The
suburb named Ganeshan, in which Midax Rale grew up, was a social backwater,
agreeably and peacefully second-rate.
His
father, Ultrisk Rale, would have done better for himself (in career terms) a
couple of miles away in the centre of Dranl, for the East Coast provincial
capital was the greatest trading city of the continent of Larmonn.
Dranl hummed with prosperity, buyers swirling through the picturesque
muddle of its commercial quarter, floods of sightseers lapping around its
dignified public buildings. By contrast, Ganeshan was quiet. Nevertheless it,
and other suburbs, shared in the prosperity of the metropolis – a prosperity
based upon its ideal position on the trade-route across the Zard Ocean to
Heism.
Ultrisk
Rale was happy in his humdrum middle-class conformity, his white-collar job in
Ganeshan. Would-be “head-hunters” who had known him at college were well aware
that he was capable of more. He had had offers of employment, not only from
organizations in the city centre, but from much further afield: he might have
relocated all the way to the continental capital, Thilpar, a thousand miles
into the interior of Larmonn, and trebled his salary – if he had wished to. Yet
he and his wife were happy to bring up their son in placid obscurity, where
life could be lived at a gentle pace. The unpretentious tree-lined streets of
Ganeshan, the taken-for-granted local shops, the greenery in overlooked copses
and dells, the scattering of weed-choked wastes, the outcrops of moss-covered
cliff left behind by the ancient shifting shoreline of the Zard – all these
ordinary idylls were storable reserves of golden memory in the fortress of the
infant mind.
One
fine late autumn evening Midax, aged six, scampered off to play outside as
usual. “Just for fifteen minutes, mind!” his mother said.
“Awright!”
he shouted back. And he ran to meet some neighbours’ children who, likewise,
had been let out a quarter of an hour before bedtime. Their mothers knew that
the little ones were nearly tired out, and that they would go to bed more
willingly if they were completely tired
out.
Midax
and his friends played “tig” among the tree-stumps in a vacant patch which they
called the “muffs”, overgrown with fluffy dandelion clocks and bindweed. Jumping
over the stumps and roots, they blew the dandelion fluff at each other. Then
came a moment when Midax happened to glance up at the western sky.
“Look at that!” he gasped.
He
had felt awed by sunsets before, but this one was extra special. It was like an
unearthly, luminous landscape floating in the sky. It was utterly tremendous if
you took it seriously, and the little lad knew of no way not to do that.
“Humm
– yeah,” said Fadron Ganol, his staunchest friend.
Midax
did not have the words to say any more. He had seen the lack of interest in
Fadron’s glance at the sky.
The
sun was sinking, Midax knew, and the vision would not last long. But all the
more did it summon him to those floating shining mountains, with their blaze of
toppling grandeur. Without question he surrendered his heart and soul to that
realm of splendour – nothing mattered in comparison with that, and it planted a
flag of undying allegiance in his young mind. He would never be the same again.
Henceforth, he knew something, though what it was he knew, he did not know at
all.
The
next day was a week-end. His mother and father took him on a trip to the
Kalbeck Forest. There he spent a happy day trying unsuccessfully to climb
trees. Once he saw a lizard. All in all, it was a good outing. Exciting, even. And
yet – it had nothing to compare with the previous evening’s ecstasy. The sight
of the sunset clouds had quietly and profoundly changed Midax for ever. Yet it
was a change that could not be remembered for long on the surface of his mind. Mostly,
his consciousness had to forget it. You could not live your life if you were
dazed all the time.
Only
when they were driving back that evening, along the dusky edge of the forest,
with Midax snuggled in the back seat and looking out of the car window at the
windy Gonesh Plains between forest and sea, did something of the mysterious
splendour return, with a silent voice – but calling from where? From out there
somewhere, yet (he sensed, uncomprehending) also from inside him. As if there
had squeezed into his insides a message from the soundlessly whispering sky of
evening, bigger than the ordinary daytime sky –
It so happened that next
day his father handed him a gift: a globe of the world.
“Shall
I teach you some geography, Midax?”
The
boy had never heard the word before, but he said, “Yes, Dad.”
He
was only vaguely attentive, out of politeness, while Ultrisk began to point out
the countries on the globe. “This is Larmonn, this is Vevtis, this is the Zard
Ocean between them…” Names. Colours. They did not seem to mean much.
Ultrisk
thought, He’s a bit too young for this,
after all. Mustn’t push him.
Father
and son were sitting contentedly on a sofa in the lounge. The room as usual was
huge to the child’s eye, a room full of comfortable shadows and mysteries that
weren’t scary because Mum and Dad were there. Time stretched ahead, days and
nights to infinity, the nights marred occasionally by nightmares which,
however, had no power to infect the day… Midax’s attention wandered back to the
globe, which his father twiddled idly.
His
mother came in and she and Dad began to chat, with good-humoured disappointment
at Midax’s lukewarm reaction to the globe. “You can never tell what’ll interest
them,” Kmee said. “Look at him now,” she added shortly afterward, for Midax had
gone to another chair and had buried his nose in an illustrated children’s
encyclopaedia. “That same old page 69, I’ll bet.”
Ultrisk
leaned over to see.
“You’re
right.” It was, indeed, that page
again. The page with the clouds. “Can you say them all out, Midax?”
The
child shut the book and recited, “Culumus... I mean cumulus…”
“Yes,
go on! Show your mum what you said last time.”
“Cirrus,
stratus, um… cirro-stratus…”
“Great!
Well done!”
“And… cumulo-nimbus!”
“You’re
going to be a meteorologist, Midax!”
“What’s
that?” asked the lad shyly, suffused with love and pride at the genuine
admiration in his father’s voice.
“A
weather-man.”
“No,”
said Midax thoughtlessly.
Aside
to his wife, Ultrisk chuckled, “He’s not going
to be one because he already is one.
Instead of getting him a globe, I should have got him a wind-sock.”
She
replied calmly, “He’ll see the point of the globe one day.”
Midax
meanwhile again grasped his beloved page 69 and once more gazed hungrily at the
pictured clouds, like an explorer who sees but cannot reach an unknown
shoreline.
>>>next chapter>>>