Extract VI - Elusive Reaches*

 

Whatever the healers were up to, the tea with the funnily glittering blue steam did help trigger it. Ushka(1) could feel a great deal of unnecessary tension leave her body as she drank up like everybody else. First of all her hair was combed, probably a good idea since it was going to get stuck under the helmet for quite a while, Ushka having a pretty strong hunch about it taking her a considerable while before she found herself completely alone in Harkas.(2)

To her surprise it was now Eläin(3) who standing right in front of her began singing what Ushka believed it to be an old Harkas song about the four eternal brothers who appeared and disappeared along with the natural cycles. There was a little pond right behind him and for the first time it occurred to her that their camping out right here must have been more than solely the convenience of staying close to water. Whether an optical illusion or not the water seemed to be resonating with the passages in Eläin's song and Ushka believed to have recognized the same bluish shimmer on the water surface in the dim reflection of their camp fire off the water surface. Then it occurred to her that she had already heard similar tales about these brothers back when she was assigned to the Harkas camp and under Eläin's command.

Ushka was all of a sudden overcome by the feeling that everything was so right in place as it could have ever gotten.

The song, the atmosphere, the cold breeze against her face and the memories made all which had to do with the Agki pass(4) and with Kenhor(4) seem infinitely distant and close at the same time. Somehow like the function sin(1/x) about the origin, Ushka thought to herself, where it does have a limited absolute value of [-1,1] and is yet out of grasp due to very strong oscillation.

It felt like Ushka was being delivered to the will and – hopefully – benevolence of the brothers upon whom Eläin and the healers were calling with their song, since now they had joined the commander in chief for what Ushka believed to be the Chorus of the song.

“The trail of the winds remains unseen

for mortals their realm stays concealed.”

It sounded perfectly like the healers, warning her about which was not compatible with logical measurements and revealing that she was to get prepared for further surprises ahead of her. Now, as they started braiding the long black curls of hair on her head, it sounded like they were calling upon the same mystical might to make affairs work out to Ushka's fortune. This made her feel lost for an instance amidst the eternal cycle of natural forces. She felt insignificant, she felt how insignificant all human quarrels and great wars throughout history – or histories – were compared to what nature was achieving right under their ignorant human noses.

“The ageless skies that stand before our eyes

when we'll be gone they'll still be flying free.”

Ushka's senses were picking up signals at such high speed and intensity that she fell into an almost-trance state. Whether it was the funny brew she had been given or real biologically functioning neurons delivering the most neutral synapses, it felt like the one reliable reality at the moment. Listening to Eläin's voice echo deeper and louder inside her skull, it felt like the healers' fingers were braiding the same silvery light of the seas into the pitch dark locks of her hair. She could not help but keep staring at the blue shimmer reflecting from the water. It was no effort feeling the golden rays of sunlight or the eternal blue delivering dark nights right after the bloody dusk crawling in between the braids, the same as a gently refreshing breeze or the freezing winter chill.

But Ushka felt no contradictions, there were no conflicts and no heaviness despite all which her head was now bearing. It felt much more like an eternally balanced circle, like a perfectly differentiable continuum. As a matter of fact her head felt even lighter on her shoulders now. 

There was a genuine gentleness, an infinite source of compassion, glowing in Eläin's grey eyes now, something warm flowing about which had not been there before. Ushka felt as though a mixture of warm blood was being pumped through her body by all other six hearts. She was suddenly feeling things she had never known before or long forgotten. The water pond, the bushes, the few trees standing tall, the spitting fire and the late autumn chill all seemed to be parts of the six humans whose heartbeats she was now so clearly feeling inside her own chest.

She could not tell exactly what happened and it did not seem important either. All what she felt was the call of the water behind Eläin, the blue, shimmering, dim light reflecting from the water surface was in a way conjuring her. So she walked past the Harkas while the passage of the song he was still singing kept echoing in her head, for a moment making linguistically no sense. As she looked down and into the water the silvery light shimmering seemed to sparkle so inaccessibly far beneath, that Ushka was convinced about the bluish shimmering steam from the tea to be also coming from worlds deep under rather than normal result of vaporizing moistures.

There it was then at last, the passionate embrace of nature.

In the water now she saw the forest; felt it, as though she were standing among trees right this very moment. The feeling was so complete, she knew she had never truly been in a forest before, even if the geography had matched. She could now sense the fallen branches under her feet or smell the late autumn leaves already decaying. Then she heard the stream, calm and peaceful and yet with water so dark that it allowed no curious peeks beneath the surface. One by one Ushka could now feel every living being around her as well as the air, the earth, the rocks, the wind and of course the water. She felt surrounded by all life forms and all which could bear life until she heard human footsteps and the hasteful demise they brought with them. One by one life fell apart and the stream seemed to flow with certain anger. It felt like human kind was leaving a path of death and destruction behind, a legacy of cold steel and war wherever it went and it seemed to keep going on until eventually everything was engulfed by flames and reduced to nothing more than dust.

For a few seconds Ushka could hear the human words in the song again, clearly understanding them:

“Across the high northern skies

the eldest brother in all his might

guards the frozen barren land

with a token of wisdom in his hand”

And there it was, no doubt that life was mightier than all humankind together and pretty obvious how nature was not going to abandon the “barren land” people left behind once the fate humans were bound to by their own deeds would take its toll.

In relief Ushka now sang along “When we'll all be gone they'll still be flying free.” Since now she could see the infinite circle of life ignored by humans for so long, it was rather knowledge than faith which provided her with the notion of security, knowing that ancient electromagnetic beams of photons would light the skies above the planet even after mankind's thirst for power or vengeance had burnt all to ashes.

(1) the female mathematician

(2) a country

(3) Harkas' Commander in Chief, a middle aged man

(4) due to a betrayal Eläin lost most of his troops at the Agki mountain pass, including Kenhor, an officer 
* Listening to the song highly recommended, of which I own no copyrights