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A.R.Yngve

DARC AGES Book Two
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Meijji & Dohan's reunion

Chapter 15


The quarantine ended; Mechao could happily declare to the anxious islanders that the visitors had been sanitized and cleared.

Only the Leper girl was kept isolated; she was brought to Mechao's mansion and laboratory. Shara kept her company in this new environment that was Kap Verita. Eye-Leg took in everything that came across her sight: an explosion of colors which had been absent in the desert; the lively, dark-skinned people -- so devoid of deformities, so immensely beautiful compared to her own people -- and the sea, vast and blue, scented with salt and life. Shara saw tears streaming down Eye-Leg's upside-down face, from her large eyes down over her tattooed forehead. She thought she knew what made the girl cry -- all the beauty she had never known, which was now revealed to her.

The first day in the laboratory, Shara came close to a fight with Mechao when he approached Eye-Leg with some horrid-looking instrument. He was reluctantly forced, with Darc's consent, to have Shara watch over his work -- checking and guarding him so that Eye-Leg would not feel intimidated or abandoned. In his mind, Mechao wondered if Shara had ever had a child of her own, but he did not care to ask; he was accustomed to dealing with strong-minded females. In his laboratory, Mechao got the chance of doing what both he and Darc so eagerly had been waiting for: a complete scan of Eye-Leg's insides.



Shara, Darc, Meijji, and Dohan watched as Mechao left Eye-Leg on a soft couch. With the help of his white-clad assistant sons, Mechao rolled a huge torus-shaped contraption over and around the couch. Two of Mechao's sons connected the machine to a power socket and a cabinet-sized metal box with a circular glass screen. Darc associated this to X-ray machines and primitive oscilloscopes -- oversized, very old and exquisitely ornamented.

"Please make her keep still!" Mechao asked Shara, who talked to Eye-Leg until she had stopped trembling.

He then asked them all to step back behind a silk screen. He turned on a power lever; the equipment clicked and hummed loudly. The glass screen brightened up, showing a latticework of dancing green wave-patterns. Slowly, the patterns merged into an outline of a three-dimensional shape -- literally three-dimensional from all angles, defining every surface in green lines dancing across it. They could see it forming a flickering image of Eye-Leg's body. The old doctor worked a panel of dials, and the image zoomed inward, inside the girl's body. Now the screen showed a living, moving cluster of intestines -- guts, kidneys, a pair of breathing lungs, and a pulsating heart. The organs seemed shaped about right, but they were distributed in a way that defied all concepts of anatomy.

Darc studied the moving, living imagery, memorizing all he saw. Mechao began taking notes and scribbling down sketches. As the hours passed, they could puzzle together a picture of the confusion that was Eye-Leg. Darc was the first one to notice the fatal flaw in the Leper girl's constitution.

"Look there, Mechao." He pointed out the central stems of arteries emerging from Eye-Leg's pumping heart. "The largest blood vessels are twirled into a knot around the heart."

Mechao saw it too, and he worriedly looked up from the screen -- at the unhappy, waiting creature on the couch.

"I'll tell you this, Darc -- a miracle it is, that she has lived this long. She might stay alive for a few more years, with proper care. But she is doomed, mark my words."

"I know," Darc muttered.

He banged his fist against the box that held the projecting screen, and the picture flickered out of focus. Mechao cast him an angry glance, and shut off the now overheating machinery. Shara approached Eye-Leg again, and grasped her hand -- a hand that was nervously groping for support.

She faced the two scientists, and said with calm determination: "You vowed, Darc. You vowed to cure her. What will you great men do now?"

Darc closed his eyes for a few seconds, shut out the world and steadied his pounding heart. Playing the Popeye tune in his head failed to calm the tension. The challenge had been there, all the way from his rebirth in this future place: Change the world or die. Then it hadn't frightened him, it had helped him escape a great loss. The challenge had changed, to a more ominous note: Change the world or they die. Please God, he thought, don't let me go through that kind of loss again. But he had lived through a second childhood and youth in this world, and perhaps he faced the beginning of a second maturity; an era of hard, sometimes drudging work toward a goal, which he probably would not live to see realized. He had gained too many enemies, and many more would join in the effort to stop Darc. The challenge was there for Darc to accept; it seemed to come right out of those innocent, questioning eyes of the deformed girl on the couch. He worded the challenge in his mind: Change the world and then die. Very well, he thought.

He accepted the facts, as he had always been able to do, opened his eyes, and faced the others. His friends.

"We," he told them slowly, "are going to cure Eye-Leg and defeat the Plague. Not I. We are."

He walked up to the resting Eye-Leg on the couch, and took her other hand -- the one that was attached to her hip. Her hand squeezed his.

"I must ask you to be very brave from now on, girl."



Meijji and Dohan walked out of the laboratory, away from the questioning, knowing glances of her family and siblings.

"Where are we bound?" he asked her, unfamiliar with the many rooms and corridors.

He reached out to hold her hand, but she evaded him, cast only brief glances at his face as she led the way up a winding, narrow flight of stairs. It seemed to go on forever. Then, just as he was about to demand a stop, they reached the top of the stairs. She looked over her shoulder to smile at him, and gestured to ask him in.

"This is the most private room in all of the family mansion. If someone wants to be absolutely alone, and escape the eyes and ears of the villagers and servants, this is the place."

It was a sort of massive pavillion, built from rock and concrete, dominated by a circular room, nine meters wide; the roof appeared to form a cupola, four meters high at the center, from which hung a wooden chandelier. The pavillion's seven windows, three of them in stained glass, overlooked the mountain peaks of the island from a rock outcrop high above the mansion. The position of the building made it impossible to approach from outside.

Dohan stepped closer, trying to take in all the rich detail of the pavillion. He arched his neck and admired the painted ceiling: it depicted a blue sky with clouds, with the sun at one end, and the moon and stars at the other. The place was not gaudy with gold and costly cloth, like the quarters of his peers in the walled cities -- its beauty lay in the use of simple paint, wood and stone to create a place that brought to mind the whole world around it. Meijji sauntered past the windows, across several thick carpets, toward the massive four-poster bed at one end of the pavillion. Dohan watched her hips sway, enchanted, and failed to realize that she was deliberately exaggerating their movement.

"You look far more lovely than I could remember you while I was away."

She stopped and faced him, her eyes wide open and her lips slightly parted.

"Darc told us of your imprisonment by your father the city lord, and your daring escape. You did all that, to come back to me?"

Dohan grinned, and shook his head ruefully; no matter what he replied to that, it would sound wrong. Meijji leaned against one of the bed's wooden posters, carved and painted into the likeness of a dolphin. She regarded his powerful build, his noble, strong-willed face, and could barely stand still.

Slowly moving closer to the waiting Meijji, Dohan fixed his eyes on hers and said: "I am not the man to make speeches. But now, it all becomes clear to me. Everything that has happened this year, has driven me to you. How this will end, I do not know... I may be giving up all I have owned, my birthright, the respect of my family, my life even... to be with you. I love you more than all of that. Do you still want to spend the rest of your life with me, if I lose everything I own? It can become a very short bliss."

Meijji rushed at Dohan, and in that moment only had time to whisper a "Yes" -- before they embraced each other, and she was unable to do other than kiss him. Locked tightly together, they fell onto the bed and tumbled among the sheets.

"No one but you, my love," she gasped, pausing for a breath.

"For ever and ever," he whispered to her.