Part 1 of 2
When the Sun breaks up the Rain
On the edge of the forest, no more than a hundred paces from the treeline, on cold stone, in grey surroundings, where ground and air no longer allow anything to grow, a bed of flowers encircles one tiny, unassuming one in its middle. When the sun breaks up the rain and light shines through the clouds again for the first time in hours or days, this is where it sends its first greetings, this is where it smiles and remembers, after a while, that the world is more than just this tiny place in the wide mountain ranges, impenetrable jungles and uninhabitable deserts.
From the sun this bed took its light, from the rainbow it borrowed the colours. In circles, first small, than larger and larger, the colours spread out from the middle. Violet is just a tiny ring, no larger than the spread fingers of a hand, Blue already has the diameter of a forearm’s length, Green again takes its width from the trunk of a tree, Yellow can compare to the stride of a horse, while Orange might be a small hut, and Red is as wide as the top of the oldest tree.
But the one in the middle, the single, lonely one, does not share any colour at all. Transparent and no larger than a thumb, it is made of ice. Its leaves, serrated and parted in three, resemble those of a maple tree, just smaller, the stalk takes its thorns from a rose, and the petals might be those of a water-lily. The blossom never opens, never closes. The flower never turns its face to the sun, but always the sun seeks it out when it shines. And then the flower glitters and tiny crystals sparkle like broken glass and send their colours to the field of flowers and enfold it in rainbows of its own.
Around the patch of colours and life, nothing grows. The ground of the high plateau is frozen and hard, stone and here and there compact earth. Pebbles and rocks are scattered there and no tracks of animals ever break the everlasting grey.
Trees, crippled and broken, which stand in loneliness where the ground starts to decline towards the valleys, seem to look upon the bed of flowers with envy and longing. No birds chirp in the distorted branches, no rodents scamper through non existing undergrowth. What sunlight there is, the trees keep for themselves, what water rains down on them, they thirstily suck into their adamantine trunks.
There, in the mountain ranges, in the forest of little life, hangs a blanket of pelt down from the trees. Stakes hold it wide to the sides and more furs, thin and threadbare, cover the ground. Little fills the shelter but a flower, a dented pot and a jagged knife, and little protects it from the harsh climate but branches that have long since started to grow around the pelts. The wind has rubbed off the hairs from the furs a long time ago, leaving brown skin and mended holes. In front of the makeshift tent, stones are laid out in a small circle, a larger one is polished clean from use and wear. Next to the stone, an old and knotty staff – more grey than brown like all the trees around – leans against the tarpaulin.
A flimsy fire warms the cold crooked hands of an old woman. The holey pelts around her shoulders and hips do little to help. The boots, hardly more than cloth and thread, seem to be grown together with her leathery skin. Her hair, once black, now hangs stringy and thin over her face, obscuring her drooping left eye and the still sharp right one, violet like the inner circle of the bed of flowers. Once full red lips now break the wrinkled skin in a colourless line. Where her skin is visible, it is brown and full of darker liver spots and only where her wrists are encircled by old scars does it stand out in snowy white.
She might seem tired and broken, but in truth she listens sharply to the world around. From below, where the valleys host towns and villages, sound sometimes carries up to her. Now, after long years of the same, the sounds have changed. They are closer. People have moved into the forest. Large groups wander through. From one side they come and from the other and whenever they meet, sound becomes noise. It echoes from the mountains, it washes over her: swords clashing onto each other, people screaming, first in anger, then in pain; the sounds of skirmishes – the sounds of approaching war.
Never does the old woman show a reaction. She always sits or, sometimes, she leaves her ever burning fire to hunt and to gather. But she never reacts to the pain below. Sometimes the woman wanders to the flowers, always she greets them young.
It is nineteenth day since she first noticed the change in the forest, in the way the leaves dance in the wind, in the way the wind talks to the grass, in the way the few animals are driven towards her. Now voices drift to her, harsh when she hears them, but mostly just the whisper of a changed vicinity. The ground vibrates under the heavy boots of three men. They sneak, but the old woman knows the forest. She knows every leave and every root, every piece of rotten wood and every sluggish stream. They hide behind tree trunks and in the recesses between air roots, but the old woman knows how the light shines through the branches and how it reflects off the dew on the mushrooms. Long before they reach her camp, it is hidden. Long before they break through the treeline and become aware of the vast high plateau and the circles of colour and life, she is gone.
She sits, perched up on some branches of the last tree before the emptiness, and watches them as they step out from the shadows and into the rain. The men are clad in thick leather and woollen cloaks protect them from the cold. A coat of arms on their chests certainly means something to them, though the old woman neither knows nor cares. It marks them as soldiers, and the swords on their sides mark them as fighters. The short bows next to them and the attempt of stealthiness mark them as scouts.
Free from the dreary forest, they suck air into their lungs, before their gazes fall upon a field of colour in a vastness of grey. For a moment, they are speechless, then one whispers: “Magic!” and runs towards the flowers.
“Wait!” another calls, but both follow.
While they still run, the first man starts to poke the flowers of the red circle with the tip of his sword. Their stalks bend to the treatment and the delicate petals shake. A wave wanders along the outskirts of the ring. When the man flicks the sword’s edge a bit and cuts one of the blossoms right underneath, it slowly slips to the ground and disappears in a sea of red, then disappears altogether.
Not seeing this, the man kneels down and plucks one of the flowers with stalk and root. A smile is on his face when he turns around to his comrades, who have reached him. He presents the red flower to them, and then it crumbles through his gloved hands, withered and part of the wind. Black ash dances for a moment in front of their faces, then it is gone.
“Dammit!” he curses, “Fucking fragile magic!”
One of the other soldiers laughs. “Would be great to catch us some magic. But that’s hardly the flower to pick, is it?” His outstretched arm points towards the middle of the field and three pairs of eyes follow the hand to the single flower that is only visible because rain, which has stopped now, has collected on it and a little bit of sun peeks through the dark clouds and reflects towards them.
“Dammit!” the first soldier curses again, then he whistles slowly. “That some fine magic over there. Just imagine what we can do with that!”
Without waiting for an answer, he steps into the sea of flowers, flattening them under his boots.
Red plants fall under him, get folded and broken. For a moment, tiny flames spark up where dead leather touches vibrant life, then the beaten flowers crumble into dust. The orange circle holds no problem for the man either. These flowers also fall when he tramples them down. Small yellow petals get ripped from their stalks and the wind takes them away, before they, too, turn into dust further away. The green flowers, which seem almost like grass, only bend to the weight of the man, but where his feet touch the ground, footprints are left behind. When he reaches the blue circle, juice collects on the ground, blue and sticky, and he has to force his legs up for the last few steps. He never enters the violet circle. Before he steps into it, he bends down to the ice flower in the middle.
His glove touches one of the petals, just the tip of the glove and just the very edge of the transparent blossom, as if he wants to test if it is real. He feels it, its coldness and its power. It creeps up through the leather and into his nail, it slithers through his finger and hand. Up through his arm and towards his heart it slides and forces its way.
The other men call out to him from the safety of the grey beyond the colours, but he doesn’t hear them. He does see crystals form on his doublet and cloak. They are ragged and stick out from his clothes, not tiny and delicate, not dew on the grass in the morning, but broken ice on a frozen lake. He wants to scream, but then the ice has already reached his mouth. It fills it, it freezes his tongue, it enters his airway.
Two man fight each other, both wanting to reach their comrade, both stopping the other from entering the bed of flowers.
Long spikes of ice, thin but strong, like those of a porcupine, shoot out from the first soldier, collecting the sunlight in their tips. They melt and with the spikes melt the crystals underneath and with the crystals clothes and man. A fountain rises up for a moment in the hostile environment, drenching the flowers in new rain. Where the water touches fallen flowers, new ones sprout from the frozen ground, leaving no trace of the man who just stepped through them.
The two other men tumble over each other. They slide into the bed of flowers, leaving a new trace of destruction. They scramble out of it, breathing heavily.
“What the fuck was that?” one asks.
“Magic, obviously,” the other answers. His dilated pupils reveal the lie in his nonchalance.
“That’s fucking powerful!” The man picks himself up from the ground again.
“Yeah.” This one stays on the ground, for his eyes only see the crystalline flower. He looks at it, to some degree with fear, but more with longing.
“Strong enough to flatten an army!”
“Yeah.”
“We only need to control it. But how?” He, too, pokes the red flowers with his sword.
“There must be a riddle. There’s always one. A secret or riddle to catch the magic. That’s how it is.” He stands back up as well.
The old woman, up in the branches of the tree, looks upon the men for a while. When the rain ends and the sun peeks through the clouds, she slowly slides down the trunk. Her leathery skin scrapes against the rough bark, leaving cuts and bruises she doesn’t pay attention to. When the man becomes ice, the woman lands on the ground with a feathery jump. She takes her staff out of a hollow between two roots. She leans on it but even though it is shorter than her, it still stands taller. Her back is crooked and stiff. Her long, unruly but thin hair hangs deeper than ever in front of her face, leaving only the tip of her small nose visible.
While the men argue about the best course of action, the woman tries to straighten her back. A few times she opens her mouth, revealing black teeth where they are not missing, and tries to speak. First, it is just a hoarse croaking. Not used to speaking after years of silence, she has to start several times. When a whisper becomes a murmur and then speech, she throws her head back.
“When the sun breaks up the rain,” she calls, and her voice carries over the hundred paces between her and the two men.
Their argument interrupted, they turn around. “Who’s there? Who are you?” one of them calls.
The woman doesn’t answer. Instead, she calmly walks towards the flowers. Her steps are slow. She holds her staff with both hands. She sets it in front of her and almost seems to drag herself forward. With every step, her back seems to become slightly straighter, as if her tired muscles and bones just needed to remember how to move after weeks of sleeping.
“and light shines through the clouds again,” she continues.
“Stop!” The man frees his short bow from his belt and puts an arrow on the wood. “I’ll shoot!”
The woman doesn’t stop. The wind blows her long hair out of her face. The locks whip behind her, strong and radiant. They reveal a face that shows no emotion, no fear, no anger, nothing. Her eyes, violet and clear, look towards the men without any sign that she even notices them. She talks towards them, she speaks in their direction and her strong, young voice carries towards them like the vibrations of a bell, but still she ignores them at the same time.
“when you no longer gain and long,” she says.
“Stop!” the man calls again, while his comrade readies his bow as well. Neither loosens his arrow. The woman is still too far away for the weak string to send the arrow to her. “Who are you?”
The woman doesn’t react. Her steps, strong and purposeful, carry her ever forward. They are light and swaying on the frozen ground, almost like a dance. Her long, slender fingers hold her smooth staff with vigour. She sets it on the ground every other step and swings it at her side in-between. Sometimes, she throws it from one hand in the other and back again. The hemline of her skirt drags over the ground and raises dust and small stones. She takes it into one hand to hold it up.
“when you see neither good nor wrong,” she calls.
“What does this mean? Is it a riddle? Who are you? What are you?”
The woman doesn’t look at them. Her eyes are focussed on the garden of colours and especially on the one in the middle. It is as if she speaks only to it, as if she answers a call from a long time ago. Her full red lips smile involuntarily as if they never do anything but smiling, and so dimples have formed on the edges of her mouth. The scars on her wrists seem less noticeable, less white on leathery brown, but instead white on white. For a step or two, her stride falters when she looks at them, but she recovers immediately.
“when love is hate and hatred’s love,” She remembers.
“What the fuck’s going on?” one man whispers to the other.
He shrugs.
The woman walks. The steps are no longer those of an old woman. Her back is straight. Her face is no longer wrinkled and haggard. Her staff is smooth and green, like a fresh shoot. Hair, once black, then grey, now black again like a starless night, falls down her back in wavy locks. Her eyes a clear. She has passed half the distance to the men.
“no lost affection lets you starve,”
An arrow flits past her ear. A moment before, her head was there, a moment after it is. The arrow lands head first in the ground behind her. Her steps don’t waver. Her tall body glides forward and stones and dust voluntarily make room for her gown. Round and firm breasts fill out the neckline, where golden and silver threads form a rich pattern.
“when passion leaves your heart alone,”
Involuntarily, the two men back off from her and only the red border of flowers stops them. The man who shot takes a second arrow from the quiver on his belt, but his hand freezes in the middle of the movement. For a moment, they see that she is changing, that wrinkles disappear and pelt becomes velvet and silk. They notice grey streaks turn to black and a drooping eye become clear. But the changes are small, with every step and every breath, and in the end they only see a young woman, unarmed and unprotected.
“no pain and sadness makes you frown,”
It takes all their will, but the bows are still turned towards her. She is close to them now, so close that a second shot could not possibly miss her.
“Stop!” one of them calls for the third time. “Stop, in the name of the king! I am...”
His words are drowned out by the stronger presence of her voice.
“when glory’s gone and power too,”
For a second time, the arrow misses her. It flies wide, shot by a shaky hand. She never looks at it. She, the young woman, still has her eyes on the flower.
Even now, as one of the men draws his sword and runs towards her, she still marches forward. He grabs her collar and puts the sword against her neck.
“Tell me who you are. Tell me what you want!” he hisses.
Finally, her eyes jump to him. Her piercing look lets him shudder. The next words are hardly more than a whisper, but one that can be heard far over the plains. “then you may seek what’s no-one’s due!”
“What does that mean? Answer me, woman!”
“I did,” she says.
Behind the men, flowers turn their heads. Blossoms look upon the woman. Where they have ignored the men, now red and orange and yellow, green, blue and violet all turn their attention towards the woman. Just the flower in the middle, frozen and stiff, only ever glitters in the sun. All colours seem more vibrant, all flowers more alive, now that the rain clouds have drifted away and the sun shines bright and strong. A gentle breeze has become the beginning of a storm, but the flowers are unfazed, as is the woman. Only her long hair whips left and right behind her back.
Through the dark sky, a rainbow bends down to the earth and where it ends, six colours are the honour guard of a woman and her flower of ice.
The second man steps closer to the woman as well. “Who, what are you?” he asks.
“Nothing. Everything. Nobody. Everybody. I am the world and the world is I.”
“Stop talking in riddles, woman. Who do you belong to? Who do you serve?”
“When there are sides, I belong to all. When there are none, I am all. When there are thousands, I am none. I have stopped being someone a long time ago.”
“I told you to stop talking in riddles! Do you want to feel my sword in your neck?” He looks her up and down. His eyes blaze with lust. “Or maybe my dick in your little cunt first?” He pushes his sword harder against her throat. His whole body presses against her.
Her eyes, uncaring, never leave him. “You may have my body, if you wish it so. Neither would it be the first time, nor would it matter. Neither would I fight you, nor would I care. If you seek answers, you may ask. If you seek gratification, you may take it. If you seek magic -” She shrugs.
