The Neverending Story (25 page)

From the new seeds grew other plants, but these had different shapes. Some were like ferns or small palms, others like cacti, bullrushes, or gnarled trees. Each glowed a different color.

Soon the velvety darkness all around Bastian and Moon Child, over and under them and on every side, was filled with rapidly growing luminous plants. A globe of radiant colors, a new, luminous world hovered in the Nowhere, and grew and grew. And in its innermost center Bastian and Moon Child sat hand in hand, looking around them with eyes of wonder.

Unceasingly new shapes and colors appeared. Larger and larger blossoms opened, richer and richer clusters formed. And all this in total silence.

Soon some of the plants were as big as fruit trees. There were fans of long emerald-green leaves, flowers resembling peacock tails with rainbow-colored eyes, pagodas consisting of superimposed umbrellas of violet silk. Thick stems were interwoven like braids. Since they were transparent, they looked like pink glass lit up from within. Some of the blooms looked like clusters of blue and yellow Japanese lanterns. And little by little, as the luminous night growth grew denser, they intertwined to form a tissue of soft light.

“You must give all this a name,” Moon Child whispered. Bastian nodded.

“Perilin, the Night Forest,” he said.

He looked into the Childlike Empress’s eyes. And once again, as at their first exchange of glances, he sat spellbound, unable to take his eyes off her. The first time she had been deathly ill. Now she was much, much more beautiful. Her torn gown was whole again, the soft-colored light played over the pure whiteness of the silk and of her long hair. His wish had come true.

Bastian’s eyes swam. “Moon Child,” he stammered. “Are you well again?”

She smiled, “Can’t you see that I am?”

“I wish everything would stay like this forever,” he said.

“The moment is forever,” she replied.

Bastian was silent. He didn’t understand what she had said, but he was in no mood to puzzle it out. He wanted only to sit there looking at her.

Little by little the thicket of luminous plants had formed a thick hedge around them. As though imprisoned in a tent of magic carpets, Bastian paid no attention to what was happening outside. He didn’t realize that Perilin was growing and growing, that each and every plant was getting big or bigger. Seeds no bigger than sparks kept raining down and sprouted as they hit the ground.

Bastian sat gazing at Moon Child. He had eyes for nothing else.

He could not have said how much time had passed when Moon Child put her hand over his eyes.

“Why did you keep me waiting so long?” he heard her ask. “Why did you make me go to the Old Man of Wandering Mountain? Why didn’t you come when I called?”

Bastian gulped.

“It was because,” he stammered, “I thought—all sorts of reasons—fear—well, to tell you the truth, I was ashamed to let you see me.”

She withdrew her hand and looked at him in amazement.

“Ashamed? Why?”

“B-because,” Bastian stammered, “you—you must have expected somebody who was right for you.”

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. “Aren’t you right for me?”

Bastian felt that he was blushing. “I mean,” he said, “somebody strong and brave and handsome—maybe a prince—anyway, not someone like me.”

He couldn’t see her, for he had lowered his eyes, but again he heard her soft lilting

laugh.

“You see,” he said. “Now you’re laughing at me.”

There was a long silence, and when Bastian finally brought himself to look up, he saw that she was bending very close to him. Her face was grave.

“Let me show you something, my Bastian,” she said. “Look into my eyes.”

Bastian obeyed, though his heart was pounding and he felt dizzy.

In the golden mirror of her eyes, he saw, small at first as though far in the distance, a reflection which little by little grew larger and more distinct. It was a boy of about his own age; but this boy was slender and wonderfully handsome. His bearing was proud and erect, his face was noble, manly—and lean. He looked like a young prince from the Orient. His turban was of blue silk and so was the silver-embroidered tunic which reached down to his knees. His high boots, made of the softest red leather, were turned up at the toes. And he was wearing a silver-glittering mantle which hung down to the ground. But most beautiful of all were the boy’s hands, which, though delicately shaped, gave an impression of unusual strength.

Bastian gazed at the image with wonder and admiration. He couldn’t get enough of it. He was just going to ask who this handsome young prince might be when it came to him in a flash that this was his very own self—his reflection in Moon Child’s golden eyes.

In that moment he was transported, carried out of himself, and when he returned, he found he had become the handsome boy whose image he had seen.

He looked down, and saw exactly what he had seen in Moon Child’s eyes: the soft, red-leather boots, the blue tunic embroidered with silver, the resplendent long mantle. He touched his turban and felt his face. His face was the same too.

And then he turned toward Moon Child.

She was gone!

He was alone in the round room which the glowing thicket had formed.

“Moon Child!” he shouted. “Moon Child!” There was no answer.

Feeling utterly lost, he sat down. What was he to do now? Why had she left him alone? Where should he go—that is, if he was free to go anywhere, if he wasn’t caught in a trap?

While he was wondering why Moon Child should have vanished without a word of explanation, without so much as bidding him goodbye, his fingers started playing with a golden medallion that was hanging from his neck.

He looked at it and let out a cry of surprise.

It was AURYN, the Gem, the Childlike Empress’s amulet, which made its bearer her representative. Moon Child had given him power over every creature and thing in Fantastica. And as long as he wore that emblem, it would be as though she were with him.

For a long while Bastian looked at the two snakes, the one light, the other dark, which were biting each other’s tail, and formed an oval. Then he turned the amulet over and to his surprise found an inscription on the reverse side. It consisted of four words in strangely intricate letters:

Do
What You
Wish

There had been no mention of such an inscription in the Neverending Story. Could it be that Atreyu hadn’t noticed it?

But that didn’t matter now. What mattered was that the words gave him permission, ordered him in fact, to do whatever he pleased.

Bastian approached the wall of luminous plants to see if he could slip through somewhere. To his delight he found that the wall could easily be thrust aside like a curtain. Out he stepped.

In the meantime, the night plants had kept on growing, gently but irresistibly, and Perilin had become a forest such as no human eye had ever beheld.

The great trunks were now as high and thick as church towers, and still growing. In places these shimmering, milky-white pillars were so close together that it was impossible to pass between them. And seeds were still falling like a shower of sparks.

On his way through the luminous forest, Bastian tried hard not to step on the glittering seeds that lay on the ground, but this soon proved impossible. There simply wasn’t a foot’s breadth of ground from which nothing was sprouting. So he stopped worrying and went wherever the giant trees left a path open for him.

Bastian was delighted at being handsome. It didn’t bother him that there was no one to admire him. On the contrary, he was glad to have the pleasure all to himself. He didn’t care a fig for being admired by the lugs who had always made fun of him. If he thought of them at all, it was almost with pity.

In this forest, where there were no seasons and no alternation of day and night, the feeling of time was entirely different from anything Bastian had ever known. He had no idea how long he had been on his way. But little by little his pleasure in being handsome underwent a change. He began to take it for granted. Not that he was any less happy about it; but now he had the feeling that he had never been any different.

For this there was a reason which Bastian was not to discover until much later. The beauty that had been bestowed on him made him forget, little by little, that he had ever been fat and bowlegged.

Even if he had known what was happening, he would hardly have regretted the loss of this particular memory. As it happened, he didn’t even realize that he had forgotten anything. And when the memory had vanished completely, it seemed to him that he had always been as handsome as he was now.

At that point a new wish cropped up. Just being handsome wasn’t as wonderful as he had thought. He also wanted to be strong, stronger than anybody! The strongest in the world!

While going deeper and deeper into the Night Forest, he began to feel hungry. He picked off a few of the strangely shaped luminous fruits and nibbled gingerly to see if they were edible. Edible was no word for it; some were tart, some sweet, some slightly bitter, but all were delicious. He ate as he walked, and felt a miraculous strength flowing into his limbs.

In the meantime the glowing underbrush around him had become so dense that it cut off his view on all sides. To make matters worse, lianas and aerial roots were becoming inextricably tangled with the thicket below. Slashing with the side of his hand as if it had been a machete, Bastian opened up a passage. And the breach closed directly behind him as if it had never been.

On he went, but the wall of giant tree trunks blocked his path. Bastian grabbed hold of two great tree trunks and bent them apart. When he had passed through, the wall closed soundlessly behind him.

Bastian shouted for joy.

He was the Lord of the Jungle!

For a while he amused himself opening paths for himself, like an elephant that has heard the Great Call. His strength did not abate, he had no need to stop for breath. He felt no stitch in his side, and his heart didn’t thump or race.

But after a while he wearied of his new sport. The next thing he wanted was to look down on his domain from above, to see how big it was.

He spat on his hands, took hold of a liana, and pulled himself up hand over hand, without using his legs, as he had seen acrobats do in the circus. For a moment a vision—a pale memory of the past—came to him of himself in gym class, dangling like a sack of flour from the bottommost end of the rope, while the rest of the class cackled with glee. He couldn’t help smiling. How they would gape if they saw him now! They’d be proud to know him. But he wouldn’t even look at them.

Without stopping once he finally reached the branch from which the liana was hanging, climbed up and straddled it. The branch gave off a red glow. He stood up and, balancing himself like a tightrope walker, made his way to the trunk. Here again a dense tangle of creepers barred his way, but he had no difficulty in opening up a passage through it.

At that height the trunk was still so thick that five men clasping hands could not have encircled it. Another, somewhat higher branch, jutting from the trunk in a different direction, was beyond his reach. So he leapt through the air, caught hold of an aerial root, swung himself into place, made another perilous leap, and grabbed the higher branch. From there he was able to pull himself up to a still higher one. By then he was high above the ground, at least three hundred feet, but the glowing branches and foliage still obstructed his view.

Not until he had climbed to twice that height were there occasional spaces through which he could look around. But then the going became difficult, because there were fewer and fewer branches. And at last, when he had almost reached the top, he had to stop, for there was nothing to hold on to but the smooth, bare trunk, which was still as thick as a telegraph pole.

Bastian looked up and saw that the trunk or stalk ended some fifty feet higher up in an enormous, glowing, dark-red blossom. He didn’t see how he could ever reach it, but he had to keep going, for he couldn’t very well stay where he was. He threw his arms around the trunk and climbed the last fifty feet like an acrobat. The trunk swayed and bent like a blade of grass in the wind.

At length he was directly below the blossom, which was open at the top like a tulip. He managed to slip one hand between two of the petals and take hold. Then, pushing the petals wide apart, he pulled himself up.

For a moment he lay there, for by then he was somewhat out of breath. But then he stood up and looked over the edge of the great, glowing blossom, as from the crow’s nest of a ship.

The tree he had climbed was one of the tallest in the whole jungle and he was able to see far into the distance. Above him he still saw the velvety darkness of a starless night sky, but below him, as far as he could see, the treetops of Perilin presented a play of color that took his breath away.

For a long time Bastian stood there, drinking in the sight. This was his domain! He had created it! He was the lord of Perilin.

And once again he shouted for joy!