Chapter 12
“Blue”
[Sometimes it is good to get another perspective on the nature of choice, especially regarding the nature of good and evil, and who better to provide that perspective than St. Augustine from The City of God. Thus I give you this quote: “In addition to the evils of this life that are common to the good and the evil alike, the righteous also face certain struggles of their own: they do battle against the vices, and they lead their lives in the midst of the temptations and dangers of that sort of combat. For—although sometimes more violently, sometimes more mildly—the desires of the flesh never cease to oppose the spirit or the desires of the spirit to oppose the flesh, and so we cannot do the things that we want, ridding ourselves entirely of all evil desire. Instead, as far as possible with God’s help, we can only subdue evil desire by denying it our consent. We always have to be on the alert so that no apparent truth misleads us; no cunning discourse deceives us; no dark cloud of error envelops us; we never take evil as good; fear never keeps us from doing what we ought to do; desire never rushes us into doing what we ought not to do; the sun never sets on our anger; hostility never provokes us to pay back evil for evil; misguided or immoderate sorrow never consumes us; an ungrateful mind never makes us slow to confer benefits; our good conscience is never worn down by malicious rumors; our rash suspicions about others never deceive us; others’ false suspicions about us never break us; sin does not reign in our mortal body so that we obey its desires; our members are not given over to sin as weapons of iniquity….” XXII: 22-23. I can only hope that Godric, our young Prince, has at sometime in his past taken such ideas under advisement, and acts accordingly; he does seem to be doing well thus far, but one never knows what lies ahead.]
As Godric slipped the blue coin into his hand and opened the casket under it, he quickly saw that the world had changed again. He found himself in a fairly terrifying, underground cavern, with oddly dressed people milling around him like zombies. Not far from where he stood, he saw that there was an even deeper cavern with metal rails running into darkness in either direction. This time the voice in his head whispered, you may use your coin to purchase a ride to wherever your heart’s desire may be found. Wherever, he thought. I can use the coin to get to the lake and the Princess. He no sooner had that thought, than he heard a kind of roaring, as if a mighty beast were coming out of the darkness on his right. He jumped back in fear, felt again for his sword which was still missing.
While it may have sounded like a beast, what came out of the dark tunnel was a large silver and blue metal vehicle of sorts. The zombie like people showed no fear or real interest in the thing. Instead, when the vehicle came to a stop next to his platform, and a set of doors slid open on one of the several cars behind the first, apparently the efficient cause of its motion, they started boarding, finding seats next to the windows that looked out at him, and they looked as bored as they had seemed while waiting for this long thing earlier.
The doors that had been open slid closed; the metal beast, so Godric thought of it, began to move forward into the dark tunnel on his left. The large eye on the front of the creature threw light ahead into the darkness, lighting the tunnel ahead of it. What strange things we travelers see, thought Godric. What to do now? Where I want to go is onto the island where I hope my heart’s desire awaits me.
He heard the rumble of a similar creature again coming from the tunnel on his right, and preceded by a similar strong light. Only two metal monsters this time, only one for passengers, and there was a uniformed conductor dressed in a blue suit, shirt, coat with silver buttons, blue pants, and an odd blue cap such as Godric had seen next to the man in the City of Desolation. “Pass to the City on the lake,” the uniformed man called out, looking at Godric intensely. “One blue coin for the trip,” said the man. Godric handed over his coin, and with some trepidation stepped into the car; he moved down the aisle, then sat down in a seat near the middle of the car and next to a window. He was alone in the car, except for the uniformed man.
When he looked out the window, he saw a scruffy, dirty man with greasy hair and scraggly beard, sitting on the floor, leaning against the white tiled wall of the underground station. More people were beginning to gather on the platform. A tall, attractive woman wearing a dark navy suit entered Godric’s car and sat down by the door. She was followed by two men of differing builds, one tall but fairly thin; the other was heavyset. The first had a head full of well-combed, wavy brown hair; the other man was bald.
Godric looked at them, the woman, the two men, the conductor. “Look,” he said, glancing out the window again. “There’s a man out there against the wall. I think he’s bleeding. We need to help him.”
No one looked out the window of the car nor at Godric. Godric got up and walked to the door, which was still open. “If you get off, you will miss your ride,” said the conductor. “Besides it’s dangerous out there once the trains have gone.”
“I’ll take my chances,” said Godric. “How would you like it if that were you?”
The conductor said nothing as Godric walked past him and stepped out of the passenger vehicle. As Godric moved toward the fallen man, the metal beast moved away and into the tunnel to the left. Godric was left alone on the platform without the blue coin or any human company. He shrugged and walked toward the man on the ground. The man looked up at him, tears in his eyes. Godric saw that his clothes were as dirty as his face, and the man had a bad odor about him. The smell seemed to be coming primarily from his leg. Godric pulled up the man’s pant leg, saw a wound bleeding from above his knee; lower on the man’s leg there was an infected wound on his ankle. Godric patted his side and felt the leash he had taken from his last adventure. He took his knife and cut off each end of the leather, let the two pieces fall to the dusty station floor. He wrapped the leather strip around the man’s leg, above the bleeding wound, and saw the flow of blood stop. He tied off the strap and pulled down the man’s pant leg.
The smell had made Godric slightly nauseous, but he put his arm under the man’s shoulder and helped him stand.
“There’s a room down that corridor. I think there’s a woman who might be able to help. She’s wearing white and there’s a sign with a red cross above her door. Come on. I’ll help you get there.”
Holding the man up and helping him walk, Godric guided him toward the room and the woman in white. He glanced around the now empty area and thought what a god-forsaken place it was. No kindness, no compassion. Just carried off to wherever. He heard another vehicle approaching this station from a second tunnel on his far left. Godric ignored the new vehicle, and helped the man into the white light of the woman’s room.
The moment he stepped into the room’s brightness, the light flared brightly and the room seemed to explode. In that blinding flash, Godric was returned to his camp, on to the blanket and next to the woman kneeling beside him and the five remaining caskets, glistening in the moonlight.
The woman leaned back, reached out to Godric and brushed his hair away from his face. “One more to go, Young Prince. Which casket do you choose this time?”
in the soft moonlight Godric found himself looking at the young woman rather than at the caskets. “Which do you think I should choose?”
“I can’t tell you,” she said. “The choice must always be yours. As was the choice to walk and ride this road in the beginning. Now it is getting near the end. Which casket would you have?”
Godric glanced down at the remaining five. The moonlight seemed to rest more lightly on the purple coin. “The purple,” he said, picking up the casket and opening it to the night.
Image: the Squarespace people, in the course of one day, have changed everything about entering text and proceeding. Frustrating, since I understand even less now about how to use this site than I did before. The image is by a well known painter whose name I have forgotten, though he seems to have gotten the listless people about right. Scary!
