___
After more hours of brooding concentration and scribbling, Osley began to open up. “Ara definitely is on an epic journey, headed south. Here’s a typical passage that I can pretty much read on its face. Bear with me.”
He held up the page and read it to Cadence.
Ara struck due south and before she realized it, she was lost in Myrcwudu, the great remnant wellspring of mighty Mirkwood itself! A darker forest, perhaps, than what may lie even in the full depths of that haunted realm. All life that could flee, even the great spiders, had long ago abandoned this drear world. She stumbled forward in the pervading gloom that would not give back its pathways.
To either side were immense, desiccated tree trunks, like beings frozen in writhing torment. Their numbers faded into the mist. At her feet, the leaves rustled like a living membrane as they parted to create a track before her and forever close the one behind. She had no choice but to go on. Hafoc flitted from branch to branch, afraid to fly more than a few feet and nervous at resting on the old limbs that seemed to reach out with grasping fingers.
She trod warily, resigned to the single, winding track the forest offered. She sensed that time was forgotten here. In the far world outside this gloom, events would run their due course and leave her far behind. The waxing moon would grow and gloat over the trap set for the Bearer. He was already moving fast to his fate while she was caught in the black heart of the Forest of Doubt.
Here the unlucky traveler contended with the most terrible of foes. Not the dim murk that seemed to flow before her. Not the legendary troops of man-sized spiders that guarded the outer reaches. No, here she faced something darker and more subtle.
Hemmed in by fallen trunks that, to her, were as walls many times her height, shadowed by a murky gloom that only grew thicker, and watched by a presence implacable and unyielding, she quit the false trail. She crawled away and curled into a frightened ball. A veil fell across her eyes. A false veil, for it portrayed that her Amon was lost forever. She imagined his face, his eyes grey-hued like a morning mist with the sun shining through. Eyes she would never see again.
As the darker dark of evening came to Myrcwudu, a glistening fog seeped from the forest floor. It pooled in the dells and flowed among roots that spread like the gnarled fingers of dirtied and downfallen giants. Ara got up and stumbled, directionless, lost in a desolation of spirit that seemed to whisper, You are vile and pointless. An insect. Scurry now.
The terror of her insignificance built itself in her mind, like a cairn of rocks heaped up one by one. The very idea made her both fearful and infuriated. If it meant anything to be a Halfling from Frighten, it was to carry a wounded pride. She was wretched and thus she was dangerous. She tried to resist the fog, but it was unrelenting. She stopped, for no apparent reason, as a cockroach might, and waved the antennas of her soul in a desperate search for direction.
Myrcwudu’s answer was no answer.
She scurried forward. Deft footfalls paced on either side. Things unseen scuttled and rustled. Once, Ara heard, far ahead, a long, plaintive sound that was something between a whistle and a cry. But for the stillness, it might have been the saw of the wind through a knothole. She froze and waited, but its maker, if there was one, did not reveal itself.
The opalescent gloom thickened until she unconsciously put her hands in front of her, as if parting cobwebs. She had to find shelter. She peered and groped until she discovered a massive, upended tree. The base of the tree was covered with roots, like a snarl of dirty hair. She could just see within these a mouth-like entrance that beckoned her. She parted the roots and, heedless, put her head in the gaping mouth. She tumbled in. To her surprise, the interior was clean and dry. It felt safe. She summoned Hafoc to perch on a limb near the entrance and she squirmed inside. There she curled into the thin comfort of her cloak.
Huddled there, like some subterranean grub, Ara listened to the night sounds of Myrcwudu. It was an ominous, horrible orchestra. Whisperings of gibberish mixed with anguished cries, as of some passing column of sad and penitent beings. An owl screeched as it passed high overhead. A raucous warbling of some unknown bird cut through the ongoing creak and groan of the giant, ruined trees. In time, the haunted melody swirled into the eddies of her dreams.
As she slept, the sounds collected in a black sack in her mind. The sack bulged and swelled and refused to spill out its contents. Ara writhed in her sleep until she felt silent hands, perhaps her own, but leprous and scabbed, feel their desperate way across her cheeks and plunge hungrily into her mouth to grope for that foul bag.
She awoke with a gasp. Her heart thudded. Her ears sensed something. A dim, gray light, precursor of a far away dawn, seeped though the entrance. Her small and delicate hands, this time unquestionably hers, pulled out her knife as she coiled in readiness.
Then she realized what had awoken her.
The silence.
No birds, no wind, no moans or whispers or creaks or groans. She sensed Hafoc was gone. Everything was waiting, and something had arrived. She held her breath and stretched her eyes wide, straining to hear or see. Or smell. She flared her nostrils. Floating in the air was the waft of some creature rustic and unwashed, fouled with the stench of raw meat. It was close.
Ara’s world closed down to that graylit entrance. She knew this was no dream. She watched in horror as, beyond all her imaginings, a ghastly arm—large and knobby and bristled with hair—finger-walked through the opening.
As she held her breath, a dark bulk followed the arm, filling the gray mouth with a deadly intruder. Her own movement surprised her. She uncoiled her body and, quick as an adder, drove the knife into the shadowy form. It screamed and fell back. The sound cut into the forest like the thudding bite of a sharp axe.
She crawled out, parting the roots and blinking in the luminous mist. Before her lay an orc-captain, his throat bleeding in spurts. He coughed but could not speak. His eyes locked on hers. Dismay, regret, sadness were all there. Whatever had brought him here—perhaps the same inexorable spell that had controlled her path— their fates had at this spot thrown the dice together. Her heart broke as she watched him fade, his orc-life ruined. Her sorrow sliced through the sack in her mind, and the loathsome spell of Myrcwudu gushed out.
Now she could focus her fury. She looked up and around, and thought, I am no insect, and I will not quail before you!
She struck out, heedless of direction, and wandered, whether for sleepless hours or days she knew not.
At last she came upon a clearing, shot through with lances of sunlight. These bright shafts highlighted the immensity of the trees. She stood in awe, her gaze climbing the trunks until her neck ached. At her feet, amidst a riot of auroch-sized roots, a puddle of water caught the light between floating leaves and twigs and created a vicious sparkle that assaulted her unadjusted eyes. She held her hands to her face and looked down between her fingers. She realized she had a bit of magic that might get her out of this place. She knelt and cleared the debris from the puddle. She felt in her cloak and found the small leather kit hidden in a pocket of its folds. This she opened and brought out a tiny, flat bit of wood, no bigger than her fingernail. She lifted from the leather fold a splinter of rock. It was dull gray and each end tapered to a point. One end had been marked with white chalk. She put the bit of wood in the pool and let it float freely. Then she placed the rock splinter on it. It turned and twirled, and came to rest with the white end fixed in one direction. The opposite end was south.
She restored her kit and set out, climbing over and scurrying beneath the deadfalls that lay like repeated hedgerows across her path. There were other puddles and these she used to float the bit of magic, the intelligent stone her father had given to her. Thus she renewed her direction and felt the fog of despair fall away. In time and events unknown to this scribe, but perhaps recorded by others, she escaped the drear boughs of Myrcwudu, and came again to travel the footpath of this tale.
There Osley faltered. “This place, Myrcwudu, was the black heart of it all. The pathless place. The trap that sets us to turn on ourselves and cycle away our days in false reckonings and petty errands. I’m worried, Cadence. I’m also famished. I feel like I’ve been stuck in there with her and can’t get out.”
Cadence smiled. “I’m not worried. She kept her head and she got out. So will we. Let’s start with that fuel.” She called room service and ordered breakfast and coffee. After eating, Osley gathered steam, feverishly jotting words. Pages of scratches later, he handed her three sheets and said. “Get this….”
Cadence read the first one:
Freed from the suffocating eaves of Myrcwudu, Ara was soon in sunlight, crossing a grassy plain leading to a series of hills. She felt exposed and watched, and so she moved as swiftly as possible.
Hafoc had recovered well. First a few feet, then a dozen yards, then a stone’s throw it flew. At the beginning it followed in the direction she was heading, but now it seemed to provide guidance when she was uncertain of the path. It would wheel upward, surveying the land and then alight within her sight.
Watching it float almost motionless on an updraft and then drop out of sight, she guessed that a precipice lay ahead. She passed dual ranks of stones propped and unturned by long ago labors. They were like guiding fingers forming a massive V across the plain. Suddenly, where the V closed to a narrow opening, the ground dropped away in a breathtaking sheer of several hundred feet, ending in a boulder-strewn streambed. The boulders were covered with a latticework of what looked like thousands of giant bones.
So steep and abrupt was the cliff that it took her an hour to pick her way to the bottom. There she stood, ant-like, surveying the confused wilderness of giant, white bone. The skeletons were all of the same kind, all immense beyond her experience, diminishing even the great-horned bison of the North. There were tusks exceeding a dozen arm-spans of men in length, and rib cages through which teams of horses could pass three abreast.
A jagged lens of ice protruded from a seep at the shaded foot of the cliff. From it protruded a mass of wrinkled hide with long tufts of orange-red hair.
A clearing among smaller bone fragments and flint shards told her of an ancient butchery preserved as the stream wandered off to the other side of the canyon. Sitting atop a pile of boulders like a lost and imperial edifice, presided a huge skull. Its long curving tusks would easily encompass a village feasting table fully laden and seated.
After a while, the smell from the ice lens and the lingering sense of disaster left her uneasy. The hawk departed straight south and she followed.
“Don’t stop reading, cause I’m on a roll now. Look at this!” He thrust several more pages at her.
Ara traveled swiftly now, beneath a growing hunter’s moon. It was in the desolate foothills, on a path lost to the memory of even the Woodsmen, that she found the lost wives.
She had traversed Knarch, the Long Downs, and passed into a land of scrub and sinkholes etched unto the back of a great limestone karsk. There she arrived at the first full knees of the Goat Mountains. Above the tree line was a defile no wider than a halfling’s shoulders. Through this she squeezed and squirmed, sometimes looking up to a thin slice of skylight blue. At length, she entered a great rift valley. Oriented to the south, it opened up into a bowl of light, sheltered from the storms and north winds, and fed by cascading streams plummeting from surrounding cliffs. At its far end, it narrowed again but remained open, leading to a plain obscured from her sight by copses of trees.
As the sun warmed the air, the sea-hawk circled above her and rested on a cliff. Ara fell asleep without realizing it.
Awakening with a start, she was encircled by them. They were tree-like, but of varieties more supple and wan than their stiff and thick-barked mates, the Treoherd.
“Who are you, intruder?” She heard this not with her ears, but from a sensation that traveled up her arm where a tendril grasped it. The tendril led to a branch that was part of one of the tree-like beings.
“I know you!” said Ara. “I have heard tales of how they were separated from you, from themselves really. They have been searching for you for centuries too many to count.”
The creatures stood still for the longest time. Ara began to feel foolish, she had been talking to the air. Then the tendril coiled one more loop and the meaning rushed into her.
“Yes. We came here long ago, beyond and before the time of the many races of mortals that walk on two feet and learned to burn and hack. Before animals began their endless procession across the face of the world, we were there. In those elder days, our kind, plants that grow on dry land, migrated by their generations to fill all these places-above-water. This is our earliest memory. It was our purpose it seemed, for we were never told another. At least, it was the purpose we became the most comfortable with. We furthered this march of green inland from shores so ancient that even we could no longer recognize them. “But that is not how we ended here, in this valley of imprisonment.”
“Why don’t you leave? Nothing kept me from getting here.”
“Be cautious with your bravery, small one. There are grim perils here.” The warning passed through Ara with a shudder and she understood the depth of terror that kept the lost wives of the Treoherd within the valley.
“There yet lives but one Worm known to the world outside this valley. Grimmer and more terrible than all others. His lair is unseen by any that walk on two legs. He is hidden in perpetual fog. He sags forth to tear and rend.
The lands beyond this valley, bare and bleak, stripped of trees for a thrice-score of furlongs, are his domain. But that is not all.”
Ara shivered in the dawn chill. She felt a fear, throbbing through these now clutching tendrils, limbs that had lasted a thousand years.
“It has allies, a plague of locust-like hornets, red-striped and each the size of a sparrow. They bite and chew as well as sting with a bitter venom. They ensure all is ruined. Though a multitude, they are as one. They live as a single being even with the Worm. They fly in a great black cloud that turns and wheels as if guided by a single instinct. They are his eyes and outliers. Worst of all, they confuse and disable his victims by their constant buzzing and stinging. For their reward, they are his scavengers. Perhaps we are wrong in this. Perhaps it is they that control the Worm as their own instrument.”
“But where does it live?” Ara spoke, but somehow felt that she could now pass this thought back through her body.
“Where? Once, a great army of men sought the answer. They marched into these lands. Marauders. Strong and well armed with the greatest machines of death. They came in search of his lair and treasure. They were wise in their plans. The plague of hornets they lured to a herd of bison, which they drove before them. The wheeling multitude came to test and harass, and stayed a moment to feed. That was their undoing, for the Men had poisoned the carcasses. The insects died with their jaws full of torn flesh, and others fell from the sky as they escaped in panic, realizing this trickery. A scant remnant of the dark cloud blew away eastward, against the wind.”
“And so the men found the Worm?” Ara questioned.
“No. The Worm found them. The next night, camped near the shore of the Flat Sea, a dense fog rolled into their camp. It extinguished their campfires. The handful of survivors who fled into the high war engines where they had the vantage of strong timbers and a view unto the camp below, later described the encounter to us:
“‘The Worm came in the stillest moment of the night, and was everywhere at once. His tail and taloned wings, and the great sail on his back we saw above the white shroud. The cries of our comrades and the clank and hew of their swords we did hear, but only for a moment. Then all was still. The night and the fog receded in equal stealth, until the dawn saw the bitter remnants of a massacre. Weapons and bodies were strewn in great confusion. A trail of blood and discarded parts of men, bisected by the groove of a great, lazy tail, led unto the sea. We wept at this sight and fled in panic back toward the Misty Wood. The insects, though fewer in number, harassed us and picked at one warrior at a time until he fell. Then they would select another. Five of a force of two thousand did survive. The rest sleep the sleep of the sword, and their spirits float in the slop and gore of this evil thing.’
“Thus do we believe that this thing abides beneath the salty face of the Flat Sea.”
“And you stay here?”
“Yes, for the Worm knows we must pass unto his barren soil to make good our escape. Some have tried this passage and none returned.”
“Maybe they made it to safety.”
“Perhaps, but none other has dared leave in many lifetimes of great trees. And so we stay here. Arriving by folly, we are contained now by fear.”
Ara responded, “Do you not think that this, too, is folly, for in time you will lose all by your fear?”
“As have you. You left with a mistaken heart and now are as lost to your loved one as we to ours.”
“No,” said Ara, “for with your leave, I am departing this valley to find him. Now! “
He watched her finish reading, then said, “OK, enough of dragons. Here is something more recent.” He handed Cadence fresh pages of ink-covered Algonquin stationary.
It is said by a few bards, though vigorously disputed by the dwindling guild of Scholars of the Red Book, that the famous halfling traveler Aragranessa learned much of the secret lore of trees. Of her wisdom the details are all but lost. Only the dimmest reference to the Lost Vale survives as a lyric in nursery rhyme.
One surviving fragment, however—attributable to students of the self-proclaimed wizard Colorfall—tells of the orphans of the wisest and most agile trees, the Treoheord. As these “keepers of the forest” became indistinguishable from old and surly trees, and their mates were lost in time, so their last offspring, perhaps never more than a few in number, wandered the forests as unlearned orphans.
In time, some of these tree-orphans longed for discourse and company, and so grew closer to men. They attended men’s parleys and the tellings of sagas. They put down deep roots and spread immense sheltering canopies. In time they became known as “council trees.” They hosted many momentous meetings and came to have esteemed names. Some were ascribed a spirit of their own.
Should you or your heirs visit one of these last sentinels, perhaps ravaged and cracked by long years, honor them as venerable orphans that chose their own destiny.
From an account in 1720:
After the Scattering of the Halflings some centuries ago, and the recent opening of the Froelboc Mine, there remains in this area, in a park surrounded by low hills of coal and hardscrabble mine tenements, a single, immense ash tree. It is gnarled and oddly shaped where predominant limbs have cracked and fallen. It bears its leaves late, and old men wager as to whom, it or they, will survive another year. But every year, like the sluggish steam engines working nearby, it finally warms to its job. It slowly drives sap to the highest branches and a nimbus aura of green emerges. By late summer it bears a rich canopy of leaves. By the second week of frost, it is the first to go scarlet and drop them all.
It stands in the unmarked park known locally as Shirecommon, and is called, for reasons unknown, the Party Tree.
Osley held up the original document, which had angry smears across it. “It isn’t just cut off here. It’s obliterated by black dye. Maybe we’ll catch up with it later, but this part is lost.”
Cadence babysat Osley the rest of the day.
He had shed his coat, and his stink was only slightly muffled by the new long-sleeved T-shirt he was wearing, as if he dressed up for the occasion. He was in a zone of intense concentration.
Looking at him, she could see remnants of the young chemist focusing on his lab work, developing techniques. Yes, the spark, so long diluted with psychedelics and God knows what else was still there.
There was more, too, a heavy pall of sadness, but this was well hidden. She wondered how many different lives one old man could hold. She decided to quit hovering.
“Os, I’ll be back in a little while. You all right?”
He turned and smiled, saying, “Yeah, I’m great,” and then turned back to the papers. Scratch, think, write, his free hand pumping out some long ago rock and roll rhythm on the desk.
As she left, Cadence felt good. There was progress. In the quiet lobby, she took a bouncing skip and step and edged through the ponderously closing brass doors of the Algonquin. The doorman fussed belatedly to help, but she was gone.
Outside, she inhaled the city smells and heard the city noises and saw the city bustle all around her. Horns honked. A siren wailed a few blocks away.
At that moment, several things happened.
Across the street, a dented and city-worn delivery van was pulled up. It was going to double park. Its color was some faded and lesser version of green. On its side it bore what had once been an extravagant image of a sunlit garden, overlaid with arching, three-dimensional letters that read “SANTI’S VEGE’S”.
Cadence’s mental sketchpad took in these details, adding verisimilitude to the scene that was about to unfold.
The van slowed. The street was otherwise surprisingly empty. Down at the corner, two taxis were laboring around the turn from 6th Avenue. Before them lay the wonder of an entire block of empty Manhattan cross street.
Taxis in such a situation could proceed with caution, or they could proceed at the posted speed, or they could take the imperative third choice: Gun it! Both taxis complied fully. They simultaneously jammed accelerators and jockeyed for position.
Meanwhile, a kid, skinny and good-looking—he could easily be one of Cadence’s fifth-graders—stepped toward the slowing van. He was silky smooth and confident in his motocross jacket. He casually moved in front of the van. He collided with the last bit of its momentum, tumbled head over heels, rolled once, and lay dramatically still. The van nose-dived and screeched as the driver stood on the brake pedal and the tires skidded the last foot before stopping. The driver was a balding man in his fifties. He jumped out, his arms making hysterical waving motions. A terrified and somehow sad “AAAaahh!” cycled from his open mouth.
The van door was open. Quick as a shadow, another kid appeared at the open door, reached in, and grabbed a small leather bag from the front seat. The size and shape suggested it might hold cash receipts. He fled down the sidewalk.
The taxis were oncoming.
The fallen boy got up, seemingly fit and healthy. The van driver grabbed the kid’s jacket with one hand, pointing in the direction of his moneybag evaporating into a crowd of pedestrians. He yelled a futile, “Hey. Hey!”
The boy was trying to slip the driver’s grasp as he sized up his escape route. Cadence knew fifth graders. She could read his eyes. She saw that at any moment he was going to bolt out into the street in front of her.
The taxis were hurtling toward them.
Cadence didn’t think. She ran. She flashed in front of the first taxi and collided with the kid. This time, his backwards flip was unpracticed. They both rolled clear as the taxis slammed on their brakes and skidded and fish-tailed and swerved past them, tires screaming, white smoke boiling, the air filling with the tang of hot, abraded brake pads. The long teeth-grinding, shoulder-wincing sentence stopped. There was a void. The inevitable punctuation mark—the hollow whomp and glassy jingle of impact—didn’t happen.
On the pavement, the kid looked at Cadence. His eyes were saucers overflowing with fear and, that most fleeting thing, kid gratitude. He scrambled up and was gone.
She pulled herself up, slowly, legs like rubber. She brushed herself off and reached down to pick up her Borunda bag, surveying the deep scrapes along the sides. The driver scurried around her. A cluster of passerby milled for a moment, but the event was just a close call, not even meriting a decent gawk. She stood there, received five, maybe ten seconds of New York accolades— the maximum allowed in this City of Haste—and it was all over. The taxis moved on. The van driver had gone somewhere. The Algonquin doorman, fussing and faithful, stayed with her.
It dawned on her, as she replayed the high-def tape of what just happened, that she probably saved a life. She was wrong. She had saved two.
Thirty feet away, Barren milled with the crowd. He had seen it all unfold. The kid with his accomplice, practicing the bump and roll to fake an accident. The stuntman’s art of timing a slowing vehicle, bouncing with it, and topping the move with a fine comic book death sprawl. Then the playing-for-gold part, his buddy’s quick reach and grab heist. They were pretty good!
Just like he had been at that age.
A memory rushed through him. He and his best friend. Inseparable, they were destined to escape their little village and conquer the world together. They stole from the first incoming circus wagon, Barren got caught, and then the circus suddenly packed up and took him with them. Barren remembered the stink of the dancing bear’s urine and feces and its low grunts as he lay tied next to its cage. He remembered the lolling wagons and ox carts trying to out-pace the plague. He remembered leaving his best friend behind to dance with the Black Death.
The memory passed. Barren had stationed himself here to complete his task. Return the scribbles entire with bloody showings in hand.
He looked at Cadence and felt a hunter’s admiration for his prey. She was quick to move and selfless. A fair steward— worthy but fated—to the vile remnants of the Saga of Ara. For this moment only, he would stay his hand.
Cadence thanked the doorman. Her adrenaline was still in full flow. She needed to move. As the crowd dispersed, she decided to walk for awhile. What she really needed was to jog, find that solid, earnest conversation of feet and earth. But that would have to wait.
She walked the streets for an hour, then came back and sat in the hotel lobby. She was coming down. The adrenaline fading into an exhausted, pensive mood.
A cat, evidently a perpetual guest at the hotel and probably a mouser, watched her from its perch on the check-in desk. She purposely ignored it. Resting in the big, plush chair, enjoying the quiet and comfort, her thoughts turned to her father and his own absent, almost mythical father. She closed her eyes and felt a desert wind.
The man who was her grandfather and who was almost always gone, so the story went, sometimes came home. At those times he was quiet. Not morose, exactly, but subdued, as if gathering strength between the legs of the unfolding journey that took him, like an alcoholic, to drink on months-long benders of wandering in search of his soul. How his soul got lost was a story untold.
Nonetheless, in those times at home he had a country man’s eye for simplicity and unspoken elegance. Things he pointed out to his son, as simple as a knowing glance or a nod, were passed on, gesture for gesture, through that soundless language, to the son’s child. So might it be for generations, a kindred nuance, none knowing the source.
There was a day’s drive from their home in Western Colorado a sagebrush desert. It was set amidst low broken hills cut by tumbleweed-clogged arroyos that flanked the high green massif known as Grand Mesa. These hills and gorges, known locally as the Dobies, grew into larger canyons that dropped to the thick willow banks lining the brown flow of the Gunnison River. In some off-road spot, amidst these low hills, Jess pulled over. The jeep, rickety and open-topped, waited like a panting horse. He cut the engine and the tick and gurgle of the radiator measured the minutes as he and nine-year-old Arnie just sat there.
The air was warming up to the century mark as the shadeless silver gray desert readied to endure another blast-furnace day. The man sucked his pipe, got out and knocked out the dottle on the fender. He fingered the pipe, letting the calabash knot bowl cool, its seasoned yellow familiar in his hand.
He put on a battered straw hat and nodded. The boy got out, hefted the water bag, and they began to walk.
They went toward the river, with its distant promise of cool breeze. A high tumble of sandstone clefts—giants’ play blocks—stood in their way. There were scores of narrow cracks, man-sized and water-worn, leading into the maze of baking rock.
The man stood and looked and then picked one, otherwise unpromising and indistinguishable. The word for such, lemon-squeezers, was not said. Usually compressing to nothing, these openings offered just enough room to wiggle in sideways. Once in there—and one exhaled to squeeze in—one’s breath mingled with the smell of rock. Sometimes there was just enough room to get in and get caught, so the fear of getting stuck was always there.
Some hikers had tried this solo, gotten lodged in the vice, and felt the illimitable strength of all the earth pressing closer against them. Mother Earth’s strong hug refusing to let go. Adrenaline and panic expanding the body, cementing their imprisonment.
But the passage chosen by the man did not close, and they wriggled left, then right, as it turned and jogged. They came into an opening, a perfect secret hollow of a hundred foot radius, cut improbably into the middle of the tumbled rocks.
The top of the walls leaned inward, sheltering the sides. On these were etched thousands of pictographs: lizards, scorpions, eagles, vultures, people with two heads, bison, elk, deer, big cats with long teeth, rising suns with splayed rays. Archetypes of a world ruled by privation and magic. The library of a people that long ago decamped, never to return. Some of the figures were twenty or thirty feet up bare sandstone cliffs. Not a sign of “Jim Bob was here 1929” or “Class of ’42” or the like.
Dotting the enclosed field were large yellow-topped mounds. The yellow was the remnant rock layer left from eons of water and wind erosion.
They stopped at one of the mounds. It was full of shark’s teeth—big, medium, little, tiny. The sharks that left these ranged from Jaws down to trout size. The bigger teeth would span your palm, the serrated edges as knife sharp as the last day they tore into flesh, millions of years ago.
Holding such a tooth in your hand brought the picture into full definition. One saw a flat sea-lagoon stirred by warm breezes, lapping at a palmed shoreline, perhaps a fresh water tributary spilling in nutrients to create a cove full of life. Then the sea retreated one summer, never to return, and the cove beshored into a small lake over-populated with the sharks as alpha predators. The lake became a pond, concentrating all life as the food chain began to eat itself. Soon sharks ate sharks. All that was left was some boiling cauldron of thousands of thrashing sharks.
The teeth, the only hard parts of a shark, survived. And now they were left in a fossil hot spot in an eroding formation beneath the merciless sun.
As relentless curators, the ants were doing their thing—mining the gravel, creating ant hills of tiny teeth as meticulously cleaned as if worked by a lifetime of tweezers beneath a magnifying glass.
The man and boy picked through some teeth, each selecting only one. Then the man reached into a pouch in his khakis and pulled out a small, washed jar. This he filled with tooth-laden gravel, sealed the lid, and gave to the boy.
They returned to the jeep by mid-afternoon, looking back once at the small mountain of boulders and the lacework of lemon-squeezers.
Not a word had been said since they left home at seven in the morning. It was in the boy’s mind as perfect a day as he could imagine, and as he would ever experience.
The jar of gravel, its label inscribed in crayon by the boy’s hand to say SHARKS TEETH, with kid drawings of sharks on either side, sat sealed on a mantle in the house for years thereafter.
There was a companion to this day, years later, when Arnie took eleven year old Cadence to this same spot. Same parking area, same walk across the Dobies. Same searching around for the right lemon-squeezer.
Once he recognized the entrance around the rocks, he turned to Cadence and said, “Let’s stop and eat lunch.” They rested in the shade of the rocks, and he opened their backpack and took out two wrapped peanut butter sandwiches and two coca-colas. Sitting together with their backs against the cool sandstone, he pulled out a dog-eared paperback book that had lost its cover through long use. She looked at the first page, saw “Ace Edition” and the strange title: “The Hobbit.”
“That’s a silly word,” she said.
He looked at her, “Yes it is, but I think you’ll like it. Let’s read a few pages while we eat. We’ll start it today and maybe you will finish it later, even if it’s a long time and a long way from here. After we eat we’re going to squeeze up in here and get some shark’s teeth!”
The cycle of the moment and the place rolled on years later. After she had created her own series of dog ears though its pages, she lost the book. But she never forgot her own version of The Perfect Day. It was marked by another, a more modern style of jar, filled with that same gravel and labeled in Cadence’s neat fifth grade lettering: ME AND DAD 1993.
The desert wind blew.
She woke with a start, feeling the cat’s tail loop and caress her ankle. She looked around and saw the cat on the check-in counter, still watching her. She did a stare contest with it. Who hated whom the most. It didn’t blink.
OK, cat, you win, she thought. She got up and headed for the elevator.
“Heraclitus.”
“Huh?” She looked over at the desk clerk.
He scratched the cat’s neck. “He’s the resident philosopher.”
She stopped and put her hands on her hips. “Got it. I’m dealing with another one upstairs.”
When she came back into the room, Osley was walking around, gesticulating and muttering. He started in as soon as she sat down and looked at him in the cautious way one regards a lunatic. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Professor Tolkien believed that every one of those pages he wrote was a promise of something real.”
“But he made it all up!”
“Hardly. Virtually everything in his stories was already out there. Straight out of Northern Mythology Central Casting. Wily dragons, wraiths, Merlin-like wizards, marching forests — remember Macbeth? Birnam Wood? Rings of Power—a staple of Norse mythology. The ‘Fell Winter’ echoes the historical fact of the Little Ice Age in the twelfth century. So, you see, a name is a covenant, as is a story.” Osley let out a breath and sat down. He suddenly seemed subdued, like a messenger burdened by ill tidings. He looked away from her and held out a handwritten page. “I finished this a few moments ago. The word haknuun, Elvish for sharpener or grinder, caught my eye.”
She took the page and began reading, involuntarily collapsing to a sitting position on the bed.
He was taken captive. He told them he was no more than a travelling sharpener of knives. They took him before a horrible band of orcs. The chieftain, grim and gaunt, put him beneath a long blade. “Tell me any information you have, tale or stone-cold fact, about a trove of writings. Perhaps it was given to you by others.”
He told them little, save that he was a wanderer who had gone far astray from the stars of his world. The chieftain listened, then nodded to a guard. “He is useless. Kill him.”
“That sounds like Grandpa Jess!”
“Yes, so it would seem.”
“They’re going to … Execute him!” Cadence began to stutter and flail her hands. “This ca-can’t be true! It’s crazy! How, how can this … end up in here, in this pile of writings, when he disappeared in Topanga a year ago?”
Osley stood up. “Cadence, don’t worry. Not yet. I don’t know what this means or how it fits, but I’m going to find out. I’m … I’m sure … he’s not there. But I would go there. In a shot, if I could.”
“Now don’t tell me it’s just something on paper. All this bullshit about the word is the promise of the thing. Then how’d he get there?”
For once, and disturbingly, Osley was without words.
The room’s slanting light behind gauzy curtains was spent. She sent him away, telling him to come back the next day. She needed down time to think about the bizarre reference to the itinerant sharpener. She needed to find her own splinter of magnetic ore to match Ara’s, and so make her own compass out of this murky landscape.
She needed a plan.