The winged child, p.14
The Winged Child, page 14
Neither boatman nor passenger offered words to the air as Wendl ferried them back to the opposite bank. Millicent brimmed with unspoken questions, but she knew better than to rush her strange friend to speech. She marveled at his adept handling of their odd little boat with neither bow nor stern, essentially a round basket of what looked like old tent or tarp fabric stretched over a frame of bent saplings with a couple of seats affixed. When they grounded on the far side, Wendl smiled just enough to reveal a glint of needle-ish canines between his thin lips, ushered her ashore, turned to the trees and unleashed a thought loud as a trumpet. She’s here.
In another instant, Millicent saw as many people as trees around her, smiling, expectant, welcoming. Vesuvia Wildness emerged from the throng to embrace her. Before she could speak, Vesuvia stepped away and Millicent saw Amelia Montford reaching out to claim her winged child.
“Mother,” she whispered. It was the only word in her mind.
They held to one another so tight and long that their arms ached, before Amelia drew back, kissed her forehead, and said, “You are your father’s daughter. As long as you breathe, I still have you both.”
“Tell about the party,” Alice trilled.
“Oh, yes,” said Millicent. “There was a party that night.”
It seemed any new arrival was an excuse for a party. The Otherside was vast and humans were few enough that any increase in their presence on the land was cause for celebration. Some came to Otherside through a Door, either by intention or accident. Apparently, Joshua’s was just one of many. A few souls were brought through by Fliers, like Wendl.
“There are others of Wendl’s kind here,” he said at table during the evening’s feast, gazing intently at Millicent over his cup of juniper ale. Flyers, according to Wendl, not only traversed time and space, but possessed ability to alter their shape and substance. To the consternation of the adults present and the delight of their children, he proceeded forthwith to demonstrate, cycling through presences as bear, owl, wolf, eagle and finally what he claimed was his true and original conformation.
“Dragon!” yelled Alice, clapping her hands, levitating about six inches above her chair.
“He looked like a dragon to me,” confessed her mother, laughing at the remembrance, “Afterward, he was just Wendl again. And after dinner we danced to the music while he told me what a fine daughter lived inside me.”
I remember him, thought Alice.
“I think you just might,” said Millicent.
“And then you went to sleep and came home.”
Millicent nodded. “I was tired after all the talk and dancing, and I’d had too much to eat. Vesuvia Wildness had a little guest cottage in the garden behind her house. I was so sleepy I scarcely remember. I think she helped me get undressed and tucked me in bed as if I were a little girl. I was asleep before she closed the door.”
“And then you woke up and came home.” Alice thought that the best part of the story.
“And then I came home, and here we are,” laughed Millicent, hugging Alice to her, kissing her fragrant hair. She remembered as if she were back there now, waking with the sun in her face, looking through the curtained window at a garden that looked like her garden at Shelton Crossing. Getting dressed and opening the door and stepping into her own kitchen as she heard the front door of her house opening. She ran to meet Eric coming in raindamped from the dark outside.
“I thought you’d gone,” he said, surprised.
This part of the story, Millicent hadn’t told her daughter yet, how she had laughed at the puzzlement on her husband’s face. “It’s been two days, Eric. Didn’t you miss me?”
Eric wasn’t laughing. “What do you mean? It didn’t take ten minutes to walk back from the river where you left me and here you are.”
Here was where Millicent had been for nearly five years since that day, with the two loves of her life, with her garden and her neighbors in Shelton Crossing and the forests and the mountains. She hadn’t flown away again, even to visit her mother. She hadn’t opened doors to any other life but this one. Outside Laurel, the world continued to fall apart. The rising ocean had pushed the coast twenty miles closer to the Shaconage. The Atlantic American Republic reduced now to a loose and unstable aggregation of squabbling and rivalrous city states. Asheton was a ghost town, looted and burned and abandoned to vengeful ghosts and scavenging four-leggeds.
Where there had been fields and farms, the sterile and polluted soil now only yielded famine and pestilence. Re-processed garbage passed for food, packaged and distributed by a few mega-corporations in the industrial enclaves of the Middle States. People stood in long lines and paid a month’s labor to get enough of it to stay alive. None from outside ventured into the Shaconage to claim her verdant plenitude, though. Rumors circulated in the shadowlands that devils lived among the trees there, or worse. Better to be hungry than to have one’s soul eaten by Fairies.
Meanwhile, the Laurel Creek Containment District was known by those who occupied it as simply. The Laurel. It was a green and pleasant place where life was sweet and death came more often by age or accident than by disease or assault. The inhabitants rarely if ever felt need to venture into the Shadow the rest of the world had become. Some said the Earth was dying. Some said it was only humans who were passing away. A few said everything was waiting to be reborn.
“We’ll be back before sundown,” Millicent said to Molly Deere, who governed the settlement’s day school. Alice sailed away to join several other children who were cavorting among the topmost branches of an old hemlock. “Here’s her lunch,” the mother said as she handed a loaded basket to the teacher. “There’s plenty in there to share.”
“We’ll be fine,” Molly said, taking the food. “Don’t get lost out on the mountain.”
Millicent laughed. “Don’t worry. We can’t get lost anymore. The trees know us too well.”
“You hunting today, are you?” Molly asked, as she glanced over her shoulder to ascertain that her squealing charges were still aloft.
“Yes. One of the foragers told Eric they had come across a colony of Queen’s Crown. We’re going to see if there are any suitable for transplanting in the Talking Garden.”
“Children, come down from there before somebody takes you for fairies,” Molly called aloud. Get you all now to Learning Circle, she thought at them when she had their attention. She turned back to Millicent. “Is it true what they say at the Hungry Dragon? Do Queen’s Crown really speak?”
“Not aloud,” said Millicent. “They’re just lilies, after all. But Eric’s starting to connect with them. They come through so wordy, it feels almost like they are voices. Eric thinks they might be a bridge into Greenmind, that we might be on the brink of deep conversation with Shaconage.”
Be found, thought Molly, Laurel’s equivalent of have-a-nice-day.
“You, too,” said Millicent aloud. All who knew her said she was talkative. She still harbored a fondness for the soundful flow of words spoken. In her opinion, a stream lived in its music. Behind her, the air was a clamor with childmind as she turned and hurried away to meet her husband, who would have their gear packed and ready by now.
She found him waiting with Sergeant at the Talking Garden. Eric started the garden soon after his arrival in the district. There among the green lives he collected, he called them his “influencers,” he pursued his neurobotany experiments, heavily biased by an obsessive conviction that, eventually, plants could become as communicative with humans as they were among themselves.
Sergeant, who grew up on a farm, and so far, having minimal policing duties in the Laurel, had volunteered as a practically full-time assistant gardener. He proved to have a knack for gleaning impressions, and occasionally, messages from Greenmind. “He grew up close to the ground,” Eric told Millicent in a praiseful moment. “It shows.”
When he saw his wife, Eric gestured at his companion. “Sergeant wants to go with us,” he said. “We might need some help carrying back our finds.”
“My husband is so optimistic,” Millicent said to Sergeant. “But there’s a good walk in it for you, at least.”
Sergeant just grinned and hoisted his pack, a large basket woven from white oak splits, fitted with shoulder straps. It was mostly empty. Eric’s plan was that it would be filled with green life by the time they started home. He slipped Millicent’s basket onto her shoulders and she adjusted it to comfort. She carried their rations for the day. She helped Eric settle his load, a small notebook he’d acquired from Amos, his collection tools, and their drinking water. When everybody was satisfied, they were fit for the trail, the trio set off toward the river. A couple of people spoke to them as they went down the street. Sharon waved from the door of the Hungry Dragon when they passed. Ten minutes later, they stood on the bank of the Long Broad, reduced by the current drought to a maze of meandering sykes amid rounded boulders that in a normal flow would have been inundated. Today, an adult human would be able to walk from one bank to the other without getting their feet wet.
Three flat-bottomed rowboats rested unattended at the landing, useless without enough water to float them. Though it was early in the day and the journey hardly begun, the hunters were wiping sweat and waiting for one another to be the first to mention drink. Eric’s pack would be a lot lighter before they came back this way.
A mile’s walk along the parched riverbank brought them to the foragers’ trail. Once they began climbing up the forested ridge in the shade of trees, the heat was less oppressive.
“Where are the birds?” asked Sergeant.
They stopped, listening. Except for a quarrel among crows somewhere on the slope below, no avian conversation at all in the unmusiced air.
“Weird,” said Eric.
“Maybe higher up, where it’s cooler,” Millicent speculated.
They resumed climbing and after another tilted mile, the air became a little cooler with a breeze lively enough they could feel it lapping up their perspiration. A wren spoke to them tentatively, promptly seemed to think better of it. Sergeant noted the lack of noseeums or bees.
“It’s the dry,” murmured Eric. “Even bugs need water.”
By now the expedition were drinking liberally from their bottles. When they reached the point where they thought the foragers had seen the Queen’s Crown, they found nothing but brown grass and briars. Another uphill hour and Eric called a halt for lunch. They still hadn’t found anything to burden Sergeant’s basket.
“We receive unworthily,” Sergeant whispered as they broke out their cheese and nuts. He produced a pone of bread he had baked. “I’ve been taking lessons from Sharon,” he confided. The bread was hard and dense, but they dipped it in their water and wolfed it down.
“A little farther,” Eric said, when they had eaten and drunk as much as they dared. “A shame to go home now with nothing to show.”
Millicent and Sergeant exchanged glances, tried to veil any thoughts they entertained that getting back home might be show enough. A half-mile further up the faltering trail they came to a rock outcrop that afforded a long view eastward. Past the dusty green and earthy blues of the Shaconage, they saw only an unbounded expanse of umbers and browns stretching away until lost in steely haze that might have been sky or might have been nothing natural.
“Dear God, can anybody still be alive down there?” Sergeant whispered.
“If they are,” said Eric, “they’re not like us anymore.”
Sergeant made a brief reconnoiter of the narrow ledge ahead. “It looks like the end of the trail,” he reported.
A sheer rock face rose above them for perhaps eighty feet. They could glimpse the green of fir branches over the top but discerned no crevice or niche that might give them purchase to climb. Eric passed around the water bottle. The drink tasted of disappointment. Faintly, they could hear birds singing somewhere up among the fir, and something else, Millicent thought.
“I hear water,” she said.
The men listened, agreed, and they began to prowl the brush at the base of the cliff. Millicent found it in a fold in the rock, obscured by vines, a cleft so narrow they had to drop their packs to squeeze through. A glimmer of light ahead and a draft of cool moist air on their faces met them halfway, and another five minutes of confined squirming brought them through to a narrow glen. Dappled sunlight filtered down through towering spruce and fir. Beyond the trees, tumbles and steeps of fractured schist and gneiss rose on all sides. Variegated mosses and lichen clung to the stones and the trunks of the trees, pendanted from their lower branches, blanketed the ground. Everywhere, from this living carpet, emerged hundreds, no, thousands of Queen’s Crown lilies arrayed in colors known and inconceivable. Hues that were seen with the eye and felt on the skin and heard in the ear, mind washing, soul cleansing color, pure and deep and intense beyond any measure and definition.
There was nothing for the three humans to do with this permeating glory but to kneel in its midst and surrender whatever prayers of praise and gratitude their minds could conceive.
Millicent felt herself dissolving in the shimmering glimmering silence and closed her eyes to retrieve her mind. She could see the colors flaring in her head. She could hear them, too, a whisper at first, but growing, swelling like a seed unfurling into a consuming chord of knowing sound, a melody, complex and profoundly simple, ever expanding and folding in upon itself, blending with her own being until she was part of the song.
She heard herself whisper, “Dear Lord, they’re singing.”
Then, from somewhere in the trees above, the bird she had never seen but heard all her life, called her solitary, silvery, sacred note. One. Millicent opened her eyes, looked at the men’s faces and saw they had heard it, too. None of them breathed until they heard again. One. And the flowers were flowers again and the humans inhabited their own bodies and the world resumed its accustomed holiness.
Their sudden separateness left them disoriented and ungrounded. Instinctively, Millicent and Eric and Sergeant reached out to join hands. They stood untimed in a mute circle waiting, watching, listening for an answer to the question they had become. The answer, when it came, formed as another question.
The three hunter-gatherers stilled, measured their own breathing, counted their heartbeats until the flower music resumed, subtly different now, less in the ear, more in the mind. This time, the song became words. How are you found?
The humans responded with a thought in common. We don’t understand.
The flowers sang to one another for a moment, a soft wash of sound blending with the laughter of the little brook that emerged from a crevice in the surrounding stone and cavorted across the glen to gather in a small pool before the mountain swallowed it again. Finally, more words. Are you found three or one?
The humans conferred in their minds in the manner of flowers until Millicent spoke for them. We are found three in the one.
The response this time was immediate and conversational. You are found enough. Three in our one will go with you.
The lilies began to fade, swallowing their colors until they were pale as trillium, like a flight of ghosts in the gathering shade. All except three by the little pool, who remained radiant as stars. When Eric knelt before them, they twisted and leaned out toward his hand as if accepting an invitation. Gently, he lifted them from their place one by one, careful to leave roots intact, and cradled the three emissaries in a bed of their own moist humus, then swaddled each one in a piece of his shirt that he wet in the brook. He handed one to Millicent and another to Sergeant to carry through the narrow way out. Holding his own close to heart, he said to the surrounding throng, “We are found thankful.”
We are found one, came the answering radiance, splendoring their sight.
The way out took longer. They went slowly, carefully, embracing their charges gently as newborn babes. The lilies chirped and murmured in their heads until they were under the sun again. Eric was ecstatic, his joy contagious. Even back in the heat, they all three felt lighter, younger. Cumulous loomed ominously northward.
“A good rain would be worth the wetting,” said Sergeant, hoisting his basket, a little heavier now.
“A good wetting would be a good end to our day,” said Millicent.
“A good wetting is a good beginning,” Eric said, patting Sergeant’s basket as the policeman led the way back down the mountain.
They hadn’t gone a mile before the rain overtook them in a sudden deluge that after a few minutes turned the trail into a creek. The going was slow and treacherous until they took shelter under an overarching bluff at a place the Foragers called Standing Stone. Previous trekkers had left a stash of dry wood and Sergeant built a fire.
The afternoon waned while the rain increased. As shadows grew, Eric said, “Maybe we should just stay the night here, and go down in the morning.”
Sergeant agreed with him, but Millicent said, “I can’t leave Alice with Molly overnight.” While the two males courted their fire, she stepped out between the raindrops and let herself rise with the mists until she saw, away and below, beyond the storm, the Long Broad curling around the settlement at Shelton Crossing. She gathered her becoming into one dimensionless point of brilliant light and she was there.
“Looks like rain,” Molly Deere said as Millicent walked into the schoolyard. When Alice saw her, she became a smile and ran to touch.
Millicent gathered up her daughter and said to the teacher, “It’s on the way. Caught us good at Standing Stone. I left the boys holed up there.”
