Moon-Flash (2 page)

“Terje, what shape is the world?”

He nudged a feather with his toe. “The River is the World. Is that all you’ve done? Two rows of feathers?”

“But what if I walked away from the River. Sideways across the world. Would I fall off? Maybe my mother fell off the end of the world?”

He stared at her. He was a little shorter than she. His skin and hair and eyes were the color of honey, and the muscles swam like fish over his bones. Something made his scowl deepen; his eyes fell away from her. “My mother sent these feathers,” he said gruffly. “I’ll help you.”

“I am a woman now,” she said with dignity. “I can sew my own skirt.” She slid her bone needle through the shaft of a feather and poked herself in the thumb. She shook her hand and sucked it, while Terje laughed. He threaded three feathers neatly, then stopped and sighed.

“What about our boat? Yours and mine? We built it together.”

“You keep it.”

“What about the time you fell out of a tree and broke your wrist and I put mud and leaves around it for you?”

Her brows crinkled, as she finally sensed what he was trying to tell her. “Oh, Terje,” she said softly.
“I didn’t know it would be so soon. But we couldn’t stay children forever. Anyway, you’ll be betrothed soon, and some other girl will come and live with you at Three Rocks . . .” Her brows crept even closer as she said that. She tossed her long hair suddenly, making feathers whirl. “Anyway, let’s not think about it.”

“Will you miss me?”

“Well, Terje, this is the way the world is. It was all decided before you and I could talk. My mother decided.” With a swift change of mood, she flung feathers angrily into the air. “And then she vanished. It wasn’t fair; she didn’t even stay to help me with this—”

“The River reached out and took her,” Terje whispered.

“No.” She was silent a long time. “My father said she left him. She went away. He said it once. Then he never spoke of her again.”

“Away,” Terje said bewilderedly. “Where is there to go? Past Fourteen Falls? Up the Face? The River is the world, and all the places in it are named.”

Kyreol shrugged. “Maybe she flew to O. I don’t know. She turned into a bird and—Terje, guess how the moon O got its name.”

“How?”

She giggled. “The first person in the world looked up at it and said—”

“Oh.”

“Terje, who was the first person in the world?”

“How would I know?” he demanded.

“Well, think.” She paused. “First there was the River. With no names. No people. And then one day there were people. And they saw turtles coming out
of the River to lay their eggs, so they called that place Turtle-Crossing. And maybe they had a boat, and it snagged on the sand, so they call that place Sandspit. And they saw a tree with pink and green leaves as big as your face and called it—No. The tree would have been a baby, then. Maybe it wouldn’t even have—maybe there were no trees. So long ago. Where did they come from? The first people?”

Terje drew a deep breath and closed his mouth. “I think,” he said glumly, “you will sew this skirt and get betrothed, and then marry and have babies, and you’ll tell them your stories and not me. So what does it matter where the first people came from?”

Kyreol sewed in silence for a while. Then the grave look left her face and she smiled again. “The River-Tree bore them. Inside its pods. They dropped to the ground and cracked, and the First People came out. Little, tiny people. A man and a woman . . .”

Kyreol’s father found them later, sewing diligently in a colorful pool of feathers. He smelled of mist and cold stone, and Kyreol knew he had been upriver, near the Face. The Face was a solid black wall of rock, the boundary of the world. It rose so high that the moon rested behind it by day, and the sun by night. The River was born at the top, uncoiled itself, roared through the air, skimmed down and down the black precipice, to churn deep into the vast bowl it had carved at the bottom of the Face. Kyreol’s father, who healed and explained dreams and bestowed the blessings of the River and the Moon-Flash on all their lives, sometimes went to the edge of the bowl to think. What he thought about there, he never told Kyreol.

Terje dropped his needle and scrambled to his feet.
Icrane was as dark as Kyreol. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was broad and muscular. His still, flat face tended to look fierce, though he was gentle-natured. He gazed at Terje absently, probably, Kyreol thought, not even really seeing him. But the blood flushed into Terje’s face, and he said, awkward for some reason,

“I was helping Kyreol sew.”

Icrane nodded, unsurprised. He put his big hand on the back of Terje’s head, in a gesture that was at once a caress and a nudge toward the door. “Your father is looking for you. And it is time for me to speak to Kyreol about the betrothal ceremony.”

He sat down amidst the feathers, threaded them as he spoke. Kyreol tried to listen; her mind kept filling with pictures of his words.
Crowd, feast, birds, cave
—

“How long?” she interrupted.

“Until you dream. Then you mark the wall and leave.”

Fire, Moon-Flash, betrothal.
It seemed a dream itself that her father was saying these things to her. A cave behind the falls at the Face, a hundred red birds released at the Flash in her name. She wondered for the first time what her betrothed was doing, whether he had listened to the same words, if he were excited, too. Feeling old and dignified and strange to herself, she put her hand on Icrane’s knee, stopping him.

“Where did my mother go?” Her voice sounded queer. “Did you ever dream where she went?”

For a moment Icrane was not going to answer her. His face grew empty and his eyes went flat, as when he was angry or offended. Then he seemed to remember that her mother had bound them together, he and
Kyreol. His face opened again; he looked down at the floor, frowning a little, no longer the Healer, her father, but a man who had been hurt long ago and was still puzzled by it.

“Once,” he said. He cleared his throat. “I dreamed—I dreamed of a stone. A beautiful crystal. First the stone opened and said her name. Then I saw her holding the stone. Then it was in the sky, a star, and she was following it. I woke and knew she had not died in the River, she had gone away from me.”

“Where?”

He shook his head. “The River is the world. She—maybe into a dream. I don’t know. I didn’t know I had made her unhappy.”

“I wish I remembered her face.”

Her father brushed her cheek with his palm. “She looked like you.”

The world, Kyreol thought later, throwing stones into the wide River, stretches up to the Face and down to Fourteen Falls. People found places on it to live and named them. Three Rocks, Green Pool, Little Stream. . . 
Our houses are built of trees and riverstone, the River and the forest feed us, we wear what the animals wear. But.
A stone plopped into the water; the water jumped upward, then spread itself into smooth, widening rings, rippling and breaking at her feet. Her thoughts veered.
Why are so many things round?
she wondered.
The moon is round, the water-circles are round, Terje’s eyes are round, dark then light, rimmed with circles of dark. The stone I threw wasn’t round, but the ripples it made were. . . Why? Where could my mother have gone? Past Fourteen Falls? Why?

A twig snapped. She turned, thinking Terje was
looking for her, and slid easily, noiselessly into the shadowed crook of a tree. It was dusk. Tiny flying things hovered above the quiet River; fish leaped to feed on them, vanished back into the circles they had made. Wood smoke hazed the evening. The first tiny stars were appearing. Leaves rustled.
I am invisible,
she thought.
I am night, and this tree, I am smoke.
She waited, enjoying herself, thinking of Terje falling into the River in shock when she leaped out at him.
I am a bad night-spirit, a wicked dream
 . . . But it wasn’t Terje.

It was a man she didn’t recognize. She stopped herself from jumping at him, then opened her mouth to greet him, then realized she didn’t know his name. He walked oddly, very quietly, as though he were stalking someone else. A hunter, maybe, from downriver. But he had no bow or spear or knife. He was very tall; his face was half-hidden by his feather hood. What she could see of it was dark and proudly made. His feet were bare; he wore a band of dappled hawk feathers about one knee. A hunter. But he wasn’t hunting. So why was he so silent? He stopped near her, and her breath stopped.

He shifted back his hood, watched the cold luminous moon beginning to rise above the Face. He stayed still so long that Kyreol’s feet began to ache in the chilly water. She could have moved, greeted him, but she was too curious, and all the night-instincts were awake in her blood. He moved finally, when it was almost too dark for her to see.

He lifted his hand. Something glittered in it: a piece of O, a mingling of water and moonlight. He spoke to the glittering. So it was a talisman, a magic
part of his hunting, the place where he kept his good fortune. But his words made no sense. “Nine point three point four,” he said very softly. “The Face.”

He closed his hand over the gleam. Kyreol blinked. For a moment she still saw him, a lean shadow etched against darkness. Then a dry leaf crackled, and he merged into the night.

She thought about him for a night and half a day, then suddenly there was no more time for thinking. There were women everywhere, cooking so much food she thought no one would ever have to eat again. They brought her gifts: a jacket of blue feathers, a gold hood, ankle bracelets. They finished her feather skirt; and at the dawn of Moon-Flash, they dyed her face, painted her eyelids and mouth, drew fire and the moon on her forehead, the River, and the River-Tree, so that the moon would know where she lived. When she looked at her reflection in the water, she knew that her old life had stopped, gone away, and nothing would ever bring it back. She thought of Terje and knew that he was gone, too, with all of her past, and her throat burned. But the stranger’s face looking back at her had no past, only a future, and Kyreol could not cry her tears. Then the sun rose and she was being carried on a skin stretched taut by the family of her betrothed, upriver toward the Face.

The journey took half a day. People kept joining them, vividly clothed and painted, laughing, chattering, carrying food, wine made of fermented honey and nuts, and cages of bright red birds. Kyreol sat silently, too unused to her new self to talk. Her father, leading the procession, was also silent. They reached the Face at noon. The River-people spread their feast on a
clearing away from the spray and thunder of the Falls and sat down to wait. Kyreol followed her father alone to the dream-cave.

The spray was blinding. It rolled off the feathers covering her, but her face and hands turned icy. She didn’t dare brush the water off her face lest she wash off her tree-sign and the moon no longer recognize her. She wished she could take her father’s hand, going up the steep, wet trail, but she was no longer a child. Neither of them spoke; the water would have roared over their voices. Finally, when her teeth had begun to chatter and her nose was numb, her father stopped.

The trail led onward, disappeared into the water. Icrane looked at her. The distant Healer’s face changed abruptly; he touched her and smiled, put his mouth close to her ear, and she felt herself relax a little.

“Don’t be frightened. The River will not hurt you.” He smoothed her hair, straightened a few feathers. Then he put two skins into her hands, one dyed red, one white. “Drink from the white one. It carries your dreams. You know what to do with the red one?” She nodded. “Don’t drink the wrong one.” He turned her toward the trail’s ending. “Don’t worry. Dream a happy dream and come back when you’re ready. Go, now.”

But I’m starving,
she thought, for she hadn’t been permitted to eat,
and cold, and I’m not sleepy. I don’t like being betrothed.
The trail ascended easily, levelled behind the Falls. She stepped between two walls, one black, hard, gleaming like night, one made of
endlessly falling ribbons of light. She thought instantly,
I wish Terje were here to see this.

The cave was a bubble of darkness. As she walked into it, the Fall’s voice dwindled. A single flame, lit by her father, floated atop oil filling a natural crevice. As her eyes adjusted to the different light, she saw what patterned the rock above the fire, and she stopped, whispering, “Oh.” The marks of the dreamers, the betrothed . . . There was an animal skin on the floor. She sat down on it. All her fear had vanished, and she felt at ease there, belonging there. She held her hands to the flame, warming them, and then she uncorked the white skin. The taste of the wine was hot and sweet, tinged with herbs. She felt her face flush, and then her hands. She smiled drowsily on the soft fur, wondering for the first time where her betrothed was hidden, what ceremony he might be going through.
Will we like each other?
she wondered.
Will he be like Terje? Will he listen to my stories?
She finished the wine slowly. The water fell constantly in front of her. Her eyes began to follow it, catching one star-gleam of spray, falling with it into nothingness, catching another, until the sheer power of the endless falling made her shift, blinking, trying to imagine what huge world of water lay on top of the Face, pouring itself day and night into the River without emptying.
Where does it all come from?
she wondered. And then she fell asleep.

She dreamed a hundred young girls, dressed as she was, came out of the shadows of the cave to touch her face with hands soft as moth wings. She dreamed a boy’s face, dark, unfamiliar, with a deer-sign on his
forehead, and she said apologetically to the ghosts,
No, sorry, that’s someone else’s dream.
A dream already dreamed. She saw the moon and the Moon-Flash. Then she saw the strange Hunter, gazing up at the moon. O point O point O . . . the Face. Her dream went dark, then, evening-dark, silent, breathless. A star exploded in the darkness. She stirred, murmuring. Everything was white. There were no familiar faces. A star was carrying her to the moon. The moon was huge, full, rising toward the Flash. In another moment it would come, in another . . . She looked back down to the Face where a betrothal ceremony was to be held, and she called to the upturned faces:
Farewell. But wait,
she thought in her sleep,
whose dream is this? I’m Kyreol.
Then she saw a hundred rainbows . . . And then only dream fragments.