Chapter 1I killed a man. I didn’t mean to, but when I removed the clothes from this poor creature, his blood began to boil, bubbles spread over his body and soon nothing was left of this blue-skinned man. Yes, I killed him, and I regret it deeply. I only wanted to take his clothes.I’ve known the humans from Dernian Landis for a long time. Every autumn, my dad and I would go to the marketplace halfway Dernian Landis. We would go there with all the other merchants and meet the people from Dernian Landis in their dark tents, under their broad-rimmed hats. I would listen to them, and eventually talk to them as I learned their language through the years. And I wanted to see more of their hidden lands. The only place we would ever go to was the market place near the oasis in the desert, but the Dernian Landis stayed a long way away, and I longed for them. Yes, I heard the stories of those who wanted to go there. I heard about their adventures, those heroic stories that always ended in failure. The Dernian Landis were hidden and stayed hidden, they were forbidden. The heroes have had their glory and their tombstones, and I felt it was my time to have my adventure. I studied those people in the marketplace. I studied their behaviour, their language, their way of being. I talked to them, but they hardly talked back. They seemed to be scared. I followed them to the borders of Dernian Landis, a land lying in the caring arms of high mountain ranges. But they wouldn’t let me in. They threatened me, they said they would kill me if I tried to enter their lands. But I wanted to go in, and I found a way. I followed the man, and hit him hard on the head. He wasn’t dead by then, I knew for sure. I wanted his clothes, so I could disguise myself, and I would give him my clothes. He was my ages, my size. He could have been me. I hit him on the head and he fell in the sand, and I started to remove his clothing. Only for a short moment, his naked blue body lay in the sunshine; then his blood poured boiling out of his veins, his skin burned away, and he died with a hiss. I killed a man, and I wish I hadn’t. But I took his clothes, took them to my tent at the market. My dad went home the day before, and I was alone in the tent. I took the ink and painted my body. How I wish I had someone who could help me, but I managed by bathing in the ink. My skin coloured blue, blue as the people from Dernian Landis - I had experienced a lot on this final touch. I put on the clothes I had just stolen from the dying man. I looked into a mirror. I was a Blue Man now. I went to sleep and got up early, to leave the market place with the caravan of merchants from Dernian Landis. We went to the forbidden, hidden country, and I was one of them. It took days to reach the mountain ranges. They rose up high, their peaks touching the sky, the snow white on the rocks. It was a strange sight, and I wish I had a way to show it to you, could paint it, but I didn’t have the time to paint. We got to the frontier, and the soldiers there studied our faces, our goods, our cars. They let us through in the end. I was in Dernian Landis, and the land lay in an endless valley at my feet. I saw fields and woods and some villages. On the horizon, the shiny roofs of a city were to be seen. How I longed to explore these places! But I had to keep up with the caravan, and slowly we walked into the land, carrying our goods to the markets. While in Dernian Landis - they call it Myrëns, “Our Peaceful Place” - they were scared of something, I noticed. I had no idea what they feared so much. They were shy, and suspicious, paranoid in a way. Their big light eyes, bright as spring ice, looked everywhere, but never long. And strange enough, they didn’t seem to see very much, it was most of the time if they looked straight through me. I started to behave the same way, just to be as them. I had already learned why these blue people always hide their skins from the sunlight: they die in sunlight. They are always covered in clothes, and when not, they are inside. They hide their eyes by placing darkened glass in front of them , they wear gloves and the broad-rimmed hats. Many of them wear veils as well. We travelled mostly in the early morning and on the eve of night. On midday, we rested and slept for a while - inside. At night, they start to take away their clothes and gloves, glasses and veils. They are almost normal then, they would fit in any Ildritzer salon. The richness of their jewels shine in the moonlight, and the beauty of this people is unveiled for a couple of hours. They live in the night, and don’t behave as fearstruck as in sunlight. Are they afraid of the sunlight? Is that what makes them scared? It can kill them, so it is not a very strange question. While walking through the various landscapes of Myrëns, I learned another thing about the Blue Men: their sight was very bad. They hardly saw anything that was further away than a couple of fathom. These pale eyes, that stared right through me, actually saw nothing of me, and didn’t even notice I was there. They made some devices to make up for bad sight: they had lenses of all kind, and even very big ones they had put on the mountaintops. With the big lenses they could look as far as the marketplace, the place we had left days before. Or so they say. It was a military secret, a former soldier told me in his drunkenness, and normal people weren’t allowed to look through the big lenses. But they had smaller lenses for normal people too, they took them along and used them to guide their way through unknown lands. Oh yes, the Blue Men were wizards with lights and lenses, with mirrors and coloured glasses. They bent the light in any direction, they split the light of Fon itself and took away the deadly rays. I saw houses and palaces and cities, lit with split sunlight, domed with coloured glass, and then they had these golden glasses I never could have imagined... It was overwhelming and I nearly gave myself away in my astonishment. I should behave like it was a normal sight, or rather, a sight I couldn’t see at all without lenses. The first night, we arrived at a rest place on the bank of a narrow river, waterfalls coming down from the cold north face of the Zhënmel mountain range. We camped there, and I took some time to look at the surroundings. It was nothing out of the ordinary, everything looked like home to me. Some plants I had never seen before, but they didn’t look strange. We rested there for two whole days. On the third evening, people came from the nearby villages and traded their things with ours. They didn’t take much, and they looked poor. Life can be hard on the bare hang of the mountains. They had sheep, a very woolly kind of sheep. Wolves must be around too, many a mountainman had a wolf skin for cloak, the sharp fangs on a necklace. As we continued our journey, we passed the first large village in Myrëns. It goes by the name of Kélflÿ (“Cold River”). The streets were narrow and lined with arcades. Some streets were roofed. The bridge over the Flÿ was roofed too; later I learned all bridges had a roof in Myrëns. The inhabitants of Kélflÿ didn’t need to walk in the sunlight, they used the arcades and the roofed streets. They held small markets in the roofed streets. Courts, which could be entered through a pair of big doors in the houses, were usually domed. These domes were made of coloured glass, so the court itself bathed in blue, red or green light. The sight was fascinating. The blue skins faded away to new shades, and I could imagine myself in a dark market in the backstreets of Topomeir. Kélflÿ is a young village, it doesn’t have any ancient monuments. When I asked about that, they told me the place was established only a big hundred years ago. Straight streets cross in the big marketsquare (which is in bright daylight) and in a regular pattern others streets are placed around it. The bridge is just a part of the pattern. There are no walls nor is there a castle or any other building for defence. It is not a living enemy they fear so much. It is so hard to get into the Dernian Landis, they are not afraid of an attack. We were invited in a big house in Kélflÿ. It was night, and it should have been dark, but there was a strange light in this house. It was not oil that burned, nor gasses as the Masters of science sometimes show. It was the light of strange glass lamps that were attached to pieces of fruit and that glowed - the lamps that is. I first thought the fruit was decoration, but then someone got up and changed the fruit when the lamp went out. It shone happily again when the new piece of fruit was attached. They called the fruit something like ‘lec'ry. One could eat the fruit they said, but it was bitter as I tasted it. Oh, they didn’t think my question was strange, these fruitlamps are a luxury and a novelty - many Blue Men in more remote places never have seen them. Around Kélflÿ, we saw gardens with ‘lec'rytrees, as we left the village. We headed for the capital, Chiirÿtët. It was hard to pronounce its name at first, but I managed to do it flawless after I practised it a couple of times. It means “the city on the bay”. The language here stays strange in my ears and sometimes I think I have my tongue in a big knot from the Myrëns words. They have characters that are all peculiar and I cannot read them good enough. But I know they have more characters than our own language, and they need it too. There is this ë character, which is pronounced like a long e (a short e as in pet is a normal e, and a long e as the a in able is an ë). A é is a short e with a y behind it, which makes it longer as well, but with a slightly different sound ( somewhat as in hey). The ´ always stands for this y sound. The accent and the double dots are never combined. Same goes for ÿ and y. Y sounds like the i in pit, the ÿ is much longer as in ear. And y´ has a y-like sound behind it (notice that the ´ might be placed on top of the character or right behind it). The i sounds like the o in son. This one doesn’t have a double dot on top of it - that sound doesn’t exist in the language. They do have an ii, and that sounds like two i’s after another. A í can only be followed by an i, strange enough. They have a, u and o (double dotted or accented sometimes) as well, but they are not common in words. But let me tell you about Chiirÿtët. The city is build next to a very large bay. I could hardly see the other side of the bay, so I guess the Blue Men can only see it through their lenses. The harbour was full of ships, but those ships were not big enough to sail the ocean. Many rivers had a mouth in this city, and you could smell them at least a gong away. I didn’t bother, because the city was the most intriguing one I had ever seen. Its roofs are made of gold! It shone in the light of the rising moon. But I was wrong in a way. Yes, it was gold I saw, and it were roofs I spotted, but not the way I imagined. The gold was plated on glass, a very thin layer of gold, just to break the sunlight and to let the safe light into the city. It was a beautiful sight, this golden haze over the city. I immediately loved it. When I asked if nobody ever stole the gold, they gazed at me. I’m nothing but a nitwit around here. And they told me taking away this gold was murder in a way, and the death penalty would be given to the thief. I’m a murderer already (and deeply ashamed of it) so I didn’t even touch the gold. |