“Did you finish your candy?” I asked.
“Don’t want the rest,” he said, and sighed.
Outside the wind boomed hard enough to shake the building, then subsided.
“I hate that sound,” he said-just what Jamie DeCurry had said. It made me smile a little. “And I hate being in here. It’s like I did something wrong.”
“You didn’t,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it already seems like I’ve been here forever. Cooped up. And if they don’t get back before nightfall, I’ll have to stay longer. Won’t I?”
“I’ll keep you company,” I said. “If those deputies have a deck of cards, we can play Jacks Pop Up.”
“For babies,” said he, morosely.
“Then Watch Me or poker. Can thee play those?”
He shook his head, then brushed at his cheeks. The tears were flowing again.
“I’ll teach thee. We’ll play for matchsticks.”
“I’d rather hear the story you talked about when we stopped in the sheppie’s lay-by. I don’t remember the name.”
“‘The Wind Through the Keyhole,’” I said. “But it’s a long one, Bill.”
“We have time, don’t we?”
I couldn’t argue that. “There are scary bits in it, too. Those things are all right for a boy such as I was-sitting up in his bed with his mother beside him-but after what you’ve been through…”
“Don’t care,” he said. “Stories take a person away. If they’re good ones, that is. It is a good one?”
“Yes. I always thought so, anyway.”
“Then tell it.” He smiled a little. “I’ll even let you have two of the last three chockers.”
“Those are yours, but I might roll a smoke.” I thought about how to begin. “Do you know stories that start, ‘Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born’?”
“They all start that way. At least, the ones my da’ told me. Before he said I was too old for stories.”
“A person’s never too old for stories, Bill. Man and boy, girl and woman, never too old. We live for them.”
“Do you say so?”
“I do.”
I took out my tobacco and papers. I rolled slowly, for in those days it was a skill yet new to me. When I had a smoke just to my liking-one with the draw end tapered to a pinhole-I struck a match on the wall. Bill sat cross-legged on the straw pallets. He took one of the chockers, rolled it between his fingers much as I’d rolled my smoke, then tucked it into his cheek.
I started slowly and awkwardly, because storytelling was another thing that didn’t come naturally to me in those days… although it was a thing I learned to do well in time. I had to. All gunslingers have to. And as I went along, I began to speak more naturally and easily. Because I began hearing my mother’s voice. It began to speak through my own mouth: every rise, dip, and pause.
I could see him fall into the tale, and that pleased me-it was like hypnotizing him again, but in a better way. A more honest way. The best part, though, was hearing my mother’s voice. It was like having her again, coming out from far inside me. It hurt, of course, but more often than not the best things do, I’ve found. You wouldn’t think it could be so, but-as the oldtimers used to say-the world’s tilted, and there’s an end to it.
“Once upon a bye, before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time, the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little…”
THE WIND THROUGH THE KEYHOLE
Once upon a bye, long before your grandfather’s grandfather was born, on the edge of an unexplored wilderness called the Endless Forest, there lived a boy named Tim with his mother, Nell, and his father, Big Ross. For a time the three of them lived happily enough, although they owned little.
“I have only four things to pass on to you,” Big Ross told his son, “but four’s enough. Can you say them to me, young boy?”
Tim had said them to him many and many-a, but never tired of it. “Thy ax, thy lucky coin, thy plot, and thy place, which is as good as the place of any king or gunslinger in Mid-World.” He would then pause and add, “My mama, too. That makes five.”
Big Ross would laugh and kiss the boy’s brow as he lay in his bed, for this catechism usually came at the end of the day. Behind them, in the doorway, Nell waited to put her kiss on top of her husband’s. “Aye,” Big Ross would say, “we must never forget Mama, for wi’out her, all’s for naught.”
So Tim would go off to sleep, knowing he was loved, and knowing he had a place in the world, and listening to the night wind slip its strange breath over the cottage: sweet with the scent of the blossiewood at the edge of the Endless Forest, and faintly sour-but still pleasant-with the smell of the ironwood trees deeper in, where only brave men dared go.
Those were good years, but as we know-from stories and from life-the good years never last long.
One day, when Tim was eleven, Big Ross and his partner, Big Kells, drove their wagons down Main Road to where the Ironwood Trail entered the forest, as they did every morning save the seventh, when all in the village of Tree rested. On this day, however, only Big Kells came back. His skin was sooty and his jerkin charred. There was a hole in the left leg of his homespun pants. Red and blistered flesh peeped through it. He slumped on the seat of his wagon, as if too weary to sit up straight.
Nell Ross came to the door of her house and cried, “Where is Big Ross? Where is my husband?”
Big Kells shook his head slowly from side to side. Ash sifted out of his hair and onto his shoulders. He spoke only a single word, but one was enough to turn Tim’s knees to water. His mother began to shriek.
The word was dragon.
No one living today has ever seen the like of the Endless Forest, for the world has moved on. It was dark and full of dangers. The woodsmen of Tree Village knew it better than anyone in Mid-World, and even they knew nothing of what might live or grow ten wheels beyond the place where the blossie groves ended and the ironwood trees-those tall, brooding sentinels-began. The great depths were a mystery filled with strange plants, stranger animals, stinking weirdmarshes, and-so ’twas said-leavings of the Old People that were often deadly.
The folken of Tree feared the Endless Forest, and rightly so; Big Ross wasn’t the first woodsman who went down Ironwood Trail and did not come back. Yet they loved it, too, for ’twas ironwood fed and clothed their families. They understood (though none would have said so aloud) that the forest was alive. And, like all living things, it needed to eat.
Imagine that you were a bird flying above that great tract of wildland. From up there it might look like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Along the bottom of the dress was a hem of lighter green. These were the blossiewood groves. Just below the blossies, at the farthest edge of North’rd Barony, was the village of Tree. It was the last town in what was then a civilized country. Once Tim asked his father what civilized meant.
“Taxes,” Big Ross said, and laughed-but not in a funny way.
Most of the woodsmen went no farther than the blossie groves. Even there, sudden dangers could arise. Snakes were the worst, but there were also poisonous rodents called wervels that were the size of dogs. Many men had been lost in the blossies over the years, but on the whole, blossie was worth the risk. It was a lovely fine-grained wood, golden in color and almost light enough to float on air. It made fine lake and rivercraft, but was no good for sea travel; even a moderate gale would tear apart a boat made of blossie.
For sea travel ironwood was wanted, and ironwood brought a high price from Hodiak, the barony buyer who came twice a year to the Tree sawmill. It was ironwood that gave the Endless Forest its green-black hue, and only the bravest woodsmen dared go after it, for there were dangers along the Ironwood Trail-which barely pierced the skin of the Endless Forest, remember-that made the snakes, wervels, and mutie bees of the blossie groves seem mild by comparison.
Dragons, for instance.
So it was that in his eleventh year, Tim Ross lost his da’. Now there was no ax and no lucky coin hanging around Big Ross’s burly neck on its fine silver chain. Soon there might be no plot in the village or place in the world, either. For in those days, when the time of Wide Earth came around, the Barony Covenanter came with it. He carried a scroll of parchment paper, and the name of every family in Tree was writ upon it, along with a number. That number was the amount of tax. If you could pay it-four or six or eight silver knucks, even a gold one for the largest of the freeholds-all was well. If you couldn’t, the Barony took your plot and you were turned out on the land. There was no appeal.