The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Sixth Annual Collection

CANDLES ON THE POND Sue Ellen Sloca

When I was five, I learned the answer to the riddle of the Pond.

I, Dahni, daughter of the Middagland, was born without a soul.

My mother expected only my sister Neel.

For Neel she braved the chambered caves below the Pond to gather honeycomb. For Neel she tempered the wax, mixed it with blood, dipped the braided wick and poured the candle. When my sister’s soul awoke and stirred within my mother’s womb, it was Neel for whom Grandfather Mose breathed on the wick to light her candle.

My mother wove a single birthing blanket.

Grandfather Mose told me that it stormed the night my mother summoned him.

His wattle-and-daub roundhouse lay on an island in the pond, across the pale green water from my village, which, like others of the Middag, rose like a circle of old stumps, brown and blended, between the water and the deep wood.

When the pains began, my mother went alone to the bank. Standing ankle-deep in the ooze at the spot where fallen trees formed two crossed fingers, she shouted over the wind.

The old man came. Some said that he walked on the water’s crest. Others, that he waded, barefoot, his leggings drawn above his knees, defying the wrath of the storm.

When the pains peaked, my mother grew afraid and confessed her secret: that she had lain with one of the Nameless from beyond the Pond. That she feared for her child. Grandfather Mose moistened her cracked lips, kneaded the pit of her back, and promised her that her child would wear a name.

Red and kicking, fists curled, arms beating, my sister greeted air. With her first indignant howl, her candle shrieked into flame before he could hold it to her mouth. It burned without wavering. He damped it with a handful of muddy moss and named her Neel, “life-strong.”

My mother cried out in joyous relief, and the pains began again. After a day and yet another night, filled with wave upon wave of life-contorting pain, he unbanked her candle. It flickered. It smoked. She tossed and twisted, moaning and begging for death.

Ashen-faced, Grandfather Mose bowed his head, and allowed her family, her friends—those of the village who would—to file by her bed of fur-cushioned rushes and drip wax from their own lit candles into the clay pot that held her flame. Her candle steadied, burning with a thin, clear fire. Her eyes closed.

At dawn her candle sputtered and died.

And I was taken from her womb: blue, limp and cold. Reluctantly I breathed on my own. Grandfather Mose wrapped me in his head scarf, placed me against my sister’s warmth, and named me Dahni, “candleless.”

On mornings when it did not rain, before the sun would burn the mist off the Pond—while the garden was too wet to work—Neel and I would race each other to the sunning rock on our side of the Pond. There we would kick off our moccasins and shimmy out of our leggings.

Should the wind lift Neel’s kirtle above her knees, she would giggle, flap her hands, hop on one foot and be a bird. I knew why she would pull the green, mossy cloth into deep folds to blouse above her sash, but I did not reveal to our aunts how much of her legs she allowed to show. We shared secrets, Neel and I.

Neel’s skin and hair were the color of sorrel honey. Early on she learned that a well-placed kick worked to deter those of our cousins who would tease.

I was a pale ghost of Neel; I left my hair braided in its thin, single plait. Early on I learned that words could hurt.

Once, when I grew bold enough to ask why we were so unlike, Grandfather Mose drew on his barrelreed pipe, exhaled, billowing smoke, and sat gray-wreathed and silent for so long that I thought that his ears were failing along with his eyes. Finally he said that I alone wore my father’s coloring.

I buried his words under the flat rock where we left our clothes, and lived for mornings heavy with haze, when I would lock hands with Neel and wade across the shallows, squishing my toes in the muck, to fill my head with his stories.

I can remember all of Grandfather Mose’s tales, but the one that I would ask for again and again was Why We Neither Fish Nor Net Birds. He would tell it like this.

On the morning of the first day the Maker awoke. It was dark. It was cold. And he was hungry.

He stood up, parting the clouds with his shoulders, and the sun rose. He smiled at the light, and the air around him warmed. After the long night, it felt good— he laughed for the joy of morning—and his breath shimmered into birds.

When it grew so warm that he no longer needed his clothes, he let them slide to his feet. His furs became trees, and the soft cloth of his kirtle, the grass.

All morning long he danced with the birds. He clapped his hands, squeezing clouds into rain. He whirled, whipping air into wind. His heels dug valleys; his toes kicked earth into hills. He loved thg Children of the Wind and found life sweet.

At midday, he remembered thatfie was hungry. He planted bluecorn; gathered tubers and nuts; hunted rabbits and ground squirrels. He ate and ate until he grew too fat to dance. Still unsatisfied, he shaped and breathed beeswax to life, and to his likenesses gave both words and birdsong. He loved the Children of the Wax and found life sweet.

Tired from his labor, he rested.

While he slept, his likenesses listened to the songs-that-remembered-flight within their heads. And banding together, they wove a net from his hair, trapped the birds and pulled off their wings.

In the evening when he awoke, he wept. His tears pooled on the birds-without-wings, becoming a green and shallow Pond. Wingstubs sprouted into fins.

Then, angry, he gave his likenesses death. One by one they grew old . . . died, and left him alone.

He loved the Children of the Mud and found life bittersweet.

He closed his eyes and darkness fell. And in his dreams he remembered the birds—remembered whose songs he had given man—grieved, and promised that morning would come again. That on the second day his children would take turns, becoming bird, man, fish . . . bird, man, fish.

And that is why we neither fish nor net birds.

As a child I grew to dread yeardays. I remember well Neel’s fifth.

Preparations for the celebration of her candling began several days before the village-wide feast. The youngest of my mother’s sisters set off into the deep woods with her bow and snares and hunting dog. My uncle, who always saved a smile for me, laid aside his weaving to twine rushes and ferns into the stiff mats that were to serve as ground covers.

While the rest of my aunts and older girl cousins shelled pine nuts, mashed bilberries into a paste, and otherwise began to prepare the meal, they argued among themselves as to whether red or yellow ochre would best express the color of Neel’s name when it grew time to paint her face. On one thing they agreed: that she was old enough to crack the corn for the communal flatbread.

I remember bending my head to the smell of sweet fern, heavy and fragrant; I remember sorting rushes by size and soaking them in a hollowed-log trough. I hear the popping crack of the corn. I see Neel’s face, flushed with concentration and pride.

After a short while, Neel complained that cracking corn was hard work. I splashed an armful of rushes into the trough, and as I turned to pick up the next bundle, my uncle slid a sprig of fern into my hair.

Both of them spoke at once.

“It’s not fair,” she said. “Dahni doesn’t have to help.”

“If you’d rather crack corn, go ahead,” he told me. “It’s your day, too, little fin.”

All my pent-up feelings erupted. “I hate you!” I said to Neel. “I wish you were dead.”

I ran from the roundhouse.

My eyes stinging, I fled down the path that wound to the Pond. Through the thin leather of my soles I felt the uneven edges of stone, the crush of too-dry leaves, crunching as I ran.

At the edge of the Pond I left the path, snagging my kirtle as I plunged through a greenbriar thicket to reach our sunwarmed rock—Neel’s and mine. There I lay cn my stomach, my head on my arms, and cried. Eventually I fell asleep.

When a shivering breeze woke me, my rock bed lay in shadow. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. A wedge of flatbread loosely wrapped in a fern lay beside me on the moss. I looked around and saw no one. I brushed the bread free of ants, and ate it hungrily.

As I chewed, I watched the Pond.

Two trees grew level with the surface of the Pond, their trunks crossing, their branches rising leafed and vined, their roots anchored in the soil. The under one wore leggings of mud-green turtles at the junction of water and wood. I lay turtle-still, feeling the cool of the wind as it whispered among the trees and ruffled the heads of the long-stalked maiden’s caps—broad, lacy clusters of white that grew with the green of the weeds on the earth-and-tree-root mounds near my rock.

A splash.

I jerked my head to the sound, but saw only water-rings rippling, widening, their waves damping as they enlarged. Disappointed, I watched until the water quieted.

Carp were bottom-dwellers, shiny and silver-finned; I had never seen one jump.

Neel. I sat up abruptly, remembering. A spray of sweet fern fell from my hair. I pitched it into the water. It drifted, floating on the slow-moving sludge an arm’s length away from my rock. I gathered a handful of stones and tossed them at the frond, until it sank.

My splash—my water-rings.

Why did I still feel like weeping?

While I watched my spot, a bubble broke—burst—from below, sending rings rippling outwards. I blinked. Intent, I studied the water. Wherever the wind died, wave-rings bubbled, met, and merged. Mouthfuls of air rose to the surface, like words, I thought. Like the language of fish.

I hugged my knees, at peace with the Pond.

When I was ten, I learned that my answer to the riddle was wrong.

Neel was born able to master the tasks expected of us.

At ten, I had barely learned to string a bow when she was chosen to accompany my aunt and adults from other neighboring families on the hunt. That her place was to care for the dogs and check the traplines, that she rarely returned with a woodchuck herself, dampened neither her pride nor my worry that I would ever fit the role.

After I tended my share of the garden, I would set out alone for the Pond, intending to practice my archery. There I would pause, barefoot, to leave tracks in the mud, to flush frogs from the thicket of heart-leaved weeds that choked the shore, to watch ducks. When the sun was level with the tops of the trees, I would return home, eager to describe what I had seen to Neel, to remember much later—at dusk—that I had left my practice bow on the rock, unstrung.

If only I had a candle, I thought.

The night that I asked her, Neel agreed to share her candle.

It was dark, and we lay, shoulder-to-shoulder, whispering. Night sounds spoke too loudly for her, and she burrowed beneath our furs. Within the cocoon our voices touched, warm and mothering.

“How can we split a candle?" I asked.

“Grandfather Mose will know. "

The quiet rhythm of breathing, hers and mine, filled me. I curled into the sound; perhaps I slept.

Some time later I became aware that she was awake. Lying hands-behind-her-head, she stared into the dark. She asked me whether I thought she was pretty, adding, quickly, that I could share the man to whom she would be candlefast at fifteen.

I closed my eyes, but could not sleep.

It was several days before I found an opportunity to talk with Grandfather Mose. The Nameless arrived to disrupt his routine.

They had visited my village nearly every summer that I could remember, appearing between the end of the spring rains and the start of the autumn winds— when the creek that drained the Pond was deep enough to float a canoe.

They had skin the color of dried cornhusks. Neel was convinced that they came from beyond where the sun fell. I wasn’t sure, though their hair, which grew no longer than rabbit-cropped grass, was darker than hers and ranged in color from brown to almost black.

Grandfather Mose had told us that they came to learn from our ways, which I thought strange. Had they no teller of tales among the elders of their village? When I ventured this to Neel, she said that I wasted too much time in thought.

That day as I lay drowsing on my rock, listening to the Pond, I saw their canoe emerge from behind the scrub pines on the lee side of Grandfather Mose’s island. It slid through the water, long and sleek and silver-skinned. There were three of the Nameless in the boat: two adult males and a boy.

I sat up, intrigued.

A boy. I wondered if it bothered him that he lacked a name.

They set up camp on the level strip between the roundhouse and the shore on Grandfather Mose’s island. I watched from my rock as they pitched sloping tents, dug a fire pit and circled it with flat sitting-rocks. There, in the next few days, the men gathered to smoke with Grandfather Mose. I rarely saw the boy. I pondered that. Did the old man’s stories not interest him?

Neel called me silly, but I kept my vigil. Whenever I could, I slipped away to the Pond to lie belly-flat on my moss-furred rock, to watch and wait.

Late on the third day, I arrived as the afternoon sun set fire to the water. A raccoon pawed through the ashes of their cooking pit.

Smoke drifted in wind-spun curls above the roof of the roundhouse. I watched for a while, and when I saw no signs that either the men or the boy were in camp, I waded across the Pond, skirting their tents, and paused outside the doorflap to clear my throat—to announce myself—before entering.

The interior was dim and smoky and smelled of molding reeds. I oriented myself by the orange glow of Grandfather Mose’s pipe. At first I didn’t see the boy, but he must have seen me, for he was standing when I reached the old man’s side.

He was shorter than I by half a head, and chunky square of waist, of shoulders and chin. He fingered a shiny disk that he wore on a thong around his neck and eyed me as if he couldn’t decide whether or not I would bite, like Neel face to face with a squirrel.

Grandfather Mose motioned for both of us to sit.

“Dahni,” he said, pointing at me.

I nodded.

“Peter Jeff Tarr.”

The boy smiled hesitantly. I remember feeling confused.

At dusk when Grandfather Mose ended his stories, I tiptoed home barefoot.

Late that night, as I lay in the dark beside Neel, I wondered how much of our language Peter Jeff Tarr had understood. Somehow it did not seem right to mention our meeting to her.

Peter Jeff Tarr.

I rolled it slowly like Grandfather Mose, then tried it fast, blurring the notes like the call of a bird.

He had a word. What did it mean to lack a name?

And how could Neel and I share a candle?

For two days after our meeting it rained, and I pulled at the corners of the questions as I cracked corn, as I scraped pelts, as I cleaned porcupine quills to be dyed and stitched on baskets—until my head ached.

At dawn on the first clear morning after the storm, I escaped. Trees dripped with after-rain. Birds awakened the wind with chirrupy crees. The odor of earth, of decay and new growth, was thick enough to bite.

At my rock I found Grandfather Mose—waiting for me—he said. I sat crosslegged beside him, facing the water, the seat of my pants becoming a wick for the wet, spongy moss.

He questioned me about little things, nodding gravely at my answers as if it mattered to him what I thought. When he fell silent I drew a deep breath and asked, “How can I cut Neel’s candle in half?”

“Can a soul be split? If I knew that, I would be the Maker himself. ”

He was lying. Angry at him, at the Maker, at Neel, I jumped up and would have run away had the tone of his voice not held me fast.

“Sit down!”

He gestured at the Pond. “Look closely. What do you see?”

I lay on my stomach and stared, squinted, closed one eye and then the other, leaned so low over the water that I nearly fell in headfirst. Opaque, muddy-green, floating with branches and wet-browning leaves, the water was . . . water. When I said as much, he told me the tale of the Rabbit Who Wanted to Be a Deer.

A long time ago, when the woods were young, the animals envied one another.

Rabbit was always hungry. He chewed tender weeds and dandelion fluffs, which tickled his nose. So while he ate, he would stop to scratch with his hind feet. But when he noticed that Deer could stretch to nibble tree buds and bend to graze on grass, he complained to the Maker.

“I dress like Deer; wear a tail like Deer. It’s not fair that Deer is so tall and I am so short. ”

The Maker sighed, and blinked, and Rabbit became a Deer.

Rabbit chewed shoots from overhead trees, and he rejoiced. But when he fed on flowers, and needed to scratch, he found that his hind hoofs would not reach his nose. He itched and itched and itched, until in tears, he begged the Maker for relief.

The Maker frowned, and blinked, and Rabbit became himself, and he rejoiced. But ever afterwards, when not asleep, his nose twitched.

But I didn’t want stories.

When the tale ended, I opened myself and words emerged, all hot and jumbled and begging with hurt. He lifted my chin and tilted my head to his, and the words trickled to a stop. His eyes were the marbled brown of the Pond after a summer rain, cloudy and swimming with thoughts.

I wanted answers cut as crisply as leaves.

I cried, and he held me on his lap—as old as I was—and sang a song without words as he rocked me to silence.

Afterwards I wanted only to sleep, but he pointed to the water—bubbling, produced a sound, and asked me to repeat it. Bewildered, I did so. Again. A leaffloating. The rock-unmoving. Again . . . again.

The sounds reused the same distortions of mouth and tongue that formed the word for the boy. Gradually it dawned; he was teaching me to speak with the Nameless ones.

In the days that followed, the language lessons continued. I taught Neel and for us they became a private game. In the garden as we worked, weeding adjacent rows of squash and beans on hands and knees, Neel would ask What is the Nameless word for this or that? and I would answer in fat patties of sound bitten off from the ends and middles of actual words and mushed together when I didn’t know the proper name. And then we would burst into just-to-be-silly laughter, and I would look at her, and for a moment so intensely filling that I ached . . . would sense that this could be enough.

And yet.

On afternoons when I lay on my rock, bathed by the wind, I scraped away moss and scratched a picture of a candle onto the granite with a stone, wrist-to-elbow long, life-thick, with a flame as tall and wide as my hand, which would last until the next hard rain.

One afternoon as I sat staring at the water, pondering the strange ways of the Nameless who had spent the morning “measuring” things in the village, I heard someone approach. Twigs snapped, leaves crunched too loudly for stealth. I held my breath and sat gray and motionless, trying to blend into the rock, hoping not to be seen if I were wanted for some disagreeable chore.

“Hullo.”

I turned. The boy, Peter Jeff Tarr, stood where the path dwindled into grass-embedded mud, studying me. His smile faded as I stared at the sunball red of his shirt. I remembered my manners and fumbled to reply in his language. Perhaps I spoke too loudly. Perhaps I chose inaptly. The corners of his mouth twitched, recalling Rabbit. I laughed. He laughed. And we shed words.

I parted low-sweeping branches to show him where to look for brown-furred water rats at play. I lifted handfuls of musty leaves to show him where to find toadcups, fruity and orange-gold. Despite my urging—I ate one first—he would not put one in his mouth. “Grandfather Mose” I named the old man’s pipes that grew in deep shade, hand-high and curved like flowers carved from wax. He grinned and dared me to walk the trees whose trunks, still rooted, extended over the Pond. He fell in.

I lent him my leggings, and while his pants dried, we talked in broken words, part his, part mine. Thinking of Neel, I asked him where he came from.

“Iowa,” he said.

“You have sun there?”

“Oh, yes. And corn.”

He stood up to show me how tall it grew in his village: above his head. I was impressed. But when he pantomimed the stripping of its tassels—his chore, he said—I thought of flowers for the Maker’s bees destroyed, and ears of corn misshapen and unkemeled—and understood more of why his people had come to learn from us.

Feeling brave, I asked him whether it saddened him that he lacked a name.

“I have a name,” he said. “Peter Jeff Tarr.”

“A word. What does it mean?”

He looked confused. “Nothing. It’s just my name. What I answer to.”

I told him how my name embodied me, showed him my drawing and confided that I, also, lacked.

Had he a candle of his own at home? I asked, ashamed of my directness—grateful that I could not see his face as he traced the lines on the rock with his finger. No, he said, but if he wanted one he could always “buy” one, or make one, he added, with a sideways glance at me.

“Make one for myself?”

He started to explain how, but I waved him to silence. What I had not heard was of a candle made for other than a child between the time of her mother’s last blood and the stirring of her soul, by any but her mother.

He would have talked further, but I was too full of what he planted in me to continue. He dressed, and started up the path, then turned—retraced his steps, and laid the shiny disk he wore around his neck on the rock in front of me. Scratched onto one side of it was his name, he said, and on the other, a picture of an old man. “Saint Christopher” he called his Grandfather Mose.

I glanced at it briefly, then tossed it back to him.

He put it on the rock again. “For you,” he said. “In return for the Pond.”

That year, when the Nameless left, I watched their canoe until it slid out of sight behind a screen of scrub pines on Grandfather Mose’s island. I closed my eyes, and saw it flying through the clear green water, paddles dipping, sunlight burning silver on its hull. And I saw him, Peter Jeff Tarr, standing shadowed in a field of tree-tall corn.

In front of me I heard a splash. I squeezed my eyes more tightly shut, pressed his disk into the hollow of my throat, and pictured Iowa.

When I was fifteen, I learned that the riddle was misformed.

That next spring when the rains subsided and the Pond rose, I waited for the Nameless to return. It pains me to remember how many times a day I paused, midtask, to listen for the shouts of greeting, to stare at the water, watching for the silver canoe.

When it arrived, and Peter Jeff Tarr was not among them, I found compelling reasons to be elsewhere when Grandfather Mose told stories. When Neel asked why, I spoke of pressing work. My uncle began to treat me as an adult; no longer was I “little fin.” Neel did not understand. They’re only stories, she said.

Grandfather Mose did not insist that I attend, but kept me at his side, a silent sponge, when he exchanged words with them. To see to an old man’s needs, he said.

Over that summer my skill in speaking their tongue improved; I grew able to transform thoughts into words without provoking smiles.

Before they left that year, I had healed enough inside to ask them from what land they had come. California. Maine. The world beyond the Pond expanded by two.

Peter Jeff Tarr. Summers came and went, and with them others of his kind. I learned to call them “anthropologists.” I discovered that they knew how to capture words, strip off their wings, and save them on cornhusk-thin sheets and in strange “metal” baskets against the coming snows. I asked Grandfather Mose if I might learn how to make the marks that remembered, but he said no.

Minnesota. Indiana. France, a village much like ours, whose speaker struggled with the words. When I asked her for a story, Grandfather Mose said no. Ohio. Georgia. Michigan. The Pond shrank as my list enlarged.

The years dripped through my fingers, as I grew. A smile above a square chin paled to the touch of a silver disk. Peter Jeff Tarr. Dreams of a magic place called Iowa where candles grew like corn, rank and lush, faded with the memory of his face.

In the spring of the year that Neel and I were to turn fifteen, I decided that I would make my own candle. It rained that day, as on the morning of the day when I resolved that I would gather myself to confide in Neel after tempers settled.

That morning within the crowded babies-crying, wet-dogs-shaking, looms-click-ing, corn-cracking, pine-bark-smoking womb of the roundhouse, water dripped through gaps in the thatch. Neel and I spent the afternoon arguing over whose task it ought to have been to move our sleeping furs away from the leak. That night we huddled near the central fire in borrowed blankets without speaking, without sleeping.

Neel broke first, as always. Grandfather Mose had agreed to terms; by fall she would be candlefast.

Neel and a man.

She did not repeat her offer to share him, made on impulse years before.

I turned my face from the fire and pulled darkness over my head. I may have asked her the customary questions; she may have answered them. What I remember of the day we parted lives was the sound of my own silence.

For days after, Neel and I barely spoke.

I surrendered my claim on our furs, and moved my blanket to the opposite wall of the roundhouse, professing a sudden interest in sleeping with the dogs. She laid aside her bow and traplines and absorbed herself in quilling her candlefast clothes.

When the spring rains stopped, and still she acted like a mud-brained guppy, I remarked to the dogs that her behavior proved that it was a man who had pulled the wings off the first bird. My uncle laughed as if he enjoyed this immensely, saying that when I was joined to a man, I would understand.

His teasing struck a nerve. I fled to my rock, the only spot where I could breathe, unbraided my hair, and stared at my mirror image, rippled in the wind-stirred water. How could I be candlefast?

I hid my face in my knees. Overhead the willows bent their shadowy branches, cradled me as I wept. Would I ever be whole?

Hands touched my shoulders. I whirled to push them away.

Neel.

She reached for a strand of my hair, waist-long, like her own, but lighter by several shades, and curled it around her fingers, shivered in the brisk wind, then asked me for the Nameless word for hair.

We had not played our game since we were ten. I looked at Neel and saw my sister, not another part of me. I dredged my voice from the bottom of the Pond, scraped the silt of years from its tone, and asked her to tell me about the man to whom she was to be candlefast.

That night I moved my blanket alongside her furs.

After that day Neel took it upon herself to share what she was taught by our aunts on how to become a proper woman to her man. She joined me at sunfall at the Pond. I lay on the shore, plucked grass, and lashed curls of bark into leaky canoes until it grew too dark to watch them chart the water’s drift while she explained the latest in mysteries.

Mostly I listened with only one ear. But the night she talked about candles I sat up straight and chewed on my sourgrass.

After a woman was with child, Neel said, she would lower herself into the caves that underlay the Pond to harvest honeycomb. The wax she would render, tint with her blood and mix with drippings from the candles of villagers who wished to share with her child. The wick she would braid from cornsilk, angora, and hanks of her hair—the longer the strands, the taller her child—and dip, suspend by a stick in a tall clay pot, and cover with cooling wax.

Aside from the danger—the caves were known for their treacherous footing— the process sounded within my reach.

“But why would a woman wait until she was sick with child?” I asked, affecting what I hoped was a casual tone.

“The bees,” Neel said. “It’s said they can sense the change in a woman’s smell and will not attack.”

I almost choked on my mouthful of grass.

I needed a man.

Who could I trust?

Without a candle I was like the Nameless woman from France who slept in Grandfather Mose’s roundhouse to avoid unwanted hands. I knew what it meant when men looked at me; I would not have them whispering lies.

I pondered the problem as summer arrived. Alone on my rock I would stare at the cornhusk paleness of my wrists, and curse my mother for lying with a Nameless man. In this sour temper the answer appeared.

I shivered as I touched the disk at my throat, and began to watch for the silver canoe.

During the waiting days, I steeled myself for the worst and practiced my invitation. One night? One hour? How long did it take to make a child? I regretted that I had paid so little attention to Neel when she tried to teach me the bitter details.

The morning the Nameless beached their canoe on his island, Grandfather Mose summoned me. The previous year I had lived with him while they were in camp; he would need me again.

The day was already sticky-hot, without a whisper of breeze. My kirtle was wet in patches and clung to my skin. I fastened my braid to the top of my head, rolled my moccasins into my blanket, and set off barefoot for the Pond.

Intending to strip, submerge, and cool off before spending the afternoon bored with formalities, stewing in sun, I stopped at my rock.

There, on the moss. One of them, seated facing the water, his back to me, his hair rabbit-short, his shirt the color of glowing coals.

I opened my mouth and swallowed . . . air. The speech I had practiced dissolved into words that coiled in my throat and refused to crawl out. Under his clothes he was only a man—I knew what they looked like. And yet.

“Hello,” I said.

He turned.

He squinted, his forehead wrinkling.

I wanted to beat my wings and fly from the spot, but I could not lift my feet from the mud-caked grass.

“Dahni?”

He stood up and crossed the few paces that separated us. Now a head taller than I, his body proportions fitted his blocky stature. His eyes crinkled as he smiled. He extended his hand.

I stepped backward and shook my head. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

“Don’t you remember me, Dahni?”

Nodding, I clutched at the silver disk and whispered his name. “Peter Jeff Tarr.”

Nothing went right for me that summer.

By night I slept by Grandfather Mose’s side; I sponged him cool when he woke in the prickly heat, and fetched him water when he coughed. Often I threatened to refuse him his pipe, but I never did.

By day I grew to know Peter Jeff Tarr.

We talked about him. He told me of “school” and of how he planned to attend the “university” when he had passed his test of manhood. He told me of his father who, as in his previous visit, belonged to the team of “anthropologists.” Winters he spent with his mother, he said, and summers with his father. I thought it sad that his people did not allow a man to live in his woman’s roundhouse.

We talked about me. I introduced him to Neel.

Mostly we explored the Pond. We traced the curvature of the shore; he drew a “map.” I taught him to name and recognize plants, to know which trefoil cluster of leaves, when crushed, raises water blisters on the skin, and which signals that a knuckle-sized bulb, edible and crunchy-sweet, lies buried in clay below the mud.

We climbed on the rocks and swam in the Pond. We lay like turtles on the logs that grew over the water, sunning ourselves, trailing our toes, and laughing like silly children. We shared meals and stories, and long silent moments attuned to the quiet of the Pond.

With Peter Jeff Tarr, I played and forgot.

As the summer slumbered to a close, and the day of his leaving approached, I awoke and remembered my plan.

That night, at dusk, as we sat on my rock, I scraped away the matted moss and scratched the outline of a candle in the granite with his pocket knife. He watched without question as I drew, and when I had finished, I unlaced the front of my kirtle, and guided his hands to my breasts.

“Teach me,” I said.

Peter Jeff Tarr. I touched his smile in my sleep. The night before he left, he promised that he would return for me, to take me home to Iowa.

At dawn the next day the silver canoe spilled out of my sight.

Did I carry his child?

The question rattled my dreams. I would wake up sweating. I took to walking the shore of the Pond by dark, until the calm of the water settled inside, and I could sleep.

As I waited for signs, I stole the supplies I would need and hid them in the hollow of a rotten log in the forest behind the roundhouse. A pine burl torch. A knife of sharpened bone. Head scarves to cover my ankles, neck and face; strips of leather to wrap around my wrists and palms: protective covering. A net-string pouch for holding honeycomb.

Six, seven, eight days passed. I must have grown cross and ill-tempered. Neel took me aside and asked me how long I was planning to mourn the departure of Peter Jeff Tarr. I lied. I told her I feared that I carried his child.

Instantly she was all concern, hugging me and assuring me that I need not worry until two moons had passed without blood—that she had been told that babies frequently changed their minds in the first full moon. I could scarcely sit through her remedies for inducing them early.

The following night I waited until even the dogs had curled their tails and tucked their heads in sleep. I dressed, scooped up a pot of still-glowing coals, and slipped outside. The moon was high and wan.

I recovered my gear, lit my torch, and made my way through the woods to the opening of the caves, a sinkhole hidden by brush and blackberry bramble on the high ground above the village. As I wrapped myself securely, leaving only my eyes and fingers exposed, I watched the Maker’s bees stream in and out of the hole.

They were bigger than honeybees, as large as hummingbirds. I had hoped to find them sluggish in the late-night chill. Three times I had to remind myself why I had chosen to steal the wax.

Gingerly I tested the crumbly soil at the mouth of the cave. Gripping the torch, I lowered myself with my free hand, using my toes to feel for buried roots and rock ledges that would support my weight. After what seemed like too few steps if Neel’s account were accurate, my feet hit level ground. As I turned to face the passage I heard a high, shrill squeak. I pulled back suddenly. The ground beneath me gave way. I slipped—slid—hit the solid rock floor of the cave with a jolt that knocked the torch from my hand.

I saw it arc—caught a glimmer of water—to fall with a clunk and a hiss. Its glow vanished, leaving me alone with the dark. And the bats.

Another squeal. I dropped to my knees and crawled toward the sound of rushing water. Keeping it at my right, I scrambled, coughing and sneezing, through ankle-deep piles of dusty dung until I found the squeeze-hole in the rock that led to the next chamber. There I paused to catch my breath, grateful that I was not attempting this while swollen with child.

The air was cool, weeping with moisture, one with the rock that closed on all sides. The sound of the water steadied me. The water. The bats, as underground birds. Words whispered in me: Bird, man, fish. Bird, man, fish. I had not guessed that the Maker layered the world. To come back as a carp I might enjoy. But as a bat? Shuddering, I reminded myself it was time to move on.

I picked my way on my hands and knees, using my fingertips as feelers. Gradually I grew aware that a distant humming drew me. I crawled more quickly. I wanted— I needed—to drink at the source.

As the noise grew louder, the darkness thinned. Soon I was able to see my path clearly. I stood up and walked. The humming swelled as the passage turned. I followed, and gasped as I entered the chamber. Luminous cones, long and white, hung from the ceiling, like icicles dripped from wax. The mid-section of each was black with bees. Cautiously I stepped closer. The cones were made of six-sided chambers, each large enough to hatch a bee. Their lower portions were uneven, as if they had been cut and reconstructed many times.

The hive. Honeycomb.

I opened my bag, drew my knife, and cut deeply into the nearest cone: wax enough for me and my child.

The humming stopped.

I knew that I ought to run, but the silence would not let me move.

The Maker saw.

He knew.

He knew that I was not with child.

I screamed as the bees attacked. My hands and eyes were on fire. I beat them off with my bag. I dropped my bag and blinded, ran. Stumbled. Fell against rock. Curled on the floor and hid my hands and eyes. Bees stung my back and my legs through my clothes.

I rolled, screaming, and fell into water. Cool cool. Burning with fire, I dove. I kicked myself lower . . . lower . . . lower.

Gasping, I surfaced and gulped air. I struggled against the current. I swam I breathed I swam I breathed I swam I breathed. I lost track of time.

I must have been climbing higher within the netting of caves beneath the Pond.

I must have passed out.

Grandfather Mose found me washed up on the sandy soil at the edge of the Pond. He dragged me into his roundhouse, removed the damper of muddy moss from his candle—used it to pack my swollen eyes—and asked the Maker to accept the exchange.

By the time he thought me out of danger, his candle had burned to a thin glaze of wax at the bottom of the clay pot.

In his care, I replenished my strength and regained the use of my eyes, although I knew they would need protection from strong light for a time—perhaps for the rest of my life.

I was still living with Grandfather Mose when the fall winds began to whip the surface of the Pond to a froth. As the day of Neel's candlefasting approached, I knew that I could not return to share the same roof with her and her man, with my family, as if nothing important had happened.

I did not belong.

I could not belong.

The Maker had seen to that.

I stood on the shore, threw stones at the water until my arms ached, and cursed him for saving my life.

And then, exhausted, I drew myself into a ball, and would have shut out the world, but the silver disk dangled between my knees. Peter Jeff Tarr. If he could come to me, I thought, surely I could go to him. On foot I could follow the creek to its outlet; I, myself, could find Iowa.

When I told Grandfather Mose that I could no longer stay in the Middag, he reached for his pipe, and busied himself in packing the spoon-cut lip of the reed with the dried weeds that he claimed were beneficial. And he told me that he had extracted an oath from the Nameless when I was born: that when he was dead, they would care for me as one of their own.

My head swam; drowning in questions, I could not word them fast enough.

Curtly he brushed them all aside and unbanked his candle; blew on it until its flame grew round and huge. When I voiced my alarm, he ordered me out of his sight.

Dizzy, I fled to my rock and asked the Pond: Should I try to find Peter Jeff Tarr myself? Or wait for the Nameless Ones to find me?

Awaiting an answer, I watched the water. During a lull in the wind, bubbles rose and broke into shimmering rings, into halos ever expanding, their auras growing like widening flames, like candles glowing on the Pond.

And I knew, then, that I could never leave the Pond.

I sat.

Soul-quiet.

At home with myself.

When suddenly, in front of me, I heard a splash, and saw it—this time, a carp— rising like a shaft of silver sunlight, fins and tail-flaps beating, flying for the space of a gasp.

I hugged myself and returned to Grandfather Mose. I knelt at his side and cupped my hands over his candle, preserving its flame.

“Teach me how to tell stories,” I said. “Teach me how to speak for the pond.”

Today Grandfather Mose is dead, and it is I, Dahni, daughter of the Middagland, who stands hands-cupped against the glare and scans the far horizon for the Nameless Ones. The evening sun bleeds red upon the green peace of the water.

I write this in my own hand. When you read this—that I send back with them this year—know, Peter Jeff Tarr, that I give you my story, in return for the Pond.