The Blinded Journey Page 3

  Chapter 5

  Kendel was tired when he arrived in a city. He’d left his own world after dark, late at night, and he’d emerged in the new world at morning. By the time he’d walked until midafternoon and reached a good-sized city, he’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours, and he felt it. And sundown appeared to be at least a couple of hours away.

  He found an inn that appeared clean, on a street that appeared safe, and he went in to rent a room for the night. He ate an early dinner, then retired to his room and fell asleep before the sun had completely set.

  He dreamt of Flora. She was standing by a body of water, but he couldn’t make out any other details. He had a sense that she was looking for him, and he guessed that she was trying to discover a way to rejoin him in the land of magic. They had talked about returning, speculating when it had seemed impossible to predict. But now the return was reality, and he wasn’t sure what Flora would think. And he didn’t have any idea of how to help her return if she did want to. Shaiss had certainly discouraged his speculation about Flora, but only in the short term. The goddess had seemingly confirmed only that it would not be her role to bring Flora across the barrier between the worlds.

  Kendel slept a long sleep of many hours, and awoke just as the sun started to rise, refreshed and feeling ready to start moving across the countryside. He was feeling frisky; his recent, frequent runs for cross-country practice had invigorated him and given him a renewed enjoyment in running; he idly speculated about how far he could run in a single day.

  He left the inn and found few opportunities to eat breakfast. The local market was just beginning to fill as farmers and purveyors of goods were arriving and setting their wares out for display. He asked for directions to the temples of both Shaiss and Mariam.

  “Did your girl leave you?” a husky young man asked as he was unloading baskets of potatoes. “Going to Shaiss to ask punishment to plague her?”

  “No,” Kendel shook his head, bemused by the question. “I just want to pray to her.”

  He hadn’t thought about the implications of praying to the goddess of punishment; it made sense that one would primary pray either for punishment to be delivered to someone else, or to try to explain away any need to be personally punished. Shaiss certainly wasn’t a goddess who was going to inspire prayers of warm love and devotion from her adherents, he shook his head as he walked to her temple.

  The temple had garish colors inside. Kendel wasn’t fashionable by any means; typically of a teenage boy he gave little to no thought to fashion beyond wearing what others wore. But he recognized that the purples and blacks and blues of the fabrics and paints in the interior of Shaiss’s temple were not attractive or inviting.

  “Why are you here?” a priest stopped him when he walked across a lobby area.

  “I, uh, want to pray to Shaiss?” Kendel tried to guess at an answer, wondering if he should just turn and leave.

  “Yes, of course,” the priest said impatiently. “What type of prayer? Illness for another? Pain? Betrayal?” the man paused dramatically, “Death?” he lowered his voice.

  “I just want to say thank you,” Kendel replied.

  The man’s expression went from a sneer to bafflement to cynical knowing. “Ah yes, you’ve successfully seen someone punished. Go in the second door from the right and you’ll be in the right chamber,” the priest pointed, then spotted another worshipper entering the temple.

  “Why are you here?” he called out, and he walked away from Kendel to direct another person.

  Kendel shook his head at the interaction. There were numerous doors, he realized, indicating some very specialized fields of punishment apparently. He shrugged at the thought, then went to the door indicated, and followed a long, dark hall back to a small, empty room, where a statue of Shaiss rose under the illumination provided by a skylight.

  Kendel knelt in front of the statue, thinking how common and easy it seemed to kneel to the goddesses of the land, and wondering why his mother’s church didn’t kneel during worship.

  “Thank you, my goddess,” he made sure to intone the appropriate greeting. “Thank you again for bringing me here. I promise I’ll do my best to find a way to rescue Miriam. Please let me know if I can do anything for you,” he prayed with one eye partially open, expecting some unpleasant response from the statue, but at the end of his prayer there was only silence for several seconds, so he rose to his feet and walked back out of the sanctuary.

  When he reached the street, he walked five minutes to reach the temple of Miriam and entered a temple that was relatively empty.

  “The goddess is not answering our prayers, my friend,” a priestess advised. “Perhaps come back when our mother is better able to protect us.”

  “She has protected me a great deal already, and I just want to tell her thank you for all she has done for me,” Kendel replied.

  “She doesn’t seem to hear our prayers,” the priestess lamented.

  “Perhaps she hears, but cannot answer,” Kendel wasn’t willing to cede any point. He was determined to speak his thanks to the goddess, perhaps as much for his own peace of mind as for the potential to reach Miriam. “So, hearing our prayers would encourage her.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse me,” he stepped away from the early morning encounter and entered the main sanctuary, where only a pair of other worshippers were also kneeling at altars.

  He selected a quiet, secluded statue and knelt, feeling a keen sense of devotion to the goddess who he realized had done so much for him. She had posed as the priestess Genniae and walked for days and days with him, letting him grow accustomed to the strange land he had been transported to. She had given him the opportunity to grow familiar with magic and a strange reality, while she had also protected him and educated him.

  “My goddess,” he prayed with a deeply heartfelt devotion, “thank you so much for everything you have done. Thank you for bringing me back; I want to help you. Thank you even for using Shaiss,” he smiled at his small jest, “I appreciate you even more now that I know her. And thank you for giving me the chance to travel with Flora and become friends with her when we were all together.

  “I’m going to do everything I can to help you, my goddess, I promise, from the bottom of my heart and with everything I have to offer,” he spoke with such sincerity that he felt moisture in his eyes.

  And then he felt something else, a stirring within himself that he immediately recognized.

  The energies within him were coming alive, responding to the depth of emotion and profound commitment he had displayed. He opened his eyes and saw that his hands were glowing with a gentle blue light. As he stared in astonishment, the blue power left his fingertips in floating strings that reached across the prayer railing to touch the feet of the statue that stood upon a pedestal before him. The energy made the statue itself start to glow with the same soft blue color, which rose gently upward from the feet to the knees and beyond, making more and more of the statue turn luminescent.

  And then his hands ceased to glow near his wrists, and the end of the glow drained away towards his fingers. And then the last of the energy left his fingertips and followed the earlier power through the air to the statue, and helped the glowing energy rise up to the top of the scalp of the statue, leaving the full figure softly radiating its blue color.

  Kendel slowly rose and stepped backwards, staring at the statue in astonishment, until his heel came down on the foot of someone standing behind him, and he turned to see that the priestess from the lobby was gaping at statue, virtually unaware that he had stamped on her foot.

  “My lord, I did not know that you were her acolyte!” she said breathlessly. “How may we serve you? Are you bringing the Goddess back among us?” The woman looked at him with an expression of complete astonishment writ on her face.

  “Miriam has been very kind to me, and I only want to return the favor,” he stumbled to reply. He could hardly boast that he was going to go rescue the goddess, though he inte
nded to try. “I hope we’ll all see her doing her good deeds among us soon,” he added. “Please excuse me,” he said and took his leave, as other priestesses came hurrying into the sanctuary to see the miraculous change in the statue.

  He was pleased by the encounter. He was mostly pleased by the fact that he had shown a manifestation of the power within him. He would need it on his journey, he was sure, and then – more importantly – he would undoubtedly need it when the time came to take action – whether to serve Miriam or to retrieve Flora.

  Kendel returned to the marketplace, which was growing more active, with several vendors selling hot food from braziers that they had fired up right in their stalls. Kendel bought a new pack he could wear, and then eagerly bought a sausage roll and a skin of fruit juice that he consumed as he walked back to his room at the inn. He sat on the bed and collected the coins he had left hidden in the mattress, then stuffed them into the pack and headed back to the front desk.

  “I’m going east from here,” he told the clerk at the desk. “How long will it take me to make it to the mountains?”

  The clerk paused and looked up at the ceiling as if searching for the answer there, then looked at Kendel. “What mountains?” he asked.

  Kendel cocked an eye and studied the man, wondering if there were more than one set of mountains causing confusion, or perhaps a droll sense of humor that was trying to make Kendel look misinformed. He decided to play straight man and hope to find an answer.

  “The mountains in the east, past the end of Headterre, where they say there’s a wizard living. Have you heard of Mount Cru Jolais?” Kendel asked.

  “I’ve heard of Headterre,” the clerk answered.

  “Well of course you have, we’re standing in it,” Kendel cut the man’s foolishness off.

  “Headterre? Do you have a fever?” the man answered scornfully. “We’re in Shoreline.”

  Kendel’s head snapped back.

  “Shoreline?” he questioned. “Along the coast?” he tried to remember if his extremely limited understanding of the geography of the magical land was right. “West of Palatenland?”

  “It goes without saying,” the man was dismissive. “Is there something I can help you with?” he was ready to be rid of Kendel.

  “What city is this?” Kendel asked.

  “It’s Ludlow,” the clerk replied one more time. “Now, please excuse me, I have work to do,” he stood silently at his desk, not doing work, but not wanting to deal with troublesome Kendel any longer.

  Kendel shook his head, adjusted the pack on his back and left the inn, stepping out into bright morning sunshine. He had intended to return to the market to buy some supplies for his upcoming journey, but he decided he first needed to get some confirmation about where he was located.

  He went to a market vendor who had blankets for sale and bought one, then casually asked. “Where was this made? What city?”

  “It’s from a small village, Belslow,” the woman selling the blankets answered.

  “What country is Belslow in?” Kendel sought clarification without bluntly asking what country he was standing in.

  “Right here, just ten miles north of here,” the woman felt the answer gave all the explanation needed.

  “In Shoreline?” Kendel finally broke down and asked.

  He went through a similar unsuccessful effort to appear knowledgeable about his surroundings as he spoke to other merchants, but in the end he had to reveal that he didn’t know where he was, and he received confirmation that he was sitting far to the west of the place he wanted to be.

  “Why would Shaiss dump me here?” he muttered to himself when he finished at the market and started walking east through the city. It made no sense to him; it was going to slow down his success in reaching the wizard, where he presumed he was going to find the information he needed in order to carry out his first true mission of rescuing Miriam. Now, instead, he had a whole long journey ahead just to get to what should have been his logical starting point.

  He stood at the edge of the market with his hands on his hips and shook his head, then gave a hitch to the strap of his pack and started walking eastward through the city of Ludlow.

  Chapter 6

  By the middle of the following day, he reached the next large city in Shoreline, Aerie, built atop a small, incongruous patch of hills that looked over a lake. Kendel was warm from his quick-paced jaunt through the countryside, and he made a decision.

  When he reached Aerie, we went to the market and found a stall where an old lady sold nondescript clothes. Kendel searched them and selected two set of pants and two shirts.

  “Now, would you do me a favor and cut the sleeves off the shirts?” he asked the old woman.

  “Why would I want to ruin your good shirts?” she asked in astonishment.

  “Because they make me hot when I run; I want short sleeves. And you can open the sides some if you want,” he offered.

  The thought of cutting the good clothing was so alien to the woman that she refused, and eventually Kendel gave up and took the clothes as they were. He went and bought a sharp knife, then bought a set of leather shoes that were less substantial than the boots he wore, and he found an inn where he rented a room.

  That night he was a terrible tailor, but did the best he could with the knife as he raggedly cut the sleeves off the shirts and cut the legs off the pants, just above the knee lines, giving him an approximation of running clothes he could wear as he planned to run his way across the countryside.

  Kendel was mistaken for a beggar the next morning when he visited the market in Aerie, and he had to hand over cash before the vendors in the market would hand over the goods he wanted to purchase. Without batting an eye, he accepted the treatment, filled his pack with supplies, then left the city and started running, finding his cross-country pace and comfortably striding along the dirt road that was the major land highway across Shoreline. He stopped at streams and at public wells in the centers of villages to drink water, then proceeded to maintain his sweat in the reasonably warm climate of the countryside as he stayed in motion.

  He’d crossed more than thirty miles he reckoned, when he decided to stop with nightfall turning everything around him darker and darker. He was in a small wooded patch between cultivated fields, not far past the last modest town he had run through, and it was time to find a place to sleep. He unrolled his blanket that he’d bought in Ludlow, lay beneath a shrub in the woods and fell soundly asleep.

  He resumed running the following day, except when he passed through a middling-sized city and had to walk and dodge among the other traffic along the main street. The city wasn’t large enough to warrant walls, but it was prosperous enough to have a group of girls only a little younger than himself singing in a choir on the steps of a handsome building. Their voices were wonderfully harmonious, and Kendel thought about the song when he was clear of the city and running through the countryside once more.

  It all was peaceful and calm and idyllic. He thought of the way that older folks in Bedford always seemed to remember the past as some wonderful, peaceful, golden era; the land he was running though might have seemed to come as close to such perfection as possible, he randomly thought as his mind whiled away the hours.

  And he thought about Liza, and Jameson, and Flora as well. He had just disappeared from their lives so suddenly that they all had to be shocked, except for Flora, if Liza had delivered his message. He wished that Flora could have been with him on the journey, though he knew that she would have slowed him down as a runner. She never claimed to be a runner, though she did have an athletic build.

  But she would be good to have with him whenever the journey grew more difficult. Whenever he would run into trouble, as he knew he would, having a friend by his side would be comforting, and especially if that friend was Flora.

  He reached a city on a large river that night and decided to spend the night in a room with a bed. He paid a few coins for a non-luxurious location, and a few more fo
r a tub of water that he used to wash off days of grime, sweat, and dirt. When finished, and feeling fresh and revived, he donned long pants and a sleeved shirt again for the first time, and strolled outside the inn, to a tavern where he ate a bowl of stew with a half a loaf of bread. He devoured the meal while listening to a girl on a stage singing a ballad that reminded him of the music his mother listened to.

  And then he listened to the conversation at the table next to his, where he heard the words “Palatenland”, “Sunob”, and “Beches” all mentioned in rapid succession, as a group of sailors on a river freighter discussed events in the land they had sailed out of.

  “Beches executed three members of the guard the day before he left, he’s still that angry about losing the Princess,” one voice said.

  “I heard about that Princess; I’d be mad too if I lost her, according to how folks describe her,” Kendel could hear the leer in the voice of the second speaker.

  “He’s lashing out left and right; they say he’s even imprisoned the ladies of the court for not reporting that the Princess was going to run away,” the first voice reported.

  Kendel’s eyebrows rose. The ladies of the court could refer to many people, he was sure, but he had a feeling of sickening certainly that it meant the three ladies he knew – Grace, Vivienne, and Sophie.

  Chapter 7

  It took Kendel eight days to run to Sunob.

  He arose early on the morning after he’d heard the alarming rumor about the dangers of the court of Palatenland, and he went to the market, where he bought more food, and another pair of shoes, and then he started running. He ran as long as he could, then walked, then ran some more, miles upon miles. He estimated that he was crossing thirty or forty or more miles each day, except for the day when heavy rains lasted all day and into the night. He only covered twenty miles that day perhaps.

  As he ran, he focused on just a few things. He focused on maintaining his pace, a steady one that ate up the miles. If he had been transported back to Bedford at the end of his grueling stretch, he’d have been the top-ranked cross country runner in the school’s conference, he was sure. A part of him yearned for a timer and mile markers so that he could document his improved ability.