An Incomparable Pearl by Jon Jacks
‘Let the darkness that spawned her take her,’ the king spat, turning to his queen, embracing her in his own far more powerful arms.
‘That serpent won’t trouble us further, my love,’ the queen whispered breathlessly, tenderly snaking her arms around his waist, drawing him out of physical waters and into her own. ‘But I can’t allow you to risk being endangered like this ever again! You must promise me to stay away whenever I’m bathing!’
And as she spoke, her waters broke: and she gave birth to the most beautiful princess.
*
Like the queen, her mother, the princess possessed an almost ethereal beauty.
Indeed, the queen’s own mythical beauty had never faded, despite the passing of the years, the ageing of the king.
It was her means of bathing, it was whispered around the courts, the towns, the kingdoms: a ritual involving the secrets of eternal youth. A ceremony invoking Nature herself, calling on the goddess to aid the queen in her quest for a boundless beauty.
No one, of course, could know for sure.
Not even the king.
He had kept to the promise he had made that day, so long ago, when he had almost been fooled by enchantments into falling into the deadly embrace of a water serpent.
The longer the years passed, however, the more he regretted denying himself the sight of his gloriously beautiful wife, naked amongst nature’s most perfect setting.
How many times had they once regularly lain naked together alongside the lake’s contentedly rippling shoreline?
How many times had he been threatened by a serpent so determined to devour him that it had veiled its ugliness within a semblance of his wife?
How many times had other serpents been spotted in the lake? (None: he had obviously killed the only one residing there.)
The odds, quite clearly, were on his side.
He would surprise his wife as she bathed. And he would help her recall all those happier times.
As soon as the king silently appeared before them, each maid naturally and subserviently moved aside to allow him to pass. Although loyal to the queen, ultimately their loyalty was to their king: and besides, like him they had been denied the right to approach the queen while she bathed, and they too wondered what her famed ritual of eternal youth involved.
The closer the king drew towards the edge of the lake, the more silently he moved through the undergrowth, not wishing to unduly startle his wife.
When he at last caught his first sight of her, he gasped.
Bathing half in, half out of the lake’s silvery waters, she appeared more beautiful than ever, her flawless skin still lily-white, her hair as long and lustrous as the most prized fields of golden corn.
Around her, water lilies had gathered like a dark green cloak of finest velvet, their snowy blooms the stars to her gorgeously mercurial body.
It was as Venus that she unhurriedly rose from those glittering waters.
Venus rising, sparkling, entrancing.
She appeared, as she rose, to be dragging the emerald leaves with her. Clinging to her waist, to her legs, like the most iridescent scales.
The king gasped, gasped in horror.
The queen heard, heard his horror.
She struck swiftly, a lighting strike of brightest green crackling through the air.
Her body was incredibly long, incredibly flowing and serpentine.
She was on him before he fully realised what was happening.
Her fangs sunk deep into his flesh. The venom flowed through his veins, transforming them into green strands, into shredding threads of life.
His body, cold and lifeless, quietly swirled away on the hidden currents of the lake.
Perhaps, if he was unusually lucky, his beautiful wife would greet him in the other world he had exiled her to so long ago.
*
Chapter 27
The prince recognised the most important elements of the tale.
He didn’t find it either amusing or delightful.
Rather, he wept.
Now, his fawn tears were such unusual things they fell to the ground as amber, shattering there into many pieces, yet each one remaining as great as the whole. Within each one, emotions lingered in their entirety, there to be recalled at any moment.
‘Hah!’
The princess leapt to her feet, the urgency of her rising drawing about her broken strands of emerald grass. Her head spun around, her teeth bared hungrily as she shrieked out into the air:
‘A hunt, my lords! I want a hunt to bring the most delicious fawn to my table!’
*
The prince ran.
His legs were spindly, his body weak and ungainly.
He didn’t hold out much chance of staying ahead of any determined hunt.
Fortunately for him, there was a delay in the hunt getting underway, the knights gathering around the princess expressing their doubts of the wisdom of a hunt in this cursed land.
‘My lady, this is not flesh…’
‘These are not deer…’
The princess stridently dismissed their doubts and fears.
‘There are no fawns native to this land! No one but us trespasses here free of conflict of time or age!’
The hunt was thereby relatively swiftly assembled, the knights mounting up with but little armour, their lances light hunting spears rather than the heavy, cumbersome weapons favoured in war or tournament.
As if sensing the danger he was in, other deer rapidly collected around the fleeing fawn, their presence reassuring to him despite the way the arrows of the pursuing men slid through the blanched bodies as if they weren’t really there. They moved as if one, as if fully aware of each other’s needs and intentions.
They moved over the rolling hills as smoothly, quietly – even as serenely, despite their haste – as scudding clouds weave across the sky. The mounted men flowed after them, a rainbow of bright colours, their arrows falling like frozen rain.
In spite of the insubstantial nature of his many protectors, the raining arrows that might have struck the fleeing fawn passed through their bodies the way light hits water: deflected, dissolving, dispersed. Not that the men could see their target clearly either, the crowding creatures a mist of concealment, the fawn veiled as if existing on some other plain.
Yet more arrows abruptly darkened the sky, falling it seemed from black clouds and wracking havoc on the pursing men.
These arrows of darkest rain penetrated armour as if it wasn’t really there, striking the flesh cowering beneath, the flesh of both horse and man. The soldiers and their mounts fell, like corn at harvest, the bodies piling up in a solid wall preventing all further progress for those coming on behind.
Of course, the pursuing men could have ridden around the wall of their own dead. But the storm of arrows coming their way would have dissuaded a far larger force, so they spun their mounts around, spurred them hard, and raced back the way they had originally come.
The fawn wasn’t completely sure that the danger was over, however.
For there was now another troop of riders rushing towards him, this time from the opposite direction. A few of the horses fell to a last, parting shot of arrows from the retreating men, but otherwise they were a strong and irresistible force.
The deer surging around him appeared calm, yet they had hardly seemed unduly disturbed either when his sister’s men had been chasing him. Nevertheless, their rushed, steady gallop became a canter, then a languid trot.
The oncoming riders were naked from the waist up and, despite what the prince had believed earlier, they carried neither bows nor spears, nor wore elaborate helms as he had first surmised.
The closer they came, the more he understood the cause of his confusion: they were centaurs, ridden by men with the heads of horses. Those closest to him could have been wielding invisible bows, yet it was just the way they held and gently rippled their arms in front of their chests, their eyes on the storm clouds gathered above. Through thes
Like a purer, spiritual reflection of those storm clouds – now being dispersed, and sent on their way – the white cloak of deer surrounding the fawn also began to turn around and make their way back towards the mountain they had left behind them in the chase.
The centaurs and their riders drew to a halt before the prince, smiling and nodding their heads in greeting and welcome.
In response, the prince nodded his own head: and was surprised to find that it was his own head, and not that of the fawn’s. He was wearing his breastplate once more, as well as wielding his sword and shield.
He thought he had been transformed back into a boy once more.
But he was wrong, he suddenly realised: for from the waist down, he was still a weak and stumbling fawn, if a slightly older and larger one than before.
*
Chapter 28
‘You’re safe here, from the Spawn of Lilith.’
The speaker looked down kindly on the prince as he trotted alongside the centaurs and their riders.
Strangely, they passed the fallen horse-headed riders without a care, the prince wondering at this as much as he wondered at the way the fleshy skins of the centaurs glowed as smoothly white as the deers’. The riders were of darker hues, as if these wholly separate portions had never been intended to be enjoined or related in any way.
‘I know no one amongst them who could be this Lilith’s son,’ the prince admitted with a bemused frown in answer to the centaur’s statement, assuming the centaur must have made a mistake.
‘We recognised him for who he is, despite his concealed form,’ the centaur continued assuredly. ‘As with her progeny through the originally spiritless Adam, the Sons of Cain, Lilith’s offspring are of the darkness, not the light; fully of this Earth, and nothing of Heaven. And so their knowledge of Earth is great, yet their knowledge of Heaven remains forever non-existent, any chance of spiritual sight lost to them, imprisoned within the forehead where it’s said Cain was marked. They wander forever in the darkness of the material world.’
The prince glanced back to see the last of his sister’s fleeing forces vanish over one of the rolling landscapes many hills. The white cloud of placid deer was still in full view, heading for higher ground.
The centaur noted the prince’s curious gaze.
‘They’re returning to the Mountain of Blessing,’ the centaur explained.
Once again, the prince met his comment with a bemused grimace.
‘The Mountain of Blessing?’ he repeated, confused. ‘But surely it’s the Mountain of Curses they’re returning to?’
This time it was the centaur who met the prince’s innocent comment with a bemused smile.
‘No: the Mountain of Curses lies on the other side of the wall where, thankfully, they have no need or wish to return to.’
‘There was nothing cursed on the other side of the wall,’ the prince insisted, more bewildered than ever by the centaur’s strange statements.
‘That is how it seemed to you, undoubtedly: but only because you have never experienced what it is like to be truly blessed.’
‘I see that your breastplate is incomplete,’ a nearby rider appeared to say, surprising the prince, who had assumed that the horse-headed man might not be capable of speech, or maybe even rational thought.
‘Are you here seeking further stones for it?’ the speaker queried, the voice not coming from the rider’s equine mouth after all, but from the centaur carrying him.
The prince shook his head.
‘I’m here to return them. Do any here belong to your kingdom?’ he asked.
Both centaurs shook their heads.
‘We have no lands of our own, unless you count this small hillock loaned to us,’ the centaur explained, indicating a small, barren knoll they were heading towards. ‘And none of the stones on your chest belong to either us or those who own this land.’
Lying beyond the small hill, but remarkably close by, was a walled city. The hill itself was surmounted by a tree that had long ago shed its leaves and was, perhaps, even quite dead, been almost devoid of even twigs and branches. Yet it sparkled like a flame at its heart, where the trunk split into three, like a cross. The flame was actually a precious gem, one of red with veins of white over black.
It was such an odd place to pin this most precious of things, the prince thought, there for anyone to freely take when there could quite clearly be thieves on either side.
‘What do you know of them, the people who live here?’ he asked the centaurs.
‘We know many stories,’ the first said despondently, ‘but then, isn’t the problem with stories that you never know which divulge the truth and which are full of nothing but myths?’
The other centaur chuckled, apologising for his friend’s pessimism.
‘All of us here once spent our lives telling stories, meaning well, yet little realising that those listening unavoidably bring their own preconceptions to the tale, moulding it to their own needs.’
‘Not that that can be a terrible thing in itself, of course,’ his friend added, speaking more brightly this time. ‘If it makes the story relevant to them, and thereby aids them. The problem lies when it is misinterpreted for their own ends.’
‘It’s true we put too much faith in our stories,’ the centaur admitted morosely, ‘little realising that we were as blind as the flocks we were flattering ourselves we could lead.’
Now they were closer to the tree, the prince saw that the flaming glow of the stone was similar in so many ways to the flame he carried within his own heart.
I would eat and I would be eaten, the flame whispered devotedly.
‘Fortunately, there are some tales,’ the other centaur said, ‘that the listener instinctively realises carries an important message for them; and so they recognise the truth and beauty of it even as others dismiss it as been quite ridiculously wondrous.’
‘The greatest story,’ his companion agreed, ‘is one that most people will accept as being obviously true, because they wish it to be so, because it inspires, reassure and elevates them – and what, indeed, could be wrong with such a story ever being told?’
The prince and his hybrid companions parted company where the road split in two just before the hill, the centaur assuring him that the people of the nearby city would allow him entrance later that evening if he rested here awhile.
The centaurs rode off at a gallop, those without riders seemingly untroubled by the lack of any guidance; indeed, these were the ones who seemed to travel with extra speed and lightness, freed of what might only be a constricting and heavy burden after all.
Seating himself as comfortably as he were able beneath the spreading tree, the prince prepared himself for a long wait. As he patiently waited, he noticed that what he’d taken at first to be nothing more than the mottled fur of his lower body was in fact a fragmenting of light into multiple shades, a dappling extending far beyond himself and stretching across the ground.
He glanced up, wondering if, by some miracle, the tree had abruptly burgeoned into leaf, the innumerable leaves scattering the light falling all about him. But no: the tree wasn’t full of leaves but, rather, ablaze with flickering flames, each one of which flared like the reddest leaf about to fall.
Upon the trunk, the mottled light played across the heavily textured bark. Most amazingly of all, here it was the pattern of a fawn’s fur, the shades of dark and light brown gracing its head and torso.
The rest of the fawn was indelibly joined to the extended limbs of a boy or girl.
And the boy’s hands and feet were pinioned firmly to the crossed beams of the trunk by brightly flaming nails.
*
Chapter 29
The prince leapt to his feet and, attempting to free the poor boy nailed to the tree, immediately began wrenching hard on the
The fire burnt hard and painfully into his palm. Even so, he still kept a firm hold of the nail, trying to wrench it clear of the flesh, the bone, the wood.
Who could do such a thing? he wailed inwardly.
The cruelty of such a thing was unimaginable.
Worse still, it was all a grim parody, an insult, to the sacrifice of our Lord, all of which he had learnt about as an essential part of his training to be a king.
He couldn’t let this poor creature, this hybrid of beast and boy so like himself, die in such a torturous way.
The flickering flames amongst the branches were already rapidly spreading, their power gaining, the wood warping in the great heat of the roaring flames and threatening to pull the pinioned boy apart limb from limb.
Unable to free the deeply embedded nail from the lower part of the trunk, the prince decided he would have to climb into the burning tree itself, in the hope that he could free the boy’s hands.
Unleashing and throwing aside his breastplate, he clambered up, his fawn legs scrambling for purchase like those of a mountain goat, his hands grasping overhead branches and helping pull him up into the ball of searing flames.
He feared he might already be too late. The flames were already coiling up the boy’s body, ascending from the burning nail that so securely bound his feet.
As if the agony of his burning hands wasn’t bad enough, the flame in his heart seared him even more agonisingly. It felt to him as if the fire there would burst free, a conflagration that would leave him as dead as the fawn-boy pinioned to the tree of death.
Like the fire roasting away within his own heart, the boy’s heart was equally enflamed, the fire expanding uncontrollably, burning away the fur of the poor creature – not a fawn, as the prince had first presumed, but now more recognisably a donkey or an ass – withering its flesh, its muscles, cracking its ribs. The flames were rapidly enveloping the whole of the body, including the outstretched limbs, the lowered, buckled legs.
The heat was so intense, the prince might as well have been pinioned there himself upon that cross, his own body aflame, roasting away to nothing.