Thief (18 page)

Then there was the anger, which seemed to be growing in him by the day. For if God did exist then he had a lot of explaining to do. Thus far Mikel had kept his rage in check with his discipline, but he feared it, especially as it continued to grow by the day. Rage had powered him for many years, but he had always known that if he let it consume him he would become what he most hated, and he had fought against it. Now he had a new fear. He was terrified that it would take control, and that it would drive Sherial away.

Sherial, he feared, was determined to iron out some of the faults she saw in him, seeing him as a human with great potential. He could do better, and she wanted his best from him, but he wanted something else. He couldn’t equate her goals with what he knew of the world. He couldn’t be what she wanted and still be who he was. And he desperately wanted to be who he was. He was a thief and a liar, but he was also Mikel. And he always wanted to be that.

Should he change millions would suffer for it, and he told her so repeatedly, every time her thoughts returned to that well-worn path. The sheer force of his pragmatism and his years of paranoia and anger held her faith at bay, for now, but it was a battle far from over, and they both knew it. Still he didn’t regret it, what was life without a challenge? And it was nice to have someone who cared.

For that was the most wonderful truth of all; Sherial cared about him. Not perhaps as a man, nor even perhaps as a friend, but at least she cared. Whether her decisions were right or wrong for him, whether or not he could accept them, they were still motivated only by her desire to help him. For that reason alone he knew he would follow her to hell and back. Literally.

That first evening he’d gathered the firewood from a small tree that had fallen over sometime in the previous few years, and had a small blaze going within minutes. And that too had been strange. He’d never had much luck lighting fires, usually having to blow and poke, re-light and blow again until fortune finally favoured him. This one just seemed to light at the first touch of his match, and more strangely the wood didn’t seem to burn down very fast either. A few small brands had lasted the entire evening.

While he’d been setting up the camp, Sherial had been out gathering food, fruit, nuts and berries from the nearby bushes. Also some ears of corn, and rice from the nearer fields, and too follow, some milk and cheese from a nearby farm. She hadn’t told him that was what she was doing, but he’d known never the less. It was almost as though he could see her gathering the foods through her own eyes. That too had scared him. How could he know such things without being told in some way? It smacked of mind control, of invasion of privacy. He had no secrets with her, a terror in itself, but now it seemed he couldn’t even keep her out of his mind.

Shortly after they’d set up camp that evening, they’d sat down and talked, or rather he talked and Sherial sometimes communicated in return, sometimes not. It was one of the differences between speaking and whatever form of communication it was that angels used. If they’d used words he knew, he would have been far better able to learn the things he wanted. But at the same time he would have been less well informed.

Mikel had learned far more her way than he’d ever imagined possible. For when she answered one of his questions he didn’t just learn the answer, he experienced it, all of it. There was an old saying, - if a picture paints a thousand words - well in this case his experiences told him far more.

When he’d asked where they were for example, Sherial had done far more than simply tell him the name of the place; she’d shown him. He’d seen, smelled, heard and felt a world of lush forests and mythical creatures, huge oceans, deserts and plains, and all filled with life. He’d immediately seen that this was indeed an entire world in its own right, and that somehow every point on it corresponded to some point on Earth. For a moment he could almost see the way in which the worlds connected, but not without her understanding in his mind.

More strange still he’d been shown that this was an ‘innocent’ world, one where concepts like civilization, cities, pollution, poverty, exploitation and a million other similar terms had never arisen. At least that was how he would have described what he was shown. Sherial saw it differently. For her it was a world well on its way to maturity. It had its problems perhaps, but great virtues as well. It was hard to understand a world so clean and pure and yet he knew it to be true. The one thing he didn’t however, learn was the name of the world, if indeed it had one. A name is a word, and Sherial didn’t deal in words.

The few humans he’d seen here, and there were some, lived in harmony with nature, as part of it, little more advanced than animals. And yet despite their lack of technology he knew they weren’t savages. They walked erect, used some basic tools, and communicated in the same insane angelic manner as Sherial. Once he had thought her tongue simply too complex for human vocal cords. Now he knew some humans had the same vocal cords.

Then again they also weren’t truly human either, though they were very close. If nothing else their skin marked them most as being from another world, being a mottled piebald mosaic of browns and gold. It was strange, yet it looked perfectly natural on them. Then too, the hair on their heads was closer to fur, running down their necks and backs like a lion’s mane. There was something in the shape of their cheeks and eyes that also marked them as alien, but not being an artist he couldn’t quite pin it down.

The locals were a tall people, averaging well over six feet, but perfectly proportioned with it, and none of them showed any sign of awkwardness. In fact they moved with the natural grace of dancers. Any one of them would have made a great basketball player. Above all there was a certain ‘rightness’ in their form that said they were no mutant or alien. They were designed for this world and were in complete harmony with it.

For all the differences between them and him, Mikel also knew they were perhaps the truest embodiment of humanity in their hearts too. They knew and understood love and joy, lived in peace, and made friends with their fellow humans and animals. So perhaps if he as a so-called civilized man looked down upon them as primitives, they too could rightly look down upon him. Of course they were far beyond that, which left him feeling more than a little ridiculous.

When they’d occasionally met a travelling man or a family, he’d studied them with intense interest, trying to understand everything about them. How they could survive as simple nomadic primitives and yet seem somehow so far above him at the same time? How they could live in such a paradise and not spoil it? What path had they chosen that the Earth hadn’t? Or more probably what path hadn’t they chosen?

It was a fruitless investigation. He’d found to his surprise that he couldn’t even begin to understand them. They spoke with Sherial in the same strange tongue and seemed to understand everything she said, yet he picked up nothing except her responses to them.

Sherial’s side of the conversations confused him perhaps even more than theirs. For while they greeted Sherial as an honoured friend, she too greeted them as such. It was as though they were all on the same level, one so far above him that he could only watch and stare. Yet Sherial was an angel, while they too were just human beings. Couldn’t they see that, he kept asking himself?

This then he’d finally decided, must be the Garden of Eden. What Earth was like before the fall. The people here so innocent that they had no conception of the order of the heavens, and perhaps so pure that it didn’t even apply. But when he’d asked Sherial she’d said no, and typically explained nothing further, simply adding to his confusion.

Mostly that first evening, he recalled, she’d sang. A wordless song, full of music and light, sung with the most delicate of bird song and purest flute. It was a song of love, not mortal love or lust, but rather pure love, that which only the soul can know, and it moved him deeply. He’d heard her singing before, often accompanying his stereo and completely outclassing it, but that first night here was different. Something in the air, in the world, in his distance from everything he called home, made him perhaps more susceptible. But then too her singing was always miraculous. When Sherial sang, the very mountains were surely moved to their knees. How anybody could have such a voice was beyond him, but then so was everything else about her.

As he’d chewed on the last of the fruits and nuts she’d brought him, he listened and watched, entranced, as he had been since the beginning. And so when darkness finally fell, and she rested for a while, he’d found himself shocked by the passage of time.

Looking around in the darkness he’d first spotted eyes, yellow eyes glowing in the reflections of the fire light. Yellow eyes of all different shapes and sizes, at a variety of different heights, and completely surrounding them. He started only a little, he should have expected them.

The first had soon walked up on them, a delicate deer like creature which had obviously decided Mikel was no threat and just wanted to be close to her. And even as it came to Sherial, nuzzling like a kid at its mother, another and another had followed, all with the same intent. But they weren’t all deer. There were birds and dogs and cats, something that looked like a koala bear, several monkey like creatures and even a moose.

All of them wanted only one thing, to be near her. To listen and watch and touch and above all to know her love. He understood that need perfectly. They too were under her spell.

All through that evening the creatures of the forest had come and received her love, bathed in her golden light and stayed to enjoy her song. As they were meant to. For finally he understood what it was that Sherial did. She had tried to explain it several times before, but always he had been running on a different wavelength. Yet as he sat there among the animals, worshiping her, he understood.

Sherial was their medium. She wasn’t so much here for him, or the other humans as she was for the animals. She brought them peace and happiness. She left them with a sense of something outside of themselves, outside of their normal worlds. She gave them an opportunity to become more, for that’s what she and the others were, agents of growth. Through her and others like her, creatures evolved.

Some of the animals that were her audience, that stayed to watch and listen, would return to their burrows and nests as more than they had been. And those changes wouldn’t just be on the spiritual level. In biological terms they would be included into their genes, in time making their species more than they were. It was incredible, impossible, and completely absurd, but still as he watched he recognized it for truth. Mikel suspected there was still more to it than that. That evolution was still far more complex a thing than he understood. But what else there might be he couldn’t begin to guess.

The surprise had come when a thump beside him had suddenly alerted him to the fact that, pressed for space, some of her audience had come closer than he’d expected. He’d turned just in time to see a tiger lying down on the bedroll with him. Briefly he’d known complete terror. The cat was so unimaginably huge and mere inches from his face. It also had appallingly bad breath and massive yellow fangs. But for some reason, - well he knew the reason, he hadn’t run, and in minutes had even forgotten the cat was there at all, as he too fell once more under her enchantment.

As long as he lived he knew he would remember that evening. The angel had come to hold court with the creatures of the world, a goddess in her own throne room. He, they all were mesmerized as they came to pay homage. Did that make him one of the beasts of the field? Did he care?

The last thing he remembered from that evening was the feel of the tiger’s fur against his face while one of the small deer curled up against the small of his back. What was it the bible spoke of, the lion lying down with the lamb? Well that night was as close as he could ever have imagined. Those words seemed to roll through his dreams all that night. Dreams so confused and chaotic that he couldn’t make any sense out of them at all. Or didn’t want to.

He’d woken in the morning to find himself almost alone, except that his feet had gone to sleep. The koala bear had apparently decided that they made a perfect mattress, and he tried not to curse the poor creature as he carried it carefully to the branch of a nearby tree. After all it was only doing exactly what he was, - worshiping her.

It however, had an excuse. It was a dumb creature of the field.

On the eighth day of their travels, when Mikel’s world was just becoming understandable, Sherial turned everything upside down once more.