Chapter 16 The Brainstorm

“This is our horse!” screams my husband.

“We caught him in the field! Finders keepers!” answers the man who played the guitar, as he turns his back to us, and joins the crowd.

As they walk by us, Sarji winks at me. He’d wave with his hoof, but for all the people too close to him!

“Oh, no, you didn’t!” Iris, pulling out his sword, is getting ready to go after them to fight for our horse, when Sada rides up to stop him.

“Sarji led them to us. We would’ve never met the tribe if it was not for Demi’s horse!” The prophet glances at Baron Leo and shakes her head no at his aggressive behavior.

The young woman smiles at me, hides the strange object and walks away with everyone else.

She leaves, but the frequency stays with me. It is as clear as any other voice of a metal. I will never forget it now.

What a shocking turn of events. Henessada’s vision came true. But what does it mean? I still don’t get it. Nothing of what the girl said was about me. She was just making it up. She was not clairvoyant, and that object was no magic!

I get behind my husband on Chirita, and hug him. It calms him down somewhat. We continue on our way, with Iris grieving for the loss of Sarji, me recalling the events over and over, and Sada riding unusually fast.

“There is a riddle here. I need to figure it out!” I say.

“There is no time for riddles! The armada will be at our northern shores in less than three days! The amount of ships they’ve got is not even possible to count! There are at least a couple of hundred warriors per ship!! We are not prepared for the war…” The prophet is gloomy, devastated over the fact that the encounter with gypsies is come and gone, but we are no closer to figuring out how to find what we’re looking for.

It’s getting dark. The air, the forest, and even our thoughts seem to get colder with every step. The sinister presence we slipped away from last night have made a glorious comeback, leaving us unprotected, creating unpleasant pressure around us.

Eventually it forces us to break into a frantic, scared run. I don’t know who initiates it, but suddenly both horses start galloping with all of their might. Iris and I barely hold on. I grab him tightly, and the warmth of his body makes me feel better.

Were we escaping from the dark shadows, or the boundaries of the ordinary that prevented us from solving the riddle of the gypsy tribe? I don’t know. After about five minutes of this dynamic, tireless race, with the wind blowing in our faces, and the trees flying past us, we slow down, and find ourselves in the middle of a vast starlit landscape. The fields seem endless, covered in whispering, enchanted grasses.

After the echo of the hoofs hitting the dusty road dies down, we look around, and notice what looks like a house, or a castle to the right of us, not too far away. We dismount, and walk across the field. I get a strange feeling. What did my mother say about the meeting with the gypsies? Listen to the metal. So, I listened. Now what?

“We need to rest, and we will have to rest in these ruins.” Leo is not happy about the prospective, but we have no choice. Everyone is tired.

We walk into the abandoned castle, or what is left of it. Sada ties up her horse and sits on a pile of black looking, mossy stones nearby. She pulls some bread and dried meat from her bag, and starts to chew it with a detached expression on her face. She is the only one of us who needs food. Not that she cares for any today.

Henessada feels that we’re stuck, and she has every reason to be desperate for a solution. She and Midlandori will be on the receiving end of the broom of aggressive foreign troops that will sweep across the country, only to lose their lands, and everything they ever cared for.

“Wait a minute!” I say suddenly. “That gypsy girl really did impress me beyond my wildest imagination. Just not right away!”

Iris raises his head, and Sada stops chewing.

“That object, it was not ‘magic.’ It was a camera from Ari’s spaceship!” I give my friends a wide grin.

“What, the gypsies got into the ship, dismantled a camera, and took it, because they needed to make some footage of their unparalleled performances? What else did they take? Maybe some of his medical instruments to do surgeries in addition to fortune telling?” Baron Leo rolls his eyes at me.

“ No! It was an external camera made of tellurium alloy. When Ari crashed, the whole left side of the ship got wiped out. A chunk of the ship got torn off, debris flew across the whole vicinity!”

“How do you know that?” Sada is amazed.

“I was there… I mean, I have a figurine from the ship that gave me strong visions about the crash, when I was a child. I must have lived through that crash a hundred times in my dreams. Ari’s girlfriend died. I saw her body.”

“So, the gypsies found the camera… How is that going to help us? They are gone with the camera, they took your horse with them! And you paid them for that!!!” My husband gets progressively irate as he lists the poor gypsies faults, when I hear that sound again.

“Hold on.” I walk away from my friends, and stand by a half-destroyed arch, looking into the starry sky, thinking of my grandfather, his misfortune, his love for Leot, and the nineteen years he had to wait to be rescued from Earth. He had to abandon his favorite spaceship because it was irrepairable.

Where did he leave it? Just dumped it? No, he could not do that. He hid it. How? He could not have taken it very far from the crash site. Ths voice of tellurium is getting ever louder. Both the camera and the ship were made of the same alloy, and now that I learned how it sounds, I can recognize its voice anywhere. The ship should not be far away from where the gypsies found the camera. But where and when did they find it?

Also, why do I hear this sound now? How old is this castle? When was it built?

“I’d dump you guys and go home. But the thing is – I might have no home by the time I get home. Can you think quicker?” Henessada comes to me really close. She holds my hand, and tears glisten in her eyes. “By tomorrow it will probably be too late!”

I wonder how can I possibly console her, when the ground under us starts to shudder. There is a winged creature above us. It hangs in the air, as if frozen. Sada gasps in terror, as she is always expecting Kallitris to attack us. She has every reason to think that – she knows he is following us, unseen and undetected.

But now it’s not Kallitris. It’s my buddy Immaul.

“Get out of the way! I found the ship!” he says very matter-of-factly.

“What’s going on?” Iris, tired and shivering with cold, comes to us.

“Run! Now!” I scream, and charge into the field.

Everyone, including our horses, follows my suit. What little that was left of the old castle falls apart, and the ground where the castle stood begins to gradually rise higher and higher, until we’re shocked to see a huge dark mass hanging above the ground with soil and rocks continuously rolling off of it, and falling on the ground with loud “bump-bump-bomp” around the perimeter of the massive object.

Then it slowly moves, and comes to a rest on the field quite away from the huge hole.

“Welcome to Arileot14,” I say proudly. I’m so amazed that I can barely breathe with joy and anticipation of setting foot in my grandfather’s flying home.

“He is here! He is inside my head!” The prophet suddenly grabs her head with both hands, falls on the ground, and starts rolling and screaming painfully.

Well, that’s not the kind of awe I expected.

The door of the spaceship opens, lighting the field with steady bluish glow.

Iris and I stare at that unexpected welcome.

“Did you open that door?” I ask Immaul, hoping he’d say yes.

“No. I am unable to control the ship. It is designed to respond to brainwaves of a human or a sian, not an arkchil.”

In an eerie silence even Sada raises her head just in time to see an apparition of a woman in a tight suit.

“Get inside!” says the woman.

Iris and I grab Henessada, who at this point can barely walk, and drag her up a ramp that appears in front of us.