by Eugen Bacon
Vida unhitches the girls from the vessel’s capsules.
Myra takes his hand. “Your arm to navigate my waist,” she smiles. “Our way is this.”
Aloft there is nothing of the storm that endangered landing but for Myra’s airborne aptitude. Rather than darkness is a jeweled sky pregnant with diamonds, stars each blinking an intimate eye as personal as it is seducing. Out yonder is emergent coral on a volcanic beach. Black pebbles run along Turtle Cove.
Amber and Tempest bob and chatter toward the cove.
“Careful now,” calls Vida. “Or you’ll be deported for too much happiness.”
They arrive at mangroves at the far shore. The coast veers into Rocky Point. Here, amethyst sand falls from waves of the great reef. Far left, a foot trail climbs to the main esplanade of the inner city, Bruthen, the capital of Grovea.
Up on the boulevard, the girls go crazy like freed animals. They tumble straight and in circles, zig-zag and in forward bursts, arms spread like birds, chaotic hair adrift. Now they are doing a waltz, now a foxtrot.
Myra eyes them. “Good seeing Amber like this,” she says.
The earthy girl shimmying carefree in the sand is far different from the thick-haired, flat faced child who stepped into their kitchen back home, a little girl wearing peanut eyes and unforgivable clothes, clutching in her hands a bundle of everything she owned.
• • •
It was the morning of the Shiva raid, the day Myra’s attack on an alien spaceship full of Shiva guards restored tranquility to Middle Creek. It was the day Mayor Jenkins said to Myra: “The key to the city is yours.”
Myra savored the moment, the neat salutes from Middle Creek rangers, a thunder of clapping from rescue teams . . . She sought and discovered adulation in Vida’s eyes but found nothing of Tempest who had vanished.
The child emerged several hours later at home in the kitchen with a little girl who smelt a bit rough, whose hair was locked in two thick braids.
Myra looked up, half-frowning and then astonished. “Why, Tempest,” she said. “Who’s your friend?”
Vida took one look at the girl accompanying their daughter and pointed without a word toward Tempest’s bedroom.
The new girl climbed but hovered at the landing. Her arms still nestled her sack. Downstairs Tempest lingered. Her eyes searched Vida’s.
“Can we? Can we, can we Pappy?”
She squealed with glee at the tilt of his chin toward the stairs. The two girls scooted all the way up to the bedroom.
“I am exasperated that Tempest never seeks instruction or affirmation from me,” said Myra.
“Yet she obeys my chin,” agreed Vida. “It is what it is. I am glad to also notice that you don’t say Mum’s good anymore when she insists on calling you Migsy.” He smoothed the curl of her brow with a finger.
“Why didn’t you suggest a bath?” said Myra. “That little girl she tugged along—”
“That little girl’s alright.”
Myra closed her eyes. “We don’t know a thing . . .”
“In time.”
Didn’t take long to link the new girl to Balmoral, the broken man rescued from the alien ship. Once you put together what the child had witnessed . . . you couldn’t fault Vida tilting his chin up the stairs for the girls.
Despite a fair distance in build between them, not much stood in age between the girls, Myra was sure. She couldn’t help but notice vulnerability in the new girl’s jaw, something that piled years to her appearance. She was attractive. Sort of—one had to look for it first. The symmetry of one eye to the other, the distance from the bridge of her nose to the flute, the height of her cheekbone from her jaw, all called up a defining beauty. But when she spoke . . . the scratch!
“Amber,” said the sand in the girl’s throat when Vida asked her name.
Myra stood straight-backed, arms crossed. Something about Amber brought Myra unease. While the girl appeared relaxed with Tempest and Vida, with Myra she stayed remote. Albino eyes looked at Myra as though they knew her secrets, but which?
The girl’s father was as good as dead. Last Myra saw him, back in his house in Camp Zero, he was curled in a corner, baring teeth at anything that came close.
Mayor Jenkins agreed without question that medical confinement was the solution, the only solution. “If you and Vida wish to adopt Amber . . .” he suggested. Vida was already nodding.
“Does Amber wish it?” snapped Myra.
And frankly, did Myra?
Since the girl joined their household, Myra felt alone, felt she was losing Vida, losing Tempest . . . Even then, despite Tempest and Amber’s bond—the girls were close as a thumb and a nail—they had their fights. Spiteful fights that took joint effort, Vida’s and Myra’s, to snatch apart the girls who were vicious as mastiffs. How the fights started was anyone’s guess. One minute, the girls were burrowed in their secret language. Next, Tempest had roared across the room. Or one moment Tempest was stepping inside a hula hoop, bringing its edges to her waist, spinning . . . The next Amber had crept, snagged a foot with a heel, sent Tempest sprawling face down, limbs open. And then a fight.
Sometimes the minds behind the tiffs were rash, foolish. Often they were calculated. Lethal. What Amber lacked in strength she made up with agility. Now a head grip, an elbow combination, reverse swap, then suddenly Amber was on top. Flip, and Amber was pinned. Hook, dodge, kick, block, upper cut. Now Amber had wriggled to offset Tempest, then both girls had tumbled.
Even as Myra and Vida snatched them apart, used monumental effort, there was no anchoring peace. The girls lunged, pressed forward, threw hands and legs. Myra determined that one day she would arm them with gloves, bolt them in a room and let them finish whatever the thing, the one that set them off.
“We need a vacation,” said Vida, releasing his seize on Amber after one such wrestling bout.
“And I know just about where,” panted Myra, freeing a writhing Tempest.
The look Amber gave Myra was poison.
• 40 •
Grovea. Myra listens to the fading notes of Amber’s song along the boulevard, not understanding a word of it: “Mah ran en at qu flate vene mondu . . .”
“Pro al fit set Nov,” joins Tempest in sweet chorus. “Fo ri zett ob!”
The girls have a code between them, a secret language that is wonderful and carefree. They call it pa tabe dome. Now their feet jump so with happiness. Looking at the skip of their happy feet, heads dipping up and down in the distance until they are out of sight, Myra remembers a star dance she once saw in Otis. It held a pattern of blinking that spread from one diamond to another, until the whole sky was a symphony of light.
The children are once more in sight. Tempest is holding Amber by the arm and leg, giving her an airplane spin. Amber goes high, higher, squeal squealing as she flies. Their play spreads. It touches other creatures in Bruthen. Fireflies hover. Cicadas awaken and begin their chant. A Vulcan eagle moves its wings to a slow beat, and then boasts spectacular loops.
Myra and Vida catch up to the girls who are bouncing in topped-up excitement. The girls have discovered a burbling brook whose waters surge against and slap into the coast. Water-sprayed strands of hair streak across Tempest’s face. Amber’s hair is locked up in braids. The two of them now are nothing like the girls who at other times roared and pulled out claws, who leapt to tear at each other’s faces. It’s not like they laid in wait for a fight or angled to make it happen. There was no scornful planning behind it. A fight just happened in an instant: one mouth twitched, an eyelid fluttered, and—as if by unspoken pact—the girls flew at each other, and someone clasped ten fingers around someone else’s throat.
Now spent from water play, Amber and Tempest are on the ground, Grovean moonshine in their eyes. “In three days,” says Myra, “when the season dips into summer, the moon becomes bloodred, and the sun that r
ises afterward is a simmering emerald.”
Before they reach the tall doors of the Temple of Saneyth, Myra points at a flight of steps leading to a bell-tower. “Wait here,” she tells her clan.
She notices Vida’s look about him. He is disconcerted, she knows.
The girls are no longer skipping. They are as quiet as Vida, their eyes drawn toward a throng of late night worshippers. Near the temple’s entrance, robed men, women in leather sandals and pleated tunics, and a handful of naked children appraise their approach.
Myra finds Novic in the incense room.
“Y-yes?” he says without recognition.
The shadows in his eyes halt her approach. He is much as she remembers him, leathered skin furrowed into itself with age, clinging to bone. His eyes are as old as Jacob. His face looks like death. But his hair! A black magical mane falls to his waist. So black, it shines like metal. So soft, the tresses of it bounce with her words.
“It’s me, Myra.”
His expression does not change. With a lift of palm, he commands the door shut. The room falls into darkness. She feels rather than sees his approach.
“Are you not afraid, child?” The roll of rocks carrying echoes in his voice is more than she remembers.
“I should be.”
“But you are not.” His robe carries a reedy scent. The touch of his hand on her chin is coarse. “It is you,” he says. “And you bring something new.” He takes her hand. “Take me to your people.”
• • •
Tempest gasps at the sight of him, at his magical hair long and flowing like a spell. Novic crouches beside her, sits her on his knee.
“Dear child, don’t look so stupefied. We have never met.”
“But—” begins Tempest.
“I understand how you can be mistaken. Child—” he lifts her chin so her tiger eyes meet the fog in his. “I am not T-Mo.”
He puts her down, pulls something from his robe. It is a mouth harp. He plays music, a welcome hymn, Myra explains. His song tells of a pristine beach and falling rocks; of wet tropics and flowing rivers; of chrysanthemum leaves and budding coral.
“This,” he says, “is the song of Grovea.” He pockets the harp. “Come. I will take you to my clan.”
• 41 •
Novic guides them through tropical palms. Sugar beets line the tableland. They travel up and down rolling hills. A cascade of natural water runs all around. They cross a floodway and find simple cottages, almost country. Past a whistling wind, up a rugged mountain like a camel’s back, down a mammoth hill . . . Alas! Mirage Lagoon.
Here, streets curl like a smile. Everything is rounded and smooth, or half-rounded and perfect. Time moves in trickles. Water in the lake does not rock or rollick. It glides. Women walk like queens; men like emperors. Sometimes, it seems, time stalls to merge past and future. Things happen that Myra is not quite sure which timeline they belong to. It seems like she has met village folk long before she actually meets them. Each introduction is like a re-introduction. Like the meeting of Novic’s wife, Yaris, now number one after Silhouette left Novic. Looking at the child, Cassius, nestled in her arms, his large, gold coin eyes and mutiny of amethyst hair, Myra knows she has seen this image before.
Or like when wife number two, Vara, her eyes carrying benevolence, unrestricted welcome in them, gushes over the ruby in Tempest’s hair, the tiger in her eyes . . . Or like when Xinnia, number three, skin like honey, rests cool fingers on Myra’s skin . . . Or like when Clarin, number four, speaks with a plum in her mouth and an accent from France . . . That sense of déjà vu for all these women . . . But the last time Myra saw Novic was as a child. How could she have met these same wives and children?
She seeks Novic.
“Speak.” His arms fold around his chest. “Why are you here? Really here?”
She tells him about Amber and Tempest, how they whisper and slip into a secret language when they are not half-killing each other.
His eyes make shadows in the room.
“I know fear,” he says quietly. “And you wear it.”
“But—”
“You are frightened for Tempest.” His tone changes. “I tell you this: if you smother her, she will leave.”
“She sees things,” says Myra. “Autumn, spring, winter in people’s eyes. She knows things I would rather she didn’t.”
“This is where you go wrong. Tempest does not see things; she is those things. She is autumn and spring and winter. She is all that and more. You cannot strangle nature.”
“And Amber?”
“She tames the beast.”
“The beast?”
“The undead thing with a tail that goes swish swish inside your child.”
“How do you know of the undead thing?”
“How do you know to sleep or to wake? Is it by the rise and set of the sun or by the inner sense of your body? How do you know to be with a man like Vida? Does your head dictate your heart or does the heart dictate the head? I know what I know, and Tempest’s power is not a legend. She is a legend.”
“But how—”
“How is not the right question. Where is what you need. Where there is Amber there is a tamable undead thing. Amber has closeness to you, more closeness than you can begin to understand. She is more than what you know.”
“But legend . . . Tempest . . . Legend is good, right?”
“In her inexperience, Tempest does not understand the fullness of her strength.” He turns away from her.
“How can I stop it?”
He swirls. “Stop it? But you can’t.”
“How can I train it?”
He pulls out his harp, puts it to his mouth and plays. His music carries her to a world that is alive, that is hers.
• 42 •
Silhouette . . .
He laughed himself to death.
Balmoral. B, B, a voiced sound. You feel a vibration in your throat. Lips together, you trap the sound in your mouth, a surge of pressure and the sound explodes. Ba-Ba-Balmoral. I like this sound. Rosellumus, the papers said. That was his surname. Rosellumus, like the bird of Tafou that goes Gwa! Gwa! Gwa! The one that got baby Peaches seated in his crib, pulling himself to a stand, walking holding the rails toward the sound to imitate: Ga! Ga! Ga! Rosellumus. You open your mouth and curl the tip of your tongue without touching the roof of your mouth. R. R. Like a pirate.
Balmoral Rosellumus.
What-am-a-hear? No, it is what-am-a-see. Seven years he had lain in his bed at Cool Oasis, a medical center for crazies. Often he was silent, sometimes he managed a cracked voice, rarely he hummed rhymes from the land of Xhaust where he was born.
One day, he looked at the doctors who treated him, at the nurses who forced medicine into him (when they were not injecting him with drips or changing his diapers), at fellow patients who screamed at him, then at other inmates who picked up wails of the screamers and themselves howled at him like maudlin wolves . . . and he saw dead clowns. A single, happy clown lay on the head of each and every person except himself, and Balmoral shook his head in wonderment.
One day, the toe of a clown on someone’s head twitched, and a small smile accompanied Balmoral’s shake of head. Another day a dead clown moved a body part and Balmoral grinned. The day a clown’s eyelid fluttered, its grin twitched, a finger jerked and a knee kicked, Balmoral could not hold back the chuckle that slipped out of his smile.
After three days of smiling and chuckling, he saw something of the clowns that changed him. Perhaps it was how they sat up and began to dance on people’s heads. Or how they gouged out eyes from their own smiley faces and played eyeball with each other. Or how porridges of blood dripped from the gouged eye sockets down merry cheeks to soak the medics’ coats.
Balmoral threw his head back and laughed laughed laughed until he died.
• 43
•
The outside world fell in a rush of wind. Vida drove through rows of pines swarmed with creepers. Once, twice he cast a glance at Myra. She sat silent in the hired hearse. She rolled down her window, brooded. It was still drizzling. Water washed her face sidewise.
Light rain chased the car miles before petering under rays of white sun. The hearse paused outside black gates of a Gothic building. Gates groaned, swung inward. The car nosed into a lawn hosting medics and the body of Balmoral, Amber’s father.
Collapsed left atrial valve, the medical certificate said.
• • •
The body was first at a nearby morgue before they moved it the following morning, one that promised a sunny and calm day, to Le Piste funeral home.
Amber stood ashen outside the porch.
Myra pondered how, since Amber joined her household, the child’s affections had fiercely navigated toward Tempest and Vida, and how with Myra she continued to remain aloof. She thought of the girls’ code between them, their secret language that was wonderful and carefree but how today even that was of no use to assuage Amber’s grief. Most of all, Myra recalled what Novic said in Grovea: “Where there is Amber there is a tamable undead thing. Amber . . . is more than you know.”
Myra wondered how much Novic had not told her.
Perhaps for wanting to find a way into Amber’s affections, this child who tamed the undead thing, or perhaps for a tugging in her heart at the sight of a child’s unspoken grief this day of Balmoral’s burial, Myra’s chest popped. Her mind was made up in a heartbeat. She spread her arms, folded one knee and launched herself. She soared up the skies until thousands of miles opened up from Earth. Her hair flapped all the way to Xhaust.