Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

I was not convinced. I made up my mind right then to tuck Wanita in every night — and to sleep close by.

Bomp bomp bomp resounded in the air. Bomp de bomp. Bomp de bomp.

“It’s Reggie!” Alacrity cried.

The sound came closer and closer. Finally Reggie emerged from the woods with a big hollow log in his arms. He beat the drum with a thick branch.

Thrombone leaped up and so did Addy and the girls. They all danced and laughed happily. No one else seemed to feel that the world was falling apart. No one else seemed afraid of what might happen in the days to come.

I fed the fire while my friends and Juan Thrombone danced. Reggie beat his drum with an amazing ear for someone untrained. They were all wild and abandoned, but Alacrity was by far the most primal. Her movements were like nothing except maybe the flames I fed. She leaped and gesticulated, bounced and sang out. Her whiteness was fearful to see. Her intensity, I feared, was the future of the world.

The dancing went on for quite a while longer. Finally Addy tired, and Juan followed her back to the fire. Smiling and happy, they sat there next to me. I felt more lonely than ever.

“The trees are not only a wall of wood and root,” Juan was saying later on, after much honey wine, “but they sing a dull song I taught them. That song hides the puppy trees and you and me. They also call for people like you, First Light” — he was referring to Addy, he was holding her hand — “humans half dipped blue. I wanted them to come help me tend the trees and the forest.”

“Why would the trees need tending?” I asked. “It is a forest, isn’t it? The trees can get along on their own.”

“But these are special trees,” the little woodsman replied.

“What kind of special trees?”

Juan Thrombone turned his full attention upon me then. In his eyes I saw a vastness across which, I imagined, a strong wind blew. His smile didn’t seem relevant to the power in those eyes, but he smiled anyway and said, “There are two kinds of trees that are special. One because they can sing and the other because they roar.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard a call, did you not?” he asked.

The storm in his gaze seemed to grow in power.

“That call,” he continued, “was from a thousand trees whose parents were white firs. I grafted them so they could sing so sweet and high. They sing like the wind, only higher. They sing like the sun before dawn.”

“The wind and the sun,” Addy said. “Are those the two kinds?”

“No, First Light,” Juan said gently. “The white firs sing of the sun and wind. And then there are the puppy trees.”

“What are they?” I asked.

“Deep bass ramblers. Children of what you call blue light but, like Alacrity, born here. They are orphans and I tend them. They rumble like bullfrogs and tickle Earth’s soul.”

“And we’re here to tend them?” I asked.

“No,” he said. The tone of his voice would have knocked me down if I wasn’t already seated. “The puppy trees, the deep ramblers, might mistake you for dinner and suck the life from your bones. Stay away from them. You were summoned here to tend the special white firs, the high singers, the maskers of blue. The ones that called you. They called and you came.”

“We did,” I said. “But you didn’t want the children. You wanted Addy, but you wanted her to leave Alacrity behind.”

I wanted Addy to see him for what he was.

“I never expected that those of such power, even so young, would follow those so weak. I didn’t know if I could protect them and the puppy trees too. The thing out there, the one you call Gray Man. He wants only to kill. I thought that all of us together here would make too much noise, would bring him here.”

“And so he could be on the way here right now?” I said, happy that I now had a way to get my friends to leave.

“He might be. He might.” Juan cocked his ear upward. “But I don’t hear him coming. No, I don’t.”

“But he could be coming,” I said. “He could be, and you just don’t hear it yet. He could come on us in our sleep up here. He could kill us in our sleep. We’ve got to get out of here. We’ve got to get out of here now.”

I looked around at my companions and friends. The children had stopped their dancing to listen. They were all looking to Juan Thrombone. It was he who they turned to for answers now. It was he whom they trusted.

“You can leave if you want to,” Juan said to me. “You are welcome if you care to stay. The Gray Man may not know where we are; he may have changed also. This could well be true.”

“I’m staying,” Reggie said. “It’s nice here. It’s the safest place in the whole world.”

“Me too,” Wanita said.

“Please stay, Chance,” Alacrity whined. “Please stay with us here. Please.”

I looked at Addy. Her fingers were laced with Juan Thrombone’s. She held my eyes a moment and then looked away.

“I’m staying for a while at least, Chance. I’m tired and sick still. And I can’t think of anywhere else to go.”

“And there will be others,” Juan said. “More people will come to us over the weeks and days. The song you heard goes like a ribbon on the wind, blowing here and there. Some will hear it. A few will come. And when they get here, there’s an old town down by the stream. It’s a ghost town now, but soon they will come and we can be happy, Last Chance, for a while more.”

Addy snuggled down and put her head against Juan’s shoulder. That’s what broke my will. He had taken everything that I had left with his funny way of talking and his eyes like forever.

“Okay,” I said. “All right, I’ll stay for a few days more. At least until Addy is better. Then we can talk about it again.”

And with that, something eased in me. A pressure, a weight. I gave in to the spell of Juan Thrombone and his magical wood. Reggie began playing his drum again and we all danced. Somewhere in the early hours of the morning Juan and Addy disappeared. I found them the next day naked and wrapped in each other’s arms under the hanging shingles of Number One. They were together from that day on.

At first I stayed because of the children. But within the first month I knew that they were safe with Addy and her man. After that I just didn’t know where to go. Juan offered to walk me out of the wood if I wanted to leave. But the truth was, I wanted him to leave. Sometimes he’d go away for days at a time. I’d begin to hope that he’d hurt himself or maybe just decided to go elsewhere. I’d try to comfort Addy at those times, telling her that she didn’t have to worry.

I wanted Addy then. It had never crossed my mind before. She was Ordé’s woman to begin with, and later, while we fled the threat of Gray Man, I was too worried even to think about love. But once we were settled in Treaty, I wanted her to choose me over Juan. I wanted her to see that he was unstable but that I was constant.

But she never worried when Juan was gone.

“He’ll be back, Chance,” she’d say with a dreamy look on her face. “He’ll come back to me and he’ll have great stories to tell.”

Not only had her wound healed but her skin had softened, the little red veins in her eyes had cleared. She started singing songs and working with strange leaves, tree needles actually, and barks that Juan brought for her to cook in a huge stone tub that appeared one day next to Number Nine.

“My friends brought it in the night,” he told me when I asked how the big hollow rock got there.

Juan taught Addy how to cook the leaves and wood and how to pound the mixture with a pestle the size of a baseball bat. She worked at it for days until the resulting green paste was thick. Then she spread out the mixture on a big stone that lay in the field separating the cathedral of Treaty from the surrounding woods. The paste dried into an extremely thin and seemingly delicate blue-green material. It was like rice paper, only it wouldn’t tear or decompose. From this cloth Addy made our clothes. She didn’t sew the seams but used wooden buttons with bearhair ties that Juan collected for her.