Sunlight and Shadow (4 page)

Kind of sappy. Yes, I know. Also somewhat predictable. Great, nameless powers often make pronouncements of this sort, or so I'm told. Deceptively simple too. Hearing the melody of your own heart, then rendering it up, is not such an easy matter. You can trust me on this one. I know.

Not only that, but in the meantime, while you're practicing, there are many other creatures who may be listening, and the melody you play may be the one that calls to their heart, even though it doesn't match your own. A thing my grandmother discovered the day the grizzly bear showed up in the garden.

The first she knew about it was a great screech issuing from the house next door. My grandmother
didn't pay much attention at first. The neighbors on that side were always making noise about something or other. It was the ominous silence that followed the screech that finally got her notice. That and the great, dark shadow that had suddenly come between her and the morning sun.

My grandmother looked up from the bench upon which she was sitting. There was a grizzly bear standing at the edge of her vegetable garden. As grizzly bears are primarily carnivorous, it seemed reasonably safe to assume it hadn't come to pick greens for a salad. In fact, being eaten right there and then was pretty much the only thing that came to my grandmother's mind.

In her astonishment and fear, my grandmother let drop the hammer with which she had been playing upon the bells. It struck the largest one on its way to the ground. At the sound it made, the bear made not a roar, but a soft, crooning sound. Its dark eyes gazed straight into my grandmother's, as if beseeching her for something.

Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, my grandmother bent and retrieved the hammer. Then, her hand shaking so much she feared the hammer would slip back out again, she began to play the bells once more.

As she did, the grizzly gave a great sigh of perfect contentment, turned around three times just like the family dog, curled up and went to sleep in the sun. Right on the bed of zucchini, which turned out to be
a fine thing as my grandmother had, as always, planted too many of them anyhow.

And in this way did she come to understand that playing your heart's true melody upon even so beautiful an instrument was a thing much easier said than done.

She didn't give up trying, of course. Would you? I thought not. Soon the grizzly was joined by a brown bear, a sun bear, and a beaver suffering from an identity crisis of magnificent proportion. It was right about then that the neighbors began to murmur the word witch, and my grandmother and great-grandfather, who was now much nicer, began to contemplate leaving town.

Fortunately for them, the next living, breathing thing my grandmother's attempt to get her song right summoned was a carpenter. A young man as finely made as any house he hoped to build, who looked at my grandmother with dreams of castles in his eyes. She looked him up and down and thought it over. The melody she had played upon the bells that day was as close as she had ever come to getting her heart's true song right. All things considered, she decided it was close enough.

She and the carpenter were married. Together with my great-grandfather, they moved to a nearby hillside with a pond for the beaver and lots of land for the bears to roam. My grandmother raised grapes, my grandfather built a house, many, many arbors,
and, eventually, my great-grandfather's coffin. My grandmother put the bells away until her children should be born.

And if, sometimes, in the dead of night, she heard her heart beating in ever so slightly a different rhythm than that of her sleeping husband, my grandmother simply pulled the pillow over her head. She had made her bed, or, actually, my grandfather had. But my grandmother was content to lie in it beside him.

Eventually, my grandmother bore a set of twins, a girl and a boy. The boy marched away to war at an early age, leaving his sister, the girl who would become my mother, behind. She was in no hurry to try the magic of the bells. Not until she was a young woman, until the music of her heart became too much for her body to contain, did she sit in one of her father's many arbors and attempted to sound it out.

She, too, ended up summoning animals, though not such alarming ones as her own mother. Her first attempt to play the bells summoned field mice from miles in every direction. They gathered around the bench on which she was sitting, noses twitching, and regarded her with round, dark eyes. There were so many of them, the family cat ran away that very afternoon.

Her second attempt brought squirrels with tails like bushy feather pens. The third, possums so
homely they made her glad the animals themselves didn't see all that well. By this time, I'm sure you've gotten the general idea, and so had my mother, to her great dismay

It seemed her specialty was to be rodents of all shapes, sizes, and kinds.

This fact upset her so deeply she married the first man who came along. He happened to be a baker, which was a good thing because, in her distress over what her playing called to her, my mother forgot to eat half the time.

My grandfather built them a house, not far from his own. The baker built a brick oven in the backyard and set about doing what he did best. Soon the townspeople were deciding to overlook their concerns that witchcraft might run in our family. Instead, they concentrated their attentions on my father's bread and my grandfather's wine. My mother put the bells away on the highest shelf that she could find, which happened to be in the bedroom closet. And there they stayed, all but forgotten, until the day I was born.

On that day, a momentous event occurred, and I don't mean just my own arrival. My mother was in one of those lulls which occur during labor, brief spells between one round of pain and the next. She lay still in her bed, panting just a little as the late afternoon sun was warm upon the bed, exhausted from working so hard.

She had just begun to feel the grip of the next contraction, when she forgot about the pain entirely. More rabbits than she had ever seen in one place together abruptly leaped in through the open window, and ran across the room and out the bedroom door.

Before my mother could so much as draw a breath to shout my father's name, they were followed by a group of foxes, and then a swarm of bees. That was the moment my mother realized the bed had begun to tremble and then to shake. Within instants, the whole bedroom had begun to sway from side to side.

My mother found her voice and shouted for my father in earnest. He arrived just as the closet door went crashing back and the set of bells hurtled to the floor. They struck the ground in such a way that all twelve bells sounded at the selfsame time. At which the trembling of the earth ceased, and my parents stared at one another in open-mouthed astonishment.

Oh, yes, and I was born.

When she had recovered sufficiently to tell my father of the events immediately preceding my birth, Papa, who was somewhat superstitious, decided that we had received a series of omens impossible to ignore.

And so I was given the name Lapin, after the rabbits who had been the first to understand that something momentous was about to occur, and the right to play the bells, not when I turned sixteen, but from the very day that I was born.

Lapin Comes to the Point, Finally

yes, I know. You should hope so. For heavens sake, just calm down. I do have a tendency to take the long way around, I admit it. But melodies and stories both can be like that. Besides, it's not as if I don't have my reasons for telling things the way I do. If you don't know where you've already been, how can you know which way to go?

I didn't start playing the bells right away. Not in any truly musical sense, anyhow. I did bang on them at a very young age, a circumstance which ended up with me and my playing being relegated to the great outdoors. Children were allowed a bit more freedom when I was young than they are nowadays. I didn't even have a nursemaid, but no one seemed to worry that I'd come to any harm.

I wasn't likely to be attacked or carried off, after all. I was making far too much noise.

I was five when I called my first bird down from the sky. It was a chickadee, a bird whose song is its own name. One moment I was sitting on one of the comfortable wooden benches my grandfather had made, trying to sound out an actual tune for the very
first time. The next, there was a flurry of wings, and a small bird appeared by my side.

It had a sharp black beak, gray wings, and a white breast. It regarded me first with one expectant, inky eye and then the other, cocking its black-capped head from side to side.

I knew the legend of the bells by then, of course. My father had assured this by making them the subject of many a bedtime story. I played the melody again, at which point the chickadee threw back its head, opened its throat, and harmonized. And as it did, though I was only five, I understood that my future would be filled with the songs of birds. From that day to this, that moment is still the happiest of my life.

The week after that, I played a song that summoned a red-bellied woodpecker. After that came a bird with a white body and a dark hood pulled over its head, looking for all the world as if it was in disguise. This was a dark-eyed junco, or so my grandfather informed me. These were followed in succession by a green jay, and, close upon its tail feathers, a blue one. Small birds all, as befitted my overall size at the time.

Then came wrens, sparrows, and warblers of all shapes, colors, and varieties. An indigo bunting as blue as a cold autumn sky. An oriole as yellow as newly churned butter. A cardinal with feathers as red as the bright drops of my own blood that I saw the
day I accidentally cut my finger on the sharpest of my father's bread knives.

Sometimes, I would play a song and nothing seemed to happen. Days would go by. Then, without warning, and generally when I was engaged in something altogether different, there would come the flutter of bird wings. The sound of the bells, or so it seemed, could travel as far as any bird could fly.

Before too long, my grandfather, getting on in years but still hale and hearty, set to work building bird feeders and bird houses. I began to play the bells at all hours of the day or night. For I had heard an old woman who'd come to buy bread say that not all birds like to sing in the bright light of day. There are some who prefer the soft shadows of the night.

And here, at last, my story is about to intersect with Mina's. For it was in calling down a night bird from the sky that I first came to the attention of the Queen of the Night.

I have already told you how the house my grandfather built for my grandmother came to be located on a hillside near the town where they'd both grown up, with my parents' house close beside it. But, as is often the case with hills, the one on which our houses resided did not stand alone. It was one of a series of many hills, all rolling together until, from their very center, a tall mountain shot straight up.

Among the many tales whispered about this mountain was that it was the first in all the world.
The one, in fact, from which the world itself had sprung. And this was the reason, it was further whispered, that the mountain was the chosen dwelling place of Sarastro, Mage of the Day, and his consort, Pamina, the Queen of the Night.

Not that anyone had ever seen them, of course.

But it was spoken that, in the time when the world began, they had wed and chosen this mountain in which to dwell. Like all the local children, I was curious about these tales. But I never thought I'd discover the truth of them for myself.

I did so when I was eight years old.

On the night of my eighth birthday, in fact. In honor of the occasion, I had been allowed to stay up a little later than usual. As always, I had with me the set of bells. My parents had thrown me a wonderful celebration. My heart was full of joy. And so, after all the guests save my grandparents had departed, I did the thing I always did when my heart was full. I sat in the orchard with my family around me and attempted to play the music of my heart upon the bells.

I'm not sure I can describe the melody I played. It was born in my heart and, if it lingers, it is there alone, and not in my mind. But I do recall that, for a long time after I ceased playing, nothing happened, save that the sounds of the world around me grew silent and still, as if they, too, had listened to my song.