Moon took over other established
things, too. By the time the first snow fell, her neighbors had
begun to bring their aches and pains to her, to fetch her when a
child was feverish, to call her in to set a dog’s broken leg or
stitch up a horse’s gashed flank. They asked about the best day to
sign a contract, and whether there was a charm to keep nightshade
out of the hay field. In return, they brought her mistletoe and
willow bark, a sack of rye flour, a tub of butter.
She didn’t mind the work. She’d
been brought up for it; it seemed as natural as getting out of bed
in the morning. But she found she minded the payment. When the
nearest neighbor’s boy, Fell, trotted up to the gate on his donkey
with the flour sack riding pillion, and thanked her, and gave it to
her, she almost thrust it back at him. Alder Owl had given her the
skill, and had left her there to serve them. The payment should be
Alder Owl’s. But there was no saying which would appear first,
Alder Owl or the bottom of the sack.
“You look funny,”
Fell said.
“You look worse,”
Moon replied, because she’d taught him to climb trees and to fish,
and had thus earned the privilege. “Do you know those things made
out of wood or bone, with a row of little spines set close
together? They call them ‘combs’.”
“Hah, hah.” He
pointed to the flour. “I hope you make it all into cakes and get
fat.” He grinned and loped back down the path to the donkey. They
kicked up snow as they climbed the hill, and he waved at the
crest.
She felt better. Alder Owl would
never have had that conversation.
Every evening at sunset, Moon took
the little drum out of the cupboard over the mantel. She looked at
it, and touched it, and thought of her teacher. She tried to
imagine her well and warm and safe, with a hot meal before her and
pleasant company near. At last, when the rim of the sun blinked out
behind the far line of hills, she swung the beater against the fine
skin head, and the drum sounded its woodpecker knock.
Each time Moon wondered: Could
Alder Owl really hear it? And if she could, what if Moon were to
beat it again? If she beat it three times, would Alder Owl think
something was wrong, and return home?
Nothing was wrong. Moon put the
drum away until the next sunset.
The Long Night came, and she
visited all her neighbors, as they visited her. She brought them
fir boughs tied with bittersweet, and honey candy, and said the
blessing-charm on their doorsteps. She watched the landscape thaw
and freeze, thaw and freeze. Candle-day came, and she went to the
village, which was sopping and giddy with a spell of warmer
weather, to watch the lighting of the new year’s lamps from the
flame of the old. It could be, said the villagers, that no one
would ever find the prince. It could be that the King of Stones had
taken him beneath the earth, and that he would lie there without
breath, in silence, forever. And had she had any word of Alder Owl,
and hadn’t it been a long time that she’d been gone?
Yes, said Moon, it had been a long
time.
The garden began to stir, almost
invisibly, like a cat thinking of breakfast in its sleep. The sound
of water running was everywhere, though the snow seemed undisturbed
and the ice as thick as ever. Suddenly, as if nature had thrown
wide a gate, it was spring, and Moon was run off her legs with
work. Lambing set her to wearing muddy paths in the hills between
the cottage and the farmsteads all around. The mares began to foal,
too. She thanked wisdom that women and men, at least, had no
season.
She had been with Tansy
Broadwater’s bay thoroughbred since late morning. The foal had been
turned in the womb and tied in his cord, and Moon was nearly
paralyzed thinking of the worth of the two of them, and their lives
in her hands. She was bloody to the elbows and hoarse with
chanting, but at last she and Tansy regarded each other
triumphantly across the withers of a nursing colt.
“Come up to the house
for a pot of hot tea,” Tansy said as Moon rinsed soap off her hands
and arms. “You won’t want to start out through the woods now until
moonrise, anyway.”
Moon lifted her eyes, shocked, to
the open barn door. The sun wore the Wantnot Hills like a
girdle.
“I have to go,” she
said. “I’m sorry. I’ll be all right.” She headed for the trail at a
run.
Stones rolled under her boots, and
half-thawed ice lay slick as butter in the shadows. It was nearly
night already, under the trees. She plunged down the hill and up
the next one, and down again, slithering, on all fours sometimes.
She could feel her bones inside her brittle as fire-blasted wood,
her ankles fragile and waiting for a wrench. She was afraid to look
at the sun again.
The gate—the gate at the bottom of
the path was under her hands. She sobbed in relief. So close... She
raced up through the garden, the cold air like fire in her lungs.
She struggled frantically with the front door, until she remembered
it was barred inside, that she’d left through the stillroom. She
banged through the stillroom door and made the contents of the
shelves ring and rattle. To the hearth, and wrench the cupboard
door open . . .
The drum was in her hands, and
through the window the sun’s rind showed, thin as thread, on the
hills. She was in time. As the horizon closed like a snake’s eyelid
over the disk of the sun, Moon struck the drum.
There was no sound at
all.
Moon stared at the drum, the
beater, her two hands. She had missed, she must have. She brought
the beater to the head again. She might as well have hit wool
against wool. There was no woodpecker knock, no sharp clear call.
She had felt skin and beater meet, she had seen them. What had she
done wrong?
Slowly Alder Owl’s words came back
to her. When I cannot hear it, it will cease to sound. Moon had
always thought the drum would be hard to hear. But never silent.
Tell me if you can’t hear this, she thought wildly. Something else
they’d said as she left, about proving negatives—that there were
ways to prove the prince couldn’t be found.
If he were dead, for example. If he
were only bones under the earth.
And Alder Owl, beyond the drum’s
reach, might have followed him even to that, under the dominion of
the King of Stones.
She thought about pounding the
drum; she could see herself doing it in her mind, hammering at it
until it sounded or broke. She imagined weeping, too; she could cry
and scream and break things, and collapse at last exhausted and
miserable.
What she did was to sit where she
was at the table, the drum on her knees, watching the dark seep in
and fill the room around her. Sorrow and despair rose and fell
inside her in a slow rhythm, like the shortening and lengthening of
days. When her misery peaked, she would almost weep, almost shriek,
almost throw the drum from her. Then it would begin to wane, and
she would think, No, I can bear it, until it turned to waxing once
again.
She would do nothing, she resolved,
until she could think of something useful to do. She would wait
until the spiders spun her white with cobwebs, if she had to. But
she would do something better than crying, better than breaking
things.
The hide lashing of Alder Owl’s
drum bit into her clenched fingers. In the weak light of the
sinking fire, the wood and leather were only a pale mass in her
lap. How could Alder Owl’s magic have dwindled away to this—a drum
with no voice? What voice could reach her now?
And Moon answered herself,
wonderingly: Grandmother.
She couldn’t. She had never gone to
speak with Grandmother herself. And how could she travel there,
with no one to beat the drum for her when she was gone? She might
be lost forever, wandering through the tangled roots of
Grandmother’s trees.
Yet she stood and walked,
stiff-jointed, to the stillroom. She gathered up charcoal and dried
myrtle and cedar. She poured apple wine into a wooden cup, and
dropped in a seed from a sky’s-trumpet vine. It was a familiar set
of motions. She had done them for Alder Owl. She took down the
black-fleeced sheepskin from the wall by the front door, laid it
out on the floor, and set the wine and incense by it, wine to the
east, charcoal to the south. Another trip, to fetch salt and the
little bone-handled knife—earth to the north, the little conical
pile of salt, and the knife west, for air. (Salt came from the sea,
too, said her rebellious mind, and the knife’s metal was mined from
earth and tempered with fire and water. But she was afraid of
heresy now, afraid to doubt the knowledge she must trust with the
weight of lives. She did as she’d been taught.)
At last she took the big drum, the
journey-drum, out of its wicker case and set it on the sheepskin.
The drum would help her partway on her travels. But when she
crossed the border, she would have to leave body, fingers, drum all
at the crossing, and the drum would fall silent. She needed so
little: just a tap, tap, tap. Well, her heart would have to
do.
Moon dropped cross-legged on the
sheepskin. Right-handed she took up the knife and drew lightly on
the floor around herself as if she were a compass. She passed the
knife to her left hand behind her back, smoothly, and the knife
point never left the slate. That had been hard once, learning to
take the knife as Alder Owl passed it to her. She drew the circle
again with a pinch of salt dropped from each hand, and with cedar
and myrtle smoking and snapping on their charcoal bed. Finally she
drew the circle with wine shaken from her fingers, and drank off
the rest. Then she took up the drum.
She tried to hear the rhythm of her
breathing, of her heart, the rhythm that was always inside her.
Only when she felt sure of it did she begin to let her fingers move
with it, to tap the drum. It shuddered under her fingers, lowing
out notes. When her hands were certain on the drum head, she closed
her eyes.
A tree. That was the beginning of
the journey, Moon knew; she was to begin at the end of a branch of
the great tree. But what kind of tree? Was it night, or day? Should
she imagine herself as a bird or a bug, or as herself? And how
could she think of all that and play the drum, too?
Her neck was stiff, and one of her
feet was going to sleep. You think too much, she scolded herself.
Alder Owl had never had such trouble. Alder Owl had also never
suggested that there was such a thing as too much thinking. More of
it, she’d said, would fix most of the world’s problems.
Well, she’d feel free to think,
then. She settled into the drumbeat, imagined it wrapped around her
like a featherbed.
—A tree too big to
ever see all at once, one of a forest of trees like it. A tree with
a crown of leaves as wide as a clear night sky on a hilltop. Night
time, then. It was an oak, she decided, but green out of season.
She envisioned the silver-green leathery leaves around her, and the
rough black bark starry with dew in the moonlight. The light came
from the end of the branch. Cradled in leaves there was a pared
white-silver crescent, a new moon cut free from the shadow of the
old. It gave her light to travel by.
The rough highroad of bark grew
broader as she neared the trunk. She imagined birds stirring in
their sleep and the quick, querulous chirk of a squirrel woken in
its nest. The wind breathed in and out across the vault of leaves
and made them twinkle. Moon heard her steps on the wood, even and
measured: the voice of the drum.
Down the trunk, down toward the
tangle of roots, the knotted mirror-image of the branches above.
The trunks of other trees were all around her, and the twining
branches shuttered the moonlight. It was harder going, shouldering
against the life of the tree that always moved upward. Her
heartbeat was a thin, regular bumping in her ears.
It was too dark to tell which way
was down, too dark to tell anything. Moon didn’t know if she’d
reached the roots or not. She wanted to cry out, to call for
Grandmother, but she’d left her body behind, and her tongue in
it.
A little light appeared before her,
and grew slowly. There were patterns in it, colors, shapes—she
could make out the gate at the bottom of the garden, and the path
that led into the woods. On the path—was it the familiar one? It
was bordered now with sage—she saw a figure made of the flutter of
old black cloth and untidy streamers of white hair, walking away
from her. A stranger, Moon thought; she tried to catch up, but
didn’t seem to move at all. At the first fringes of the trees the
figure turned, lifted one hand, and beckoned. Then it disappeared
under the roof of the woods.
Moon’s spirit, like a startled
bird, burst into motion, upward. Her eyes opened on the center room
of the cottage. She was standing unsteadily on the sheepskin, the
journey drum at her feet. Her heart clattered under her ribs like a
stick dragged across the pickets of a fence, and she felt sore and
prickly and feverish. She took a step backward, overbalanced, and
sat down.
“Well,” she said, and
the sound of her voice made her jump. She licked her dry lips and
added, “That’s not at all how it’s supposed to be done.”
Trembling, she picked up the tools
and put them away, washed out the wooden bowl. She’d gathered up
the sheepskin and had turned to hang it on the wall when her voice
surprised her again. “But it worked,” she said. She stood very
still, hugging the fleece against her. “It worked, didn’t it?”
She’d traveled and asked, and been answered, and if neither had
been in form as she understood them, still they were question and
answer, and all that she needed. Moon hurried to put the sheepskin
away. There were suddenly a lot of things to do.