A Choice of Gods

12

He knew of music and was entranced by it, sometimes imagining that he heard it in the wind blowing through the trees, or in the silvery tinkling of swift water running over stones, but never in his life had he heard music such as this.

There had been Old Jose, he remembered, hunkered of an evening at the doorway of his hut, tucking the fiddle underneath his chin and drawing the bow across the strings to make happiness or sadness or sometimes neither, but just a flow of sweetness. "Although I can no longer do it well," he'd say. "My fingers no longer dance upon the strings with the nimbleness they should and my arm has grown too heavy to draw the bow with the lightness it should have. Like the wings of a butterfly across the strings — that's the way of it." But to the boy, crouching in the sand, still warm from the sun, it had been wonderful. On the high hill behind the hut a coyote would point its nose into the sky and howl accompaniment, voicing the loneliness of hill and sea and beach, as if he and the old man with the fiddle and the crouching lad were all the life still left in this lonesome land, with the stubs and mounds of ancient shapes showing in the dust of twilight.

There had been, much later, the buffalo on the plains with their drums and rattles and the deer bone whistles, thumping out the beat to which he and the others danced in the flickering campfire light, dancing with a high exhilaration that he sensed had its roots far back in time.

But this was neither fiddle nor deer bone whistle, nor the thump of drum; this was music that filled the world and thundered at the sky, that caught one up and carried him, that drowned him, that made one forgetful of his body, welding his very being into the pattern that the music wrought.

One part of his brain was not caught, was not drowned, but held out against the magic of the sound in puzzled wonderment, saying over and over to itself: It is the trees that make the music. The little clump of trees standing on the knoll, ghostly in the evening, so clean and fresh after the sweep of rain, white like birch, but larger than most birch. Trees with drum and fiddle and deer bone whistle and much more than that, putting it all together until the very heavens talked.

He became aware that someone had moved up the garden and now stood beside him, but he did not turn to see who it might be, for there was something wrong out on the knoll. Despite all the beauty and power there was something there that was not exactly right, something that, if it could be fixed, would make the music perfect.

Hezekiah reached out and gently adjusted the bandage on the young man's cheek.

"Are you feeling all right now?" he asked. "Are you feeling better?"

"It is beautiful," said the young man, "but there is something wrong."

"There is nothing wrong," said Hezekiah. "We bandaged you and kept you warm and fed you and now you are all right."

"Not me. The trees."

"They are playing well," said Hezekiah. "They seldom have played better. And it is one of their old pieces, not one of their experimental…"

"There is a sickness in them."

"Some of the trees are old and dying," Hezekiah said. "They do not perform perfectly, perhaps, not as they did in their younger days, but they still do well. And there are some young saplings that have not caught the knack."

"Why does no one help them?"

"There is no way to help them. Or if there is, no one knows of it. All things grow old and die, you from oldness, I from rust. They are not trees of Earth. They were brought here many centuries ago by one of those who travel to the stars."

And there, the young man thought, was the talk again of traveling to the stars. The buffalo hunters had told him there were men and women who traveled to the stars and again this morning the girl he had talked with had mentioned it again. Of them all, the girl might know; for she could talk with trees. Had she, he wondered, ever talked with the ghostly trees standing on the knoll?

She could talk with trees and he could kill the bears and suddenly the moment was with him once again when that last bear had reared up from the gully and had been far too close. But now, for some strange reason, it was not the bear at all, but the trees upon the knoll and in that instant the same thing happened as had happened with the bear, that same sense of going out and meeting. And the meeting of what? The bear? The trees?

Then it was all gone and he was back inside himself again and the wrongness of the trees was gone and everything was right. The music filled the world and thundered at the sky.

Hezekiah said, "You must be wrong about the trees. There can be no sickness in them. It seems to me, right now, they do as well as I ever can remember."