Wonders of the Invisible World (39 page)

They were all silent, gazing at me. Every rocking chair was still. Then Brother Michael cleared his throat, and I saw the light in his eyes as if a door had opened and our future shone out of it.

“Let us pray over this,” he said, and we did, then and there, with such inspiration and enthusiasm that the house itself seemed to dance on its foundations around us.

So we found a virgin. They still exist, though finding one without some odd brand of religion attached is not easy, and the proof is even harder to obtain. And then we spent days in prayer, chanting and dancing ourselves into trances, so that our Mother’s instructions would be revealed to us. Her name, we heard again and again, in many different tongues: Ann, Ann, Ann... We followed her instructions. In a year we had our child, and the ironclad documents that said she was ours from the day of her birth. I left her naming to the others. They called her Ann, after our Mother, of course. We live without possessing; we share everything equally. The child, like the idea, was something that came from me, but she was not mine, any more than she belonged to the woman who bore her. But she had my red hair, and when I sang or danced, I felt her in me like light, as if I had truly given birth.

Two years later, she said her first prayer, and five years after that, she had her first brother, James, named after Mother Ann’s successor.

She harries us, the child does: she demands more children, more dancing, more singing and devotions. She has designed her own line of toys, and has specific ideas about how to market them. She herself dances like the wind and speaks in her trances, to a woman she calls Mother. Her dark eyes see beyond this world. She foretells things, in ways our Mother did, at the unlikeliest times. She gazes through the open doors at the fields as Sister Tiffany rocks the butter in the churn on the porch, and Brother Patrick strokes the crabapples into his basket with the picker he invented. “They will flock to us like doves,” she says, as if she sees the multitudes pouring through the wood, surging around the pond, to come to us. We have cloned the Word, we know now. I was simply the instrument of her creation. She is the second coming of Mother Ann. We keep all things in readiness for her flocks. We watch the empty fields with her, and wait.

T
he
O
ld
W
oman

and the
S
torm

The sun rose, as it did every day, making the birds squawk, painting the world. But this rising was different. Arram sensed it as he stepped out of his house. His bare sole felt a newness. His eyes filled with a memory of light. He stood still, watching the night melt away, and for just a moment, time enough for the first warmth to touch his face, he knew that this was also the First Sunrise, when the Long Night had ended and the world began to form. The sun had risen so. The earth was old-new underfoot. Dreams and memories stirred in a breeze through the trees. Arram went for a walk in the new world.

The Sun, the painter, got out her paintbrushes of light. She drenched a bird in red and yellow as it swooped by. She spattered purple among the berry bushes. She painted stones and reflections of stones in the river. Arram passed his favorite rock, where he himself had painted his First Name. The Name had come to him in a dream: the First Name which the being that breathed through his body and saw through his eyes had called itself. Now it had Arram’s name and voice. Arram had made a gift of the Name to the rock. It slept so calmly in the water, massive and yellow, a dreaming giant. Other people had liked it also: many pictures, gestures of affection, patterned its weathered sides.

Arram filled his belt-skin with water and turned away from the river. The flat earth, the Sun’s domain, spread before him in a thousand shades of brown. He faced the Sun, felt her pour hot dark color into his hair, his body. Far away, another stone, huge and rounded with age, smoldered in the morning with a glow like fire. It caught his eye, greeted him with the common greeting: the languageless, timeless memory of the First Morning. Arram walked toward it.

A lizard scurried away from his foot. A hawk circled above him, then hurtled down, a fist of brown plumage. It rose again with a snake in its talons. Minute red flowers swarmed across Arram’s path. Animal bones slowly buried themselves in the earth. Tracks of a live animal came across the desert, crossed Arram’s tracks, and went their own silent way. A cloud smudged the sky, and another. The Old Woman who hated the Sun was smoking. The distant rock moved slightly closer to Arram. It had changed color: the fire had melted into brass. Have I been to that rock before? Arram wondered. Or do I only remember it from another time? Thoughts rambled pleasantly in his head; the world constantly changed under his eye. Is this walk mine? Or am I remembering an earlier walk? He stopped for a swallow of water. The ground simmered around him, blurred with light. The air droned and buzzed with invisible singers. A shadow passed over him, and he looked up. The Old Woman was puffing clouds all over the sky.

Arram walked on. When he grew hungry he killed a lizard and roasted it. The soul of the lizard went on its own walk, searching for another container. The rock began to loom across the horizon, bigger than Arram had thought. It darkened; the clouds were draining the Sun of color. The air was motionless, moist-hot. If I remember the rock, I should remember reaching it, Arram thought. But I don’t. So this must be my own walk. There was a fragment of red cloth on a thorn. Someone else had come that way and gone. In the dim, steamy afternoon, the voice of the desert was a vibrant bass hum. The Sun managed a final angry shower of light. She burned the cloud-edges silver, struck sweat from Arram’s face, turned the great wall of rock orange. A shadow, black as night, fell across Arram’s path and he stopped, as though he had caught himself from stepping into a rift. He glanced up. Then down and up again. Someone lost a shadow, he thought surprisedly. There was nothing, even in the sky, that it belonged to. As his eyes fell again to the earth, a wind came up tasting of dust and rain, and sent the shadow tumbling across the desert like a leaf.

Now that’s strange, Arram thought.

He continued his walk. The rain fell, drenching, warm as a lover. He opened his mouth and drank; he walked through water as through air, for who could know how many times his soul might have been a fish? He had dwelled in water, under the earth. He had died again and again, and been reborn to the same earth. Now he was a man, with a head full of misty memories. Dreams of other lives. There was nothing in the world to fear; he had been, or he would be, every shape in the world. But still, when two boulders crashed and split over his head, and the sky flashed a frosty color that was no color, the man decided it was time to run.

He reached the lacework of caves in the rock just as eggs made out of ice began to fall out of the sky. One struck him, a hard blow on his shoulder that drove him to his knees. He crawled the rest of the way into the cave, sat against the wall in the dim light, rubbing his shoulder and wondering at the force of the storm. The rock above his head seeped into his awareness. It had been battered times past counting, nothing could destroy it. I would like to be a rock now, Arram thought. A puff of smoke made him cough. A stone-painting on the cave wall was no longer a painting. It was the Old Woman. She lifted her pipe, made lightning flash and Arram saw her face.

He stopped breathing. She was the ugliest woman in the world, as well as the meanest, and he wasn’t sure what to say to her. He wanted to move very quietly and take his chances with the ice-eggs. But he hesitated, and as he sat motionless, the Old Woman passed him her pipe.

He took a puff, not knowing what else to do, and passed it back to her. “So,” she said in her croaky voice, “you want to be a rock. Go ahead. Walk outside. You won’t be a man very long. You won’t be anything recognizable.” She laughed a reedy, insect-laugh. Her hair was white as river-froth, her nose humped and battered like the rock they sat under. She was shriveled, light as a bundle of twigs. She was crazy with jealousy of the Sun, and she was dangerous. Her eyes were the color of lightning.

Arram sighed. He thought with longing of the butterflies along the river, of his love putting her hands on his bare skin. Who would have thought a walk in the morning would have led to death? “The storm will end,” he said softly, and she answered,

“I am the storm.”

His eyes flicked at it. The sky was growing darker, the ice was still falling constantly as rain. His throat closed suddenly. He wondered how far it could spread. It could batter homes to the ground, it could kill children....

“You’re so angry,” he breathed. “Why are you so angry?”

“You made me angry!”

“Me? What did I do?”

“I saw how you looked at the Sun this morning! She rose and touched your face and you followed her without a thought....”

“No, that isn’t the way it was! She—I—”

“How was it? You looked at her as if she had never risen before. I saw you.”

He nodded, confused. “That’s the way it was. She was—But I—I was only remembering, the way I must have seen her first. When I was a child. Or in another time. The world—”

“Could you ever look at me like that?”

He leaned back, sighing again. He was silent, drawing his name on the ground in the dust, feeling the air in his lungs, the blood beat in his fingertips. “All right,” he said after a while, his voice detached, faraway. “You can kill me now. But first stop the storm.”

She only growled something and the thump of ice in the dark sounded louder. Many living things would be left looking for shapes that night. He gazed at her, bewildered.

“Then what do you want?”

“Well, look at me! I am rain! I am thunder, I am lightning, I am bitter, bitter winds—I never have choices! Make me another shape. One that will move you to look at me the way you look at the Sun.” She waved her pipe again, and the lightning swam over Arram’s amazed face. “Do that, and the storm will stop.”

“I’m only a man,” Arram protested. “I walk naked in the world. I kill lizards and paint rocks and then I die. I have no power.”

“But you don’t know what power you might have had. In another time.” She snapped her fingers impatiently and thunder rolled. “Think! Remember.”

Arram tried to think. But each time he tried, the thunder snarled and the lightning spat. He could only think of the quiet river with ice-eggs smashing into it, the forest bruised and broken by the storm. He couldn’t remember a life of magic power. He didn’t even know anyone who could remember. The Old Woman herself was the most powerful being he had ever seen. More powerful it seemed, even than the lovely Sun, who had fled from this storm. Maybe, he thought suddenly, the Old Woman is so strong, so angry, that she never sees the simple world. How can she? She throws fire at it, she rains on it. Maybe if I tell her what I see she’ll believe that I will have to die to make the storm stop, because I can’t help her.

So he said, “In my forest there are red flowers, so big they overflow two hands. They are very beautiful, with many petals reaching toward the sky.” The Old Woman was beginning to look annoyed. Her white brows flew together and a boulder crashed down the cliff outside. Arram cleared his throat and continued hurriedly, “They weren’t always flowers. Once they were all young women who had no lovers. They cried and pleaded for lovers, but all the young men had died in a battle, and no one knew what to do. One day the great black Hunting Beetle came to them and said, ‘I’ll be your lover. The only lover all of you will ever need.’ And of course they laughed and threw stones at him, making him scurry into a hole so he wouldn’t get squashed. That night he crawled back out and looked wistfully over all the arms and legs and breasts of the sleeping women, all of whom he loved at once. He wished for them, and wished, and they sobbed in their sleep for the young men who would never come. And his desire and their sorrow kindled a magic between them, for all things are connected and the earth takes care of its own. In the morning, where the young women had lain, grew the loveliest flowers in the world. The beetle had his wish. And so did the young women: for even today the Hunting Beetle roams over all the flowers in the forest, feeding on their honey and freeing their seeds to the wind.”

He stopped, feeling a little confused. He had meant to tell the Old Woman a simple story, but this had a magic in it he had never noticed. She was watching him puzzledly, puffing brief puffs on her pipe. The terrible sound of the ice storm seemed to have lessened a little. The Old Woman said finally, “That’s no use to me. I wish and I wish, and nothing ever listens to me. But tell me another one.”