He gulped the first swallow. It was so cold that it made his teeth tingle. He got out a thank you, but couldn’t leave well enough alone. His usual problem was saying one thing more than was necessary, or prudent. “Are you a witch?” he blurted out.
The lady allowed silence to settle over them. The kitten sensed Clive’s tension and departed more swiftly than it had arrived. There was no purring anywhere in the house.
There was a definite school-teacherish quality about Mrs. Norse. She proceeded to prove it: “Always be careful of the manner in which you use words. They have meanings, words do. As to your question, no one has sufficient authority to decide such matters except school librarians … and witches, of course!”
One of the cats laughed. Either that, or it was getting ready to spit up a fur ball.
Wolf decided to help out poor Clive. “I’m sure he meant nothing by it, My Lady.” It was the first time Clive had heard Wolf address her formally. She inclined her head in a manner that suggested everything was all right. A little voice in the back of his head was replaying dialogue from a classic movie: Are you a good witch or a bad witch? Best to leave well enough alone.
Meanwhile, an even more ungracious chattering was going on in the back of his skull to the effect that Wolf and Mrs. Norse were keeping secrets from him, and just who the hell did they think they were not to level with him? Fortunately he stifled the impulse to articulate any part of that special pleading. “You haven’t come all this way, Clive, not to have satisfaction,” announced Mrs. Norse.
“Can you tell me what has happened to my sister?”
“I’m glad you ask about her first. She is your comrade in this adventure of yours. She is safe.”
Clive was greatly relieved. He wondered if he should feel guilty about not feeling as much concern for his parents, but he really didn’t. It was as if they had abandoned Fay and him long before they were kidnapped, stolen, replaced….
Mrs. Norse observed the emotions playing over Clive’s face but said nothing. He took another swallow of the cold beverage. Then Mrs. Norse asked, “Clive, why do you think you and your sister have so few friends?”
This thoroughly unexpected inquiry fell like a physical blow. It was one thing to be asked such a question by Grandfather, but quite another to be asked by her. Here he was bracing himself for mighty quests, impossible dangers, monsters of every shape and size … and she goes and hits him with a question like that.
But wait! Why was he thinking of Mrs. Norse in this way? She hadn’t caused this mess, as far as he knew. It was Grandfather’s fault, or whatever he had become. There was no cause to blame this person who only seemed interested in helping what was left of the Gurney family.
“I’d like a moment to think about it,” he said, carefully.
Mrs. Norse’s voice was more musical than ever as she said, “Trust to memories, trust in dreams.”
Dreams. That was one thing Fay and he had in common now. Were they not sharing the same delusion? Or what did they call it at school when they had the monthly anti-drug lectures? Hallucinations. That was it.
Yet even as these thoughts were racing through his mind, he was already discounting them. This fantastic world was a real place. In some ways, it seemed more real, more solid, than what he’d left behind. Every passing minute made the land of his birth recede a little further. The nightmare had begun in the old world with Grandfather and his threats. Now it would be resolved, one way or another, right here.
The dreams to which Mrs. Norse referred had to be the ones Fay had been telling him about, and that he had had a taste of earlier. Those dreams forced him back into contemplating the last thing he wanted to remember. Better to fight with strange forest creatures than have to talk about himself!
“Mom and Dad never made it easy for us,” he said in a low voice. “They wouldn’t let us bring friends home or stay overnight at their houses.”
“Mrs. Norse seemed to be speaking to him over a great distance when she asked: “Was it always that way?”
Clive was becoming unhappier by the minute. He hadn’t thought about these matters very much, but he had to admit that all the really bad stuff had occurred in the last few years, when the family fortunes had taken a nosedive. The recession had been the final blow. There had been sunny days before that, happy memories, but the storm clouds had rolled in and everything changed.
Dad was mad all the time. Mom cried all the time. At first her tears had been from frustration at their situation, the same as Dad. But then her tears were the way she let her anger out … and Dad became the situation to her. She wanted to go back to college. He criticized her for not caring enough about the children. What Clive and Fay felt was a constant fear from both of them.
He’d almost managed to forget all of this and now Mrs. Norse was forcing him to remember. He looked at her, catching the reflection of his face in her polished glasses. There was no hope of transferring his hatred to her, much as he might like to blame the nearest person at hand. He just couldn’t feel that way about her, just as he couldn’t really feel badly about his parents. There was only one adult, one relative, that all his dark emotions could settle on as a fog of soot settles on towns that can no longer breathe. And that one had earned every ounce of enmity.
“Mrs. Norse, I have to ask you something. Is it wrong to hate?” She seemed the exact sort of person to ask such a question.
“Please forgive my bad manners,” she replied. “I forgot to offer you a cookie.”
He took a cookie off the tray. It was no ugly grey thing but a big chocolate chip cookie, Clive’s favorite kind. But even a flavor as fine as this wouldn’t distract him. Mrs. Norse was avoiding the question.
Or was she? In one graceful motion she had placed the tray on the coffee table next to the couch, and was gliding over to the bookcase, the hem of her long dress rustling across the polished floor. The cats surrounded her legs in a sea of fur. The object she was after was not in the case, however. It was a large red book in its own stand, atop an onyx table. As she lifted the book, Clive could see its reflection in the glossy surface of the table, making him think of a lake frozen over in winter — cool thoughts for a mild day in Autumn.
She brought him the book, passing it to him with the special care one would give a baby. The book had a single design threaded in silver at the center of its crimson cover: a circle divided into four portions by a horizontal and a vertical line. Some books have character, made up from the dust of musty libraries, and a texture that only comes when they’ve been passed down from one generation to the next. Anything rough has been made smooth as a polished stone. This was that kind of book.
He hesitated before opening it. He wanted her to say something. She did: “Clive, never try to talk yourself out of your own experience. Never deny the reality of an emotion. You know what it means to hate. You also know what it means to love. But neither run very deep in you. The only way that happens is when you’ve lived long enough to forgive.”
Reaching out with delicate long fingers, she helped him turn the pages. It was a book of pictures. The remarkably intricate designs were of odd shapes he’d never seen in his Geometry textbook. But as he observed the page, something much odder than the drawings caught his attention. The pictures faded, to be replaced by words in a foreign language he no more understood than he did the drawings. The letters were strange little squiggles and dashes and dots. As he studied them, they started moving and swimming around on the page. He closed his eyes in disbelief, but when he opened them again, the show was still going on.
He seemed to be looking at a page of instructions from a computer manual, like the one he had studied when Dad had announced he’d be getting an Apple any day now. (Dad didn’t like it when Clive told him that his favorite teacher at school said Apple was the worst system you could buy because there was a worm in it; and the merger with IBM only meant there would be lots of apple sauce.) But the symbols weren’t really the same as what he had seen; they were mere
ly similar.
Before he could make heads or tails of it, the page changed again. This time it appeared to be in columns of Chinese writing; at least what Clive took to be Chinese writing. Next came something very much like Egyptian hieroglyphics, or maybe it really was the language of the Pharaohs. He wouldn’t know but just thinking about it seemed to bring up pictures, in faint outline, behind the cryptic messages on the page. Was that a pyramid filling in the left page? Did a sphinx rise from desert sands to hold court on the right page? The style of illustration was very fine, with thin black lines and a definite exaggeration which helped bring the figures to life.
“This is like watching a movie,” he said, expressing the highest compliment possible for his generation. “But I don’t get it.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wolf turning in a circle, the way dogs will, before lying down. The cats made room for him, although most of them were curling up in more comfortable locations. It’s as if they all knew this was going to be a long one.
“You are reading The Book of the Seasons,” whispered Mrs. Norse in a reverential tone of voice. “The book is searching to find the best way of communicating with you, but you need to help.”
“How?”
“Through what we’ve been discussing — love and hate. Provide it with a focal point, something personal.”
There was no hesitation on Clive’s part. He was too worried about his sister for that. He thought about her. He thought hard. And as he did so, the pages changed. On the left was an illustration of Fay visiting with a most peculiar and diversified company. The most striking personage was a man whose skeleton was visible. Judging by Fay’s happy, relaxed expression, she had become accustomed to the unusual. Perhaps she had adjusted better than he.
The other figures in the drawing were not as “Halloweenish” as the skeletal gentleman. He was glad of that as he was still coming to grips with the creatures that had frightened him so badly in the woods. He especially liked the appearance of a very beautiful woman with flowers in her hair. She reminded him of an older girl at school. If he didn’t have friends, he thought peevishly, it wasn’t from lack of trying.
He was glad to see Kitnip in the picture. At least Fay hadn’t made the journey alone. He wondered if that cat had been any more informative with Fay than the dog had been with him. While he contemplated the lack of cooperation attendant upon newly liberated pets, words began forming on the page opposite the illustration.
They looked like this: To return whence you’ve never been;
to go whither you don’t know;
to see the blinding, hear the deafening, taste the tasteless
smell the emptiness of inner depths;
to touch the fire and live through its embrace;
to do all these things, one must be invited to the Other Side and
arrive at your destination by going the other way.
“Well, that’s as clear as mud,” said Clive, turning the other page. He was pleased that the next part of the text at least had something to do with the picture on the previous page. There was a new picture now, a picture of himself reading the book!
The new words read: And so it came to pass that the saviors of the Seasons came into the Land. If they were to prevail, they would be as the saviors before them, each different and yet each the same in victory. For only if Lord Malak destroyed the balance of all worlds, by making the Four into the One, would the efforts of Lord Clive and Lady Fay be in vain….
Clive did a slow double-take when he read that. Lord Clive? Lady Fay? Was this a joke? One look at Mrs. Norse’s smile told him otherwise.
He resumed reading: Jennifer the One had but recently finished introducing the Lady Fay to the Lord High Mayor of Spring when a new individual entered the scene. “Oh no,” said the mayor, “it’s Mr. Wynot.” Mr. Wynot was a middle-aged man dressed in white shirt and shorts with a white pith helmet on his head, and beaming with a full mouth of teeth just as blindingly bright as the rest of him.
“How about those turtles?” asked Mr. Wynot. “They’re really in the soup, huh?”
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Copyright © 1996 by Brad Linaweaver. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHORES
“How about those turtles?” asked Mr. Wynot. “They’re really in the soup, huh?”
Fay decided that pretty soon nothing would surprise her anymore. At least this new character had a human appearance.
“You are most welcome here, Lord High Mayor of Summer,” the Tabrik greeted the newcomer.
“Thank you, Lord High Mayor of Spring,” replied Mr. Wynot, bowing low so that his helmet fell off, revealing a full head of snow white hair.
“He always does that,” said Jennifer, giggling.
“The spirit of Spring is lovely as always,” said Mr. Wynot. Having yet to recover his headgear, he had no problem bowing low again, and pressing his lips to Jennifer’s fingers.
Fay had never thought of curtsying before, and thought it would be an embarrassing action to perform. But Jennifer made it appear graceful and attractive. When the well aged hand of the older man took hers, she surprised herself by doing as Jennifer had done. Curtsying wasn’t difficult. The interesting part of it was that bending the knees and doing a partial squat could look so good.
“Ah my dear,” said Mr. Wynot, his white mustache trembling ever so slightly, “you are warm to the touch. There’s a subtle little fire coursing through your skin.”
“That must be my sunburn,” answered Fay. “Or what’s left of it.” Fay sorrowfully observed the fading pink on her arm that she had hoped would be turning brown right about now. One thing was certain: she wouldn’t be getting a suntan in a world without a sun! And yet Mr. Wynot had pleasantly brown skin making a nice contrast against the whiteness of his hair and clothes. It didn’t appear to be his natural color, but Fay wasn’t about to follow this line of inquiry. Maybe you could get a tan from magic, but even if true, Jennifer’s pale white skin suggested not everyone wanted one.
“Ah, methinks it’s the fire of youth,” said Wynot, inhaling the perfume of her skin. She couldn’t help noticing the large veins in his hands, and the wrinkles around his wrists. This was the first example of age she had seen here, although she assumed from the way everyone spoke of her that Mrs. Norse wore the signs of age as well. The difficulty in considering these matters was the absence of any way to measure anything in this crazy place. And Fay had not seen a single child.
As if privy to her young companion’s thoughts, Jennifer asked a question of her old acquaintance: “Isn’t she a bit young for you?”
Mr. Wynot literally beamed in response! “Those of us who measure our years by the age of the Seasons find every mortal breath as fresh as a daisy, be it newborn or grandmother.” Having unburdened himself of this Thought for the Day, he caught the critical expressions of his companions. “But, of course, she is but a child as you say,” he added hurriedly, releasing her hand.
With that highly refined obliviousness that is both the charm and burden of youth, Fay insisted, “I’m not a child!”
“Age resents youth,” said Kitnip. “This isn’t a problem unique to humans.”
Fay was glad to have Kitnip on her side despite the cat’s being middle aged; she picked up Kitnip before asking permission (when a cat says no, it means no) … but Kitnip offered no resistance. She purred instead, and Fay felt a whole lot better.
Meanwhile, Mr. Wynot had retrieved his pith helmet, and contrived to make himself the center of attention again. “Yes, it’s true about youth and age. But do not forget that youth resents age, too! Many a time I’ve failed to receive the appreciation due me for many a mighty battle against the forces of evil. Why, just t
he other day I was asked to recount the tale of….”
“Oh,” said the Tabrik leader.
“No,” added Jennifer.
The proof of Mr. Wynot’s greatness lay in his inability to notice any hints, much less pay attention to them: “Why I fought the original Malak, I did.” Fay could tell from just glancing at Jennifer and the Tabrik that there was nothing special about Wynot’s claim among this group. He continued: “Malak liked turning his enemies into different sorts of things in those days. He’d figured out that it wasn’t very smart to change them into mice or frogs or birds, or frankly any sort of creature that could still get around and cause trouble. He finally settled on the notion of transforming them into rocks. But I was not afraid of him.”
The Tabrik leader intervened. “Our young visitor is unversed in the nature of our struggles. You have not told her how our powers are balanced, and that none of the incarnations of Malak has yet succeeded in making any of us truly vulnerable.” The semi-transparent head fixed her with watery eyes beyond which yawned the two black holes of the skull’s sockets. Where before she had been afraid at such a sight she was now calm. “As each season was made to have its own special protectors and avatars, so too was each an environment in which life could grow and develop. Malak has twisted and destroyed much of this life through Time; but he could not do this to every individual who might be under the conscious protection of one of us.”
“We couldn’t protect everyone all the time,” lamented Jennifer.
“Not if we were going to maintain the integrity of the Seasons, our primary task,” said Mr. Wynot.
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