At least we have the same name, Pamina, though Mina is what I prefer, most often, to be called.
I don’t mean that my mother rules the darkness. She doesn’t, not precisely. She doesn’t make it come and go, for instance. The universe does that all on its own. It’s more that she is the guardian of the night, of the things that belong to it. She keeps them safe and in their proper place, just as my father does for the things that belong to the daylight hours.
We walked in silence for quite some time before I realized where we were going: through the thickest part of the forest to where my father’s favorite room looked out over his side of the top of the mountain. It was but a short journey, even on foot, a thing I always found surprising, showing, as I thought it did, that my parents were much closer than they cared to acknowledge. There, my mother stopped, her face turned up to where, almost at the mountain’s top, a shaft of golden light stabbed out into the darkness.
“Do you see, Mina?” she said softly. “Do you see the way your father tries to impose his will? The way he will not accept, but seeks to defeat, the darkness?”
I did see, of course. But my mind, which even moments ago had spontaneously plotted ways to displease my father and so encourage him to return me to my mother, now leaped to his defense.
But what if he just wants to read a good book? What if he’s come to the very best part and doesn’t want to stop just because the daylight has gone? Must the lighting of a lamp always be considered a crime? Do we not pull the shades to keep out strong sunlight?
Of course I did not say these things aloud. Instead I said, “Why did you ever marry in the first place?” A question to which I’d wanted the answer for as long as I could remember.
“Because it was necessary. It is still necessary,” my mother replied after a moment. “There are some things which must be in order for the world to exist, Mina. The marriage between your father and me is one.”
I bit down, hard, upon my tongue to keep from asking just one thing more, the thing which I had always wished to know the very most. It didn’t do any good. I asked the question anyway. I’m just made that way, I suppose.
“But did you never love each other?”
My mother was silent, gazing up at the light streaming out from my father’s room. Silent for so long I became all but certain she wouldn’t answer at all. Then, just as I was beginning to feel altogether wretched, she said:
“Yes, we loved each other. Once. It might even be the case that we still do. It’s been so long since I’ve thought of such things that I no longer know. But I do know your father and I have never understood one another. And without understanding—”
My mother broke off, her eyes still fixed on the light.
“Love is like water, Mina,” she continued after a moment. “Water, in all its forms. It can squeeze between your fingers like your own tears. Burn and freeze your heart at the selfsame time. It can evaporate before your very eyes in no more than an instant. Making a reservoir to hold your love is the most difficult task in all the world. You will never do it if you do not understand first yourself, and then your beloved.
“Have you heard the saying, Still waters run deep?
“Of course I have,” I said.
“But do you understand its meaning?” asked my mother. “It’s the best way I know to describe abiding love. Remember that phrase when your father marches his parade of potential husbands before you. Look for the place within, the reservoir where love may reside until it fills to overflowing. Do not be dazzled by outside appearance, for that is merely what the sun does best: It shines.”
“I will remember,” I promised.
“Good,” said my mother. Then she turned and laid her hand against my cheek. “Go inside now. Sleep, and have sweet dreams, my daughter. For tomorrow is a big day. You will be sixteen and I must take you to meet your father.”
“Yes, but will you?” I asked, intending to tease, for my mother had never gone back on her word as far as I knew. Not to me, nor to any other. I knew that she would keep her part of the bargain made at my birth, no matter what it cost her.
She laughed, but the sound was without mirth.
“Now you sound just like your father. His greatest fear all these years has been that I’ll change my mind at the very last minute, find some way to keep you all to myself.”
“He doesn’t know you very well, then,” I remarked.
“On the contrary,” a new voice said. “I know your mother very well.”
With a cry, my mother spun around, thrusting me behind her. Not that it did any good. For, in the same instant, torches flared to life all around us. As if the very ground had opened up and spewed forth fire. And so, in the space of no more than a few heartbeats, we were surrounded by my father’s soldiers.
I think my mother understood what he intended at once, though I wasn’t far behind her. There could be but one cause for this. My father intended to take me away before the appointed time.
“No,” my mother said, a statement, not a plea. “Do not do a thing you may come to regret. This is not the way, Sarastro.”
“It is the only way I can be sure,” the voice said, a voice I now recognized as my father’s. “And I’ve had almost sixteen years to think about it.”
A figure stepped forward. In one hand, it carried the largest, brightest torch of all. So bright it made my eyes water and caused my mother to muffle her face inside her cloak. My first true sight of my father was thus obscured by tears, and I learned a lesson which I never forgot:
Darkness may cover light, but that is not the same as putting it out. Whereas, to overcome darkness, all light need do is to exist.
Yet, even beaten back, my mother was not cowed.
“This is not the way, Sarastro,” she said again. “There is no need to do this, and the day may come when you will be sorry you have made this choice.”
But my father simply laughed, the sound triumphant and harsh.
“Don’t think you can threaten me with words, Pamina,” he said. “It is simple. I have won, and you have lost. It was never much of a contest in the first place, really.”
“It should never have been a contest at all.”
“Enough!” my father cried. “I will not stand around in the dark and argue with you. Instead, I will simply take my daughter and go.”
At this, I saw him give a signal, and I braced myself. I expected several soldiers to try and drag me from my mother’s side. Instead a single man stepped forward. Even through the water in my eyes, I could tell he was the most handsome man that I had ever seen. Eyes the color of lapis lazuli. Hair that shimmered in the torchlight, almost as bright a gold as mine. He extended one hand toward me, as if inviting me to dance.
“Give me your hand and come with me,” he said, “and I swear to you that your mother will not be harmed. Resist, and there is no telling what will happen.”
And, in this way, I learned a second lesson I never forgot: Beauty may still hide a treacherous heart.
“What do you take me for?” I asked, and I did not hold back the scorn in my voice. “I will not give you my hand. For to do so is to give a pledge. This, I think both you and the Lord Sarastro know full well.
“I will not be tricked into pledging myself to a stranger. But I will come with you for my mother’s sake, for I love her well and would not have her harmed.”
“Strong words,” my father said.
“And a strong mind to back them up,” my mother replied. “I say again, you will regret this act, Sarastro. Thrice I have said it, and the third time pays for all.”
“Step away from your mother, young Pamina,” the Lord Sarastro said. “I will not ask again. Instead, I will compel.”
And so, I stepped away, pulling my hood down over my face, for I had begun to weep in earnest and did not want to give my father and those who did his bidding the satisfaction of seeing me cry. The second I stepped away from my mother, I could feel the wind begin to rise. Tugging on my cloak wi
th desperate, grasping fingers. Howling like a soul in hell.
Over the scream of the wind, I heard my father shouting orders in a furious voice. Then I was gripped by strong arms, lifted from my feet, and thrown like a sack of potatoes over someone’s shoulder.
The last thing I saw was the flame of my father’s torch, tossing like some wild thing caught in a trap.
The last thing I heard, dancing across the surface of the wind like the moon on water, was a high, sweet call of bells.
Bird Song
The Lady Mina has given me my cue, and so, just when you are wondering what happens next to her, I must doom you to disappointment, at least for a little while. For now it is time for me to enter and take up the story.
What cue, you are no doubt wondering?
She has called you intelligent. I know she has. Not only that, I know it pleased you. Don’t bother to deny it. I know much more than I appear to, particularly if it has to do with Minas story, for parts of it are also mine. Our tales are wrapped together, twisted around one another like point and counterpoint. Melody and harmony. But as for me, I’m not so sure how smart you are. How clever can you be if you failed to see my entrance coming?
She used the oldest trick in the book. The very last thing she said. How much easier did you want her to make it for you?
That’s right. It’s the bells that announce my entry into this story. I’m the one playing them, for they are mine. And who am I, you are no doubt wondering? I am Lapin, a name that means rabbit, though, fortunately, in a language not my own. There’s a bit of irony for you. I couldn’t care less about rabbits, unless they’re in a stew.
It’s the birds I care about.
See, this is where that great intelligence of yours is going to get you into trouble. You’re trying to make sense of this, when it would really be so much better not to. Some things cannot be reasoned out, though they may be explained, a thing I will do shortly. In the meantime, you must do what I have learned to do: accept things as they come along without making too much of a fuss about them.
So just believe me when I say that I am called Lapin the bird catcher. Though, I prefer bird caller, if the truth were to be told. It’s not precisely accurate to say that I catch birds. I don’t set snares or traps. I don’t lure them or capture them by force.
What I do is play my bells and the birds come to me. To wherever I am, from wherever they are. And once they have come, they never depart. This is how I came to know the Lady Mina.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I need to explain about the bells, and to do that, I must back up. The first member of my family to possess them was my grandmother. Though, as they never would have come to her had it not been for the actions of her own father, I suppose I must back up one step further to my great-grandfather. His name was Pierre-Auguste, and he was unlucky in love.
This is hardly an unusual circumstance. And, when it does occur, the disappointed party is generally considered to have two options. He can pull in his breath and expel it in a laugh, thereby ensuring that his heart will mend and his life will go on. Or he can pull in a breath and expel it in a sigh, a signal that his heart will remain broken for as long as it continues to function. It was this second path that my great-grandfather chose.
But Pierre-Auguste did not stop there. He cherished his heartbreak, nourishing it like a sick child, until, with time, both it and he became something else altogether. A thing like the rind of a grapefruit left out in the sun. Hard and bitter. Sour enough to cut your mouth on.
In spite of this, he married, hoping for sons to carry on his name. He got a daughter, and at that, only one. A thing which, as the years passed, caused my great-grandfather’s bitterness to increase to such an extent that it completely slipped its bounds. One day, he struck a servant, over nothing more important than the breaking of a teacup. She fell, and in so doing, pierced her temple upon the sharp edge of a table. She was dead before she hit the floor. And now, at long last, the powers who watch over the universe decided enough was enough. It was time for them to get involved.
Yes, there are powers who do this. Watch over the workings of the universe, I mean. I’ve never met any of them in person, so I don’t know what their names are. I’m not even certain that they have names. Not like you and I do, anyhow. The only thing I know for sure is that they don’t interfere in the lives of mortals very often.
To see the entire universe at a single glance requires excellent vision. And so it was that the powers that watch over the universe saw something no one else would have noticed when they looked upon my great-grandfather. And this is what it was: that the break in the heart of Pierre-Auguste might provide an opening to mend a rift between two others. This is the real reason they decided to get involved.
And so they appeared before my great-grandfather, who was understandably startled, not to mention frightened. They coshed him on the head, thereby giving him pretty much the punishment he expected. But instead of striking him dead, they sent him a dream. A dream of what might have happened if, at the very moment he’d sucked in a breath at the pain of his own heartbreak, he had released it in a laugh instead of in a sigh.
All the things my great-grandfather had never known were in that dream, the life he had denied himself. He awoke with tears upon his cheeks, the first he had shed since he was a boy. And so it was that my great-grandfather came to experience the one kind of bitterness he had never known: the bitterness of remorse. And thus was he justly punished.
But this was not all. For my great-grandfather had done more than blight his own life. He had taken the life of another. And so the powers that watch over the universe now turned to his descendant, to my grandmother. And, through her, to those whose lives had not yet been dreamed of, let alone begun.
This means me, of course.
The powers that watch over the universe gave my grandmother, then a young woman, a set of bells. In number, twelve. Mounted on a board of mountain ash. To be struck with a hammer whose head was polished stone cut from the mountain at the heart of the world. And this is what they told her about them: If she could hear the melody of her own heart and sound it out upon the bells, she would call to her side her heart’s true match. Its one true love.
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 t
he 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.
Sunlight and Shadow Page 2
