The old man decided to make an announcement and he clanked on his glass with a spoon. It was hardly necessary as one could hear a pin drop in the silence that had descended on the visitors, faced as they were with this splendid feast. Yet, out of respect for their host, the visitors’ good manners forced them to cease eating.
Once the clinking of cutlery on plate paused and a hush fell on the table, the old man, satisfied that he had everybody’s attention, as four pairs of eyes zoomed on him, made his announcement with a flourish and a hint of irony.
‘Edible, but not without a twist. Please remember, you can all stay here for as long as you wish. Please enjoy all on offer and remember to rest too. Time in here has almost ground to a halt. So at least you won’t have to worry about anything you may miss in your world. The delay will be negligible, barely a thousandth of a second.’
Out of nowhere a figure appeared, an odd-looking half furry animal, half humanoid, apparently from the neighbouring realm, and asked for food. His plea fell on deaf ears. He asked again and then he begged and begged.
The figure was completely ignored by the old man and pushed away by his companion. The figure, feeling desperate for being ignored, vanished in a puff of smoke. Was it dead or just gone?
Katerina and the others could not understand why the figure was receiving this brutal treatment at the hands of their host and his companion, a treatment that resembled that of brutal master to slave or beggar in desperate need, for that was what the figure was, or bothersome dog, but they were reluctant to ask.
The old man, though, saw the puzzlement on the faces of his guests. He knew he had to address the matter. His expression was harsh and unforgiving. His words when they came were delivered in a soft and sad tone, as a drone’s droll.
‘That creature was one of the few remaining inhabitants of our neighbouring realm. They are desperate too, in some ways more so than we are.’ Two children appeared next to the old man as if by magic. ‘These two children are for you to take away and to raise as your own.’ Katerina and the others shared the thought that that was a quick trip from the laboratory, however nearby that may have been. ‘We will also need an infusion of blood from all four of you. You are the first visitors we have ever had. You are the ones we have been waiting for for generations.’ He paused.
When he resumed, the droning droll theme unashamedly continued unabated. ‘We need your blood to refresh our own blood and cure the sickness brought by inbreeding as our numbers dwindled. And if you help us you will lift the curse put on us by our neighbours that bounced back at them. And then hopefully both we and they may finally, after all this time, return to our normal lives.’
His eyes connected with Katerina’s, transferring their plea before the connection was severed. Katerina turned to their host and nodded, accepting the challenge on behalf of the four of them. That was the test. By their acceptance of the task they had overcome the risk and the fear of the unknown. They had passed the test.
The old man smiled. Was that a jubilant expression on his face or did they imagine it and their mind was playing tricks on them? Was it the food that was making them see things that were not there, ghosts and chimaeras where there were none?
There could be no doubt. There was, indeed, a triumphal expression on the old man’s face, if even for a tiny moment in time that if you had blinked you would have missed it.
‘As a gesture of gratitude, there will be a visual feast to compliment the meal you’ve just had. The effect will be temporary. Farewell, friends. Thank you for taking this on. Good luck.’
Suddenly the space, the square Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo were standing in and the hanging balconies and cities and every nook and cranny was filled with figures, human-looking, but glowing as if to say thank you. At least the four visitors felt this was what they were telling them.
And they saw it, the promised show up in the sky and all around them, the whole landscape and its inhabitants becoming one giant collection of images, merging and changing shape and form as one entity, unwrapped and revealed before their eyes in all its glory and beauty. Naked bodies slim as wraiths, bathed in light and words, formed dazzling patterns and multi-storey formations on the ground in front of their feet.
The ground became a mosaic, at the same time solid and fluid. Katerina, Vasilis, Lara and Aristo felt as if they were swimming with the landscape around them in one delicious soup, with taste and smell unknown and indescribable, but undeniably pleasant.
As the colours changed around them, they were on an emotional rollercoaster themselves as on a demonstration of the gamut of feelings. As suddenly as it began, the show fell like dominoes and vanished. That was the message that it was time for them to leave. The four visitors found themselves in a vacuum. They had one foot through the door of the next destination. They pushed the door to open.
CHAPTER 62
Cyprus
Present day
They left the realm of the cliff people behind and came to the territory of the people of the mist. Once clear of the gorge, there was nothing on the other side, but a chasm, and beyond that and all around them they were surrounded by a white space like a dense all-absorbing mist, sucking energy from all living things, the edge a sheer drop into depth unknown.
They almost crashed into some unidentifiable forms in the middle of a thick mist soaked in fog. Some strange short humanoid figures appeared.
‘Thank you for saving us.’ They said with one voice.
What a luscious silky voice they had.
‘How did we do that?’ Katerina asked.
‘You helped our enemies. The curse has been lifted. We got tired of their constant mutations and attacks. We are twins as are all our friends here.’
Katerina seemed to have continued as the four visitors’ spokesperson in this part of their journey inside the bizarre worlds of the cave inside Mount Zalakas. ‘We are glad to have been of assistance. Now, please tell us how to proceed to the next stage.’
The plain started to fill with pair after pair exiting their low-hung dwellings, as if the signal was given that all was clear. Katerina and the others looked down at them, bewitched.
Within minutes they were surrounded by a throb-bing throng, and probed by desperate, curious, willing and prying hands. Assaulted was more like it, but it felt affectionate, and, assuming that it was the local habit and also that the locals had not seen anything like their visitors before, Katerina and the others did not react for fear of offending them. The locals made them feel right at home.
‘You had placed under your care some children of our neighbours. There is something you should know about those children. They were the result of an experiment to produce the ideal ruler, when our royal line died.
‘They were taken by our neighbours as hostages, in the hope that, if we were rudderless, we would be rendered incapacitated. That act did not destroy us, but it did cause us irrevocable damage. The structure of our society could not survive such upheaval following the removal of its hierarchical head, and it almost collapsed, as everybody wanted to rule and demagogues appeared to plague us and seduce us.
‘The extreme perfect democracy that followed kept stirring the pot of discontent — a bit of disloyalty here, envy and animosity there, you get the picture — into a vortex that placed us at each other’s throats.’
‘Just like in Athens and the modern world.’ Katerina said.
‘The children are made out of the genes of Plato, Aristotle and Pericles and DNA collected on one of our trips through the portals. We wanted to adopt Plato’s rule of the philosophers as the way of government for our society and to use Socrates’ dialectic method to confuse and defeat our enemies and we wanted Aristotle and Pericles, because we admired them too.