They arranged their chairs in a triangle, knees almost touching. “Don’t be frightened,” Avalona continued. “Look on this as a game—a game of pretending. But always remember- that one day in the ifalong, your day will save the entity of Starquin from dissolution. On an acceptable number of happentracks, that is.”
The cottage was still as a well, and the moons lent a diffused glow through the window. Nyneve felt her heart beating steadily and her skin prickled with awareness. She felt one with the forest, one with the cottage, and one with the ancient people sitting opposite her. Merlin’s eyes were shut and his thin, blue-veined hands rested on his knees; only his jaw moved slightly, champing on toothless gums as though half-remembering some morsel. Avalona watched Nyneve with eyes as cold as the greataway.
An image leaped into Nyneve’s mind, so clear that it was like a view on a sunny day. She saw herself standing among the trees. Every detail was there, quite unlike the muzzy outlines of her usual daydreams. She smiled. The image smiled, too.
Then the image began to walk.
Nyneve started.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Avalona. “I made it do that. Look, here I am, and here’s Merlin.”
Two more images joined the Nyneve-image, walking beside her.
“We can all control one another,” said Avalona. “We can build whatever people and circumstances we wish, in one another’s minds. And more important, we can put them into other people’s minds, too.”
“Are you seeing the same as me?” Nyneve asked Merlin.
In answer, the Merlin-image took the Nyneve-image’s hand.
Nyneve snatched her image’s hand away.
The scene began to quaver.
“You see?” said the witch. “We need to practice, to attune ourselves to one another. And when we’re ready, we’re going to build a new world.”
The world they built was bright and simple, the characters few and colorful. The places were places they knew or had heard of or, where necessary, invented. Lady Igraine lived with her duke at Tintagel because Nyneve remembered a traveler telling her of such a place. It was on the north coast and it had a castle.
Lady Igraine was beautiful. But not so beautiful as I am, thought Nyneve, who had created the Igraine-image.
King Uther Pendragon, ruler of all England, was Merlin’s invention. He was tall, fierce and extremely hairy, and he wore armor. As Nyneve watched the play of characters, it seemed to her that King Uther never undressed. He strode endlessly through castle halls and rode endlessly through leafy forests, fighting battles and winning them all, permanently armored, like a turtle. In time he came across Nyneve’s people, the Duke and Lady Igraine. Opposing forces clashed.
Avalona sat still, saying nothing. Her contribution to the scenario was more subtle.
The battle raged for a long time. Incredible feats of valor were performed. The bravery of the men was unearthly, the wounds frightful. Women, dressed in long diaphanous robes, urged them on and comforted the wounded. Merlin and Nyneve were like children, inventing, inventing.
This is how life ought to be, thought Nyneve, enchanted. This is more exciting than dull old Mara Zion with its cloddish villagers. This is real! And the next night, they played the game again. …
A few days later she was walking through the forest near the village, gathering blackberries and mulling over the latest installment of the game. Codes of honor were being formulated, and Merlin, unable to resist the temptation, had appeared several times as himself.
Last night’s game had been marred by a quarrel between Merlin and Avalona. Merlin’s self-image had appeared before King Uther and got a little carried away. He had indulged in a bout of prophesying, running through the future and predicting all manner of honor and glory.
Avalona, who normally kept quiet during the game, had suddenly spoken.
“Merlin, I’ve told you before not to try to guide the ifalong by revealing future events. That’s not the way a world is built. Let it happen naturally. You must curb this tendency to show off your knowledge.”
“I have a reputation as a sorcerer to maintain!” Merlin was annoyed.
“Just perform a few miracles if you must. Leave the ifalong alone. You’re behaving like a human child.”
Nyneve, chuckling to herself as the remembered Merlin’s resultant tantrum, failed to observe Ned Palomides riding toward her on a heavy draft horse.
“Ah-ha! The pretty little Nyneve!”
“Oh, it’s you, Ned,” she said resignedly.
“You don’t seem very pleased to see me.” Ned carried a crude, heavy sword slung ostentatiously around his waist. He rested his hand on it somewhat self-consciously.
“Expecting marauding Irishmen?”
Her sarcasm nettled him. “Something bigger than that. I’m after that dragon we saw the other day.” He swung to the ground, breathing heavily.
“Just don’t come any closer, Ned.”
By now he’d rationalized the odd happening at their previous meeting. “And what can you do about it? There’s no dragon for miles around this time—I’ve been searching the forest since dawn. We can’t have a brute like that loose, terrifying our women. I think I’ve run him off.”
“Terrifying our women?”
“I was startled last time, that’s all. If I’d had my sword it would have been a different story, believe me.” He grabbed her wrist, pulling her close. His other hand reached round her, fondling her buttocks. Rancid breath enveloped her face and coarse hairs scratched her skin.
“Let her go!”
The shout came from behind Ned. He swung around with a grunt of frustration. “By the Lord Jesus, am I fated? Oh, it’s you, Tristan. Bugger off, will you? Can’t you see I’m busy?”
“I said let her go.” Tristan was tall and slim, not so heavily built as Ned, but with an air of quiet strength. “We’re getting tired of you interfering with girls, Ned. You’re giving Mara Zion a bad name.”
Ned released Nyneve and drew his sword. Holding it in both hands, he swept it in a low arc at Tristan’s legs. “Get out of here, Tristan! This blade has frightened a dragon off already today. I’m giving you fair warning!”
Tristan jumped back and eyed the sword uncertainly. “All right,” he said. “Just watch what you do with that thing, will you? Someone could get hurt.” He turned away.
“Stop right there!” shouted Nyneve furiously. “Tristan, aren’t you going to protect me from this lout?”
“He has a sword.”
“Well, fight him! Dodge his swing and jump in, and knock him senseless with your fist!”
“Do I look like a fool?”
“I’m a woman, Tristan, you coward.” She drew herself up proudly. “Protect me!”
Now they were both looking at her in astonishment. “Why?” asked Tristan.
“There are places,” said Nyneve icily, “where women are respected, and where men will fight one another to the death for the honor of a lady.”
The two men had relaxed and were exchanging amused glances. “What places are those?” asked Ned.
“Well … Camelot, for one.”
“Never heard of it. Try another.”
“Tintagel.”
“Tintagel is a hotbed of sin, so they tell me. Ladies have no honor there.”
She looked at these two uncouth examples of real life, and compared them unfavorably with her imaginary world. Ned’s nose was running and Tristan was scratching his left armpit. She walked away from them and picked up her basket. With her head high, she turned to let them have a parting shot.
“I would never give myself to any man who would not die for my honor,” she said.
To her surprise, their amusement had changed to grudging admiration. Hesitantly, Tristan said, “I’ll walk you home Nyneve, if I may. There are wolves around.”
Ned said, “I’ll ride behind you. I can give you a lift back Tristan.”
Springtime in Gnomedom
Spring was calling to Nyneve from
every new leaf in the forest. Anxious to get out of the house, she was hurrying through her breakfast when Avalona said, “Wait.”
“Why?” Nyneve gazed longingly out of the window. She’d arranged to meet Tristan at the beach, and they were going to climb around the cliffs to the Mudstone Bay, and perhaps cuddle a little. They weren’t in love, or anything like that. They were genuinely good friends. During her childhood, Tristan had been like a tolerant elder brother to her, and things hadn’t changed very much since. And a cuddle, Nyneve told herself, never hurt anyone.
“Don’t question your foster mother,” mumbled Merlin, who was washing up the breakfast plates at the earthen sink.
“When I need your support, Merlin,” said Avalona in her dead tones, “I’ll ask for it. And I don’t see that happening in the next few millennia.”
“Happentracks are infinite!” croaked the old wizard triumphantly. “It must happen sometime!”
“There is a nearby happentrack,” said Avalona to Nyneve, “that is within your new powers to visit. This you will do, today. I foresee this other happentrack being of great importance to our work in the ifalong, and it is best that you familiarize yourself with it.”
“Perhaps you ought to tell me something about it, first,’ said Nyneve, her stomach a knot of apprehension. “Then aren’t any … monsters there, are there?”
“Your notion of a monster is different from mine, Nyneve However, Morble lives there.”
“Oh, that happentrack.”
“Precisely. Morble will protect you, should the need arise However, I don’t think it will. In fact, you will find much on that happentrack to please you.”
Nyneve shot her foster-mother a glance of the deepest suspicion, but the witch seemed to have lapsed into one of her trances, staring fixedly before her. Nyneve transferred her gaze to Merlin, who grinned weakly.
“There are little people there,” he explained.
“You mean, like fairies?” she asked, incredulous.
“Not by my understanding of the word. They call them selves gnomes.”
“Gnomes? Oh, come on, Merlin. Gnomes are like piskies. They’re things people see when they’ve drunk too much You can lose a lot of credibility if you see gnomes very often. I’ve never seen them, I’m happy to say.”
“I’ve seen them.”
She bit back a quick reply. He was serious. Rheumy eyes stared at her with apparent candor. “And what about all the other things the minstrels sing about—do they live on tha happentrack too?”
“Other things?”
“Oh, like unicorns and … what were those things Ned said he saw up on the moor one foggy evening? Moondogs he called them. The ugliest creatures he’d ever clapped eyes on, he said. He’d been drinking at the time, of course.”
Merlin nodded wisely. “A few beers can open the mind’s shutters and let visions in from other worlds.”
“You’re serious?”
“Why do you think people only see piskies after a drop or two?”
“I’d never really thought about it that way,” admitted Nyneve.
Avalona emerged from her silence and rose from the table. “Come,” she said briskly. “It is time.”
She always seems to know when it’s time, reflected Nyneve as she accompanied the witch along a forest path in the direction of the village. What would it matter if we’d left ten minutes later, so I could have finished my hot drink? Would a million happentracks have diverged by then, making us different people? Would a bough from the oak have fallen through the roof and nailed me to the floor?
Nyneve had the uncomfortable feeling that Avalona already knew exactly what was going to happen to her in this different world. But it was a waste of time asking. Avalona wouldn’t tell. “We must not prejudice the ifalong,” she would say icily, and Nyneve would feel rebuked.
“You are coming with me on this other happentrack, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I am not.”
“But … But I might get lost”
“You will not.” Avalona halted at a clearing. “Now,” she said. Here the early sun sparkled from a million dewdrops on the short grass and a grazing deer, startled, fled with nimble bounds.
“Oh, no!” exclaimed Nyneve. In the center of the clearing, pushing pale-capped through the grass, was an almost perfect circle of mushrooms. “This is ridiculous. This is a fairy ring! Old people say the piskies dance in these places. I don’t believe all that stuff.”
“Perhaps the old people weren’t so far wrong.”
“Is this really the place? You’re not joking?”
“I never joke. The fungi grow in a circle because happentracks coincide here, like joined bubbles. The interaction between the two atmospheres fixes nitrogen in the soil at the arc of coincidence. This type of mushroom will only grow in a nitrogen-rich medium.”
“To me it’s still a fairy ring.”
“As you will,” said Avalona indifferently. “Now you must prepare yourself.”
“How?”
“First of all, stand still, like this. Stop fidgeting around. Now put your fists together in front of your chest, elbows out.” Avalona demonstrated. “Push just a little, tense your shoulders and your legs. … Now, relax everything. Think of nothing. Forget you are human. Concentrate your being to one single spark of intelligence, burning like a candle in space, which,” added Avalona with her obsession for accuracy, “is scientifically impossible, but you wouldn’t know that. Become one with the greataway.”
“Why?”
“Because that is the way. There is no other.”
“No, I mean, why won’t a candle burn in space?”
Avalona came as close to impatience as it was possible for a Dedo to get. “It was a poor analogy. Imagine yourself as a small bright spot in a vast nothingness, with the capacity for thought, but not thinking. Do it now. We’ll talk about candles tonight.”
Reluctantly Nyneve let go of the interesting candle question and composed herself as Avalona had directed. At first the shrill twittering of a nearby bird interrupted her concentration, but soon the sound faded, and she discovered something new within herself, a core of serenity in which she could immerse herself like a warm bath. She didn’t need to close her eyes. She lay calmly within her own consciousness and waited; and after a while the noises of the forest returned.
But Avalona was gone.
Nyneve stared. No, Avalona was not quite gone. A faint shadow remained, an Avalona-shaped wraith like smoke against the sun-dappled brightness. And as she watched, it turned and faded away.
Now Nyneve was alone, and the forest was subtly different. The mushrooms still thrust through the grass in their perfect circle, but the trees were shaped a little differently, and lying across the far side of the glade was a huge, moss-clothed trunk that had fallen long ago, but that had only appeared a moment before.
It was true. She was in a different world.
As if in a dream she began to walk, and the familiar forest paths were familiar no more. They took unexpected turns, and when she reached the place where the cottage was, it wasn’t. There was just a small clearing and a single holly bush in it, head-high. She walked on and saw no trace of human habitation whatever: no litter, no broken earthen ware, no cast-off clothing. No smoke rose above the trees and no thud of ax on wood came to her ears.
Suddenly she felt terribly lonely, and was tempted to run back to the fairy ring and into her own world. She stood still for a moment, hearing birds singing unfamiliar songs, then she decided that Avalona’s icy disapproval would be the worse of two unpleasant alternatives, and she walked on.
She received another surprise at the beach. The tide was impossibly far out; flat meadows reached to a new shore line. The tall headlands were now rocky inland bluffs and their feet were washed by purple heather instead of waves Nyneve walked west, and around the far side of the head land she found a wide marsh with a lazy stream meandering through it, flanked by trees very like willows, but not quite
&n
bsp; Then she heard the music.
It was an eerie sound of pipes skillfully played, evocative of sadness and lost love, and it came from somewhere up the hillside. She pushed forward, anxious to meet a real person in this abandoned land. Soon she came to a place where gorse and heather gave way to a grassy platform surrounded on three sides by low evergreens.
Standing in the clearing, head down and grazing, was a creature. It faced away from Nyneve, and at first she took it for a goat. It was certainly goat-size, but its white coat had a silvery sheen unlike any goat in Nyneve’s world. The music rose and fell eerily, but the creature grazed on. Gradually Nyneve became aware that the animal and the music were in some mysterious way connected.
It wasn’t that the music came from the creature. It clearly emanated from a rocky slope behind a clump of pinelike evergreens. But the creature was surely in tune with the music, and its lambent coat seemed to reflect the subtle musical intonations—and, more prosaically, its jaws were munching in rhythm. She trod quietly around the clearing in a flanking movement, the better to see the animal’s head. It heard her, looked up, and warm brown eyes dwelt on her in mild curiosity.
Nyneve let out a gasp of astonishment.
In the center of its forehead the creature bore a single golden horn.
“A unicorn!” exclaimed Nyneve in delight. “You’re a unicorn!”
She walked slowly forward, afraid that the beautiful creature might run into the forest, never to be seen again. But it showed no fear. It watched her approach in friendly fashion, still chomping absently on some grassy morsel, its horn glittering in the sun. Now she could see that the horn bore a perfect spiral pattern down its length, and its golden glow complemented the silvery sheen of the fur. The animal graced the clearing like a jewel, and Nyneve, entranced, stroked the soft fur of its neck.
“You’re beautiful,” she said. “Do you know that?”
The unicorn lifted its head and looked at her, and Nyneve had the strangest feeling that she was being loved.
“No,” she said. “I love you. But you’re just an animal. Aren’t you?”
Fang, the Gnome (Song of Earth) Page 2
