Aeon Twelve

by Aeon Authors

  The pony carried us through ripening fields and fallow hills that looked much the same as those around our village. Sometimes we’d see a farmhand striding the fields, checking the crop or the fences, a dark speck in a vast plain.

  After a long spell of silence, the man said, “Well, I guess you oughta know something about me. They tell you anything?” He glanced at me. When I made no answer, he continued, “I’m a tinker, mostly. A few other odds and ends, too—won’t bother you with that,” he hastened. “Usually just me and the road. And Mallon, of course.” He winked. “I just fix whatever comes along. That’s why I’ve got the canopy. I sleep a lot of nights on the side of the road, nothing bothering me except the starlight shining in my eyes.

  “Not that I’m asking you to wander like that. Time I settled myself someplace, anyway, in something better than the gin-house we’re headed to. So you just sing out if you see a little corner of the world you want for yours.

  “We wouldn’t be in such a hurry, but we’re running low on supplies. I wasn’t planning to be gone so long.” A lopsided grin crossed his face. “Wouldn’t have been, if the gin-seller hadn’t told me about the girl who the butterflies follow around.

  “Didn’t know that, did you?” he asked, his voice softer. “It was just my wonder bump itching, but your village was on my way back, so I asked around a little. Now I look at it, it might have been hard embarrassing if it’d turned out different. But when I saw you sitting there—that was only two days ago, wasn’t it? Seems a year, at least.”

  He had come looking for me. He was not just a traveler hunting a wife. The dull shame of the gin-seller’s gossiping tongue was buried under the shock that this man had sought me out. I had paid but little attention to the pairing of village girls and masters, but I did not remember it working this way.

  Already, though, I had heard more words than I wished for one day. I yearned for the bright rustling speech of a kinling. The cocoon hidden beneath my hair would not reawaken a winged thing for days yet. Without one of my kin nearby, it was as though the touch of my fingers had dulled or the dry, dusty scent of the afternoon heat had faded away.

  Several times I had seen kinlings, flitting across the fields or above the road. Always I called, but they would not answer.

  As dusk swept away the last scatters of daylight, the man reined Mallon to the side of the beaten track.

  “Here we’ll stay tonight, I think,” he said, hopping down from the cart. As I turned to climb down as well, I found him at my knee.

  “Here you go,” he said, taking my hand as I clambered down. “See? Kind of a long jump.”

  I pulled my hand away, and he dropped his, nodding slowly. “Gonna start a fire, I guess. Maybe warm up some of what’s left of your mother’s basket.”

  I shook my head.

  “Not hungry?”

  My breaths grew short and sharp. I knew he was staring at me, though I had dropped my eyes and saw only his feet.

  “Not my mother,” I finally managed to say, the sounds catching in my throat.

  “Oh?” I caught a glimpse of him from between my lashes, his head cocked. “Huh. Well, you don’t look much alike, so I guess it follows. The master of the house, is he your father?”

  I shook my head again, still not meeting his eyes.

  “Hmm. Sounds like a story there,” he said. I took a sharp breath. “But I’m hungry. Stories can come later.” He turned and began building a fire a little ways away from the cart. I let my breath go. My hands trembled.

  There were indeed stories that night, but they were sung, not spoken; and none of them were mine. I sat with my mutton and bread while the man spread his arms wide and his voice broad, singing romances of old days, of heroes and kings.

  After a while, he looked at me sideways and said, “I guess you’ve heard the story of Garrell, the lost prince, haven’t you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, it’s time you did, then.” He winked and settled back.

  As he recounted the quest of a prince stolen as a child and returning to claim his throne, I found I could see the proud young man in my mind. I heard the clatter of his horse while he rode the weary journey to a home he did not know. I saw him creeping silently and disguised to poor gin-houses, seeking glory-hungry men who would fight beside him. As the battle broached between his scavenged band and the usurper’s army, his heart beat heavily in my own chest.

  When the man sang a last note of triumph and fell silent, I felt as though I had been wrested from a dream. Or from a vision given me by one of my kin. Even the minstrels who sometimes passed a night in the village on their way to greater places had never pictured things to me that way. Dazed, I looked at the man, whose fire-lit eyes were watching me. As our gazes met, he smiled. Reaching over, he caught my hand.

  I felt a thrill at the fervor in his eyes, but I did not like the clutch of his hand on my wrist. I struggled, unthinking, until he loosened his grip and let me go.

  He didn’t say anything else, but went to the cart and returned with a rough cloth. I spread the cloth and lay down while he tended the pony. When he returned a little later with a second cloth and lay down a short distance away, I wondered that he did not sleep in the cart, as was his master’s right.

  Curled in the blanket, I soon forgot the man and dreamed of a boy with ember-red hair leading a vast gather of butterflies against a heavy-fisted king.

  As we followed the road the next day it wandered through foothills, the smaller kin of mountains looming ahead. I had always imagined those mountains as little higher than these hills we now drove through, but they kept climbing the sky as we approached.

  Seeing my gaze, the man laughed. “Not afraid of heights, I hope.”

  I shrugged. My friends flew many spans in the air; what should I care that the ground be a little higher? Yet—would even they quest so high?

  Never had my kin spoken of these mountains. Always when they traveled, it was to the south, where the days sprawled long and warm, like a lizard on a rock. Were there, then, no butterflies amidst these towering heights? The thought chilled me.

  I turned to the man and tried to form a question, one of words instead of flappings and wafting scents.

  “There.” I shook my head and tried again. “There—” I pointed to the mountains.

  “That’s where we’re going, all right,” the man said, his voice light but his gaze intent upon me.

  “There.”

  “Those very hills,” he said, nodding.

  I gave up on the words, twisted to face him, and held my hands high, flapping them with the thumbs hooked together. Then I pointed to the mountains.

  He cocked his head. “Don’t think I caught that.”

  I tried again, flapping slowly, like a kinling sunning upon a flower. My face warmed as he watched me, and I had nearly dropped my hands to my lap when he brightened.

  “Would that be a butterfly you’re showing me?” he asked.

  I nodded and pointed again to the distant peaks.

  “Are you wanting to know if there’s butterflies up there?” he asked.

  I nodded again.

  He shrugged. “A few. Not the kinds you get down here in the flats, but there’s a few hardy breeds that like it up there.” He sat back and looked at me, but I could not read his face. After a moment, he said, “That was a pretty trick, talking with your hands that way.”

  I frowned. The master had never thought it “a pretty trick;” he called it one more proof of my feeble mind.

  “You don’t believe me,” said the man, seeing my expression. “It might be right handy, though, if I knew a little more of your hand-talk.”

  I watched his face and sat still. It occurred to me that as we’d driven further from home, I’d lost my ladylike shame and come to look him clear in the eye whenever it pleased me.

  “Why don’t you teach me a lesson, as we’re driving along here? If you were talking about Mallon here, let’s say, how’d I know it?”


  I held my right hand to the fist of my left and poked two fingers up for ears - it was how I told the mistress when our pony had a sore foot or needed fresh hay.

  “That how, huh? Let’s see if I can do that.” The man tucked the reins between his knees and held up his hands, imitating me.

  I nodded.

  “Well, how about that. What about those mountains, there?”

  I paused for just a moment; I had never needed to tell the mistress anything about them. Then I held up one hand in a curve.

  “Looks just like that old crag there, doesn’t it?” He grabbed his hat. “And this?”

  I made up a new picture right then, holding my hands in a circle above my head.

  “And what about this?” He pulled a chain from inside his shirt, and hanging from it was a twisted figure carved in cream-colored bone, an animal with an extra leg hanging from the front of its head. The figure was so strange I smiled, and then caught myself.

  But he was laughing too. “Are you saying you don’t have a word for this?”

  I shook my head, smiling again, thinking how funny it was that he’d call my hand-shapes words.

  It was some days later when the cart began to tilt as we climbed the first low mountain. For days, the wind across the hills had clogged in my nose and the sun had painted me pink, until the man said I should sit in back, under the tent. He didn’t mind the sun, he said, for it knew him so well it didn’t resent him anymore. After a moment, I decided he must have meant it as a joke.

  The second day we climbed, I crawled under the canopy of the wagon, my back to the man, and scrambled to a place somewhat clear of firewood and scattered scraps of metal. There I untied the cocoon from my hair. As the wheels hurdled gaps and boulders, I sat and watched the crusted brown form, the curves across the back hinting at the wings that would soon unfurl. Behind me, the man filled the air with raucous singing, gin songs and ballads and epics turned to music. Even when the words lost their grasp on me, the rise and fall of his voice told me all the story I needed. I let my bones settle into the rhythm of the cart’s bumping and rattling.

  A quiver flowed through the cocoon. Good. I wanted to send the butterfly home, if need be, before we crossed the mountains.

  Through my hand I felt the butterfly’s hunger for the open air. It would remember almost nothing of what had come before, of life as a crawling grub. At that moment, the tight walls of its cocoon were so familiar that it barely realized they were there, yet something within it would not allow it to rest a moment more in confining safety.

  It quickly tired, having only worked open a tiny split in the cocoon. I leaned close and breathed. In language too deep for words, I spoke to it. “Warmth and goodness is there here, but you must come out, little one.”

  Finally, the split widened so that a leg flicked through. A few moments more and the slit ripped lengthwise up and down the cocoon, and a black, shiny head emerged.

  “Hello,” I whispered to its mind. It didn’t hear me then. It was too tired and still had too much to do. After a further struggle it crawled limply out of the cocoon and hung from it, its unshaped wings curled beneath it.

  I settled back a little. The worst was over now. Blood surging through the wings would form them as the heat air-dried them. While I stood watch, this kinling would survive its first, most dangerous hours.

  A board creaked behind me. I whirled and nearly knocked into the man. His gaze was fixed upon the butterfly in my hand.

  I cupped the butterfly between my hands and set my mouth.

  After a moment of rattlings and silence, he rose from his crouch and sat at the front again, picking up the reins from their knob.

  I breathed again then and uncupped my hands. The butterfly asked faintly what had happened. “Nothing,” I said. “There is nothing to fear.”

  That night the man wrapped a blanket around me before he built the fire. “Can’t have you getting cold, you know. It chills you right through, up here.”

  After he had doled out our suppers, we sat around the flames and ate in silence. Even after we had finished, he seemed loath to break the stillness. Finally, his craggy features lit by the flickering light, he looked up at me.

  “Reckon you might tell me your story now?”

  For the first time in days, I turned my eyes away.

  “Aw, don’t go doing that, girl. Come on, look at me.”

  He was leaning forward, his eyes wide, beseeching. “I got an idea you’re scared to tell it, or it hurts, or you just don’t trust me. I guess you got no excuse to trust me, except I promise you, I won’t ever tell another living man.” He reached around the fire and laid his hand across mine. “If you want to talk, I’d sure like to listen.”

  We sat that way a moment, watching each other’s eyes lit up by the flames, his hand cupped over mine. Finally, I nodded and pulled away my hand. He leaned his head on his clasped hands, his elbows on his crossed knees, and watched.

  Though we had made many hand-words in the days since I had first asked about the mountains, there were still many things my hands could not picture. For a moment I was still, trying to see in my mind how I would speak.

  I don’t know where I came from, my hands said. I do not know who my mother and father are. The woman at the house where I lived found me crawling among her flowers when I was just a baby. She had just lost her own baby daughter, so she wanted to raise me. The master did not like me. He said I was feeble-minded and useless. I shrugged. Maybe I am. I lived with them, expecting to be taken by one of the boys in the village. I had expected this, but I had hoped for other things. Foolish thought, I had hoped to be found by another like me. As I paused, I left behind many of the things I had meant to say. Shrugging, I said, And then you came.

  He watched me still with that intent gaze that belied his usual cheer. “And what about the butterflies?”

  I shook my head as though I did not understand.

  “No, the gin-seller told me the butterflies follow you. And I saw that one in your hand today.”

  Just stories. Because I am foolish.

  He glared at me, just slightly. “You’re no dumb one. I see the look in your eyes; it’s no less keen for all you spend most your time looking out to the horizon. Now, I guess I can take the village folks telling stories about you because you’re different.” He cocked his head. “I want to know what it that makes you that way.” His eyes looked almost fierce in the firelight.

  He threw his hands up. “I mean, aside from the way you spelled me into bringing you home with me. You know what I am, girl? I’m a man set on living out his days alone, with his pony. All I want is a good gin and a round of lucksticks now and again. And then I walk into your garden and it’s all up for me.” His voice softened. “You got some kind of witchery on me? The gin-seller said that, too, but I hear too many witch stories to give them much account. You, though…” He lifted a hand stroked my hair.

  “I always get to talking at the worst times, you know, but I got to tell you, when I paid your master, I thought I’d won all the woman a man could dream of. And then I figured out I hadn’t won her at all, I’d just bought her.” His face squinted in disgust. “I paid fourteen thrush, and then found I still had to do the winning.”

  You paid too much, I said. Surely he had; the best housewife in the village couldn’t have cost more. The master cheated you.

  “He did not,” his voice soft as the morning mist, so that I could barely hang onto his words. “He didn’t ask nearly enough.”

  I waited, watching his eyes. After some moments in silence, he stood and returned with another blanket for me and one for himself, and we curled around the fire and slept.

  The next day I sat beside him in the sun as the pony continued to draw us around ever more sharply curving hills. The air chilled far too cool for summertime. I kept a blanket drawn around me far into the morning, when the sun finally warmed me.

  Sometime during the frosted night I had decided, without ever really thinking at all
. Watching the man out of the corner of my eye, I reached behind my head and brought the kinling out from under my hair, where it had slept the night. It crouched in my hand and opened its wings wide, soaking in the sunlight.

  Suddenly, the man drew a sharp breath. He’d caught sight of the butterfly.

  “Your friend,” he said.

  I nodded. After a pause, I lifted the butterfly and let it grasp my hair. My hands free, I pointed first to the kinling and then to the mountains. Are there butterflies like this one where we’re going?

  He turned around to look at the butterfly, then shook his head. “Nope. That’s one of the ones I only see this side of the mountains.”

  I nodded and reached below the wagon seat, where I had hidden the last of the plums days ago. Now it squished in my hand as I lifted the butterfly from my hair and set it atop the rotting fruit. The butterfly uncurled its tongue and began drinking the sweet juices.

  “Butterfly gin, huh?” the man said, eyeing the butterfly.

  I waited until the butterfly had drunk its fill. It wouldn’t need anything more for some hours, long enough for it to fly east, to its native meadows. I lifted it up to my face and breathed, giving it my warmth.

  “Go,” I said silently, “seek your homeland.”

  “Why?”

  “I fear that where I am going, you will find none of your own kind.” Just briefly, I pictured to it a glimpse of two swirling butterflies.

  “But then you will have no one.”

  I glanced at the man and then told it that I would be all right. It returned the image to me of the two butterflies, asking. I put the thought away without reply.

  “He is no kinling,” the butterfly said.

  “Not as you are. But maybe he is kin in another way.”