Javelin Warriors

by Lee Morris

I am an old man but I have my Ittai and together we are the best of the Heart’s Cure Javelin Warriors.

Ittai is the greatest of the Javelins. Her soul is a great soul and she feeds me with her power. Together our spirits merge into one force that only we, Ittai and I, can see and we move into the spirit world and enter the body of our host and we fight the scourge of cancer.

It is like a wall of rotting flesh, the cancer is. It seethes and reeks before us. I, joined with Ittai, hold out my spirit hand which is not a hand at all, but a spear, and I burn the mass away. Not all at once, but quickly and with care. Quickly around the edges and carefully in the center because if the cancer touches us, we will feel pain and we will be diminished.

It is a strange thing it is to be a Heart’s Cure Javelin Warrior in the modern world. Ittai and I, we are like the shamans of the days of primitive magic. I read of them when I still lived outside in my old home. The shamans went into the spirit world to battle demons, or so they said. The world thought their battles were imaginary and their claims were delusions.

Well, Ittai and I, we are shamans of today. But we are real and we live in North America and we are surrounded by scholars and scientists and medical folk. No one understands how the Heart’s Cures work but they do work and they are like magic. But they are not magic. They are just part of things we don’t understand yet.

Like how I can speak with Ittai and how our spirits blend. I do not know where Ittai and I go when we become spirits and merge. I think we are here in the real world but we sense and perceive without our bodies. I can’t explain it. It’s as though I know where I’m going and what I’m doing but it’s not in a world with hard edges. Things are soft there and fluid and living, so that everything, even the air around us, is alive.

As one spirit, Ittai and I merge and move from our separate bodies into the body of our host, the person with the cancer. The host is more solid, like a firmer shadow. Ittai and I, as one, enter the host through his breath. We ride as a spirit onto his breath and become infinitesimally small and glide into his lungs and become smaller still and are carried by the blood toward the cancer.

This is the marking of time. We glide through the blood to find our way. Sometimes we glide through several cycles of blood and this is rest to us before battle; it gives us strength. Then we feel a heat as we cycle through the body and we know the site of the cancer and we glide before it.

Sometimes the cancer is black, and sometimes it is black and gray, and sometimes it is pus-like and yellow. The last are the worst. We stand before the cancer or we float before it and the body of the host clears our way while we do battle. How the body knows to do this I do not know, but it is like a staging area between the cancer and us two. We begin to fight.

Ittai is fast; faster than a human, faster in her mind, faster in her limbs. Her brain merged with my brain directs my arms. My arms are like spears or javelins and the power of our spirit comes from them as a fire. Ittai says the power comes from the sun in heaven. It comes to our living minds from the food we eat which has taken it from the sun. It is energy, Ittai says, energy that is not in the body of the host and that he cannot direct toward his cancer.

So we fight. The special nature of the fight and the reason I merge with Ittai is the speed of her strokes. The cancer must be burned with light and cut with light as it grows and bubbles and seethes. If we are too slow and do not cut every part of it quickly, it will heal itself and grow over as though nothing had been done.

It takes a long time to kill a cancer. If I were a man in the world again, as I was a welder by trade in the world, it would take a working day. Some cancers can be taken in a working day. Some must be cut and burned and darkened so the cancer no longer grows. Then Ittai and I must return to shear off the dark cauterization with our spear of light and fight the seething tissue that remains.

Sometimes, when we can stop, we swim in the flowing blood and take our rest and then return. Sometimes we must leave our host and return to our bodies so we can eat and rest. But we destroy the cancer; we always do, Ittai and I. We have never run and we have never given up. Sometimes we have finished a work that others had started.

We are the best of the Heart’s Cure Javelin Warriors. Ittai is faster than fast in her mind and in her body, her real body, and I am a man who never gives up. I am steady and I care about life and the host. I care about precision. When I was a welder in the outside world, the lines I burned never failed, and I cared that this was true.

You may ask how a man so old as I came to be a Javelin Warrior. It was Ittai who chose me. Back before the art of spirit war became known and before medicine became an art rather than a science of logic, back years ago, Ittai came to me and she was a spirit cat. She was so very young, only seven months old. She has never told me of her time before that time. She is ever a mystery.

She ate the food I set out for strays. Then one night I thought I heard her sweet voice. The next night, there she was standing in a magnolia tree. I could barely reach up to her. She came into my arms and cuddled against my chest, and purred and wiggled and was delighted to meet me. She gave my hand soft bites as I stroked her fur.

She has such pretty fur. It is brown-black like sable with black on black tabby stripes. Her face is heart shaped and her paws are tiny but her body is small and powerful. Her eyes are strangely brown for a cat. She is not called for her tabby pattern but for Ittai, a hero of the Bible. He was a foreigner and a warrior who stood with Israel and was their champion when others deserted.

Ittai spoke to me in my dreams in the days when the Javelin Warriors emerged. At first I dreamed of simple things and they were only dreams. Then I dreamed of being a cat and of being her. We were one and we hunted in the night and we walked outdoors in the moonlight. I saw and smelled and heard things that I had not known and I understood these things in a way I cannot tell you of in words.

Then Ittai and I began to merge our spirits in the soft world that was not the real world. We learned of the Javelin arts and of the Warriors, of people and animals who became one to fight cancer in the spirit place.

I gave away my home. I had thought to die in it and soon. My wife, whom I loved, had died years before and I lived in the house to keep her memory. But I was losing my recall of her, and my life was no longer precious to me. I had no children. I had no one until my Ittai.

So Ittai and I came with all we owned to the Heart’s Cure Javelin Warriors. Now we live on the grounds of their compound. It is prepared for us and those like us. Ittai practices her speed and motion every day in the woodlands and gardens and I practice precision.

The Warriors are my companions. Had I known them in the outside world, I would have loved them as friends. They are champions who have given over their lives to the Heart’s Cure and healing. They are filled with peace and joy and with power. We talk with one another in our minds and it was they who called me and Ittai to join them.

Ittai is the best of the Javelins, for so the animal Warriors are called. The Javelins of our compound are all cats, although I have heard that in Africa meerkats have emerged as Javelins. From the Javelins come skill and speed and hunting instinct. From the Javelins, too, comes the ability to spirit merge with the human Warriors who provide strength and perseverance and some things that cannot be defined.

And so Ittai and I, we fight cancer here within the boundaries of our compound with its woodlands and gardens and homes, its hospital, and its “medical experts.” No one outside knows of us except those who have received the cure, and those who can remember coming here do not tell of it.

Perhaps it is a secret because so few can be taken to receive the cure. Or perhaps it is kept to protect the cats so that a when a Javelin cat emerges and chooses its Warrior, they will be free to make their way here on their own.

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