“GOLDEN LIGHT” by Angela Harburn

“Uhh!”

I bashed against a wooly ground, bruises forming in places I didn’t even know I had. I turned slowly to my side, wincing at a pain in my knee. Some lukewarm sticky fluid filled my mouth, and I spit it out, choking weakly. Struggling to sit up, I gasped in pain as I moved my leg and lay down again, wondering why I was still alive.

They had nearly beaten up the others to a pulp, threatening to lynch us all. My loosened chains had slipped from my wrists as I ran, but I had tripped on a root in the road and they’d caught up with me. For a runaway slave, there was no mercy in Babylon. I cried as they hit me, and only the moon was my witness.

Now my face was warm, as warm as if it were bathed in sunshine. In fact, it felt exactly like sunshine. And the more I thought about it, the certain I grew that it was sunshine.

I was sure I was going mad.

Instinctively my hand groped the ground near me even before I opened my eyes. Something fuzzy and carpet-soft sprawled beneath me. Body rigid with dread, I forced my lids to open and saw that I was lying on moss; wonderful, blessed green moss. A few inches from my head, a hunk of a root looped up from the earth. It connected to a tree. And what a tree! No black, gnarled skeleton; this was richly brown, as healthy a tree as I’d ever seen. And around me—heaven help!–a whole forest of brown, healthy trees.

Well, I was already mad, then.

Then the trees thinned, and a glade appeared beyond, littered with white stepping stones forming diagonal paths. In the center was a ring of heavily-heaved trees, trunks so tightly packed that I could not clearly see if anything was in their middle, nor behind the thick vibrant foliage. Those were the four timeless trees: a silver plum-tree, a bronze apple-tree, and golden peach-tree, and a copper olive tree. And the fifth tree, the tree closest to the travelers,

The leaves were of a pale gold; not a film of gold, but of solid gold. Heavy, maybe–but alive; rustling, clinking a breeze that they did not feel. The invisible wind swished through the golden leaves, parting them for a moment so that I caught a glimpse of a bird perched on a limb; brilliant, scarlet-gold, bronze eyes and black beak.

“Angreek87″