A Wrinkle in Time Quintet (46 page)

The anguished cry called Charles Wallace back to himself. He cried,

He took a deep breath and hot air seared his lungs and again he was assailed by an unquellable fit of coughing. He buried his face in the unicorn’s mane and tried to control the spasm which
shook him. It was not
until the racking had nearly passed that he became aware of something cool brushing his burning face.

He raised his eyes and with awed gratitude he saw snow, pure white snow drifting down from the tortured sky, covering the ruined earth. The monster had stopped its ponderous approach and was staring up at the sky, mouth open to catch the falling flakes.

With the snow came
a light wind, a cool wind. “Hold!” Gaudior cried, and raised his wings to catch the wind. His four hoofs left the ground and he launched himself into the wind with a surge of power.

Charles Wallace braced, trying to tighten the grip of his legs about the unicorn’s broad neck. He could feel the wild beating of Gaudior’s heart as with mighty strokes he thrust along the wind through the darkness
of outer space, until suddenly they burst into a fountain of stars, and the stench and the horror were gone.

The unicorn’s breath came in great gulps of star-lit air; the wings beat less frantically; and they were safely riding the wind again and the song of the stars was clear and full.

“Now,” said Gaudior, “we go.”

“Where?” Charles Wallace asked.

“Not Where,” Gaudior said. “When.”

Up, up,
through the stars, up to the far reaches of the universe where the galaxies swirled in their starry dance, weaving time.

Exhausted, Charles Wallace felt his eyelids drooping.

“Do not go to sleep,” Gaudior warned.

Charles Wallace leaned over the unicorn’s neck. “I’m not sure I can help it,” he murmured.

“Sing, then,” Gaudior commanded. “Sing to keep yourself awake.” The unicorn opened his powerful
jaws and music streamed out in full and magnificent harmony. Charles Wallace’s voice was barely changing from a pure treble to a warm tenor. Now it was the treble, sweet as a flute, which joined Gaudior’s mighty organ tones. He was singing a melody he did not know, and yet the notes poured from his throat with all the assurance of long familiarity.

They moved through the time-spinning reaches
of a far galaxy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.

He was hardly aware when Gaudior’s hoofs struck ground and the melody dimmed until it was only a pervasive beauty of background.
With a deep sigh Gaudior stopped his mighty song and folded his wings into his flanks.

Meg sighed as the beauty of the melody faded and all she heard was the soft movement of the wind in the bare
trees. She realized that the room was cold, despite the electric heater which augmented the warm air coming up the attic stairs from the radiators below. She reached over Ananda to the foot of the bed
and pulled up her old eiderdown and wrapped it around them both. A gust of wind beat at the window, which always rattled unless secured by a folded piece of cardboard or a sliver of wood stuck between window and frame.

“Ananda, Ananda,” she said softly, “the music—it was more—more real than any music I’ve ever heard. Will we hear it again?”

The wind dropped as suddenly as it had risen, and once
again she could feel the warmth coming from the little heater. “Ananda, he’s really a very small boy … Where is Gaudior going to take him now? Whom is he going to go Within?” She closed her eyes, pressing the palm of her hand firmly against the dog.

It was the same Where as the Where of Harcels, but there were subtle differences, though it was still what Gaudior had called Once Upon a Time and
Long Ago, so perhaps men still lived in peace and Charles Wallace would be in no danger. But no: time, though still young, was not as young as that, she felt.

The lake lapped close to the great rock and stretched across the valley to the horizon, a larger lake than the lake of Harcels’s time. The rock itself had been flattened
by wind and rain and erosion, so that it looked like an enormous,
slightly tilted tabletop. The forest was dark and deep, but the trees were familiar, pine and hemlock and oak and elm.

Dawn.

The air was pure and blue and filled with the fragrance of spring. The grass around the rock looked as though it had been covered with a fall of fresh snow, but the snow was a narcissus-like flower with a spicy scent.

On the tabletop stood a young man.

She did not see
Charles Wallace. She did not see the unicorn. Only the young man.

A young man older than Charles Wallace. Harcels had been younger. This young man was older, perhaps not as old as Sandy and Dennys, but more than fifteen. She saw no hint of Charles Wallace within the man, but she knew that somehow he was there. As Charles Wallace had been himself and yet had been Harcels, so Charles Wallace was
Within the young man.

He had been there all night, sometimes lying on his back to watch the stars swing slowly across the sky; sometimes with his eyes closed, as he listened to the lapping of the small waves on the pale sand, the clunkings of frogs and the hoot of a night bird, the sound of an occasional fish slipping through the water. Sometimes he neither heard nor saw; he did not sleep, but
abandoned
his senses and lay on the rock patiently opening himself to the wind.

Perhaps it was his gift of kything practiced with Meg that helped Charles Wallace slip more and more deeply into the being of another.

Madoc, son of Owain, king of Gwynedd.

Madoc, on the dawning of his wedding day.

Meg’s eyes slowly lowered; her body relaxed under the warmth of the eiderdown; but her hand remained
on Ananda as she slid into sleep.

Madoc!

It was for Charles Wallace as though a shuttered window had suddenly been opened. It was not a ballad or a song he was trying to remember, it was a novel about a Welsh prince named Madoc.

He heard Gaudior’s warning neigh. “You are Within Madoc. Do not disturb him with outside thoughts.”

“But, Gaudior, Madoc was the key figure in the book—oh,
why
can’t
I remember more!”

Again Gaudior cut him off. “Stop trying to think. Your job now is to let yourself go into Madoc. Let go.”

Let go.

It was almost like slipping down, deeper and deeper, into the waters of a pool, deeper and deeper.

Let go.

Fall into Madoc.

Let go.

Madoc rose from the rock and looked to the east, awaiting the sunrise with exalted anticipation. His fair skin was tanned, with
a reddishness which showed that he was alien to so fierce a sun. He looked toward the indigo line of horizon between lake and sky, with eyes so blue that the sky paled in comparison. His hair, thick and gold as a lion’s mane, was nearly covered with an elaborate crown of early spring flowers. A lavish chain of flowers was flung over his neck and one shoulder. He wore a kilt of ferns.

The sky
lightened, and the sun sent its fiery rays over the edge of the lake, reaching up into the sky, pulling itself, dripping, from the waters of the night. As the sun seemed to make a great leap out of the dark, Madoc began to sing in a strong, joyful baritone.

When he finished, still looking out over the water, his song was taken up as though by an echo, a strange, thin, cracked echo, and then an old man, dressed with the same abundance of flowers
as Madoc, came out of the forest.

Madoc bent down and helped the old man up onto the rock. For all the Old One’s age, his stringy-looking muscles were strong, and though his hair was white, his dark skin had a glow of health.

When the strange duet was ended, the old man held up his hand in a gesture of blessing. “It is the day, my farsent son.”

“It is the day, my to-be-father. Madoc, son of Owain, king of Gwynedd, will be Madoc, son of Reschal, Old One of the Wind People.”

“A year ago today, you sang the song in your delirium,”
Reschal said, “and it was the child of my old age who found you in the forest.”

“And it
is mirth that is called for,” the young man affirmed, “and we shall sing today for birth, for the birth of the new One which Zyll and I will become when you join us together.”

“On the night that Zyll was born,” the Old One said, “I dreamed of a stranger from a distant land, across a lake far greater than ours—”

“From across the ocean”—the young man put his hand lightly on the Old One’s shoulder—“from
the sea which beats upon the shores of Cymru, the sea which we thought went on and on until a ship would fall off at the end of the world.”

“The end of the world—” the old man started, but broke off, listening.

The young man listened, too, but heard nothing. “Is it the wind?”

“It is not the wind.” Reschal looked at the young man and put a gnarled hand on the richly muscled arm. “Madoc, son
of Owain, king of Gwynedd—how strange those syllables sounded to us. We did not know what is a king, nor truly do we yet.”

“You have no need of a king, Old One of the People of the Wind. Owain, my father, is long buried: I am a lifetime away from Gwynedd in Cymru. When the soothsayer
looked into the scrying glass and foretold my father’s death, he saw also that I would live my days far from Gwynedd.”

The old man again lifted his head to listen.

“Is it the wind?” Still, Madoc could hear nothing beyond the sounds of early morning, the lapping of the lake against the shore, the stirring of the wind in the hemlocks which made a distant roaring which always reminded him of the sea he had left behind him.

“It is not the wind.” There was no emotion in the old man’s face, only a continuing, controlled
listening.

The young man could not hide the impatience in his voice. “When is Zyll coming?”

The dark Old One smiled at him with affection. “You have waited how many years?”

“I am seventeen.”

“Then you can wait a while longer, while Zyll’s maidens make her ready. And there are still questions I must ask you. Are you certain in your heart that you will never want to leave Zyll and this small,
inland people and go back to the big water and your ship with wings?”

“My ship was broken by wind and wave when we attempted to land on the rocky shores of this land. The sails are torn beyond mending.”

“Another ship could be built.”

“Old One, even had I the tools to fell the trees for lumber for a new ship, even had my brother and my companions
not perished, I would never wish to leave Zyll
and my new brethren.”

“And your brother and your companions?”

“They are dead,” Madoc said bleakly.

“Yet you hold them back so that they cannot continue their journey.”

“We were far from home.” Madoc spoke softly. “It is a long journey for their spirits.”

“Are the gods of Gwynedd so weak they cannot care for their own?”

Madoc’s blue eyes were dark with grief. “When we left Gwynedd in Cymru
because of the quarreling of my brethren over our father’s throne, it seemed to us the gods had already abandoned us. For brothers to wish to kill each other for the sake of power is to anger the gods.”

“Perhaps,” the old man said, “you must let the gods of Gwynedd go, as you must free your companions from your holding.”

“I brought them to their death. When my father died, and my brothers became
drunk with lust for power, as no wine can make a man drunk, I felt the gods depart. In a dream I saw them turn their backs on our quarreling, saw them as clearly as anything the soothsayers see in their scrying glass. When I awoke, I took Gwydyr aside and said that I would not stay to watch brother against brother, but that I would go find the land the Wise Ones said was at the farther end of
the sea. Gwydyr demurred at first.”

“He thought he might become king?”

“Yes, but Gwydyr and I were the youngest. The throne was not likely to be ours while the other five remained alive.”

“Yet you, Madoc, the seventh son, were the favored of the people.”

“Had I let them proclaim me king, there would have been no way to avoid bloodshed. I left Gwynedd to prevent the horror of brother against
brother.”

“Have you”—the old man regarded Madoc keenly—“in fact left it?”

“I have left it. Gwynedd in Cymru is behind me. It will be ruled by whomever the gods choose. I do not wish to know. For now I am Madoc, son-to-be of Reschal, soon to be husband of Zyll of the People of the Wind.”

“And Gwydyr? Have you let him go?”

Madoc gazed across the lake. “In many ways it seemed that I was older
than he, though there were seven years between us. When we came to the tribe on the Far Side of the Lake he was afraid of their dark skins and hair and their strange singing that was full of hoots and howls, and he ran from them. They kept me as guest, yet I was a prisoner, for they would not let me go into the forest to look for my brother. They sent a party of warriors to search for him, and when
they returned they carried only the belt with the jeweled buckle which marked him as the son of a king. They told me he had been killed by a
snake; Gwydyr did not know what a snake is, for we have none in Gwynedd. They told me that he had called my name before he died, and that he had left me the Song of the King’s Sons. And they buried him out in the forest. Without me, they buried my brother,
and I do not even know the place where he is laid.”