The Golden Thread (22 page)

Bosanka shouted out over the crowded water, “I am a highborn, a leader, a master among my own. If you are my people,
why did you leave me
?”

The echoing cry of the violin was painful to hear. Joel played something that made me remember being little and lost at Jones Beach one time, and how it felt to be one lone speck in all that sunny, sandy space, thinking I'd been left because I'd done something wrong.

The outburst of sea voices was softer now, more blended.

Barb cleared her throat. “It's like this,” she announced. “So listen, because I'm only going to say this once. They say, ‘We left you to follow, to find us, to track us, here to our new life in far-distant seas. We left you to bring us these friends with you, handed-folk, youthful and open, to carry our song home and sing to their own kind the lessons of power.' ”

“They hid from me,” Bosanka said, “by purpose!” She looked absolutely stricken. I knew more about how she felt at that moment than I had any wish to. Somehow Joel was playing the afternoon when I came home from grade school and Mom sat me down in the living room and said, “Honey, Daddy's not going to be living with us anymore for a while. He's gone away on a long trip.”

In fact he had already gone, and he never came back, and I couldn't figure out what had happened but I knew it had to be because I'd done something so awful that Mom couldn't even talk about it. Even now that I knew it hadn't been my fault at all, just remembering how I'd felt then made my eyes smart.

I heard Bosanka say bitterly, “So, good, they like that I track them, I find them. This is done. Should I die now, go crazy, what?”

Joel played the night that Paavo Latvela died, or anyway that's what I heard. Other people in the boat cried over private meanings of their own.

The boat turned lazily surrounded by the riot of clicks and hoots and whistles that answered.

Barb spoke like an oracle announcing a decision of the Fates: “Listen. They say, ‘The choice you were born for is bright with this moon, join us or leave us, be swimmer or runner or hand-folk or fin-folk. Our powers are cast off, except for a small part, we saved it for you, child, to alter your form. Your lone swim is over. You drew these young handed-ones here as our voices, and now this is ending. Your questing is over, your worth is well proven. You are our daughter, and we are your people. Land-choice or sea-choice, we love you forever, we sing you forever, you live in our songs.' ”

Bosanka, her mouth drawn down like the mouth of a theatrical tragedy mask, blurted out, “I don't come all this way to be—to be
animal
!” She pointed shakily at me. “When we are on land, Balentena, I will kill you for this low magic that turns my people into—into—”

“What is wrong with you?” Barb said fiercely. “They want you! Which is more than you deserve, girl!”

“You don't know, witch of the dark!” Bosanka spat. “This is
beasts
! I don't want
them
!” She shook her fists over the water. “Go away, leave me! I, Horn's Breath, First Hunter of the High Forests, the last of my true people,
I don't want you!
”

“Bosanka, don't!” Lennie said, over the howl of the violin.

The sea-people answered once more.

Peter nudged Lennie's back with his foot. “Leave it, man, it's over. They're going. They're saying good-bye.” He paused, looking embarrassed. “I can't do it like, you know, poetry.”

“Just say it out,” Barb said impatiently, and Mimi said, “Don't worry, Peter, it's not a contest!”

Peter stood up with the easy balance of somebody used to boats. With a sort of formal stiffness he recited what he heard the whales and dolphins say.

“ ‘The choice is your choosing, sad for us, it sinks our hearts. But our tides still call us'—uh, something about they have maps to make and places to put in their songs still—uh—‘We sing the seas' heartbeat, our currents spin onward—' They don't want you to feel bad, though they know you will. ‘In dreams you may hear us, we'll be singing your choosing, farewell and remember, remember, recall.' ”

He stopped, bowed a ridiculous little bow, and sat down.

Joel had lowered his bow and the violin at last. His shoulders loosened and his head dropped back a little so that the moon shone on his face. He had done real magic tonight, magic that Paavo himself would have been proud to do. This was Joel's triumph, and he glowed with it.

Nobody could stay like that for long. I didn't want to see his brightness dim, so I made myself look away.

All around us the water swirled silently as one by one the islands of the whales' backs slipped under the surface. But one shape began to rise and rise and rise alongside the boat, as if we were in an elevator going down. More and more of the moon-washed sky was blotted out by this living wall lifting out of the sea.

“Yo!” Peter said softly. Nobody told him to shut up.

The giant rolled slowly past our boat in a curve like the curve of a whole planet's horizon, turning back downward toward the deeps: a salute, a farewell.

My throat closed up and my eyes teared.

I had one clear thought out of total left field, or maybe out of some of the memories that Joel had roused up: if only my mom was here—she would finally understand what it was about magic that called me! I wished she could see this: it belonged to her, too, by family right.

Twenty feet away over the empty water, a lone dolphin leaped and did what trained dolphins do in shows. With a whiplash movement of its whole body, it threw something it had been holding in its mouth.

I grabbed my silver pencil out of the air, the token of my wish. The slim cylinder burned like ice in my palm. A cool flood of knowing rushed up my arm and through my mind.

I had wished blindness on my mother, and that had blinded me as well. All wishes that try to force other people turn back on the wisher. Now, with the dolphin's help, I had canceled the wish that bound my mother—and my own mind cleared. I could “read” a final message from the pencil as clearly as if the dolphin had delivered a telegram. The pencil was, after all, an instrument of communication.

“Bosanka,” I said. “They ask that since you choose to be hand-folk, like us, you try to use your hands only for helping and healing. They hope you'll teach us to do that, too, for their sakes and our sakes and the sake of everything living on this world.”

“Shut up!” she screamed at me. “Shut up, shut up!” Her face was twisted with fury and tears streamed from her eyes.

Facing that mask of fury, I saw how hopeless the sea-people's wish was. I saw Bosanka's future as an exile living as one of the clumsy, technological hand-folk she despised.

She would become a bitter, miserable, destructive person, cut off from everyone else by her own choice, reaching deeper and deeper into the meanest, angriest, most hurtful parts of herself. She would struggle to hang onto the raggedy bits of the power she remembered having had, once. That old life on a lost and ruined planet would grow more glorious with time, making the present uglier and more repulsive by contrast.

She would become what my mother had always feared becoming, and what maybe I could have become too, without Mom, Gran, Paavo, Joel, or the whole Comet Committee for that matter: hateful, cold, hoarding the warped ruins of half-remembered powers—a wicked witch.

I thought of my Gran, the most unwicked witch there ever was, and how one time I saw her hold out her hand to an evil sorceress in a last attempt to win her away from black magic. Great young talent gone bad and lost, Gran had said later, mourning her enemy. “Sister,” Gran had appealed to Ushah. “Daughter, mother, friend.”

Well, I wasn't Gran and I couldn't go that far. But I had to do something, because Bosanka's future was unbearable to contemplate.

Even she deserved better.

“Hey, Bosanka,” I said. “It's not the end of the world. I won't leave you twisting in the wind. I'm just a talented lowborn, but I am your student host.”

And I put out my hand toward her, but it stopped in midreach, while a whispery voice crawled in my mind where nobody could hear it but me, “Very generous, but it's the people close to her who'll bear the brunt of her anger—and whatever power she has left. She wants to destroy you right now, like a drowning person pulling her rescuer under!

“Gran offered Horrible Ushah her hand—and remember what happened! Ushah tried to kill her! And besides that, who are you, anyway? You are not your Gran!”

For a second, I thought I had been turned to stone, by the fear of what I'd already done and what I was about to do.

But I knew that voice now.
Fear, go away
, I thought, as fiercely as I could.
No, I'm not Gran. I'm Valentine Marsh, and I will do my will!

Suppressing a shudder of pure panic, I reached toward Bosanka, trying not to think of what I would or could do if she tried, literally, to drag me over the side of the boat and drown me in vengeful fury.

What she did was go stiff as a board and clamp her eyes shut, but she let me close my fingers around her icy hand.

Somebody took my other hand—Lennie, that was his chunky mitt. It would be him, I thought, going all sloppy inside with gratitude and relief; warm hand, warm heart, a real softy.

The others took their cue from him. They shuffled around arranging themselves. Tamsin reached for Bosanka's other hand, completing the circuit.

I saw a faint golden glow on Bosanka's wet face—was the sun coming up?

I thought of the round-cheeked Sun card in Gran's tarot deck—the card that Gran said stood for the heart's desire. We all knew the desire of Bosanka's heart. She had come a long, cold, lonesome way for it, but she would never have it now.

We all knew it, and she saw that we did, and I think that was as hard on her pride as anything.

I tried to make it easier. “I know we're not your people, but we'll do what we can, okay?”

She threw back her matted hair with that gesture I had always thought of as contemptuous. She looked me in the eyes and I believe she read my mind, read her future there, and understood it. A sobbing breath whooshed out of her.

In a low, painful tone she said, “No, you are not. I have done a mistake, many mistakes. Balentena, will you make the light you made on New Year's? Maybe they come back for me. Will you show me to my people?”

Well, we'd come this far, hadn't we? I was willing—but what about Peter and Mimi, who had torn around the park as a couple of deer, and the rest of the committee, forced to the lake by Bosanka's power lines and hunted almost to death?

I said, “You've got the whole Comet Committee here, just as you wanted. Ask them all.”

Bosanka resolutely raised her head to face them. “Committee, will you show me to my people?”

There was an awkward silence.

Then Tamsin said irritably, “Well, why didn't you just ask like that in the first place?”

Peter laughed nervously.

And then, by God, we made a comet.

The boat filled with light that seemed to shine from inside the crooked circle of our linked bodies and hands. A weird, giggly tingling made me feel weightless and insubstantial, as if I were part of one of those skydiving teams, holding hands and falling together.

But we fell upward, toward the sky.

We were brighter than the moon, brighter than the sun. There was nothing anywhere that shone like us as we fell without moving, all the motion existing inside us.

Bosanka sat taller, stretching, shimmering with light caught from us. Her hand squirmed and changed in mine. With a tremendous muscular twist she pulled free and leaped up and outward, tearing out of our circle with a painless parting of pure energy.

The rushing in my ears became a tidal roar that was as much light as sound. The brilliance we had been holding among us streamed after Bosanka as she arced through the air backward, over the stern of the boat.

Her joined legs and feet, now dolphin flukes, hit the water a terrific wallop, dousing me in a freezing drench.

While I still had my eyes squeezed shut and was gasping for breath, I heard my mom's voice saying, “Valentine? You'd better come with me now. We have to go.”

 

18
The Golden Thread

 

 

I
OPENED MY EYES.
I was sitting half-frozen in the bottom of a rowboat grounded on the littered shore of the rowboat lake, right by the little wooden pavilion. The sawhorses with their Danger signs made shadows that glimmered on the iced lake surface under a cold, moonlit sky.

“The hospital called,” Mom said. She was standing in the pavilion dressed as she had been when she'd left for the day: gleaming silk blouse tucked into her good black pants, with her camel coat hanging open. Her hair spilled in a tangle over her collar.

“They called me out of the writers' conference,” she said. “I've been with your Gran since noon. We have to get back there.”

Nobody else was in the rowboat except Joel. He crouched in the bow, hugging a bulky object that had to be the violin, inside its battered case again.

“Where'd everybody go?” I asked him. My lips tasted of salt, my clothes were still damp, and I was beginning to shiver.

Joel shrugged. “People came for them,” he said in a carefully neutral tone. “Like your mom, here, for you.”

But nobody had come for him, obviously. One of the really annoying things about Joel was that he was so prone to feeling sorry for himself, and that he usually had a perfectly good reason to feel that way.

I gathered myself up to climb out of the tilted boat, stumbling over the oars that were lying in the bottom. “You'd better come with us, then. Mom, can Joel come with us to the hospital?”

“Yes,” she said. I couldn't see her face too well, which was okay.