Blue Window

by Adina Rishe Gewirtz

  “Well, go on,” Jean prodded. Her voice sounded a little better. Kate cleared her throat and read on:

  “The reason is because what we learned on our own was just a percent of a fraction of what there is to learn. We were like somebody trying to figure out how to build a car by himself, just because he figured out how to make one wheel. Here, people have been studying how to do things, how to understand things, that is, since almost the beginning of time. They have books and books and books of people’s thoughts and learning and discoveries, and Tur Kaysh says that in the old times, they knew even better than we do today, with us being so far from the beginning of everything. I’ve never met a teacher like him before. At home, questions aren’t always so welcome. Teachers get impatient, and they want to move on. Don’t you hate when they say that? It’s like the class is a train and I’m holding everybody up in getting to the next station. It’s not like that with the Guide at all. It’s more like having a conversation. We talk and talk — that is, he talks and I listen, but he doesn’t mind questions. He says questions are the lifeblood of thought. He says they’re the mark of the true student. Wait till I tell them that at home. Maybe I can skip a grade and get to college faster. Even if I did, I don’t think it would be as good as this. When I visit next, I’ll show you some things you wouldn’t believe. See you soon.

  Your brother,

  Max”

  Neither of them said much when she’d finished. Jean wiped her nose with the back of her hand, then kicked at the clover until she’d gouged out a clump with her heel. Overhead, the sky had begun to fade gently into its long summer twilight. After a while, Kate folded the letter back into its wrinkled square and handed it to Jean.

  “He’ll come get us,” Jean said, and Kate was glad to hear that she was done crying.

  “Yeah, he will.”

  Jean retrieved her Barbie and made it walk back and forth across the clover, jumping the little ditch she’d made. After a while, Kate left her there and wandered around the house. Nell had left the garden, and she could see her through the window now, talking to Laysia at the table. The first of the fireflies were blinking in the shadows rising from the grass. She didn’t feel like going inside just yet, to the scratchy feel of more upset and irritation.

  Instead she sat down under the trees past the garden, where the wood took back the clearing, and watched the fireflies winking at her, appearing and disappearing in unexpected places. She thought about Max being a true student.

  As hard as she could, she tried to put her mind to sticks flying up, and pieces of air, and peaches and water and all the things the others could do so much more easily than she could. She wished she understood things the way Max did. Then she could look in the big books and know all the answers and they could be home, away from the awful noise down in the valley. Maybe if she were better at things, she could help open the window, but right now all she could do was sit and listen to the mist grumble and mutter as the sky faded to denim, and after a while Susan called her in for dinner.

  By the end of that first week, even Jean could make her stick, or pebbles, or leaves, fly. Still, she’d lose interest rapidly, and whatever she’d sent up would rain down on them, sometimes knocking one of them on the head if they failed to pay attention.

  “It’s hard to keep thinking of it,” Jean said by way of apology.

  It didn’t get easier for Kate, though she did learn to think a little more of the one thing and not the others, and could hold on to it longer, until one day she lifted Laysia a foot or so and sent her laughing, in a sudden flurry of waving arms, several paces across the clearing.

  It was easy, during days like that, to forget that they were waiting. But at night they knew it. As they walked toward Laysia’s house through the rose gold of evening, the light turning the leaves to silk and the tree trunks to velvet, they could hear the low static of the mist and feel the pressure of it like the weight of the sun on an August afternoon. And they remembered.

  They were waiting for Max, and he didn’t come.

  After the first day, Susan and Nell had stopped arguing about it. But their silence bothered Kate more than the talk had. Some nights, when the others were sleeping, Kate saw Susan go to the window of the small bedroom that looked out into the black of the wood and peer through it. Or she’d go to the table in the big room, where Laysia sat bent over her books. Kate couldn’t hear their whispered talk, but once she heard Susan’s voice rise.

  “Yes, he would ask for us!” she said. “He will.”

  Kate wanted to go and join them, to ask Susan how she could be sure. But she knew Susan wouldn’t welcome the interruption. She’d only say not to worry, that Kate wouldn’t understand, that she’d take care of it. Susan thought Kate was little. She wouldn’t change her mind even if Kate could make sticks fly. Even if she could lift Laysia herself.

  Halfway through the second week of lessons in the clearing, a drizzle cut the day short. The four of them had spent the morning making fire and dousing it, but the dull persistence of the rain sent them home. Nell asked why Laysia couldn’t push it away, the way she did the wind, and she said that it would be wrong to deprive the ground of nourishment.

  “Rain is part of the pattern, made by a far greater mind than mine,” she said. So they went back. Kate lingered for one more look at the far-off ocean, an iron line in the faded landscape, before following the others. She hated to leave the wide-open space and retreat through the damp wood, slogging along as the trees closed in. The gray light and dingy sky reminded her of the mist, and she began to feel hopeless. The scholars were stronger than Susan, than Laysia, than anyone. They could shut the world down faster than rain.

  Nell must have been thinking the same thing, because when they’d gotten back, and all Kate could do was watch the rain pebble the windowpane, she heard Nell ask Laysia how the Genius had managed to beat the scholars in the first place.

  “They could demolish him. Why didn’t they?” she asked. “They could have pulled the guns right out of those red cloaks’ hands! Light the air on fire around them! Why didn’t they win?”

  Laysia set lamps on the table in front of Nell and watched them a moment, until flames sparked and leaped behind the glass globes.

  “So say all the young watchers when they begin. So said my brother when he first took the watcher’s oath. To see and defend, they say. But if I can make fire in this room, or in the clearing, does it mean I can do the same when the threat comes? If one man runs at me, thinking his own violent thoughts, shouting them to make himself fierce and give himself courage, what about me? Don’t I hear him? What does it do to me to hear him?”

  Nell looked steadily at Laysia. Kate saw her open her mouth to say something, then decide against it.

  Laysia saw. “You understand, I think. That’s the secret of the mist. It seeps through all the cracks; it can outshout your own thoughts. You can be very strong and still hear. Maybe the strongest hear it most of all. And meanwhile, fear bewilders you. The scholars were not prepared for the violence of the Genius and his war. By the time they understood the danger, it was too late.”

  The lamp yellowed the room, and everything in it looked soft. Susan sat on the cushioned chair near the basket of books. She’d been leafing through one while Jean used the rest as a mountain for her Barbie to scale. Kate had thought maybe Susan wasn’t listening, but now she looked up.

  “Is that why we understand you, do you think?” she asked. “I’ve been wondering since we came about that. When we first got here — for a little bit — the people we talked to sounded strange, like they had a different accent. Then that all went away. Don’t you have different languages here?”

  Laysia seemed happy to have a question that didn’t carry such pain in it. She shrugged. “That’s a fascination — you mean that two people speak and don’t understand each other? No, we don’t have it. Only the old speech and the new, and there’s not much difference in them. Just new ideas that need new words, or old ones, ful
l of words for things we don’t think anymore. What’s it like where you come from? Two standing side by side can’t speak to each other?” She shook her head wonderingly. “Even your words are walls!”

  “Maybe they are,” Susan said. “Where we come from, different countries have different languages, and people can’t talk to each other across them unless they’ve learned to. But here you must hear thoughts, a little, at least enough to get the sense of a thing.” She looked over at Nell. “I keep thinking this place is the same because it looks it. It isn’t!”

  “No,” Nell said grimly. “It isn’t.” She turned to Laysia. “But anyway, one thing you said doesn’t fit. We only found out what we could do here when we were half crazy with fear. Being afraid didn’t stop it from happening. It made it happen!”

  Some people, Kate had noticed, never really listened to questions. They were too quick with the answers. Laysia wasn’t like that. She listened, thinking, without fear that she’d lose her chance to speak. Maybe that came from being by herself so long; Kate didn’t know. So the question hung there for a while.

  Finally, Laysia said, “Yes, and in that is the kernel of the unseen difference. Or perhaps I should say the half-seen, for I sense it sometimes, when I look to what it is you brought with you through that window from another place. What a strange land it must be! Here, thought brushes against us as the wind brushes skin, like the sun weighs upon the shoulders. For us, thoughts are like a song that moves us to dance before we know we’ve heard the tune. And here come you, unbent by the wind, unburnt by the sun! And yet you hear the song and sing it back from within the walls you each wear. How is that? Where we are permeable, you are solid.”

  Kate wondered if it was a trick of the lamplight that reddened Nell’s face so. Laysia glanced at her, then out at the woods, where the drape of clouds erased the treetops and the sky was a blank.

  “A song,” Nell said sullenly. “Susan said that once. It doesn’t seem much like a song to me.”

  Again, that long silence. Then in her quiet voice, Laysia said, “The mist is very hard. You do hear, as I said, and when it comes for you, even armored as you are, you may yet fall. And then, too, the mist is worst for those it has cause to know. It uses your very self against you, twisting first mind, then body. Always, though, there is some hope. The mist can, after all, be mistaken.”

  Susan’s head came up at that. “Is that how you escaped it? It made a mistake?”

  Laysia nodded. “I felt the change beginning, felt the wildness at the edges of my mind. And I would have let it come, but the Guide, Kaysh, misunderstood me, and it was his thoughts that flowed there, his anger and his misunderstanding. What I heard of them stopped me.”

  “What do you mean?” Nell asked her.

  “I mean they were a lie. He called me beast, and one who desires the beastly. From beast we all rise, yes, but I didn’t desire any return to it. I wanted learning — that was all.”

  “He called me that,” Nell told her, forgetting suddenly that she’d been angry a moment before. “An animal, he said.”

  Laysia nodded. “Knowing you are no longer a beast is a great strength,” she said. “And with all his knowledge and skill and power, it’s one the Guide does not yet possess.”

  In the whispering orchard, Laysia walked beneath a sky of polished copper and trees aflame. She had not known seasons to touch the orchard, and yet the wood burned red and yellow and orange, though no leaf had fallen.

  Through the ruddy trees, she saw a clearing, and there a pool, tarnished silver in the yellow light. No bird sang, and no wind moved the leaves.

  She was startled to see not a child, but an aged woman on her knees beside the water. The years had puckered the woman’s cheeks and hands. When she turned, her grief-stricken eyes were the color of winter.

  “Gone,” she said. “All the children, gone. Even the last one.”

  Fear seized Laysia and she stopped walking.

  “No,” she said. “Don’t say that.”

  “Should I not speak the truth here in this place?” the old woman said in her hollow voice. “The child is lost! Did I not plead for him?”

  She turned to gaze into the water. The trees reflected red there.

  “The pattern is laced with pain,” she said. “Why must all the threads of life unravel in agony?”

  Laysia had no words to give her.

  “Look,” the woman said. “The water is all blood.”

  Full of dread at her talk, Laysia wanted to turn and run. But the woman was as old as Tur Nurayim had been in the last years. Laysia thought of the mother she had never known, and the grandmother. She watched the woman bend toward the water, doubled in her pain. No one should be so alone, Laysia thought. Not even in dreams.

  She knelt beside the stranger and pressed her own dark hand over the woman’s fair one.

  “Be healed, wise one,” she said.

  She looked to the water and saw that the clouds reflected there had turned to hills in a glade, and it was red, all of it, as the woman had said.

  Again, the fear gripped her, but when she turned, looking for the woman, she saw that her hand rested only on the long flat grass that bent toward the water.

  Laysia seemed troubled in the morning, and when Kate asked her why, she said only that she had fallen behind, been slow and blind, and that now she must hurry. Kate wondered how she could fall behind. This was not like school, with its homework and tests. But she saw the look on the woman’s face and kept quiet.

  They were all dour that morning as they walked through the wood. An hour after the sun rose, the air was heavy. Wet beaded the leaves and clung to the weeds, weighing them down so they hung into the path. Even the tree bark sweated. Kate trudged beside Jean, who had started the walk ahead of the others but had dropped back to complain about the heat, the hike, and the long day ahead.

  “I miss cars,” Jean said. “Do you know what my dream come true would be? My dream come true would be if somebody would drive by and pick us up right now.”

  Jean had lots of dreams like that. At home she’d once said her biggest and best hope would be waffles for breakfast, and Mom had asked her where she’d learned such gaudy talk.

  Now Susan, walking nearby, rolled her eyes.

  “Dream bigger,” she said.

  Kate thought about dreams. Not the wishing kind but the other, the kind that came to you without being asked for. She had the sense, sometimes, that she’d dreamed of places she couldn’t remember. She wondered if that was the only way home now.

  “Do you know what my dream is, Jean?” Nell asked. “My dream is that my little sister would keep quiet for half an hour.”

  Jean eyed her. “Dream bigger,” she said.

  Laysia had moved on ahead. Now she called back to them to keep up. She still wore that strange look on her face, full of upset and worry and something else Kate didn’t quite know how to name. Maybe anger.

  “We have much to do today,” she said.

  In the clearing, she didn’t sit but strode almost to the edge, to look out at the sea.

  “The great forces,” she said. “Light and air, fire and water. These are the tools the scholars of old used in battle.”

  “Battle!” Susan said. “Light and air? Really?”

  “I thought she said kids didn’t have to fight,” Jean whispered to Kate. “I don’t like the sound of this.”

  Kate shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. Below them, the sea pulsed out toward the horizon, fleeing the shore.

  “Light and air,” Laysia said again. “Misdirected light, air with the force of a mountain thrown. These were the tools with which the sage kings took the lands around them. With these tools, they defended their kingdom, and with these they built the golden age.”

  Susan was looking uneasily at Laysia.

  “You said they couldn’t keep it up,” Susan said. “They lost to the Genius. How strong could they have been?”

  Laysia glanced her way. That mix of f
ear and anger in her face unsettled Kate more than anything she said. “They lost then, yes, for the reasons I told you. They were strong, and yet he found their weakness. That is a weakness you will not have, so let me give you their strength, too. Let that be our hope.”

  Kate agreed with Jean. She didn’t like the sound of this.

  But she did turn out to like the lessons of that day, and the next, and the next. They were lessons on the fragile nature of light, how it bounced against you, like a ball, and rebounded to the eyes of whoever was looking. If you were careful and still, and kept your mind fixed on it, you could push that light away before it got to you. And no one could see you.

  Jean saw the possibilities right away.

  “Wish I could do that,” she said to Kate. “That would be a trick! Then Susan wouldn’t be able to see when I’m not listening!”

  It was like that with Jean, Kate thought. Tricks. Maybe because Jean knew how to listen without even trying to. Though she’d complained about thinking thinking thinking all the time, back at the cottage, when the others were busy, Jean had made her Barbie into a teacher like Laysia, and Kate had fashioned sticks and stones and a little girl tied out of grass to be Barbie’s students. Jean had made the stones pop up and down when Barbie told them to, though she hadn’t even known she’d done it. Kate wished she knew that trick.

  But she’d never had that knack, of doing things easily. So it took her a long time to think of light as something she could see, but as she’d learned to with air, she got used to thinking of it there, all around her, able to be moved and used. She imagined light like grains of sand, like dust caught in the sun. Untouchable but there, movable.

  Susan was first to do it. Kate watched her, sitting on her knees in the grass, facing the far-off water. Then she wavered, like water herself. Kate blinked. Susan was there, solid — the familiar shape of her sitting under the sharp blue sky — then she wasn’t.