by Karen Myers
*Picture of east coast and ocean and west coast of Europe, from very high up. Picture of same, but the continents visibly closer. Question?*
“You’re asking about continental drift? Plate tectonics? You know about that?”
*Excited. Yes. No. Want. Question?*
Oh my, he thought. I might be a little late to dinner.
As the after-dinner guests continued to drift in, George let himself slump comfortably in his chair along the outer edge, keeping Mag company with a mug of warm cider in his hand. The fire in the conservatory warded off the outdoor chill, and George relaxed, looking forward to his bed in his usual guest room in the manor.
The tables had been separated again and were scattered about the room like seatings at a cafe, the people at each table sated after their roast beef and pie. The servants kept them well-provided with cider and beer. The one problem Edgewood didn’t have was a shortage of food. The population seemed to have diminished faster than the food supply.
Rhys took a casual seat at the front. George knew how he enjoyed Rhodri’s performances.
Those travelers who had instruments had been encouraged to bring them, and some of the residents came prepared as well. Many had brought children, some of whom were young enough to run up to Seething Magma and stare at her until their exasperated parents retrieved them, apologizing for their manners.
*Picture of Granite Cloud. Picture of children. Question?*
“Yes, those are children.”
One determined little girl with brown curls, about five years old, crept up to George’s chair and leaned on his knee, never looking at him. She couldn’t take her eyes off of Mag.
“Hello. I’m Gwyneth. What’s your name?”
*Amusement. Picture of boiling lava.*
George said, “You can’t hear her answer but she said her name is Mag.”
The child looked at him skeptically. Mag rippled the front of her mantle at her and convinced her he hadn’t made it up.
“Where are you from?”
*Picture of Blue Ridge cutaway.*
“She said she lives deep in the Blue Ridge mountains,” he told her, pointing to the west.
“Why did you come here?”
*Picture of Granite Cloud, picture of girl, picture of Granite Cloud reaching.*
“She said she has a little girl like you that’s gotten into trouble.”
This time she turned her head and looked directly at him. “You’re going to help her, aren’t you?”
“Yes, my dear,” he told her gravely, “we’re all going to help.”
He spotted a woman standing and looking around the room distractedly, and ventured a guess that this was her mother. She came over to his raised arm with relief on her face, ready to scold her daughter.
*Envy, worry, picture of Granite Cloud.*
George forestalled the mother. “Mag says she envies you your daughter. She’s looking for hers, much the same age.”
The woman’s face softened with a vision of how worried she would be if her daughter went missing. She curtsied to Seething Magma.
“I hope you find her, safe and sound,” she said, then took her daughter by the hand and led her away.
The room quieted as Rhodri left the far side where the musicians had been tuning and walked to the front near the fire, holding a bowed instrument similar to a fiddle.
“We’d like to invite everyone to join us, as they wish, for our own mutual entertainment. Cydifor and I have a little something to get us started.”
While he was talking, Cydifor came up with a similar instrument and stood beside him. Rhodri lifted his bow and began a stately dance tune in a minor key that put George in mind of a minuet, and Cydifor joined him in unison. The timbre of their instruments was mellow rather than harsh, somewhere between a viol and a violin.
As the tune reached its end the first time, Cydifor began a series of variations around Rhodri’s solid melody, first as a slow weaving around the harmony, then in later repeats as double-time embellishments and flourishes. They whipped the duet up to maximum complexity, never altering the tempo, then in the final repeat, it wound back down into simple harmony, ending in unison.
The room was silent for a moment, then burst into applause. George stood as he clapped, and Rhys rose from his chair to shake both their hands. He said something to Cydifor that George couldn’t hear, but he could see his flush of pleasure all the way across the room. Looks like he’s found a home, George thought.
*Interest. Picture of lines rising, crossing, geometric forms and relations.*
Yes, he thought to her, music is closely related to mathematics. Do you know about harmonic intervals?
He told her about vibrating strings and overtones while other musicians joined the ones on stage to make livelier tunes and the audience grew more boisterous.
After one foot-tapping song that had the whole room singing along on the chorus, Mag asked, *Picture of people swaying rhythmically. Question?*
Not sure what you’re asking, Mag, he replied silently. Is this something we do for social bonding? Yes. Is rhythm a part of music? Rhythm’s even more fundamental to music than melody, certainly more hard-wired into what we are, as physical animals. He showed her dancers, marchers, sailors hauling a rope to a chantey. Rhythm entrains us to act together. It’s hard to explain, we don’t understand how it works very well ourselves.
George had studied music informally out of interest, as a casual singer. He’d always envied those with a special talent for instruments. Music theory and its relationship to mathematics fascinated him, before he was distracted by his work building a software company. He was deep into this silent conversation with Mag when he noticed faces turned his way.
Rhodri stood in the front with his eyebrows raised in question. When he saw he had George’s attention, he said, “I asked, what do you play, huntsman? I’ve heard you singing to the hounds, so I know you can carry a tune.”
George was startled, but game. He said, “I can sing for my supper, if you like.” Rhodri beckoned him up.
George stood in front of him and the other musicians, and said to them, “I better do this one on my own since I don’t think you’ll know it.” He waited a moment for silence and surveyed his audience, noting the attentive children. Behind him, Cydifor played a suggestive triad privately for his own ears, and he found it fit well enough with his range.
He launched into a comic performance of the old ballad “An Outlandish Knight,” playing all the parts for maximum dramatic impact. First he was the seductive knight luring the maiden off with him, with her father’s gold and horses. When the knight threatened her with robbery and death, he was the cunning maiden who plays modest and tricks him to his own death and then returns to her home, sneaking back in. He was her sleepy father wondering at the noise outside, and finally the nosy parrot, milking the suspense to see if he would betray her clandestine adventure.
Cydifor entwined his singing with a quiet high tenor wordless descant around George’s baritone, once he caught the contours of the tune. He managed to enhance the comic effect greatly.
When it all came to a satisfying conclusion, he was gratified to see smiles on the younger faces. Rhodri said, “Always good to have a nice low voice to round out the singing.”
Rhodri launched into an a cappella parody song about a clumsy warrior that Cydifor clearly also knew. George was put on his mettle to improvise a vocal “oom-pah” walking bass line beneath it in place of the missing instruments. He relished the way it required all of his attention to stay synchronized with the others as he came wheezing to the end.
He bowed to the humorous applause and returned to Mag.
*Picture of instrument, picture of George singing. Question?*
I’ll assume that’s not a critique of my performance, George thought to her, amused. We call the second type “song.” It includes words with rhythm and rhyme. We have a non-musical version of the same thing for the spoken word, called poetry.
&nbs
p; He filled out a basic musical education for Mag for quite a while before succumbing to sleepiness and heading off to bed, the party still going strong behind him.
Seething Magma watched the remainder of the entertainment, another hour or so of musical performances, and one comic recitation by a korrigan, which she understood was not exactly music, but similar.
What a very interesting thing the surface folk had made of rhythm and sound. She knew of rock formations that gave off a clear tone when struck, but music itself was wholly new to her. She found the mathematics of it fascinating, as well as the physics of the different instruments that were used by the performers. George had also tried to describe to her some of the art of it, the confounding of expectations with the unanticipated, the suspended resolution, the similarity to emotional narrative. She’d pursued the subject with George until he yawned in her face and put a stop to it for the night.
Sleep, now, that was another thing she hadn’t thought about before. She knew that animals quieted sometimes without being dead, but the underground fish she was most familiar with never stopped moving, like her own people. George explained that to her, too—sleep was a time for the body to rest and the mind to “catch up,” as he put it. She couldn’t believe it, though—a third of each day, just for that?
They’d tried to explore their differences in minds and brains but couldn’t get very far with the one-sided nature of their conversation.
She could feel the change in George’s thoughts as he got sleepy, and she monitored him discretely in his room as he dropped off. He’d told her about dreams, and she found those very odd indeed. What a strange way to digest the day’s events.
But then, what a surprise all these people were. She’d expected that some would be afraid of her, but mostly they were polite and helpful, and she could feel their genuine sympathy for her need. The anger she tasted from them when they realized what Madog must have done to hold Granite Cloud, why, they wanted to make it their own fight. She needed to explore this with George when she saw him again in the morning.
The biggest shock was George’s casual revelations about the bones of the earth, what he could tell her about the movement of the lands. In just a few moments he had illuminated generations of speculation among her own kind. How could a creature so young know these things? She saw behind his explanation a dim image of hundreds of other people, all learning about the subject and contributing their knowledge into a great pile of glistening treasure. She knew he came from somewhere else, and that he’d learned these things as students do, not through his own expertise, but it was almost impossible to believe that any people so young could make that much sense of what had happened so long ago, and was still happening, to the rocks of the world. It was humbling. My kind may be the elder, but his people see further back in time. How unexpected.
There would be much to tell her mother and her kin when she returned from this encounter. She wondered if they would believe her? She’d always thought of herself as one particular bit of the gravel in the image that represented her mother’s name. Maybe I can make that piece shine like a jewel for her.
She turned to the door and extended a pseudopod to open it, taking care to close it again after leaving, as George had told her. She’d spend the night foraging until they were ready for her again in the morning.
As she passed the barracks where the travelers were staying for the night, she caught the taste of a sleepy child and its mother. The mother was singing to the child, and it calmed and settled. So that’s another use of music, she thought, to capture the senses of a child and encourage it to rest. She made a resonating chamber with a vibrating tongue and experimented with pumping air through it, humming the tune to herself as she entered the woods.
CHAPTER 11
George joined Idris and Lleision at breakfast just as they were getting started. “Sorry to interrupt, but it was occurring to me last night that I might be off in the south much of the day and I haven’t yet looked at that way which appeared a few days ago, replacing the one I destroyed last time.”
Lleision nodded as he chewed.
“I’d like to duck over there first, before Idris assembles his men to return to Gwyn,” he said and turned to Idris. “Can we do that? Shouldn’t take long, and I hate to think of leaving that behind us, like an open door.”
“Who do you want with us?” Lleision asked.
“Rhodri. I don’t see him here but I’ll roust him out of bed if necessary. I’d like Mag, too, if she’ll come.”
Edern leaned over the two marshals. “Where is she?”
“Don’t know,” George said. He lifted his head. Can you hear me, he thought at her.
*Greetings.*
He told her the plan.
*Agreement. Picture of terrace.*
“She’ll wait for us outside,” he said. “I’ll go find Rhodri.”
Edern said, deadpan, “Tell him from me he’s too old to be laying around in bed.”
George blinked then smiled slowly as he heard the affectionate tease in his voice.
He stood in the snow and looked at the new way with distaste. They were close enough to the manor to see the buildings through the bare trees. Much too close, George thought.
“I marked the spot for Lleision,” Rhodri said, speaking softly to appease his obvious hangover. George saw the branches that had been dragged into a low line along the width of the way entrance, and the snow was unbroken from that point.
“No one’s come through since it appeared, judging by the snow,” George said.
Seething Magma moved closer to the entrance, leaving her odd signature in the snow behind her.
*Picture of Granite Cloud. Picture of setting sun.*
“Mag says Cloudie made it, and it points west.”
Seething Magma straightened her body and oriented it south of west. George made note of the direction using his compass. “That’s the exact direction,” he said, pointing at her. “How far, Mag, can you tell?”
*Picture of Shenandoah Valley to the west. Picture of north end of ridge in the middle of the valley floor.*
“Comes from the north end of Massanutten mountain. That would be about thirty miles.”
Edern said, “Can it be blocked?”
“Let’s run a few tests,” Rhodri said. “I see it as owned and closed. What can you see, George?”
“It’s… blurry,” he said. “I can see it from a distance just fine, but it’s not very clear when I look at it.”
“That’s the ‘closed’ part. So, can you claim it?”
“How would I do that?” George said.
“It’s an act of will.”
George reached out and the way was… slick to his feel. He couldn’t get a grasp on it. “I don’t think so.”
“Was the Archer’s Way different?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t try to claim that. But it was already open, not closed. Does that make a difference?”
“We’ll see what we can find out later this morning when we work with it,” Rhodri said. “Let’s concentrate on this one. Now, can you open it?”
George had no idea how, and unsurprisingly it remained closed. He shook his head.
“That’s normal. Do you remember how you sealed the Archer’s Way? Can you do that here?”
George looked at it and tried not to predetermine an answer. A picture of a weave came to him, and this time he could feel the horned man stirring inside him, rousing a little at the challenge. He wondered if it had been the same when at the Archer’s Way and he just hadn’t recognized the feeling yet.
“Yes,” he said slowly, “I think we can.”
“You and Mag?” Rhodri asked.
“No,” George said. “Me and Cernunnos.” Edern and Rhodri turned their heads and looked at him.
“Do it,” Edern said.
George nodded and visualized the way exit as a closed eye, He stitched the lid shut in a semicircle along the bottom, pulling whatever it was he was using as mental cord t
ightly through and knotting it somehow at the end.
Rhodri followed along with him and shivered. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Except for your seal on the Archer’s Way.”
*Surprise. Picture of horned man?*
“I don’t know, Mag, I think he helped.”
Edern asked, “Can you destroy this way?”
“Probably. Shall I do it?”
Lleision spoke up, “If it’s truly sealed, then there’s no hurry about it. We should save that for a more strategic blow and keep our options open.”
“Mag, can you take over this way or open it?”
*Frustration.*
“Too hard a question, we’ll have to break it into parts,” George said.
“We’ll leave it sealed and under guard for now,” Edern decided.
Idris and his guards assembled below the terrace steps while George waited on the terrace for the last of the messages he was supposed to bring with him. A bag hanging at his side held the bundles from Rhys and Edern, but Ceridwen was running late.
George spent the time filling Cydifor in on their activities earlier in the day. Rhodri, meanwhile, was looking over the entrance to Mag’s way.
“Can you see what’s different about this way?” he asked George.
George looked carefully, then tried to grasp the outer surface mentally. “It’s not blurry, which means open, yes?”
Rhodri nodded.
George continued, “The outside feels different from the other one, I can get a grip on it.”
“That’s because it’s unowned, unclaimed. In the old world, it’s very unusual to find an unowned way. Here, I’ve found several.”
“And claimed them, of course.”
“Immediately.” Rhodri grinned.
*Warning.*
“Mag says that wouldn’t be a good idea.”
Rhodri looked directly at her. “I had no such intention, my lady. This is your way. Can’t you claim it yourself and prevent anyone else?”
*Frustration*
“I can’t tell if the answer is hard to communicate or the action is hard to do,” George said. “We’ll have to get into this after we send Idris off.”