A Wrinkle in Time Quintet (50 page)

“Ritchie is afraid of them.”

She pressed his shoulder gently. “Life has been nothing but hard work for Ritchie, with no time for seeing pictures or dreaming dreams. Your mother tells me that in Wales there are people who are gifted with the second sight, and that these people may be feared for their gift but they are not frowned on.”

“Ritchie says I would be frowned on. It is different here than in Wales. Especially since
Pastor Mortmain came and built the church and scowled whenever Maddok visited the settlement or I went to the Indian compound.”

“Pastor Mortmain would try to separate the white people from the Indians.”

“But
why?
” Brandon demanded. “We were friends.”

“And still are,” Zylle assured him. “When did you last see a picture?”

“Tonight,” he told her. “I saw the reflection of a candle on the side
of the copper kettle Mother had just polished, and I saw a picture of here, this very place, but the rock was much higher, and there”—he pointed to the valley—“it was all a lake, with the sun sparkling on the water.”

She looked at him wonderingly. “My father, Zillo, says that the valley was once a lake bed.”

“And I saw Maddok—at least, it wasn’t Maddok, because he was older, and his skin was
fair, but he looked so like Maddok, at first I thought it was.”

“The legend,” she murmured. “Oh, Brandon, I feel we are very close, you and I. Perhaps it is having to keep our gifts hidden that brings us added closeness.” While they were talking she had been gathering a small plant that grew between the grasses. She held the blossoms out to the moonlight. “I know where to find the healing herbs,
herbs that will keep babies from choking to death in the winter, or from dying of the summer sickness when the weather is hot and heavy as it is now. But your mother warns me that I must not offer these gifts; they would not be well received. But for myself, and the birthing of Ritchie’s and my baby, I will not be without the herbs which will help give me a good birthing and a fine child.” She
began to spread the delicate blossoms on the rock. As the moonlight touched them, petals and leaf
alike appeared to glow with inner silver. Zylle looked up at the moon and sang,

Then she knelt and breathed in the fragrance of the blossoms, took them up in her hands, and pressed them against her forehead, her lips, her breasts, against the roundness of her belly.

Brandon asked, “Do we take the flowers home with us?”

“I would not want Goody Adams to see
them.”

“When Ritchie and I were born, there wasn’t a midwife in the settlement.”

“Goody Adams is a fine midwife,” Zylle assured him. “Had she been here, your mother might not have lost
those little ones between you and Ritchie. But she would not approve of what I have just done. We will leave the birthing flowers here for the birds and moon and the wind. They have already given me their help.”

“When—oh, Zylle, do you know when the baby will come?”

“Tomorrow.” She stood. “It’s time we went home. I would not want Ritchie to wake and find me not beside him.”

Brandon reached for her long, cool fingers. “It was the best day in the world when Ritchie married you.”

She smiled swiftly, concealing a shadow of worry in her eyes. “The people of the settlement look with suspicion on an Indian
in their midst, and a blue-eyed Indian at that.”

“If they’d only listen to our story that comes from Wales, and to your story—”

She pressed his fingers. “Ritchie warns me not to talk about our legend of the white man who came to us in the days when there were only Indians on this continent.”

“Long ago?”

“Long, long ago. He came from across the sea, from a land at the other end of the world,
and he was a brave man, and true, who lusted neither after power nor after land. My little brother is named after him.”

“And the song?” Brandon asked.

“It’s old, very old, the prayer for a blue-eyed baby to keep the strength of the prince from over the sea within the Wind People, and the words may have changed over the years. And I have changed, for I have made my life with the white people,
as the Golden Prince made his with the Wind People. For love he stayed with the princess of a strange land, and made her ways his ways. For love I leave my people and stay with Ritchie, and my love is deep, deep, for me to be able to leave my home. I sing the prayer because it is in my blood, and must be sung; and yet I wonder if my child will be allowed to know the Indian half of himself?”

“He?”

“It will be a boy.”

“How do you know?”

“The trees have told me in the turning of their leaves under the moonlight. I would like a girl baby, but Ritchie will be pleased to have a son.”

The footpath through the grasses led them to a brook, which caught the light of the moon and glimmered in the shifting shadows of the leaves. The brook was spanned by a natural stone bridge, and here Zylle
paused, looking down at the water.

Brandon, too, looked at their reflections shifting and shimmering as the wind stirred the leaves. While he looked at Zylle’s reflection, the water stirring her mouth
into a tender smile, he saw, too, a baby held close in her arms, a black-haired, blue-eyed baby with gold behind its eyes.

Then, while he gazed, the eyes changed in the child and turned sullen,
and the face was no longer the face of a baby but the face of a man, and he could not see Zylle anywhere. The man wore a strange-looking uniform with many medals, and his jowls were dark, jutting pridefully. He was thinking to himself, and he was thinking cruel thoughts, vindictive thoughts, and then Brandon saw fire, raging fire.

His body gave a mighty shudder and he gasped and turned toward
Zylle, then glanced fearfully at the brook. The fire was gone, and only their two faces were reflected.

She asked, “What did you see?”

Eyes lowered, gazing on the dark stone of the bridge, he told her, trying not to let the images reappear in his mind’s eye.

She shook her head somberly. “I make nothing out of it. Certainly nothing good.”

Still looking down, Brandon said, “Before I was made
to feel afraid of my pictures, they were never frightening, only beautiful.”

Zylle squeezed his hand reassuringly. “I’d like to tell my father about this one, for he is trained in the interpretation of visions.”

Brandon hesitated, then: “All right, if you want to.”

“I want him to give me comfort,” she said in a low voice.

They turned from the brook and walked on home in silence, to the dusty
clearing with its cluster of log cabins.

The Llawcaes’ cabin was the first, a sizable building with a central room for sitting and eating, and a bedroom at either end. Brandon’s room was a shed added to his parents’ room, and was barely large enough to hold a small bed, a chest, and a chair. But it was all his, and Ritchie had promised that after the baby was born he would cut a fine window in
the wall, as people were beginning to do now that the settlement was established.

Brandon’s cubbyhole was dark, but he was used to his own room’s night and moved in it as securely as though he had lit a candle. Without undressing, he lay down on the bed. In the distance the thunder growled, and with the thunder came an echo, a low, rhythmic rumbling which Brandon recognized as the drums of the
Wind People as they sang their prayers for rain.

In the morning when he wakened, he heard bustling in the central room, and went in to find his mother boiling water in the big black kettle suspended from a large hook in the fireplace. Goody Adams, the midwife, was bustling about, exuding importance.

“This is a first birth,” she said. “We’ll need many kettles of water for the Indian girl.”

“Zylle is our daughter,” Brandon’s mother reminded the midwife.

“Once an Indian, always an Indian, Goody Llawcae. Not forgetting that we’re all grateful that her presence among us causes us to live in peace with the savage heathen.”

“They’re not—” Brandon started fiercely.

But his mother said, “The chores are waiting, Brandon.”

Biting his lip, he went out.

The morning was clear, with a small
mist drifting across the ground and hazing the outline of the hills. When the sun was full, the mist would go. The settlers were grateful for the mist and the heavy dews, which were all that kept the crops from drying up and withering completely, for there had been no rain for more than a moon.

Brandon went to the small barn behind the cabin to let their cow out into the daylight. She would graze
with the other cattle all day, and at dusk Brandon would ride out on his pony to bring her home for milking. He gave the pony some oats, then fed the horse. In the distance he could hear hammering. Goodman Llawcae and his son Ritchie were the finest carpenters for many miles around, and were always busy with orders.

—I’m glad Ritchie didn’t hear Goody Adams call
Zylle’s people savage heathens,
he thought.—It’s a good thing he was in with Zylle. Then he started back to the house. The picture he had seen in the brook the night before troubled him. He was afraid of the dark man with cruel thoughts, and he was afraid of the fire. Since he had tried to repress the pictures, they had become more and more frightening.

When he reached the cabin and went in through the door, which was propped
open to allow all the fresh air possible to enter, his mother came out of the bedroom and spoke to Ritchie, who was pacing up and down in front of the fireplace.

“Your father needs you, Ritchie. Zylle is resting now, between pains. I will call you at once should she need you.”

Goody Adams muttered, “The Indian girl does not cry. It is an omen.”

Ritchie flung back his head. “It is the mark of
the Indian, Goody. Zylle will shed no tears in front of you.”

“Heathen—” Goody Adams started.

But Goody Llawcae cut her short. “Ritchie. Brandon. Go to your father.”

Ritchie flung out the door, not deigning to look at the midwife. Brandon followed him, calling, “Ritchie—”

Ritchie paused, but did not turn around.

“I hate Goody Adams!” Brandon exploded.

Now Ritchie looked at his young brother.
“Hate never
did any good. Everyone in the settlement feels the lash of Goody Adams’s tongue. But her hands bring out living babies, and there’s been no childbed fever since she’s been here.”

“I liked it better when I was little and there was only us Llawcaes, and the Higginses, and Davey and I used to play with Maddok.”

“It was simpler then,” Ritchie agreed, “but change is the way of the world.”

“Is change always good?”

Ritchie shook his head. “There was more joy when there were just the two families of us, and no Pastor Mortmain to put his dead hand on our songs and stories. I cannot find it in me to believe that God enjoys long faces and scowls at merriment. Get along with you now, Bran. I have work to do, and so do you.”

When Brandon finished his chores and hurried back to the cabin,
walking silently, one foot directly in front of the other, as Maddok had taught him, Ritchie, too, had returned, and was standing in the doorway. The sun was high in the sky and beat fiercely on the cabins and the dusty compound. The grass was turning brown, and the green leaves had lost their sheen.

Ritchie shook his head. “Not yet. It’s fiercely hot. Look at those thunderheads.”

“They’ve been
there every day.” Brandon looked at
the heavy clouds massed on the horizon. “And not a drop of rain.”

A low, nearly inaudible moan came from the cabin, and Ritchie hurried indoors. From the bedroom came a sharp cry, and Brandon’s skin prickled with gooseflesh, despite the heat. “Oh God, God, make Zylle be all right.” He focused on one small cloud in the dry blue, and there he saw a picture of
Zylle and the black-haired, blue-eyed baby. And as he watched, both mother and child changed, and the mother was still black-haired, but creamy of skin, and the baby was bronze-skinned and blue-eyed, and the joy in the face of the mother was the same as in the picture of Zylle. But the fair-skinned mother was not in the familiar landscape but in a wild, hot country, and her clothes were not like
the homespun or leather he was accustomed to, but different, finer than clothes he had seen before.

The baby began to cry, but the cry came not from the baby in the picture but from the cabin, a real cry, the healthy squall of an infant.

Goody Llawcae came to the door, her face alight. “It’s a nephew you have, Brandon, a bonny boy, and Zylle beaming like the sun. Though sorrow endure for a night,
joy cometh in the morning.”

“It’s afternoon.”

“Don’t be so literal, lad. Run to let your father know. Now!”

“But when may I see Zylle and the baby?”

“After his grandfather has had the privilege. Run!”

When Goody Adams had at last taken herself off, the Llawcaes gathered about the mother and child. Zylle lay on the big carved bed which Richard Llawcae had made for her and Ritchie as a wedding
present. Light from the door to the kitchen-living room fell across her as she held the newborn child in her arms. Its eyes were tightly closed, and it waved tiny fists in searching gestures, and its little mouth opened and closed as though it were sipping its strange new element, air.

“Oh, taste and see,” Zylle murmured, and touched her lips softly to the dark fuzz on the baby’s head. His copper
skin was still moist from the effort of birth and the humidity of the day. In the distance, thunder growled.

“His eyes?” Brandon whispered.

“Blue. Goody Adams says the color of the eyes often changes, but Bran’s won’t. No baby could ask for a better uncle. May we name him after you?”

Brandon nodded, blushing with pleasure, and reached out with one finger to touch the baby’s cheek.