The Seven Gifts (14 page)

“No," the Queen snarled. “I'll do it myself,
like I have to do everything myself around here. Just get that
gardener out of the way." She turned to George and almost spat in
her fury: “You're fired, you old fool." Then she grabbed a
forester's axe that was leaning against the palace wall and chopped
the crown of tiny white flowers clean off the stem of the weed.
George fainted.

But when he came to nothing had happened.
The Queen stood by the decapitated weed, still shaking with anger
and still clutching the long-handled axe. Then suddenly, as though
it had waited for George, the weed shuddered; and before all their
eyes the stem pushed slowly upwards and produced a bud that opened
right out into a delicate crown of tiny white flowers. Then it
stopped.

George shivered, and looked around him. He
could feel menace in the air. But the others did not. They crowded
round the weed and stared in amazement.

“This could revolutionise the whole farming
industry," announced the Agriculture Minister. But the Minister of
Technology was not listening. He had a strange gleam in his
eyes.

“We could take over the world with a plant
like that," he breathed. The Chief of Police nodded in agreement,
plans already formulating in his fertile brain.

But the Queen in her anger was not thinking
at all. She guessed she had missed with her first swing, and so
tried again. George watched her. He felt strangely detached, and
sensed with an absolute certainty that something incredibly
horrible was going to happen. The weed had given them all a chance.
This time, he decided as the Queen swung the axe down again, it
would run out of patience.

As the heavy axe split the crown of tiny
white flowers for a second time the weed seemed to literally
explode, growing in all directions at once. But there were no more
white flowers. Tendrils, as thick as the gardener's fingers, leapt
and writhed, spilling out in bunches to pour across the ground like
a mountain stream. One struck at the Queen like a bullwhip,
gripping her neck and squeezing till her eyes bulged like her
breasts. And the weed shot up, now the size of a small oak tree,
dripping tendrils that sought the ground and then raced in the
direction of the palace walls.

The two ministers stood petrified. Not so
the Police Chief, however, who was made of sterner stuff. With a
gun in each hand he stood back, blazing away at the maddened,
writhing weed. Like a cowboy trying to be an actor, thought George
dully. Too much television, that was the trouble. These people had
it rammed into their heads so much they no longer had any concept
of reality. The macho image: so important, yet so often hiding the
exact opposite. But was this reality? he wondered. His mind seemed
to float, refusing to relate to what was happening before his
eyes.

The weed must have been thirty feet high,
its tendrils flowing to the ground like the branches of a weeping
willow, then spreading out across the palace walls like ivy,
creeping and crawling, rooting into every crevice. He heard the
crash of breaking window panes as the weed relentlessly pushed its
way inside the palace, then the screaming of the servants.

The Queen had vanished beneath the swirling
mass of tendrils and her minions were nowhere to be seen. George
stood alone at the bottom of his garden watching the weed, that had
once lived there harmlessly with its crown of tiny white flowers,
methodically tearing apart the magnificent white palace that the
old Queen had spent seven years building. Oblivious to the bricks
and chimney pots that fell around him, he wondered what the old
lady was thinking. He had let her down, when she had obviously
stuck out her neck for him. He hoped she wouldn't suffer. Frankly
he felt little concern for the others.

The palace was almost in ruins. Beyond the
dust and smoke that arose from the burning rubble he could see the
weed's outriders - the furthest tentacles - charging down the hill
like galloping great green horses. Rearing and plunging, they
strode into the streets of the city, crushing people and tearing
down houses. Bulbs flickered and blew as the garish neon lights
were ripped to the ground, and the half-naked bodies of dancers,
courtesans and princes poured screaming into the streets, to be
crushed and mangled by the flying tendrils of the weed.

The weed itself, as thick as a house now,
seemed to reach the very base of the clouds. Beneath its spreading
mantle of green the sky grew dark, lit by occasional streaks of
lightning. And George thought he could hear the rumble of thunder.
Curiously, no tendrils had encroached on the garden. His flowers
still bloomed, a startling splash of colour amid the surrounding
devastation. The reds and yellows, pinks, golds and purples stood
proudly, bathed in the strange greenish light that was reflected
from the weed. And George himself was untouched.

Still the weed grew. It covered the city now
till it resembled a long-wrecked ship left dry by the receding
tide. And still it galloped on: through towns and villages,
farmyards, stations and seaports, to the furthest extremities of
the Snow Queen's kingdom. Here the spreading mass of green was
joined by more tendrils, reaching down from the upper branches of
the weed, wriggling through the clouds to build a curtain from the
sky that surrounded the whole kingdom.

Then, as though its job were now done, the
weed died; as quickly as it had grown. The millions upon millions
of long, snaking green arms withered from their ends, their life
seeming to draw back along them and into the stem of the weed. And
the stem itself drew back into the earth, until there was only a
small green plant with a delicate crown of tiny white flowers to
indicate that anything had happened. But the Snow Queen's kingdom
was bare; as though it had been stripped by countless quadrillions
of voracious soldier ants. Not a building stood. Not a person
lived.

Apart from George, who stood in his garden
watching little green plants shoot up through the blackened,
scorched remains of the Queen's palace, to sprout delicate crowns
of tiny white flowers, then stop. A strange welling of music seemed
to expand in the still evening air, sweeping from the tiny white
flowers to enfold the garden, and George himself. And soft voices
began to sing: lilting, rolling songs that flowed back and forth,
into and through one another.

The sound grew, a thousand voices
harmonising in sweeping melody and counter-melody, building and
building till it filled the air like a fragrance. It seemed to
blend with all the flowers in the garden, drawing them in to one
world with the weeds and the music and George.

A feeling of intense joy and deep
tranquillity suffused the old, tired gardener, spreading warmth and
energy through his weary body. He stood straighter, more erect. He
felt younger. He felt at peace.

He turned to face the smouldering remains of
the old palace, from where the music seemed to come. As he stood
there he saw an arm thrust out from the ashes and reach upwards,
clutching a battered old thirteen string guitar. And through the
heavenly music an unmistakable voice called out:

“Here comes my band again!"

o ------------------------
o

The young boy closed the
book on the Sixth Gift

and remained a while with
his thoughts

in the lonely tower at the
end of the beach

And the Angel watched over
him

o ------------------------
o

The Neverending Story

THE BOY laughed. “He didn't wreck the place
again, did he?"

“Of course not!" The Angel was short.

The boy stopped laughing, and said
seriously: “I think this one must be Eternal Life - new life
growing from the ashes of the old. The indestructibility of life. I
think this gift is Eternity."

“It is," said the Angel.
“The guardian's sixth gift was
ETERNITY
. However people may change
and die; however they are destroyed, the essential life that is in
them - their spirits - cannot be. The life of a man's spirit is
forever."

The boy nodded absently. He seemed
unconvinced. By its simplicity, perhaps.

“I think there is more to the story than
just that," he said.

“Do you?"

“Uh-huh."

The Angel seemed to think for a while before
replying.

“Perhaps you are right," she conceded. “This
gift does have certain strings attached to it, none of which" - she
stressed - “affect the basic quality of the gift. Spiritual life is
eternal, and that cannot be altered. Its progression can, though."
She paused, gathering her thoughts.

“Do you remember the salmon?" she asked
him.

“Yes."

“And how horrified you were at the prospect
of them never reaching their goal?"

“I do," he said with some feeling.

“Well; Eternity," she elaborated, “can be
viewed as a series of goals - an infinite progression of spawning
grounds, with rest and recovery here between each. It is countless
lives and deaths - incarnation and return - each different, each
containing something for us to do - something for us to learn.

“Eternity is a never-ending cycle of cycles;
and although the Eternal Cycle can never be ended, it can be
frozen. It is possible to become trapped in one particular cycle
for an indefinite period."

“Wow!" The boy's eyes were wide. “You mean
like a salmon that can never reach the spawning grounds?"

“Something like that. We must learn the
lessons of each cycle before we can pass onto the next. Just as you
have had to learn the secret of each of these books before you
could read the next.

“If we do not learn the lessons, we have to
go through that cycle again and again until we do. As you would
have to read the book over and over until you understood it."

“Wow!" the boy muttered again. “I don't like
the sound of that. Does it happen often? Are the lessons very
difficult to learn?" He looked worried, perhaps thinking of his own
coming lifetime.

The Angel shook her head encouragingly.
“No," she said, “the lessons are not difficult to learn. But there
are distractions, as you saw in the story of the fifth gift. The
learning does require perseverance and a strong will. When these
are lacking, it is possible to get caught in a recurring cycle. And
the longer one remains in the same cycle, the more difficult it
becomes to get out of it.

“Added to which, there are no rest periods,
as there are between changing cycles."

The boy whistled. “So the destruction of the
Snow Queen's palace, yet again, was a sign of her kingdom being
caught up in a recurring cycle?"

“That's right."

“Because of the behaviour of the Queen and
her subjects?"

The Angel smiled wryly. “Well, they did not
learn much from their lives, did they? Hardly on a par with the
philosopher and the bosun, or George for that matter. Or even
Coalhole Custer.

“These four all learnt what their lives
showed them. And by varying means were released from the recurring
cycle that gripped the Snow Queen's kingdom.

“The bosun's sensitivity to his experiences
drove him back to his island and away from the trapped kingdom. The
philosopher's enforced childhood preserved him automatically from
re-entering the cycle, while George was simply left alone by the
weed because it knew he had cared for it. Coalhole Custer was
literally blown out of the cycle by the power and honesty of his
music."

There was a pause. “But what about Henry?
The honey bee? Surely he learnt his lesson?"

A smile spread slowly across the Angel's
face at the memory of Henry the honey bee, and she took her time
answering the boy's question. Finally she said rather
enigmatically: “When you have read about the seventh gift you will
understand the deeper significance of Henry's experiences, and also
those of the old lady dying in hospital."

The boy thought for a moment about all this
before he spoke again.

“Well, then presumably the Snow Queen and
her kingdom will start life all over again, just as it was
before?"

“Yes," said the Angel. “And live it as they
did before. And they will go on doing so until they learn what
their lives are trying to show them. Only then will they be able to
break their bonds and enter a fresh cycle."

“Mmm..." The boy was pensive. “That's some
penance," he said. “But...... I still don't quite see how Coalhole
Custer fits into all this. I mean, he seemed to be appearing in the
recurrence of the cycle. Yet you say he escaped it."

“He did," the Angel confirmed. “Although he
appeared as the Snow Queen's cycle began yet again, he was,
himself, in a new one. Coalhole Custer, you will discover, is not a
part of the Snow Queen's kingdom, so he cannot be trapped in its
cycles."

o ------------------------
o

~
The Seventh Gift
~

The Beauty of The
Beast

QUITE WHAT Coalhole Custer's guitar and left
arm were doing poking out of the smouldering ashes of the Snow
Queen's palace, we may never know. A more enquiring mind than
George's might have hung around to see what would happen. George,
however, had had enough.

So far as he could tell, there was not a
living soul left in the land - not a person nor a thing, save only
his garden. Perhaps the weeds would take care of that; or maybe
that bearded weirdo of a pop singer - if that really was him under
the ashes - could do it. For George had no intention of staying
around himself.