“Your literal feet,” Laura said.
“The feet you gave me.”
For some reason this sounded like an accusation. Laura couldn’t tell whether she was being blamed for the shortcomings of Nown’s feet or for failing to respect them as feet. “Nown,” she said. “If you knew where I was because I made you, does that mean that you—I mean the eighth you—knew where my father was when he was missing?”
“Yes.”
She took several deep breaths before asking, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I did tell you that since I was, then he was still alive. And you strode ahead of me smiling and crying. You didn’t ask me where he was.”
In the shelter of the dune, the salt filled the still air with its dry fumes. Laura was having difficulty thinking. She got up and kept walking. Her sandman followed her. His weighty steps made wider circles of cracks in the crusted salt.
After a time she asked, “Does anything I say matter to you the way it did before you were free?”
“I don’t yet know.”
“But you followed me here.”
“Yes.”
She led him out onto the beach again. The tide was coming in, and, as she looked back between the gap in the dunes, Laura could see that it was making more progress on the western shore than where they were, so that the sea seemed to pile up against the barricade of the Spit.
She was more comfortable in the open air. Nown had come close to her until she was standing in his shadow. She was sure he’d done it deliberately—had noticed that she was panting and that she’d put up a hand to shade her eyes. Without looking at him, she pressed her hand against his side, his gritty skin and mock ribs and ridges of muscle. She said, “From now on, could you please tell me anything you think I might need to know?”
He was silent.
“Nown?”
Laura could have sworn she heard him sigh. She glanced at him, but his face had no expression, or none she could interpret. Perhaps she had only expected to hear a sigh. He was looking at a bank of cloud closing in on the Spit faster than the light sea breeze. Or at least he seemed to be looking at it. She asked, “Can you see that?”
“There are layers of wind. One is warmer,” he said. Then, “Laura—my experience of freedom is limited. So, therefore, is my experience of making judgments. I cannot yet know what I will have to consider each time I am considering what you need to know. My knowledge of your needs has been guided by your instructions. At times I have tried to imagine, without guidance from you, what you might need. I have made mistakes. After you caught the nightmare, you were weeping, and I picked you up to rock the tears out of you—I had seen that done. You did stop crying, but you didn’t approve of my action. I cannot trust the sympathy I have for you to guide me. We are too different, you and I. If you ask me to take care of all your needs, are you then giving me your freedom? Why would you free me only to hand over your own freedom?”
“Nown!” Laura had to stop him. He was retreating into a thicket of philosophical complications, and she was sure that it was a deeper and thornier thicket than either of them could imagine. She stepped onto one of his feet in order to stretch up and cover his mouth with her hand. “Shh,” she said. “That’s enough.”
He pulled her hand away. “Besides,” he said, “if you ask me to tell you anything you might need to know—to remember to tell you from now on anything you might need to know—are you asking me to promise? I think a promise must be like a law. I understand laws. They are what I’ve lived by. If a promise is like law, then, even free, I think I might do whatever I promised. Come what may.”
“But—no—I released you,” Laura said. “You’re free.”
“I’m free to promise,” Nown said. “And if I choose to make promises, I’ll honor them.”
“Don’t promise then! Don’t tell me what I might need to know.”
Nown’s eyes blackened and glittered. “Don’t say that.”
“You can’t possibly still be susceptible to my orders.”
“I find I am. I still want to do what you want.”
“Well—stop!” Laura ordered, exasperated.
“No,” Nown said.
She started to laugh, stood laughing, turned into the wind and the sunlight, which was fiercely hot, concentrated by the encroaching cloud. She felt happy, in a crazy way. Nown was a fearful responsibility, but when she was with him, the feeling she had of being trapped and baffled just disappeared. He was so contradictory—scrupulous and untamed at the same time—that in his presence all the things that had hemmed her in seemed to melt away. Her father was broken and beyond reproach, Rose was right to hate her, and she had been wrong to keep her own promises. But Nown made her feel like God on the first Sabbath; he was a great responsibility, but he was good, like the world, and being with him made Laura sleepy with happiness.
They kept wandering along the Spit, away from the sentinel lighthouse and Laura’s human company. They didn’t talk. It seemed that Nown had nothing further to tell Laura, and she, finding herself so content with him, stopped thinking altogether.
The massed gray clouds closed in on them, and a wind came up, a constant, cool, gritty wind. It scalped the dunes and scattered sand into the waters of Coal Bay. As the tide came in, and the waves grew bigger and steeper, water began to percolate through the Spit itself, so that the dunes grew damp and gave differently behind each step they took. Nown hiked up to the spine of the dunes and walked there. Laura followed him with difficulty, till he picked her up again and went along with her, rocking her as he swayed.
“Can you see the sea at all?” she asked.
“No.”
“Is it like walking on a bridge, then? A bridge over nothingness?”
“But there are birds,” Nown said.
Laura looked where she supposed he was looking and saw the diminishing dunes and bleak, choppy sea and, at the very end of the Spit, flashes of white, not foam on whitecaps but the myriad bodies of roosting gannets. Even in the stiff wind there were gannets out over the sea, weaving back and forth, scanning the water for prey. Hard-pressed and hopeful now, for it couldn’t be easy for the birds to spot fish under the agitated waves. Still, every few seconds one of the great, gliding creatures would pause, and close its wings, and fall, an accelerating white dart, into the water. The bird would disappear and would surface sometime later, shaking itself off, clutching at the air till the air shouldered its weight, and flying up to rejoin the rest of the hungry patrol.
Laura asked Nown to set her on her feet. She leaned against him, sheltered from the worst of the wind, and watched the gannets fish. She felt she should applaud these dives as the lighthouse keeper’s son did.
They stayed watching for a long time, till it was too cold and gray, and the birds became hard to see because the day was coming to a close. Then Laura put up her arms, and Nown picked her up and set off along the narrow backbone of the Spit toward the pale streak of the distant lighthouse.
Laura had her sandman crawl in under the keeper’s house, where tangles of harvested seaweed were drying among the timber piles. She told him to stay still and hidden.
In the early hours of the morning, when the dependable westerly had dropped again, she climbed out of her bed—a mattress on the floor beside her father’s—and crept out of their hut and under the keeper’s house. She found Nown by touch. She lay down with her back against his body and drew his arms around her. Then she went back to sleep again, cradled in a nest of shaped sand and snarls of seaweed.
At dawn Tziga woke and let his arm drape off the side of his bed to feel for his daughter’s head on her pillow. He couldn’t find it. He ran his palm over the cold, empty dent where her warm curls should have been and then leaned up on an elbow to look at her bed.
Tziga put on his patched fisherman’s jersey and went out to find her. He looked on the outer shore and found only a flock of terns standing by the tide line turned in to the breeze. Then, as he was crossing the windbreak
to look on the Coal Bay shore, Tziga noticed a smear of pallor between the piles of the keeper’s cottage. As he got closer, he recognized Laura’s white nightgown. He steadied himself against the wall of the cottage and stooped to look.
Laura was asleep, but the sandman’s eyes were open—always open, made that way—and looking at him.
Tziga felt himself recognized. He felt the sandman’s calm, alien interest. He saw how the thing’s arms enfolded Laura’s slight body, how her head was pillowed on its shoulder. The thing looked nothing like his own roughly made and rather grotesque servant.
Laura had been late for dinner, pink with cold and exertion, and very happy. Now here she was, asleep in these inhuman arms. The sight was terrifying to Tziga. He wanted to crawl in among the seaweed and haul her out. He wanted to make the thing disappear.
She didn’t need it anymore.
Tziga looked for the letters of its name and saw an unmarked brow, and below the brow the eyes, watchful, but with no sign of concern or challenge in them. The thing was simply waiting for him to go away. It seemed to know that he wouldn’t want to wake Laura, and to understand that he wouldn’t want her to find out that he’d seen it.
Laura woke up when she heard stirring above her, the keeper’s wife opening the stove top to drop kindling in on the embers of last night’s fire. She turned to Nown. “My uncle Chorley is sending a boat to take me and Da to Summerfort. For Christmas—so soon. I’ll want you there, Nown. I’m sorry to have to send you off, but if you’re going to get there in time, you’ll have to start walking. I know you do most of your walking by night, and the nights are getting shorter.”
“Yes.”
“What are you saying yes to?”
“The nights are shorter. You’ll want me. I should start walking to meet you there. I believe you are sorry. I’m saying yes to all that. And, yes, I will go now, I will do what you ask.”
Laura extracted herself from the accommodating hollow he’d made in his body. She said thank you. She crawled out from under the keeper’s cottage, picked stiff fragments of seaweed from her nightgown, and crept back to her cold bed.
At breakfast Laura’s father asked her whether she’d written again to her friend Sandy.
“He didn’t reply to my letter. It wasn’t much of a letter, I’m afraid. I’m no good at writing them.”
“Have you written again to Rose?”
“She’s given up on me, Da.”
“Don’t be silly, Laura.”
She scowled at her plate of oatmeal.
“You’re just nursing a grudge,” said her father. “Rose told you off. A telling-off isn’t a real breach, darling.”
“But I can’t say what I need to say to Rose in a letter.” Laura knew there was nothing she had to say to Rose before showing Nown to her. He’d still be her secret, even if she showed him to Rose. Rose was Rose. The only reason she hadn’t told Rose everything was that she wasn’t telling herself either.
Her father was saying, “I may be an invalid, but you’re not. You aren’t even a fugitive. No one can prove you had anything to do with—with anything. You can take up dreamhunting again. You can catch new and useful dreams, build a career, team up with your friend Sandy, boost each other and play the bigger venues. You’re still in the world, Laura. You belong to the world. You don’t belong with an invalid. You can’t stay sequestered. You should be with people.”
Laura nodded. “All right,” she said. She gave his hand a squeeze. “But until I see Rose, I won’t know what to say to her. And Sandy—Sandy prefers to tell people what to do rather than take suggestions.”
“Fine. But you can be a dreamhunter. You can have friends. You can have a pretty dress made and go to the Presentation Ball with your cousin.”
“And you can be poked and prodded by Uncle Chorley’s expensive physicians.”
6
RACE WAS BUYING A NEW PACK AT AN OUTFITTER’S ON THE ISLE OF THE TEMPLE WHEN SHE RAN INTO SANDY MASON. He was picking up and putting down sale-price water bottles, working his way along a shelf. None of the bottles seemed to pass his inspection. He looked dubious and sour, as though he was suffering from indigestion.
“Hello,” said Grace. “How are you?” She wasn’t just being polite, she really wanted to know. She was sure that Sandy had suffered some kind of trouble after taking a print of Buried Alive. She had. Her own suffering had taken the form of a marked dip in the popularity of her performances. She had been forced to catch old favorites and to travel with them to some of the smaller provincial dream palaces: The Beholder at Sisters Beach—before the summer season had filled it with its big audiences—and The Second Skin in Westport. She’d even sat up on an overnight train to the first sizable town south of The Corridor. Eventually Grace had returned to the Rainbow Opera for a performance at reduced rates; the Opera was paid but she wasn’t. It had taken her weeks, and cost her money, but she had finally worked her way back into public confidence. Her audience had forgiven her.
Though Grace had recovered her old virtuosity, she found that she couldn’t relax. When she was busy wooing back the public, she’d been able to put other thoughts and feelings out of her mind. Now these suppressed feelings had returned in force.
It had been written in newspapers: “Grace Tiebold should be ashamed of herself.” She had read it, and imagined other people reading it—her neighbors, the workers at her favorite bakery, the man who trimmed her hair. She’d gone around with her eyes cast down for fear of finding herself looked at—not by those she had offended or disappointed but by people who had only heard it said: “Grace Tiebold should be ashamed of herself.” She was afraid she’d see those people looking at her to discover how she was taking it.
Grace had done the hard work, had shown humility, and was back in favor. But now she wondered if she’d ever again feel her former happy confidence in her power to please people. And if she’d ever be able to forget the relish she’d sensed in her public scolding.
So when she asked Sandy Mason how he was, Grace wasn’t just being polite but was genuinely concerned.
Sandy only grunted in reply. Then he looked guilty and tried again. “I’m fine now. There was a short period when I was catching poor quality dreams. St. Thomas’s turned me away. I nearly had to give up my room, though Mrs. Lilley was good about waiting for my rent. All the other lodgers kept asking me about Laura, as though she was mine.” Sandy had begun his account in a brisk, no-nonsense voice but ended sounding bitter. He was frowning at Grace. “Laura’s room just stands there empty,” he said.
“I can get a message to her, if you have one,” Grace offered.
Sandy’s frown deepened, he shuffled his feet. “I mean—it’s wasteful to keep a room empty week after week.”
“Never mind that,” Grace said. She was puzzled by his behavior. He’d been so concerned about Laura after the riot. “I’m sure Laura would be interested to hear about your union plans,” she said.
“Oh, that.” Sandy sounded disgusted. “There was a meeting. We should have been talking about a charter and how to collect dues. Instead, it was an orgy of whining, dream-hunters slighting dream parlor managers, or complaining about the state of the dream trails. I saw how much had to be done. And I saw that, if I wanted it done, I was going to have to do it all myself. Besides”—Sandy paused—“I want to be a great dreamhunter. And I’ve got only seven months of my exclusive left on The Water Diviner. I don’t have time to waste.”
“Fair enough,” said Grace. Then she persisted. “You could give me a letter and I’d pass it on to Laura. I’m going to see her at Christmas.”
“I know where she is,” Sandy said, so blunt he was almost brutal. “Not that she really meant to let me know.” He emphasized the “me.”
“Oh—well,” Grace said. She picked up the pack and hoisted it onto her shoulder to test its empty weight.
Sandy seemed to be struggling with himself. Grace thought he might have realized that it was against his self-interest to be r
ude to the most famous dreamhunter. He began to talk again, stiff and expressionless. “I did set out to visit her. I caught a lift on a barge from Tarry Cove—you know, the last stop on the Sisters Beach line?”
“Where the fishing fleet anchors.”
“And coal barges. I caught a lift on a barge going to Debt River, the mine at the base of So Long Spit.”
“And?”
“And I thought about it as I went.”
“You thought about going to see Laura?”
“I thought about whether I really wanted to see her.”
“Oh, Sandy, what did she do to you? I mean, apart from—” Grace stopped, not wanting to talk out loud about Laura and the nightmare. She put her hand on his arm. “Was it you who copied out the letters for her?”
Sandy was startled. “What are you talking about? What letters? Laura sent me a letter—she wanted me to pass it on to some other person.”
“Who?”
“The letter didn’t say who. I was supposed to leave it somewhere. I didn’t do it.” Sandy was struggling to hold back the fury in his face and voice. He ended up looking prim. “She was trying to get me to be her go-between.”
Grace looked around them. The outfitter’s wasn’t busy. They had an aisle to themselves. She lowered her voice, trying to encourage him to do so too. “Where is this letter now?”
“I tore it up. Shreds of it are still plastered to the gutter outside my bedroom window. A nice reminder of Laura, and my limited usefulness to her.”
Grace touched his arm again, tentative. “Sandy, I want to apologize for Laura if she—”
“She’s just a child,” he said. “Self-centered, feckless, and childish.”