THE POET-1
“Sunlight sparkled in a golden sky.”
The girl who called herself Haynta awoke with these words in her mind. Sweat ran down her face in rivulets, which flashed like her ever-hopeful hyacinth eyes in the afternoon sunlight that stormed through the window at just the right angle to make a bright portrait of her pillow and face.
Running her hands through her damp lampblack hair she wondered for a moment why these words were in her mind, and then as the mist of lethargy that often follows an afternoon nap, especially an unintentional one, began to lift, she remembered. The little dragon she had spoken with in her dream had said them to her.
“I remember, oh I remember,” he had said, in a voice that could have been that of a child or of a man a thousand years old, “The sons and mothers soared, oh, did they soar; and sunlight sparkled on a golden sky.”
“The sky was golden? What world was this?” she asked, in the sarcastic way she had of making light of what she wanted to be true and what she knew with her spirit to be true but which her mind wouldn’t accept. “The sky is blue, and if it were golden, it would be ugly.”
The little dragon laughed, a sound like a nalanthrite chime, and said, “You must understand not with your mind but with your spirit when a story is told.” He regarded her with his ancient black eyes and added, “When the mothers and the sons soar in the blue blue sky, the sky is golden, Fielder, as you know. Golden with the infinite; golden with mystery; golden with possibility; golden with the beckoning.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” she told him, “and stop calling me Fielder. What does that even mean?”
With a Mrs. Camden-esque cadence, he said, “It means gold-robe. As white-robes guide souls to the white tree, as green-robes tend the green gardens in the desert, as orange-robes protect the everlasting flame, so gold-robes draw the golden sky above the Field and so are called Fielders of Sky or Fielders of Gold.”
Not to be turned from her desperate attempt at doubt, she said, “And while we’re at it, you do know that every mother is a daughter and every father is a son, don’t you? If the mothers and the sons are the ones who are so big—as you say, ‘infinite’—and who soar about so majestically in, as you say, a golden sky, then fathers and daughters can’t be little, like you. Well, I suppose daughters could be until they became mothers, but I don’t think that’s how you mean it.”
“Our physical statures are as I have described to you, Fielder,” the little dragon assured her, “the sons and mothers large, the fathers and daughters small. About that, I can put your mind at ease.”
“My mind is at ease, good sir,” the girl who called herself Haynta assured the little dragon, “I’m perfectly content in my knowledge that what you say cannot be true. It’s a self-negating statement.”
“You must understand with your spirit, when a story is told,” he said again, and then he took to the air, with a fluttering of wings.
Now awake, the girl who called herself Haynta wondered at the vividness of the dream, somewhat disappointed that she’d woken. The little dragon might have been full of it, but it had felt good to talk to him; it had felt like being in a lush grove of spruce and green-tips, basking in air both cooling and warming, while sunlight sparkled above, and goldfinches and bluebirds, cardinals and blue jays, yerrians and bluewings, swooped and bobbed in and out of the grove with an infinite, soothing, babble and a fluttering of wings. A place to rest one’s head in the long grass while a story was told.
The direct glare of the afternoon sun, its heat increased by the window, must, she thought at first, have lured her to consciousness; but then she realized that her roommate Yaan, whom she affectionately called Little Bolo, was no longer in the room, and in the moment of realizing this, she recalled that just as her consciousness had crossed the barrier between sleep and waking, she had heard, in the distant way that one hears things at that barrier, the familiar little squeak of the doorknob.
“Well, that little sneak!” she murmured. She was so tired from the schedule she had set for herself, which included flourishing at her own studies and making sure that Yaan stayed caught up with hers, that she considered just letting her go, so that she could rest a little longer. She may even have said, “She’ll probably just wander around looking at things, she’ll be fine.” But then she thought, no, I’d better go after her; even if it’s just a small chance, she might get herself into trouble with that absolute pure defenseless innocent trustfulness of hers. Denying her fatigue, she roused herself, wondering briefly through which door Bolo had exited, the Nonagon-door or the Outside-door, as she had long ago named them; and then a moment before remembering that the Nonagon door’s knob didn’t squeak, she felt a knowingness that she had departed through the Outside-door; and the search was on.
Greeted by the clear blazing brightness of early Oliaza, she could at first only squint and blink. Her eyes adjusting, however, she surveyed her surroundings, searching first the dappled shadows of the nearby clusters of souse for the light, carefree movements of her friend, and then examining the lush plaza of splengrass that spread from her room to the Institute’s garish welcome walk for fresh indentations. Finding nothing on either of these scores, her eyes went next to the mystery tree that stood alone on this lawn of splengrass and with which Little Bolo was fascinated, and beyond that to the massive front gate of this former monasterial fortress, which would be open another hour or so. There, although she couldn’t say from this distance that her eyes weren’t playing tricks on her, she thought she glimpsed a sliver of the red damask skirt that Yaan had taken to wearing (upon the very advice of the girl who called herself Haynta) disappearing around the corner. A light teasing laugh seemed, too, to skitter low across the grounds on the invisible colors of twarkle, overflowing with mysterious joy, and an ancient wisdom, too, understood by the spirit when a story is told.
“Bolo!” she called, “Yaan!” and ran heavily across the lawn and through the gate entrance, there slowing to a walk. Houses and trees that in this recently-constructed neighborhood seemed young and new in the shadowless gleam of mid-day, seemed old today, as evening came on—manifestations of long-forgotten spirits that had lived in this place before there were even such things as houses, perhaps. Shadows stretched towards the eastern fields like arms and fingers of these spirits, reaching towards a yesterday that they couldn’t let go. And all was silent, too silent, she thought, although late afternoon, at least where she came from, was a time of rest and eating, before people either came out to do their evening work, or to sit on their porches and enjoy the sliding of the day into night. No sound, not even of a breeze, broke the silent reverie of these ancient shadows, though. The cobblestone roads lay in a dead red-gray sheen, the scuff of her shoes as she shuffled forward seemed the fierce hissing snarl of a wildcat.
Her eyes turned toward the walnut grove, as if she hoped the echo of the janitor Nolk’s presence, could aid her in her search for her friend; there, a squirrel scrambled along a branch, breaking the afternoon’s deep silence. His movement disturbed a small flock of maroon-tinted yerrians, who rose with a fluttering of wings, and curled up in the eye-tricking blue above the tree, where sunlight sparkled in the sky. The silence swallowed this brief flurry of activity with such a completeness, however, that she couldn’t say for sure that it had really happened.
Finding no trace of Little Bolo in town, she decided to follow the shadows east; there, the horizon, bright when seen from the comparative darkness of the shadows, beckoned. She followed the main road, the one which crossed between the neighborhood and the school and then curved south and became the Calico Way; but where it curved she went straight, crossing through a thin line of brush to the corner of two fields: one of hay, one in which black and white cows grazed.
The girl who called herself Haynta decided that of the two, the hayfield would make for more comfortable going. There, picturesque haystacks dotted the rolling plain, making the knee- and thigh-high grass seem an inviting carpet of sweetness. What kind of hay is that, anyway, she wondered. Timothy? Sweetgrass? Serrasa? Those were said to be aromatic. Bolo would know. The cowfield was surrounded by a twisted-board fence, a style notorious for bucking off climbers, especially non-agile ones such as herself, and while the cows certainly looked unthreatening, it was possible that a temperamental bull would be roaming about.
Nevertheless, even as she tromped through the hayfield, scanning the distances for Bolo, and half-expecting, half-hoping that she would jump out from behind a haystack laughing gaily and say, “There you are, Haynta!” she kept an eye on the cowfield as well. One never knew with Little Bolo; she might be playing with the cows.
But she wasn’t, and she wasn’t in the hayfield, either. At the limit of her eyesight, she detected movement in the vicinity of a farmhouse that sat, impossibly distant, like a white castle, beyond and above the endless undulations of the hayfield; but squinting through rounded hands, she saw that it was just a sheepdog trotting across a bright band of grass.
Here in the hayfield, but for the buzz of a few gnats, the whoosh of the grass against her skirt, and the crush of the grass beneath her shoes, silence reigned—a thrumming, humming silence, she thought, perhaps only the ringing in the ears that is caused by silence; and a golden silence: Gold-tipped green, waves of it, extended, unbroken, as far as she could see to the east and south, to the road to the west and the cowfield to the north; the haystacks were turning gold as well, and even the air seemed golden, as if absorbing the sunlight that sparkled on the blue sky above. The farther one got into this hay field, the harder it was to distinguish anything from anything; all seemed golden. For all she knew, little golden people, fairies of the field, were watching her, or dancing in circles in the long grass; or perhaps other golden creatures, or monsters, of unknown size, shape, and motive, were rambling around, or hunting. Probably not, but creatures and monsters and fairies, while not real, did exist in stories; and that thrum of the silence suggested a certain lyrical energy, as when a story is told.
“Have you seen her?” she called to the cows, “Have you seen my friend? She’s about yay tall, all freckly-faced, red-golden hair.” She received a few bland gazes but no useful responses. And she walked on.
As she came at last to the edge of the hayfield, which was now adjacent to a similar hayfield, the cowfield having been left far behind, an oak and souse forest loomed before her. Peering into it, and somewhat reluctant to dare its deepening shadows this late in the day, she again heard what seemed distant laughter and then saw a flash of yellow, the color of Yaan’s favorite shirt, disappear behind a stout tree trunk and into the depth of the woods.
Although she thought that the yellow could have been a goldfinch, or else a trick of the eye caused by its association in her mind to the laughter, which itself could have been a misinterpretation of a bird’s call, she pressed onward (and inward), like Infin Gorilla pursuing that elusive infinite moment. After an initial thicket of nettle and bramble and clinging bushes, it was a relatively sparse wood, of large oak and souse and gold-tips, little understory, and a groundcover, it seemed to her, consisting only of various ivies and wildflowers. (If she’d have had the time to count the number of different plants that comprised this groundcover, she’d have been surprised at how many hundreds she would have enumerated, but she wasn’t looking for plants at the time, and in any case, it was a sparse wood.)
As she scanned the lengthening shadows for another glimpse of red or yellow, some part of her enjoying the cool air of the wood and its accompanying cool smell of dirt and bark and dead leaves, once in awhile calling “Bolo? Yaan?” her wavering voice fading uselessly into the continual scraping together of oak and souse leaves, she thought, with a start, that she saw a little face, dirty and big-eyed, looking at her from behind a tree, and then another from underneath a snail’s umbrella, as the jilflower is sometimes called, in both cases the face disappearing so quick she couldn’t say she hadn’t imagined it. Frozen, and just about ready to run back the way she’d come to the relative safety of the hay field, she heard laughter again, unquestionably laughter this time, joyful laughter like Little Bolo’s, riding on beckoning filaments of twarkle; and she forged onward, comforted by the sunlight that found its way to the forest floor in variegated stripes.
The forest, she noticed at some point, had deepened, with tall ferns, wide yarrs, and young goldtip trees crowding together around the larger souses and oaks, while brambles and briars began to catch at her sleeves and skirt; but she could sense, or see without knowing that she saw, that ahead, it thinned out into a glade. She caught the scent of spruce, which she thought strange since spruces didn’t usually grow among oaks and souses, and at the same time she heard voices, and then a twittering and a low susurration that increased in volume as she made her way forward, along with that beckoning of twarkle.
It soon became clear that this sound was the fluttering of a multitude of little wings, birds, restless, she would have said, in a tree, or trees. One of the voices, she had no doubt, was Little Bolo, the other was familiar, but she couldn’t place it. It rose and fell in a poetic cadence that caressed every word as if it believed that in every utterance a story is told.
She followed the voices, never seeming to get any closer to them, until, without warning, her way was barred by a line of spruce and green-tip growing close enough together that she couldn’t see anything beyond them. The smell of their resins was heavy in the air, almost like incense, along with another odor, something like honey, she thought, but not as sticky. The fluttering of wings was as loud and persistent, now, as the sound of a steady rain in the forest. The voices, of Bolo and the unknown other, continued, but she couldn’t make out any of the words they were saying. A deep thrum seemed to vibrate through the earth, into her feet, into every tree in the forest; sunlight fell through the trees in a dazzling dapple of gold; fairies and other strange beings, she was strangely sure, watched her from behind logs, under ferns, and in the crooks of trees.
And suddenly she was afraid to go any farther. If she were to go through this line of trees into the glade that she sensed lay beyond it, she would be leaving the world she knew. It would be obliterated. All would be new, all would be strange; everything she had believed, everything she had been taught about the world, everything she knew, would be rendered obsolete, meaningless, unreal. Her life heretofore, then, would have been as nothing, she might as well have started at seventeen, and had a life expectancy of sixty or so instead of close to eighty. More to the point, the new existence that she would come to know if she stepped through might itself, at some point, be rendered obsolete, and then her life expectancy might as well be forty, or twenty, or two years, or a day. To go in there is to die, she thought; her heart thundered like a blacksmith’s hammer.
“I can’t,” she whispered, but her hand was grabbing a branch to pull it aside, and her foot was stepping forward. The fluttering of wings was deafening for a moment and then she was through, into what could most properly be called a circle of trees, but which she still thought of as a glade, or grove. Spruce and green-tip made up the perimeter of this circle, which was about twenty paces long and fifteen wide, standing side by side, like sentries, their branches interlocked, while a couple of gold-tips and a small oak spread branches upward within the clearing, shading a lush carpet of forest grass.
Overhead, sunlight sparkled in a blue blue in a golden sky. Around her, on all sides of the circle, cardinals and blue jays, goldfinches and bluebirds, yerrians and bluewings, flitted in and out of the crowded spruce and green-tip trees in dizzying combinations, variously tweeting, twittering, cheer-cheering, deedeedee-ing, jeeking, and tyoo-ing. At the far end of the glade, Little Bolo was deep in conversation with a little red-gray dragon, the one from her dream, in fact, both of them seated comfortably upon a large, striated rock. The dragon turned its black eyes upon her, and with what seemed a smile, tapped Bolo’s arm, “Fajee, the Fielder has arrived.”
“Bolo,” she stammered, “Yaan!”
Yaan beamed.
The little dragon beckoned to her with a tiny talon. “Welcome, Tahain! Won’t you join us?”
As Tahain crossed the grove, a warm tingle spread through her body. Her chest felt both empty, and full to bursting, as if her organs were engulfed and buoyed by light. Her heart felt weightless, almost as if it wasn’t even there, and yet it thrummed with a wild uncanny strength, as if embracing the wind, like a fluttering, no, like a great beating, of wings.
The story is told.
A story is told…