Note to readers: “2200 Blues” is a novel in progress, and each chapter is an early draft in its unfolding journey. Your thoughts and reactions are invaluable, guiding its evolution and refinement
The robed figures broke their vertical procession, moving past one another to stand in front of the rising canyon, standing next to one another. Nickel and Farrul stopped walking, standing behind by a few feet.
The robed men removed their hoods, shuffling their feet before the rock, a few taking meager steps over its inclining surface looking into the rising darkness.
Nickel walked a few steps closer to them, going unnoticed as they shuffled inside of their robes, removing objects from under, clinking against one another, handing them to each other.
Nickel turned around, looking for Farrul’s reaction. He still stood farther away, eyes glazed, mouth firmed in an impassive expression. His scraggly hair blew over his eyes in the soft wind, obscuring them. When they whipped aside, flattening against the side of his head, his cold eyes met Nickel’s, unmoving, like he was watching him.
“You good?” Nickel asked him.
Farrul didn’t respond, just continuing to watch him and passively.
Nickel turned around, feeling disconcerted. He could always rely on Farrul to be sordid and lacking in cooperation. The thought flared the pang of loneliness once again.
The Ether didn’t guarantee familiarity. Nickel was discovering that through Farrul, the only other young person he’d met in person who was from the Ether.
The robed men stood at a wayside, some squatting next to the rock. One of them rummaged at his hip, pulling out a bulky object that clanged against the metal of his belt.
Two other men standing next to him rushed to his side to support the object that he carried. First holding it in place, the robed figures extended large cords from the insides of their robes. Another man to their left walked around all of them, squatting above them on the rock, holding out a large piece of stone flint.
The four men stood close together and the three remaining men stepped up onto the rock, kneeling and standing right at the edges of the four Thraíha men working with their tools.
The three men moved from side to side, the two on the opposite ends pulling back and forth in their directions as the man in the middle, moved with their force, rocking back and forth. His hair fell over his neck, cascaded over his dropped hood. It was dark and tousled. The man standing above him stayed close to them, but his contributions were largely hidden. The remaining Thraíha men stood at their sides, holding them in place with their hands.
Nickel frowned. What the four men huddled together were doing with their tools was hidden to him.
The men grunted and heaved, their swaying robes ruffling the earth and clattering against its sediments of rock and dirt.
Wisps of fog thickened around their bodies as wind picked up, a short howl bringing an obscuring tan haze that made them look like a giant bear huddled on the ground eating at an animal’s carcass.
A spark of light billowed in the middle of the four huddled men, bringing a glow that emanated between their bodies, highlighting the contours of their individual selves once again.
Orange flared around them, illuminating the fine textures of the grainy rock ledge.
“Follow,” said a robed man in a hollow voice, turning to face Nickel and Farrul from the left of a man dismantling the cord. As the cord holding man turned around, the cord revealed itself; a long twiny rope, corded in consecutive knots, fraying, burnt at the end.
“What are our names to you?” asked Farul in a low voice. Nickel whirled around to stare at him. Those were the first words Farrul had spoken since the end of their initiation rite. His body appeared dwarfed by the fur robe he adorned, highlighting his frailty. His sunken chest seemed to sink below the sides of the robe that covered him. His eyes were sullen, peering at the robed men. His mouth was stretched in an unwelcoming line.
The other three turned to look at Farrul from their tools. Swinging aside the glowing object, the Thraíha holding it frowned at Farrul. His eyes were darkened shadows, hanging over his firm cheekbones and the searching glow of the flaming lantern he held at his stomach.
The three to the right of him tore off the cord tethering it, allowing the man holding the lantern to pull it closer against his chest.
All the ceremonial three men turned to look at Farrul, their faces revealed by their fallen hoods. All of them had dark bands wrapped over their foreheads, shadows dancing across their faces as the lantern bobbed in the air, falling against its carrier’s stomach as he adjusted it. The Thraíha stilled, staring at Farrul as they adjusted to turn to him.
“You are nameless to us,” said the lantern holding man. Fires danced inside of the glass case, melting a wicker material at the bottom of the black case. The man’s voice was cool.
“What are your names,” said another man, pivoting on his feet as he turned to look at Farrul from the side of the three already facing him, “what are your names to us?” His voice was higher pitched and smoother, speaking of youth. “Your names are—
“You were following us to be given names,” interrupted the lantern holding man. The shadows deepened across his eyes, sinking over his cheeks. “By the light of the Huntsman where all names come from.”
“Stars?” breathed Farrul. His expression loosened, betraying a hint of surprise and of being overwhelmed. His gaze widened; eyes stretched in an overwhelmed gaze. “Is that where we’re going?”
“Normally, you’d find out when we finally brought you up there,” said the younger Thraíha, his hood still shadowing his face.
Ferrule’s mouth widened in a small o.
“I’ve never seen stars before,” he whispered. Catching Nickels eye, he glanced at his feet, almost seeming abashed.
“Not just any stars,” the young man said continuing to look at Farrul as the rest of the robed men turned, the ones at the foot of the rock, taking steps to meet with the three who’d climbed further up. “The stars that the Huntsman wants to show us on the morning you were born Thraíha.”
“Hurry up!” grunted a throaty man already started up the rock on the left. “Enough explaining. We have blessings to see!”
The lantern holding man turned and waved at Nickel and Farrul, motioning for them to follow. Turning, he climbed up the rock, moving up one step at a time, briskly following the rest of the Thraíha.
“Quick,” muttered the gravelly voiced man, charging up the rock, leading at the front as he grabbed at the rock with his hands, bending his knees towards his chest. “The sun will break soon.”
The Thraíha moved at a brisk pace, climbing up the inclining surface of gravel in wide strokes, stepping across with a practiced balance, shifting their weight according to the oncoming rises, fallings, and protrusions in the rock. They climbed with ease, indicating an accustomed ease to the path.
Nickel and Farrul followed them, scrambling over the sharply changing elevations in the canyon, occasionally slipping over its changing surfaces.
The ground gave way to gaps, the path turning into mounds of boulders, and large rocks with uneven surfaces for them to grab onto and step over.
The growing a lightness of the morning air dimmed as they made their way deeper into the canyons, climbing further to its heart.
Stars.
Nickel couldn’t help but feel a strange anxiety about what they were to see. He couldn’t remember the last time in recent memory that he’d really been able to pay attention to a field of stars in the night sky. He’d remembered faint memories of looking up from orchards before his parents had bought the industrial hub. He’d seen stars then, but he’d been so young. There had been occasional stars in the flights he’d been on, across the U.R. with his parents on a commercial air terminal, and now and then, sparsely populating the dark haze of air pollution that he’d flown through on his hovercraft.
Did the Thraíha see the stars often? They hunted often, so they must have seen the stars. How else would they have been able to find their way back from the far distances they traveled across the Atlantic from their encampment to hunt for hawks and other food?
The procession of leading Thraíha paused. Nickel frowned, pausing at the stilled back of a robed Thraíha. Farrul stopped short behind him, standing aside on a rock outlet.
A hushing murmur spread through the Thraíha in front. They rustled against one another, then the men at the front of the line crunched over gravel, disappearing into the darkness of a gaping opening in the inlet they stood in. They disappeared in between the narrowing walls.
Solid footsteps occurred on an unseen surface. They clanked, producing a dull padding sound, as though on metal.
Nickel couldn’t see much through the darkened opening and the bodies of the Thraíha in front of him obstructed the way. They stopped rustling against one another, standing in a half hazard arrangement, huddled against each other diagonally, across the entrance of the cove.
Nickel shivered, feeling a chill sweep through him. Without the insulated dankness of the egg’s interior, his bare chest raised gooseflesh. Even with the robe, he felt shaking tremors of coldness.
“What happens if I don’t go in?” said Farrul. The Thraíha still standing outside of the entrance turned around to face him, frowning in consternation.
“Then you make do in the canyons,” husked the Thraíha man with the hollow voice. “Without us…….without any of the Thraíha…………or the grace of the Huntsman.”
Farrul’s mouth was firm, a grim line. His eyes betrayed fear. The boy who had once held a retort or grumbling for nearly everything, now had nothing to say.
Watching for his usual retorts, and hearing none, the Thraíha turned around, waiting for the men inside the cove.
Their clanking footsteps were no longer audible. Farrul’s question dawned on Nickel. Could Nickel make do in the canyons? Or was he always to live by the map of the Huntsman? Did the map of the Huntsman go far beyond the Thraíha hunting and water grounds?
The clanking sounds resumed, faint at first. Creaking emanated from the points of impact, like jagged cracks splintering at the bottom of the darkness.
The clanking sounds grew louder and one man returned from the cove.
There was a loud high-pitched creaking that echoed from the darkness. A shaft of light broke through, falling from the inner ceiling, illuminating the two Thraíha men emerging from the darkness.
The light grew wider, and the creaking grew louder, expanding the high pitch of its timber.
The Thraíha men came out, ushering the rest of the Thraíha inside, waving with their hands.
They followed, bustling together once more and resuming their shuffling movement of robes brushing against one another and the ground as their bodies swayed with their huddling movements.
To keep warm, thought Nickel. He frowned as he followed them from behind, once more feeling like the out of sync straggler that he was, his movements clumsier and less assured compared to them. As he gained footing on the even surface, he regained a better sense of balance.
Farrul bounded lightly over to the remaining boulders behind him, his feet tapping against the stone and jumping to Nickel’s side.
Farrul may not be Thraíha, but he’d spent more time in the Atlantic Canyons, if only the rock plain of the deserted flagpole that he’d squatted on.
Nickel had never truly found out what that flagpole had once belonged to. He hadn’t seen any hovercraft wreckage around the site. Presumably that was how Farrul and Steve had ended up in these canyons as Nickel had.
Farrul slipped in front of Nickel, tagging behind the last three men who entered the cove. Startled, Nickel came to a halt. He looked around, noticing the greater shadows that wrapped around the site than from the incline where they first started trekking. The rock walls had enveloped them at this point, reaching far behind Nickel, like the jagged walls of a staircase reaching far down below, snaking over innumerable boulders and rock formations. The walls had first beckoned him, standing in front of him along the top of the canyon. Now they surrounded him sending cascading shadows that Nickel nearly forgot it was morning.
Nickel stood still, looking out below. The windstorm had thickened, and the obscuring haze had risen once more, tanned by the canyon shadows. The incline they had started from and the rock plain behind it was now invisible, a distance beyond the immediate fog and the steep drop of crushing rock that appeared like a frozen avalanche.
This world was getting to Nickel. Without the distractions of his hovercraft, it’s ever-present screens, flickering to life at his presence. This was a world of haze and shadows. This is what we’ve done to the world, Nickel thought. The screens of the Ether Realms were a window away from the earth. While the Ether Realms kept running and men built more places inside of it, the real world became a hollow mirage.
Yet there was a beauty to the loneliness and the emptiness of the canyons. It had been so long since Nickel had been in the Ether. A month at least. He noticed how strangely clear his mind felt. Even with the clear pangs of desperation at being at the whims of the strict and foreign Thraíha. And the fear of losing out on his parent’s dreams. His mind was a vista as large as the canyons, uncluttered by the Ether.
A loud scraping echoed from within the cove and the shouts of grunting Thraíha ensued.
Nickel flinched and turned around, jolted by the immediacy of the noises. He ran into the cove. Slowing down inside of the darkness, he realized he was the last one in it.
Farrul had rushed in before him so that he wouldn’t be afraid of being left behind.
G.R. Nanda 