Wandering Spark - Part 66
In the stomach, it muttered ever more insistently. Varan returned to the dock, burrowed into a pile of dry leaves and slept there until sunset - until he was awakened, someone shook his shoulder. It was his awakened father, he was feverishly cheerful, unusually talkative, not believing, it seems, in his luck. Once again his lost son comes back alive and unhurt...
Varan kept silent. What he could have been told to Nila in the most colorful details, would seem a silly fiction, if he decided to share what he had experienced with his father. Having poured dry leaves bags on their backs (the weight was light, but it is difficult to keep the balance - the wind was blowing), they walked one by one along the pier board, hung the cargo on the hooks on the sides of the basket, returned back for the new sacks and so, pacing back and forth on a narrow pier over the abyss, loaded on the basket eight dry leaves bags and four bags of dry, still warm salt.
The father was gasping. And Varan was fine, it seems, he used to highland, probably. He breathed into his lungs the air of Gorni.
The sun went over the edge of the clouds. Illuminated from a side, the clouds seemed a very real terrain with mountains and caves, with trees, with inhabitants; even Varan, many times experiencing the clouds with touch, looked. Is this the realm where Gorni travel after death?
"Let's go home," the father put his hand on his shoulder. "Your mother is exhausted... She didn’t sleep at night... Let's go."
Varan nodded, knowing well that his business on the highland is finished, and a little ashamed that he hadn’t thought about his mother for all these days. The pier watcher Gorih waved his hand, giving the go-ahead for the descent. The father first climbed into the basket, inspected the cargo fastening and nodded to Varan:
"The Emperor is with us... We are loaded to the maximum, well, yes we go downwards, not up... Come on, son."
Varan threw his foot over the edge of the basket and for the last time turned back to the wharf. Pier boards, as the fingers spread out, the black holes of the warehouses, the two pier watchers on the edge of the stone were sitting, dangling their legs, spitting into the abyss...
The piers watchers turned around at once, noticing something invisible to Varan, and a second later Nila jumped out of the dark corridor. Varan instantly recognized her, despite the fact that she wasn’t in the usual trousers, but in a dress. A broad-brimmed hat was moved to the back of the head, a light evening veil hangs with a ragged spider web. Nila looked like a real Gorni that had just woken up on a pile of dried seaweed.
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