Sea of Silver Light (57 page)

Frightened, Renie grabbed for the Stone Girl, but her companion shook off her hand. "It's just Weeweekee," she said.

"Stop!" The thing lifted its hand. A glowing ball hung just above it, a flame with no source. "Who goes there?"

"It's me, the Stone Girl."

As they drew closer, the weird apparition blocking their path became only slightly less so—a kind of human-sized rodent in a pale, flowing outfit like a hooded wedding dress. It waved its paw and the hovering ball of fire followed its hand—an impressive display, somewhat undercut by the creature's chubby cheeks and goggling black-bead eyes.

"You should be in bed," the giant marmot, or whatever it was, declared in the voice of a tattletale child. "For it's eight o'clock."

"How can it tell?" This was the first Renie had heard any mention of exact time for longer than she could remember. "How does it know it's eight o'clock?"

"That's just his word for 'dark,'" the Stone Girl explained.

"All children should be in their beds," Weeweekee told her.

"I'm not going to bed. I'm going out to search for the Witching Tree, and she's going with me. So there."

"But . . . but . . . you can't." His voice was swiftly losing any semblance of authority—in fact, getting dangerously near a squeak. "Everyone is to be in bed. I have to rap at all the windows."

"The stepmother threw us both out," asserted the Stone Girl, which was not true, but close enough. "We can't go back."

Weeweekee was getting close to panic now. "Then you can go in somewhere else, can't you? Just . . . go to bed. There must be some other beds, even with all the people sleeping in the street."

"Not for us," the little girl said firmly. "We are going out into the Wood."

Now the dark eyes widened with horror. "But you can't! It's eight o'clock!"

"Good night, Weeweekee." The Stone Girl took Renie's arm and led her past the creature, whose whiskers and hovering flame were both drooping.

Renie turned to look back at him. The rodent was still standing as if frozen, staring after them with misery clear in every line of his being. Even his filmy robes had lost their animation.

"Oh," said Renie, and suddenly found herself struggling not to laugh. "Oh. He's Wee Willie Winkie. In his nightgown." It came back to her in one piece, like an evocative scent—the paper Mother Goose book her grandmother had given her for her fifth birthday, the pictures bright as candy wrappers. She had been a little disappointed, wishing it were something that moved by itself like the children's stories she saw on their small netscreen, which all featured exciting toys (even though her family couldn't afford most of them) but her mother had given her a discreet push in the back and she had carefully thanked Uma' Bongela and put the book beside her bed.

Only months later, on a day when she had been home from school sick while her mother was out and her father was working, had she finally opened it. The strangeness of some of the words had confused her, but it had caught at her, too, like a window suddenly open into places she could barely imagine. . . .

"Wee Willie Winkie, running through the town

Upstairs and downstairs, in his nightgown

Rapping at the window, crying at the lock,

'Are the children all in bed? For now it's eight o'clock.' "

This recital gained her an irritated look from the Stone Girl. "His name is Weeweekee," she corrected Renie, with the air of someone dealing with the borderline competent.

It took a moment for Renie to realize that even without Weeweekee and his magical candle, she could actually see that expression on her companion's face. "It's getting lighter!"

The Stone Girl pointed to the surrounding hills. A radiant sliver had appeared along the crest—a frighteningly wide sliver. As Renie watched in mingled fascination and unease, the full moon slid up into the sky. It seemed to cover a huge portion of the heavenly firmament, a vast blue-white disk that nevertheless gave scarcely more light than the ordinary variety.

"That's . . . that's the biggest moon I've ever seen."

"You've seen more than one?"

Renie shook her head. Easier just not to talk. This was a dreamworld—probably the dream of something not even human—and wrestling too strenuously with the particulars was useless.

The Stone Girl led her out beyond the village and along the valley floor. Renie saw more dark shapes clinging to the hillsides on either side, the shuttered dwellings of another settlement, leaking light between curtains or sparking from the chimneys, but whether they were more shoes or other articles of clothing she could not tell.

"So where is this tree?" she asked after they had walked for perhaps a quarter of an hour beneath the intrusive but oddly benign moon.

"In the Wood."

"But I thought you said you went looking for it before and it wasn't there."

"It wasn't. The Wood was gone."

"Gone?" Renie pulled up. "Hold on, then where are we going? I don't want to walk all night—I want to find my friends!" The thought that she might be putting distance between herself and !Xabbu, or that worse, he might be out in this same moon-domed night just a short distance away, gave her a fierce, sudden ache. She had been trying not to think about him but it was a precarious sort of ignorance, fragile as a bubble.

The Stone Girl turned to face her, arms akimbo, stubby hands on hips. "If you want answers, you have to come and make a Witch. If you want to find the Witching Tree, you have to find the Wood."

"It . . . it moves?"

Her guide could only shake her head. "I don't understand you. I'm trying to help. Do you want to come with me or not?" There was a pleading note beneath the fierceness.

A sudden idea struck Renie. "Could you make a map? Maybe that would help me understand." She reached down and found a stick, then scratched a line in the dirt—bold, so it would show on the moonlit ground. "Okay, that's the road we just came down. See, I'll draw some shoes to be the houses. These are the hills. And here we are now. Now can you make a picture of where we're going?"

The Stone Girl looked down at the ground for a long moment, then up at Renie, squinting her pockmark eyes as though against a fierce sun. "Before I met you," she asked with a certain delicacy, "did you sort of . . . fall down? Maybe on your head?"

By the time they had reached the thick, scrubby slopes that the Stone Girl said marked the outskirts of the Wood, Renie had begun to realize how impossible the whole thing really was. There would be no map, either for this journey or any other such trip Renie might want to make. Apparently, there were no such thing as maps in this place, and for a very good reason.

It looks like there's just not much normal here-to-there proximity,
she decided.
I should have thought of it. The human-built simulations are made to be navigated by humans just like they were part of the real world. But why should a machine intelligence try to duplicate something like physical proximity or geographical continuity that it never uses or experiences itself?

As far as she could tell, some things like the villages
did
have implied maps, or at least a sort of three-dimensional organization and stability that allowed the inhabitants to find their way around their home turf, but once you left the familiar locale there were apparently no memorized routes to other places within the world, even it the inhabitants had visited those places before.

In fact, the Stone Girl had been coping bravely with what Renie now realized must seem very strange, fundamentally wrong questions. "You just . . . find the Wood," she explained again. "It's always in front of you until you walk for the right amount of time, then you look for things."

"Things like . . . what? Shapes? Trees you've seen before?"

The Stone Girl shrugged. "Just . . . things that seem like the Wood is somewhere near. Like that." She pointed to a vertical stone thrusting from the hillside undergrowth, illuminated by the huge moon.

"That rock?" The finger of pale stone was the size of a truck—certainly a fairly obvious landmark. "You've seen that before, then?"

Her guide shook her head in frustration. "No. There are lots of rocks like that. But tonight it's a close-to-the-Wood kind of rock."

Now Renie was the one reduced to headshaking. Clearly her companion had knowledge she didn't—perhaps transmitted cues that Renie could not receive, or even precoded information being translated as spontaneous recognitions. Whatever it was, Renie didn't understand it. And if it was something precoded, she would
never
understand it.

As the Stone Girl led her uphill through the scrub growth, Renie pulled the blanket tight around her to protect herself from scratches and tried to imagine what it felt like to live in such a world.
But how can I hope to make sense of it? I can't even imagine what it feels like to grow up the way !Xabbu did, to see normal urban life as something strange, and he's a living, breathing person like me, not an artificial construct.

The sharpness of her separation from him came back, this time with a helplessness she hadn't felt before.
Is it pointless anyway?
she wondered.
I feel so strongly for him, I'm so scared we won't make it out of this together—but what then? Even if we survive, how could we have a life together? We're so different. I don't know anything about his background, his people's lives, except the few things he's told me. What would his family think of me?

Renie's steps slowed as her spirits sagged. She forced her thoughts in a different direction.

I still don't know whether or not the people in this world—the Stone Girl, Weeweekee—
are
really the missing children. But it certainly seems possible. Maybe the Other brought them all here, their consciousnesses, their minds, whatever.
She felt a shiver that was not caused by the cool of the night air.
Their souls.

And if Stephen is here in this world, how can I find him? How will I recognize him? Would he even know me?

"The Wood is just beginning." Her companion came a little way back down the slope. "This is a bad place to stop—Jinnears, and maybe some Ticks, too, they all like it here on the edges."

"Do you know. . . ." Renie could hardly think of what she wanted to ask. "Do you remember being . . . having a life before this?"

"Before what?"

"Before you lived in the shoe, with the stepmother. Do you remember anything else? Crossing a white ocean? Having a mother or a father?"

The Stone Girl was puzzled and clearly a little worried. "I remember lots of things from before the shoe. Of course I crossed the White Ocean. Who didn't?" She frowned. "But a mother? No. People talk about a mother, but nobody has one." She suddenly became very solemn; the dark holes that were her eyes grew wide. "Where you come from . . . do people have mothers?"

"Some do, yes." She thought of her own, lost so long ago. "Some lucky ones do."

"What do they look like? Are they bigger than stepmothers, or smaller?" Renie had finally struck a topic that interested her companion. "This boy who used to live in the Shoes, but then he went away, he said he remembered a mother, a real one, one that was just his." Her indignant snort was not entirely convincing. "Bragger, we called him."

Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to make sense of what little information she'd put together. "Do you all come here as birds? Are you all birds to begin with?"

The Stone Girl laughed loudly, a surprising sound in the evening dark. "All birds? You mean everyone, the people in the Shoes, in the Coats, the people at Bang Very Cross and Long Done Bridge? How could there be so many birds?" She leaned down and poked Renie in the arm. "Now come on. Like I said, there's usually Jinnears out." Renie realized that beginning to make some sense of this world would mean little if they were caught out-of-doors by one of those terrifying creatures. "Okay. Let's keep moving."

Like everything else she had seen since finding the black mountain, the Wood was both more and less than reality. A few paces in from the perimeter the trees grew very thickly and seemed to share branches, as though the whole upper forest was a tangled mat of one single growth spread miles wide. Some did not grow so high, but branched sideways farther than any real tree would, like vast green mushrooms covering hundreds of meters. Many of the freestanding shrubs had definite shapes to them, rounded forms as regular as the icons of playing cards, spades and clubs and diamonds, as though the tangled woodland were the preserve of a fanatical corps of topiary gardeners.

Although the high canopy blocked out most of the great blue-white disk overhead, small, warm lights now kindled in the overhead branches as if to replace the lost moonlight. These individually weak lights grew more and more dense until the forest was brighter than the hillside they had climbed, an endless twinkling bower like a gigantic Christmas display.

"What are those shining things?"

"Bugs," the Stone Girl told her. "Wood-candles, we call 'em. They're like the candle Weeweekee has, but smaller."

Will-o'-the-Wisps,
Renie thought,
that's what they should be called. Whatever those things are that used to lure travelers off the path. They're beautiful. You could follow these lights forever.

"We're close to the Witching Tree now." The Stone Girl spoke quietly, as if the tree were something that might be spooked into flight.

But maybe it is,
Renie thought.
Who can know around here?
She had begun to formulate a guess as to what the thing might actually be. "This Witching Tree," she said. "What do we do when we find it?"

"Make a witch, of course."

"Ah." The weird mangling of Wee Willie Winkie into Weeweekee had not escaped her—the Other seemed to have an idiosyncratic grasp of spoken English, almost childlike in its misunderstandings. She was being taken to a Wishing Tree, "You tell it what you want, is that right?"