the Great Mirrors.
This is Mimir’s way of welcoming them in a formal manner. He has only been in this room once before, during their graduation, and had been a different person then. A rough, young boy more concerned with cutting class than saving the world. This time there are no crowds of eager students, no congratulatory speeches, no Rai to thump his back and ask him whether he wants to get out of there and get a drink. The Academy is empty. The students of the last batch have graduated, and it is two weeks before the new term begins.
