The Golden Helm: More Tales from the Edge of Sleep

by Victoria Randall

  “I came to see the ruler of the greatest empire in the western world,” he said.

  “You’ve seen me. Now go,” said Marek. “No, wait! What is that you’re wearing?”

  “You’ve seen it before,” said Aidan.

  “Where did you get that helm?”

  “A mermaid gave it to me.”

  The king drew his sword. “It is mine. It was stolen from me. Give it to me.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Aidan.

  “You are a dead man.” The king ran at him and struck him with the sword, stabbing him to the heart. The pain felt excruciating, but as he fell Aidan seized the king’s arm and gasped, “Be healed.”

  The sword clattered to the floor. Aidan stumbled, and caught his balance. He was not injured; he had no wound and no pain where the sword had struck. He looked around wildly, for he could not see King Marek anywhere. There was no trace of him but a crumpled heap of clothing where he had been standing.

  He heard a shrill cry and looked down. Tangled among the king’s clothes he saw a baby, only a few weeks old, waving its arms and wailing inconsolably.

  He picked up the baby, who stared at him with near-sighted, terrified eyes. He wrapped it in the king’s shirt and ran toward the door. Before he could reach it he heard the pounding of feet, and as he hesitated a squadron of soldiers burst in. “Don’t move!” ordered the captain. His eyes widened as he saw the baby. He glanced around the chamber. “Where is His Majesty?”

  Aidan backed away. “I don’t know,” he stammered. “He handed me this child and left—”

  “You lie,” said another man. “No one has left this chamber. How did you get in?” Aidan faced a thicket of suddenly drawn swords.

  “Give me the child,” said the captain, advancing.

  Aidan glanced down. The baby still cried in terror, as if he knew and dreaded the harshness of the world. Aidan felt a sudden surge of protectiveness and tightened his hold. “He’s not your child.”

  “We’ll see what His Majesty says about it,” said the captain.

  “You’ll have to find him first,” Aidan pointed out.

  The captain’s attention wavered as he glanced around the chamber once more for the king. In that instant Aidan whispered to the helm, “Make me invisible.”

  The soldiers cried out and looked around wildly. “Where did he go?” cried one. Holding his breath, Aidan hurried to the wall and slid past the guards.

  He ran down the hidden stairway to where the wolf waited.

  “What’s that?” the wolf asked. “Something for me to eat?”

  “No,” said Aidan. “Hurry, they will be after us.”

  As they sped away archers appeared on the battlements, filling the sky with arrows, but by then they were out of range, high among the clouds of sunset.

  Aiden feared that the infant would be restless during the long flight, but he was not. After rooting without success for milk, when none was forthcoming he fell asleep trustfully, lulled by the wolf’s leaps.

  As they passed over the middle of the ocean in the dark night, Aidan wrapped the helm of power around a rock and dropped it into the depths.

  “Why did you do that?” asked the wolf.

  “It’s better so,” said Aidan. “That thing will cause nothing but trouble.”

  Moonlight lay white on the breaking waves as they came in sight of Alyria at last. “Where shall I take you?” asked the wolf.

  “Home, if you please. And thank you for your help.”

  “Not at all,” said the wolf.

  It was nearly midnight when he reached the door of his house, but he saw as he entered quietly that the lamp was still lit, although the fire had faded to embers. His wife was sitting by the fireside, her hands empty in her lap.

  “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said.

  “I was worried about you,” said Celine. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “I brought you something.”

  “I don’t need anything, only to have you home safe. Let’s go to bed now.”

  He began to unwrap the sleeping baby, who blinked and looked up sleepily. “I think you should see this.”

  The baby’s eyes were big and violet. He drew breath to cry once more.

  “What on earth!” said Celine. She took the baby from him and cradled it close. “The poor dear! He must be starving. But whose is he?”

  “Yours, if you want him.”

  “But—Aidan! You can’t just walk in here with a baby and say it’s ours.”

  “I do say so. His parents are dead and no one wants him. They say he’s been having nightmares; I thought perhaps here he could sleep better.”

  “Oh, of course he will. But what is his name?”

  “Justus,” said Aidan, who had had time to think on his voyage home. “His name is Justus, and he will be our son.”

  “Thank you,” said Celine, her eyes shining. She turned away, crooning to the child. “We have to find you something to eat . . .”

  The baby stopped crying and lifted a hand to her cheek.

  * * *

  His Majesty of Salagron was never seen again, though spies searched for him high and low in many lands.

  But in the house in Alyria, a little boy played and grew happily under the eyes of his watchful father and doting mother. He loved to ride on the back of the wolf who visited them every winter.

  Never again was he troubled by bad dreams.

  The End

  Dinosaur Voices

  Sara knew that the water from the bathtub faucet contained the atoms of all the dinosaurs that had ever lived. When she sat in the tub and had to close her eyes to keep the soap out, she grew terrified by the roaring they made, the frustrated rage pouring from their throats, buried in the sound of the thundering water so that she could scarcely hear it. As Aunt Madge pulled her toward the tub, she jerked away from the woman’s grip. “No!” she sobbed. “I don’t want a bath.”

  “Come here, brat,” panted Madge. “I’m not putting up with this. You’re having a bath.” She grabbed for Sara, but she ducked under her arm and ran into the kitchen.

  Madge pursued her, ponderous steps shaking the floor. Her shapeless housedress, printed with violent blood-red and jungle-green blooms, billowed about her, but she was not as fearsome as the dinosaurs, with their cruel teeth and earth-shaking tread, that waited just under the surface of the bathtub water.

  Sara sped through the kitchen where breakfast dishes crusted with dried egg and scraps of toast littered the table. Shutup, the mangy red dog, bared his teeth and lunged at her as she passed, but he only caught a corner of her flimsy nightgown and it ripped out of his teeth.

  She ran through the living room where the dark green chairs crouched under their drifts of newspapers, and up the stairs past the dim dusty corner where she sometimes huddled at night. Breathless, she reached the room that she shared with Liz and Ellen. They were both at school in the daytime, leaving her alone to take the brunt of Madge’s fitful rages.

  The stairs creaked under her aunt’s footsteps. Sara cowered in the corner behind the door, afraid of the dinosaurs, afraid of the hours that lay in wait, like vicious gray dogs, until her sisters came home from school.

  She knew the dinosaurs were all gone, that the earth no longer shuddered under their weight, but she knew that would not stop them from surrounding her in the bathtub. She had heard a man on TV say that all the atoms of the creatures that had ever lived still floated around in the world, none had ever been destroyed, so that a dinosaur’s eye might be part of your knee. But she knew the dinosaurs were in the water; she had heard their muted bellowing, their ancient threatening voices.

  She squeezed her eyes shut tight as Madge came into the room. The door swung shut; there was no hiding. A hand gripped her arm and lifted her until her feet dangled. “No more of that, Miss Smartmouth. Get downstairs into that tub.”

  “I don’t want to, Aunt Madge,” she whimpered as she followed the flapping housedress an
d the flip-flopping slippers out of the room. “I don’t want to get eaten.”

  “Nothing’s going to eat you. Where’d you get that stupid idea?”

  Sara shook her head. She wasn’t going to say anything about the dinosaurs. She pulled the collar of her nightgown to her mouth and began to chew on it.

  “Stop that! It’s a filthy habit.” Madge slapped her hand away and tugged her down the stairs.

  Her heart sank as Madge pulled her through the living room and the kitchen. The last time she had had a bath it was with Lizzy, and that wasn’t so bad. The dinosaurs kept quiet when someone else was there; when you could hear someone else’s voice their roaring was muted. But if she were left alone in the tub, she didn’t know what they might do.

  As Madge pulled her into the bathroom she had a sudden splendid vision: one of the dinosaurs, one of the big meat-eating ones, might take shape again, rising out of the bathwater with his long neck and powerful jaws, and his eyes would dart around the room and light on the juiciest person there. The neck would arch down, the jaws open wide and snap shut, and no Aunt Madge would remain to trouble her.

  But it would not happen.

  Madge shook her until her teeth chattered. “You get in that tub and scrub yourself clean. You’re disgusting. And no more whining.” She bent down and turned on the water once more, giving Sara’s wrist a hard twist.

  “No!” Sara pulled away, tears in her eyes, terrified by the sudden roar of the water. “Don’t! You’ll hurt me like you did Andy.”

  Madge loomed over her, suddenly ferocious. “You hush about that. That was an accident! It’s bad enough I get saddled with you kids, without getting blamed for every accident you get yourselves into.”

  “He was only three.” Sara’s anger blazed. “You’re supposed to watch little kids.”

  Madge’s eyes grew cold. “It’s not my fault he fell down the stairs. Don’t ever say a word about that again.” She slapped her suddenly, hard, so that her head bounced off the tiled wall. It hurt too much to cry; she gasped and slid down to the floor. Then her head started to pound, and she drew a long wailing breath.

  Madge jerked her to her feet. “Stop that screeching, or I’ll give you something to cry about.” She pulled the nightgown off over her head and plunked her into the tub. Dazed, she sank down, waist deep in the lukewarm water.

  “Wash your hair!” Madge ordered, and stamped out of the room.

  The side of Sara’s head throbbed. She stared fascinated at the water cascading from the faucet, frothing into the tub, hiding the dinosaurs that floated invisible around her. Her head ached worse, it felt as if would burst. A drop of blood fell from her nose to the water, dissolving to a smudgy pink fog.

  She closed her eyes and put her face in the water, letting her hair float, and heard the roaring of the dinosaurs, but it was muted, as if it came from a distance. It was not fierce any longer. Their voices were kind, sorrowful, mourning the lost world they had known, the blazing sunlight, the huge plants, the pristine swampland now gone forever; and mourning with her the world she had lost, the sunny garden, the warm embraces vanished as surely as the dinosaurs’ world.

  She felt herself dissolving, melting like the dinosaurs, and with the last of her strength reached out and opened the drain. Her atoms mingling with the dinosaurs’, she went spinning and whirling away down the drain, down through the dark pipes and passages under the land, out to the mighty river in the company of the extinct, vast, terrible reptiles, roaring and laughing as they sped to the sea; and she laughed with them as she ran away to freedom.

  The End

  Apple Seed

  “My vegetable love should grow

  Vaster than empires and more slow.”

  ~Andrew Marvel

  “Of whom shall the race of men be renewed?

  Lif and Lifthrasnir alone remain in Hodmimir’s Wood, living on dew and sunlight.”

  ~Elder Edda

  Saturday, May 2, 1990

  Dear Tom,

  My mom is helping me write this. I am telling her what to say and she is writing it. I am sorry you had to move away. But you are not too far. I hope you can come visit me this summer.

  My kitten played hide and seek with me around the big tree. He popped out and looked funny. My dad hung a swing on the tree. You can swing on it when you come to see me. Mom says the tree can be my own special tree.

  Your friend, Laura

  * * *

  The tree was aware of the kitten where it played around its roots. It sensed it as a warm, darting, blurred creature, prickling with tiny sharp appetites: curiosity, hunger, mock bloodlust. But the tree was even more aware of the child who played with it. She was soft, smooth-skinned, hair a bright halo around her head, darting in her movements as well—all unrooted creatures seemed to the tree full of frenetic activity—making sharp squeals and squeaks. It occurred to the tree that some of the squeals might be a form of communication, and it set itself, in its slow green consciousness, to learn their meaning.

  Does it surprise you that a tree should be sentient? It was a different kind of sentience than humans possessed, of course, before the biowars.

  Who knows how the tree became conscious? It was a long slow process, that we know, stretching over many decades of chemical rains, acids leaching into the soil, radiation striking through the envelope of atmosphere to jar the sprouting seeds’ nuclei at just the right moment. Why other plants were not affected, we do not know either; perhaps they were, but never gave a sign, choosing to live out their lives standing in sun and rain, through daylight and dark, and die in silence. Perhaps love was the catalyst, the essential ingredient. For the tree, as the years passed, as its sentience deepened, came to love the girl named Laura.

  We are not certain where the consciousness of the tree dwelt. In the cambium layer, perhaps, or in the heartwood, protected deep within the tree. As time went on cells evolved into dendrites and axons, and synapses formed, and neurotransmitters derived from chlorophyll were secreted. As its intelligence increased, so did the tree’s perception of the girl grow clearer, and its love grow stronger. It offered her what it could, transient, fragile gifts: a mossy seat; shade from the sun; the murmurous music of its leaves; apples, small and round, red-striped and sweet.

  Did love flow both ways? We cannot know. She sat on the swing her father built, sturdy enough for a growing child, scuffing tennis shoes in the bare dusty space beneath the swing. She stared into the grass and mused, and up into the leafy patterns against the sky. In what seemed exorbitant bounds to the tree, she grew. She sat hugging her knees, engaged in the long earnest conversations necessary to adolescence.

  And there was her first kiss, quick, shy, embarrassed, with the boy who came often to visit her. She leaned back against the bark, staring into intense brown eyes, and shared with the tree that moment of ecstasy. The tree did not begrudge her joy; it wished only warmth and richness for her. But it observed with detachment as the gangling young man came and went in the firefly-lit summer evenings, and its critical faculty deepened.

  Dear Tom,

  We went to visit Baker last week. It seems like a good enough college, though it’s hard to tell what a place is like from a weekend visit.

  I feel as if an era is coming to an end. I’ll miss our long talks under my tree; in fact I’ll miss my tree if the truth be known. I know it sounds funny to say it, but when I think of home that’s what comes to mind first: the apple tree in the back yard. It’s like an old familiar friend, where we used to sit and tell secrets for hours on end.

  Of course I’ll miss you too. But it will give you time to be sure about us—you’ve talked about all the boys I’ll meet at school, and how I might outgrow you—but of course the same goes for you. Time will have to tell. Write and tell me all your news—I’ll let you know as soon as I know for sure where I’m going.

  Love, Laura

  * * *

  She sat beneath the tree. It would be the last time for awhile; somehow the tree s
ensed her melancholy, in the slowness of her movements when she laid her cheek against its bark, in her stillness as she looked up at the sky through its leaves. A premonitory ache spread from root tip to leaf tip, grief for a loss that was not yet.

  Then the boy was there, flickering across the grass, kneeling beside her for a farewell hug. He too was quieter than usual; he too felt the ache of loss that was about to befall. The tree could feel sympathy for him. But mostly it felt its own loss; and when at last she left, gone from its sight, it gave a long, long exhalation into the bright air, and it was long before it drew in sunlight and oxygen again.

  Tom—just a note to tell you I’m off! I’ll arrive Saturday and by Monday when classes start I’ll be all settled in. Call you soon.

  ~Laura

  The tree grieved for those few years, and endured. Briefly, now and again, she flickered back for a visit, so that it knew it was not wholly forgotten. When she came, it quickened to life, feeling as if spring had come even in the midst of winter. It felt as if it only grew in her presence, as if her coming was sunlight and water and air to it. Deep in its heart, it knew how absurd it was to love her, but it could not help her effect on it. It thought of her in botanical terms: the golden tendrils of her hair, the soft down on her dancing limbs, the sweet sunlight filtered through her laugh. In her absence once again, it thought its long green thoughts, and began to explore its capabilities.

  One day in early summer, she came home. She came back to live with her mother, to help take care of her now that her father was gone, and to prepare for her wedding. The tree was happy, with a kind of tentative, unfulfilled happiness; it was glad she was home again, but it wanted to give her more than it could. Days and nights flowed over it, and it yielded to the turning earth and the seasons, but its thoughts were fixed on Laura.