The seventh tree held its first pale gold leaf at the tip of the highest branch. One leaf.
It had been there since the man ate his piece of the fruit. It would be there when the next thing happened and the thing after that.
It was not in a hurry. Nothing in this garden had ever been in a hurry.
Khalil had not moved from where he had been watching the shaft since Vantini retreated.
He had watched the rope stop moving. He had watched the stone above the shaft opening the way he watched all ground -- not with suspicion, but with the particular quality of attention that had kept him alive across twenty-two years of work where imprecision had permanent consequences.
There was a difference between suspicion and attention. Khalil had always known the difference.
He spoke without turning around.
"The liaison was not what he said he was."
Nobody responded. Nobody needed to.
It was the kind of sentence that did not want a response -- it wanted a witness, and it had five of them.
Khalil had watched and Khalil had decided and that was the end of it. Amara looked at the back of his head and felt something settle in her chest.
There was a specific comfort in being around a person who knew what they knew and was not confused about it.
She had been around Khalil for nine days and had come to understand that his silences were not empty. They were ladden with a deeper meaning. Every one of them.
. . .
Yosef rose from the grass slowly.
Not because his body ached, though it did. Because he was in no hurry.
He was a man who had just finished the longest calculation of his life and he was not going to rush the moment of having finished it.
He stood and looked at his hands. His hands were shaking slightly -- not from effort no, but from something else. He did not try to stop the shaking. He just looked at them.
His father had told him, when Yosef was seventeen and had failed the clan's assessment, that some men were made to stand guard and some men were made to find things.
You are a finder, his father had said, and it had felt at the time like the kindest possible way of saying something that was a dismissal. A door closing on that part of the world.
The clan had been in his family for six generations. Guardians -- those who stood in the space between the human world and the world that mundane humans did not know existed.
He had wanted to be amongst their number ever since he was a child who saw humans wielding weapons that bent the elements with sheer will.
The assessment had looked at him and returned its answer: not this one.
He had carried that answer for thirty years the way you carried a stone in your shoe. Aware of it always.
Accommodating it without ever quite accepting it.
He had taken up fieldwork instead -- had told himself it was because the ground was honest, which was true, but had known underneath that truth, another truth: that if he could not stand guard in the supernatural world he could at least excavate it.
Could at least find where it had been. Could hold in his hands the physical residue of what he had not been permitted to touch directly.
He looks at the Wall. At the light that has no source. At the man sitting in the luminous grass who ended the Primordial Chaos and does not know the word for what he ended.
His father had said finder like it was the lesser thing. Yosef thought about that -- about the thirty years of following evidence, the eleven excavations, the formations that didn't fit, the data that had no explanation, the one lead archaeologist who had the permits, the budget who looked him in the eye at the airport and said I'm right with the flat certainty of someone who had already decided.
He had thought, standing at the airport, that she was probably right. He had not known how right. He had not known that right, in this case, meant the starting point of myth.
He puts his hands in his pockets to stop the shaking. He exhales, some calculations,he pondered, when they were complete, left you emptier than when you started -- not because the answer was wrong but because the answer was so much larger than the question. He had asked: what is this site?
The answer was: the first site. The only site. The one everything else is an echo of.
He breathes again. He is Yosef Mizrahi. He does not collapse under answers. He files them and keeps going.
That's right, He keeps going.
. . .
He could feel it click into his body ever since he finished eating the piece Amara gave him.
The faint thrum of that energy. Yosef clenched his fists as the door he thought he'd never be able to open in this life, started to loosen just cause of a piece of fruit.
Life force.
That was the term those old men said. 'Yes, now we'll see who's lesser, Dear Father'
. . .
She was sitting with her back against the ember-copper tree and the tree was warm behind her the way it has been since the first night.
This was the garden that made wonder before wonder had a name. She had run out of the energy required to be surprised by the individual things in it.
She just received them now. This is, she thinks, probably what the garden intended all along.
She was looking at him.
He was on the grass -- sitting the way he always sat, which was not a position he had chosen but simply where he was.
The forty-five degrees at rest, the almost-smile filed away for later. He is holding the word awe in him. She can see him holding it.
She gave it to him twenty minutes ago and he is still finding all the places it fits, the way he always found all the places a word fit before he put it down.
He was thorough. Everything about him was thorough. It was the thoroughness of something that had been the only thing in existence for a very long time who had learned that if you were going to do something, you do it completely, without any of it left for later.
To be Continued...
Author's Notes: (Dear Readers, I'm back! I'm sorry for the lapse in update but I had been recovering from a chronic medical condition I have. But here we are with chapter 22.
Going forwards, I'll publish 3 chapters a day with today having 2 more double feature chapters for my lapse of yesterday.
With all that said, do Review, Drop some powerstones and please Add my novel to your collections!! Kai signing out)