Then there was a big jolt. I blacked out.” He pushed himself into a sitting position. “It looks like everybody else did, too.” He rolled over into a kneeling posture and began to check the others on their cushions and blankets. Dickon ignored him to stroke Ben’s brow. That’s when Dickon noticed Ben’s hair had gone white just since he’d entered the Chapel.
“Everybody’s still breathing,” the Swami said when he had crawled around and checked everyone in the circle. “Ben breathing too?”
“Yes,” Dickon said, “barely.” DiConti came over to Ben and the Swami.
“I’m going to brew some tea,” DiConti said. “All these people will need a restorative.”
“Tea’s the best for that,” the Swami agreed. “Tea and warmth. As people wake up, we need to get them into a cottage, where they can be warm.”
“Use ours,” Dickon said. “Can someone help me with Ben?”
“Yes,” DiConti said. “I put two emergency stretchers under some pews near the door. We’ll use those to move people.”
“I want to start with Ben,” Dickon said.
“And the Princess should be next,” the Swami said. “I’m not an expert like she is, but I know enough about these psychic collapses to understand it’s usually the leaders who get hit the hardest. That’s Ben and the Princess, here.”
“Do you think you can manage one end of a stretcher?” DiConti asked the Swami.
“I do. Might have to stop a moment to get my breath along the way.”
“Good,” DiConti said, and went to get the stretchers.
The Swami, Notta, DiConti, and Dickon rolled Ben onto one stretcher, and Princess Valiant onto the other. Dickon and the Swami took up Ben’s stretcher and started toward the cottage. Butter trotted alongside the stretcher. At the last moment, as Dickon and the Swami were going through the door, Charles Algernon Burnswine squawked, “Warms me heart’s cockles, maties,” and leaped onto the Swami’s shoulder. When the bird’s talons sank in, the Swami muttered something. “Mind your tongue,” the parrot replied.
“You game for it, Notta?” DiConti asked, nodding toward the Princess on the other stretcher.
“I am,” Notta said, “but I don’t want to leave Hyacinth.”
“She’s got Ermentrude to watch over her.”
“And her grandmother,” Emma said, struggling to her feet. DiConti went to help her get up. “I take it the storm’s over?”
“Dickon says he saw Vanna dissolve in a waterspout,” DiConti said.
“Water is supposed to harm some witches. The more usual destruction is by fire,” Malcolm said. He, too, was coming around.
“How do you know that?” Emma asked.
“I’m not sure,” Malcolm said. DiConti and Notta picked up Princess Valiant’s stretcher and made their way to Dickon and Ben’s cottage. The fog was twisting and twirling in the wind, almost as if it were dancing. As the other Villagers woke, they made their way by twos and threes to Ben and Dickon’s place to take tea and gather their wits.
Walkabout in the Dream Time
Ben wandered lonely as a cloud that’s lost its storm through a landscape made fantastic by blue trees and yellow grasses. Orange mountains girded the horizon. Odd as the colors were, they felt right and fitting to him. When he hungered, pink and silver apples appeared on the blue trees. When he thirsted, fountains flowing vermilion lemonade appeared to slake his thirst. When he wearied, a rosy rock cushioned in soft black velvet appeared for him to sit on.
He was sitting on such a rock when Princess Valiant came and sat beside him. She wore no clothes. Ben looked down at himself. He, too, was nude. He smiled at that. He hadn’t been nude with a woman since his mother changed his last diaper into briefs. Quickly he checked. The Princess had had the “final” operation. The Villagers had speculated about that probability ever since Val had come among them.
“Hello,” he said to the Princess. The crow on her shoulder nodded to him, and put its head back under its wing.
“Hello,” she said. She looked him up and down. “Not bad for an older man,” she said. “Dickon must enjoy you, very much.”
Ben blushed. “You’d have to ask him about that,” he said.
“You blush all over, did you know?” she said.
“I do? I never thought about it.”
Val put an arm around Ben’s shoulders and leaned to whisper in his ear.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” she said softly. Ben jerked his head away because Val’s breath tickled his ear.
“This is my last hurrah,” Val went on. She let Ben go and looked away from him. The colors were bleeding from the landscape. Already the world was noticeably pastel.
“Your last hurrah?”
“Yes.”
“What do you mean?”
Val clasped her hands in her lap. “I mean, this is the end of the line for me.”
“Do you mean you’re dying?”
“Yes, Dense One, I’m dying. You’re dying, too, but you won’t complete the job for a long time yet.” Ben felt tears start in his eyes. He had grown fond of this Princess.
“Don’t weep for me,” Val said. “Don’t let the others be too sad, either.” She smiled a radiant smile. “You’ve all given me a great gift, you know, to let me be one of you for a while. I never had that kind of belonging, before. It’s good to die among friends. If the Village is willing, I’d like to be buried in the cemetery on the hill. Just a plain plywood coffin, nothing fancy. Maybe Dickon can say a few words over me. Ask them for me, will you?”
“Yes,” Ben said through the phlegmatic thickness in his throat. Val kissed him.
“Thanks,” she said. She reached out to a nearby juniper that had sprung up and took a beaded buckskin dress off it. She stood and slipped it over her head. She looked down at a stunned Ben.
“It’s only the Universe maintaining its balance,” Val said to him. “When Vanna’s darkness receded into the Nether Ether, the balance requires a light counterpoint to recede as well. I’m the chosen one, this time.”
“It’s going to be up to you, now, Ben,” she went on. “You’ll have to help maintain the balance until Hyacinth can.”
Ben stared at her. “I don’t know anything about how to do that.”
She smiled at him. “You’ll have to make it up as you go along,” she said. “That’s the way we all learn.” She held out a hand to him.
“Stand up, Ben. It’s time for you to go. I’ll take the high road, you take the low road. If by chance we meet again, it will be wonderful. If we don’t, things just happen that way.” Ben took her hand and stood. The colors of the landscape had faded to grayscale. Val touched the juniper again, and extracted a loincloth. She handed it to Ben.
“Tie this on,” she said, “and go on down. Don’t look back, look forward.” She turned her back on him and started climbing up. He waved a forlorn goodbye to her and started to walk down. The grayscale landscape became a pencil drawing, and faded to black.
The Long Watch
Dickon and Butter were at Ben’s side through the two long nights and days of his recovery. Dickon held Ben’s hand, rubbing it, and talked to the silent man. He called Ben by name at frequent intervals. Butter lay on the bed next to Ben. She shared her warmth with the chill body of her beloved person.
“Ben,” Dickon said, “I don’t know if you can hear me. Butter’s here, I’m here, we’re waiting for you to come back. Vanna’s gone, whirled away in a waterspout. It’s safe to come back, Ben.” He repeated his words several times an hour, until they became a kind of mantra for him.
Dickon even tried to pray, a practice he had given up years before. “God, or Great Spirit, or Universal Whatever, we need to talk. I need you to bring my man back to me, if you can. I’m not complete without him.” Dickon was silent for a while searching for words. “That’s it, that’s all I have on my mind. Bring Ben back. Amen, I guess.”
Emma and Mae Ling took turns sitting at Princess Valiant’s bedside. She was no less comatose than Ben, until about an hour before her death. She began moaning. It became a cadenced kind of moaning, almost a chant. A rattling rush of breath fled her lungs and rasped out of her throat ended the moan. It was Princess Valiant’s end, and the end, too, of her crow tattoo. When they went to wash her body, the Villagers discovered the tattoo lay on its back, its claws in the air, and its head lolling down Val’s shoulder blade.
Ben recovered consciousness soon after Princess Val died. He opened his gray eyes and smiled. Dickon dozed in the chair at his bedside. Butter lay beside him, breathing the heavy breath of sleep. Ben freed a hand from his blankets to stroke Butter’s ears. She stretched, yawned, and licked Ben’s arm. It was enough to waken Dickon.
“Hi,” Ben said. “Have I been out long? I’m so hungry I could eat horseradish.”
“Ben,” Dickon said, his smile erasing the weariness that had lined his face. “Welcome home, brave warrior,” he said. Tears stood in Dickon’s green eyes. He stood, bent over, and embraced Ben. “I was so afraid I’d lost you,” he said, his voice muffled by Ben’s neck.
“I was in another place, for a while,” Ben said into Dickon’s ear. “A long time, I think, as hungry as I am, and as thirsty.”
“It’s been two nights and two days since Vanna was melted away by a waterspout,” Dickon said. “It’s true, Ben, Vanna’s gone.”
“I know,” Ben said. “Princess Valiant told me, just before I came back.
Ben Soul Page 164
