The 13th Descent: Book One of The Rosefire Trilogy (18 page)

“I could ask you the same thing,” he
groggily replies.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN
MY
ROOM?!” I scream again at the now standing Josh Feneri.

He is so tall
and lean, except for the biceps and pectoral muscles that have clearly made themselves known now he has crossed his arms over his chest. Most people looming over me in this stance would come across as being armoured and indisputable, but he is not giving off that vibe at all. He seems to be more thoughtful, and what from I can read, smug, which quickly takes the shine off the intoxicating, all knowing grin spread across his face.

“Our room,” he calmly states.

My automatic response is to clench my fists and shake all over, but before I can think twice, I have already taken the stride needed to be toe to toe with his huge size twelve feet. Drawing in a deep breath, I growl through my teeth, “How can you claim that this is your…our…room, IF YOU HAVE NEVER BEEN HERE BEFORE!” I finish yelling up into his sun kissed face, staring down his wide baby blue eyes, which I can’t help but notice really do look bigger and bluer thanks to his long black eyelashes.

Gaping back at me, his chiselled nose twitches and he smiles big, showing two rows o
f slightly crooked, well looked after teeth. My focus is now completely taken over by five-dimensional memories of his mouth, and I have the sudden urge to reach up and run my palm over the brindle-brown stubble framing it. But then I realise that he is probably smirking like that because he is a snicker off laughing at me, and I now want to use my palm to smack that self-righteous smirk right off his face.

Shooting daggers through my eyes
combined with the dirtiest look I can muster, he responds by knowingly, and annoyingly, shaking his head in what I am reading as disbelief, runs one hand through his long, silky, ginger-ale coloured layers and says, “They’re right. Being with you, seeing your expressions, your way…it’s bringing it all back.” The softness in his gaze hits me square in the chest, forcing me to drop the scowl to swallow the saliva building up in my mouth. “And, I have been here before, Ren,” he softly adds. “I followed you here.”

Instantly disagreeing, I defiantly shake my head.
“No, you didn’t follow me here. The first time we came to Earth was together,” I point out, suddenly feeling strange. “It was Mike who followed us…here…the first time…” I babble through a rush of wooziness as torturous images of Joshua’s whipped, bleeding and broken body flesh flash red behind my eyes.

“I think
we should sit,” he says, gently steering me towards the small settee by the window. I reluctantly lower myself into the chair he has pulled out for me, wincing to emphasise my resistance about hearing any more, but the sincerity of his look not only stresses the importance of what he is about to say, it lights up forgotten corners of my heart and mind shrouded in cobwebs. “In my only earthly lifetime before this one, I followed you here, to the
Apple Isle
,” he clarifies.

“B
ut….but…that’s impossible. You…died!” I cry out and slump across the table, as the merciless stabs of ancient grief, loss, and guilt sever through my defences, opening up a lost world of emotions, possibilities and regrets that rain hot tears down my cheeks. “They tortured you! They killed you! And…and…we…left you. We left you behind,” I shamefully sob into the cold, hard wood.

He reaches across the small table and grabs my hand,
and rubs the pad of his thumb over fleshy space between my thumb and my index finger like he used to. “We all knew what was coming, and we all knew what we had to do, Rose,” he says with an eerie acceptance. “They did torture me, and they came very close to killing me, but thanks to Micah and Uncle Ari, I survived. And, thanks to Micah and Uncle Ari, I managed to find my way home, to you…to our boy…and to our people.”

I look up across the table into the kindest and
loveliest of all faces. Now locked in each other’s gaze, I can see the warmth of his heart smouldering in the light of his eyes. I can hear the love in his words. I can feel the softness of his lips, the callouses on his hardworking hands, and his weight hovering over my body. I can taste the daily meals we shared and, at night, the saltiness of his skin. I can smell the fire heating our bed chamber and fragrant oils we used to anoint each other. As my body, heart and soul remembers, the tenderness we shared rears up and rushes over me in a mountainous wave, but instead of knocking to me off my feet and into unconsciousness, it raises me up out of my chair, so I can stand before him, hold him, touch him, marvel at him, weep over him and smother him with kisses of joy and thanks all over his mouth, face and neck. And in the wake of this monumental remembering and with all of my inhibitions long forgotten, I do.

As our lips meld together, my connection with this man, once my husband, always my first love, trickles forward from the past and begins to solidify in the present.  As he holds me closer and presses h
imself into me I am aware that he feels it too: all that we once shared as two halves of the whole, living side by side, as perfect opposites.

Needing air, we force our mouths apart, but our de
sperate hold on each other remains tight. With my face buried in his chest and him nuzzling my scalp, as his shirt dries my tears and my hair dries his. For minutes we stand there, embracing the then, the now, and each other; feeling this loved, this safe, this sure, I am perfectly happy for time to stand still, or to go back two thousand years.

Breaking our contemplative silence, Josh whispers in my ear, “Our room,” as I feel his lips curve up in a smile. I blurt out a laugh. “But, I think it’s best if I go back to mine,” he
adds, slowly releasing me from his hold.

Unwillingly, I
bring my hungry arms back to my side, but he catches and holds my hands before I have the chance to step away. The touch of the other’s skin was only gone for an instant, but it seems he missed it too as we both stare at our joined hands, basking in the warmth.  “So…you do have your own room,” I say, looking up at him with a smirk.

“Yeah, I do,” he answers with a sigh. “
It’s here in the Rose Wing, from the top of the stairs, second door on the left,” he points out.

“Ah. So,
you were in my room because…?”

“I was in
our
room because I remembered it was,” he explains. I nod acknowledging that when you’re in the middle of a remembering, it’s best to surrender and go with where it leads you, as mortifying as it may be. “And, I wanted to see you, on familiar ground,” he says with a small smile. “In future, I’ll only enter when I’m invited,” he chuckles, lightly squeezing my hands.

“Good to know,” I say, smiling and nodding.

He raises our laced fingers to his lips, lightly kisses the back of my hand and regretfully releases his hold. Dawdling towards the door, he asks over his shoulder, “See you at dinner?”

I look out past the ivory ruffles framing my window to see that the b
rightness of the day has lulled: that the sun is in descent and the waning moon on the rise, preparing to shine its mysterious light upon the earth.

“Sure. I’ll see you then,” I answer, more eagerly that I mean to.

He turns, answering me with a wide smile and a glint in his eye, which suddenly fades with what seems to be a mental jolt. After a short, strangely tense silence, he hangs his head and says into his chest, “You know, Mike was right. You do look like you did then, but fairer, and even more beautiful.”

He bows low, turns to open the door and closes it behind him, leaving me in the solitude I longed for just minutes ago; the loneliness of him leaving as
real and as raw as our baby kicking in my womb, back when I believed that we had lost him, back when I feared that his light would never grace the world of man again.

xxXxx

The two hours since Josh since left my room have been spent lying on his side of my queen sized bed, staring out through muslin canopy at the stucco walls and the painted landscapes of the places I have lived in my twelve lifetimes before this one. My focus always returns to the very first and most simple of painting: of palms trees and the sandy banks lining the river of might and calm; of tragedy and blessings, remembering him, remembering me, remembering us.

I have been revisiting my li
fe as Shoshanna in reverse, Benjamin Button style: from the wisdom of old age back through to the illustriousness of my childhood, believing it would be best to start my recollections at a time when my knowledge of Joshua was at its strongest. But in beginning at the end, my recollections started with the man we all left behind. With the flesh of my husband, our son, my father and my uncle having returned to the earth and their souls gone home, it was Micah who nursed me through my last breath.

Joshua, Micah, my father and my uncle
were the four men who knew me for most of that life and knew me well. It was their relationships with me and their relationships with each other that taught me of brotherhood and the uncanny, devoted love of family, and that even though blood may be thicker than water, water is free flowing and universal. 

Joshua was
the eldest brother, older than his second brother, Micah, by one year. They had two younger brothers, Thomas and Matthias, and one younger sister, Julia, who was very well protected with her own little army of siblings she could command with a single cry.

My father, Eli,
was the High Priest of our village, and was to Joshua and Micah what he was to the many children we grew up with: a spiritual teacher from early childhood. Ari, my father’s younger and only brother, also instructed the children, but in “worldly matters,” as he used to put it. My father and my uncle were our village’s go-to men – any questions about the ancients and their ways, the history of the world and our divine origins, my father had the answers to, and any requests financial, influential or political in nature, Uncle Ari had the knowledge and the resources for. 

Like many children raised in the light, Joshua and Micah’s pa
ths were made evident early on. Joshua quickly became an eager student of the spiritual, as well as my father’s prodigy. Uncle Ari honed in on Micah’s wide-eyed desire to experience all he could of the physical world and wasted no time taking him under his wing. Even though these pairs of age and youth were heading down different paths with those not of their blood, all were pleased that their brothers were walking in the light with a kindred spirit.     

“Who is the richer brother?” Uncle Ari
’s enthusiastic voice echoes through my memories. “The brother who provides the wood for the fire or the brother with the bellow stoking the embers?”

“That depends,” I said.

“On what, my little rosebud?” he asked, taken aback.             

  “What the fire was built for and why it should be kept burning,” I answer.

“Good girl,” he said laughing loud, picking me up and whizzing me around in a circle. “Good girl.”

My childhood as Shoshanna was a happy and carefree one. I was a cherished only child, but I was never alone, always surrounded by my cousins and the children in our village as we spent our
day’s together working, learning, and playing. Even though it didn’t seem so at the time, my young life was evenly split between responsibly and pastime: I’d rise early and spend my mornings doing my household chores or the chores of the sick or the elderly in the village. During the day, I’d study under the Priests and Priestesses at the Temple. The afternoons I played away with friends, and in the evenings I ate with my family and the different people they invited to join us.

Joshua and Micah’s father,
Nathan, and their mother, Ruth, were our neighbours and good friends of my parents. They would visit with us often, and with Joshua and I so close in age, routinely brought together in our daily lives through our village chores, Temple classes and sharing the same friends, we were very familiar with each other, and always had lots to talk about on the nights his family would eat with mine.

Growing up as close as we did, everyone assumed that Joshua and I would marry. Even though my parents quickly silenced those who
would start to tell the story, in fear it may have influenced the decision they always stressed was ours and ours alone, I already knew all about how the signs were there before Joshua and I were even born: how after two decades of trying to conceive a child without any success, my parents had nearly given up hope until they both dreamt on the same night that my mother would give birth to a sacred child carrying a red rose in her hand. As it turns out, my mother was newly pregnant, and eight months later, I was born and named Shoshanna after the rose of their dreams.

The story also goes that in the same month of my conception, a rose vine mysteriously started growing out of the ground by
Nathan and Ruth’s front door. It climbed the wall, and in the months ahead, grew up and over the entry way, and, on the day their first son was born, the buds hanging from the vine opened and bloomed into roses of blood red, which was three days after I first arrived into the world.

Joshua and I were born in the same week, only seven doors from each other.  We grew up together, learned together, played together, fought together, laughed together, lo
st together and prayed together; we learned from each other, toyed with each other, fought with each other, challenged each other and delighted in each other. And because of all that we shared, the bond between us was strong. He was what I knew. He was what I trusted. He was what I believed in. His gentle, masculine beauty filled my heart with love; his words with wonder; his actions with hope; his faith with strength. It was his earthly heart that filled mine with the light of home. We were always given the choice, but, at the time, there was none. Joshua was my home and my beloved.