Phoenix Without Ashes (4 page)

PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES

PROLOGUE

Devon’s dream: it had recurred more and more often during his sojourn in the hills. During the latter nights he had come almost to fear lying down beneath the low pine and closing his eyes. It was not so simple as being plagued by nightmares; Devon did not fear what his mind saw. Rather, he was disturbed by the disorientation, the
alienness
of his fantasy. It reminded him of the endlessly repetitive fever dreams of his childhood when he had sickened and nearly died. After the initial fever had broken and he had wakened to the calm comfort of his mother covering his forehead with a cold compress, there had still been the slight distortion, the unpleasantly vague warping of reality through the aftermath of dream.

It was something like that now. The vividness of the dream was softened with morning; yet Devon could recall the general characteristics and, increasingly, more of the details. He was young, and so he brooded over what he had seen beyond the night. He sat on the hilltop as close to the sunrise as possible, arms hugging his knees.

Here is how the dream ran:

Gray. A plane extending to an indefinite horizon. Gray. The color of Cypress Corners; the color of Devon’s life. Deepening to black—the color of the rich earth, the somber long dresses of the women, the rough overalls of the men, the flat-crowned, wide-brimmed hats of the Elders.

Black, merging through gray to white; swirling like the mists rising in the autumn off the small lakes surrounding the village.

Speed, impression of motion; faster than Devon could gallop on his father’s best horse. And if it were Old Devon’s horse that Young Devon rode in the dream, then wicked thought! For Devon flew, hurled through the air above the treetops, the village, the lakes and fields, across the hills to the sky.

The sky loomed before him, a blue-gray surface as metallic and hard as the panels Devon had helped his father assemble into a calving shed beside the barn. The sky rushed toward Devon’s face, and he would have raised his arms to protect himself, had he limbs. But the sky dissolved as he touched it: a knife penetrating smoke.

And then the night, night blacker than any new-moon midnight over Cypress Corners. Against the night, a brilliant splendor of lights; they burned steadily, unlike the pale stars blinking in the night sky above the hills.

And here, sometimes, Devon would twitch in his sleep and mumble parts of words. With his head gently cradled in her lap, Rachel had once seen and heard him. Then Devon had come awake, disturbed, not recognizing her for a minute or two. She had gently stroked his hair as though he were still a little boy until at last clear sight came back into his eyes. He had refused to talk about the dream.

Other times, Devon awoke alone, comforted only by the grass and rough bark and the fragrant branches of which he had made his bed.

But many times, the dream continued....

He whirled, turning helplessly, and the vertigo began to clutch at his belly. The blackness and the lights and then—something else. Devon had never seen anything so huge. Nothing could be that large. Even the hills themselves and all the fields of Cypress Corners were dwarfed to insignificance by this thing. Shapes and lines and structures dwindled away in a perspective Devon’s eyes had never before attempted to encompass. He stared with incomprehension as his motion continued and this thing whatever-it-was began itself to shrink, diminishing with distance until it was even less than the other lights spangling the blackness.

Then Devon felt there was nothing to touch, nothing on which to stand. Nothing, ever again.

He awoke.

ONE

Twenty kilometers above their heads, the hexagonal sun silently ticked another frame down the long track to sunset. It was early autumn, but that made no difference to the pine which shaded the couple beneath. They sat quietly, watching the village in the valley. A breeze hissed softly. A pine cone dropped to the bed of fallen needles.

“What did you tell your parents?” said Devon suddenly.

Rachel nestled her head against his shoulder without looking at him. “I do not lie to them, Devon. I said I would fetch thread from Master Cowley’s loom, and so I shall.”

“Eventually.”

“Yes, eventually.” This time she turned to face him, and this time Rachel smiled. Devon’s gray eyes, his dark hair, his slender, strong body, all pleased her.

“You’ve never lied to your parents?”

The smile left her lips. “Never.”

Something made him say, “You’d not lie about this?”

“No.” Rachel looked at him seriously. “I pray to the Creator that they never ask the right questions.”

“You’d tell?”

“I would tell them that I visit you here against their wishes and the directives of the Elders.”

The silence came back between them, made more gentle by the scent of crushed pine needles. They continued to watch the valley through the screen of brush.

The hills were rounded, falling in gentle slopes to the outlying farmsteads. Rachel and Devon were high enough to have an overview of most of Cypress Corners.

The valley was an orderly patchwork quilt, a gridwork of farms and fields, lakes and woods. Only a few kilometers distant lay the village itself. Cypress Corners was constructed in a fashion as orderly as everything else in the world: there were the houses and the several shops laid out in a careful pattern. The four narrow roads radiated out, perfectly straight, until they were stopped by the hills which approached the sky.

In the center of the town, the houses made up a circle around the Place of Worship. The houses were plastic and metal. The Place of Worship alone was solely constructed
of wood. It was a somber temple, a plain, rectangular structure built of planks hewed from the trees that gave the world its name.

An inner circle inside the greater, the ring of live cypresses screened off the Place of Worship from the rest of the town. Like all else, the cypress trees had each been placed as a component of the ordered design the planters sought.

The sun sank one more frame toward the horizon.

“I must go soon,” said Rachel. “I’ve spent too much time here.” Her elbows spread like wings as she began to wind up the long dark hair spilling down below the blades of her shoulders.

Devon stopped her hands. He buried his face in the sweet, clean scent of her hair. The words were muffled but she still understood. “I wish we could stay here together. Forever.”

“I know.” She gently disengaged herself. “But we cannot.”

Devon started to say something.

“My mother will be impatient for Master Cowley’s thread,” said Rachel. Expertly she pulled her hair into a tight bun. Dropping her hands, she indicated the wicker basket at their feet. “Master Cowley will settle for less cheese than my mother believes. The bread I baked myself. There are currants. I would not have you starve, Devon.”

Devon stared over the valley away from her for a moment. Then he turned back suddenly, almost angrily. “I do starve, though. Not for food. For you.”

Rachel’s cheeks reddened. “Please don’t say those things. You should not—”

“Shouldn’t I?” Devon moved closer and put his arms around her. Rachel’s body stiffened slightly. He tried to kiss her; she turned her head so that his lips brushed her cheek. “Stop it,” said Devon. This time she did not move her head. Devon touched her immobile lips; it was a static, unresponsive kiss. “Rachel...”

Her face only centimeters away, her gray eyes wide and candid, she said, “It is wrong to kiss, Devon. It is as wrong as it was four nights ago.”

“Four nights ago,” he echoed, and it was Devon’s turn to color. “Rachel, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—to offend.”

For a moment she looked at him steadily, and there was something hard in the planes of her face.

Her eyes... thought Devon. The eyes of her parents. The eyes of the Elders.

Then the adult dropped away and Rachel was again her seventeen years, or perhaps less. She shook her head slightly, and there were tears at the corners of her eyes. Devon’s arms wound about her, and she crushed her face to his chest. There was a desperation in their embrace that transcended loneliness.

“I’ve got to go,” said Rachel. “I’ve got to.”

“I won’t let you,” said Devon stubbornly, childlike. He gently pulled her down beside him on the cushion of pine needles.

“Devon, no.” But she let him kiss her again and a third time, a fourth. Slowly, unwillingly, her body began to relax.

The late afternoon breeze eddied about the hilltop, soughing among the boughs. The chill of evening had begun. Rachel felt the chill and it frightened her.

Through the rough fabric of her black dress, Rachel felt Devon’s fingers. She felt the warmth of his body and, distractedly, she rolled away from him. He followed her, his hand on her shoulder.

“I love you,” said Devon.

Rachel bit her lip and said nothing.

“Do you love me?”

“I can’t love you,” said Rachel sensibly. She gently removed his fingers from her shoulder; but she hesitated when she stood up.

“You could love me.”

Rachel stood mute. She began to shiver and drew her shawl close around her shoulders. “I can’t.”

Devon watched her from the ground. “Get your thread, then. Go to your parents. Hurry, lest you be too late to help prepare dinner and the world ends.”

“Don’t be angry,” said Rachel.

“I’m not. Not at you.” Devon moodily rolled over toward the valley side of the crest.

Rachel reached down and touched his hair. “I’m sorry.”

“When will you come again?”

“I don’t know.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“I cannot. The prayer meeting...”

“Afterward?”

“I would have to sneak,” said Rachel. “This is bad enough.”

“Tell them you have private devotions in the wilderness.”

Rachel said, “And so I do.” She smiled tentatively.

“It’s a hard life in the wilderness,” said Devon. “The bread and cheese will soon be gone.”

Rachel wavered. “I will bring you more.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“I will think about it,” said Rachel. She took the pale cheese and crusty bread from her basket and handed them over.

Devon stood and took the food in his hands. He bent his head and gently kissed her again. This time Rachel resisted for the barest instant. Then she dropped the basket and hugged Devon fiercely.

The wind carried the sound of chimes up from the valley.

“The early vesper services,” whispered Rachel. “It is nearly sunset.” She snatched up her basket and turned toward their private path, the one trodden out of the brush by deer.

“Tomorrow night,” said Devon.

She hesitated, said nothing, and then fled down the hillside toward the ordered patterns of Cypress Corners.

TWO

Devon cut for himself a meager supper of bread and cheese. Earlier he had checked his snares; they were simple traps of wire and bent branches. Apparently they were not sophisticated enough to fool the rabbits. Two loops lay untouched. The bait, cheese from Rachel’s last gift of food, was missing. The third snare had been sprung, but nothing was caught in the dangling loop. Again, the cheese bait was gone.

Devon reset the traps, this time using bits of bread for bait. Then he returned to his vantage point above Cypress Corners. He had yet to determine in his own mind why he was living in temporary exile on the very frontier of the Elders.

Early on, he had tramped across the relatively narrow band of hills until he neared the sky itself. There he stopped short, heeding the childhood admonition never to approach the sky. It occurred to him later to wonder why not. But at the time, it was a virtually automatic impulse to turn around and return to the margin of civilization. So he showed his back to the hard, blue-gray sky and retraced his steps to the top of this hill overlooking Cypress Corners.

Below, the bells sounded for late vespers. In the east, to Devon’s right, the moon had begun to rise. Its white aureole extended above the hills. As Devon watched, wrapped in his ratty woolen blanket and gnawing on a chunk of cheese rind, the moon rose into full frame. In its six-sided austerity, the moon cast a glow across the valley. Shadows sprang out in sharp relief. The moon was nearly full; a harvest sign.

Cypress Corners lay perfectly still, the final chimes for vespers fading on the night wind. The village houses with their lighted windows made up a perfectly set ornament in the night. From this perspective, the town possessed a deceptive brightness, almost an air of warmth and cheer. Yet no one knew this but Devon, for no one but Devon looked down on Cypress Corners.

And even had they looked down, not one in a hundred would have thought anything less prosaic than:
Were the night but shorter! I have wheat to harvest, apples to pick, sheep to shear.

Devon looked down and thought of Rachel. He turned his head to the west and tried to pick out the farmstead of Aram and Old Rachel. He thought he could see the illuminated rectangle of Rachel’s loft window, but finally decided he was imagining it.

He continued to fantasize it as he pulled together the stuff of his bed, the boughs and brush that made a slightly more comfortable mattress than his usual pallet in Cypress Corners. Devon pulled the blanket around himself and checked to be sure that his knife was close by his right hand. The predators of the hills had not yet bothered him, but there might always be a first time.

Devon lay so that the opaque crown of the pine screened him from the direct glow of the full moon. Half his sky was the dark tree; the other half was the stars. He lay on his back and watched them blink.

Then something struck him which had not occurred to him before: there was a pattern to the twinkling of the stars. He had been picking out the constellations his father had taught him years before. The Cross. The Altar. The Ring of Order.