One day, as expected, his pretended wife, that is the youngest sister, asked him why he refused to eat or drink. He told her that he wanted to lay with her because that was what a husband and a wife were supposed to be doing. He asked why he and his brothers never got laid in the face of the fact that they were hosted there as their husbands. He told her that he wouldn’t eat or drink anything until he laid with her and had made love to her.

  Now this little princess was worried because she knew that Jothamus was awake. It was her responsibility to make things right before late. The youngest brother had to be put back to slumber and he must also grow fat like his elder brothers. The king had given each of his daughters the task to take good care of their own husbands until the great blood moon during which they would all be slaughtered. She feared that she would be reproached and punished by her father for being inattentive to do her part.

  But contrary to her fear, her father tenderly called her up to his chamber one day and asked her why the animal she was taking care of was not growing plump but thinner each day. She told her father everything that the man desired; that he wanted to lay with her and make love to her as husband and wife and that he would eat or drink only when his desire was fulfilled. The father and king of this bizarre world said to his daughter, “Then let him do as he desires. The blood moon is barely a time away. Keep him happy and make him strong. A thin animal makes a bad sacrifice.”

  And so, the young beautiful goddess slept with Jothamus who then, started to eat and drink a little of what they were served but still making sure that he was always awake. Jothamus found out that the youngest girl was relatively natural and fairer than the other sisters. He knew that he had seen her at least one time in the past. He thought hard and to his amazement recognized that she was the one he had seen in his dream who gave him his first wet dream the night he slept in the forest with his brothers. The dream had now turned into a reality.

  His desire for her promptly changed. He started waiting on her not to find the secrets of the kingdom anymore but instead to hold on to her and enjoy her company which gave him the greatest pleasure. He was now lost more in her thought than in his escape plan.

  But Jothamus came back to his senses. He was not going to leave the stones of this place unturned. He already knew something was very fishy about the place they were putting up at. And he was no doubt brainier and more concentrated than all his brothers. He was the son of the man whom his mother married as her last husband.

  Unknown to all her other husbands, Seraphie loved her last husband most, for he was from the native kingdom who was the gentlest and humblest with the noblest heart of hearts.

  Jothamus, as the product of additional love and dedication, was therefore more sensible and more out-of-the-ordinary. He was, after all, the son of Seraphie and her last husband to whom the heaven’s daughter was secretly more committed.

  Having shared the warmth and breath of each other in intimate love-making, the goddess too slowly began to feel close to Jothamus. The two, Jothamus and Ajubel, as the youngest princess was called, began to congregate a lot and talk more than before. Jothamus found the opportunity to get supplementary facts about the kingdom. He would use his diplomacy and ask Ajubel everyday not in a straight line about the secrets of the kingdom but to tell him how he and his brothers could approach her father to ask his permission to become the real sons-in-law and return to their land with them.

  “Do you know,” Ajubel said one day, “though I am forbidden to tell you,” she paused and then continued, “that you have been here for three thousand days?” Jothamus knew that Ajubel was just kidding. But he knew it all wrongly. “In this land, Ajubel continued, “a day can be like a minute and a century like a day unless one is always completely awake. There can be no end or no beginning of anything.”

  No sooner than when Jothamus thought that they were in paradise in that case, Ajubel told him that he and his brothers were on their way to a dreadful end. She knew that her tongue had slipped to say it even as she told him that her father was the lord of a perverted world and that all immortal spirits were his loyal helpers. But she found no regrets over the slips of her tongue as she told her human companion the secrets of her father’s ground. She felt so energized that at last there was at least this chance for the truth to be spoken out of her heart for once in her life. Like a humanoid, Ajubel could not hold for long, what was secret.

  Jothamus kept listening as Ajubel told him further why she was much unlike her other sisters. Her father, who laid with any female of his choice in the kingdom, once got laid forcibly with a woman from a human kingdom not too long ago where he had gone to slay a man who had to become the victim of his own curse. The victim was the father of eight brothers born as triplets and twins.

  On his way back after killing the man right before his sons and then in-taking the fresh kill at a secluded place, her father saw a young beautiful woman coming back from the field. He immediately shifted his form into a man to catch her interest and against her will, took her away with him to become one of his wives. The woman later came to know that he was the one called Uglyface but she was helpless.

  She soon got impregnated and with the greatest pain ever, delivered a baby-girl who was loved and adored even by the devil himself. That’s her, Ajubel, two-fourth human, whereas her sisters and others in that fort were just human imitators. Her father, Uglyface, as known by the humans, treasured her as the most precious thing among all things he possessed. He loved her more than any of his six other daughters. Her father had been a gentler king whose greed for human blood had been greatly controlled ever since her birth. However, the advent of the blood moon was a rare occasion during which he made sacrifices to his master to enhance his power for his uninterrupted immortality by getting himself drunk with the blood of human beings.

  Though Ajubel was much older than Jothamus, her immortality pooled with mortal blood, made her always young and more beautiful than her sisters.

  And her mother? She did not like the idea of living as a wife of a man-eater and mother of an ugly daughter whom she thought Ajubel would turn into. She managed to escape from the place soon after Ajubel’s birth. But she couldn’t go back to her village as the villagers considered her to be possessed and unholy. So she became an outcast and now lived as a recluse far away from the village territory. Having been used by the immortal for nearly a year, she became one-fourth god, a perpetual human. She was Agnethas, whom the eldest brother of the eight brothers had wanted to marry.

  Then Ajubel told Jothamus that the legendary blood moon fair was just more than a few hundred days away and when the day arrived he and his brothers would be done away with. She said that terrible things were about to happen to him and his brothers. “Go away therefore and save yourself and your brothers. Even if we love each other, we are like the day and the night that embraces each other but can never stay together. It is far better for you to live and die an earthly old man’s death where you will be given a proper funeral than to die here where your flesh would be gorged and your blood drunk.”

  A popular story in folklore said that the phenomenon of the moon occasionally becoming red was due to spilling of the angels’ blood which was shed in Heaven in a constant war between Hades and Heaven. They counted the number of such occurrences and they believed that the one hundredth occurrence would be the last event by which time the angels in Heaven would be thrown out of the bliss and Satan, the king of Hades would finally rule Heaven and earth again.

  Ajubel therefore told Jothamus everything what he and his brothers had to do in order to get away from what was believed to be the ninety ninth and first final blood moon episode. The last and final episode would occur in the next one hundred years and that would be the end!

  “And when you ride away from here, be assured that you ride behind your brothers,” Ajubel said. So Jothamus in turn told all his brothers what they were in for on that strange land without evidently narrating his total experience with his Ajubel. At first they laughed away at his immaturity but Jothamus, by his perception, persuaded them and made them believe him. They therefore restricted their diet and presently realized that they were indeed in a numb state. They curbed themselves from merry-making entertainment to sort an escape plan. In a little while they decided to execute their plan in the next forty days.

  The brothers still remembered the game of polo that they played back there at home. People in this kingdom too played the same game except that they played it by riding the bulls instead of the horses. Besides that, this game happened to be the king’s favorite pastime. So, when the fortieth day set in, they challenged the king’s royal team for a polo match. Ponies were arranged for the game on their request and soon a never before played, exhilarating match of a different polo began between two teams – one riding on horsebacks and the other riding on bulls’ backs.

  When the match had just reached the pinnacle, at the bewilderment of the audience of varied faces, the seven brothers together rode fast and away from the ground to the entrance of the gallery and then farther away from there to the outskirts. The king realized what was happening and ordered his faithful daughters in anger to ride after the animals and slaughter them then and there.

  There was a chase, a wild chase. Ajubel had speculated everything and given all crucial instructions so the brothers knew where to ride toward. The eldest sister rode up fast and came behind the youngest brother who was riding far behind his brothers. Ajubel shouted to his sister claiming that the youngest one should be her kill. So the eldest sister backed away and gave her little sister the pleasure to kill the last brother. Ajubel came galloping behind Jothamus, drew her sword and struck from behind but in her act of pretense she purposefully let her sword slip off of her grip. She struck again but missed him again and again and again. And in this manner the escapees were chanced to run away farther and farther.

  There was a cliff straight ahead. The wild sisters thought the humans had no means to run past the cliff. But their ponies still didn’t stop. They kept running towards it and then madly dashed forward falling off the cliff one after another. They were then out of view.

  The seven brothers fell off the cliff! But they landed on safe ground. There was no cliff at all! It was an exit, the line between the two distinct worlds – the mortals’ and the immortals’ world. When looked from one side it was a thorny thicket to divert people’s unnecessary intrusion into their world and when viewed from another side, a cliff, to prevent the run-away of captives from their county.

  That was a narrow escape but thanks to Jothamus who fell in love with a man eater’s daughter who helped him and his brothers escape from the carnival of death.

  9

  Lilium Dreams Again

  The mysterious return of the seven brothers generated fear, confusion and excitement in the minds of the people. Their story was heard with keen interest as they narrated their few days experience at a strange terrestrial creation. But for the people of their province, they had been gone for a very long time!

  People recollected the past account and re-narrated the story of Ahisamak who was killed by a monster and the events of Ahisamak’s eight sons who went to avenge their father but never returned. They narrated the story of Agnethas who returned with a witchy face after being held captive by the monster for a year.

  The seven brothers had thought the story to be just a myth but they were told that it was the story of their own grandfather. They learned from the people that Lilium, their grandmother who still lived, was the ill-fated woman who lost her husband and her eight sons. Now Jothamus remembered everything that Ajubel told her.

  The old prophetess who cautioned about the danger in the jungle three years back was dead and she was replaced by a daughter who had the gift of her mother. The new prophetess said that the brothers were doubtlessly trapped by Uglyface’s daughters for blood moon sacrificial consumption as predicted by her mother in the past. But the brothers still couldn’t be taken in to her stories because what they had seen and where they had been contradicted the story of the look and lifestyle of the scary world. The man and his daughters and the entire subjects were not fear-provoking as they were believed to be. The young mystic then explained that the devils could shift their shapes and that they were everyday becoming trickier and getting more like human in appearance. Jothamus knew it. They were under hypnotism and only half awake there. The devils were putting on their best to keep them until the great fair. He knew the prophetess was right all along.

  The prophetess who looked as if she knew more than necessary said also, that the brothers’ safe return from such a place was an unimaginable fact. It was something that could only happen with some mysterious assistance. Nevertheless, she did not reveal the feasible reason for the successful homecoming of the captive brothers. She said that the devils would find an alternate means for the loss they suffered.

  If an immortal spirit failed to accomplish a given task and brought disappointment to his master, then he would be loaded with a burden seven times that of the first task. And if he failed for the second time, he was ducked in holy water which was terribly painful.

  So Uglyface would, in order that he did not displease his master, send his subjects to hunt and capture sacred animals of the earth to be slaughtered on the blood moon night seven times seven in lieu of the seven humans that escaped. This was meant to save himself from getting ducked in holy water and to gratify the god of Hades, the Beast who gave him control over the earth.

  Jothamus knew the prophetess doubted him. He never disclosed about his intimate relation with the daughter of the devil to anybody. Even his brothers knew very little about it. Yet she seemed to have seen it by her discerning power. So he tried to refrain from her sight. He became silent most of the time, thinking of Ajubel. He wanted to return to the underworld. He felt the unbearable sting of separation from his half human lover so much so that he could not help thinking of her. ‘I must go back,’ he decided.

  Therefore one night when everyone was snoozing in his own room, he got up, took his horse and tiptoed towards the main entrance of the gate, and went away trying to find the way back to the jungle. He roamed about in the woods and was able to find the border in the morning of the third day when the sun had just risen. It was the restricted thorny thicket which threatened everyone to pass through. But he knew it all now. He waded through and came to the territory of the eighth kingdom which was obscured. He waited on, at the well, hiding, until finally he saw Ajubel coming with her bamboo pitcher to fetch water to quench her half-human thirst. Jothamus had waited for almost the whole day when Ajubel finally showed up.

  Ajubel was disturbed and troubled when she saw Jothamus. She tried to send him back explaining the outcome of his stay when found out. But the lover boy refused like anything to meet the terms without her coming along with him. He was madly in love with a supernatural being without even knowing the danger of a man-god relationship.

  A human, they said, who had deep liaison with a god or goddess would have to suffer much pain in the process of changing his/her life form from being mortal to immortal after years of togetherness and he or she had to lose his or her chance of enjoying eternal ecstasy with the creator in after-life. Even the gods were envious of humans for being mortal for they (the gods) could not earn the right to die and live again with the maker, having to live a life of eternal gratification with the creator.

  Fearing discovery by others and especially by her greedy elder sisters, Ajubel hid her human companion in her pitcher like magic and took him to her room where she then put him in a locket. When she joined her sisters moments later, they complained of the stinks that came from her. Learning of her sisters’ intention to doubt and search her anytime, she knew that she had to find a way to convince Jothamus to leave for good.

  When she got back to her room, she got bare and gave Jothamus the peak of satiation, and from the left side of her underbodice and a hair from the apex of her head, she made an instrument which she gave to Jothamus and said, “Please go back to where you have come from. Play this instrument at any time and I shall appear before you and dance to the music. Never lose it or give it away for as long as you keep it, so shall I be with you.” So saying and handing over the instrument and then giving him a hard-pressed kiss on the lips, Ajubel tossed Jothamus in the air and blew him away, back to his kingdom’s topography.

  Jothamus was as a result, back to his kingdom and his hometown where he continued to live like others. And whenever he was tired, he would go to his room, close the door from behind and play the musical instrument at which the figure of his princess appeared and dance before him. He would pay little importance to any other concerns of the world.

  Nobody knew about the instrument until one day when Asa heard Jothamus playing music in his room. The music was heard late in the night. Asa was curious to know what his younger brother was playing alone in his room in the middle of the night.

  Like many other secrets, this secret instrument too could not be concealed any longer than needed because of Asa’s curiosity to try out his younger brother’s gadget.

  One day when Jothamus was not around Asa quietly came to explore his brother’s instrument and when he began to play the strange looking apparatus, a beautiful girl appeared and started to ballet. Asa was more than astonished to believe his eyes. The youngest of the seven immortal sisters was in his brother’s room! As he looked on in awe, the girl stopped with a frown and snatched the instrument away. She gave Asa one last look and disappeared into thin air.

  Asa was worried and heavily burdened. He loved his brother and never wanted to offend him. But he knew how his brother would react to what he had done. Hoping for reconciliation with his brother, he approached him and told him what had happened.

  But the little brother was fuming and refused to pardon his brother for his theft-like intrusion into his privacy. He picked a quarrel and confronted him.