by Alexandra Duncan
Alexandra Duncan made her F&SF debut with “Bad Matter” in our Dec. 2009 issue. Her new story is a lovely tale steeped in mythology.
In the soft space when the sun dips behind the trees and crickets fill the shadowed grass with their high metal voices, my mother and I ready our lanterns. Sunset is the vigil hour. My mother wraps herself in a heavy woven shawl, purple like the mountains looming to the west of our cottage. Fireflies bob and flicker over our wheat field. Our mouser takes up his post on top of the garden gate, regarding us with his bright stare. A crisp, early autumn breeze moves over the wheat. I shiver in my white linen chiton and rub my arms for warmth.
“There,” Mother says, pointing.
I squint into the dim. Yes, there. I catch a hint of movement along the brambles at the edge of our wood. I breathe in, letting the darkening air fill my mouth, lift my lungs. Dusk tastes sour honey sweet. Sweet because the fading light means my father is making his way to us through the far-off wood. Sour because my mother will snuff out her lantern and leave me alone as soon as he comes into sight.
When I was a child, I would stand at the window and cry to see the sun go down.
I am too old for that now.
Mother opens the hinged glass door of her lantern and blows out the flame. In the moment before the light goes out, I see sadness written deep around her eyes and mouth. It’s not the kind of sadness that makes her sullen and snappish at her work, or stare wistfully across the fields. It’s something else. The only time I think I might have felt something like it was when our first mouser died. He was yellow like saffron and liked to rub against my legs when I fed him bits of meat. I called him Rumbler, for the sound he made in his throat when I was near. I have since learned not to name our farm animals.
Mother squeezes my hand. I don’t look as she sets down her lantern and steps backward into the night. It’s easier that way, like looking away when she pricks the soft side of my arm with a lancet for inoculations. I try not to listen to the receding shuffle of her footsteps and concentrate instead on picking out the glimmers of light reflecting from my father’s belt, the hilt of his hunting knife, the metal clasps on the shoulders of his traveling cloak. They flash in the moonlight as he approaches, like little stars moving through our fields. He has reached the foot of the hill leading up to our house. With one hand he supports a dead stag, slung across his shoulder. I know I should stand still to welcome him, like a dignified girl who is studying to become a woman, but I break into a run. The lantern swings beside me and my skirt flaps like a flag as I careen down the path. He meets me halfway, holding out his free arm and pulling me into a fierce hug.
“Ourania.” Father breathes out my name as if he’s been holding it in with his breath all day.
I don’t say anything, but bury my face into his shoulder, like a little girl. He smells of sweat, crushed leaves, and animal blood, and his cloak is rough against my nose.
We walk up to the cottage, hand in hand. I kneel by the hearth and start a fire with my flints while he hangs the stag’s carcass in the cellar. I set out a basin of warm water and a clean cloth so he can wash the blood and dirt from his arms. When he is clean and we are sitting at the table for our simple meal of bread, cheese, soup, and wine, he asks what he always asks.
“Did your mother leave any words for me?” His face goes still and his shoulders tense as he waits for my answer, as if everything turns on what I might say.
I pick up my wine cup and take a swallow. I don’t like the way the drink dries my tongue, but I like that Father doesn’t try to water it for me, the way Mother does. “She says to tell you she mended your heavy cloak, so it’s ready for winter. We killed a rabbit and she added its fur at the collar. She thanks you for the meat.”
Father smiles to himself and takes a long drink. When he sets his cup down, his face is flushed. He’s still smiling, and little points of light glitter in the folds of his eyes. I pick up my spoon and blow into my bowl to cool the broth. We both fall quiet for a time, focused on our food, making ourselves accustomed to each other’s presence again after the long day apart. Later, he will tell stories by the hearth until our fire sinks down to an embered glow.
* * * *
Long ago, when Day was a young woman, she blazed across the sky with little care in her heart. When she laid her head down to rest, the world became dark. When the time came for her to bring light to the world, she warmed everything, from the heath balds to the ocean deeps. Her only joy came in giving warmth.
But one night, she turned to look back into the dusk, and caught sight of a man. His robe was white and glistening like sun-warmed ice, his strong arms the pale blue of milk after the cream has been skimmed away, and his hair coiled and curled around his brow in midnight waves. This man was Night. He lifted his eyes, bright as two stars, and found her watching him.
They each left their paths and went to one another. Day fed her light to Night, Night offered up his cool for Day to sip, and they found how they curved together to form a whole. Thus Day and Night first knew love.
* * * *
I wake with the sun on my face and the smell of fresh bread and olive oil hanging in the air. The mouser is curled up next to my feet at the end of my cot. I shove him off the bed and force myself up. The sun is high and hot already, and my head aches from too much wine. I’ve let myself sleep past dawn. I’ve missed Father’s parting. Mother had no one to greet her. The goats will be sullen and stubborn when at last I get around to milking them. I pull on my ear in frustration and hurry to wrap my chiton around myself, stepping quickly toward the kitchen.
Mother’s face shines with sweat, but she smiles to herself as she pulls a loaf of bread from our stone oven on a long, wooden board. She must have passed within a hand’s breadth of Father as he was parting, in the confusion between night and dawn a heavy mist can cause. She straightens and slides the bread onto the table for cutting. A pail of cool milk rests on the center board.
“Why did you let me sleep so late?” I ask. Petulance sneaks into my voice. She’s only being kind, giving me a morning off from my chores.
“You looked so peaceful.” Mother rests her hands on her hips. She’s tucked the hem of her long skirts up into her waistband to keep them out of the fire and I can see the broad arch of her calves, thick and strong from walking. I wonder where her trek takes her each night. Does she always make for the same place or does she wander? Does she rest? She must. But when, and where?
Mother slices the bread and lays a plate of it on the table, next to a shallow bowl of spiced olive oil. She wipes her hands clean on a broadcloth, pours a small measure of wine into two mugs, and tops them off with water. She slides one to me and sits down at the table with the other.
“Drink up,” she says, sipping from her mug and reaching for a slice of bread to dip into the olive oil.
I wrinkle my nose at my own cup. I know the wine is for killing disease in the water, but my tongue curls at the slight, familiar bitterness of it. I sop my bread in oil and bite off a big, crackling chunk to scrub the taste from my mouth.
Mother has me practice my Latin as we weed the garden. We bend our backs under the heat of the late morning sun, yanking invading threads of root from the spaces between the arugula, spinach, and tomatoes. Mother kneels in the dirt and calls out infinitive verbs over their leafy heads.
“Colere,” she calls. She winds the stem of a prickly weed around her gloved hand and tugs.
“Colere,” I repeat, then string out the conjugation. “To cultivate. Coleo, coleas, coleat, coleamus, coleatis, coleant.” A bead of sweat drips over my eyebrow and lands on one of the flowering yellow weeds that try to take over our garden each year. I rip it out and toss it in my compost pail.
“Amare,” Mother returns, without missing a breath.
“Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant,” I say into the dirt.
“Consecrare. Exspectare. Invigilare. Demetere,” Mother calls, and I send each of the words back across the leafy rows in turn.
After we finish weeding, we take small horsehair brushes and dust the stamens of our scarlet runner bean flowers with pollen from the pistils of a hearty green snap-bean. As she dips her brush into the well of each flower, Mother tells me how she hopes to breed a hybrid with the sweetness of the scarlet bean and the snap-bean’s resistance to frost.
When the sun nears its zenith, we retreat inside to escape the midday heat. Mother prepares a meal of greens from our garden and lies down on a low divan by the cool north wall to wait out the worst of the heat. I pocket one of the newest books she has brought home for me and lie down with it in my room. I can never sleep through the midday, like Mother does. Even when I draw the shades and strip off my dress, I can only lie on my back and sweat into the bedclothes. I sit up and lean against the stucco wall, sweat gathering in the hollow of my back. I trace the gold-leafed imprint of words on the book’s cover. Sometimes I will sneak out and read up in the olive orchard, where the breeze reaches.
I sit quietly until Mother’s breath slows to a gentle snore. Then I slide my legs off the bed and walk barefoot through the common room, quiet and careful as a mouser on the hunt. As I pass the place where she lies, Mother’s breath skips in her sleep. I freeze, looking down at her, and hug the book to my chest. Her lips move rapidly and her brow creases, as if she’s arguing with someone in her dream. Then she breathes out. Her body relaxes into the divan cushions.
I step carefully until I pass the threshold into the kitchen, and then I run, out the kitchen door, through the garden, over the gate, and up the hill behind our cottage, where a cluster of olive trees overlooks the valley. I settle at the base of the oldest tree, its branches curving over me like the whalebone parasol Mother brought back from her journeys one time. The canopy of tiny leaves shades my head, and a soft breeze cools my skin. I lay the open book across my lap and look down on the valley.
From here I can see the flat roof of our cottage, with its high stone wall squaring off the large garden in the back. The valley dips down, split by a dirt path. Our fields billow with wheat on one side, and on the other, a corral encircles our little herd of goats. They rest in the shade of a lemon tree, not far from our barn and silo. From here, it all looks like something effortless, a spread of wildflowers cropping up naturally by a roadway. You can’t make out any of the muck and sweat from so far up. A light wind trails its cool fingers up my spine and across the nape of my neck. I lean my head back into a fork in the olive tree’s trunk, stretch out my legs on the mossy grass, and close my eyes.
A muffled trill of laughter sounds somewhere behind me, waking me with a start. The book drops from my slack hand and snaps closed on the ground. I scoop it up and pick my way through the olive grove, toward the meadow that lies on the other side, and the sound of voices. The sun still rides high in the sky, but tilts a little more sharply than when I fell asleep. I’ve only slept a short time. I pause at the lip of the meadow behind the shelter of a broad, old tree.
“Ollie ollie oxen free!” a voice rings out from a low scrub bush only a few yards to my left.
Two girls in pale blue and pink frocks, with hair like tails of wheat, dash from the shade of the trees out into the blinding bright meadow. The smaller one chases the taller, her hands outstretched. The older girl turns back, shrieks in mock terror, and lifts her knees higher as she hurtles forward through the tall grass.
“Maria! Julia!” a woman’s voice calls from the near corner of the meadow. I shift my gaze and see a matronly figure in a pale, fitted dress and a broad straw hat sitting on a checkered blanket. “Stop running around and come sit in the shade. You’re going to give yourselves heatstroke.”
“Yes, Mama,” the older girl says. The small girl drags her feet as her sister leads the way over to the blanket.
“Look at you, you’re all red,” the mother says as they draw near. “You know young gentlemen don’t want a wife with ruddy skin, right? Come out of that sun.”
The girls drop down, obedient, to the blanket and begin making chains out of the same sort of yellow weeds my mother and I rooted out of the garden earlier. The mother reclines stiff-like into her resting place, as if something is hemming in her stomach and keeping her from moving in the natural way. Maybe it’s all the lace and ruffles across her bodice, or the tight row of pearl buttons down the front of her dress. I look from the bare arms of my chiton to the patches of sweat darkening the sides of her dress and the fair curls at the back of her neck. She must be a strange one to wrap herself up this way in the dead heat of summer. I peer out from under cover of the olive tree, my palms pressed against its rough bark. I look at my hand on the wood. The sun has browned my skin the color of an oil-fried fish and dirt rims my fingernails. This woman must be rich, to never have to go out in the sun. She must have servants to milk her goats and serve her dinner. Father has told me about such people, and Mother has read to me about them from her books, but I thought they were fancy tales, like the cat who makes his master into a lord.
The small girl drapes a chain of weedy flowers around her neck, and the older one arranges a shorter chain on the crown of her head like a diadem. But the sun must be making them drowsy, for after a few minutes they rest their heads next to their mother’s breast and close their eyes. The wind rustles the leaves, and the dappled sunlight ripples over their sleeping forms. They make me think of statues fallen to the bottom of a clear pond.
I step forward to the edge of the meadow, meaning to take a closer look at them in their strange clothes. As I move from behind the tree, something comes into view that makes me freeze, poised with one foot in the air and one hand trailing behind me. On the other side of the blanket, a young man lies on his back. He’s clothed in white shirtsleeves and trousers of the same pale, striped material as the woman’s dress. A vest crosses his middle, fastened with a row of brass buttons. A broad-brimmed hat tips back from his head, and under it, two dark brown eyes stare back at me.
I turn and flee through the olive grove. I hear a scuffle in the dirt as he springs up to follow, and a hoarse whisper calling after me. His shoes crackle over the carpet of twigs and small stones, where my bare feet pass silently. I round the last row of trees and am about to hurl myself forward into the safety of the sunshine, when he grabs my arm. My own momentum swings me around. He catches me about the waist with his free hand, and we stand face to face, gaping at each other. He can’t be more than a few years older than me, around the age when my father says men should be off learning war. His eyebrows angle down into a troubled knit as he stares.
“Let go,” I say, and push him. He lets my arm slip from his hand and stumbles back a step. I should run, but I don’t.
“Who are you?” he asks. The words are soft in his mouth, not clipped like the woman’s. He holds his hand out, as if asking me to wait.
“Ourania,” I say.
“Have you come from a play?” He turns to look around the wood. “Or do you belong to the Classical Society?”
“I don’t know what you mean,” I say, creeping back against the nearest tree. “Why would I want to be in a play?”
“Your dress,” he says.
I look down at my chiton. Mother and I painted it with beeswax and dyed it blue so a pattern of cream-colored birds and flowers shows through. Some of the flowers have come away smudged a muddy green from my leaning against tree trunks and falling asleep in the grass. I lick my finger and try to rub at the stain, but it’s set in already. I sigh. He must think I’m part of a paupers’ troupe with my dirty robe and bare feet. I reach up to retie the bands around my hair and pull away a dead olive leaf. I crumble it in my free hand and drop the shreds to the ground, hoping he hasn’t added that detail to my catalog of shames.
“I’ve been working,” I say. “I fell asleep on the grass.”
He blinks at me, then swallows and blinks some more. “What are you?”
I feel a scowl cloud my features. “I’m Ourania, like I said. What are you?”
“Aaron Lyell. I’m an apprentice engineer.”
“A what?”
“An engineer. You know, for locomotives.”
I stare at him.
He clears his throat. “Trains. You know.” He shuffles his feet over the rocky ground.
I cock my head to the side and wait for him to explain himself.
“If you don’t mind my asking, where do you come from?” He raises his eyes and looks at me with pure, innocent curiosity.
“Down the valley,” I say, nodding to the slope beyond the break in the trees. “This is our olive grove.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. He runs his hand through his mess of short, curling hair, the same burnished yellow as the girls’ braids. “The company was surveying this tract of land for railway development, and I found this lovely meadow. Looked like a nice place for a picnic. I didn’t know anybody was living here. We’ll have to go back over the property records now, naturally....” He trails off, staring at me again.
“Should I draw you a picture?” I say.
“What’s that?”
“I said, should I draw you a picture,” I repeat. “That way you wouldn’t have to look so hard.”
“Sorry,” he says. His pale skin goes a deep red and he looks down. “It’s only...I’ve never, well, in books, but I’ve never seen anyone like you before.”
“You’re a strange one,” I say, leaning against the tree behind me. “I’ve never seen anyone like you either. It’s like you stepped out of a wives’ tale or—”
“You’re lovely,” Aaron interrupts, looking up at me suddenly.
I feel my own face go hot and I look down at my bare feet. A peddler said something like that about me once, when my mother and I traded him some eggs for ribbons, but it didn’t mean the same.
I hug the book to my chest. We stand in silence, avoiding each other’s looks.
“May I ask,” Aaron says to break the long pause, “what is it you’re reading?”
I hold the book face-out so he can read the lettering.
“On the Origin of Species,” he reads aloud. His eyes light up the way Father’s do when he’s telling how he brought down a hart after a daylong stalk through the forest. “You’re interested in natural history?”
I shrug, then lift my eyes to look at him sidelong. “Have you read it?”
“Oh, yes,” he says, a grin parting his lips and tugging up his serious brow. “Engineering science is my trade, but I’ve a great interest in naturalism. Mr. Darwin is marvelous. Here.” He digs in his back pocket and produces a thin leather-bound volume. He holds it out at the tip of his fingers.
I step forward warily and take the book. It opens up to reveal small, cream-colored pages crowded with precise drawings of flowers and birds, sketched in graphite. Below each likeness, the name of the specimen flows in Aaron’s neat hand. I sit down on the ground and begin to page through from the beginning. “You did these?” I ask.
“Yes.” Aaron sits cross-legged beside me.
“I’ve never had time for drawing. Mother calls it a hobby.” I lift a page and stop with the book open to a sketch of the two girls I saw in the meadow. The older one is sitting with her feet up under her on a plump cushion, her head bent over an embroidery hoop. The younger leans against her, fast asleep, her hand resting on a cloth poppet.
I look up from the book. “Are they your sisters?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but a voice echoes up from the direction of the meadow instead. “Aaron?” It’s the woman, stretching out the sound of his name. “Aaron, where’ve you gone?”
He jumps up at the sound of her voice. “Coming,” he shouts back. Then quietly, his voice straining with nerves, he leans close and says, “Will you come here again next Sunday?”
I sit on the forest floor in a muddle. “When’s that?”
“Seven days,” he says. A twig pops some way off among the trees. He glances over his shoulder and begins backing toward the sound. “Meet me here. Please. In the meadow. I only want a chance to know you better.”
His eyes stay fixed on me until I nod, and then he’s gone, the soft thud of his shoes fading into the twisting file of trees. I wait a moment longer, and hear the woman’s voice cut out mid-call. My body feels odd and full of humming energy. I can’t feel my fingers, and when I look down, I see I’m still holding Aaron’s little leather-bound book. I stumble up after him. I jog through the shaded grove, dodging olive trees and hopping stones. But when I reach the meadow, the only trace of my strange visitors is a square of flattened grass where they laid their blanket. I walk slowly back to the spot where Aaron and I sat, gather up both books in my arms, and turn my feet toward home.
* * * *
The afternoon passes slow and sluggish in the heat. Mother sets me to a column of geometry equations that have to do with the volume of water in our well during different seasons, while she ties on her veiled straw hat and heads out to check on the bees. I sit by the window with a wax tablet and stylus laid out in front of me and watch her white-swathed figure moving between the bee boxes. I would rather be out under all that cloth and sun than cloistered here with mathematics.
I slip my hand between the folds of my robe and pull out Aaron’s book. Its cover is worn smooth from handling. I dart my eyes to the window. Mother is easing a honeycomb from one of the hives. I spread the pages open and crease each one down as I turn. Aaron’s hand is exact, picking out the smallest veins and petals of the flora and fixing a lively glint in a bird’s eye, but I don’t recognize a single one of them. A Latin name and a common one accompany each drawing. Both sound strange on my tongue, like a cousin to a word I know. Cercis occidentalis. Judas Tree. Junco hyemalis. Dark-eyed Junco. Callipepla californifica. California quail. I try to sound them out, but they turn my tongue to clay.
I flip the pages under my thumb and the book falls open to a detailed sketch of an even road, flanked on both sides by tall bricked buildings. It’s a street in a city of some kind, but nothing like the places I’ve read about or Mother describes. What might be blown glass clings to the buildings in sheets, and little curls of iron or wood jut from the stonework. Tradesmen’s signs hang down from posts ensconced in the walls. There are hardly any animals in Aaron’s picture, except a single horse and some kind of pygmy dog led by a woman dressed more or less the same as the one I saw in the meadow. No oxen. No goats. No chickens. No market stalls, even. The men wear tall hats, and the women cover their hair with bonnets. The next page holds the schematics for some sort of spoked wheel and chain device. Next, the skeleton of an impossibly tall building, and an oblong shape moving among the clouds. Zeppelin, the script beneath it reads.
I put my hand to my lips and remember to breathe out. Is it real, or something Aaron made up in an idle hour? When I was young, I would draw fancy pictures full of lichen-dripped crevasses and monsters with hundreds of heads bobbing on their long, eel-like necks.
“Ourania!” Mother’s voice clips across my thoughts. She is struggling up the hill with two pails balanced out from her body in either hand.
I snap the book shut.
“Ourania!” Mother calls again. “Help me with the door.”
I open the door and stand back so she can pass through with the pails, honeycombs resting in sticky blocks at their bases. I keep quiet the rest of the evening. We finish butchering the stag in the cellar and jar the honey. We bake more bread. We light our lamps. We wait.
* * * *
“Father,” I ask that night when most of the bread from our dinner is gone. “Could you take me with you to the wood, if you wanted?”
He chuckles, raising his eyebrows at me over the soup bowl at his mouth. “What do you want with the forest?”
My eyes slide down to the empty bowl in front of me. I pick at a heel of bread. “You could teach me to hunt. I could help you.”
“But then who would help your mother? And who would be our messenger?” Father asks. He reaches across the table and pats my hand. “You make a better Mercury than you would a Diana, I think.”
I must be scowling, because Father laughs again. “Is your mother’s company wearing on you?”
“No,” I say. I pour the last of the wine into my cup. “I only miss you, that’s all.”
“And you don’t think my company would wear on you, too?” Father asks.
“No,” I say again, cutting my eyes down to the table. I can see he doesn’t mean to answer me. I open my mouth to speak again, then change my mind and snap my jaw shut instead.
Father lifts an eyebrow. “Is there something else you wanted to ask, Ourania?”
I duck my head and feel my face fill with heat. “No,” I say in a small voice.
“You know I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Father says. “You only have to ask.”
I hesitate, and raise my eyes to him. “Do you know what a locomotive is?”
Father’s eyes narrow. “Where did you hear that word?” His voice has a tang of metal in it. I am suddenly aware of all the beasts he has felled.
“Nowhere,” I say, dropping my eyes again quickly. My heart speeds up and I can feel the bread and lentils in my stomach curdle. “Nowhere. I mean, I read it. There was a book Mother had me read.” I bite the sides of my tongue and widen my eyes at the empty space on the table between us. He can’t know all I’ve been reading. I might very well have seen the word written. I chance a look up to see if he’ll take in what I’ve fed him. He stares back at me with that same hard look in his eyes. His usual, easy smile is gone, and I catch a glimpse of something dangerous coiled in its place.
I rise to clear the bowls from the table. Father remains, watching me move about. I keep my back to him and push my hands beneath the water in our kitchen basin so he won’t see them shaking. After a moment, I hear the scrape of his chair as he rises, and then the low tumble of wood as he kneels to build up the hearth fire. I stay at the dishes longer than I need, wiping them dry with extra care so I won’t have to turn around and see the awful power in my father’s face again.
“Would you like to hear a story, Ourania?” Father asks, his voice softened and friendly again. He stands in the doorway, but I can barely hear him over the pop of burning logs.
I sigh, slipping back into the comfort of our routine. “Please,” I say.
Father has told me about Diana springing forth from father Zeus’s head, Lord Rama, and the hero Sunjata’s sister, who married the spirit beneath the hill, and later betrayed her husband to save her brother. Tonight he will tell me of the god Osiris, whose brother murdered him and scattered his flesh over the Nile, and of faithful Isis, who gathered together the body of her husband, and restored him to a throne in the underworld.
* * * *
But down on the earth, the sun halted its course at the edge of the sky. Dark did not fall, and all the beasts were trapped in a terrible half-light.
“Why has Day stopped her course? Where is Night?” the animals cried. They cowered and trembled in the stillness.
One of the beasts, the one called Man, stood upright. He held aloft a burning branch that tempered the darkness. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I will go and find them. I will set them back on their paths and restore order to the world.”
Man ranged over hill and valley. He scoured the salt oceans. At last, he scaled the summit of the highest mountain. There he came upon the two of them, cradled together in a bed of stars.
A hot anger flared in Man’s breast to see them so reposed.
“You, faithless ones,” Man said, and his voice sparked like new-caught fire. “How could you forsake us?” He reached up into the abyss of heaven and called down a terrible beast. It snaked across the sky like a serpent, and shook the earth as it passed. Thick scarab metal covered the length of its body, and it hissed and growled foul smoke that poisoned the air. Man set it on the lovers. So Night and Day were forced to flee from it, always, or be devoured.
* * * *
I am careful to rise early the next seven days. I milk the nanny goats in the chill, predawn mist, make cheese from what they give, practice my Latin and geometry, and watch the grain grow. At night, I hold Aaron’s book open inside the copy of Darwin. Father asks me to read to him sometimes, but then shakes his head after only a few paragraphs of Mr. Darwin’s prose and says he’ll tell me a story instead. It suits us both better. By the way the wheat bows and the twinge of cold in the air at dawn, I know the harvest isn’t far off.
On the seventh day, I trudge through the muggy heat of midday, up the hill to the olive grove. I carry a sack of bread and cheese. Aaron’s book rests snug inside my waist sash. A breeze picks up as I near the crest of the hill and the cool wood. I walk through the grove, trailing my fingers across the trees’ smooth backs and letting the wind lift the hair from my neck. The treetops create a canopy that filters little dapples of sunlight onto the ground. I am going to see Aaron. I am going to ask him if he’s seen the places he draws in his book, or if they’re fancies. I am going to ask him about the obelisk and the zepplin. I am going to ask where he found the Dark-eyed Junco, and what it is. I smile up at the canopy and round the last stand of trees.
The clearing stands empty. Aaron hasn’t arrived yet, so I crouch down and pluck at the blades of long grass. I split one down the middle with my fingernail to make a whistle, hold it to my lips, and blow. The grass makes a dry, sputtering tweet. I bite my lip and grin. If I close my eyes, I can picture my father sitting cross-legged beside me, showing my young self the trick of it. When I tire of my game, I make a chain of flowers and drape them around my neck and head, the way I saw the little girls do. I walk the circumference of the meadow, letting my hand trail over the saplings and low brush at its border. I pause at the spot where Aaron and the girls laid their blanket. Something has been carved into the thick trunk of one of the nearby trees. I kneel beside it and brush the markings with my fingers. The cut stands out faint and boxy, but I can read it. Ourania. A thrill passes through my chest. I stand and scan the meadow, expecting him to stride into view at any moment. But he does not come.
I take the little hinged, bronze knife I carry from my pocket and unfold it. The bark is thick, but I keep my knife sharp. It cuts a bright yellow line in the trunk below my name. I strain my arm against the hard wood and run my hand over my work when I have finished. Aaron. His name joins mine on the tree’s flesh. I braid long slips of grass into rope as I wait, flip through Aaron’s book again, and lie back to stare at the clouds passing soundlessly overhead. If only I could make time pass more quickly, the way the wind moves clouds at its whim, so Aaron could be here already. I close my eyes. A wind shakes the leaves at the top of the trees, making them rattle like a rainstorm on all sides of me. I lean back against the earth and rest Aaron’s book on the slope of my chest. For some reason, I find it easy to sleep here in the heart of the meadow. I’m sure Aaron’s footsteps will wake me when he comes. I let myself drift on the hush of leaves.
I dream of Aaron coming to me through the fold of trees. He kneels and lays himself over me. I feel the length and firmness of his body pressed against my belly, my breasts. The grass is like silk against the soles of my feet. It rises up and braids itself into a bower over our heads, shading us from the sun, as if the earth itself is responding to the heat in my body. I find myself over Aaron, with his hips tucked between my thighs. I pull the bindings from my hair and let it down so it falls in waves over his body. I kiss his throat, his chest, the soft, dark indentation of his navel, covering him with my hair. I feel his hands cupping my skin, and then, and then....
I wake, feeling as if the world has tilted on its axis. My chest heaves as I try to catch my breath. At first, I don’t know where I am, and I paw at the bed of grass around me, trying to work my way to my feet. The sun has sunk low in the sky, a bloody bronze color. Far off, something howls. It is like the long, low baying of a wolf, but sharper, with the sound of rending metal folded in. My heart seizes, and I jump to my feet.
Late. It’s too late.
I make for the olive grove, scattering chains of flowers and grass behind me as I run. I clutch at my sash and discover I’ve dropped Aaron’s book. I scurry back to the meadow. There, beside the patch of grass I’ve tamped down in my sleep, it lies half-hidden in the weeds. I snatch it up and run again, through the darkening grove and down the hill, my feet fleet over the roll of the earth, terror beating in my chest.
The lights of our house shine bright. Mother has lit the lanterns without me. She stands, wrapped in her shawl, waiting by the front gate of our house. She must hear the sound of my footsteps, for she turns, and relief rushes her face. She holds out her arms and I run straight to her. Only when I’ve buried my head in the soft, dark folds of her cloak do I feel myself shaking.
Mother pulls back and holds me at arm’s length. She slaps my face, which she has not done since the time in my fifth year when I tied a bucket to our goat’s tail and he trampled part of our summer garden in his panic. “Where have you been?” she asks. And then, without waiting for me to answer. “I thought you were gone. I thought it had taken you.”
“I...I was hot, so I went up to the olive grove. I feel asleep,” I say. Then her other words seep into my ears. My heart quickens again. “What would want to take me?”
She presses me tight against her. “Nothing. Nothing. Promise me you won’t stray past the borders of the farm. If you do, I can’t protect you.”
“But what do you need to protect me from?”
Mother stares at me. Her eyes look like dark, polished river stones. “There are all manner of evil things in the world, Ourania, that you are lucky not to know about. Let us not change that.”
* * * *
Day wept as she fled, and her tears flooded the earth. All the beasts cried out and raised their hands to her for mercy, but the deluge swept many under. Then Day felt something move within her. She looked, and found Night’s child growing in her belly. Day dried her tears and went to Man to strike a bargain.
“Man,” she said. “Have pity. I am with child by Night. Only call off your beast so we may raise our child in peace, and I swear Night and I will part forever. We will each take up our course in the sky, as always was.”
“Very well,” Man said. “But should you ever stray again, I will loose my beast and hound you to the ends of the earth.”
Day agreed, saying, “For even if we never meet, Night’s child is dear to me.”
Thereafter, the pattern of days returned to the earth. Man became chief among beasts, and he turned his hand to quelling the earth and seas, and all within his ken.
* * * *
Seven days pass, but I do not visit the meadow again. The grain is almost ready for threshing, so Mother and I sharpen our collection of scythes. I wonder what kept Aaron from me, if it was the same thing I heard howling, the same thing my mother fears. If my mother fears it, it must be too terrible. I am sick from wanting to ask her what it might want from us, but I don’t dare. I am nearly finished with Darwin, and geometry helps keep my mind from straying to the olive grove and my strange dream. C=2(pi)r; A=(pi)r2; V=(pi)r2h, I think as the sun beats down on the roof of our house. A=1/2 bh; a2+ b2=c2
“I have something for you,” Mother says at breakfast one morning. She dusts breadcrumbs from her hands as she rises and holds up a finger, telling me to wait where I am. I clear our breakfast and wipe the table clean with a wet rag. Mother returns holding an oilcloth package bound up with twine. She holds it out to me. “Open it.”
I cut the twine with my knife and fold the oilcloth away. A nest of fine, creamy linen rests inside. Light from the window catches in the fine weave, making it shimmer like sunshine on a lake. I let out a short breath. This is fabric for a priestess or a bride, not a girl who mucks around with goats and spends her days winnowing grain.
“What’s this for?” I ask, turning from the kitchen window, my arms brimming with cloth.
Mother steps into the square of light with me. Her dark hair has fallen out of its tie. It curls down her back and over her breasts like thick, unchecked vines. The light picks out the thin hairs on her forearms, bleached fair by the sun, and warms her browned skin to gold. She reaches out to touch my face and I swear I feel all the heat of summer brush my skin. “You’ll be a woman soon,” she says. “That brings certain duties and certain boons.”
I feel the air quiver around me, and I open my mouth, a hundred questions ready to tumble from the tip of my tongue. But Mother drops her hand. The air changes, as if something has gone out of it, like the release of tension between the earth and sky after a thunderstorm. I sink into my chair, my legs trembling.
“I thought we might dye the border this afternoon, after your lessons,” Mother says, folding the oilcloth and twine together for safekeeping. She winds her hair back off of her neck, and I see the smudges of soot on her elbows and faded oil spots on her clothes again. She scoops up a water pail in each hand and holds one out to me. “Come on, help me with the pump.”
* * * *
I still can’t sleep at the midday hour, but I don’t dare scale the hill again. The echo of Mother’s unnamed terror is too real when I wake each morning. I lie on my back in my cot with Aaron’s book open in one hand, and the other cupped over my own breast. If I close my eyes, I can imagine it’s Aaron’s hand, not my own. I press my fingers against the soft flesh of my lips and think of him and his imagined body until the heat from my dream courses through me again. When it is gone, I feel something other than myself. Foreign and hollow, though I don’t know why.
I get up and pace the quiet house with Aaron’s book. I find the stub of red clay Mother uses to mark measurements on cloth and stone, and take it out to the garden. First I stare out over the vegetable rows with the clay poised over a blank page of Aaron’s book. I bite my lip and pull on my ear. The mouser sleeps atop the garden wall, his eyes closed to soft slits and his tail twitching against the stone. I put the clay to the paper and try to imitate the subtle curve of his ears, the ripple of muscles beneath his fur. I block in the balance of stones in the wall, with a thick snake of vines twining up through the cracks and over the top. I hold the paper out. It is not at all neat like Aaron’s drawings. The mouser might well be a toad on a woodpile. Mouser sleeping on our garden wall, I write below my scrawl, so Aaron will know what it is, if he ever sees it.
Still, it is only my first attempt. I assume this skill is like baking bread or math. I must practice my hand at it. I move over to the cone of wooden stakes where our bean plants grow and hunch over its flowers. I record these and label them, then a black, crook-legged maria bug I find resting beneath the late spinach. I wander the garden, taking down everything I find in Aaron’s book until my skin begins to feel tight and hot under the sun. I creep indoors.
Mother lies fast asleep with her back to the wall. Her hair curls around her shoulders. She looks soft, all the drive and hurry wiped from her face. I wonder if I look this way when I sleep. I settle in the chair across from her and begin sketching, trying to spool myself, my life, together again as I go.
* * * *
I cannot wait another seven days. No amount of mathematics or sketched mimicry can quell the heat flaring beneath my skin or the worry in my stomach. I will go to the hill, and I will not lie down to sleep. I will find Aaron or else leave word for him that I am waiting. My limbs shake as I slip from the house at noon and lift a sharpened scythe from the barn wall. If there is really some terror out there, I will not go unarmed.
I mount the hill again. My trek through the close files of the orchard seems to take longer than usual, but maybe that is the crawling feeling, like ants covering my skin, making time slow. As I step into the meadow, I feel a thrum in the air. The air smells hot, like when Mother works on her conductivity experiments. I adjust my grip on the scythe and step away from the sheltering trees.
I have only moved a few paces into the meadow when my foot strikes something hard and ungiving. It makes a hollow noise. I kneel down in the grass and run my hands over it. A long rail, made of thick, sun-warmed metal. Several feet away, its twin runs parallel, with a neat pattern of heavy wood boards spanning the distance between the two. The rails stretch across the length of the meadow, and now I see a break in the trees on either side where someone has cleared all the growth to make a path for them. I run to the break. Farther off, on the next hill rise, I can make out the dark curve of the track disappearing over its crest.
A low howl fills the air, the same I heard before. My chest tightens with horror. A black cloud rises over the hill, cumulating and moving at terrifying speed, faster than I have ever known any beast to run. Beneath the screen of smoke, I make out a flash of dark metal glinting in the sun. It stretches in a sinuous trail over the top of the hill, like an asp or a millipede, gaining velocity as it drops toward the valley floor. The metal thing dips along the swale, then tilts its face toward me and begins to strain up the hill. It beats out a hollow rhythm, metal against metal, with a horrible, tooth-scraping grind between beats.
I drop my scythe and run back along the wooden path. The sound of the thing—is it animal or some kind of machine?—drowns out the slap of my sandals against the boards. The ground rumbles beneath my feet, growing to a constant tremor as the high howl and screech flood my ears, my mouth, my entire body. The noise fills everything. My heart shudders in time with the creature’s unearthly growl, like a bell reverberating, and I throw myself from the path, into the high grass. I huddle, clutching the earth. The world is nothing but rattle, rock, clack, and moan. And then as suddenly as it came, I feel the thing pass. A rush of air sucks at me, leaving the grass swaying as the roar retreats into the distance.
I stand up. The air tastes acrid, like burning rock. I feel grimed. I run my hands over my hair and skin. A fine, gray dust has settled on my neck and arms, and through my hair. I spit and wipe my eyes. I stand mere feet from the track, and on the other side, there is a man. He wears a brown suit, cut in a simpler version of the style I saw on Aaron, and a domed hat I recognize from the book of drawings. A silky piece of fabric hangs in a knot at his throat. His face is older by far than my father’s, more lined and baked by the sun. Drifts of gray hair sweep out from under his hat. But his eyes, those are brown and deep as a cistern.
“Ourania?” His voice sticks and comes out as a croak.
“Do I know you?” I call back. I can hear the waver in my own voice. I hurry forward until my feet meet the rail, then stand back a pace. Who knows if the metal creature might come ripping through the trees again?
He walks toward me and lifts his feet over the track without pause. We stand within a hand’s breadth of each other, only the span of the metal rail separating us. I look up at him. I study the folds of flesh under his eyes and the creases at the corners of his mouth, the shape of his ears and the familiar, broad line of his nose. I know. Oh, help me, I know.
“Aaron.” His name comes out of me in a rush of breath. I want to double over, for I feel as if something has knocked the air from my lungs. I hold out a hand to keep myself upright, and he catches it. He helps me over to a patch of low grass in the shade of the olive trees. I sit, hard. He kneels by me.
“I knew,” he says. His eyes rim with wet. “I knew if I kept coming I would find you some day.”
“Aaron.” I lift my hand to touch his face. His skin feels thin and soft. “What happened to you? I came to the meadow after seven days, and you weren’t there, but I saw where you carved my name.” My eyes flick across his face. I know of many stories my father tells, where a sorceress or some such casts a spell on a man to make him take a form other than his own.
“Have you been cursed?” I ask. “Who’s done this to you? My mother, maybe she can fix you. She knows....” I spy the sadness welling in Aaron’s eyes and let my voice trail off.
“Ourania.” He takes my hand and buries his face in it, kisses my work-rough palm. “I’m not cursed. I’m old, that’s all. I’ve grown old, and you’re still young, after all these years.”
“Years!” I snatch my hand away. “It’s only been weeks since I saw you, not even a season.”
He shakes his head. “I came after seven days, and then another seven. I came every Sunday I could for fifty-two years. This is the first I’ve seen you.”
My breath hitches and my vision clouds. I cover my face with my hands. The meadow air is too close.
“At first I thought you couldn’t get away, and then I thought I’d gone mad. That I’d dreamed you altogether.” He pulls my hands softly away from my face. The skin around his eyes crinkles as he smiles. “But you’re here.”
I feel a sob welling up in my chest. I try to tamp it down, but it breaks through anyway. Aaron holds me and we rock together in the dry grass.
“Take me away with you,” I say, finally, pulling back from him. “I wanted to see where you came from, if the things in your book were real. I wanted you to show it to me.” I pull the book from its place at my waist sash.
His mouth opens as he stares at it. He reaches out and brushes his fingers against its leather cover. “Like new,” he says. He takes the book from me and begins paging through, turning each leaf faster and faster, until he reaches my drawing of the garden wall. He stops. Aaron traces his finger over the page, then closes the book. His face looks pale. He stands and hands the book back to me.
“Keep this,” he says.
I scramble up after him. “It’s yours,” I say.
He shakes his head again. “I had forgotten all about it. But you,” he says, touching his hand to my face again. “I can never forget you.” He leans in to kiss me.
I close my eyes. Our lips touch and I see him as a young man, straight and unlined, untouched by age. I would gladly stand here until the sun sinks from the sky. I would gladly follow him to whatever strange land he would lead me, even if it means braving beasts of smoke and metal.
Aaron breaks away and steps back. “Thank you, Ourania.” He turns and begins walking to the line of trees.
Time slows and crystallizes around me. I feel the pump of my own heart and the gentle sway of wind picking at the hem of my skirt. Aaron is walking away from me, but for the life of me, I cannot follow. He reaches the tree line and looks back. He smiles. Then passes through to the other side, and I see him no more.
* * * *
In the quiet hour when the moon has put itself away, when my father sleeps and my mother wanders far, I gather my worldly possessions. Aaron’s book with the pictures of my home inside, my folding knife, my mother’s copy of Darwin, and the yards of white linen. I pack them away in a leather satchel. I loop a water bladder around my neck. I stow several days’ rations of bread and dried meat, and open the cottage door onto the night. Our mouser watches with eyes glowing like two moons as I turn my feet to the road leading away from our door.