by Coral Walker
“What about the engagement, father?”
“Your heart wasn’t fully crossed. Are you sure you didn’t faint deliberately?” he said with a chuckle.
“Father!” she cried, pressing her hot cheek against his chest.
There was an uproar from one of the elevated stages. “I must go, father,” said Cici and cast an anxious glance in the direction of the noise. “Prince Marcus is challenging Ornardo. I don’t want Ornardo to get hurt. He is not a man who knows how to fight.”
“Prince Marcus would never land his fist on a defenceless boy …”
But Cici was already at the edge of the wood.
“Marcus, are you sure you don’t want to come down?”
“I’m fine here, Mother. If I fall, my dear Higo will jump to save me without hesitating,” Marcus shouted back to the carriage.
“It’s been a tough day, your Highness.”
Marcus raised his brows. “... tough day?” he repeated it and glanced at Higo, puzzled. “You mean because Lady Cici fainted when I was taking the oath?” Nimbly he drew out a velvet box and flipped its lid open. “But I still have this.”
Inside the box, the golden Arnartarna flower and its band glittered happily. He picked up the band by one end and lifted it. Unexpectedly, only half of the band was dangling from his fingers while the rest, along with the Arnartarna flower, lay listlessly in the box.
Someone must have cut the band neatly in half.
With a loud sigh, he threw the band back in the box and shut it. “Actually, the worst thing today,” he reflected, “was that I challenged a boy who knows nothing about fighting. I would never lay a hand on a defenceless person. How could he have been so good last time but no good at all this time?”
“That was what I meant when I said that you had a tough day,” said Higo with a sympathetic grin.
Marcus sighed again, thoughtfully tossing the box in his hand before putting it back in his pocket. As he dropped it in, he felt his finger touch something hard and circular. Curious, he fished it out.
In his hand was a dull-coloured ring. It was wide and plain, but on its front a scene was etched showing a targar flying upside-down towards a fierce-looking bokwa. He felt a sudden thrill.
“Mother,” he called, his raised voice sounding clear over the drone of the wheels, “do you remember the ring I mentioned to you the other day? A ring I think I must have worn during the days that I can’t remember. I might have just found it in my pocket. How peculiar. It looks exactly like I thought it would.”
5
Test
The glass door shut noiselessly. She stood.
“Would you like to sit down, Brianna?” Tilting the chair slightly away from the glass box, Peter sat down himself.
She gazed dully down at the white chair in front of her, but she remained standing.
“Relax, Brianna. We’ll look at a few pictures. You healed the mouse. Remember? It was marvellous. I’d like to find out more about it.”
He caught her glance, guarded and evasive, like the look of a fawn. She wasn’t in a calm mood, as he could tell. Being shut inside a glass box, of course, wasn’t agreeable, and the room, he frowned as he looked around, with its bare, featureless walls, was bleak and disheartening, worse than a purpose-built interrogation room.
“It’s only a small test,” he reassured her and grinned amicably to appear cheerful. “The box captures the air around you. There are sensors installed — those little white circles on the glass.” He pointed at one with a finger. “They sense the specific molecules you emit and measure their concentration. I’ll receive the reading here.”
He flourished the tablet in his hand. It was sleek and wafer-thin, a smart gadget, as powerful as a supercomputer and as teeny as a deck of cards, well, if it was folded up. He tapped in the corner where the iconified visualizer was docked. “See the green bar,” he said, “any detection of the molecules will cause the bar to lengthen in proportion to the density of the molecules.”
“There is a hidden screen on the glass panel. If I switch it on from here,” he tapped on the tablet with a finger, “you’ll see it appear in front of you.”
A shimmering rectangle appeared on the glass at the level of Brianna’s chest, its soft lights slanting up to her face. He could see the spark of interest as she looked down at the screen.
“I’ll display some photos on that screen, and you tell me, for each of them, what you feel, as simple as that. Would you like to sit down now?” he suggested again, hoping.
For a while, the room sank into a curious silence.
Then she shifted forward and flopped down into the chair. She sat bolt upright, her eyes inscrutable and her lower lip held tightly between her teeth.
“So Brianna,” he began and smiled softly pretending he hadn’t noticed the defiance in her demeanour. “When you were doing it — holding the injured mouse in your palm — what did you feel?”
“Sad,” she replied quickly.
Sad, he echoed the word in his mind, weighing it. “Was that all you felt?”
The hint of incredulity in his tone must have somehow irritated her. He sensed the slight contempt in her fleeting glance.
“I wanted to stop it,” she said dryly.
“To stop what?”
“The pain.”
For a brief moment their eyes met. The nervous and timid young girl was no longer there. Ruffled, he glanced down at the tablet, shuffled between the iconized photos, enlarging and shrinking them with a touch of his finger, and double-tapped one.
Immediately the picture was displayed on the glass screen — an injured deer lay dying by the side of a motorway. At once her gaze was drawn to it, soulful, profound, as soft as it was intense.
“What do you feel?” he asked. The corner of his eye caught the rising green bar on the tablet.
“Sad,” was the answer.
“Sad,” he muttered as he typed in the word alongside the picture. Swiping it aside, he tapped the next one.
A fish out of water gasping for air.
“Sad,” she repeated.
He marked it and dragged it to the previous one. A folder automatically formed requesting a name. ‘SAD’ he typed in. In a while, a handful of photos of injured and suffering animals were gathered in the ‘SAD’ folder. The last of the animals, he thought, tapping a photo.
It was a snake squirming in pain, with a gaping wound on its tail.
He poked the screen to pop up the keyboard and hovered his finger over the letter ‘s’, waiting for her to say ‘sad’. The hush was peculiar, and the green bar diminished to its lowest. He looked up, baffled.
She sat staring at it, her brows wrinkled as if she were trying hard.
“What do you feel?” he asked.
She shook her head, looking dejected.
“Does it make you feel sad?”
“No,” she said with a snap.
“Any other feelings? Angry, annoyed, disgusted, nauseated —”
“I don’t know! I really don’t know,” she exclaimed, cutting him short, and the wrinkles on her brow deepened.
Looking shocked by her own raised voice, she threw him a fleeting, furtive look and asked, “Is there any green bar?”
He flipped the tablet to show her.
“Of course not,” she muttered looking down.
Intriguing, he thought as he put a question mark alongside the picture, Brianna dislikes snakes.
He moved on to photos of sick and wounded people. Monotonously, the green bar grew, increasing as far as a third of the full length. There was one exception — a photo of an unfortunate boy who had his legs blown off by an explosion.
The glass panel rattled as she stared at the screen, but the green bar was absent.
“Angry,” was the answer when she was asked.
“When other intense emotions such as anger come upon her,” he noted in his tablet, “she becomes unable to perform the healing properly.”
Swiping aside the photo he dr
agged an image of a mother crying for her dying baby into the white screen. The green bar returned but then fell all of a sudden as her glance flicked away from the photo as if something else had caught her attention.
He followed her glance — nothing was there except the unvarying wall with an ordinary door and a square grey window. However, she seemed to have a mind of her own and left the chair to stand against the glass panel that was facing the wall. It was the grey window she was looking at, and her gaze — how tense her gaze was!
She can see through the grey window!
Of course, it suddenly came to him, the window was opaque from one side but see-through from the other. Nearly all rooms in this grim, featureless building had such windows — it was the way Lord Shusha liked it — to keep a watch and to be in control.
A message bobbed up on the tablet screen. It was from Nina.
“She’s looking at us. Can she see us?”
“I think so. Go away now. You are interrupting!” he typed quickly.
A message came back. “Can’t. Lord Shusha is here, and Ms Upright.”
Peter frowned. How could he get on with the test if they just decided to show up like that!
Another message popped open. “SHOW HER THE PICTURE!”
With its bold style and big capitals, it was clearly a command.
“Shusha’s request,” came the next message.
Feeling the indignity of having to obey, he, nevertheless, swiped aside the messages, slipped his finger to the iconized photos and let it fall onto the one requested,
The picture took shape on the screen.
“Brianna, this is the last picture, I promise. Have a look at it, please. He is …”, he swallowed, “the patient.”
She turned sharply. No sooner did her glance fall on the photo than it darted away as if something had scorched her eyes.
“What do you feel?” he asked, heart pounding in alarm.
“Nothing” she murmured, refusing to look again.
“Nothing?”
“I … I just don’t like to look at him.”
“What do you feel … disgusted?” he suggested thinking of the snake picture he had shown her earlier.
“No,” she hesitated, “perhaps … scared.”
“Scared? You think he looks scary?” He glanced at the screen himself to see if he had missed something that she had picked up on.
The man in the photo was in a gaudy floor-length blue cloak and stood looking ahead. His body tilted slightly sideways, revealing his back that jutted out. Although he was, by no means, a pleasant looking man, a little too intense in his glance, with his distorted back well covered under the blue cloak, in the photo he didn’t seem scary.
“Does something he’s wearing scare you?” he asked, puzzled.
“No,” she said firmly. “It’s him.”
“He might look slightly disagreeable,” said Peter frowning, “but I can’t see what about him could scare you. Try again, Brianna, see whether you can shoot up the green bar. Remember he is the patient. See his back, disfigured. He has suffered a lot. Can you help him, Brianna? If you do, perhaps Lord Shusha would help you to get your family back.”
Her gaze shifted back and fastened on the screen, her face straining with effort.
“No!” she uttered a cry, “I can’t. He is angry! He is dangerous!” Abruptly she jerked her head to the left and glowered at the grey window as if she were defying something. With apparent rage, she started rapping on the glass with her fists. “Let me out!” she cried.
The glass box rocked, and the screen flickered.
This was getting nowhere.
Fumbling with the icons, he shuffled his finger to the control button and clicked it. The glass door swung open. She stormed out and strode towards the door.
“What about Bo? What about Jack?” he shouted after her.
The words delayed her for just a split second before she pushed open the door and vanished through it.
It struck him as odd later that he had mentioned Bo and Jack. He wasn’t even sure where Jack was. It might be that, deep in his subconscious, he had assumed that as long as the treatment went well, everything would turn out for the good.
He heard a commotion of shouting and screaming outside in the corridor. His face furrowed and his heart ached. He could still remember the blue face of Marcus and the red face of Zelda when they had first appeared on the Island of Skorpias, taut and blank with exhaustion and fears of the unknown. Fires were burning in their eyes, bright and intense. Peter had been curious — what sort of passion would sustain so brilliant a fire?
Driven by an invisible force, Professor Nandalff had been engrossed in preparing the couple for their life on Earth. He and Kevin Renshell had been young scientists at that time, gaining research experience on the island, and helped him to instil the knowledge of Earth into the minds of the Prince and Princess.
Their minds were sharp and assimilated the knowledge well, and they proved to be good parents too. They had taken care of Jack and Brianna exceptionally well, both a tender three years old, which helped the Professor to make up his mind — the Prince and Princess must adopt the children and live together on Earth. That was how the Goodman family had started.
Why should he feel disconcerted? Haven’t he and Kevin Renshell made up their minds a long while ago? Without Professor Nandalff’s knowledge or consent, they had signed the contract and placed the fate of the Goodman family in Lord Shusha’s hands.
Unlike the Professor, a 150-year-old boffin — if you believed what he claimed — who spent more time in space than on Earth, he was unequivocally from Earth, his was hard-wired with devotion to his planet, and was prepared to do whatever it took to save the planet that was his home. His people were suffering and dying from a critical shortage of energy. The ultimate success of the operation would mean a plentiful supply of energy-rich moon stones from the land of Taron — it was the sole hope for Earth, promising thousands of years of prosperity.
He plugged his earphones into the socket of the tablet and inserted the buds into his ears. The music switched on automatically.
He shut his eyes.
6
Sanseed Cake
The day was good, an outdoor day, a bright day.
It was too bright for Jack, and he requested the curtain to be pulled, but Ornardo ignored him. Half leaning out, Ornardo was greedily sniffing the drifting smells of the street. It was an annoying aspect of being possessed by someone else’s soul — you got no holidays. All the time there were conflicts and mismatches. If one was happy and the other was sad, you felt both emotions, like you were eating lemon cheesecake mixed with a chicken casserole.
He deserved a good rest after facing that bug eye to eye for a day and night. The oversized pincers and jagged tail were still fresh in his mind’s eye. How terribly large it had looked when he was staring at it with his small mind’s eye. The bug had gone straight for him, waving its notched pincers. He had been terribly frightened and hadn’t thought he would survive. Almost from the start, he had submitted to it — the miserable fate of being devoured by a soul-eating bug. Yet he had wanted to stay a bit longer, to see how Ornardo got on with his plan. So he had hung on, staring and keeping his mind awake for all that time.
Soon he’d realised the bug was waiting too — waiting for him to be consumed by fear, or exhausted by staring. He wouldn’t give it that chance, not yet. When the sunlight slanted in through the eye frame and Ornardo was digging the tomb for Lizi, he knew he was utterly spent. He thought that was the spot not only for Lizi but for him too. He thought he might as well keep Lizi company under the Charleea tree with the golden flowers blooming and golden-winged birds chirping in its branches. What could be better? But then, in a puff of air, the bug with its large pincers was gone.
It wasn’t until later that Ornardo told him that, according to folktales, the Ginata never stayed inside a person’s body for more than a day.
He should have told him earlier
!
The carriage slowed down as they were passing a cobbled street sandwiched between shops. Momentarily he saw his face in blue reflected in a shop window and was struck with the oddness of seeing his face with Ornardo’s expression. It looked happy, almost childlike with eyes wide with wonder. On the forehead, the shallow furrows and the slightly tilted eyebrows were recognisable as his — disgusted and nauseated.
He took a deep breath and immediately saw the rising and falling of the chest and gasped. Wasn’t it him who had drawn that breath? There was a sense of wholeness, or a comforting unity of body and soul, refreshing and reassuring with a touch of joy and anticipation. Was it because Ornardo’s sense of jubilation at seeing the old streets and watching the folks strolling by had cleared the fog and smoke that had been obstructing him from experiencing things?
“Sanseed cake! The smell of Sanseed cake!” Ornardo exclaimed.
Traces of a strong cinnamon-like aroma found its way into the carriage. Ornardo sniffed again. Jack sensed it too but felt only dislike.
“Stop, stop!” Ornardo rapped on the front window, and Putu’s large face looked back through the window frame. “I want to … get … some Sanseed cakes.”
Putu frowned.
“Like I did last … time. I … gave … gave her a surprise,” stuttered Ornardo, panting from the growing excitement.
He jumped off before the carriage came to a full standstill, scurried past folks with loads on their heads, sniffing along the way. In an instant he located the shop that was tucked away in a narrow alley leading to a chaotic yard full of women with bare arms, piles of dirty washing and rowdy children running about between the maze-like washing lines.
The gaze of the sunken-cheeked woman swept past him and fixed on Putu, who bent his back awkwardly to fit his head through the tight doorframe. On the simple table top lay rows of greenish cakes, each of which was oval-shaped and semi-transparent with some blue seeds scattered over the surface.
“Two Sanseed cakes ...” said Ornardo. His eagerness overcame his stutter, and the words were delivered flawlessly. The sunken-cheeked woman’s gaze was now directed at him, studying. Satisfied that the fresh-faced young man was not a rascal but an eager client, she let the corners of her mouth be pulled upwards into a thin smile.
