Chapter Links: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 Epilogue (Links will not work on all browsers so you may wish to use your "find" function to go to: Chapter Two, Chapter Three, etc.)

The Giant's Harp

by Robert Hunter

Chapter One

Whispers Of Ist



"Listen son. Hear her?" Ro clenched Elmo's wrist as they leaned over the ledge of the Giant's Harp, looking through layers of cloud and mirage at the faraway beach below.

"Let go, Father! I'll be careful. Is that her down on the rock?" Ro doubted his son really saw the Schula through the reflective layers of hot and cool air where the desert approached the sea, but there was something down there that looked like a woman. He produced a spyglass from the fold of his cloak.

"If something is solid, a telescope brings it closer but mirages disappear . . . well, well - she's there, right enough! Have a look." Ro grasped the child's arm as he handed him the spyglass, wary of the fenceless step jutting over the abyss.

For the first time ever, Elmo saw the girl clearly. She looked older than he but not by much. She was singing more beautifully, to his ears, than ever before in his ten years. And wasn't she looking right at him? So it seemed. He ventured a wave but it wasn't returned. After gazing a long while, he said:

"When I'm older I'm going down there."

"When you're older you won't want to."

"Did you ever go?"

"Well..."

"Were there Schulas in those days?"

"More than you could count, son."

"Is she the only one left?"

"No, but there aren't many."

"Where did they come from?"

"All I know is what I've heard from the storyteller. The way Aeoui would have it, they serve Ist who sowed them from whale's teeth and sent them to sing for her father, Bran the Giant, after he was turned into a floating island by Yu."

"Do you believe in Ist?"

"That's not a proper question."

"Lo said you don't believe."

"Depends which side of the bed I drop my shoes."

"Well, I don't believe."

"I'm sure that distresses Ist greatly."

"I believe sometimes. It depends who I'm with. When I play with Echo we pretend she's Ist. She makes herself believe she's Ist so hard I believe it too, at least for awhile. It makes her awfully mad when I stop believing. Sometimes she rolls on the ground and screams until her father wakes up and tells me to go away. I hate him."

"Mind! Sod's gruff but he's a decent and honest man. What part do you play in the game of Ist?"

"Sometimes I'm the rat that bites her heel and gets cursed. Look! The Schula just waved."

"I don't think she can see us all the way up here. It's more than three furlongs down to the beach."

"Oh she can, she can! Look at her, she's waving!"

"Let's see. Well, well!"

"Is Ist still the boss of the Schulas?"

"If you believe the first part of the story, you might believe the rest. According to Aeoui, she wears the Schula like an overcoat when she wants to. Ist is said to take many forms in many places - sometimes several forms in a single place."

"Like wind?"

"Like water."

"Like clouds?"

"Like sky."

"How big is she?"

"Many sizes, many faces."

"Not Ist, I mean the Schula."

"Small. Bigger than you."

"Echo says Ist comes to Terrapin sometimes. Is she a Schula then?"

"Not according to the story. When she comes here, she's a beautiful lady with blazing eyes, very vain and easy to offend."

"Have you seen her?"

"Someone who fits the description. Some vow she was Ist. I am not among them."

"Will she come again?"

"The woman? Or Ist? Neither, if we're lucky."

"I want to see her. I hope she comes. How can you tell when she's coming?"

"Oh, things change in strange ways. Winds blow down chimneys and rattle cookpot lids. Those winds are her ears."

"What are her eyes?"

"Windows are her eyes. She can see you inside your room if you don't pull your curtain. Even then, she might send a little whirlwind under your door to part the curtain so she can see what you're up to."

"So you do believe in her?"

"I'm only telling you what Aeoui says. Stars are my stock in trade. I happily leave such beliefs to those in need of diversion and suggest you do the same."

"But if you believe something, why hide it?"

Ro's eyes twinkled at the question. He recognized the influence of his old friend Lit, Elmo's teacher.

"Your beliefs are your own affair, so long as you don't pester others with them. It's time we headed home."

"I want to watch the Schula some more, Father. Please! Can't I just stay here by myself for a little while? I promise to be careful."

Ro considered. More caution would be coddling, the widower decided, as he'd often warned Henrietta, his late lamented wife.

"You may stay, but mind the angle of the sun. If you're not home before it sets, beware my wrath!"

Elmo was jubilant. Ro was so cautious he'd felt no hope of a "yes."



Ro walked away, nerves humming: a touch of vertigo, he realized, a new feature of advancing age. The child had no fear of heights whatsoever. Nor had he himself, except when gazing through his telescope on a particularly clear night - when he sometimes felt in danger of tumbling into the sky.

This touch of vertigo was probably a product of his overconcern for Elmo, he reasoned. It was the child whom he feared might fall, not himself. For himself, the astronomer had no concern except as parent to his son who had become doubly precious following the loss of Henrietta.

"The fearlessness of others is a fearsome thing," he muttered.



As soon as Ro left, the Schula sang more clearly. Her ballads became love ditties as a warm zephyr favored the notes, scooped them from the beach and carried them up the promontory cliff to the Giant's Harp, a megalithic monument of marble, ancient beyond known local history. Elmo clambered higher up the massive steps in order to hear better, ignoring the deeply etched freezes of deities and battles connecting the scores of white fluted columns supporting ten cubit square slabs of obsidian, hoisted in place, it must be, by giants, gods, or machines unknown on earth in remembered time.

The Giant's Harp was a remnant of Time Before. It bore other names in other times. "Time Before" was the long, long space preceding the short, short memories of the illiterate people of Terrapin, an inbred town bordered on three sides by desert, set on a cliff facing the sea.

Ro was among the very few citizens of that town who had traveled beyond its boundaries. He'd made the dangerous trek, in the company of Lit, across the desert to Nikaba; Lit in search of books, Ro of diagrams, astronomical charts, discourse and lenses for the telescope he meant to construct. In Nikaba, Ro learned other names for the Giant's Harp. He kept them to himself. It was not considered good form in Terrapin to know things.



Elmo splayed himself on the marble lap of the goddess of architecture, bracing his arms on her T-square and compass to steady his spyglass. The Shulas's voice resounded through the corridors of the Giant's Harp, splitting into several voices as the end of one note trailed into the next. Granite eagles and gargoyles of onyx gazed in rapt attention. Arcades of marble men and women, supple in the craft of their carving, if missing an arm, a head or a nose, gave unwavering audience. Elmo could feel the multitude of statuary crowd slowly around him, the marble lap of the goddess grown soft and warm, as he stared at the lovely singer below in growing entrancement.



"Elmo, what are you doing here all by yourself?"

Spell suddenly shattered, he turned in annoyance to find his playmate, Lo, standing hand in hand with her father, Lit the teacher.

"My father said I could."

"There, see! Elmo gets to do everything. Why can't I go anywhere alone, Father?"

Lit had seen Ro walking away from the Giant's Harp, by way of the western terrace, looking a bit ashen. He guessed what had happened and more or less applauded Ro's decision to let the lad watch out for his own balance. Lit, himself a widower, realized that he must now, reluctantly, allow equal privilege to his pretty, pale daughter - or never hear the last of it.

"What time must you go home, Elmo?"

"Before sunset, Sir."

"Lo can stay and listen to the Schula with you. Be sure she gets home by twilight!"

"Father! I can take care of myself!"



Lit returned by way of the Hall of Urns: thousands of niches bearing ashes of generations celebrated in the art of the Giant's harp but otherwise absent from living memory. Unreadable writing in a forgotten language recorded the name and deeds of the tenant of each urn.

He lowered himself down the seven western steps, hanging by his hands from the ledge of each step and dropping to the next, then crossed the long meadow to the mimosa grove where the path into town began.



Stopping for a pint of cider at the Sign of The Nine Hammers, Lit found Ro alone at a table.

"Your liberality is contagious," said Lit. "I let Lo stay with Elmo to listen to the Schula."

"I was up there alone at his age."

"So was I."

"First bachelors, then husbands..."

"Then widowers and now mothers!"

"What have you been teaching my son lately, Lit?"

"A bit of this and that. He's learning to put an edge to a blade, so he'll have a trade."

"He's been practicing on my razor," Ro patted his nicked chin. "Does this keenness extend to any other studies? He's been plying me with religious questions lately ... picks up a lot of nonsense from Sod's daughter Echo. I don't want to set him against the oddities people believe around here. He's not discerning enough to hold his tongue around believers...but I don't want him to swallow it whole either."

"If our gentlefolk knew your true thoughts on the subject, they'd cross their fingers when you walk by a deal more than they do."

"I'm polite and mind my own business. I find, unfortunately, that my astronomical calculations do not square with the notion that the stars were sewn by the gods on a black cloth carried to the sky by a turtle."

"I daresay. Yet you believe in Ist."

"Believe? Hardly. I acknowledge the cursed fact of Ist."

"Then, you should have no quarrel with my teaching of your son. After all, you've taken pains to impress your educational opinions on me, in great detail, this past half century."

"Indeed. And to you alone, being the possessor of one of the few functioning minds in this barren end station of the world."

"You slight Gia and Aeoui?"

"Aeoui is a pedant and Gia confesses her own senility. But no, of course I don't include them. They're my teachers, after all, and I seem to be able to think, though that's as much inconvenience as blessing in Terrapin."

"Tell me the truth, my friend, have you any serious objection to the way I instruct Elmo?"

"No. He can accept or reject your opinions once he's learned them, although it is startling, sometimes, hearing the parrot of your voice and ideas around the house. It reminds me of the nights we argued away our youth."

"First here, and later at Gia's ...when the keeper kicked us out of the Nine Hammers!"

"Did you see Gia by the Giant's Harp?"

"Yes, we spoke. She keeps watch lately. She won't say, but I'm sure enough she's looking for signs of Ist."

"Pray it will be a brief visitation."

"Or that she's wrong," Lit said fervently.

"I don't think Gia, of all people, would be wrong about that."



In a dark, back corner of the tavern, alone, facing the wall, Lit's dark, sullen brother Eliot drank down his sixth pint of black beer, commenting on the probable course of their conversation to himself, though he'd heard none of it. It was all the same to Eliot: "They don't know what they're talking about."



"Let me see the spyglass, Elmo."

"Leave it alone."

"Come on, let me see!"

"Let go or I'll push you right over the ledge!"

"Try it and Ro will never let you come out by yourself again!"

The children scrapped over the spyglass, heedless of the ledge of the Giant's Harp and the yawning abyss of melody and mirage. Elmo snatched the glass from Lo and ran to the far side of the terrace, she chasing. As the sun touched the water, both game and music stopped suddenly as though by command. Time to head home.



The children scaled the seven terraced steps, boosting one another by shoulder and handhold, then crossed the main hall of the Giant's Harp without looking to right or to left at the ancient artifacts which were, after all, just part of nature to them. They jumped down each of the seven southern steps, landing with a series of hard jars, rather than simply walking around the corner of the terrace they'd played upon and strolling downhill. That route would have brought them too close to Gia, known by all children to be a witch.

In their scuffling, they'd stopped paying attention to the Schula, whose pre-sunset ballad wasted itself, likewise, on the disenchanted ears of Gia. The old woman stood like a lightning struck tree, grimly propped on her cane, staring out to sea. Over a hundred years old, she'd lost track of her age, Gia was feared, though not hated, by all children and respected by adults who could remember fearing her, too, when young. Even the great-grandfathers of the town remembered her as an old woman.

It was said that one of Gia's eyes had been plucked out by Ist, whose beauty she had supposedly rivaled when young. In truth, the eye still rested in the socket beneath its tight closed lid. Only when startled would the lid fly open. The dazed orb would weep for an hour after she shut it.

"One thing I know," said Elmo, as he chased Lo across the meadow, "I'm not inviting you to my birthday."

"When is it?"

"Soon."

"I'm not inviting you to mine either."

"When aren't you?"

"Midsummer Day."

Nor did he, though she came anyway. The next year he did invite her, but she didn't come. The next year he had no party, and the year following, Lit died and Lo went to live with her feeble-minded Uncle Eliot, on the far side of the village, near the southern gate leading to the Desert of Bones.





Chapter Two

Descent



Lo knelt dreaming over a washtub full of the filthy rags Eliot called his clothes. Memories of pleasant days, long gone, eclipsed the thick gray bubbles reflecting her unhappy face in grotesque; streamed through the tatters of curtain nailed above the cottage window. Daydreams, almost daring to become visions, suddenly retreated in panic as the outer bolt was slipped and the door flew open. Eliot lurched in.

"So, you have no taste for work!" he growled, catching her half submerged in reverie and squeezing her painfully with his grimy paws.

"I'm sorry, ouch, please stop! I was just thinking. . ."

"See what you think of this!" A kick of his boot sent Lo sprawling across the washtub. She strangled a scream to avoid more trouble, but a whimper escaped.

"And don't mewl!" He slapped the back of her head, threw a chunk of dog meat on the table to be boiled for supper, then stormed out the door to drink away his troubles at the Nine Hammers.



Lo dried her face on her apron and ran her fingers through her matted hair, feeling the ugly chunk cut by Eliot's shears as punishment for being caught looking out the window, which she did constantly in his absence.

She feared to actually step outside. Eliot set traps around the cottage to make sure no one was prowling about and he had a paranoid's keen eye for detail. He was unlikely to miss such marks of disobedience as the imprint of her shoeless foot in the forbidden world outside the door.

Eliot spent all his idle time, hours when the tavern was closed and no work was offered him, designing and hiding his traps. He changed them often and showed something like intelligence, if not outright genius, in their construction. There were sharpened shafts in surrounding bushes, a spring action noose and a false surface giving way to a nine foot pit of barbed wire, dogshit and broken glass.

The desert that bordered the South wall of his cottage presented a blank slate suitable for peopling with Eliot's deepest and least rational fears. The North side, facing Terrapin, did not. In town were pints to drink, wells to dig, cesspools to drain, and people to dislike. But from the desert something seemed to warn.



Eliot out the door, Lo started a fire, filled the cookpot from the cistern, and threw the high-smelling meat in the cold water with a handful of salt. Eliot liked lots of salt. No sooner had she hung the pot over the fire than the heavy iron lid began to rattle. A quick breath of wind from under the door sent the yellowed curtain dancing. Lo was startled at the concurrence. Surely the huff of wind wasn't strong enough to rattle a cast iron cookpot lid?

She settled herself by the window and gazed at the desert . Was someone coming? No. It was only a mirage that soon dissipated.

Since Eliot's house was isolated, none knew what abuses he practiced there. Generally disliked, he was tolerated at the Nine Hammers, so long as he kept to himself, which he did from preference. He paid his tab regularly and caused no trouble.

"Let the bastard be," was the edict of Dor the taverner, and let be the bastard was.

Eliot was given leave to sit in a dark corner, tacitly reserved for him, and left alone to mutter inaudible comments into his ragged black beard, curses lost in the general noise and cheer of the sole tavern between the continental ledge and the great desert.

Eliot was tolerated in memory of his brother Lit, whom he resembled only in greatness of girth. The school master had been a town favorite, with his gift for reducing complex problems to simple, comical alternatives. Occam's Razor, he'd called it. Many had sought Lit's savvy perspective on their troubles. Even the taverner, Dor, used to being the catchpot of his customers' woes, would turn to Lit to unload his own perplexities.

Other than ancient Gia, no one else had ever been so much at ease with Ro the astronomer: a gentle soul, of sorrowful countenance even before the death of his wife. When Lit died, Ro stopped coming to the tavern, keeping entirely to his telescope and calculations.



All agreed Eliot was a half-wit, but he was a work horse and people hired him to dig their wells and cellars. They'd have thought it a grave misfortune, had they thought about it at all, for Lit's frail daughter Lo to fall into Eliot's hands. They knew she wasn't dead, insofar as they knew anything at all, because she was sometimes seen at her window beside the southern gate. That she looked sad was easy to understand, had they understood anything at all, what with her father dead and she so young, no more than sixteen. Had any discerned the more immediate cause of that sadness, assuming they discerned anything at all, it is likely Eliot would have been lynched.

Unfortunately, there was no reason for anyone to pass by Eliot's cottage except to visit the southern gate to the Desert of Bones. Terrapin was fertile and self-sufficient, desired no commerce with the land across the waste, so passers-by were rare.

Bullied into submission, Lo failed to realize that release from bondage would have been as simple as running to Ro. The daughter of his oldest friend would have been protected as a matter of course. Unfortunately Ro had much to occupy his mind and remembrance of the pale, black haired girl found no place among his comets and constellations.

Nor did Elmo much remember her, though they'd lived next door, played and scrapped together while their fathers smoked and exchanged riddlesome chat. Besides, Lo had been altogether too smart for Elmo's taste. She was, after all, a year older than he. Elmo wasn't less intelligent than many, but Lo was, after all, the school master's daughter and probably had lessons for breakfast. She made him feel a bit thick. He wouldn't have been surprised to find she could read.



Few in the town could read, other than Ro, Lit, old Gia and maybe Aeoui, who would never say. The ability to do so was viewed with suspicion. Since there was nothing in Terrapin to read anyway, neither menu nor road sign, Elmo didn't suppose it made much difference and never applied himself to Lit's offer of instruction. Some said the marks on the floor of the Giant's Harp were writings, but most believed they were just decoration.

Elmo learned to play whistle, having a good ear and deft fingers. He sometimes attempted duets with the Schula, but since the wind generally blew music either down the cliff or up from the sea, seldom did their melody unite unless the winds were still. Even then the faint music was often overcome by the murmur of surf.

Elmo had a yen to join her and make music face to face, but descent from the Giant's Harp to the beach was perilous. Those who attempted were few in any generation. Certainly no grown townsman would be fool enough to try, even if tempted by the enchanting melodies floating up the promontory face.

*

Early one morning, before Ro awoke, Elmo set off to attempt descent of the northern promontory cliff face, undismayed by tales of boys who never returned. It was the morning of his fifteenth birthday and this was the present he'd promised himself. His interest in the Schula had burned brighter and brighter since the afternoon Ro had handed him the spyglass to view the lovely creature five years ago. He'd decided to wait until he was at least as tall as he guessed her to be. He'd grown quite a bit in the last year.

To the right of the overgrown path, leading to the cliff face, rose the lyre-shaped pillars of the Giant's Harp. Stone steps descended a hundred feet to the jade mines. Rusted tools and coils of rope lay scattered around the entrances to the mined-out shafts. Elmo found a small hand pick and selected a coil of tarred rope which he slung over his shoulder. He stuck the pick in his belt, where dangled his sheath knife, whistle, Ro's spyglass and a canteen.

A hairbrush, a wood framed looking glass and a bag of taffy, items that might be expected to entice a Schula, should personal charm fail, completed his array of necessities.



The steps ended five hundred feet past the mines. A footpath ran at a steep angle past the vent holes and surface quarries but soon trickled away to a deer trail through a maze of vines covering a series of monolithic terraces, hidden, except in broad outline, beneath centuries of untended growth. Like the Giant's Harp, whose terraced steps they resembled in height and breadth, they terminated in mid-air, jutting into emptiness. Whatever they once led to no longer existed.

Elmo slid down a maze of vines, known as "the monkey climb," scratching himself on blackberry bramble, thistle and the stinging nettle which twined among the creepers. The edge of the monkey climb was as far as anyone usually ventured before reconsidering the call to adventure, what with two thankless hours needed to battle to the bottom of it and twice that to climb back. Only a bare rock ledge, providing an inferior view, rewarded the toil.

Silver lizards dozed in the late morning sun, scattering as he came to the end of the monkey climb and approached the rocky ledge. It was more difficult to climb down the steeply sloped lip of the ledge than it had been to slide and stumble through the vines. The vines offered only discomfort but the rock face promised danger. At least there were no further thorns to jab or nettles to sting.

Face against the rock, his back to the sea, Elmo didn't see the lucid mirages over the shimmering water below: projections of the town, familiar houses and avenues, mingled with fantastical landscapes, making it impossible to tell where permutation ended and simple reflection began. The Nine Hammers was promoted to the dimensions of the Giant's Harp, which monument was reduced to the size of a mean hovel among shifting, glass-like fingers of hallucination.

Elmo descended the first several hundred feet splayed belly to rock, oozing like a drop of tallow from ledge to ledge. As the distance between ledges increased, he began looping his tarred rope around outcroppings of stone to lower himself.

The rope was fifty feet long to begin, but he cut it in half to lessen the burden. None of the drops had been more than twenty feet and he figured, out of misplaced optimism, that the going would not get much harder.

The next hour vanquished this miscalculation. He was forced to reclimb. He was fortunate enough to find a more accessible route back up, where he sat and spliced the discarded length after coming to a drop requiring fully fifty feet of rope to negotiate. He'd learned rope splicing from Lit, did it well and quickly, but the miscalculation cost an hour of precious daylight.



His method of descent involved slipping a noose around the base of a rock, sliding down, then unfastening the loop with repeated whipstrokes. Sometimes it wasn't possible to dislodge the rope, and he had to shinny back up and secure the loop in a different fashion. It didn't occur to him to loop the rope around a rock on shorter drops, slide down the doubled course, and simply pull it after him. What Lit or his father had not specifically taught seldom occurred to him.

Evening approaching, Elmo was able to gain several hundred yards quickly as the stone strata became more forgiving. The pick sank easily into the limestone layer, allowing short drops without the nuisance of securing and retrieving the rope.



The sun touched the sea as the limestone face graduated again to harder rock, requiring rope. The first few drops were easy enough, but they led to a hundred foot clear fall. Elmo stared at his fifty foot coil, questioning, for the first time, the good sense of his adventure as fatigue swooped out of a red chunk of sunset cloud and claimed him.

He broke into tears of frustration. If only he had a kite of Harp Tree leaves to carry him to his destination. The wind was probably strong enough to bear him to the beach had he the materials and tools to make one. Having nothing better to do at the moment, he recalled the first time he'd ascended into the winds of Terrapin, his kite string played out by Aor, the town Rough, one of the sons of the mythic Wolf O'the Wild, old Loup Aru. He remembered the exhilaration he'd felt during this rite of passage ... and the sensation of terror, second only to that of his father, who'd declined to hold the slender cord of the kite himself while watching the issue of his loins silhouetted against a crimson cloud, causing the astronomer to mutter an unaccustomed but spontaneous prayer to a deity in which he did not believe.

Elmo's resolve was refreshed by the Schula's song, absent the greater span of his climb, ringing to responsive stirring in his heart. Doubt vanished as quickly as it had descended. But there could be no more climbing today. First he would have to unwind the individual strands of the rope and rebraid them, thinner and longer, from the half inch thickness. The rope would be less secure, but there was no other choice.

Before beginning the long job, he had to reclaim the rope, again wedged tight in its anchorage. With no strength to climb back, he whipsnapped, ever more languidly, while he listened to the Schula sing an interminable ballad of ancient Terrapin, a story familiar from the tellings of Aeoui.



Yu was father to all gods but one. Ist was half mortal, daughter of Bran, a giant shepherd of land whales. Her mother, File, was the youngest daughter of Yu. She had discovered the giant drifting in the sea, an island to all appearances.

It seems that after searching the Earth for hundreds of years, seeking others of his giant race and finding none, Bran gave way to despair, left his herd of land whales, and plunged into the sea where he floated unconscious and dreamless. File discovered the giant, fell in love with his handsome countenance, and did her best to awaken him by dancing on his breast while singing the same song with endless variations for a hundred years.





Wake my love and come to me

Wake my love and follow

I will sing to thee today

And thou to me tomorrow

alalee alala alaloo



Wake my love to this my song

From slumber hie thee hither

Before the fruit of love decays

The supple branches wither

alaloo alala alalee



Wake my love and fill my cup

With measure overflowing

Place thy treasure in my keep

Who best may tend its growing

alala alalee alaloo



Wake my love, I dance alone

Who woulds't with thee entwine

As human flesh to human bone

As red, red lips to wine

alalee alala alaloo





Before the birth of Ist, Yu was content ruling over the gods, a respected parent. But Ist was stubborn, willful, insolent, beautiful, vain, and gifted with music earthly and divine.

She made Yu unhappy. This was his first encounter with such a feeling, so he didn't understand what it was, only that he wished to avoid it. Before this, there was nothing he did not embrace with the whole of himself. This feeling he would cast away from him. Or cast himself away from it, if need must be. After long brooding, he left the City of Eagles to seek remedy not to be found in heaven. He sought no advice from his gods. Since he'd never before had a question, he did not know how to pose one.

Yu wished only to be where Ist was not. Her beauty disturbed him as much as her insolence. Never having experienced anything but the greatest felicity from his children, he did not know willfulness for what it was - nor understand pride, admixture of traits human and divine - for he was only divine. And though he'd breathed life into those godlet creatures shaped by his sons and daughters to be carried to Earth on the broad back of the Terrapin, their doings were beyond his interest or his ken.

Yu went walking on Earth, making himself small so he did not upset the people or step on their towns. He'd never come to Earth before, only looked down, now and again, attracted by a well said prayer and suitable sacrifice. If animal, the spirit of the sacrificial beast was served to the gods at table. If human, it was set to work - spirits of women to spinning and weaving; those of men to serving wine and tending table. Spirits of children were set free to enjoy the endless day of the City of Eagles.

Spirits of the sacrificed were fed well and given good liquor in just compensation for their moment of supreme agony. The work was pleasant among playful and loving gods, and music was part of the air of the City of Eagles, wherefore, the moral of the Schula's song avowed, it behooved any young man or woman to be sacrificed to Yu.



Elmo teased at the rope a bit more, yawning. He didn't think that being sacrificed to Yu was probably as inviting as the Schula suggested, but then he wasn't very religious. As the endless song continued, his efforts to free the rope became ever more feeble, the whipsnap ripples more gentle, until they no longer stirred the clump of sowthistle the rope was snagged in.



It happened, sang the Schula, life was so interesting on Earth that Yu recovered his former good cheer. In the hundredth year of his wanderings, he discovered the oldest of his creatures, one long lost to him, created even before the gods to whom was given the task of building Earth upon a foundation of mud heaved up from the dark ocean between the stars. The dark ocean was the mother of Yu, who had no father.

This oldest of creatures was the very friend Yu had created for company while still a child, tired of wandering the skies alone - the very Terrapin who helped the children of Yu to build Earth, carrying upon his broad back whatever the gods designed and wished to place there: trees, sand, the many living things they had made in their shops and petitioned Yu to breathe life into.



The song was becoming repetitious. Elmo did not hear the end of the tale. Drowsiness proved stronger than interest. He would leave the rope wedged till morning. The boy crawled into a shallow niche in the cliff to succumb with reluctance into the sleep of fatigue.



Dreams eased up the crevices from the beach, some wound down the promontory face on puffs of cloud, fragrant and rosy with sunset colors. Other, darker, dangerous dreams lurked inside the niche, but they were formless and difficult to dream. Long banished to the walls of the shallow niche, they dropped gratefully onto the sleeper in hopes of finding a stage upon which to perform their transmutations.

The mind of the exhausted climber dissolved into a tantalizing romp of fantasy which faded until only a silver sky remained, shading gradually into its own horizon, darkening into the depths of slumber without image.

Dawn spirits in scrub trees conversed in cricket ratch and cicada whir, loud even against the roar of waves. There was no trace of quiet in the night, outside of the sleeper's deafness to it all.

A discontented measure of melody drifted in a tendril up the cliff face, like an uncoiling rope, paying out to the level of the sleeper's niche, worming its way through the substance of his slumber, summoning him like a beckoning finger. Something of the Schula charged this tentacle of tone and was not to be dismissed. Elmo arose, still sleeping, caught hold of the tip of the beckoning strand and fixed his own rope to it, making a ladder to descend to her.

But the tendril now projected horizontally, rather than downward. At its end lay the beach and thudding surf, no longer below but inclined straight ahead across a gulf through which the strand twined and shimmered.

The tendril twisted teasingly to and fro then suddenly slithered around his wrist, penetrating his skin, threaded his veins as easily as vision pierces clear glass, pouring melody in pulses through his arteries.

Mingling with his lifestream, it breathed through his lungs, looked through his eyes, gave instant solution to all the mystery the music presented, promised answer without ceasing to many more mysteries, all delicious to know.

It seemed a simple matter to pursue the trilling to its source, to take a step forward and flow along it like an impulse along a plucked string, but as he lifted a foot, a chill blast of wind turned the warm current of his dream into ice. He awoke teetering on the verge of the precipice, preparing to step to his doom, shrill of cicadas loud in his ear, banishing the phantasm of music with a jolt of pure terror.



He spent the rest of the night clinging to the bosom of the stony niche. Nor till dawn did the youth fall into a strength-recovering sleep, fingers loosing their compulsive grip, dozing sentience assuring that murderous visions are of the order of night, powerless to broach daylight slumber.



When Elmo awoke, the sun was nearly forty five degrees above the horizon and the vista was awash with mirage: spires and domes of unearthly architecture, shot through with dragons and birds of light, transparent to the horizon of sea and sun.

In a heap at the mouth of the niche lay his climbing rope, by some agency dislodged and kept from falling to the beach below; its most likely natural trajectory.

Elmo figured that the last limp, lashing tug of evening must have unseated it; its own weight allowing it to gradually slither free. The light rain of morning must have helped it some, lubricating and adding weight to the strands. Mystery explained, he began unbraiding and resplicing the rope to double length while the Schula's full-throated morning song commenced.





Upon a silver strand sat I

O me and my love beside me

If ever, my love, I chance to die

O die, my love, beside me





...sang the Shula with a rollicking lilt belying the substance of the lyric. Resting his fingers for a moment from the braiding, he trained Ro's spyglass on the singer. For the first time, he saw her face in clear detail. Below abundant copper hair, violet eyes looked back, aware of being watched. She smiled brightly.



Strength was renewed, as much by the smile as by slumber, though Elmo was very thirsty. His canteen was empty and his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth as he fixed the rope to a rock and began to lower himself through the swarming mirage which poured off the ocean, hiding the true features of the face of his descent.

Approaching the end of his extended rope, he had to swing out in an arc to reach the outcropping below. And there, it seemed, his journey must end. The rest of the drop, three hundred yards, was smooth as glass with no outcrop, handhold or pick purchase visible.

Frustration vied with thirst for the spoils of aggravation. He had no choice but to stay right where he was. He could hear, but not see the Schula, who lilted on no more than half a minute's walk away, were that walk not a sheer drop.

He wasted away the morning, dejectedly tossing pebbles to the beach, wondering if there was any way to get back up since he couldn't get down. The Schula sang on and eventually there was nothing to do but take his whistle from his pouch, apply his dry lips and join the music. They could, at least, hear one another clearly at last.

He waited until she finished her song, then played one he'd often heard her sing. The Schula joined in at the second phrase, soaring over the notes he played, curling round them until, transported, Elmo lost the beat. She stopped abruptly, with a shriek of displeasure.

After awhile she sang again and he ventured his whistle into the web of tones cautiously, exercising more discretion. He played with closed eyes and didn't notice that, as the angle of the sun steepened, the mirages around the cliff face dissipated, and where there had been a sheer wall of impassable glass, the true lay of the face revealed itself, stepping from beneath its deceptive curtain.



The three hundred foot drop was a mirage! The beach was a mere stroll away. He covered the ten foot drop to the next ledge in a joyous leap, plunging into a bush of daisies soft as feathers.

A spray of mist collected by the breeze from the cataracts of Terrapin promised quenching of his thirst and the nearness of song the sating of his heart's desire. The stream of Schula melody coursed liquidly and along it he flowed, exultant, to the beach.





Chapter Three



Ballad of the Doubly Drowned



One further minor mirage cleared as Elmo sped to the beach. The short run downhill was steeper than it looked. Unable to brake his momentum, the boy charged past the Schula and half way to the surf before losing his footing.

Startled, the Schula's pitch wavered. She stopped mid-note and glanced briefly at the offending projectile. Seeing only an insignificant boy, about her own size, she recovered her composure and sang on, just as though no intruder had dropped out of the sky to disturb her.

Elmo recovered and approached the Schula's stone, politely awaiting the song's end to introduce himself. He'd heard this ballad before but did not remember it being so lengthy. When the Schula came to the last verse, she began another song with no break between; one unknown to him.

Though the new tune was a good one, the boy became more and more distressed at receiving such casual treatment after his arduous descent. Fatigue and thirst provoked further irritation but there was nothing to do for it but wait politely while the Schula sang verse after verse. Elmo's debut had been disastrous and he didn't want to compound it by interrupting the maiden or insulting her by wandering off in search of a drink before introducing himself.





Barren beats my broken heart

And listless rolls my eye

Life has fled, the better part,

And left me here to die



A bird upon yon elder bough

Brought news of you to me

Your coming death he did avow

And bade me visit thee



William, sweet William

I heard me not your plea

Vain and proud I would not come

You died of love for me

I will tie a lover's knot

That none shall ever loose

Of roses, vine and bergamot

I'll plait myself a noose



Around my throat I'll wear it

As from yon elder bough . . .





"Aren't you clumsy? Where did you come from?" demanded the Schula in mid-phrase, suddenly riveting Elmo with eyes of brilliant blue.

"Up there, where the clouds are," said Elmo, pointing to the Giant's Harp wreathed in morning mist.

"Are you hot?"

"Hot?" he replied, a drop of sweat dangling from the tip of his nose, "Not very."

The Schula turned from the boy and continued her tune, picking up the beat of the tale where she'd left off.



Despite thirst and confusion Elmo was astonished by the glamour of the Schula. Some of the girls of Terrapin were fetching enough, but glamour of this sort was unknown in Terrapin, whose rural necessities produced a species of female more prized for strength and durability than comeliness.

Nor had Elmo seen a female half clad before. The Schula wore only an unconcealing skirt of braided fibers. Apple round breasts peeked through cascading tawny locks, making the young lad nervous. He tried to avert his eyes, but could not. The Schula gave no indication of minding. Elmo might just as well not have been there at all. He had a curious feeling of invisibility which was not unpleasurable.

Elmo hit on the ploy of offering the sack of lures he'd so carefully selected. That might get a response. He untied the pouch from his belt and dangled it by the thong. But the Schula was not to be diverted from her song a second time. Her brilliant blue eyes gazed right through him.



As the Schula sang, mirages formed of forest, fen and foreign soil. A honey-colored shaft of light shot through with bands of black seemed to roll and coil above her head as the sunlit beach became a stage for another, darker, time and place. Then, the Schula herself dissolved into the play of mirage, until only her eyes and voice remained.



Elmo stood stupidly, dangling the lure, a shadow transfixed, until at long last, the heroine of the song hanged herself by her garland while the messenger thrush celebrated the definitive union of the star-crossed lovers in death.

The mirage dissolved slowly and, through it, the lightly webbed hand of the Schula extended. Elmo gave her the sack. He'd intended to parcel it out an item at a time, but. . . it wasn't really his to decide.

Her gaze once more included him for a moment, which was all the thanks he was to receive. She studied his face for a perplexed moment, then turned her eyes to the gift. Thick coils of bronze hair hid her face as she peered into the sack. Elmo could not tell whether she was surprised, delighted or even somewhat pleased by its contents.

Whatever her expression, by the time she finished eating the sugar, admiring herself in the mirror and running the whale bone brush through her hair a few strokes, it could not be read.

Sufficiently groomed, she tossed the toiletry gifts to the sand and made two fists which she held before one eye in the attitude of a spyglass. Elmo proffered the instrument, which she eagerly snatched and put to her eye, wrong side to, lens trained on her foot. Startled by the unexpected change of perspective, the Schula dropped the spyglass onto her rock. The lens cracked. Elmo snatched it up and put it quickly to his eye to check the damage. A hairline fracture. Ro would be furious. The boy realized that now he could never return. A lump rose in his throat as he turned the glass on the Schula who had begun to walk down the beach.

The fissure in the lens created an optic flame which surrounded the Schula's head like a nimbus, but it was her swaying stride and claspable waist that stirred Elmo's attention. He wiped a drop of sudden sweat from his nose and followed her down the beach.

The Schula found another rock to adorn, tossed her hair, yawned and then demanded:

"Who are you and why do you pursue me?"

"Elmo. And I like your singing. Who are you?"

"E," she touched her finger to her chin and drew a straight line to her navel, ending with a finger snap.

"E?"

"Sa!" She made a sad face and buried it in her hands as though grieved. "Aeeeii ... Sah!" Then she inquired: "What is that?"

"It's a spyglass, it makes things come up close, if you look in the right side. Did you see me watching you from above?" She nodded.

"Mirror."

"Spyglass," he corrected.

"Mirror!" she replied decisively, turned away and began singing.



Suddenly Elmo's thirst would allow no further distraction. He turned his back upon the lady of the rock and dogtrotted a few hundred yards to where a waterfall splashed from the cliff, buried his face in its pool, and drank his fill several times over. A sharp cramp ended his greedy guzzle. He would have howled in pain were he not choking on the last swallow. He gagged ... panting and coughing at the same time, bent double with pain.

Great as was his distress, he refused to cry aloud within hearing of the Schula, whose back was turned to him. He assumed that any show of weakness would doom all further attempts to make friends with the imperious creature. He was probably right.

Wondering why the boy, who obviously fancied her, had suddenly stopped paying courting, the Schula slyly turned her head to discover, by peripheral vision, the cause of her abandonment. Had Elmo accepted disdain at face value and gone away? Ah, no. He was lying by the pool. But how could he nap in her presence? ...and during her song!

Elmo had stopped writhing by this time. Still rigid, he tried to melt the cramp by will power, making it no better and no worse, for he had none.

Waiting several minutes to detect any sign of artifice in Elmo's posture, the Schula's vanity and curiosity wrestled within her charming bosom. Aggravation stirred toward this male creature who was apparently less susceptible to her charm than she would have expected.

Cheeks aflame, her will, for the moment, was not her own.



The Schula approached Elmo and prodded him with her toe. The cramp was beginning to subside, but he lay very still, concentrating, confident that his will was working a wonder. She prodded him again. This time he managed to look up. Even though she broke his concentration, the cramp continued to relax, proving that will, once set in motion, works wonders on its own.

He looked up to a smiling face. "Isa" she said, pointing to herself. Elmo heard the note of surrender in the simple enunciation of her name, but it didn't signify much to him, filtered as it was through the nausea of his diminishing cramp and he made no reply.

This lack of response to her friendly tone was so unexpected that the Schula's previous aggravation kindled to rage. She fell to keening tones of such distress that Elmo was moved despite his misery, though not to physical motion. Impassioned Isa, able no longer to stand the pain of slight, threw herself on the sand and began thrashing.

The cramp suddenly released its hold on Elmo, who sat up and looked in amazement at the actions of the Schula. So bitter was the pain of apparent rejection, the Schula didn't notice the change in the boy. He tried to stand but the Schula grabbed his leg, fearing that he intended to flee. Her small fingers were stronger than they appeared and the grip hurt. As Elmo tried to pull away, she clenched more desperately. A wave splashed far into shore; a finger of ocean rushed directly to their spot and lingered for a moment pointing straight at them.

"Hey, that hurts! Let go! I'm not going anywhere..."

Isa let go her grasp and buried her face in her hands, shamed by her foolish actions. The boy had no idea what to do next and sat thoroughly confused. The Schula composed herself and gave the boy the last piece of sugar candy in the pouch. He accepted it and put it in his mouth. A wave crashed and applauded. Face was restored.

Three more Schulas appeared far down the beach, laughing and chattering as they came closer. They darted in and out of the surf, lacing their babble with chirps of musical phrases. The trio settled on a rock and struck up a harmony.





When the wind rolls on the ocean

When the sun shines on the sand

When clouds reach from the sky above

And take me by the hand . . .





Elmo turned from Isa to watch the pretty Schulas and listen to their tune, but Isa gently took his hand and led him further up the beach, away from them.

"They sing like gulls. It hurts my ears."

"They aren't as good as you, but it's a pretty song."

"A silly song with a silly story, though you can't tell from the way they mumble it."

"I know the song, I've heard you sing it. Or I think it was you."

"I sang it once, that's so, but only because I was sick with poisoned clams and it expressed my pain."



A bubble surged from the subaquatic pits which kept the local sea warm as bath water, colors streaming over its surface in broad horizontal bands. A flock of seagulls settled on it, crowding together at the top so as not to slip down the sides. Isa led Elmo around a fold of the cliff, far enough down the beach for the surf to hush the rival Schulas. She chose a rock to adorn, held both of his hands, and began singing a song calculated to demonstrate, convincingly, her easy superiority over her silly sister Schulas and charm their memory out of his ears.

The Schula sang, in minor mode with little ornament, a mournful ballad, sparse of melody, with many, many, verses. As she sang, it seemed, the sea crept closer to listen:





A sailor who perished at sea,

Able a man as ever was found,

Drifted down to the Garden of Po

God of the sea - king of the drowned



All the blooms of the garden

From tangles of seaweed grew

Eyes rolled up in eternal dream

A cheerless and ghastly crew



Their hair and hands floated upward

As though they sought to flee

But none had ever escaped from Po

And his garden beneath the sea



Those who die on shipboard

Are subject to other fates

But those who drown inside the sea

Sink through these garden gates



A Schula who loved this sailor

Sweet daughter of Po and Ist

Begged her father to spare the man

"Surely one flower will never be missed"



Full of the dead his garden grew

The rotten ripe fruit of the sea

She begged, pleaded, and softened the heart

Of the God whose favorite was she



Often she sang on the sailor's watch

To hurry the night away

He on the quarter-deck, she on the waves

Who vanished at break of day



The face of the maid who sang to him

The sailor never had seen

At hint of dawn she disappeared

Beneath the ocean's green



The sailor was married, this she knew

The Schulas know many things

Married to one to whom he was true

As the Schula to songs she sings



And thus her love was pure

And thus her love was true

She didn't divide his loyalties

With a flash of her eyes of blue



The god relented but cautioned her

Since never had such been done:

For seven years the sailor might live

But return when the time was run



For upon his brow the mark of the drowned

Was set and would there remain

No other kingdom of death may hold

A soul that the sea had claimed



He could not die in battle or bed

Nor perish in fire nor frost

And though a sword should pierce his heart

His life could not be lost



The sailor returned to his family

And turned his back on the sea

Though at night he went to the water

Where the Schula would oftimes be



And though he never saw her face

He loved in his heart her song

He thought of her as a childlike thing

But in this he was halfway wrong



For the Schula was a woman

Of beauty surpassingly rare

Waist slender as two hands round

And hips full round to bear



Lovely was she as starlight

Pale was she as the moon

Blue her eyes as sunlit sea

In the bright shining afternoon



Any braw man would love her

Of this she was quite aware

And so she kept to cover

Her face and her golden hair



Seven years passed agreeably

The sons of the sailor grew

Strong young lads with their father's face

Handsome young men and true



The eve of the day agreed upon

The date that his soul was due

The sailor went down to the beach at night

In hopes of a song or two



The Schula showed herself to him

By light of a crescent moon

And told his fate in words of woe

Soft spoken, no more the tune



"Now hast thou laid thine eyes on me

Who concealed myself with cause

That thou might love thine wife, not me,

And honor thy marriage vows



"But now thou must away with me

To the garden of drownded men

Thou wert delivered but by my pleas

Who must fetch you back again"



"I know full well that doom resides

Within this heart of mine,

Although I knew not what the cause

Nor how that doom would shine."



This the sailor said to her

But would not take her hand

"Let thy father come to me,

For I'll not leave the land!"



And yet his heart was smitten,

Divided quite in twain

As though it had been written

That the price of love is pain.



His wife, the joy of his eye,

Now looked to him so plain

Beside the glowing Schula

Who came for him in vain



Each by each the days grew cold

Though it were late in Spring

Listless lapped the gray, cold waves

Where Schulas did not sing



Each by each his sons went down

In ships to ply their trade

His eldest fell in battle

To a round of cannonade.



This stroke felled the sailor's wife

Whom lack of love had sallowed

Both were laid in Fiddler's Green

And soon a third grave followed.



The second son fell from a mast

And all his bones were broken

Still the sailor would not heed

The words that had been spoken



Full well he knew a curse was laid

Yet naught to him prevailed

So stricken by the Schula's charms

Was he that reason failed



His youngest son was lost at sea

And still the sailor kept

Both his feet upon dry land

And not a tear he wept.



He waited by the beach each night

In hopes to hear the sound

Of his beloved's singing voice

One night she washed up drowned



He roared and ranted at the sea

He tore his clothes and cursed

At length he knelt him down to pray

Where angry breakers burst



"O god of the ocean, king of the waves

And all who inhabit the deep

I would strike a bargain with thee

To return to thy ghastly keep"



Wind upon wind and wave upon wave

And lightning gave him reply:

"Tell me sailor, the terms you seek

And prepare yourself to die!"



"Thou has destroyed the life I had,

I require no further days -

But this, thy daughter, I thee implore,

From the depths of the dead to raise!"



"Fling thyself from the uppermost rock

Of the ridge abutting the sea

And I will deliver my daughter's life,

Though it do no good to thee!"



The sailor leapt over the cliff to doom,

The breakers devoured him whole

Tides delivered him to the home

Awaiting his bloodstained soul



The Schula woke from the dream of death

And found what had come to pass,

Demanded of Po her stolen death,

Which he granted, with grief, alas



For though the granting of life was his,

A power he'd come to rue

It lay not in his power to refuse

A death which was rightly due



Returned to the rapture of the drowned,

A heaven of silt and slime

Her body sought the sailor's,

In the garden they intertwined



At the garden gate the lovers float

To welcome the newly dead

With silver fishes in their throats

And eyes turned back in their heads





The grim ballad issued like a golden tendril from Isa's lips, twining about itself to form a braid of narrative and, when finished, shivered into pinpricks of light and vanished. Seeing the effect of her song upon her listener, Isa regained all of her former self-possession and was only too ready to refuse when he begged to hear another.



The other Schulas had come up the beach to hear the Ballad of the Doubly Drowned and when it was done, rushed out to the waves to sport around the sand pit bubble and chase their reflections. Isa sprang from her rock and ran after them, slipping like a hand into the glove of the sleek surf. She emerged four hundred yards out, shooting straight up from the water, within the bubble, beckoning to Elmo, who was quick to follow, stripping down to his undergarment and diving into the sea for the first time in his life, finding the warm saltwater more inviting and buoyant than the cold creeks of Terrapin.

Emerging inside the bubble, he was astounded. There was no sensation of rising within a confined space. The perspective was, instead, one of colossal sky overhead. The effect of the sunlight shining through the shifting bands of color was exhilarating. A flood of lemon yellow washed away by a rain of aquamarine greeted his arrival.

Isa smiled, treading water with so little effort she seemed to stand still, while Elmo splashed like the river trained swimmer he was. Isa again began to sing.

This time she sang no story or melody, but sustained a high, ringing pitch. Gradually she let the note warble and vibrate, producing overtones which ascended the harmonic ladder to the ceiling of audibility. The colors and patterns of the sky-bubble shifted and changed hue in response to her tonal commands. A clear patch formed in the center of the hemisphere. Isa directed her tone at the center of this patch, tightening the vibration until the note she held was overshadowed in volume by the clear, ringing overtone it produced, growing in intensity until the bubble suddenly shattered.

Isa dove beneath the water before the fragments touched them, pulling Elmo with her. He was so startled he lost his air, struggling below the surface with empty lungs. Isa drew him to her, placed her lips upon his and gave him half her air in a carefully measured kiss while a boy on a kite sailed high over their heads from the steps of the Giant's Harp.



During this time in Terrapin, the inhabitants were treated to a variety of new tunes by the Schula. Elmo taught her some of the songs of the nomadic Roughs, as learned from old Aor, master of kites. Elmo played the tunes on his whistle, for he had no voice to sing, and recited the verses to Isa, who learned them perfectly first time through, giving new weight to the ancient litanies by her sonorous tone and delicacy of ornament.

Her favorite, the "Palanitos" was a lament of eye stinging sadness, supposedly in the ancient tongue of Terrapin, relating the suffering of a kidnapped virgin in the home of a cruel giant:





Mishwallala lia lo, liolai,

Shambala, Intoila, liolai-arou

Elio septe Intoila,

Shalla Mishwalla, lia lo, lio lai, lialoo





When she sang it for the first time, the shaggy heads of some Roughs, that evening passing through Terrapin, appeared on the lower terrace of the Giant's Harp, enraptured by the transformation of the favorite tale. She watched them through the cracked spyglass as she sang. The sea was quiet as sun set and after awhile the Roughs could not help but bawl along on the refrain, intensifying the music until it seemed the lowering disc of sun paused a bit, wanting to hear the end, before slipping behind the rim of the bay.





Chapter Four



The Wind of Ist



Isa, supine on the beach, watched her toes through the wrong end of the spyglass as the water rushed over them and retreated, carving furrows beneath her heels. She suddenly turned the glass on Elmo, whose eyes she could feel washing over her with an undertow of their own. He looked away quickly. Why, she wondered, did he blush so when she caught him staring at her body?

The Schula smiled, sat up, returned her gaze to the sea, shifting so her profile was displayed, arranging her cloak of tawny hair to the best advantage of her charms. She felt his eyes return like an arrow to its target as soon as she'd looked away.

Elmo carved at a thick reed with his jack knife, intending to make a bass flute, but his attention was so distracted by the Schula that the blade slipped and drew blood. He threw both tool and reed to the sand, angrily, and sucked at the finger.

A shadow fell over him and when he looked up, Isa was standing there, hair billowing in the breeze.

"What have you done to yourself?" she scolded. He held up the gashed finger and she took his hand. The proximity of her bewildering femininity was too much for Elmo. Finding nowhere to avert his eyes, he closed them. He felt the lick of her tongue on the gash, lapping away the blood. Then she took the finger in her mouth, held it there, rolling her tongue around the injured member. Elmo flushed to the roots of his hair and quickly placed his free hand over his lap in a gesture of concealment which Isa, eyes wide open, did not fail to mark.

For fully five minutes she ministered to the finger and, when she was done, there was no trace of cut nor blood, just a pleasurable tingle in the restored digit.

Elmo was too flustered by the Schula's nearness to fully appreciate the small miracle. When he could safely stand, he did, ambling down to the surf. Isa remained where she stood, unable to fathom the boy's shyness. She had never seen such physical reticence before. She vaguely understood it didn't imply rejection, but beyond that it made no sense.



The Schulian culture, nine-tenths female, was not much concerned with clothing. Denizens of temperate beaches, music was their whole concern, seafood being plentiful and makeshift shelter, from wind, rain or high tide, easy to find on the cliff base where thickets grew.

Obeying the Schulian adage "when in doubt, sing" Isa began an ancient air:





When mighty Terrapin was young

And stars were yet to shine,

Before a song was ever sung

Nor ocean flowed with brine,



'Pon his back he brought the work

Of Heaven's gods to berth

Across an endless sea of murk

And built the garden Earth.



Star by star and sea by sea,

In Heaven's workshop wrought

To the world transported he,

And all the mountains brought



To rise above the firmament

He'd built of straw and sand,

Twice a thousand years were spent

To build this place to stand



Between the sky and emptiness

He carted grit and soil

Without a moment's pause to rest

from his appointed toil





While the Schula sang, Elmo went for a walk along the beach. Lovely as the day, nice as the song, he felt a rising irritation. Something was demanded of him by Isa, but what was not clear to him. He felt ashamed that he could hardly keep his eyes off her and more so since she caught him at it so often. What must she think of him?

He didn't understand the nature of this attraction. He'd certainly been drawn to girls before, but this was different. Red haired Echo had excited a certain response in him, as had Lo, but it was mild and passing. And, of course, they were always fully clothed, even modest in their dress. Besides, it was their faces that attracted him, not their unripened bodies.

Of matters physiological, his education was lacking. Certainly his father, Ro, would never speak of such things. And Lit, his teacher, had nothing to say on the matter, though he'd promised to tell Elmo certain things when the time was right, knowing Ro would simply postpone the task until it was too late to make any difference.

As for gutter education, Elmo had small opportunity. His few friends knew as little as he. The primness of the local moral code was strong and binding. Elmo had heard a thing or two about how babies were conceived, but he didn't believe it. It sounded too far-fetched; the fantasies of dirty minds.

He believed his feeling for the Schula to be more elevated than all that. Her great beauty and wonderful singing touched him deeply. Yet, it seemed, in her actual presence, the song faded away under the urge to perform something indefinite, something undefined but forbidden, upon her sweet ripe person.

He felt sure she could read his mind. The feeling was so pronounced it must be apparent from a hundred paces. Otherwise, why would she suddenly turn and gaze at him with that knowing smirk on her face? And, knowing, why did she torment him as she had just done, healing his wound in such a lascivious fashion, her small skirt of reeds brushing his face, her aggravating breasts visible even through his closed eyelids? It was too much to bear! Her behavior was . . . scandalous!

The song of ancient times rolled on the breeze. It seemed the Schula was singing in his ear, following him. She was impossible to escape.





On Terrapin the gods did ride

To stir the sea of mud

To froth it to a foaming tide

And quicken it with blood



Each god opened up a vein

And let the blood flow in

From it living creatures came

Where none were to begin



Yu sent down the heat of sun

To bake the sediment

Until at last the deed was done

The finished firmament



T'was then all things were ferried

To be set upon the land

Across the abyss carried

All the gods had made by hand,



Upon the back of Terrapin

Till all was brought at last

Each thing found a place therein

Then Terrapin slept fast



A thousand years he rested

Beside a silver stream

Where gentle billows crested

In a sleep bereft of dream.





Elmo sat down on a rock and continued to carve at his bass flute, scraping away a spot of dried blood, suddenly realizing the strangeness of the healing process whose pleasurable sensation had turned his thoughts from the sweet simplicity of an innocent act to enflaming images. That he was bad, he had no doubt. That the Schula provoked this badness was also beyond denial.

Isa's melodious discourse eased his apprehension, but only somewhat, as she wove the tale of Earth's creation.





While he slept, upon a loom

The gods were set to weaving

A giant cloth as black as doom,

As dark as widow's grieving.



They sprinkled it with bits of light

They chipped from off the sun,

Wove in comet tails of white,

And threads of dawn were spun.



When done, they woke old Terrapin

To endless daylight bright

And bade him take one end within

His jaws and hold it tight



They bade him take it to the world

And cloak the sun from sight

And as he swam, the cloth unfurled

And thus was born the night.





Elmo knew the story well, from the lips of Aeoui, the storyteller. For the next thousand years Terrapin delivered these and all manner of things that are now to be found. There was this difference in his labor now: he slept at night, so that not everything the gods conceived and made was, in the end, delivered. Much remains in their workshops. The two humans the gods had fashioned became restless and vowed it was good enough for them just as it stood and gave the gods no peace until they had their way.



Terrapin carried all the creatures the Gods had fashioned, forty at a time, one trip a day for forty days until all had been delivered. He was summoned then to the City of Eagles to be rewarded for his toil. A great banquet was given in his honor.

Weary from his labor, he fell asleep after drinking the first glass of wine from the first pressing of the first grapes. When he awoke, another thousand years had passed and men had built their towns and villages. They had learned all the arts the gods had given them to know, but they did not know how to dream. Of dreams the gods knew nothing.

Sleeping in the City of Eagles, Terrapin invented dreams, that sleep might be the sounder. He made enough to spare and when he woke he went back to Earth and wandered from place to place, leaving a portion of dreams in each place he visited, some in cliffs and some in forests, some on mountain peaks, wherever someone might chance to fall asleep. When he reached the West, many dreams remained. He left some on the beach and the rest on the desert, which became mirages.



Elmo paid scant attention to the singing of the familiar tale. He was too disturbed by the singer. He had not, he said to himself, come down here to be ignored. The Schula had ignored him from the start . . . when she wasn't throwing herself at him. Do her good to see less of him for awhile, maybe she'd . . .

No way to get out of here, or he'd take it, the way he felt at the moment. It would take a week or two to climb back up the cliff, if it could be done at all. There was no ducking in and out of the Beach of Mirages.



Isa, on the other hand, wondered why Elmo expected her to make all the moves. Certainly he was interested. And company was company. There were no men of her scarce race available. The few Schulos there were had more willing women at their beck and call than they could handle, so that they grew soft and stupid to a man. Even Elmo looked good next to them. Maybe she wasn't good enough for him? He said he was an astronomer and made maps of the stars when he was home. It sounded like a lie, but he talked knowledgeably about ecliptics, orbits and other boring things. She would have preferred to converse, but he tended to speak at, rather than with, her.

"What happened after Yu found Terrapin when he came down to Earth to get away from Ist? I fell asleep on the cliff before I heard the end," said Elmo, just as though he didn't already know the story. It seemed like a good thing to say at the time. Give her some of her own back.

"Then you heard all I sang. I grew tired and slept myself."

"Tell me the rest. There's nothing else to do down here."

Isa flushed, turned quickly away and, after a moment, began to sing. It is the Schula's way to sing when perplexed.

As the song unfolded, the grayness of the day passed with a brief, warm rain and a rainbow arched to touch its own reflection on the calm swells, forming a perfect circle. A mirage of the Giant's Harp wavered within.





When first Yu came to Terrapin

He came not in fine array

He wore a body black and thin,

A pilgrim of the way



Ten thousand years unto the day

From when the world was made

The roiling mud turned into clay

And trees brought down for shade



Ten thousand years, no more nor less,

The sun rolled 'round the Earth

Before the god came to the West

To this, our place of birth.



And here he met the terrapin

Beloved first creation

Before the beasts on wing or fin

Before the world's foundation



Before the gods themselves he wrought

This friend to call his own

And none can know the joyful thought

"No more to be alone"



Deep within the desert near

A secret, hidden spring

The creature slept from year to year

Woke seldom but to sing



His mournful voice made warriors sleep

All argument to cease

Eyes were dried that endless weep

Each heart was given peace



For seven years the song would roll

Throughout the day and night

Until the country, healed in soul

Admitted Heaven's light



And in this way, the Terrapin

Preserved the human race

And then he went to sleep again

And left them to their fates



And in his song he spoke to Yu

Of everything on Earth,

All that happened, old and new

From the moment of its birth



Of heroes and misbegotten,

Of matters great and small

Nothing was forgotten

Old Terrapin told all



And at the finish of the tales

The long and ancient list

Yu told of his own travails,

With the demi-goddess Ist



The Terrapin was half-amused

And half-perturbed at this

His counsel never was refused

He cautioned thus of Ist:



Only half a god is she

For Earth her nature yearns

Send the wayward one to me

The things of Earth to learn



I'll teach her of the land and sea

And all that swim within

Of human hearts' complexity,

Of duty, rank and kin



Of sacrament and sacrifice

Of poverty and need

Of honesty and artifice

Of treachery and greed



Of this and every other thing

Of scripture and of song

Of changes that the seasons bring,

Why Winter nights are long



When all has been revealed to her

When every art is learned

When nothing is concealed from her

And charity discerned



I'll loose her from my tutelage

And send her home to thee

Freed by reason from her rage

And ask one boon for me -



That I may quit this endless round

That holds no joy for me

And rest in dreamless sleep profound

For all eternity





Yu's reply was lost on Elmo, who snored loudly in the brilliant sunshine. He dozed till sunset. Isa sat on the rock for a long while, watching him through the wrong end of the spyglass.

When she had seen all she wished to see, Isa tossed the spyglass alongside the sleeping boy. "Mirror," she said decisively, left the rock and waded out past the small frothing breakers. Facing shore, she threw her right hand over her head and sprang lightly, shaping her back to the curve of the wave as it touched, melting into the curl, whirled round once and slipped from sight.



Elmo awoke at sunset, alone. He wasn't disturbed. Isa likely had gone for fish to vary their clam and berry diet. No sun remained to start a fire with his spyglass lens. He noticed disapprovingly that the objective lens was face down in the sand. Carelessness! He examined for scratches and, though it was dark, thought he saw some.

Isa enjoyed fires, approached them with awe, tried to dissuade him when he extinguished one. He argued that driftwood was scarce and that he'd spent an hour a day for the last two weeks keeping the fire supplied. Isa ate her clams raw and said she didn't care if they had a fire or not, but that it seemed a shame to put one out when you had one.

Since Elmo created the fire by focusing a tiny image of the sun, she reasoned a bit of the sun itself visited them and should be treated respectfully. Elmo couldn't truthfully deny that this was so, but didn't see what difference it made considering that it couldn't be used up, although the wood could.

Elmo said he always damped fires at home, and she replied that it showed what kind of home he came from; "If all the people in Terrapin are like that, it's no wonder you ran off."

Not wishing to strengthen an already incorrect impression, Elmo admitted exaggerating, hoping to end the absurd dispute. When she demanded to know why he had lied, he said in exasperation, "To tease a silly girl!"

He took the whistle from his pouch and tried the melody Isa had been chanting earlier. That song about night being a bolt of dark cloth. She probably believed it. Were the stars just holes in the cloth letting spots of daylight through, in her view? Or were they jewels sewn on by the gods? Ro and he knew they were something else entirely.

No, stars were not holes in the fabric; he saw it confirmed as one of them dropped from the sky and fell at such an angle a dreamy observer might think it landed down beach. Elmo suddenly jumped up and ran as hard as he could, outspeeding his frustration, searching for the fallen star. But no bright thing from celestial heights was to be found, only more sand.

Down he flopped panting. He decided to spend the night right where he was and dug a pit for shelter, laying a few sticks of driftwood on top and covering them with fronds of seaweed over which he strewed handfuls of warm sand. It was snug and cozy. Only his head protruded.

If Isa missed him, it served her right. She might learn to announce her goings. It was good to be utterly alone for once in two weeks. She watched him like an insect under glass. Still, it was lonely on this vast beach without company. Isa was at least that and they had enough fun to keep him from dwelling on the impossible ascent home, but if she was going to start running off without warning, that was a different matter.

She should at least consider his feelings. What if he were worried that she'd drowned? Was he? He thought about it and wondered if he should be. He wasn't, but what if he was? She wouldn't care any more than she cared for the spyglass she tossed so offhandedly in the sand. She didn't think about anyone but herself. That's what made her so boring. She'd liked the Rough songs but did she thank him for teaching them to her? No, and if he missed a beat or played a jarring note on the whistle while accompanying her, she always stopped cold. Sometimes she refused to finish the song and if he showed any sign of displeasure she just might not sing the rest of the day.



Another star fell, but so far away it must have landed across the ocean, over in that place he used to see when he went up on Aor's kite. Echo had told him about it and when he looked for it he thought he did see it, the golden lily fields out past where the giant snakes stuck their heads up over the horizon.

Echo was a funny girl. You could get her to believe anything, but she would do the same to you if you weren't careful. She mixed made-up facts with things that might be true until there was no way of telling.

His thoughts turned more and more to home - the place, people and ways he knew. He wondered whatever had happened to Lo after Lit died. Not all that sorry to see her go, she was nothing but a tease, though he liked her well enough. She thought she knew everything. Isa was a tease too, but in a different way. She didn't know anything at all. Her songs had an answer for everything, but she didn't think for herself. They were just words to her, something to string a melody on. Stupid. Time to think about climbing home. The ocean murmured gently and he fell asleep wondering if he should take some clams back to Terrapin.



Elmo dreamed he walked a black sand beach where waves of milk splashed ashore. All he saw was black and white, seabirds, sky, horizon. He walked the sand for hours, naked, shivering, shrill of cicada and hush of white waves breaking, wind hard but inaudible.



About to die, and soon, he knew he must, he saw a patch of color some distance down the beach. His spirit revived. Drawing closer, the patch took the appearance of a woman. Coming closer yet, he realized the woman was several times his height. The colossus was a statue of Isa. As he gaped, her four arms began moving, jointlessly, serpent like.

Six-breasted, she glittered with silver scales. A rumble issued from her parted lips. Each hand held an item of menace: whip, torch, hatchet and trident. Her breasts were tipped with lidless staring eyeballs and her hair stood straight away from her head. Her expression was severe, the eyes of her head were coals of blue fire.

As he stared in fearful wonder, Elmo became painfully aware of his nakedness, but did not try to hide it. It was beyond hiding. A powerful current of desire enflamed and enlarged him until he felt near to exploding.

All the eyes of the statue were fixed upon this flagrant protrusion. They grew ever brighter and more menacing as the member engorged to heroic proportions. . . and then he did burst, splattering the legs of the statue with wave after wave of crimson seed. It ran down her legs and puddled at her feet, staining them .

Eight eyes riveted on him, as though demanding explanation, he hung his head, exhausted and detumescent. There was a long moment of silence. The cicada stopped shrilling. The white waves were silent. Then slowly, the sound of the wind became audible, faint at first, gradually ascending to a deafening roar. From the motionless lips of the statue issued a terrifying hiss, followed by strange words:

"Sagatha Ka!" she raised the hatchet, and, with a sudden accurate swing, emasculated him. The severed part fell to the ground and exploded in blue smoke.

"Sagatha Ta!" thundered Isa, and thrust the torch in his face, burning away his youth, leaving his face ancient.

"Sagatha Ha!" she roared, and from the eyes of her breasts flashed rays of dark light which entered his own eyes, destroying all but hateful memories.

"Sagatha Va!" The whip lashed out and the tongue crosshatched his flesh. At the center of each wound erupted a stinging boil.

"Sagatha Pa!" her mouth spewed dark blue blood upon him. All of his senses produced, of themselves, whatever degree of light, taste, sound or touch was least bearable to them: blinding lights, screaming, tintinnabulation, foul taste, intense heat, stinging, clawing, slapping.

"Sagatha Sa!" She pronounce the words with a voice like the swarming of hornets and pierced his heart with her trident. The flesh of pain cracked, shattered and fell away in dust. All evidence of mortality vanished and he stood in his eternal form, filled with blue radiance.

"Eula Bondi," concluded Isa, in a voice melodious and soothing, as she drew him toward her with a magnetic force, allowing him to flow through the portals of her monolithic thighs and out the other side, into a garden of similar blue spirit beings. Looking back, he saw her standing tall as the pillars of the Giant's Harp, staring distantly toward the land of wakefulness.

Her feet rested upon an immense domed shell with octagonal markings, as of a tortoise. She had only two arms now. Her right was raised high, her left held a fan of gleaming coral. Each strand of her hair floated independently and electrically, filling the air with a crackling hum. Something mysterious and terrifying could be felt gathering in the air.

He suddenly fled down the dilating iris of a tunnel which opened in empty space, leading to a dreamscape of confused, disordered fantasies where he languished until morning.



The boy awoke to the sound of squabbling gulls, worried. He arose, wrecking the sand and seaweed cocoon, and ran back to his familiar stretch of beach. It was so early the tide lapped at the foot of the rock where Isa usually lolled. She was nowhere to be seen. A group of other Schulas sat close to the cliff, one crooned a disquieting lament:





My love lies bleeding on a rock

The rock lies in the sea

Rise you waves and crack the rock

Return my love to me



Return my love, though cold and dead

His body drained of blood

That I may take him to my bed

Return him on your flood





One Schula nursed a child. She met his glance but looked away quickly as Elmo approached. She was pretty, not markedly favored like Isa, but lovely enough to be the prettiest girl in Terrapin. Next to Lo. Or maybe Echo, who was beautiful without being pretty. Crimson as sunset, pale as snow. Well, not really but that sounded nice. She was ruddy enough to support her freckles, so Ro had said.

A grandfather was eating clams as he gathered them from beneath the wet sand of the shore, opening them with an iron tool he wore on a seaweed thong around his neck. The old Schulo's one tool did many things. He could hurl it with great accuracy at a target, it was both hammer and drill, made a good broth spoon, and was useful for starting fires when struck against a piece of flint into a handful of sagebrush tinder.



The mother sang as she suckled the child:





Everything out of the sea is salt

And all of the sea is brine

That thou art gone is nobody's fault

Nay, nobody's fault but mine





Though the mother, pouring melody and milk into the tale of abandonment, ignored Elmo, the grandfather nodded as he sat down to listen and pry open clams. Only the infant seemed curious, her violet eyes following Elmo's every motion.





Everything out of the sea is salt

Salt are these tears of mine

That I am alone is nobody's fault

Nobody's fault but thine



Salt, sand, coral and brine

Will O'the Wisp in the wind

More have I been sinned against

Than ever I thought to sin





Careless of offending the Schula at song, Elmo asked the old man if he'd seen Isa but got no reply. When he was rude enough to ask a second time, the song stopped, the family arose in a body and stalked into the frothy tide, the infant bobbling easily behind. A wasp then stung him and a gull delivered a carefully aimed load on his head. The wind seemed to chuckle. It's laughter was low and feminine.



Elmo spent the time until mid-day sulking on the sand. His irritation at Isa began to give way to that strange new sense of longing she raised in him. Justifying and pardoning her, he remembered the attention she had shown him: the half lung full of air when he was struggling beneath the shattered sea dome, the wonderful singing which even the elements gathered to hear, the jealousy around other Schulas, the healing of his finger which had awakened such disturbing and unusual thoughts.

Thoughts of this led to another round of irritation. Isa could desert him easily enough, but it wasn't possible to desert her in turn. This seemed an unfair situation that she was taking advantage of. She must be very angry. He tried to remember if he'd done anything to cause it. Couldn't think of anything. Maybe she was just bored with him. She was pretty boring herself, always brushing her blond, or was it brown, hair. And staring at him with those questioning blue (or were they green?) eyes.

He found it inexplicably difficult to remember her face. When he almost pieced it together, an eye, an ear, a feature at a time, the image dissolved to be replaced by wrathful Isa of the dream . . . imponderable Isa of the colossus.



There was really nothing to do but fall asleep, which Elmo did. He slept until dusk, awakened by the hiss of the sun entering the waves. Loneliness settled with all its weight. It deepened with fading day until, night come, it was complete. He sat on Isa's rock and, to his own amazement, wept.

When there was no more to weep, he plodded to the cliff and considered, by moonlight, the path by which he'd come.

He climbed to where the mirages had parted two weeks before, revealing the jut of rock from which he'd made his final leap. He sat beneath a sail leaf tree. The leaves of this tree would make a good ground cloth should he decide to camp here. And they would do for blankets. He'd need them. A rising North wind rippled the leaves.



The surf churned and pounded while the full moon tugged at the tide. In an hour the foam lapped the base of the cliff. The beach was gone, except for a few prominent markers such as Isa's favorite rock. Why hadn't she warned him? She must have known! Elmo he examined the moon with his spyglass until it set. The scratch on the lens gave it a vivid purple halo. He was halfway glad the tide kept him from waiting down there for Isa. In case she was spying, he didn't want to give her the satisfaction. Suddenly he no longer felt ashamed to picture her in the heated fantasies his mind presented, despite his conscience. She'd left him to be caught by the tide. What better did she deserve? He gave himself wholeheartedly to the arousing images and fell asleep afterward.



No dreamland gate arose when he fell asleep; the edge of a forest appeared. Hundreds of eyes lurked in the branches. They did not menace.

A great circle of animals sat in a clearing, among them Aor and several other Roughs known around Terrapin. All were mute, motionless. In the center of the ring stood Isa, no longer monolithic, merely tall and stately, shining with diamondic blue, as did her eyes which focused nowhere but saw everywhere. The coils of her hair lived a life of their own, though the color had changed to red, churning and twisting around her face as it had in his last dream, which he remembered he had dreamed, though he did not know he was dreaming as he remembered.



Elmo sat on the outside of this circle through the night, a dream without event, only the mute presence of Isa and the watchful animals. When he awoke, it was as though the dream continued: Isa's hair became the very vigorous North wind which blew stronger by the minute.

Elmo stripped a handful of currants from a bush and added a few scarlet Harp Plant berries, which the children of Terrapin were warned not to sample, but he'd learned better from Aor, who would pop a few of the "poisonberries" in his mouth whenever he passed a Harp Plant. The Harp Plant bore berries of two colors. The children were free to eat the sweet blue berries, but the poison myth and bitterness were enough to dissuade children from eating the red. Adults brewed liquor from their juice. The narcotic properties of the red berries served to spirit away the last trace of Elmo's depression.

Storm clouds, some hours still from shore, were visible on the moonlit horizon. He decided to make the climb. No worry about drinking water this trip, the rain would provide, and there were plenty of niches and caves to hide in. An hour's scrabble at the cliff convinced him ascent was impossible by the old route. What he jumped down, he could in no wise jump up. He realized he knew that anyway. But the red berries had given him courage to make double sure.

He looked for a lateral passage, hoping for a new avenue of access, and discovered a place where he could climb a few hundred feet, but after poking through briar bramble and thistle for an hour, he ended up on an exitless ridge overlooking his campsite. He had to go back around to get down and recovered his former ground lacerated and planless.

His sail leaf blankets were gone. The strong wind had carried them off like kites. The attached leaves of the sail tree itself snapped and cracked like banners.

He recalled the less windy afternoon he had sailed aloft on a kite made of them, old Aor skillfully plying the kite string. It occurred to him that a kite would be about the only way out of here.

There were plenty of leaves, and the wind was strong enough. The red berries discounted danger of themselves. All he lacked was twine to stitch the leaves together and someone to hold the cord. The roots of the Harp Plant were thin and strong, they would do for thread. Elmo uprooted all the young harps growing either side of a hundred foot stretch of trail. A splinter drew the thread, and the twigs of the older harp plants were supple enough for bracing. Decision made, his kite was sewn within an hour and braced in two. Of course, there was no one to hold the rope - and no rope to hold. The red berries advised him to never mind that.



The storm front had nearly reached land as Elmo prudently wrapped his body with sheets of sail leaf in case he got dragged along the rocks.

It occurred to him that he could abandon this dangerous enterprise and return to the beach. It occurred to him he could not. Settled on that, he moved out of the shelter of trees, holding his kite obliquely to the wind so it wasn't ripped right out of his hands. He climbed to the top of the tallest sail leaf tree. He cut a leaf off and watched what it did. Right up the cliff face it flew. Well, why not?



He leapt into the wind.



Holding onto the front brace, Elmo kicked his feet back, hooking his toes on the rear brace as Aor had taught him. He entrusted himself entirely to the wind, did not doubt the updraft would be fortuitous and grounding easy. Suicide was far from his intention, though he could in no wise guide the kite, only follow the course of a leaf in a gale.

He wondered if it was the poison of the red berries that made him see the shining tendril, messenger of Isa's song in the dream from which he awoke teetering on the verge of the cliff. The tendril reached from the cliff face to his kite and began reeling him in and playing him out with as much skill as Aor, changing its length elastically to preserve his distance from the rock.

It suddenly snapped and he was cut free in the wind and borne out to sea. Out and out and up and up, and, in what should have been his panic, he found himself thinking of Isa, of her body, of his wounded finger, of his damaged pride. Then of his descent to the beach. Then of his playmates, red haired Echo and pale Lo . . . the games they used to play. He thought of his long dead mother and could feel her presence, the gentle rock of the cradle, birth . . .



The wind shifted and suddenly he was blown back toward the cliff, though high above it. Over the Giant's Harp he sailed and, in a clap of thunder, the vagabond returned to Terrapin as the storm exploded in full fury, forcing the kite down with the weight of a good soaking and a down draft, not gently.





Chapter Five

Wolf O'the Wild



Elmo lay in bed three months, left leg broken in as many places. Aor changed his cast three times as the boy outgrew each.

"If you outgrow this one in the next two weeks, it'll be too bad. It's time for my yearly howl."

"That means the barber, the dentist, the doctor, the smithy, the roofer and the trash collector will all be gone. Terrapin will have to close down for the fortnight," said Ro looking up from his astronomical chart. "I will tend to each of these duties in turn and entertain the children in my spare time, but I will have my two weeks with my kin," growled Aor, tightening the tape till Elmo winced, then loosing it a bit. "Still tender, eh? All right, when the tenderness goes, you can start testing it. I've never fixed bones that grew so fast. It might improve the mend or it might hinder it. Either way, it can't hurt you to keep to your bed another month."

"You said two weeks!"

"I said no such thing. I said I've got to go sing with my wolfenkin for two weeks and I'll look at it when I get back. Make a note of that Ro, lest you both forget. Have you been rubbing onion into the tape like I told you?"

"Yes, Aor," said Elmo, who had not. Nor had Ro enforced the prescription. He cared no more for the reek of onions in the small house than did his son. Though he had the greatest respect for Aor's abilities as bone setter and tooth extractor, he had little faith in his remedies which ran the gamut from onions whole to onions sliced, juiced and aspirated.

"You've been seeing to it have you, Ro?"

At that moment a knock at the door kept Ro's tongue free of lie or evasion. Gia entered without waiting to be asked. Aor stood and Ro put down his pen respectfully.

"I will come right to the point, Aor," said the ancient woman.

"The boy . . ." began Aor.

"Is old enough to hear. He's been to the Schulas and come back. Many have not. When they don't, the ensuing trouble is less. The longer he stays off that leg, the better all around. I do not refer to his health, Aor. It is your intention to go to the winter howling at the Ebo?"

"It is my duty sworn and my desire."

"I see. I cannot forbid it or I would. You may do less harm than good if things pass as I foresee, but don't ask my blessing. Are you girt for battle, Ro?"

"I will do my year's transcriptions in two weeks time. I can do no more."

"Nay, nor any of us. We can still speak our minds until the stranger from the desert comes. But when he does, day by day more silence must prevail."

"Then we Roughs must sing the louder through the darker nights of winter. By Yu, may the stranger not appear!" prayed Aor.

"Save your throats. He comes not 'til Summer."

"Will he be like the other?"

"More like the first than were the second or the third, Ro."

"That was before my time."

"Well I know. T'would be wise to practice for the coming silence by not saying what need not be said. Then it will be a natural thing in its time. Good-bye. I am going to look in on Echo."

Gia left, Ro relaxed. Elmo was amused to see his father, Aor for that matter, reduced to schoolboy status before the mistress. He believed none of her nonsense. She stuffed everything into her pipe dream, even Isa. As for Ist, Elmo didn't believe in gods, less a demi-goddess, and was hence ill-equipped to discern such a one, not for lack of opportunity.

"Echo is in for a hard time," Aor said.

"Maybe not. Gia's more easy on Sod's daughter than on most of her broodlings."

"Only because she must be. Echo is frail."

"Echo? Frail?! said Elmo. The frail one had once blacked his eye when he teased her about her flaming tresses once too often.

*

Gia passed several itinerant Roughs on her way to the home of Sod the wheelwright. She didn't like Roughs, as much for their onion reek as for their want of civilized principles. Aor stood proof they could be useful citizens, without losing their touted untamed streak. The majority wandered nomadically, inciting susceptible village youth with wanderlust and disdain for education. Fortunately, Terrapin was difficult of access and their visits were infrequent. When they came, they stayed a fortnight, camping at the Ebo Oasis, eighteen furlongs into the desert. They set up such a howl, all night, every night, it was heard in Terrapin.

Gia did not have to look far for Echo. She stood in a crowd gathered around a Rough named Gorg who entertained with a mild version of one of the raucous songs of the pack.

Gia caught Echo drinking the song like a cat lapping cream, shaking her thick red braid to and fro, when Gia pinched her sharply on the arm and spoke loud enough to ruin the charm of the song for Gorg and his spectators: "Come along, Echo. I want a word with you at home."

Echo's violet eyes winced from trance to focus as she obeyed the old mother with neither pleasure nor question. The Rough cleared his throat, offended, unhappy at the loss of this pretty and fervent spectator who looked back and waved. Gia did not notice since Echo walked on her blind side. Had she noticed she would have said nothing about the low bred act of waving in public. Or indeed anywhere. Waving was for mounted Captains urging their troops to war. Or Schulas. Low bred but highly born, thought Gia of Echo, whom she loved with a love beyond her will to question, a love having to do with another love, and before that, near the dawn of memory, another.

Gorg summoned up the Wolf O'the Wild again, where he'd been cut off, as though nothing had happened and soon had his audience of loitering youths and unemployed elders re-hypnotized.





Jack O'the Wild, Wolf O'the fen

Soul of the pack, faces of men

Brothers of all, Servant of none

Run by the moon, sleep by the sun



Wolf O'the Wild, hear me plead

I have served you till I bleed

I have fought at your right hand

Free me to mine own command



Jack O'Roses spurned your curse

Jack O'Diamonds stole your purse

Jack O'Rifles shot your mate

Jack O'Whispers sealed your fate



Wolf O'the Wild, hear me plead

I have served you till I bleed

I have fought by your right hand

Free me to mine own command



Silver money, Silver bars

Silver needles, Silver stars

Silver castles, Silver skies

When a boy is born an old man dies.

*

The house of Sod rocked with snores. The wheelwright made his wares so well they never broke so he had no business. He slept all day and when he woke he ate everything in the house then amused himself shocking (he thought) his daughter with crude tales of war before going back to sleep or rolling off to the Nine Hammers, where he would fall asleep over his sixth pint and need to be shaken and told to go home long before closing time.

Whenever he slept he snored, from the moment his eyes closed till they opened. No common snore this, but a rich and varied repertoire of gagging, retching and other digestive functions at flabbergasting volume.

Sod was tolerated and given free beer in return for the immense bar with carved-in seats he hewed and chiseled from a walnut trunk, four years labor for the wheelwright. He was the maker of the Sign of the Nine Hammers as well, carved twenty years ago.



The motif of that wheel of oak, whose spokes were nine arms at right angles, bent at the elbows, wielding hammers, was taken from an a similar icon sculpted of obsidian at the western portal of the Giant's Harp. Sod's wheel revolved, but only in a strong North wind. Except, according to local lore, when Gia passed, though none ever saw this since the old mother avoided that street of the town. Unwary drunkards were apt to catch a painful whack when a sudden wind blew from seaward.

"Mind the hammers," was innkeeper Dor's usual good-night to customers and "Knocked by the Nine" was local slang for a hangover, a phrase spread by the nomadic Roughs until it was used by the citizens of towns who knew nothing else of Terrapin.



In the opinion of many, Aor's wife Pisey in particular, Sod's snoring had killed Echo's mother and would be the end of Echo too, who was often seen with dark rings around her violet eyes, nearly asleep on her feet.

She had dropped and broken every piece of porcelain in Sod's house in her sleep-deprived state. Sod happily replaced them with items carved of wood. It gave him something to do and he was never happier than when crafting something needful from wood - though it never crossed his mind to sculpt something on his own. It had to be needed