A Wrinkle in Time Quintet (55 page)

The baby unicorn stood on new and wobbly legs, neighing a soft moonbeam sound until it gained its balance. It stood barely as tall as Charles
Wallace, testing one forehoof, then the other, and kicking out its hind legs. As Charles Wallace watched, lost in delight, the baby unicorn danced under the light of the two moons.

Then it saw Gaudior, and came prancing over to the big unicorn; by slightly lowering the horn it could have run right under the full-grown beast.

Gaudior nuzzled the little one’s head just below the horn. Again the
baby pranced with pleasure, and Gaudior began to dance with it, leading the fledgling in steps
ever more and more intricate. When the baby began to tire, Gaudior slowed the steps of the dance and raised his head to the sickle moon, drew back his lips in an exaggerated gesture, and gulped moonlight.

As the baby had been following Gaudior in the steps of the dance, so it imitated him now, eagerly
trying to drink moonlight, the rays dribbling from its young and inexperienced lips and breaking like crystal on the snow. Again it tried, looking at Gaudior, until it was thirstily and tidily swallowing the light as it was tipped out from the curve of the moon.

Gaudior turned to the nearly full moon, and again with exaggerated gestures taught the little one to drink. When its flanks were quivering
with fullness, Gaudior turned to the nearest star, and showed it the pleasures of finishing a meal by quenching its thirst with starlight. The little one sipped contentedly, then closed its mouth with its tiny, diamond-like teeth, and, replete, leaned against Gaudior.

Only then did it notice Charles Wallace. With a leap of startlement, it landed on all four spindly legs, squealed in terror and
galloped away, tail streaming silver behind it.

Charles Wallace watched the little creature disappear over the horizon. “I’m sorry I frightened it. Will it be all right?”

Gaudior nodded reassuringly. “It’s gone in the direction of the Mothers. They’ll tell it you’re only a bad
dream it had coming out of the shell, and it’ll forget all about you.” He knelt.

Reluctantly Charles Wallace mounted
and sat astride the great neck. Holding on to a handful of mane, he looked about at the wild and peaceful landscape. “I don’t want to leave.”

“You human beings tend to want good things to last forever. They don’t. Not while we’re in time. Do you have any instructions for me?”

“I’m through with instructions. I don’t even have any suggestions.”

“We’ll go Where and When the wind decides to take
us, then?”

“What about Echthroi?” Charles Wallace asked fearfully.

“Because we’re journeying from the home place the wind should be unmolested, as it was when we came here. After that we’ll see. We’ve been in a very deep sea, and I never thought we’d get out of it. Try not to be afraid. The wind will give us all the help it can.” The wings stretched to their full span and Gaudior flew up between
the two moons, and away from the unicorn hatching grounds.

Meg sighed with delight.

“Oh, Ananda, Ananda, that was the most beautiful kythe! How I wish Charles Wallace could have stayed there longer, where he’s safe …”

Ananda whined softly.

“I know. He has to leave. But the Echthroi are after him, and I feel so helpless …”

Ananda looked up at Meg, and the tufts of darker fur above the eyes
lifted.

Meg scratched the dog between the ears. “We did send him the rune when he was in the Ice Age sea, and the wind came to help.” Anxiously she placed her hand on Ananda, and closed her eyes, concentrating.

She saw the star-watching rock, and two children, a girl and a boy, perhaps thirteen and eleven, the girl the elder. The boy looked very much like a modern Brandon Llawcae, a Brandon
in blue jeans and T-shirt—so it was definitely not 1865.

Charles Wallace was Within the boy, whose name was not Brandon.

Chuck.

Mrs. O’Keefe had called Charles Wallace
Chuck
.

Chuck was someone Mrs. O’Keefe knew. Someone Mrs. O’Keefe had said was not an idiot.

Now he was with a girl, yes, and someone else, an old woman. Chuck Maddox, and his sister, Beezie, and their grandmother. They were
laughing, and blowing dandelion clocks, counting the breaths it took for the lacy white spores to leave the green stem.

Beezie Maddox had golden hair and bright blue eyes and a merry laugh. Chuck was more muted, his hair a
soft brown, his eyes blue-grey. He smiled more often than laughed. He was so much like Brandon that Meg was sure he must be a direct descendant.

“Ananda, why am I so terribly
frightened for him?” Meg asked.

“Let’s blow dandelion clocks,” Beezie had suggested.

“Not around the store you don’t,” their father had said. “I’ll not have my patch of lawn seeded with more dandelion spore than blows here on its own.”

So Chuck and Beezie and the grandmother came on a Sunday afternoon, across the brook, along to the flat rock. In the distance they could hear the sound of trucks
on the highway, although they could not see them. Occasionally a plane tracked across the sky. Otherwise, there was nothing to remind them of civilization, and this was one of the things Chuck liked best about crossing the brook and walking through the woods to the rock.

Beezie handed him a dandelion. “Blow.”

Chuck did not much like the smell of the spore; it was heavy and rank, and he wrinkled
his nose with distaste.

“It doesn’t smell all that bad to me,” Beezie said. “When I squish the stem it smells green, that’s all.”

The grandmother held the snowy fronds to her nose. “When you’re old, nothing smells the way it used to.” She blew, and the white snowflakes of her dandelion flew in all directions, drifting on the wind.

Chuck and his sister had to blow several times before the clock
told its time. The grandmother, who was quickly out of breath, and who had pressed her hand against her heart as she struggled up the fern-bordered path from the brook, blew lightly, and all the spores flew from the stem, danced in the sunny air, and slowly settled.

Chuck looked at Beezie, and Beezie looked at Chuck.

“Grandma, Beezie and I huff and puff and you blow no stronger than a whisper
and it all blows away.”

“Maybe you blow too hard. And when you ask the time, you mustn’t fear the answer.”

Chuck looked at the bare green stem in his grandmother’s fingers. “I blew four times, and it isn’t nearly four yet. What time does your dandelion tell, Grandma?”

The spring sun went briefly behind a small cloud, veiling the old woman’s eyes. “It tells me of time past, when the valley was
a lake, your pa says, and a different people roamed the land. Do you remember the arrowhead you found when we were digging to plant tulip bulbs?” Deftly she changed the subject.

“Beezie and I’ve found lots of arrowheads. I always carry one. It’s better’n a knife.” He pulled the flat chipped triangle from his jeans pocket.

Beezie wore jeans, too, thin where her sharp knees were starting to push
through the cloth. Her blue-and-white-checked shirt was just beginning to stretch tightly
across her chest. She dug into her pockets like her brother, pulling out an old Scout knife and a bent spoon. “Grandma, blowing the dandelion clocks—that’s just superstition, isn’t it?”

“And what else would it be? Better ways there are of telling the time, like the set of the sun in the sky and the shadows
of the trees. I make it out to be nigh three in the afternoon, and near time to go home for a cup of tea.”

Beezie lay back on the warm ledge of rock, the same kind of rock from which the arrowhead had been chipped. “And Ma and Pa’ll have tea with us because it’s Sunday, and the store’s closed, and nobody in it but Pansy. Grandma, I think she’s going to have kittens again.”

“Are you after being
surprised? What else has Pansy to do except frighten the field mice away.”

Despite the mention of tea, Chuck too lay back, putting his head in his grandmother’s lap so she could ruffle his hair. Around them the spring breeze was gentle; the leaves whispered together; and in the distance a phoebe called wistfully. The roaring of a truck on the distant highway was a jarring note.

The grandmother
said, “When we leave the village and cross the brook it’s almost as though we crossed out of time, too. And then there comes the sound of the present”—she gestured toward the invisible highway—“to remind us.”

“What of, Grandma?” Beezie asked.

The old woman looked into an unseen distance. “The world of trucks isn’t as real to me as the world on the other side of time.”

“Which side?” Chuck asked.

“Either side, though at the present I know more about the past than the future.”

Beezie’s eyes lit up. “You mean like in the stories you tell us?”

The grandmother nodded, her eyes still distant.

“Tell us one of the stories, Grandma. Tell us how Queen Branwen was taken from Britain by an Irish king.”

The old woman’s focus returned to the children. “I may have been born in Ireland, but we never
forgot we came from Branwen of Britain.”

“And I’m named after her.”

“That you are, wee Beezie, and after me, for I’m Branwen, too.”

“And Zillah? I’m Branwen Zillah Maddox.” Beezie and Chuck knew the stories of their names backwards and forwards but never lost pleasure in hearing them.

Meg opened her eyes in amazement.

Branwen Zillah Maddox. B.Z. Beezie.

Mrs. O’Keefe.

That golden child was
Mrs. O’Keefe.

And Chuck was her brother.

* * *

“Zillah comes from your Maddox forebears,” the grandmother told the children, “and a proud name it is, too. She was an Indian princess, according to your pa, from the tribe which used to dwell right here where we be now, though the Indians are long gone.”

“But you don’t know as much about Zillah as you do about Branwen.”

“Only that she was an
Indian and beautiful. There are too many men on your father’s side of the family, and stories come down, nowadays, through women. But in Branwen’s day there were men who were bards.”

“What’s bards?” Chuck asked.

“Singers of songs and tellers of tales. Both my grandma and my grandpa told me the story of Branwen, but mostly my grandma, over and over, and her grandma told her before that, and the
telling goes back beyond memory. Britain and Ireland have long misunderstood each other, and this misunderstanding goes back beyond memory, too. And in the once upon a time and long ago when the Irish king wooed the English princess, ’twas thought there might at last be peace between the two green and pleasant lands. There was feasting for many moons at the time of the nuptials, and then the Irish
king sailed for Ireland with his wife.”

“Wouldn’t Branwen have been homesick?” Beezie asked.

“And of course she’d have been homesick. But she was born a princess and now she was a queen, and queens know how to mind their manners—or did in those days.”

“And the king? What was he like?”

“Oh, and handsome he was, as the Irish can be, as was my own sweet Pat, who bore well the name of the blessed
saint, with black hair and blue eyes. Branwen knew not that he was using her to vent his spleen against her land and her brethren, knew it not until he trumped up some silly story of her sitting in the refectory and casting her eye on one of his men. So, to punish her—”

“For what?” Chuck asked.

“For what, indeed? For his own jealous fantasies. So, to punish her, he sent her to tend the swine
and barred her from the palace. So she knew he had never loved her, and her heart burned within her with anguish. Then she thought to call on her brother in England, and she used the rune, and whether she and hers gave the rune to Patrick, or whether their guardian angels gave it to each of them, she called on all Heaven with its power—”

The children chanted the rune with her.

The grandmother
continued, “And the sun shone on her fair hair and warmed her, and the gentle snow fell and made all clean the sty in which the Irish king had set her, and the fire burst from the fireplace of his wooden palace and the lightning struck it and it burned with mighty rage and all within fled the fury. And the wind blew from Britain and the sails of her brother Bran’s ship billowed as it sped
over the deep sea and landed where the rocks were steep and the earth stark. And Bran’s men scaled the rock and rescued their beloved Branwen.”

“Is it a true story, Grandma,” Beezie asked, “really?”

“To those with the listening ear and the believing heart.”

“Chuck has the believing heart,” Beezie said.

The grandmother patted his knee. “One day maybe you will be the writer your father wanted
to be. He was not cut out for a storekeeper.”

“I love the store,” Beezie said defensively. “It smells good, of cinnamon and fresh bread and apples.”

“I’m hungry,” Chuck said.

“And wasn’t I after saying before we got into storytelling that we should get along home for tea? Pull me up, both of you.”

Chuck and Beezie scrambled to their feet and heaved the old woman upright. “We’ll pick a bouquet
for Ma and Pa on the way,” Beezie said.

The narrow path was rough with rocks and hummocks of grass, and walking was not easy. The grandmother leaned on a staff which Chuck had cut for her from a grove of young maples which needed thinning. He went ahead, slowing down when he saw Beezie and his grandmother lagging behind him. A bouquet of field flowers was growing in Beezie’s hands, for she paused
whenever she saw that the old woman was out of breath. “Look, Chuck! Look, Grandma! Three more jacks-in-the-pulpit!”

Chuck was hacking away with his arrowhead at a strand of bittersweet snaking around a young fir tree, strangling it with coils strong as a boa constrictor’s. “Ma used to have us looking for bittersweet a year or so ago, and now it’s taking over. It’ll kill this tree unless I cut
through it. You two go along and I’ll catch up.”