Leaves of Fire: Part Two of the Newirth Mythology Read online

  “I have arrived.” She felt a rush when the sound of the statement lilted in her voice. It sounded sexy and real. She trained her eyes on the seated form across the room. She sensed him smile.

  “And so you have. Since I saw your face, I’ve thought of nothing else,” he said leaning slightly forward. “I’ve waited for you.”

  Again, Helen suspended her breathing. What now? She lowered her gaze and looked at her long legs, her ice-blue wrap of a skirt and her bare stomach. How did she get here? What did she want? Just hours ago she was let in backstage—and that was a dream come true—admission into the mysterious and hypnotic world of Led Zeppelin—but now to be within reach of Jimmy Page’s bed, his touch, his magic, was all too much suddenly. To think that her beauty and her need to be needed brought her here, and the power of that yearning could actually bring a god to his knees. The scent of cherry snuff was fading. But replacing its sweetness was her confidence made up of things wholly pure and simple: her eyes, her petite body, the curved line of her hips and the earnest hope in her eyes. Her heart. The way she could make him feel like a god, and how he could do the same for her—if only to say the right thing. The right prayer.

  I’ve waited for you, he had said.

  Helen took three strides forward into the candlelit room. She stopped and rooted her feet firmly, feeling a sudden invincible wave crash through her. She assured him quietly, “Yes—and now I am here. My name is Helen Storm. I am all yours,” she said.

  Loche, Julia and William

  November 3, this year: Verona, Italy

  Julia Iris’ quiet voice begins to recite a poem. Loche Newirth stares at her—his five-year-old son Edwin is asleep in her lap.

  Now, find the single star

  And watch it blink,

  Until the mountains fade

  And you to sleep.

  Above the deep blue sea?

  Just watch it sink.

  When sky and water join,

  Sail off to sleep.

  It hides sometimes in trees

  Like owl eyes wink,

  It soon will fly away

  Take wing, you. Sleep.

  High over desert sands

  Right where you think.

  Through snow and rain and skies

  Of clouds, so sleep.

  If there’s no sky above

  If all is black as ink,

  There’s light—

  Oh yes, there’s light indeed.

  Just blink and see it

  In my eyes,

  Where I will always keep you bright

  My single star,

  It’s time to sleep. It’s time to sleep.

  The room is silent now save the sound of traffic below.

  “Why does that poem sound familiar to me?” Loche asks.

  Julia smiles at him, her fingers threading through Edwin’s hair. “I wonder if it was you that wrote it,” she said. “As you’ve written me. Just as you’ve written William, Helen… history.”

  “I don’t remember writing it,” Loche says.

  Across the room, William Greenhame sighs, “It is no matter.”

  Julia drops her gaze to Edwin, now deep in dreams. Loche stares at the two of them. Edwin is breathing low. They are holding hands. Julia’s face is lit with the gold of the day’s end. Her eyes are weary, red and sad. On the table beside her is the glass of wine that she had been given when she arrived, two hours ago, and she has not yet finished it. The crushing realities of the last few days have been hard on her. Sleep has been impossible. Loche understands.

  He can see her mouthing the rhyme again, attempting her usual trick for sleep, her father’s poem: Find the single star and watch it blink, until the mountain fades and you to sleep. Her father used to whisper it into her ear—when she could not drift off—or would not. It had always seemed to work.

  How do I know this? Loche wonders suddenly, did she share this story of her father with me? He cannot answer himself with certainty. She knows the stars. The constellations—all because of her father’s rhyme—so she could find her way home. “Just see the star and think of nothing else,” her father had said. “Let everything fall away and sigh. The mountain below will turn from blue to purple and finally to sky. All the mountains eventually fade into the sky. It’s okay. It’s okay,” he would say.

  Julia smiles. And Loche sees it—and he is better for it.

  “You alright?” Loche asks.

  Julia turns to him. “I don’t know,” she says. “Did you write the poem? My father’s poem?”

  “Wondrous strange,” William Greenhame says.

  “No,” Loche says, “I mean, I don’t think so. But it is familiar to me somehow. All I know is that I wrote about you for the first time at my cabin at Priest Lake. Though, I’ve dreamt of you my whole life. I seem to remember new things about you each moment. It is hard to explain.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like your father’s rhyme. The little song to help you sleep?”

  Julia is transfixed. “I’ve never shared that with you,” she says.

  “No,” Loche answers. “But I know of it, somehow. It just came to me, just now.”

  “Can you read my mind, or something?”

  Loche shakes his head, “No. Not that I know of.”

  “Perhaps,” William interjects, “as the Author, the Poet, you have meditated long on the very essence of Julia whilst you wrote her. Whilst you created her. Oh, how the mind wanders when we are in the throes of making. We uncover subtlety and potent substance with the penning of a single heart crossing word.”

  Loche closes his eyes and attempts to return his memory to his desk at Priest Lake. The pooling ink, the cramp in his hand, and the whirling rage within him. When he conceived of Julia, did he know her past? Did he write it in his thoughts to help with her rendering?

  “I can’t—I can’t,” Julia begins to rub her eyes and shake her head in frustration. “I don’t get it. How can any of this be real?”

  Loche reaches to her. She senses him and pulls away. “And I,” she forces a whisper, “I’m like William—I am like Samuel and George? I can’t die? Is that it?”

  From across the room William Greenhame chants in answer, and to himself: “Ithic veli agtig.”

  Without moving his eyes from Julia, Loche translates the Elliqui phrase: “Why does my death delay?”

  He sees her fingers brush across her stomach. Three days ago, Dr. Marcus Rearden’s gun went off during a struggle and a bullet struck her in the abdomen. She woke at Loche’s cabin—there was a ring of white foam around the fatal wound, and then, nothing. Healed. Since the terrible event—miracle—she must have checked and rechecked her stomach every few minutes. Searching for a scar she would never find, save in memory.

  She struggles to conjure her father’s eyes. The star glinting there.

  Leonaie

  November 3, this year,

  Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, USA

  Moonladder

  Half way up the ladder,

  Ladder to the moon,

  She turns to me and says:

  “Here I am.

  Do not be afraid.”

  Do my eyes

  Give away my hiding place,

  These shadows in my face?

  Here beneath the mirror moonlight,

  Can you see into my shell?

  Here upon this rung

  Where my grip is slipping?

  She wraps her arms around me,

  Presses her fingers to my skin.

  And there below,

  Is the sea. The sea skimmed with stars.

  Oh the sea.

  How did we raise this ladder

  From under that heavy husk

  Of water, waves and still, empty space?

  And where are we off to now,

  Climbing together

  Out of the grave deep,

  Upon this wooden, swaying ladder?

  Up and up.

  “Here I am.

  Do not be
afraid.”

  What are the chances of one more step?

  Of five or ten?

  Can you climb, my darling?

  The ladder will reach.

  Leonaie Echelle, eyes green, gold and grey

  Pulls me in closer and I hear her say:

  “It is not the moon that I am climbing to

  Nor the stars pinned to the sky.

  Not back down to those black waves

  Speckled with the hovering face of heaven.

  No,

  I will be the moon.

  I will be the stars.

  I am no longer an empty shell,

  Come from the sea filled with the sound of the void.

  If it is the moon you are climbing to

  Or the stars you are trying to reach,

  Here I am.

  Here I am.”

  —Samuel Lifeson, 1953

  Leonaie Echelle folds the poem back into its envelope and holds it upon her lap. She stares at it for a few moments and considers just how the paper has yellowed over the years. The address scrawled across its face is still crisp and legible, as is the return address—all in Samuel Lifeson’s distinct hand writing: little hooked loops, and winged fringes on the S and the L. She places the envelope beside the lamp. Leonaie takes her reading glasses off, and lets them hang by the cord around her neck. She smiles at how decorative the envelope looks combined with the gilded framed portrait of her and her husband, Charles (twentyeight years ago), an antique pen upon its olive velvet box that her mother had given her (forty years ago), a pair of baby shoes (her son’s, who is now 63, or 64?), and the lamp she bought when she was just a girl in France. Green, gold and grey glass beads hung from thin iron arms—a stained glass shade—a black base.

  Then, curiously, there is a small sticky note on the table before the picture frame. She hadn’t noticed it before, or perhaps she did, she isn’t sure. She pulls it from the table top and lifts her glasses to read it. It is written in her handwriting. It reads:

  November 3, Samuel is coming at 3.

  Don’t forget.

  3pm

  Her heart leaps. What day is it? She stands up from the bed, as quickly as her body allows, and grasping her cane she hobbles over to her small kitchenette to get her cell phone. Damn things, she thinks. Her son bought it for her, and she can rarely remember how to use it. But she loves it as a time piece. One press of a button and it appears, the true reminder—the real date—the real time:

  2:47pm

  November 3

  Another leap of the heart. Setting the phone down her hands rise immediately to her hair. Up or down, she wonders. She has always been fickle about her hair. Leonaie moves a couple of steps to the mirror beside the door and studies her face. Her hair is long and silver white, still thick. The wrinkles along her cheeks and forehead are bothersome and infuriating. She is surprised every time the mirror reveals them to her. Were these new wrinkles around her eyes there yesterday? Not that she can recall. And the pink pouches of skin below her eyes—where did those come from, for God’s sake? Am I really ninety-four? Leonaie rubs gently, but the pockets remain, and she sighs. Then, she catches a spark of light. Her eyes are gold today, more gold than green, and that is a good sign. Leonaie’s eyes are hazel: green, gold and grey, and the colors would shift back and forth from time to time. There is one thing that never changed about her eyes, they are always lit as if from behind, illuminated and piercing, like the face of the sun on a forest stream.

  She knows the person behind those eyes, and quickly forgets the imperfections, forgets the pain in her right hip, forgets the wrinkles and the long years that put them there. She feels better and gives herself a little wink. The reflection in the mirror smiles her devious little smile right back.

  Leonaie turns, limps back to the bedside and notices the picture frame of her and her husband, Charles, again, and the yellowed envelope that contains a letter. Or was it a poem? That shouldn’t be out on the table, she thinks and reaches over to the envelope, slides her fingers inside and pulls out a worn piece of parchment. Unfolding it, a sticky note catches her attention, in the direct center of the bedside table. Something is scrawled on it. She plucks it up, places her glasses on her nose and reads:

  November 3, Samuel is coming at 3.

  Don’t forget.

  3pm

  Her heart leaps. She rises toward her cell phone upon the kitchen counter. Damn thing. She presses her favorite button on the phone and there appears what she needs:

  2:53pm

  November 3

  That’s today. She leans over to the mirror and wonders if she should wear her hair up or down.

  “Leonaie?” comes a voice and a light knocking at the door.

  Leonaie doesn’t answer but instead stares deeper into the glass and those damned wrinkles.

  “Leonaie?” says Olivia Langley. Her bright smile, Irish green eyes and deep red hair are all peeking in from the door way. “Do you remember what today is, Leonaie?”

  “How did I get this old so quickly?” Leonaie asks, her gaze still points into the grooves and lines along her cheeks and brow. “And look at the suitcases under my eyes, for God’s sake. What’s become of me?”

  Olivia steps into the room and joins Leonaie in the mirror. Olivia watches the old woman struggle to erase the lines—press the weary years away—the envelope still in her hand. “We should put that away, don’t you think?”

  Leonaie stops and stares at the envelope and the sticky note. “You’re right,” she agrees. “Would you put it back in the book? Oh and close the door, won’t you dear?”

  “Sure,” Olivia says. She closes the door. Taking the envelope she crosses the room and places it back inside Leonaie’s worn copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare—at page 713, at All’s Well That Ends Well. The sticky note she crumples and tosses into the waste basket.

  “Hair up or down?” Olivia asks.

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  Gathering the thick hair in her hands, Olivia lifts it up over Leonaie’s head and lets dangle a few locks. The spirals shine beside Leonaie’s cheeks. “Oh, I like that,” The old woman says. “Let’s do that.” Olivia pulls a thin stick from out of drawer, threads and twists it into the coil letting fall a funneling stream, spilling down like silver water from a fountain.

  “At least my eyes look the same.”

  “That they do,” Olivia agrees. “You look beautiful.”

  “Oh dear, that’s sweet of you. Sweet dear.”

  “It’s almost three, Leonaie.”

  “Yes,” she replies, “I almost forgot. It’s a good thing I wrote that note—otherwise, I may have.”

  “I wouldn’t have let you forget. Now do I get to meet him this time?”

  Leonaie wrinkles her nose, “Have you not met him yet?”

  Olivia shakes her head. “No. I know that he comes every week, but…” She pauses. “But hopefully I will today.” Leonaie smiles. She knows that Olivia is lying. Playing along. She knew Olivia was told to entertain the old lady’s notion of the mysterious Samuel. Leonaie’s imaginative promptings—it helped Leonaie, and she loved Olivia for that. But, for what it is worth, Leonaie thought Olivia loved the story—a poet writing to his beloved—the handsome Samuel is still alive and holding on to some kind of unrequited love—was never letting go—was always just one visit away.

  “And Mr. Lifeson and I would love to have coffee in the courtyard, if you can manage it. We met in a courtyard, you know.”

  Olivia nods. She’d heard the story a hundred plus times, ever since Leonaie was admitted to the Greenhavens Community, some three years ago. “And I know this sounds ridiculous, but there was this ladder leaning against a tree—an apple tree—and when I first saw him I was so nervous I climbed up that ladder and pretended to pick apples.”

  “And when he saw you,” Olivia picks up the story, “he stopped at the base of the ladder and asked you, now what was it, ‘Are you picking apples for
a pie?’”

  “That’s right,” Leonaie cuts in, “and I took one look at him and my God, I knew he was the one. Then I looked down over my arm, arched my back a little bit—let my little butt stick out just a tickle, and I said to him: ‘My apple pie would make you want to marry me.’” Leonaie laughed a pure, singing laugh. “Can you believe that? Oh dear… so naughty.”

  Olivia laughs. Leonaie always made her laugh. “You’re bad.”

  “In the best way,” Leonaie adds.

  The two women’s faces are both framed in the mirror—both are smiling. Then slowly, as if some regret crosses Leonaie’s thought, her smile fades and her eyes squint slightly. “But,” Leonaie sighs, “I was already married.” Olivia’s expression falls away, too, watching her. They are both searching their reflections. Leonaie seeking some way to return to that time, to do it all again, only this time, the right way. Olivia trying to imprint the old woman’s longing upon her own spirit—as a lesson—as a warning. “Live your life, darling, like there’s no tomorrow,” Leonaie says, her eyes flitting to Olivia’s, “because there isn’t a tomorrow. Have no fear, look here.” Leonaie fixes her eyes to Olivia’s—the old woman struggling to feed her young friend food that only she can taste.

  Smoke

  April, 1338,

  the village of Ascott-under-Wychwood, England

  “Are we to church, Mama?” William asked. Geraldine closed the door to the Thatcher’s house and turned toward the lane leading to the village abbey. She took William’s hand in hers.

  “Yes, to see Father,” she said.

  “Then we go home, Mama?”

  “Then we go home.”

  “And to work, then?”

  “Yes.”

  The two walked along in silence. It was cold. Geraldine stopped suddenly and looked at the sky. William looked, too. Light was fading, though it couldn’t be much past midday. Certainly well before Vespers. Then William could smell smoke. His mother’s grasp tightened upon his hand as she began to walk again. This time a bit quicker.