The Magister (Earthkeep) (15 page)

"Get shut of all your thoughts.  Head for that sweet restin' place where you float.  There, where you touch your soul, your peace."

Home!  Jez thought, and caught her breath as she stepped into deep space.  Home, she smiled, floating on empty eternity.

Becky crouched beside her like a bench-press coach. 

"Now you're truckin'," she rasped, "you're settin' right there where it all is.  Everything.  Stay there, Jezzybell.  Hold it like a cloud."

She waited a full minute before she spoke again.  "You're goin' to start changin' the energy now," she said softly.  "You're goin' to move that sweet peace up into hallelujah joy.  Easiest way to do that is just to pick somethin' and focus on its best parts.  Just start lovin' it.  Pick that rock wall, Jezzybell."

Deliberately, Jez shifted away from the vast stillness where no thing existed into a tiny movement toward the wall behind her.  It was a thing now, an object of her attention.  She felt its hardness, its rough texture.  She imagined its dimensions, its heaviness.

Becky's cracked voice reached her. 

"Bring in appreciation, Jezzybell.  Get grateful!  Tell that granite wall how amazin' it is.  Thank it for gettin' belched up from the boilin' bottom of these mountains, movin' in a red-hot flow, coolin' down, bein' mica and feldspar!  Praise that rock for makin' up this mountain, Jezzybell!  For holdin' up the soil and the trees, the blacks and the browns and the greens that live together on top of it.  You got to love that rock, girl!"

And Jez did love the rock, loved it with a wild admiration and respect, loved it with the tears that fell in thankfulness for its being.  She was exhilarated, riding a high energy that did not somehow carry her with it but rather flowed through her with a tremendous passion and joy.  Her ki rotations were soaring.  Her whole body trembled.

"Good!" cried the old woman.  "You're close, right on the edge."  Her voice modulated into a higher key, its tempo doubled.  "Now stay focused on that rock!  Keep up that pure energy!  That's it!" 

Jez concentrated on the great granite wall, praising its every quality.  Her passion escalated and a surge of light covered her. 

"You're gone!" laughed Becky. 

"Am I?" Jez laughed back, her eyes still closed.

"Gone!" repeated the crone.  "Your bones and muscles ain't nothin' but pure ecstatic vibrations, Jezzybell!  You are gone from this world!"

Becky was right, Jez realized.  She had no body.

"Stay high, and don't focus on anything, else you'll come back!"

The warning was too late.  Already Jez had rematerialized.  She sat on the pallet rubbing her arms, her chest. 

"Becky, I did it!"

"You done good," said Becky, leaning against the wall.

Then Jez did it again — disappeared and moved around the cave room while Becky's eyes passed right over her.  As they prepared and ate a hot mush sprinkled with tangy seeds, Jez experimented with her new skill until she felt adept at it.  On her last return to material form, she fell on the old woman with hugs and gratitude.

"What gifts you have given me, Rebecca Tsunami!" she announced.

Becky held her a moment, then moved away from her to scrape her bowl, busily.  "There's one more of them gifts," she said.  "It's the one you come for."  She downed the last of her mush.  "We got to go outside for it.  You up to that?"

Jez pushed Becky's bowl aside and took her hands in her own.  "Of course I'm up to it."  She lifted Becky's hair back from her eyes.  "We've stepped into tall sistership, you know."

"Yep," Becky grinned.  "Wrote up the affidavy last night."  She sat stroking Jez's hand.  "Girl, you've done give me a gift too, you know."

Jez searched the craggy face before her.

"You've done parted me from my madness," Becky said quietly.  "I feel all of a piece now."

They sat without stirring, there in the deepest pool of their kinship.

Finally, Becky said, "Jezzybell, you got to be on your way soon.  We're both knowin' that."

"I'll be back."

"Maybe."

"I'll come back.  And," Jez smiled, "I'll teach you. . .to fly."

Becky's eyes were bright.  "Mebbe."  She laid a soft kiss on Jezebel's cheek.  "So we got to get dressed now." 

She leapt up and boosted the crystal-lume to a hot brightness.  Then she rummaged in yet another trunk, this time for a down vest that she donned over her longjohns.  She pushed her bushy hair into a snood; on top of it and at an angle precisely parallel to the floor, she planted a ladies' flat, straw sailor hat bedecked with artificial flowers.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

It was midafternoon when they entered the woods, Becky clad like a scarecrow-come-to-tea and Jezebel in her trews and softshirt.  They stepped from the cave through a narrow vertical crack that spilled them out near the bottom of a deep ravine.  Just beyond them, waters wound their way down the narrow but deep draw.  Jez stood with her companion, captured by the quiet, the remaining chill of winter, and the chuckle of the stream.  They were much lower, she calculated, than the mine entrance, which she estimated to be almost directly behind and above them on the other side of the mountain.  Her sensors told her that Dicken and the Welchtown women sat there awaiting her.

Becky led her down a rough path through the underbrush, holding back whipping arms of vegetation for her passage.  The old woman walked with purpose but without speed and sometimes, Jez thought, with a touch of reverence to her gait.  Once or twice she stopped to smell the bark of a tree or to scrape at it softly.  Once she dropped to her knees to examine the earth.

They came to a small clearing, where the land sloped gently down to marshy ground that bordered a rill, flowing silently.  Jez was marveling at the hold that winter still had on the forest when her companion halted them with a Listen! gesture.

Jez did hear something.  Rather, she heard absolutely nothing, but felt as if she were hearing something.  Or she heard an impending something.  She sent out enfoldments.  They vibrated as if about to surround someone, and then dissipated into emptiness.  She looked to Becky, who was on her way again, straight into the underbrush, still careful but determined, her hat still balanced precariously on her head. 

At long last they stopped at a spot where the terrain called back some of the water into a modest inlet, almost a pond, two to three meters wide.  The old woman directed Jezebel to get comfortable atop some dry stones, as she herself was doing with the folding of her long bones into a compact bundle.  They braced their backs against a bank and settled in for what was clearly to be a vigil.

The light of the lengthening day seemed fairly strong even for late afternoon.  The spring sun shone from a winter sky, allowing the forest only a dulled uniform illumination.  Jezebel identified a willow tree above them.  Then a hickory beside it.  The rest were, she thought, maples of some sort, though one on the far side of the inlet resembled a fruit-bearing tree.  She concentrated on stillness, curbing even slight movements, lest her companion frown at the disturbance.

There was no wind.  Now and again Jez sensed a strange impending presence, as if someone were lurking behind them.  Or around them?  She scanned the area several times in vain.  Nor was Becky open to mindreach.  Forget any attempts at words.  Jezebel suppressed a snort.

The old woman had closed her eyes.

They sat in the stillness.

The late winter afternoon stretched on.

A falling leaf intruded on Jez's peripheral vision, just a flicker of movement to her left, there, at the edge of the inlet.  She turned her eyes without moving her head but failed to catch the leaf's landing.

She was about to close her eyes when the same leaf movement stopped her.  She leaned forward carefully and shifted to change her sightline on the bundles of wet brush, the plant stems and bracken that lined the far side of the still water.  It wasn't a leaf at all.  It must have been that smaller piece of stick, the one that had just disturbed the surface of the water.  It had fallen.  She sighed her relief and eased back against the bank.

Then the piece of stick fell upward. 

Jez stared.  Yes, that was unquestionably what it had done.  It hung there, a few inches over the water.  Or did it?  She could not see it at all now.  She leaned far forward as quietly as she could.

She must have been mistaken.  No, there it was again.  A thin brown, no, blue, ah, a blue stick?  She shifted her bottom slowly and noiselessly toward a neighboring rock.  Sure enough, the stick was blue, and sure enough, it was dropping to the edge of a leaf, ducking one end of itself into the water.

Jezebel blinked.  Then she leaned toward the slender stick, enfolding it, extending to it, determined to hold it in the center of her perception.  It did not move.  Her eyes had fooled her, then.  All was right with the world, after all.

But a blue stick?  She had no sooner formed the thought than the object in question floated upward once more and disappeared, only to appear again instantly, this time perched on her extended elbow.  It balanced on legs cornered at precise right angles, and for her fascination it twitched a double pair of delicately veined diaphanous wings.  Jez stared into enormous eyes and felt her heart quicken when the insect drew the distal end of its blue-stemmed self into a rounded arch and began poking at its blue-tinged wings as if to separate them or perhaps clean them of some drifting debris.

Tears sprang to her eyes.  As if in response to those tears, the frail figure pounded its wings into a lift, sailed to within a few inches of her nose and hovered there at the edge of her astonishment, daring her to see what she could not be seeing.

"Shut your mouth or it will fly in." 

The words snapped her head toward Becky.  The movement banished the dragonfly.  But Becky was nowhere to be seen. 

"Get shy, girl.  You gotta see this," the voice came again.  A mindreach at last from the old woman!

Jez wasted not a moment, but breathed deep and found her inner place of stillness.  She shifted to focus upon the image of her double-winged little visitor, praising its lightness, its iridescence, its mobility.  She felt her vibrations rise.  Still she focused and appreciated.  As she began shaking from head to toe, she acknowledged that she was about to enter another world. 

It was the sounds that struck her first, sounds her ears had never heard but had only heard about.  The forest, this quiescent winter forest, was ablast with them: the crackles and the croaks, the slaps, the pecks, the rasps and the buzzes, the swishes and the cheeps; the susurrus of an established tonic of life; sounds made by things that lope and jump and dart and swing and hop and crawl, by things that climb and slither and fly and pad and swirl, that sniff and suck, chew and ooze, that snap and hiss and claw and sting; sounds that had once told of interwoven strands of life, folding over and around each other, leaning upon and into each other; sounds testifying that here in this dimension such embedded concourse thrived again.

Jezebel sat immobile in a sound-drenched forest, bathed in tears.  Beyond her, Becky stood by a spruce tree immersed in a world gone shy.  She had taken off her flowered hat and was now holding it over her heart.  Jez followed her gaze, expecting to see the Goddess Herself.  She saw instead the grubby white suspended body of a young 'possum, probably snoring, its bare rattail coiled around the substantial horizontal branch of a persimmon tree.

For a long time in the chill afternoon, Jez moved her eyes around slowly, letting them rest on sights that no one of her generation had ever seen.  Birdflight.  Fishglide.  Chipmunkscamper.  Tadpoletwirl.  Snailcreep.  Moleburrow.  Tickbloat.  Spiderweave.

The forest's canopy faded, and a flock of geese covered the sky.  A herd of buffalo thunder-trod a canyon.  A school of minnows flipped on a lake's surface.  Walruses basked, oysters rocked, crayfish crawled, penguins plunged.  Visitors came to Jezebel: A nail-tailed wallaby laid its head in her lap, received her affection, sprang away; a Barbary ape investigated her ear; a black-bellied pangolin swept its long tongue down her ankle; and a giant tortoise let her touch two huge eggs buried deep in white sand.    

Dusk came and went.  They stayed there, the two celebrants, into a foggy night, both of them oblivious to the chill.  They listened to the dark sounds of a living forest and watched the prowl of beings that Jez had loved only through the words of Afortunadas or the charity of flatfilms and pictures.

Becky was hugging a pine tree some distance from her, silently searching for the moon, when Jez first heard the singing.  Heart pounding, Jez turned uphill, toward the music that was all too familiar to her by now.  She had last heard that haunting tune from the little ones in Lavona's house just after she had tucked them into bed.

A band of children was winding down the mountainside, following a deer path and calling out parts of their song to specific animals, to a squirrel here, a rabbit there, their voices light with laughter, their hair almost indistinguishable from the mists rolling about them.  Jez could make out at least eight small figures, one of them with her arm raised in greeting.

"Taína!" Jez shouted.

"Calica Jezebel!"

Becky witnessed the conference from her vantage point by the pine tree: Jezebel Stronglaces and a girl-woman, standing transfixed and smiling at each other for a very long time in the heart of an oak and maple forest, while mists and moonlight wove wonder around their motionless bodies.  At last the small figure moved out of sight behind the band of singing children, and Jezebel stood waving at shades and spirits in the trees.

In the dawn, with the awakening of the sunlight world, the old woman and her companion moved one nanosecond away from those who were shying, and from the magic of the night.  In that second they returned to silence and emptiness.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Jez and Becky sat for the last time around glowing quartz filings in the old woman's cave room.  They toasted each other with crystal-cooled root wine, drinking their farewell with appreciation and thanksgiving.