All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (40 page)

I still miss her
, Kole couldn’t help thinking again as he poured oil into the pan and waited for it to heat up. He diced onions and peppers into small cubes and piled them on the corner of his chopping block. In a small bowl he crushed stale bread into crumbs with a pestle and cracked two eggs into the mixture. After he had made a paste he added a handful of wild locusts, stirring them around with a wooden spoon until they were covered with the batter. Carefully he scooped them out and dropped them into the hot oil, enjoying the sizzling sound that they made. He skinned and cubed two large potatoes, spooning the chunks into the pan and saving the skins for the remainder of the breadcrumb batter. He stirred the contents of the pan, then scraping the onions and peppers into the palm of his hand, he blended them into the hash as well. He stirred the breakfast stew slowly thinking about the day ahead of him, watching the colorful medley of vegetables, and inhaling its hearty aroma.

The weather outside his home was almost perfect for what he had in mind. The air was warm but gentle, promising advantageous updrafts. He had selected his jumping off point and was anxious to try his latest design, hopeful that today would prove to be a landmark excursion. It felt better, he often thought, when creation provided his needs in their entirety rather than when he had to supplement them with his own particular gifts. His
seedvision
. Perhaps it felt more fulfilling because he sensed his Creator’s closeness when the earth was cooperative, all the more since he was now so alone.

Kole shook his head and felt the lump rise again to his throat. Thinking about Chavvah was still painful. The loss of his friend, his stalwart steed, after so many years and adventures together, remained a gnawing emptiness in his heart. Today, though, was not a day to mourn. There had been too many days that had been consumed by melancholy and sorrow. This day, this dawn, Kole promised himself, would be one of splendor and excitement.
A milestone
, thought Kole and smiled to himself. Yes, a milestone. Just like the markers that he had set up along his route.

Kole gave the contents of the pan another stir and removed it from the heat of the fire. He placed a hot pad on the polished, wooden table that dominated the middle of his cookery and set the pan on it. His plate and two-tined fork were already set in front of his usual chair. He moved his lantern over from the counter to the table and sat down with a sigh. Staring distractedly at the parchment that rested beside his mug of warm tea, his eyes narrowed. He pulled it closer and inspected the intricate, hand-drawn sketch upon its coarse surface. He picked up his sharpened quill and dipped it into a small jar of ink, then made a notation on the chart. Satisfied that the minor change he had made to his map was precise and accurate, he dusted the ink with sand, drying it quickly to prevent smudges. He bowed his head and asked for God’s blessing on his food and his future endeavors before taking his first bite.

Outside it was still dark, dawn yet another hour or so from breaking. Kole had risen early, eager to start the day, to test his new theories and designs. He had been working on them, crafting them and modifying them for years and today he hoped would be the culmination of all his efforts. Not that he would stop making improvements. Kole had several ideas that seemed far-fetched even to him, but if today turned out the way he planned, nothing would seem impossible.

Kole rubbed his leg where he had broken it fifty years earlier. It had healed quickly, aided by his ability to use the natural healing harmonics of creation, but he occasionally imagined a phantom pain deep in the bone. Especially on days when he planned to repeat his folly on an even grander scale.

He ate in silence. The world seemed quiet. Kole could hear the faint song of the natural world around him, singing its soft lullaby of praise, but he had become so accustomed to it that it barely registered. The birds were still asleep in their boughs. The night creatures had all retired to their caves and cool places in anticipation of the approaching dawn. And Chavvah was gone.

Kole missed her more than he would admit. His unicorn, a name he had fashioned for her species, had died suddenly and without warning. Not from old age, although she had lived and worked beside Kole for centuries, but from a fluke, an accidental mishap, a chance encounter with calamity. Kole had mourned her like a family member, for weeks barely able to do more than feed himself, and still he felt the hollow loss of her deep in his breast. But he had over seven hundred years worth of good memories with her, and he forbid himself to dwell on the negative; most of the time.

The loss of Chavvah was in some ways more poignant than the loss of Kesitah. His sister had been a part of his youth, had been a promising dream left unfulfilled, but Chavvah had been his pet, an intricate part of his life, his first friend. He had shared his triumphs with her, his daydreams, his hopes. She couldn’t speak to him but she communicated a steadfast loyalty, faith, and love through her actions. She had defended him against wild animals; found food for him when he was weak with hunger. She had carried him home when he’d injured his leg, even though she herself had been wounded.

So many nights he had fallen asleep to the sound of her breathing, his head pillowed against her flank. So many days he had confessed to her his doubts and found comfort in her presence. He had accepted her loss, as he had learned to accept the loss of Kesitah, but that didn’t make his years any easier. Often he found himself looking around for her, as if his mind refused to believe that she would not come trotting down the path. He spoke to her sometimes still, forgetting momentarily that she was not beside him, keeping pace.

Today would have been a shining achievement that they would have shared. Chavvah understood the tests that he was performing, seeming to sense the purpose in them sometimes more than he did himself. At the end of a long day, if the experiment had been successful, she would be there, prancing around in congratulatory circles, ready to carry him and his equipment home. Today he would fly in her honor.

Kole looked down at his plate and realized that he had eaten all his food. Again he sighed and shook the cobwebs from his mind. He rose and rinsed his dishes off in the sink. Years earlier he had piped in water from the spring above his house with a hollow wooden tuber called bamboo. It was lightweight and sturdy, strong and flexible, and it had first given him the idea that his experiments might be possible.

Kole’s reminiscing had put him in a funk completely at odds with the promise of the day. He decided that without Chavvah physically being present to share in today’s triumph, the tide of anticipation he has been cresting would continue to dim. Only one thing would remedy that. He must include her.

There was still plenty of time before dawn, and he did not want to begin his drop before the morning winds had settled, so he decided to take a few moments in the lower levels of his house. Brushing the crumbs from the table into his hand, he tossed them out the window and brushed off his fingers with a towel. Taking his lantern with him he headed to the back of the house. His bedroom was off the cookery and he walked briskly through it. The bed was rumpled. No need to make it on a fine morning like this. Let it stay unkempt all day for what it’s worth. By the time Jorel arrived later in the afternoon, to care for his house and sheep while he was gone, he’d be too far away to be reprimanded. That thought made him smile.

His hand grabbed the brushed metal of the closet handle and he pulled the door open. It was a large room, nearly half the size of his bedroom, and was stuffed with crates full of a lifetime accumulation. His clothes all sat folded neatly and stacked on shelves or hung from rods around the perimeter. Sliding the robes and tunics along the back wall aside, he eyed the rock wall.

One of the reasons Kole was captivated with this particular spot, when he was choosing a location to build a home for himself, was the cave. Kole’s home was built nestled up to the side of a steep mountain, but this particular section of its rise had a low-grade easy for climbing. A spring half way up made getting water convenient, and it flowed down the slope in a shallow trickle to form a creek that emptied out at the end of the stone canyon.

Flush against the rocky side of the first rise was an opening, not much more than a crack in the granite really. Kole would have missed it had Chavvah not snorted and sniffed it out. Originally hidden behind a screen of verdant ivy, it was now secreted behind the stone walls of Kole’s house.

Placing his hands on the cool gray surface of the rock, he listened for the sound of the rock’s vibration, the movement of its smallest parts and particles, the heat and friction that they generated, the substance of their being. He heard the faint harmonies of their shifting and sang silently into their movement with the power of his mind. His song was one of suggestion, and he felt the intermingling of the musics, weaving the actions of higher laws with his own willpower. Suddenly there was a grinding noise, and the once immovable wall of rock moved, sliding sideways and folding in on itself.

Kole remembered, as he traversed its cool passageway, the first day that he had explored the cave. A bit nervous that it would be the home of a wild animal, Kole had crept slowly and cautiously into the hole. Carrying a makeshift torch, he had explored its length, finding that it delved deep into the mountain’s heart before opening out into a vast chamber. The walls were crystallized from years worth of minerals seeping down through the soil and gleamed and sparkled with gemstones in the firelight. Still to this day, the reflected gleam could cause him to pause with wonder.

Across the cavernous room the tunnel continued. Kole knew that if he followed it long enough, it would double back on itself and begin to slant steeply upward, eventually opening to the light of day on a small shelf of rock halfway up the mountain. Kole had striven to conceal that entrance as well with naturally-shaped slabs of indigenous stone. The tunnel had been too narrow to traverse in some places, and Kole had widened it in spots with hand tools and harmonics, bracing the roof with wooden supports where the vibrations of sound hinted at structural stresses until the tones were even and amplified.

Within the large central crystalline cavern was a strangely eye-catching anomaly; a large boulder three times the height of a man and at least that wide around, leaning up against the far wall. How the stone came to be in the cave, Kole could not imagine. It was far too large to have been rolled through the cave opening and it was unlike any of the other rock that formed the cavern’s walls. How could it have come to be there? Did the Creator simply create it for reasons unknown and place it in the womb of this mountain as some massive, natural monument to his abundant abilities? Some kind of cosmic inside joke?

There were no pockets of missing rock in the ceiling of the cave, no hollows in the surrounding stone. The boulder, consuming nearly the same amount of space as Kole’s bedroom, was odd for more than just its size and apparent lack of familiar origin. The truly unique aspect of this baffling peculiarity was the fact that it was blue—deep, rich crystalline blue, like the sea at midday, like a butterfly’s wing. At least it seemed blue in the light of Kole’s torches and lanterns—a big, blue aberration.

Climbing it and sliding down the other side of it, Kole had found a gap between it and the wall. At the bottom of that gap, Kole discovered a hole in the floor of the cave. Wiggling down into it, Kole found that it dropped into a damp tunnel, walls dripping with moisture. A small rivulet of water ran in a narrow channel along the center of the passageway. The tunnel did not go far to his right before narrowing to become a dead end where the water came through the wall, but to his left it ran for nearly a half mile before emptying into the basin of a large underground lake.

Standing on the shore of the lake, Kole stared into the blackness. The water was cold, icy, and as far as he could tell, extremely deep. He had, upon occasion, caught a few pale, eyeless fish from its depths, but mustering up the appetite to eat them was almost more than Kole could achieve. Something about the eerie, bloodless look of them quickly diminished his appetite. Besides, with the abundance of game, his ample vegetable garden, and the profusion of wild nuts and berries, Kole could easily ignore these underground albinos.

Setting his lantern in a secure declivity in the rock floor, Kole pulled his canoe from beneath a shallow overhang along one wall and eased it gently into the dark water. Kole had made the canoe in the cave, carrying the materials down through the hole. Fashioned from a large, white piece of light birch bark, it was stitched along its curved ends with animal sinew and sealed with a mixture of pitch and boiled plant oils. He slid his body down into the boat and picked up the sturdy, olivewood paddle, his fingers gliding easily down the olive-oiled shaft and settling into the worn, finger grooves.

Kole liked this paddle and dreaded the day he would have to carve and sand another. It was his fifth paddle in three hundred years, but at least they lasted longer than the boats. Despite Kole’s best efforts to waterproof his little cave-lake craft, after twenty or thirty years they simply lost their will to survive.
Perhaps it’s the constant cool temperature down here,
thought Kole,
or the tree bark’s objection to the lack of sunlight.

Kole enjoyed the time that he spent in the cave but more so recently. It was not a place that he had ever shared with Chavvah, the tunnel and the hole being too small for her to squeeze into and he’d never felt close enough with anyone to want to share it with them. His parents had visited over the years, and his brother Jorel, but for whatever reason there was always plenty to do, and the cave never came up in conversation.

Still the fact that he had never had Chavvah in the cave seemed to bless it with a feeling of separation from his pain; as if the fact that her essence, her spirit, her memory couldn’t engulf him here, and he could come here to remember his friend in his own way, fondly and without the overwhelming sense of loss that seemed to shadow him everywhere else. The cave had no natural shadows. Only the ones he brought with him.