Never the Melody

He watched her moving away. Not wanting to acknowledge the growing gap between them, closing his eyes to any knowledge of whose hand she might touch, whose embrace might come to her. He closed his mind to her appearance, shutting out any thought of what she looked like, her scent, the feel of her, the texture of her skin. He refused to travel any of the pathways in his mind that would lead to her and went out instead into another world, telling a different story, for now, her story was too painful to follow.

She walked beside a river, looking for a place where she could rest a while. Summer warmed the air, the midday sun lit the space under the trees. She walked on, every now and then, forced from the banks as the trees and rocks become too crowded to let her pass.

She was tall, young, but beyond youth, dressed in a garment the color and tone of her skin, a light color taken from the earth, the fabric itself, light around her, having little weight, just enough for it to hang and move with her as she sought a path by the river. She sang to herself as she went:

I lived a year
A year alone
Alone in forests and hills
without fear
still as a stone
summer's heat and winter's chills
leave me milk,
bread and honey
Leave them for me in the field...

Mab stopped part way through the song, lifting a hand to shield her eyes. She saw something moving at the edge of the stream, not the light shimmering off the surface of the water, nor the leaves stirring in the breeze; something moving with a different rhythm and direction that the water and the breeze could not account for. She stood still for a while, wondering what had come into her domain, listening, feeling the ground, looking up into the air.

She noticed her fingers in amongst the clouds, spread out to catch the sun; she felt her hand against the bark of a tree, the veins and sinews under the skin rich with the life in the tree, singing of the colored blood flowing up into the sky; she remembered her solitude and saw that it was broken. The life in the stream had come to make a different world for her.

She made a way to the edge of the stream, pushing aside branches and leaves till she was peering down into a basket floating in the water, looking into the green, bright eyes of the child lying awake, pulling at the clothes and straps around it. It was a traveling basket, the child strapped in, unable to fall out or get out. Mab cooed and called softly. The child stopped pulling at the clothes and looked up at her, a slow, delighted smile coming to the child's eyes. Mab bent down, reaching out over the water, pulling the basket towards her. She pulled the basket up onto the bank and unstrapped the child, unwrapped the child and laid him on the bank under the trees while she turned back to the basket to see if it gave her any sense of where he came from.

It was well made, tightly woven, and quite dry inside even though it had obviously been in the water for some time. She looked upstream; seeking a sense of where he came from, there was nothing. He had presumably been asleep and only woken as she came upon him, she could sense his wakening hunger now as he lay on the bank of the stream. She turned to him picking him up, wrapping him again.

Mab strapped him back into the basket, hefted him onto her back and started at a quick pace back into the woods to where she lived, a little way up the side of the hill with the stream at its base. A little way up in a cottage of turf and stone built into the side of the hill. It was small but comfortable enough and warm in the winter. Mab had goats that took one side of the cottage while she took the other. She gathered acorns and made her own acorn flour, she had little need of the milk and bread they left for her, though now, with the child, she thought it might come in useful.

She looked at him wondering how old he was, what his name was, why he was abandoned to the stream. She assumed he was abandoned, he surely couldn't have come far, yet she had no sense of a hue and cry after a child in the river. She could only imagine the horror of a child swept away. What life could lead to a choice where that horror was a preferred alternative? What could such a thing be preferred to? She found the thought of it so hard that it was difficult to see it clearly in her mind. The sentences mixed themselves up and refused to confront the horror of a child abandoned to death in the river.

The thought stayed with her for many years. There was always a shadow over her vision of the child made from the darkness of her imagining what waited for him in the river; abandoned to the water and the end of life. She never named him as a child, instead calling him first just 'Boy', then 'River Boy', and finally "Basket Boy' which she always shortened to 'BB'. By the time he could understand such things he only knew himself as BB and so had no notion of where he came from or how he came to live with her. Whenever he asked she would laugh and tousle his hair saying, "I found you in a basket in the river."

As he got older he would laugh, "Mab that's not true. I have seen many things come from the river but never anything like you or I. Besides, I remember you teaching me to swim. How could I have come from the river if I could not swim?"

"I told you, you came in a basket. And besides, it wasn't this river, it was another one. "

He heard but he would not believe. He learned many things from Mab. She understood the woods and things beyond the woods. Above all, she taught him how to sing. She waited until his voice broke, doing enough to teach him to distinguish one note from another. She would sing and have him sing the counter melody so he learnt to carry both tunes in his mind, the melody and the counter melody, weaving them together into something utterly mysterious, completely unknowable to the listener; known only to his own mind that could hold both melodies at the same time.

Beyond his ninth year, she never allowed him the melody at all. He would sing to himself in the woods letting the counter melody shimmer in the air under the trees as he walked in the soft light of the early morning. The melody would be there, but there only in his mind. She would see him so and smile at the beauty he brought into the world, how incomplete it was because of his presence. How alive it became because he was there with all the promise he carried with him, the melody hinted at in the sound that came from his lips as he sang.

She waited until his voice broke and taught him to sing outside the range that any man would ever sing. His voice was so high and so penetrating that no one who heard it could shut it out. Now when he sang in the woods his voice made the whole forest ring with sound, a high, penetrating, beautiful sound unlike any made by man before.

One day he came back to the cottage and found it empty. Mab was no longer there. She had left him. Abandoned him; walked away from him; leaving him to drift away from her; knowing they would never separate any other way. He knelt by the empty door and wept; unable to sing, unable to speak. He sat at the door for two days. Finally, recognizing it was useless to stay, he left. Walking off, seeking the boundaries of the woods beyond which he had never been before.

She fed the child and sat looking at him wondering who he was and where he came from. Knowing, one day, she would have to leave him; swept up in the sorrow of his coming and his going. She fed him and loved him all the same. She kept him with her until one day she knew the time had come and she stood at the door of the cottage, looking out at the morning, listening to his distant voice, singing in the woods. She gathered up what she thought to take with her and left, leaving the cottage behind her, empty and abandoned.

There was the cast off son of the king. He lay in bed, the cat under the covers at his feet. The cat stretched, caressing the son's legs with his paws, stretching out his claws as he did so making the son twitch and move as the cat's talons threatened to dig into him. What was the cat saying? "Get up, its time to feed me." "I'm awake so you should be awake." "You're flattening me!" Probably not, he would let out a howl if he were being flattened.

There is a strange paradox of the king's messenger. It follows from how the king can discover things about the world he rules. Consider what the king has to do. Say, for example, he needs to know how many villages are in the southwest quadrant of his kingdom. What does he do? He reads something. Looks for a message of some sort that says: "Here is a village, here is another one. There used to be a village here but it isn't there anymore."

The king isn't looking at the village itself; he's reading something about the village. Really, he has no direct evidence that the village itself exists. The message might be lying. Anything the king can read might be a lie. The king is completely trapped by his role, if he were to go and look for himself, he would cease to be a king and become a mere messenger. You can imagine, if he went as the king, if there was no village where there was supposed to be one, they would put one there just for the occasion of his visit.

How do we know the world is not lying to us? He was the son of a king; He lay in bed imagining the sound of the cats, feeling the cat down by his legs. None of it was real, none of it actually happened. He did feel the cat, but then he woke and the world was not as it was in his dreams. He woke to a world in which there were no cats.

The next section to read is: Faded Away

To follow this thread in the story go to: Faded Away Down a Crevasse

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