The Birth of a new moon

by Laurie R. King

  The artificial controls were beyond her reach here, but she certainly seemed to be in the right place for hard work.

  She reached the end of the room and carried the last dustpan load to the garbage can, then hung up the broom and pan where she had found them, retrieved her shoes and the loathsome hat from the mud room, and went outside to find her informant in the walled garden.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  From the journal of Anne Waverly (aka Ana Wakefield)

  Sara was in the greenhouse, rearranging flats of seedlings. Ana greeted her and looked over her shoulder at the plants.

  "Broccoli?"

  "Cabbage," Sara corrected her. "But close—they're hard to tell apart when they have only four leaves."

  "Boy, I love these greenhouses. They look like something out of Kew Gardens."

  "Aren't they beautiful? It took months to rebuild them, apparently, they were in such terrible shape. Now they look like a place you should hold a garden party. Here's a trowel. You'll find some gloves in the wardrobe over there."

  Ana had noticed the object, a tall mahogany clothes closet more suitable for a cool bedroom than this hot, humid atmosphere. She wrenched open the doors with some effort and rummaged through the heap of mismatched gloves until she found two that fit and had a minimum of holes. Then she took up the trowel and a flat, and followed Sara out to the bed that had been set aside for the young cabbage plants.

  "What a luxury to have the ground already prepared. And what gorgeous soil."

  "We dug it over yesterday and let it rest. And yes, that's what soil looks like after five generations of care. Do you want a kneeling pad? I don't know about you, but I can't squat for two hours like I used to."

  Ana didn't think she had ever been able to squat for two minutes, let alone hours, and accepted the offer of a peeling slab of thick, closed-cell foam rubber. She gingerly lowered herself onto her right knee and prepared to follow Sara's lead in planting.

  For twenty minutes or more, the only sounds were the gentle, soul-satisfying noises of trowel parting rich earth and then tapping it down again. Marc Bennett faded in her mind, Martin Cranmer might have been a thousand years ago, but eventually, reluctantly, Ana stirred herself to work around to the questions that had brought her out there.

  "Have you always been a gardener, Sara? Or just since you came here?"

  "Oh, I always had at least a patch of potatoes and lettuces, even when I lived in the city."

  "Was that London?"

  "York. You know it?"

  "I've been to the cathedral."

  "York Minster."

  "That's right. And that area around it with all the narrow alleyways. It has some funny name."

  "The Shambles?"

  That's right, the Shambles. York's a beautiful town. Do you have family there?"

  "My ex-husband and daughter are probably still there."

  "You're not sure?"

  "It's been four years. Two since I heard from them, when there were some papers to sign."

  "You haven't seen your daughter in four years?"

  "Thereabouts. I think maybe come autumn I'll go outside and look her up."

  Ana glanced at her, but couldn't see Sara's face behind the brim of the floppy straw hat.

  "You like it here, then?" she asked.

  "It's where I need to be," said Sara, which didn't exactly answer the question. "I am growing and fulfilling myself in a way I never could outside. That's worth the ache of not seeing my child."

  "I just asked because it seems, I don't know, tense here somehow. Like there's a lot going on that people are worried about."

  "That's always the case. But you're right, it's not an easy time for you newcomers to fit in. We're going through a difficult time with the Social Services—the people who oversee the schooling and welfare of our children. One of the boys who left earlier this year, poor misguided soul, is trying to get back at his wife by making her choose between her life here and her children. It's one thing to enter into it fully like I did with a nearly grown child, and quite another to be torn apart. A very difficult time all around," she repeated. She had briskly planted the last of her seedlings in neat rows, and got up to go to the greenhouse for another flat. Ana worked more slowly, and with less tidy results. The natural look, she told herself.

  When Sara came back, Ana maneuvered the talk around to Marc Bennett, giving Sara a shortened version of what had happened between them in the dining hall. Sara shook her head.

  "He means well, love, but even he feels the sort of pressure he's under. He hasn't been here even as long as me, you know, and it's a big responsibility he's taken on. Hardly surprising he's a bit techy, times. I know that "great heat makes for great growth", but Marc's not had all that much time to prepare himself for it. Jonas just saw him standing there and dumped it all on him."

  Ana was astonished at Sara's loose tongue, under the influence of common labor and the warm sun, but she was more than willing to take advantage of it.

  "Why? Who was doing all the work before Marc?"

  "A lovely woman name of Samantha, called herself Sami with an I. She'd been here forever, far as I know, and then she upped and left."

  Ah, thought Ana, at last, a trace of the elusive Samantha Dooley, whose main characteristic seemed to be her ability to slip away—from her family and Harvard University to India, from Pune to England, from Change to the women's community in Toronto. "Really? Why did she leave?"

  "Ask ten people, you'll hear eleven stories, as my grandmother used to say. I do know that she and Jonas were having a lot of disagreements. About his Work, mostly. We were having a spell of difficulties with the county council around then, a building permit they were holding back or some such nonsense. Sami wanted Jonas to deal with some of the inspectors; he just said he had his Work to do and to let him be. There was a load of other stuff, I'm sure, but as far as I remember, that was the final straw for her. A few weeks later we woke up one morning and she was gone, she and a couple of other women who'd been here for a year or two."

  That seemed pretty much a dead end, unless Sara had stood with her ear to the door during Sami's final conversations with Jonas, and a few more casual questions established that no, Sara knew nothing other than what she had already said. Ana had to move away from the topic before Sara began to wonder at all her interest in a woman she had never met. "And when she left, Jonas gave all her responsibilities to Marc. That was when?"

  "Oh, last autumn. After the main harvest, before the frosts. October, maybe?"

  "Jonas sounds like a real character."

  "You haven't met him yet? Oh dear, I probably shouldn't be talking to you about any of this. You're not really one of us until you've talked to Jonas."

  "Shouldn't you? Oh. Well, all right, but I'm not exactly new to Change. I've been in Arizona for a while, and Steven himself sent me here."

  "That Steven's such a pleasant man. I don't think I'd mind too much if I was sent to Arizona, if it wasn't so terribly hot there."

  Ana wiped the sweat off her forehead with the side of her glove and shoved her hat onto the back of her head. "Actually, it was cooler there when I left than it is here. It's up in the hills, so it doesn't get quite as hot as the lower desert. A very different kind of gardening, though, because of the shortage of water. Sparse, but beautiful. You'd like it, I think."

  "Do you? I'll consider it."

  "Jonas is Steven's teacher, too, isn't he? That's why Steven comes here so often. He must be terribly… wise,"

  "Wise?" For the first time in their conversation, Sara paused in her quick, methodical actions, a tiny root ball cradled in one hand and the trowel in the other while she considered this description. "I suppose he must be. Most of the time he just seems, I don't know. Unreachable, maybe. Like he's so far above most people, he doesn't really see us. I mean it—Jonas seems to look straight through you, unless you happen to say or do something that catches his attention, or his imagination. When I first came here, it bothere
d me. I mean, it seemed a bit rude. I talked to Sami about it one day, and she said it wasn't rudeness, when he ignored you or said something that was kind of insulting; it was like a jolt he'd give you, to help you with your Work. Do you know anything about Zen Buddhism?" she asked unexpectedly, returning to her planting.

  "A little."

  "Well, you know how there were Zen masters who used to slap their students or clout them over the head with their staffs, and then the students would enter a state of satori?" Ana nodded, fascinated by this new side of Sara. "It's kind of like that."

  "You mean Jonas hits people?"

  "No, no, no. Oh, well, I suppose he does, times, but not very often. Only when someone is being particularly blocked by their mind's assumptions."

  This sounded like a lesson learned—painfully, perhaps, taught by the flat of Jonas's hand? Ana thoughtfully dropped the last two plants into their holes and tamped the soil down, and as she went for a second flat, she made a mental note not to turn her back on Jonas if he approached her with a walking stick in his hand.

  Sara helped her set out the last of the four flats of cabbages, and then they took two watering cans from the shed next to the greenhouse, filled them at the tap next to the house, and hauled them back and forth to water in the new roots. Apparently, English gardens did not have what Sara called hose-pipes, but relied on rain or muscle. At least, this one did.

  They hauled water until Ana's shoulders burned, Sara making three trips for Ana's two, but finally she was satisfied, and the two of them stood looking at their handiwork, dozens of small, spindly green plants lying limply on the damp earth.

  "They'll pick up by tomorrow," Sara predicted cheerfully. "And they'll keep us in soup all winter."

  "Do you ever use vitamin B12 to keep them from transplant shock?"

  "Never anything but clear water and the earth they're put down in."

  "You don't fertilize them?"

  Sara turned to her, surprised. "Oh, no. This is an organic garden. The only things we use are Bacillus thuringus and sometimes a bit of oil spray when the whitefly gets too thick."

  It was Ana's turn to be surprised. She would have sworn that Glen's information included a high use of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the British Change compound. Or was that the Boston group? Damnation.

  Sara gathered up the flats and put them to soak for their next use. They then began to clear out the side of the greenhouse that had nurtured the numerous varieties of plants now growing outside, stripping the growing benches of plant stakes, shards of broken pot, empty seed packets, and all the rest of the debris. It was not the time of day Ana would have chosen to work inside a glass house under the blazing sun, but when she mentioned the possibility of doing the job the next day while the sun was still low, Sara looked at her without comprehension and said she had something else planned for the morning. Ana shrugged, and sweated, and finished the job without complaining.

  Afterward, the water that gushed from the tap was deliriously cool and sweet. And then they weeded for a while—in the shady areas—until it was time to pull some lettuces and wash the grit from them. As Ana carried the rich armful into the kitchen, she reflected that her afternoon in the garden had borne some thought-provoking fruit.

  Perhaps it was only that Ana had spent the afternoon with her hands in the earth and her ears soothed by Sara's easy accents, but the kitchen staff seemed even more irritable than it had that morning, with pans slapped down smartly and very little of the usual boisterous conversation that kitchen work often gives rise to. Later in the dining hall, she found the same state. Unidentifiable currents and tensions ran through the room.

  Not that people were openly irritable with each other; it might have been better if they were. Instead, they seemed grimly determined to remain calm. Residents presented one another with taut smiles, edged away when another person sat down too close, and listened politely with faraway gazes.

  Even the children seemed either listless or fractious, with two separate incidents of tears before the meal was over.

  Toward the end of the meal Marc Bennett presented himself at the door and waited for silence.

  "I need you all to be sure you know where the torches are on each floor." Ana was struck by a brief, bizarre image of flaming brands stuck into holders on the wallpapered hallways until her internal dictionary reminded her that "torch" was simply English for flashlight. "The local utilities today informed us that as we may not be working to code, they may cut off our power. It is simply further harassment, and if it does happen, I am sure we will all use it to drive us a step further along on our Work. I am merely telling you so there will not be any panic as there was the last time the power went out."

  He nodded and left, and behind him rose up a murmur of dismay and annoyance tempered by a surprising amount of philosophical acceptance. Another thing to remember, Ana thought: have someone point out the caches of flashlights.

  After she had cleared her dishes she looked around for Jason and Dulcie, and found them sitting with three or four other teenagers. Jason was deep in conversation: Dulcie looked bored and truculent. Ana went over and sat down beside her.

  "Hola, Dulcinea. Did you enjoy your apple crumble? I helped make it."

  The child nodded, and Ana wondered if her former silence was returning, but then she elaborated grudgingly, "It would've been better with ice cream on top."

  "I know. Oh well. Hey, I have to go help with the dishes, but afterward I wonder if you'd like me to read you a story?"

  Dulcie nodded, animation seeping back into her face.

  "Great," Ana said. "How about you come to the kitchen and save me from the dishwashing after you've had your bath and brushed your teeth? Is that okay, Jason?" she said, turning to face him. He looked up at her blankly, having obviously not heard a word she had said before his name.

  "What?"

  "Can you bring Dulcie down to the kitchen when she's ready for bed and I'll read her a couple of books?"

  "Sure. No problem." He went back to his conversation and Ana studied him for a moment. The hardness was leaving his face, dropping years as it went. The tough, sexy street kid she had met was now visible only in the edges of his face and the angle of his head. He had put on a little weight, true, but that was not the only reason that the harsh lines of his face had softened. Unlikely as it might be, here, yanked from his native land and set down among strangers, he had already made friends. Here he was free to be a different person.

  Ana looked away before he could catch her staring at him, and smiled a bit sadly at Dulcie.

  "See you in a bit, okay, Sancho? Bring me a couple of good books."

  Two books translated into four, and after Ana had suggested that Jason come back in twenty minutes or so, they settled down in a comfortable armchair that smelled of dogs in a small room off the kitchen, a space Ana thought might originally have been the butler's domain. Dulcie was warm from her bath and tired from the long day and the time change and the turmoil, and she fell asleep in Ana's arms halfway through a book she had found about a tribe of mice who lived in a church and earned their keep polishing the brasses. Ana finished reading the book silently, then settled back in the chair and was nearly asleep herself when Jason returned for his sister.

  "Hey," she greeted him.

  "She fell asleep, huh? Thought she might. Sorry,"

  "Why be sorry? Sit down. So, what do you think of the place?"

  "It's okay,"

  Ana grinned at him, and, slowly, he returned it. "I mean, it really is okay. That Bennett guy's a—" He stopped and glanced around guiltily. "You know, he's not real friendly, but some of the kids are pretty cool, and Jonas is great,"

  "You've met Jonas?"

  "Oh, yeah. I spent most of the afternoon with him,"

  "Doing what?" She hoped she didn't sound as startled as she felt.

  "Oh, just talking,"

  "Talking? About what?"

  "Just stuff. My family, how I grew up, the neighborhoods I l
ived in, things like that,"

  (Was that a twinge of jealousy she felt, that Jason should confide so freely to a stranger?)

  "You know, it's true," the boy went on with a note of discovery in his voice. "It does help sometimes to talk to people about things. Problems and stuff. It makes things clearer, you know?"

  "I know," she said, and bent her head to look at Dulcie and hide the twisted smile she could feel on her lips. (Yes, no doubt about it; it was jealousy.) "Have you noticed that our names are the same?" Jason asked suddenly. "Jason, Jonas—they're just turned around,"

  "Did Jonas point that out?"

  "Yeah. He has a funny way of looking at things. Original, like. He'll go all quiet for a while and then he'll say something really off the wall. Sometimes I could sort of understand what he meant, but most of the time I really couldn't. I mean, you know how you sort of laugh when someone tells a joke you don't get? Well, I did that a couple of times and I think it kind of pissed him off, because the second time he just stood up and kind of waved his hand like he was brushing me off, and then he walked away.

  "I was kind of worried, you know, in case I'd done something wrong, but I asked a couple of people and they said it was no big thing, Jonas was like that. It's like his brain gets full and he has to go think about things for a while,"

  "I see,"

  Dulcie stirred then, and Jason took her limp body up in his arms and said good night. Ana responded automatically, but for once she was not thinking about them. She was too preoccupied with Jonas Seraph, the distant figure around whom this tense little community turned.

  The dynamics of the community were not at all what she had been led to believe, although she had to admit that was because of her own assumptions and expectations, not due to any overt flaw in Glen's information. She had expected Jonas to be dynamic and involved; instead, he was playing the role of the distracted alchemist buried in his thoughts and in his laboratory, and it appeared that Change had been given much of its shape, not by Jonas or even by Steven Change, but by the now-departed Samantha Dooley. Samantha, vanished with her two friends into the women's community in Toronto, where no doubt her intense interest in growing things, in transforming the earth to cabbages and winter soups, was being given free rein. The information on Change had all been there from the beginning, but like an iceberg, the reality changed beneath the surface.