The Second Ardath Mayhar

by Ardath Mayhar

  Putting the fire screen in place, he went into the kitchen and sliced cured ham, fried eggs, baked a can of biscuits (far inferior to those Martha flung together with reckless speed). His blunt hands laid the table, placing colorful pottery and plain silver on a yellow cloth, the food onto serving dishes. That was how Martha served meals, and he did it the way she had taught him.

  Once finished with the meal, he cleaned the kitchen, put away the dishes, and shrugged on his heavy parka. It was colder outside, the wind icier, and the soil underfoot was chilling rapidly. In the morning, he knew, it would be freezing and fair. The pond and the creek would steam like kettles of soup, their waters, still warm from today, interacting with the freezing air.

  He thrust his hands deep into his pockets and moved to the big hay barn. Haying and milking, haying and milking took up all day, every day, in winter on a dairy farm. He climbed into the loft and pitched down alfalfa hay for the milk cows. Darkness would come early, beneath the low gray mat of clouds. That done, he battled the wind to the dairy barn. Lighting the water heater, he sterilized his equipment, put feed into the troughs, and moved to the sliding doors. “Hooooeeee!” he cried.

  The call was whipped away, but soon a cow appeared at the top of the hill, and the entire herd met him at the gate, lowing gruffly and jockeying for position behind the shelter of the barn. He milked with easy competence, using intelligence to make up for the lack of a second pair of hands. But even after two years of doing this alone, he still missed Martha’s quickness, her jokes, her teasing. He wished the boy were here with him. Life would be easier with someone to work for, to share with, and to plan for. But Martha’s mother had insisted that he was too young to live without his mother’s care...and maybe she was right. Ten is very young. He stopped suddenly. Tomorrow was Sunday. Teddy would be with him all day. The thought spurred him to renewed effort.

  It seemed a long time since last Sunday. “A man needs someone around to keep him pinned down, or he rattles around in empty todays and tomorrows and can’t keep them straight,” he grunted, shutting down the milker. The silence was startling, even with wind rushing over outside. He cleaned the barn until it shone white and sterile, scrubbed his vessels and sterilized them. With his hand on the light-switch, he paused to stare about him at white, empty walls. “Like me,” he thought.

  He flipped the switch and trudged through the darkness toward the house, avoiding with accustomed feet the uneven spots, the ruts, the ripples in the ground. The house was toasty warm. Snapping on a light, he had one moment of unreasonable expectation. Surely Martha would step into the kitchen with his house slippers in her hand and an admonition on her lips. “Hurry! Supper’s just ready, and Teddy and I are hungry, if you’re not!” with a twinkle in her eyes that belied her tone.

  She didn’t come, of course, but he took comfort in the indefinable feel of herself that she had left in their home. Some women, perhaps, would have gone away altogether when they died. Not Martha. She put so much of herself, her energy, her forethought into her home that he almost felt her living presence. He kept the house as she had, constructively as a continuing project, and it was still vitally alive.

  Changing his shoes, he busied himself with supper, whistling softly as he worked. The bang of a car door interrupted his preparations, and a crease appeared between his eyebrows. “Maybe a neighbor needs to use the phone,” he murmured as he went to the front door across the warm, pine-scented living room. He peered toward the gate, after switching on the outside light. It clicked open and shut, very firmly. A small shape, burdened with a big case, marched up the flagstone walk and looked up at him.

  “Hi, Daddy,” said Teddy. “I told Gramma I just had to come home. After we talked for a while, she said she supposed I really did, but to be sure not to miss school or get sick. Uncle brought me home, but he had to go right back for a meeting.” The boy’s brown eyes looked a bit worried.

  Berg stared down into the small replica of his own homely face. A rusty smile began to grow at the corner of his mouth. “Been needing a hand in the dairy,” he said. He reached for the suitcase in the boy’s hand, opened the door again, and let out the smell of frying chicken and hot biscuits. They entered, side by side, and it seemed the entire house settled around them, relieved to have the two of them together again.

  In the kitchen they worked together easily, laying the table, pouring milk into tall yellow glasses, placing food in the serving dishes. Neither said much, but their eyes smiled when they met. Teddy’s appetite would have astonished his grandmother, Berg knew, as would his willingness to help wash the dishes.

  “Daddy,” the boy said suddenly, “I won’t have to go back to live with Gramma, will I?” Berg hung the dish towel neatly on the rack to dry. “No, son, I guess we both belong here together, just the way Mum left us.” He reached down to take his son’s hand and glanced out of the window, which was now beginning to fog over.

  The norther had spent much of its strength, and the wind was dying away to a murmur, a whisper, stillness. Frost was glinting now beneath the cold, starry sky.

  Tomorrow would be fair and cold...but only outside. Inside it would be summer.

  PER CASTANEA

  Visiting the strange countries in my mind is a marvelous adventure. This was a most interesting one. I also like goats—used to milk one, in fact. Nonetheless, I never was quite satisfied with this tale.

  The Mountain rose in ascending slopes, its entire face marked with streams.

  Their courses knitted into lacy patterns against the grass, twining around the bases of towering beech trees, and watering the fields below. Ela the goat-girl thought it the most beautiful thing in her life. The crown of great beeches circling the crest surrounded a giant of their kind. In a clearing just below it three rough-hewn stones stood in a huddle, the space within that triangle bare. Nothing grew there; no living creature ventured into that barren spot.

  In summer goats grazed the Mountain, tended by Ela. Since she was six she had followed them as they worked their way gradually up the Mountain in the wake of the sprouting grasses of spring. By midsummer her flock always reached the beech tree, and she made a habit of resting in its shade while the animals browsed. She often wondered if her goats would have entered the angle between the stones if anything had ever grown there.

  When she was younger, she had entered that space, thinking it good for playing or thinking. All had seemed well. Then her skin crinkled, her hair crawled on her neck, as if wicked eyes glared at her from the stones. Shivering, she had retreated and never ventured near the stones again. The goats stayed clear even of their shadows, and there was a rim of uneaten wild roses outlining their shadows.

  Sitting beneath the biggest beech, Ela looked about, checking on the goats. Then she took out her cheese and bread. So often had she done this that birds of all kinds came for the scattered crumbs. She had come to realize that they did not fly over the standing stones but circled about the spot. Although she was not exactly afraid of this place, she was always very cautious as she went about her duties. Anything that could keep a goat from eating rose vines was something to consider carefully.

  Thinking was what defined Ela. Other children had little time for thinking, but Ela’s long days on the Mountain allowed her to examine the world around and inside her, which gave her a unique ability to deal with the unusual and the unexpected. As there was little in life to challenge her innate curiosity, she came, in time, to consider the stones, using both logic and imagination.

  When winter came, and she was almost fifteen, Ela took her handwork with her to the firesides of the oldest villagers, where she made baskets and asked questions with equal persistence. Learning all the tales about those three stones should be of help, she thought, and the elders were willing to tell their old tales to a fresh pair of ears.

  Mam Pauli was the best storyteller in the village, but Ela did not go to her. She had noticed that Pauli’
s tales seemed embroidered with details that nobody could possibly know. Instead the girl went to Grandmam Seela, whose tiny hut did not attract many visitors in winter. When Ela tapped on the door and spoke her name, the old dame welcomed her into the dim room, lit only by the flicker of a very small fire.

  “A cold evening,” she said as she stooped into the room. “I will mend your fire, if you do not object, so I can see to weave my baskets while we talk, for there is a tale I would hear.”

  Seela was more than pleased, for she had to carry the peat for her blaze from the village stack, and it wore hard on her old bones. So the goat-girl took a big basket from the hearthside and brought it back full to the brim, enough fuel to keep the grandmam’s blaze burning for two days. Then she sat and began to twist and weave the willow withes together, as she asked the old woman her questions.

  “I do not know all you ask,” Seela said at last. “It has been many summers since I last set foot upon the Mountain or saw that spot you ask about. Yet when I was young, perhaps your age, I, too, wondered about those strange stones and that spot where nothing grows. My own great-great-grandmam was alive then, and she told me the tale she had heard when she was young. Weave your basket, and I will try to recall her words.”

  Seela paused and drew a deep breath. Then she began to speak: “In the oldest of days this land stretched from the hills in the east to the river in the west, for no Mountain yet loomed over our village. There was then no ruler in the south to require heavy taxes, and we lived well, with no hunger in winter as there is now. This meant that in spring, after crops were planted, the young folk could venture into the grasslands to play in the sunlight. Now it would seem mad to waste a moment in such things, but then there was no need to use every moment of life for survival.

  “One of these was a scholar, old enough to be wise but young enough still to be vigorous. He fancied himself a wizard of sorts, for then there was no penalty for pursuing the occult arts, and he hunted the rocky slopes at the edge of the valley for minerals and the pasture-lands for herbs.

  “He had huge and ancient books in his house, which he studied by firelight after finishing his day’s work, teaching the children. Not a single person was allowed into his home, for he defended his privacy fiercely. Our people were innocent and hard-working folk, then, and no one was overly curious about his activities.

  “Yet there came a summer when those researches brought about a terrible curse upon the valley and its people. Nobody knew exactly what blasphemy he committed, for only some children playing in tall grass saw him go into a hole in a hillock, and what he did there he did not return to tell.

  “They only knew that in the midst of peace and sunlight there came a thunderous sound, and the ground shook. Those who were standing fell, and those lying in the grass amid the flowers clung to the soil as if fearing to be flung into the sky. When the shaking ended, the Mountain had risen from the hillocks.

  “The people were stunned and astonished, and they stumbled back to their shaken homes as if in a daze. By nightfall they had begun to ask each other what had occurred. Then a bright blaze appeared on the top of their new mountain. So bright was this that it outshone the full moon, but no single soul ventured to climb the new slopes to investigate. When, weeks later, three hunters climbed the height they found the stones standing as they do today, though then they still held soil in the crevices and the broken edges were not weathered to dullness. The space between them had been burnt to black dust. So said my great-great-grandmam, and she was a truthful woman, though her tale had been handed down for generations,” Seela concluded.

  The goat-girl secured the last strand of willow. Then she rose and said, “I thank you, Grandmam Seela. An interesting tale, indeed.”

  * * * *

  Over the winter Ela found more bits of the tale among the elders, but not one of those hinted at a reason why the stones should hold such an aura of fear. She went at last to the schoolmaster, who had a store of ancient books left by generations of his predecessors. He allowed her to explore those volumes at will.

  Almost every evening, by the dim light of an oil lamp, she examined the books. They were stored in securely sealed containers the attic of the teacherage, and amid the scutter of mice and the soft rustle of snow sliding down the roof, she tried to decode the crabbed texts, the earliest in a language she could hardly understand.. Yet line by line and word by word, she began to make sense of them, finding that the earliest must be the writing of that ancient who had caused the Mountain to rise.

  The first relevant information she found began thus:

  I have founde amidde the Hillocks to the east an Opening that seemes to runne deep into the Rootes of the Worlde. There be strange Attraction there that biddeth me Enter and Explore, but there also be a Sensation of Danger that warneth me away. I must Medidate uponne this before Takeing any Actionne, yet I am Torne between my Desires—there seemes greate Wisdome to be gained by the Studye of this Place. Maye the Gods grante me Guidance!

  So. The ancient seeker after the unknown had been warned by some inner sense that this fascination might be perilous. Little had he suspected how terrible that danger might be, Ela mused. Still, she felt a surge of the excitement that old seeker must have experienced. She, too, would have decided at last to explore that hole and its secrets. In her own situation, she considered the space amid the menhirs to be her own goal.

  Since first she had led the goats to the mountaintop, those stones had drawn her, and that space between them had equally repelled her. Now she was of an age to marry, if she chose, and fully competent to determine her own activities. Being a sensible person, she continued her researches during the winter, and before snowmelt she found another page on which the writer mentioned his visits to that intriguing hole.

  Each Foraye into that Forbidden Opening leads me more Strongly towarde fulfillinge my Desire. The Spirit Guardinge the Place is beautifull to See, and his Warninges are now less Forbiddinge. When the Fieldes are Planted, I shall goe there again, and this Time I shalle enter into the Deeper Mysteries and finde my Goale.

  And after that Ela found no more writings in that precise hand. Surely, she thought, the ancient curse would have worn away with time, even if that hole he had entered still existed. By now exploration of that triangle should be a safe project to attempt, if it were connected at all to that ancient disaster.

  She found a contemporary account of the sudden upthrust of the Mountain that was reasonably similar to the tale Seela had told her. Putting together the generations, the size of the giant beech tree, and common sense, she decided this must have happened something like a thousand years in the past, not an unreasonable span given the long history of her people’s presence in this valley.

  As winter waned, Ela began to consider what she might do when she entered the blighted area. The healing woman of her clan seemed a possible source of help, and she went to her to ask about potions or herbs to ward off evil influences. This was a rather difficult thing to do, for Atelle, the healer, was as curious as a cat. That was why Ela began her request with a white lie.

  “I have been tending the goats on the Mountaintop for most of my life, Atelle,” she began. “But I have never grown used to those stones near the big beech tree. There is something about them that feels evil, and even now that I am grown, I cannot feel comfortable there. Have you some herb that wards off that sort of threat?”

  Atelle paused in her work of pounding roots in her mortar and stared at the girl. “You have never feared anything, Child, even those matters that should terrify you. Why do you now fear so familiar a thing?”

  Ela shrugged. “Perhaps I have only just become old enough to realize how fearful those stones can be and how strange that spot is.”

  Atelle wiped her hands upon her work apron and turned to inspect a collection of pottery pots on the shelf behind her. She drew out a squat jar whose lid was wired down to its stubby ha
ndles. “I know of no cure for fear,” she muttered, “but this may help you find the answer to your problem.” She unwired the top, took a tiny horn spoon and dipped out a dose onto a scrap of parchment, which she handed to Ela. “Add this to your herb tea before you sleep,” she said. “You may be…surprised...at what happens next.”

  “What?” Ela demanded, but the healer would not answer.

  Not really content with the result of her visit, the girl returned to her home, where supper waited on the table, and her mother scolded her for staying out so late. She no longer protested that she had been earning her own way for half her life and should no longer be treated like an infant. She understood that to her mother she would never be a grown-up, even if she should live to have children of her own. She only smiled and sat to eat, discreetly adding Atelle’s contribution to the mug of herb tea beside her plate.

  After the evening meal the family went to their sleeping room, and soon the house was quiet. Because Ela did not know what might follow her herbal dose, she chose to sleep before the hearth, in case she might need the light of the coals in the hours of darkness. Wondering what the night might bring, she closed her eyes and waited for sleep.

  Without any interval, she found herself drifting, seemingly bodiless, far above the world. The sensation was strange and should have been frightening, but, disembodied as she was, there was no fear. There was delight when she found herself floating above the starlit clouds, as she rose higher. She looked down upon the mountain, across the river, over the hills, while the world grew smaller below her.