Rainbow's End - Wizard (48 page)

It was the last Friday of the month, and the workers had received their wages early that morning, before being carted into the nearest town to
drink and carouse all weekend - some, but not many, to send money to their families. The single man who’d been left behind as a guard, Orson had found sleeping in one of the lorry-cabs, and after the old Traveller “pushed” him, he’d also left for town - trotting down the dirt road bisecting the forest like an ugly scar: on the double and every few seconds glancing over his shoulder.

Thomas stood looking at the mine and small groups of buildings for a long, silent minute
… Imagining the already massive hole twice or more its present size; imagining the buildings having been moved to where currently green trees and other plants grew, where birds and monkeys and other animals played and lived and fed and had their young.

He looked at Orson, and to the old Traveller his eyes were a haunted green, h
is face pale and ineffably sad - as if the worlds troubles were all his own. His voice trembled with what Orson mistook as trepidation, but if he’d payed closer attention, he would have sensed his pupil’s anger; a slumbering, smouldering rage in the process of waking, of bursting into flames.

‘Anything I want?’ Thomas as
ked then, and extended his arm - the one holding the crystal - to the buildings. He opened his hand, and the gem was tinged with the deepest red, almost purple, Orson had ever seen. He frowned, perplexed, and his drooping eyelid lifted.

‘I can do anything I want with this?’ Thomas reiterated, and lowered his gaze to the now pulsing crystal. His voice was soft, but intensely focused.

‘To the earth, yes - the soil, rocks, sand…’ Orson shrugged, dismissively, as if bored. ‘
If
you’re strong enough.’ He sniffed, and then added, ‘
If
you’ve guts enough…’ The look he received from the boy had him unnecessary clear his throat, and then fall awkwardly silent. He gripped his staff with both hands, and rested his jaw in the crook of one elbow, taking inordinate interest in the far-away mountain peaks, whilst surreptitiously watching his student from the corner of his eye.

Thomas turned to the forest again for a long minute, and the distant Andes, and Orson saw several emotions cross his face: a gentleness, sorrow, even love. But then he turned back to the open mine and the buildings, and his expression changed, conveying anger again, and then, finally, resolution.

The ground
just metres in front of them lifted and then subsided slowly, and they with it, like ships riding a small wave. Orson arched his bushy eyebrows in feigned boredom, and lifted his shoulders in a negligent shrug, as if to say, “How nice - and now can we move on, do you think?”

But Thomas ignored him and turned his back,
and spread his feet apart. He could no longer see the young Traveller’s face, but Orson felt the anger emanate from his tautly tensed body, the growl in his throat seemed impossibly low for one as young. His fingers clenched around the Red Crystal, and his arm - still pointed at the buildings, but like a weapon this time - knotted and bulged with young muscle and veins and trembled with incredible tension.

The earth
began trembling under them then, and the forest went strangely quiet, as if sensing the approach of some cataclysmic event. Unnaturally, deathly quiet.

Orson’s staff began vibrating -
as if resonating in sympathy with the hurt and trembling Earth. He lifted his eyes, and gaped in astonishment then; condescension turning into apprehension. The crystal set at the apex of the wooden shaft was pulsing in a deep, very dark blue hue - almost black.

And Thomas screamed. He screamed as Mother Earth would if only she could, and stamped down hard with one hiking-boot before grounding his heel into the trembling soil; his free hand pushed in a powerful, shoving-away motion - as if consigning the whole of the human-made atrocity before them to nothingness, to limbo. The ground heaved again: stronger and with a low rumble, causing the unprepared Orson to stagger back several paces and fall to his knees, still clutching his staff with its all-the-time-pulsing Indigo Crystal, gaping open-mouthed in stunned fascination at the scene before him.

And all the hells broke loose…

The ground rose up in thunderously groaning waves - numerous and higher and much longer in length than before, starting right against the mine and ending scant metres from the tree-line, causing the very jungle itself to shake and tremble and sway. A hellish cacophony of screaming and screeching erupted from it: monkeys and birds - the former fleeing deeper into its murky depths, the latter taking wing in droves and flocks of multi-coloured clouds.

When the
waves moved, they were fast - very fast. Like playing cards or dominoes set in rows, each set to topple the next once the first had been nudged, so they ran. Just metres apart, they undulated through the already broken up earth, and then - powered by the incredible strength and fury of the young Traveller - erupted in flying clods and clouds of still-damp soil, flowing together until just one massively seething, undulating and rolling, speeding brown mass, hovered over by slowly-drifting dust.

They surged under the cement slab once more, and the already broken up chunks crumpled further and exploded with bangs in puffs of grey. Tons of earth heaved and then catapulted the huge yellow bulldozer somersaulting nearly a hundred
metres into the air; on a parabolic course that had it slamming down on its roof with an ear-shattering “whump” and the snap and crackle of breaking things. It bounced once, high into the air again - leaving one of its ugly metal tracks behind, and dropped over the first precipice of many, into the huge hole, crashing on its side onto the first ten metre wide level below; then executed a half-turn and dropped down another six metres, landing right side up this time, and then another level, and another - rolling and somersaulting - all the time picking up speed until seconds later and in a last huge cloud of dust, crashing onto and settling in the big arena below; a large, crumpled, good for nothing lump of steel.

But it was not finished. The brown waves of soil went under the two workshops and picked them o
ff their temporary foundations - pulling them apart like little matchstick houses, shattering and breaking window-panes and frames and doors and roofs, and taking their debris along like flotsam before a flood.

Next, the container-o
ffices and more breaking glass - their rectangular shapes also carried off like toys, rolling and bobbing in a sea of brown and a pall of boiling dust.

The long dormitory-buildings followed, and here a continuous cacophony of shattering glass could be heard as they were heaved from their pole-perches and swept away, rolling and crumpling, their wooden frames breaking up until, finally, they were simply no more.

Last was the cook’s small house, and the kitchen and dining-room; even the vegetable garden.

And then the seething mass changed direction, and turned towards the open mine: sliding over its rim in a brown deluge of soil inter
spersed with human-made debris - steel, asbestos, concrete, glass, and more…

Still it was not over. Thomas paused and took a shuddering breath, and the ground slowly subsided as it waited for his next
command, their next onslaught - a most agreeable and compliant partner and tool.

He swung around, facing the other way, and a still-kneeling Orson sa
w the boy’s eyes as mere slits - glittering green. His face was white as snow, and sweat was running down it in small rivers; his white T-shirt soaked. The old Travellers eyes went to his clenched hand - now pointing to the processing plant and the dumps - and his grey eyes bulged some more and went wide, stupefied by what he saw…

And the young Traveller gave another
shout of rage, and another stamp of a foot that re-awoke the earth and had it tremble; another violently shoving motion with his free hand, and the crystal squeezed with uncommon young strength, and the destruction continued.

The undisturbed ground that lay at their backs, now rose up with more strength and higher
if at all possible; became rippling waves that ploughed through and tossed huge clods and smaller stones high into the air, leaving behind another pall of dust while rushing with astonishing speed towards the southern end of the mine. It destroyed the entire road - from its exit-point out of the forest to where it dipped away into the massive hole of the mine; then continued on towards the extraction and separating plant - ripping huge motor-drums, conveyor belts, long stainless steel sorting tables, and other equipment worth millions of dollars from the cement seats they were bolted onto with ease, crumpling and ripping and tearing, carrying away each item in the brown sea.

And on… Towards the mounds of coal and th
e mountains of worked-out soil - sweeping under and bearing away their blacks and browns, their millions of tons. And changing direction again towards the mine - cascading and sliding over its edge, taking all of the collected debris with it.

Another s
hout rended the dust-laden air, and the ground shook anew as Thomas’ foot slammed into it once more; and with a commanding wave of both arms - crystal and “push”, the final act begun.

The r
ippling waves turned yet again - and this time they moved along the rim of the mine, faster and faster, until eventually, the whole of its almost five kilometre circumference was one heaving mass. Large cracks appeared in the vertical walls of its more than forty levels, and they quickly widened and deepened, until the destroyed bulldozer could easily have fitted into any of them. The shaking earth and gravity did the rest. Huge blocks of yet unmined ground - all weighing many hundreds of tons, started leaning away from their core, and slowly - beginning at the topmost level - broke away and fell crashing onto levels below: their weight starting another domino-effect, which this time, turned into a landslide of massive proportions, lasting many minutes. When eventually it ended, the massively huge, man-made hole had been half filled and had forty-five degree angled sides - reminding of an inverted, inactive volcanic mountain. The earth-moving vehicles that had stood on the mines floor far below, were covered by the millions of tons of ground they had spent years carting to its top.

Then - with a last, almost loving gesture - his voice soothing
, and the sweep of his arm mesmeric, Thomas smoothed the large field of earth and rock, now less than a hundred metres down.

He stood back and turned to his grandfather, who had, eventually, with the aid of his staff, struggled to his feet, and in an infinitely weary voice asked, ‘Some rain, Orson?’

The old Traveller’s look was no longer mocking, and he nodded, not trusting himself to speak as yet. Then - to show his still-superior powers, he squared his shoulders and pointed his staff at the clear blue sky, grumbling and muttering to himself all the while.

And clouds started drifting in, swiftly, from over the forest and the far-off mountains, from all directions: fluffy white ones at first that became progressively darker as they fused and
meshed with one another, until - just minutes later - the sky overhead was pregnantly-heavy and purple-grey, and all-the-time lightning inside its underbelly.

Then, with arms wide-spread and a hoarse shout of his own, Orson pointed his staff skywards once more, and in a magnificent display of
wizardry (no other word will do) commanded down a thousand bolts of lightning. They flickered and played along the sides and the bottom of the half-filled hole for a long time, all the time accompanied by the rumbling of thunder: burning and melting and turning its soil and rock first a dull - and then a cherry-red, transforming it to magma, its sand into glass; sealing it like a huge swimming pool. Then a hundred claps of thunder: crashing and roaring and reverberating through the air, a few bone-rattling gusts of wind, and the skies came bucketing down - literally.

Some hours later, the first motor-vehicle (alerted by the “pushed” guard), arrived back at the used-to-be-mine. Drunk and half-drunk workers spilled and fell from it, and stood gaping in disbelief. A large lake - still murky and almost perfectly round lay before them. Flocks of Macaw flew over, and a beautiful rainbow spanned the whole of it…

3
9

‘It was
blood
, I tell you. Earth’s blood, but blood nonetheless.
Nobody will convince me otherwise - not even you.’ Orson bulged his eyes at Ariana. ‘He squeezed it from his Crystal until it dripped off its chain, and every time a drop of it fell on the ground, he seemed to get angrier and stronger…’ The Traveller fell gloomily silent in recall.

The sun was setting and they sat on the Talking Rock, the goddess and the Traveller, watching the day
end. The sun sinking behind the mountains to the west, cast a last golden glow on the surface of Ariana’s pool, and lit the crack in the cliff-wall, turning to liquid gold the water tumbling through it. The finch had gone to bed, and in the tall grass somewhere, a cricket began tuning his instrument.