Woes of the Words

By Manuel Sieunarine

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It’s difficult not having a mother. Lionel, from 1920’s France, has a mother. She left his father after the man took a keen interest in the hired help, and she beat Lionel in his place, but a mother she was – and is, if he cares to visit her. Narantsetseg, or Nara for short, has a mother from 1250’s Mongolia who claimed to have shared a bed with the great emperor Khan himself, but then again, many women told the same story around that time. Then there’s Kanya, a beautiful girl whose mother lived 7,910 years before God walked the earth. We found her and her mother on the area of land known as Thailand in the present. Like us she possessed the gift – or curse, if you like – to see time.

When you can see time, you can find its pathways. At first, they don’t always lead where you want them to go, but when you’ve lived for as long as we have – or as short, if you believe the theory of relativity – you learn to find the doors. Time, like everything else on earth, is affected by the presence of living creatures. Whenever a great number of living creatures die – be they protozoa or human beings – a door appears along the pathways. There are doors leading to every moment of history, of course, but the easiest ones to find are the “Death Doors”. We can open and shut them; by this method we summon.

Lionel summons out of human wars. His favourite weapons are projectiles: rocks, spears, arrows, bullets, and the occasional burning oil or napalm if he’s feeling vindictive. He summons explosions, too, but more often than not the target is too near. Nara summons nature: blizzards, tidal waves, earthquakes; the usual life-ending fare. Kanya, however, summons words. All the words of humanity, in fact: words representing ecstasy, joy, mirth, and the terrible words of sorrow, pain and fear that come from Death Doors. She inspires us while demoralizing our enemies, the demons.

Ah yes, the demons. Our power has a price. You see, we’re not the only beings that can see time. The “spirituals”, which exist in eternity past and eternity present, are not of the physical realm. They were born inside of time, like us, but they don’t have bodies composed of matter. They are true spirits within the physical universe; they can’t touch us and we can’t touch them. I have a sneaking suspicion that, while we can’t see them, they can see us. However, when walking the pathways of time, the rules change; the things we summon, like bullets or fire, can hurt them. They can’t die, but we can drive them off with pain.

We are perfectly safe within the physical universe, but we don’t want to be safe. We want to walk the pathways. We want to skim the tapestry of history, dipping in here and there to witness or take part in a remarkable event. The angels get angry at us, saying that humans should not be allowed to walk across time, but as long as there is life in the four of us, we will. Who knows? Maybe we will find a fifth.

My name is Aaen, by the way. I pronounce it “Eye – en” but Kanya says the linguistically accurate pronunciation is “Ah - een”. I don’t care; “Eye – en” is how my mother pronounced it.

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Aaen was the first. He found me as a boy in my room, lying on my belly after mother stung my backside. After attacking me mother raids the pantry for cheese and wine. I have sampled the cheeses and wines of history and I hate every last one of them. Mother also smokes, so I hate that as well. I’m not a very good Frenchman. I hate my name, too, because mother named me after my so-called father Léon. After Aaen found me, lying on my bed whilst cursing fluently in Third Republic French, I walked backwards in time to watch the moment mother discovered father carousing with the maid. I took grim satisfaction in watching mother pound father’s face until it closely resembled raw salmon.

Aaen showed me how to find doors. Doors are more than portals to a specific time; there is a door for every point in the universe, for every time. If you could find it, you could open a door on the prow of Columbus’ ship when he made landfall in the West Indies on October twelfth, 1492. You could open a door to one of the stars on Orion’s belt, four billion years before the earth spiraled out of the sun. Any point in the universe, at any time in eternity past or eternity present. Only the spirituals have the eyes to see all the doors; we, being neither angels nor demons, have only eyes for Death.

There is a door I am fond of. It leads to the isle of Rhodes, 226 B.C., upon the northern tip of the island. The earthquake that destroyed the Colossus of Rhodes is about to begin, but here, walking unconcerned upon a beach, is a lovely young girl called Aldora. She is daydreaming of her ideal lover. Then, the earthquake begins, and the island shakes as though Atlas shrugged. Terrified, she falls to the sands, but then a young man in the bloom and blush of youth takes up her hand. This man is strange, because the earthquake moves not his feet, and in his arms there is not the slightest tremor. Surely, she thinks, this is a god in the guise of a man! She is excited, terrified, enraptured by this handsome stranger. He whispers to her in her own language, and she yields to him most willingly.

I have had Aldora thousands of times. Every time I pass through the door, she sees me for the first time, and every time I have her, she has not been had before. My companions think me a lecher, but am I not monogamous? Have I touched another woman throughout history? No; rather, I have one, one who neither ages nor becomes bored with me. Eternally young, eternally innocent. If there is one thing I love in this universe, it is the door that leads to her.

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Lionel may be a filthy pervert but at least he’s honest, like my mother was about Genghis Khan being my father. I checked to be sure, and there he was, the great emperor, having a slave girl among the rice paddies. History records all of a man’s conquests except for the ones that matter. I was only seven years old when Lionel found me. He showed me what all glowing ribbons twisting in and around me meant. I had asked my mother what they were, but she thought I was playing a game. The pathways of time are not a game. It was by walking on them that I learned of my true father, and was introduced to Aaen.

I take to wandering the corridors and byways of time by myself. Whenever I encounter a demon, I simply summon my three other companions. Aaen says nothing, Lionel is always angry at being interrupted, and Kanya opens a door to triumphant singing to get us all in the mood for battle. Battling in the pathways of time is decidedly odd. There seems to be a ground underfoot, but it’s not composed of soil or rocks. Above, around and through us twist the shining ethereal ribbons that connect time and place. The demon usually attacks us head-on, trying to use its speed to overwhelm us, but “speed” has very little meaning to four humans who wade through eternity past and present.

Aaen disappears from where he stands to appear behind the demon. He opened a door there, three seconds before the demon began to attack, and transfixes the ugly spiritual on his bastard sword. The blade breaks off inside the demon, which charges Lionel. Predictably, a roaring hail of tracer bullets emerges from the door he opens. Judging from the size of the holes in the demon’s flesh, I’d say he summoned antiaircraft artillery. The demon is stopped in its tracks, writhing on the ground of the twisting ether, but still claws its way forward. Showing mercy, I open a door to a nasty Antarctic blizzard that drops the temperature to negative eighty degrees centigrade around the demon. Howling, it opens a door to retreat, and three of us heave a sigh of relief that Kanya did not have to intervene. We have never heard the sounds that Kanya summons against our foes, but we have seen demons weep when she does.

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Nara is kind to me. I was singing with my mother when she appeared among us. I knew every face and name in my tribe so I knew she was not one of us. I thought she meant to hurt us, but she spoke our language, offering us peace. With my mother’s permission she showed me what the living fires meant. I know that there are many words to describe what time looks like; Nara calls them ‘glowing ribbons’ but I call them living fires, because fire is supposed to have a fuel to burn, but time burns and blazes inside and outside me without a source. Maybe I am the fuel? Are all living things the wood for time’s fire? Perhaps that explains the doors. I wonder at the doors. I think about them much.

Ah-een showed me many doors. There are doors to life and doors to death, doors to somewhere and doors to nowhere. I can see almost as many doors as Ah-een can. He showed me the final door, the one that is always closed: the door to eternity future. That door does not frighten me, but whenever Ah-een looks at it his face grows pale. Ah-een, who slew three demons by himself, afraid of a door? I do not understand. Angels and demons do not go near that door; it is forbidden. Once, by myself, I saw a demon try to open the door to eternity future. The demon got very near to it, but before touching the door the demon began to weep, and it shied away. Have you ever seen a demon crying? Sometimes I cause them to cry with the words I summon. They cry red. Sometimes they cry black. I wonder if angels cry, but I do not ask. Angels do not like us, but at least they do not interfere.

Do not tell these things to Ah-een. I vex him enough by speaking his true name. Once I asked him to show me his mother, and he did. It was deep in eternity past, when the rules were different and humans were almost spirituals themselves. They could see and touch both angels and demons, the same way I can see and touch Ah-een’s hand. His mother loved a human, and had Ah-een. The other half-humans did not have the spiritual ability to see time, but Ah-een did. While humans walked the earth, Ah-een walked through time. He found Lionel who found Nara who found me. It’s strange… soon after he found us, his mother hid herself. We could not find her inside or outside of time. Then the rules changed and spirituals became invisible and intangible to humans. Ah-een gave up his search. Lionel has Aldora and Nara likes being alone, so I spend more time with him than I do the others.

Some say that time is relative. Have I spent a day with Ah-een, or a million years? Have I spent one moment, or one eternity? It does not matter. I am with him and he is with me, even though I vex him.

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Is this just another demon that Nara encountered during her wanderings? I hold my bastard sword at the ready. This sword does not belong in either the one-handed sword family or the two-handed sword family; the same way I belong to neither the human nor the spiritual species. But more than that, they just don’t make swords like these anymore. Even in eternity present where there are lighter, nigh unbreakable blades, I just like the heft of a bastard sword and the feel of it in my hand, so I steal them from 15th century armories all the time. Let me tell you, I have caused more than a few knights to fail inspection, but let’s get back to the demon at hand.

This is a tricky one. I opened a door behind it, two seconds before it lunged to attack us, but its tail coiled and slapped the sword from my hands. Oh, I see why; it has eyes behind its head. How careless of me. While I stoop to retrieve my blade Lionel lets fly yet another stream of automatic gunfire. He is terribly fond of armour-piercing rounds, but these bullets ricochet off the demon’s hide. Before it gets within range he summons a rocket-propelled grenade which the demon leaps over before pinning him to the ground. The grenade explodes somewhere behind me in the corridor of time – thankfully, our roughhousing does not disrupt the time stream itself.

Nara calls a tornado. The demon disappears inside the vortex, flung a few hundred feet in the air. I open a door just above it and plunge my sword, only to feel the hardened steel snap like a cheap toy against its back. Another lash of its tail sends me back through the door and onto the ground where I had been standing a moment ago.

“Kanya!” I shout above the roar of the tornado, and it is more of a command than a shout. She nods with understanding as the rest of us look away.

“Woes of the words!” Kanya speaks her invocation. Almost immediately we hear the demon’s tortured howls of anguish. Through its loud groans I hear something I have not heard since eternity past.

“Eye-en, Eye-en.”

I turn around. The rest of my companions are looking at me. They all heard what the demon cried out in longing.

“Close the door, Nara!” I yell above the windy squall. The tornado vanishes as though it never had been, and the demon falls to the ground, weeping black tears.

“Eye-en. Eye-en?”

Is that recognition emerging from the demon’s grief? I walk towards the grotesque creature, forgetting my bastard sword on the ground as I walk across time to meet her. Her, not ‘it’.

“Mother?”

The demon shrinks, taking on the form of a young woman. She does glow, but that glow is diminished. She is beautiful, but the beauty is marred by her mottled skin, wild tangled hair and eyes still weeping black.

“Mother.”

I embrace her. I am three years old again, no higher than her waist. I bury my face in her dress, remembering her smell.

“Eye-en. Aaen. After you were born, the rules changed. I could no longer be with your human father. He could neither see nor touch me any longer. I loved him. I loved him more than I loved God. That is why I became a demon. I disobeyed. I refused to serve God after He separated us. I was too ashamed to claim you, so I fled. I ran through time, forever running from you, because I knew you would search for me. After eons of despair and madness, tortured by my separation from the divine source of my birth and separation from my lover, I forgot myself. I became just another demon that hunts you. And now I have found you again.”

Her hands lay upon my head. I look up at her. I am still a child of three. Unlike her black ones, my tears run clear.

“I would never have been ashamed of you. You are my mother,” I say in the voice of a toddler, “I wouldn’t have cared if the other humans, or angels, or even God despised you. I would have loved you. But you ran away from me.”

“Oh, Aaen, Aaen.”

Together we sat, and together we wept.

“I can only hold this form for a short while, my son. Soon the madness will return. Soon the despair will overtake my rational thought. The darkness will come to blot out the light. I will forget you once again.”

I am a man again, bastard sword in hand.

“I wish I could kill you, mother. I wish that you were human, and that your soul could be freed from the eternal nightmare all demons must endure.”

My mother smiles.

“I have never been happier, Aaen, than I have at this moment.”

She convulses, and snarls, curved horns sprouting from her tangled hair, a barbed tail emerging from her dress. We turn away from her, opening four doors to some other time and place. I step through a door, and lose my mother a second time.