“Thank you for your service to the Prophet and to the village, Andrius,” she said sweetly.
He felt his insides skipping. A lot of people had been greeting him that way today, but he liked hearing it from her. A troubled feeling fell over him, however, like a heavy fog.
“You know,” she began, “I don’t mind practicing writing, but I think it’s a lot more interesting when the instructor talks about Zydrunas. Don’t you?”
“Oh. Yeah. I think so too.”
Milda smiled graciously and they walked on. The subject died on the table. A minute later she tried again.
“I bet if you start working on next year’s offering they’ll pick you to represent us for the next Day of Remembrance. Everyone would want you to win now.”
Andrius was still distracted and a little morose.
“People don’t like the things I make. The patterns.”
“Well, maybe you just need to explain them better. Have you kept them all?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have your water pitcher with you?” She laughed. “Of course you have it. You’re always carrying it everywhere. Can I hold it?”
Andrius handed it to her indifferently and she stopped near Thirteenth Brick to receive it from him.
Her head was pointed slightly upward in a totally different direction from the pitcher. Andrius never would have thought this to be odd before, but now he did. She wasn’t even looking at it. She couldn’t.
Milda ran her fingers along the grooves carved into the wood, tracing the long, intricate borders and the accent ticks in the shape of leaves. Near the belly of the pitcher it was carved inward such that parts sticking out were like little people. Some of them were sad, others happy, others angry or bored or amused. One figure bought bread from another as someone else drove pigs down the road. It was very detailed, but though she was trying, Andrius could tell that she didn’t appreciate it in the same way he did.
When she was finished rubbing her smooth, white hands across his pitcher, she nodded and handed it back to him.
“You should make something like this again if you don’t want to write a poem or a song or a story or anything normal. It’s kind of fun to feel the grooves in it, and it’s something you can use too.”
Andrius took a drink from the pitcher. He would have liked to make another, but it hurt him to even consider the possibility. He put so much of himself into the work and no one had really understood it.
“I don’t know. I really do more of the patterns now. And not just for the offering, actually. I have a bunch that I’ve made just for fun. I could show you sometime.”
“Oh, sure, Andrius.” She didn’t sound interested. “But how did you make the pitcher like that? You should do that again.” Her cane tapped against the protruding brick on the side of the road, so she knew they were passing Eighth Brick.
“Leonas let me borrow his tools. I don’t want to make one again.”
Milda had opened her mouth to say something, but she let out a breath and closed it instead.
Something was still gnawing at Andrius. “Milda,” he asked, “are you my friend?”
“Of course I’m your friend, Andrius. I was nice to you before people liked you, remember? I’m your only true friend, really.”
Andrius dropped his eyes to the road. That was true, sort of. “But I heard you say that you weren’t.”
Milda laughed. Andrius liked the sound of it. He couldn’t help himself. “I never said anything of the sort. Why would I say that?”
“Oh.”
He remembered though. It wasn’t that long ago when she had been talking to Berena and he overheard.
Nobody noticed things, so Andrius sometimes heard comments he wasn’t supposed to hear. It let him know usually what people really felt. He wondered momentarily what the village would be like if everyone could hear with their eyes and notice people better. Maybe there wouldn’t be so many secrets.
Maybe he had misheard her or something. He didn’t have a lot of friends.
Just Milda, really.
They passed a field of cartwheel flowers on the left. It was Stephinius’s second field, Andrius thought, but he wasn’t sure. Everything belonged to the village anyway, especially the plant that supplied the cure to the disease.
He always liked looking at the tall, thick plants. Cartwheel flowers were almost always taller than him, and usually by quite a bit. They had large, fanned, jagged leaves that sprawled out every which way and round stalks that shot up and sprouted a wheel of hundreds of tiny flowers. He didn’t often stop for them, but he always noticed as he passed.
“So,” Milda began. She was trying very hard to have a conversation. “What did you think about lessons today?”
“I don’t know,” Andrius replied distractedly. “I wasn’t paying attention.”
Milda gasped and Andrius felt ice shoot through his veins. What had he just admitted to?
He took her by the shoulder.
“Milda, calm down. Please, just wait a second okay? I didn’t mean—It’s not that—”
She was breathing fast, nearly hyperventilating.
“I had a good reason!” Andrius insisted. He closed his eyes while Milda panicked. He was going to die before he reached twelve; he was sure of it.
The cartwheel flowers swayed in the gentle breeze, oblivious to the affairs of the people passing them by.
“You mean that you,” Milda said between breaths, “weren’t listening during lessons? That’s worse than being late, Andrius!”
“Shh, listen. Just wait, okay? I can explain, I think. I can. But you can’t tell anyone. Just calm down okay?” He felt her slow her breathing a bit, and some of the tension went out of her shoulders. She was still panicked, but she was trying to remain calm.
Andrius sighed. He felt sick again.
“Milda, please calm down. No one knows. It’s . . . Well, it’s not okay, but it’s all right. I had a good reason. I promise.”
Milda wiped her eyes with her sleeve and tried to regain composure. Her nose seemed funny now that she was so upset. The tip was different somehow.
“Blizzards, Andrius! Are you trying to get brought to judgment again? If you think that he’s going to let you off easy because you’re a kid, you’re wrong.”
She was sniffing between her words now and then. Andrius’s heart beat faster. He thought it was adorable. He couldn’t help it.
He waited for her to relax, and then, with a sigh from Milda, they continued walking. Her cane tapped regularly in front of her.
“So what is it?”
“Huh?” Andrius asked.
“This great reason you had. For,” she lowered her voice, “not paying attention.”
Andrius looked at her out of the corner of his eye.
“Do you really want to know?”
“Yes I want to know! Is it good? Tell me.”
“I still haven’t quite figured it out. That’s why I had to think so much instead of listen. I heard this grasshopper in front of me—”
“An ant?” Milda interrupted.
Andrius shook his head.
“It was a grasshopper.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because there was only one instead of a bunch of them, and he was bigger than an ant,” he said, a little frustrated. “Anyway, there was a grasshopper and I was looking at him when another grasshopper shows up.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t an ant?” she interrupted, skeptical.
“I’m sure. Listen, this second grasshopper was exactly like the first one, okay? But it was different. It was different, Milda!”
He was getting excited, but his enthusiasm didn’t spread to Milda, who seemed confused.
“Was he bigger than the other one?”
Andrius shook his head. “No, they were the same size.”
“A different shape?”
“No, the same.”
Milda thought really hard as they passed Fifth Brick. It hit her suddenly
. “It was missing a leg!”
Andrius frowned. “No, nothing you would usually think of. I can’t quite figure it out, but it was really different. I know it’s important somehow, I just can’t name it.”
“Andrius, you aren’t making any sense.”
“I know,” he admitted sadly.
She tapped him with an exaggerated swing of her cane.
“Are you sure one of them wasn’t an ant?”
Andrius shook his head and took a drink of water. He didn’t feel the need to answer her again.
The water felt good on his lips. It was cool and refreshing. He closed his eyes in satisfaction, but a bump in the road made him stumble.
Water fell down his shirt and splashed onto his feet, wetting the dusty road around.
He stopped in his tracks. The road was different where the water had hit.
Milda continued walking, unaware that he had stopped. She laughed.
“Did you spill, Andrius? Maybe you wouldn’t be so clumsy if you used your cane like a normal person.”
She smiled smugly, but Andrius didn’t care. He was onto something.
He jerked his head up and began looking around. The clouds, the trees, the road, the huts . . . It suddenly started to make sense.
“I’ve got it!” he declared excitedly.
“What?”
Andrius jumped and let out a whoop, causing more water to splash onto the road. He looked at it change.
“I know what was different about the grasshoppers.”
“Is this part of hearing with your eyes?”
“Yes, Milda, it is. I’ve got it.”
“Well spit it out. They weren’t different sizes?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know if there’s a word for it, but they were different . . . Snow and hail! This is hard . . .” He furrowed his brow. Gimdymo Namai began rising up before them. “Okay, you know how when you hear a song, you can sing the same word, but in a different way?”
“Like with a different note?” she offered.
Andrius snapped his fingers. “That’s it! Milda, you’re a genius. A different note, exactly. Just like in a song a word can have the same volume and everything but a different note. The grasshoppers had different notes, but notes that only your eyes can hear. One was like grass and the other one was like . . .” He looked around, then grabbed at his clothes. “Like my shirt! Or dirt, that would work too. They had different notes.”
Milda considered this for a while. Andrius waited expectantly.
Finally she shrugged her shoulders a bit and said, “That’s neat?”
The evening had passed in studied silence for Andrius. People spoke and argued about every topic of conversation at the Stone Gathering, but Andrius ignored them. He was looking at things by the fire, comparing them.
Now as he stood on top of his little hill again and the people gathered, he was lost in thought. More people had come today, but Andrius was for the moment more interested in all of the beautiful, varying notes around him that he could hear with his eyes. When he looked over the crowd at last, it filled him with delight.
They were here to hear him.
“Today,” Andrius announced, “I want to explain some more about this new sense. It lets you know where things are, but your ears do that sometimes, and so do your hands, your nose, and maybe even your tongue. It lets you know how big something is, or you can tell what it feels like without touching it, which is good when things are far away or really hot. But still, you can know that with your hands, I guess.
“Today I want to tell you about something your eyes can sense that no other part of you can: notes!”
The crowd remained silent, and Andrius’s stomach tightened at the lack of response. He remembered, however, that they were here to hear what he had to say. They would listen.
“No, wait,” he said, raising his hands. “It’s not like the kind of notes you hear with your ears; it’s something completely different. There just isn’t a word for it, so I call them notes.”
“Do you hear them when the sun is singing?” someone shouted from the crowd.
Andrius nodded. “Yes. There are such amazing notes when the sun sings! A leaf can be like grass or like dirt. A chicken’s feathers are like the clouds. A rock can be like the sand or like the mountains or like the fog.”
The people seemed to be following, and Andrius was pleased. He continued in the same vein until their time was up. He ended with an urging for the people to open their eyes and look at things.
This was met with great applause.
His satisfaction was dampened, however, when he overheard several groups of people leaving the session saying things like, “A chicken’s feathers are like a cloud because they are too soft,” “What’s a cloud again?” and “A leaf can feel fibrous like grass or crunchy like dirt.” “Notes are like textures.”
He tried to correct one such group, but he was out of time and needed to get to lessons. They left very confused as to why he was upset.
At lessons, Andrius didn’t pay attention again. He was thinking.
The walk home was odd. Berena and a few of the other children all asked Andrius if he wanted to walk with them. No none had ever asked him that. It had been strange enough when Milda asked, but now there were others.
What’s more, his classmates complimented him when he spoke—which he did not do often—and patted his back. Tomas had linked arms with Andrius on the way back from lessons and declared the two of them to be good friends. Tomas had always dismissed Andrius in kind of an arrogant way, but now he said they were friends. He couldn’t tell him no.
Several others from his age group asked to be friends with Andrius also. He said yes to them all. What else was he supposed to do? Was he even allowed a choice once the question was asked? He didn’t really have any friends, except maybe Milda lately. It was complicated, and he was new at this whole friendship thing.
His walks to and from lessons were usually peaceful, if a bit lonely. Today it was a cacophony. So many boys and girls talking at once—at him, at each other. Andrius’s head was on a swivel trying to keep up with it all.
Needless to say it was a bit overwhelming, and by the time the others had reached their homes and Andrius approached Twenty-fifth Stone he felt relieved. Though, in truth, he had enjoyed the attention.
On the other hand it made him uncomfortable.
He hadn’t decided how he felt just yet.
Caught up in thoughts, Andrius followed the fraying rope from the main road to his house. It had been a long day. He undid the latch and gently pushed the door inward.
“Well look who decided to show up.”
Daiva sat on her stool, fat and disgruntled as ever. She was in a bad mood from the looks of it.
Aleksandras stood at the counter with an apron on, putting the finishing touches on dinner. He had roasted a couple of chickens outside. One entire chicken would be for Daiva, of course, in addition to sides.
Andrius glanced about the room. The sun was still singing softly.
“Why are you upset, Daiva? I’m not late.”
She snorted. “Oh, and you make the rules around here, don’t you?” She shifted her huge girth, and for a minute Andrius was worried that she would get up and beat him.
“No, Daiva. It’s just that—”
“It’s just that what?”
“Dear,” Aleksandras interceded.
“Shut up!” she screeched. She rose from her seat and lumbered in Andrius’s direction. “The Prophet’s own,” she said in a high, nasal voice. “The Prophet’s own, the Prophet’s own.” She spit. “Well even Prophets have a chamber pot. That’s the Prophet’s own too.”
Andrius reached across the room and set his water pitcher against the far wall of the hut. If he was going to get beaten, he didn’t want that to get damaged at least. He couldn’t help trembling as he waited for the worst of it.
“It seems to me,” Daiva shouted, groping about with her rough, meaty hands unt
il she gripped the boy by the shirt, “that you think you’re too big for your pants now.”
Andrius looked down at his pants. They were loose. He had been losing weight from skipped meals.
She shook him by the shirt, and Andrius felt a heaviness come over him. It was happening again. He didn’t want this anymore. He still had bruises from the last time, and he was very afraid.
“Dear, I think that Andrius is a—”
“Shut up!” she screamed, louder this time. Her face shriveled up in a rotten grimace as she tightened her hold on her stepson. “You sack of manure. You trip into someone who happens to be committing a crime, and I bet you think you’re some kind of hero now.” She rattled him. “Don’t you?”
“No . . .” Andrius tried to protest. His lip quivered uncontrollably and he felt tears on the way.
“You accidentally do one thing right for once in your life,” she yelled, “and now you’ve got this big head. Look at you, you teach classes. Look at you, you have another sense.” She slapped him across his face, hard. The sting spread from where she hit him to the rest of Andrius’s face.
Aleksandras wasn’t preparing dinner anymore.
“Daiva.”
“You’re worthless. Worthless! I wish you would have died that day in the cold. I swear I do. When you were little—”
Aleksandras laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Daiva, is this really necessary?”
She didn’t waste any time swinging at Aleksandras with her free hand. It was a wild punch, but it connected with his nose, and Andrius heard the crack. The old man staggered backward, hitting the counter and holding his face in his hands. Blood was seeping through the gaps in his fingers within moments.
Daiva did not calm down. She hit Andrius again.
“When you were little I thought about killing you while Aleksandras was out with his cows. I thought I should just lay on you and crush you, or smother your little lungs, or poke your eyes out.”
She hit him again, in the stomach this time. Andrius mumbled.
“What?” she cried. She slapped him across his face. “Speak up, boy!”
For Whom the Sun Sings Page 11
