Water Magic

It was a bright day and most of the town’s inhabitants were lounging in the speckled shade. With her mother and sister, Istra sat among the locals, enjoying the fine atmosphere of the town’s central plaza. Towering above them were thin trees, filtering and cooling the sun with their leaves, they cast warm green light upon the idle dwellers. On their right, a stone’s throw from their earthly seats, was the town’s main attraction: an elevated rock formation, only 30 feet wide, but running the entire length of the village. The boulders were deeply carved in the middle, cradling within their granite arms a gently cascading river, and, by the borderlands of the town, a set of petite waterfalls.
The air was full of oxygen, moist and light. The gurgling sounds of moving water danced through the light air like a company of fairy ballerinas. Cool sprinkles landed upon the skin of all who sat by the waters. There was a calm sense of activity, brought into existence merely because of the rivers, for no one else was doing much. The villagers were not burdened with the thought of duties or enterprise. Some were busy with black-smithing or tending to children, but if one desired to luxuriate in the company of the sacred waters, it was judged as a good use of time.
Far beyond the natural boundaries of the village, far into the sprawling empire at the base of the mountains, the river bed was known to be alive. For longer than anyone could remember, the villagers had boasted about the pureness of their water source, the rejuvenating quality it granted the thirsty, the liquid salvation it brought in its elemental state. Travelers and heros on quests journeyed for months, sometimes years, to sip at the banks of the meandering liquid stream.
The rock wall formation was at least a hundred feet overhead, but some clever men of the village had constructed a little faucet close to the ground. Copper in origin, it now was covered in turquoise rust, and soft patches of emerald green moss grew in the cracks of water moistened stone.
As Istra sat, enjoying the weather and ambiance, she saw a handsome traveler. She watched him as he passed through the natural archway in the boulder, the passageway granting access to both sides of the village. Her eyes rested upon him as he approached the faucet. He filled his jug with the delightful liquid from the earth and then he vanished.
She marveled at the idea. Although she had seen the faucet, it hadn’t occurred to her to fill her glass jug. She had been so entranced in the movements and elements, her rational mind hadn’t put logic into use. She ran over to fill her bottle, acutely aware of the two young men close to the spigot that openly stared at her derrière, exposed in all its soft whiteness to the sun, riding the edge of social acceptance by covering only the most crucial parts with small red panties.
She waited for her clear jug to fill, quickly growing cool to the touch. Still behind her, they watched her flesh ripple; conscious, but unaffected with their attention, she concentrated on the water, the gurgling sound it made, changing in melodic pitch as the bottle filled. She felt its coolness, the air around her was different in its presence, more alive, like all the elements were converging with the jig of life.
She held the clear vessel to her mouth, savoring the liquid sweetness it held in its charge. She had never experienced water so delicious and perfect. Remembering her mother and sister, she refilled the bottle, bringing it to them for a taste. As she approached them, not a 100 steps from the faucet and steps from her kin, the water turned a reddish brown and became thick and cloudy. It separated, the essential elements running away from each other like oil and vinegar and small sudsy soap bubbles began to spill from the mouth of the bottle. Istra was confused with the change, explaining to her mother that she had just drunk the same pristine water only minutes ago. Her mother looked startled, her eyes darted about as if in a daze. She hadn’t even noticed that they were sitting by a river nor had she heard the soft burbling of the water. Istra then hesitated to look around, for she was suddenly aware that if she were to turn, the running waters might not be there at all. No water, no faucet, no waterfalls. Nothing at all.

River

There is a woman with wide white shoulders. As a white bird soars across the field of her vision, her arms open as wide as they possibly can. She feels the pull of her muscles, straining under the weight of her will. She feels them, yet gives them no time. The radiance of her chest leaps out to meet the wind. She opens herself to the sun and moon. They linger, suspended next to each of her hands. Streaks of red clouds light the sky with a brilliant brush. Those long fibers of movement are the commandments of a civilization. Wisps of red move on the wind like ink in a glass of pure water. They move and move and move, there is no resting place for these long strokes of crimson. No place they will ever “be.” Their existence lays in the movement. Their life is the journey. From rain to ocean to sky. The cycle is the way, their process of being.
There is a woman with wide white shoulders and long dark hair. Long strands of black tangle behind her in the breeze. There comes a storm. There comes a fresh start. There comes a much needed fucking. Brilliant red clouds release their blood. A small spout opens up in the only way it knows how. The earth, without thought, without desire or disdain, the earth accepts the gift of the sky. It accepts what is given. It takes. Uses. Transforms.
There is a woman with a tangled mess of long dark hair. She stands upon the highest peak of the purple mountain. The earth below her is open. Open with fire, open with water. It is cracked and gushing. From the height of the mountain, she sees the river. The channel of blue that has carved itself into the porous land. It flows past the base of green and yellow peaks. It wraps itself along the edges of great boulders. Its existence is the movement, the process of constant flow and constant journey.

The river travels and moves up. It flows up the purple mountain, up and up until it reaches her feet. Then it disappears. At the tip of her toes it enters her, for she is the beginning and the end. The great blue river enters through her white toes. It travels past the muscles of her calves and the bones of her wide pelvis. Up and up, circling her chest, rising to her crown. She stands, an open vessel without thought. Without sentimentality or pride. She takes what comes through her. The water rises and at her peak, at the top of her head, the mist forms. Around her is a halo of blue mist. Pale vapors swirl like mini tornadoes and then they rise, higher and higher, into the great wide sky above.

Wizard

The stormy night rose around the tower as walls of rain and crackling lightning. The wizard took a glance out of one of the two little windows that were set high up in the stone walls. Unnaturally tall though he was, he still had to rise to the tips of his toes to peer out of the diminutive opening. The crown of his head was bald and shiny, wreathed by a mane of long thinning and matted black hair. His eyes, a keen pale blue, peered into the maelstrom which held him prisoner within his tower. A dark mood descended upon him, sired by the whip like arcs of light that rose from the earth all around his keep. The corners of a big mouth set in a broad face shaped like an inverted spade turned down and the thick black brows over his eyes lifted as if they might slide from his brow in resignation. The clang of the old clock striking eleven roused him from silent observations and he hurried back to his wooden table where 17 small figurines fashioned of wax were lined in three neat little rows. There were yet 18 figures that must be made before the stroke of midnight. Despair seized his heart and for a moment he contemplated sinking to his knees and enduring his imprisonment until starvation eked the last of his life from him. Then he recognized such apathy as the spawn of the malignant spell that raged all about him, and thrust it heavily aside. One candle burned on the little table, nearly down to the nub. He would need more wax. Bending his gargantuan height, he threw open an oaken chest and rummaged hastily about and seized three more tapers with his massive hands, not as much as he could want, but it would have to do. His faded olive robe flagged out behind him as he hurried back to the work table with heavy steps. One hour remained to complete his work. Whether it could be done or not he turned his will unwaveringly to the task.

* * *

Lucien passed over the green hill littered with gray stones that had once been the walls of a keep. He picked his way carefully among them until he had passed into the circle of ruins which were once the foundation of a tower. There was little in the way of relics to be found, others had come and carried away the most alluring items long ago. Lucien found a spoon lodged halfway beneath one of the fallen stones. Then he wandered out of the foundation and lifted his lithe body onto a boulder to survey the area. Among the stones and green grass, the burnt remains of four trees stood black and forlorn against the overcast sky. To the west, a river rushed hastily along its course. Lucien sighed and slid onto his rear. His mind turned towards his homeward voyage, towards his empty handed return to the old woman who cast the bones. He would tell her that there was no tower, and that there was no wizard with thirty five warriors of wax with which to defeat the Demoness of Berg. He supported his head in his hands and felt the ache in his feet. The sound of the rushing river reached his ears. It seemed for a moment as if it were singing a song, the words of which were almost decipherable by him. He shook off the eerie perception.
The journey home would be disproportionately longer than the journey here had been, now that he would have to bare the weight of disappointment. He resolved not to return. He would go on searching for another way to combat the Demoness, even if there was none to be found. He would search to the ends of the earth.

Thus thinking, he leaped down from the boulder and proceeded to pass by one of the burnt trees. His eye caught sight of a leather bound book resting at its foot. He wondered that he had not noticed it from his vantage point atop the boulder. Lucien’s heart fluttered. He could read. When the old woman had cast the bones for the six lords of Almerne she had insisted that a scribe and not a warrior be sent to retrieve the thirty five. Eagerly, he opened the book and flipped through the pages, glancing here and there. He let out an excited cry. Recipes and rituals were scrawled on the pages and notes about the weather and the writer’s deepest feelings. This was the journal of a wizard. He found the last written page midway through the book. On it was written,
“The thirty five are complete now. Their singing never ceases.”
The remaining pages had been left blank.

Lucien stood quite still for a moment. The mention of thirty five could not be a coincidence. This was a mention of the thirty five warriors he sought. He spoke the words softly to himself, wondering, hoping that something further would be revealed to him. The babbling of the river reached his ears again, almost melodic. He snapped the book shut with a start. Could it be?
Springing to life, he ran the distance to the river. Smooth white pebbles populated the bank . The rush and roar of the foaming water thundered in Lucien’s ears. He could hear the song it sang more clearly now. He gazed into the watery depths and searched through the changing liquid shapes.
At first, he saw only the green river ferns swaying beneath the surface. Then, as he listened intently to the singing of the river, the water seemed to adopt new shapes before his eyes. The bubbling and rippling water outlined the contours of fine faces and athletic limbs and subtle but feminine bosoms. These were not the men of wax that he had expected, but women of water, dressed in armor and helmets and wielding spears.
Lucien stepped back from the water, frightened and awed. He paced along the bank counting their translucent forms. Thirty-five. Here was the wax army of the Green wizard, transformed to water, singing battle songs beneath the river’s rushing surface to pass the time while they waited. And if they were here, waiting in the water, then the wizard that could command them must be somewhere as well. And if they were no longer wax but water, then he was free.
Lucien searched the sky and wondered. He looked carefully at the pebbles under his feet and at the hills around him. He sat down upon the river’s bank and searched with his eyes and with his ears and with his heart for the green wizard that could awaken the thirty-five. Whether it could be done or not, he would find the wizard. He would awaken the mage who must be hidden somewhere, everywhere, waiting to be roused.

The Lion's Face

His name was Tad which was short for Thaddeus. Thaddeus was his father’s name. He was sixteen years old and unusually tall and lean. His hair was the color of straw and tended to be a mess. No one had ever taught him a way of combing it and he had cut it himself just to keep it out of his eyes since he was six years old. That was after his mother had run away to California.
He sometimes got a postcard or letter from her. He had received three to be exact, two postcards and one letter in the ten years since her departure. Her name was Helen. She had married Thaddeus Sr. when she was only fifteen. She ran away to be with a traveling vacuum salesman and get away from the town of Bethlehem where she had lived her whole life up till then.
Tad was in the high school marching band. When he wore his white uniform and bright red cap he resembled a matchstick. He played trombone. That was until the day that Pauly, Cash, and Steve pried the case out of his hands after school. Pauly was the shortest, with a mean square jaw and a buzz cut. What he lacked in height he made up for with pure aggression. He was the ring leader. Cash was the lumbering giant. Big and dumb with a perpetually bruised eye. At home he was the punching bag, but at school he did all the punching. Steve was of average build, not too lean and not too hefty, neither short nor tall. He wore a leather jacket and sold ecstasy, acid, and reefer to other kids, all of which he obtained from his older brother Stan. While Pauly was the brains, and Cash the muscle, Steve just struggled to keep up and laughed no matter what was happening, encouraging the other two with his enthusiasm.
Tad tailed after them begging to get his trombone back. Whenever he got close enough to make a grab for it, Cash just gave him a rough shove back while Pauly continued mixing insults and abuses with the occasional taunt and Steve trailed behind the other three, doubling over with laughter now and then when the abuses were particularly amusing. In this way, they paraded all the way down to the river where Pauly flung open the case, made a few more quips, and dumped the instrument into the brown water. Now Tad made his greatest effort to reach the trombone, but Cash threw him down on the muddy bank and pressed his cheek into the wet earth. Pauly kneeled and tilted his head to face his victim.
“What’s the matter? I’m doin’ you a favor. Your never gonna get any girls if you spend all your time fiddling with your trombone.” Steve erupted into a fresh burst of chortles and flopped down onto his rear trying to catch his breath.
“Yeah.” Pauly said, “Have you heard from your mom lately?’
When Tad’s answer was to try and struggle with Cash, Pauly continued, “Aw. That’s too bad. She stopped by my place last night.”
And so it went until the trombone was long gone and Tad’s uniform was soaked and stained with mud. Cash then let go of him and the three tormentors strolled away. Tad lay in the muck waiting for their voices to fade into the distance. Laying there studying the mud he noticed something shiny protruding about two feet from his face. He reached out with his hand and plucked it was of the moist grime and brushed its surface clean with his fingertips. At first he thought it was a coin, but then he noticed that it had a loop to run a chain through. There was a lion engraved on one surface, and on the back, “For my Katie.” was inscribed in a flowery script. Tad clutched the amulet in his hand and stood up. He spent the evening searching the banks down stream for his trombone but all he found was the case.

Tad could not tell his father about the trombone since it had cost a great deal of money. Neither could he bear to explain the manner in which it had been lost. In the weeks following the event, he carried the empty trombone case away from the house to keep up appearances. He often didn’t make it to the school at all. Instead he strolled along the river bed, musing over his treasure, wondering who Katie was, imagining that he might meet her one day, looking for her medallion among the reeds. He imagined she would be so pleased that he had found it, that they would agree it was fate that had brought them together. Katie might have long brown hair and green eyes. She might be someone from the school that he had never seen before, or somebody’s cousin just visiting, or even an older woman, a college student come home to care for ailing parents. They would fall in love and she would beg him to come with her, away from Bethlehem to New York, or California, or wherever she went to school.
Soon he no longer debated whether he should go to school or take another walk. The river seemed to be calling him, Katie was waiting for him. Each day, he left the house a little earlier and he came home a little later.
He wandered farther afield than he had ever gone as a boy, following the river upstream, under bridges, through pastures. Breathing the fresh air, stretching his legs, examining the amulet, he dreamed up pleasant conversations with Katie, picnics and swimming in the river, first kisses and second kisses and more and more and more.
On one particular Friday afternoon, he passed the point at which he usually turned back home. His father would go to the bar after work and he would be home late. Tad would be home late too. He pressed on and caught sight of a distant orchard. The sun was poised in the center of a blue sky beaming warmth down on his straw colored hair. He whistled and ate a sandwich and drank a root beer he had packed. On the opposite bank he caught sight of the ruins of a burned out house. The whole bank surrounding it was charred black. The remains of a few trees jutted up out of the ground mournfully. Tad put away the uneaten remains of his sandwich. He stripped off his shirt, socks and shoes and put them in his backpack. The medallion, which he wore on a bit of twine around his neck, gleamed in the noonday sun. He sat the back pack down in the grass out of the river’s reach and waded in. The cool water felt good after a morning of walking. The current was gentle and he waded until he had to swim and soon, he made it to the opposite bank.
He approached the charred ruins carefully, watching for broken glass or anything that might injure his bare feet. There was very little to see. A wall stood with a bit of sooty wallpaper still intact. He had almost satisfied his curiosity and made up his mind to swim back when he noticed something glittering beneath a mound of ash. Walking on the balls of his feet he approached gingerly and brushed away the soot. He caught his breath. It was a lion’s face, like the one on Katie’s medallion, gazing at him from the lid of a pewter jewelry box. The box lay open, it’s hinges fully extended. He lifted it, but there was nothing underneath. His hand drifted to the amulet at his throat.

Saturday morning, Tad mowed the lawn for his father. Thaddeus Sr. sat under the shade of the porch drinking bottles of cool beer one by one. When the lawn was finished, Tad left his father dozing on the porch and stormed the garage. Every Sunday for the last three years the Nors County Tribune had been left on the porch. Tad’s father read the funnies and the sports section and then deposited the paper in the garage to be recycled someday. There, in the stuffy darkness of the dusty garage, the young man searched around for the most recent papers, carefully reading dates and arranging a stack that spanned over the last 12 Sundays. Then he retired with them to his own room and began a systematic search starting with last Sunday’s paper. In the third paper, he found what he was looking for. A fire in east Nors county had killed 82 year old Kathleen Sims in her home. She had no children to survive her. Her ex-husband Ralph Sims still lived in Florida with his second wife.

On Sunday, Tad walked the length of the river only as far as Old Pete’s bridge. He stood in its center, watching the water rush by, disappearing under his feet. He remembered that his mother had brought him here to Play Pooh sticks when he was small. It was a game she picked up from an old children’s movie which she played for him every morning while she did the housekeeping. The game involved each player dropping a stick into the water at one side of the bridge and then rushing to the other side to see whose stick came out in the lead. She’d had to hold him up so that he could drop his stick over the side at the same time that she dropped hers. Then she would rush with him in her arms so that they could see whose stick had won the race.
He thought about his Katie, the way he had imagined her, and of the picture of the wrinkled little woman from the newspaper photograph. If they had met while she was alive, she might have baked him cookies and he would have done her yard work. If he had been born 66 years sooner, then maybe she would have been his green eyed black haired Katie. She would have married him instead of Ralph Sims and they would have died together in the fire. He turned the lion faced amulet in his fingers and watched the sunlight reflect from its golden surface. He heard them coming long before he looked up to face them. They were practically on top of him before he acknowledged them with a glance.
“Where you been Tad?” Pauly sneered. “Haven’t seen you around school lately. You been here looking for your trombone this whole time?” Steve snickered.
Pauly caught sight of the amulet pressed between Tads thumb and forefinger, “What’s that? Was it your whore Mommy’s? You missing your Mommy Tady wad?”
Pauly’s hand darted out to snatch the amulet but Tad was a hair quicker, jerking his own hand out of reach. In an instant, Cash was behind Tad pinning his arms behind his back.
“Throw this moron into the river.” Pauly laughed at his own suggestion because Steve was too occupied with slumping against the railing as if he were falling asleep.
Tad struggled while Cash endeavored to heave him over the rail. He wiggled and kicked and his head was slammed against the rail just as the bigger boy managed to flop him over the side. Katie’s medallion fell ahead of him glistening in the sun as it went. It hit the water just seconds before Tad’s inert body came crashing down over it, forcing it down to the river bed escorted by tiny green bubbles. Cash and Pauly hung over the rail waiting for Tad to resurface so they could throw in a few more abuses. When he did, he was face down in the water and completely motionless, drifting slowly downstream.
“Shit.” Pauly said after a few moments of stunned silence. “Shit! You banged his head on the rail!”
“I didn’t do nothin’,” Cash protested.
“Fuck.” Pauly said. “Fuck. I think you killed him.”
“I did what you told me to do.” Cash puffed out his pudgy chest.
“Oh shit.” Pauly said looking around to see if they had been observed. “C’mon, lets go.” He didn’t have to tell Cash twice, but Steve didn’t move.
“Steve,” Pauly said, “C’mon, we’re going!” He pulled on the leather jacket but Steve was out cold now, sitting with his back propped up against the rail and his mouth draped open. Pauly pulled him until he fell over on his side and murmured something indistinct.
“Whatever. Forget him. Let’s go,” Pauly commanded and he and Cash hurried away with shoulders hunched.
Katie’s amulet followed Tad’s dead body downstream for a while until he drifted up onto the bank not far from where they’d met. Then it kept going on it’s own, carried along by the current, until the lions face was once again shining in the sun, miles away from the town of Bethlehem.