He felt some measure of guilty pleasure at the thought of the words eyes in her head. The Innocent had no eyes, in more ways than one. She was nothing more than a wicked old woman wreaking revenge on men. It had probably been a man who had blinded her.
What of the male druids who served her? he wondered. Had they, too, submitted to this humiliation? Were they so spineless that they believed torture was the way to enlightenment? Or were they the sort who enjoyed abuse?
He crawled to the entrance of the mound. Like a mole, he thought, or a beaten dog. His legs were like dead weights. Well, he would force them to stand when he got out. He would walk out of this nightmare with the dignity of a man. The world outside was waiting for him. It hadn't changed.
Nor have I.
The thought occurred to him just as his hand reached the entranceway. It was night outside, but lit by a full moon. He turned his arm back and forth slowly, watching the play of moonlight on his filthy skin.
It was hard to think. His mind had become undisciplined in the hole where he had allowed himself to degenerate into the creature he had become.
"The dignity of a man," he repeated aloud. He had no dignity. She had taken it away from him. She, the blind bat who had sent him to this torture. She, who had made him crawl for so long that he had lost the use of his legs.
Taliesin shook his head. His legs... It wasn't about his legs, really. He did not need legs to possess dignity, any more than the Innocent needed sight.
He had been told to live in the earth, but not in squalor. His books had been removed, but no one had told him not to think. He had been prohibited from playing music, but not from hearing it in his soul.
And yet he had done none of those things. He had changed nothing about himself to adapt to what was, but had merely waited and railed and wished for what was to become something else.
The Innocent had done nothing to harm him, Taliesin realized: He himself, alone, had possessed the power to make him something less than a human being.
And he alone could make him something more.
He went back into the darkness, to the stinking chamber pot that crawled with maggots, and brought it into the tunnel. When he came back into the mound, he reached up to its roof with tentative fingers. He had been told to remain inside, he realized, but he had never been forbidden to change the mound itself.
"The darkness," he croaked, scratching furiously at the hard-packed earth. "I never had to accept the darkness."
His heart racing, he picked up a rock and dug faster, laughing as clods of soil fell onto his upturned face. When he finally broke through to the surface, he gasped at the feel of the cold air on his hands, the welcome stretch in his spine. Taliesin wiggled his fingers, feeling as if they were the fragile stems of some new plant, pale shoots growing between blades of grass.
And I am their root, he thought.
Between his fingers shone a single star. He cupped his palms around it. "Thank you," he whispered. "Gods of my spirit, gods of the earth and the universe, thank you for giving me so much."
With some turf he scrubbed his body until it smelled of green grass. When his meal came, he used the water to wash his face and hands. He placed the bread outside, as an offering to the gods. Then he closed his eyes and listened to the music of his mind.
It was exquisite, the song of his first night on earth. And when the moon passed over his tiny window above his head, anointing him with silver light, his song blended with the distant druids' moon reverence to create a music more moving and lovely than he had ever dreamed could exist.
Later, at the most silent hour of the night, it began to snow. It fell lightly over Taliesin, making a circle around the place where he sat. He opened his mouth to taste the perfect crystals on his tongue, and rejoiced to feel their coldness. He filled his lungs with healing air, then sang the song his spirit had created, the wild, perfect melody that captured all the joy and wonder that he felt surging through him like liquid light.
As the music poured out of him, the snowflakes seemed to change into stars that fell from the sky in a glittering column, descending into his very essence. He gasped, feeling the pillar of starfire alight inside him, filling him, burning him pure. His hair stood on end; his fingernails melted. He felt himself shrinking, shriveling, drying to white ash. Then, cell by cell, he felt himself growing again, becoming someone he had never known. Not Taliesin, although he would use the name for all his life on earth, but someone—something—utterly different, a creature made of snow and moonlight and filled with music.
He cried out once in happiness, then wept, conscious of every joyful tear.
"What were your faults?" the Innocent asked gently when morning came.
Sunlight streamed from the hole in the turf above Taliesin to bathe him in warmth. It spilled over onto the old woman, who crouched in front of him like a wolf on its haunches.
"My ingratitude, Master," Taliesin answered, "to receive the gift of growth without appreciating it. My arrogance, to think I did not need the things of the spirit. My foolishness, to believe I needed anything else."
The Innocent turned her face toward the opening in the roof.
"My torpor, in not trying to reach the gods, though they were waiting always to help me." He turned his open palms up into the shaft of sunlight. "It took so little effort to bring this light."
"And so much to live in the darkness." the Innocent said.
Chapter Seventeen
The ship bearing Taliesin and his two wards docked at the Port of New York the next day.
They were awakened by the jostling of the ship and shouting from outside. The old man sat bolt upright. Arthur was a few feet away, rubbing his eyes.
"Where's Beatrice?"
The boy looked around. "She was—"
"I'm right here," Beatrice answered. And she was, right on the pallet of blankets where she had gone to sleep the night before.
"That's funny. I didn't even see you," Arthur said.
Few would have, Taliesin thought. He alone had noticed the almost imperceptible shift the girl had made from perfect stillness to waking vibrancy.
"Arthur, listen to me," he whispered. "When the hold is opened, you must find a way to slip out unobserved. It won't be difficult—the crates the stevedores will be unloading are large, and they won't be expecting to see anyone."
"Then what? Once I'm out, someone's bound to see me.”
"Just pretend you've wandered onto the docks by accident. Say you were looking for someone. You're a child with an American accent—they may accept your story. If not, try to make a run for it. We'll meet you in front of whichever building is closest to this place."
"What about you?" Arthur asked, alarmed. "And Beatrice?"
"We'll be all right. Now get behind that box near the hatch. When they move it out, stay behind it."
Arthur nodded, then made his way toward the cargo near the hatch.
"Now you," Taliesin said to Beatrice. "Help me move these blankets and things into a corner where they won't be spotted for a while."
She obeyed, bundling up the candles and food they had removed from the galley inside a sheet. "But Mr. Taliesin," she whispered. "What shall we do when the stevedores come?"
"We, my dear," he said with a smile, "shall become invisible."
Beatrice looked at him dubiously. "Invisible?"
"Come, now, you just did it. The stillness, girl. The way we did in Mona."
"What's Mona?"
"What's… but we talked all about it!" he sputtered. "Almost all last night..."
"But you were asleep when I went to bed." Her expression revealed nothing but bewilderment.
"Asleep? Oh, never mind. Go with Arthur. Where's the cup?"
"Arthur's got it." She headed for the hatch, but after a few feet she turned around to face him. "Are you sure you'll be all right, Mr. Taliesin?"
"Of course I will! It's you I'm worried about. Just keep quiet. Let Arthur talk." He shooed her away.
When the hatch opened, the two children scrambled out like crabs behind the first big box onto the dock.
"Hey, what are you kids doing here?" an angry voice shouted.
There was a long pause. "Go on, Arthur, talk!" Taliesin goaded in a whisper from inside the hold.
"We're looking for our dad," Arthur said with just the right touch of street toughness.
"Yeah? What's his name?"
"Art Blessing."
"Blessing? Don't know him. He union?"
"Naah. He don't work much. But we already checked the bars."
"Good," Taliesin murmured. "Very good, boy."
"We don't use nobody outside the union here. How'd you get in?"
"Fence. No big deal."
"Well, you could be arrested for being here. So blast off unless you want to be in big trouble."
The fence, Taliesin thought as he heard their running footsteps. He would look for a fence.
Just then two men walked into the hold of the ship, and Taliesin willed himself to stillness. He slowed his breathing until the very air around him quieted. He made his heart beat so slowly that a physician would have declared him dead. His senses, too, shut down one by one, to be replaced by a different means of perception: Instead of vision, Taliesin recognized the solid objects around him by the movement of their molecules and their displacement of space. He shrank the aura surrounding him, that emanating band of vitality that signals one's presence as surely as a shout, so that he became as outwardly lifeless as a rock. Then, with his new spirit's eyes, he moved past the men.
They were no more than energy forms to him now, their speech and laughter explosions of color that Taliesin felt throughout his body. Outside, the gentle water at the docks gave off the tremendous power of the ocean's hidden life. The concrete beneath his feet shone with the slow, eternal vibrations of its component minerals. Far in the distance, past the heavy, squat buildings guarding the dock like sentinels, a line of trees breathed the joyous essence of wood and green leaves. And beyond them, hundreds of miles past the streets and automobiles and the jagged yellow lines of electricity and the millions of human beings throbbing with life inside their sturdy cement walls, were ancient low mountains.
He could see everything.
Arthur and Beatrice, their unique energies as familiar to Taliesin as his own, were climbing over a chain-link fence that gave off the spirit-scents of iron and aluminum. As he approached, the two forms leaped to the ground in a cloud of exhilaration.
Taliesin remembered his first day on Mona, when he had appeared as just such a form to the invisible druids who had watched him with their inner vision.
No more nor less than a blade of grass or a star, he thought as he melded himself with the fence and moved through it to the other side.
"You are no more nor less than a blade of grass or a star." The Innocent walked beside him through a field of flowers. "All being is eternal, and part of All That Is. Understand this, and in time you shall harness the power of the universe." She disappeared before his eyes.
When she reappeared a moment later, it was on a hilltop miles away.
"How can you transport yourself like that?" Taliesin asked when he caught up. "It is impossible, against the laws of nature."
The Innocent laughed. "Which laws are those? The same ones that insist the earth is flat? Or the laws announcing that the sun moves around the earth?"
Taliesin had been studying the night sky from the druids' standing stones, and knew that neither assumption was true, even though they were so accepted in the world that any word to the contrary was punishable by death. So the druids kept this knowledge to themselves, just as they kept their knowledge about foretelling the future and calling up magic. A gigantic observatory at Stonehenge had been standing for millennia so that men could see for themselves the truth about their planet's place among the stars, but even that had had no effect on mankind's perceptions of the "laws of nature."
"It is not the same," he said. "In the observatory, I can see with my own eyes that the earth revolves around the sun."
“But even the most ignorant herder has seen the sun rise and set. To him—and to the mass of men—that is indisputable proof that the earth is the center of the universe, and that our arcane observations are false."
"Are you saying that what you did was a trick? That there is no such thing as truth at all. But only perception?"
The Innocent smiled. "Oh, there is truth, to be sure. But it lies only in the things that cannot be perceived." She walked to a boulder that stood taller than she, then disappeared inside it and emerged out the far side.
"You walked through solid rock!" Taliesin whispered in amazement. "How is that done?"
She made a dismissive gesture.
"How did you walk through the rock?" Taliesin shouted. "You must tell me!"
"I can tell you, but my words will not help you. To make magic, you must not think, but become."
"Become what?"
The old woman put her hand over his heart. "Become a blade of grass," she said. "Or a star."
"Where'd you come from?" Arthur asked, startled at the sight of the old man at the fence beside him.
"The ship, naturally," Taliesin said. "And now we must find a place to stay, if we ever expect Hal to find us."
"Hal?" Arthur's fingers gripped the wire of the fence. "Hal's alive?"
"Heavens, yes. Didn't you know?"
Arthur fought down his irritation. "No," he said. "I didn't. And you didn't tell me."
"I did," Beatrice said softly.
"Well, no matter, eh?" the old man said heartily. "All's well that ends well."
"Where is he?"
"Who, Hal? He's on his way. Needn't worry about him. What we've got to find now is a room, preferably with a bath that isn't down the hall—Oh..." A soft pop sounded from somewhere nearby. The old man fell to the ground.
"Taliesin!" Beatrice shrieked, kneeling beside him. "Oh, God, Arthur!" She held up her hands. They were soaked with the old man's blood.
Arthur fumbled to get the cup out of the pocket of his jeans. With shaking hands he placed it over Taliesin's bloody chest.
Across the street, a man with blond hair got out of a battered blue van and ran toward them. "Someone's coming," Beatrice whispered.
"See if you can keep him away. I don't want to have to explain this."
Beatrice stood up, prepared to intercept the stranger. "He's all right," she shouted. "It was just..." Then she screamed.
Arthur looked up. The blond man lunged at Beatrice.
Grabbing a handful of her hair, he dragged her behind him as he moved toward the fence.
"Bea!" Arthur left the cup with Taliesin and ran toward the attacker. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed that the street was empty. There were no police here, not a soul except himself to hear Beatrice's screams.
At that moment, the doors of the Port Authority building swung open and two young people holding flowers spilled out, chattering and laughing. Their merriment died away abruptly as they took in the sight of a man who was obviously trying to abduct a child.
The man saw them as well. He hesitated for the briefest moment—long enough for Arthur to take a flying leap at him, and for the passersby to drop their flowers and stampede toward them in a rage.
"Let go of her, you creep!" shouted the woman, running toward them in a sprint. She wore her hair in braids that streamed out from her head like serpents. In a single motion, she unshouldered a huge backpack and smacked the blond man across the face with it.
As he reeled away from the blow, a skinny young man still bearing the marks of teenage acne gently untangled the blond man's fingers from Beatrice's hair. "This is your soul, man, don't you get it?" he asked earnestly. The blond man kicked him in the groin.
"Bad karma," the skinny man wheezed as the girl picked up a rock and threw it like a hardball into the assailant's forehead.
Blood flooded the blond man's face. He shoved Beatrice away from him and fled b
ack to the blue van.
"Get the license number!" the woman with the braids shrilled.
"Got it," grunted her companion, wincing as he pulled himself to his feet.
Arthur jogged back to Taliesin, who was pulling himself up to a sitting position beside the fence. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes," the old man said dazedly. "Yes, I think so, although I'm not quite sure what happened." He picked up the cup which had rolled into his lap, and slipped it into the sleeve of his shirt.
"It was just a mugger, I guess," Arthur said. "But why would he mug us? We look like bums."
Taliesin rose to his feet. "A mugger? I think not."
"What do you mean? The guy in Tangier? That wasn't him. I remember his face."
"So do I. I also remember the dock workers shouting that the ship we were stowed away on was headed for New York. This chap was expecting us, Arthur."
Beatrice ran into Taliesin's arms, sobbing. Behind her were the two people who had helped to turn her attacker away. "There, there, child," the old man said with a smile as he enfolded her in his arms. "No harm seems to have come to either of us."
"You've been hurt!" the braided woman gasped, seeing the blood on Taliesin's shirt. "We've got to call an ambulance. There's blood all over you."
"It's quite all right, miss," Taliesin said, doing his best to cover the red stains that covered his entire torso. "The wound was no more than a graze, I assure you."
"A graze? I'm sorry, but I was a medic in the Peace Corps. A graze doesn't bleed like that." She swooped at him like a vulture and yanked open his shirt. Frowning, she explored the old man's unbroken skin. "There's no wound," she said in amazement. Slowly, she looked up into Taliesin's face.
"Maybe he was hit someplace else," her friend said, limping past her to take a look at Taliesin. "Is your head okay?" he asked. "Kate's right, you know. We should get you to a hospital. Or do you want to talk to the cops first?"
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