The Child
Every child is a metaphor for resurrection; a renaissance and a debt redeemed; a figurative process of the dead brought to life by the hand that once had vanquished it, from a lesser to a stronger form, which in the exact ideal state should always be a better, more refined version of its breeder, a more lively manifestation and redemption for the corpse from which it was born. It was true for most of the children who had lived in the high expectation of their great sires, thus it should be even truer for the child hereby being addressed, who was eight in age, tiny and still childish in stature, yet placed high by the word’s people and worldly reputation, being a prince of a Dominion, tended and cared by six masters proficient in different directions by its mother guardian—— the lurywen, but in itself clearly took more pleasure in the doleful affection from its father, the repeine who once was a Dominion, who too clean its dusty playfulness and emotional upheaval, washed its muckiness and sang it to sleep. It was, a small matter as it is, incontrovertible that the child loved him. The love much stronger than the words so far available to him thus rendering it ineffable; While this autumn the parents were away on the TOWER for meeting yet to concern any children, the child felt depressingly lonely, wondering frequently in the stone mansion too often criticized to be cursive and unsightly, with its piled rectangular shingle and tiles, unadorned or perhaps rejected by any flowery plants, lying bare and unassuming around the girdle of the mountain of Wein, converging at the breaking point of the precipice—— it was precisely at this spot of sudden steepness that the child roamed and wondered, on daily basis, like a baby tramp, shaded by the flowing of bird, by the light carried through their feathers, looking on the verge of the treeless plain and the horizon beyond, displaying such striking and timeless melancholy of losing the contact with a deeply loved one. We should simply mention that the child here to outline somehow its clinging to its father, that it had loved him, with the resistance to all the thorough arrangement from the mother: it wobbled with its tiny feet from the instructors and stated forcefully that every tomorrow, its father should return, right then. At the time when the child was eight and the TOWER was holding its most grandeur meeting in the last ten centuries, the child’s greatest wish every day, for seven consecutive days, was to run to the highest place of the mansion, yelling at the approaching fleck in the sky, saying:” I told you, I told you!” It dreamed such scenes in his dream that he giggled: I have told you that he would return. Now he did. He then reposed in his childish dream to see the dragon fly, hovering like a kind bird for him to gaze by.
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Yes, dear, I know your expression. I know it all too well…. We have known each other since our youthful days in Academy, haven’t we? I remember quite well. still, my first sight of you. A lost beauty in a jungle mirrorless, with no reflection of his own. Oh perhaps, I thought to myself. this beautiful creature was blind or possessing an intriguing disposition to shush his own existence from the world? Either way, you must be deeply unaware of the charming beastliness in yourself; too often the reduction of distance brought a reduction in sight, and I have determined to make you an acquaintance since then. A good journey indeed we have been through, which makes every change in your facial expression dear to me. I am not unable to grasp some of your wife’s enthusiasm to see your falter though your impassive face too holds the touching bewitch. Sometimes even more, to an intellectual arouse, of the pursuit of your formation and thoughts, even it might as well lead to none… I am sure your wife has more or less imply to your for multiple futile tries. Sometimes you are indeed impervious…that is your loveliness. My friend, I have always enjoyed you. I would like to mention you this interesting incidence that when few of my forthright branches are resolute in persuading me to switch an ally, for what an atrocity can’t be bred over times, by efforts, but more willing to abide me, than this foreigner, lowborn? Our ancient blood has its full bloom in flowery ferocity in south. “ Young sire, you have your repugnance for the southerners, but a hundred south men are better than this lowbred…” Nonsense!,. I have no personal abhorrence for southerners but no southerner so far as to my scrutiny has been finer than you. Should I choose an allay in setting forth to the final war, I would certainly choose you as friend and my red lord as the honorable enemy. We believe there has been the pure bond between us and I play with the idea of a greater, more grand war in my mind where forces compressed and betwisted with one another without a clean escape but a final outburst, into a metamorphosis from its prime to its primordial, to be conceived and born, once again, from the embryonic childhood, rising out of its tangled demise where one becomes manure; one becomes ordure and one becomes tenant and the possessor of the new world, surviving the longest night into a bright, pellucid dawn. I though to myself that I would like to see the brightest morning ever with one more to my own preference…
Oh. Dear, your expression was though speaking to me of, what craze am I uttering? You hold a pair of eyes rendering either you a maniac or the one speak to you a snot, of shining an appalling light on one whispering, is it true that nothing that I do holds any meaning at all? I do frequently fall into wild rhapsody of unserveciable things of matters yet to be put into wiring the reality but now I issue the things highly practical, of the pregnancy here pulsating in the TOWER, to plunge into death, before it rises again into a transcending new height. Don’t, don’t look at me in your pretty eyes, dear, dear. I am not speaking something stupid, am I—— we always have to check our soundness in our speech but you have inquired me all too often. There you are, shinning in your madness--- tame, tranquil and unconscious madness to interrogate me slowly and thoroughly. But I am talking only normal without implicature. I am talking about birth and death. Something we must have been through thus we are, eventually, despite the disparity, brethren.
From death that we are born. Or haven’t we?
(Smile)
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In the past they talked a few times about the matter—— that morning she woke from the slumber, which marked their mutual absence from the TOWER, a little earlier than him, lying on her back to see the cadaverous sky and a hint of pale sun. The color, the scenery and the bite of air all conveyed one signal as coldness, and she for the first time in his arm lost all the will and numb mechanization to drag her feet and sway her arms, gazing up, in this still and only slightly lukewarm body and fell, deliberately thus inducing some efforts and some trembles as well as persuasion, to stroke this half-stranger and half-endearment’s face, and fell asleep once again, after which he too woke up, staring at her visage for long, losing in that speechless sandness assaulted him hard when thinking of her: he had been a speechless person and to some extent it was fair to say it was due not to his intelligence competence but to the existence of the very woman who then lay in his arm. Unconsciously he somehow knew that the silence was the only way he could treasure her memory, all too well, left him with no words but some quirks and pain when seeing her in face——when she woke again they held each other, gently, in a posture could be seen by no social web and described in no social convention, for a brief moment truly existed in the happiness she had once imagined—— that sweet misery. seeing nothing but the scar of time in and on each other’s face, and they talked, firstly, of the matter that they have conversed over a few times in the past.
-How was it like? I mean to conceive a life by yourself but not by a corpse…
He explained that yes, they had had a conversation on the topic, many years ago, when they still lived in a small cottage and them two alone; he was tall and grown enough such that can no longer be called a child she was then a inch or two smaller than him which invoked some mutual confusion to adjust to the implication of the phenomenon and its far-reaching effect; none could tell. “Well, lurywen.” As they stood side by side by the counter in preparing the food he picked up the topic, of many a child’s natural wonder, and the germination of their enthusiasm for pursuit of knowledge, that how they were born, “How do we come to know each other?” He had chosen a rather peculiar expression and she chuckled. “What.” And for she had smiled he felt like smiling, too. “Why laughed at me, mother…!” “I am not.” She argued, pinching gently on his arm, perhaps out of some curiosity too of him. It was strange, how should one doubt, that one would have something so different from something that should have been homogenous; something that should have been herself. She had for him a safe similarity and dangerous, thus delicious curiosity: why fear my own flesh, and how comes the difference? As simple as such… “It’s just that your expression was very unusual. People have children; they don’t come to know their children.”
He pondered for a while and halted his movement. When he resumed the movement he seemed to have come to a conclusion and presented it to her: “I guess it could explain something then. I feel like I have known you all along. I have never un-known you. It is something different from any other relationships I have known. I mean those with the children in town. Maybe we should count the old vendor.”
The topic weighed them both down to some extent; these days he consumed more and fetching from the wilderness somehow seemed to be a way less effective. True he could feed them both by going into the forest but therein some attachments were lost, as where should he get those fabricated apparatus for his mother when his hand, despite being able to acquire most of the raw material, seemed to be clumsy when it comes to compile them into a whole? How could he cook better than the chef in the town when their sweetness made her nearly exclaim? With the silver metals they gave him, he even bought a dress for her. Her face turned pale in the sight of the elaboration thus they talked not of its beauty but its labor.
“It is like magic, mother.” He touched the texture of the cloth with some awe and fear and much less true wonder, speaking in a wearisome tone, “I feel like my hands could never make out anything like this.”
“Ah, it’s not magic, dear. It’s not. It’s just some manual and training.”
She said. Some education. Right back then, however, education was a thing distant and vague for him. He was too old for the basics and besides he was not formally registered officially so there was no school; he was even a formidable and dubious figure by simply being around the educational institution with every single whisper muttering his presence, that unfamiliar and unconventional features and atmosphere. He was like a foreign intruder. But he was just right in age and right in nature, for the combating arena of the youngsters. How they had welcomed and hailed him! Intuitively he knew the ill-portent and shadow of the rest of his life from that rootless warmth. They hugged him more tightly and more fervently than his mother, when there was blood of his but more of his components on his face, when he struck a timid child with no personal ordeal—— He never had had any personal feelings for anyone since then. They were just strange to him. Very, very strange—— they gave him the currency of the town so he could bring food and appliances back to her.
“I hope you will not come to town, to fight, anymore.” She proposed, wiping the bowl. “I am fine with a wooden bowl instead of a porcelain one. I don’t need dresses, darling. Dresses are for ladies, and if you want more to feed yourself, I can come with you. I can even return to work myself, and if you are pleased, you can come with me——”
He remembered how he looked at her with shame for himself——but I don’t want to smell blood from you anymore. My baby, I don’t. I hate to see you hurt but I know you hurt more.
“You have a thing for violence, lad.” They told him. “A gift for commanding and depriving.”
“Oh. Mother.” He collapsed. “I am sorry. So very sorry, forgive me. I will never go again, however they should persuade me. I thought I would make you happy.” The fading child——He was yet to call himself a man though the mass in the arena addressed him as the man in black——pleaded with her. “No!” She startled and plunged, from the hard-maintained tranquility to the chaos too. “I didn’t mean to accuse you. It was just…It was just I couldn’t take it.” She was nervous. “My master, have I told you, darling? He used to beat me. His wife didn’t beat me but she would like me to suffer. When I got sick——my belly began to swell. They thought me to be an abomination and wanted to get rid of me, for good. ”
She then began to tremble—— he then knew it was her unquenchable habit which sent beyond any correction, to shake involuntarily for most of her time. It was rather uncomely for her to remain calm, while she was with him.
She shook her head and told him that she cannot get over the blood——The blood of hers, firstly. “It hurt terribly. But of course the swell won’t go. Somehow I didn’t think, in the end, that the bugle on my belly was going to kill me. It was not going to me more than the blood ——” Horrible amount of the liquid out of her vein that she wobbled, ran and escaped, all in the darkness and dewey forests. Her own blood she feared, and then the blood of others. “What is the—— I do not know. But what is that…is that building, I mean, that high…You know it, darling?”
“The TOWER.” He added silently, looking at her sadly; he held out his hand tentatively, which she accepted, to his great relief. She stroke the skin there and managed a terrified and fatigue smile. “I am not to frighten you.” “I know. I am sorry—— I Want to——”
“The TOWER—— oh, I am sorry.”
They spoke at the same time, interrupting each other. “Please, mother.” He said earnestly. “I would like to listen to you first.”
-Then this was the incidence you would like to hear again.
( He nodded, silently, looking down when she looked up. They didn’t move, touching the scales by their eyes only by the gaze, as if whispering how old we have become. But everything seemed perfect clean and still, as if statues, And she began to speak. )
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I noticed the growing of my belly three months before I knew you. It was true, after all, that I came to know you but you never came to know me… We met, then. Before that the swelling was nothing more than an increase in weight. I was doubted to be sneaking food from the kitchen and had some meals canceled as well as good beating. It broke my ribs but I saw no blood. Two months after I had myself beaten my belly began to swell that only the word swelling could describe and nothing else. My master said I was seriously ill and should quit and find a place to…for the final rest, to where the majority lay. I believed him at first but later I felt nothing; not pain or the fatigue and fever of the illness. I told the lady that I not felt like dying and she said it was impossible. “You should look into a mirror.” She told me. “In the name of the supreme height, you look freakishly grotesque.” I did as she commanded and went to a mirror—— a river, more precisely, and saw the odd figure of myself. Something, which I could not know was growing in me, I knew. A tumor, my master determined. but I was more inclined to believe it was something alive. “I felt it throb, my lord.” He then yelled to me that it should be a parasite. Worse. “You will die in an inner bleed, then.”
I didn't mean to linger but I had nowhere to go and lingered for half a month, till they got really irritated. When they beat me to blood they were confused how I was able to wander around with such an abomination. “We should help her, then.” The lady said. “We do.” The husband said. “Charitable act.”
( When she told he looked at her. Somehow she decided to cross her fingers with him and it was unusual. He later realized it was because that was the seventh day, The last day so she decided to touch him for the last time.
She clutched his fingers. With force, but tender. ）
Somehow, then, when the first blood shed, it dawned on me that this may be a child——we all knew that children are born out of a corpse so when I die the baby will be born. I cannot be sure of the mechanism but it felt right. I thought to myself that it would be sad, because I am a Perity, my corpse will bear no strong child. I will be a bed of a slave girl and she will be beaten, too. And perhaps for the first time in my life I began to truly cry—— I was whining so hard that it became a signal of my life. and as the indicator waned, they deemed effectively that I had died. I lost my touch with the world, for a while, of course when they threw me to the ditch when I cried for the child to be born in me in my unconsciousness. I always, since then, thought somehow emotion as strong as such would be detrimental to all. that it broke me, when I thought of the child fed by my master and the lady and became a slave. I never could deal with a surge as harsh as that night—— but I have met with it multiple times later…I have met with you several times. You are with me, after all. You are safe when I cried and bled, and I decide, when I woke in the ditch of corpses, that I should go, to somewhere without a master, when I bed the child, so that she will not be a slave.
-I thought you would be a girl.
( She whispered while she stroked his hand. Times over times. To which he laughed. )
-I know. I know. You made dresses for me. I must have disappointed you
( No. You never. She muttered slightly. You never. It was just I… it was just I. You never. ).
I headed from south to north, passing a small grove——It was there I saw the TOWER, close for the first time. You have grown, very large and I thought I myself being a bed amid the meadow. Will you be fine? Is a corpse enough? Will you feed on me? I cannot tell. I saw the TOWER on the verge of the forest on the night when it was lit by fire when two troops of selling-swords fought each other and I cuddled in the darkness with hands on my belly. When the battle was finished I came out of my niche, walking into a hollow in the forest and saw the TOWER, the corpses lying on the ground.
-It was magnificent, The building. Is it that almost everyone will be bemused by it, hearing its aspiration to rise into zenith unknown….I do not know and I cannot tell. But I was mesmerized too for the first moment when I saw it.
And I began to cry—— for pain, firstly. There was pain down the botch and I had to kneel. fumbling and finally lay on the ground, becoming the bed. There was a moment before the pain came I thought of eating a soldier or using them as your extra beds. But I decided not to. I cannot make myself too, when the TOWER was so beautiful upon seeing. What was all that grandeur for——
（ She silenced. For. When finally she raised his hand to touch his face, directly and unheedingly, without intoxication of liquor, simply touched
My baby. She said, and she smiled. )
-What was all that grandeur for, when lying on the ground, the soldiers and I and you are all going to die in the dark forests, bearing nothing, bleeding wildly. I do not want to eat them and I prayed that you would survive by only feeding on me and you would never bleed, nor yourself, nor bleed any other else. When the mercenaries came you will come to the niche and you travel and live by the forest and river that you would never be a slave. Let me explain to me, briefly, of my joy of holding you in my hand, when we were both breathing and bathing in the light, not bleeding, not enslaved and not eating others, not anymore. I was laughing. I could hear myself. Not a word did I utter, only the laughter. I did not really know what I did think. How do you think? Well…I should not bother you with this. Very likely I thought, it was fine that you and I neither had to be a bed and both not slaves. I was happy.
That was all she could remember—— she concluded. I was happy that we did not have to slaves and both were alive.
-And here you stand.
( She unleashed his fingers, setting them to freedom. )
-And what were you about to say when I cut you…
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“Nothing.” He gave her a bitter smile. “Something of reminiscence, I guess.” He sighed and lowered his head, holding pushing himself to the stone wall. looking tired and vanquished, resigned.
“I guess you wouldn’t want to come with me, then.” Eventually he said, mostly to himself, “It was on me, though, truly. I shouldn’t have come to bother you. Never mind,mo—— madam.”
They looked at each other, until she too smiled. “My lord."She withdrew from him, looking out of the cave, in search of the sea, on the seventh day of the meeting. “Is it time you should return to the TOWER?”
“It is.” He agreed. “It has been my greatest pleasure to be able to meet you again.”
“Let me walk you out, then.” Said she.
They walked out. side by side, in slow and gentle steps. leaving trails on the bleached shore. The sun was dazzling and they slightly narrowed the eyes. “It is indeed a fine island, madam. How did you find it?”
“I find by chance after my last seeing you, my lord, in Academy, after you have won the finale.” She replied, “I was working in the north and I left the north, coming to the island. The life was easier than I have thought, though soon, in the years to come I would not be able to turn into the larger frame and perhaps shall never leave it again.”
He turned to her, urging his hand such that he did not touch her, voice quivering, asking if he could come and see her from time to time.
“I think you should not, my lord. It will be inappropriate.”
“And dangerous, indeed.” He murmured. “My coming might lead others’ spotting the island and claimed this as their own.”
He was using all his strength to curb the feeling——I have that tremendous affection for you, he had been unsophisticated enough to utter so the second night but it was all too true —— “...I cannot quite explain but I think you might tell from my past folly. I promise to you I will not repeat them again. Will you, will you——”
He resigned, at last, saying, no. “It doesn't matter. I should not have bothered you and I will return to the TOWER.”
The man smiled faintly. “Though I do wish I have brought more to you, if I cannot possibly see you again——this is the seventh day.”
On their front the sun was rising, to the zenith unknown, higher than the TOWER, “I guess I would be still working around the TOWER. It has claimed me, perhaps from the day I first received the silver, and you could find me there, ma——”
He trembled quite obviously. When they raised their head they saw the tears in their eyes shining like broken glass. “Mother.” The lord cried, “Mother. Forgive me. I just wanted, that day, I didn’t finish, I wanted to tell you ours was different. I could bleed anyone if I was paid but I will never bleed you however they pay. They might as well claim my life but I cannot bleed you. I dreamed, on every fallen one’s face, of your visage. Might you have died from me, or might you have hated me? It doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter anymore. I…I should——”
He gasped and said that he should be able to provide some protection should anything happen and she could find him in the TOWER. Take the badge, he proposed, and show it to anyone in black. They would know it is my token.
He then lowered his head to her as a gentle goodbye.
“——”
When he turned and stepped to the boat, having bathed a night and more in the sea, she called out a name——A name, readers, they are always untranslatable, having been written in a more ancient language losing all the reference and orthography rules. All that we know, we know it was an effeminate version of the name used then by the black lord.
She addressed him so when he was a child, that when he turned for the last time, she was smiling at him with tears falling.
“I love you." The woman said, calmly, tasting her own tears. “I don’t believe I have ever loved anyone else.”
And she said it broke her heart to lose him to—— what? who can tell? But the man could definitely understand, for he was losing her to the same thing, too.
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