Chapter 6
The Meeting of Frightening Forms
Twenty minutes had passed since the clocktower bell echoed across the Meadow's valley. No matter the time of day it brought all sheep to witness any vote, and as they poured up road from their homes, their furled brows or contented smiles would reveal its emergency to anyone with an unmarked calendar. Woogums had been sent running to tell the Prime Minister of what befell Ruff, and how far away, and she could have sworn that bell was rung as soon as his hoofsteps were lost in the distance, and she never heard it clamor for so long.
Pom's three remaining puppies kept easy pace behind her as she scurried down from the hill of her cottage, no longer content to sweat and breath shallowly out of her bedroom window. In the week prior she learned to love the silence of the morning, but the silence now was cold, and threatened to reveal Ruff's lost cries over the hills in the wreckage of their pierced balloon. She descended from the arc of the bridge and stood at the end of the town's broad street. Every doorstep was dead, and every window was empty and open. A glimpse of the alarm tower rippled through her like a premonition, and for a moment every building's old thatch roof and wooden signs swinging from iron nails were alone just the same, and had been so since long ago. She knew better than to walk down an empty street, or pace a path in fresh grass alone. Had she only known the path they had cleaved into the immaculate sky, they'd all have come to no harm. At the distant end of the street the great double doors of the town hall quivered in her sight. A woolen moat floated into the straight black schism between them. It was Woogums.
"We have to go find him!" Pom blurted out when they met in the town's center, "This has been so stupid. I don't even know how I planned on getting him back!"
"You can't blame yourself," said Woogums, "I forgot the return pulley just like you, and I still would have flown it. We don't have to go anywhere, just wait for the hearing to end. Trying to do this alone is what got us here in the first place!"
"No, no, it will take them too long. He's out there with whatever it is that shot him down! Please Woogums, I know I've asked too much, but I have to ask it again. I don't know what else to do! I don't know where else to go if I'm not with someone braver!"
"Aye, you do need someone braver, but that's not me. After what the herdsman said to me, I threw that blueprint in the river, did you know that? It's gone, and I never want to see another one. I never want to feel that again. If we just wait for the hearing, this can all go away before the day is out."
"We don't have time to wait! We tell the herd what we want to do, and we're crushed every time. The Wicklighter knows it too, or he wouldn't have helped us. I flew that balloon because I thought I had nothing to lose, but I was wrong. We can't lose Ruff, we just ca-"
Pom's voice only stopped when she couldn't hear herself speak. As if they'd both been dropped under an iron hail, the winding breeze and impenetrable silence of their ghostlike town had been chased away in a cacophony of bellwethers. The doors of the great hall were open, the inside empty. Pom and Woogums stood in a slow and trodding wave of the earthen colors of wool, and intermixed with the wiry steel of billowing sheepdog fur. Hooves scraped the cobblestone street and claws filed themselves on its sandpaper surface, but suddenly it all stopped and hung around them like a warm and gracious cloud.
From the indivisible circle of the flock more massive than Pom had ever seen, she recognized the Prime Minister. He stepped forth and sat before them, still handily taller than those still standing, a crimson band around his neck and an antique silver bell with the entire life and destiny of all flocks carved into its ornamented surface. The most revered of the town's keepers, and who's strength Pom still recalled, Big Scrap's leering head peered over his shoulder.
"Are... You all going to go get Ruff?" Pom asked.
"No. We're not." The Prime Minister said, "You're going to go get Ruff. We're your escort."
Under the lurching shade of the crowd, Pom walked and watched the ground below her. The land forbidden by the town's perimeter was hidden in the wool that moved her and her brother further and further still. Never before had her legs taken her in a single direction so long, though she couldn't see what lied beyond the bend, she was in that place wrongly. She could feel it in the immaculate lush grass that tickled high past her hooves and the necks of weeds broken under the hooves of sheep ahead, weeds that had long since been extinguished from the civilized earth. All she could see besides the flanks of leading sheep, her brother to her left and the Prime Minister to her right was the newly trodden ground she longed to see coming under her feet and passing away again.
"It never happens how you think it will. Not for me, not for you, nor any sheep." The Prime Minister's voice rumbled low and cut past the endless simmering of hundreds of hooves kicking through untamed fields. Until he looked briefly down past his heavy coat into Pom's cowering eyes, she was not convinced his words weren't a waking dream. "Leaving for the first time."
"Are they mad at me?" Pom asked.
"Most of them."
"Oh."
The two were silent again. Woogums tried to catch acquaintances eyes in the herd, and sheepdogs sneezed and scoffed from the upset pollen. Every now and then a nimble hound darted like a watery spirit between the bodies of wool to reach the flock's front from its back to reveal no vulnerable side.
"We didn't want them to be angry," Pom said, "we didn't want to waste their time, calling votes for things like flowers past the hills."
All voices were silent.
"And we didn't want to waste ours. We couldn't take 'no' for an answer."
The Prime Minister ducked his head in a brief nod, as if she had finally uttered the final verse of a long password.
"No, no you didn't. You know what sheep do, and what traditions we keep. We keep them to answer questions we never knew we'd ever ask. We keep them to avoid disasters we've never seen."
"Can they do that? Can they really answer everything?" Pom asked like a skeptic, but spoke like a wonderstruck child.
"They cannot. We have no tradition for flying things. We've never seen them before. I wished to see it intact in the town hall this morning so perhaps we could make some real decisions around here, but then you strapped a dog into it."
"Are you saying that if we had only asked, you may have allowed it?"
"No, I'm not saying that."
"Oh."
"But you still think these traditions are doing you no favors, I'm sure."
Pom's mind wandered to the Wicklighter, who she'd not seen in the crowd. He mustn't think highly of them either, now dragging him from a tired bed after tired work. "It's not just me, I don't think. If I thought it was just me, I never would have bothered."
"Spoken like a true sheep."
"I was worried that it might have been more of them than I imagined."
"You got emotional. We got emotional too, in that committee this morning. Take notice that we were out within the hour, and within two we've nearly reached your lost pup. Do you know why?"
"Because of tradition." Woogums said suddenly. His face was solemn and he stared on, eyes shifting away from contact and no rejoice in his answering. Something in the Prime Minister's face reminded Pom of the herdsman when he spoke to Woogums, but absent of anger and tinted with affection.
"That's right. You knew the rule: No one leaves the border without the rest of the flock. One day Pom, you'll see that when one sheep speaks, most agree, but for that alone we can wait hours. There was no waiting in that courthouse. Some sheep barely took a seat. Mad as the herdsman was, I didn't need to calm him down and hear his sound opinion. Our solution was clear because it wasn't made by us; it was made by sheep before who knew that someone, someday must make it again. For the sake of you and your dog, It must be decided without feeling, and only those buried in the Meadow can do that. I've rambled. Come now, you two and your dogs. No no, the decision has already been made."
Sheep began to pave the way at the timbre of the Prime Minister's bell which bellowed as low as a distant thunderclap and sang like a lark at once as he stepped toward the front of the flock. In the distance something was shifting and Pom heard the sound of hooves against stone in the green ocean of the meadow. A few dogs growled from some impenetrable side of the whole town's gathering, and little as they wanted the two siblings found no difficulty in obediently following the flock's leader. Black fangs of two pillars, crumbled and cut from the millennial winds having rolled down the hills and battering the valley bared into the sky ahead of them, their foundation hidden past the crowd. To see Ruff again she walked over those who were buried in the Meadow, if only to hold him and see him asleep tonight in the pile of her other pups as if he nothing ever happened. Aside stepped the Prime Minister, and she knew by those shapes in the distance that her wish could never be, as those shapes had single horns, and they approached.
"All hooves underneath you, Pom, the whole flock is behind you," The Prime Minister spoke softly.
Pictures in books where Unicorns were stenciled for the children of the Meadow did nothing for color and motion. The creatures, long legged as she, but elegant and tall-standing took slow and noble steps with no fear toward all of them. Their colors, as though inverted from the earthen sheep's by some warping of light in another world, looked dripped from the sky in blues and whites. Their manes cascaded long from their skinny selves and some attitude of eternal youth glowed from every step of theirs, even when they stopped before them at a stone's throw distance. Every bit of them shined a more playful color in the radiant sun that betrayed Pom's nightmares of war in torchlit darkness.
"Curious," started the firstmost Unicorness, colored like a fainting sky, "I didn't know your people were capable of surveillance vehicles."
Behind the slender frames of a dozen or so of them the aircraft lie, the paper balloon half singed to a crisp, and before it was Ruff, sitting obediently, still showing Pom her cracked reflection.
"We're not," the Prime Minister said, "that was a dog in a hot-air balloon."
Some tin bells struck dully around their the necks of sheep who gazed about at the stone ruin from where the Unicorns emerged. The foreigners trod upon a shattered disc tens of meters edge to edge, and circumscribed by those pillars Pom had seen thick as the trunks of ancient trees. Inwardly the pillars bowed far above as if they had all locked in a knot at a midheaven long gone. A black-brick pyramid behind them barely taller than they was scaffolded in glass. The speaking Unicorn looked back at Ruff and faced front again with a deliberate toss of her mane.
"He won't move from that spot, and growled every time we tried to take the mirror."
"Good pup."
Pom had never heard such a silence amongst strangers, or of such behavior from her quietest of dogs. Even her conversations with the Prime Minister were suffocated in formality, but he spoke bluntly and without graciousness, as if he'd known their blue leader from long ago. The town's guardians hadn't lowered their haunches, and Pom wobbled at the prospect that were waiting for her signal. She cocked her head at a low angle and tossed to to the side, and the precious tone of the tiny golden bell rang at her throat. With regard for her, and her alone, Ruff released his fragile cargo which tipped to the unforgiving stone, and he had just passed the foreigner's front line when the deafening shatter came.
The image of pearly blade of steam erupting from their horns held Pom frozen even when the vice of hackles clasped in a foaming, howling, affronting wall. Something cold and blinding like the moon's face in the last dying burst of a sun was blocked from her eyes by the furious dogs, and she felt her brother's long leg of surprising strength push her head to the ground. The whole town bleated into the sky with a checkerboard of cries where the vengeful and vindictive ones were sown between the regretful, and something baritone and brash was shouted forth. Pom shook, and the way she shook was through her whole being as though it would never stop, and had shivered all her life and every moment was some cataclysmic affront leaving her begging for an end to it. Even under the weight of Woogums her head tossed about, dislodging the nightmare of the blinding lights and screaming dogs breath steaming even in the midspring heat as if all these things were spiders creeping past her ears and inducing her nightmares, and her bell got louder. The sounds of a crystalline pendulum chimed striking a fateful hour on the clock of her life's mistakes, and it chimed until it was all that she could hear, and when she stopped, she stopped in silence.
Opening her eyes, they met with those deep sea blue inset into their leader, still at a distance, but curious now. The dogs parted, but only for Pom. Time had stopped, or so she thought, slipping from the weight of her brother's embrace. She stepped forth past the guardians with licked chops, out of the unbreakable circle, to make good on the promise made by the long-gone.
"What a power you have over them," the unicorn said, "you must be someone's daughter, no?"
"Ah, no. I mean, yes. It's not me, it's the bell."
"They all have bells, but not like yours."
"Oh no, I can't carry a heavy one like that," Pom laughed apologetically and swallowed, "W-What's the good word from the forest? Don't we share this river? See many flowers come by?"
The unicorn's expression was unreadable from a distance.
"Yes," she said quizzically, "yes we do. Our portion of said river is sanctioned for that reason. The flowers floating down it come from further past your own town, is that true? Then you must get first pick of the precious things."
"Pick, yes, we do pick them. We throw them down the river ourselves, actually, so we're not shorting you a single bud, I promise. Though I've been afraid we've even sent down too many, even!" Pom made herself laugh again, "Hence the balloon. We sent it to look for stragglers."
"That contraption?"
"Yes."
"You all built it to look for flowers?"
"Yes, but no. Just me and Woogums, mostly Woogums." A brief moment passed, but she corrected herself with a wobbly gesture pointed back to her brother, who bowed his head stutteringly in courtesy.
"I'm surprised you throw them down at all then, if they're precious to you as well. Or are they not precious to you all until they're thrown? Nevermind that. We lift them from the water and use them in braids and curls. Trill!" She called behind her, "Trillium, come up here and let her see your mane."
A cream colored Unicorn, crouched behind the sparse crowd of them stepped to her feet and began a delicate canter closer. A hue of pink washed through her coat passing through some perfect angle between her and the sun, and at a distance halfway between the two tribes, she leaned her head and held her mane like a quilt drying in the sun. It indeed was scaled with both yellow and white, cast in connective chains pedals with golden pins holding pedals tip to tip. A single whole daffodil head caught the eye and cast it into the miniscule meadow in her hair like a clock in the clocktower does adore over the town. A pink hint flushed her face, not from the light of the sun, but perhaps Pom had been looking too long, and she begun to trot away.
"You must have all come looking for more, didn't you? I would too, to look like that," Pom said.
"For the flowers? Oh no, child, its your old architecture here. Shall I inundate you with your own history? It's an astrological instrument your ancestors had built long ago to glimpse patterns of the stars and moons, perhaps for delineation, or possibly just to make calendars. We're here to restore it and put it to real use."
The Prime Minister spoke, "I didn't send allowance for your people to touch our historical sites."
"This historical site is outside your city limits, I studied the maps thoroughly,"
"City limits aren't ancestral limits. That's some great-grandfather's work you're stepping on."
"Then you'd have to annex it with your whole town."
"You're looking at the whole town."
"Yes!" Pom came in loud as she could, "yes, and we don't all get out much. So much that you even beat us to finding it. How did you do that, anyway?"
"Well," a rare hesitance came and went, "how do I put this to someone dull to the arcane? Have you ever had an itch on your neck or back? You can't quite see it, but you know where it is, and your reach right there with no fumbling around to scratch it?"
"Aye,"
"We're attuned to Foenum just like you to your body,"
"And you've done half the work in that, I think. We could even save you all the trouble of rebuilding it now that we know it's here. You've seen my brother Woogum's work, we've builders of passion here in the Meadow," Pom's eyes faltered when they flicked to the annihilated mess piled in the ruin, "and when we're all done, we'll float down a postcard and you can come on up if you still want to bother with it."
Some of the foreign entourage turned their heads a bit to look at one another, and foremost to their leader, who looked back for no council nor reassurance.
"A Postcard?" She said flatly.
"With an illustration of it all, maybe a facsimile of the design. Whatever you need, we'll float it right on down."
"You really want us to go home, don't you?"
"No, not you, us," Pom said, "I found what I was looking for."
The mill at night was a lonely place, but with all four dogs Pom could stay until the candles all went out. It was like a precession far more at that time with the fireflies wandering, glowing like aerial embers responsible alone for the hot air of the summer night. The water could be told from the grass only when it caught the moonlight as it trembled over the rocks and silt below. All her dogs would drink it in a lap or two at a time before returning to play, chasing the sparks through the air and biting down the ears of any others that would nearly succeed. A heavy splash in the dark came once in a while when a dog bounded blindly into the creek, shook itself off and was dry soon after from all the ceaseless running and circling. Pom's white wool shone under the moon and to any passers by she'd flicker like a phantom as her dogs in black chased past, before and behind her as she jumped after them, and on rare occasion one would run to her and spit a golden glow into the grass at her hooves, which would kindle again then float far above.
Woogums would be in bed by now, he knew only early mornings since the renovation of the ruins. For this Pom blamed herself, knowing early mornings burned him worse than any candle. Now she found they burned only her, and mostly when Woogums would insist she woke for his goodbyes before he trotted out the door and past the river's bend. Neither of them had again the idle days before the balloon, but they both saw each other when the whole town sallied forth weekly to sidle the town's perimeter to secure it of any curiosities for Unicorns or otherwise. They both gladly consumed the recounts of each other's days, avoiding the eyes of the Prime Minister who they likely cost much with their unstoppable curiosity and reckless diplomacy.
No Unicorns came, however. Some letter was sent that she believed to be the postcard she promised, and for a long time no response came. One night at the mill was a dozen hours before a hearing. It was over some thing of inconsequence, the diet of dogs, but still she felt as though all idles days were slipping away for each of them, and soon she'd sleep through the candlelit nights to meet with some calling in the mornings. Now she picked daffodils and daisies. The river was riveted with her sleeping dogs, and still she floated the petals down the river, and in the darkness she couldn't see if the mill lifted them to show the moon the offering and let it float away again. Trillium was her name, and Pom wondered how many manes her and her brother had decorated with the flowers they christened and sent away, and hearing them called "precious" made her wonder of her own restlessness, and knew fully well now their preciousness came not from picking. When her calling came into the light of day and she'd be drawn into the life of all the bellwethers before her, what need had she to leave, she thought. When that letter for her came, she'd wait right here for it.