Being a Green Mother (2 page)

Orb tried to paddle for shore, but the current fought her, and she could not reach it.

“Oh, I must go back!” Waterbead cried. Indeed, she looked distressed, her hair turning lank and her skin clouding up. “Get out of the bad water as soon as you can, Orb!” Then she stroked swiftly upstream, leaving Orb alone.

The tube spun about, bouncing through the rapids, and Orb had to cling on for dear life. Then the river smoothed out in a kind of lake, with a factory beside it. A huge pipe poured dark fluid into the water.

Indeed, the water was bad here; it was discolored and cloudy, so that she could no longer see to the bottom, and
it stank of something rotten. Orb did as Waterbead had advised and paddled for the shore away from the factory.

But now more sprites appeared. These were of similar size to the first ones, but their bodies were twisted and their hair tangled. “What’s this? A child of man!” one cried.

“Drown her!” the others chorused.

“But aren’t you sprites?” Orb asked, alarmed.

“She sees us!” the twisted creatures cried as if horrified.

“Of course I see you and hear you, too,” Orb said.

The hostile sprites ringed her, staring. “We can still drown her,” one said, scowling. Her eyes were cloudy, as if there was disturbed weather inside her head.

“Not while she’s in that tube!” another pointed out.

“Then get her out of the tube!”

They splashed at her, not playfully as the others had, but roughly, so that the water stung her face. “Hey, stop that!” she cried.

They did not. One rushed at her, making a horrible face. “Out! Out! Out!” the mean sprite screamed.

Orb got angry. “Yah!” she screamed back and struck at the sprite with her fist. She missed, but made a bad splash of her own. Then she whipped her arm back and forth, throwing up water so that it flew all over, and screamed so hard that her face heated.

The nymphs were daunted. Evidently they had never seen a temper tantrum before. It was a thing Orb was good at; sometimes she even frothed at the mouth, alarming everyone. Luna almost never got mad, but Orb made up for both of them when something set her off.

The sprites withdrew to a safe distance, “We can’t touch her,” one said.

“We don’t have to,” another answered. “There’s more than one way to drown a mortal. Start a swirl.”

“A swirl!” the others agreed.

They swam in a circle, stirring up the water, forming a great whirlpool. The nice sprites upriver had made fun swirls, but this was an ugly maw. Orb’s tube was sucked into it. Faster she moved, as the sprites accelerated the water. The tube tilted as the center of the whirlpool dropped low. Orb was afraid she would topple over. Then she would have to let go, because her head would be under the foul
water. Her anger was replaced by fright. What could she do now?

“A boat!” a sprite screamed angrily.

“It can’t see us,” another said.

“Yes it can!”

Abruptly the sprites left the whirlpool and dived under the murky water. The swirl eased, and Orb was able to see the boat. “Daddy!” she cried.

In a moment her father Pace was there, lifting her out of the tube and into the canoe and wrapping a blanket around her shivering body. She hugged him, crying, her relief causing her to let go of all the anger and fear.

But she was young, and in a moment the siege of emotion passed. Now her curiosity returned. “Daddy, I saw the sprites!” she exclaimed.

“You saw them?” he asked, repeating her statement in the way that adults tended to do. He seemed pleased.

“Nice ones in the pool, but mean ones here. Why is that, Daddy?”

“Because this water is polluted,” he said. “The factory pours its wastes into the water, and that ruins it, and the sprites who live here become twisted. It is a sad thing.”

“Why?”

He did not chide her for her “Why’s.” Daddy understood her, “Because the factory can make more money if it dumps its wastes out instead of paying someone to haul them away. We have tried to get the factory to stop, but it has a lot of money and it uses it to prevent us from stopping it.”

“But the sprites—”

“It is sad about them,” Pace agreed. “But very few people can see them, so there is no clientele.” He paused, realizing that he had gone beyond her vocabulary. “No one to try to help the sprites.”

“Oh. That’s very sad, Daddy. Even if they are real mean.”

“Yes, it is. Perhaps when you grow up, you can do something about it. Then this colony of sprites won’t be mean anymore.”

That was too complicated to grasp fully, because Orb wasn’t sure how anything could be other than it was now, so she asked another question. “How come nobody can see the sprites?”

Pace shook his head. “Some folk just seem to have more
magic than others,” he said. “Just as some are taller than others, or more mischievous. Or have worse tempers.” He gave her a little squeeze. He didn’t even mind her tantrums, which was one of the perplexing things about him. “Magic has run in my family, and that’s part of it.”

“What’s the other part?” They were at the shore now, and he was lifting her out.

“Why, you know that, Eyeball,” he said with mock reproval.

Orb considered. Then she smiled. “Your music, Daddy!”

He nodded. “My uncle had it. My cousin had it. I have it. And maybe you do, too, pumpkin.”

“I heard a song,” Orb confessed, knowing that her father would soon get around to inquiring why she was out in the lake. “When I woke up, I just had to find it. And I couldn’t. It just went. Then I heard the river, and it was singing, too, only not the same, and the sprites called, and—are you going to tell Mommy?”

“Will you promise me not to do it again?”

Again Orb considered. “Daddy, I’ve just got to reach that song!”

“Dumpling, you just can’t reach that song.”

“Why?”

“Because it is the Song of the Morning. It fades out when dawn ends.”

“But—”

“It will return tomorrow at dawn. I’ll take you out to listen to it. Now will you promise?”

“Okay, Daddy.”

“Then I won’t have to tell your mother.”

“Okay, Daddy!” she repeated, hugging him. Then: “But why aren’t you mad?”

“Daddies don’t get mad at little girls—”

“Oh, Daddy, you fibbed!”

“When they turn up with magic talents,” he concluded.

Orb sobered. “I don’t think I can make music like you.”

“You heard the Song of the Morning. And the Song of the River. You saw the sprites. Those are signals of our family magic. It is just manifesting now. I was older than you are now when I first heard the music, and older yet when I learned to make it. Give it time, peanut.”

“Okay, Daddy.” She could tell how pleased he was about
her hearing the Song. That was her luck, for she knew she had gotten herself into a lot of trouble, almost drowning in the river. Then, just in case he might reconsider, she changed the subject. “How am I related to Luna?”

She knew by his reaction that she wasn’t deceiving him, but he answered anyway. “You are her aunt, technically.”

“But I’m the same age!”

“Age doesn’t matter. Niobe and I are your parents together and Luna’s grandparents separately, and you are the half sister of each of her parents.”

“I know!” she exclaimed. “A half and a half is a whole! I’m a whole sister!”

But he shook his head. “Half sister to her father the Magician, and half sister to her mother Blenda. Because you share one parent with each. Two halves. But either qualifies you as Luna’s aunt.”

Orb shook her head. “That’s too mixed up for me, Daddy.”

They were approaching the house. “I could draw you a chart, but I don’t think you could read the names.”

“I’ll learn, Daddy!” she exclaimed.

So when they got inside, and Orb had been washed and cleaned by her mother, who did not ask questions after receiving a warning look from her father, Pace made a chart for her.

Then he went over it with the two girls, because by this time Luna was up and curious, too. “My cousin Cedric Kaftan married Niobe, back way long, long ago,” he explained. “Their son became the Magician. Meanwhile, I married Blanche, and our daughter was Blenda. The Magician married
Blenda, who was his second cousin, and they had you, Luna.” He tweaked a strand of her clover-honey hair, and she smiled. The two girls had been born only days apart and had trouble remembering who had been first.

“Cedric died young,” Pacian continued, “and later Blanche died. That was when Niobe and I got together, and had you, Orb. So you are the Magician’s half sister through Niobe, and Blenda’s half sister through me. The two of you are of different generations, even though you are the same age and look like twins.”

“Why are you so much older than Niobe?” Luna asked.

Pace smiled. “I’m actually eleven years younger than Niobe,” he said. “She was the most beautiful woman of her generation, and she kept her youth.”

The two girls looked at each other, the clover-honey blonde and the buckwheat-honey blonde, and shook their heads. They suspected they were being teased. It was obvious that Pace was much older than Niobe!

“Which relates to the prophecy concerning the two of you,” Pace continued.

“What?” Orb asked.

“A prediction, a divination, a telling of the future,” he explained. “What will happen. I think it is time for you to know it.”

“Yes!” they agreed together, for this had the smell of mystery.

“It was a complex prophecy and it caused the Magician to lay a geis on you both, that no further prophecy can be made for you. It started with your fathers, when we were young, before we ever married. It was that each of us would marry the most beautiful woman of her generation and have a daughter.”

“And you did!” Luna exclaimed. “Our mothers are—”

“Yes. That is part of it. But the rest of it is this: that one daughter might marry Death, and the other might marry Evil.”

“But we’re too young to marry anyone!” Orb protested.

“So you are—at the moment. But when you both grow up and are as beautiful as your mothers, remember that prophecy and be careful. No one knows exactly what it means.”

“We will!” they chorused, not taking it seriously, for they never really expected to be other than they were right now. In later years, however, they were to remember, and Orb would wonder: did this relate to her vision? A wedding—and a dead world?

– 2 –

Two years later both Orb and Luna could see the sprites and other magical creatures, and Orb could hear the music of natural things, while Luna could see their auras. It was a secret from their mothers but not from their fathers, because Pace could relate to the magic of nature and the Magician, Luna’s father, knew everything about magic. The mothers were virtual twins in beauty, though they were, like the girls, of different generations. But they had no such perceptions and seemed too busy with practical matters to be concerned with them. Luna’s mother Blenda spent most of her time assisting the Magician, who was doing ever more obscure research in magic, while Orb’s mother Niobe did the laundry and shopping and meals and reading stories. Luna came to regard Niobe as virtually her mother, for Luna spent more of her time here than at her own home.

Luna tried in vain to show Orb the auras she perceived, which she said manifested as shimmering glows around and through all living things, while Orb had the same frustration when trying to have Luna hear the songs of nature. “It’s the Song of the Morning!” she would exclaim at dawn. “Can’t you hear it, Motheaten?”

“Look, Eyeball—if you can’t see the auras as plain as day—!”

But the other magic Pace had promised Orb had not materialized. She could hear the music, but could not make it. Oh, she could sing, and with fair effect considering her age, but there was no magic. She was glad that her father had not told her mother about her misadventure with the sprites of the river—at least not about the cause of it, which was her ability to hear the Song of the Morning. She heard that song every morning now, if she was awake, and it was always lovely, changing a little with the nature of the land and the season, so that there was always a refreshing novelty about it. If only she could make music like that!