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I NEVER expected Saul to open up enough to really listen to Tony’s story, but he does. As if in a trance he listens to the message from long, long ago. And it’s not just him – all the people from my village listen to the words of our ancestors. Words that were magically preserved on the wondrous box that Tony’s brought along. When Tony finally switches off the device, some of them have tears in their eyes.
The Eldest clears his throat and wipes his cheeks. “Tell us what happened to them. To the people who left this behind.”
And Tony does. He tells us about his cross-country trip together with Henry, looking for the origins of the radio message they’d picked up on an old frequency one evening. It sounds like a fairytale. Their arrival in Penzance, an abandoned coastal town. The automated message that had kept playing thanks to energy from the sun. The old, yellowed logbooks and diaries they’d found at the harbor, the pages filled with our history.
“There once was a group of fifty healthy children and their parents fleeing the city of Exeter,” Tony explains. He is now using the portico as a sort of stage to address the people present. “Those parents came down to the shores of Penzance and sent their kids to Tresco by ship. It was an island that had once belonged to a very rich man, who’d died of the disease by then. The ship wasn’t large – it could only hold fifty people, some animals and a small selection of useful books. The captain was supposed to drop off the children and the cargo and come straight back to get the others. Or at least the adults who showed no symptoms of the disease yet. But he never came back, and there were no more ships. The childrens’ parents all got critically ill and eventually died. The very last page of the most recent diary was written by the father of a boy who’d been brought to Tresco. He was the one who recorded this message, in the hopes of alerting someone to the fact that there was an island full of children waiting for their parents to show up.”
“What were his last words?” the Eldest inquires softly. “In that diary?”
“The last thing he wrote was the phrase: May the Force be with them. Probably because his little boy really loved the stories where they use that expression.” Tony casts down his gaze. “And your Book... most likely it’s the little boy’s diary. It could be a notebook he brought with him to the island, which he then used to write down his own stories about what had happened. He was writing a book to give himself and the others around him courage through heroic tales. To tell them that the Force would always be with them, even if their parents weren’t.”
I swallow hard at the word ‘stories’. “How old were those kids?”
“About six or seven years old, according to the log. But the oldest boy was ten. This man’s son.” He holds up the device.
“They had no parents,” Colin says flatly. “They were all alone after the captain sailed away and never returned.”
The meaning of this makes my head spin. The children might have gotten divided. The Fools stubbornly maintained that help would come, while the eldest boy, Luke, started to believe his parents had abandoned him. He turned into the first Unbeliever. Maybe he’d gathered a group of like-minded children and taken them to the other side of the island to live there and make a clean start. And they wrote their own history. They were all convinced that parents were not to be trusted. That all children of a certain age had to fend for themselves, without the help of their mother and father. Something we’ve believed up till this day.
“They were small children,” Tony continues. “They had to survive, but it was probably also a kind of game for them. They were playful and young, so they made up their own reality. A reality with new names taken from old stories.”
And when he tells of wars between the stars, of Darth Vader and his dark past, and of brave people who learned how to harness their powers and tap into the Force in order to do good, I cry with joy. In the darkness of the night, it’s like I hear their names for the first time, as if the story sprouts wings and takes flight again. It makes our forefathers all the more courageous and strong. And it makes us privileged. They had to go it alone, without their parents taking care of them, but we don’t. Not anymore.
We now have each other.