The Memory of Sky

by Robert Reed

  That a book could hold pictures was a revelation. The fat old volumes on his shelves were filled with long, impenetrable words, but one of his learning books was built from brightly colored drawings. Diamond studied strange faces and bizarre objects. The faces belonged to the Creators. Painted scenes showed the bright blackness that existed in that timeless time before the world. Mother sat beside her strange boy, describing how the Creators tried to weave perfection out of shadow, out of nothingness. Each of their works failed and had to die, but the gods learned and learned, and in a show of genius, they managed to piece together this Creation, this splendid, beautiful world without end.

  The Creators loved the world and knew they could never do better, and celebrating what they had accomplished, those titanic beings kissed one another before dissolving into the same nothingness from which people and trees had come.

  One Creator was named Marduk.

  Patting the floor, Diamond said, “Our tree is named Marduk.”

  Important trees had important names and long histories.

  His mother nodded. “But how do you know that?”

  “I heard so.”

  “Someone told you about our tree?”

  “No. You and Father were talking, and I was listening.”

  She looked at him and then at the closed door. “What else have you heard?”

  The world was full of noises that never found his ears. “I haven’t heard much,” he claimed, not really lying.

  “There are reasons we tell you so little,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “Why we don’t dare explain more.”

  Diamond waited.

  “But if you live in the dark too long, your mind will be crippled.”

  Mother’s plan, imprecise as it was, involved teaching the boy just enough—a string of tiny lessons to feed his mind, and perhaps, with luck, ease his transition into the world. Some days were full of reading and counting, and he never got tired. But she was tired or she was scared, and there were days when he taught himself, reading common words and writing them with his right hand. She also taught him manners and some mathematics and little songs for children. Diamond was rarely bored, but if he let his gaze wander, she would relent, giving him larger skills and bigger views. And every day, no matter the circumstance, lessons began and ended with a solemn promise not to share what was happening. Father was busy and had many problems, and no, Mother wouldn’t explain the poor man’s burdens, but Diamond needed to believe her and please stop asking those questions.

  So he stopped asking, for days and days. And then one day, without urging, Mother began to talk about their home tree. Marduk was a blackwood, and more than a thousand families lived inside its carved tunnels and rooms. Some neighbors were her cousins, and others were friends or at least had been friendly in the past. She saw few people anymore. But hearing sadness in her own voice, Mother promised that if something was important and necessary, then there was goodness to find, and that’s why this isolation was endurable.

  Sitting in a chair, she named dozens of people and her ties to each of them, and she mentioned some of the larger trees by names or species, ending with the famous old bloodwoods growing in the District of Districts. But no tree was better than Marduk.

  “Why, mama?”

  Because her ancestors claimed the tree when it was little more than a sapling and she was born inside its wonderful wood, and she felt nothing but pride for the home that had fed and sheltered her without complaint. No other blackwood grew such sweet nuts, and that’s what Father believed too, and he wasn’t even born here. He came from the District of Mists, and he was a hornbeam man. Diamond asked what that meant, but she didn’t hear him. Her face tilted backwards, eyes watching what only she could see. Then she smiled, and it was a different smile than any he could remember. Suddenly she was telling how she was a girl and Father was a beautiful soldier stationed in the nearby wilds, and that was how people from different places could meet and fall in love.

  “The courtship and our marriage,” she said wistfully. “It seems so long ago, my parents alive, standing beside me at the ceremony . . . ”

  Her voice trailed away.

  “How long ago was it?” he asked.

  That question she heard. Thorough calculations ended with the number, “Our wedding was five thousand and fifty-five days ago.”

  The number made little sense. Trying to measure it against something familiar, Diamond asked, “How old am I?”

  She started to answer, but winced and put one of her hands into the other and held it snugly, as if comforting herself.

  “I’m past nine hundred days,” he said confidently. “But I haven’t reached one thousand yet.”

  She found a smile. “Nine hundred and thirty days ago. That’s when you blessed us by joining our lives.”

  How many of those days could he remember? Diamond looked into a bare wall, thinking back as far as possible.

  “That was a very long day,” his mother mentioned.

  Diamond looked at her.

  “Sometimes that happens,” she continued, talking as much to her clenched hand as to him. “There are days that feel as if there might never be another night in the world. But night is inevitable.”

  Night was a presence. It was something that lay beyond the reach of men, plunging the world into shadow whenever it wished. And the darkness was a mystery to the boy.

  “And the dawn always follows night, bringing us rain,” she said.

  Rain sounded beautiful, and it sounded terrible.

  “You don’t understand what I’m saying,” she said hopefully.

  Diamond didn’t know what he understood. But after a few moments of silence, he asked, “How old are you?”

  New calculations were made. “I’m ten thousand, six hundred and twenty-three days old.”

  That was an enormous number. He nodded and dipped his head.

  She misunderstood. With a laugh, she said, “Don’t worry. My parents lived past sixteen thousand days. They enjoyed good long lives, strong to the end.”

  “The end,” he repeated.

  She said nothing.

  “When you die, what happens?”

  She looked at her hands again. The fingers began to wiggle. “Those left behind will cry,” she said. “Beyond that, I do not know.”

  Father was a careful speaker, but even silent men are full of lessons.

  He often wore special clothes, heavy clothes covered with deep pockets and sturdy loops. He had a favorite pair of boots with armored flaps over his exposed toes, and padded undergarments helped protect his heart and belly and groin. The gray work shirt and trousers often came home needing to be mended, particularly when he had been gone overnight, and after Mother washed them, Father would sit in his son’s room, expertly sewing up the long, unexplained tears.

  Every person carried himself in a certain way, and Diamond studied how his father sat and walked; and later, in front of the big mirror, the boy would try to move like the scar-faced man.

  When he was tired and smelled of death, Father’s words were less guarded. He might mention a distant tree or some other landmark, and Diamond knew that if he put on a curious expression, some detail might be offered about a distant, unknowable piece of the world.

  One evening Father sighed and said nothing, exhausted eyes staring at the floor. Then he sighed again, and with an important tone he warned the boy that coming home always took longer than leaving.

  “Why would that be?”

  The man thought for a moment. “For every reason you can think of,” he said mysteriously.

  Knots were their shared passion. Father showed the boy how tie the bright needle to the thread and pull it through the ripped fabric. He taught him how to marry two threads together and how to make one rope into a trustworthy slipknot. Every knot had its name, though he didn’t know where any name came from. And he was impressed when Diamond practiced on his own, mastering even the most intricate knots.

/>   Father left late one morning and came home while the day was beginning to fade. The room lights were softening, signaling night’s arrival. Diamond was sitting on his floor, playing with the wooden soldiers. Father came through the door and smiled. He was wearing green clothes, soft and cut differently than his serious work clothes. This was what he wore when he didn’t have to go away for a long time. Unlike every other day, he knelt on the floor in front of his boy, waiting for something. The room’s door was ajar. He was listening. After a while, Mom called to him. She said that she was going to Cousin Ollo’s, and Father instantly shouted, “Fine! Your men will defend the fort in your absence.”

  Something here was funny.

  The two “men” laughed while Father reached into a front pocket, winking at Diamond. “I shouldn’t. Don’t tell her. But I saw this outside, and I thought . . . well, I don’t know what I thought . . . ”

  There were colors in the pocket. A patch of blue appeared, brighter than any blue Diamond had ever seen, and around the blue was a thin gold ring, and on the other side of his father’s finger was a startling green—radiant and metallic, possessing depth, as if the greenness only increased as the eyes peered deeper into the beauty. The painted wooden soldiers were drab in comparison to this astonishment. Diamond giggled until his father held the colors close to him, and then he saw the dull black eye in the middle of the blue. The eye remained open, even as the man’s thumb pulled across it. A pair of matching triangles, orange and tiny, stood near the eye, and the boy realized that the triangles formed some kind of mouth and the blue color was the head of a tiny animal and that rich metallic green was a body unlike anything that he had ever envisioned.

  “What is this?” Diamond whispered.

  “An usher bird.” His father held the body and head in his long palm. “I found it on our landing. Poor thing flew into the window, probably just before I came home.” Using his other hand, he eased one of the little wings away from the body. Its underside was white as cold milk, and each feather was a little different from its neighbors. “He’s still warm,” Father mentioned. Then after some thought, he asked, “Do you want to hold him?”

  Diamond nodded, and the bird rolled off into the cup made by his tiny hands. The body weighed next to nothing, and the open eye was matched by another open eye on the opposite side of that narrow head. Diamond turned the bird and looked down the mouth, admiring a tiny tongue, and he turned it over and looked at the golden feet with their long toes and curled claws. Returning to the face, he studied the eyes while holding all of it tightly. Then quietly, more puzzled than worried, he said, “I don’t think he’s breathing.”

  “He isn’t,” Father agreed.

  The boy looked up.

  “He’s dead, sweetie.”

  Diamond looked at the bird again, but differently.

  “His neck is broken. Like I said, just before I got home, the poor boy flew into our window.”

  Yet the creature looked alive. That was Diamond’s sense of things, and Father was mistaken.

  “I’ll have to take him with me. By tomorrow, he’s going to stink. And nobody wants that.”

  The world was full of life. Little insects and millipedes occasionally found their way into this room, and Diamond had studied them with the hand lens and his tiniest tools. Tearing apart bugs taught him what death was, but it was never sad. This was sad. He stared at the usher bird, and finally his father said something about Mother coming home soon, carefully easing the corpse out of the boy’s hands.

  Diamond was close to crying.

  Father looked at the wet eyes and then at the floor. “Maybe we shouldn’t have.”

  “Shouldn’t have what?”

  “Never mind.” Then a little later, he told him to do what was impossible. “Forget it,” he said.

  The bird vanished back inside the pocket.

  “I’m glad you showed it to me,” Diamond said. But he wasn’t glad. Suddenly and for no reason he could name, he was angry.

  Father didn’t notice, or he ignored what he saw. Either way, he stood stiffly, knees sore from sitting on the floor, and after glancing at the half-open door, he turned back to his son. “We had good reasons,” he said. “Everything we have done has been for you.”

  Then he left.

  Diamond got to his feet and stood before the door as it was carefully relocked, and despite trying to think about anything else, his mind was filled with that gaudy gorgeous almost-alive bird. He felt sick with fury. If something as beautiful as an usher bird could be found and thrown away in the same day, then the world outside had to be astonishing, and he didn’t know anything about anything, and he feared that he was going to live forever, trapped inside a tree that he would never see for himself.

  In one of his dreams, Diamond found himself out in the world, walking under the wide strong arms of what he assumed to be trees, and strangers spoke to him, and they had faces like his face, and there was light in the world and green shadow with distant walls and a ceiling made of a dark scented wood, and he liked all of it, even when he was awake again, lying in his familiar bed.

  But there was another dream, an old piece of nonsense that always left him curious and terrified. It began inside his room. He was playing with his favorite toys when a sound interrupted his fun. Sometimes it was a voice, and sometimes it was music—a few bright little notes beginning some melody that felt familiar. And the voice was familiar too. Sometimes it belonged to a man, but usually a woman was talking. He heard his name called, except he wasn’t Diamond, and he tried to remember the name but his usually perfect memory failed him, losing it before he woke.

  That night, after Father brought the bird and took it away again, the dream returned. The woman called to him, using the other name. He always recognized her voice. Diamond got up from his toys and listened until she called again, her voice more urgent than usual. Of course he followed, and like every other time he ended up inside the side chamber where the big chest stood with its many locked drawers. The chamber was the same as in life, except for a tall door that didn’t belong. The door was bright and gray, slick like a mirror but strong to the touch. His touch triggered a hidden mechanism, or maybe the door opened for no reason. Either way, it would pull aside, revealing another room, unsuspected until now. The room was Diamond’s secret, and that night, when he touched the door, he expected what always happened. A great wash of light would pour over him, and he would see wonders, and the shock and his amazement would yank him out of his sleep, leaving him unable to remember any details.

  This would be the same dream, he assumed. With that thought, he touched the door and watched it fall away. But there was no flash of light this time, no visions too wondrous to recall. There was just a long gray hallway, and standing before him was a powerfully built man who stared hard at him, as if angry to find a boy where he expected someone else.

  Diamond tried to talk but couldn’t.

  Then the strong man knelt and greeted him with the other name.

  The boy recognized the voice.

  “This is just for the little while,” said the man. “Just to keep you safe.”

  “I am safe,” Diamond said.

  “Until you can leave and come find us.”

  “Come find who?” Diamond muttered.

  The man had different features than Father. His face had no scars or wrinkles, but it was an uneven, ugly face just the same. He had short arms thick with muscle and long legs and the wrong-shaped feet that Diamond knew well, and the boy stared at those feet until boots formed around them. Then the strong man touched him on the face, fingers warm as a fever.

  “When you come find us, bring them,” said the man.

  “Who do I bring?” Diamond asked.

  But the man didn’t answer. A smile broke out on his unhandsome face, and a voice that sounded rough and sturdy and never quite friendly said, “One bit of advice. Everything is even stranger than it seems.”

  And with that, Diamond fell awake.
>
  Night was its darkest, deepest. Mister Mister agreeably went with the boy, riding under one arm as he climbed through a passageway that smelled of sap and living blackwood, two friends slipping into the chamber with the old chest and the many locked drawers and round walls that held no secret door, and that’s where the boy was when dawn broke. Metal tubes carried the day inside that little space—a blood-colored light that meant rain—and he sat on the bare floor, long legs crossed, feeling the slow, majestic sway of Marduk as the world began one more day.

  TWO

  Tomorrow Diamond would be nine hundred and eighty-three days old.

  He mentioned this while making ready for bed and his mother nodded as if listening. She was kneeling, picking up blocks and putting them into their special big box with the hinged lid and rope handles. That was unusual. Mother was diligent about cleaning his dishes and the chamber pot, but this was his room and his world, and she demanded nothing but enough space for a person to walk wherever she wanted. Yet there she was, on her knees with her long back bent, working her way toward a stout little building guarded by wooden soldiers.

  “This was a quick day,” Diamond mentioned.

  She nodded again, finding a place for a long cylinder. Then she hesitated, focusing on her fingertips before looking at her son sitting on the edge of his bed. “What did you say?”

  “It was a short day.”

  “It was,” she agreed.

  He asked, “Why?”

  “Because.” She took a breath and held it deep, golden teeth shining in the dim green light. She was trying to devise a worthy answer, or she was thinking about something else entirely. There was no telling. Then the air leaked out of her, and she attacked the big fort. His soldiers fought as hard as they could, accomplishing nothing. She swept them aside and quickly dismantled what Diamond had built today, dropping blocks into the open box until sharp corners and whole pieces were sitting above the rim.