This looked so endearing that Mary and Paul watched the cat being happy. When they looked up, the snake was gone.
‘Oh,’ said Mary. And she shed a tear. The tear fell upon her ring and where it landed there grew a tiny diamond. And when another tear fell there grew another diamond. These formed the eyes of the snake that was imprinted in the gold. And this was a sign to show Lanmo that love is a jewel and helps us to see and is not only a terrible thing. Although it may also be a strange thing.
But Lanmo was not there to see it.
Lanmo, with his newly beating heart, returned to his work, going up and down and around the world. He met woodcarvers and helicopter pilots and guitar players and swimmers and humans who wandered from place to place because they liked to and humans who wandered from place to place because they had no homes and humans who loved to whistle and others who loved to paddle and some who loved to climb trees. He also met humans who had never yet found anything, or anyone, to love. These humans made his heart beat slowly and grow heavy in his chest, and this disturbed him.
Every morning he licked the air with his wonderful tongue and tasted where Mary was and if she was happy. Every evening he sent her funny dreams and silly dreams and dreams where she won her heart’s desire and dreams where she swam with tigers and then lay on the beach with them while their fur dried and they purred. He also, because he thought he should, sent quite pleasant dreams to Paul – ones where Paul was a famous footballer, or a beautiful giraffe, or a tree filled with parakeets. (Lanmo could taste that Paul loved football, giraffes and parakeets.) And the snake sent some smaller dreams about mice and biscuits and tickles to Shade. (Cats’ dreams have to be small, because they need to fit inside catnaps, which are short.) And Lanmo made sure that all three of our friends knew where to go on the morning of each day when they woke.
And as he travelled across all the countries that humans have invented, Lanmo knew that on all sides the humans were performing his duties without him. It seemed strange to the snake that so many humans would use so many ingenious machines and so many ingenious excuses and so many ingenious methods to rush each other out of the world, when all of them must leave their lives in any case. They should fly kites, he thought. They should play with cats and eat ice cream and bake bread and dance with each other and sing and they should marry each other and perhaps make intelligent children who understand things, or adopt children who are orphans and have nobody for them in the world. But he knew that he could not change the humans against their will and that the humans could only choose to change themselves and so he must leave them to be lost in their own ways.
Mary and Paul were not lost. For many months after they left their home city, they followed the dream map that Lanmo showed them, a little bit more every night. Their path was strange – it wriggled and squiggled and writhed and scrithed and did not include any straight lines in the way that a human path might. This was because snakes never move like humans and do not trust straight lines – they find them unnatural.
There were days when the path was dusty and our courageous three were thirsty by the end of the day, but the snake would make sure that by sunset they would find a stream, or a pool, or a well to drink from and a tree to climb, or a large bush to shelter under. And they would fill their water bottles once more and wash their faces and be glad. The travellers climbed into mountains so high that there was snow underfoot, but this didn’t trouble them because Mary had packed them warm clothes and the snake would guide them to quiet corners in cliffs where they could huddle and stay warm and where they could find dry leaves and sticks that Paul could use to light a fire. Above all, the snake led them away from other humans, because this was a time when very many of the world’s humans were too sad, or angry, or desperate to be safe. And when our three friends could not avoid humans, their rings kept them safe and they moved onwards.
This lack of other humans might have meant that Mary and Paul felt lonely, but in fact they were entirely content. They played with Shade and took turns carrying him when he was tired. They whistled while they trudged on and, as it happened, when one of them was weary and sad, the other was able to cheer them. They were never weary and sad at the same time.
And, one evening, they rested in bracken on a gentle slope that faced a beautiful sunset, as Lanmo had known it would. They had climbed over the highest of the mountains and that had been hard, but now they were descending and this was easy and they looked down at a wide and peaceful city where kites flew merrily in the breeze, perhaps a thousand bright red kites, bobbing and swinging and shining with red sunset light. (Lanmo knew about the kites and had – you will remember – told Mary she should stay in this, the first city after the mountains.) They had eaten some sweet berries they had never seen before and cooked some large roots which the snake had told them in a dream they should look for, dig up and then roast on their fire. They felt full for the first time in many months and this made them drowsy. (Lanmo had known this would happen.) Away to the east there was a high waterfall and the light through its water made rainbows that no one would have been able to look at without smiling. (Lanmo paused in his work while he knew this would be happening and he smiled his snaky smile and chuckled.)
So Mary was resting against Paul and smiling, and Paul was also smiling, and Shade was curled in Mary’s lap and purring – which is a cat’s way of smiling – and the birds sang and there was no sound of gunfire, even far away, and no sign of burning houses and no marching columns of men, or straggling columns of downhearted people. There was only peace. And suddenly Mary and Paul both had enough space in their heads to recall that they really were married and that they really did love each other and they held hands and they sang.
You are the night with sunshine
You are the ocean with no shore
You are the bird that sings wine
You are the lion with no claw
And be my honour and be mine
And be my glory and be mine
And be my living and be mine
My friend, my love, be mine.
And then they slept.
In the morning, they both walked down the slope, followed by Shade, who by now had turned into a rather larger, stronger and more impressive glossy black cat. Mary’s twenty-one white hairs glimmered in the dawn light and, although her clothes (and Paul’s) were faded and torn, today they both seemed somehow proud and calm and a little magnificent. Although they did not know it, a few days ago they had all crossed the border into the Land called Perditi, a country that Lanmo was sure would be safe for many, many human lifetimes.
As they neared the foot of the slope, they joined a smooth, well-kept road that curved towards a great walled city, held in a gentle valley. As they marched on, for the first time on the snake’s path, our friends passed lots of other humans and even little stalls that sold cooked rice and meat wrapped in leaves. At first the sight of humans made them nervous and also ashamed because Mary and Paul knew they looked grubby and dishevelled. (Shade looked as neat as cats always do.) But the other humans nodded to them as they passed, or smiled, or greeted them in a language they could not understand, but which sounded friendly. A woman at a stall selling a kind of large red fruit saw how tired Mary and Paul looked and so she reached out her hands and offered them fruit. It had been a long time since either of our human friends had any money and so they shook their heads, even though the fruit looked delicious. But the woman just laughed and nodded and put one fruit into Mary’s hand and one into Paul’s and then waved them away. By signs and smiles – and suddenly feeling quite close to crying – Mary and her husband showed the woman that they were grateful. Then, as they marched on, they bit into the fruits and enjoyed the soft, moist, perfumed flesh which tasted a little like sunshine and a little like grapes. And, in the years ahead, they would always remember the taste of those fruits – which they learned were called bamandaloo – whenever they walked near the Wide and South Gate, which was the one they first used to enter the city.