amc@whuts.UUCP (Andy Cohill) (08/22/85)
It was in the blue hills that he heard her, singing the song
without a sound. High up on the wind rocks, on the sandstone ridges
that had waited 800 million years to see the sun. There she sang,
the sweet clear notes that had no home, that existed only on the
wind, on the wings of the seven hawk summer.
It was at 3 AM, the first time. He awoke, startled, and went to the
open window. It was high summer, but there was something else in the
breeze that he had never heard before. He threw on his clothes and
went down to the river, where she waited for him, singing in the
trees of autumn-to-be. He understood, suddenly, that she was bringing in
the new season, and as the hills caught fire it was not some
chemical reaction triggered by the shorter days, but an unconcious
response to her song.
Year after year, he climbed up to Dragon's Tooth, to wait for the
sun to touch the ridges, finally to disappear in the indigo
night. He was very close to her there, up where the hawks waited
lazily on the updraft from the river. The river, he was sure, was
part of the key. A river so old that it flowed backwards, straight
up the hills, across the ridges and valleys. She was waiting for
him, he was sure. All those nights he went to look and to listen, he
never met another soul.
There were times when the song died completely; stilled, he
supposed, by the death that drew round his own life. But he left
*that* darkness behind, and the song, one day, just like that, was
back, clearer and stronger than before. As if he had passed some
test. He smiled suddenly, knowing that. Death was a test, and if you
could go to sleep each night with death in the room, and get up each
morning with it still there, you passed.
He had passed by imagining a window out onto a world that he could
not see. But his feelings were stronger than sight, so he built the
window, stepped through, and left death looking out that window at
him. And the song came back.
Years later, he understood that death better. You hold a woman in
your arms, and let the life drain away because there is nothing that
you can do, and then you remember that there is one thing...
You can scream. So you go back to your house in the woods, where the
song has died too, and you scream to bring that woman back. You
scream at the chemicals that took her life, and you scream at her
for taking it, and you scream at a God you never liked anyway, and
the screams don't seem quite loud enough, so you scream louder, at
the wind that carries only the black death, and you scream at the
mist rising on the river, at the full moon that glistens like
winter.
And then you hide. In her death, and your own, waiting, so
patiently, so quietly, so softly in a life gone mad. But you step
instead, through the window, because you know she waits there for
you, with the song without a sound, born on the wings of the seven
hawk summer, above a river like beaten silver.....
Andy
{ihnp4|allegra}houxm!whuxl!whuts!amcdjw@lanl.ARPA (08/26/85)
I think I'll give myself another day after that! Dave Wade