Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  Light was seeping from beneath the door of the holy benna’s cells. Mogri paused, then without knocking she simply lifted up the latch and entered.

  Torgon was in the inner cell. When she saw Mogri, she jumped in surprise and gave a small, startled cry. Mogri jumped herself because at first glimpse she didn’t recognize her sister.

  “Is that you?” she queried, squinting hard against the light.

  Torgon had grown gaunt and pale, and her hair, completely shorn the night the Seer had come into their family’s hut, was barely more than stubble now, giving Torgon a boyish look. Only by her eyes, still pale as the winter sky, did Mogri know for certain it was her sister, and on seeing them, she knew too what caused the noise. Torgon had been crying.

  “Whatever are you doing here?” Torgon hissed. “You must go. Immediately. This is my private cell. No one’s allowed in here but me.”

  “But I’m your sister, Torgon.” No. No, she wasn’t. Not any longer. Dwr had stripped Torgon of all human ties when he had made a god of her.

  “You shouldn’t use my name,” Torgon said, her voice grown softer. “You must get used to that or the Seer will take his stick to you.” She brought a hand up and wiped her eyes. “And you must go. Or he’ll take his stick to me.”

  “I heard you in the washing room and feared that you were ill. I only came because I worried.”

  Lowering her head, Torgon said wearily “Thanks for your concern, but I am well. Go now, quickly, before someone notes that you are gone.”

  “You look not well to me. Truth is, you look most unhappy to my eyes. Here. Take the comfort of my arms.”

  “Mogri, I’m not playing at some game. I am the holy benna now. You must not touch me.”

  “No one is here to see. What would it matter between the two of us?”

  “Things are different now.”

  “Do you want them different, Torgon?”

  “No,” she said piteously and began to weep again. “But if the Seer comes at me just one more time, I know I’ll break.”

  Crossing the room, Mogri sat down on the bed and gently put an arm around Torgon’s shoulder. “You’re worker kind and made of tougher stuff than he.” She leaned near to kiss her sister’s cheek. “And you are still my sister too, no matter what the teachings say. Da’s blood runs yet in both our veins, and even Dwr can not change that. I will not give up the right to call you by your name. I love you much too well for that.”

  Torgon didn’t answer. She only sat, her head still down.

  Mogri glanced sideways at the fine, embroidered cloth of the benna shirt. She looked then at Torgon’s stubbly hair and tentatively brought a finger up to touch it. “Does it itch, when it’s growing out like that?” she asked.

  In spite of herself Torgon turned her head and smiled. “Silly question, Mogri. Only you would think to ask it at a time like this.”

  “Well, so? Does it? It looks as if it would. And I must admit, I don’t like it much. Such a style doesn’t suit your face.”

  “Do you forget I didn’t have a choice?”

  A small silence came then. Torgon snuffled noisily and gave her eyes a final dab, examining the tears on her fingertips before wiping them on her shirt.

  “What’s it like?” Mogri asked. “Being the divine benna, I mean. Being holy. Do you now feel very different than when you lived with us?”

  “No.”

  “’No? So did you always feel holy?” she asked in surprise. “Because if you did, you kept it very well disguised.”

  Torgon grinned. “No. Hardly, Mogri. I never felt that I was holy. Truth be said, I don’t feel holy now.”

  “It’s a most astonishing thing. You must admit. Mam still can’t believe it’s happened. But Da, he’s quite adjusted, and he’s so proud of you.”

  “Don’t talk of this. You’ll make me cry again.” She lowered her head and brought a hand up over her eyes. “Do you know what night this should have been? My wedding night. This very moment I should be wearing that beautiful robe Mam had on the loom and dancing with Meilor at our marriage feast. Look me instead, sitting here, not knowing what to do, not knowing who I am. Not even fit,” she said, gesturing to her shorn head, “to be called a woman.”

  “Doesn’t the Power tell you what to do?” Mogri asked. “For I’d rather assumed it would.”

  “Power? What Power? What is the Power anyway?” Torgon asked. “I don’t know. I wasn’t taught that in the fields. nor when working at the loom.”

  Mogri sat in bewildered silence.

  “You know what my life is like?” Torgon asked. “If it is daylight I am not allowed to leave this room. If it is night I am not allowed to sleep. I may not even approach the window, if it’s not the Seer’s wish. The only soul I see is him. The only human flesh I feel is his when under guise of holy rites he relieves his lust with me. Otherwise, I sit. Alone. Each day, all day, and every day. ‘Communing with Dwr’, the Seer calls it. But what is that? I wish I knew. For my part I’m only sitting. And when I’m not sitting, I am with him. And if I don’t do things exactly as he says, he takes his staff to me, as if I were naught but a stupid cow in need of breaking to the yoke.”

  “And Dwr allows this? Because the divine benna is holier than the Seer.”

  “I don’t know what Dwr allows. I don’t know anything except that I am suffering. Why has this happened to me, Mogri? I never aspired to anything more than being my mother’s daughter, who knew happiness in work. How is it that I am now on this other path?”

  Chapter Fifteen

  “Look at the marbles!” Morgana said, holding up a jar.

  James grinned and nodded.

  “You got such good stuff in this room.” She brought the container over to the table. “There’s a million colours. Aren’t they pretty?” Taking the lid off, she put her hand in to swish the marbles around with her fingers. “I got some like these, but they’re not so nice. I put mine in the fish tank.”

  Morgana lifted the container up to eye level and peered through them. “Know what? If you look through them like this, they make everything look wavy and green and pink and blue. You want to try?” She held the jar out to James. “Here. See the way they make everything look.”

  James obliged.

  Tipping her head, Morgana watched him. “Can you tell me something?” she asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “What exactly are you supposed to do with marbles?” she asked.

  “There used to be a game of marbles. I don’t know if children play it anymore, but I played it a lot when I was your age,” James replied.

  “Oh, I like games!” Morgana said enthusiastically. “Will you show me how?”

  Leaving his chair, James beckoned her down on the carpet. He took a handful of marbles and felt unexpected pleasure at the sensation of the small spheres rolling around in his hand. Marbles had been hard currency on the playground of his youth and he’d been good at the game. He could still remember the gratification of winning steelies off the other boys, of their clicky weight in his pocket.

  Morgana wasn’t so impressed. At six she didn’t have the coordination necessary for good control and her efforts at shooting resulted in their rolling off her finger unpredictably. After a few moments of playing, she said with strained politeness, “It’s an okay game.”

  James rose and dusted off the knees of his trousers.

  “I can tell you who would think these were neat, though,” she said, stirring the jar of marbles again with her hand. “The Lion King. He just loves to play games like this. There’s this game he plays at home with his cousin and he showed me how. It doesn’t need anything you buy. We were down at the creek, so he showed me how we could play it using stones and drawing the game board design in the dirt. So I bet you he’d just love these marbles.”

  Putting the lid back on the jar, Morgana returned it to the shelf.

  “Guess what?” she said as she came back to the table.

  “What’s that?”
<
br />   “Me and the Lion King had a bad argument. I got mad at him.”

  “Why was that?” James asked.

  “’Cause he can be really stubborn sometimes.” Pulling out a chair at the table, Morgana sat down. “If you don’t agree with him, he won’t listen.”

  “That sounds annoying.”

  “It is. I was going to do this really nice thing for him. We got this book about tigers and how they’re getting endangered and stuff, and it’s got lots of really good pictures, so I knew he’d like to see it. I was supposed to put the book back, ’cause Mum said I wasn’t to take it outside, but I didn’t. I snuck it under my sweater like this,” she said, demonstrating with her hands. She laughed conspiratorially. “Then I went really fast out the door and down to the creek to meet the Lion King.

  “So, when he got there, I said, ‘I brung you this book,’ and I told him I wasn’t supposed to, but I’d done it anyway because I knew he’d want to see. And know what he said? He said, ‘You shouldn’t have stoled it.’ I said, ‘I didn’t steal it. It belongs to my family and I’m part of my family, so it isn’t stealing.’ He says, ‘You still shouldn’t have tooken it.’ He says, ‘You shouldn’t never get knowledge by stealing it.’ So I got really mad at him.”

  “You took a risk to bring him something nice and it felt like he didn’t appreciate it,” James said.

  “Yeah.”

  “How do you feel about it now?” James asked.

  “I’m still mad at him because he doesn’t understand. He likes to see pictures of lions and tigers and things and these were really good. But he wrecked it. He wouldn’t even look at the pictures. We just fought with each other.”

  “You must have felt disappointed too, as well as mad,” James said.

  She nodded. “He’s always telling me off. He says when you’re born you got a plan that makes you part of things and you’re supposed to follow it. You can choose not to follow it and that’s called free will. But really, you’re supposed to use your free will to choose to follow it because that’s the right thing to do.”

  “How old did you say the Lion King was?”

  “He’s eight.”

  “He sounds like a very unusual boy.”

  “That’s just the kind of stuff him and his cousin learn. A man comes to their house to teach them, but all he seems to teach them is about being good and bad. The Lion King says he’s got to learn it to make him a good king when he grows up.”

  “And yet this man doesn’t teach him how to read?” James asked.

  “No. The man doesn’t know how to read.” Suddenly Morgana’s face brightened. “But guess what? The Lion King knows all his letters already. I taught him the alphabet song.”

  “Does his cousin come to play with you too?”

  “No, she stays at home. We don’t want her anyway. It’s a secret, him and me playing together.”

  “Why is that?” James asked.

  “We don’t want anyone to know we see each other. So don’t tell, okay? I’ve only told you because you said I could tell you secrets.”

  “Your parents don’t know about this little boy?”

  “No.”

  Concerned, James said, “I’m not sure that’s a good idea, keeping a secret like that from your parents”

  “My dad wouldn’t like him.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “He’s got long hair,” Morgana replied. “Daddy says boys with long hair are hippies and he doesn’t like hippies ’cause they camp on our land without asking. So he’d tell me not to play with him. Then he’d say, ‘How come are you playing with a boy anyway?’ He’d want to know why he doesn’t have any friends his own age to play with. It takes too much ’splaining to tell my dad stuff.”

  “What about telling your mum?”

  “My mum’s got too much else to think about. Besides, I like having secrets.”

  “Some secrets are not good to keep,” James said. “I’m thinking your parents may feel very worried if they find out you have friends they didn’t know about. I think they should know.”

  “No, I don’t think so. I never go where I’m not suppose to. I’m just down by the creek. I’m allowed there ’cause it isn’t very deep, and I always tell them when I go out to play. And the Lion King would never, ever hurt me.”

  “Here is paint,” Conor said. “Coleman School Supplies,” he read on the side of the jar. “Blue. Blue finger-paint. Coleman School Supplies.”

  “You read well,” James said.

  “You read well,” Conor echoed.

  “Perhaps today you would like to finger-paint. Have you ever done it?” James asked.

  Conor looked up briefly. “Blue and red and green makes brown.”

  “Yes, I suppose they would.”

  Conor picked up a jar of red finger-paint and unscrewed the lid. He sniffed it. Very gingerly, he touched the surface of the paint with one finger. “Jelly.”

  “Because it’s finger-paint, it’s very thick,” James explained.

  “The boy will paint,” Conor said decisively.

  “Shall I get you some paper?” James asked. “Or would you like to get it yourself? The paper for finger-painting is kept right there. Then we need to put some water on it first so the paint will work.”

  “A brush!” Conor replied abruptly. “The boy won’t use messy paints.”

  “Today you don’t want to finger-paint. You prefer to paint with a brush.”

  “Yeah.” He set the jar of red finger-paint down on the shelf.

  “The brush paints are over there in the tray of the easel,” James said, pointing.

  Whirring softly, Conor went to the easel. Picking up a brush from the yellow paint, he made a broad smear across the paper.

  “Here is what isn’t,” he said and added another broad stroke of colour.

  James didn’t quite understand, so he didn’t comment.

  Conor turned slightly towards him. He seemed to be aware of James’s confusion because he said, “Here is what isn’t. Now is. Now is colour. Now isn’t ‘isn’t.’”

  “You are telling me that there wasn’t anything there before?” James asked. “But now you have made something. You have created something that wasn’t there before.”

  “Yeah. It isn’t ‘isn’t.’”

  There was a very faintly detectable note of pleasure in Conor’s voice at the word repetition. A glimmer of a sense of humour? Conscious word play? This was sophisticated thinking.

  Conor stepped back to regard his painting and said, “Where is ‘isn’t’ gone?”

  When James didn’t answer, Conor turned around. His eyes rested briefly on James’s face. “Isn’t there,” he said. “‘Isn’t isn’t’ isn’t there.” And smiled.

  When he came to pick Conor up after the boy’s session, Alan asked, “Can I have a word? Do you have time?”

  James nodded. “Yes, come on back to my office. Dulcie? Could you mind Conor for a few moments?”

  Alan said, “I’ve got something really great to tell you. Over the weekend I was out in the corrals by the house, fixing one of the water troughs. Conor was just hanging out with me, and all of a sudden this dead leaf was blown into the water in the trough. I didn’t notice it right away but then Conor says, ‘There’s a maple leaf.’ Clear as day. Just plain as anything. That’s how he said it. Then he got a stick and fished it out.

  “I haven’t heard him speak like that – you know, in a conversational way – in years. Actually, not since he was a toddler. And he just said it so normally – ‘There’s a maple leaf.’”

  “That’s excellent news,” James said warmly. “That’s a real breakthrough.”

  Alan smiled self-consciously. “I mean, I suppose it’s not much. My nine-year-old kid manages a complete sentence. Hardly like he’s ready for Harvard. But … you can’t imagine how amazing it is to hear him say something normal.”

  “I don’t want to sound over-optimistic here,” James said, “but I have begun to seriously question t
he diagnosis of autism. It’s understandable how it came about, given his rigid behaviour and echoing. But the truth is, the longer I work with Conor, the more convinced I am that we need to start thinking outside the box.”

  Alan’s eyes widened.

  “While he does show some distinctly autistic-like behaviour, overall he’s a more flexible and imaginative thinker than youngsters on the autism spectrum typically manage. I’m seeing moments of abstract thinking that would be quite extraordinary even in a normal nine-year-old. I’ve certainly never seen it in an autistic child.”

  “Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” Alan asked, his voice going soft with hope. “That he could get better?”

  “Perhaps it’s wiser just to say that I am feeling more positive every time I see Conor.”

  “Wow. That is fantastic news. It really is,” Alan replied.

  “I could really do with a chance to pick your brain, though,” James added. “This morning I was re-reading Conor’s file and looked through some of those reports from the in-patient unit that diagnosed him with autism. But I feel I’m missing a really clear picture of what was going on for Conor at that point. Not so much his behaviour as what was happening in the world around him then. You gave me an idea during our first meeting, but I’d find it very helpful if we could talk about it in more detail.”

  “Sure,” said Alan and he crossed over to sit down in the conversation centre. After a pensive moment, he said, “It was Hell. For me it was the ranch. It started with an unusually cold spring, so I’d already lost calves and had huge feed bills. Then in June, I had a bad outbreak of TB among my cattle and the ranch ended up being quarantined. I had to slaughter almost a quarter of my herd and I wasn’t allowed to sell any of the rest until there was an all-clear. As you can imagine, I got in the red very quickly. Seriously in the red.

  “Up to that point, Laura and I had always pretty much kept our finances separate. We’d just kind of fallen into that pattern and it worked well for me, because I never wanted people thinking I’d married her for her fame or her money. Not that Laura was ever that wealthy, but you know how people think. Anyway, that year it got to the point where I had to admit how bad things were to her, because I was going to go bankrupt otherwise. I had to borrow money from Laura to keep things afloat until the quarantine was lifted, which made me feel like crap.