Mitchell Smith - Moonrise

Baj cleared his throat. "I have heard the… idea."

"Have you?" Louis Cohen nodded. "Well, it's a correct idea. All things are made of those vibrations, a sort of music our ears are too dull to hear, but which great men sense… and greater men act on."

Baj smiled agreement, very content to keep his mouth shut.

"I have sharp ears," Nancy said, and stared at Baj as if she spoke to him. "Almost all Persons, Moonrisers, hear very well."

"Yes," Louis Cohen said, "and many such Time-lost seem stronger than we, and some"- he smiled just past her – "appear more beautiful. You… apparent people have a place, in this icy, dissolving world, and we do not grudge it. But Warm-time is still to be retrieved, and can be brought back by no lever or engine-motor, by no fiddling of the Boston Talents – but only by conviction." He was no longer smiling. "That alone makes the littlest things spin and tremble and fly the way they must to roll time's carpet up again." He stood silent, then, and seemed abstracted.

"We must not interfere?" Baj said, then wished he'd said nothing.

Louis Cohen nodded. "Just so. You've been our transitory guests – barely imagined by the well-taught, though dealt with decently by those wiser, able to see and hear you fairly well… You are, as all creatures out of place in time, interesting in your way." He shook his head. "But you will become more and more… weighty as you stay near us, and might tear the fabric that marches to perfection and Warm-times again. We cannot allow it."

"Then our thanks to you and your father," Baj said, "for permitting a visit that has hardly happened. And since any… occurence here would be even more a disturbance, we are gone as if we'd never been…" He stood up from the bench, and bent for his pack, bow, and quiver, praying to every Jesus that Nancy and Richard would do the same. And, as though he'd drawn them with him, they did – even Errol, drowsy with feeding, stood, ready to go.

Baj didn't look at Louis Cohen again, said nothing more to him, but took hold of Errol and walked away through the crowded tables of people eating, families enjoying their sunny day despite the cold breeze blowing… He walked away, making a spirit of himself that did not see and was not seen – hoping that Richard and Nancy were following.

He crossed the grassy square, and kept on past the row of little buildings, copy-treasures he would dearly have loved to stroll through.

… Padding footsteps. Richard came up beside him. "Middle-Kingdom," he murmured, "might have done worse than kept Bajazet-Baj a prince, for swift decision and common sense."

"Don't run." Nancy, behind them. "Don't run…"

The buildings left behind, they passed a street of little houses, grass lawns, and shading trees. The copy driving-cars, so brightly painted, rested silent and forever still on gravel drives… A chill wind was gusting over distant harvested fields, breezing down from blue mountains, the Tuscaroras, that rose rank on rank, the northern gates of Pass I-Seventy.

Behind them, the musical band could be heard playing a cheery melody – from the very oldest copybooks of musical notation. An odd and ancient tune, but one Baj had heard before. "… Good Vibrations."

They came over stubbled fields to the northern mountains' foothills in late after-noon, and climbed up into those forested slopes as if into their mothers' laps, for safety… By evening, high in a hemlock clearing, they settled to sleep, curled in cloaks and blankets, to no music but the wind's, sliding though evergreen boughs.

Baj lay awake awhile, saying a good-bye to the Bajazet of only Warm-time weeks ago. That prince uncertain, was now hammered harder in mind and body by mountain traveling, travel's fair meetings and foul. Tempered too late, of course, to aid his brother… He said that good-bye, then turned in his blanket, and slept, dreaming of living in the Copy-town. He knew, within his dream, what the houses were like inside. He was served a breakfast of pork-strips and eggs by a pretty woman in a flowered apron, who spoke odd book-English and called him by another name… Then, still in his dream, he walked down a narrow hall on woven carpet dyed one creamy color, and stepped into a nursery where a baby lay in a huge iron crib. Immense – bigger than Richard – naked, pale, and smelling of pee and perfumed cream, the child turned its great head as Baj came in. It stared at him with eyes a drifting milky blue. – Then Patience stood up at the crib's other side, and said, "Get out."

"… Enjoy your visit?"

Baj, waking after a hunting-dream following the other, roused to dawn's first light and heard Patience ask her question again, and Nancy say, "No."

Lying propped on an elbow under a wind-bent hemlock, with her worn blue greatcoat buttoned to her throat, Patience yawned, glanced at Baj as he threw his blanket aside and sat up. "- And here's a busier visitor. One who should learn to knock before he enters others' dreams." She'd taken her nose-spints off, leaving only a fading bruise across the bridge.

"Your pardon," Baj said, startled by the mention – and the cause, though he'd heard of double dreaming, usually by sweethearts.

"Oh… not your fault."

Richard came lumbering through brush, doing up his trouser lacing. "All awake, I see." Errol ambled behind him, doing up in imitation.

"Ah," Patience said, "- he has finished his toilet, and finds us awake! As, at moon-down, I settled here to find you all snoring. I could have cut your throats, one by one, and each throat deserving it."

Richard's deep, considering hum as he knotted his laces.

"Before you burst into song, dear one," Patience said, "you might remember that Moonriser ears and noses may have been sentry enough in the south. But we're north, now. It's time and past time we stand night guard, or some other air-walker, for Boston's reason, may sail down silent to kill us."

Richard stopped humming and said, "True. Time to guard against Walkers-in-air. We'll set night watch and watch."

Patience nodded. "… And none of you enjoyed your visit to almost Warm-times? Warm-times in a blown-glass bottle – where, from the smell of you, you ate a great meal of meat."

"I did enjoy the idea of it," Baj said.

"Ah. The 'idea.'"

"Yes… Such an effort to make imagination real."

"As they did to the Robins," Nancy said. She stood, and walked away into the brush.

Patience sat up, eased her left arm from its sling, and gently exercised it. "You wished to stay?"

"No."

"And why not, if you admired their efforts?"

"Because it's only wishing," Baj said. "And they cripple and murder to try to make it otherwise."

Patience got to her feet, swung her arm in careful slow great circles. "Not nearly the first, not nearly the last to do that. Wishing is the winding-key of history, for – as copybooks say – good or ill… I am absolutely starving."

"Baj," Richard said, "travel ahead a little, hunt for us."

"Straight north by the sun?" Baj picked up his bow, knelt to set and string it. He had only seven arrows left – the rest splintered, or lost despite searches.

"North, by the sun. We'll catch up."

"I'll climb with you, Richard." Patience stretched. "Walking either way, in air or on the ground, stiffens me a little, either in mind or muscle – the penalties of age."

Baj fastened the throat of his cloak – it was not a warm morning – shouldered his pack and quiver, and trotted away uphill, brushing through crowding damp hemlocks as he climbed. Not a warm morning. The air, that had been so friendly all the weeks coming north, traveling with the short-summer – now, closer to the Wall, had turned a warning chill, as if Lord Winter spoke through it… whispering, as snow in gathering blizzards whispered, "I will arrive. Shelter, or die."