Chapter Sixty Five – River
Sheeta made clothes, and earned money by making them for others. Together they ran their farm and the years were kind to them. They were happy as farmers. She was a good cook, very good. A little too good perhaps. As she grew older she became curvier, bigger in many places. But Pazu absolutely didn't mind this. He loved it, he loved her shape, her delicious woman curves. More of her to hold, more of her to love.
And of him? What of him? He never did build his flying machine and he never flew again. Not once. Instead he became an engineer. He began, as I have told you, with small things, wind pumps and irrigation on the farm. People saw his work and asked him to do things for them. He was paid a fair wage for his skills. Over time he became known in other villages and the towns and throughout Gondoa as a man who could work with wind and water, stone and iron. Through his twenties and into his thirties he built dams, and bridges and houses, he lay irrigation channels, set up wind pumps, built windmills, waterwheels and water powered hammers for forges. He even, when he was older, working with a large team of men under his command, built a canal between three of Gondoa's towns. He never worked with steam though, no. Never again. Just natural things, stone, wood, water, clay, iron.
He did though, from time to time, take his horse and a couple of pack yaoko and ride away for periods of two or three weeks, returning with the panniers of the yaoko bulging with hidden cargo. Their neighbours enquired of Sheeta where her husband went but she refused to say.
He became skilled at translating the books, so skilled in reading the old tongue that he could walk among the library shelves and pick books he knew would be useful, books on chemistry, physics, metal working, calculus, fuel systems, astronomy, metallurgy, hydrology, and of course, aviation. And at the end of the day, when his work was done and he'd finished shoveling the endless mountain of yaoko dung yet again, he would work late into the evenings at his translating work. And after the twin boys were born, three years after Rhaeal-Aghana, he would read to them, all sorts of interesting stories he would read about how men once lived in the sky and didn't ride horses but flew with wings.
He extended their house. He had to, their family needed the additional bedrooms. He couldn't build out into the yard or over the garden and on the lake side was the grain tower and he certainly wasn't going to demolish and move that. So he built an extension away from the lake on the south side of the house towards the lane. Downstairs was a large sunny room with big windows that became a family room, a playroom. It was reached by a door through from the parlour. Pazu built two bedrooms above the family room and they were reached by a new stair that he built up from that room, so the children if they wished, could rise and play or go outside to the latrine without them running backwards and forwards along the landing outside their parents room. He cut an opening in their bedroom wall and made a doorway to the two new bedrooms, so that if bad dreams and tears came in the night Sheeta could go to the children, or they could come to her. And this they sometimes did early in the morning, running into their parents room and bouncing on the bed and interrupting whatever was going on there and making their mummy laugh and their daddy cross.
But as to flying? No, that was a dream for others, and he never once looked to the sky, at least not when people were looking. Until that day.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
Rhaeal-Aghana grew like crazy and one day he awoke and she was thirteen and suddenly full of grace and slender and taller than her mother and her hair was long and fair and he looked at her running across the yard with her first proud dot of blood bright on her forehead. She had, when she was small, always hurt him, just by being. Just her hair would hurt him, he always saw that small dusty tangle of blonde hair held fast against a dead mothers breast in a pitiful dirty shed. But one day, the day she was thirteen and she was suddenly a woman, he forgot. He saw someone new, someone Lucita had taken because she was innocent and good and pure and remade her, used again the parts of that dead child. And Lucita had looked upon that shed and chosen to reuse all of her, leaving behind only the memories. And in his workshop, seeing her run across the yard, Pazu stopped work and sat quietly a moment by his lathe, and he prayed. He prayed his thanks to Lucita and for all her kind works.
Maerth-dhu of course was furious, not only had Pazu cheated him of so many lives in a war that never was, but the little girl's life was his blood payment in a deal she and he had agreed, but Lucita knew that life went on, and on, a gently rolling endless thing, like a road a person walks, or a storm cloud that builds in front and fades to a whisper behind, always being renewed, never ending. Maerth-dhu would have his payments again of course, he would go on taking and she would go on giving, creating life. He would end it, she would begin it. It was a fair exchange because she loved to create, loved to give, it was her whole reason for being. As long as there were things living on the earth this would happen. It would be this way for that was how it was meant to be.
But Pazu and Sheeta knew it would happen. One day it must, it was in the nature of men. In the same way that it was in the nature of lovers to make irrational decisions and throw away a promise of great things so that they might have just each other, they knew that it was in men's nature to not stand still. Men would come. Engineers would look for coal, for iron ore, builders would come looking for stone. And not everyone in Gondoa was happy. Many were poor and starving and a farming life was not what every man wanted. Some day a man in strange clothes would turn up at some struggling farmers door. Perhaps a farmer whose child was ill and who needed expensive medicine, or a man whose heart was broken by a fresh stone across the entrance to the family barrow mound and who wanted only to go away and leave this place and its black memories behind. And a stranger would come and buy that land and begin digging and a mine or a quarry might come there, and then a processing plant would be needed to crush, wash and grade the stone. A railway line would be needed to carry the stone away and bring fuel for the mine's machinery, and food for the workmen's stomachs, or a canal might be dug. And the canal or the railway would bring workers and a town would happen and later that town might need an aerodrome and the flying machines would come. And that was how it happened, by small stages that people might hardly notice. Inconsequential things, as tiny as drips of water in a cave, but over time, change was inevitable.
It may not be this year, or the next, or even in their lifetimes, but it would come. Time was a river, flowing slowly yes, but always onward. Each man was like a boat. You could row swiftly with the river and progress quickly on, or you could row against the stream for a season and stay in place. But you would eventually tire of holding your vessel against the current and you had to flow away eventually. Some men rowed against the river all their lives but they passed away and the river flowed on. In Gondoa, men had rowed against the flow for seven hundred years but their time was ending, the river could push away even seven hundred years of stubborn men's hearts. And this river had no banks. You could not row to the shallows and get out and rest. Onwards, it always flowed onwards. That was how it was, the very existence of Maerth-dhu, and Utomu and Lucita and Konuguen required it to be so. It could only stop if there was nothing, not even time, not even life. The existence of life caused events and events caused time, and time caused the river to flow.
There would one day no longer be the soil, or the sky, these trivial arguments of men. There would only be the future, something so different to what men expected. Men's expectations were limited by their narrow horizons which is why the soil and the sky had once seemed so important. The decision would not always be between the soil and the sky.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
One late summer day when the boys were eleven and Sheeta was thirty one (and still, Pazu thought, as beautiful as the day he had first seen her, rounder yes, but still as beautiful), they were helping her in the lakeside field, gathering the harvest. Rhaeal-Aghana, now fourteen and already a woman in full bloom, was nowhere to be seen, she was off again in the hills with that Kyehana boy, riding his pony and getting up to things in the summer woodland Sheeta would rather not think about. Pazu was in the yard banging away at a stubborn bearing on a pump for a family in the next village. There came a sound, a noise that cast a shadow over that harvest day. Not a bad shadow, just a long one. Pazu, despite the noise he was making, heard it first. It was a sound he knew well, like the cry of his own baby it was a sound he always reacted to. Even though it was more than fifteen years since he'd last heard this sound, it was suddenly yesterday.
He came out of the yard and looked up. At the same time, in the lake field he heard the boys shrill voices, shouting, their arms pointing up. It came over the trees at the foot of the valley, low and slow and droning like the king of bees. It was silver and puffed up like a giant cigar, a control deck hung below it. Windows from which faces looked down. In the sides were portholes and on the flanks and at the stern large silver airscrews spun, grabbing fistfuls of invisible air and compressing them, whirling them around and forcing them backwards, pushing the great ship forwards like a swimmer in a lake. There was writing on the side but he didn't need to read it, to know what it said. It said the future, it said progress, it said the end of these days. The airship went smoothly away up the valley following the ribbon lake along the shoulder of the mountain. The boys were ecstatic, jumping up and down and screaming and waving. From the control deck men stuck their heads out of windows and waved back. One threw something down, a cylinder with a long red cloth streamer attached. It fell in the wheat and the boys ran to pick it up, Tormola always the slightly faster one leading, the slighter, blonder Phuta at his heels.
Inside the metal cylinder was a rolled up glossy coloured handout. It was just an advertisement, it named the company that operated the airship and told the prospective customer that they carried passengers and cargo and mail between towns in Marinaer and Restormel and the new independent Republic of Greycastle. And in bold lettering across the bottom it named a town in southern Gondoa. The future was coming, thought Pazu, looking at the paper. And it was almost here.
Tormola was ecstatic, on the back of the written sheet were pictures of the company's five airships, each one different, each one a fantasy for a little boy.
And so it came that a few years later when Tormola went away for a year and returned as a man a summer later, he came back not suntanned and muscular and riding a horse or bringing home a girl with a big belly, but he came from the sky. A small fast sleek red craft came over the village and turned, hovering above the square, with a whoosh it descended in a cloud of dust and squawking chickens and open mouthed children. The small fast red ship settled to the ground on stubby wheels, the sharp whine of it's engine dying in the dust, the spinning turbine of the gas motor winding down. A clear cover slid back and a man got out. He wore a one piece canvas flight suit over a broad chest and muscular hips. He disconnected an air hose and a power hose from his suit and a third hose that pumped fluid around his suit close to his body to prevent the blood draining from his brain in high–G manoeuvres. He pulled off a bowl-like round glass and metal flying hat. And there stood Tormola, his shock of red hair hanging low over his eyes, smiling and suddenly the centre of a crowd of staring girls.
They crowded round wanting to see who this new man was, touching his strange clothing and looking inside his peculiar flying craft. Tormola shut off the Ogilvy-Moreau gas drive and disconnected the actuating lever of fine crystal. Checking the power chain was shut off and the fuel pumps locked down, the wheel brakes were on and no inquisitive child could start her up, he stepped away from GD-117 CV-44 Anstruther and let the little boys and girls scramble over her. No bigger than a farm cart she was and one of the bigger boys, showing initiative asked:
"Where's the propeller, mister?"
"No propellers, my friend, an Ahmtuillian gas drive."
"A what?"
And so the blood of the forgotten prince came back to Gondoa. Seven hundred and twenty years the dream had been in his heart, passed on from father to son across the nations and the seasons, through the earth of men's bodies, through the spirit of their dreams. The bloodline might easily have ended in that council chamber with a decision to end it all, to prop up the museum of royalty and the clutter of the rules made by men long dust. If that had happened who can say where the river would have flowed, nor how long Sheeta and Pazu might have lived.
But the river flowed on, it flowed through time and through men's hearts. And although Paetsu Fuhmonhir no longer existed, what that name stood for continued on and in the circle of dust and frightened chickens and pointing awestruck pretty girls, time went on. A small drip it might be and the changes might be slow, but drip it would, drip and drip, some small, some bigger and one day the drip would become a flow. The dream of men went on.
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
One day, a few years later, when she was bathing, he went into the bath room and stood looking at her, at the beautiful valley of her chest, that sacred place where his lips would worship her. The blue stone no longer lay there, and even if it had, neither of them could have drawn a spell from it. There were times when he missed the stone, it felt as though she were not complete without it. And on those days he would regret their decision. But then he would look across the yard and see their children and across the village and see the place he had come to love and that had come to love and accept him. Had the stone remained, had she remained Queen and he a lost prince, this village now might not even exist, war might have come and swept it away. Their children might not exist and they might not even be together, but separated, the figureheads of opposing factions.
He, or she, might even be dead.
When he considered the decision in those terms he realized it hadn't been a decision at all, not a hard one. The path had seemed to divide, there had seemed to be a choice but that wasn't true. There had only ever been one path, that the Engine under the mountain must sleep, to give up her stone, to end the Gondoan royal line, to avoid civil war and for them to marry. And to have life.
"Shall I wash your hair?" he offered
"Hm, please. That would be lovely."
He walked to the bath. He noticed she had that look in her eyes, the lids half closed as though she were a little tired. To anyone else she just looked bored, but Pazu knew what that look meant.
"Pazu, I have been thinking."
"About?"
"I'll be thirty six next month, I'm not getting any younger, and well…"
"Don't be shy with me, nothing you do or say can embarrass me."
"We have Rhaeal-Aghana, and the boys…"
"Men," he corrected
"Yes, men. But, you know, another baby would be lovely, don't you think? Perhaps another girl if Lucita will bless us with one?"
"Yes," he replied, pulling his shirt over his head and climbing into the bath with her, "yes, I agree, another baby would be lovely."
--I--
---o-o-oOo-o-o---
I I
Which was how their fourth child came to be born. A second beautiful girl, this child had thick lustrous reddish hair like her mother and father and the first thing she did when she came into the world was smile. She wore a wide grin for hours after her birth, and even smiled gently when she slept. When she fed she even made a sort of chuckling happy sound (which, considering where she was, Pazu could quite understand). They named her Lucita, and the spirit after whom she was named delighted in her and blessed her with grace and strength and a sharp happy mind and a delicious femininity that the boys in the village would fight over just to be near. Despite the joy of Rhaeal-Aghana and the strength and intelligence of the twins, laughing Lucita was their favourite child, they loved her until the day they died.
To her he was again Pazu, just plain simple, clumsy, gorgeous Pazu. Sheeta never again called him Paetsu. At least, she didn't know she did. But there were times, late in the night when they thought the children were asleep (but they were secretly listening and learning) when they lay together, and she pulled him against her and he came into her and her back would become an exquisite arch and her mind became the rainbow and her voice would call out that name, crying out a name she never spoke. And afterwards she would lie gently with him and softly weep her thanks using that name.
"Paetsu, Paetsu, yau taemo. Yau al-dhu' ulve om."
One night, afterwards when sleep was almost upon them, a thought came to him.
"You know, perhaps I should fly again. Take you up in that gas-scout of Tormola's."
"Hm... why?"
"Just so I can land it. Just so you can get out and walk away. So I can say I did it."
"Hm… no need," she was close to sleep, drifting away.
"Why?"
"You brought me here, as though we were flying. Sometimes it felt like a dream, but mostly it felt like we were flying. You landed here, a beautiful landing. The best you ever did. I don't want to walk away from this."
She put an arm out and lay it across his chest, smoothing the pads of her fingers across his skin. She lifted her head, kissed his chest and lay back down. Her blue eyes seemed large and dark and they were calm and open and watching him. He looked at those eyes for a time, watched them finally close, and felt her gentle breathing. Felt her against him, her warmth and softness, a heart at peace. He leaned forward and pressed his lips to that sweet forehead. Then he lay back, staring at the ceiling, at the hills outside blue in the moonlight. A good landing, yes. His best. He closed his eyes. He slept.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
If not for you,
Babe, I couldn't find the door,
Couldn't even see the floor,
I'd be sad and blue,
If not for you.
If not for you,
Babe, I'd lay awake all night,
Wait for the mornin' light
To shine in through,
But it would not be new,
If not for you.
If not for you
My Sky would fall,
Rain would gather too.
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all,
I'd be lost if not for you,
And you know it's true.
If not for you
My Sky would fall,
Rain would gather too.
Without your love I'd be nowhere at all,
Oh! What would I do
If not for you.
If not for you,
Winter would have no spring,
Couldn't hear the robin sing,
I just wouldn't have a clue,
Anyway it wouldn't ring true,
If not for you.
Bob Dylan – If Not For You, 1970
-oOo-
The End
-oOo-
- this is for you, Mark : nice one -
- and to Miyazaki-san : again, thank you -
-oOo-
4 - 5 April (mostly)
16 April & 5 May (polishing) 2007
"Hills of Moonlight" : a sequel to "Laputa : Castle in the Sky"
2 March – 5 May 2007
MSC