This was surely the most awesome trick it had ever played. If its prank with the sleeping humans and their sacks didn’t make the prep-school folklore hit list, this singular event surely would, even if there were no other living creature around to be dazzled by it. Again and again, Keyshi circled the brilliantly glowing object, swooping up more and more sand, and flinging it higher and higher into the air, sometimes bursting forth two, three, and even four multicolored displays in a single event.
At last, Keyshi sucked up all the sand its swirling vortex could carry and put on a marvelous grand finale which consisted of a repetitive, quadri-level, series of a dozen, or so, individual, multi-colored bursts.
The light given off from this dynamic performance lit up the Center House porch and several rows of huts nearest the well. Nothing so beautiful, so spectacular, had ever been seen before in Nuttinnew - and wasn’t seen even now, for everyone in Nuttinnew remained in a deep, though restless, sleep. Or so it seemed.
As the droplets of sand fell to the earth, they became dimmer and dimmer. For as they fell by the millions, they gradually covered over the source of their light until, at last, the object was completely hidden and its light shone no more. No longer amused, Keyshi danced on to find whatever more mischief it could. Turning northeastward, its attention was drawn to a singular hut which struck Keyshi as unusual, even though its general appearance was just like the many others. This perceived difference piqued Keyshi’s curiosity.
"Well, now, what is this I see?” Keyshi giggled, even though it still didn’t know what it was that had drawn its attention. But that didn’t matter, a successful, prank-playing little, summer breeze always trusts its instincts. So stealthily, Keyshi snaked its way toward the hut. Then, like a cat pouncing upon its prey, it attacked, only to discover its efforts were thwarted, as all potential entry ways of this particular hut were tightly sealed.
Keyshi swirled around and around seeking even the smallest opening to squeak though, but found none - not even a crack to whistle through. First Keyshi was puzzled, then it was infuriated. Around and around, again and again it circled and swirled about the hut tossing sand and dried veget leaves all over it. For like any prankster, it made a superb tricker, but a sadly poor trickee. Keyshi's ferocity caused quite a mess about the outside of the hut, but this did little more than annoy the occupants cloistered within.
"What's that?" asked one of the dozen people gathered within the sealed hut.
"It’s nothing! Just a summer breeze!” the rebel leader barked with the irritating tone of annoyance which demonstrated his displeasure with being interrupted. “Now, what was I saying?"
"You were telling us your plan for the new system of planting and rationing,” answered a young male sitting at the eating table, anxiously waiting for the rebel leader to continue - which he began to do, but was usurped by another.
". . . once the New Order is established,” added a soft, raspy, whispering voice of a slightly framed, hooded figure crouched in the shadows in a corner of the room.
"Down with Mayor Pulpitt!" another young male shouted suddenly as the thought burst forth spontaneously from his head.
"Yes, yes, down with the mayor!” shouted another, and a chant broke out, soon reaching a deafening roar within the confines of the small structure.
Loden waited with forced patience for the chant to subside. Personally, he felt such outbursts were a waste of time - and time was something of which, he believed, they had precious little. So often these same chanters had heard him say, "Time is water and water is time. When the water runs out, so has our time.” Still, they persisted in these spontaneous outbursts right in the middle of his very important speeches. He’d have put an end to them long ago, but the Hooded One assured him that these spirited eruptions kept the others motivated toward their common goal.
Outside, Keyshi jumped and twirled and threw the most incredible tantrum of its short, young life. It was a shame that, for all its effort, it accomplished absolutely no mischief at all. Out of pure frustration it soared high into the air, lifting with it all the sand it could carry. The purpose was to shoot straight down on top of the hut, covering it with the sand in one fell swoop. It was an exercise in futility plan to be sure. But then, it had been conceived out of the irrational constructs of desperation.
Fortunately, Keyshi didn’t have time to follow through with such an embarrassing, childish display. Hanging, momentarily, high in the air above the hut it made one last calculation on its cargo weight, pitch, velocity and all those particulars breezes have to take into consideration if they are to survive. It was then that Keyshi noticed the large white house conspicuously located just north of the hole.
"What’s this?" Keyshi gasped. "My, my, how could I have ignored such a splendid opportunity for mischief? That isn’t one of these unpretentious human ant hill. That is a real human house.” Keyshi had never seen one before, of course, but it had once heard intriguing tales about them from an aged winter wind who had spent all its fury in the north country and had come to the southern plains to warm up and die.
At the time, Keyshi thought its stories about human houses were just an old windsack's final mischievous prank. Now, upon seeing one for itself, it whispered a belated apology to the departed. Then, giving up its present folly, it released the sand it had lifted, and streaked off toward Center House - whistling a mischievous tune all the way.
An instant before the released sand touched the hut's roof, an air vent opened abruptly and the face of a human male poked through and was showered with the falling debris.
"Ugh! (spit. spit.) What the?" the male hacked.
"Joudliér, for veget sake shut that vent. Do you want someone to see the light from our candlelight?"
"(Spit, hack) Need fresh air. Candles too.”
"He's right, Loden. We'll all be out of our heads if we stay locked up like this much longer."
"Or dead,” added the Hooded One huddled in the shadows.
"Alright! You're right. Go ahead, open all the windows and vents, but first put out all the candles,” Loden ordered, then blew out the candle on the eating table which was draped with plans and drawings for the creation of New Nuttinnew.
Quickly the order was obeyed and each window, door and vent was flung open. All except the overhead vent which earlier had provided Joudliér with a face full of sand. Unwilling to be made the fool twice, he coerced his friend Dampy, who professed the agility of whirliwind, into performing the task.
Not wanting to dispel his self-generated myth, Dampy flung open the vent, then jumped aside to avoid being showered with sand as Joudliér had been. However, there was no sand. Joudliér was baffled. So much so, he slowly stepped beneath the same vent and stood for the longest time staring up into the clear star-studded sky.
The others in the hut made the event a context for humor, making Dampy the butt of their jokes. Like: "Why’d you jump back? You afraid the moon man's going to doodle on your face, too? Ha, ha!” Of course, they were really making fun of Joudliér, who actually did get doodled on. But those gathered were too wise to directly gibe the big fellow and risk bringing his wrath down upon themselves.
Dampy, to say the least, was quite embarrassed by this chiding, as young males easily are, and saved no words telling the star-gazing Joudliér, how perturbed he was at being made to look the fool, when he was just doing him a favor. However, Joudliér paid little attention to him, or to the jokes which seemed to spring forth like veget puffs after a good autumn rain. Unknown to both males, the summer breeze, which was the cause of this fracas had long since left the area and was now conniving to wreak major mischief on their beloved Center House.
***** ***** *****
Center House provided even more entertainment than Keyshi had hoped for. Sailing freely through the first downstair’s window, it danced with delight from room to room shuffling, moving, turning and generally disheveling whatever it could. Curtains flapped, ornaments spun about, trinkets tumbled, and food flopp
ed to the floor. In the process, everything was soon covered with a thin layer of annoying dust.
"What great fun!" Keyshi cried gleefully. "Wonderfully wonderful, great fun!” it laughed as it twirled and swirled up the stairs to the second floor. "That old winter wind was right. I may just be a little summer breeze and maybe I can't tear shutters off their hinges and fling large objects out through the windows, but I can still perform a multitude of marvelously menacing mischiefs. These humans will not forget the night Keyshi, the proliferate prankster, paid them a personal visit."
Keyshi didn’t find the upstairs rooms as challenging as the ones downstairs. There were not nearly as many doodads to nudge precariously close to the edge of a shelf or table. It did, however, find something which it considered a bit irregular even for humans. In one small room it found a male and a female human huddled together in the strangest sleeping cot Keyshi had witnessed thus far. In fact, it was nothing more than a hollowed out a boulder.
Another thing surprised Keyshi. Unlike the other humans, these didn’t have a pile of those strange objects sacked between them. Instead, their pieces had been attached to a large cloth fabric casually draped over a nearby chair.
Several times Keyshi fluttered the piece-covered cloth, which turned out to be much lighter than it looked, but the disturbance elicited no change in the human’s sleeping patterns. "Apparently," Keyshi thought, "not everyone finds these strange objects quite so valuable. The ones stuck to this female human’s head seems to satisfy their desire.”
For awhile Keyshi just circled about the room studying the two naked humans entwined in close embrace, in the hollow of the stone. They looked like a prank in the making, but nothing Keyshi came up with excited the little breeze out of its complacency. Even their cover was twisted about their ankles so it couldn’t perform its favorite new trick on them. Besides, they were already so cramped in the stone hollow, there was no room between them to put any sand.
Disappointed, Keyshi huffed at a lock of the female’s hair so that it tickled the male’s nose, eliciting a whimpered a sneeze. This minimal response only caused Keyshi even more disappointment. Floating above their heads, it thought, "How strange these humans are. Just when I think I have their nocturnal habits all figured out, I come upon a couple doing something very different from all the others. The bio-creatures who live in the wilderness are so much more predictable.” It was a pretty heavy thought for such a young breeze, so it was quickly bored of it. Dashing out of the room, it continued ransacking the rest of the upstairs rooms as best it could.
Pleased with its accomplishments, Keyshi blew out through an open window and circled the house in hope of finding still more targets of mischief. Then it noticed the bell tower. "Hm, I didn't see an entrance to this room when I was inside.” With the serendipitous discovery, Keyshi was once again intrigued and moved closer to investigate what appeared to be a small room at the base of the obelisk perched on the building’s prominent southern gable.
The room had windows on all four sides, but instead of being wide open, they were obstructed with equally spaced, narrow, boards set at forty-five degree angles. Just inside of these slats was a thin sheet of an unusual shiny substance which Keyshi had never encountered before. The sheet itself had been punched full of small holes. Each of the four windows which formed the room’s sides was constructed in the same fashion.
“Humph! These slats and holes are obviously meant for air to flow through, and anywhere air can go I can go!” Keyshi declared. Then, drawing itself into a long thin stream, it easily glided between a set of slats and through one of the small holes in the inner sheet.
Inside, Keyshi found something else it had never seen before: a fairly large, hard, shiny object hanging down from the ceiling. At first it was reminded of the small bio-creatures it had come across in the desert cave, but this was certainly no bio-creature. It looked more like an upside down bowl hanging from a tree branch. Keyshi circled it a couple of times then looked up inside it. There it saw a long tongue hanging down. At once Keyshi knew what it was. “It’s a bell!”
The old winter wind had told Keyshi about bells. “... and the bells, the glorious bells. How I blew them back and forth, back and forth, in every church, all over the city. Oh, what beautiful sounds I made. It was surely one of my greater moments.”
The old wind had told him of a time when all the winter winds in a certain human city far to the north joined together to play a most delightful torment. At a predetermined signal each wind roared through its preassigned bell tower and simultaneously set them into motion. The clambering of hundreds of bells filled the air with a splendidly loud cacophony of sounds.
Immediately, the humans began running from their multi-leveled shelters. Some were smiling and laughing. Others clapped their hands over their ears and began shouting foul expressions, greatly adding to the noise themselves.
Just the thought of it excited Keyshi to a renewed vigor. Quickly, it slipped out through a hole and between the slats. Once out of the tower it dove in a steep descent to gather speed. Sweeping close to the ground it raced past the well, picking up more speed. Then, spinning around the first hut to the west of the well, it accelerated northward with heroic velocity directly toward the tower. Never before had Keyshi wilfully propelled itself to such speed. It was even faster than the earlier episode when it found itself descending the well shaft.
Again, through its own daring, the little breeze managed to scare itself half to death. However, the thought of ringing that bell and seeing all those humans come running out of their dwellings, was an impulse to which fear only added to the excitement. Closer, closer Keyshi came to the tower.
Dead on target, Keyshi sailed between the slats of the bell tower at nearly forty knots. It could feel its leading tip slip through a small hole in the inner screen, but it had not judged its diameter correctly and could feel the unusual material give way slightly under the pressure, then rebound with an equal force, sending vibrations all along Keyshi’s being, causing it to lose concentration. Out of control, it slammed into the slats and inner screen a split second later.
Keyshi could feel its physical essence being shredded into thousands of fragments. Parts of it glanced off the smooth surface of the bell and slammed into another combination of screen and slats, exiting as a multitude of individual bits and pieces. Other parts didn’t make it through the second set of small holes. These began ricocheting off the inner walls, slamming into each other, and knocking its scattered consciousness into a myriad of incoherent deliberations.
Much time passed before Keyshi managed to gather up enough remnants of itself to form a coherent identity. Even then, it was barely half what it was when it entered the human town. Barely gliding above the ground between the huts to the west of the well, Keyshi nursed its pride, along with its wounds. It knew it could regain its size and strength in the warmth of the next day's sun, but in the meantime it felt weak, tired and injured. Even little summer breezes need a rest now and then.
While the light of the new dawn lightened the morning sky over the eastern hills, Keyshi slowly regained the greater portion of its original essence and collected its random thoughts into a coherent consciousness. The episode in the desert cave with the winged rodents was nothing compared to the ordeal it had just experienced. Still, summer breezes are more resilient than one might assume.
Keyshi took a quick check of its cognitive processes. Total awareness of its surroundings had been recovered. General cognitive functioning was in sync. Checking its memory shadows, Keyshi tuned into the memory of the conversation it had with Tonc, the old winter wind which had first told it about bells.
***** ***** *****
"I have the most appalling confession to make, (puff, puff) - a most horrible secret that I don’t want to die with it on my eternal consciousness. I must tell somewind about it - might as well be you, even if you are just an insignificant breeze,” the old wind said one day as it hovered in the desert, hidden from the
morning sun by the shadows of a deep, ancient gully.
Although Keyshi had never seen anything actually die, it was quite certain the old wind was choking out its last few laborious puffs. "Well, old wind, you.. ..”
"Tonc,” the old wind interrupted.
"Huh?" Keyshi responded - a bit confused.
"Tonc. It’s what all the other big winds call me. It isn't my real name, of course, but we northern blowers are much more into titles than names. I’m known, and venerated I might add, by the appellation, Traumatizer Of Northern Cities, but, alas, for brevity’s sake everywind just calls me T.O.N.C. - Tonc, you see?” The old wind exhaled a deep cumbersome groan.
"Hum! Yes. Well, as I was saying, old - er, Tonc, wasn’t it? You’ve already told me quite a bit more than I really cared to hear, so I suppose a little more should make little difference to me.”
Youth in any species carries with it more than an innate grain of insolence.
In its own younger days the old winter wind would have slapped a sense of respect into this uncharitable twit, who devised its own name from the last and first triplet of letters from an archaic expression for prank: monkey shine. Like it or not, however, the proud old wind was at the twits mercy, if it truly desired to unburden its guilt. So, huffing and puffing, Tonc began, as best it could, to tell its long, hitherto untold tale of shame.
“One morning, (puff) I’d been causing all kinds of mischief in a very big human city far, far to the north. It was winter - a real winter, not one of those chilly little things that shivers the likes of you half to death,” Tonc paused, wondering how a great northerner like itself had ever been reduced to confessing such a horrid secret to such a young and puny, wisp of a breeze. “But what choice do I have?” it thought, then continued.
Pieces: Book One, The Rending Page 11