The curve of his beak parts the dawn sky as he spirals upwards from where his man-body lies inert on the koppie. A wisp of fragrant smoke from the flickering embers of the camp fire floats upwards in his wake. Then the last remaining log splits asunder and explodes in a shower of pin-prick scarlet sparks.
He soars on the thermals; the warm air fills his wings and transports him over the purple veld. He flies east, as the new day’s pink-gold sun emerges and spills over the purple mountains. Below him, he watches his own shadow running beside a long ribbon of eland as they follow-my-leader across the parched earth.
His keen eye discerns the path his companions have taken and he smells their scent which lingers in the breeze.
The song of the San Man reaches out to him across the sapphire sky.
Soon he alights on a branch of the solitary thorn tree. His companions are resting in the still-silence; neither awake nor asleep, drifting in the half-light of the awakening veld. Now, with his arrival, they let go and he watches over them as they sleep.
The San Man picks up his spear-stick and walks silently off into the veld.
Back on the koppie a slender figure emerges from the cave. She kneels down by the man who lies by the dying fire. He stirs, staring up at her with unseeing eyes. She shakes her head. He sleeps on.
Great Being Five gazed up at the three Superior Beings in Interview Chamber 4. She didn’t have to be told why she was here.
She had contravened the non-interference protocol¹, deleted one of her planets² and banished a fellow Being to the furthest corner of the universe³.
There was silence in the Chamber.
Five reflected on her transgressions. She must justify her actions.
She flung out a mind-picture of how she’d saved her lovely blue Planet Earth. One US president accidentally falling from the top of his own building had prevented the outbreak a third world war. It had only been a tiny tweak.
She visualized the moment when, years later, she’d reluctantly activated the total destruction of Planet Earth. It had been for the Greater Good. Those wicked little humans were about to infect another planet.
As for the fate of the odious Great Being Nineteen: who’d missed him with his destructive ways? Probably someone he owed money to. If anyone had contravened…
ENOUGH!
The thought-wave almost knocked her out of her chair.
The room vibrated as the Supreme Beings mind-melded.
Five gripped the arms of her chair.
Great Being Five, we are filing a guilty verdict.
Five braced herself.
However, your justifications are accepted.
You are assigned to the Academy for Wisdom.
* * * * * * *
Five sat expectantly in the big red chair in her shiny new office. Her screen flashed. Assignment:
Great Being Nineteen – Re-education. Take all the time you need.
‘You’ve got me an audition for what?’ Freya stared at her agent in disbelief. ‘You are joking aren’t you?’ A neat curlicue of steam issued from her purple nostrils.
Jed Talent hurried across the room and flung open the office window. ‘Unikitty is big time, Freya.’
‘I’m a serious actress,’ Freya huffed. ‘I will not work in some Lego toy spin off.’ She raked a purple-painted talon across the arm of the capacious couch on which she was perched.
‘Sometimes we have to take what we can get, sweetie.’ Jed returned to his leather-upholstered armchair. ‘After your disastrous audition for G.O.T…’
Freya pouted. Her spiky tail began to twitch; the glass-topped coffee table in front of her rattled ominously.
‘Okay, okay.’ Jed held up his hands in surrender. ‘Not Unikitty.’
‘Well?’ Freya’s eyes smoldered. ‘What else have you for me?’
‘Rainbow Butterfly Unicorn Kitty?’
‘What’s with the unicorns, Jed? I’m a dragon!’ Freya snorted, issuing a shower of sparks from her nostrils.
Jed eyed the resulting scorch mark on his thick shag pile carpet.
‘You want me to dress up in drag?’
‘Unicorns are where the big-time is at, sweetie.’ Jed ran his fingers through his thinning hair.
‘If that’s the best you can do, I’m finding myself a new agent!’ Freya stood up and swept from the room, her tail overturning the coffee table as she went.
Jed sighed as he watched Freya fly off from his office window, her dazzling blue wings framed against the giant Hollywood letters.
‘They look so realistic! It’s bronze isn’t it?’ she steps forward reaching out to touch the arm of the nearest figure.
‘You shouldn’t touch…’
She pulls her hand back.
‘…remember in the Tate with the Henry Moore?’
‘But this is outdoors, exposed to the elements.’ She paces around the sculpture of the warrior bearing his fallen comrade in his arms. ‘The detail’s so fine!’ Unable to stop herself, she brushes her fingers across the shoulder of the upright warrior. The metal is cold and hard. She knocks against it gently with a knuckle. ‘I wonder who they are?’
‘Who they were, you mean.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘There must be a plaque or something.’ She crouches down, running her hand over the calf muscle of the warrior’s left leg. ‘What about the leaflet they gave us?’
He fishes in his pocket and hands her the crumpled guide to the castle, before strolling off towards the battlements. Sculpture’s never really been his thing and he finds the pair, posed together as they are, strangely unsettling.
The print on the leaflet is small. She walks over to a nearby bench, fumbling in her bag for her reading glasses and dropping the leaflet as she does so. As she bends to pick it up, she hears a loud yawn. She glances around, but no one’s there.
It hits her like a mallet.
The statues have moved.
She retreats, catching herself as the back of her knees make contact with the bench. She sits abruptly, never taking her eyes off the two statues.
The warrior has unburdened himself of his comrade and is stretching magnificently. His back is turned towards her and she can see every muscle and sinew rippling across his back. In one fluid movement his companion rises from the ground and stands facing her.
Living statues, like the ones they’d seen in Barcelona? But she’d just touched one and it was cold and hard.
The eyes of the statue facing her widen; his mouth drops open.
She freezes.
He puts a hand on his companion’s arm; he turns. Eyes lock on hers.
A long moment is frozen in time.
A loud whistle distracts her; she hears him calling her name. She looks up and sees him waving to her from the castle walls. When she returns her gaze to the statues; they have resumed their original pose.
She rises and approaches, raising a hesitant hand. Cold, hard and immovable; but she didn’t imagine it.
Did she?
She starts to walk away, then turns, staring at the two figures. Then she realises what’s changed.
‘You switched places!’ she accuses, raising a finger. ‘I know it!’
The statues remain impassive.
Footsteps approach from behind her. ‘You’re not talking to them are you?’ he says. He puts his arm around her. ‘You’ll be telling me you’ve had a conversation with them next,’ he laughs.
She smiles up at him and turns to leave, casting one last glance at the sculpture.
Freya admired her newly-polished talons. She glanced over her scaly shoulders at her wings, freshly adorned with the finest lapis lazuli, mined by the dwarves of Zendor. The elves had done a fine job on her. It had cost her several gold coins from her secret horde, but it would be worth it. She was ready for the audition.
As a young actress she’d been an extra in the final Lord of the Rings film. She hadn’t enjoyed flying on by herself all the way to New Zealand. It had been exhausting. But there’d been no way she would have agreed to go in one of those flying metal contraptions, crated up like an animal. And then, after all that, her scene had ended up on the cutting room floor.
Her other big regret was to have just missed the part in the BBC TV series, Merlin. She’d have loved to have worked with John Hurt, but they’d said she was too pretty. Fair enough, she’d thought; the role had, after all, been for a considerably older dragon, and a male at that.
Now she was pinning her hopes on the Game of Thrones. This could be her big break!
I return to the cave behind the koppie one last time. I’m alone. My story-teller has finished his story now. Still I am drawn to this place where the veld stretches out to the smudge-blue mountains. It is late afternoon, when the sun’s red-orange afterglow becomes a purple-haze dusk; when the air is alive with spirits.
Inside the cave, my hand traces the outlines of the eland and the hunter who stands, bow and arrow poised, taking aim at the beast. A shadow moves across the scene and I turn to see the figure of a man outlined against the burning sunset. For a moment I think it’s the story-teller. But no, this is someone else.
He’s dressed in a long blanket; a string of beads decorates his head. He carries a long, stout stick which he lays against the cave entrance before stepping silently into the cave.
The San man.
He points at the eland and at the hunter. He turns to me and our eyes meet. His are the colour of the early morning sky. They tell me that he was that hunter and this was the first eland he ever killed. Killing an eland made him a man.
He beckons me over to another drawing. A lion and a man stand next to a bush which has strips of meat hanging from its branches. The man doesn’t fear the lion, because they are friends. The man shares his meat with the lion and the lion does the same with his kill. They belong to the land and the land belongs to them.
Together we walk to the cave entrance and stand looking out across the veld as the sky darkens; two tiny figures in a vast universe.
“Come sit and write down the story of the old San man,” he says. “Before it’s too late, before the story gets lost.” He wags his finger at me. “Stories are like the wind, they float away to another place unless you write them down.”
“Tell me the story of the old San man then.”
He nods and settles himself more comfortably on the sun-warmed rock and begins.
“When the moon is full and the land is parched and dry, the San man comes. He comes when the spirits call him. Old as the hills, yet he walks tall and straight; his eyes are clear and bright. Dressed in a long blanket and pushing his hand cart. All he has is in that hand cart.”
“He travels from place to place as his people have always done; although few are left. They say: ‘When you lose your land, you lose everything. When the animals are gone, the people are gone.’ And so it is.”
“He visits the places where the rocks still speak and the air is alive with the spirits.”
My storyteller strokes the smooth rock on which we are sitting. I’ve seen the rock art in the cave behind us: faded pictures in ochre and red, showing animals and people.
“He comes to perform his rituals; to perform the trance dance, the dance in which men become animals and their souls travel far, far away, and it is said if they stay away too long, they never return.”
My storyteller stares off into the distance.
“Once, long ago, when I was a still a boy, I followed him.” He turns and points. “I hid behind that big rock and watched, thinking I was unseen.” He pauses, nodding slowly, his body swaying gently, as if he’s listening to a song.
I grow impatient. “Go on, what did you see?”
“As the sun slipped behind the mountain, he lit the fire he had built, just down there, on that patch of bare earth. Then, as the fire took hold, he began to shuffle around the fire; his feet scuffing the dirt, raising little eddies of dust. The dance began, he raised his arms and threw back his head and started to chant. Then the chanting stopped; he spun around and looked at me, beckoning me to come.”
He looks over to the mountain, where the sun is almost gone. His voice is a whisper.
“I was afraid, but I went. He took my hand and I followed him in the dance. And then I was flying like an eagle, looking down from the sky at me and the San man dancing far below me. I saw the San man turn to me and put his hand over my heart and I felt his spirit too, running with the springbok, the kudu and the eland; the great herds of the plains.”
The storyteller fell silent.
“What happened next?”
“It started to rain. Out of a clear sky, it started to rain.”
Capturing the Rain Animal is an important mythological and symbolic aspect of the rock art of the San People. Read more…
Great Being Five was having a bad day. The worst day she’d ever had since she’d decided to delete planet Earth. She’d known she had to do it, but still she regretted it. What she also regretted was agreeing to collaborate with Great Being Nineteen on his newly relocated planet. What a nightmare that had turned out to be.
After the destruction of Earth, Great Being Nineteen had given his barren little red planet a nudge, moving it gently into the Earth’s old orbit. Deferring to her experience of the ‘Goldilocks Zone’ he’d asked her to set up the basic building blocks for life, most essentially, the liquid water. The planet already had important elements like carbon and nitrogen; it even had ready-made continents and a slightly defunct volcanic system which just required a little kick-start to give the planet more energy.
She’d carefully retrieved the Earth’s old moon and substituted for Mars’ own two moons which she felt weren’t really up to the job. They were too small and misshapen and she hated their forbidding names which reminded her of all the worst qualities of her erstwhile earthlings. Who in their right mind would call their nearest heavenly bodies Phobos and Deimos – fear and dread?
Being thrifty she had put them in storage in an empty part of the universe. They might come in useful for something, although Great Being Nineteen would probably auction them off.
She sighed as she looked across the surface of the red planet. It had gone so well initially, especially after she’d introduced the blue-green algae. The warmth of the now-nearer sun had allowed them to photosynthesize and voilà, oxygen levels increased rapidly, an ozone layer formed and the plant developed an atmosphere. It had been a long wait, but as far as Great Being Five was concerned, it was party time.
As she and Great Being Nineteen toasted their success, the bickering began. First of all they couldn’t agree on a name. It needed something new, bright and vibrant, but all their brainstorming only ended in bitter recrimination. Great Being Nineteen wanted something tough and macho-sounding. Five told him tersely that it really wouldn’t do. What sort of tone would that set for a new world? Eventually, they decided to ‘park’ the problem until the planet developed a character of its own.
The next bone of contention was how they would develop the aesthetic. Great Being Nineteen really had no idea. They browsed among the galaxies, searching for ideas, but nothing really grabbed them. Eventually Five decided to show him her lovely planet in Alpha Centauri, proudly lifting the subtle cloaking device she’d installed to keep it hidden from predatory interstellar life forms.
He wasn’t impressed. “Just birds and trees and flowers? Where’s the interest? Where’s the ultimate struggle for survival?”
Five had turned away in disgust, washing her hands of the whole project. Let him do as he wants, she thought, and turned her attention to adding some pretty pastel coloured animals to the dappled woodlands of her lovely planet; all herbivores, of course. And then, finally, she settled upon its name. Her lovely planet would be known as Orea.
But over the millennia she couldn’t resist the odd little peak at Nineteen’s handiwork.
Over time, Great Being Nineteen had named his planet Ferox and had introduced an interesting collection of flora and fauna. He’d raided the Earth archives she’d shared with him and picked out the most predatory creatures he could find. Huge raptors circled the skies, carnivores red in tooth and claw stalked the plains and forests, killer whales patrolled the oceans. Happily there were no war-mongering bipeds… yet.
Five had to admit his collection of big cats were beautiful, as she scanned the planet; but, wait, what was that tiger eating? She peered at her viewing screen more closely. What she saw filled her with horror.
She flicked her monitor over to Orea. Where were all the furry mammals? She roved among the woodland glades. Not a pink fluffy bunny in sight! And where were the birds?
She returned her attention to Ferox just in time to see a raptor gobble up one of her red-gold sun-birds in mid-flight. Everywhere she looked were signs of the carnage; a handful of bright feathers here, a sorry lump of pastel-coloured fur there.
He’d ransacked her lovely planet. It had to be him! No-one else knew about Orea. How could he do such a thing? She wept for the loss of her beautiful benign creatures.
Finally her lament ceased. Great Being Five brushed away her tears.
She had a plan. She would re-set her planet. Ctrl-alt-delete, turn back the clock, then repopulate.
Then she had her best idea.
Adopting an anonymous thought-pattern, she sent a mind-message to Great Being Nineteen. “I have some very exciting new stock you might be interested in.” She smiled to herself as she dropped the thought into his brain. “It will add a real ‘wow factor’ to the planet I hear you’re working on,” she floated an image of a couple of dragons in flight in front of him. “But you’ll need to come in person.”
She gave him the co-ordinates.
Great Being Nineteen arrived on the surface of the planet. It looked familiar, very much like that soppy planet of Five’s, but he was certain he’d never visited this part of the Dark Universe. He stared around. Where was this new stock the dealer had offered him?
Over on the bright side of the universe Five hit the keyboard, glancing at her monitor to see the empty space which Orea had previously occupied.
She hit the keyboard again and entered another complex sequence into the system. Orea reappeared, recently returned from the furthest corner of the universe where she had dumped a few unwanted items. Orea was as lush as ever and ready for new life.
She holds the golden sphere in the palm of her hand. It glows, warm with all that remains of him. She has him now, resting in the palm of her hand. His soul, trapped. He in her power; not she in his.
Revenge is sweet, she thinks.
She curls her fingers and feels the sphere pulsate. She turns and walks the few steps to the bridge. Leaning on the rail, she watches the greasy, grey river flow beneath her.
She tosses the sphere in the air and catches it. Tosses again; lets it fall.
Cepha observed the two galleons turn broadside. As greed and hatred erupted into sea-churning canon fire, she flung a tentacle into the pool beside her, summoning the sisterhood.
They came, they writhed, and the sea boiled. They pulled timbers apart with zealous suckers. Masts crashed onto splintering decks. Water gushed in.
For the humans must pay: creatures, so new to old Mother Earth, now plundered her riches and fought over them.
Cepha stirred the pool again.
Coins and trinkets emptied from chests were gathered up by eager tentacles, while sailors sank into the murky depths.
luna's on line 