Bones of The Moon Read online

  I knew Eliot would disapprove of my prompting, but I had to ask. «What about my dreams? I've been having a series of _really_ strange dreams. Sometimes they're so strong and vivid that they scare me.»

  «There are signs of a very strong fantasy life in your hand, that's for sure. Your imagination is vivid and it probably carries over into your night dreams. Is that what you mean?»

  «Well, not really. What if I said I think I have 'powers', or something?» I felt so much like a goony ass saying that that I couldn't even look at Mary to see what her expression was.

  «You don't have to be embarrassed, Cullen, there really _are_ people who have them. But if you do, they don't show up in your hand. Sometimes special powers arise from a situation; we don't have them in us innately. You know what I mean – a child is run over by a car and the mother is able to pick up the car by the front bumper to save the kid. Or we're threatened physically and suddenly have tremendous strength to defend ourselves: a kind of strength that goes away immediately after the danger passes. Even scientists admit to that kind of phenomena, although they attribute it to things like adrenaline rushes. Who knows for sure about these things?

  «All I can tell you, Cullen, is that your hand shows no powers. So I don't think they're _your_ powers if they do exist. In your palm it shows you're protected by others, but not by powers. Whoever it is, _they_ won't let anything happen to you, if it is at all possible.»

  She took my hand and looked at it closely for a long minute. «No, I don't see any powers here. A giant amount of love, but no powers.»

  How strange it was to eat glass and light. All of the food on the table was laid out beautifully and precisely. The spread would have looked delicious if everything hadn't been transparent; splashing the light from the icy chandelier hung high and huge over the crystalline dining table.

  Pepsi picked up his clear hot dog wrapped in its clear bun and took a big bite. His walking stick leaned against the chair and was the only patch of color around. Exposed to the sun for days on our walk here, the sticks had burned or ripened . . . changed from their original gray-brown to a deep, vivid purple.

  Sizzling Thumb had mine over his lap and kept petting it like a cat. «Your tapes arrived without chickens.»

  When we'd reached his castle earlier that morning, he had greeted us at the drawbridge by saying «Doughnuts and staples, remember!»

  Luckily Mr. Tracy had prepared us and was there to translate. «He's welcoming us. Says his home is ours as long as we want it. Give him your walking stick, Cullen.»

  I did and the man's bright old face lit up. «Scare butt plum jabs!»

  Sizzling Thumb was the first human we had seen on Rondua and despite the jumble of words, his presence was tremendously reassuring. He wore a suit made entirely of newspapers, as did everyone in the castle. On closer inspection, I saw that the newspaper was the one Eliot wrote for, _Tic-Toe_.

  This jolly old fellow controlled the entire Fourth Stroke ol Rondua – the southern section we had been crossing ever since our arrival – and his castle sat on the border with the north. I was required to turn the first Bone over to him if we were to pass on unharmed. There had been no mention of Pepsi surrendering his.

  The King of the Fourth Stroke worshipped light, so everything around him was there to serve and complement it; not argue or distort. We were treated well, but with the distance and respect usually afforded ambassadors from remote, questionable countries. Everyone stared uncomprehendingly at us in our multicolored clothes and sneakers. No one paid any attention to the animals.

  We were given a tour of the castle and shown little cars that ran on solar power, rooms where reflections were stored, museums that housed perfect diamonds and glass noodles. Everything was certainly solid and real, but I kept feeling I was either stoned or under water the whole time. Later on, at the end of the tour, I hesitantly asked why everyone wore newspaper suits. Sizzling Thumb smiled and put out his hand and one of the butlers put a magnifying glass in it. The king walked over to a window and, holding the glass this way and that, focused sunlight on to a small piece of his suit in the middle of his stomach. In a few seconds the suit started to smoke, then caught fire underneath the glass with a slight «puff sound. Alarmed, I looked at him to make sure he knew what he was doing.

  «_Hot_ light!» He watched the flame catch hold of everything and burn right up. The suit was one big orange blaze in a few seconds, but none of the servants did a thing. Pieces of ash like black snow-flakes floated wispily up and down and everywhere around us. Sizzling Thumb flapped his arms up and down like a fat bird on fire. The air was full of ash and pieces of flaming newspaper.

  Minutes later, he stood there naked and untouched and jaunty as ever.

  After the banquet was over and everyone had toasted everyone else, Sizzling Thumb (in a brand-new suit) banged his goblet down for quiet.

  «The hat looks like it wants to say something.»

  I smiled and nodded and waited for the Mr. Tracy translation.

  «Sizzling Thumb says the north has very bad weather now. That will make it very difficult for us to find the second Bone. He says he doesn't even think Pepsi's walking stick will help us, but I don't believe that.»

  «What's he going to do with mine, Mr. Tracy?» I looked at it on the old man's lap, not without a lot of sadness; I had grown very used to having it in the dome of my hand.

  «It's his protection, Cullen. The entire Fourth Stroke is safe now.»

  «And what about us? Are we safe too?»

  «Yes, as long as Pepsi keeps his.»

  «But isn't he too young? He doesn't understand everything yet.»

  Mr. Tracy turned and nodded to Pepsi, who was sitting on his other side. «Tell your mother the Law of Stolen Flight.»

  «Only flame, and things with wings. All the rest suffer stings.»

  «Mr. Tracy? Where did that come from?»

  «From no one, Cullen. You should remember all this. Pepsi's change has begun. He _will_ find the second Bone because he owns the important half of the first. You found it for him. After he owns the second, then he will be stronger than all of us.»

  The North was dark with clouds and impending war. As soon as we crossed the border, we met up with dragoons of Heeg, the lizard King. These soldiers rode giant iguanas the color of stone and grass and were dressed in parish uniforms that reminded me of Hapsburg outfits Danny and I had seen in a military museum in Italy.

  Once we had shown them Pepsi's walking stick, they treated us with brusque respect. Nevertheless, they warned us to travel only in the day because their patrols might otherwise mistake us for the enemy who had been steadily moving in from the West for the past few weeks.

  A day later we met this «enemy.» They looked exactly like Heeg's men, only this bunch was all in gray: uniforms, sabers, iguanas. But they were awed by Pepsi's stick and asked if there was anything they could do for us. They treated us to a delicious meal of gray food.

  Later we watched them ride off and wondered which of them would survive their coming battles.

  The wolf rubbed her nose with a paw. The camel quietly chewed his cud. The dog looked at me.

  «It wasn't like this before, was it, Mr. Tracy? We used to come to the North to watch the thunderstorms and wash our clothes in the rain.»

  Felina spoke. «It's never been like this before. I have cousins by the sea who march in file and sharpen their teeth on wet coral. There's greed and treachery everywhere. It used to make us sad, but now we're frightened. Aren't we?» She looked at the dog and the camel and they nodded.

  «Are we going to fight too?» Pepsi waved his stick around in the air like a sword.

  «You're going to _stop_ the fighting, Pepsi. You and your mother.»

  Martio stretched his long camel's neck and gazed down the railway track into the silent, empty distance. It had rained again and the steel rails shone a wet, silvery blue.

  «Don't sit down, Pepsi. You'll get your pants wet.»

  «I'm
tired, Mommy! I want to go to sleep!»

  He hardly ever whined or complained, so the day's trip across the North to this railway line must have been harder on him than we'd thought. We'd been moving since dawn. Sizzling Thumb had said it was imperative we walk and not ride the animals at all across the Third Stroke. However, that cut our pace to about a tenth of what it had been before.

  The train was due at any time. There was no station where we were, only a place where the road crossed the narrow, meandering railway track. The train would take us to Kempinski, the capital city of Rondua where the first of Pepsi's great tests would take place.

  The brown sky and fall of late afternoon light left us all quiet and still. There was nothing to do but wait and think about what we had seen and heard that day.

  Purple Jakes lived in the North. Purple Jakes and Yellow-striped Drews that ate cheese pies and slept furious or in fear of everything. Every one of them, bright neon things moving fast against the dark-earth colors of that landscape. Besides the colors, if you asked me to try and describe them, I would smile.

  Do you know the pictures children draw when they're first given crayons and paper? Those wild red slashes, or thick blobby blue circles that spill and shoot off the page and have nothing to do with one another? Those were the Jakes and Drews, the major inhabitants of this stroke of Rondua. Heeg ruled this section, but it was a mystery to me what he and his men controlled besides a certain piece of hilly land on a map. Beside his gray soldiers and their lizards, there were no «living» beings here that had any kind of recognizable form.

  Something else too: I have no idea what language they spoke or even how they communicated, because every time we saw one of them that strange day, they were far off in the distance moving in the opposite direction.

  Felina said no one she knew had ever seen a Jake or a Drew close-up. Like shy rare birds, the scribbled-looking things fled from everyone. The only way you could recognize them was by their brilliantly distinctive colors.

  «If they're always running away, why does Heeg have to have an Army? Who's here to conquer? Who's his enemy?»

  «The _land_, Cullen. Heeg wants to own the Stroke. But if the land doesn't like the leader, it rebels.»

  «Rebels?» How?»

  «Look up at the sky. Look at the land here. Everything is either wet and soggy, or too bright and quivering, like the Jakes.»

  «But Felina, I remember it used to rain here before. We had fun then.»

  «You were too young, Cullen, to see what was really going on. It was beginning even back then. But we knew you were leaving, so we didn't want to worry you by telling you the truth. We knew that you'd come back some day. All that you've seen so far is what happened after you left Rondua to go back to the other side.»

  Far off in the distance, a train whistle _quecched_ once.

  «Well, are there a lot of people like Heeg around in Rondua?»

  «There aren't any shadows on a cloudy day, Cullen. None at all before a storm, because _everything_ is darker then. Our weather here has been cloudy for years. The Third Stroke is only one example.»

  The train whistle slashed through the air again, much closer this time. Pepsi, Martio and Felina moved toward the sound. Mr. Tracy and I stayed where we were.

  «When you were first here, Cullen, we had hoped you would be the heir who could save us from all this. But you weren't, although you came very close. We let you go when you were a child, because children are wonderfully selfish and remember only what matters to them at the time. And those are always small things – the color of the cake at their birthday party, or who gave them a Valentine at the second-grade party last Wednesday. But adults remember so much more, whether they like it or not. When you were a child we wanted you to go away clear and empty and happy, so you would have only good memories of your time in Rondua. Then one day you would voluntarily bring us an heir who _would_ have the power to make it right here again.»

  His last words disappeared in the clamor of the arriving train which passed in a slowing rush of clanks and spits and hot oiled metal.

  I yelled to him over the noise, «_Is_ Pepsi the one? Does he have what you need?»

  «Yes! We think so! If we're lucky!»

  «But what if you're wrong? What if he's not the one?»

  «We all die.»

  Kempinski would have been miraculous if we hadn't been in Rondua so long and hadn't seen so much already. Giant animals like our three friends strolled the streets. People dressed in bizarre clothes and living hats moved by in a hurried crush. Different kinds of outlandish music accompanied us everywhere; much of it was reedy, mysterious and oriental. It was a suitable background for belly dancers and fire eaters, or walking through a bazaar in Baghdad or Jerusalem.

  At one point I started laughing when we passed a movie theater that said it was showing «WEBER GREGSTON'S NEWEST MASTERPIECE – SORROW AND SON.»

  Pepsi held my hand and asked two hundred questions about what we were doing and what we were seeing. I answered as best I could, but my knowledge and memories of Kempinski were dim or clouded by the years I had been away. I had little spots of memory – I knew that that street led to the «Avenue of Napping Bull Terriers» and that we had to buy some coily from a street vendor because it was the best chewing gum around, but little else.

  We arrived early in the morning and spent most of the day tramping through the city seeing the sights, trying to remember what it had been like when I'd been there before. We fed the Weez and Daybuck at the Zoo of Blind Animals, ate a big lunch of marucks and toocha juice out in the rice-fields at the edge of town.

  As a lavender and gray dusk set in, we made our way to the amphitheater at the center of the city. Everytime we turned a corner that day, the building had loomed up in front of us, colossal and old beyond belief but perfectly preserved. Now people streamed into its many entrances unhindered by any ticket takers.

  The night before, Mr. Tracy had said going to the theater was the only necessary thing we had to do while we were in Kempinski. What happened there would determine how long we would have to remain in the capital. He made no mention of why, or what was supposed to go on in that ancient place.

  The murmur of the crowd died down quickly when a man appeared on the small stage in the center of the theater, just as we were sitting down on one of the stone benches. His clothing was nondescript and his voice was high and thin, unimpressive.

  «Today is the third day of the Search. If contestants fail to build the Wind's Lips again today, the next round will be held as usual in two months' time.»

  The people sitting around us didn't react. Eager for things to begin, they were apparently well aware of what the announcer was saying.

  «May we have the shapes, please?»

  For the next ten minutes, men dressed like different kinds of vegetables brought out transparent glasslike blocks which looked like the blocks children play with. These were much larger, however; larger and lighter, because the men carried them on six or seven at a time.

  When they were done, about forty-five or fifty of the things sat in a sloppy heap off to one side of the stage. They came in all sizes; some looked like the boxes you carry long-stemmed roses in, others were larger than a phone booth.

  «What are they for, Mom?»

  The memory loomed into view like a slowly rising fish. I remembered. What do we know? How much have we forgotten? Is Ronduan history swimming away in all of our minds, only way down deep where the murky things live?

  Pepsi pulled on my sleeve. «_Mom_, what are they for?»

  «One day a child was playing with blocks exactly like those, Pepsi. By accident, they put them together so specially that they made something called 'The Wind's Lips.' Somehow, whenever the wind blew through it, it was able to whistle perfect songs.»

  «The wind or the lips, Mom?»

  «Well, we need our lips to blow, don't we, Peps?»

  «What happened to these lips? Did they die?»

  «Somebody k
nocked them down a long time ago. But they've been trying to put them back together that same way ever since. No one's been able to do it.»

  «What happens if they do make it again, Mom? Do the songs come back?»

  Nearby, a man with three hands was listening to us and smiling. Leaning over, he said what I expected to hear: «If you're the one to do it, Sonny, you'll win one of the Bones of the Moon.»

  I looked at him. «And only children are allowed to try, aren't they?»

  «Naturally! A child did it first, so only a child will have the ability to do it again. Go ahead up to the table, boy. Give us back our music and win your mother the Bone!» He looked at us, then laughed and laughed as if we were the funniest things he had seen all day.

  After the first gasps, silence fell on the amphitheater like a sword. Pepsi stood back and listened, with the rest of us, to the growing swirl of music pouring from the form he had made with the blocks. The shape he had come up with in the end looked vaguely like one of those space needle/restaurant things, but it had certainly done the trick. Every sound imaginable poured out of there: Iraqi grunting music, _a cappella_ French children's songs, bird whistles, disco tunes. At one point, I heard a few bars of Danny's favorite Frank Sinatra song. A United Nations of music. Pepsi delighted everyone by turning round and shrugging helplessly at us; as if to say that he didn't understand it either, folks.