The Blinded Journey Page 4

  He also focused on the energy within him, the strange power that had emerged unexpectedly over the recent weeks of his life. He knew that he had almost nothing he could rely upon as an advantage in his upcoming adventures, nothing that would give him an edge over contrary forces he would face – nothing expect the energy, the blue and the green

  He needed to know how to use it. He still had his walking stick that he had plucked out of the forest when Shaiss had first returned him to her domain. He usually kept the stick tucked between his back and his pack, secured in place while his hands and arms were busily swinging in rhythm with his running. But when he was particularly focused on finding the energy he would slow down his pace and pull out the stick and try to use it as a focusing tool.

  In his previous visit to the land he had possessed the walking stick that had been appropriated from the shack of the second sun witch. That staff had been the best and easiest channel available for him to use to release the power that he held. His new staff, one collected at random from the forest, provided no such ease of access. But still he persisted in trying to use it, focusing on the staff as much as the energy at times. And slowly, he came to find that the staff was useful to a degree.

  There was a knothole in the staff. Kendel ran and carried the staff and focused on the energy within him many afternoons. As he ran and his eyes stared vacantly ahead while his consciousness looked inward, his view happened to stare at the knothole, and he noticed both the intricate, whorl pattern within as well as the spots of decay around its edges. The decay was minute but discernable, and it followed paths within the wood, patterns that were a part of the intricate and complex whorl.

  As he traced the paths of the lines, those that led from the outer edge of decay into the curving pattern that seemed to circle back upon itself with uncanny beauty, he suddenly imagined that the decay was like the power within him. It sought – and could only use – certain paths to reach the outside world, just as the decay could only follow the small bands of certain wood fibers that were vulnerable to its gnawing power.

  If, Kendel thought speculatively, if he could straighten out the path of the whorls, the decay might advance more quickly. And if he could straighten out the complex patterns of his own consciousness, he might give the energy an easier path to be released.

  He was thunderstruck by the seeming simplicity of his breath-taking theory.

  He stopped in one city and entered Miriam’s temple to pray for direction and guidance, hoping against hope that the goddess would somehow be able to reach out and help him further unravel the question of how to implement his concept.

  The priestesses took one look at the strange, unkempt boy who was entering their temple, a temple that already was suffering from a reduction in traffic because Miriam no longer answered prayers, and they sprang into action. He found that his way from the lobby of the temple into the sanctuary was quickly blocked by a pair of women in blue robes.

  “What brings you to our Mother’s temple today?” a stern-faced priestess asked.

  “I want advice,” Kendel answered truthfully. “I thought maybe Miriam could help me understand how to, um, simplify myself.”

  “What do you mean?” the second priestess asked with a note of caution in her voice. Though she intended not to let a dirty vagrant sully the temple, she found the answer to be out of the ordinary, not one that might have been created as a typical excuse.

  “I think,” Kendel tried to figure out an answer that wouldn’t sound as preposterous as the truth was. “I think that if I could simplify my thoughts, my heart would be purer, and I’d be a better person,” he fumbled to an answer that he thought was actually accurate, and that made him sound nobler than he felt he was.

  “That’s a question for Heum’s temple, not ours,” the steely-eyed priestess dismissed his comment. “Go down the street two block and go left. You’ll find Heum’s temple and they can wrangle over such foolishness as the simplification of your heart. Besides,” she added snidely, “you’re a boy; your thoughts are bound to be relatively simple anyway.”

  Chastened, Kendel turned and slouched off in the direction of Heum’s temple, uncertain of whether he’d actually even bother to enter the building, or just resume his running. When he reached the temple, a surprisingly small building, he decided to look inside to see whether it appeared inviting or not.

  The lobby was small and empty. Beyond it, he found another room that apparently was a passage to the sanctuary, a small room with benches, but no door leading on.

  Kendel sat on one of the benches and let his pack slip off his back, to his considerable relief.

  “That must feel better,” a man was suddenly standing at his shoulder. “You look like you’ve been on a long, hard road, no offense my friend.” The man casually seated himself on an adjoining bench.

  “It’s good that you’ve come in to rest. Can I offer some refreshment? Would you like something to drink, or eat?” He wore a long robe, apparently a priest of the temple.

  “No, thank you,” Kendel replied. “I came because Miriam’s temple wouldn’t help me. They told me to come here.”

  “So, we’re where castoffs are sent, is that it? Or did they proclaim our god to be superior to their goddess, better able to serve you?” the man asked with a twinkle in his eye.

  “Miriam is a very good goddess,” Kendel spoke passionately. “She has sacrificed herself for the good of her people.”

  “That sounds very noble; I can understand why you admire her so much,” the man placated Kendel with his reasonable tone of voice. “She is a good goddess; I know that too.

  “Why were you in her temple? What problem did you want Miriam to address?” the man in the temple wanted to know.

  He seemed to be sincere in his question, Kendel thought.

  “I don’t know exactly how to explain,” the boy began.

  “Is it a problem with a girl?” the priest asked.

  “No,” Kendel answered. Then he paused. The complications and confusion, the swirling and tangled emotions and thoughts that prevented him from easily accessing the energy within his soul – was it that simple? Was it all about a girl? Was it his feelings for Liza?

  He wondered and sat silent in the temple as he examined himself. His feelings towards Liza were straightforward. He’d liked her since elementary school.

  “Well, there is a girl,” he clarified. “But she’s not a problem for me.”

  “You and she are getting along well? You’ll be able to leave here and go home to see her? She’ll greet you at the door with a kiss?” the priest asked with a raised eyebrow.

  “Well, I’m on a journey right now,” Kendel tried to explain.

  “So, you’ve left her? For another woman? Is there another girl you care about?” the man wanted to know. “Is that what’s tangling up your heart?”

  “No, Flora has been friendly with Liza. They weren’t fighting,” Kendel answered.

  “You didn’t answer my question. I asked about your heart, not the relationship of the two females,” the priest asked.

  “Well, I like both of them,” Kendel replied immediately to quash the mistaken impression the other man had. “But it’s different.” He explained.

  And then he paused, and he wondered if it was different. He wanted to say that he thought of Liza as a girlfriend, and he thought of Flora as a friend. But he remembered the kiss, the impetuous kiss that he had leaned into and shared with Flora, in the first minutes of their return to their own world and their own bodies. He had enjoyed the kiss, and he believed that Flora had too.

  And that – perhaps – was the conflict that complicated the affairs of his soul. Perhaps he really did have a level of affection for Flora that surpassed what he was willing to acknowledge. And perhaps that subconscious affection was in conflict with his desire for Liza.

  “I need to think about it,” he finally spoke after accepting the existence of the potential for there to actually be such a conflict.

&n
bsp; “Thinking is good, as we say in the house of Heum,” the priest replied.

  Kendel rose and lifted his pack and staff.

  I’ll think about it while I keep running,” he announced. “Thank you,” he gave a gesture of parting, then left the temple and returned to the street, where he walked until he could run, and he resumed the quicker pace of his journey.

  For the next two days he actively debated with himself about his relative feelings for Liza and Flora as he ran through the countryside. Both the young women were good-hearted he knew, and while Liza shared a nearly lifelong proximity to him through school and society in Bedford, Flora shared a few weeks in which the two of them had virtually never been out of one another’s sight, and had interacted with one another in dire and intimate moments throughout.

  They were both important to him. He thought of the night the three of them had spent together at the church carnival for the school kids, when he had been with both girls. It had been a special time, one that was fun and without any fault. He hadn’t thought to favor one girl over the other; he’d simply enjoyed each of them for themselves.

  And they each seemed to like him. Liza had invited him to watch the submarine races. He knew what that implied; he was flattered by her attraction to him – their mutual attraction to each other. And Flora called him every day after the return to their own world; she’d even flown out to visit him, and they had buddied around together with great affection.

  He wasn’t sure how to untangle the complex interaction of emotions that he felt for the two, and he knew that unless he solved that problem, he wouldn’t be able to easily release the magical energy bottled up within him.

  He slept under a hedgerow after his second long day of running and self-reflection, and dreamed that the priest from Heum’s temple spoke to him.

  “If you cannot reconcile the conflict of affections, why not simply acknowledge that for now – while neither of them is present – you do have strong feeling for both of them, and they are both worthy of being loved and honored and respected. Your heart should not feel that it must compare and contract and choose between them, but instead it should enjoy your relationship with each of them as positive elements of your life,” the man offered.

  “Your goal at this point is only to simplify. Maybe you can do that without resolving the question here and now. Just be glad and celebrate two good friends as a double blessing, and let that simple answer remove the complications that you are building within yourself,” he counseled in the dream.

  When Kendel awoke from the dream it was dawn. A light layer of dew lay upon his blanket, which he crawled out from underneath to stand on the edge of the empty road. The road pointed due east, straight towards the brightening light on the eastern horizon. Kendel chewed on a crust of bread and stared at the horizon and tried to make sense of the dream.

  Perhaps he could simply accept that both Liza and Flora were friends, and for the time he was in a different universe, on a different world, without interaction with either of them, he could accept that simple proposition in his heart. He would have to tell himself it was the truth, and he would have to believe it, embrace it, and live with it as his reality.

  The sky was growing lighter – and he belatedly realized – it was brightening with a tinge of green. He watched the first bright edge of sunlight rise above the horizon, and he saw that a thin sliver of the green sun was visible, just starting to emerge from behind the larger yellow sun.

  He felt the submerged energy within him flip over in excited acknowledgement of the green sun’s emergence.

  All the opportunities were in place for him, he told himself. Kendel bent and lifted his pack, then rolled up the still damp blanket and stuffed it in place before he put the pack and his staff on his back and started running once more.

  That day he constantly repeated a manta to himself, a reminder that he didn’t have to worry about Flora or Liza or how he felt about either one. He loved them both, he told himself, and he was lucky to know them.

  The following day he repeated the exercise, and while the green light grew steadily more visible, he began to try to call upon the power. He had eased the path needed for its release, and the green sun had begun to exert its influence, meaning that the window of opportunity had widened. He ran at his slower pace with his staff held in his hand, and he tried to focus on releasing the energy he possessed.

  He looked at the greenish sunlight that fell upon the land, and he tried to find a sense of greenness within the energy, tried to harmonize what was within to match what was without.

  He succeeded for the first time while he was loping along, the staff in his hands, and his success produced a bolt of uncontrollable energy that flashed out of the end of his staff like a bolt of lightning that was jumping upward into the sky instead of coming down. There was the searing flash of light, a tremendous clap of thunder-like noise, and Kendel found himself sitting on the ground in the middle of the road, his staff giving off smoke from its position on the ground thirty feet away.

  It was a reminder of the need for the sheath of blue energy that had always surrounded the staff in the past. The blue energy had served a purpose he hadn’t recognized until that time – it had been an insulator, preventing the powerful green energy from exerting its full destructive power when it was unleashed.

  Kendel ignored the ringing in his ears as best he could for the rest of the day. He gathered up his staff and his pack and he resumed his travels, focusing on finding a way to bring the blue energy out first. He thought of the blue energy, which meant that he thought of Miriam, as he recollected when Miriam – in her guise as Genniae – had unleashed the blue energy against the second sun witch. The blue energy had beaten the green power, saving Kendel during the battle in the forest. And later he had dreamed about the final culmination of the struggle between the two forces, the victory that blue had achieved over green, making the green energy within him become subservient.

  It made sense to him, more thoroughly than it had before. He realized that he had to rely on Miriam’s blue energy to harness the witch’s green energy. For his new endeavors, that meant he would have to consciously bring the blue energy out first to provide the control and protection that would allow the green energy to be usefully deployed.

  So, for the next day he practiced his use of the blue energy, coaxing and conjuring it to come forth, to shine around his staff, making the wooden implement a suitable – though still imperfect – vessel to carry the green energy. And he practiced as he ran, coming to eventually be able to exercise his powers in a rudimentary fashion within minutes of when he wanted to – he could cause bolts of power to fly through the air from the end of his staff, and he left a trail of burnt and damaged trees and fences along his way in the wake of taking aim at targets as he practiced.

  But he could achieve nothing more than that as he practiced. He felt satisfaction that he had learned to exercise the energy, entirely on his own, but he felt frustration that it was such a slow process, and of such limited scope. He remembered the way the energy had seemed to anticipate his needs better than he understood himself when he had used it previously; he thought of the barriers and walls that had sprung forth to protect him and others when confronted with hordes of Mormos; those barriers were hardly complicated tools, but they were beyond his ability to create intentionally.

  He didn’t settle for the partial success, but he couldn’t make any further progress, and so he ran on across the countryside with sporadic attempts to test new ideas about the use of his powers.

  He crossed the border between Shoreline and Palatenland without incident and continued to hurry towards the capital city where he feared that the girls he knew were being held as prisoners. In the guise of his own body, and without the mask of Parker’s knowledge of people, places, and personalities, he would be anonymous, a stranger to the city, and to Grace, Vivienne, and Sophie. They would not know him, but he would know them. He would know that they seemed to be innately
good people who were caught up in a dangerous situation not of their own making, and he would know that if they needed rescue, he was willing to try to arrange it. And so he traveled on.

  Chapter 8

  He was filthy, his hair was matted, his clothes were stained, but he arrived at the gates of Sunob at noon on an ordinary market day. The guards at the gate watched him for only a moment as he passed into the city proper.

  Kendel wished he still had Parker’s memories and knowledge. Sunob seemed like a maze of narrow streets in the vicinity of the western gate he had entered; he had to ask for directions three times before he finally found his way to the part of the central city where the palace sat amidst its beautiful gardens, all contained within protective walls.

  He remembered parts of the palace. He remembered climbing down an ornate wall with Flora when they had run away from the palace. They had made the momentous decision to escape before Lord Beches could force Agata and Flora into marrying a nobleman who Beches favored. Their decision had seemed like a risky gamble at the time, but as Kendel looked back, it seemed like it was fated to be, fated by more than just a mistaken movie script. It was the decision that not only forestalled the marriage, but that threw he and Flora together with one another and with Genniae.

  Kendel slowly walked around the exterior of the palace grounds, and spotted the location of the culvert under the wall, the place where a rusty grate could be bent aside to allow young squires to secretly pass from their duties inside the palace to the entertainments that resided out in the city around them. He felt relief that he at least had a way to enter the palace grounds to search for the young ladies of the court.