A Swiftly Tilting Planet (7 page)

Harcels asked the Teller of Tales about the other tribes.

“Leave them be,” the Teller of Tales said in the sharpest voice he had ever been heard to use.

“But it might be fun to know them. They might have things to teach us.”

“Harcels,” the Teller of Tales said, “I, too, have ridden a creature like your Eyrn, and I have had my steed descend
in a hidden place, that I might watch unseen. I saw a man kill a man.”

“But why? Why ever would one man kill another?”

The Teller of Tales looked long into the clear eyes of the boy. “Let us hope you will never have to know.”

It was easy for Charles Wallace to live Within Harcels, in the brightness of the young sun, where darkness was the friend of light. One day when Harcels was astride Eyrn, they flew over a cluster of dwellings and the boy started to ask Eyrn to descend, but Charles Wallace gently drew his thoughts to the pleasure of flight as Eyrn threw himself upon a stream of wind and glided with the merest motion of wings. Charles Wallace was not certain that this small interference was permissible; he knew only that if Harcels learned the ways of the tribes who knew how to kill, his joy would vanish with his innocence.

—It was the right thing to do, Meg kythed to him fiercely.—It has to be the right thing.

She looked again at the clock. The hands had barely moved. While the seasons were following each other in swift succession in that Other Time where Charles Wallace lived Within Harcels, time was arrested in her own present moment. Time was moving only in that When in which the land so familiar and dear to her was different,
where the flat star-watching rock was a hill of stone, the green valley a lake, and the little woods a dark forest.

She sighed achingly for a time so full of joy that it was difficult to realize it had once been real.

Ananda whined and looked at Meg with great anxious eyes.

“What is it?” Meg asked in alarm. She heard Gaudior’s neigh, and saw a pulsing of silver light, the diamond-brilliant light which lit the unicorn’s horn.

Charles Wallace was astride Gaudior’s great neck, looking from within his own eyes at Harcels, Within whom he had known such spontaneity and joy that his own awareness would evermore share in it. He rubbed his cheek gently against the unicorn’s silver neck. “Thank you,” he whispered.

“Don’t thank me,” Gaudior snorted. “I’m not the one to decide whom you go Within.”

“Who does, then?”

“The wind.”

“Does the wind tell you?”

“Not until you are Within. And don’t expect it to be this way every time. I suspect that you were sent Within Harcels to help get you accustomed to Within-ing in the easiest way possible. And you must let yourself go even
more deeply into your hosts if you are to recognize the right Might-Have-Beens.”

“If I let myself go, how can I recognize?”

“That you will have to discover for yourself. I can only tell you that this is how it works.”

“Am I to be sent Within again now?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not as afraid as I was, but, Gaudior, I’m still afraid.”

“That’s all right,” Gaudior said.

“And if I let more of myself go, how can I kythe properly with Meg?”

“If you’re meant to, you will.”

“I’m going to need her …”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. I just know that I am.”

Gaudior blew three iridescent bubbles. “Hold tight, tight, tight. We’re off on the wind, and there may be Echthroi this time who will try to take you from my back and throw you off the rim of the world.”

FOUR

The snow with its whiteness

The great unicorn flung himself into the wind and they were soaring among the stars, part of the dance, part of the harmony. As each flaming sun turned on its axis, a singing came from the friction in the way a finger moved around the rim of a crystal goblet will make a singing, and the song varies in pitch and tone from glass to glass.

But this song was exquisite as no song from crystal or wood or brass can be. The blending of melody and harmony was so perfect that it almost made Charles Wallace relax his hold on the unicorn’s mane.

“No!” Meg cried aloud. “Hold on, Charles! Don’t let go!”

A blast of icy cold cut across the beauty of the flight, a cold which carried a stench of death and decay.

Retching, Charles Wallace buried his face in Gaudior’s mane, his fingers clenching the silver strands as the
Echthroid wind tried to drag him from the unicorn’s back. The stench was so abominable that it would have made him loosen his grasp had not the pungent scent of Gaudior’s living flesh saved him as he pressed his face against the silver hide, breathing the strangeness of unicorn sweat. Gaudior’s bright wings beat painfully against invisible wings of darkness beating at them. The unicorn neighed in anguish, his clear tones lost in the howling of the tempest.

Suddenly his hoofs struck against something solid. He whinnied with anxiety. “Hold on tightly, don’t let go,” he warned. “We’ve been blown into a Projection.”

Charles Wallace could hardly be clutching the mane with more intensity. “A what?”

“We’ve been blown into a Projection, a possible future, a future the Echthroi want to make real.” His breath came in gasping gulps; his flanks heaved wildly under Charles Wallace’s legs.

The boy shivered as he remembered those darkly flailing wings and the nauseous odor. Whatever the Echthroi wanted to make real would be something fearful.

They were on a flat plain of what appeared to be solidified lava, although it had a faint luminosity alien to lava. The sky was covered with flickering pink cloud. The air was acrid, making them cough. The heat was intense and he was perspiring profusely under the light anorak, which held in the heat like a furnace.

“Where are we?” he asked, wanting Gaudior to tell him that they were not in his own Where, that this could not possibly be the place of the star-watching rock, of the woods, only a few minutes’ walk from the house.

Gaudior’s words trembled with concern. “We’re still here, in your own Where, although it is not yet a real When.”

“Will it be?”

“It is one of the Projections we have been sent to try to prevent. The Echthroi will do everything in their power to make it real.”

A shudder shook the boy’s slight frame as he looked around the devastated landscape. “Gaudior—what do we do now?”

“Nothing. You mustn’t loosen your hold on my mane. They want us to do something, and anything we do might be what they need to make this Projection real.”

“Can’t we get away?”

The unicorn’s ears flicked nervously. “It’s very difficult to find a wind to ride when one has been blown into a Projection.”

“But what do we do?”

“There is nothing to do but wait.”

“Is anybody left alive?”

“I don’t know.”

Around them a sulfurous wind began to rise. Both boy
and unicorn were convulsed with paroxysms of coughing, but Charles Wallace did not loosen his grasp. When the seizure was over, he dried his streaming eyes on the silver mane.

When he looked up again, his heart lurched with horror. Waddling toward them over the petrified earth was a monstrous creature with a great blotched body, short stumps for legs, and long arms, with the hands brushing the ground. What was left of the face was scabrous and suppurating. It looked at the unicorn with its one eye, turned its head as though calling behind it to someone or something, and hurried toward them as fast as its stumps would take it.

“Oh, Heavenly Powers, save us!” Gaudior’s neigh streaked silver.

The anguished cry called Charles Wallace back to himself. He cried,

He took a deep breath and hot air seared his lungs and again he was assailed by an unquellable fit of coughing. He buried his face in the unicorn’s mane and tried to control the spasm which shook him. It was not
until the racking had nearly passed that he became aware of something cool brushing his burning face.

He raised his eyes and with awed gratitude he saw snow, pure white snow drifting down from the tortured sky, covering the ruined earth. The monster had stopped its ponderous approach and was staring up at the sky, mouth open to catch the falling flakes.

With the snow came a light wind, a cool wind. “Hold!” Gaudior cried, and raised his wings to catch the wind. His four hoofs left the ground and he launched himself into the wind with a surge of power.

Charles Wallace braced, trying to tighten the grip of his legs about the unicorn’s broad neck. He could feel the wild beating of Gaudior’s heart as with mighty strokes he thrust along the wind through the darkness of outer space, until suddenly they burst into a fountain of stars, and the stench and the horror were gone.

The unicorn’s breath came in great gulps of star-lit air; the wings beat less frantically; and they were safely riding the wind again and the song of the stars was clear and full.

“Now,” said Gaudior, “we go.”

“Where?” Charles Wallace asked.

“Not Where,” Gaudior said. “When.”

Up, up, through the stars, up to the far reaches of the universe where the galaxies swirled in their starry dance, weaving time.

Exhausted, Charles Wallace felt his eyelids drooping.

“Do not go to sleep,” Gaudior warned.

Charles Wallace leaned over the unicorn’s neck. “I’m not sure I can help it,” he murmured.

“Sing, then,” Gaudior commanded. “Sing to keep yourself awake.” The unicorn opened his powerful jaws and music streamed out in full and magnificent harmony. Charles Wallace’s voice was barely changing from a pure treble to a warm tenor. Now it was the treble, sweet as a flute, which joined Gaudior’s mighty organ tones. He was singing a melody he did not know, and yet the notes poured from his throat with all the assurance of long familiarity.

They moved through the time-spinning reaches of a far galaxy, and he realized that the galaxy itself was part of a mighty orchestra, and each star and planet within the galaxy added its own instrument to the music of the spheres. As long as the ancient harmonies were sung, the universe would not entirely lose its joy.

He was hardly aware when Gaudior’s hoofs struck ground and the melody dimmed until it was only a pervasive beauty of background. With a deep sigh Gaudior stopped his mighty song and folded his wings into his flanks.

Meg sighed as the beauty of the melody faded and all she heard was the soft movement of the wind in the bare
trees. She realized that the room was cold, despite the electric heater which augmented the warm air coming up the attic stairs from the radiators below. She reached over Ananda to the foot of the bed and pulled up her old eiderdown and wrapped it around them both. A gust of wind beat at the window, which always rattled unless secured by a folded piece of cardboard or a sliver of wood stuck between window and frame.

“Ananda, Ananda,” she said softly, “the music—it was more—more real than any music I’ve ever heard. Will we hear it again?”

The wind dropped as suddenly as it had risen, and once again she could feel the warmth coming from the little heater. “Ananda, he’s really a very small boy … Where is Gaudior going to take him now? Whom is he going to go Within?” She closed her eyes, pressing the palm of her hand firmly against the dog.

It was the same Where as the Where of Harcels, but there were subtle differences, though it was still what Gaudior had called Once Upon a Time and Long Ago, so perhaps men still lived in peace and Charles Wallace would be in no danger. But no: time, though still young, was not as young as that, she felt.

The lake lapped close to the great rock and stretched across the valley to the horizon, a larger lake than the lake of Harcels’s time. The rock itself had been flattened
by wind and rain and erosion, so that it looked like an enormous, slightly tilted tabletop. The forest was dark and deep, but the trees were familiar, pine and hemlock and oak and elm.

Dawn.

The air was pure and blue and filled with the fragrance of spring. The grass around the rock looked as though it had been covered with a fall of fresh snow, but the snow was a narcissus-like flower with a spicy scent.

On the tabletop stood a young man.

She did not see Charles Wallace. She did not see the unicorn. Only the young man.

A young man older than Charles Wallace. Harcels had been younger. This young man was older, perhaps not as old as Sandy and Dennys, but more than fifteen. She saw no hint of Charles Wallace within the man, but she knew that somehow he was there. As Charles Wallace had been himself and yet had been Harcels, so Charles Wallace was Within the young man.

He had been there all night, sometimes lying on his back to watch the stars swing slowly across the sky; sometimes with his eyes closed, as he listened to the lapping of the small waves on the pale sand, the clunkings of frogs and the hoot of a night bird, the sound of an occasional fish slipping through the water. Sometimes he neither heard nor saw; he did not sleep, but abandoned
his senses and lay on the rock patiently opening himself to the wind.

Perhaps it was his gift of kything practiced with Meg that helped Charles Wallace slip more and more deeply into the being of another.

Madoc, son of Owain, king of Gwynedd.

Madoc, on the dawning of his wedding day.

Meg’s eyes slowly lowered; her body relaxed under the warmth of the eiderdown; but her hand remained on Ananda as she slid into sleep.

Madoc!

It was for Charles Wallace as though a shuttered window had suddenly been opened. It was not a ballad or a song he was trying to remember, it was a novel about a Welsh prince named Madoc.

He heard Gaudior’s warning neigh. “You are Within Madoc. Do not disturb him with outside thoughts.”

“But, Gaudior, Madoc was the key figure in the book—oh,
why
can’t I remember more!”

Again Gaudior cut him off. “Stop trying to think. Your job now is to let yourself go into Madoc. Let go.”

Let go.