The structure’s insides are ostentations, but not in any deliberate way immediately apparent to me. Calyx says something about the smell of the air inside, but to me, it’s the visual aspect of it which grips me. It’s the light. If I would have believed in a God, I would have thought him to exist here, in this place, in this small, modest shrine, or fane, or whatever one might call it.
Inside, the temple is silent. I don’t pay much attention to the finery draping the walls, to the statues at my side depicting struggles and victories of men and women long since dead and gone, frozen forever in heroic poses. Light, strong enough to illuminate every particle of dust before me, streams through the faint mosaics upon the walls and paints the insides with gold. My attention is drawn to the far side of the structure, where a group of men stand, holding instruments. They talk amongst themselves as Calyx and I walk closer. Her hand is in mine and she seems as though she had forgotten that we are still touching. But that hand is, beside the light, all that I can feel. All I want to feel and we simply exist, together, in the light, and I wish our hands could stay like this forever. I look at her. She smiles and I smile back. With difficulty, I avert my gaze from hers and look ahead. Some of the contraptions which the men are holding look more like collections of trumpets with a single blow hole, others are percussion devices, while some look like hydraulic pumps with wheels in their middle and paddles to propel them. There are others about which I have no clue what they might be or what sounds they can produce. I didn’t expect the men to start playing, but when they do, noise shakes the walls. Its cacophony rises into a litany of sounds that increase exponentially until, in a symphony of overlapping sounds and harmonic layers of auditory bliss, they come to a climax and I think, if this played at the end of the world, it would be a beautiful end.
Even Ty wakes up. I place him down and help him stay on his wobbling feet. I notice Calyx’s hand had had left mine, and I feel a sort of pit in my chest. I want that hand back, realize I want more than just the hand.
“The fuck is this place?” Ty yells out, his voice barely registering.
The musicians stop abruptly. One of them walks over to us, his instrument hugged to his chest, a brass blow-device. I recognize the man by his thin and long, white hair, shining in the light. Eirik smiles and bows his head. “I see you three made it. Good.”
I can barely keep my eyes open.
“I can see time and its passing has taken a toll on you,” smiles Eirik. It takes a moment for me to realize he thinks I look tired. “Indeed, time betrays us all. You three can rest in here, if you wish. There’s some food to be sold outside, in the market, not much, of course, but good if you have the credit.”
“What about the music?” Calyx asks. “I want to hear more.”
“We shall play more outside,” says Eirik. “You are free to come.”
I need some rest. I sit down near one of the statues, my back propped up against it. After a brief conversation with Ty, I fall asleep.
I don’t remember a dream, but can feel its aftereffects as I wake up. A feeling you get when something strange has happened but no one is talking about it.
“Tell me, do you always sleep like a corpse?” Calyx asks me, sitting propped up next to me.
“Generally, no,” I say. “I haven’t slept like that for years, I think.”
“It’s this place,” she nods with a smile and I stare. Those lips… they curl into the most sublime feature and I remember what I’ve been dreaming about. It was her. Lately it seems it’s always her. I wonder what it would be like to press my lips against hers. Would she kiss me back? “There’s something immensely calming about this place,” she says. “The light is almost physical in nature, soothing. I feel caressed by it.”
I swallow. “You do look calm.”
She rests her head on my shoulder and I feel a spiral in my chest, as though standing too close to a fire.
“Why do you travel all the time?” she asks me. The question seemed odd, unexpected. “Have you not a home?”
“My home‘s no longer a place anyone would want to live. I’ve seen too many things to ever want to stay there. I don’t want to spoil your mood by retelling them.”
I heard it before she said it, the question. “But why did you leave, exactly?”
She wouldn’t let this go, I could see it in her eyes. That determination that will drive a person to the very depths of the soul. “I saw my mother,” I sigh. “She walked out in the cold one day, stood there while flakes of radioactive ash covered her until she was a statue.”
“What? Why?”
“She just couldn’t cope. When my father died, she couldn’t cope. She said this world isn’t real, that it’s an illusion. She said she saw beyond the veil of time and that we are trapped here, on this world. She wanted me to come with her, to the other side. But I couldn’t. I was too afraid. Now, sometimes, I wish I had gone.”
“What did you do?”
“I banged on the glass, I yelled for her to come back inside. I broke the glass and my tears froze as I raced to her. I still remember them stinging my eyes. But it was too late and she could no longer hear me, no longer see me. I’m sure that even to this day, she’s still there, standing, gazing up at the sky. Those flakes would do that to flesh, you see. They made it hard, like glass. It’s like they meld you with the soil. I picked up all that I could carry and would need and went South.”
“How old were you?” she asks.
“You know, now that we’re here, in this place… I began to realize how strange the flow of time has been for me. I’ve left cities behind me, and in some cities, life seems to have moved backwards, in others it has been debased to a terrible succession of unchanging days. In some remote places where man has not set foot in who knows how long, the trees are green, as though the destruction hasn’t even reached them. As though something in them doesn’t care and they just grow like they used to.”
“You’ve seen green trees? Where?”
“Only in two places that I remember. One was when I crossed the Alps, high up in the mountains, in a gorge where the sun never reaches, but the trees were green there, as though something else gave them energy. The other was in a cave, also in the Alps. Those were not only green, but fluorescent. I stayed there for a week just so the memory would stay with me.”
“I’d love to see that place,” she says, dream-like and distant.
“What about you? How did you actually manage to lose your father?”
She hesitates. “They come in the night,” she says. “They always come in the night. They need you and they simply take you. I’ve been told they find out where you are by asking you. You tell them in your dreams. I was told that’s how they took my father.”
I sigh. “So what’s the plan? Should we try and sneak into the fortress tomorrow?”
“You would do this?” she asks.
“I don’t see why not.” Actually, I could see why not, but my sense of reason had somehow been diluted to a point where rational decisions were crushed in the face of Calyx’s stare.
“We should spend tomorrow here, try and find some supplies or something that will aid us. Some information at least,” she says.
“Aye. Where’s Ty?”
“He said he needs to eat something. I assume he went to get something,” she says.
We went to look for him outside, in the fading evening. There was an abundance of people, happy people, carefree people, and their demeanor confused the fuck out of me. But in the market, in the smack middle of it, a large group had gathered around a commotion of sound.
We wade through the bodies of cheering men and women to find Ty, locked in hand-to-hand combat. The face of his opponent is bloody, but so it Ty’s.
“Why am I not surprised?” I ask.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” sighs Calyx beside me and I can barely hear her over the din.
“Bets?” says a man beside me, carrying a huge bag of creditcards and scars on his face.
“What??
?? I ask.
“The odds are five to one towards Olif,” he says.
As the man says this, the brute lands another uppercut and sends Ty tumbling backwards. The crowd cheers.
“Seven to one,” laughs the man.
I grab hold of three Mastercards and the man’s eyes bulge. I can see he had never even seen a bet of such size before. “All of it on my friend there.”
He gargles a laugh and walks away.
Ty looks beaten. But I know his game, because his is also mine. I know his strength, and in the last two days, I have learned a thing or two of his cunning. He stands with his shoulders hanging, hands limp, ready to give up, his nose bleeding. The opponent sees this and with it, his opening. Olif’s face twists into a sneer and the brute charges. Heavy feet excite dust and the crowd goes rigid.
“This is it,” says a man next to me. But the crowd doesn’t see, doesn’t know. But I do. A look, a flicker in the eyes of Ty. He knows the fight is over. Ty ducks beneath the punch and with a burst of forward momentum, jams the tip of his fingers in the man’s throat. The man staggers and grabs his neck, trying to catch breath. Ty brings down both his hands on top of the man’s head. Olif collapses in a spasming heap. The crowd gasps. I laugh, and the man doesn’t get back up until six hours later.
CHAPTER 12