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In Calabria
| Author: | Peter S. Beagle |
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Tachyon Publications, 2017 |
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| Book Type: | Novella |
| Genre: | Fantasy |
| Sub-Genre Tags: | Fairytale Fantasy |
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Synopsis
Claudio Bianchi has lived alone for many years on a hillside in Southern Italy's scenic Calabria. Set in his ways and suspicious of outsiders, Claudio has always resisted change, preferring farming and writing poetry. But one chilly morning, as though from a dream, an impossible visitor appears at the farm. When Claudio comes to her aid, an act of kindness throws his world into chaos. Suddenly he must stave off inquisitive onlookers, invasive media, and even more sinister influences.
This is a novella of 31,954 words.
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE WHOLE TROUBLE with your farm," Romano Muscari said, "is that it is too far uphill for the American suntanners, and too low for the German skiers. Location is everything."
"The trouble with my farm," Claudio Bianchi growled through his heavy, still-black mustache, "is that, no matter where it is located, the postino somehow manages to find his way out here twice a week. Rain or shine. Mail or no mail."
Romano grinned. "Three times a week, starting next month. New government." He was barely more than half Bianchi's age, but a friend of long enough standing to take no offense at anything the Calabrese said to him. Romano himself had beenborn in the Abruzzi, and in a bad mood Bianchi would inform him that his name suited him to perfection, since he spoke like a Roman. It was not meant as a compliment. Now he leaned on the little blue van that served him as a mail truck and continued, "No, I am serious. Whichever way you look -- down toward Scilla, Tropea, up to Monte Sant'Elia, you are simply in the wrong place to attract the tourists. I grieve to mention this, but it is unlikely that you will ever be able to convert this farm into a celebrated tourist attraction. No bikinis, no ski lifts and charming snow outfits. A great pity."
"A blessing. What do I need with tourists, when I have you to harass me with useless advertisements, and Domenico down in the villaggio to sell me elderly chickens, and that thief Falcone to cheat me on the price of my produce, when I could get twice as much in Reggio --"
"If that truck of yours could get even halfway to Reggio --"
"It is a fine truck -- Studebaker, American-made, a classic. All it needs is to have the transmission repaired, which I will not have Giorgio Malatesta do, because he uses cheap parts from Albania. Meanwhile, I endure what I must. Whom I must." He squinted dourly at the young postman. "Do you not have somewhere else to be? Truly? On a fine day like today?"
"Well ..." Romano stretched out the word thoughtfully. "I did tell Giovanna that I would give her a driving lesson. She is learning my route, you know, in case of emergencies. Such as me actually needing to sleep."
"Your sister? Your sister is not yet old enough to drive a motorcycle!"
Romano shook his head slowly and sorrowfully. "The saddest thing in this world is to watch the decline of a once-great mind. You can no longer even remember that Giovanna will be twenty-three years old next month." He rolled his eyes, regarding the sky accusingly. "She cannot live with me forever. People will talk. Once she graduates, she will most likely move in with her friend Silvana, until she can find work and a place of her own. Just as you will undoubtedly need a quiet room where you can sit untroubled all day and write your poetry. Food and calming medications will be brought to you periodically." He caressed thegraying muzzle of Garibaldi, Bianchi's theoretical watchdog, and glanced warily sideways at the short, barrel-chested farmer. "Have you written any nice poems lately, by the way?"
"I do not write poetry. As you know. I sometimes -- sometimes -- read poetry to my cows, because they seem to like it. But it is not my poetry, never my poetry. I read them Leopardi, Pavese, Pozzi, Montale -- poets of some size, some humanity, poets perhaps to make my cows understand what a thing it is to be a man or awoman." He cleared his throat and spat neatly into a tuft of weeds, startling Sophia, the stub-tailed three-legged cat, who was stalking a sparrow. "Now even if I did write poetry, I would never dream of reciting it to the cows. They have been raised to have taste. I would be shamed."
"Admirable modesty. Truly admirable." Romano clucked his tongue approvingly. "Well, I must tear myself away from this peaceable kingdom, or my flyers will not go through, and poor Giovanna will wait in vain for her lesson." He patted the blue van's left front fender, as he always did on getting into it; when Claudio mocked him as a superstitious peasant, Romano would reply serenely that the routine was merely to reassure himself that the fender remained attached. Starting the engine, heleaned out and spoke over its raspy hiccup. "One day you will see that girl driving this machine up the hill to your door, just as I do. She is a very quick learner."
Bianchi snorted like a shotgun. "She is too young. She will always be too young. You are too young." He stepped back, raising a hand in a gesture that might conceivably have meant farewell, but could just as easily have been directed at an annoying gnat.
Romano and his sister had barely started school when Bianchi inherited the rambling farm west of Siderno, north of Reggio, from a second cousin on his grandfather's side whom he could never remember meeting. The Bianchis of southern Calabria as a group generally disliked one another, but they disliked outsiders even more, and there was no question of selling off the farm as long as there was some splinter of the family tree to take it over. It was still referred to locally as "the Greek's place," because a Bovesian relative of some generations back had supposedly spoken a dialect that contained some words and phrases of the ancient Griko tongue. Claudio Bianchi had his doubts, as he did about most things.
He was forty-seven years old: short, barrel-chested, and broad-shouldered, like most of his family, like most of the men he had known all his life. His black hair was increasingly patched withgray, but remained as thick as ever, and his skin was the color of the earth he worked every day in the sun of the mezzogiorno. The lines around his eyes were as harsh as the land, far more likely to have been inscribed by weariness, anger, and bone-born skepticism than by laughter; but the large eyes themselves were deep brown, and their wary warmth should have had no place in the heavy-boned face of a Calabrese farmer possessed of noillusion that God and his angels ever came this far south. Bianchi had been embarrassed by his eyes on a few odd occasions.
The afternoon was sunny but chill, unusual for the region, even in November. Bianchi had noticed animals he saw every day, from his three cats and the old goat Cherubino to the neighboring weasels and foxes to rabbits and caterpillars, growing heavier coats than normal; he had had to start heating his cow barn at night, a month or more early, and begin swaddling his outdoor faucets and hoses -- even the Studebaker's engine block -- against the cold. He growled often to Romano, or Domenico, or to Michaelis the village innkeeper -- who really was Greek -- that one might as well be living in England or Denmark. Or in PedracesBolzano, if it came to that. Bianchi tended to disapprove of all of Italy north of Milano.
In fact, however, he rather enjoyed this odd cold snap, or climate change, or whatever it was. It did no harm to his cabbages, kale, onions, scallions, eggplants, and potatoes, long since harvested and sold to that thief Falcone, nor -- as long as the rain was not excessive -- to the dwindling hillside vineyard that he kept up out of pure stubbornness when he had let so much else crumble and blow away, and it was a positive benefit to his dormant apple trees, ensuring crisp tartness come spring. If Gianetta, Martina, and Lucia, his three cows, had not been put to stud in more than a year -- and could die as virginal as Giovanna Muscari, as long as that shameless pirate Cianelli kept demanding such outlandish fees for the use of his reportedly Frisian bull -- still their milk kept coming, and kept the cats and the cheese making Rosmini brothers happy. If the old house was little more than kitchen, bedroom, bath, a bit of a parlor, and an attic long since closed off and still, nevertheless it held the heat from his oven and his fireplace better than a larger one would have done; if the nights were dark and silent, the better for thinking and smoking his pipe in peace. And for writing poetry.
For Romano was quite right about that. Claudio Bianchi did write poetry, at highly irregular intervals during his solitary daily life asa farmer in the toe of the Italian boot. Few of his acquaintances -- Romano again excepted -- knew that he had finished high school before going to work; or that, despite both of these circumstances, he had never lost his childhood love of reading poems, and in time trying to imitate them. He had no vanity about this, no fantasies of literary celebrity: he simply took pleasure in putting words in order, exactly as he laid out seedlings in the spring, and tasting them afterward, as he tastedfresh new scallions or ripe tomatoes, or smelled mint or garlic on his hands. He never thought of his poems as being about anything: they came when they came, sometimes resembling what he saw and touched and thought all day -- sometimes, to his surprise, becoming visions of what his father's days and nights might have been like, or Romano's, or even those of Cianelli's aging bull. He would say a coming poem over to himself while he was repairing the Studebaker or his tractor, repainting the barn, or adding red peppers to his dinner of sautéed melanzani eggplant. They came when they came, and when they were finished, he knew. Nothing else -- as he often thought -- was ever truly completed; there was always something else to be added, repaired, or corrected to make it right. But when a poem was done, it was done. There was satisfaction in this.
As there was in living in the old house where the dirt road ran out, inhabiting a life that he was perfectly aware could have been a nineteenth-century life, if one ignored the electricity, gasoline, and the telephone he often went weeks at a time without using. Sometimes, when the reception was not too erratic, he watched news broadcasts on the little television set he had accepted in payment for helping to recover a neighbor's escaped black pigs (come to visit his own half-dozen) and then repairing the gap in the fence through which they had made their getaway. He could not remember the last movie he had seen, nor the last doctor; and he was more likely to whistle ancient Neapolitan canzone about his work than operatic arias. His teeth were excellent; he most often cut his own hair, washed and mended his own clothes, and quite enjoyed his own simple cooking. He knew something of sorrow, remembered joy, and devoutly hoped -- as much as he consciously hoped for anything other than proper allotments of sunshine and rainfall -- never again to encounter either of those two old annoyances. Asked, he would have grumbled, "Sono contento," if he bothered to respond to such intrusion at all.
The universe and Claudio Bianchi had agreed long ago to leave one another alone, and he was grateful, knowing very well how rare such a bargain is, and how rarely kept. And if he had any complaints, he made sure that neither the universe nor he himself ever knew of them.
* * *
The morning after Romano's last visit -- he had few other regular callers, except for the one local policeman, Tenente Esposito, who was near retirement, and would sometimes stop by without notice for a cup of coffee with a dash of grappa in it, and two hours of complaining about his grown children -- Bianchi stepped outside on a sunny, frosty morning, the American scientists are right, something is changing, determined to finish pruning his tottering grapevines before the sirocco blew in from Africa to deceive crops with its treacherous warmth. The Undertaker's Wind rasped his cheek, late, it should have been blowing well before dawn. He looked around for Cherubino, mildly surprised that the goat -- a far more aggressive sentinel than Garibaldi -- was not at the door to greet and challenge him, then bent to scratch the black cat Mezzanotte behind the ears. He straightened up and shrugged into his battered, beloved leather jacket, thinking, there is a poem in this coat -- stretched his arms pleasurably, yawned, scratched the back of his own shaggy neck, and saw the unicorn in his vineyard.
Cherubino was a little way from it, seemingly frozen in the attitude of a fawning acolyte: head bowed, front legs stretched out on the ground before him, as Bianchi had never seen the old goat. The unicorn ignored him in a courteous manner, moving with notable care around the fragile arbors, never touching the vines, but nibbling what weeds it could find on the cold ground. It was a kind of golden white, though its mane and tail -- long and tufted, like a lion's tail -- were slightly darker, as was the horn set high on its silken brow.
As Bianchi stared, it looked up, meeting his eyes with its own, which were dark but not black: more like the darkness of a pine forest in moonlight. It showed no alarm at his presence, nor even when he took his first slow step toward it; but when he asked, "What do you want?" -- or tried to ask, because the words would not come out of his mouth -- the unicorn was gone, as though it had never been there at all. He would indeed have taken it for an illusion, if Cherubino, anarchist and atheist like all goats, had not remained kneeling for sometime afterward, before getting to his feet, shaking himself and glancing briefly at Bianchi before wandering off. Bianchi knew the truth then, and sat down.
He remained on his doorstep into the afternoon, hardly moving, not even thinking in any coherent pattern or direction: simply reciting his vision in his head, over and over, as he was accustomed to do when shaping one of his own poems. Garibaldi,who apparently had not even noticed the unicorn, came up and nuzzled his cheek, and Mezzanotte and Sophia in turn pressed themselves under his hands, seemingly more for comfort than caresses. Bianchi responded as always, but without speaking or looking at them. The sun was beginning to slip behind the Aspromonte Mountains before he stood up and walked out to his vineyard.
He did not bring his pruning shears with him, but only stood for a time -- not long -- staring at the faint cloven hoofprints in the still-near-frozen soil. Then he went back to the house and closed the door behind him.
At some distance, he was aware that he had eaten nothing at all that day, yet he was not at all hungry; in the same way he thought somewhere about opening the bottle of Melissa Gaglioppo that he had been saving most of the year for some unspecified celebration. In fact, he did nothing but sit all night at the wobbly kitchen table that served him as a desk, writing about what he had seen at sunrise. It was neither a poem, insofar as he could judge, nor any sort of journal entry, nor a letter, had there been anyone for him to write to. It was whatever it was, and he stayed at it and with it until Garibaldi scratched at the door to be let in, and brought him home from wherever he and the unicorn had been. He lay down on his bed then, slept not at all; and at last rose to stand in the doorway in his undershirt, looking out at the stubbly fields that comprised his fingernail scratching at the earth.
Not much for forty-seven years, Bianchi. You have let this place melt away under you for such a long time. When you are gone, it will all melt back into the earth, and who will even know you were here?
The moon was down, but its absence made the sky seem even brighter, crusted thickly with more stars than he was accustomed to seeing. The unicorn was in his melon patch, and Cherubino was again with it, this time close enough to touch noses with the creature. The goat's stubby tail was wagging in circles, as it habitually did in those uncommon moments of excitement over something other than eating. Bianchi was almost more astonished by the fact that Cherubino was taking the same care as the unicorn to avoid trampling any of the fragile vines than by the bright apparition pacing daintily among the husks of the melons that he faithfully planted for the deer, in appreciation for their leaving his tomatoes alone. He hardly dared to look at it directly, until the unicorn stamped a forefoot lightly, as though to attract his attention. There was no other sound in the night.
For a second time, Bianchi asked, "What do you want of me? Are you here to tell me something?" The unicorn only looked calmly back at him. Bianchi fought to clear his throat, finally managing to speak again. "Am I going to die?"
PROLOGUE
The White House,
April 16, 1865
The sanity of a bloodied nation hung by a precarious thread. Hundreds of thousands of bodies rotted in mass graves. Mountains of arms and legs lay just beneath the earth in countless pits of appendages. Thousands of young men had been torn into wingless birds, stunned, harrowed, and half whole. No one had gone untouched by the war; everyone was haunted.
A gunshot in a theater tipped the straining scales and the nation's battered, broken heart faltered and stopped.
This was the world in which twelve-year-old Clara Templeton grieved. She wept for her land with the kind of passion only a young, gifted sensitive could offer. When she was called to the side of the first lady, she did not hesitate.
Clad in a black taffeta mourning gown, Clara stood in a dimly candlelit hallway outside the first lady's rooms, awaiting admittance alongside her guardian, Congressman Rupert Bishop, aged twenty-five--though his prematurely silver hair gave one pause as to his age. He'd been silver-haired as long as she'd known him. When she'd asked about it with a child's tactlessness, he'd simply responded with a wink and a smile: "It's the fault of the ghosts." Soon after, Bishop took her to her first séance and Clara began to understand just how dangerous the thrall of ghosts could be....
A red-eyed maid opened the door and gestured them in.
Inside the small but well-appointed room, a low fire mitigated a cool draft and cast most of the light in the room. Mary Todd Lincoln sat on a chair in the shadows, staring out a small window, her bell-sleeved, black crepe dress spilling out in all directions. Only the ticking of a fine clock on the mantel and the occasional sniff from the weeping maid broke the silence. The congressman beckoned Clara forward, into the firelight. Her step creaked upon the floorboards as her petite body cast a long shadow behind her.
Finally the first lady spoke in a quiet tremor. "Do you know why I called you here, Miss Templeton?"
"I've a supposition," Clara replied quietly, nervously moving forward another step. "But first, Mrs. Lincoln, my deepest sympathies--"
"When your guardian here first brought you to visit the White House two years ago, you ran up to me, a perfect stranger, and gave me an embrace from my William. My dead William."
"Yes, Mrs. Lincoln," Clara murmured, "I remember--"
"I need you now, Miss Templeton," the first lady began with a slightly wild look in her eyes, "to give me an embrace from my dead husband."
Alarmed, Clara looked at Bishop, her eyes wide. The tall, elegantly handsome man lifted a calming, gloved hand and Clara attempted to gather herself
"I... well," she stammered, "I'm unsure my gifts can work on command, Mrs.--"
"Try!" the grieving widow wailed, turning to face the girl, her face drawn and hollowed. Clara rushed over and fell to her knees beside the first lady, removing her kid gloves to take Mary's shaking, bare hands into hers.
"I know that he is with you," Clara murmured, tears falling from her bright green-gold eyes. "The president is with all who mourn him--"
"Prove it," Mary Todd murmured. She snapped her head toward the door. "Rupert. You're a spiritualist, have you not trained Miss Templeton since she became your ward?"
"Only charlatans cue up the dead precisely when the grieving want them, Mary, you know that," Bishop said gently. "And this is far too vulnerable a time to try." He shivered suddenly. "Too many things want in. We risk inviting malevolence, not comfort."
"No one should ever have to suffer what I have--" the first lady choked out.
"No, they shouldn't," Clara replied. "Never."
"The country can bear no more," Bishop added quietly, his fine black mourning coat making him almost invisible in the shadows by the door. "We must guard against the basest evils grasping for purchase--"
"What could be more evil than what I have endured?" the first lady exclaimed.
The last two years had taught Clara that Rupert Bishop coddled no one, even the grieving. She spoke before he could offer another example of his oft-sobering perspective. "Such a powerful seat needs protection," Clara exclaimed, squeezing the widow's shaking hands with innocent, sure strength. "Such a man should never have fallen. He deserved to have been made immortal!"
"Why... yes, child!" Mary Lincoln exclaimed, a sudden light in her eyes. "Do we not have resources, researchers, scientists, theorists? Should we not have granted a man like the president eternal protection while he bore the nation on his shoulders? My dear Congressman Bishop..."
The small woman rose to her feet and began to pace the room, skirts swishing and sweeping with renewed determination.
"I charge you," she said, bright gaze fastened on Bishop. "If you'll not bring my husband back to me in spirit or form, then you must do this. Take Clara's idea. For this bled-dry country. For the seat cloaked in immense power. Do this, Congressman, so no other wife in this dreadful house might go through such agony again...."
"Do what, Mary?" he pressed.
She stared at him with steely ferocity. "Find a cure for death."
Seventeen Years Later,
New York City, 1882
"It was born of good intentions," Clara insisted in a choking murmur.
She sat on a bench in Central Park on a mild June day, beneath a willow tree, looking out over the southeastern pond. She could not move. Her breath was shallow against the double stays of corset and buttoned bodice; soft ivory lace and muslin ruffles trembled around her throat. Tendrils of dark blond hair, blown free from braids beneath a fanciful straw feathered hat, tickled around her streaming eyes. Her world was again cracking open.
"Wake up," she heard a voice calling. "Wake up." It was not a human voice but that of some ancient, cosmic force.
She had known there was something different about her since the age of nine, since she'd awakened in the middle of the night to see a wild-haired woman in a cloak sitting at the foot of her bed.
"You're special," was all the woman said before vanishing.
The next day, Clara's father, a prominent doctor to Washington lawmakers, died of tuberculosis. Her mother soon followed. They were buried in a Greenwood Cemetery mausoleum in their native Brooklyn. Clara was the marble sepulcher's most frequent haunt. The Templetons' will ensured that Clara would be educated at fine institutions and looked after by prominent figures.
Rupert Bishop, then a talented young New York lawyer, frequented the same Washington and spiritualist circles as the Templetons. A beloved family friend, he stepped in to graciously provide for the girl left behind. Bitterly estranged from their Southern families after the war, the Templetons hoped Clara's manifest spiritual talents would blossom under Bishop's care and guidance. She indeed flourished, until her gifts turned physically dangerous and had to be carefully monitored.
The visitor returned the night Bishop brought Clara to the White House the first time; Clara saw the creature watching her from the shadows. She had not seen the strange herald since, not even after that fateful second encounter with the first lady, a meeting that had set an unlikely destiny in motion.
Paperwork left on the slain president's desk established a "Secret Service" to investigate counterfeit currency. A tiny cabal, headed by Bishop, supposed the service might also, in some unnamed office, investigate immortality. Bishop assembled a team of occultists, mystics, and chemists and set them to work in a secret location.
Once Clara completed finishing school, Bishop gave her a key to a nondescript office on Pearl Street in downtown Manhattan. A county clerk's record office on the first floor served as a front. Clara's offices--and those of the colleagues she and Bishop hired--took up the top floor. Congressman Bishop became Senator Bishop. A quiet era of investigation and theorizing followed.
In 1880, Eterna theorist Louis Dupris secretly told Clara that he'd made a breakthrough in localized magic. The world had suddenly seemed full of possibility. But now...
The Eterna Compound had been born out of grief. At this moment Clara wondered if it should never have been born at all, for now it bore grief of its own.
"Something's wrong," Clara murmured, wanting to cry but feeling wholly paralyzed. "I can feel it...." All of Clara that had ever been could feel it; a love torn from her like layers of skin.
Before her eyes, in layers of concentric circles stretching out like mirrors reflecting mirrors in dizzying multiplication, she saw lives. Her lives, those she'd had before. She was twentynine years old... with a soul a thousand years older.
Pried open in a painful awakening, she knew her life was far more than the boundaries and limitations of her current flesh, but at present she felt the pain of all those centuries all at once, things done and undone. The sheer, heavy press of it all was staggering.
A mockingbird alighted on a branch above Clara's head. It squawked and stared at her, then made the sounds of a police whistle, a bicycle bell, and some roaring, whooshing thing: the sound of something tearing.
And then there was a woman next to her. The visitor.
Though she couldn't turn her head, in her peripheral vision Clara saw skirts, gloves, and long hair that was scandalously unbound. The presence of the visitor confirmed what she was feeling; something terrible was happening. Clara tried to move again, to fight the gravity lashing her to the bench, wishing tears, something, anything could be set free.
"What is it this time?" Clara gasped.
"Hello, Clara," the visitor said quietly. One didn't mistake an ordinary person for the visitor, for it brought with it the weight of time itself. "It's been awhile." The visitor smoothed the skirts of its long, plain, black, uniform-like dress, something a boarding school girl might wear. "Have you been waiting?" the visitor asked.
"I'm not one who likes waiting," Clara replied.
"That's why I trust you," the visitor said, pleasure in its voice. "I last saw you when you impetuously gave the first lady an embrace from her dead son."
The mockingbird gave a raucous trill from the limb above them. The woman adjusted what Clara thought was a hat-- she still couldn't get a good look. The mockingbird had flown across the path and alighted on a limb at her eye line, trilling accompaniment to their conversation.
"You presage terrible things but I never know what," Clara growled.
"You've always been gifted," the visitor replied. "Sensitive."
"And we see what good sensitivity has done me." Clara choked out her words. "I'm a freak of nature. My 'fits' render any hope I might have had for a normal life or a place in society laughable. I curse my gifts for all the misfortune they bring." Embarrassing, traumatic memories paraded through her mind, her past lives staring on in pity. Clara hated pity. Perhaps it was best, then, that the visitor had none.
"Don't be ungrateful, child," the visitor chided. "You've two friends in a world of loneliness, you had a lover when many never know such pleasure, you've worked when hordes seek pay, you've had a guardian who dotes on you when countless orphans have no one, and you've money and a fine house in a city that denies both to thousands of its denizens."
Clara wanted to lash out at the creature. But it was right, which only sharpened her pain.
"Something terrible has happened, hasn't it? To the Eterna team?" she whispered, her throat raw as if from screaming even though she had loosed no such sound. "To my Louis? My love is among them...."
An amulet of protection, tucked beneath her corset stays, was a knot against her shaking breaths. The amulet had been given to her by Louis, an item charged and blessed by his mother. Clara never felt she had the right to it, and now, he, who needed protection, lacked it
"I am very sorry for your loss," the visitor said solemnly.
"I must go," Clara insisted, trying to fight free but failing. "Maybe I can help the team--"
The visitor held up a hand. "It's no use. They're gone."
"Why can't you stop terrible things if you're aware of them?" Clara demanded. "Why can't I?"
"Not in our skill set," the visitor replied. "You've taken too much ownership of something that is not your responsibility, Templeton. What is your responsibility, is to--"
"'Wake up?' Yes, I hear it, on the wind. In my bones. What does it mean?"
The woman gestured before her, to Clara's iterations. "You see the lives, don't you?"
"Yes." Clara swallowed hard. "Do you?"
"Of course I do," the visitor replied. "I'm here to tell you that a great storm is coming. It will break across two continents; two great cities, the hearts of empires. Your team is gone and storms are coming. Weather them, find special souls and shield them. Second-guess your enemy. Find the missing link between the lives you see. Do this for yourself. And for your country."
Clara snorted bitterly. "Do I hear patriotism?"
The visitor shook its head. "I owe allegiance to no land."
"Then what are you here for?" Clara begged.
The visitor's voice grew warm. "I care about certain people."
"Why me?"
"Show me why you, Templeton," the visitor proclaimed. "You're at the center of the storm. Be worthy of the squall."
The mockingbird made the strange, roaring sound again and the woman was gone.
Clara's hands shook. The people she had been in her many lives turned and looked at her, male, female, all with certain similar qualities that she recognized as uniquely hers. Curiosity. Hunger. Restlessness. Intensity. Independence. A desperate desire for noble purpose. And lonely.
She was awake. But Eterna had died, taking with it the lover no one knew she had.
Copyright © 2017 by Peter S. Beagle
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