All Living : A Seedvision Saga (9781621473923) (19 page)

Home was like nothing Kole could ever have imagined, mostly because at first glance he didn’t see anything. The woods that they had been walking through ended at a broad, grassy plain. Low hills dotted the landscape, and the stream that they had been following meandered between them. A few trees, hundreds of cubits tall, with thick, brown trunks and lush crowns of leaves shaded large circles of the verdant meadow. Small herds of animals could be seen off in the distance grazing on the waist-deep grasses and grains. A few of them lifted their heads to watch the arrival of Adam and his family, then dipped their heads back down to continue their meal. Low, stone walls snaked and coiled as if they had a mind of their own, shedding their thick, gray skins on the turf. Here and there Kole saw columns and pillars of thin smoke rising up from the tops of several hills as if the earth was on fire within. That illusion was not so far from the truth.

“What do you think, son?” asked Adam.

“Of what, Father?” replied Kole

“Home.”

“I’m not sure what I’m looking at, Abba,” Kole answered truthfully, gently setting down the log, and rubbing his tired shoulder.

Adam laughed. “We have tried to maintain the appearance of the meadow, Kole, and apparently we have done an adequate job. When your mother and I first laid eyes on this valley, we were smitten with the natural beauty that the Lord had wrought here and were reluctant to spoil it. Thus, we have dug out our homes beneath the soil and what shelters we have built we have covered with sod. Come, let me show you.”

As the rest of the family began to scatter around the area, disappearing into cleverly hidden holes in the ground or greeting those who had been left behind to tend to the place, Adam led Kole toward the center of the broad meadow. Rounding a small, treeless hill, the ground sloped down gently and Kole found himself looking at a solid door made of flat wood and colored a deep, rich blue.

“Are there blue trees around here?” asked Kole, looking around in bewilderment.

“Ah, the door, yes. Beautiful, isn’t it? Your mother and some of the others spent a lot of time working berry juice into that wood until it successfully stained it the color that you now see before you.”

Kole stepped up closer and saw that around the edges were intricate carvings of animals and birds and fish, trees and high hills, waterfalls and people. “These are amazing, Father. You?”

“Ah no, not me. I have some skill as a carver of wood, but it’s your younger brother who crafted these designs.”

“They are all my younger brothers, Father.”

Adam laughed. “So they are. It is Jorel I am speaking of.”

“From the fist, fingers, flathand game this morning?”

“Indeed. He is quite artistic and highly intelligent. That’s probably why he dominates the game so often. He can come across as a bit condescending to those he feels are his inferiors, which is most everyone,” Adam sighed, “but he is loyal to a fault toward those he perceives as his betters. I fear you may have picked up a second shadow in that one, Kole,” Adam said, indicating with a nod the brother in question standing not too far off, watching the two of them with something akin to admiration.

“Well, there are worse ways for brothers to feel toward one another,” said Kole, raising an eyebrow toward Adam.

“There are at that,” replied his father. “I suppose it is a heavy burden to anticipate your upcoming confrontation with Cain? I can see it in your eyes that you feel you must.”

“I must.”

“I assumed as much. I would hope that you would welcome a bit of wisdom that I have gleaned over the years, Kole.”

“I would.”

“I know the feelings you held, hold, for Kesitah. I too loved her, as a daughter, yet none-the-less anguished to see her go, unhappy as she was. I too miss Abel and think of him often. I too hold dark thoughts toward Cain at times. Thoughts I have shared with no one, including your mother. Yet, there is a way that seems right to a man, but at the end of that path is death. The only way to fully appreciate this life that the Lord has graciously blessed us with is to show the kind of love and mercy that we hope to have from Him. Can you do that, Kole? Can you forgive your brother and work toward the Creator’s plan for peace and abundant well-being.”

“I want to, Father, yet I find my thoughts wanting two very different things. I want the Lord’s way, and yet it seems this news has set my feet upon a path that could lead anywhere. I cannot see the future, Father, but I fear the sun is already setting. The days seem to darken and the shadows to lengthen around me.”

Adam stood with his hand on the latch, pausing before he opened the door. “Kole, the sun will set but it will also rise again. Remember that our Creator is the star of the morning. You must set your sights on him and allow the darkness to mourn its own death. Ours is not a substance of shadow but of light and tranquility.”

“I will ponder your words, Father. Even now I sense the clarity in them at the edges of my understanding yet lack the experience to fully grasp the depth of wisdom you are holding out to me.”

“It will be enough, Son,” Adam reassured him, laying a hand lightly on his shoulder then opening the door.

“You are welcome to stay here with your mother and me,” Adam said, gesturing him inside, “at least until we’ve had time to make you a place of your own.”

The interior of the room was spacious and neat. As Kole entered, he ducked his head instinctively even though the opening of the door was a good span higher than his head. It was not an earthen enclosure as he had suspected. Not a cold, dirty hole in the ground crawling with bugs and worms.

The walls of the room were paneled with thick slabs of cedar and pine alternated to give a striped appearance of light and shadow. It smelled warm, rich, earthy despite being unused for a fistful of days. Tanned animal skins draped the walls in various places and lay scattered about the floor in thick piles. Clay jars and pots lined shelves along three walls, stoppered with clay lids and wax plugs. A circular, stone-lined firepit took up most of the space along the back wall, and Kole noticed a thin shaft of light coming through a hole in the ceiling.

“To let the smoke out and the light in,” said Adam to the unasked question in his eyes.

From the ceiling hung braids of dried herbs and flowers, vegetables and fruits, a colorful display that pleased the eyes and nose with equal favor. A spicy scent permeated the air and set Kole’s stomach to growling.

“Let’s wash up,” said Adam, “and see what we can find to eat. It was a long walk today.”

They feasted on leftover venison from the previous evening’s meal; warmed up over a central cook fire, the deer steak was the first that Kole had eaten in over a hundred years and tasted delicious. Somehow he had overlooked the succulent chunks of meat the night before but he didn’t mind. He suspected they tasted even better now, on the second day, hot and crispy on the edges, juicy and flavored with salt and garlic and wild onions. He alternated bites between the meat and a wonderful root vegetable that he had never tried before called a potato.

A variety of people came by to chat with him, to show him things, or to ask him questions. It seemed there was no end to his relatives’ curiosity about the garden in Eden. He answered as best he could, supplied as many details as he had to offer, trying but falling short of describing the grandeur that the Creator had imagined and willed into being.

Somewhere midway through his meal he found himself alone, sitting cross-legged on the ground some distance from the camp’s fire, shadowed and still. He let his gaze roam through the crowds of people, enjoying their laughter and idle banter.

As happened occasionally when he was not engaged in direct thought, his mind drifted away from himself, his eyes unfocused, and he found himself immersed in the secondary sight that he had periodically experienced, a “sight” that involved more hearing than seeing. Of course he noted the soft auras of light that seemed to emanate from everything. Pale and hazy light of all colors and some of color he had no name for. Vibrant light as well, soft and cool or hot and pulsating.

He assumed the light must have meaning, must have definition, but as yet he had no basis to determine if different shades of blue meant different intensities of emotion or if subtle variations of red implied happy or angry. It was the sound, the music of every created thing that more meaningfully washed over him in a gentle surge—blending, fading, rising to a crescendo, and slipping away.

He still heard the sound of the voices, but now he also heard the music of their being, similar tunes that he identified as a human, composed of so many smaller scores of sound, each emanating from the individual parts of the body, each in its own way, unique to that life. He heard too the sound of the wind sighing through the grass, but now he heard the grass as well, singing its small green song of life, each blade offering its own individual tone, yet one singular sound itself, meaning “I am grass,” and also “I praise my Creator.” It seemed that all of creation sang that same praise to the Ancient of Days, and yet in each thing, grass, bush, tree, there was a sour note as well, very subtle and hard to detect, that seemed to be groaning as if waiting for some revealing.

Kole listened and heard the music of insects. Not just the sounds that they made with their body parts, but the sounds of their bodies; the sounds of their life that no one else seemed to be aware of. He spread his own awareness further and felt the hills, the sound of their being like lambs leaping. He found other hills that lacked this exuberant song and realized that these were not hills after all but mounds that had been built over the homes of his family. Kole frowned.

He had not realized before now how the things made of man, the domination over the natural state of things, lacked the inherent beauty of original song, although his mind had hinted at it when he’d listened for the sound of the log boat earlier in the day. It seemed as if the Creator had supplied each drop of life with its own inherent harmony, a feat that humans had not been able to achieve, in part because they had no idea that such a level of being existed. Kole focused on one silent mound. He aimed his awareness at it and heard nothing from it as a whole. He heard its parts, the grass over the structure, growing in a shallow layer of earth. He heard the faint and fading sound of the wood that was used in its construction, of the vines that bound the logs together, but there was no unifying melody of oneness.

Kole knew what the hill should sound like, if indeed it had been a normal hill. He could hear the other hills around him silently singing their own songs. Kole focused on the home in the hill. He unconsciously began to sing the song of a true hill to it, not aloud but within the confines of the silence in his mind. He could hear, and he alone, the sound of the song that he knew would be its inheritance from the Creator, if indeed the Creator had made it. His whole will was directed at the pile of earth and at the structure within it, his mind began to weave around it the song that it would have sung had it not been an orphan of creation, an imitation of the Creator’s eternal imagination. He sang inside his own thoughts and the sound was beautiful, overwhelming, and wonderful. He sang praise to the Creator, “I am hill, and I praise my Creator.” He sang without making a sound until sound was all he heard in his mind. Until one sound in particular pierced his hearing and pulled him out of his trance. Someone screamed.

Jarred out of his reverie, Kole watched as people fled in one direction away from the hill that he had been singing to. He watched in numb horror as the hill folded in on itself and collapsed upon the structure within. Dirt and a choking cloud of dust rolled over the people who sat or stood too close and nearly doused the central fire. Mothers grabbed children, and men grabbed women and pulled them to a safer distance. The sharp cracking of logs was heard and the rumble of earth and stone falling together drowned out the collective gasping of the people. Someone grabbed him by the elbow. “Kole, move back.”

It was his father.

“What’s happening?” asked Kole.

“One of the shelters just collapsed in on itself. I’m not sure why. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

A fear gripped Kole like an icy fist.

“Where’s Cayel?” yelled a young woman. She had long hair that had been pulled back and braided; a yellow flower was tucked behind each ear. “I can’t find Cayel,” she screamed again.

“He was in the hut,” said another girl, near tears.

Adam sprang into action. He lunged at the area where the door used to be, flinging debris right and left. “Come on,” he shouted, “clear this rubble out.” Several men and women ran up to help, Kole among them. They dug frantically, pulling rocks and clumps of dirt out with their bare hands. One man, it was Jared, the brother he had first met on his path back from the garden, sprinted up with a large, flat stone secured to a pole. “Let me in here,” he screamed.

People moved aside, and he started digging furiously. Several others grabbed shallow clay bowls and started scooping out the loose soil. Soon they had a good-sized hole dug in the side of the collapsed structure.