“Hear, hear,” Daria said. “If a stupid butterfly can break out of a cocoon, if a chicken can crack open an egg, human beings should be able to burst through any barrier which confines them.”
Malvern looked annoyed. “Yes, exactly so. We’ve conceived a plan for draining water from the swamp.”
Phileas was electrified, his prey in sight. “How will you do that?”
“My engineers have come up with a feasible scheme. I’m sure you wouldn’t want me to bore you with the details.”
Kermit looked up in surprise. “I love details.”
“So do I,” Phileas said, “especially about a swamp that no one has ever explored—except, perhaps, the ever-elusive Earthers.”
“Our engineers are perfectly capable of designing a theoretical model to test feasibility. They’ve also established that once the swamp is drained and cleared, a new community could be built for our expanding population.”
For a moment or two Phileas was paralyzed by the brilliance of the scheme. Yes, of course, tell the farmers, their eyes in a perpetual squint from staring at the sky for rain clouds, that the dragon is responsible for their misery. Tell them that it’s possible to end drought through a new source of water, gain new land for colonization—and a private kingdom and power base for Malvern.
The last part was speculative, but Phileas was sure it was true. Still, that automaton Kermit would demand evidence, proof, facts, and Daria would fall asleep in the midst of any extended explanation. He would have to find another way to block Malvern’s march towards dictatorship.
“Wouldn’t these plans be costly to develop?” he asked Kermit.
“Very,” Kermit said. “Earth to move, pipes to lay—the cost in labor alone would be astronomical. I would insist on a very detailed budget.”
Malvern threw up his hands in mock despair. “I’d love nothing more than to be able to give such details to you. Am I one to waste our country’s precious resources?”
“What lives in the swamp now?” Romala asked.
“Only a few worthless species of animals.”
“And the dragon!” Daria shrieked. “Have you forgotten?”
“Hardly. As the Guardian has so correctly pointed out, we are denied access to the swamp by the presence of the dragon. Killing him is a prerequisite for the launching of our plan. I say the time to kill him is now.”
To his astonishment Phileas found himself shouting at the top of his lungs, “That’s a terrible idea!” What possessed him? How could he imagine that the dragon must not be killed?
Everyone was staring at him. His mind cast off derangement and came to his help. “Excuse my emotions. It has been a long and tiring meeting. Let me rephrase my statement. As with all of your schemes, a campaign against the dragon would be costly. The fields are already short of labor, thanks to the Earther defections, and we can’t endanger the harvest by taking more away. Many of our citizens are already working extra hours as auxiliaries in the Peace Patrol; how can we ask them to do more? We dare not march off to the swamp and leave the city open to attack. Nor can we afford the risk of losing our finest fighters in an assault on the dragon.”
Everyone else nodded their heads in agreement, and Malvern lost even more control than Phileas had. “I don’t think that’s why, I think you’re afraid of the dragon.”
Romala jumped to her feet immediately. “To accuse the Guardian of cowardice is treason.”
“Statute 12, Article 47,” said Kermit.
“Punishable by exile,” Daria said. “Come to your senses, Malvern, you don’t want to be traveling with the Earthers to Tamaras or Dolocairn.”
Malvern’s face turned white as a Dolocairner snowfield. “I meant no treason. I spoke in the heat of the moment. Guardian, I apologize.”
Now that the bully was flat on the ground, Phileas decided to show the other Councilors that he could be gracious. “Malvern has only said that I’m afraid of the dragon. That’s true; so are we all. It’s not considered good etiquette to mention it. The remark was rude, but I’d be hesitant to accuse any Councilor of treason without further evidence. I accept your apology.”
Malvern still looked white. “Thank you, Guardian.”
“And it’s hardly necessary for me to say that should the dragon attack, I will be the first to take up arms against him. I suggest we move on. I propose that we table any decisions on the dragon and the swamp until the harvest is in. By then, our field hands will be free for mobilization, and we should have the Earther problem solved. If an attack on the dragon is warranted at that time, we’ll have the forces to do so.”
“Call the question,” Kermit droned.
Malvern voted aye with the rest.
Chapter 19
Phileas sat alone in the chambers long after the others had left. Romala had lingered, perhaps intending a cozy dissection of the meeting. He had praised her for her contributions to the discussion, begged her to evaluate the proceedings at her leisure, and report to him the next morning.
A woman knew when she was getting the brush-off, no matter how it was worded. “Very well,” she’d said and left without a farewell.
He dismissed all thought of her. He had far more important matters to analyze, a dizzying array of questions that gyrated like a child’s spinning toy. Malvern was hardly quelled. Once he recovered he would be more circumspect, concealing his machinations. Phileas, though he disliked the idea of a secret corps of spies, decided that from this moment forth Malvern wouldn’t spend a waking or sleeping moment unobserved.
The propaganda war was another matter. The most skilled agents couldn’t track down whispers. Malvern wouldn’t call him a coward, but those sentiments would circulate in the marketplace, the fields, wherever the people gathered. The Guardian’s authority would be undermined. Was that what made him so uneasy?
It was enough, but he sensed rumblings in an area of his mind he was reluctant to explore. I am Guardian, he told himself. If I can bear to look at the disease in others, I must examine it ruthlessly in myself. Why did I become unbalanced when Malvern spoke of killing the dragon? Fear alone wouldn’t stop me. I would lead the people if it were the right thing to do, and when could it ever be wrong?
He heard demented Janzi moan, “The poor dragon.” He’d easily dismissed that insane remark until it had been joined by the nonsense he’d found in that damned girl’s delusions about the giant reptile: If you learn to love me, Oasis will be saved.
How had such heresy stuck in his mind? Could the bullet that struck him have in some way been poisoned with the subtle oils of doubt, creeping slowly into his mind until they found a place to sprout evil seeds? Nonsense, pure superstition, and a reflection of the worst Etrenzian practices: soothsaying, desert visions, gods speaking to men who were sun-sick. Perhaps he suffered an illusion woven of unhealthy country air.
Whatever its source, I must face this unhealthiness in my own mind. The more I look into it the more it’s like biting into rotten spots in what appeared to be a perfectly solid and healthy apple. I must go deeper. How can I triumph when I fear my own thoughts?
He left the chamber, nearly tripping over a pair of cats crouched by the doorway.
* * *
The house was very quiet when Fiola left for work, and all sounds seemed muted outside. Stalks of corn and wheat rustled in the dry breeze, and the petals of meadow flowers fluttered limply. Though cooking smells and cries of greeting gave testimony that other humans existed, their presence was faint, far from Serazina’s lonely corner of the world.
She was glad she’d already given up any possibility of becoming a Healer. No one tainted by an outlaw Earther parent could ever be trusted in such a sensitive position. Even Elissia’s job might be now endangered. But that was far from the worst of it.
The worst of it was almost beyond thinking about. Serazina had never imagined feeling sorry for her mother, but what she felt now went far deeper. Fiola would be destroyed by the anger sure to explode through every layer of me
ntal mastery she’d ever built. Once she’d spent her rage, she’d be left with loneliness and suffering, endless days and nights of grief.
Though a newfound compassion for her mother made Serazina long to comfort her, she would instead cause more suffering. She had to leave the country before they decided she was an Earther, too.
There was no hope for her in this world, and she found herself longing for the other, where all was peace, where a lovely green lady replenished the shrinking store of love in her heart. If only she could escape there again, to that misty land where fear found no home, to that world of moss and vines, where the Guardian could never find her.
Kitten rounded the corner to go to the side of the house. Serazina thought she heard digging and cried, “Don’t, please. Fiola will kill you if you dig a hole in her vegetable garden.” Not that Fiola was going to give a dragon’s butt about carrots now.
As she’d feared, the kitten was pawing the earth. “I’m warning you,” Serazina said. She stopped in astonishment.
No vegetables grew in this section of the garden. Flowers Serazina had never seen erupted from the earth: butterfly golden blossoms whose depths held sunbeams, blue flowers the colors of sky and sea, pink ones like a kitten’s nose, row after row of glorious flowers that looked as radiant as jewels must be, rising from stems and leaves sparkling like emeralds.
Serazina, bedazzled by this display, didn’t notice the kitten tugging at the stalk of a pink flower with her teeth until she had pulled it out from the ground. “Why?” Serazina cried. “Give me that. I’ll have to throw it away so she doesn’t find it.”
When Serazina reached down for the flower, the kitten growled, her eyes the dim sulfur of a mist-shrouded moon. For a second Serazina thought she saw contempt in them. That was ridiculous. Cats might feel happiness or sadness, but they didn’t have complicated emotions.
“Come on,” she commanded, “I’m trying to save your little tail. My mother isn’t going to like this. Can I have it?”
The kitten dropped the flower into her hand. Its petals, soft as a baby’s flesh, warmed her hand. Light danced in the corners of her mind, weaving her thoughts into a rainbow mist. She knew that no such flowers grew in her familiar world and that these could have only come from the world beyond. Or perhaps she had again entered that world without knowing it. Maybe the worlds had blurred together, like the places where two different colors of wet paint met. Or maybe there were windows and doors she couldn’t see, and the light of the other world streamed through them.
Or maybe she was totally demented.
The kitten gave her a look like the whisper of a dragonfly’s wings and dashed past her towards the fields. She knew. She was from that world, too.
Nature’s conversations. Serazina wept for the loss of her father. If she found that world, could she somehow find him, or at least feel close to him and understand why he had to run away and ruin their lives? She tucked the pink flower into a buttonhole and followed the kitten.
* * *
Tara was exhausted from listening to Serazina’s thoughts. They jumped around like a horde of hungry grasshoppers.
The fields seem more dry than usual. The earth crumbles beneath my feet, and those plants look awfully thirsty. Oh, I’m hot. Oh, I’m tired. This time next week, probably, I’ll be somewhere else, but if I leave Oasis, I might never see my father again. I wish I could do something to save him, to make people understand what he believes. But what does he believe? It’s hard to follow, like that kitten; she doesn’t even act as if we’re going anywhere; she just zigs and zags all over the place.
With a mind like hers, Serazina had huge nerve talking about zigging and zagging.
Where’s the magic world I saw before?
She’d never see the Brightness with the downpour of her thoughts.
If it disappears so easily, I could never stay in it anyway. I might as well turn back.
Not a chance. Tara dashed out of the last field into the meadowlands.
“Wait! Where are you going?”
She stopped so that the stupid girl could catch up. They’d been walking a long time, and tiredness sharpened her irritation at the impossibility of trying to communicate with a creature who couldn’t understand civilized habits. If she tried to sleep a little, Serazina would just start whining again about how they weren’t going anywhere.
After a quick wash, Tara ran up to the girl, stood on her hind legs, and stretched her front ones up to the girl. Serazina loved this; she called it “just like a baby wanting to be picked it up.” What a cat had to suffer in order to communicate with humans.
Now listen to me, she said, making her eyes reflect the colors of the garden. Her gaze rewove the rainbow tapestry; a beam of brilliant colors flashed between herself and the girl. Look, her mind shouted. The magical world is HERE. The new world takes form in the brightness of the old.
The girl throbbed with vague comprehension, but her mind rejected the pictures. Hallucination. I’m tired. The sun is too bright. My eyes hurt. I hardly slept all night. My life is ruined. There’s nothing here.
It was discouraging work. Tara tried to heighten Serazina’s other senses. She opened her own ears wide to take in the love songs of birds, the soft creak of tree limbs as tasty rodents leapt from one branch to the next, the laughter of leaves.
Blended fragrances bathed her mouth and quivering nostrils: the earthy scent and taste of moles, the green sweetness of young grass and leaves, the tang of pine needles. How exquisite the world was, how various the elements that formed the One. Why couldn’t the girl sense it?
Disinclined though she was to give Orion any credit today, she remembered the mental techniques he’d batted into her. She would stop trying. She would empty her mind of ambition. She would think only of the Mother.
Help me, she prayed. Let the girl see you again. Give her a vision that will bind her feet to Your path.
The golden eyes were unblinking. No.
Tara glared at those cold yellow eyes. Why not?
If I could let her in, I could let all the humans in, and there’d be no need for your Quest. She must choose to know my world.
The last thing Tara wanted to hear about was the choice-based universe. But how?
You must be the connection between her heart and mine.
Do you think I’ve been chasing flies all day?
The Mother’s smile was a shimmer in the grass. The girl won’t open her heart to Me until you open yours to her, until your love for her is free from your many opinions about her humanness, until it is a pure force to pull her to Me.
If you had to spend a few weeks in a human home, Tara spat, I guarantee you’d reconsider this whole Quest. It’s fine for you to have perfect love. No human ever trod on your tail or tried to kill you.
The sky darkened and growled. In many human hearts, I am long dead.
But there’s so much more of you. It’s too much to ask me.
I ask a lot, the Mother said and disappeared.
Tara looked at the sky, wondering where She’d gone, probably off to tell some other poor innocents why they had to do it all by themselves. Fine, since no one is about to help me, I’ll give it a chase—but I’m not knocking myself out, You hear me?
No answer. Tara hunkered down to business, applying every lesson in discipline she’d ever learned. She dug into all the corners of her mind, remembering the girl’s acts of love, the endless hours of stroking and rubbing, the way she scratched particularly sensitive spots behind the ears, smuggled gifts of fish, the daily risks taken to deceive that horror of a mother. Serazina loved her as much as any human being could love an animal.
This, when you got down to the unsheathed claws of it, was only enough to allow Tara to project a thin and wavering pulse of love, but it was more than the girl had ever gotten. Her heart could barely take it in.
* * *
Serazina’s heart swelled like an overripe fruit filled with liquid warmth. With gentle hands the green and golden
lady parted the layers of fear and disbelief that covered its sweetness. Trust and confidence spilled out of her, dissolving the worried girl named Serazina into a dance of light and sound. No more me, a voice exulted, no more miserable mass of complaints and fears.
No more me? her mind shouted. Stupid heart, this means death!
The lady faded. Don’t leave me, her heart cried.
The lady materialized long enough to give Serazina a long, sad look. Follow me, she said and dissolved into a nimbus that danced across the meadow to the woods. Tara jumped out of Serazina’s arms and began trotting in that direction. Undecided, Serazina paused until a cord looped around her heart to pull her along the kitten’s zigzag trail.
“Lady, lady, please wait,” Serazina sobbed as she stumbled over stones and tree stumps. She had been running for years. Her heart, pounding unevenly, hurt as much as the aching muscles of her legs. As she faltered, the warnings of her mind grew stronger, until at last the vision of the lady was no more than a tattered memory.
When she stopped to rest, her burning lungs took in the reek of decay and death. There was no Lady here, unless her colors had rotted to gray and black. She couldn’t live in this world where dripping vines snaked across the boggy path and shrouds of moss concealed the sun.
Serazina screamed and began to dash back to the woods. She was nearly there when she noticed that the kitten hadn’t moved.
* * *
Tara buried her head in her paws and mewed. To have come this far, to have exhausted the energy she’d once thought inexhaustible, only to have the girl refuse to take the last few steps that could make the difference between the survival and the loss of a world, made her feel that leaving her mother had been a catnip feast in comparison.
I give up. I’m not Chosen. I’m not worthy. And it’s not my fault if the Mother abandoned me.
The old familiar purr buzzed in her hears. Who forsook whom? Who diluted the flow of My love into a thin stream of watery milk? Instead of giving up, why don’t you surrender?
To what?
To me. To the Dance. It’s not your life I want. My jaws hunger for the flesh of your vanity and the shivering bones of your fear. Let Me relieve you of these burdens.