Passion

Time is a flame that burns the past as we flee before it in our lives. We build the flames higher feeding them with the passions of our lives. Sometimes those passions threaten to consume us and we run faster before the flames that pursue us.

Once in the flames of time there was a storyteller caught in the passions of his love. He had once been his village’s dragonslayer, but the dragon he met was the gypsy Madame Selah Welinska. From their first meeting, Steven George had known that he had met his dragon. He made his way on the long road with his love telling and trading stories, sometimes mending and repairing the projects that villagers brought to him. He was not as fine a tinker as the famous Armand Hamar, but it seemed his fires were always hottest and the pots he mended stayed mended.

But as time passed, the lovers’ passion increased that it threatened to consume them. Not only did they love passionately, they fought passionately. When Steven looked into Selah’s eyes, it was hard not to see the green vertical slits of the dragon he had once mastered. At times, he felt so hot that he feared he would burst into flames. Lately it seemed that every decision in their unconstrained lives was cause for conflict.

It was this, in fact, that brought the couple to their current campsite. The patient little donkey, Xandros, who willingly pulled their meager possessions in a cart, had come to a fork in the road and had stopped, waiting for the couple to tell him which way to turn. He would have followed either of them had one taken the lead, but as it was, Steven stood on the left path as Selah stood on the right path shouting at each other about the merits of which way their path should take them.

“It is too cold to go north into the mountains,” Selah stated matter-of-factly in a voice that could be heard a mile down either path.

“The path into the forest provides shelter, food, and firewood,” Steven responded in a voice that made the donkey cringe.

Selah scuffed in the dirt with her bare heel and proudly pointed at the ground. “The brick road goes this way,” she said. “I follow the long road and Xandros has paved it with bricks.”

Somewhat dismayed by this bit of news, Steven scuffed at the road on which he stood and spoke up sharply. “The bricklayer has been this way as well,” he said pointing at the bricks paving his road. “We should follow the road into the forest that Xandros has made.”

“You traded for warm clothes in the village a week ago while I was in the hills. I am still barefoot.”

“You generate enough heat to keep the whole forest warm.”

The argument proceeded without pause for over an hour, until both were hoarse with shouting. All this while the little donkey—named for the famous bricklayer who built the long road—stood at the fork swinging his head from one to the other. Finally, he sat down in the traces and began to bray. Steven and Selah stopped their argument which had brought them closer and closer to each other at the fork. They looked at the little donkey, and then they looked at each other, and then they began to laugh. Without saying another word, Selah unhitched Xandros and set him free to graze.

Steven gathered wood and built a fire pit surrounded by stones. Before the sun went down, the two sprawled together next to the fire eating the burnt bits of a rabbit that Steven had snared while the donkey grazed quietly nearby. The argument forgotten for the moment, they laughed as they tore bits of the meat from the bones and fed them to each other. Steven rose to tend to the donkey and rub him down, much to the little beast’s delight, as Selah banked the fires. Soon Steven heard the ring of finger cymbals that he had learned meant his love was beginning to dance.

He returned to the fire where Selah had begun to beat out a gentle tempo with her feet in time to the cymbals. He pulled his little bone whistle from his belt and began to improvise a tune to go with the increasingly complex rhythm that she beat. From a slow and deliberate pace to a moderate whirl to spinning dance that would collapse a dervish, the dance picked up speed and passion, fanning the banked fires with the breeze it created. At last the tempo could no longer be sustained and the gypsy woman fell into the arms of her lover. They collapsed in giggles, panting for air. Steven drew Selah to him in a kiss, but she pushed him away.

“Not yet, Steven George, dragonslayer,” she laughed. “I want to tell a story.”

“Do you mean to once upon a time me?” he asked.

“Once or twice or as often as you like,” she said, chuckling at an old joke between the two. “But you must return with a story of your own. I am already one ahead of you and you owe me. I want to know the story of your new sheepskin vest.” Steven patted the wool of the garment. He had acquired it at the last village, but not in the way Selah thought.

“Perhaps you would like me to go first,” he said.

“No,” she answered, “I really don’t mind you owing me one.” And so they lay down on their bedrolls beneath the stars and Madame Selah Welinska began her story.

Next Chapter: The Fool's Gold