Pierrot's Song

Chapter 1 - To the Fureys-3

While Sofia sat nearby, perhaps furiously seeking in her store of stories for a way forward, Luka let his mind go, imagining himself soaring over the land below, wheeling with the breezes, catching updrafts then floating downward with easy grace. All unaware, he began humming. It was a simple tune, a child’s tune. Luka had not had much of a childhood. He had grown up fast, living by his wits on the streets of Aurea. There had been little time for games. But he had always loved music, long before he came to perform melodies onstage, and this song was lodged in his memory from a time before his mother died—before his father sent him out to earn his bread.

Sofia’s eyes snapped into focus. She turned her intense gaze on Luka. ‘Sing it again.’

Luka hummed the childish tune once more. Sofia c****d her head and narrowed her eyes. Her hands moved of their own volition, clapping then sliding then weaving, and as the actions returned to her, so did the words.

Onward, onward, upward ever.

Can you find them, are you clever?

Climb the path where nothing grows,

What do we seek? No one knows.

Sliding, sliding, up or down?

The one who wins will wear the crown.

Find it now, the hidden stair,

Are you close? Well then, beware,

For there are daggers, sharp and bright,

Before you walk the path of light.

Soon you’ll reach the journey’s end …

Sofia clapped her hand over her mouth, then drew it away. She stood and faced the cliff.

‘Hidden in plain sight again. I have spoken the Tales of Tarya my whole life, never knowing what secrets they might contain, and now I find even children’s songs have clues we need. If the song is correct, there should be a hidden stair here somewhere …’

She began walking along the length of the cliff face. ‘Look for a sign … something carved, perhaps.’

Luka, searching in the opposite direction, ran his hands over the rock. ‘What sort of thing?’

‘I don’t know. But it will be made by humans. It should stand out. Mina, do you have any ideas? And do you know what the final line is? I can’t remember …’

Mina didn’t answer. Luka glanced at her. Seeing her head sunk into her arms, he realised she was asleep and turned back to searching for stairs. Sofia did likewise. A minute later Luka exclaimed excitedly.

‘I’ve found it! There’s no symbol. Come and look at this.’

Sofia made her way across to him. ‘There’s nothing here,’ she snapped.

‘Look again. Here,’ Luka took her hand and lifted it toward the rock. ‘Take a step forward.’

Sofia did so, and her hand went straight through the air. Where her hand should have met the cliff face, there was nothing.

‘It would be easier to find during the day,’ Luka said. ‘The darkness adds to the illusion.’

This was the point where two walls of cliff met, but one was set back from the other. It gave the appearance of a solid wall. Stepping forward, they saw a very crude staircase had been carved in the back cliff. The steps were steep and rough, but they were there.

Sofia climbed the first step. Though it was deeper than a normal step, she managed it easily.

‘I’ll get Mina and the bags,’ Luka said, and turned back. Mina was still asleep, so he reached to gently wake her, but when he touched her arm, he couldn’t stop himself from crying out. Sofia hurried over. ‘What is it?’

Luka pulled Mina into his arms. She didn’t wake at the movement but flopped across him. When he touched Mina’s cheek, his fingers recoiled from the burning cold.

‘She won’t wake up,’ he said. ‘And she’s icy to the touch. This isn’t normal.’

Sofia kneeled beside him. ‘You’re right. Something strange is going on. We have to wake her!’

Sofia tried to shake her, but Mina remained limp. They called to her and pinched her and even slapped her, but still Mina did not respond. They tried warming her, but the touch of their skin on hers did not change her temperature at all. Luka felt his heart pounding. Even Sofia, usually unshakeable, sounded panicked.

‘What is this? What’s happening?’

‘Can you feel it?’ Luka asked. ‘She’s in Tarya, I’m sure of it. I have to go after her.’

He tried to still his beating heart. Slowly, his senses stopped fluttering and he could think again.

‘Yes, you’re right. There’s something here …’

But Luka sang a line of melody and was gone.

~

‘Where am I?’ Luka asked, hearing his voice echo over and over. He seemed to be in a large, perfectly round chamber. The floor beneath him sloped, forming part of a giant sphere. It was not too curved to walk on, but there was a strange sensation with each step he took, a low, deep trembling in the room.

‘Mina?’ he cried out, and her name repeated around him, becoming softer and softer, then fading away entirely.

‘Where are you?’ This time he kept his voice low, speaking more to himself. He could see no break in the sphere that enclosed him, no door or gap of any kind. He walked forward, hoping to get closer to the edge, to see what this space was made of. Was this Tarya? He had never experienced it like this before. When he was playing, he saw the Place of Dreams, overlaying the real world with light. He had never seen anything different. Why was there nothing here? He kept walking, but he seemed to be going nowhere, and the quiet rumbling followed his every step. The darkness pressed on him—not a physical weight but a mental one.

After what seemed a long period of ineffectual walking, he realised the entire room was moving underneath his feet. A strange sensation, like sorrow and fear combined, grew as he walked, so he found himself dragging his steps more and more. It took him even longer to realise that though he was walking forward he was going nowhere because the sphere was rotating around him. The rumbling must be the slow, inexorable movement of whatever this sphere was. Yet his body didn’t seem to accept he was going nowhere. The rotation of the sphere was slow, so his mind too rejected the idea that he was caught on a giant wheel. At first, he continued walking, then he tried running. Now the rumbling noise grew louder, echoing through the chamber in a way that sent vibrations through his chest. Still nothing changed. After a minute he gave up, bending over. The oppressive sensation grew stronger. He was expecting to be exhausted, and mentally he was, but physically he felt nothing despite his sprint. Suddenly he remembered he was in Tarya, bodiless. Which meant he could approach this problem in another way.

‘Mina?’ he whispered. His whisper hissed back at him, made sinister by the echo. To block out the sound he hummed, low at first, then louder. It was one of Pierrot’s love songs—one that made all the girls in the audience sigh for him. A melody of pure longing. He pictured Mina in his thoughts, her honey hair and smiling eyes, and wove all his feelings for her into the song. Nothing happened at first, and then with a burst of light the sphere around him became transparent, the black dissolved. Yet that wasn’t right. He realised the light came from Mina herself, who now stood in the centre of the sphere, turning it into a glowing orb. He could see nothing beyond its boundaries, but here within, it grew warm.

‘Where are we?’ she asked him. With the darkness gone, so too had the echo.

‘I think it’s some kind of trap,’ he said. ‘You left your body.’

‘I was so tired, then I was just floating. It was so dark, and there was nothing. Nothing for forever. How did you find me?’

A battle raged within him, silent and fierce, for the space of a breath. He knew she did not love him. Why subject himself to further pain? But he was who he was, honest to a fault.

‘I feel you in here.’ He pointed to his heart. ‘I can always find you.’

Mina smiled, the smallest of smiles, but enough for hope to flare within Luka’s heart.

‘I’m glad,’ she said, and reached out her hands to him. In the instant their hands touched, the light around them flared to unbearable brightness.

Luka felt a sharp burning in his chest and a voice full of all the echoes of the chamber whispered in his ear, ‘You think a broken heart is noble? She will destroy you …’

Then they were huddled at the cliff face, and Mina was looking up at him, her face aglow with the first traces of the dawn sun.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered.

Even as Luka smiled down at her, the echo still resounded in his mind.

‘… destroy you … destroy you … destroy you.’

~

Although the stairs were steep and rough, there were not many. Shaken by their strange side trip into Tarya, Mina and Luka were keen to leave the vicious crags behind. Sofia and Luka carried a bag each and despite trembling legs, their ascent was swift. Soon all three travellers stood at the top of the cliff face, watching dawn break across Andon. Peach and gold light flowed across the landscape, sweeping away their fears along with the shadows of the night. They could not help but feel exhilarated, standing high on the Fureys, with the fields and forests lighting up like a tray of gems before them. In silence, they let the fresh dawn air restore their optimism. They had never seen a dawn like it. The day would be glorious.

Finally, Luka broke the magic. ‘What was the place we went to? Did you have any sense of it, Mina?’

‘It’s nowhere in Tarya I’ve ever been before,’ she said. ‘It felt … personal … somehow. I sensed someone there, but not there. Not like being in a house and knowing someone else is there. More like … being inside someone’s mind.’

‘But it was Tarya, wasn’t it?’ Sofia asked. ‘I felt the shimmer.’

‘I think so. But I don’t know how anyone could make Tarya part of them … or,’ Mina smiled sheepishly, ‘this might sound strange, but maybe we were in them, in Tarya. In their thoughts.’

Luka scowled. ‘Sounds more frightening than strange. How could someone draw you into their version of Tarya?’

Sofia turned away from the cliff edge and began pacing. ‘I think we’ve learned now Tarya is not just the heavenly realms, not some marvellous place we go to when we die. It’s a place some can reach, and some not, that some can manipulate and some not. We’ve only just begun to explore the possibilities, but this shadow person we’re up against seems to have been using Tarya as his personal playground for a long time. He knows a lot more than we do. Oh Creator! We’re nearly at the peak.’

The others turned to face her and exclaimed at what they saw. Ahead was a gentle slope, with no shale this time, and then a final grand point rising high above them, sheer and vast and pockmarked with caves.

‘Any idea which cave it is?’ Luka asked with a sigh. ‘There must be nearly a dozen of them.’

‘I’ll work it out,’ Mina responded, walking toward their final destination.

‘This shadow person,’ Luka said to Sofia as they followed, ‘he knows Tarya. And if Mina’s right and we were somehow inside his mind, I’ve never felt anything so dark.’

‘How did you find your way out?’

‘I thought of Mina and a light appeared.’

‘That’s what we have,’ Sofia responded. ‘He has years of knowledge on us, but Mina has a gift that opens Tarya to her in ways of which he’s probably jealous. And he’s terribly dark, but Mina is light. Shadows disappear in the light. If I were him, I would be afraid.’

Up ahead, Mina reached her hands out, her face shining with joy. ‘Snow!’ she exclaimed, dancing around with her hands up to the sky. ‘It’s snowing!’

Luka and Sofia looked up and neither could help but smile. Above them clouds rested lazily in the sky, the dawn light smearing their fluffy forms with brilliant bands of gold and amber. And all around crystalline patterns were starting to fall.

Like children, the three forgot their purpose as they reached for the falling snow. Like tiny dancers, the flakes spun and twirled in the air. Hands reached to cup them gently. Luka gazed at Mina, captivated by the look of wonder on her face. Sofia examined the tiny crystals on her hand, gazing at their mathematical perfection. Snow was a wonder to them all, so entirely new it could erase all the burdens, fear, and yearning from their thoughts.

A wind blew across the slope, bringing more clouds, these ones dark, and then darker. In the passage of a few breaths the sky became dark grey. The bite of cold drew Mina and Luka and Sofia back to themselves.

‘What’s happening …?’ was all Mina managed before the wind growled a warning and darkness descended once more, the pure white of snow clouds and the pastel light of dawn smothered by the charcoal sky. Lightning seared the air, whiter than white, blinding them briefly, and then the snowflakes plummeted down, faster and heavier.

‘They’re changing shape,’ Sofia gasped, as the three instinctively turned for the caves. Her words were drowned by thunder, but the others could see for themselves. The snowflakes were lengthening, losing their symmetry. Now they looked like shards of ice instead of mandalas. Against the darkened sky, their points glinted. Hundreds, thousands of daggers plunged downward.

‘Run!’ Sofia screamed.

The slope they ran across became slick and treacherous as ice shards hit the rocky surface, shattering into tiny pieces. They tried to help each other, stumbling forward, feeling the ice break against their backs, beauty turned to danger in an instant.

‘There,’ Luka pointed. There was a cave just ahead. They could see nothing beyond the yawning black, but it was easily tall enough for them to run inside. Luka pelted forward, his arms above his head to protect his face from the ferocious shards. With a final burst, he skidded into the cave and turned to watch the others. His jaw dropped. It couldn’t be possible.

To reach Tarya, actors must reach inside to the part of themselves that believes in what is not there, to see things that never were. Luka knew he was good at this. But what he saw now defied even his ability to see the impossible. For the objects plunging from the sky were elongating, becoming sharper. The falling daggers of ice were transforming as he watched. They had long ago left behind the soft perfection of snowflakes. Now what fell fast and hard onto Mina and Sofia, as they raced desperately toward the cave, were real daggers, their metal blades spinning with ferocious speed as they plunged downward.