THE REVISED EDITION > PART 1 — DESERT

The Green Man of Destiny: 2 — The Gusha

Within the Walled Oasis

Gren was groggy from the drink his father had given him. How many days was he gone to himself and the world? Gren did not know. As he awoke under the damp tarp he felt sickened in his belly. He flung aside the tarp and vomited in the sand. He looked from whence they had come. He saw the boulders of the Praying Hands. The Second Passage completed itself in Gren.

Wry stopped the uru’s forward motion. [an uru is a cross between a cow and a rhinoceros. A wide body and short wide legs. They have large eyes with multiple irises, a small horn, and a kindly face. They serve as transport in the desert.]

“Here, drink this.” Gren’s father handed him the brown drink. He sipped the soothing warm liquid. Gren was eager to know if he had completed Second Passage.

“There is time to know it all from your memories of it, scant they may be,” Wry told him with a gentle voice. “You are a man, now young Gren.”

My father the speech-giver, Gren thought. I am grateful.

The uru’s nostrils flared at a perceptible scent of distant water, and it picked up the pace a bit. The sun was sliding across the sky and down to the horizon. Gren and his father jumped down. They turned the tarp that covered them during sunlight and kept them cool to the hot warmth of the day. Through the night they went. The tarp radiated the slow heat into their bodies. The tarp’s heat insulated from the frigid cold of the desert’s night.

Day broke and again they stopped for water and food, for men and beast — the turn of the tarp. The tarp had absorbed the cold night for slow release during the sun’s anvil at her zenith.

They moved downward, toward the oasis. As the uru plodded on, traversing the ridge, Gren felt waves of nausea, and he held onto his gut as if cradling an infant. The nausea drove him down into himself.

The stones — the voices were perceptible as wisps in the depths of his being. The stones, they whispered.

As if awaiting more revelations from the voices, he strained to hear them but it was too much. He slumped into the blackness of unconsciousness. It was a waiting of sorts. When the road passed into the shadow cast by the Great Wall of the Gusha, the boy who was a man, awakened. He was jogged back from the edge of the abyss by the cool of the sloping smooth wall and the green cast that only he could see in the shadow.

Wry guided the uru close along the outer wall to the gap where the second wall appeared. He angled the beast and wagon between the two walls parallel to each other, far enough apart for a wagon to pass. The uru tried to hurry, but the pace was too quick. Wry hauled on the reins until the beast and wagon stopped in the right spot. A vertical groove cut into the wall ran up to a hole, as high above the seat of the wagon as a man is tall. Together, Wry and son threw back the tarp. Gren retrieved a worn box from inside the wagon and handed it to his father. Wry, in turn, placed the box on the seat and climbed onto it. He stretched until his mouth reached the hole. He uttered a piercing call through the aperture into the Gusha:

“Eeeeeee … ! Kondac, Wry Ben.” Wry climbed back down and Gren stowed the box away inside the wagon.

From somewhere within a grinding sound grew. As it became louder, a section of the wall began to slide back, revealing the interior. Two guards stood poised with raised spears until a third man lowered his arm and they relaxed. The father’s brother, Tipadoe, approached from the sentry house.

Tipadoe extended a hand up to his brother on the wagon.

“It’s good to lay eyes on you, Wry,” and he turned toward Gren. “You must be Gren — come of age, nearly?”

“He is of age. He has survived the Tradition of the Eight.”

“Ah…yes…I see. Apologies, Brother, I did not wish to offend.”

Wry took the reins and pulled hard to turn the uru. The beast hauled the wagon slowly into the courtyard as the wheels were engaged. The wide desert skis ascended into the underbelly of the wagon. The wagon passed through the crumbling inner walls from ancient times and into the Gusha. Tipadoe awkwardly boosted his heavy water-indulged body up beside Gren on the seat. The wagon bumped forward. They passed by the walls and then downward, slowing on the road. The three passed below the slender trees, so tall they seemed to touch the sky.

Cool, fresh, moist air washed over their desert-wearied bodies. Magic, Gren thought as the wagon drifted through the tunnel of trees. He had been here only once before, ten years earlier, for his First Passage Rites, where he had met with the One Magus.

The One had looked into the depths of the young Gren’s eyes, to the very core of his being. Gren remembered the focus and intent of those eyes. The One was at once young and ancient. A person could hide nothing from this man, this Magus, so deep was his gaze. And although nothing in the physical world was moving, Gren had felt that the One was shaking his head.

“What?” Gren had dared to ask. “What does that mean?”

The Magus had looked through him. “What do you mean, boy? What are you saying? You dare to speak to me?”

“I see … you’re shaking your head. Something … is wrong …”

“This is good. You have seen well. Never let that sight go, for it will serve you. Later. Ten years from now you will see me again.”

“After Second Passage …?”

The One had held up his hand, cutting off the boy’s speech. “These numbered passages are a mirage. True passage will require honing your true self. Only then will you find your way through the furnace of the sun that you call the expanse; to the north, west, and south. That is why you must come to me before. You will come to see it as the seedling comes to grow.”

He had pushed Gren onto his back, spitting water and sap all over his chest. “It is done,” the One had pronounced.

Now as the wagon rumbled across a low bridge, Gren remembered. He heard again the words that the One had spoken: “There will be something greater for you …”

Gren knew he must see the One Magus before he began his journey across the great desert to find the Green Man.

©2019 F. K. Ontario

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Thank you for joining me in the hero’s adventures across a dying planet ready for resurrection through the ways of alchemical magic. And in search of the Being to restore the world to greenery once again.

Blessings, Passion, and Grace on your journey. May whatever or whomever your looking for — find you.

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