These Shadows Remain (12 page)

The castle had a new intensity of design. Its extensions, its elaborated shapes, were radiant with the same glow Tomas saw on Miranda's skin.

He stopped, surveying the scene. 

Gabrielle and Santiago slowed their pace, seeing too that this wasn't the place they had left. Adina seemed eager to get on, towards the gate, and to that bath she craved, though she too noted that the castle had become grander with a radiance that rivalled the luminous screens they'd left behind.

*

Tomas shielded his eyes. Suddenly there was too much energy. It was as if the castle was glowing in triumph.

He tried to remember other places where he'd seen such a vibrant emptiness.

In his dream, he saw it there, after the column of air had vanished into crackling immensity. It had the brilliant whiteness of screens just before the projections or emanations.

What exchanges had taken place? What sharing of knowledge? Maybe traces of each form of being had been left on the other. Maybe the images had taken a piece of the human, and the humans bore the images' mark.

Tomas looked down at the forest from where they had come. He saw a fluttering in the leaves, a darting between branches. Then there was the presence, the one that had not been the children, or Adina, the other that never materialized yet had impelled him.

It was ahead of him now, not behind.

He looked to the trees. He looked to his hands and their humanness. Had he been the hand that had shaped the wizard's disappearance? Or was he the hand that had been moved all along?

Uncertain, he thought this was more difficult than being in the forest. There he'd known he was lost.

Tomas made an abrupt gesture, unexpected to himself, to grasp the air. Then he looked at his hand, realizing that nothing had left its imprint.

*

Tomas stood alone on the hill before the castle while people greeted one another. He glanced over his shoulder.

The valley was shadowed. A cloud crossed in front of the sun.

People poured up from the forest. Their joyful noises were getting louder as they became more trusting of the earth, and the sky, and of the people before them, and the sun. But in the valley's shadow Tomas saw a funnel of air forming. His senses opened like the gate to the castle. He wanted to absorb every detail and understand why a shiver of premonition shook him.

“What's this.” What he uttered wasn't a question. It was an identification – a reaching after a name for what he saw.

The funnel climbed like a prairie tornado. It narrowed, darkening. It rose, swirling.

In their delight at seeing each other again, the people around him took no notice of what was far behind. The twister spun, churning up dust.

He hadn't scattered Pluta to the wind. Inadvertently he'd let him be everywhere. The magician was a master of distorting communication. Now he'd played the greatest joke of all. Tomas had merely helped him to transfigure. He had gone into the air, and the air could be anything, anywhere.

Tomas blinked. Then the twister was gone.

He turned to see Gabrielle, Santiago, and Adina, in the embrace of the guards and other children from the castle. He saw Cyrus approaching him. No one registered dismay or concern. They hadn't seen the whirlwind.

*

Tomas nodded as if coming out of a dream.

Maybe it had been a stray image or a straggler toon doing a fancy-free imitation. It could have been the Tasmanian Devil from the Warner Brothers' vault of figures. Sid and Diego might have been body-surfing on the tip of the wind. Or the last toon, soon to be sucked back onto a screen, scampering wildly in one final mad exhibition, showing off before it became flat again.

*

Tomas felt a hand on his shoulder. Cyrus stood before him.

“For the second time I say thank you. For our children. For our way of life. This time I say thank you for everything.”

He looked into Cyrus's face, and saw openness for an instant.

“You must come inside with the others. We have things to discuss.”

Tomas wondered if Cyrus had seen the whirlwind, but decided against mentioning it. This had been some after-image retina burn. It had been a trace. The rout must have been complete.

“How's the hand?” Cyrus asked, smiling. 

Tomas showed him both hands, palms up. They were flesh and blood.

*

Crowds assembled by the forge. The celebration, it was announced, would begin at nightfall. There would be food, drink, dancing, reunions. There would be speeches, and congratulations. Cyrus had left Tomas's side and went up before the multitude, speaking on behalf of many. He said there would be moments when they would give thanks, and moments of silence to honour what had happened. He said there should be discussion of how to properly award the person who travelled so well between domains, and who had first led the children through the woods.

Cyrus said it would be a long time before anyone turned on a screen again.

Uneasy and shy, Tomas wasn't certain he wanted to join the festivities. In the crowds he'd lost sight of Adina. When he gazed around, searching for Gabrielle and Santiago, he couldn't see them either.

The crowds grew. With their arrival came more of the clamour, the sound of many conversations at once.

The castle swarmed with people, and Tomas abruptly felt that he wanted to find a place away.

He needed a home. 

Where would this be?

His home had been screens and then the wind. It had been the path of quests, then the forest, then the night, then this castle. Beyond these memories he knew nothing of what a home might resemble. Toons didn't have resting places. They had shut off points, blankness, darkness, static, white space. They had suspended time, zones where they merely waited, muttering sometimes, for the next switch and the next episode. They might stay for months, or even years, stuck in a freeze-frame limbo. They might find themselves morphed into new configurations of being. Images hovered, images lingered. Symbols and images could withdraw into the invisible beyond the white spaces, and no human knew what they did there. But no toon had a language for that domain either.

*

He'd crossed between realms and already a forgetting was setting in, confusion too.

Santiago still had his sword. 

And the eyes were back.

They were popping, red and white lights bursting with erratic brilliance.

The tourists to the castle had brought cameras – small disposable cameras that they had found in the one store left with supplies inside the walls. They clicked off picture after picture, craving keepsakes, images for their albums and collections, flashbulbs and flashcubes bursting.

Tomas found himself dodging the bursts, turning away.

*

Cyrus approached him again, after speeches and promises.

“What do you want for yourself?” His question was kindly.

“I'm not sure.”

“Doubt and uncertainty. Very human traits.”

“I'm still learning.”

“There'll be a need for leadership. We can raise lots of money here.”

“I think,” Tomas said, hesitating. “I need somewhere to go.”

“The conclusion we'd come to ourselves.” 

Cyrus spoke as if he represented a new network that had coiled up, extending quickly after the images had been confined into the frames that would allow people to view them at their leisure. Tomas had the impression that another powerful structure had come into place, but that it was in part invisible.

“We'd like to offer you a position on our committee of change.”

“What?”

“The committee will allow us to come to grips with what happened. We'll make studies.” 

Cyrus spoke in a way that suggested he enjoyed his new power. He liked to rule, Tomas thought. Maybe he cast himself in the image of a king. It ran through Tomas's mind that the image realm had infiltrated deeply into human affairs.

“You are the one who was between worlds. You could have a special place.”

“Where are Gabrielle and Santiago? Where's Adina?”

Cyrus explained how he could find them outside the castle. He gave careful directions.

“We owe you more than you know.” 

Tomas walked away, and when he did, he found his heart pounding, and his eyes watering strangely.

*

It was late afternoon and the glowing castle attracted more visitors. Tomas moved through the crowd towards the gate. The knight found himself an object of searching eyes and talk.

“Is that him?” a woman asked, surprised. 

“Yes,” a man said who had been a guard at the gate. “I knew him.”

“Well, well,” she said. She went silent, watching.

The former guard couldn't tell if what she'd said was said in admiration or disappointment.

“Look at his hands,” another woman said. “They're older-looking than he must be,”

the first woman said.

“What do you suppose that means?” 

“Sure weird.”

“He doesn't look so brave,” a man sneered. 

“Maybe he isn't,” another man said. Several young men looked on.

“Hey cool dude.” 

“Metro warrior wear.”

“All the knight stuff.” 

“O yeah.”

*

Outside the walls Tomas made his way towards the path.

At the path's opening, he stopped again. 

Were there eyes floating in the tangles of branches down in the forest?

Maybe it was merely the animals returning: deer and foxes, birds and squirrels.

He saw trees vibrating like waves. The trees rippled, and a great stillness came over him, a quiet he identified with the night. It was the stillness that settled over people at midnight when the world turned to shadows. In a meditative serenity he saw the tangles of branches moving.

The trees were aerials. They were like antennae. He recognized them from his dream. The antenna that formed from the mast of his ship was like the trees. These trees glistened like aerials glazed with sheets of dew.

Tomas saw the world's communications. Everything was pressing to be perceived, to be told.

He turned towards what he had been offered, this path, away from the trees and the castle, and what had been the valley of images and the tent of the wind, and the war that was in the past, and any war that was to come.

*

People would keep rallying to the castle. They would arrive excited by their receptivity to its amplified halo. And in part because their tan from their time on the screens was fading, they would want to come here rather than return to their homes. They wanted to be close to the radiance.

They knew this light, though it was certainly mysterious. It reminded them of the period they had spent captive on the screens. The castle would glow for a long time in what those who studied it under the guidance of Cyrus would observe was a curious but no doubt harmless radioactivity.

*

Tomas found the house at the forest's edge. Its windows were open towards the castle, and the back porch was open towards the trees. The house was painted white outside, and inside the walls appeared blank. It looked untouched, gleaming new.

At first he saw no one. He wondered if Cyrus had given him the wrong directions. One thing he had learned. Everyone got things wrong.

“Tomas . . . ” The voice was clear, and recognizable.

“Tomas!” Two voices called from the house.

Gabrielle and Santiago tumbled out the front door, and rushed down the short steps to the grass.

“It's a gift,” Gabrielle said. 

“This?”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Well, we asked for something on your behalf,” Santiago said.

“We thought you'd like it. We do. It's rilly large.”

“Lots of rooms. Lots of space. And no fences,” Santiago said.

Then Santiago presented the sword back to him.

“It belongs to you. Heart rage, and courage.”

Tomas took hold of the sword. He had never used it in violence, but he had made it his symbol, and he had passed that symbol on to the children.

*

Again he glanced back.

“What's wrong?” Gabrielle asked.

“I keep seeing trees sway. Air agitated in the distance. Something wants to come through.”

He flashed on an image. There was a shadow at the door of a glass house. All the entrances bolted shut. There was no way in. Yet the shadow hovered, moving back and forth at the door. It didn't knock or try the bell. It simply wavered, appearing in silhouette, hovering and willing to wait.

He'd known things. There was something else, here.

He was envisioning scenes, his eyes wide. He stood, bowing slightly, accepting.

Were knowledge and vision the same? 

More, more: that's what the toons had called for, that's what Pluta had demanded. More than this, there had to be – was there? – more. It was the urge that brought the people to the castle. It drove the children through the dust. It took Adina into the forest where she'd risked being absorbed into the whirlwind's obsession. It followed Tomas across the screens. What couldn't be said. It was this, fracturing and yet framing, that had impelled him away from the wizard. It had made him come to the crossing where he'd met the children and cross down into the valley of images. It had crossed his tunic, and it had made him cross into the human.

*

“There are other images.”

“What's with that, Tomas?” Gabrielle asked.

“I see them.” Santiago looked serious. 

“Tell me,” Tomas said.

“There were the toons. But there's another generation. Older. More like people and yet not like people. They never made it to the toons' world. They were on the screens too but we never saw them in any battles. They weren't part of the circus and I didn't sense they were anywhere at the camp. They came from the deepest dreams.”

“Santiago please, like you're totally scaring me.”