I didn’t know how to deal with that, and I didn’t know what it meant. I had more than enough parents. But then, Father Boulder had always been…a father to me, in the same way the lake was like a mother. How different could this be? “What do I have to do?”
“Put your head under the mud.”
“But—”
“Put your head under the mud.”
“But I won’t be able to breathe.”
“That’s the only way I can help you.”
I sat in the mud’s enveloping warmth and thought about that for a while. If I died by drowning in mud, I’d be letting down Pop and Granddad and Evan and Willow and even Mom. If I didn’t duck under the mud I could go home and open the store at nine, and life would go on, only with a wound where my relationships with Evan and Willow were, and acres of worry. Or I could go to Lacey five and plead with the Keyes, but I had a pretty clear idea that that wouldn’t do any good, only get me in deeper trouble.
If I did duck under the mud there was a chance that Father Boulder could help me. I couldn’t imagine how. But he had never lied to me about anything.
I thought about Evan being marched away under someone else’s power, locked up by people he didn’t trust so that they could teach him how to behave. I thought about Willow, having to watch this happen to him. I thought about Mom, who had escaped the cage of her first family, and then escaped the cage she had made of her second family, and who was finally learning not to build cages. I thought about Pop, wanting everything to stay the same, maybe finally figuring out that it wouldn’t, accepting Evan into our lives one way and then another, capable of more change than I had suspected.
I thought about me. Willow had come, and Evan had come, and everything had changed. I loved it. I wasn’t ready to let go of either of them, no matter what the Keyes wanted. I didn’t want things to go back to the way they were before.
I took a deep breath, gripped my nose between thumb and forefinger, and ducked my head under the warm, sticky mud. For a little while it felt great being surrounded by solid warmth; I’d never felt it on my face before, kissing against my lips and eyelids, crowding into my hair. I felt like I was floating inside a hug.
It crept into my ears. I shook my head, but that didn’t stop it. Finally I stilled myself. I hadn’t been able to hear anything, anyway…until my ears were full of mud; then I could sense that things were going on around me, sending the vibrations of movement to where I could almost hear them. Nothing was happening close to me, though; I knew that through my skin and my ears.
Presently my breath got stale, and I breathed it out. It formed bubbles and rose away from me, I tried to follow it and swim up to the surface to get more air, but I didn’t know which direction to swim; I was weightless, no clues from gravity. I thrashed around, the mud embracing my every move, giving way and filling in, inescapably friendly.
Finally I had to open my mouth and nose, and the mud came in, heavy and slow. It tasted a little like chocolate and a little like sulfur. It came down my throat and into my nose instead of air. I swallowed it because I needed to swallow something. I tried to choke, but I couldn’t even cough, just felt my chest and throat spasming. I thrashed, trying to drive the mud back out. There was nothing to hold on to. There was no way I could fight. Everything in the world was mud.
I saw whole galaxies of purple and pale green stars on the insides of my eyelids. I felt like my head was about to explode.
Then it did explode. My whole body exploded. Pieces of me went everywhere, and the mud embraced them all.
Hurt like hell at first. Slowly, the pain faded. Ultimately, being dead was very restful.
I opened my eyes and looked up at blue sky with pine tops, and speckled gray sandstone around the edges of the view. I pulled long cool draughts of air into me, wondering how my head could still be on my body, and how I could still have lungs, or for that matter, eyes to see with, since I could remember what it felt like having them pop. With each deep breath I felt my way into my body, hands and feet, arms and legs, head, chest, back, butt, everything. I was alive.
I was alive, and the world smelled and tasted slightly different. Blue looked bluer. Green almost glowed. The gray and white stone of Father Boulder reminded me of something else.
Flesh.
I put my hand against the rock and felt humming life under the surface.
I closed my eyes for a little while, then opened them and studied myself. I was still wearing whatever I had thrown on last night—turned out to be jeans and a worn flannel shirt of Pop’s I had found for Evan in the trunk in the attic—and I was still curled up on top of Father Boulder, only there was something different about my position. Stone pressed against me from more directions than just down.
When I was sure I was all there I sat up. I was sitting in a cup on top of the rock just the right size to hold a curled and sleeping me.
I began to shake.
Father Boulder was a constant. He wasn’t supposed to change, no matter what else happened. I closed my hands on the lip of the cup and held on while I shook. I felt hot, and hotter, and then hotter. I wondered why my hands weren’t bright red, the way Pop’s face got when he was yelling.
After a while the heat faded and so did the shakes. I climbed out of the cup. The tennis shoes I had stomped into the night before were missing; my feet were bare. “What happened?” I said, sitting on the still-smooth slope of the rest of the rock.
Lie on the ground.
The voice came from the rock under me, only it wasn’t so much spoken as felt.
He’d never talked to me while I was awake before. Maybe I was imagining it.
On the other hand, what could it hurt?
I climbed down off Father Boulder and lay on the needle- and moss-carpeted ground, pressing my palms to the soil. Time drifted past. I realized I had left my watch in my room. I realized I was hungry. I realized this was probably the end of independent life for me; as soon as I got home Pop was going to take away all my freedom. So I might as well do whatever me hell I wanted to right now. Mostly what I wanted was to find out whether Evan and Willow were all right.
My skin felt prickly all over. I wondered if ants were walking on me. I resisted the urge to scratch, even though the prickling intensified into the unbearable range, and it was everywhere, even on my face. I closed my eyes and waited.
All right. Pull the cloak around you. Go to the place of strangers.
I sat up. Cloak? Cloak? I looked down at myself and realized I was incredibly dirty. Dirt was packed under my fingernails. My skin was covered with dirt so deep I couldn’t see my natural color, and my clothes were filthy. I slapped at a sleeve and dust flew up. My scalp itched. I scratched, and dirt cascaded down. My hair was caked with it.
Jumping in the lake would feel really good. I brushed off the back of one hand.
Stop it. Pull the cloak around you.
Cloak? What cloak? I put my hand down, feeling among the dirt and moss and pine needles to see if there was some sort of cape on the ground. Dirt rose up and coated the back of my hand again.
Spooked, I jumped to my feet. I peeked inside my shirt and saw my chest was covered in a layer of dirt. Drowned in mud, covered in dirt, I thought. I wondered what my face looked like. My feet were deep dirt-brown.
Dirt was the cloak.
Ewww.
Okay.
I knelt, closed my eyes, grabbed dirt and sifted it down over myself. At first I was only conscious of how much I hated the feeling of being filthy. It itched. It felt wrong. All I wanted was water. Even my throat and the inside of my nose felt coated with dirt. I couldn’t smell anything, and all I could taste was dirt, but I noticed I wasn’t coughing anymore.
I stopped scrabbling in the dirt after a while. I had a feeling of completeness. I couldn’t imagine being any dirtier. I opened my eyes and stood up, and suddenly I didn’t itch anywhere anymore. I couldn’t even feel the dirt, any more than I felt my own skin from inside.
I walk
ed down the slope toward the place of strangers.
My knock left a streak of dirt on the door. I stooped and grabbed another handful of dirt to restore my hand.
The door took a while to open. Elissa stood there. She was wearing the white see-through dress, and she held a burning stick of incense in one hand. “What is it you want?” she said.
“Evan, and his snow crystal. Willow.”
“Go away.”
“No.”
“There are more restrictions we can place on you than silence without violating salt covenant. Go away now and we will leave you alone.”
I came toward her, and she backed away.
“I forbid you to cross this threshold,” she said, her voice heavy with vinegar and steel.
“You invite me. Ceaselessly you invite me.” The voice was low and muddy. It came from the dirt. The words tingled against my skin. Inside the dirt, I walked right into the house.
“Rory!” Elissa cried, backing toward the living room. The dirt walked me after her, which scared me. It felt like my clothes had come alive and were controlling my body.
The whole family was still sitting around the table in the living room. Smoke rose from the fire in the little brass bowl in the center. The skilliau rock lay in front of it, and Granddad’s creel was still right behind it. Rory, dressed all in black and looking much less like a nice vacationing tourist, sat between the table and the fireplace, with fire at his back. He had a silver wand in his hand. At his left, Willow cradled a green glass bowl of water on her lap. She looked frightened, trapped, and upset. To Rory’s right, Lauren held a bone; next to her, one boy held a leaf, and beyond him, the other a feather. Bennet sat beside Willow, holding a chunk of quartz, and Evan, still twisted tight somehow, his eyes dull, clutched a handful of dirt.
“You called me and I have come,” said the dirt on me.
“Nick?” said Willow.
“Silence!” Rory snapped at her.
“What do you want?” asked the dirt.
“Who are you?” Rory whispered.
“I am what you speak to morning, noon, and night, what you invite, what you summon. Now I am here.”
Rory sketched some signs in the air with his thumb. Suddenly everything except Rory looked different. A yellow ghost wolf sat where Evan had sat. Willow had an outline of yellow flame; Lauren’s lines were sketched in wavering green; Elissa’s were too, Bennet and the older boy looked like red rocks, and the younger boy was pale blue and see-through.
I remembered Evan heating the pot of water and saying, “Sign fire.” I remembered him looking at my ring of blue flame and saying it had something to do with air. Maybe yellow was fire and blue was air; red rocks might be earth, and green would be water, I guessed.
As for me, I was standing in the middle of a ghost volcano, red-hot lava spilling down from above my head to pool and puddle on the floor around me. I could almost feel the heat.
In a moment the images faded.
The Keyes stared wide-eyed at me for a while. Dirt held me still. Evan still looked tranced and dull, but Willow was staring at me with her mouth half-open.
After a heavy silence, Rory said something in the other language.
“Yes,” said the dirt.
Rory spoke in the other language, a passionate torrent of questions. The answer from the dirt was always, “No.”
He cried one last question. The dirt said, “Did you honor me? In many ways you did. In this most important way you did not.” It held out my arms, and my head looked down at myself, then up at Rory again.
“This is yours,” he said. His voice sounded tired.
“Yes.”
There was another long silence. I thought about that. I belonged to the dirt? I belonged to Father Boulder? I belonged here, at Sauterelle?
And my memory stone was in the lake somewhere.
“How can we honor it?” asked Rory.
“Give it what it wants.”
That silence stretched a while, too. At last, Rory said, “What do you want, Nick Verrou?”
“Evan. His snow crystal. Willow. And I want you to leave me alone.”
Everyone sat still for a long moment. Only the little fire moved. The face formed above it, looked at me and laughed silently, then stretched back into smoke.
“This isn’t just up to me,” Rory said. “Evan’s and Willow’s parents placed them with us, trusting us to care for them.”
“Transfer the trust to me,” said the dirt. “I will honor it.”
“Skilliau being a parent? I have never heard of a thing like that.”
“You forget,” said the dirt, its voice deeper still. It held out my arms to Rory, and then…
Then all my edges blurred. Skin and bones, blood and muscle, hair and nail and breath, nerves and brain, everything that made me human melted out from inside me, throwing me back into the night’s dream, where the mud came into me and I into it and we mixed and I was a bubble in the mud. “I am skilliau’s parent. I am the parent of everything,” the dirt said. Its knowledge was inside me. I knew what it felt like to be weathered by hail and rain and lightning, flood and frost, and how the small stirrings in it excited it and woke it, and how small stirrings grew to be larger stirrings, how grass bladed up to eat sun and in turn be eaten by other things that had once been earth, how stirrings grew and spread and intensified until so much was stirring, plants, animals, insects, birds, tiny things and giant things, how even dirt’s loving grasp on itself was broken as feet lifted loose, only to return, and wings lifted farther; but everything came home to rest eventually; everything was born of dirt and everything came home to dirt, and I was dirt.
“Power,” whispered Rory. “I did not know.”
The dirt laughed. It lowered my arms that were arms no longer. Stirrings inside me itched and ached and flowed as what I recognized as myself reformed inside the cloak of dirt. “Do you any longer want what you have asked me for?” the dirt asked Rory. “Or do you wish me to withdraw?”
I tried to imagine what it would be like if dirt withdrew from you. Would it take gravity away? Would it keep everything you could eat away from you? Would your body stop working? Or maybe it just meant we would walk out the door. Then what?
My mother had cut me off from her, and then I had told her to stay away. My father and I had so far not connected on a comfortable level. I was inside dirt. I knew it was my ultimate parent, one that I would never leave no matter where I went, one that would never leave me.
Rory blinked. Then he sang a long complicated song in the other language. Elissa and Bennet joined in for some of it. The dirt on me grew warm for part of it, cool for another part of it, and then sizzling hot near the end, but it didn’t hurt me. It sang some of the time too, deep, muddy responses to some of the things Rory sang. Rory unbuttoned a pouch at his side and pulled out a sliver of clouded quartz. He held it in his open hand. It lifted from his hand and floated across the room and I reached for it, pulled it out of the air.
Evan relaxed and took some deep breaths. Color returned to his eyes.
They all sang some more. Willow took the bowl of water from her lap and set it on the table. Her shoulders untensed. “Dirt,” she said in a low voice.
“Child,” said the dirt.
“If I bind to you, do I unbind to my family?”
“Only if you wish to,” said the dirt.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you for choice.”
Dirt raised my arms and said something in a voice like a mountain talking. Rory, Bennet, and Elissa repeated it in voices like pale echoes. The children cast the objects they were holding, leaf, bone, and feather, into the fire, and spoke farewell words. A shudder went through me. I felt like a sleepwalker waking up in midstride. The weight of power and history and gravity eased off my shoulders.
“Honor the terms,” said the dirt. “Now we can talk.” Then I was walking toward the front door. Then I was out in the open air.
10
Stones
A moment later and Evan was behind me, the door slamming shut in his wake, and then his arms were around me, dislodging dirt. He still clutched his handful of dirt. “IloveyouIloveyou,” he said. He released me and danced around me like a delighted dog.
“Willow?” I said.
“She wanted to stay. She wants to talk to them. She’ll come if you want.”
“If I want?” Skewed déjà vu of our whole relationship: my wanting her not to want me to do things unless we both agreed first. I shook my head. “When she wants. Come on.”
Dirt and I walked into the woods, wending the secret ways with Evan behind us until we came to the clearing where Father Boulder stood. Evan stopped at the edge of the trees, staring, as I climbed up on top and sat with my feet dangling in the me-shaped cup in the rock.
“This place,” Evan whispered.
“I don’t know what just happened,” I said. “It sounded like whatever this dirt stuff is adopted you. I don’t know what that means. It adopted me too. I said it was okay.”
“Oh, Nick!”
“Is it okay with you?”
He stared at me. He blinked. He closed his mouth and nodded, slowly at first, and then vigorously.
I set the sliver of Evan’s snow crystal at the bottom of the cup. Sandstone welled up to envelop it, and kept welling up, filling in the cup and pushing my feet up until the rock was smooth again. I patted the rock. “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”
My pleasure.
“May I come in?” Evan asked.
The dirt said, “This is your place. I am your parent now.”
Evan walked, with a hesitation between each step, over to Father Boulder, held his hands near the rock, skimming the air around it. “Oh, Nick. This stone. This place! Did you know where it was all along?”
“I come here a lot.”
“Sirella. Talk about paying attention to all the wrong things. I could have asked you a few questions and known all this…” He shook his head, smiling.
“This is Father Boulder,” I said, patting the rock. “Now he has your crystal.”
The Silent Strength of Stones Page 22