11-Chapter 1-
All men are bull-headed, but I'm the only one I know who actually has the head of an ox. I was born twice: once as Mark Lewis, son of Joan and Ray Lewis, five pounds nine ounces, and again more than twenty years later as Minos, the creature. From the neck up I am an animal— horns, hair and all.
Don't believe me? Why not? Magic doesn't exist solely in foggy forests and castles of yore. Ghosts are not restricted to aged Victorian mansions. Miracles are not the exclusive right of the Old Testament.
I know all of that now.
Oh, magic certainly does wind its way through the crevices of ancient ruins and creep like mist down English hillsides, but the unbelievable is also in the dust of the desert and the walls of the canyon. The otherworldly is for the old as well as the young, and the miraculous is not just for the great, but also for the unworthy.
Let this fairy tale begin, then, not in a mysterious woodland or lost country, but out west, wild and open. Let it begin not with a wide-eyed and adventurous adolescent, but with a tired, thirty something half-man. And let it begin not in a castle or with a battle or a spell, but with an outdated crop-duster.
"Come on, come on, baby. Not now. Don't stop on me now."That would be me, there, coaxing the old shuttle in whose cockpit I sat, the wood and canvas falcon that should have been securing for me enough pay to buy a decent meal or two, but had instead decided to tumble from the clear desert sky like a dead bird. Look closely, now, and you can almost see, beneath the animal husk—the rough brown hair, the short snout tipped with a leathery nose, the devilish, crescent horns—a shadow of the man within. The engine had sputtered and smoked and eventually stopped, and I was nearly breaking the bones in my index finger as I jabbed again and again at the ignition.
"Come on, come on."
Air rushed past me so forcefully that it took a great deal of strength just to keep my head forward and watch as the Hristov farm raced up to meet me. I remarked bitterly to myself that I thought time was supposed to slow down in these sorts of situations. My eyes were watering, my stomach was in my throat, and every muscle in my body had tightened into a ball.
I made a heavy pull with all my weight, but the force of gravity only snapped my head back painfully. I thought the chapped skin of my face would strip away any moment like the peel of an orange.
The plane began to shudder violently and I thought: This is it. The air is tearing this ancient bird to pieces and me with it.
They say that your life flashes before you eyes when you're about to die, but I experienced no such thing. My mind was far from the dirty city where I had grown up or the few people I had known. I can't say that I really blame it; it was a little preoccupied with the present situation to be taking strolls down memory lane. I made no final declaration into the heavens as I fell from them, and I replayed no comforting memory. I said no prayers.
Instead, I only continued the rhythmic pressing of the big red button that should have started the machine up again, and cursed the fact that I was going to die because John was too cheap to fix up his old plane.
Then the engine sputtered.
"Yes!" I shouted. "There we go, baby! There we go!"
Though I thought that I had been stuffing my finger against the ignition with all the quickness I could gather, this new breath of hope managed to double my speed. I ground my teeth and pulled back on the stick with all my weight and desperation. The engine coughed again, then again, then a whole series of coughs as that unforgiving Earth raced ever closer.
The left propeller made a weak attempt to move before resigning itself to immobility again, then the right propeller gave it a shot and spun a short while longer. The left propeller, not wanting to be shown up by his right-side counterpart, had another go at it and lasted slightly longer. The ground, however, would not wait for the rivalry to escalate much longer. I was so close that I imagined I could smell the dirt and vegetables below. I could almost feel the impact, already. I took a deep breath.
This was it.
"Come on, come on! Almost! Come on, come-"
I let out a loud, unintelligible roar and squeezed my eyelids together and clenched every muscle in my body in that last instant when, only feet from the ground, the propellers whirled into life and that old war-bird swung me into the blue sky, only just missing Hristov's farmhouse on the way up.
I released the sort of wild howl of exuberance and astonishment that one might expect during such a moment of victory, and turned the plane around. It was a quiet, sunny day. In the distance I could see the nearest settlement—a small religious town whose name I don't remember. The town, along with the whole area, had a deceptively Middle Western feel, rather than the Far Western one that would have seemed more appropriate considering its relative Pacific proximity. Whatever church ran those little villages dominated the whole area. Jonathan's farm was something of an oddity out in those parts; most agriculture was done in small plots within the city limits to feed the members of the community and nothing more. I had stayed clear of them. Though, at that moment, as I listened to the hammering of my heart against my chest wall, like a trapped hummingbird flying against the inside of my chest, I wondered with a mixture of sarcasm and honesty if maybe a little God time wasn't such a bad idea.
As I flew around, I dropped the pesticide over the crops below in a yellow cloud and came in for a smooth landing.
"What happen!" Jonathan Hristov came running through the dust, holding his tattered hat fast to the top of his bald head.
"What happened?" I said, stepping out of the cockpit and onto the ground, the propellers still spinning and turning up dust. "Your piece of junk plane broke down on me and I almost died is what happened!"
"Oh no, you are not faulting this one on me!" By now we were face to face and he was shaking a tanned little finger at me. "I ask you before you go if it looks O.K. to fly, and you say yes!" John, whose real name I never could pronounce, was an immigrant from some eastern European country, and although he had spent the last fifteen years in the states he always spoke his broken English with a heavy accent. I kind of liked that about him.
"Well, maybe if you weren't still flying old scrap dragged out of the war I wouldn't have to worry about it!" I knew John was right; he had asked me to check on the plane before I got up into the air, and I didn't bother.
"New metal planes too expensive for me. You know this."
I sighed and looked back at the machine. I had been doing odd jobs for John less than a year, and all that time I was fascinated by the ragged, marvelous biplane pulled out of antiquity and somehow into the barn of an old immigrant bachelor. Victory tallies painted on the hull and more than a few bullet holes made it obvious that the bird had seen wartime, but John had been nowhere near the Great War. He said he bought it from someone. "Yeah," I said begrudgingly. "Well, no harm done, I guess."
John smiled. "Good!" he said, and patted me strongly on the back. "Now you fix!" Fighting with John was pointless, anyway, and also a little cruel. He would've backed down soon if I hadn't; after a particularly arduous immigration process and the death of his wife he became the sort of man who took more interest in agriculture and the weather than adventure and confrontation.
I kind of liked that about him, too.
We dragged the plane into his barn together where he left me to get to work.
"Stopping time," John announced several hours later as he flung open the barn door. It was dark outside. "You need place to stay the night?"
I pulled myself out from under the plane where I had accomplished little in the passing hours. I wasn't a very talented engineer. "You know I don't," I said.
"Why you not sleep inside, just once? Or go to town? They rent you a nice room there. It is not healthy to always sleep out in the cold, my friend. Or safe. Someone come up and hurt you, maybe, while you are sleeping. Or maybe it rains or get very cold and you get sick. When was last time you slept in bed, eh?"
"I seem to have survived this long."
"You have been lucky, then."
I couldn't help but laugh. "I don't know if I've ever been called that before."
"Would you be not much more comfortable inside? Please?"
I sighed. "Animals sleep outside," I said and scratched at the rough fur around my jaw.
"You are not animal, Minos."
I know. I'm something else, entirely. I'm a monster. "I'll see you later, John. Sleep well, okay?" I said and walked out into the cool night air.
As I left the farm and approached Absalom's Canyon, I marveled at the land around me. Nighttime in the dessert is an unusual thing. The landscape lies as open and as vast as the sky above, and always surrounded by the slumbering stone giants: canyons, plateaus, mountains a hundred feet tall—everything highlighted by the steamy light of the moon so that you behold a silver beauty, grand and brilliant. No matter how many nights I had spent in the wild, I always felt like a tiny intruder on some lost countryside, like heaven had secretly fallen to Earth in the night and I had been permitted to tiptoe thorough its valleys.
I made my way steadily into the base of the canyon and struck up a small fire under the walls that rose up on either side so high as to create a feeling almost like being indoors. I didn't think I was tired quite yet, but as I watched the white smoke billow up in little threads above the fire, my eyelids grew heavy. The night blinked in and out of consciousness as I began to nod off. Everything was quiet.
"Oh, you can't be tired now; we haven't even gotten started!"
I jerked upright, every fiber in my body coiled. What was that? The fire's light, which still glowed, created a barrier which I could not see beyond.
Still, I peered around carefully.
Nothing. Silence. Maybe I had only imagined it—a product of the mind as it entered sleep, a half-dream. I let out a shaky breath.
"Try over here."
I spun my lumbering sack of a head towards the voice, but found only darkness. My heart pounded nosily inside me like a hurricane against my chest. Slowly, and trying to draw as little attention to the action as I could, I inched my hand along the dirt towards a sizable rock and wrapped my fingers around it. I recalled John's warning with a nervous swallow. I was pretty certain that I could drive off a single thief, but realized with a pang of anxiety that I really had no reason to believe that I only faced one assailant other than the fact that I had only heard a single voice, the possessor of which I couldn't even make out. I could only guess how many unseen eyes were watching me, how many comrades the disembodied mouthpiece spoke for. I wasn't quite so confident of how I would fare against a whole gang of bandits.
I was essentially at their mercy and I knew it.
If I survived this, it would be the last time I slept outside. It was a shame I couldn't just be left alone in the desert, though.
Actually, as I thought about it, it really wasn't fair that I couldn't just sit out there alone and enjoy myself. I hadn't been bothering anyone. I wasn't on anyone's property. I just wanted a nice place to sleep and be alone. Why was it that these men, these men who I didn't even know, could come out here and demand from me property and life? What gave them that right? What gave them a right to me?
I was beginning to get angry. I gripped the stone in my hand tighter.
That's it, I thought. I don't care how many of them there are. This isn't right and I'm not going to sit idly by. I may not win, what do I care? Everyone goes eventually, and it isn't as though I've got a whole lot to look forward to in the morning, anyway. At least I'll get a few good shots in.
I jumped to my feet with a heated rumble rising from my throat and brought my arm up menacingly.
The darkness laughed. "Easy now," it said, and a figure emerged from the black curtain, stepping into the revealing tide of light.
The rock in my now limp hand fell to the sand below with an unheard thud. I stepped back with a gasp of horror.