An Incomparable Pearl by Jon Jacks
The prince plucked at this little gem, pulling it from the waters, where it still shimmered with dew-like droplets, magnifying each small part of it.
And here, too, the veins branched endlessly, each a minute tree in its own right.
The trees of the generations of man. The branches of the realm of animals. The stems of knowledge. The shoots of everything new.
Another leaf appeared in the water, and another, yet rather than coming in on the wind these were floating up from below, bobbing to the surface.
Peering into the water, the prince saw what could have been the reflection of many hanging branches dipping into the trough: and yet, of course, there was no such tree out here in this barren field that could have created such a reflection.
The more he looked, the more he saw of this tree: a tree growing upside down, and extending far down into the water, where everything became ever darker and unclear.
As he bent to look, the prince caught his own reflection within the water, caught the image of his own long hair drooping into the water like the sobbing boughs of the willow. The brightly coloured gems embedded in his breastplate sparkled amongst it all like miniature, whirling planets.
He had gathered another gem, he saw: the bright green of the heliodor.
The colours blazed within the water, dazzled as they danced. They whirled and spun, drawing the multiple tones together, melding them, merging it all into the purest white light,
So see you Me in yourself, the rippling waters whispered.
It glittered, this pure whiteness, as the moon glimmers when reflected in lakes and streams. And like the leaves, for the briefest of moments it bobbed to the surface.
It was the pearl.
An inconceivable pearl: unless it was spirited into existence right before you.
The prince reached for it – but it slipped farther away from his grasp.
He grabbed for it once more – only for it to yet again keep on falling away from him, dropping deeper and deeper into what now seemed an endless black, even its remarkably bright glimmer rapidly becoming ever dimmer, ever smaller and more insubstantial against the enveloping darkness.
The prince made one final, desperate grasp for the sinking pearl – but he was too late once more, his fingertips coming close to touching it, yet not anywhere close enough to stop it from continue falling farther and farther away from him.
*
Chapter 53
Urgently, the prince removed his heavy breastplate, his constricting leggings, even his undergarments, all of which could become waterlogged.
Although the trough was obviously far deeper than he had originally supposed, just how deep could it really be?
Taking a deep gulp of air, he slipped into the water, pulling himself deeper with a fierce stroke of his arms, swimming down into the darkness.
He could no longer see even a fragmentary glimmer of the pearl: it had dropped too far into the darkness, obviously.
He plunged deeper into the water, grabbing at the branches of the tree when he sensed the waters trying to drag him back to the surface. He used the tree as if he were climbing it, placing his feet on extensions of the trunk and pushing himself along, grasping at any handholds that would help him pull himself onwards.
In this intense darkness, the ever branching tree could have been a maze, each stem taking him off on the wrong track. Therefore he stuck to the thicker part of the tree, the part he realised that everything else, all these lesser limbs, must have sprung from.
He couldn’t be sure when it dawned on him that he was no longer descending but ascending, climbing up rather than sinking. Neither could he be sure when he had begun breathing naturally once more, the waters having become, it seemed to him, a fluid space of ultimate darkness.
Far ahead of him, at last, he began to catch the first glimmers of his goal, the glittering, pure white light of the sparkling pearl.
It lay, it appeared to him, at the very crown of this immense tree. It was a pearl that could have been of any size now, immense or minute, for it was impossible to judge distances within this darkness.
Around this pearl, there were now other lights too. Glistening like other, lesser jewels studded around this setting of the perfect pearl.
Evermore lights appeared, each one at the end of every dark stem of the tree, a universe of splintered slivers of glass.
The nearer he drew towards the peak of the tree, however, the more the pearl appeared to be once again receding from him. There was growing space, a dark space, between the tree top and the glowing pearl.
When he finally attained the top of the tree, swaying on its precariously thin branches, the pearl hung far above him, as if it were an ever elusive and unapproachable moon. Its embedded gems, each glare as sharp as a thorn, were her crowning of stars.
And the moon and stars were being carried on the back of an ass.
*
Chapter 54
Fortunately, the ass was unhurriedly walking towards the prince.
Unfortunately, of course, it would never, ever reach him.
The moon shimmered, quickened, becoming at once a white robed man riding upon the back of the ass.
In all am I scattered, and whencesoever thou willest, thou gatherest Me; and gathering Me thou go gatherest thyself.
Somewhere far beyond the heel of the ass, the prince caught the movement of the darkness; a rapidly oncoming presence, revealed by the way stars briefly blinked out of existence as writhing coils passed in front of them.
It slithered its way through the darkness, this even darker presence.
The prince couldn’t allow it to cause the ass to stumble.
What controlled the serpent better than the stone of bright green, the tablets of the designs of everything here on Earth? What could have been the point of collecting this and all the other stones unless its power was there for him to access in a time of dire need like this?
Everything on Earth must obey its laws, its instructions for all earthly materials.
As if viewing it all through the green lens of the stone, the universe was abruptly revealed to him as if on a forever revolving grid, of spheres, of triangles, of ever shifting numbers.
Yet where does such a beast as this Great Wyrm appear on such a great and enormous plan?
There!
The serpent is the universe!
Its shifting swirls.
Its multiple circles.
Its entrapping coils.
Its darkness.
Its beginning.
Its end.
And as soon as the prince recognised this, the serpent grew evermore immense and powerful.
*
Of course, the material universe fed on the material.
It was of its own substance, its own design.
How could the prince have been so foolish as to believe Earthly reason and rules would thwart the serpent?
And why, too, was he still applying Earthly reason in this other realm?
He climbed up the very last stem of the tree, and confidently stepped out into the darkness.
*
Chapter 55
If the ass couldn’t come to him, he would draw close to the ass.
The closer he drew towards the ass, the more the glow suffusing its rider became once more the pearl, one shining as brightly and reflectively as any mirror.
And yet the prince as he thought he was wasn’t reflected there.
Neither did he see, as he once saw when peering curiously into a mirror, his love, his Princess Lorica.
He saw staring back at him, rather, a hart, whose horns curled up as a brightly illuminated crescent moon.
The prince felt the flame burn within his heart, yet he knew it was a flame that would wound him the more it faltered.
The flame whispered amorously. And it is from this that the greatest flames might arise, given the right spark.
At first it was a flickering, a dance of hot flames. Then an enflaming of t
And beneath flesh lies souls with no surface, no boundaries.
The serpent writhed once again as it burned, shedding blackened, charred skin after darkened, charcoaled skin.
Yet beneath its flesh, there was no soul.
*
The Lord will add a son.
A whole pearl was now safely encupped within his antlers.
The pearl in which he saw himself was now the light crowning the coiling horn of a unicorn.
He was the light, yet this was perfection.
Urim and Thummin.
But – no.
This wasn’t for him.
‘I have to return,’ the prince said. ‘The people are my body.’
‘This then this is your burden;’ the ass declared bluntly, ‘to deny that which could now so easily be yours.’
*
Chapter 56
The prince was lying in a pitch-thick darkness.
He sensed he was wearing his clothes, his breastplate.
He was also encased within an incredibly constricting tomb.
With a sense of growing panic, believing himself to have been mistakenly buried alive, the prince frantically pushed up at the large stone sealing his burial casket.
The stone raised at his push, slid aside as he swung his arms.
He breathed in the air, took in the dim light with relief.
He stepped out of the stone trough, seeing around him an alien landscape of the strangest growths, entire fields of glistening green shards.
They were slivers of shattered and scattered heliodor, ranging in size from what could be blades of grass to gigantic meteorites.
He glanced over to where he had last seen the imposing citadel of emerald. Its walls had splintered, revealing once more the old capital he had so hurriedly deserted so long ago.
Within his breastplate, he now had the full complement of glowing stones, the amethyst no longer fragmentary but entirely whole.
*
These were the hallways he had run through as a child.
The gardens he had played in.
The rooms where he had been gradually taught the rules of kingship.
Now they were empty of people, everyone either having fled or now lying within the ground, food for wyrms.
Despite the size of the old place, his route to where the queen lay was clearly set out for him.
Immensely long, charred husks of skin lay everywhere, translucent and weirdly beautiful, as deceptively flimsy as the discarded wings of dragons. Within their chaotically warped blackness you could imagine many forms, much as landscapes are conjured up within the realm of clouds.
Here a ferocious wolf, there a foolishly overburdened ass, this a proud lion.
At last the prince came across one a little more substantial that the rest, gathered together about itself like the foolishly long train of a bridal gown, only here as black as funeral garb.
Following this took him through a number of rooms until he arrived – where else? – in the throne room.
At the end of the long, serpentine trail, the queen was sitting limply upon her throne.
She too was nothing but a dried husk of what she had once been, her once ageless beauty gone, her darkness and ugliness unveiled and plain for all to see.
And yet, for the very first time, he recognised and acknowledged the similarities between them. Why had he never seen it before? Because he could never admit that she was a part of him?
As the prince entered the great hall, the queen raised her head proudly, stroking her long, elongated neck as if striking a pose that would display her once renowned beauty at its most perfect angle.
‘Look at me, at what you’ve done!’ she chuckled bitterly. ‘I, who was once so beautiful, beautiful even in heaven: and that, of course, is real beauty!’
The prince saw little point in using his sword to finish her off: she was plainly dying. The only real surprise was that she was still alive, as if she had used what little life she still possessed to wait here for him, intending only to make a final mockery of his achievements.
‘You, you let me have the heliodor, the green stone, didn’t you?’ the prince asked.
She wearily chuckled once more.
‘Ah yes: I must admit, I was impressed when you figured that one out. Though why I bothered, heaven knows! That’s the trouble with this world, though: you cling to it, as it clings to you, even when everything is screaming at you that’s it’s time to go!’
‘My sister said something similar.’
‘Ah yes, poor girl: all my fault too, can you believe that?’
She glanced hatefully at the stones embedded in his breastplate, her ire particularly directed at the third row of gems, the jewels that had never appeared within Samael’s crown.
‘But no, I’m being far too hard on myself: for the fault wasn’t really mine, as I remained unaware of the deliberate limitation of my powers. The black agate: that was missing, so I wouldn’t pass on my royal seed. The Amethyst; that’s the true, received spirit, and obviously I had to be denied that! And the amber? Missing because my future punishment was written into the very fabric of Creation, even though that creation was mine! A creation that I intended would inherit my beauty: not become ugly and corrupt!’
She slumped back within her throne.
‘It’s time you recognised your inheritance, my child; you are blessed yet cursed, for what you flatter yourself you are master of, you only become slave to. Inexorably, I’ve taken on the veil of life, letting into weave into my very being, like some parasitic ivy.’
The prince stared at her quizzically.
‘Because you’ve failed, you believe I must too?’
The queen glared back at him, frowning in disappointment.
‘Ah well,’ she sighed resignedly, ‘I initiated all this: and so I must also finish it – and aptly, my last tale involves circumstances similar to my first.’
*
Chapter 57
The Shepherd who Married the Moon
Once there was a king who had decided that he would marry the Moon.
Not, of course, that he intended to take as his bride the Maiden, the Queen of Heaven
Nor (obviously!) the crone, the old and dying Queen Mother.
Naturally, for a man of his great standing, of his many remarkable achievements, it could only ever be the young, vibrant and brightly glowing princess, the Royal Daughter, whom he could take to be his wife.
His dynasty stemmed from a particularly ancient linage, one stretching all the way back to the very earliest annals of man’s history. And so although innumerable princesses throughout the land constantly presented themselves at his court pleading their love for him, he had determined that the only alliance he would forge would be one with a royal house every bit as esteemed as his own.
Unlike most people on Earth, he had been advised by the wisest in his kingdom regarding the true history of the Moon. And like most people on Earth, he wasn’t aware that the power of the Moon had gradually waned the longer she had stayed to oversee her charges.
Now of course, this powerful king wasn’t the only one who admired this most gorgeous of princesses. There were other suitors, some of whom many would say were far more worthy of her hand.
A rich merchant, a trader of the world’s very finest materials, admired the way she carried herself so elegantly, graced in silken veils the likes of which he knew would cost the combined fortunes of even the largest realms. Her youth and vitality would make the perfect adornment to his own already considerable prestige, he believed, while also being the ideal model for his own wares.
A handsome shepherd boy, however, saw her completely differently.
On a night, the light of her gracious smile gently caressed the sheep in his care, making them glow ethereally; such that they shone in the darkness, making it nigh impossible for them to become lost.
Not that the king was in anyway troubled by these other suitors.
‘Like you, royal blood flows through my veins,’ he declared proudly to the princess, ‘and so our merging will be a blending of equals.’
Not that the rich merchant was in any way troubled by the declarations of the king.
‘Who but me could keep you in the manner to which you have become accustomed?’ he pointed out to the Royal Daughter. ‘Only I have access to materials made of silk finer and better spun than any spider’s web; only I could ensure your elegance is arrayed in the most fitting of garments.’
Now of course the poor shepherd was seriously troubled by the blandishments of the rich merchant and the king.
‘Sadly, truth be told, I’m little but a shadow in your most gracious of lights,’ the shepherd boy apologised to this child of the Queen of Heaven. ‘I’m almost as lowly and uneducated as the flock I so tenderly care for: their love for me is returned tenfold, but I could never expect my love for you to produce the same results within you.’
The Royal Daughter promised to consider all these proposals carefully before granting her answer to each of them in turn.
To the king, she said:
‘My lineage goes back to before man picked up and shaped a stone to furrow the soil, let alone bore a pen and composed his history. If the coming together of equals is your goal, dear king, then may I suggest you keep your eyes solely upon the Daughters of the Earth?’
To the rich merchant, she said:
‘How could you hope to be even remotely aware of what I have become accustomed to? My veils are of my own creation, there for me to adorn myself within or to shed at my whim: there is no one on Earth, no matter how much you are willing to pay them, capable of weaving even one inch of my coarsest lace.’
To the shepherd, she said:
‘You have spoken far more wisely than you might at first think, good shepherd…’