Old Green World Read online

  Mura smiled. “It’s probably truer to say we saved each other. But yes, we escaped. There were others as well. We all got away together.”

  “What happened to the rest of the people?”

  “The trip was difficult. Some people didn’t make it. Most of us did, though. We found a village in Baixa, and most of the group settled there. You know the rest. Mama and Papa and I kept going. We wanted to get far away. We wanted to make sure we were somewhere peaceful. So we crossed the sea and found this place and made a life, and we had you.”

  Albert drew and fired several bull’s-eyes silently before speaking again. “So you and Papa and Mama are married, right? Thomas has to get married to that girl in Over-town. It’s the same thing, right? Just that Administrators have rules and ceremonies for it?”

  “I don’t know, really. I don’t understand what their ritual is all about. It has more to do with land than anything else, I think. Papa and Mama are village kin, and Mama and I love each other. We all raise you together. Maybe Thomas can tell you what that would mean for them.” Mura studied Albert for a moment. “Why is this so interesting to you all of a sudden? Is Thomas putting something into your head?”

  “No, of course not. It’s not Thomas at all. He doesn’t want any of it,” Albert said. “Maybe he’ll say no. I don’t think he should do it.”

  “I see.” Mura sighed. “Of course.”

  He said nothing. He was scared of what would come out if he spoke. He did as he first learned from Sister Alice when he was very small: he stood very still, turned to the sound and feeling of his breath, and let the things he held in just wash over him.

  Mura stared at Albert for a long time, then gave him a kiss on the cheek. She crossed her arms, hugged herself, turned, and walked toward the house.

  Albert took some time to collect himself. He shot a few more arrows: they were all true. He could shoot an arrow, no matter how he felt. When he felt calm enough, he headed toward the house.

  Mura tended to the fire. Mama Lini and Papa Arto were making supper. Lini was the tall, stout epicenter: her red hair cascaded from her head in all directions, and the energy of the room danced around her. Piles of chopped soup vegetables sat before her in a frozen orbit. Arto was a compact block of a man, short and sturdy, with a thick black beard the only hair left on his head. He held down the floor with his gravity. He was dropping biscuits for cooking.

  The Todorovs spoke a casserole of dialects. The languages of the White Island and Viru made the meat of it, but it was seasoned by everything in between. Arto said to his son, “I need you to help pack the cart before we go to market tomorrow morning, all right? It shouldn’t take too long. But you should sleep early for it.” Albert nodded listlessly.

  Lini paused her chopping. She went to Albert and cradled his head in her hands. She felt his forehead. “You look sad. Are you sick?”

  “I’m fine, Mama,” Albert said. “I was just practicing a little extra.”

  “He does us all proud. He’s ready for whatever Baixans they throw at him,” Mura said. She put new wood on the fire and poked at it.

  Lini winced. “Let’s not talk about the Baixans. The Newtons are well? You behaved yourself today?” Albert nodded and worked his way toward Mura and the fire. He stared quietly at the pot. “Really, what’s wrong?” Lini said. “Did you eat enough for lunch?”

  “Leave him be,” Mura said, looking intently at Lini. “He’s fine.”

  “Oh! Oh.” Lini’s eyes snapped wide.

  “What? What’s going on?” Arto asked.

  “Shush, it’s fine.” Then, in a comical stage whisper: “A crush.” She then turned to Mura to confirm. “A crush?”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” Albert said. “Please stop.”

  “Is it a nice girl at school?” Lini asked. “Not the horse-keeper’s daughter, she’s hideous. Is it your teacher? What is the new Adept’s name? Julia?”

  “Clare,” Mura said. “She’s been his teacher for a year and you never remember. It’s Clare.”

  “Right, Clare. So it’s her?”

  “Please, please stop,” Albert said. He had already turned to face the wall.

  “He’s right,” Mura said. “Let it rest.”

  Arto said to Lini: “There’s no girl at school. You never pay attention.” And then, to Albert: “Thomas is a good boy. You’ll make a good home together.” And then, to Mura: “The family is ruling class, though, is that going to be a problem?”

  “Everyone should stop talking,” Mura said with considerably more intensity. Albert was already out the door.

  He looked out across the field toward the forest. It was still twilight. The glow of dusk illumined everything and made the familiar seem unfamiliar. He could see details at the point where the woods met their farmland: leaves, needles, and underbrush, and the spaces in between. Vague layers of forest lay beyond that, dark branches that webbed across all his field of vision. Beyond that was the greenish black shadow of the forest dissolving into the enormity of itself, on and on and on forever.

  He spent some time staring at it, listening to his own breath and listening to the wind caress the trees, feeling it cool his ears. At one point, when everything was still, he thought he saw something, or a shadow of something, several layers in: an indistinct figure moving in the depth of the forest.

  He stood and focused on the woods. He felt the wind grow colder as the sun set, a chill on his neck and in his bones. He had lost the shadow, though, and couldn’t get it back.

  There were things out in the forest. Maybe it was Mister Ewan’s father, or the ghost of Mayor Newton, or the Baixans. Maybe it was a crowd of spirits, all those millions of people that died when the world ended, all of them piling on one another in layers and layers of brush. Maybe when he died, he would go and live there, too. He would become just one of those things.

  After some time, he turned toward the house and went in to supper.

  + + +

  He dreamed he was in the forest, the deepest of all, with every tree spidering out of the ground and into the other trees. He could see the pattern of every tree inside the leaves, and he knew that the pattern of the forest was the same as the pattern of the tree.

  He didn’t know the edges of the forest, or how to get out. He was inside a thicket, and it felt like shelter. The shadow came over him. He couldn’t see the shadow, but he could feel that the shadow was warm, and wanted Albert, and Albert wanted him back. And when he buried his face into the shadow, feeling its pulse and skin and warmth, he was the shadow, too, and they were the forest, too. When his father woke him, he had a moment of not knowing where he was.

  Arto put out some of last night’s biscuits with a strong cheese and some radishes from the garden. He made some eggs and barley tea while Albert loaded up the cart.

  They ate in quiet until Arto said: “You haven’t talked since last night. We didn’t mean to embarrass you.”

  “I know.”

  “And we won’t speak of it. Mama Mura told us that it’s difficult.”

  “There’s no it. There’s nothing to talk about. Everyone’s made up a story about nothing. I’m fine. I love food and fighting and shooting arrows. That’s all.”

  Arto smiled and patted his hand. “Probably it will die down at the market around lunch, and you can go out and hunt a bit.” He took a sip of his tea. “I want you to get some things to read from Harriet today. You haven’t been bringing books home. You didn’t think I would notice, did you? I told Harriet I would trade some vegetables and beer. Get whatever you want.”

  “No, don’t do that,” Albert said. “It’s not worth the cost. I’m almost out of school, and I won’t need to read after that.”

  “You need to read for the rest of your life, all right? You don’t know how good it is, that you and all the children in Eden-town get to spend years in school. In the rest of the world, you don’t have the Adepts healing everyone and teaching them how to live. When you get away from the Islands,
you’re lucky to eat, much less go to school. You aren’t going to waste that.”

  “Do they read in wars?” Albert said. “You’ve been in one, and I haven’t, so I don’t know. I didn’t get the impression that there was a lot of reading, though.”

  Arto looked away from Albert. He gave more attention to his bite of biscuit and cheese than it needed. “You’re smart, aren’t you? Smarter than your father.”

  The Adepts had taught them in school how to identify emotional states in their bodies: they taught it when the children were very little, using games and play. Albert remembered the lesson about shame, about the tightness of breath in the top of his stomach, just beside the ribs. That was where his shame lived, and it sang to him now. “I’m sorry, Papa. I don’t govern myself.”

  “Yes,” Arto said. “You are going to war. And I don’t sleep anymore because I know this. But what happens when you get back? This is what I try to think about. I try to think about when you come home. Maybe someday I will think about it enough to sleep.

  “And, when I finally sleep, I’ll dream that you come home with honor, and that you move into a nice house. Maybe a farm, or maybe you will live with Thomas . . . or, no, because you don’t love Thomas, do you? But you’ll be home. On the Island, in civilization. You taught me that word. Do you remember that? I don’t need much from civilization. It’s not really my world. Civilization means we have this farm, and no one is trying to kill us. That’s all I need. But you, civilization is your world. You learned everything from the Adepts, and you learned it better than anyone, better even than Thomas, although only his mother is brave enough to say that out loud.

  “So I’ll dream of you coming home a gentleman, with strength and honor and the power of your mind. All the riches you will have!” Arto said, with a burst of enthusiasm that took him halfway out of his seat. “I can barely imagine. I told you how it was in Viru, it wasn’t like that at all. Everyone was poor always. Hell, one winter it was so bad somebody tried to eat me.”

  “That’s right, the one time, and the man was crazy and you had to run away.” Albert had heard the story many times and very much wanted to preempt hearing it again.

  “You’ll never understand until you see it,” Arto said. “All these things that have been part of your life since you were a baby. ‘Book.’ When I was a boy, I didn’t know ‘book.’ There was no such thing. What is ‘book’? What is ‘read’? I never read anything, and I never will. Your mother, sewing with needles now? There was no ‘needle’ in Viru. There was no ‘market,’ no ‘farm.’ When we got here, Mal Planck and the Adepts taught us what farming was, and why we should care. Before then, all our lives, it was nothing but hunt and fight and eat and die. You couldn’t even understand.” He trailed off. There was a long silence.

  “So,” Arto then said, picking up and biting a radish, “you are going to keep reading. No more protest. Once you have a book, then you can read it and then trade it for more books. That’s what Harriet said. And then, when you become a gentleman, and you live in your big house, probably without Thomas, but maybe with Thomas—when you live there, you can remember that we bought you a book, and you can invite us to live with you in your big house.”

  Albert put his hand on Arto’s. “I don’t know if it will work out like that. But thank you, Papa.”

  “We should head into town,” Arto said.

  They started down the road from their farm to the market square. The road was relatively smooth and marked with their wagon wheels. They shared the road with the Plancks, who had the farm just one over. Arto always sang a song while they rode: once, when he was little, Albert had asked Arto about it. “It’s a folk song from Viru, wishing good travel. It’s lucky,” Arto said. “It doesn’t sound lucky. It sounds scary,” Albert said, and Arto laughed.

  Now Albert sang along, although he barely understood the song. All the words were familiar, common words they used in the house, but together they became gibberish, or a code. He sang along all the louder for that, full of hope that someday the veil would drop, that he would be granted a sudden understanding of something real and deep about his father.

  There were thick woods for a while between their farms and the town, but when they came out from the woods the town and the Castle stretched before them like another world. The breeze kept Albert alert but not too cold.

  When they approached the market, just at the foot of the Castle, it started to get crowded with throngs of people and carts. “If you please,” Arto smiled to another farmer as he pulled ahead of him into their spot. The Todorovs had a good spot, near the front of the market.

  There were carts with piles of kale greens, beetroot, and mushrooms, carts with big sea fish ready to be split open, fileted, and salted. One cart only sold cut firewood. It did quite well. There were distractions and luxuries: books, spices, wool scarves, and iron jewelry, hot barley and pine teas and boar meat pies. It smelled of food and butchery and harvest. The market was loud with greetings and with the hashing out of bargains and with gossip. Arto and Albert put out their flag.

  Mister Ewan was their first customer, as usual. “What do you have today?” Mister Ewan asked. Arto said, “I brought the salted fish you asked for, and the cheese. I have apples and beetroot and greens, lots of greens. And I have your beer. And I have these morels, these mushrooms, take a look at these mushrooms, tell me that you don’t want those, Lady Newton could eat like the noble she is just on these mushrooms. And this, you should try it.” He handed Mister Ewan a small earthen crock. “This is good, it’s salt and peppercorns and bits of the pig’s head.”

  “Do you have stockings? Both the Lady and Thomas have holes in their stockings.”

  “I do. New ones! Lini just finished these.” He pulled them out. They were a vivid red. Mister Ewan laughed and said, “Yes. These are lovely.”

  “Thank you, Mister Ewan,” Arto said as he took some coin from him. The Adepts had recently introduced money to the White Island. “Do you know why we immigrant Todorovs do well at market?” Arto said. “We do well because you always come to us first and trade with us. You trade for the Newtons. And you always have, since the very beginning.”

  “It’s selfish. You have the best cart,” Mister Ewan said. He looked at Albert. “I remember when you were a baby. Your father had just started to bring the cart. You would roam around all day talking to everyone. Charming everyone.”

  “He loved the butcher,” Arto said. “One time he disappeared for hours, have I told you this story? I was terrified. His mothers would kill me if I lost him. And so I run around the market in a panic, and turn over every rug and every cart, and then when I get back to ours he is just sitting there, covered in blood and offal, and smiling and saying, ‘I was helping the butcher.’”

  Mary Hawking drifted over to them from her cart. She sold spices. Arto was talking, but she interrupted him. “The Baixans are sneaking in, did you know that? On their boats. All quiet-like. If they knew what was good for them, they’d turn around and jump back into the sea.” She punched Albert’s arm. “Before we send you at them.”

  Samuel Bohm had joined in by now. He built furniture. “I heard they’re down south, somewhere with nothing but rocks and beasts. I heard they’re going to settle in and make a town. Then, when they have a town, they’ll attack us and say the Island is theirs.”

  Geoffrey Pauli sat in the cart next to Arto’s, selling his pottery. His son Harald sat next to him and ate a small rhubarb cake that Albert had given him. Geoffrey wiped some cake off of Harald and then made a face at Samuel. “How do you know all this about the Baixans, if there’s nothing where they are?”

  “Mal Planck heard it from one of the Adepts,” Samuel said.

  “So the Adepts know this. The Adepts,” Geoffrey said. “And, knowing this, they are just letting the Baixans do it.”

  “I don’t know, maybe the Adepts have something up their sleeve. Maybe they’re just waiting for Albert to finish school in a few weeks, so he can send the
m all crashing back into the sea.” Samuel gave Albert a gentle punch on the arm as well. Albert had gotten a lot of gentle punches recently.

  “I’ll believe it when I see a Baixan,” Geoffrey said. Samuel started to say something, but Geoffrey was already walking to the other side of the cart.

  They sold out of most of their supply in a blur of a morning. By lunch, everyone had gotten their shopping and their gossip out of the way. They sat quietly while Arto counted the money. Most of the White Islanders still found money bizarre and frightening, but Arto had taken to it. “It stands in for things you trade. We had something like this in Viru. I understand some things,” he had said to Albert.

  Albert went to get pies for his father and himself from a cart down the way. On the way there, he went to the book cart. The volumes were large, sewn with hide on the front. “The sisters put the words on them at school,” he said to Harriet, the book vendor.

  “We just have ones with words on them already. Because I’m not an Adept.” Harriet smiled. “I have plenty of books, though, and I know them all. So you can come and talk to me. And I can talk to Sister Clare if you want something I don’t have.”

  “Do you have any physics?” Albert asked.

  Harriet picked up a volume. “This is called the Feynman Lectures. I tried to read it once. It’s difficult. I didn’t understand it!” She laughed. “Do you study physics at school?”

  “Thomas does. Physics is mostly for Administrators, I guess.” Albert said. “Do you have any sutras?” She had a book with sutras and stories of bodhisattvas. He paged through it. It had pictures: images of the Buddha and mandalas.

  The traffic at the cart picked up a bit right after lunch, but then dropped off again. Arto was relieved; he was running low in stock and hated to turn people away. They sat in the cart, and Albert told Arto about the books: which ones he wanted to read first, what a sutra was, and what little he knew from school about the people who wrote sutras, people who were ancient at the time of the ancients. After that, they just sat and watched people go by. The afternoon sun settled into the horizon.