The Golden Thread

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  This made a little bubble of laughter deep in my mind somewhere. Right away I felt my deer shape drifting and leaning, as if it were coming loose from an outline that had been drawn to hold it in. I felt shaky and feverish.

  If only I could unhitch the last little hooks of my consciousness and float away from the staggering deer-Val before Bosanka set her dogs on us!

  Not yet, apparently: first, she had a speech to make.

  “Now,” she said, “you do what I say. You make your committee, you send your signal of light. Then, if we wish it, my people and me, we will hunt you together, to the kill.”

  We all crowded close, leaning on each other—oh, the sound of our lungs laboring, the sharp tang of our terror, the flash of our despairing eyes!

  I was the one with the magic grandmother. I was the one the others had followed here. And I was the one who was not going to be chased any more by Bosanka, a bunch of panting mutts, and a snuffly little Pekingese.

  I turned and made a last-ditch, galumphing dash for the end of the bluff. There I dug in my hooves and more or less threw myself out over the sea. Falling, I heard the hoofbeats of the others running to leap after me, and—so gratifying—Bosanka’s startled yell.

  We’re dead, I thought as I smashed down through a great weight of icy, inky water. I saw stars and thought, I’m drowning, as my chest began to strain and my sight grew prickly and dim.

  And then something big surged up from below and booted me rudely to the surface.

  I broke through the water gasping and choking, a human being again. Hands grabbed at me, people pulled me bruisingly over the side into a boat. “A ship a-sailing, a-sailing with the wind”—good old Mother Goose!

  These people who were tugging at me and manhandling me up out of the water swore and gasped and urged each other on in voices that I knew: Peter. Joel. Tamsin.

  I flopped down on the wet, chilly bottom of the boat. Nobody paid me any further attention. They were busy hauling somebody else in from the water. I stared at the sky. What I had thought with my deer vision to be the sun was in fact the full moon. Bosanka had hunted us through the day to the moonlit Saturday night that she herself had appointed for her personal meeting of the Comet Committee.

  They put the next rescuee further up front in the boat, and then Lennie hove up over the side and nearly fell on me, dripping and blowing and burbling exultantly, “Did you see them? It’s dolphins, I can’t believe it, they held Barb and me up in the water until you came! God!”

  He hugged me hard and I hugged him squelchily back. He was sleek and soaking, like a dolphin himself. “Are you okay, Valentine? You’re all right, aren’t you?”

  I was. It was as if the icy plunge had washed all through me and flooded out all the panic and exhaustion of the hunt in one shocking rush. My hair and clothes were already drying in a warm breeze that blew out of the clear night sky. I sat up and looked around.

  We were in an old wooden boat coated with layers and layers of scarred paint, like the boats you rent at the rowboat lake in Central Park. But we were not in Central Park.

  We floated on a wide, moon-sparkling sea. I couldn’t see a sign of land, any wink of man-made light, or the shadow of another boat anywhere.

  No one spoke. We coasted quietly up the back of one long swell and down another. The water made small lip-smacking noises around us. Little flips of foam popped off the crests of the swells or curled like lacy fans down their backs. This was deep, open water if ever I saw it, mysterious, dangerous, and beautiful under the moonlight.

  Here we were bobbing lazily around in a park rowboat in the middle of the night on what appeared to be something on the order of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Oh my God!” I said. “Where are we?”

  Peter croaked, “Look up there. Those are the stars of the southern hemisphere.”

  I tried to take stock of our situation. I mean, you have to start coping somewhere, no matter how crazy things are, right?

  Up on the single seat at the prow of the boat, Joel crouched facing forward, away from the rest of us. Barb hunched in the bottom between him and the next seat down, swearing foully between coughing fits. On the next seat, Peter was trying to explain to Mimi, who sat next to him, how to work the oars to help steady the boat, though we obviously weren’t going to row anyplace in particular.

  On the widest seat, in front of me, Lennie had settled next to his sister. He craned his neck to see over the sides of the boat, watching for dolphins. Tamsin leaned against him and massaged the muscles of her calves with both hands.

  Then there was me, on the bottom. So there we were, the whole Comet Committee, all human-shaped again, and in the same boat.

  And in the stern, gripping the edge of the last seat, was Bosanka Lonatz.

  “Bosanka?” I said stupidly. “What are you doing here?”

  “You ask that!” Seawater dripped from her hair, and her teeth chattered audibly even though the night was warm. “You did a trick on me! I have no place here. Hunting the sea is for the Lords of the Waters. You never told that you were one!”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I’m not like you, I’m not a lord of anything.”

  But Bosanka was afraid, and she was right to be afraid. We weren’t in her foggy forest or her dead world now, but on the open sea of Earth.

  “Now what, you kill me?” she said harshly.

  “Don’t worry,” Peter said. “We’d like to, but nobody’s got the guts.”

  “It’s too late,” Barb groaned, hunching over her camera, which was hanging from her neck on its strap. “My Leica’s ruined, and it’s her fault!”

  “What’s the matter with you people?” Lennie bubbled joyfully. “We’ve got help here, the best kind of help! Don’t you realize we just had our lives saved by dolphins?”

  “That thing bumping me in the water?” Bosanka’s broad shoulders shrank in a kind of cringe. “Was it ‘dolphin’?”

  “Had to be,” Lennie said happily. “There are stories of them saving drowning people. Where’d they go? Can anybody see them?”

  Tamsin grabbed his arm. “Quit leaning out like that, you’ll tip us over!”

  A little moan of terror escaped from Bosanka. I was not above being delighted to hear it.

  Something in the atmosphere began to move, stirring around us like wind. A change was coming. My skin prickled and my blood zinged. This is it, I thought. This is what my silver wish bought for me, the freedom to be here, tonight, for this—whatever it is.

  The boat slapped down in a trough of water, and something slid out from under the stern thwart and bumped my leg: a violin case, of course. My heart gave a thump like a war drum.

  Destroy Paavo’s violin? Of course not! That was a coward’s way, a baby’s way. There was a better choice, if we were brave enough. We floated on a sea of our own world’s magic now. It was time to trust that magic and its gifts, or die trying.

  I said, “Pass this to Joel. It belongs to him.”

  Without a word they handed the case up to the prow. Joel turned to face into the boat, staring at the wet, battered fiddle-case for a long moment before he reached out and accepted it. He set it across his knees, opened the lid and lifted out the violin and bow.

  Barb took back the empty case and tucked it somewhere in the bottom of the boat, which except for the water dripping from our clothes was only medium damp. She kept the square of silk that had covered the violin strings, and began tenderly wiping off her camera with it.

  I wondered how Joel’s hands felt, how his heart felt, but I kept my mouth shut. This was his moment, not mine.

  Go for it, Joel!

  I had a strong feeling of events gathering on the edge of happening, and of there being, somehow, enough time.

  Joel lifted the instrument and tucked its wide end under his jaw. His eyes glinted as he lifted his head slightly, shooting me a defiant look down the length of the boat. I understood that look: he was petrified, but he was ready.

  I was, too.
<
br />   “Bosanka,” I said, “you asked what we’ll do to you. We’re going to answer your magic with some magic of our own. The call that began your visit here should have the power to end it.”

  Peter noisily shipped his oar, holding it across his lap like a weapon. “I say we just shove her over the side.”

  Lennie said, “Can it, Peter. We’re way past that, okay?”

  “Speak for yourself,” Peter said sullenly, but he piped down.

  How much did Bosanka understand of our situation? She didn’t give any sign that she recognized Joel from that dawn on Boston Common, or connected the violin itself with the call she had followed there. What was obvious was that she was terrified of the sea.

  She said in a whisper that I think only I heard. “Calm down, junk-boy, you get what you want. This water is my death.”

  She sat rigid, stoic now, cut off from the powers of her high-forest home and alone with us on our ocean. I didn’t know what would happen when Paavo’s magic violin was asked to speak, but I was eager to find out.

  “Joel,” I said, “play.”

  Joel sat poised there for a moment, his eyes closed, the bow raised. Then, with a flourish, he drew the bow across the untuned strings, using the instrument exactly as it was. If I put my trust in the water, he put his in that beat-up, water-logged, patched-up violin.

  What did I expect? That Paavo would walk to us on the water, or Sorcery Hall appear in the form of a Spanish galleon, or Gran’s voice sing a spell to music that would set everything right?

  I knew there would be something. I felt a force rising to meet us, and it was something grand.

  A wild, deep note skirled upward from the fiddle into a staccato squawk, at which point the water all around us erupted in flashing silver arcs.

  Lennie shouted, “The dolphins! There are the dolphins!”

  The air shivered with sounds too high to hear. Joel played on the edge of silence and over it, past the limits of human hearing.

  The great dark backs of whales broke from the water like islands made smoothly and quietly by the sea itself.

  17

  Water Music

  ALL AROUND US THEY GLISTENED in the moonlight, huge creatures spurting their noisy breath in pale geysers against the sky.

  Bosanka leaped up shrieking, “What is it, what is it?”

  I screamed back, “Sit down, sit down, you idiot!”

  A shape like a conical mountain heaved up out of the water about twenty feet away. A baseball-size eye gleamed at us from next to the corner of a mouth like the Grand Canyon turned on end.

  Bosanka flopped back down on her seat, lifting her hands defensively. “What is it?” she wailed.

  I was too breathless to speak, but I remember thinking with an edge of hysterical humor, Something bigger than a little old leaf-taker, kid.

  “Bosanka, it’s okay,” Lennie said, leaning past me, patting the air with his hands as if to calm it. “Don’t be scared.” Sleepy-eyed, easygoing Lennie quivered like a hot wire, and his eyes shone. “That’s a whale spy-hopping, that’s all—sticking his head out of the water to have a look at us.”

  Tamsin stared openmouthed, hugging her knees. Mimi reached into the water, begging, “Oh, let me pet you, come closer!” Tears sparkled on her cheeks.

  Another whale surfaced close to the other side of the boat, about ten feet from Peter.

  “Awesome,” he breathed. “Look, look! Awesome!” He jiggled around on his seat like an excited little boy.

  Barb groaned softly to herself, looking longingly out over the water, her ruined camera clutched in both hands.

  I turned back to Bosanka, feeling light-headed with excitement. But my voice came out calm. There was no need to shout over the softened sounds of the violin.

  “The whales are the biggest warm-blooded animals alive on the earth. They’re wonders to us. People save up time and money for years to go out in boats just for a chance to see them. Tonight they’ve come here to us. Why?”

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  Mimi murmured, “Who cares? God, look!”

  A formation of dolphins flew past one of the water giants like white birds past a volcano. They vanished in the water with tiny foam splashes. Two of the whales slipped quietly back under and others came up. One bunch of dolphins went wheeling away and some others swooped toward us, spraying us with feathery spume as they hit the water.

  I began to distinguish other sounds mixed in with the skittering, swooping voice of the violin: beepy, squeaky, boomy noises, in the air and in the water. The thick planking vibrated through my shoe soles.

  Bosanka wouldn’t or couldn’t answer me, but the whales and the dolphins would. If I just waited, if I could just sit quiet and not force things—there was enough time. I would understand, I would know what to do or say next. I swallowed the little surges of panic that kept spiking up into my happiness, and I waited.

  “Oh, right!” Lennie said suddenly, clapping his hands down on his knees. “Bosanka, they’re singing a message for you. They say they’re glad you came. They say it’s about time.”

  Bosanka turned a horrified stare on him. “They say? What are they to me, these things?”

  “What are they? You mean, who are they!” Lennie answered. “They’re your people, Bosanka.” He grinned. “You wanted us to find them for you, and we have.”

  I laughed, it just broke out of me—so much for Bosanka’s plan to rally “her people” around her to take over the earth!

  “No!” cried Bosanka furiously. “These are monsters!”

  Joel whipped a jaggedy yowl out of the violin, with a tremulous whine fading up at the end, out of hearing range. Somehow, I recognized this as a translation of Bosanka’s protest into another language, a language of sound and emotion instead of words.

  A great burst of clicks and peeps and squawks from the water around us followed.

  Lennie said, “I can’t make it out, they’re so—” He looked around frantically. “Can anybody—?”

  Mimi said, “You don’t hear that? I do.” She wouldn’t look at Bosanka or address her directly. “They say—she still has the kind of body they had on their old world, but these are their new forms, here on this one.”

  At long last I let go of something I hadn’t even known I’d been clenching inside me. All I could hear was a noisy racket rising from the water all around us, none of which made the slightest sense. But it was all right as long as somebody understood it. And as long as the whales and dolphins understood whatever translation of our language Joel played in sea-mammal talk, on Paavo’s violin.

  Mimi went on breathlessly. “They say, she’s a good hunter to have found them. They hoped she would. On their old world, they all had great hunting magic. They could draw pictures of their prey and make certain—certain designs, and that would force the prey to come to them to be killed, you know, for food—and also later for sport and for, um, like showing off. None of the animals could resist for long.

  “So Bosanka’s people wiped out some kinds of creatures that—well, without them the whole ecology fell apart. Everything died off, including them. Except Bosanka. They sent her off on a spirit journey, where she’d be safe until they could call her back to them.”

  Blank-faced, Bosanka looked from one of us to another.

  Three dolphins arced past an arm’s length away, breathing in explosive, sudden bursts when they broke the surface. Then they were gone again, smooth as silk, but they left the oily tang of their breath in the air.

  “My turn,” Tamsin said dreamily. “Oh, it’s so spiritual! All their bodies died, and their souls came looking for another world to live in. But they didn’t want to be a dominant species anymore, so they decided to live as sea mammals, the whales and the dolphins. Not hunters so much as hunted, not the arrogant masters of everything but at the mercy of the earth’s dominant species—us.”

  Bosanka hit her thighs with her fists. “Lies, you all lie! My people are lords of everything, the fores
t and the sky and all the creatures!”

  Joel played hard, twanging notes and got for an answer an uproar in the water.

  “That’s the point,” Tamsin said, “They were all that on their old world, and they did a very lousy job, killing off so much. So they don’t want to do it anymore. They’ve deliberately given up having hands, because of what they did when they had them—they abused the power that the works of their hands, their magic arts, gave them.

  “They invented all those spells where you set up your stones and your leaves and things, with your hands. The power they called up and directed that way made their world and everything in it do just what they wanted. That was their way of dealing with their environment, just like tools and science are our way. That was their power.

  “They say they hope that we learn the lessons of our own power, too, but better and faster than they did, so we can keep this world alive, which is more than they did with their own.” She grimaced. “They say it doesn’t look good, though. They die by the thousands because of the technology our hands have made, and they see lots of other creatures dying, too, because of us and the ways we live. But they try to stay hopeful.”

  Bosanka shouted out over the crowded water, “I am a highborn, a leader, a master among my own. If you are my people, why did you leave me?”

  The echoing cry of the violin was painful to hear. Joel played something that made me remember being little and lost at Jones Beach one time, and how it felt to be one lone speck in all that sunny, sandy space, thinking I’d been left because I’d done something wrong.

  The outburst of sea voices was softer now, more blended.

  Barb cleared her throat. “It’s like this,” she announced. “So listen, because I’m only going to say this once. They say, ‘We left you to follow, to find us, to track us, here to our new life in far-distant seas. We left you to bring us these friends with you, handed-folk, youthful and open, to carry our song home and sing to their own kind the lessons of power.’ ”

  “They hid from me,” Bosanka said, “by purpose!” She looked absolutely stricken. I knew more about how she felt at that moment than I had any wish to. Somehow Joel was playing the afternoon when I came home from grade school and Mom sat me down in the living room and said, “Honey, Daddy’s not going to be living with us anymore for a while. He’s gone away on a long trip.”