Soon they near the tall black gorge where the road pinches and the log-bridge extends over the narrows. A few carts come and go; two women drive a gaggle of geese across, on their way to market. Omeir listens to the river cut deeper through the gorge and then they’re across.

In the dusk they pass the village where he was born. A half mile from home, he leads her off the road and to a bluff above the river and they stop beneath the spread boughs of the half-hollow yew.

“The children,” he says, “say that this tree is as old as the first men, and that on the darkest nights their ghosts dance in its shade.” The tree waves its thousand branches in the moonlight. She watches him, eyes alert. He points into its crown, then at the sack she keeps clutched to her chest.

He takes off his oxhide cape and lays it down. “What you carry will be safe here. It will be out of the weather and no one will come near.”

She looks at him and the moon-shadow plays across her face and just when he decides she understands none of what he is saying, she passes him the sack. He wraps it in his cape, swings himself into the branches, squeezes inside the hollow tree, and presses the bundle deep inside.

“It will be safe.”

She stares up.

He draws a circle in the air. “We will come back.”

When they reach the road again she volunteers her wrists and he ties her. The river is loud and in the starlight the needles on the pines seem to glow. He knows each step of the road now, knows the timbre and tone of the water. When they reach the track leading up to the ravine he glances back at her: slight, filthy, scratched, shuffling inside her torn dress. All my life, he thinks, my best companions cannot speak the same language as me.

TWENTY-ONE

THE SUPER MAGICAL

EXTRA POWERFUL

BOOK OF EVERYTHING

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Φ

… Looking into the ·[book,]· I felt as though I’d hung my head over the lip of a magical well. Across its surface spread the heavens and the earth, all its lands scattered, all its beasts, and in the ·[center?]·…

… I saw cities full of lanterns and gardens, could hear faint music and singing. I saw a wedding in one city with girls in bright robes, and boys with golden swords…

… dancing…

… and my ·[heart was glad?]·. But when I turned ·[to the next page?]· I saw dark, flaming cities in which men burned alive in their fields, and were enslaved in chains, hounds eating corpses, and newborns pitched over walls onto pikes, and when I bent my ear low, I could hear the wailing. And as I looked, turning the leaf over and back…

… beauty and ugliness…

… dancing and death…

… ·[was too much?]·…

… grew afraid…

THE LAKEPORT PUBLIC LIBRARY

FEBRUARY 20, 2020

6:39 P.M.