Heather Farthing's Blog - Posts Tagged "egg"

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The man has pale blond hair, cut close to his scalp, fair skin under his sea-tan, and a sour expression. He would look out of place, more at home in someone’s drawing-room than the humid docks, if it wasn’t for his gray captain’s coat and distinctive, dragon-headed cutlass, to say nothing of how other sailors give him a wide berth
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He has just disembarked from an impressive ship, gold fresh in the pouch at his hip. His boots clop against the cobblestones as he browses the shops and their wares, a discerning eye passing over every trinket and charm.

He pauses to smell incense burning at one booth, inhaling deeply, thinking of how his young bride likes the smell. He buys several cones, wrapped in paper, and tucks them into his satchel, before moving on to the next stall.

The next stall is a purveyor of gems and jewels. There are obsidian stones set into copper bracelets with thin wires like spun hair, dangling earrings that look like raindrops. Across the main surface of the booth are tiny trees with crystal leaves and wire branches, and in the center is a large rose with petals of ruby and a stem of emerald.

A very old man sits on a cushion, smoking from a hookah, and doesn’t stand when he sees the captain arrive. His skin is leathery, the color of walnut hulls, and his hair has long gone sparse and silver.

“See something you like, Captain? Perhaps present for pretty wife, yes?”

“Very pretty,” the pirate agrees, looking over a blue diamond cut in the shape of a heart, strung on a thin silver chain.

“These? These are common,” the old man scoffs in a strange accent. “Every sailor who comes to my shop buys one for pretty wife. You are man of particular taste, yes?”

The pirate looks up curiously. The old man is standing now, still puffing on his hookah.

“Yes, yes, Sea-Dragon is in the market for rare treasure, not common trinket.”

The pirate raises an eyebrow, unsure of how the old man recognizes him. While he is quite sure he has never seen the old man or his booth before, it is most likely that his reputation precedes him.

“Yes, yes, I have something for Sea-Dragon in wagon. Come, come, you will see.”

With surprisingly youthful vigor, the old man waves for the pirate to follow, past the booth to where a wooden wagon is parked, near a dwarf-sized elephant the old man pats affectionately, apparently the chauffeur.

The inside of the wagon is dark and smoky. A ristra of dried, yellow apples hangs in a corner, the ground is covered in pillows and blankets, as if the old man sleeps where his body gives out, and the walls on the pirate’s starboard side are covered in small drawers, likely where the stock is kept during off-hours.

“Sit, Sea-Dragon, sit,” the old man demands, pointing at a round cushion, depicting blue sea-serpents tormenting a ship in a storm.

The pirate does as he’s bid, and the hold man moves to one of the larger drawers with a key strung about his neck. Inside is a good-sized box, made of teak and closed with another lock. With the treasure in hand, the old man takes a seat on a cushion depicting the firmament as seen from the deck of a ship with surprising accuracy.

The old man sits the box in his lap, hand protectively over the lid. “Sea-Dragon will hear story,” he says. “Young is treasure-hunter, yes? He goes to every place looking for treasure, like Sea-Dragon, but young man is alone, yes? Young man has small boat, big enough for barrel of food and barrel of water. Rain takes care of water, fills barrel, but now young man is cold and hungry, and he needs to find land…”

Without food, the young man sailed for three days in search of land. He checked his charts and his maps, following the stars. He is desperate and needs to find land, and if he doesn’t, well…he wouldn’t be the first to go missing chasing adventure.

In the middle of the night, a heavy fog blows in. The young man can’t see where he is sailing, and between the rain and the fog and the lack of food, he’s beginning to sicken. All of a sudden, the ship lurches, but he doesn’t immediately realize what’s happening at first.

The small boat isn’t moving. He’s made landfall.

The young man carries a rope off the ship, walking into the fog in search of something to tie it to, carrying a lantern to light his way. His footsteps fall flat in the fog, as if the sound can’t travel properly. Eventually, he runs out of rope, and must hope that the weight of it alone is enough to hold if the tide comes in.

The young man keeps walking. There is nothing for him behind, so he can only move forward. He’s hungry and tired, and he starts to see strange things in the mist. A beautiful woman beckons him onward, with skin and hair the color of fog, scales like a snake, and antlers of a deer. He hears his mothers voice calling him for supper, like when he was a child. He narrowly avoids being crushed by something so large he can’t see its belly as its tree trunk-sized legs step over him. Children sing nursery rhymes whose melody he knows but language he doesn’t. Someone is baking fruit in wine.

The mist begins to clear, revealing a lush paradise in the predawn hours. The man is delighted, and immediately begins searching for edible fruit, or even some kind of animal he can net, but the island appears to be completely deserted.

Finally he finds a clearing in the jungle, and a line of fig trees, where he stops and eats his fill. When he’s full to bursting, he lies down and takes a nap, waking to the afternoon sun, when he notices the straight lines the trees are growing in. He’s in a man-made orchard.
He picks what fruit he can fit inside his pockets, and then decides that it is only decent he explains his predicament to the master of the orchard, and exchange some of his precious stones and gold for enough fruit to see himself home.

The orchard is planted outside of a sprawling, white marble city, overgrown with vines, rising out of the jungle like the bones of some long-dead animal. The buildings are as silent as a tomb, not even birds chirping in the fruit trees that grow along the empty streets. He looks into windows and sees nothing, shops with empty shelves, homes with blankets and pillows still on sleeping pallets, dining services set out as if awaiting a meal, but no food in any hearth or pot.

In the center of town, he finds a pool where the water is cool and clear and he drinks his fill, looking down into a forest of freshwater weeds, stringy and bright green, with sandy pebbles and dark rocks.

As he stands before the pool, the hair on the back of his neck begins to stand on end. It is so quiet, no other animals, no people. He’d have believed himself adrift in time if the wind didn’t blow the leaves on the plants. Still, he is disquieted in a way that he can’t quite identify.

He starts, the answer coming to him like a wave. There are no signs of people at all. There are houses and places of commerce set up as if people should be there, but there are no statues or murals depicting daily life or mythology, as the Greeks have.

Suddenly, he feels more alone than ever before.

There is art, however, just none of people.

Some of the buildings are muraled with pastoral scenes of strange animals. One creature has a thick, round dome of a body, the tail of an alligator, but the feet and face of a squirrel, grazing near a river. Another creature has the limbs of an ape but the face of a horse, and uses its great height and hands to bring down a tree branch to his mouth. A third scene showed maneless lions with long, curved teeth like daggers, stalking camels in a grassy field. A fourth shows massive elephants with long, straight tusks.

In one home he finds a rose with ruby petals and an emerald stem, apparently growing from a base of jasper, under a cloche that drips sapphires onto the flower like rain. In another, near a sleeping pallet, he finds a stately tower of selenite that shows him scenes from his previous night’s dreams. A third house has a jade cat with tiny pearl fangs, curled in a woven basket, whose sides rise and fall as if in sleep.

And yet no people. What kind of calamity could have befallen these people, that they would leave such wonders behind? The very notion makes his hands shake in fear, his blood run cold, and his heart deafen his ears.

Still, he has taken fruit and water from this place, and as a guest he must try to pay back his debt in whatever way he can. He must search as far as he can for someone he can pay for fruit and water, and if not, leave something of value to him in an appropriate place.

On the island’s highest hill, there is a handsome palace as if for a great king. He decides that is where he must go, and so he walks again, wandering about the paths as he moves. There is a leather ball in a yard, as though the child it belongs to went inside mere moments ago. A wagon has vases still in its bed, the harness laid out as though the draft animal wearing it blinked out of existence.

As he walks, he realizes it is less that the people who live here evacuated due to some kind of tragedy, like a volcano or storm, and more as though they disappeared suddenly, in mid-action. A cook-pot is on its side as if the owner dropped it while carrying to a table, a vessel is near the pool on its side, facing one of the houses as though someone was carrying water to one of the houses. There is a fishing net and shuttle under a pear tree, as if someone had taken their work outside with them.

He finds the palace as silent as the village below, but is obvious a very rich man once lived here. There is a pool of water in the main hall, as cool and sweet as the one in the village, but clearly put here for the royal family’s personal use. A throne of gold is visible in a straight line from the palace entrance, shaped in the form of a pack of enormous wolves with teeth of pearl and eyes of ruby.

Here, the young man finds a very special room. It is round, with only one entrance, and a window in the ceiling that cast light onto a round vessel in the middle of the room. The walls have a dark mural depicting the night sky, with diamonds as the stars, which he verifies for accuracy by his knowledge as a sailor.

The lower half of the mural is green, with white buildings as viewed from the side. It takes him only a few minutes to realize that he is viewing the city below, as though he were standing on this spot and the palace were not on the way, which placed this room, specifically the window in the roof and the vessel beneath it, in the exact center of the island—or at the very least, this strange civilization.

The importance of the room is clear.

There is a basket beneath the constellation Leo, and inside are dolls made in the likeness of the animals on the mural. Another beneath Orion has rattles made of turtle shell and bone, wooden figures on wheels to be pulled by string or pushed with a stick, and small, wooden carts just big enough to fit small toys, with miniature harnesses. A third has blankets and swaddle of haunting color and unimaginable softness. Beneath Draco is a small, ivory wagon with leather straps, as though for carrying a child, shaped like a miniature of one of the wolves in the great hall.

It’s a nursery, he realizes, and it is almost as if the women have taken the babies out and could be back any minute.

Finally, with the kind of dread only a father can know, he goes to the basket in the center of the room. It’s made from the antlers of some great deer, wider and flatter than any deer he’s ever known, lashed together, strung with bells, and lined with blankets like the ones in the basket. The widest part of the antlers point up, guarding the treasures within with their points.

His heart pounds in his ears as he reaches for the blanket, the weight of the fruit heavy in his belly. He will remember how the textile felt under his calloused fingers for the rest of his life.

Beneath the blanket are three, bejeweled eggs, each the size of a newborn, made of perfect opal, two white and one black. The black one is dark and vibrant with a rainbow of color, but the two white have a washed-out, desiccated look, one is even cracked open with a tiny skeleton beneath the shards.

His fingers touch the second white shell. It fragments at his touch, collapsing into a pile of shards and dust. His blood runs cold again at the thought of what he has done, but the second tiny skeleton reminds him that the egg has been dead for a very long time.

The black one holds, warm in his palm. As he turns it, he feels a liquid moving inside, and a small creature kicking at the shell. The black one is alive.

The young man knows what he has to do, how to repay his debt to the island. He places the egg in one of the blankets, wrapping it gently, and layering inside the basket so that it is safe from the jostle of the waves. This he takes back to his boat and places it below deck, and hides near where he sleeps.

He spends the next day stocking his boat with figs, pears, and fresh water. At night, quartz crystals in the pebbled streets light his way and the murals are as visible as they ever were in daylight.

When he is healthy and strong again, he pushes his boat into the surf. The island becomes smaller on the horizon, and then a fog rolls in. When the fog clears, the island is gone.

“So what happened to the young man?” the pirate asks, resting his hand on his chin as if contemplating the story.

“He goes to shore, and he stays there,” the old man shrugs. “He lets the new young do the treasure-finding, and opens a shop.”

“And…what was in the egg?” the pirate asks, a dry tone coming into his voice.

The pirate balances out the notion that there are stranger things in Heaven and Earth with a healthy dose of skepticism. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d found old sea tales to be true, his personal cut of plunder can attest to that. Still, it also wouldn’t be the first time he found an amazing story to be nothing more than an afternoon’s entertainment.

“The young man never finds out,” the old man replies.
“And…what became of it?” the pirate sighs, eyeing the box.

“The young man keeps it safe, like he promised the ghosts on the island. He keeps it where he sleeps, and the egg keeps him until he is young man no more,” the old man explains.

“The egg keeps him?” the Sea-Dragon repeats, another eyebrow raised.

“Yes,” the old man agrees. “The young man doesn’t take sick, his bones don’t creak in his old age. His sons grow strong and clever and take to the sea and return when they are old men with sons of their own. Egg is lucky.”

“The egg is lucky,” the pirate repeats flatly, but there is a questioning wonder behind his eyes. He doesn’t believe wild tales easily, even when he has a trove of wonders that would make him richer than any king, had he a care to divulge the jealously guard secrets.

He also comes by his name honestly, and the item in the box might be worth it to him for the story alone.

“Opal is lucky stone,” the old man nods, “and black opal is rare. If Sea-Dragon is kind to egg, egg is kind to Sea-Dragon.”

“And what would such a treasure be worth?” the pirate asks, feeling the coins in his pocket.

“A pittance to pirate of Sea-Dragon caliber,” the old man replies. “Two hundred gold, English, Spanish, Chinese—no matter, it all melts the same.”

“If the egg is so lucky, why are you willing to part with it?” the pirate asks.

“The egg rocks now, and there is peeping inside. Baby has been from world’s end to world’s end, and now hatch-ling wants to see the world for itself. Grows impatient.”

“The young man in your story had sons,” the pirate notes. “Why not them? Surely one of them knows how to raise an animal.”

“Sons are not here,” the old man nods. “Such is life.”

“So you’d sell a lucky egg, likely containing an animal worth a king’s ransom in rarity, to some stranger you met in port?” the pirate asks, sighing and getting to his feet.

The old man shrugs, twisting the key from his neck in the lock.

“Egg is safe with Sea-Dragon, like island wants,” the old man says, nodding again. “The Sea-Dragon hoards rare treasure, yes?”

The old man pulls the lid back, revealing the glittering, black gem. A sparkling rainbow plays across the shimmering surface, colors of every sort rolling like waves among the scale-like texture. The pirate reaches out to touch it, but the old man flinches, an apparently unconscious movement.

“It’s a large stone, clearly valuable, but that isn’t an egg,” the pirate scoffs. He’s seen things like this before, decorative objects for curiosity and nothing more.
He’s also seen things he can’t rightly explain.

“No?” the old man asks.

The egg rocks in its velvet-lined box.

“You tilted it,” the pirate accuses.

“I did?” the old man asks, then places the box flat on the wooden floor of the wagon, level and away from the cushions.

Again, the egg rocks.

The pirate kneels in front of the box, removes a glove, and places it on the egg. The stone surface is smooth and glossy, immaculately uniform, no flaws or sharp edges. It’s also very warm, like the deck of a ship under sunlight. Something inside it moves.

“Two hundred gold?” the pirate asks.

“Two hundred,” the old man agrees. “Enough to take me home for burial, bring great-grandson here to mind the shop.”

“You have a deal.”