The old man dreamed of the broken child: Limbs twisted and features fragmented almost beyond recognition, the boy felt no pain. Pain, the man remembered in his dreaming state, had fallen from him, as surely as he had fallen from the sky. The dreams came each night, coaxing memories the old man wished he could forget. He had spent half a lifetime healing, and another half trying to bury the child he had been.
Waves. It was, in the absence of pain, the sea’s movement which brought sensation back to the child. Unsettled blue, swirled with muddied crimson, babbled at gray pebbled sands. In his dreams he barely remembered the fall, but he remembered the sea and shore.
“Hello?” beckoned a voice.
The old man rubbed his eyes, still weighty with dream-sand. He sat up in bed. The sound of waves came unbidden, intrusions from his slumber bleeding to a faint rumble from the nearby sea.
Another rattle sounded against the cottage door. “Sire, might we speak?”
The tang of salt and copper stirred in his mouth. The old man probed a loose, rotting tooth and spat. “I’m not decent,” he replied.
“We’ll wait,” came another voice. This one was higher, more eager.
Like a child’s, he thought. Impetuous. He stood, shaky. Somewhere below his knee, some rough southerly place between cartilage and joint complained. It had never been the same since that day. In his dream the memory was clear: the leg shattered, twig-cracked. He couldn’t feel the agony, not with his neck equally twisted, but he could feel the sea’s caress. That, and the taste of salt and copper, and the sight of feathers bobbing on the waves.
He pulled a shawl around his waist. The fabric didn’t protect him much from the winter’s chill, but the inclement wind at the bay during colder seasons bothered him little. He opened the door.
“Are you him?” asked the first youth, before the old man gathered his thoughts. There were three all told, perhaps between twenty and thirty seasons. Two had a native look and Athenian cut to their clothes while the third, darker-skinned and by far the younger of the three, stood at the back exuding anxiety.
He stared.
“They say you died,” said the eldest.
“Do they?” asked the old man. Striding back into the cottage, he lit a thin tapered lantern with a shaking hand and set it on a bare wood table. A waft of scent from the candle, or perhaps the sea, stung his senses: honey. “Is that what they say?”
“Yes,” said the eldest, voice a-tremble. “We don’t wish to intrude.”
“Yet you are!” He rummaged on his shelf, rattling clay pots and bowls before he thrust a jar into the youngest’s hand. “Help by milking the cow. I don’t have enough breakfast for the four of us.”
They scurried off, and he walked toward an outcropping to wait for them to finish the task. He had died, the old man decided, in the sea, on the shore. Died fifty seasons before, maybe more, tasting the waves and pebbles and tiny sand-crawlers trespassing across the skin of his lips. A lone gull screeched its call, breaking his daydream, but still the feel of water lingered. No, more than water; a wavering, rolling sway, lapping at him as the sea on the shore. He felt old and cracked, like driftwood.
The eldest of the students, whose name was Heron, returned. “The cow is milked,” he stated, holding the jar in offering. The student’s posture reminded the old man of the Athenian priestesses from a memory half-forgotten, broken, weightless. “Now, will you tell us?”
“I have nothing to tell,” the old man said.
“But you lived!” the youngest student argued.
The old man snorted. Clutching his stave for weight, he sat on the roundest and most well-worn of the rocks to watch the sun’s reflection in the sea.
“Damn you,” hissed the student. He threw down the jar. It smashed on the ground. Bitter milk twisted its way through lax grass threads. “We came all this way to hear your words.”
He could have looked up. For the longest time, the old man thought, Icould have looked up. If he did so now, he’d see the eyes of the child. He’d see the person he once was staring back at him, defiant, earnest, light as the wind. He’d see himself, before the fall, before the waves, before the light.
“Fine!” the student said. “We three mean to take the ambrosia, and sought you as a teacher. If you will not, we will do so without your wisdom.”
The three stepped back, one pace, another. Sandals scuffed against small pebbles, and the old man said, “I would give you all I know, had I any to give.”
“You lived!” insisted the middle student.
“Lived?” asked the old man.
Live, the voice had said to the broken child.
The old man could scarcely remember the voice, yet he remembered the words, and the light. The taste of the light. A light which filled him, moving from outside to within. He absorbed it, drawing heat and life, renewal. The dreams always ended before the memory of the light, so vast and full, like the sun, burning away the taste of the sea salt.
The light had made the boy whole, and it had offered more. The old man shut his eyes, feeling the age in his body, the weight on his joints. Some days, he wished he could fly.
The taste of ambrosia lingered on his tongue, as did the image of the woman kneeling beside the broken child, copper cup in hand, cradling his broken head. Live, she’d said.
“I lived,” said the old man to the students, “if you can call it that.”
The eldest turned his head this way and that. “Here,” he asked, spreading arms wide. “Why in this cottage? A man like you, you could be...”
“A what? A teacher? A governor? A warrior? Which life should I lead with this gift? I made my choice: I’m a farmer and a hermit. I tend my sheep and grow my crops and spend the evenings watching the waves and the sun. Is that not enough?”
“It could be more,” said the student. “Could it not?”
Could it not, thought the old man. Could we not soar higher, sail upward, reach ever further? “Aye,” said the old man, “I guess you could. You very well could.”
He could indeed.
In his memories, the broken child stood. His unsteady legs, like those of an old man, adjusted to his weight once again. He stood among the waves, and the driftwood, and broken springs and strands of leather and feathers. The woman held his hand. The boy’s head blazed with the light; his body burned with it.
Light engulfed him once more, only now it brought renewal, not death. It seared him, momentarily, his mouth contorted to a scream. He had not screamed as he fell, but his father’s scream had followed him down. That cry had been so keen, searing through the boy, piercing him like a blade, he could scarce remember any word his father had spoken before.
“You could be more,” said the old man, “but I could not.”
“Please,” said the student, “I seek only your wisdom.”
“Then seek out my father’s pupils. Turn the gifts the light of the gods, this ambrosia, grants you to some good. But speak not of me, nor of my life here.”
Nor, he thought, of the woman. He recalled someone tall, clad in a gown of white, watching the boy as he rose once again. When he tried to remember her face, though, her features changed every time. Perhaps that was her gift. For years since, he had sought her. Tales led him far from home, far from where he’d died and rose again. He wondered, did she toy with them? Perhaps she truly was one of the gods, for all the curses he could spit at her.
It had been so long since the old man had seen the face of his mother. Perhaps it could have been her.
The student bowed his head. “Is there truly naught you can teach us?”
Stiffly, the old man rose. Wrinkled fingers brushed loose gull feathers from the rock. A young bird, more fluff and beak than wings, gave a raucous caw from where it sat on the ground, alone. It pecked needle-like, at the man’s calloused hand. “They’re abandoned, sometimes” he mumbled, scooping the bird up in his palm. It jabbed at him again, more hungry than aggressive. “Or they wash up on the shore. Sometimes they learn to fly again. Other times they stay grounded, living here by the rocks.”
The small bird bit down on his finger. Small serrations brought memories to the surface of wooden splinters, sharp and cracked. They smelled of melted honeyed glue, stitched to leather, basted in sunlight. Pain, hot like sunlight, jammed through his nerves. The old man ignored it. He’d felt pain before, from the sun’s fire, from the golden liquid which had stitched the boy’s torn limbs back together into the strongest they could be.
“Will you fly, little one?” he asked, cupping the small bird. “Even if you fall, will you get up and fly again?”
The student turned, walking back to his fellows. Tension bunched in his brow. “We traveled far!” he shouted back.
The old man shook his head. “I wasn’t asking the bird,” he whispered. He knew the power of the gods. He’d grasped it twice and felt its burn like sunlight on bare skin. It had seared his wings. He muttered a silent prayer for the students, who thought the goodness in their hearts, or the strengths of their will, would keep them safe through the fall. The fall all who took the power of the gods into themselves experienced.
As the students left, the old man reached out, uncurling fingers. The small gull sat, bundled and still.
The bird would not fly, the old man realized. Even when cared for, even when nursed back to health, it refused. Its eyes scanned the distant horizon, yearning, but unwilling. Instead it nestled, home.
Gradually, the old man set the bird back down on the rock, knowing it wouldn’t move. Knowing he, too, wouldn’t. His mouth pulled itself to a smile. Damn those students, he thought, they won’t learn. How could they, when he himself had not?
The old man looked back at the cottage, his home for so many years, a brick birdcage from which he couldn’t fly. A gift wasted, he thought. He’d been burned twice by the light, once felled and once reborn. His refusal to take flight again pulled the memories of the broken boy to him nightly. He closed his eyes; fragments of a half-buried past washed to the shore, speckled with driftwood, broken wings and feathers.
Quietly, he wept, turning his face toward the sun, hoping the light would burn away the tears and the long years that had passed. He stepped through the grass, still wet with morning dew, fingers unfastening his robe. It fell, sunlight folding across skin. Muscles, unused for ages, flexed, and for a moment the old man was a boy again — not broken on a shore, but standing alongside his father, atop a tower and ready to soar. Stepping forward, wings unfurled from his back, feathers upturned. He would not fall into the waves. The sun lifted him up.
Feathers lifted him into the sky. They felt so unfamiliar to the old man, like an arm, half-mended, stiff from underuse. An ache settled heavily into his back, forcing him to push against it, straining against the years and the waves. A cry broke from his throat, a bellow of renewal. A broken boy, whole again. A fledgling gull breaking from its nest. The sky, the ascendancy of the gods, and a sun as golden as ambrosia. With one great beat of his wings, the old man pushed himself upward, and flew into the sun.
