All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (31 page)

Stones, slippery with moss and silt, rolled out from under him, threatening to send him sprawling into the surging stream. He held tightly to the last sapling, judging the distance to the far shore, the strength of the undertow and the depth of its passage. He secured his pack to his back, tying it around his shoulders, and looked upstream. When he saw what he thought to be a break in the barrage of floating fragments of trees and brush that had been ripped forcefully from their roots by the oblivious violence of the water, he took a deep breath, said a quick prayer, and plunged into the churning froth. He kicked his legs hard and struck out with long, steady strokes of his arms but almost immediately knew that he had made a terrible mistake.

The water was deceptively murderous. It seemed the surface was nothing more than a calm lake on a still day compared to the power and force beneath. The river grabbed him immediately and tore his breath away, dunking him into its cold, dark depths. Twisting and turning, Kole struggled for the surface but had no more say over where his body went than a leaf did in an autumn wind. His body hit jagged boulders and shelves of slag buried beneath the sinister surface, bruising and bouncing him from one to another.

Sharpened spears of wood lanced his flesh; branches tore at his face and hands as he fought to break the river’s hostile hold on him. At one point, his ankle wedged between two large rocks, and he felt as if the force of the river’s pull on him would completely sever his foot from his leg. But the river won at last, and as the rocks released him he was thrown forward as if from a sling.

His mind, at this point, started to shut down all bodily functions not associated with survival; his hearing, his vision. Both seemed warped and unreal. Sounds became no more than one continuous buzzing. Sights flickered in and out as if he were blinking far too rapidly. His lungs were screaming and on fire despite the water all around him, threatening to extinguish them forever. Spots of various colored lights began to flash behind his eyelids and he knew that he was going to drown.

Yet it was at that moment that a strange current in the water spit him up into the air like a hollow gourd. His mouth tore open and he swallowed air like a starving man. His body seemed not to want to respond to any commands that he gave it, and the world seemed to rotate around him in slower motion than was usual.

At this point, two things happened simultaneously: A large wooly moose, dead and water-bloated, popped up out of the water right in front of him, its face hideously distorted and mashed. Kole choked and got a mouthful of water that to him tasted ominously like a dead moose might. Then the full force of the moose’s weight rolled over him and Kole was struck hard by one of its massive antlers across the bridge of his nose. The world exploded into one pain-filled white light. Kole screamed. Unfortunately he was underwater at the time and could not even say that he heard himself. What he did notice was the taste of blood in his mouth, salty and hot, and he hoped that it was his and not from the moose.

He finally got his legs to work and kicked hard toward what he hoped was the far bank and not the one he had started from. He was completely disoriented by then and felt satisfied just to be able to tell which way was up. His head came out of the water again, and his feet hit solid ground. He became aware of the shore near him and lurched hard in that direction. His hand grasped a tree limb that protruded out from the water, and he pulled himself up on to it.

Carefully sliding his body along its rough length, tearing the skin and hair from his chest, he reached the thick mud of the shore and crawled, half exhausted, onto the dry sand along the river’s edge. He collapsed, weakened and weary, into a state of semi-consciousness. He lay there for some time, how long he did not know. Slowly the world became aware of him again, or he of it, and he opened his eyes.

Summoning what strength was left in him, he crawled further up the bank on his hands and knees, until his fingers felt the soft warmth of the grass bordering the beach. Kole realized at that point that he was no longer wearing his pack containing his food and supplies. And his clothes! This sent a burst of alarm through Kole and he stood up suddenly, his troubled gaze returning to the turbulent waters. He gasped in disbelief and then sighed as his eyes spied his pack hanging precariously over the water from a small branch on the fallen tree near the bank. He carefully made his way into the river once more and retrieved it without further incident. As he turned to clamber back to shore he spotted a most peculiar creature standing just among the trees, watching him, studying him, as if thinking to itself,
What a silly species these humans are.

The animal was a horse, or nearly a horse. It was very horse-like in nature but had one unique feature that clearly distinguished it from the animal that Kole knew as horse. Protruding from the center of its forehead, about the length of Kole’s arm from shoulder blade to fingertip, was a slender, spiraled horn, delicate and unnatural in its perfection, as if it were made of some celestial shell that had fallen into the sea. Kole stood stunned.

The animal was beautiful, to be sure. Its coat was the color of light cream and beeswax. Its mane was long tresses, thick with ringlets. The eyes of the beast were huge, liquid pools filled with intelligence and compassion. The muscles in her neck and legs were long and sinewy, well-developed, graceful and coiled, able to spring away at the slightest hint of danger. But she stood as still as Kole, self-assured, never taking her eyes off him.

Kole could see that she was a female. Never in his life had he seen a finer animal. Something about her presence commanded his attention, and he moved very slowly from the shallows to the sand. “Hello there,” said Kole softly, in what he hoped was a reassuring tone. The horse with the horn just continued to stare at him, not alarmed at all by the sound of his voice. Kole let his pack slip softly from his hand to the sand and took a cautious step forward. The creature seemed content to let him approach. He put one hand out to her, palm forward, and continued talking.

“You’re a pretty little thing, aren’t you? What’s your name then? I don’t remember my father ever telling me about a beauty like you, and I’m sure I would have remembered.”

Step by step, Kole got closer to the not-a-horse creature. He could feel her warm breath exhaling from her nostrils as she sniffed at his hand. Her whiskers tickled his fingers and made him smile.

“Sure. There you go, sweetheart. Kole smells okay, now doesn’t he? I did just have the most intense bath a moment ago. Will you let me pet you? You won’t run away now, will you? You’re not afraid of me, are you?” Kole stretched his hand out further.

The female lowered her head toward Kole, granting him his request. The tip of her ivory horn brushed his left shoulder. His hand moved to touch the soft shag of her forelock but she tossed her head back as if reconsidering. Kole froze, his hand half outstretched. Their eyes met, and hers were not afraid. Again she lowered her head to him, but this time her horn rested on his right shoulder, as if she had just anointed him as God’s warrior.

He fell to his knees, overwhelmed, his right arm still in the air. She lowered her head further, and his fingers met the fringe of her mane, softer than anything Kole had ever touched before. The fur seemed to spring to life around his fingers and he moved them gently, feeling as if there were nothing finer in God’s creation. His head was down and his eyes were squeezed shut. The horse-but-not-a-horse shook her head and lifted it so that Kole had to raise his eyes until they found hers. They beheld each other; in troth, a moment of supreme importance passing between them. Kole heard her chuff softly, and then she was gone, bounding delicately away to disappear into the green wood.

Kole knelt mesmerized for several moments, wondering what the meeting meant. For surely such an experience was no chance thing. No mere coincidence, that she should be there, one of God’s finest works of art, Kole was sure, just when he was on the verge of collapse. Her presence seemed to have invigorated him, refreshed him. Kole felt finer than he had ever felt, even after his recent ordeal in the river, and all of his aches and pains were now less than they had been moments before. He looked down at his body. The flesh was still torn and bruised, bloody and battered. But he did not feel the wounds. They were insignificant, inconsequential now, compared to the blessing that the Creator had just bestowed upon him.

With his mind blissfully numbed, Kole made camp.

He awoke in the pre-dawn gloaming and walked for an hour before the trees gave out, and he found himself on the border of an immense plain, barren and bleak. His soul still sang from the previous evenings encounter with the original horse. For she was that, Kole reasoned. When horses were created, she must have been the pattern used by the Creator. And she herself was nothing less than the pure imagination of God, fashioned in the image of his most wonderful thoughts. Kole stood on a sloped hill leading down into the plain and watched his third sunrise since the hunt in the Valley of Pride.

The morning dawns slowly, like a faint blush on the cheeks of a shy girl,
Kole thought. But all poetry slipped from his mind when, by the light of the rising day, he got his first glimpse of Cain’s abomination. The city seemed to pull and repel him at the same time.

“Lord, be with me,” said Kole under his breath as he re-shouldered his pack and went alone to challenge history.

Kole was not alone for long. The walk from the hills to the outskirts of the town seemed to take longer than Kole thought it would. His food and water were gone, and his clothes still felt damp from yesterdays dunking in the river. He was ready to get this over with and get home.

The first thing that Kole noticed as he drew near the town was the stench. The smell of excrement assaulted his nostrils and made his eyes sting. He stopped to rub them, but the odor was inescapable. Kole pulled a leather pouch out of his bag and tore the seams out of it. This he tied around his lower face to cover his mouth and nose. It helped but not nearly enough.

He passed through an arched gateway as he entered the city and saw a group of men squatting in the dirt beside a building, playing at some game of chance. When they saw him their eyes widened and they leaped to their feet. Two of them ran off toward what Kole thought might be the center of town and the rest watched him with suspicion. Kole assumed at least some of those men had been on a particular hunting trip a few days earlier and he did not need to ask directions to know that they would not prove helpful to him. No doubt it would not be long before Cain found him anyway.

The city was laid out with more forethought than Kole had noticed from the distant ridgetop. The streets were parallel and straight, the buildings plumb, and the ground level. The dust that covered everything seemed to be more a result of the recent sand storm than from consistent neglect. Many of the houses were built from fired clay bricks, but others were clearly constructed of cut stone. The blocks seemed to be fitted together with an eye for detail, and there were very few chinks in the seams. Most of the cracks had been filled with clay or mortar and painted with a coat of whitewash. Kole was surprised that so many of the names and new words that he had learned from his family came easily to his mind.

Doors on street level were brightly stained in reds and greens. Carvings of animals and men detailed the wooden frames around them. The windows on the taller buildings had colored skins hanging from them, either to keep out the sun, the dust, the bugs, or the smell. The town seemed oddly still. No animals roamed the streets and no children played in them. There were no women hauling water, no men building.
A city this size must consume considerable labor,
speculated Kole.
I wonder where all the inhabitants are?

The tight confines of the buildings and streets opened unexpectedly into a large circular central plaza. In the middle, a fountain burbled up in a small pool surrounded by a low rock wall. Water gushed out from a spout in the side to form a shallow trickle that flowed down the middle of a street along a stone-lined channel. Small, wooden bridges arched over the water in several places. The channel in turn stretched the length of the plaza and disappeared into a dark hole beside a low squat building to Kole’s right. Above the building, a column of black smoke rose heavily into the stagnant morning air.
A bit of a breeze would do wonders for this place,
thought Kole, but before he could close his eyes and sing for one his attention was captured by a new sight.