The next day, Glaide was the first one up. The sun flooded the room, and the sweet scent of spring held sway over the room. The young man couldn’t help but smile, and decided to take the stairs down to the first floor.
The patron of the establishment greeted him joyfully, and asked if he’d like something to eat. The adolescent wasn’t hungry, though. All around him, the revelers of the night before were finishing the night, slumped about the tables. As he left, he took care to make his weapon disappear – not knowing if walking about armed was allowed, he preferred not to take a risk. Outside, the merchants had begun to set up their market stalls. He decided to go wherever his feet led him, meditating all the while. “The first reaction we have to the unknown is always fear... Wariness – or even wickedness – is in the nature of men, but so is solidarity. Here, the people seem to be more or less friendly – one need look no farther than these men here!
“Perhaps in wanting to explain everything, we’ve become more and more individualistic with time. Here, there are many things that must simply be accepted as they are, and so the kindness and altruism that characterized mankind have been preserved. Furthermore, if you think about it, the countries where people show the most solidarity are often those that are the poorest – where death is mundane, and can strike at any time. It’s the same here: one can’t spend their whole life constantly thinking that they risk being attacked and killed at any moment. But they know that that could happen, and so they react with solidarity in the face of a common enemy. It is situations of this kind – for example, being faced with natural disasters – that show us that men from all over are really not so different from one another. Yes, as soon as they are faced with a common problem, men forget their differences.”
Little by little, he left the inn behind. It was then that he saw a merchant lamenting the state of what appeared to be some kind of salad – but dry and wilted. Glaide thought to himself that the summer had to have been hot for produce to be so dehydrated. It was true that since he and his friends had arrived, the weather hadn’t changed; the nights had been mild, and the days had been sunny, with ideal temperatures.
He thought also of the food; none of the young people had paid much attention to what they’d eaten up until then – everything they’d experienced had been so extraordinary that food had been the least of their worries! However, with a bit of an effort he was able to recall what they had eaten the evening before: soup that had tasted like tomato, followed by a roast, and to finish, fruit that had looked and tasted like apples. Yes, everything seemed to be just like back home. However, wanting to find out for sure, he approached the unfortunate merchant.
“Good morning, sir. Could I ask what happened and, perhaps, offer you my aid?”
“Good morning. That’s very kind of you, but I’m afraid there is nothing you can do for my poor lettuce...”
“So they are lettuce,” Glaide thought to himself. The food really was the same as in his own world, then. So then, where did he find himself? Another planet also inhabited by mankind? He continued, “So, these are heads of lettuce. They don’t look very good.”
“Bah! Tell me about it. They’ve been cooked by the sun,” the man said, then cried in the direction of the sun, “If only the rain could come! We have enough problems already!”
Glaide jumped: the speaker, so calm a few seconds earlier, had yelled this words with such hatred that the adolescent froze for a moment. However, the merchant calmed himself and said, turning towards the boy, “Excuse me, I’m sorry, but... It’s just that we have more and more trouble growing our crops. I feel as though the end is drawing near...”
“Oh, no, don’t say that. We just have to wait. The rain will come back one day,” Glaide said with a big smile, trying to comfort the man. The reaction he received, however, was not the one he had expected. The man stared at him, and a glimmer of confusion seemed to flash in his eyes, as if this mention of the rain brought back distant, forgotten memories – memories of a forgotten time. His face lit up with a smile.
“You must be a protector, to be comforting people like this, huh?”
“Oh, well, yes, actually.”
“Well, thank you very much. You’ve played your role well! You’re right: we must continue to hope. It will only be if all of the humans of Galadria have lost hope that Baras will really have won. But we haven’t reached that point yet!”
Glaide was pleased to see that the merchant before him now appeared to be feeling much better. The latter began to speak to him in a more familiar way, saying, “You’re dressed strangely enough. Where are you from?” However, Glaide didn’t have time to answer before the man continued on, saying, “No, don’t tell me. I bet you’ve come from the south, and that you’ve heard of the famous Shinozuka growing methods. And so you’ve come with your magg to see it with your own eyes!”
“That’s it exactly,” exclaimed the adolescent, relieved not to have to invent his own story. “And my magg is still sleeping, which is why I’m alone.”
“Alana,” cried the man. “Come see!”
A woman arrived at a run, stopping before Glaide and looking at him. She appeared to be about thirty years old. She greeted him politely, and Glaide introduced himself.
“Dear,” continued the man, “this boy is a protector! He came from the south especially to discover Shinozuka’s growing methods. We could show him everything!”
“With pleasure,” responded his wife.
“Ummm... Great, let’s go then,” said the adolescent. “Where are we going, then?”
“This way,” Alana said, pointing to the interior of their abode. Glaide thought it wise not to ask any questions for the moment, but the presence of a vegetable garden inside a home left him perplexed. However, he followed the couple, entering the home.
It was now the middle of the morning, and his companions were probably awake.
Chapter 16
AS he travelled through the home, Glaide noticed that the interior, much like the exterior, resembled a medieval Japanese home. “What a strange mixture of cultures,” he thought to himself. Near the living room, a staircase led up to a sleeping loft. The home seemed quite immense, which was perhaps the reason for the great size of the village.
As they walked, the young man reflected on his identity: he could reveal without fear that he was a protector, but what about his origins? As the Guardian had confirmed, travel between the worlds was unusual, and consequentially, if he wanted to assimilate with the inhabitants of this world quickly and efficiently, it would be necessary for him to leave his past behind him.
His thoughts were interrupted then, because they arrived before a sliding door, made of what appeared to be rice paper. The panel slid to the side, revealing a magnificent garden, where all sorts of vegetables that the young man recognized grew: carrots, beans, lettuce... But two things immediately attracted his attention: the garden plot immediately before him was not the only one. The plots were innumerable, all more or less square, forming a circle around... around what exactly? The teen couldn’t really say. It was a huge turquoise-blue sphere. It had a diameter of between five and ten feet, and he could distinctly see water in the interior. But how could water be held inside?
The other mystery, which was just as surprising, took the form of sliding panels much like the one the teen had slid to the side, but each one situated before another vegetable plot. Furthermore – and which gave them a strange element of character, to say the least – the sliding panels seemed to lead... nowhere. In front of them were the vegetable plots, and behind them was the rest of the plain. Nonetheless, a continual flow of people was constantly leaving through one doorway, then entering through another. All around Glaide, there was no longer any village, but just circles of vegetable plots, each with a huge sphere in the center. He could see that these were of different sizes, though from a distance, it appeared that even the smallest were still at least three feet in diameter.
At his look of surprise, the man and wo
man couldn’t help but laugh, then they explained, “To start with, you should know that every home has a garden plot. You are before ours, and you can see around this sphere all of the plots from our neighborhood. So then, each circle represents the land of another neighborhood,” the man began.
“But as you can see,” continued his wife, “all these plots of land take up a huge amount of space, which is why we couldn’t very well have them inside the city. Here, you are actually far to the south. Look,” she said, as she pointed a finger towards the mountains in the distance. Glaide immediately recognized Fyth, and in front of the mountains, the path he and his friends had taken several days before. “That’s where the black orks came from... No wonder those mountains seemed menacing as we passed them...” he thought.
“I’ve already been by here, on this path,” he declared out loud, pointing to the path along the fields. “However, my friends and I saw nothing.”
“That’s perfectly normal. These fields are protected by magic, so that no one can see them, except, of course, for those who work in them. Plus, it is impossible to hear anything past the boundaries – that protects us from the orks. If they were able to destroy these crops, it would mean the end for all of us!”
The young man paused for a moment, musing at such an enormity, then he continued, “But tell me, where does this magical protection come from? Wouldn’t it be possible to use this same technique to protect the villages themselves?” Glaide, naturally, thought of Rackk. Since leaving the village behind, he searched constantly for some way that they could have saved the village, even though he knew it was futile.
“As far as I’ve been told, these fields have existed since before the foundations of Shinozuka, along with the doors that let us teleport ourselves here. No one really knows who created all of this, though it all appears to function thanks to the eorens and maggs.”
“Ah ha, so here is one of the great purposes of maggs,” thought the young man. “They really do seem to be important. But I would be surprised if this was their only gift...” He realized then that his companion had employed a term he had never heard before. “Umm... Did you say ‘eorens’?”
“Yes, why? Don’t you know about eorens?”
At that moment, the young man felt rather like an infant who had been asked what two plus two equaled, and who proved himself incapable of responding. “Well, I mean... We came to learn more about the Known Lands. Where I come from, we don’t really have much...”
“I see,” murmured the woman. The explanation seemed to satisfy her, and she explained, “Eorens are the bluish spheres. I’m not an expert on the matter, but I know they are magical instruments. Numerous sorcerers use them elsewhere for casting spells.” Glaide asked himself for a moment how a man could carry about and use a sphere of six feet in diameter, but he preferred to keep his questions to himself.
“Some maggs,” continued the woman, “gave a part of their power to these eorens so that they would diffuse invisibility and a blanket of muteness around them. The whole process is very complex, little known, and poorly understood. But one thing is sure: some of these magicians must constantly remain nearby to maintain this state, as without them, none of it would function. This system of protection is shared by all of the major villages of the Known Lands, but I suppose you come from quite a small village...”
“Yes, that’s it exactly. Our growing methods are more traditional, and much less secure, unfortunately.”
The man and his wife nodded, then he continued, “The second peculiarity of these eorens is that they give us water – you could see yourself that these are water eorens. So, they have the power to produce rain, and to water the plants and the plots. I suppose that the village you were born in has the luck of being situated near one of the very rare rivers of the land?”
Glaide quickly reflected on his reply before saying, “Yes, exactly. Otherwise, I’d know what eorens were, wouldn’t I?”
“Right, that would be logical,” exclaimed the man, laughing.
However, it wasn’t so logical for the teen; it seemed that anyone who didn’t live near a river was obligated to use eorens like this. But then, where did rain come into it all? “Is it really possible that it doesn’t rain?” the young man asked himself. “No, that would be ridiculous. However, since arriving here, the sky has remained ever perfectly clear, without even the tiniest of clouds. That being said, it is summer.” He preferred not to expand on the subject, as he was certain he would wind up revealing his origins.
“As for those homes that are completely isolated: maggs carry pieces of these eorens to them. Because you seem completely ignorant about these artifacts, let me explain that sculptors sometimes carve off pieces, to produce an extract of these spheres that is then transportable.” At that revelation, the young man found it easier to imagine the uses mages could make of these curious objects.
“However,” continued the woman, “water eorens are gradually used up. Their size decreases as they empty. I’ve even heard that it's affecting Galadria itself. Two great magicians were speaking, and I overheard part of their conversation. They said that the eorens drew their water from the earth itself, and that it was drying up. I don’t know exactly what they meant by that; but it didn’t sound good...” The woman seemed to be equally saddened and angered.
Glaide organized his thoughts, then summarized everything, saying, “So if I understand correctly, here, you have no water for your fields. So instead, you use these great spheres called eorens, but they are being used up, and the reservoirs are by no means infinite. If you were to no longer have any more... It would be the end of life on this planet. And it seems then, that these eorens draw from the interior of Galadria, at the risk of putting the whole planet in danger.”
“Exactly, young man.”
Glaide was intrigued. Before arriving in the capital, he and his friends had never seen any of their chance companions carrying objects of that sort. And yet they had been able to give them water so that the young people could refill the skins they’d used to carry water. The horsemen, Boaret, the carpet merchant... they had all given them water to drink.
Glaide realized that they had been sent to bring help to the inhabitants of this world, but they knew absolutely nothing! What he had just learned demonstrated that maggs and their protectors were not simply there to confront Baras and his minions. For the first time, Glaide caught a real glimpse of the magnitude of the mission he and his friends had been given; they really would need to completely reconstruct their lives, learning everything from scratch. “Yes, this task promises to be an uphill battle,” he thought, with a slight bitterness. It seemed that in the end, his dreams of glory and heroic combat would remain simply dreams. The reality being offered to him, even if it still approached what he had always wished for, was very different in many ways to what he had imagined.
“Can I go look at this eoren a bit more closely?” asked the young man.
“Of course,” replied the woman.
He approached the enormous blue sphere, looking all around him at the men and women working in the midst of their plots. The closer he came, the more the marks of eddies began to make their appearances on the surface that he had thought was perfectly smooth. The ripples had been invisible from far away. One would almost think there were currents inside the eoren... From close up, the sphere was even more impressive than he could have imagined. He could distinctly see the water that was in the interior, as if the sphere was a casing of transparent glass filled with a liquid, rare and precious.
“All it needs now are fish,” whispered the young man with a smile. However, deep within him, he felt afraid. Afraid of what he faced. If he had understood correctly, he stood now before a manifestation of that powerful force that was magic. “And I’m just a human,” he said to himself. “I’m afraid of the unknown.” So, he touched the eoren.
Chapter 17
NOTHING could have prepared him for what happened: his finger, instead of bumping against a
surface hard as glass, sunk into the water. “No,” he said with a murmur tinted with deference. “No, it’s not possible. It’s not a container, it’s water alone, with nothing around it. It has no solid casing to hold it in, it holds itself in...” He shook his head. “It’s impossible.” He realized that his finger was still sunk into the liquid, and he pulled it out abruptly. His finger dripped water in a perfectly natural way, as if he had just plunged it into a river or a pool.
He looked at the ground to see what the eoren was resting on, and saw a structure made of whitened steel. From its center, it split into eight equal branches that came up like a seashell, but they weren’t very long, and really formed nothing more than a base. Actually, the sphere wasn’t exactly resting on it, either – it floated.
Glaide turned towards the two farmers. They began to speak, though the adolescent was no longer listening. Too many things had happened; he needed to give a complete account of all of this to his friends. “Tell me, this pedestal that I see, is that what keeps the eoren in this sphere shape?” he asked.
“Well, actually, I don’t really know,” replied the man. “We cultivators know that the eorens give us the water necessary to produce our crops, but we don’t really know how. I once saw a sorcerer use an eoren: with it, he burned up five or six monsters! However, now that I think of it, the spheres he used were solid. I suppose that the white structures make it so we can touch the water. According to the stories that the elderly like to tell – stories of an age that I know little about – there was once an ancient time where it rained. Water actually fell from the sky! Unimaginable, isn’t it? They had none of these worries. That must have been a wonderful time,” he added with a dreamy look on his face.
Chronicles of Galadria I - The Other World Page 13
