CHAPTER TWO

My father came to visit very soon after I came to myself.

He was awkwardly anxious for me, I thought, for I was much quieter, and I often paused and became very thoughtful before I spoke.

It frightened both him and Nurse, but to me it seemed only natural. Why should I not change? Must one always stay the same, from the very moment of their birth?

For now it seemed that I had some calling in life, even if it was one that no one else could understand, for before I had been a vain child (speaking my own praise, commanding the coming about of my own wants, ignorant of truer beauty in high places), I thought, or perhaps still was.

I did not tell either of them what I had seen in My Valley, and I suppose they never thought to ask.

They followed me, or rather let my dazed self lead them were I went, and would not let their tired eyes off of me.

This tried on my well being a good deal, I think. I was never a rash child, for though maybe selfish, I would wait, to some extent, for the things I wanted, and would always consent after some amount of pleading or commands to me.

This was why it was unnatural for me to slip away to My Valley, on one brightly moonlit night while my father stayed with Nurse and I at the cottage.

As I approached the wavering trees and eternally green grass of the valley, a cold feeling swept over me.

The loneliness I had felt before wavered there to grab me, but it seemed on the verge of disappearance. I fled forward, to one of the great trees, and lay at its base, shivering in my cool white bed clothes that lay beneath my long white cape.

A cool security seemed to take over my anxious mind, and I closed my eyes and stretched myself out on the grassy ground, then lay peacefully in the moonlight.

A strum of music seemed to come from the distance, inevitable in its reality. I was neither asleep nor dreaming, and yet it was very dream like, or rather beyond explanation, as is the feeling that comes when something has happened just the same way it has happened to you once before.

I felt my lips curve up at the sides as the melody floated past me, passing earthward from above, almost like it had come down from the moon.

Shifting on the cool ground, I opened my eyes… and saw him again.

He was standing just across from the tree I lay below, both of us so that our sides were faced to the cottage on its little hill above the dale.

I think that he smiled, as if confirming that he had been right when he said that I would come again, if he had been the one who had said it.

Voice sweeter than willows, will you not sing again?

I sat slowly up, pulling my white cape closer around me.

My lips, chapped and dry, could not open to utter a word, or release a note.

My brown eyes saw that in his hand was a ten-stringed instrument, and instantly my gaze went to his eyes again, that I might, in my mind, ask him to play for me, instead.

He seemed to understand, as he knelt on the cool grass, some distance away from me, and ran his fingers over the soft strings in a rich, soothing chord.

I closed my eyes again, feeling the music warm me in the middle of the cold night.

The cold green that wavered among the trees seemed to dance and ripple like water as he rolled the melody out on his perfect instrument.

I swayed with him, my brown eyes downcast, my dark lashes quivering with the cool pattern of my breathing.

That sweet, yet bitter, minor composition, that wordless song could have lasted a thousand years, I know. And perhaps it did, and passed the boundaries of time, so that we were the only ones in a separate world, bound by something unspoken and wordless.

But when it finished I felt as though I had awoken from a dream, and I could not remember what the tune was, or how it had gone.

I lifted my eyes and looked up at him. I wanted what he had - That ever assuring warmth, the confidence that the world would never touch him if it was not let to, the safety of his sheltering valley. There was a story behind all his actions, his movements, his speechlessness.

I realized that the moon was fading, and the shimmering stars were less bright. Morning was coming, and it seemed almost too fast, as though the sun rose much higher every minute. I glanced pitilessly back at the cabin. I did not want to return.

But he stood, and stepped forward, and took my two hands, allowing me to hold them out to him, palm upward. I closed my eyes, my senses confused with heat and cold. I felt something thin and hard like clay in my hands, and soft motion closed them around it. Then something wet, and light as air, touched the back of one of my hands.

I dared not open my eyes, but I had no reason for keeping them closed.

Finally I looked up, only to catch him creeping back into the shadows. He bowed to me a deep, solemn bow, and then he vanished.

I watched with bitter amazement, thinking that he was wrong to leave me. But something beckoned me back to the cabin.

Before I turned, I remembered the object in my hands, and looked down to behold it.

It was a little clay cup, with words written all around in a beautiful calligraphy that I could not read. Somehow I knew it held a secret which I desired.

Breathlessly I raced the sun up the hill – for time seemed to have quickened all too strongly after its having been slowed.

As I burst through the door, my eyes bright, my cheeks pink, I came face to face with my father, standing, decked in his thick armor, on the threshold, waiting for me.

The look of his face was stern, almost terrible. But it melted instantly, as though touched by a warm radiance.

He embraced me.

"Daughter, how long has it been this morning? It seems as though I have slept a thousand years."

I looked up innocently into his strong, rough face, wondering if he knew of the song that could slow time. But he spoke of something other.

"I have come to a decision," he muttered, stepping back so that I felt small and alone, with the sun on my white cape, warming it and leaving my shoulders hot. My hands covered the little cup under the folds of the thick cloak.

He lifted a great satchel from the floor and swung it over his shoulder, then stepped back toward me.

"Today you leave this country, and journey to Sfar Ambyl with me."

My insides seemed to shudder and waste themselves within me, but my body stayed stiff and rigid. My eyes felt hot, but I could not understand why. I saw a thousand flashes of green, the leaves of the trees. I saw their reflections in the clear pools, making their water green also. The green grass. The blue sky. The red fruits, the golden wheat, the white sheep! I could not, could never leave it.

And yet I bowed my head in submission, an affirmative nod.

"I have prepared everything for us," my father said as he embraced me again, and then stepped past me, over the threshold and into the brilliant sun. He seemed to be watching something.

Before I followed his gaze I looked back at nurse. She stood ever so compliantly, her hands clasped neatly in front of her, her grey head bowed low. But I knew her eyes were full of tears. She would find a shepherd's boy, or a village girl, to help her tend the fields. She would forget me, would she not?

Quickly, with my heart in my throat, I turned to watch my father.

He was well down the hill, to the right of the valley, and before a large pack of beasts I had never seen before. They were hardly like horses, which I had seen him ride. Their necks were long and ugly, their eyes wet and black, and their backs had very large humps on them. For a moment I thought that they carried luggage only – but I saw that the humps were great lumps of flesh upon their bodies, and I was somewhat shy of them (though they did not seem like wholly bad –nor good- creatures). As I stared, I felt steps on the wood floor behind me, and nurse pressed her hands and aged, soft lips against my neck. I placed my hand against hers for a moment, not looking back at her.

Father came up to me and took my hand away from hers.

"I don't suppose you have seen a camel before?" he asked laughingly as he pulled me (frightened, silent,) away from all I had ever known. I could not look back for a last time, for I knew already what I would see.

I stepped forward to the side of one of the great beasts and looked into its wide snout. It leaned away from me, to one of its caretakers, and made a great, lowing sort of noise, like a sick cow.

Father had already hoisted himself onto the back of one, and motioned for me to do the same.

As I did so, the caravan men stared at me until I grew pale. I shivered and drew my arms close to me, keeping my eyes downcast. When the creature beneath me began to move, I was all the more horrified. I had never even ridden a horse. I gripped at its cloth tyings and clung with my ankles as best as I could, as the other riders did.

Slowly the caravan inched away from the valley, away from the little cabin under the sun.

I let one of my hands dig into the folds of my cloak and grip the cup, and held fast to it the whole journey through.