Moon-Flash
Authors: Patricia A. McKillip
Terje stirred. His frown moved from the mask to her. But he wasn’t seeing her. “They made me—They were waiting for me just outside the cave. They scared me. I tried to run, but they caught my arms and all the berries scattered all over the cave. I didn’t understand for a while that the masks weren’t their real faces. It was raining; night was coming; it was hard to see. They came out of the shadows like bad dreams. . . . Then they put a face on my face, and I knew they were people. Like us. Only . . .” He paused, drawing breath. He let his head drop back against one of the dreams on the wall. “They took me to another cave. They kept touching my hair, looking into my face. I think they think I’m a ghost. They kept trying to teach me how to throw a spear. At a mask and a bunch of twigs. Maybe they needed a hunter. Only the mask was a man’s skull.” He touched a spear point. “They kill each other.”
“I know,” said Kyreol.
“Well, why?”
“I don’t know.”
His brows pinched together. “I can’t think of any reason. How could people on the River come to be so different from us?”
“They have signs. They have a dream-cave. They know the Moon-Flash. Only here it doesn’t mean good fortune or betrothal. It means—”
“Killing.”
| FIREBIRD | |
W | |
The Changeling Sea | Patricia A. McKillip |
The Ear, the Eye | Nancy Farmer |
Enchantress from the Stars | Sylvia Engdahl |
The Far Side of Evil | Sylvia Engdahl |
Firebirds: An Anthology of | Sharyn November, ed. |
House of Stairs | William Sleator |
Interstellar Pig | William Sleator |
The Mount | Carol Emshwiller |
Parasite Pig | William Sleator |
Singing the Dogstar Blues | Alison Goodman |
originally published as
Moon-Flash
and
The Moon and the Face
PATRICIA A. McKILLIP
FIREBIRD
Published by the Penguin Group
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Moon-Flash
originally published in
the United States of America by Atheneum Publishers, 1984
The Moon and the Face
originally published in
the United States of America by Atheneum Publishers, 1985
This edition published by Firebird, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2005
Copyright © Patricia A. McKillip, 1984, 1985
All rights reserved
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
McKillip, Patricia A.
Moon-flash / Patricia A. McKillip.
p. cm.
Previously published separately as Moon-flash (1984)
and The moon and the face (1985).
Summary: After dreaming that they must leave their isolated home of Riverworld,
Kyreol and Terje travel beyond what they believe to be the end of the world,
where they discover new planets and new ways of life.
ISBN: 978-1-101-65998-4
[1. Coming of age—Fiction. 2. Self-realization—Fiction. 3. Dreams—Fiction.
4. Interpersonal relations—Fiction.
5. Science fiction.] I. McKillip, Patricia A. Moon and the face. II. Title.
PZ7.M478678Mo 2005 [Fic]—dc22 2004056340
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that
it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise
circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Version_1
To
my father,
whatever dream
he’s in
KYREOL’S EYES were so dark that if she looked at you between leaves you couldn’t see them. Her skin was the color of a shadow, and her hair was blacker than that. She was tall for her age, and lean, a great tree-climber and a magnificent storyteller. She knew all the secret places in the world—the bramble-cave in the forest, the pool beneath the falls where the great fish sunned, the hollow tree—for she had walked from the Beginning of world halfway to its End. The world began at the Face and ended at Fourteen Falls; it was bounded by forests, and the River ran through the center of it, giving life and carrying it away. Kyreol had fished in the River, sailed on it, swam in it, thrown rocks and flowers at it, learned stories from it, and watched herself grow in its reflection year by year. On the day she became a woman, she gazed into the water, searching for signs of the change on her face, and remembered that she had been betrothed since the day she was born.
Kyreol’s mother had betrothed her to Tarvar’s youngest son, Korre. He lived downriver, at Turtle-Crossing,
and Kyreol knew him only vaguely. He was a short, dark, serious boy with a shy smile. She saw him mostly from a distance in his boat, for he had a handful of sisters to fish for. Since Kyreol’s mother had vanished off the face of the world ten Moon-Flashes before, Kyreol had to tell her father that she was ready for the betrothal ritual. Then, since she had no sisters, she had to make her own betrothal skirt. The ritual was to be held at Moon-Flash; and the next Moon-Flash, her father told her, was very soon. So Kyreol, who hated sewing, sat in the quiet of her house, an upside-down bowl of mud and dark river rock, surrounded by piles of green and red and gold feathers. She threaded them together slowly and told stories to herself for comfort.
“My mother went to Fourteen Falls and turned into a rainbow . . .
“She walked through the forest toward sunrise. She travelled from Flash to Flash across the world until—until . . .” Kyreol smiled. “She found a place-name. And the place-name was River-Tree. Her home. She walked all the way—” Her hands stilled. She gazed out a round window across the River as if she were watching her mother return from a walk of ten Flashes. She frowned suddenly. “Wait. If she went that way—” She pointed the hand with the needle in it behind her—“how could she come back this way?” She pointed the hand with the feather in it in front of her. It was in this position that Terje found her.
He dropped a bag of feathers at her feet, eyeing her unsurprisedly. He lived at Three Rocks, and he had been with Kyreol more often than not since they were tiny children. They had grown together; they had
learned words from each other and fed each other berries. They spent nights on the riverbanks together talking about the world. Now Kyreol was going away from Terje to live with another family at Turtle-Crossing. Terje scowled at her. She stood up impetuously, scattering feathers, thinking only of her question.
