Rainbow's End - Wizard (7 page)

The doors behind him were just a few of
many lining the circular walls between which he stood; walls seemingly hewn out of the rawest rock, the walls of a cave. A great big cave.

Its
floor was about forty metres across, flat and level and smooth enough to host a ball on; the walls were rough and raw, in grey and brown, and rose many metres above the doors before angling inwards to join and form the dome of the roof. At the roof’s centre was a big open circle, obviously manmade; it - together with the high wide opening of the entrance - let in enough sunlight to lighten up every dip and nook and cranny of the caverns surface. Its most astonishing feature however, were the gems. And their colours.

Ropes and ribbons and clusters and lines
of emeralds and sapphires and rubies and garnets; purple pinks and reds, and a hundred shades of blue and green, were inlaid and incrusted in the grey-brown walls; beginning on the floor and then rising and branching and stretching until they disappeared into the rocky dome of the roof; in partnership with the sun, they turned the cavern-walls and floor into a glittering miasma of sparkling, glittering colour.  

Thomas was
agog, spellbound, entranced… and only became aware of Big John when the large man rested a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’

He
nodded mutely and stared at the huge man standing next to him. He was massive - a small giant really. He wore his long grey hair in a thick pony-tail; his beard was full and neatly clipped, and his eyes - the same colour as his hair - twinkled. His voice was nice - a “let’s-be-friends” voice - and he said, ‘My name is John,’ and solemnly shook Thomas’ hand. He smiled and his teeth were big and white. ‘There is normally more than one of us around, so everybody calls me “
Big
John”. You can too, if you want.’ He smiled again and lifted his eyebrows. ‘I’ll bet you have a thousand questions,’ he said. Thomas nodded, and John put his massive arm around the boy’s shoulders.

‘Let’s go sit outside.’
 

*****

Ariana’s Pool…

The sun was out
: its warm soft glow a velvet glove that caressed your skin and mellowed your senses, turning you all languid and lazy and sleepy again.

Unless you were hung-
over. It just made you grumpy then, and short-tempered, and plain disagreeable. If you were born that way, it made you worse…

He was sitting on his hands and his
pale white feet dangled beneath the surface of the water - like two dead fish. His hair was a bushy mess and his eyes bloodshot.

She sat down next to him and her voice was soft.
‘Hello, Orson.’

He grunt
ed and squinted at the water.

‘You’ve been back two days.’

‘Three.’ Another grunt, almost a groan.

Ariana sighed. ‘Have you and Tessa been cellar-crawling again Orson?’

He said nothing, but
squeezed his eyes tightly shut. It brought visions of overflowing rubbish bins and empty wine bottles, and an urge to throw up. A pair of sun beetles started their monotonous buzzing in the tall grass somewhere behind them, and Orson swore softly and painfully under his breath. When he spoke, his voice was but a croak. ‘We almost died,’ he said. Then - clearing his throat, ‘We were almost killed!’ Louder.

‘Yes, I know all about
that
,’ Ariana said. The water in front of them rippled and Orson heard his own voice coming from it.

“And now what dog?! Look at the
… the…
crap
you and Madame Ariana have dropped us in!” He felt his face flush, but before he could say anything, heard himself begging and wheedling - “Come on, Ariana, come on. Bring us some magic…”

The ensuing silence was deafening
and Orson refused to look at Ariana, instead glared at the dog sleeping in the shade of the nearby willow tree. He heard her snore and felt his bile rise at the unfairness of being human. Just then, the yellow finch started its raucous noise, and although it hurt his head terribly, Orson felt sadistic pleasure when he heard Tessie’s soft yelp, and saw her, in an almost human gesture, fold yellow paws over floppy ears.

He watched for a
minute, and then, keeping his eyes on the dog, said, ‘He’s a Traveller, Ariana. He never slept. He never even blinked.’ He looked at her. Ariana wore a white dress and her raven-black hair loose, and she was very beautiful. She said, ‘I know Orson.’ Her voice gentle. ‘I know.’

They
sat quietly for a minute and then Ariana said, ‘Tell me about him Orson. Tell me about Thomas.’

His
eyes turned pensive and Orson started rubbing the grey wart at the side of his nose. It turned bristly purple after a while, and he said, ‘He’s just a boy. Eleven years old… Tall for his age.’ He gave an ugly grin. ‘Taller than me.’ He picked up a small pebble and threw it at the hung-over dog, missing her by a metre.

‘Hair the colour of straw
,’ he said. ‘And green eyes… Very green eyes that seem to look right through you. He has freckles…’ Orson shrugged. ‘He’s just a boy, Ariana.’ Concluding - ‘A good boy, I think.’

They were both quiet again
. Orson looking for pebbles and throwing them in the water, and a minute later - unable to contain himself any longer - blurted, ‘Is he the one, Ariana? The next Traveller?’ The hope in his voice turned Ariana’s soft. ‘I don’t know, Orson,’ she answered, ‘I honestly don’t know…’

Disappointment
showed on his face and Orson slowly struggled to his feet before pushing them - still wet - into a pair of beautifully crafted leather sandals. His head hurt and he wanted his bed. His voice became harsh and his attitude its normal quarrelsome self again.

‘You owe me a new coat
,’ he demanded, ‘and new boots; and a cap; and…’

Ariana’s voice interrupted his with a sigh. ‘Annie’s already fixed your coat Orson. And you can buy a hundred pairs of boots if you want
. You know that.’

‘Gmmphff.’
He blew loudly through his fleshy nose and looked at her with a haughty expression. ‘Just so’s you remember what you just said.’ He turned around and slowly started away from the water, then paused and without turning around, said, ‘I might see you tomorrow. If I feel better.’ He stressed the “if” and stepped onto the well-trodden footpath. Tessie staggered to her feet and followed, her walk just as unsteady and jarringly painful as her partner’s.

*****

The valley lay surrounded by mountains and hills on three of its sides, and stretched away in a series of meadows: greener and lusher down its centre and closer to the river, then lime and autumn and gold the further one moved up its edges and away from the water. Clusters of, and the occasional single tree, created oases of shade and homes for the valley’s thousands of birds; masses of multi-hued flowers dappled and dusted the meadows, transforming them with sprays of colour into rainbows of their own.

The river
looped and curled and twisted down its centre, a sparkling rope that bound and connected a long string of silver-blue pools. Two or three kilometres distant, it disappeared into a thick green forest, which, even from a distance, seemed forbidding and mysterious.

The azure expanse of the sky was a soft, watered-down blue
; the only clouds, a few downy dabs of white low above the far-off mountain tops.

A pair of
fish-eagles, wings spread wide and the feathers at their ends splayed like fingers, rode the air currents: leisurely patrolling the length of the river, with the occasional sharp cry proclaiming their area.

There were two benches: of wood and polished mirror-smooth by thousands of backsides seeking their comfort over centuries of time. They were anchored into the large flat rock fronting the elliptical entrance of the cave, one stood on its left, and one on the right; both facing down the length of the valley.

Thomas
and Big John shared the one on the right. The boy was taking in the beauty of the valley; in between taking surreptitious glances at the man whose huge body took up most of the rest of the bench. His eyes were on the pool of water in which Thomas, Orson, and Tessie had landed three days ago. It lay on their right - just a couple of hundred metres away. Seven brilliant pillars of colour rose from its centre, creating a rainbow that stretched high into the air, before curving away and disappearing over a towering cliff and waterfall. The waterfall tumbled and splashed down a series of natural steps in the rock-face, its entrance into the pool muted and not even heard from where they sat. The laughter and shouts of the children playing on the pool’s banks and in its water, echoed happily through the morning air, and put a contented smile on Big John’s face. His grey eyes (very much like Orson’s) crinkled and smiled with the rest of his face. Thomas kept quiet - content to watch the adult’s enchantment with the happiness of children. The song of the sun-beetles and the friendly sun on his face made the boy all drowsy and sleepy again and he started drifting.

Then Big John spoke. ‘Everything at Rainbow’s End is different, Thomas. Seasons, time, and years as
you
know it - they don’t exist here. The nights and days - they never vary - their length stays the same. It rains every morning between three and four. It never snows unless Ariana gets a bee in her bonnet, or wants it to. The sun shines but doesn’t burn; it’s never cold, always beautiful - like today.’ He opened his arms as if to embrace the perfect day.

‘
Space here… that is also different. You are used to only four dimensions: length, width, depth, and time. Here, none of them can be measured by Earth standards. We have dimensions that physicists on the Earth have not yet
begun
thinking of… or even dream about. Dimensions within dimensions; space within space; rooms within rooms… Always more, and nothing - or almost nothing - as it seems.

‘And time…’
He looked at Thomas.  ‘In your old world Frieda would be in her early fifties.’ He saw disbelief in the boy’s eyes and asked, ‘How old do you think I am, Thomas?’ He was really not very good with ages, but the soft lines and wrinkles on the man’s face were no more or deeper than Sergeant Wilson’s at home in Rockham, and Grammy had told Thomas the bobby was retiring the following year at age sixty-five. That’s what he said now - ‘Sixty-five?’

John’s eyebrows lifted. ‘You sound quite sure of that,’ he said, and Thomas nodded. The big man waved a hand at something, somewhere in the skies above. ‘Back there,’ he said - ‘on the Earth - I would now be more than a hundred and twenty years old. Here
, I am somewhere in my late seventies, but I can pass for a lot less.’ The scepticism still lay in Thomas’ eyes and Big John laughed. ‘Orson would also look younger,’ he said, ‘if he drank less. We are the same age - at least, in Earth time. I know he looks older, but in
Rainbow’s End
time, he’s actually younger than me. He came here long before I did, and aged a lot slower in that time. We’re twins,
you see…’

*****

Desolation…  

Far, far away, in a small room that was
bitterly cold, the black-clad boys wormed and fought their way deeper under their dirty grey blankets. They huddled together and stayed away from the freezing walls; the rock burned anything it touched with cold. They were hiding, too miserable and afraid to talk, and when they whispered, the chatter of their teeth seemed louder than their words. Kraylle’s demented screeches echoed up and down the long passageways, and the boys shivered - not only because of the terrible cold.

But they would
not leave. They
could
not leave. Desolation and Kraylle’s Castle was their home - to some of them the first and the only they’ve ever had…

And t
omorrow would be better. Rudi said so…

*****

Thomas was tired. Wonderfully, deliciously tired. The day had been like no other he’d ever known. Had he been an adult, his sanity might have flown very early on; as a child his imagination had been sorely tested as surprise followed surprise; strange was followed by
stranger
; and incongruous by the impossible.

He had played a game of cricket and had three delicious meals;
not counting the ice cream and cold drinks in between. He had seen wonderful things (like the cave), and heard stories that could have come straight out of a Hans Christian Anderson or Brothers Grimm novel.

And now he wanted to sleep. He had
taken a shower in Annie’s bathroom (in a shower stall he was sure had not been there earlier), and afterwards she had supplied him with a set of brand new pyjamas and showed him to his room. The door was unmarked and the small, cell-like space seemed to have been hacked out of the same grey and brown stone as the rest of the cave. There was no window; and the reds, violets, pinks, greens and blues of the walls sparkled and shone in the light of the single, bare bulb that hung from the roof. The bed was the only piece of furniture and Thomas left his clothes (neatly folded) lying on his sandals on the floor; the photo-album which he had salvaged from his backpack and which Annie had kept for him, under his pillow. He lay in bed; drifting and thinking about his day…