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“God!” roared Uncle Einar. He leaped up with a deafening kettledrum of wings. “Children! Children, I love you, I love you!”
“What? What’s wrong?” The children backed off.
“Nothing!” chanted Einar, flexing his wings to their greatest propulsion and plundering. Whoom! they whammed together like cymbals and the children fell flat in the backwash! “I have it, I have it! I’m free again, free! Fire in the flue! Feather on the wind! Brunilla!” He called to the house. She stuck her head out. “I’m free!” he cried, flushed and tall. “Listen! I don’t need the night! I can fly by day, now! I don’t need the night! I’ll fly every day and any day of the year from now on, and nobody’ll know, and nobody’ll shoot me down, and, and—but, God, I waste time! Look!”
And as the shocked members of his family watched he seized the cotton tail from one of the kites, tied it to his belt, grabbed the twine ball and gripped one end between his teeth, gave the other end to his children, and up, up into the air he flew, away into the wind!
And across the meadows and over the farms his daughter and sons ran, feeding out string into the daylit sky, shrieking and stumbling, and Brunilla stood out on the farm porch and waved and laughed to know that from now on her family would run and fly in joy.
The children pell-melled to the far Kite Hill and stood, the three of them, holding the ball of twine in their eager, proud fingers, each tugging, directing, pulling.
The children from town came running with their small kites to let up on the wind, and they saw the great green kite dipping and hovering in the sky and they exclaimed:
“Oh, oh, what a kite! Oh, oh! I wish I had a kite like that! Oh, what a kite! Where’d you get it!?”
“Our father made it!” cried the honorable daughter and the two fine sons, and gave an exultant pull on the twine and the humming, thundering kite in the sky flew and soared and wrote a great and magical exclamation mark across a cloud!
CHAPTER 16
The Whisperers
The list was long, the need was manifest.
Manifestations of need took many shapes and forms. Some were solid flesh, some were evanescent ambiences which grew on the air, some partook of the clouds, some the wind, some merely the night, but all needed a place to hide, a place to be stashed, whether in wine cellars or attics or formed in stone statues on the marble porch of the House. And among these were mere whispers. You had to listen closely to hear the needs.
And the whispers said:
“Lie low. Be still. Speak and rise not. Give no ear to the cannons’ cries and shouts. For what they shout is doom and death—with no ghosts manifest and spirits given heart. They say not yes to us, the grand army of the fearsome resurrected, but no, the terrible no, which makes the bat drop wingless and the wolf lie crippled and all coffins riven with ice and nailed with Eternity’s frost from which no Family breath can suspire to roam the weather in vapors and mist.
“Stay, oh, stay in the great House, sleep with telltale hearts which drum the timbered floor. Stay, oh, stay, all silence be. Hide. Wait. Wait.”
CHAPTER 17
The Theban Voice
“I was the bastard child of the hinges at the great wall of Thebes,” it said. “By what do I mean bastard or, for that matter, hinges? A vast door in a wall at Thebes, yes?”
All at the table nodded, impatiently. Yes.
“Quickly then,” said the mist within a vapor inside the merest sneeze of shadow, “when the wall was built and the double gate chiseled from vast timbers, the first hinge in the world was invented on which to hang the gates so they could be opened with ease. And they were opened often to let the worshippers in to worship Isis or Osirus or Bubastis or Ra. But the high priests had not as yet magicked themselves into tricks, had not as yet sensed that the gods must have voices, or at least incense so that as the smoke arose one could configure the spirals and whiffs and read symbols or air and space. The incense came later. They did not know, but voices were needed. I was that voice.”
“Ah?” the Family leaned forward. “So?”
“They had invented the hinge made of solid bronze, an eternity of metal, but had not invented the lubricant to make the hinge gape quietly. So when the great Theban doors were opened, I was born. Very small at first, my voice, a squeak, a squeal, but soon, the vibrant declaration of the gods. Hidden, a secret declaration, unseen, Ra and Bubastis spoke through me. The holy worshippers, riven, now paid as much attention to my syllables, my perambulating squeals and grindings as they did to the golden masks and harvest-blanching fists!”
“I never thought of that.” Timothy looked up in gentle surprise.
“Think,” said the voice from the Theban hinges three thousand years lost in time.
“Continue,” said all.
“And seeing,” said the voice, “that the worshippers tilted their heads to catch my pronunciamentos, garbed in mystery and waiting for interpretation, instead of oiling the bronze hasps, a lector was appointed, a high priest who translated my merest creak and murmur as a hint from Osiris, an inclination from Bubastis, an approbation from the Sun Himself.”
The presence paused and gave several examples of the creak and slur of the hinge binding itself. This was music.
“Once born, I never died. Almost but no. While oils glistened the gates and doors of the world, there was always one door, one hinge, where I lodged for a night, a year, or a mortal lifetime. So I have made it across continents, with my own linguistics, my own treasures of knowledge, and rest here among you, representative of all the openings and closures of a vast world. Put not butter, nor grease, nor bacon-rind upon my resting places.”
A gentle laughter, in which all joined.
