An Incomparable Pearl by Jon Jacks
‘And what makes you so sure, “Brother”,’ the princess chuckled maliciously, ‘that I possess any facet of mercy within me?’
*
Chapter 37
‘Ah, it seems I do have a sliver of mercy lying unseen deep within me after all,’ the princess joked as the blindfolded prince was led towards her tent. ‘Unlike our other captives – oh, I won’t be letting them go, of course – I won’t insist that you’re stripped naked: that, I fear, would be far too revealing, don’t you, “Brother”?’
‘Your men, Sister: were they the ones who bored that snaking hole through the wall? How did they do it?’
‘Remarkable, wasn’t it?’ the princess replied with an inappropriate joviality. ‘Truly remarkable, don’t you think, what you can do if you put your mind to it and–’
Her comment was brutally cut off by a shriek of pain from behind them. Other screams followed, cries of horror and shock, of viciously injured and dying men.
‘No!’ the prince himself screamed, whirling around on his unseen sister. ‘You can’t kill them! They haven’t done you any harm!’
His sister either suddenly wasn’t there or refused to respond, let alone bring the massacre to an end.
The cries of the dying were more anguished than ever. There were other sounds too, the slew of sharp blades piercing or hacking flesh and bone, the rush of fleeing or struggling bodies, the wails of mercy cut short in a harsh gurgling of blood.
The one thing lacking, of course, although usually a normal part of any battle, was the metallic rings of swords on armour. Rather than this, there was the dull thud of hard iron against soft flesh.
The prince could smell the blood being splattered about him. He could even taste it, he believed, every now and again.
Frequently, too, he sensed the urgent struggles taking place close around him, felt the brush of movement, the rush of displaced air.
But he couldn’t see any of it. He was blind to it all.
He slipped to his knees, weeping behind his blindfold.
Weeping for the death of such an innocent and helpless people.
Weeping at his own ridiculous sense of hopelessness, his complete lack of any capability of aiding these people.
There was a waft of air behind him as a blade deftly severed his binding threads with one swift swipe. (But unfortunately catching and granting a slight wound to his feet.)
As his arms and hands came free, his wet blindfold was torn from his head.
He looked about him – and sighed in horror.
He was surround by wolves, wolves standing on their two hind legs as if the most bestial of men.
*
Chapter 38
The maws of the wolves were bloodied. Strings of shredded flesh were caught between their massive teeth.
Their fur, too, was caked in blood. Claws were as bloody red as their teeth.
Each proudly held a lance, lances whose blades no longer glittered, for they were sheathed entirely in red gore.
On the ground, there lay the torn and violently crushed bodies of men-at-arms and knights, their armour battered into misshapen hulks.
As for the naked men and women, there was no sign at all of them.
Then the prince noticed that the wolves nearest to him had rope bindings around their wrists. Indeed, some of the wolves were removing the very last of these binding wreaths with a deft swish of a claw.
So, these people weren’t so innocent after all. They had hidden depths undreamt off by normal men.
And normal men had paid the price for their lack of this inner knowledge.
The wolf nearest to him reached out and grasped his shoulder, the lance he held so incredibly bloodied that the blood ran right down to his furred hand.
The prince bent and bared his neck, accepting that he was about to lose his head, like so many of those lying about him.
‘We thank you for offering your life for ours,’ the wolf said, using his grasp on the prince’s shoulder to help the boy rise to his feet. ‘Though there was no need, as you can now see; for we were never in any real danger.’
As the wolf said this, the claws of his hand retracted, slipping back inside the fur like the most expertly sheathed swords. Even the red-stained lance slipped away into the palm of the wolf’s right hand, vanishing as smoothly as the claws, as if an inedible part of the creature.
The fur rippled, like darkly rotted corn in a windswept field, and this too rushed back inside the beast’s flesh. Muscles flexed, rolled like the waves of a sea, and quickly shrunk.
In a moment, a naked woman stood before the prince, not a wolf.
Around her, other wolves had also become once more the smooth-fleshed men and women who, only moments before, had been held captive. Others, remaining as wolves, were utilising their incredible strength and litheness to remove the corpses, lifting them up effortlessly two at a time, throwing them into the bright material of downed tents in readiness to drag them away.
The prince also saw, with relief, that other wolves were guarding humiliated and disarmed men who’d had the sense to surrender. They were now the ones on their knees and securely bound.
‘If you could do this – why did you wait?’ the prince asked the woman.
‘We gathered they were waiting for someone to use the Mirror of Angles: we realised we might have to help them when they appeared.’
‘My sister!’ The prince looked anxiously about him, unable to see her either amongst the prisoners or the dead bodies. ‘Did she…’
‘She escaped, somehow,’ a nearby man explained. ‘It’s not often anybody can avoid us, if we set out to capture them: yet she seemed to vanish, as if by magic.’
‘She might still be a danger to you,’ the prince pointed out.
The woman shook her head doubtfully.
‘No, it’s you she wishes to destroy, it seems to us: and she would have done so as soon as she found a reason that the men of your kingdom would have accepted.’
‘You’re probably right,’ the prince agreed sadly. ‘I didn’t realise the crown of our kingdom meant this much to her.’
‘Crowns mean a great deal to many people,’ another woman said. ‘Here we would rather lose our heads than accept any crown offered us, for it only brings bondage to worldly powers.’
‘Our Saviour proclaimed the Kingdom of God,’ the man added with mischievous guffaw, ‘and the Church claimed the crown.’
A lance reappeared in the first woman’s hand as she offered further explanation: ‘Amongst the Sons and Daughters of the Right Hand, it is the lance that is sacred, for it reminds us of the sacrifice we must make for the overall good of everyone else.’
‘You should take a look once more within the Mirror of Angels,’ the second woman said, indicating that she wanted the prince to follow her as she unhurriedly made her way towards the sparkling topaz set upon a stone plinth.
The prince shook his head, unsurely hanging back.
‘I’ve already looked into the mirror: and I didn’t understand what I saw there.’
‘Things have changed since you last looked,’ the first woman declared, her lance once again slipping away into nothing within her palm as she nodded towards the captive men. ‘Your own men no longer pose a threat to you: that makes a great change to what potentially awaits you.’
*
Chapter 39
The prince stared yet again into the fragmented gold, the streaks of reflective black.
The stone was small but, when standing close, it was like peering into the dark mirror of your lover’s eye where, surprisingly, you can see yourself reflected.
The prince couldn’t see either himself or the Princess Lorica reflected here, however.
The darker streaks, in which he was supposed to see his earthly, darker side, was like the darkness of the cosmos, gradually being veiled by scudding clouds.
The veins of gold, in which he should perceive the latent self, was similarly fogging over,
Both black and gold were blanching. Merging, as they became equally white.
Forming into a most perfectly glistening sphere.
Like a moon.
No: not a moon.
For this was a gloriously shining white.
Like the most glorious pearl.
*
It was such a wondrous sight that – despite his earlier reservations about the pearl actually being a stone – the prince glanced down eagerly at his breastplate, fully expecting a glittering pearl to have magically appeared there, safely embedded within one of the two remaining spaces.
Unfortunately, the settings remained empty.
The prince looked once more into the mirror, wondering if he’d missed something.
The image there was already changing. From the top down, it was running, like water.
Like tears.
Like the tears that had run down the moon carried on the ass’s back.
Here though, rather than being of silver and gold, the tears were perfectly white, such that they themselves looked like so many miniature pearls, falling and collecting in an equally blinding white dish.
Behind them, from where they had started to run, they left only a pure darkness, a darkness increasing as each pearl-drop tear collected within and became a part of the dish’s sides.
The falling drops began to turn, to swirl, like the stars of a whirling cosmos.
The darkness swirled with it, coiling, entrapping the curls of white within its serpentine form, squeezing the life, the light, out of it, until the only light was an orb of white within the mirror’s very centre – and abruptly this vanished too as a grinning serpent head devoured it in one brutal gulp.
The prince prepared to recoil in horror, wondering if he was once again going to see himself there as a serpent-tousled gorgon.
But no gorgon appeared there.
Neither did he see there any reminder of the beauty of his Princess Lorica.
He had been wrong to assume all the light, the brightness, had been absorbed by the black serpent. The light that had pooled within the mirror’s base, that had clung to and curled up its sides, like horns, was still there, seemingly glowing more brightly than ever.
Like a sickle, fragmented moon.
Or, maybe, a fragmented pearl.
As you see yourself in water or a mirror, so see you me in yourself, the mirror whispered.
Bewildered, the prince shook his head, turned away.
He was more confused than ever.
*
Chapter 40
The prince still remained unsure as to what the mirror had attempted to reveal to him.
Weren’t the black streaks supposed to reveal his darker side, rather than merging with the angelic gold?
He tried to hide his puzzlement, though, as the captured men bowed before him and pledged their allegiance to him.
They were more than willing to do this, they explained to both the prince and their captors, for they had heard that the queen had transformed the kingdom while they had been away, allowing black demons to rule over the land.
‘Then I must return to save my people from this,’ the prince vowed adamantly, appreciating at last that his quest must come to an end, that this was his appointed role and one he couldn’t simply shrug off.
As each knight recognised the prince as king, and promised to follow only him, his weapons were returned to him.
‘I beg forgiveness, my lor…my…lady?’ a befuddled Sir Grandhan had stammered, the first to be brought before the prince and possibly still suffering from the hard blow to the head that had felled him.
Realising that his overly long hair had probably added to the poor knight’s confusion, the prince explained, with a satisfied and forgiving chortle, ‘that he would have to get it shorn as soon as possible, to prevent any other possible mix up!’
The Sons and Daughters of the Right Hand appeared highly amused by the knights’ many promises of subservience, yet accepted these rites as just being the customs of another land, admitting that they themselves had once subscribed to similar pledges. Moreover, a land bordering theirs still adhered to comparable beliefs, and they suggested that the dead amongst the prince’s men would find peace there until ready to move on again.
‘The dead?’ the prince had declared in surprise: only to be more surprised than ever when he saw that the men killed in the short but brutal battle had indeed risen to their feet once more, waiting in line to make their own pledges to their new king.
‘King Teleion will welcome them,’ the woman assured the prince. ‘And while there, they will recover any lost limbs and be made whole again.’
Of course, the once loyal horses of the dead men now shied away from their touch, refusing to draw near, let alone carry them anywhere.
And so these men straggled behind the column of mounted knights, on foot and without armour.
A thick black cloud hung over them all the way to the Land of Simeon.
It was a swirling, ever growing cloud.
It was a cloud of hungrily squawking ravens, every one of which eagerly pecked and rived at the dead flesh.
*
Chapter 41
The Land of Simeon, everyone agreed, was the most beautiful land they had yet come across on this side of the wall.
It was, in fact, the land most recognisably like the kingdoms they had left behind.
Great white walled castle and cities were scattered across the landscape of neatly ploughed fields and well-tended woods, every gate they came across open and welcoming, as if they had never feared or suffered the hardships of war.
The brightly coloured tents of packed and excited tournaments were everywhere, while the hunting parties flowed through the woods, horns blaring, pennants flying.
It was a land of pageantry, heraldry, and chivalry.
Like a dream
A paradise.
They came across King Teleion and his court as they took part in one of the great hunts, every lord and lady there supporting a hooded and tightly jessed hawk or falcon on his or her wrist. And far from being horrified or startled by the disturbing presence of the swarming crows, the lords and ladies who first extended their greetings to the prince’s men insisted that the carrion would readily disperse as soon as they were sated.
‘The crows are a necessity,’ a lady reassured the prince, noticing his surprise at her amusement as she observed the raven’s repugnant antics, ‘ensuring progress within our own realm; despite them not being of this kingdom, but of one indelibly entwined with it.’
In spite of this bizarre callousness of the king’s court, they warmly welcomed the prince’s men, and most especially the crow-pecked stragglers, almost as if they regarded them as kindred spirits.
No one was more felicitous in his welcoming pleasantries than King Teleion, the only pause in his greeting being a brief one when – it seemed to the prince – his eyes fell upon the stones on his breastplate, and the sword strapped to his horse.
The king was too polite, the prince recognised, to accuse him of possessing the Prophet stolen from his lands.
‘I have something of yours: two things, in fact,’ the prince announced, carefully withdrawing the sword to ensure his actions weren’t mistaken as a threat. ‘But to offer them both to you, I believe I must first return your sword.’
As the king still supported his hooded hawk upon his wrist, he accepted the sword with one hand, apologising for his gracelessness.
‘Although I might add,’ he said, ‘that this a sword without honour, and I hope it has brought you no ill fortune, as it has my court.’
‘I know of its history,’ the prince replied, ‘and I would assure you that its heart is true; its own misfortune was to perceive the treachery of the knight who stole it.’
Before he had the opportunity to explain anything more, he was interrupted by the thundering hooves of another rider ferociously galloping towards them from out of
On her wrist, strangely, she carried not the peregrine expected by the prince, but a black-feathered crow, its beaded eyes glistening like the choicest berries.
‘My lord,’ she yelled out excitedly, pointing up high into the air, ‘there are more birds there, can’t you see? Of every kind too – oh, I beg your pardon, my lord!’
On spotting the prince, she slewed her horse to a gentle canter, bowing her head in submission as an apology for her rudeness.
‘As the King’s Daughter, Hierkoracica always acts as if born only yesterday!’ the king explained with an apologetic shrug to the smiling prince.
Twisting slightly in his saddle, the king peered up towards where his daughter had pointed, shading his eyes with a hand as if attempting to veil his eyes from the very brightest of suns, the hawk on his wrist remaining unperturbed by the movement.
‘It used to be that she had finer sight than any of us,’ he continued with another sad shake of his head, ‘in touch with worlds beyond our own perception, in fact. But now, I fear, she always see birds where I fear there have been none since the murder of a good knight, this being the very misfortune I’d mentioned.’
The prince was unsure what to say. The sky was filled with a great many birds, and of every kind too, as the King’s Daughter had quite rightly announced. And yet the king and his court appeared completely oblivious to them, as if blinded by a blazing sun.
Perhaps this was why, the prince reasoned, they kept their hawks hooded and patiently waiting upon their wrists.
The young girl didn’t make any attempt to correct her father’s mistake, but neither did she appear angry at his strange insistence that the sky was empty of birds.
‘The Prophet!’ she said instead, elatedly rising in her saddle as she noticed the sword her father was holding.
‘But my girl, we all saw–’ the king began to morosely protest at his daughter’s enthusiasm for the return of the sword.