And Other Stories (25 page)

But it was as if Alice and I were
wired up like Secret Service guys. We could watch the crowd for
snipers while we had each other’s backs. I’ve started raising my
hand in class. I just laughed and walked away when Amber called me
“Gross Peeling Thing”. I’m not alone, like the tree behind Little
Mike’s garage. I’m a forest, like the trees in the park.

The park is why I had to tell
Alice. “Let’s go out there this Saturday,” she said today after
sixth period.

“Why?” The bottom
fell out of my stomach.

“Joshua Tree is a big
deal. I read about it. It’s this amazing ecosystem that doesn’t
exist anywhere else. And so far I’ve only seen it in the
dark.”

“It’s the desert.
There, I saved you so much time.”

“Tab!” Then she
looked at me with her eyes squinched up. “Is this anything I should
know about?”

Even when I was behaving like a
psych case, she didn’t insist I tell her my deepest, darkest
secrets. So of course I had to.

I told her about the creature in
the desert, about waking up on the other side of the park, and the
doctor saying I was lying.

Alice didn’t say anything right
away. I got scared. “It was probably heatstroke,” I added, and
heard the flatness in my voice.

She shook her head. “I don’t think
so.”

That scared me even more. “Why not?
It was heatstroke, LSD, or I’m insane! What do you mean, ‘I don’t
think so’?”

“Remember your
lips?”

I was about to yell at her, but she
looked so serious.

“Lips dry out worse
than any other part of your face, because they don’t have any oil
glands,” she went on. “When I came to see you right after it
happened, you looked like you’d just come off a barbecue grill. But
your lips didn’t. They weren’t even dry.”

I think every hair on my body stood
straight up. “When I drank out of its palm—”

“You put your mouth
in the water.”

This Saturday we’re spending the
day in the park. We’re going to bike in, and pack a lunch and huge
amounts of water. Alice has a guide to the birds and animals and
plants, and the plan is to see how many we can check
off.

It’s funny, but I’m not worried
about seeing the joshua tree thing again. I think if something like
that happens to you, you get one shot. You can do what you want
with it, but that taste of live magic is one per
customer.

Now that I’m not trying to be who
I’m supposed to, I’ve started to wonder about the rest of the
world. Is everybody wearing a disguise with the zipper stuck? Are
all the supposed-to-bes big fat lies? If so, how about the desert?
I know what it’s supposed to be: no water, no life, everything
poisonous, pointy, or otherwise out to get you.

I was supposed to be a loser. Maybe
the desert and I have something in common.

Can’t wait to talk this over with
Alice.

Silver or
Gold

Emma Bull

Moon Very Thin sat on the raised
hearth—the only place in the center room out of the way—with her
chin on her knuckles. She would have liked to be doing something
more, but the things she thought of were futile, and most were
undignified. She watched Alder Owl crisscross the slate floor and
pop in and out of the stillroom and the pantry and the laundry.
Alder Owl’s hands were full of things on every crossing: clean
clothes, a cheese, dried yellow dock and feverfew, a tinderbox, a
wool mantle. She was frowning faintly all over her round pink face,
and Moon knew that she was reviewing lists in her head.

“You can’t pack all
that,” said Moon.

“You couldn’t,” said
Alder Owl. “But I’ve had fifty years more practice. Now remember to
cure the squash before you bring them in, or there’ll be nothing to
eat all winter but onions. And if the squirrels nest in the thatch
again, there’s a charm—”

“You told me,” Moon
sighed. She shifted a little to let the fire roast a slightly
different part of her back. “If I forget it, I can look it up. It’s
awfully silly for you to set out now. We could have snow next
week.”

“If we did, then I’d
walk through it. But we won’t. Not for another month.” Alder Owl
wrapped three little stoneware jars in flannel and tucked them in
her wicker pack.

Moon opened her mouth, and the
thing she’d been busy not saying for three days hopped out. “He’s
been missing since before Midsummer. Why do you have to go now? Why
do you have to go at all?”

At that, Alder Owl straightened up
and regarded her sternly. “I have responsibilities. You ought to
know that.”

“But why should they
have anything to do with him?”

“He is the prince of
the Kingdom of Hark End.”

Moon stood up. She was taller than
Alder Owl, but under that fierce gaze she felt rather stubby. She
scowled to hide it. “And we live in Hark End. Hundreds—thousands of
people do. A lot of them are even witches. They haven’t all gone
tramping off like a pack of questing youngest sons.”

Alder Owl had a great many
wrinkles, which deepened all over her face when she was about to
smile. They deepened now. “First, youngest sons have never been
known to quest in packs. Second, all the witches worth their salt
and stone have tried to find him, in whatever way suits them best.
All of them but me. I held back because I wanted to be sure you
could manage without me.”

Moon Very Thin stood still for a
moment, taking that in. Then she sat back down with a thump and
laced her fingers around her knees. “Oh,” she said, halfway between
a gasp and a laugh. “Unfair, unfair. To get at me through my
pride!”

“Yes, my weed, and
there’s such a lot of it. I have to go, you know. Don’t make it
harder for me.”

“I wish I could do
something to help,” said Moon after a moment.

“I expect you to do
all your work around here, and all of mine besides. Isn’t that
enough?” Alder Owl smoothed the flap down over the pack and snugged
the drawstring tight.

“You know it’s not.
Couldn’t I go with you?”

Alder Owl pulled a stool from under
the table with her foot and sat on it, her hands over her knees.
“When I travel in my spirit,” she said, “to ask a favor of
Grandmother, you can’t go with me.”

“Of course not. Then
who’d play the drum, to guide you back?”

Alder Owl beamed. “Clever weed.
Open that cupboard over the mantel-shelf and bring me what you find
there.”

What Moon found was a drum. It was
nothing like the broad, flat, cowhide journey-drum, whose speech
echoed in her bones and was like a breathing heartbeat under her
fingers, whose voice could be heard in the land where there was no
voice. This drum was an upright cylinder no bigger than a quart
jar. Its body was made of some white wood, and the skins of its two
heads were fine-grained and tufted with soft white hair around the
lashings. There was a loop of hide to hold it with, and a drumstick
with a leather beater tucked through that.

Moon shook her head. “This wouldn’t
be loud enough to bring you home from the pump, let alone
from—where are you going?”

“Wherever I have to.
Bring it to me.”

Moon brought her the drum, and
Alder Owl held it up by the loop of hide and struck it, once. The
sound it made was a sharp, ringing tok, like a woodpecker’s
blow.

Alder Owl said, “The wood is from
an ash tree planted at the hour of my birth. The skins are from a
ewe born on the same day. I raised the ewe and watered the tree,
and on my sixteenth birthday, I asked them for their lives, and
they gave them gladly. No matter how far I go, the drum will reach
me. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound.

“Tomorrow at dawn,
I’ll leave,” Alder Owl continued. “Tomorrow at sunset, as the last
rind of the sun burns out behind the line of the Wantnot Hills, and
at every sunset after, beat the drum once, as I just did.
”

Moon was a little shaken by the
solemnity of it all. But she gathered her wits at last and
repeated, “At sunset each day. Once. I’ll remember.”

“Hmph. Well.” Alder
Owl lifted her shoulders, as if solemnity was a shawl she could
shrug away. “Tomorrow always comes early. Time to put the fire to
bed.”

“I’ll get the garden
things,” Moon said. She tossed her cloak on and went out the
stillroom door into the night.

Her namesake was up, and waxing.
Alder Owl would have good light, if she needed to travel by night.
But it would be cold traveling; frost dusted the leaves and vines
and flagstone paths like talcum. Moon shivered and sighed. “What’s
the point of having an able-bodied young apprentice, if you’re not
going to put all that ableness to use?” she muttered to the
shifting air. The cold carried all her S’s off into the
dark.

She pinched a bloom from the yellow
chrysanthemum, and a stalk of merry-man’s wort from its sheltered
bed. When she came back into the house she found that Alder Owl had
already fed the fire and settled the logs with the poker, and
fetched a bowl of water. Moon dropped the flowers into
it.

“Comforter, guard
against the winter dark,” Alder Owl said to the fire, as always, as
if she were addressing an old friend. She stirred the water with
her fingers as she spoke. “Helpmeet, nourisher of flesh and heart,
bide and watch, and let no errant spark leap up until the sun
should take thy part.”

Firelight brushed across the seamed
landscape of Alder Owl’s face, flashed yellow in her sharp, dark
eyes, turned the white in her hair to ivory. Tomorrow night, Moon
thought, she won’t be here. Just me. She could believe it only with
the front of her mind, where all untested things were kept. The
rest of her, mind and lungs and soles of feet, denied
it.

Alder Owl flicked the water from
her hand onto the hearth, and the line of drops steamed. Then she
handed the bowl to Moon, and Moon fed the flowers to the
fire.

After a respectful silence, Moon
said, “It’s water.” It was the continuation of an old argument.
“And the logs were trees that grew out of the earth and fed on
water, and the fire itself feeds on those and air. That’s all four
elements. You can’t separate them.”

“It’s the hour for
fire, and it’s fire that we honor. At the appropriate hours we
honor the other three, and if you say things like that in public,
no educated person in the village will speak to you.” Alder Owl
took the bowl out of Moon’s hands and gathered her fingers in a
strong, wet clasp. “My weed, my stalk of yarrow. You’re not a child
anymore. When I leave, you’ll be a grown woman, in others’ eyes if
not your own. What people hear from a child’s mouth as foolishness
becomes something else on the lips of a woman grown: sacrilege, or
spite, or madness. Work the work as you see fit, but keep your
mouth closed around your notions, and keep fire out of water and
earth out of air.”

“But—”

“Empty the bowl now,
and get on to bed.”

Moon went into the garden again and
flung the water out of the bowl—southward, because it was
consecrated to fire. Then she stood a little while in the cold,
with a terrible hard feeling in her chest that was beyond sadness,
beyond tears. She drew in great breaths to freeze it, and exhaled
hard to force the fragments out. But it was immune to cold or
wind.

“I’d like to be a
woman,” she whispered. “But I’d rather be a child with you here,
than a woman with you gone.” The sound of the words, the knowledge
that they were true, did what the cold couldn’t. The terrible
feeling cracked, melted, and poured out of her in painful tears.
Slowly the comforting order around her, the beds and borders Alder
Owl had made, stopped the flow of them, and the kind cold air wiped
them off her face.

At dawn, when the light of sunrise
lay tangled in the treetops, Alder Owl settled her pack on her back
and went out by the front door. Moon went with her as far as the
gate at the bottom of the yard. In the uncertain misty land of
dawn, Alder Owl was a solid, certain figure, cloaked in shabby
purple wool, her silver and black hair tucked under a
drunken-brimmed green hat.

“I don’t think you
should wear the hat,” Moon said, past the tightness in her throat.
“You look like an eggplant.”

“I like it. I’m an
old woman. I can wear what I please.”

She was going. What did one say,
except “Goodbye,” which wasn’t at all what Moon wanted? “When will
you come back?”

“When I’ve found him.
Or when I know he can’t be found.”

“You always tell me
not to try to prove negatives.”

“There are ways,”
Alder Owl replied, with a sideways look, “to prove this
one.”

Moon Very Thin shivered in the weak
sun. Alder Owl squinted up at her, pinched her chin lightly. Then
she closed the gate behind her and walked down the hill. Moon
watched her—green and purple, silly and strong—until the trees hid
her from sight.

She cured the squash before she put
them in the cellar. She honored the elements, each at its own hour.
She made cheese and wine, and put up the last of the herbs, and
beat the rugs, and waxed all the floors against the coming winter
muck. She mended the thatch and the fence, pruned the apple trees
and turned the garden beds, taking comfort from maintaining the
order that Alder Owl had established.