Уолтер Мосли - Blue Light

The body through the trees lunged for cover more quickly than I would have imagined possible, but the shout of pain told me that Alacrity’s speed had been greater.

Reggie was up in a moment, hobbling away.

“I’ll kill you!” Alacrity cried. She had nocked another arrow.

Reggie screamed.

I jumped, grabbing the bow and throwing my body weight against the enraged girl. The bow snapped and I fell. Alacrity started running in the direction that Reggie had fled, but I managed to grab her foot and topple her.

She went down but was up in an instant. I grabbed her again; she turned and threw me up against a tree. With one hand against my chest, Alacrity hefted a large wooden knife in the other. The killing rage that shook her dampened any possibility for love. I could see that this was the passion sex brought up in her.

I was used to wildflowers and red wine, not arrows and knives.

“Fuck!” Alacrity shouted in my face.

She turned away from me and stalked off into the woods. I wasn’t worried about Reggie anymore. It looked as though the arrow had only caught him in the thigh, and I knew Alacrity wouldn’t be able to find him once he got out of sight.

The surrounding white firs hummed a sweet counterpoint to my panic. But the music was no balm for my pain. I was flesh in the face of iron blades; I was a Christian at the mercy of lions. I was at the center of history and paying the price. I shivered when I thought of how quickly Alacrity had decided to kill her friend. I tried to think of something to do about it, but nothing came to mind. The aftermath of my fright left me drowsy. I closed my eyes, and sleep followed me into the dark.

When I returned to the camp that night, Reggie had been there but was gone again. Addy said that he claimed his wound had come from a fall. She hadn’t believed him, but he was gone before Juan or I had returned.

Alacrity was back late. She was sullen and went to sleep soon.

We didn’t see Reggie again for days. He made his presence known, though, through missing food and the disappearance of his sleeping bag.

Silence prevailed over those days. Wanita was quiet, not even talking about her dreams. Addy sat for hours with her daughter, cooking and working with tree cloth. Only Juan Thrombone seemed unaffected by the mood. He spent most of his time preparing for the new citizens of Treaty.

He kept saying that people like me and Addy — half-light and free — would soon be coming.

Bones was always returning from or going to the abandoned town about five miles away. It had been a mining town, just three broken-down buildings on one side of a creek that must have once been a road. There was a hotel, a church, and what might have been a barn or a dance hall. Juan was working on them, filling in cracks, bringing bear pelts and big granite pots.

I once saw him moving a great pot by using bears as beasts of burden. He led them with simple reins made from various animal hairs and deer leather. The ropes he used were also from hair and of thickly braided tree cloth. It was quite a sight, seeing a team of six huge bears working in unison pulling the four-foot-high oblong stone bowl.

That particular morning I had been out looking for Reggie. I hadn’t seen him since the day in the singing grove. I heard sounds pretty far away and followed them. When I got there, I saw the team of bears pulling the stone bowl down a gully of small trees. Juan Thrombone sat atop the bowl, driving the grunting bears. All around them were butterflies. Thousands of butterflies. Some were big like the ones that attacked us, but many were small and normal-looking. They seemed to be urging the bears and Thrombone on.

“Hurry up, bears!” Juan Thrombone barked. “The sooner we get there the sooner you get your honey!”

I followed them for the rest of the morning. There was nothing else to do. They pulled and yanked, growled and roared for more than three hours until coming to the town of Treaty deep in a cedar grove.

When they got the big bowl out in front of the barnlike structure, Juan laid out six big wooden bowls, filling each with honey from a large deerskin pouch. The bears went at the sweet liquid and were instantly carpeted with butterflies.

“Pretty, huh?”

The voice startled me. I gasped just like a frightened starlet in a bad western.

“Hey,” Alacrity said.

“Hey,” I whispered back.

We watched for a while, and then she jerked her head to indicate that we should leave. I followed her down a path that I hadn’t noticed before. She was wearing a pair of her mother’s jeans and one of my plaid shirts.

We walked for a long time, saying absolutely nothing. For more than an hour we made a gradual climb but then began to descend. The terrain was pretty rough, and through most of it there was no path. Every footfall was a different motion, a new gesture. Following Alacrity through that rough terrain was like going through the motions of some primeval prayer and dance.

After maybe two hours more she stopped.

“It’s just up there,” she said.

“What?” I was breathing hard and didn’t want to take another step.

“You got to get ready now, Chance,” she said instead of answering my question.

“Ready for what?”

“Just try to keep calm now; it’s just up here. Right after we go between these trees.”

We were in a grove of Juan Thrombone’s singing firs. They formed a blockade and a doorway. Alacrity pushed her way through the sapling trunks. Actually, the trees themselves seemed to move apart for her. We went up through into a large space, a grove of young sequoias. Young, but what trees they were.

There were two dozen forty-foot sequoias spaced out around the clearing. Each one was magnificent in its own birthright, but what dazzled me was something else. Where the singing trees of Juan Thrombone chanted in high-pitched tones like castrati, these great trees hummed out a psalm so deep that I was forced to my knees. They were, I was sure, the choir of Earth. Their deep rumbling melody told me everything. They were the hymn of unbroken history back so far that they predated the light that illuminated them.

I was there on my knees outside of the circle of trees. I named them instantly — the Bellowing Trees of Earth.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said to me. “I wanna show you the throne.”

“No,” I croaked.

“Why not?”

“I can’t.” I swallowed the words. I didn’t think she understood me. “I can’t,” I said again.

“But it’s a throne. You’ll really like it.”

I sobbed but couldn’t say any more. Alacrity knelt beside me and put her arms around me. Instinctively she brought my head to her breast. Her strength and warmth, the powerful beating of her heart, revived me some. I held on tight and her embrace tightened too.

As sad and suicidal as I had been in San Francisco, I never even once thought that there could have been too much beauty. But there with those trees, in that beautiful warrior woman’s arms, I felt too small to enjoy the pleasure offered me.

“Come on, Chance,” Alacrity said again. “Come with me.”

She pulled me to my feet, and we walked through the chorus of gods. The music that emanated was less sound and more a bone-shaking vibration. A deep longing for friction was satisfied somewhere that I hadn’t known existed. My balance was shaky, the ground seemed to shift now and then. The trees didn’t appear to be limited by space at all. They were everywhere at once.

Alacrity walked with her arm around my waist. She led me to the largest tree toward the other side of the grove. There was an opening shaped like a frozen black flame in its bark. The slit was large enough for a man to go into, but not far.

“Sit in it,” Alacrity told me. “Sit down in it.”