Shadow of the Owl
an excerpt

She was always sensitive, everyone could tell that about her, but her sensitivity went beyond understanding the feelings of others. She knew things before they happened, could sense the natures of arguments and defuse them even before they began. From the time that Joppa was a little girl playing in the fields with her brothers, she would always know then the rain was coming, or when her mother had cut her hand preparing the noon meal. The twins, Joppa and Abihu, created secret languages and spoke for weeks in their gibberish tongue, felt each other’s pain from great distances, laughed at jokes the other had never spoken aloud. Therefore, when her brother finally answered the call of the El, it was the hardest day of her life. That was until a week and a half ago.

Joppa, ever the daughter of the soil, was out with her older brothers, enjoying the end of a long day working the grain harvest. The air smelled of rain and dirt and traces of the swamp that bordered their land. It was her custom to spend the time walking back to the house talking to the plants and animals around her, connecting with the lives of the world. There was only so much you could learn listening to human voices. At times the lesser understood citizens of this world were more intuitive and certainly more interesting conversationalists.

This particular evening a breeze rolled down from the mountains, rustling the trees and bushes as it went, gaining momentum as is sped down from the rocky peaks. The cold frigid air reached Joppa as she stood in the field, knocking her to her knees with one arctic blast, more like a hammer than a wind. Wrapped in a cold so profound it choked her, when she was finally able to catch her breath, it was then that she began to scream. A great wailing and howling that boiled from within her so totally she lost all sense of its boundaries. She did not stop screaming for two days.

Locked in the dark of her room, supposedly for her safety but mostly for theirs, Joppa paced until the boards did nothing but creak in anticipation of her footsteps. She had grown up in this room, shared it with her brother until the day he traveled to be with the brethren. There were so many memories here they saturated the very walls like whitewash. She remembered her childhood in a series of vibrant flashes, like the stained-glass windows in a cathedral transported here to her room. The more she looked at images, the more fractured they appeared to become, until she wasn’t exactly sure she was seeing anything at all but blocks of bright colors.

She remembers the harvest when she was young. There she is standing in a field of golden grain, the tops of the stalks brushing against her shoulders. She is six. She was watching her father pull the oxen, watching the great beasts snort and toss their great heads as the whip came down on their backs. Don’t hurt the cows, Daddy, they’re helping you. She reaches out to pet the plants around her. The heads of grain tickling her palms. She sees a field mouse darting between the rows of stalks and begins to give chase and then…

He remembers the first lesson he had in the Language of the El, sitting at the feet of the traveling priest, eyes wide and heart aflame. His older brothers thought him crazy, and even his father looked at him askew, as if not quite sure what to make of his interest. Only his sister Joppa understood, and sat down by the fire next to him, and held his hand as he listened to the priest tell stories about the Miracles and the Heroes in the Testament…

She falls, scraping her knee on a rock’s jagged edge. For a moment she doesn’t notice, so intent on the mouse is she. The mouse seeing its advantage, dashing away out of sight. She cries loudly, the great heaving sobs of the young. Whimpering as she limps back to the house, but father is there to give her a plum and a plants a kiss on the scrape. He sings her a song she remembers mother used to sing, only his voice is low and scratchy and not nearly as pretty as Mommy’s was. He always knows what to do in order to make her feel better. It was almost as if he heard…

The calling of the El, felt the pull of the Order long before he even realized he had decided to leave home. The day he told Joppa she was smiling and sobbing at the same time, and he felt like he was betraying her most of all. But he also knew that she understood, deep down, that this was what he had to do. He could no more deny the call then his father could ignore the fate of the crops on a frost-ridden evening. Hadn’t they since childhood woken in the middle of the night to walk among the crops in the freezing cold with buckets of smoldering coals, smoking the frost away from the precious grain? Wasn’t his heart’s ambition, his drive to serve his fellowman, equally as vital? He was setting out to tend the crops of Shadowhaven, to smoke the frost away from the tender shoots of mankind, and yet his father’s eyes were nothing but cold to him. He spoke as if his son were committing some great crime. Couldn’t he understand that…

The room spun, feeling both cavernous and confining by turns. For days Joppa couldn’t distinguish whose memories she relived. One moment she was laying by the hearth listening to her brothers talk about the days activities and the next moment threw here into a prayer service filled with faces she could not recognize. Were they her brother’s thoughts or her own? Day and night she labored with two minds in her one skull, fighting to find her own identity at the same time. By the end of a week she could no longer tell the difference between the two, but she had given up trying and didn’t care much about it anyway.

Once a day a member of her family would bring her food. They gave it their best, attempting to communicate with her. It was as if they to see if she had finally broken herself of the illness that plagued her. Abihu would have found it amusing that they would expect a sickness to go away without treatment, and his comments to that effect sent her into fits of giggles. Joppa just wanted to be let out into the fresh air to work the fields with her brother, to feel the damp soil squish between her toes.

This morning her brother Aebrin brought her bowl of broth. He was the youngest of her elder brothers, around seventeen, with their father’s dark eyes and brooding expression. Despite his looks he was nevertheless a sensitive person, and had stated more than once his objection to seeing his sister made a prisoner of her own room. It was he who had smuggled in the drawing tablet and pencils to her the first day. The tablet had immediate taken flight out the window but the pencils she used to write her essays and sermons on the walls. She was down to the last one.

“I’ve come to see you Joppa,” Aebrin announced a little too loudly as he unlocked the door, “Now don’t throw the chair this time, you know how it angers the other furniture.”

Joppa was sitting in the windowsill overlooking the fields, her eyes constantly scanning the rows and rows of golden grain. “The cock gets to crow and the boys get to tend the fields, but can Joppa go out to ritual in the sunshine? Oh no, the dark is the place for her, even though the days grow short and the light grows more and more skittish. It hardly ever comes to play in Joppa’s window now. No, the light is as skittish as the father. Lock her away, he says. The dark is the place for her.” And she jumped down from the sill and began scribbling on one of the few blank places on the wall, her penmanship harsh and rough like a child’s.

“Now when did you learn to do that? Was you stealin’ books from the Callister’s farm when we weren’t lookin’?” Aebrin set down the bowl of broth on her little wooden table and took a turn about the room, surveying the hieroglyphic records that wrapped the room from ceiling to floor. “Don’t see no books, though. Strange sickness that struck you, Love. I can’ hardly understand it.” There was concern in his eyes and in his hands, which twisted nervously, the fingers turning into knots.

“Anything is understandable if you take the time to observe,” Joppa replied icily, snatching her bowl from the table and retreating to the windowsill. “Once you had little knowledge of what it was like to be a jail keeper. How well you have learned. You’ve turned into an excellent warden. Father must be so proud.” She slurped down her soup loudly as if she hoped to annoy him as much as possible. Aebrin was hurt.

“Aw, come now Joppa, don’t be like that. We was always pals, wasn’t we? You remember when I would take you on my back and you would ride like I was a pony? Remember that? They was good times we had. I did my best to be good brother to you once Abihu was…” He trailed off, and Joppa noticed. Interesting, the thought came, unbidden, I wonder how long they have known? Were they never going to tell me?

“Of course I remember, are you insane?” The question hung in the air in front of her, and she stared at it, tilting her head like a confused dog. “Scratch that, nevermind.” A pause. “I believe this belongs to you,” She said, chucking the bowl at him. He ducked as it flew by his head, and turned, managing to catch the crockery before it exploded against the door frame.

Aebrin sighed sorrowfully, evidently making a decision that today was not the day to press the matter. He left the room with the bowl he came with, shutting the door behind him and relocking it with a rusty snap. Joppa waited until his footsteps faded down the staircase, and then pulled out her last little stub of a pencil, which she had secreted in her hair. Pulling it out she put the finishing touches of her masterpiece, a hole in the window frame large enough to stick her hand through. She had been digging at the wood all week, when she wasn’t interrupted by visitors, or caught by the urge to write. The little scrap of blue curtain her mother had tacked to the window when Joppa was a girl had covered the opening whenever someone came to pay her a call. She tossed aside the cloth with little ceremony, and set to her task.

Now Joppa reached through the opening and tugged with all her might at the nail that held the window fastened closed. The motion, although strange to most hands, was one Joppa was used to, having performed just such a task numerous times out in the field with her brothers. If she could pull weeds from the ground will all their persistent root systems, with their need to grip the earth for their very life, then she could do this. Which had the greater tenacity, the weed or the nail? Or the Joppa?

It was the Joppa who won out. To her delight, the nail was shorter than it looked, and the wood of the frame already beaten by weather and time. After two hours of persistent pulling, she was able to pull the nail free. She had spent much time at her perch observing the comings and goings of her family below, and now they were all at evening meal. Before she opened the window, she collected the two items most precious to her in the world: her pencil, and a doll Abihu had made her out of scraps of cloth found around the farm. Then she bounced up to her windowsill, pushed open the one thing keeping her penned up, and rolled down the roof landing softly on the cool, damp earth. For a moment she let it squish between her toes, smiling to herself.

Mustn’t be late, oh there is so little time! Told me to be there at dawn, and that was more than a week ago. Though patience be a quality I must cultivate, I cannot abide being held from what I must do. How will I ever explain to Brother Timothy was has happened here? The anger in my father’s eyes when he read the letter, the disdain in his voice. The arguments that followed and the hateful, raging words. Oh Brother Timothy shall give me the strongest talking to, allow me to read my penance from the Testament, standing, all night long, and then I will surely be given service in the kitchens. How I hate doing dishes! That is if I am allowed to take my place amongst the brethren at all. Patience, Abihu, remember patience. As the Testament says, “One must first make the journey before he knows the end of it.”

North then, and be quick about it. It’s into the swamps I must go, trudging through the water, as the El has bade me do. Don’t mind the muck, or the smells, it’ll be the creatures that you must worry about. Sleep in the trees, they say, sleep in the trees. Once I get through the swamps, Laud-El can be found nestled before the mountain pass. To the East. Follow the rising of the moon, the letter said. “Its light will show you the way, just as the Light of the El guides our very lives.” If I hurry I can reach the monastery by dinner tomorrow.

The evening was cool and breezy, as if autumn were entertaining winter for the evening and wished to hear him sing. Joppa ran across the fields, resisting the urge to howl at the moon, as it rose on its invisible string, pulled above the eastern horizon. There was too much work to do, though, and she must travel fast if she wanted to make sure she reached her destination before the conscriptions were closed. What good was a calling, if you heeded it all too late?

If any one of her brothers had been looking out the window just then, they would have seen a dark-haired beauty dashing through the rows of grain, hair unbound and arms flailing, heading north towards the Swamps of Gar-din.