Overheard in a Dream

by Torey Hayden

  “Oh Torgon –”

  “No, Mogri, please. Please do this for me. I no longer have my holy visions but I have dreams and in them I see the babe grown to be a man. A king. A divine king with Dwr’s holy gift of Power. But if he stays here … he will walk all too soon among the dead with me. I see that too.”

  “If it has really come to this, Torgon, wouldn’t it be far better to take the babe and escape with him yourself, so that at the very least you could raise him in the ways of holiness?”

  “I’ve spent many hours in thought on this, for, of course, it’s what I’d wish to do, but in the end the answer’s always no. If I went too, the Cat King might well refuse us aid. My eyes are my curse. No matter how careful I might be in my disguise, they would still give me away, and sheltering the divine anaka benna would surely bring our warriors to his gates. Why would the king wish to risk war over me? But one baby looks much like any other and you could pass easily for a travelling peddler woman.

  “More importantly, no one yet knows the babe is born. I can go back to the compound and forestall the Seer and the holy brothers another week or two, perhaps even longer, as this is my first child and first-born children are often slow to come. It would give you time to reach the borders of the Cat People without pursuit. And even then I can tell them that the babe’s a girl. Or stillborn. Or, for that matter, that I killed the babe myself lest they should take it from me.”

  “And they will kill you.”

  “Mogri, they are going to do that anyway.”

  Tears filled Mogri’s eyes. She lowered her head.

  “I fear I have even more to ask of you,” Torgon murmured.

  “Speak on, then. Get it over with.”

  “When you have reached the kingdom of the Cat People, I beg you to remain there with him. I ask this not as the holy benna, but simply as your sister, who loves you and him very much. It will be dangerous here in days to come. When it is discovered he is gone, they will guess you’ve helped me and your life will be taken too. So stay there and care for him as I would do. He needs a guardian. Even if the king should take him, I fear what might befall him. What if he is mistreated? Or he falls ill and is alone? I want him to know the kind of love that you and I enjoyed in youth, for that is how noble men are made. Even kind indifference, which does not hurt the body, marks the soul and leaves a hollow space. So, please, please, Mogri, remain and care for him.”

  Lowering her head, Mogri nodded. “Very well.”

  “Holy benna?”

  The hut was totally dark. No hint of dawn distinguished the high-set window from the walls. Turning in the straw, Torgon tried to gain her bearings.

  “Holy benna?”

  “Aye, Loki. I’m awake,” Torgon whispered into the darkness.

  There was the sound of the girl crawling through the straw. “I cannot sleep,” she murmured.

  “No. Nor can I.”

  “I have been thinking all through the darkness of the night, holy benna.”

  “Here, Loki, come under the covers with me. I wish not to wake my sister. Lie here close. You’re cold. Perhaps when you are warm, you’ll sleep.”

  “No, I think not,” she said softly, but she accepted the warmth and pressed close.

  “I have decided, holy benna, that when they depart, I shall go with them.”

  “No, Loki.”

  “Aye, holy benna. I have thought much about it.”

  “It is in my heart to do this. It will ease your sister’s burden. She can not easily carry two babies and the basket. With so much snow, it will make her journey slow. I shall go with them. I can take the holy child and keep him warm while she carries her own babe.”

  “No, Loki.”

  “But people will be suspicious if she has two babes. They are too far apart for twins, too close for normal bearing. Someone might accuse of her of child stealing. If so, then ill would befall them all. But if I am with her, I can say that he is mine, and they will assume I am cast out from my tribe for loss of my virginity.”

  “This is too great a sacrifice.”

  “I want to do it,” Loki said.

  “Aye, with your courageous heart, I know you would, but we must be practical too. You are too highly born. Mogri won’t be missed, but if a warrior’s daughter disappeared, there’d be an outcry and they’d search for you. It would be safer if Mogri went alone.”

  “I’ve already thought of that,” Loki replied, “and I want you to tell them I have died. Say to them that while I was in the forest waiting on you, a great cat came and devoured me, and there is now naught left of me but my few clothes.”

  “You’ve been too long with me. You’ve learned my way with lying.”

  In the darkness Loki chuckled. “No, it is my own secret mind at work. Besides, it carries truth in its own way. He bears the name of the great cat, not so? And I am already devoured with love for him.”

  “No, Loki. You are too young to understand the sacrifice you offer. A good life lies here ahead of you. It isn’t right that you should exchange it for a refugee’s existence in a foreign court.”

  “Anaka benna, I have no desire for the life that lies here now. I would not stay to make a marriage to some high-born son, knowing as I know now that worker children starve in their huts while mine play carelessly with silver baubles. And certainly, I would not stay to watch you die. If you are gone, my life would have no meaning here. So let me go with him so that the baby king grows up knowing he leads his people even now.”

  Torgon felt through the darkness to touch the girl’s face. “Very well. If you so wish it, may it be so.”

  They rose at dawn and broke their fast with bread and broth. The remaining food was packed into the sheaf basket, and then the extra clothing. Loki lifted it up for Mogri and fastened the straps tight. Then came the babies, Jofa into the folds of Mogri’s garments, then Luhr into the folds of Loki’s.

  Torgon hesitated as she held the baby out. He’d just been well fed and was growing sleepy. Then with a sigh she placed him close against Loki’s budding breast and began the task of binding him. She paused and caressed his dark hair, touched, as Mogri said, with just the glint of red. “Oh, Dwr keep you safe, my little one,” she whispered and leaned down to kiss his face. She rested so, her lips against his skin, and Loki stood quietly, feeling the warmth of Torgon’s head through the folds of clothes.

  No one spoke otherwise. The three of them worked silently until all the tasks were done. Then Torgon lifted up the heavy bar across the door. Outside, the snow had ceased and lay inviolate.

  “Give my love to Mam and Da, Torgon.”

  “Aye.”

  “Find your way to them. Don’t leave the task to someone else. Go to them yourself and tell them what has befallen us, for while your heart cries out at losing one child, remember they are losing two. And grandchildren besides.”

  “Aye. I shall. I promise.”

  They stood, silent.

  “Travel well,” Torgon whispered, for the words wouldn’t come out any louder. “And may Dwr keep you all.”

  “And you,” Mogri said. “May Dwr keep you too. For if the future you describe is just your sensing and not visions he has sent, then perhaps it will go differently. I shall stay in the court of the Cat People and not go elsewhere so that you will know where you can find us, if you ever come to seek us out. And while I’ll raise Luhr as if he were a child born of my own body, I shall teach him he is not mine and that he must stay ever watchful of the eastward road, in hopes he might someday see his true mother coming.”

  “Here,” Torgon said and reached out. “Embrace me one last time. Let me kiss you. And you too, Loki. No. Kiss me not as the benna, for the time of bennas is past. Kiss me here, upon the face, like the sister you now are to me. And then I’ll bid you both farewell.”

  James turned over the final typewritten page. He looked at it, blank on the back, dog-eared, slightly yellowed at the edges with age, and he felt a sense of loss that it all was over, that th
e story had ended, that Torgon was returning to die and her nobility hadn’t saved her. Loss too at no longer having this shadowy mirror to hold up to Laura’s life.

  It occurred to him, as he regarded the unpretentious stack of pages, that this was the only place Torgon existed. All that life, that vibrancy was nothing more than a set of marks across a page that he and Laura and a handful of others had experienced. And yet he felt loss. Strange, really, if you thought about it.

  Chapter Forty-One

  “So that’s how it ended for Fergus and me,” Laura said. “I didn’t finish my degree. So, Fergus was right there. I never did work a day as a doctor. Instead, I left Boston that November dawn and came back here. There was a vacancy for a paramedic in the ambulance service out on the Pine Ridge reservation, so I took that and started the long, slow job of patching my life back together again.

  “The first weeks were awful. That really black depression I’d had in the spring didn’t overtake me, but anxiety did instead. I was scared to death Fergus would find out where I was. The only time he ever did seem psychic to me was in his uncanny ability to find me, wherever I happened to be. It was terrifying to think that maybe somehow the Voices could tell him where I was, because how do you protect yourself from that? I saw him, like a ghost, hiding behind every dark corner. This gave me chronic insomnia. I’d wake every night with a pounding heart and lie there panicked in the dark. It carried over into the daytime as a kind of edginess that left me feeling nervy and irritable and unable to concentrate on anything.

  “The only thing that helped was strenuous physical exercise. The reservation borders the south side of the Badlands, so in my free time I started hiking. The Badlands were a good place to do it. I felt safe in their openness, and their bleakness, especially in the winter, matched my mood. I went out in all weathers: wind, rain, even snow. Always alone. My parents were absolutely paranoid about how dangerous it was to do all this walking alone in case I fell or something. Truth is, I think I would have actually welcomed something happening, something that would take the responsibility for disaster away from me. For hours and hours I walked the basins, climbed up the gullies, scrambled over the rocks, and during the entire time my mind was absolutely vacant. Which felt so good. So healing.

  “One Saturday – it must have been about three weeks after I’d returned – I had spent the whole day out hiking. The weather had been absolutely foul, and by the time I got home, my clothes were soaked, my cheeks wind-burned and my fingers and toes numb with cold. I started cooking my supper, then opened a bottle of red wine and poured myself a glass. I felt like some music, so I went into the living room and put Saint-Saëns’s Requiem Mass on the stereo.

  “I was sitting, relaxing in the armchair with my wine when that unusual brass intro to the ‘Agnus Dei’ began. I’ve listened to it many times before, of course, but what happened then … suddenly I was in the Forest. Seeing it with the same abrupt, eidetic clarity as I’d experienced it in my youth, in the old days before Fergus. I was there once more in a way I’d long since given up hope of experiencing again.

  “Torgon was in the isolation hut. She was shutting the door. Mogri and Loki had already departed through the snow with Torgon’s newborn baby. She’d watched until they’d disappeared from sight, then she closed the door and turned back into the darkness of the hut.

  “That slow, eerie part of Saint-Saëns’s ‘Agnus Dei’ had begun …” Laura raised a hand absently, almost as if conducting the unheard music. “I could hear it, music, I mean. Even as I was in the Forest, seeing Torgon. The music was somehow part of it. Or maybe I just wasn’t as fully in the Forest as I thought, because I was so aware of the music.

  “In the isolation hut the loneliness was as penetrating as the ‘Agnus Dei’. Torgon was picking up her few things, putting them slowly one by one into her bag in preparation for returning to the compound, and there was such a sense of total desolation. She knew she was going back to her death, and she knew she was returning utterly alone, without any support whatsoever. Without Loki. Without her sister. Without her child … and … I realized for the first time, without me.”

  Laura looked over. “Because, of course, I was the Power, wasn’t I?”

  James looked at her.

  “I mean, you’ve figured that out by now, haven’t you? Torgon’s world was my inspiration for trying to become something more than I could be by myself, but in the same way, I was hers. She had become great by imagining my world.” Laura’s eyes brimmed with tears. “But then she lost her visions, because I’d abandoned her.”

  “That’s an interesting premise,” James said. “But ‘abandonment’ is a very strong word.”

  “No, it’s the right word. I chose to leave her. I chose to turn her into something less than she was, because I wanted …” Laura halted a moment and wiped her eyes. “Because I just wanted to be ordinary. To have what everyone else had.”

  “So, you’re saying that you feel responsible for Torgon’s fate?” James asked, intrigued by this surreal complexity.

  Laura’s brow furrowed. “Can you understand what I’m talking about? The difference? Between the real Torgon – this beautiful, noble creature who came to me in childhood – and the caricature I’d turned her into, which was no more than an extension of my ego?”

  James nodded.

  “There was Fergus with all his talk about destiny. I kept hearing that word all around me and never paid enough attention to it, never recognized I already had a destiny. I didn’t need Fergus’s version of it.”

  Laura let out a long, slow breath.

  “In some different, better world, I would have stayed on course with what I was fated for. I would have become that brilliant doctor and gone off to some god-forsaken corner of the world to do immeasurable good. People would have looked at me and said, ‘She’s inspired.’ Maybe even, ‘She hears the voice of God.’ Because there are indeed Voices in this world, call them what you may, and if you heed them, you are special.”

  Laura paused and in her silence James detected a faint defensiveness. “But the frank truth is,” she said, “very few of us have it in us to be Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King. It’s easy to think that we’d all be capable of that kind of greatness if given the chance. But that’s a dream. The reality is very different. Torgon demanded everything of me from the moment I met her that night on the path the summer I was seven. She wanted my time, my attention, my social life, my education, my career. To do what she wanted of me meant I couldn’t have friends. I couldn’t have a family. I couldn’t have anything except her. That was too much for me. To follow Torgon required a nobility from me I just didn’t have.

  “So … I left her there as she was, to return to the village alone, and I moved on to create a life of my own. I’d had a remarkable apprenticeship, doing all that writing on the Forest, so I’ve put it to good use. My books are quality literature. They bring enjoyment to a lot of people and, I like to think, some depth and insight to the issues I write about. I’m a decent person. I try hard to do the right thing whenever I can. But I’m tired of feeling that I didn’t live up to what might have been. The way I see it, yes, a golden chalice was passed to me, but it wasn’t meant to be mine. So I drank from it and passed it on.”

  “There is a story here,” Conor announced, taking a large, blank piece of drawing paper. He carried it over to the table. “It looks like there is nothing on it, but really there is a story here. Do you see it?” he asked James.

  “I see a piece of white paper.”

  Conor reached over and took one of James’s pencils and then sat down. “You will see the story soon, because I’m going to draw the pictures for it. Tomorrow when you look at this paper, you will see the story’s there.” He bent forward and began to draw a long line across the top of the paper.

  “I was thinking about this when I was in my bed this morning,” he said, as he continued to draw. “I thought, the story will be on the paper tomorrow. So is it always on the paper
? Is it just the way our eyes are that we can’t see it because it’s today and not tomorrow?”

  “That’s a big thought to be thinking,” James said.

  “I think big thoughts.”

  “So I’ve noticed.”

  “Tomorrow is hidden. My story here is hidden until I’ve done it. The world is full of hidden things.” He was drawing vertical lines on the paper, dividing the space into boxes. “My mechanical cat is hidden. No one can see it, because it’s in here,” he said and tapped his chest.

  “You know inside you there is something strong,” James said.

  Conor nodded. “Yeah. I hear it singing. My mother can’t. She says, ‘Put on your socks, Conor, it’s time to go.’ I say, ‘The mechanical cat is singing.’ She says, ‘Don’t be silly. We haven’t got time.’” He looked up. “But the mechanical cat knows. Nothing’s hidden from the mechanical cat.”

  James looked at him.

  “The mechanical cat can see everything. He can see the story hidden on this paper. He can see tomorrow. And at our house he can see the ghost.”

  “This is the man under the rug?”

  Conor didn’t answer. He had finished dividing the paper into sections and now turned to the box in the top left-hand corner. “I’ll draw a picture of the man under the rug. Then you’ll know what you’re looking for.”

  Tongue protruding between his lips, head bent close to the paper, Conor threw himself into the activity. A figure appeared, lying prone, but the drawing was hard to decipher because there were many faint, spidery lines coming out from the body in all directions.