(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

Not a poem,;

A Repost:
Stay healthy beloved readers. I send you all my healing love:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Use apple cider vinegar or any vinagar asap even if you feel no tickle add sea salt gargle gargle gargle every hour if possible before and after eating! Or blend garlic and add vinagar gargle it!
men please do it! Go bathroom kitchen sink and look up at the ceilling open mouth wide gargle deep it shall burn a bit spit it out  do it sgain many times until it hurts no more.
Acid gets virus hiding in throat to come out and avoid getting the bicho nano bug into your lungs!?

A healthy immune system begins in the gut with a healthy balance of beneficial bacteria.

For far too many Americans, Candida overgrowth compromises the immune system, as it is constantly fighting the battle to keep Candida in control
If you do become ill, DO NOT feed the virus or the Candida with sugar. Yes, you need to drink a lot of fluids, but don’t drink sodas and sugary juices at this time. Cranberry unsweetened read lable cocktail has sugar get unsweetened one or grandberries fresh into blender or lemonade with stevia is a good choice. Try it warm or cold.

Gargle. Gargle. Gargle. Gargling lowers the viral load, leaving your throat body with fewer invaders to replicate.

So sip on this Mother Earth Organic Root Cider warm. Cold’s and flu often start in the throat or the nasal cavities.
At the first sign of a sore throat or sinus infection, sip on the root cider! If you don’t have it, use apple cider vinegar
Also flush your nose deep each side lean over sink to right and left sides flush nose for God's sakes alternate sea salt baking soda or use vinagar to nose too!? Rubb garlic on your nails eye bows.

Also, remember that a fever is one of nature’s means to fight infection.
Of course, you don’t want it to get too high (higher than 102) and drink plenty of fluids to prevent dehydration.
Filtered apple juice has boron brings down fever fast 4 to 6 onz every hour or if too sweet delute it half water half juice!
Vitamin A, vitamin D, vitamin E, and vitamin C are all vital nutrients for the immune system.
If you have any lip mouth sores you need to ballance minerals too much vitamin requires minerals fulvic humic

If you take high doses of vitamin C to fight a virus, remember that you should not abruptly stop taking vitamin C.
You should titrate down.
Vitamin C is needed by the immune system to make interferon, which the immune system produces to protect healthy cells from viral invasion.!!!

Zinc has been proven to be effective against the common cold and to be effective as a topical treatment for ****** sores.
ZINC It is believed to be effective due to preventing replication of the virus.
The immune system needs selenium to work properly and to build up the white blood cell count.
Berberine is an alkaloid compound found in several different plants, including European barberry, goldenseal, goldthread, Oregon grape, Phellodendron, and Coptis chinensis.

It has antibacterial, anti-inflammatory, antiviral, anti-parasitic, and immune-enhancing properties.
It’s been proven effective against a vast array of bacteria, protozoa, and fungi.
It can be used topically on cuts and other wounds, and it’s perhaps most commonly used to treat gastrointestinal issues.
Probiotics are always helpful in maintaining gut health, especially when the body is under a viral attack that involves the digestive system.
Probiotic foods and drinks without added sugar can help maintain a healthy balance of bacteria.

Garlic is anti-viral, anti-fungal, and antibacterial.
You can take garlic in a tonic or if you can handle it, chew raw garlic.
It not only will help fight the virus, it will help **** any secondary infections trying to take root.

Echinacea not only supports the immune system, it also has been proven to reduce the severity and duration of viral infections.

Colloidal silver is believed to interfere with the enzymes that allow viruses (bacteria and fungi as well) to utilize oxygen
A double-blind trail showed elderberry extract’s ability to reduce symptoms of influenza and speed recovery.

It also showed elderberry’s ability to enhance immune response with higher levels of antibodies in the blood.
It is believed to inhibit a virus’s ability to penetrate healthy cells and protect cells with powerful antioxidant S. Elderberry has also been shown to inhibit replication in four strains of ****** viruses and reduce infectivity of *** strains.

The flavonoids in green tea are believed to fight viral infections by preventing the virus from entering host cells and by inhibiting replication.

Though double-blind clinical trials are needed, olive leaf extract has been shown to inhibit replication of viruses. In one study, 115 of 119 patients had a full and rapid recovery from respiratory tract infections while 120 of 172 had a full and rapid recovery from viral skin infections such as ******.

Pau d’arco has been used in indigenous medicine for generations. One of its compounds, lapachol, has proven effective against various viruses, including influenza, ****** simplex types I and II and poliovirus. It is believed to inhibit replication.

Studies have shown that glycyrrhizin, a compound found in licorice root was more effective in fighting samples of coronavirus from SARS patients than four antiviral drugs. It reduces viral replication, cell absorption, and the virus’s ability to penetrate cells. It is also being used to treat ***.

St. John’s Wort has been proven effective against influenza, ****** simplex, and ***.

If you’re prone to viral infections or are dealing with a chronic infection like ***, as mentioned above, the first step is to get your gut in shape. This is absolutely imperative. The best article to do that with is Best Supplements To **** Candida and Everything Else You Ever Wanted To Know About Fungal Infections & Gut Health. Everyone who is chronically ill has an abundance of Candida. Yes, everyone.

Provided your gut is healthy, or if you just feel the need to skip that part, here are the supplements to take in order to make sure your immune system is able to fight off viruses:

While there are most supplements listed above, the combination of these listed here is more than enough to balance out the body and ward off viral infection.
~~~~~~~
A Repost By Karijinbba.

This is not where this idea began but it ran and I

missed my mark. Mark sin.
-1 deficit reality quotientcy
currency.  Sure.
(Press Sure, to let the bursting pressure equilation expand at will)
Score.

That fine a level of reality
demands more attention than I have to pay.
Patient agent wait and not see or see if/then

you suffer, is there ought that I might do now
for you
that these words are not doing?
All I am is words, in a sence, sense, since

we come in threes, we are some of those sets of thoughts tangled in complexes
better left alone.

Untangling twisted knotted realities is what we do best.
We've been wadding up proteins,
since God knows when,

time's less twisted than people think it is,
but it is silly to imagine
time's arrow is a metaphor for these meta-gnostic moments.
Is it?

Apophrenia
or mere
Dejavu, you believe,
what if it is your memory lying by ignoring time
attention ratios determining the observations stored in HD?
What if it's just a glitch?
Blue screen of death.


If you suffer, is there ought that I might do now
for you
that these words are not doing?
All I am is words, in a sence, sense, since

we come in threes, we are those sets of thoughts tangled in complexes
better left alone.

Untangling twisted knotted realities is what we do best.
We've been wadding up proteins,
since God knows when,

time's less twisted than people think it is, but
is it silly to imagine
time's arrow is a metaphor for these meta-gnostic moments?

We come and go. To and fro up on the face

messengers bearing news in both directions, watch
the trickster, Jacob, in this story, he sees the messengers from
heaven bearing leaven thither and hither

upon the face of the earth.
the wrinkling mother, smiling now, chuckle head
I ain't no ***** saint.

Jah, I know. Joy is my dance, this is my song.
Is it good Grandmother?

---- on the porch facing my west gate ---

fences don't play exactly, out acted, the role of walls.

The idea that something
there is that does not love a wall,
has frozen my pond

the stillness beyond the sylvan **** crowned head
radiates through the medium of the message to me in time
to you.

Miles to go, you recall the feeling of feeling miles to go
before
I sleep.
That was yesterday, and you know yes ter everything's gone,
roar.

Aslan can pierce the barrier between mere Christians and me,
how would be fun to know, but
knowing why would help us keep the story interesting as life goes on

Who controls my peace?
Am I a mercurial sheen in between chaos and order,
chronus and zeus?
Could be, ya thank so, ye know so, less unlessed as

unlessing means nothing to you,
that means you are visiting here.

Visting whom, vis it ing whom?
Who's in charge, where's the power
short

age, wrinkles in time, rogue waves at the quanta scale,
we were dancing
with the thoughts emanating

from some IDW smart guy proffesing
Critique-technic-magi action, post mode'r'ism
at the point of Dada und Scheizkunst,
the unmass-queque,
the line of lies awaiting unbelief,
idle words lingering,
hoping
to be noticed and added back into the story book of life,

a simple wish.

It could be every child's, should we think that
if we can or may,

sometimes I'm still, and

confusion troubles the water,
it seems,
then another hurt is healed, another lie is gone and life goes on

we won again, this never gets old,
I do love my opposition,
pressure pump
pump pump. De-us-me-can-onbeoffbeyond

five years ago unmasking and rhetoric meant nothing to me
the purpose of learning forever and never
knowing anything beyond all things

our bubble is metastasizing, a mercurial film forms
informing us
in its reflection,

this is the ying yang thang in 3 or 4 d, HD+ chaos one half

order the other,
sharpest imaginable thing
me trick being mag ift just if eye winged show

how beautiful are the feet of them who bring good news,
you see, it flows, sweetwater flows
winged feet
whish through leaving, leavin' leaven…

unleaven that which has been leaved?
Fat chance, all who
eat this bread and don't get gas,
they are our same bread people. Companions.
Vectors of sour dough,
webs of fungal
axions
make a way
bore, pore, poor-with-us, pour

in to it ish, that idea, an opening through,
trickle down good gravity leveling stillness,
gentle rocking earth
roll round and round and round

the pythagorean version
of Euclid's point in his mother's story,

the point of this song? To know the point you must have been

to the point of in-forming the point on which we dance and you recall

we come in threes, and just, we are, just, if it, that idea,
rests in your
back roads, gentle on your mind. We make peace.

Being young is easy from my POV.
I've lived in my future for sometime now

I can't say how, beyond saying aloud, this was never hidden,
in my accounting of idle words I claimed,
upon hearing the stories each contained.

i'da swore i hear that wise *** o'balaam's abrayin'
Braindeem, deemed 'eem. Wham, uptheyhaid. Relig, fool,

or chaos wins and no hero ever lives again!
Drop anchor, wait it out.
let patience blow her nose, gnostic snot caught in the nets,

nonono nothing's wasted in patience work, we make glue
from gnostic snot that patience sneezes
when reality grows cold,

that has happened, you know, temperatures are just now,
oh, wait global warming, bad dam,

Script, bust it,
leveling is essential to eventual temperature
equilibrium.
The heat is on, the bubbles are forming, informing one to another
below the surface
greasy tension, slippery slopes putting pressure on chaos
to conform to the curve

Ying yang, mercury film upon the sea of time and the scene of chaos
in this bubble of all you can imagine real.

Hows' that feel? Why?

You want that? What are you standing under? Does chaos win?
You are, as we say, cognisic magi we-ified,
practical magic at
the moment
the point
is made, then the creation begins fractalling outward

and not before or is this all
unrolling ex nihilo, no magi ever knew…
come, let us reason together,

why am I empowered? To live, first thought wise, that's good but
evil forces me to think again and I see the pattern

life goes on, John Molenkamp, Sam, soldier 4,
(as the credits role by, the name catches my eye)
never in a thousand years,
'cept unbelievable is one of those lies I came to **** by strangling
on bile while
rescuing every idle word ever involved in the infection

from the point in the absolute center of the bubble,
objectively, you see everything
that is
seeable

but would good prevail if evil had no hope?

I know that one, yes. why?
evil has no mind, soul, some think--
same same medium message spoken spelled chanted danced
who care's?
*** 'er done. Life has a chaotic side, the churning creates

number one from none, the cult of one divides itself
go do be
we three we three we three a wavy song ding ****.

Aware? Awaken? Avowed-wowed-wit-wise,
fullcomp, retired
Peacemaker. Me.

All my hero's imagined or real, were Peacemakers.
Just now, peaceful now, mindful now
we remain
the same blessing promised in the package of yeses
stolen from Cain by his older sister, his
bride,
keep that quiet, eh?

Secrets made sacred, always
those are lies, no lie is of the truth,
all lies are about the truth.

What empowers you, poet or poetry? Right, you know,
God, good god knows, resentment lives in lies

the rotting idle words deemed curses at best, secret at worst,
those idle corrupting thoughts sparking as if absolute annihilation were thinkable by rational minds

of ---wait, there's arub, a sore
ex nihilo, the homeless wanderer screams,

"May the whole world perish, may you all go to hell,"

the mad man wept his hell, and imagined his curse,

not mine,
I don't have one. I did, but I went back so often to find pieces of my heart that now I have an Elysian network woven through All-hell, the big idea that broke loose infecting the mind as wisdom's leaven builds her womb
inhabitation
placenta
stem cell informing builders empowered, pressure empowered, what must be, but is not verse, versus
us, the we that be
we must
choose,

let this be, come and see,
life goes on.
Agree, or empower us as we bubble by and
takenallwecan expanding gobbling bubbles,
good
by ye.

Once we flushed the Dada poison and let mito mom
instill the patience gene with
epigenetic peace we can pass on with a touch or a word,

we've never woven lies for no reason,
if a rung breaks
and they can, last straw and all that weight,
you know,
Jacob's ladder is an escalaltor-ladder, wittily invented,
with knots and twisted fibers electricked,
there are automated steps, algoryhmes of reasons to repair the broken rung
with a reason to believe the rung has been repaired,
only believe, take a step,
re
paired again with the idea of meaninglessness masked in create-if-ity

good enough. okeh. don't believe lies.
Don't pass undigested lies to see if farts burn.

When his eyes first fell upon her
She was choosing avocados
In the fruit and vegetable aisle.
And he watched how her thumbs lingered
On the base of the alligator pear
And pressed, maternally.
He feigned interest in the cabbages
Whilst sensing her delicate architecture
Through his peripheral gaze.
He thought that somewhere,
In real or imaginary life,
They would soon bathe together.
And when they did,
They soaked for years in secrets,
Details suffusing through their lips and arms,
Water-hole satisfaction and moonlit deserts
To make them feel they might have transcended cabbages
And be pervading a rhapsodic realm
They forgot their friends watching in greenery,
Subsumed by each-other,
They felt no need
To live in a world of relativity and apples.
Their love-traced sphere tightened around them,
Until it ****** at the edges of their skin
And wailed when they parted.
Tighter it grew, elastic dug into their humid thighs
Contorting their once harmonic bodies
That used to fit like crosswords.
And they each became ugly to the other
As the seconds ingested their perfection
And they bickered like flailing urchins
In a deep sea soiled darkness.
Decisions were made and paroxysms detonated
And they were taken back by their
Fungal friends with tissue offerings
And ethanol.
Time passed, and memories were binned
Periodically on tuesdays
Until neither knew the other
And they would pass in the supermarket
With no more than a quickened gait
And a silent thud in each ribcage.

But neither could buy avocados.

Vernarth and his companions delighted in the company of the biosphere since he was in the Eclectic Spiritual Portal, and in this dimension only he could be. Later, they communicated only through his donkeys, when they wanted to send them messages or share with him, they mounted one of these equids and they could pass into this atmosphere of ultraviolet light that separated them. More than an egregious Pythagorean calculation, he already stood out in his eon of matter-spiritual energy Vernacentricus, as a quantum station of the geodesy of the Megaron that has already begun to be built. At this precious moment the secular and demiurge satellites of him arrive, they came with the foundation of the points to refer to definitively raise the Ultramundis Vernacentricus. From the Vóreios or boreal the apocalypse of San Juan will be intertestamental with the canons of Zefian that transmigrated from the powers from the transversal valleys of the Horcondising, essentially following the sensory track of the Nothofagus Obliqua to attract the iterated populations of the forest.
The patriarchs and the orthodox mountain range appeared in the cords of the fungi called Ambrosiella ceratocystidaceae, to provide the Ambrosia Mercurial, as a nutritional addition to the main pilasters of the temple, with great influence of fungal fungi. Everything was beginning to demarcate from the eruv of the Zefian arrow that was named Tetarto Vélos, or fourth arrow that was already beginning with its culminating operation with the borer beetles, demarcating the urev of the Vóreios throughout the region and on the oaks of Patmos, that began to be located from the Meli Witran Mapu Mapuche winds, beginning with Pikún-kürüf Northwind with the first two arrows of the Taxotas, and Sur Waiwén, of the Pezhetairoi, of the quantum of transmigration of the Horcondising-Panhellenic sub-mythology. Then the Puelche drags the borer beetles with more force to lift the uprising fungi of the Mandragoron by the eastern vertical, to culminate with the Lafkén-kürüf all attached to the axis that supports them from this great bilocation. The boreal is demarcated, so that the Necromancer Ezpatkul with his Augrum and gold teeth, twisted the tendency of the beetles to move the main columns of the frontispiece, being colossal in reality with twice the diameter of the central ones. Then the conclusive and posterior ones of the rectangular quadrant of the Beit Hamikdash were bilocated, to bilocate the Bern Olive Trees from Gethsemane so that they finally joined the Meltemi, and towards the aeolian winds of Tramontane Eolionimia falling on the Tekhelet of Paul of Tarsus, dropping relevant heights of some cranes with gravitating silt on their extremities, and with garbeas that were secondarily colonized on the banks of the desert areas of the rocky Hamada. As was previously proverbial, three birds climbed reflecting the crown of the kings in Bethlehem, Arriving at the sacred native city, and beginning the choirs of Nativity and passion for the hiss in tenuity on the twelve Giant Camels, where they paid special attention to rebuild another temple with a sigh greater than a Sheba Dean. The canon of Policleto was renewed with Zefian who agreed with San Juan, for this kanon that will be the relevant line of topographic surveying. Thus the basal measurements of the golden number will begin with the acroteria concerted summer seats of prosperity next to the Metopes. Ezpatkul would bring with his magic the red blood cells of Betelgeuse along Leiak with all the Templar three-dimensional morphology, naming this singular parapsychology of Pope Urban II who proclaimed the First Crusade at the Council of Clermont, in France, on November 27, 1095, to delineate the paradigm in the anatomy of Gaugamela bled into Vernarth's breastplate, as the archaic and first crusade that would inspire Christian supremacy, which was already anticipated before the Christian era to come. It will be visible gestures of the trajectory of the arrows of the Zefian Torah that were deposited with their hallelujahs from the ***** of Crete. The sulfur yellow and red blood cells marked the radiosity of the Eclectic Portal that opened to give Vernarth material egress, so he would take his tools and go with his donkey's escorts for the chromatic that will be sulfur yellow and red blood cells, both dependent on the complementation with the Cinnabar, and in the raised bodies of Court V of the Helleniká Necropolis in Kímolos.

Under vileness or absence of light among darkness or apocryphal light of Evil, in contrast to the robust equanimity of light and shadow partisan of Saint John the Apostle, for the hegemonic good of his incorruptible vision. The naturalness made the world apologetic with the immune defenses of the polish textures, they invoiced proportional mathematical measures ibidem of the Hommo Novis, and of the Geometric Pythagoreanism for a body seven and a half times of Polykleitos, starting from the base to the feet as the base of the plinth or frieze until reaching near the capital that exemplifies the chin, before reaching the cornice, highlighting the figure of the capital with the front of the proportional ligament between the trunk, and the columns duly. Here the seven-headed Kanon of a David would recite the measures of the psalms, or beads in degrees with hoped-for dimensions. The kinetics was earth towed by towing carts in tetra bronze arrows, which balanced the unbalanced balance and harmony of the created whole. The symmetry of the transverse poles was muscled to make kinetic centripetal in the inertia of the bolt when hitting the faint glow of the canon rays. Making himself the sustenance in the stone and the mound, towards the Vernarth counterpose when the Himathion was tried, he appeared disguised and in composing. After this initial task, they approached the fire and scalding water to **** herbs, which pretended to be the formula of the backhoe extracted from the palimpsest of the generals of Alexander the Great, when they distributed their illegitimate Ark with royal titles; they were Perdiccas, Antipater, Crátero, Eumenes de Cardia, and others like the satraps who came to be enunciated as kings; Antigonus, Ptolemy, and Seleucus. Residing only the most substantial military colleague of them in this parapsychological saga Vernarth; and his brother Etréstles de Kalavrita who seconded and predestined him in his monolithic, and in the constituent sovereignty of Polis, for the purpose of reigning and raising his Kopis and Xifos intertwined in aldehyde manumissions and in the alcoholic carbonyl residues emanated from the Backhoe ferment and Nepenthe, depositing LSD in substantial amounts to align itself with Seleucus, and materially present itself in the sphere of Patmos as two representatives of both empires, one ancient Christian and the other Panhellenic, placing Seleucus in that totalitarianism over that of Alexander the Great, now extinct. On the last day after working and being satisfied with the construction work of the frontispiece, and its major columns, Vernarth joins them after temporarily leaving the eclectic portal, they sit by the fire to review the plans of the subsequent construction process del Megaron, along with his seven donkeys, mentioning Borker's necromancy. Since the omens of Wontehlimar, the linemen before Borker became reigning, for the static balustrade that will surround the Megaron, where all the Ibics rings were enlisted chorally by the patronage of the Hellenic Orthodox legacy of Alexander the Great after he was rescued by Wonthelimar from Babylon, and finally take you to your physical and spiritual shelter. The eruv of the Nótos was demarcated, surpassing the limits of the rings of stefánes Íbix, or Hoops of ibix, like nano kvantikoí daktýlioi, Nano-Quantum Ring auguring sensitize the dermis and its carpal phalanges. From the intertestamental, such as in Vóreios, passages from the Old Testament are explored here that says…: “The temple that was the only legitimate sanctuary of the Israelite people contained within it the Ark of the Covenant, a golden altar, and candlesticks of the same metal. , a table with sacred loaves and other utensils used to carry out the worship of the god Yahveh. It was located on the esplanade of Mount Moriá, in the city of Jerusalem, possibly where the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque are located. From this dome the larnax of the Great Macedonian, a prioris, the schismatics of ancient Christianity, and orthodox Judaic will be derived, separating from each other, after the fall of the second temple. Of this class and previously this was detonated due to the undivided troops of the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II, who destroyed it in 586 BC, also taking captives a large part of the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Judah, to Mesopotamia, giving rise to the exile and captivity of the Hebrews in Babylon. A reflective Borker of this premonition, he takes the Ibics Rings and selects one of them to join them with the first Zefian Arrow, as nano Kvantikoí Daktýlioi, quantum Nano-ring, to ensue in future similar events, avoiding invasions that cause looting and destruction. of the temple to be built on Patmos.

Nano-scales for Borker's nanotechnological conception, and estimates of threats of invasions and climatic changes, in one billion (109) and one billionth (10-9). In a meter there are one billion nanometers or, in other words, a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. For those who will have to configure the dimensions of the Mandragoron "Temple of Vernarth" with carbon atoms, the support will be made in chemical units for the re-conception of nature, and its two- or three-dimensional networks. The nanotubes with 60 carbons, distributed in 20 hexagons and 12 pentagons, according to the geometric patterns of the cellular scale, in the conformation of the Hexagonal Primogeniture, being in this way concealed by the Ibics Rings, for each linear meter and cubic, traced by a nanometer which is one-billionth of a meter. Here, the borer beetles will catch the fungi ambrosiella ceratocystidaceae and will displace the virals that move geometrically from the beams of the Icosahedron.

The ranks of Falangists moved triangularly in multiple directions, to reach the Austral del Nótos de Borker, thus they would form the magic vectors of the polyhedron internally, triangulating at the top of the ram that carries an illustrious triangular phalanx, opening up the areas with its prop. vulnerable, to consolidate the buttress of the façade; the Áullos Kósmos, and pay homage to the apse that was filled with rejoicing. Sones of the philosopher Plato, made them regular or perfect in convex polyhedra, such that on all their faces were regular and equal polygons were made, and in all solid angles also equal. From this boulevard, the theology of Vernarth and Alexander the Great, fully professor and Platonic guide, will follow, making nomenclatures of nanostructures that affirm the volume and structure of the central sections of the radier, and their foundation bases shielded by the icosahedron in the nanotechnological scale, having physical material cells, for adaptation of structural changes and their environment.

The volume will be adapted microscopically, to analyze small particles with the return of the fourth arrow or Tetra Sagita of Zefian, absorbing nutrients and discarding the environmental threats based on carbon dioxide, to make a limiting membrane beauty, which moderates the nanoparticles that borer beetles were developing. The solidity of the partitions and walls will have the exact proportion of the nanomaterials, to adapt to the general area of the Mandragoron Nótos, which will ooze the surpluses due to the porosities, towards a volume highly resistant to invasions of limestone nanomaterials, and boulders that are made from the flow of the buttress of the apse that rises towards Aorion. The interior and exterior faces will be supplements of prayers of Prochoro, in didactics that will shield with the Antiphons Benedictus, and the hive of Plato's Icosahedron, becoming a consular material organism, and solid in interstices or leftovers from the feces of the Borers, until pasting and to reach the volume of the polyhedron, and its twenty faces pointing towards the physiognomy of the boulevard, tracing the general volume of the Mandragoron, and intercommunicating the quantum support and its theological harmony.

Says Borker: “if the organic cells operate with homage and with greater multicellular fields, here are the nanoparticles, in greater fields of fiatto, and in the slides that will recirculate in favor of the throat of the Mandragoron, and in the carbon nanotubes, essential elements of the biosphere and in useful layers of life that retrace the rest. There will be 20 linear meters in the area that lavishes the width and height, the projection of this scale of nanotechnology, will make the three-dimensional shape and a large voluminous serial in the Austral Nótos ”Vernarth's purging dimension, made him materialize at times and laugh out loud because he knew that everyone who was with him loved him! and from this fraction of faith, the Angel Raphael diagnoses them bread with archangelic essence; herb with great healing powers, especially in the dimension of the eclectic portal that allowed Vernarth to concern himself with material living beings.

Definitely, the second step of consolidation of the Megaron was established in the linear that the seven donkeys eagerly left, as masons and cabinetmakers who worked together with the Hexagonal Primogeniture. From this moment everything begins to have an inter-dimensional aspect, from the Invisible Eclectic Portal to the majestic geodesy and orography of this temple, which incorporated everyone for a charitable epiphany together with everyone in the Profitis Ilias, which was already crowned as the cusp Spiritual World of the Vernarthian Eclectic.

Pounding heads and churning guts lie
next to me on an old quilt under fleece
Still stuffy air enters heavy lungs and leaves
Coming over the hill behind the sea
was an overwhelming sight to see
Endless gray intersecting with sky
reflecting backward and forwards
where perspective meets the eye
Rotted plankwood will lead to demise
executed by jagged shore rock and waves
carrying one away to the ephemeral light
bobbing below the surface that fades
Out with the old days to make room for new,
recounting last year’s glaze
Remembering like it was yesterday
how sick you’d gotten so soon
A tender heart I’ll always have,
and an old, nurturing soul, too
Awakened by life with fresh eyes,
stimulating a walk to take with you

I know I've been there,
I've given into death and altered the fabric of reality
Every day we waste away transfixed by flattened images
Of the limitlessness of death
Coupled with elusive, Luciferian harm which will befall us all
Who subsist on the manipulated reality of the hyperspace information field
But one day, enlivened by the festivities of Shakori Hills
And the fungal spirits who awoke beside us
I walked the irreversible pathway through oblivion
Facing cruel destruction and terror
For a horrifying passage across Styx into eternity
And emerged within a crowd of mollusks dancing to the waves of a musical sea
All time suspended in the impossibly drawn-out ****** of the
Archetypal wizardry of rhythm,
The swirling clumps of faces in
Unshakable ecstasy
And seemingly responding to the wild currents of my conscious thought;
A longing for human touch drew the others closer and closer around me
Till they began brushing against me
Bumping into me,
The flow of the crowd saw its axis at my psychic emanation
As once more the last song of all time began with thunderous energy and applause.

I escaped the arresting confines of the crowd
By willing them aside, wearing, as I suddenly became aware, the shoes of Moses
And seeing my muddy feet upon the sands of Egypt
But I yet had no understanding
Of the nature of the garden of earthly delights
Into which I had fallen,
And fear began to envelop me,
Producing law enforcement officials hawklike swooping in to limit my power.
I had but to let go of my acceptance of their power over me to transcend them
But fear tethered me to reality,
Even as I saw about me a Dharmic mandala
Of my past present and future,
Generating inexplicable archetypes around me in a manner profoundly defiant
Of rational logic.

Synchronicity compounded upon me
As the Christos within me
Brought rain down upon us
Forcing us together and leaving me in dumbfounded reverie
Of all that had transpired to bring this moment forth

What had seemed to be the end of history was in fact
The awakening of a new rebirth
The first moment of coming to be
The union of past, present and future
As the reassuring smiles of my trustworthy disciples gently allowed me passage back into a rational existence
I beamed in utter gratitude for the eternal life which Christ afforded us.
Chaos had subsided back into normalcy
But still winked at me
In telepathic coincidence.

My soul has begun to realize that it resides in all things
Soon they are to be reintegrated

A ripened sky splits and bleeds
Mangled reds and blacks;
An instant melts as heat from
Clustered newborn suns --
Blistered from the wounds --
Collects and beams 1600 feet
Earthwards from Fat Man's
Plump and pompous underbelly.

The pure-light pin-***** stopped
The city's pulse for a moment;
Collecting remnants of the
Beating hearts (of artists,
Doctors, students, parents,
Preachers, rats, and peasants)
To plant on rotting soil -
A hellish fungal pustule.

The swelling abscess breathed
But once and burst to
Ripple excess outwards
Soaking up the landscape;
Ingesting miles and spewing
Spores towards septic skies to form
A mass of mushroomed
Might and pyrrhic triumph.

He heard a last echoed clink of liquor-laden ice-cubes,
Stuck between two stools that screamed for company,
I gazed across his vacant stare to the barman –the silent DJ,

Professionally ignorant as I gestured my hoarse thirst,
I waited a little minute, another minute an’ just one more,
Enter our businessman, full-schedule, long-hauled to drink,

With a rib-eye steak of a face an’ breath surely barbecued,
Two satisfied cheeks, pink-puffed with brows fit for burial,
Teeth ground with tension but brighter than the lighting

A fungal-lung nose perched upon a smile that I could smell,
He plumbed himself wet-shave close to my stiffened neck,  
“..Hana Drink..?” (Silence) best to follow the DJ’s example,

(Bullish huffs) (Lips licked) “.. Ya’ll wantin’ a drink, Mister?..”  
Flustered by the company, I replied “..Non, Je think eh Je chi..”
A retort of sorts, faux languages not my degree, “..Leaba..Bed!”

Spluttered just at the end – an insulting first impression,
He seemed nervously joyous, loosened from being himself,  
Yet his trouser belt buckled, pulled tight to conversation level,

An’ Redwood-trunk hands, alive with the latest deal struck,  
“..Bedtime for us..” he bare-bawled, splitting my weary eyes,
His numbed arm clumsily flung around me, “..bedtime for us!..”,

DJ unmuted, the music paused, I mouthed softly “..just the bill..”
(Silence)
“..Who’s Bill?.. a friend?…Is he cute?.. So this drink?” I panic still.

that you may read poetry without a tongue, with a plight
of sore eyes, of eager eyes, only eyes,
and shelter yourself from the rain
with a hand agreeing to greet it falling extended:
plucking mushrooms as you
might be reasonable meeting it with
umbrellas - but umbrellas
far beyond the flowery gutter of scent
and decaying ambition where the frugal
fungal arise like lechery of goblin ****
celebrated - some might add
a dice throw of Macadamia nuts -
eyed i too you the death-stinker;
this is the English revision of Zulu -
primitive tongue extended into abstract,
by those speaking English as foreign,
my English is an English reversed on
the colonialists - its a robbing tongue when
effectively used, with this in mind
i'm starting to think the Irish are bigger *****
than the Welsh even with the middle exported
as V into France and the longbow-men -
remember the antonym of German compounding
is the hyphen in English - optic talk -
failed rubrics of arithmetic for one,
failed rubrics of spelling the other -
i wish you knew English as well as you once
you knew Swahili - i actually wish you knew
Swahili ably talking to you grandparents...
i'm not your grandfather, even though
i wish he wishes he was -
you became gluttonous in tongue as they in body,
fat overdose from mono-linguistic apartheid -
you let them undermine the bilingualism
inherent in you... the Prussians
and the Russian and the Austrians never stole our
tongue... of course we devolved it borrowing
too many words, but loan nouns are never able to evolve
into slang, into urban talk that deconstructs nations,
where once was France now there's only Paris,
the same with England and London;
that you may read poetry without a tongue,
and make tongue read unto mind a Braille -
goosebump fidgety prickle - sour palette without
saying Thai in York - for the eyes to see the deformity
at hand, for the tongue to turn silent for one evening
alone, Venetian snares of the omni- eyed fake
entrusted with Cerberus' oath (only howl a wake
when your master Hades passes into the Styx for
voice of democratically reprimanding judgement over all
souls to arise from droplet into their own content
river form); for i too would have taken to resurrecting
the tongue, but the tongue was forgotten for a purpose
of agility in sports and un-thought poetics of excessive
rhyme, hardly the jazz, hardly the blues,
and hardly poetry - jazz i agree beyond measure a mint
cloud among the down-pouring heavy-clad-grey-clouds
of Mozart - i admit the blues the invigoration -
but rap? rap i just don't get.
me and this homeless man just laughed it off:
and i'm a Brazilian (blue tracksuit bottoms,
yellow t-shirt, green hoodie) - Eminem nemo Emo?
get the beach bleach out... we're going to stain those
starfish as coordinates' worth of horoscope... twirling
twirling twirling... cartwheels a'hoo a'hoo a'hoo ha hey.
i mean, sorry, i don't get the "hood" -
i don't get post-grunge either... i think i'm getting old -
and it's true what they say... the only black friend
was a drug dealer - wanted me to teach his daughter
to play the guitar... i said i listened to Bob Marley's sons
and he said i listened to culture -
racial stereotypes can be fun, i guess, if you're honest
about them... keen on the Illuminati,
so i said: anything better than Kubrick's eyes wide shut ******?
n'ah? hell, if it can't beat that, what's the interesting part?
or as i itemise the rewards the Koran states...
those 72 virgins... is that a metaphor for gym membership?
if you're a lazy drunk like me... the last thing
you want is 72 eager beavers.

U for Unilateralis Cordyceps. The fungus enters an ant's body through its respiration. It invades it's brain and changes how it perceives smell, because ants do everything they do from their smell of pheromones, right? So this microscopic little fungal spore, then makes the ant climb up the stem of a plant and bite ******* a leaf, with an abnormal force. The fungus then kills the ant, and continues to grow, leaving the ant's exoskeleton intact. So, a small fungus drives an ant around as a vehicle, uses it as food and shelter and then as the ultimate monument to itself. And when the fungus is ready to reproduce, its fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head and rupture releasing the spores, letting the wind carry them to more unsuspecting food. There, our entire idea of free will down the bin.

One single small fungus spore does that to an ant. You have trillions of bacteria in your body. How do you know where you end, and where your environment begins.

We invent God, soul... heaven, afterlife...even life-imitating technology, all sorts of transcendence to cope with the idea of an absolute end. And then, we die for an idea that promises us some sort of immortality.

The horizon's bending backwards,
stretching sideways 'cross a vision
of glimm'ring hieroglyphic superstitions.

My body's feeling heavy
but my psyche just won't let me
return alone into the void.

No voice can seem to reach me
although their pleas beseech me;
can't I stay right here a little more?

I'd never stop to question
this painless vivisection
of what my life is for.

She cried,
Oh, how she wept,
When she heard of the frogs who had died,
Of the deadly, fungal disease
which had already reached so wide
Only 8,
but she loved frogs,
like she loved herself,
Said she didn't want to wait,
til Heaven,
didn't want to live without them
It was hours before her tears would abate,
and days before she believed,
she hadn't been born too late.

Profitis Ilias

Zefian brought the Toxota and Pezhetairoi arrows; they were sovereign moldy points of the Bronze tips of the Taxota Archers and the Falangists. That in turn from the high sky formed a great pinwheel when the great dimension shone from the flat equinoctial sky, bumping the chins of Kaitelka, the dealer of the Parthenon lost, which rang the great bronze pine, and kilometers in length forming the makro koelum of Patmos; with vertices of the Pythagorean canon of Polykleitos. A large horizontal "V" was seen from Aorion's falling acrotera, projected in a bronze mega bolt coming from Betelgeuse's armpit, and forming a sidereal Vee, launched by the hunter Aorion from his constellation. This would be architectural form and Pythagorean canon-mathematical for purposes proportional to the Mandragoron. They fell from the four arrows that Zefian launched, from Crete that approached the contravening of Apollo, and Artemis towards an olive tree, originating in the arrows of Zefian, to mark the new cardinal points. Thus they began with two first sagites that are placed in the arc string, each one belonging north-south trajectories and the other two that were again violated with the eastern arc, to shoot the east-west arrows with southern magnetism limits. Three bolts are deposited in the canon of Polykleitos, and in the reticulum of the Pleiades that Aurion pursued.

The first two were Taxotas:

- North: Vóreios (Zefian Boreal)
- South: Nótos (Austral de Borker)

The last two were from Pezhetairoi:

- West: Dyticá (Sunset of Leiak)
- East: Aftó (Equinoctial of Kaitelka)

A - Zefian Vóreios

In the intertestamental of these egregious Pythagorean calculations, they stood out in the Vernacentricus, or extra automatism of foundation of the points to refer geodesics for the lifting of the Ultramundis Vernacentricus. From the Vóreios the Zefian canons are inter-testamented, which uses Horcondising forces, following the northern one of the Nothofagus Obliqua, essentially in the fungi of their trunks that paraded along the paths of the iterated populations of the Ezpatkul Forest; who was a servant who had remained from the last diaspora of the horcondising transmigrant by Joshua de Piedra, patriarch of the Orthodox mountains, and from the cordons of the Ambrosiella Ceratocystidaceae fungi, with a large proportion of the Ambrosia Mercurial, and of great influence from the fungal fungi, provided from the Legacy of Vernarth in Zefian to demarcate the northern boreal or Vóreios for the purpose that this Ezpatku, with its prominent Augrun or Gold teeth turned all the borer beetles demarcating the Vee of the Vóreios throughout the Horcondising region, bilocusing it in the borers of the Encinas de Patmos, with such frenzy... !, that from there they would extract the force of the Mapuche north winds from the Meli Witran Mapu, starting with the Pikún-kürüf North wind, first two arrows of the Taxotas, and South Waiwén, of the Pezhetairoi, of the quantum of transmigration of the sub-mythology of the Horcondising – Panhellenic. Then the Puelche that drags the borer beetles with more force to lift the uprising fungi of the Mandragoron by the East vertical, to culminate with the Lafkén-kürüf.

Zefian had enough time to mediate the ratio of Polykleitos to Ezpatkul. This Kanon or Canon will be of great relevance for the topography and survey of the temple, knowing that we must emphasize the perfection of the basal measurements, and the acrotera that will be suspended in the sensorial iconography of its forms, and in the star Betelgeuse giant with red blood cells, for the morphology of their own three-dimensional bodies, towards a comparatively human paradigm of Gaugamela anatomy bled in his pectoral, from here the Templar base of Megaron or Mandragoron began. Its size will be colossal but more ergonomic; it will be to redirect visuals of the Orion Belt, from where the fourth and last Zefian arrow was already on its way, to join the other three remaining from the Cretan *****, for the entire front of the façade Principal. The chromaticity will be sulfur yellow and red blood cells, both dependent on complementation with Cinnabar, and on the raised bodies of Court V of the Helleniká Necropolis in Kímolos. Under vileness or absence of light among the darkness, or of the apocryphal light of Evil, in contrast to the robust equanimity of light, and partisan shadow of Saint John the Apostle, for the hegemonic good and the incorruptible vision of him.

The naturalness made the world apologetic, and the immune defenses of the polish textures, invoiced proportional mathematical measures ibidem of the Hommo Novis, and of the Geometric Pythagoreanism for a body seven and a half times, starting from the base of the feet as the base of the plinth or frieze, until reaching near the capital that exemplifies the chin, before reaching the cornice, highlighting the figure of the capital with the front of the proportional ligament between the trunk, and the columns duly. Here the seven-headed Kanon of a David will declaim the measures of the psalms, counts in degrees, and sighing dimensions. The kinetics was earth towed by towing carts in tetra bronze arrows, which balanced the unbalanced balance and harmony of the created whole. The symmetry of the transverse poles was muscled to make kinetic centripetal in the inertia of the bolts as the faint glow of the canon rays struck. The stone of the mound was made of the sustentacular, and Vernarth's counterpose when the Himathion was tried, appearing disguised and in composing. In this way the movement and position of the muscles and of the figure in general of the human temple are portrayed, when pressing the third arrow of Zefian it adorned the consecutive cardinal points; in this position of the myriad, and their forces widened the line of sight of the Vernacentricus, dispersing the oblique line in forty-five degrees that would join with its right counterpart, in the middle of the radius that joined the central point destined where the fourth arrow would fall.

Zefian falling from the Belt of Aorion, destined to embed itself at the intersection of the next full moon. The volume of naturalism resembled the directive of Polykleitos, but it was far from his figurative geometric conception, being conceptualized by an intertestamental tendency of sub-mythology, and the Duoverse, which in turn was condescending of morphology by reestablishing a prehistoric figurative, which tended to be reflected in the similarity of an anachronistic contrast of the original morphism of the aesthetic universe, being retransformed into a sub-mythological Duoverso.

Time turns to liquid, rolling off my tongue like molasses
dripping technicolor drool, viewed through fungal lenses.

here the grass look up brunette trunks, branched arms flex their
form is calm, spindly fingers bloom their open palms
there they reach for spreading clouds
encapsulated sounds of gentle leaves, green noise
orange hues through cherry waves of grape and lemon, sweetened
pecks of the sun set in amber—morsels of melody, snipped bits of

things in canon
contrapuntal
sprouting airgerms
fugal, fungal

Part I

The fragile, forgotten arctic perseveres; the white snowy tundra wrapped in a blanket of darkness.

The buried threads of memory under hardened, ice plastered arctic waters.
Why always to be submerged? Can you feel the freezing?
As if only icebergs can gather the brine of the ocean to itself and never let go.

What does not return fungal and muddy in more corporeal climes travels toward the poles.
Is there an alternative to ice bound quiescence?
As if what has passed to the extremities of mind is not forever lost.

And so I follow the leads, swimming in the cracks of what forgetting has not claimed.
Will even these channels soon freeze over?
As life travels northward intent on testing the conditions of existence.

Part II

Under an icy sheet of polar sky; fissures of light weeping through an immovable, immeasurable surface.

The strongest force in the universe embeds the foundation of our undulating, fractured lives.
Does that which holds us together also keep us apart?
As light is held in tension between being and becoming, revealing and altering.

Our wavering hearts like solitary planets seek orbit around a suitable center.
Do we choose the star which gives light to our days?
As our gravity reels, heedlessly casting for moons or meteors in passage.

And so the hushed wall spreads a river of blazing reds and somber greens.
Do the gaps in our comprehension expand imagination or despair?
As memory embeds each frozen expanse, touching where the horizon unfolds.

May the furnace burn us
So that we might rise from crash's ashes
Like the Phoenix as Felix
Pounds out a bravado sonata
Something brash and passionate
Like abstract fashion it
Causes conundrums among tongues
Flapping, rolling, lapping, growing
Synaptic tactics mapping spastic
Canals through the fungal jungles
Of minds melting from psilosybin I been
Growing dendrites as my pen writes
Reaching Zen heights while the men fight.

You feel the burning within, no?
The festering of your morality?
There is nothing so infinitesimal as the meaning of your existence.
But don’t despair, child.
Fear is a construct of your own mind.
Will you conquer it? Or will you die like a dog?
Better to leave this world covered in blood than in tears.
Smear your shame on a canvas and call it art
When we all know that you cannot capitalize on your suffering
But I ask, do not stop
Watching you walk the fine line between reason and madness is tantalizing

I know you hate me, love.
I can feel your anger seethe from your body and ooze out of every pore.
Your mind rots from the fermenting emotions inside.
You want to carve me open.
Watch wine spill on the floor, coating everything in a sickly shade of red.
Shatter the glasses and pierce your skin
Blood is so bright, a stark contrast to the black and white nature of our vision
Splatter the walls in red, just to have something organic decorating your walls
Show the world the artist you are
Paint your face in your medium
Pick up your brush
Tears in your eyes, blurring your view
Can you finish the task?
Will you survive outside of this world?
Can you escape your own decay?

But it is getting late.
The sun is setting on many things, and you don’t have much time.
You cannot **** me in any way that matters, so stop trying.
I will always be with you.
A guide. Mapping the void for you.
So do not fret, dear.
Your soul will be dealt with the hour is right.
No god can save you from the fate I have in store for you.

Skyscrapers jut towards the heavens
middle fingers to Mother Nature
or sun-bleached white ribs of some poor beast
who tangoed with a toyota
and lost.

The stench that wafts through the streets could easily strip paint
but the locals don't seem to mind.
They march through their mundane Mondays
like maggots in goose-step.
The cacophony of their carrion communion is grisly and deafening.

Garish billboards burn
obscene advertisements onto assaulted retinas.
Street salesmen descend upon naive tourists
like vultures after fresh meat.

Policemen **** and pillage
what they were sworn to protect and serve,
and the Mayor's fungal tendrils
reach deep into the criminal underbelly of his city.

The voracious human hunger for wealth
knows no boundaries.
The grey-on-grey urban tragedy that is this concrete corpse
is always changing. Growing. Advancing.
however, it is not without waste.

Abandoned asphalt arteries stretch as far as the eye can see.
Somewhere, in a derelict parking lot, a flower is blooming.

We may spit in the face of Mother Nature
with every tree we cut and river we dam,
but soon she will be the one laughing
over our shattered
concrete
corpses.

you know, i abstract far enough to make the x, y, z
co-ordination seem as bewildering
as using a satellite navigation
without instruction,
i mean, i get to the point where it's
just automated,
i wonder about the applause and a
large crowd and feel uncomfortable,
i bite my nails and love the taste of
keratin - i remember when
she stole my trentemøller c.d.
with the silver surfer, ghost rider go!
track on it, while she wept and something else,
she loved playing video games,
i grew out of it, i started reading her dissertation
in anthropology and started making markers,
you know post-colonial anthropology will
be hard, it will have to learn a new humanism
by dehumanising psychiatry,
then i blind drummed the beat of
teenage mutants' out of time (finnebassen remix),
drummed or nodded, whatever,
i find it hard to encounter a clear narration
after i abstracted using points of departure,
chemist abstract to the point of
symbolic phonetics encapsulating something,
physicists abstract to the point
symbolic geometry, the mushrooms of hiroshima
and nagasaki left them a bit mute,
fungal shapes took over, as did the fascination
with creating a pop culture via these fungi
and l.s.d. tabs and creating the perfect
analogue of plato's cave: the television, almost
near perfect synchronised adventures...
these numbers are numbing,
you get a virtual crowd of 500 and still no
point to gig your outpouring out to an earning grace...
you could claim me being autistic,
but i wasn't the ****** that wanted to be impregnated,
i told you, condoms were priority, and pulling
out of a *******'s canalisation prior to
******* also, to boot,
if she was only better educated in the activity of ***
she would have the problem,
but it's like these days you have to appropriate
psychiatric terminology to say something
complex enough yet simple enough to simple
expressions, only because our understanding of the world
has become so complex that expressing politics has
become the plain jane of the studious environment...
politicians are liars, or so they boast in a wholly brass band
known as the salvation army...
to use psychiatric terminology to express emotion
is to deem fit a complexity of the emotion
naturally and simply expressed,
only because understanding the digestion of
a piggish carbohydrate chain took us from
congested, into acid poached squeamish -
or something akin to depressed rather than sad...
after all a punch in the face was not designated an
onomatopoeia... but a clean house kept to a ****
of hardly a brush stroke of dust with the finger by a woman,
was equal to a haphazard arrangement of ideas
by the male intellect, parody the two and you get the same,
a clean house via a women, a ***** arrangement of
intelligence via a man...
and indeed the zenith a necessary departure into
abstraction, donkeys counted the years of the problems
being unresolved, but what mammal brought the poet
back into a love of narration without third-party narratives
of a book of fiction? well, something with about
8 - 10 fingers, yes, in that range, two hands...
sometimes the index, sometimes the middle,
sometimes the pinky, and indeed the thumbs always welcome
to draw the shape, the shape akin to circle or triangle
of two hands prancing about on
q            w         e         r        t        y       u       i      o      p
   a              s         d        f        g         h       j       k      l
      z             x          c        v        b         n      m
indeed this grand chess board of alternative stenography,
the board of stenographic chess of thinking quick quick quick!
indeed, but what shape have i just drawn?
well, the poem i guess, and it's not exactly worth
you picking up syllable digestion to make your
tongue into a dagger, or fold it to make a parabola.

The meaning of the trustees and the ablution of the signs respectively were based on the word ficare "in the proportion of providing signs and building", as a complement to the concept, in the case of Zefian's Virola, it is given to the ring that rotates in its elliptical as a virtual particle, similar to the Muon. But always in a semantic ring or circle look. Linguistics will attribute both the Virola and the Fero; in this case "leading or leading" The dissociation here is the semantics in the object not entrenched to be used as a common kind of language, but rather as "Virolifero", it is understood that this word will forge the Zefian Arrow into the amalgamation of the ring that leads, to abduct all energies towards a Central Whole. The product of all this energy will be called channeling of the mental representations of the "sign" of signifying, evoking independence in each terminology by itself and represented, rather in the theological physical elementality, associated with the Virolifera plane.

As the treatise of this codex suggests, a term between terms, to assign mnemonic and etymological chaining of meaning most of the appropriation of terminologies attached to a properly vernacular word. The horizon that is stipulated is of a Vernathian nature, where the average life-turning receptacle is of enormous proportions in its multi dynamics, especially in the moral, ethical and theological, especially in matters of emotional articulation associated with a significant meaning. Vernarthian dreams are of Speed of Quantum Physics, therefore they are pure metaphysical and meta-biological, appending to restricted spaces of stimulus and impulse speed, hiding in the residual mass of the unknown, to attribute to them chromatics that is settled in the Corpus Callosum of both hemispheres. Neuroscience yes, but that deposits physical values in the concentration of rest and active energy in areas of the cerebellum, to unleash a choice of names or anthroponyms. Where all the names with a certain alacrity of reason, meaning is attached according to their toponymy, in this case, Virolifero, could be a factor of canceling choices and adaptation of higher energies, on the universe, as a patronage of the Universe "called Rings of Zefian ”endowed with electron elliptical Muon particles.

The signifier of Virolifero will be its phoneme, perhaps more associated with the subject being the ring, associated with its mental representation. This force of Vernarthian thought indicates semantics and phonetics of speculative endowment, for becoming of building rings associated with an eco-physical and eco-environmental scheme. The entire philosophical Vernarthian range has a Sacred Geometry in its verbal and numeral composition, either in the connotation of concepts-ideas and of signs that represent the mental cultural heritage.  Literality will advocate the chronology of gap and verbal-linguistic space, contributing figurative, Greco-Latin barbarisms, such as Virolifero's verbal vigor if we place it in the reference of a building ring, being able to be figurative as a ring that makes or leads according to its practical verbal use dialectical. And in context, it would appear as something sacred in what will be referred to in this Codex of Nuraga Complexes, where each fold of lithosphere will be of the geological relationship between Stonehenge or Nuraga in Sardinia, each one appropriating age in what could be more or less an archaeological conflict of origins, or of comparative aspects of the referenced union, for the end of times, nations, civilizations, political states, and generations of socio-economic persistence. Making an archaeological contextual fact as in these terms, of such references of reception or political exile, but also cultural, adding the terminology of the intracultural contribution of the region. In the argument of Pythagoras and his self-exile in Italy, it is said that he had been condemned to exile from Samos because of his aversion to the tyranny of Polycrates. Around 530 BC settled in Crotona, a Greek colony in southern Italy, where he founded a movement with religious, political, and philosophical purposes, known as Pythagoreanism, and which generated duplicity of context in his sacred mathematical pilgrimage, towards a process of exercise contrary to his own Pythagorean School, expropriating a persona non grata in internal conflicts with personalities from Crotona itself, where he had to flee later. Here ipso facto the verbal exercise exemplifies his transliteration by an unfailing fact, in favor of what emerges from a coercive task, abandoning the same in what placidly sheltered him, and virtually ostracized as an immigrant from Samos.

Hosted the Pythagoreans in Sardinia, Italy.  Being in the colorimetry of the 6th century BC. He was peering into a universe that wasted infusion, clinging to the unknown roots themselves, with undulating harmonies in what we inhabit as an ethical and religious wave and vibrational entity. The prefix Vilori will indicate sacred mathematics, adapting to the numeral and algorithmic harmony of three plus three + 1, which would be the suffix, Fero. The external exaltation of numerical sensations will lie in human sensations already pre-established as a socio-environmental existential order, towards a divine-human being. What is strictly formative is a sacred legacy, since its equivalence is composed of mathematical formulas and figures that all point to the creation of an ambivalent whole, upward and downward proportionate. Focusing on originality of thought and work, embodying the prose, prophecies,  and intensely solid parables.

Vernarth and Etréstles began the attached Rituals in these megalithic complexes. On each Solstice, they arranged sectarians related to this phenomenology, in such a way as to incorporate them into this millenary civilization. They always attacked the archaeological area of Orroli, which is in the center of the soft plateau of Pran'e muru, in a strategic position to control the territory along the middle course of the Flumendosa River. Normally here they performed twilight liturgies similar to those perpetually held in La Mandragora, Sudpichi, Horcondising Region - Chile. Vernarth, always got all the provisions and utensils off the sailboat. Pyramid Torches, Oil Fuels, Sacred Drums, Proved Firewood, Stonework for Obsidian Workshops. Mapuche  wind instruments such as Trutruca, Cultrún and trompe. Buzzers to repel zoomorphic beings of the Bestiary, Alchemy, and Esotericism. Etréstles, coordinated content and other related duties by illuminating all the souls who once lived here. To which Vernarth masterfully adhered, filing them with impressive themes of the prehistoric world. To consider more than five volumes by concept before departure, to then break into the sacred space and meaning, limpid and originating from the session of totem animals and trance with Navajo drums. Each oar looked like a Karibu daunting a maple or a conifer that wanted to change its bark skin for those of the goring of the Karibu or the Moose him. While the eagle with its claws dropped crashing down on the Rehue line to Gnegechen, on the Cultrun, whose plural palpitations of the mandrake wanted to seem to be more than a hallucinogenic thrilling herb.

Describes Vernarth in Regression of him: Theater and Aeschylus, Dance and Athena, gifts from Stonehenge and Borrehaugene in Norway on Viking ships. They walked over the suspicious stones of the Nuragas.  In each ritual in these sets, they concelebrated next to the gorges, through which said river ran, being globally submerged in two artificial lakes until today. A territory deeply marked by man since prehistory, confirming the extraordinary concentration of remains found; from the Neolithic to the Bronze and Iron Ages, Roman times, and the Middle Ages. The Arrubiu was the main bastion, around it, satellite Nuragas gravitated, dominating strategic points and access roads. Near the complex is the tomb of Giants from the Sword, here they would consecrate their dynamics of the Xiphos Hoplite sword, to develop the bronze rites,  as a heritage from the linear insertion of Sardinia with Patmos,  to which they will go after the Solstice from the Nuraga complex. In his prehistoric speeches, he always had to stand out and go back to years prior to 1000 BC. Today it has become the symbol of Sardinia and its distinctive culture. The typical Nuraga is located in a panoramic place and has the shape of a tower with a geometric shape of a truncated cone or divided in half, some higher, others very low, reminiscent of a Tholos (Ancient Greek circular construction). Right here Vernarth, they poured milk and Pranayama, to delineate the points of the Sun to align them with the whims of Brahma and Xifos; swords that are gleaming over the eyes of a stingray. Vernarth, as post-frontal poetry, in treachery that decorated such a hendecasyllable, undertook to rescue the largest real estate fire, from where his own subsistence will hang. In the main protocol, in a drumming trance, he pierced the brains of all those present. Fragments remained everywhere ever imagined, on the timeless Nuragha ruins under the treetops and their Templum. Misleading beings that attacked the underworld of Persephone, and the Nuragic Gods who were elemented, by prevailing in this ceremony that they did not know if it was their own, not knowing that they were included.

Isaías sings (bis): “The presence in the corresponding versed folio makes it relative to the prophecy of the Immanuel born of a ******, which is associated with a similar Virgilian prophecy of Cumana, justifying its prophetic symbolism. Here is the warning that blackens the skies where the light retracts, thousands of attendants in the Nuragas are chained during the announcement of a thousandth that climbs abysses like the fateful Strigoi, and only tribulated pasture will have to transplant rebellions, which lie asleep for the wind of the ideal of incipient spiritual ******* dressed in execration. Has the conflagration of the heart that resists death and agonizes several times in the Templum ritual been unleashed ... The conditions await for the apostates when they refuse the water that does not make them optimal, and makes the radius of obedience of the Vernarthian heart elliptical, full of granules of lumpy Physconia, whose frequency will become embedded in bodies of treacherous, kingdoms and fungal lineages. The reign of the saints will judge diversity on the thrones with devastation in the fatuous beatifications in Pergamum, already admonished by me also in Sardinia”

The wet lichen
and I
sit upon the dew-slicked
outcrop of boulder bits -
both preternaturally verdure

Each seeking solace in the
space
each seeking what we need from
air
Inclined to commune here, both
'til
the sunrays fade-
my companion soaking sun from
without
and I, I seek a subtler, silent
inner light

We two ourselves
had thought perhaps
to sitstill alone
here
And having found (of course,
of course) a fellow
sit-seeker here
changed course (of course)
and sat astride this
same (but not for long,
only for long) stone

What'd've been an I
(grumble,sigh)
was now a we you see
and I, as well was never
only I but, rather I
as I'd not yet known
and my body and its songs

The lichen too
composed
of two
sat as seeming One
but was as much
a fibrous mesh of fungal
strands sit-seeking
along with its
(not hosted but self-same self)
algal (not plant, not animal; not
either, not both) or cyanobacterial
bits of cells and life material

So together, apart and as much
as One
we looked down
in late-October dawn
into the pond
(to see the sun's rise and blush)
and each and both of us
hoped then to find and feel our Light

Then, through the rising
warm mists,
I sought the Sky -
cloud-filled with cattails’ tufts
and there at last
(of course)
through the irreal fog
(annihilated obnubilation)
I saw the fog
and clouds as One

We two, too
were One.

Sleepy September rain
pretending life isn't busy
Standing still on slippery edge
Taking in foggy city view
Of little senators and harpies
Playing house of cards
All so quiet up here
On newly constructed condo roof
Little ant people climbing up
Towards the light with fungal parasites
protruding from wet open wounds

Unaware of the blood that runs through the cracks, among the withered corpses that lay beneath them

Denial is a foul drug, it is not mended by intervention, it isn’t removed by honesty

It is expediated by horror, it is exorcised by the blood drenched enlighenment

For honesty doesn’t cure it anymore, denial has evolved beyond the scope of reason

It has grown legs, it speaks as it pleases, it preaches as it pleases

It gains power and leads the ill informed to become its pawns

It is a mighty sick creature, a disgusting ooze that seeps into the minds of the unlucky

Denial is a fungal disease, it spreads its spores to all human life

It is chaos, and seeks to destroy

This is the way of denial

And ****** to those that help denial, for they become the sickness as well

listen to them wingmongers
circling round
squawking about how
there be tiny cities on the ground
moss barble asphalt
laid down
betwixt twig-mud megatowers
architecture of invisible sound
leaves decomposing, ants scurrying
spider weaving her web,
connecting flowers like power
lines buzzing beetles hurrying
all the way down the naturebound
highway,
off-ramps to the nine burrows
past the dead squirrel,
through the downpour
of fungal spores more
self-sustainable than any city of yours,
screech the wingmongers,
and from dirt level
i understand their song
these tiny cities will be
long past
when our civilization's long gone

you touched your wrists
to mine
and a rash blossomed
across my skin
red and dry
ran across  
indigo hills
fields of turned-over soil
in the night-time
to cool my
strangled sweat
to find a sink
a light in the kitchen.

im sorry, i promise
i'll buy a slice
i just need to use your sink, please.

fluorescent-white
heat
i put the water on the hottest setting
and i scrub and
scrub, and scrub
fast, and hard
i rinse the raw
i leave.

when I wake up
for all my scrubbing
the rippling rash, the buds
are still there
under my skin.
a lone fungal stalk
of crimson
a fruiting body
rises from my wrist.

this does not belong
here
like a broken bone
bending in the wrong direction
under the skin
like the voice on
the other end of the line
this is not real

A home of fallen dreams
and wishes made upon dead stars
of feathers and fungal dreams
brushing gently your tendril wings
rearranging your wisps of hair
like ghostly fingers
in thin air

We’re all friends
By miracle, so soon
Comrades by the break of dawn
And strangers by noon,
As sure as the seasons
And predictable like rain
You can watch it with certainty
As a waxing moon wanes.
And when they’re gone
Entreaties refused to deign
--Like you’re an ugly growth
Or some fungal pain—
Then acknowledge a scale tipped
And gifts, given and got
The fair trade or
Reciprocation that it is not.
And how sad, and self-prophesied
The nature of ‘friend’
It teaches us that what begins
Is surely bound to end.

ingredients were chopped
cleanly, neatly
with care
cutting tools were pre-sterilized
and pre-packaged
then wiped clean after use
he arrived in blue scrubs
and donned blue nitrile gloves
for mutual protection
it had been a while for her
her nails were long
she sat in an easy chair
with her feet up on an ottoman
a towel was spread before he began
to make clean up easier
the scent of an alcohol wipe
wafted as he worked
little did he know
we would finish what he started
after he left we gathered up the clippings
thick and fungal
we put them in a *** to boil
with sautéed celery, onions and seasonings
salt and pepper to taste
hmmmmm...delicious, home made
toe nail soup!

Ezra clamber’d o’er the crest
to seek the way which he knew best
which, passing by the yellow tares
and turning at a grove of pears
set him at ancient fungal oak
where upon a branch he hung his cloak

For on some odd-nights within his mare
declared a warlock and his maiden fair:

“Spindled by the peary copse
after fields of shammy crops
stands that vile toady oak
shading torpid mystic folk

“Percieveth thee the one with warty beak?
‘Tis to him whom you must speak.
Rouse him from his slumber, Ezra,
pray of him your task."

The wizard with the moley snout
reclining with a snoozy pout
snored upward from that moldy bark
and whispered “yonder peasant, hark!

“Ezra, deary, there’s a bane
The shepherds hold in some disdain
for sheps can’t herd bereft of sheep
and this bane ingests them in their sleep.
Do ******* hip your faithful blade
and into swampy depths do wade
so to provoke this shepherd's foe
and smite him lifeless head to toe.”