So he spoke, even then, not of Kaysh and himself, but of some and of others. There were no enemies in Tur Nurayim’s calculations. No calculation at all. Only the sometimes contentious debates of sages.
Tur Kaysh favored a harsher calculus. He had been a watcher in the city when the present Genius rose, a terrifying figure so ambitious and magnetic that he pushed his own father aside. The new Genius roused the city with promises of the change gone, of a coming era of power and glory. Witness to his ascent, the young Kaysh had returned with thoughts of a different future. Laysia remembered him in his later years, as he gained his seat on the council and rose. He had been charming, powerful, the kind of man that made other men fall in love with him. Lan had worshipped him from the start. She recalled her brother’s talk of the man’s brilliance, his depth, his wisdom, his warmth. “We need a leader,” he had said. “Tur Kaysh says the end of times approaches, and leaderless, debating intricacies, the council dallies. He would lead them! He should!”
The early scholars had written approvingly of the thousand faces of truth, truth like a diamond, facet upon facet full of light. Tur Kaysh spoke of truth as the tip of an arrow, a single sharp point ready to pierce and destroy the evil that had overtaken the world.
Soon all the young watchers spoke as he did, and their elders followed, until at last the sages of the council turned their backs on the thousand faces in favor of the one. They grew impatient with quiet, impatient with gentleness, impatient with patience itself. Unlike Tur Nurayim, Tur Kaysh had no trouble speaking of enemies, and finding them. And the first of his enemies was Tur Nurayim himself, the kind old man who spoke quietly, who voiced doubts and urged a different view. For Kaysh, nothing but the devouring fire, the punishing wave, would do. And soon the council bowed to him and swept the gentle sage from their table, turning his chair to the wall.
Until they did it, Tur Nurayim, for all his farsight, had not seen what could come. Not to him, not to her, and not, as the fire burned and the wave rose, even to children.
Nell woke that afternoon with a howl and her hands around her head, but it was only fear of the mist that made her cry out, not any real change. Kate tugged her arms down and whispered to her, and when she opened her eyes, miraculously it was Nell there, not something strange and fearsome on the soft pillows in the back bedroom. The light slanted through the window now and made the dust dance in its path. Nell turned her face to it, then sat up and looked out. Over the wood, the blackbirds swooped like daredevils in the windy sky.
“Where are we?”
Kate told her. As she did, she watched Nell grow sharp-eyed and alert again. She looked past Kate, trying to see into the big room.
“Where’s Susan? Is everybody here?”
Kate didn’t know how to explain that, so she said only, “She’s getting Max. Then she’ll come.”
Nell’s brow wrinkled. She seemed about to ask something else, when Laysia returned from a trip to the garden. She came straight to the door to welcome Nell and to tell her that she looked hungry, which she didn’t, Kate thought. She looked full to bursting with questions, but Nell didn’t ask them right away. She only thanked the woman and followed her out to the table.
“Jean?” she asked, looking over at Kate.
“She’s with Susan.”
Laysia took up the chipped pitcher and went to fill it. Nell watched her go.
“She’s the one who helped us?”
Kate nodded. “The exile, they call her.”
At the word, Nell turned her head sharply. “The exile,” she said slowly. “I’ve heard of her.”
After that, Nell moved around the room with interest, examining the books and peering out the window. She stepped outside and walked to the garden, and Kate followed her as she circled the house, looking. At one point, she stopped and squinted eastward through the trees.
“The valley’s that way,” she said. She frowned, shook her head, and went inside.
Laysia had again set out bread and cheese on the table, and Nell took the seat she offered.
“They told me about you,” she said. “The old man. He thought you sent me.”
One dark strand of hair had fallen from Laysia’s braid, and she was in the process of tucking it back when Nell spoke. She let it drop again.
“I’m sorry,” she said in a rough voice. “It’s on my account they’ve done this.” She shook her head, and another loose strand fell. The sun was in the western half of the sky now, and the front room sat in shadow, the windows full of cool light. Impatiently, Laysia brushed the loose hair from her face.
“Children, exiled! Was it for asking too many questions? For wandering in the wrong garden? What could you have done, after all?”
Nell looked a little affronted at that, but she said nothing right away. She hadn’t finished studying Laysia, and when Kate opened her mouth to speak, Nell shook her head briefly. She looked over at the cheese on the table and said suddenly, “Where did the cheese come from? I didn’t see any animals in the yard.”
Kate thought that a strange thing to say, especially in the accusing tone Nell used. Laysia raised an eyebrow at the question, and Kate flushed.
“She really likes cheese,” she said.
Nell frowned at her and said to Laysia, “Where did it come from? There’s nothing for miles here.”
Again Laysia didn’t answer, and Kate couldn’t understand the guarded look that had come into her face. Maybe it was Nell’s rudeness, she thought. Trying to smooth it over, she said to Nell, “Maybe she has a refrigerator, you know, under the rug, like at Liyla’s house. Maybe she got it from someone.”
Neither of these answers would serve, it seemed. Nell shook her head again, never taking her eyes from the woman. And Laysia dropped her gaze to the table. After a while, she said, ruefully, “I can see why you frightened them, down there.”
Nell didn’t say anything. She waited. Her bangs had grown down into her eyes in the time they’d been through the window, and she glared through them, unappeased.
Dismayed, Kate watched the two of them stare at each other. Nell was not as old as Susan, and yet she seemed suddenly very old, as if coming up the mountain had let her jump across the bridge that made her an equal to Laysia, or any of the others. She was full of the secret understanding adults always had, and she sat there, unafraid despite the brutal trip through the mist, challenging the woman. And Laysia, to Kate’s surprise, neither brushed the question off nor turned away. Instead, she said, a little tentatively, “There are some things maybe you would not understand.”
Nell’s eyebrows came up, and Kate suddenly felt sorry for the woman, saying all the wrong things. She watched the two of them a second, each holding her secrets close in that funny, opaque game adults played, saying things by halves, making you guess and give your ignorance away.
After another second, Nell sniffed and looked sideways at Kate.
“She thinks we can’t make peaches,” she said.
Kate decided not to remind her that neither she nor Nell had, in fact, made peaches. And anyway, Nell was looking at her hand in the fierce way Max had looked at the ground when he made food for them in the woods. A little buzz tickled the air, and then, in Nell’s cupped hand, a fine blur. A second later, one of the flowers, a pink open-palm, lay there.
Nell looked up at them, that challenging, half-angry expression bending into a grin.
“Better than cheese,” she said.
Dreams and fragments of dreams
Are we,
A musing thought
In the mind of the maker of patterns,
Soft skinned, moldable as unglazed clay.
Such is the world
And such are we,
Yet we carry the shaper’s tools,
Gouge and blade and wire in hand,
And thus unfinished,
Ever firming our own lines and edges,
We may yet reach out to remake
The very surface of the world.
— Vision of the Walking Sage, First Age of Sage Kings, Ganbihar
A child had opened her hand and made a flower. A child!
How could it be? “Such is the world,” the Walking Sage had written, “and such are we”: “soft skinned. . . . ever firming our own lines and edges.”
Years ago, Tur Nurayim had quoted the passage to bolster Laysia’s patience. She had been a young student then, chafing with the work of learning. How tedious the tasks he set her, the endless fixing on a stone or a flower or a mound of sand. And for two hours’ strain, she earned nothing more than the sand swirling in its bowl!
“Is it a simple thing for us to remake the surface of the world?” he had chided her. “Much of a man’s mind is busy holding his own self firm, though he may not know it. In this dark age of ours, we’ve learned even that might be lost, without some effort. So to do more, he must spend years sharpening his mind like the sculptor’s blade. Only then can he turn outward.”
Hearing this with impatience, she had wondered aloud why man — jewel of the pattern and graced with the gift of shaping — couldn’t simply be born hard boned and unchangeable. Why such a flimsy-edged thing? Why not stiff shelled and invulnerable?
A wistful look had come into Tur Nurayim’s face when she said it, and he’d told her that, indeed, some spoke of other places, worlds like tapestries hung in the great hall of the pattern maker — a thousand of them, more.
“Among these, they say, there are iron-hard lands full of people edged in steel, impervious to change.”
He sighed. “But not in this one. Here we are of the soft-skinned variety. Perhaps for fear of what we might do, unfettered by our own weakness. Maybe in those other lands, men are wiser.”
The memory echoed in Laysia’s head now as she stared at a child — a child! — whom the mist had battered and could not take.
What were these children of dreams? From what tapestry had they emerged?
“Why did they send you through the mist?” she asked the girl.
“For going to the center,” Nell answered promptly. “For breaking their stupid lock and their stupider rules.”
Another thought came to Laysia. The child had said “we.” We make peaches. She turned to the small one, the quiet cloudy-haired child whose face she had known in dreams.
“And can you, too, do this?”
The little one shook her head. “I don’t think so. Only Susan and Max.”
Her sister frowned at that. “You could learn. It’s not that hard. You and Jean both.”
Laysia sat and counted names. The small one, Kate. Her round-faced sister with the soft profile of a child and the sharp eyes of an adult, Nell. And these others: Susan, Max, Jean. Five. Five glazed and firm edged, unbending, unchanged and unchangeable. Five who walked in dreams.
“Tell me how you came here,” she said.
But there was most certainly steel in this one. Nell refused.
“You’d think we were crazy,” she said. She sat still and wary, watchful with those sharp eyes. But Kate patted her hand and leaned over to whisper in her ear, motioning Laysia’s way.
Nell frowned and shook her head and at last gave in.
“It was wintertime,” she said. “And the five of us were home from school. We weren’t doing anything special. Then our window — we have a big window in that room — it changed. I don’t know how, but it opened. And we came here.”
At the word “window,” Laysia froze. She thought again of worlds like tapestries in a great hall, of colors and designs and threads woven in patterns that had never been seen or imagined.
Nell glared at her across the table, defiant. “We’re not crazy,” she said. “Kate will tell you the same thing. We all would. It happened.”
Shakily, Laysia stood and took from her shelf the worn copy of The Age of Anam Tur Nurayim had set there so long ago. She opened it to the most familiar of all the orchard visions.
Out of the longest night,
Into the age of wolves,
The five
Will come.
Strangers
Bringing hope of light.
Watch for them
When the time ripens
And the danger grows.
Wait then
For the opening
Of the window.
Nell whitened when she saw it.
“The age of wolves,” she said. “That’s now.”
“Who wrote it?” asked Kate.
Laysia thought of the arguments of sages. Anam himself wrote it, though he was not named. Another, a disciple, a follower. Neither. It was the product of a different, earlier time; it came from the very dawn of life and passed from the first on. Which answer would she give to these, who were themselves an answer? Who and what the five would be had been debated for centuries. And the window? On that there had been unusual agreement — it meant not a window at all but a moment, an opportune time.
And now here stood two of the five, telling tales of windows, come into the age of wolves. So she said only, “An ancient. We don’t know who.”
“But they knew about the window!”
The small one, Kate, plucked worriedly at her dress, and Laysia reminded herself that after all, this was still a child, uncertain as children were uncertain, afraid as children were afraid.
“How are we supposed to fix things?” the girl asked. “We don’t know anything about bringing light!”
“Perhaps you know more than you think,” she said, not knowing another answer. “I would never have dreamed a child could resist the mist — or another save her from it.”
Nell looked puzzled. “What do you mean? Wasn’t it you who saved me?”
“Hardly. It was this little one here.”
She watched surprise flower on Nell’s small, soft, shrewd face. Kate colored.
“I think Susan helped me,” she muttered.
“No,” Laysia said. “There was no one else on the mountain. I would know.”
Nell turned those keen eyes her way, and Laysia saw them flare with sudden pain. The girl knew the sound of the mist, too, now. Hard-shelled though she was, she could hear its acid whispering. Laysia watched her struggle to push it away.
“So these five,” Nell said at last. “What are they supposed to do?”
Laysia didn’t seem to know, and that worried Kate. She didn’t like expectations, and suddenly the woman seemed loaded with them. She had looked into her big book, face etched with disbelief and fear and surprise, and the words were like a shovelful of promises poured into a basket, heavy, heavy, and waiting to be carried. But Kate didn’t know how to carry them.
“How can people see what’s going to happen before it happens?” she asked, trying to find a way out of it. More, she wanted to know where the part about going home was in that big, knowing book. She wanted to read about windows opening to let you out as well as in.
“And this was written before the change?” Nell asked. She seemed unafraid of the book and its demands. Surprised, yes, but not terrified. Nell was never terrified, Kate thought with a mixture of relief and resentment that she couldn’t have sorted out even if she had had the time to mark it.
Laysia explained that people often foretold things like that and wrote them down. Or at least they used to. In the old days, they’d known the change was coming. So when it came, they had hope — they waited.
“Well, what did they think they were waiting for?” Nell asked.
Laysia shrugged. The long, still light of afternoon fired the windows to her back and side, and it was not cool and white anymore, but buttery, a warm glaze that slipped through the glass at the edges. All the little cups and plates and the bindings of the books with their worn gilt lines twinkled and sparked with it.
“They debated,” she said. “These things are never clear. Some thought the five would be warriors. Other said the five would come from the watchers, for after all, weren’t they watching for signs that the end of the dark age was near? My brother, when he fir
st became a watcher, used to imagine he would be one of them, one day.”
Kate had whispered the name of Laysia’s brother to Nell, and she received this news sourly. “I thought the watchers stayed away from the Genius. All we saw them do in the city was run when anyone came near.”
Kate couldn’t see Laysia’s face when Nell said that. She had turned a little away at mention of her brother. After a moment, Laysia got up and set the chipped pitcher before them. She looked into it steadily, and suddenly Kate heard the lapping sound of water rising up from its round opening. Laysia set two cups before them.
“They run, but not out of fear anymore,” she said as she poured. The afternoon light danced along the stream of water as it spilled from pitcher to cup. “Once, they did. When the sanctuary was new, and they were small in number. They were weak then. All they could do was watch. Later, their numbers increased as they began bringing in the unwanted, like me. So over time they grew strong. It would be folly to think them weak. They are part of the power that is the mist.”
She looked up briefly at Nell, who flinched at the word.
“If they’re so strong, what do they hide for?” Nell asked.
The woman sighed.
“Again to the cherished debate.”
Kate looked at Nell for an explanation, but she only shrugged.
Laysia said, “It’s an old saying. Argument sharpens the mind, and so the sages often do it. And though one side may not prevail, still their reasoning is treasured and kept for the lesson it offers. Or at least it used to be so, before Tur Nurayim was turned from the council. He argued that the time had come to show our faces, to offer proof that the change could be turned back. He lost that argument to Tur Kaysh and the followers he gathered around him, which after a time included the council itself. Kaysh insisted there is nothing to salvage in the city. It’s evil, and the watchers must hide their faces until the time comes to punish it with the hand of justice.”
“Hand of justice,” Nell said quietly. “Is that something in your books, too?”
Laysia nodded and raised her hand, bending each finger in turn. The punishing hand of justice. Kate looked at her own five fingers and frowned.
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