A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L’Engle (8)

 

Unicorn and boy vomited sea water and struggled to breathe, their lungs paining them as though they were being slashed by knives. They were sheltered from the wind by a cliff of ice onto which the sun was pouring, so that water was streaming down in little rivulets. The warmth of the sun which was melting the ice also melted the chill from their sodden bodies, and began to dry the unicorn’s waterlogged wings. Gradually their blood began to flow normally and they breathed without choking on salt water.

Because he was smaller and lighter (and billions of years younger, Gaudior pointed out later), Charles Wallace recovered first. He managed to wriggle out of the still-soaking anorak and drop it down onto the wet sand. Then with difficulty he kicked off the boots. He looked at the ropes which still bound him to the unicorn; the knots were pulled so tight and the cord was by now so sodden that it was impossible to untie himself. Exhausted, he bent over Gaudior’s neck and felt the healing sun send its rays deep into his body. Warmed and soothed, his nose pressed against wet unicorn mane, he fell into sleep, a deep, life-renewing sleep.

When he awoke, Gaudior was stretching his wings out to the sun. A few drops of water still clung to them, but the unicorn could flex them with ease.

“Gaudior,” Charles Wallace started, and yawned.

“While you were sleeping,” the unicorn reproved gently, “I have been consulting the wind. Praise the Music that we’re in the When of the melting of the ice or we could not have survived.” He, too, yawned.

“Do unicorns sleep?” Charles Wallace asked.

“I haven’t needed to sleep in aeons.”

“I feel all the better for a nap. Gaudior, I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“For making you try to get us to Patagonia. If I hadn’t, we might not have been nearly killed by the Echthroi.”

“Apology accepted,” Gaudior said briskly. “Have you learned?”

“I’ve learned that every time I’ve tried to control things we’ve had trouble. I don’t know what we ought to do now, or Where or When we ought to go from here. I just don’t know …”

“I think”—Gaudior turned his great head to look at the boy—“that our next step is to get all these knots untied.”

Charles Wallace ran his fingers along the rope. “The knots are all sort of welded together from wind and water and sun. I can’t possibly untie them.”

Gaudior wriggled against the pressure of the ropes. “They appear to have shrunk. I am very uncomfortable.”

After a futile attempt at what looked like the most pliable of the knots, Charles Wallace gave up. “I’ve got to find something to cut the rope.”

Gaudior trotted slowly up and down the beach. There were shells, but none sharp enough. They saw a few pieces of rotting driftwood, and some iridescent jellyfish and clumps of seaweed. There were no broken bottles or tin cans or other signs of mankind, and while Charles Wallace was usually horrified at human waste and abuse of nature, he would gladly have found a broken beer bottle.

Gaudior turned inland around the edge of the ice cliff, moving up on slipping sand runneled by melting ice. “This is absurd. After all we’ve been through, who would have thought I’d end up like a centaur with you permanently affixed to my back?” But he continued to struggle up until he was standing on the great shoulder of ice.

“Look!” Charles Wallace pointed to a cluster of silvery plants with long spikes which had jagged teeth along the sides. “Do you think you could bite one of those off, so I can saw the rope with it?”

Gaudior splashed through puddles of melted ice, lowered his head, and bit off one of the spikes as close to the root as his large teeth permitted. Holding it between his teeth he twisted his head around until Charles Wallace, straining until the rope nearly cut off his breath, managed to take it from him.

Gaudior wrinkled his lips in distaste. “It’s repellent. Careful, now. Unicorn’s hide is not as strong as it looks.”

“Stop fidgeting.”

“It itches.” Gaudior flung his head about with uncontrollable and agonized laughter. “Hurry.”

“If I hurry I’ll cut you. It’s coming now.” He moved the plant-saw back and forth with careful concentration, and finally one of the ropes parted. “I’ll have to cut one more, on the other side. The worst is over now.”

But when a second rope was severed, Charles Wallace was still bound to the unicorn, and the plant was limp and useless. “Can you bite off another spike?”

Gaudior bit and grimaced. “Nothing really has to taste that disagreeable. But then, I am not accustomed to any food except starlight and moonlight.”

At last the ropes were off boy and beast, and Charles Wallace slid to the surface of the ice cliff. Gaudior was attacked by a fit of sneezing, and the last of the sea water flooded from his nose and mouth. Charles Wallace looked at the unicorn and drew in his breath in horror. Where the lines of rope had crossed the flanks there were red welts, shocking against the silver hide. The entire abdominal area, where the webbed hammock had rubbed, was raw and oozing blood. The water which had flooded from Gaudior’s nostrils was pinkish.

The unicorn in turn inspected the boy. “You’re a mess,” he stated flatly. “You can’t possibly go Within in this condition. You’d only hurt your host.”

“You’re a mess, too,” Charles Wallace replied. He looked at his hands, and the palms were as raw as Gaudior’s belly. Where the anorak and his shirt had slipped, the rope had cut into his waist as it had cut Gaudior’s flanks.

“And you have two black eyes,” the unicorn informed him. “It’s a wonder you can see at all.”

Charles Wallace squinted, first with one eye, then the other. “Things are a little blurry,” he confessed.

Gaudior shook a few last drops from his wings. “We can’t stay here, and you can’t go Within now, that’s obvious.”

Charles Wallace looked at the sun, which was moving toward the west. “It’s going to be cold when the sun goes down. And there doesn’t seem to be any sign of life. And nothing to eat.”

Gaudior folded his wings across his eyes and appeared to contemplate. Then he returned the wings to the bleeding flanks. “I don’t understand earth time.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Time is of the essence, we both know that. And yet it will take weeks, if not months, for us to heal.”

When the unicorn stared at him as though expecting a response, Charles Wallace looked down at a puddle in the ice. “I don’t have any suggestions.”

“We’re both exhausted. The one place I can take you without fear of Echthroi is my home. No mortal has ever been there, and I am not sure I should bring you, but it’s the only way I see open to us.” The unicorn flung back his mane so that it brushed against the boy’s bruised face with a silver coolness. “I have become very fond of you, in spite of all your foolishness.”

Charles Wallace hugged the unicorn. “I have become fond of you, too.”

Joints creaking painfully, Gaudior knelt. The boy clambered up, wincing as he inevitably touched the red welts which marred the flanks. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you.”

Gaudior neighed softly. “I know you don’t.”

The boy was so exhausted that he was scarcely aware of their flight. Stars and time swirled about him, and his lids began to droop.

“Wake up!” Gaudior ordered, and he opened his eyes to a world of starlit loveliness. The blurring of his vision had cleared, and he looked in awe at a land of snow and ice; he felt no cold, only the tenderness of a soft breeze which touched his cuts and bruises with healing gentleness. In the violet sky hung a sickle moon, and a smaller, higher moon, nearly full. Mountains heaved snow-clad shoulders skyward. Between the ribs of one of the foothills he saw what appeared to be a pile of enormous eggs.

Gaudior followed his gaze. “The hatching grounds. It has been seen by no other human eyes.”

“I didn’t know unicorns came from eggs,” the boy said wonderingly.

“Not all of us do,” Gaudior replied casually. “Only the time travelers.” He took in great draughts of moonlight, then asked, “Aren’t you thirsty?”

Charles Wallace’s lips were cracked and sore. His mouth was parched. He looked longingly at the moonlight and tentatively opened his mouth to it. He felt a cool and healing touch on his lips, but when he tried to swallow he choked.

“I forgot,” Gaudior said. “You’re human. In my excitement at being home it slipped my mind.” He cantered off to one of the foothills and returned with a long blue-green icicle held carefully in his teeth. “Suck it slowly. It may sting at first, but it has healing properties.”

The cool drops trickled gently down the boy’s parched throat, like rays of moonlight, and at the same time that they cooled the burning, they warmed his cold body. He gave his entire concentration to the moonsicle, and when he had finished the last healing drops he turned to thank Gaudior.

The unicorn was rolling in the snow, his legs up in the air, rolling and rolling, a humming of sheer pleasure coming from his throat. Then he stood up and shook himself, flinging splashes of snow in all directions. The red welts were gone; his hide was smooth and glistening perfection. He looked at the sore places on Charles Wallace’s waist and hands. “Roll, the way I did,” he ordered.

Charles Wallace threw himself into the snow, which was like no other snow he had ever felt; each flake was separate and tingly; it was cool but not chilling, and he felt healing move not only over the rope burns but deep within his sore muscles. He rolled over and over, laughing with delight. Then came a moment when he knew that he was completely healed, and he jumped up. “Gaudior, where is everybody? all the other unicorns?”

“Only the time travelers come to the hatching grounds, and during the passage of the small moon they can be about other business, for the small moon casts its warmth on the eggs. I brought you here, to this place, and at this moon, so we’d be alone.”

“But why should we be alone?”

“If the others saw you they’d fear for their eggs.”

Charles Wallace’s head came barely halfway up the unicorn’s haunches. “Creatures your size would be afraid of me?”

“Size is immaterial. There are tiny viruses which are deadly.”

“Couldn’t you tell them I’m not a virus and I’m not deadly?”

Gaudior blew out a gust of air. “Some of them think mankind is deadly.”

Charles Wallace, too, sighed, and did not reply. Gaudior nuzzled his shoulder. “Those of us who have been around the galaxies know that such thinking is foolish. It’s always easy to blame others. And I have learned, being with you, that many of my preconceptions about mortals were wrong. Are you ready?”

Charles Wallace held out his hands to the unicorn. “Couldn’t I see one of the eggs hatch?”

“They won’t be ready until the rising of the third moon, unless …” Gaudior moved closer to the clutch, each egg almost as long as the boy was tall. “Wait—” The unicorn trotted to the great globular heap, which shone with inner luminosity, like giant moonstones. Gaudior bent his curved neck so that his mane brushed softly over the surface of the shells. With his upper teeth he tapped gently on one, listening, ears cocked, the short ear-hairs standing up and quivering like antennae. After a moment he moved on to another shell, and then another, with unhurried patience, until he tapped on one shell twice, thrice, then drew back and nodded at the boy.

This egg appeared to have rolled slightly apart from the others, and as Charles Wallace watched, it quivered, and rolled even farther away. From inside the shell came a sound of tapping, and the egg began to glow. The tapping accelerated and the shell grew so bright the boy could scarcely look at it. A sharp cracking, and a flash of brilliance as the horn thrust up and out into the pearly air, followed by a head with the silver mane clinging damply to neck and forehead. Dark silver-lashed eyes opened slowly, and the baby unicorn looked around, its eyes reflecting the light of the moons as it gazed on its fresh new environment. Then it wriggled and cracked the rest of the shell. As fragments of shell fell onto the snowy ground they broke into thousands of flakes, and the shell became one with the snow.

The baby unicorn stood on new and wobbly legs, neighing a soft moonbeam sound until it gained its balance. It stood barely as tall as Charles Wallace, testing one forehoof, then the other, and kicking out its hind legs. As Charles Wallace watched, lost in delight, the baby unicorn danced under the light of the two moons.

Then it saw Gaudior, and came prancing over to the big unicorn; by slightly lowering the horn it could have run right under the full-grown beast.

Gaudior nuzzled the little one’s head just below the horn. Again the baby pranced with pleasure, and Gaudior began to dance with it, leading the fledgling in steps ever more and more intricate. When the baby began to tire, Gaudior slowed the steps of the dance and raised his head to the sickle moon, drew back his lips in an exaggerated gesture, and gulped moonlight.

As the baby had been following Gaudior in the steps of the dance, so it imitated him now, eagerly trying to drink moonlight, the rays dribbling from its young and inexperienced lips and breaking like crystal on the snow. Again it tried, looking at Gaudior, until it was thirstily and tidily swallowing the light as it was tipped out from the curve of the moon.

Gaudior turned to the nearly full moon, and again with exaggerated gestures taught the little one to drink. When its flanks were quivering with fullness, Gaudior turned to the nearest star, and showed it the pleasures of finishing a meal by quenching its thirst with starlight. The little one sipped contentedly, then closed its mouth with its tiny, diamond-like teeth, and, replete, leaned against Gaudior.

Only then did it notice Charles Wallace. With a leap of startlement, it landed on all four spindly legs, squealed in terror and galloped away, tail streaming silver behind it.

Charles Wallace watched the little creature disappear over the horizon. “I’m sorry I frightened it. Will it be all right?”

Gaudior nodded reassuringly. “It’s gone in the direction of the Mothers. They’ll tell it you’re only a bad dream it had coming out of the shell, and it’ll forget all about you.” He knelt.

Reluctantly Charles Wallace mounted and sat astride the great neck. Holding on to a handful of mane, he looked about at the wild and peaceful landscape. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You human beings tend to want good things to last forever. They don’t. Not while we’re in time. Do you have any instructions for me?”

“I’m through with instructions. I don’t even have any suggestions.”

“We’ll go Where and When the wind decides to take us, then?”

“What about Echthroi?” Charles Wallace asked fearfully.

“Because we’re journeying from the home place the wind should be unmolested, as it was when we came here. After that we’ll see. We’ve been in a very deep sea, and I never thought we’d get out of it. Try not to be afraid. The wind will give us all the help it can.” The wings stretched to their full span and Gaudior flew up between the two moons, and away from the unicorn hatching grounds.

Meg sighed with delight.

“Oh, Ananda, Ananda, that was the most beautiful kythe! How I wish Charles Wallace could have stayed there longer, where he’s safe …”

Ananda whined softly.

“I know. He has to leave. But the Echthroi are after him, and I feel so helpless …”

Ananda looked up at Meg, and the tufts of darker fur above the eyes lifted.

Meg scratched the dog between the ears. “We did send him the rune when he was in the Ice Age sea, and the wind came to help.” Anxiously she placed her hand on Ananda, and closed her eyes, concentrating.

She saw the star-watching rock, and two children, a girl and a boy, perhaps thirteen and eleven, the girl the elder. The boy looked very much like a modern Brandon Llawcae, a Brandon in blue jeans and T-shirt—so it was definitely not 1865.

Charles Wallace was Within the boy, whose name was not Brandon.

Chuck.

Mrs. O’Keefe had called Charles Wallace Chuck.

Chuck was someone Mrs. O’Keefe knew. Someone Mrs. O’Keefe had said was not an idiot.

Now he was with a girl, yes, and someone else, an old woman. Chuck Maddox, and his sister, Beezie, and their grandmother. They were laughing, and blowing dandelion clocks, counting the breaths it took for the lacy white spores to leave the green stem.

Beezie Maddox had golden hair and bright blue eyes and a merry laugh. Chuck was more muted, his hair a soft brown, his eyes blue-grey. He smiled more often than laughed. He was so much like Brandon that Meg was sure he must be a direct descendant.

“Ananda, why am I so terribly frightened for him?” Meg asked.

“Let’s blow dandelion clocks,” Beezie had suggested.

“Not around the store you don’t,” their father had said. “I’ll not have my patch of lawn seeded with more dandelion spore than blows here on its own.”

So Chuck and Beezie and the grandmother came on a Sunday afternoon, across the brook, along to the flat rock. In the distance they could hear the sound of trucks on the highway, although they could not see them. Occasionally a plane tracked across the sky. Otherwise, there was nothing to remind them of civilization, and this was one of the things Chuck liked best about crossing the brook and walking through the woods to the rock.

Beezie handed him a dandelion. “Blow.”

Chuck did not much like the smell of the spore; it was heavy and rank, and he wrinkled his nose with distaste.

“It doesn’t smell all that bad to me,” Beezie said. “When I squish the stem it smells green, that’s all.”

The grandmother held the snowy fronds to her nose. “When you’re old, nothing smells the way it used to.” She blew, and the white snowflakes of her dandelion flew in all directions, drifting on the wind.

Chuck and his sister had to blow several times before the clock told its time. The grandmother, who was quickly out of breath, and who had pressed her hand against her heart as she struggled up the fern-bordered path from the brook, blew lightly, and all the spores flew from the stem, danced in the sunny air, and slowly settled.

Chuck looked at Beezie, and Beezie looked at Chuck.

“Grandma, Beezie and I huff and puff and you blow no stronger than a whisper and it all blows away.”

“Maybe you blow too hard. And when you ask the time, you mustn’t fear the answer.”

Chuck looked at the bare green stem in his grandmother’s fingers. “I blew four times, and it isn’t nearly four yet. What time does your dandelion tell, Grandma?”

The spring sun went briefly behind a small cloud, veiling the old woman’s eyes. “It tells me of time past, when the valley was a lake, your pa says, and a different people roamed the land. Do you remember the arrowhead you found when we were digging to plant tulip bulbs?” Deftly she changed the subject.

“Beezie and I’ve found lots of arrowheads. I always carry one. It’s better’n a knife.” He pulled the flat chipped triangle from his jeans pocket.

Beezie wore jeans, too, thin where her sharp knees were starting to push through the cloth. Her blue-and-white-checked shirt was just beginning to stretch tightly across her chest. She dug into her pockets like her brother, pulling out an old Scout knife and a bent spoon. “Grandma, blowing the dandelion clocks—that’s just superstition, isn’t it?”

“And what else would it be? Better ways there are of telling the time, like the set of the sun in the sky and the shadows of the trees. I make it out to be nigh three in the afternoon, and near time to go home for a cup of tea.”

Beezie lay back on the warm ledge of rock, the same kind of rock from which the arrowhead had been chipped. “And Ma and Pa’ll have tea with us because it’s Sunday, and the store’s closed, and nobody in it but Pansy. Grandma, I think she’s going to have kittens again.”

“Are you after being surprised? What else has Pansy to do except frighten the field mice away.”

Despite the mention of tea, Chuck too lay back, putting his head in his grandmother’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. Around them the spring breeze was gentle; the leaves whispered together; and in the distance a phoebe called wistfully. The roaring of a truck on the distant highway was a jarring note.

The grandmother said, “When we leave the village and cross the brook it’s almost as though we crossed out of time, too. And then there comes the sound of the present”—she gestured toward the invisible highway—“to remind us.”

“What of, Grandma?” Beezie asked.

The old woman looked into an unseen distance. “The world of trucks isn’t as real to me as the world on the other side of time.”

“Which side?” Chuck asked.

“Either side, though at the present I know more about the past than the future.”

Beezie’s eyes lit up. “You mean like in the stories you tell us?”

The grandmother nodded, her eyes still distant.

“Tell us one of the stories, Grandma. Tell us how Queen Branwen was taken from Britain by an Irish king.”

The old woman’s focus returned to the children. “I may have been born in Ireland, but we never forgot we came from Branwen of Britain.”

“And I’m named after her.”

“That you are, wee Beezie, and after me, for I’m Branwen, too.”

“And Zillah? I’m Branwen Zillah Maddox.” Beezie and Chuck knew the stories of their names backwards and forwards but never lost pleasure in hearing them.

Meg opened her eyes in amazement.

Branwen Zillah Maddox. B.Z. Beezie.

Mrs. O’Keefe.

That golden child was Mrs. O’Keefe.

And Chuck was her brother.

* * *

“Zillah comes from your Maddox forebears,” the grandmother told the children, “and a proud name it is, too. She was an Indian princess, according to your pa, from the tribe which used to dwell right here where we be now, though the Indians are long gone.”

“But you don’t know as much about Zillah as you do about Branwen.”

“Only that she was an Indian and beautiful. There are too many men on your father’s side of the family, and stories come down, nowadays, through women. But in Branwen’s day there were men who were bards.”

“What’s bards?” Chuck asked.

“Singers of songs and tellers of tales. Both my grandma and my grandpa told me the story of Branwen, but mostly my grandma, over and over, and her grandma told her before that, and the telling goes back beyond memory. Britain and Ireland have long misunderstood each other, and this misunderstanding goes back beyond memory, too. And in the once upon a time and long ago when the Irish king wooed the English princess, ’twas thought there might at last be peace between the two green and pleasant lands. There was feasting for many moons at the time of the nuptials, and then the Irish king sailed for Ireland with his wife.”

“Wouldn’t Branwen have been homesick?” Beezie asked.

“And of course she’d have been homesick. But she was born a princess and now she was a queen, and queens know how to mind their manners—or did in those days.”

“And the king? What was he like?”

“Oh, and handsome he was, as the Irish can be, as was my own sweet Pat, who bore well the name of the blessed saint, with black hair and blue eyes. Branwen knew not that he was using her to vent his spleen against her land and her brethren, knew it not until he trumped up some silly story of her sitting in the refectory and casting her eye on one of his men. So, to punish her—”

“For what?” Chuck asked.

“For what, indeed? For his own jealous fantasies. So, to punish her, he sent her to tend the swine and barred her from the palace. So she knew he had never loved her, and her heart burned within her with anguish. Then she thought to call on her brother in England, and she used the rune, and whether she and hers gave the rune to Patrick, or whether their guardian angels gave it to each of them, she called on all Heaven with its power—”

The children chanted the rune with her.

The grandmother continued, “And the sun shone on her fair hair and warmed her, and the gentle snow fell and made all clean the sty in which the Irish king had set her, and the fire burst from the fireplace of his wooden palace and the lightning struck it and it burned with mighty rage and all within fled the fury. And the wind blew from Britain and the sails of her brother Bran’s ship billowed as it sped over the deep sea and landed where the rocks were steep and the earth stark. And Bran’s men scaled the rock and rescued their beloved Branwen.”

“Is it a true story, Grandma,” Beezie asked, “really?”

“To those with the listening ear and the believing heart.”

“Chuck has the believing heart,” Beezie said.

The grandmother patted his knee. “One day maybe you will be the writer your father wanted to be. He was not cut out for a storekeeper.”

“I love the store,” Beezie said defensively. “It smells good, of cinnamon and fresh bread and apples.”

“I’m hungry,” Chuck said.

“And wasn’t I after saying before we got into storytelling that we should get along home for tea? Pull me up, both of you.”

Chuck and Beezie scrambled to their feet and heaved the old woman upright. “We’ll pick a bouquet for Ma and Pa on the way,” Beezie said.

The narrow path was rough with rocks and hummocks of grass, and walking was not easy. The grandmother leaned on a staff which Chuck had cut for her from a grove of young maples which needed thinning. He went ahead, slowing down when he saw Beezie and his grandmother lagging behind him. A bouquet of field flowers was growing in Beezie’s hands, for she paused whenever she saw that the old woman was out of breath. “Look, Chuck! Look, Grandma! Three more jacks-in-the-pulpit!”

Chuck was hacking away with his arrowhead at a strand of bittersweet snaking around a young fir tree, strangling it with coils strong as a boa constrictor’s. “Ma used to have us looking for bittersweet a year or so ago, and now it’s taking over. It’ll kill this tree unless I cut through it. You two go along and I’ll catch up.”

“Want my knife?” Beezie offered.

“No. My arrowhead’s sharp.”

For a moment he stared after his sister and grandmother as they wended their slow way. He sniffed the fragrance of the air. Although the apple trees were green, the pink and white blossoms were still on the ground. The scent of lilac mingled with the mock orange. He might be able to hear the trucks on the road and see the planes in the sky, but at least here he couldn’t smell them.

Chuck liked neither the trucks nor the planes. They all left their fumes behind them, blunting the smell of sunlight, of rain, of green and growing things, and Chuck “saw” with his nose almost more than with his eyes. Without looking he could easily tell his parents, his grandmother, his sister. And he judged people almost entirely by his reaction to their odor.

“I don’t smell a thing,” his father had said after Chuck had wrinkled his nose at a departing customer.

Chuck had said calmly, “He smells unreliable.”

His father gave a small, surprised laugh. “He is unreliable. He owes me more than I can afford to be owed, for all his expensive clothes.”

When the strand of bittersweet was severed, Chuck stood leaning against the rough bark of the tree, breathing in its resiny smell. In the distance he could see his grandmother and Beezie. The old woman smelled to him of distance, of the sea, which was fifty or more miles away, but perhaps it was a farther sea which clung to her. “And you smell green,” he had told her. “Ah, and that’s because I come from a far green country and the scent of it will be with me always.”

“What color do I smell?” Beezie had asked.

“Yellow, like buttercups and sunlight and butterfly wings.”

Green and gold. Good smells. Home smells. His mother was the blue of sky in early morning. His father was the rich mahogany of the highboy in the living room, with the firelight flickering over the polished wood. Comfortable, safe smells.

And suddenly the thought of the odor of cookies and freshly baked bread called to him, and he ran to catch up.

The family lived over the store in a long, rambling apartment. The front room, overlooking the street, was a storeroom, filled with cartons and barrels. Behind it were three bedrooms: his parents’, his own little cubbyhole, and the bigger room Beezie shared with the grandmother. Beyond these were the kitchen and the large long room which served as living and dining room.

There was a fire crackling in the fireplace, for the spring evenings were apt to be chilly. The family was seated about a large round table set for tea, with cookies and bread still warm from the oven, a pitcher of milk, and a big pot of tea covered with the cozy the grandmother had brought with her from Ireland.

Chuck took his place, and his mother poured his tea. “Did you save another tree?”

“Yes. I really should take Pa’s big clippers with me next time.”

Beezie pushed the plate of bread and butter to him. “Take your share quickly or I’ll eat it all up.”

Chuck’s sensitive nostrils twitched. There was a smell in the room which was completely unfamiliar to him, and of which he was afraid.

The father helped himself to a cookie. “This is one of the times I wish Sunday afternoons came more than once a week.”

“You’ve been acting tired lately.” His wife looked at him anxiously.

“Being tired is the natural state of a country storekeeper who doesn’t have much business sense.”

The grandmother moved creakily from her chair at the table to her rocker. “Hard work’s not easy. You need more help.”

“Can’t afford it, Grandma. How about telling us a story?”

“You’ve heard them all as many times as there are stars in the sky.”

“I never tire of them.”

“I’m told out for today.”

“Oh, come on, Grandma,” Mr. Maddox cajoled. “You never tire of storytelling, and you know you make most of it up as you go along.”

“Stories are like children. They grow in their own way.” She closed her eyes. “I will just take a small snooze.”

“You tell me about the Indian princess, then, Pa,” Beezie ordered.

“I don’t know much about her as far as provable facts are concerned. My illustrious forebear, Matthew Maddox, from whom I may have inherited an iota of talent, wrote about her in his second novel. It was a best-seller in its day. Sad he couldn’t have known about its success, but it was published posthumously. It was a strange sort of fantasy, with qualities which make some critics call it the first American science-fiction novel, because it played with time, and he’d obviously heard of Mendel’s theories of genetics. Anyhow, Beezie love, it’s a fictional account of the two brothers from ancient Wales who came to this country after their father’s death, the first Europeans to set foot on these uncharted shores. And, as the brothers had quarreled in Wales, so they quarreled in the New World, and the elder of the two made his way to South America. Madoc, the younger brother, stayed with the Indians in a place which is nameless but which Matthew Maddox implies is right around here, and he married the Indian princess Zyll, or Zillah, and in the novel it is his strain which is lost, and must be found again.”

“Sounds interesting,” Chuck said.

Beezie wrinkled her nose. “I don’t much like science fiction. I like fairy tales better.”

“The Horn of Joy has elements of both. The idea that the proud elder brother must be defeated by the inconsequential but honest younger brother is certainly a fairytale theme. There was also a unicorn in the story, who was a time traveler.”

“Whyn’t you tell us about it before?” Beezie asked.

“Thought you’d be too young to be interested. Anyhow, I sold my copy when I was offered an outrageously large sum for it when I … it was too large an amount to turn down. Matthew Maddox, for a nineteenth-century writer, had an uncanny intuition about the theories of space, time, and relativity that Einstein was to postulate generations later.”

“But that’s not possible,” Beezie protested.

“Precisely. But it’s all in Matthew’s book, nevertheless. It’s an evocative, haunting novel, and since Matthew Maddox assumed that he was descended from the younger Welshman, the one who stayed here, and the Indian princess, I’ve followed his fancy that the name Maddox comes from Madoc.” A shadow moved across his face. “When my father had a stroke and I had to leave my poet’s garret in the city and come help out with the store, I had to give up my dream of following in Matthew’s footsteps.”

“Oh, Pa—” Chuck said.

“I’m mainly sorry for you children. I never had a chance to prove whether or not I could be a writer, but I’m a failure as a merchant.” He rose. “I’d better go down to the store for an hour or so and work on accounts.”

When he left, holding on to the banister as he went down the steep stairs, the smell that made Chuck afraid went with him.

Chuck told no one, not even Beezie, about the smell which was in his father but was not of his father.

Twice that week, Chuck had nightmares. When he cried out in terror his mother came hurrying, but he told her only that he had had a bad dream.

Beezie wasn’t put off so easily. “You’re worried about something, Chuck.”

“There’s always something to worry about. Lots of people owe Pa money, and he’s worried about bills. I heard a salesman say he couldn’t give Pa any more credit.”

Beezie said, “You’re too young to worry about things like that. Anyhow, it isn’t the kind of thing you worry about.”

“I’m getting older.”

“Not that old.”

“Pa’s giving me more to do. I know more about the business now.”

“But that’s not what you’re worried about.”

He tried another tack. “I don’t like the way Paddy O’Keefe’s always after you in school.”

“Paddy O’Keefe’s repeated sixth grade three times. He may be good at baseball, but I’m not one of the girls who thinks the sun rises and sets on him.”

“Maybe that’s why he’s after you.” He had succeeded in deflecting her attention.

“I don’t let him near me. He never washes. What does he smell like, Chuck?”

“Like a dandruffy woodchuck.”

One evening after supper Beezie said, “Let’s go see if the fireflies are back.” It was Friday, and no school in the morning, so they could go to bed when they chose.

Chuck felt an overwhelming desire to get out of the house, away from the smell, which nearly made him retch. “Let’s go.”

It was still twilight when they reached the flat rock. They sat, and the stone still held the warmth of the day’s sun. At first there were only occasional sparkles, but as it got darker Chuck was lost in a daze of delight as a galaxy of fireflies twinkled on and off, flinging upward in a blaze of light, dropping earthward like falling stars, moving in continuous effervescent dance.

“Oh, Beezie!” he cried. “I’m dazzled with gorgeousness.”

Behind them the woods were dark with shadows. There was no moon, and a thin veil of clouds hid the stars. “If it were a clear night,” Beezie remarked, “the fireflies wouldn’t be as bright. I’ve never seen them this beautiful.” She lay back on the rock, looking up at the shadowed sky, then closing her eyes. Chuck followed suit.

“Let’s feel the twirling of the earth,” Beezie said. “That’s part of the dance the fireflies are dancing, too. Can you feel it?”

Chuck squeezed his eyelids tightly closed. He gave a little gasp. “Oh, Beezie! I felt as though the earth had tilted!” He sat up, clutching at the rock. “It made me dizzy.”

She gave her bubbling little giggle. “It can be a bit scary, being part of earth and stars and fireflies and clouds and rocks. Lie down again. You won’t fall off, I promise.”

He leaned back, feeling the radiance soak into his body. “The rock’s still warm.”

“It’s warm all summer, because the trees don’t shade it. And there’s a rock in the woods that’s always cool, even on the hottest day, because the leaves are so close together that the sun’s fingers never touch it.”

Chuck felt a cold shadow move over him and shuddered.

“Someone walk over your grave?” Beezie asked lightly.

He jumped up. “Let’s go home.”

“Why? What’s wrong? It’s so beautiful.”

“I know—but let’s go home.”

When they got back, everything was in confusion. Mr. Maddox had collapsed from pain, and been rushed to the hospital. The grandmother was waiting for the children.

The frightening smell had exploded over Chuck with the violence of a mighty wave as he entered.

The grandmother pulled the children to her and held them.

“But what is it? What’s wrong with Pa?” Beezie asked.

“The ambulance attendant thought it was his appendix.”

“But he will be all right?” she pleaded.

“Dear my love, we’ll have to wait and pray.”

Chuck pressed against her, quivering, not speaking. Slowly the smell was dissipating, leaving a strange emptiness in its wake.

Time seemed to stand still. Chuck would glance at the clock, thinking an hour had passed, only to find it barely a minute. After a long while Beezie fell asleep, her head in her grandmother’s lap. Chuck was watchful, looking from the clock to the telephone to the door. But at length he, too, slept.

In his sleep he dreamed that he was lying on the flat rock, and feeling the swing of the earth around the sun, and suddenly the rock tilted steeply, and he was sliding off, and he scrabbled in terror to keep from falling off the precipice into a sea of darkness. He cried out, “Rocks—steep—” and the grandmother put her hand on the rock and steadied it and he stopped dreaming.

But when he woke up he knew that his father was dead.