Chapter 4 – An Old Man’s Sad Imagination…
Elloch whispered as he crouched with Malek at the edge of the lom field. “Did you remember to bring the syrup?”
A breeze swayed the lom stalks, and Malek used the hiss of the wind as cover for his reply. “Of course I did. I’ll be lucky that mother doesn’t cut off my hand when she learns I’ve stolen her only bottle of syrup. The syrup gets harder to come by as the lom fields claim so much of the swamp.”
Elloch smiled, his tongue remembering the taste of every time he had drowned his plate of lom in ample doses of syrup when his mother turned the other direction. “I don’t think she’s going to mind the loss of the syrup when she finds out we went to the island.”
“All the more reason we have to come back with a medicine.”
“You think this bottle of syrup is going to tell Glennis we’re serious?” Elloch asked.
“He just has a sweet tooth,” Malek’s smile reflected moonlight. “He’s been pining for someone to challenge the sea and the outsiders for years. He even has his light on for us.”
The color of old man Glennis’s cabin twinkled on its perch overlooking the sea. Glennis painted his exterior walls in vibrant colors. Traced by the old man’s hands, pastel shades of yellows, oranges and greens blended to form exotic creatures and fauna. The flying hellispray may have gone extinct before even Glennis was a boy, but the lost sea animal again jumped above the waves in a rainbow arc of spray on the canvas of the cabin wall. Stain glass filled every window. Glass beads, their insides swirling crimson flames and cooling blues, hung from the front threshold’s frame in place of an uninspired, wooden door. Sitting beneath the land’s gray sky, Glennis’s colorful cabin captivated attention; and though the village’s harbor lacked the jagged reefs and hidden rocks of more dangerous ports, the old man’s abode perched atop its slight hill overlooking the sea burned as powerfully as any lighthouse that might have elsewhere saved a crew’s breath.
Glennis pawned trinkets to the outsiders whose curiosities craved such color. The outsiders’ ships, however massive they might have been, lacked much of anything to inspire a dream. The porthole only showed the outsider sailor the dull tinge of gray. The waves churned gray, and the sky blew gray. Gray blankets embraced the outsiders who slept upon their ships’ gray berths. They swabbed gray decks. They interpreted gray charts. They fed gray coal to a gray engine so that the ships’ gray towers could belch more soot into a darkening, gray sky. The outsiders signed their marks to the navy’s rosters to escape the doldrums of the native land’s tenement apartments, and yet their hopes turned empty when the color looked to have fled the rest of the world as well.
The oceans of blue and lagoons of green long ago transformed into the gray, murky waters. The violet mantibloom, whose crimson eyes sailors once counted on their deck watches, disappeared from the waters. The emerald green eyes of the giant periclid whales no longer glistened in the sailors’ portholes to wake the men in ships come the morning sun. The sea, like man and like the world, faded into gray.
But old Glennis made sure his trinkets sparkled. He polished his mirrors and dusted his gems each morning to catch the attention of an outsider’s tired eye. Tin and copper wind-chimes hung from the every branch of the native swamp trees Glennis refused to cut down for the sake of making more room for the lom. Notes of such wind-chimes ringed the breeze. Banners unfurled from every peek Glennis’s old knees could scale. He carved tall totems stacked with the aspects of wild creatures and savage men, colored in fiery shades of oranges, reds and yellows. Terracotta toads painted deep green hunched everywhere in the yard. Old man Glennis’s home appeared such a strange place of wonders to the sailors, whose voyages only led them to so much more gray, that few upon the ships could claim not to have visited that cabin.
The din of wind-chimes wafted to Elloch and Malek’s ears as the twins crouched in the edge of the lom field.
“Hold a moment,” Malek grabbed Elloch’s wrist to prevent his brother from leaving the cover of the field.
Elloch squirmed out of Malek’s grasp but did not step forward. “I thought you said his light showed he was expecting us. I don’t want to be in this lom any longer that I have to. Hard telling when a llungruel might crawl past.”
“There’s an outsider in the cabin,” Malek whispered. “I don’t want to knock on Glennis’s door to seek counsel on returning to the forbidden island with an outsider in the room to hear us.”
“How do you know?”
Malek’s nostrils flared as if sniffing the chimes that floated in the breeze. “Look at all the ship lights burning in the harbor. Our village port is busy tonight. Seems to me the outsiders hate their ships as much as we, and where else would they go during the night to escape their confines?”
“They might try knocking on the doors of some of our women.” Elloch winked.
Malek rolled his eyes. “If you can’t smell and see, then try to listen.”
Elloch frowned, but he strained his ears. He ignored his beating heart and tried to pay closer attention to the spaces between the wind-chimes’ jingle. He discerned a foreign voice, a sound loud enough to drift in the wind, spoken in the heavy accent of a tongue Elloch still struggled to comprehend. His senses heightened. He felt the outsiders’ heavy tread rumble through the ground before Glennis’s guest exited the cabin through the beads covering the threshold, the man’s teeth glistening in the moonlight that seeped through the thin cover of clouds.
Glennis laughed alongside the visitor, offering his guest a short bow and a pat on the shoulder before the outsider twirled and strode back towards the boats that crowded the village harbor. Elloch watched Glennis wave at the man’s back for several moments before returning into his cabin and moving the source of the cabin’s illumination from one window to another.
“Come on.” Malek stood out of the lom’s cover and paced towards Glennis’s cabin.
Elloch did not like the subterfuge. He did not like feeling like a thief for stealing his mother’s syrup. He did not like feeling like an interloper in his own village. He did not like feeling like any such things on account he wished to return to an island his people once cherished as sacred.
But Elloch trusted Malek more than any other, and so he stood from the lom, still unsure what, exactly, he needed to hide from, and followed his twin towards Glennis’s strange cabin of many colors and yard of singing trees.
Glennis and Malek waited for him as Elloch turned the cabin’s corner.
Glennis smiled. “The two of you make as much noise as the foreigners, and you don’t smell much better than their ships.” Glennis suddenly slapped each brother’s shoulder and laughed at the grimaces that crossed the twins’ faces. “I see my reeds bit deep. The pain lets you know the marks will stay.”
Elloch and Malek flushed.
“Fool boys,” Glennis turned his smile into a snarl. “Don’t simply stand there. Get into my cabin before you start attracting the eyes of mothers and sailors.”
The twins squirmed through the threshold’s beads and spilled into the single room of Glennis’s cabin. Trinkets and knick-knacks filled every inch of the interior space. Plastic necklaces heaped onto piles on every inch of open shelving found in crowded bookcases. Carved busts of villagers and sailers made tables heavy and wind-chimes cut crookedly throughout the room, arranged so chaotically through the single chamber that the twins recognized few paths deeper into the space. Colorful kites suspended from the ceiling, and their ribbon streamers tickled Malek and Elloch’s foreheads. Flags of unknown lands curtained many of the windows.
Despite such clutter, the walls quickly clutched the twins’ attention. Masks of savage creatures populated each inch of walls. Though abstract in their carving and creation, Malek and Elloch had little trouble in recognizing how carved tree bark, when given a proper mouth of glass teeth, captured the visage of the swamp’s frightful jalsheed. Dyed pillow feathers pasted on goat hide somehow captured the simian strength of t
he violent ushstarten. The twins recognized most of those creature masks as things of legends, creatures of fables, or animals long gone extinct in a world aging gray.
Elloch marveled. “How many lands have you visited, old man? Where have you been to know the face of so many masks?”
Glennis sighed. “I’ve seen none of those creatures. I’ve hardly left my cabin.”
Malek rubbed his chin. “I don’t understand.”
“Because you are young,” Glennis replied.
“But then how do craft such savage masks?” Elloch’s eyes flitted from one face to the next. “They make me tremble though I know they’re made of little more than paper.”
“The outsiders have more imagination than the two of you would believe,” Glennis continued. “I make the masks simply by listening to them. Their imaginations make them so sad.”
Glennis turned quiet, seeming to turn upon himself regardless of the company.
“And where did you find all the other trinkets?” Malek's question broke the older man's rumination.
A spark resurfaced in Glennis’s eyes. “Now that is a wonderful story. Sit there on those cushions and I will tell you. Just sweep that debris aside and let me get you both something to drink while you listen.”
Malek and Elloch discovered a long couch beneath several stacks of magazines and shoeboxes. Plopping into its cushions, they ignored the dust that flew into the rays of the kerosene lantern. Glennis returned quickly and presented two tall glasses of water.
Glennis hesitated to serve the drink. “Did you bring it?”
Malek chuckled. “Give him the syrup, Elloch.”
Elloch’s fingers stung after Glennis snatched the proffered bottle before his guest could think about withdrawing it. The twins’ eyes widened as Glennis pulled at the bottle and coated his throat with the syrup before splitting the remnants into the twins’ glasses. Malek and Elloch’s teeth throbbed by just watching. They had never dreamed of enjoying so much syrup in one sitting.
“Drink. Drink.” Glennis nodded, “and I will tell you how I came to own so much treasure.”
Malek grimaced as he sipped his sweet glass, but Elloch smiled and swooned.
“When I was young, when I too had many brothers and sisters, the outsiders’ gray ships arrived upon our shores. The color that used to swim in our waters pulled them to our coast. The tranquility of our waters soothed them, and the taste of our fish thrilled their tongues. Color and fish were abundant then before the outsiders came with their unquenchable appetites.
“The outsiders thought they might purchase our color and our waters with the glimmering trinkets they offered to us. They thought they might trade for our treasures with all the baubles their ships collected from one port to the next. Who were we to deny them the sea? Who were we to refuse their stomachs fish when they could use a net as easily as we? We first accepted their trinkets out of courtesy. We didn’t know what we might do with such sparkling things, but we feared to be rude by refusing them.
“It did not take long for their gray ships, and their gray clothes, and their gray skin to foul our colorful waters. Our nets returned less fish until the netting returned none at all. We had no fleet to chase their ships away from our waters. Our weapons were too meager to frighten any outsider from stepping ashore. With nothing else to do, we demanded more and more trinkets each time an outsider smiled at one of our women or sat next to one of our fires. We were powerless and small, and trinkets were the only things we could take from those who took so much from us. We prayed that perhaps one day they would turn their ships around and leave us when they finally emptied their ships of all their sparkling things.”
Glennis frowned and sipped at his glass of syrup water. He sat heavily upon a chair and paid no attention to the dust that embraced him.
Glennis sighed. “We took all the trinkets our cabins could hold as their ships fouled our waters. The outsiders broke their own hearts when they arrived one morning at our harbor to find our colorful waters they so badly desired had disappeared. Either they were ashamed of themselves, or either they pitied our growling stomachs, but the outsiders thought they owed us for what they took. They had filled our village with so many of the baubles you see shining from my walls, and still they wanted to give us more. So they gave us the lom to satiate our stomachs. They gave us the lom to make amends. And our lives have never been the same.”
Malek swirled the water in his glass while Elloch continued to sip.
“The old recognize the circle of all things,” Glennis continued. “Now, the outsiders sit upon their ships in our fouled waters and pine for those trinkets I now hang from the trees around my cabin, the very treasures and baubles their forefathers so easily gave to us. The world is a strange place, and only the old recognize the way the color fades.”
Malek set his drink upon a stack of books while Elloch finished his serving.
“We wish to see a little of that old color, Glennis,” Malek spoke.
Elloch slurred his words with his tongue made numb from such a sweet drink. “We wish to return to the sacred isle and bring back the medicines to soothe the llungruel’s bite.
Glennis’s eyes twinkled. “That is a very fine reason, but I doubt that is the only reason.”
Neither twin denied Glennis his suspicions.
“Why is it forbidden for our people to travel to that island?” Malek asked.
Elloch nodded. “And who are the outsiders to deny us?”
Glennis’s teeth ground upon one another, and the friction of his words sounded like scraping rocks. “Much color remains still on that island. The outsiders clutch to such color. They would hide it so only they could see it. They would share that color with no one. Yet the color always reminds them of how fantastic blues and greens once filled the seas, before their gray ships dulled everything to gray. They still feel much shame for it. The outsiders will never share the color with anyone. They want to hoard it, and they don’t want anyone to see how the surrounding gray makes them cry."
“And we do nothing?” Malek stammered.
Elloch took a long swallow of the drink his brother abandoned. “Why do none of us demand to be allowed back on the sacred island?”
“The two of you remain young,” Glennis responded. “The world may have once held so much more color, but the world also held so much more danger. The island is a wild place. Men did not grow old on the island. Hurts and sickness harvested the people who called that island home before any of their hair turned gray, before any of their backs bent from the years. Perhaps the two of you are too young to know anything else. The lom tastes dull, but it satisfies our hunger. The llungruel’s bite is cruel, but the island’s predators are much more savage. We have only chosen the lom over the color, and even a man as old as myself, who remembers how the waters used to twinkle in the sun, can recognize the wisdom of such a choice.”
Malek’s hands turned to fists. “How can we be so afraid?”
“I hate the outsiders!” Elloch gulped the remains of the syrup water. Yet even that drink failed to vanquish a bitterness that lingered on his tongue.
Glennis calmed the brothers by raising an open hand. “Do not think the outsiders are rich at our expense. They miss the color far more than we. We still have stories and memories, but the world the outsiders flee is more gray than either of you can dream. They may have introduced the lom to our fields, but the lom disappoints their palettes far more than it disappoints our tongues. My cabin’s walls are crowded because those outsiders have invested all their treasure searching for a color that will last. And because they want it so badly, the island turns them savage and cruel. I speak the words of an old man. Perhaps twins such as the two of you will have to go wherever the llungruel’s fever takes them. But learn this if you learn nothing else from me. The llungruel’s venom carries more than poison.”
Glennis stood from his seat and withdrew the three empty glasses to signal the time for questions was at end. He signaled the twins to
follow him with a whistle. Malek and Elloch struggled to follow their host through the cabin’s clutter, climbing furniture and squeezing through narrow spaces until they arrived at the far wall. Glennis shoved several boxes to the ground from the top of a long and narrow tarp.
“And here is a treasure from our people.”
Glennis pulled the tarp clear with a snap of his wrist and revealed the slender lines of a village makoro, the shallow canoes Malek and Elloch’s forefathers once used to navigate the swamps and sea. The twins held their breath. Carved from a thick and dark tree of the swamp, the makoro’s lines recalled a craft that was lost after the hulking ships of the outsiders crowded the waters and made the waves too rough for the village’s simpler vessels. The makoro stretched over ten feet in length. The narrow craft forced passengers to sit single file in the carved hallow. The hallow did not extend into the makoro’s aft, providing instead a raised platform atop which a boatman might stand to manipulate the long pole that served as a rudder on the seas and a prod within the swamp. Thick coats of varnish made the makoro shine no matter the dust, and Glennis smiled to watch the twins reach out to trace with their fingers the many glyphs of blessings and protections carved along the elegant makoro’s hull.
Malek stared. “It doesn’t look more than a day old.”
“It looks as if it was polished yesterday,” Elloch whistled.
Glennis chuckled. “I remain foolish in many things. I trick myself into believing my reflection in that dark wood looks younger the more I clean it. You’d think that craft could turn back time, the way it tempts you put it back in the water.”
The twins bent their necks into the makoro and smiled to see the fishing nets whose knots only the oldest villager might remember how to tie.
“You put your trinkets in danger in keeping this craft.” Malek spoke.
Elloch dared not take his eyes off the makoro. “The outsiders would burn this makoro, and your cabin with you in it, if they ever removed that tarp to find it.”
“I don’t think I’m going to be hiding it in the back of my cabin much longer,” Glennis began moving boxes about the cabin. “You boys grab that makoro while I clear a path and follow me out of the cabin’s back door.”
The lightness of the craft surprised the twins as they hoisted the makoro upon their shoulders, but the length of the canoe made movement through Glennis’s cabin clumsy. The twins bumped the makoro into tables and bookshelves. Glennis laughed at the shattering sound of the falling trinkets.
Glennis grasped the bow of the makoro as they exited his cabin, and the twins bumped their heads in the sudden stop. “We’ll not go towards the harbor and the sea. The sailors would spot us too easily, and they would laugh as they confiscated our craft. Our way to the sea goes through the swamp. Bend your knees a little so the craft doesn’t rattle.”
Elloch and Malek’s hearts raced as they entered the lom. Concern shifted from the outsiders to the llungruel. The lizards were restless at night, and with the makoro hoisted upon their shoulders, the twins could not peek to watch how the lom might sway to warn a llungruel approached their ankles.
Luck kept the twins company as they progressed through the lom fields. Soon, their steps felt the soil become soft as they neared the swamp. Villagers seldom entered the humid shade. There was little demand for the dark wood of its trees, so few new cabins sprouted in the village, the craft of makoro-making faded into a fable. The outsiders’ doctors replaced the village’s medicine, and so there was little desire to enter the swamp to uncover the fungi and roots once mixed into balms and ointments.
Though the villagers emptied from the swamp, the dangers had not. Creatures more dangerous than the llungruel hid submerged in the swamp’s waters, creatures that still filled the village’s nightmares.
Elloch and Malek remembered several of those nightmares as the ground grew softer with their steps. Mosquitoes bit their skin. The irritation of such bites and the humidity that surrounded them turned their exhilaration into fear, and the weight of the makoro magnified on their shoulders.
Glennis once more grabbed the point of the makoro, and Elloch and Malek again bumped heads.
“The journey is only starting. Don’t let your knees go weak so early. Not when the llungruel still scurries in the lom. Set the makoro down and let the water hold it.”
The twins instantly obliged and dropped their burden with a splash into the knee high water. The sounds of the swamp assaulted them after the noise. They froze at the sound of the buzzing insect swarms, the hiss of serpents in the trees, the rattle of branches as creatures darted through the overhanging canopy, the sound of sloshing water as creatures took to deeper water. Their eyes still adjusted to such deep shadow in the night, but their ears heard so much surrounding them. The twins shuddered.
“Once you two are in the makoro, don’t dangle your limbs in the swamp or the sea. No matter how hot the sun might make you.” Glennis growled at the brothers. “Your hands would make a fine snack for the awful jalsheed who rules the swamp. In the sea, you will find the patches of the slime from the outsiders’ ships floating on the water will burn your flesh before you find any way to clean it off. Neither of you have much experience, and so you’re not going to have steady sea legs. Stay still so you do not have to test your balance. Be quiet. The outsiders have keen ears on the sea, and in the swamp, your words might attract the attention of the winged electicks hunting in the trees. They’ve been known to grow large enough in the swamp to tackle strong villagers.”
Glennis watched the faces of the twins turn pale. The young did not understand the challenge of dispelling the llungruel’s fever.
“Did you not think there would be such dangers?” Glennis whispered. “You seek an old medicine, and the old ways were filled with much cruelty.”
But Glennis squeezed the shoulder of each twin before their courage left them. “And I have one more thing to help you. Take this bauble. It’s made by an outsider’s hands, and it will help you reach the island as long as you follow where it points.”
Glennis set the wooden box in Malek’s palm. A cord of beads had been fastened to the box’s corners to form a necklace. Malek opened the box’s lid, and the twins looked upon a glass sphere set in the container’s center. Inside the sphere, a blue liquid floated a needle. No matter how Malek turned the box, the needle refused to sway from it stubborn direction. Fine increments were painted on the glass sphere, but the twins could not understand the force that allowed the needle to remain steadfast no matter how Malek tried to fool it, nor could they guess what could be gauged as the needle swept past the glass sphere’s markings.
“Don’t worry about how it works,” Glennis continued. “The current will take you easy enough out of the swamp, but you’ll have a harder time navigating the sea. Just follow the way it points, and be sure to wear it around your necks so you don’t lose it if you fall from the boat.”
Malek and Elloch nodded before stiffening their shoulders and turning towards the makoro. Neither looked back towards Glennis, the twins fearful that looking again into those old eyes would give too much power to their fears. Elloch bent first into the makoro and remained still as Malek entered and mounted the elevated platform in the aft. The vessel rocked as Malek balanced himself as he lifted the steersman’s long pole and pushed off from the swamp’s shore. But the makoro soon settled, and the current pulled the twins into their voyage.
The twins’ courage surprised Glennis, and his years welcomed the feeling. “I was not sure that the two of you, or even one of you, would have the courage to begin such a trip. Tell me, what will urge you on when the waves rock your small boat so much that you’re sick?”
Neither Malek nor Elloch hesitated to answer, and they spoke with a unison shared between brothers of a common blood.
“Talson, old man. Talson urges us on.”
* * * * *