Two Worlds Among The Many

A Willerby Story

Jazmir and Odetta came thorough the shortcuts from different worlds.

Jazmir’s world was all limitless blue skies and rolling, shifting bright yellow sands that stretched away and away for thousands of miles in all directions until – far further than anyone he knew had ever been, they surrendered to breaking waves on a savage shore.

His was a world of constant movement on the great croaking flightless birds that carried him and his people between the oases where they camped until the stars said it was time to go.

Odetta was from a floating city visited by trading ships from far more countries than anyone she knew could name.

Hers was a life of teeming markets and bazaars filled with the cries of merchants and traders and the smell of frying fish and vats of steaming farmed seaweed.

In Odetta’s world every inch of space had to be sought out, fought for and protected. It was in a search for a place to sleep she first found the way from her from her ocean home to the heartlands of England and the village of Willerby.

The first door was familiar to her – a pitted blue oval set into the side of what had once been the hull of a steel-sail second class ship-of-the-line. Behind it was a narrow corridor that twisted and turned and ended at a square of iron ajar on rusting hinges.

She pushed it open, stepped though and found herself in a rectangular stone courtyard.

Here the air was warm and still and the sudden quiet was deeper than anything she’d known. There was no shouting and no music, no laughs, wails or cries. The only sound was the soft babble of a fountain set in the middle of a stone-flagged floor.

She knew water well but had never heard it sound like that and found it more beautiful than she could find words for..

Apart from the door she’d come in though there was just one other exit – a gate through which she could see a faint green glow. She opened it, stepped through and was in a corridor walled by thick hedges stretching hundreds of feet above her and framing a strip of dark sky.

She knew then she was no longer in her world.

Jazmir discovered his way in at the bottom of a well he found on a dreaming journey.

The ladder went down beyond the sand and into the loam beneath it. At the bottom there was only a cold solid rock floor and a door that opened onto the same green corridor Odetta found beyond her courtyard.

Odetta had already visited the corridor and village beyond it many times when she first saw Jazmir, standing in front of an open door and looking up at the sky above the hedges.

She knew he was not of her world by his flowing white robes and tattoos and was surprised he spoke the same language she did.

The first thing she ever said to him was, “where are you from?”

After that they met many times over many years on their visits from their own worlds.

Sometimes they found themselves in Willerby on their own and sometimes they were there together.

They grew to know each other well on night-time walks up the street and in the long dark hours they spent talking on the bench opposite the Green Man pub.

Odetta told Jazmir of the great beasts that swam past her city once a year and the thrill of standing in the rainbow-spray with a harpoon on the bow of the hunting boats that chased them. Jazmir told Odetta of month-long sandstorms and the great meets when all the tribes camped together around the stone mountain at the centre of all the lands beneath the four suns.

As years went by and they got to know each other better than anyone in their own worlds knew them, Odetta told Jazmir of the great struggle to find and hold a place in the city, and how those that didn’t diminished to shadow and then faded away if they stayed. Jazmir told Odetta of how he must one day lead a band and how much the thoughts of this future crushed and suffocated him.

They tried many times to visit each other but their doors opened only ever opened for them when they stood before them alone.

The last time they met Odetta told Jazmir she might not ever return – she had not found her place and had taken work on one of the great ships that ranged the ocean.

Jazmir returned for many years after always hoping he’d see her, but he never did.

Odetta came back just once when she was much older, but Jazmir was not there.

She spent the whole night on the bench failing to find the right words for the ache in her heart.

Then she went back to her ship.