Chapter 9: Moonmere

The Aldgate road was the short way and Gareth would not take it.

He had stood at the last gate with his brother and counted what was on that road at that hour of the night. A carter coming back late from Fairbury with an empty wagon and a lantern on the rail. Two or three tenants walking home from wherever they had been drinking. And the watch, if the watch was out at all, moving along their stretch with a light of their own — and men on a road at night look at whatever else is on the road.

“Through the reeds,” he said.

Duncan looked down the road, and then out past the fence at the black line of the reed flats, and then he said, “Through the reeds,” and came after him without another word about it.

The reeds closed over them at the third step. The ground went soft, and then it went to water, and after that they were in it to the knee with the stalks leaning in over their heads and the mud pulling at their feet. Duncan went first and broke the way with his shoulder, both arms around the glass wrapped in a fold of his coat, and Gareth came behind him in the water his brother had opened.

It had been warm on the table in the front room. Out here it was hot, and getting hotter. Duncan shifted it from one arm to the other and shifted it back.

“Gareth.”

“Keep walking.”

He kept walking. After a while he began to talk to it, low, the way a man talks to a horse he does not trust.

“Is it for us,” he said. “That’s all I want to know. Is a thing like this for people like us.” The stalks came apart and closed behind him. “It’s been in that house my whole life and it never did one thing for anybody. Now it’s lit and it’s hot and it’s pointing.”

Gareth watched the back of his brother’s head and said nothing. He had heard the wanting in him before, in other words.

“Good glass,” Duncan said then, in a different voice, half under his breath, hitching it up higher against his chest. “Good glass. Steady. Nearly there.”

They went on through it. The water came up over Gareth’s belt and then went down again, the reeds thinned, and his brother stopped.

Moonmere was in front of them.

It lay out flat and pale under the moon, out and out to the far shore, and out of the middle of it stood a bar of broken stone with the water standing quiet in among the rocks. Along the near bank a dozen white birds stood on one leg, heads down.

The birds went up all at once. They wheeled out over the water and came down again a long way off, and Gareth stood still and let them.

Duncan had gone down flat in the reeds beside him. “They heard us.”

“Birds,” Gareth said. He was not looking at the birds.

Then it was too hot to hold.

Duncan came up off his knees and opened the coat — not to show it, only because he could not keep it against his skin another second — and the light came out of it, up and out, pale and thin as skimmed milk.

And in that light, standing over the water at the height of a man’s eyes, was the bar. Gareth saw it as a man sees his own field by a lamp turned low: the stones, and between two stones, low down, where the water came in and did not go out, something pale wedged in the gap.

Neither of them said anything for a while. Then the light went back into the glass and the glass was only warm.

“It’s in the rocks,” Duncan said. He was already pulling his shirt over his head.

Gareth caught him by the arm.

“Let go.”

“I’ll go.”

“I swim it faster than you.”

“You don’t,” Gareth said. “And you’re not going into that water with that thing in your hands. You stay on the bank and you hold it.”

He turned his brother by the shoulder and pointed up past the far treeline, at the place where the moon would stand when a good part of the night was gone.

“This is how it goes. I go out and I come back. If I’m not back by the time it’s up there, you put the glass down in the reeds right here where you’re standing, and you take the Aldgate road and you run. You don’t go home. When the sun’s high you come back and you look at the water.”

Duncan stood there with the coat open in his arms and did not say anything. His voice had gone when he tried it. He wiped his face with the flat of his hand, twice, and then he said, “All right.”

Gareth laughed at him, short, one breath through the nose, and pulled his own shirt off over his head.

The water was cold and it came up to his chest. The mud was deep for the first ten paces and then it wasn’t. He had swum out to that bar before; he had been nine the first time, with his father alongside him the whole way, and after that he had come out to it on summer nights with Corwin and the other boys until there was nothing left in it to prove. He did not have to look for it.

He came up onto the bar on his hands and knees. The rocks were slimy under the water and the moss was cold and slick, and he went over the whole of it with both hands, feeling into every gap and crack he could reach, and he found water, and slime, and grit, and nothing.

“Nothing,” he said, out loud, to nobody.

He did it again, slower, one stone at a time, and in the fourth crevice his fingers closed on something that moved.

He came up with them in his fist — five, six, small and hard and scuttling, river crabs — and he set them down on the stone beside him without thinking about it at all.

Then he put his arm back in to the shoulder and felt along the underside, and it was there. Cold, and smooth, and not stone and not wood.

He took it between two fingers and pulled, and it came out with a small suck of water.

It was a strip of pale stone, two fingers wide and as long as his hand, and there were marks cut into the face of it.

He floated on his back with it up over him and let the moon do the work. He could read — the schoolmaster had knocked letters into him along with the rest of them, and he could read anything written or printed plainly — but this was neither. The marks ran one into the next in an old hand, and the moon only gave him so much.

He found one he was sure of: moon. He thought he had another: breath, or air. Then a third that he could not settle, which might have been wheel and might have been turning. After that the strokes closed up on him and were only strokes.

He looked back at the bank. Then he turned over in the water and started back with the stone in his fist.

“Duncan.”

His brother came out of the reeds at once, to his knees in the lake, the glass in both hands.

Gareth stood up out of the shallows and opened his hand to show him.

The stone went.

A line of white light came off his palm and into the face of the glass, faster than he could close his fingers on it, and his hand closed on nothing.

Duncan went back a step with a sound and sat down on the bank. The glass stood in his hands with a face full of white, moving.

And out over the water the moonlight came apart. It broke into rings, one behind another, and the rings came off the lake and went into the glass, one, and then another, and then more than he could count, the whole sheet of light on the water going the same way, and neither of them could move until it was done.

Then it was done, and the glass was gray and quiet in his brother’s hands.

Behind the ridge the day had begun to come up, gray, and then the color came into it, red and gold, and lay flat along the water and stood in long lines on Gareth’s bare shoulders, and it was cold.

He got the coat up off the ground and wrapped the glass himself and gave it to his brother to carry.

“Home first,” he said.

Duncan took it. They went back into the reeds, Duncan first, and the light came up behind them and lay along the top of the reeds and on their shoulders as they went.

The pull had been north all night. In the reeds it drew on me like a rope, and did not slacken.

Before the two of them came out of the stalks I saw where we were going. It came to me flat and without edges, the way the outside always comes to me: a lake, cold and clear, the water standing still, white birds along the near shore on one leg, and the reeds behind them. I held still for it. There is a rule I keep, and the rule is that what I am shown, I take.

Then the heat. I had been warm in the house; I got hot; I got past hot, into a place with no word in it and no patience either.

When the two of them stopped at the bank I was already looking past them, and I found the bar out in the middle of the lake, the stones standing up black with green on them below the waterline, and one gap where the water came in and did not go out. Something pale was in the gap. I let the light go out of me and stand over the water, and both of them saw the bar and the pale thing in it, and I did not care that they did.

Gareth would not let him go in. Then he went in himself. I could not watch him and watch the gap at the same time, so I watched the gap. He came up onto the bar and went over it twice for nothing. Then his arm went into the gap to the shoulder, and it did not come out empty.

He was in the water again with it in his fist. I could see it through the water the whole way back, pale and small and moving with his hand. Then it was not in his hand any more.

The light came straight in at me.

And behind the light, everything. Nobody asked me. It did not come in pieces and it did not come in any order at all. It was packed in as fast as a man packs a bag he has to close, and it did not stop when I was full.

I shouted. Nothing comes out of me; nothing ever has. Then it took me, and I was out.

I did not mind being out.

Elias Hale was at the long table in the front room when they came in. He had been up the whole night with Corwin, and the two of them stood in the doorway wet to the waist with the reeds still on them and told it, one taking it up where the other stopped.

He listened to all of it. Then he said, “Where is it?”

Duncan had it in his brother’s coat, under his arm. He unwrapped it and put it down on the red wood.

Elias looked at it a while. He did not touch it, and he did not ask what it was.

“You did well,” he said.

He looked at the two of them standing there in the door and counted them, and then he looked back down at the table and went on with what he had been turning over all night.

“Now,” he said. “The two melon patches in the front. I want them out. Dig them up and put two rooms there, one on either side of the gate, and run the wall from the one to the other, so the whole front of this place shuts and nobody can look in over the top of it.”

He had been meaning to do it since the boys started getting tall on him, and there were four of them now.

“Close to twenty acres,” he said. “A little over ten of it watered, that I bought when I came back out of the army, and a little over five of the good ground out of my father. In a good year that feeds twelve and keeps something in the barn. Alder Creek is kind ground. Say what you like about the people, the water here is good, and the reed flats and the shore are the reason anybody lives in this valley at all.”

He had seen the houses in Fairbury. One wall around the whole of them, one son reading for the courts and one son with the soldiers, and the same name standing on that gate for a hundred years. And he had seen the other kind, where the old man goes into the ground and the brothers divide it down to the spoons, and in ten years there is nothing left there but four poor men who used to be one family.

“This house does not split,” he said. “And when it comes time for wives, they come from families we know to the root.”

He put both hands flat on the table.

“Go get Corwin and tell him to come back and level the ground for me. The land can wait on the tenants; they’ll do what they’re told. And the youngest doesn’t go out to the fields in the afternoon any more. From tomorrow he’s at the schoolmaster’s the whole day and he reads.”

Duncan said, “All right,” and was out of the room and down the step before the last of it was said, and then he was past the corner of the house and the yard was empty.

Gareth had not moved. He stood at the end of the table and looked at the glass where Duncan had set it down.

“You mean to do the whole of it,” he said. “The way it’s set down. The chapel and the name-stone. The hall. One of us at a clerk’s desk and one of us in the garrison.”

“The Hales have been gathering since before this village had a name,” Elias said. “Two hundred years of it. It’s time.”

“And letters and swords.”

“The Aldgate road is a bad road,” Elias said. “Going up into the Grey Range is ten dead to one alive, and letters and sword-work don’t sell to a court that far off, not out of Alder Creek. So what is any of it for? To keep the land and hold the family together, and not be the man who loses it. That’s the whole of it.”

Gareth was quiet. Then he said it low, still looking at the table.

“There might be better things than letters and sword-work.”

“Not in this house.”

Elias laughed — the whole of it, out loud, from the chest — and crossed the room and put his hand flat on his son’s shoulder and left it there a moment, and then he took it off and went out with his hands behind his back.

Gareth did not say the rest of it. He stood at the table with the morning light lying across it and the glass sitting gray on the red wood where Duncan had set it down, and outside his father’s steps went along the wall under the window and away around the corner of the house.