Every Boy Should Have a Man

9 Their World Shall Pass Away

In the morning the one called Gen’rl said to those gathered around the map, “Today we go to final victory. There is no turning back. This is the day we have been longing for. We are outnumbered, but we are not undone. Let us pray! Oh great creator, protect us as we do your will. And if we fall in battle, remember us evermore in your kingdom to come!”

And they said, “Verily in your name!”

And he said, “Verily in your name! To arms, great oafs!”

The female man was bound in rope on his cot. She was the last man alive in the cave, all the others having been devoured.

One of the ailing oafs was put to watch her, but he slept for most of the morning and then gasped loudly and finally on his cot, and he was dead.

She knew that he was dead because his chest was no longer wheezing. He was dead, but not from his ailing.

From behind the dead oaf appeared the strange little man, and the blade in his hand was red with blood. She looked again and saw that the oaf’s throat had been cut clean through.

The strange little man wiped the blood from his blade with his shirt, and then he used it to saw through the rope that bound her. He told her, “Come with me if you want to live.”

Brushing back tears, she said, “I want to live.” And they raced to the hole at the back of the cave.

“Don’t forget your harp,” he told her.

She went back and got her harp and then he showed her how to flatten her body so that she could fit into the hole at the back of the cave, and then she followed him through the hole, and just in time.

She heard the soldiers loudly chanting their victory as they came back early from the battle that they had won: “Fe! Fe! Fe! Victory!”

She heard the one called Gen’rl cry hysterically, “She’s gone! She’s gone! Where has my little red-haired female man gone?”

As she ran ever deeper into the dark vault of space behind the cave, she heard one of the ailing ones say, “She went through a hole at the back of the cave, sir. There! See?”

She heard the tremendous hammer blows against the rock. She heard them breaking through the rock. There were harsh cries as the oafs came through the cave wall — coming after them.

“Fi! Fi! Fi! Die! Die! Die!”

She ran and she ran. There was no time to think or even to breathe. She raced after the little man through the winding recess at the back of the cave, and then, finally, there was light.

There was a hole in the hard ground and a light came up through it.

When she looked down into it, she saw a never-ending series of steps, a stairway that went down, down, down. But down to where?

“Fi! Fi! Fi!” sang the oafs behind them.

“Let’s go!” urged the little man.

But despite the noise of huffing, puffing pursuit behind her, she refused to take a step down the lighted hole.

She was much too afraid.

“Fi! Fi! Fi!” sang the oafs.

The little man took her hand and spoke to her gently, and his voice had a calming effect on her fear. “It’s okay. Don’t be afraid. This is a hole in the firmament. You will be safe.”

“What is a firmament?” she asked.

“Uhm, er,” he said, “that’s an explanation that will have to wait for a later date. Hurry, let’s go!”

Holding her hand, he steadied her, and down she went.

She stepped into the hole in the firmament and stood stock still on a plank, a step that was as firm as solid ground. When she looked down, all she could see were stairs going downward, on and on. And below that, at the lowest level, the stairs were hidden in what looked like clouds.

It was a strange sensation staring down at clouds below her feet.

Then the little man also stepped into the hole with the stairs that led down to the clouds, and she watched him as he reached back up and pulled the cover into place and secured it from below.

“Fi! Fi! Fi!”

She cowered at the noise above their heads, but he told her, “Don’t be afraid. Once that cover is pulled back into place, the portal becomes impossible to detect. They’ll be marching over rocks and stones for hours, seeing nothing. It’ll all look like rocks and stones to them.”

They stood beneath the firmament and listened as the oafs lumbered over the hole, now hidden by its latched cover. They passed over it like thunder. And over it and over it and over it, they thundered.

“Fi! Fi!”

She pressed the heels of her hands against her ears to block out the noise of it. The terror of it. In time, the thunder stopped.

The end of it was a relief to her, and she said to him, “What if they had come through?”

He shrugged. “It has happened before.”

“And?”

“I dealt with it.” From inside his shirt, he withdrew an object such as she had never seen before in her life. It was a shiny black thing of peculiar shape, a kind of machine that he held in his fist the way a child holds a toy. “This is a pistol,” he said. “It is a surefire giant killer. The last one that followed me through that hole went tumbling down those stairs after I slew him with this.”

She nodded, though she did not understand how a toy could kill an oaf, and she imagined that he was boasting, for he did seem a boastful little man as well as an unsavory little sneak thief.

As she followed the sure-footed little man down the stairway to the clouds, down, down, down to she knew not where, she wondered again, Who is he?

As if reading her mind, he turned to her about two and a half zlazla hla-cubits down the stairs and he told her, “My name is Rufus.”

“Oh.”

“But you can call me Jack.”

And down they stepped, down the winding and infinite stairs, until they reached the clouds, and beneath the clouds there was another firmament, and scattered over the broad plane of the lower firmament were the dead and broken bodies of several large oafs.

There were at least four dead and broken bodies that she could see.

Rufus who was called Jack laughed an embarrassed laugh as he explained, “I shot them with my little pistol and they came a-tumblin’ down.”

“This is carnage! I thought you said that you had killed but one!”

He blushed. “I lied.”

“Obscene,” she said. “You are no better than they are, Rufus who should be called Jack the liar!”

Rufus shook his head at her childish ideas as he reached down into the clouds and grabbed hold of a small ring, which he pulled. Up came the door in the floor, revealing another hole. But there was no bright light coming through this hole, only darkness.

Rufus said, “Here it is. This is the door to my world.”

“But it is so dark,” she said.

Rufus laughed at her ignorance.

“It is nighttime in my world, and we are entering it through the sky. We are high atop a great mountain, whose peak is hidden by clouds. Of course it is dark down there, but you are going to love it.”

“But what is this? How is this?”

A thoughtful look settled upon his face. “God, I think. I think God did it — or as you say, the great creator. I think they were gods, once upon a time, maybe angels, and we built a tower to join them. But God — uhm, er, your great creator — put an end to it, and all that is left is this portal, these thousands and thousands of stairs.”

“That’s ridiculous,” she said.

He shrugged. “Well, it’s just a theory.” Then he scratched his chin and added, “You know, Red, I’m not just a world-class adventurer and explorer. In my world I am a professor, a teacher at a university — what they would call in your world the great school — and I hold degrees in many subjects, including history, religion, and linguistics.”

She said, “You’re a sneak thief and a rascal is what you are.”

He muttered under his breath an unheard thing: “Just like a human. Free for less than a day, and already she takes her freedom for granted. Already she has forgotten the one who brought her out of bondage. She will do well in my world.”

“What’s worse,” she continued, “you have no respect for life.”

“The life of an oaf?” he said. “They enslaved you and would have eaten you as food.”

“All life is life,” she said.

“Even that of your enemies?”

“Even that of my enemies. There is much good in them too,” she said, remembering her boys. The one who risked his life to rescue her. The one she so longed to see.

He muttered under his breath another unheard thing: “We will see, Red. We will see.”

And then once again he took the hand of the barefoot red-haired girl and steadied her as she stepped down into the dark hole that led to his world.

Thus did the female man enter the world of man.