"The Land Down Under by Billie Sue Mosiman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Mosiman Billie Sue)

The Land Down Under
by Billie Sue Mosiman

I had taken an apprentice and taught her all I knew. She was ready, she said, but I knew she was timid as a field mouse. Her confidence, for all her intuitive powers, yet went lacking. She stayed in her oceanside home not far from me, practicing, gathering the necessary strength she needed to be of service. So I worked on.

It was Mabina, my daughter's youngest child, who has been with me in these, the very last moments of time. And I would go gladly now, were it not that Mabina is ill and needs my help. If I cannot save one I love most, then my life is not finished and I will die impoverished of spirit.

"Shall I stoke the fire?" Mabina asked.

I could hear her across the room, but I could not see her well. The light, the little of it that we were privileged to get beneath the great forest canopy, had fallen out of the sky, and the room was dim. "Please," I said. "I'm cold. It seems the nights aren't as warm as they used to be -- when I was young," I added, not meaning to. A skilled one should not take unto herself pity the way I just had. Of course, I was cold and the nights as they slithered forth were colder to my bones. Of course, I was old and nights never bothered me when I was young. Nothing did. Nothing bothered me then, not the fluctuation of temperature or material deprivation, not the loss of my mate, or even the thought that an age was passing before my eyes, never to be seen again upon all the earth, unto all time.

This was something I knew I had not told. There would be no more centuries. No more visits from Invaders to save us, no more beings with strange machines to explain our natures. There was an End, and though it was still decades away, I knew we were all heading toward final extinction. I had seen it when I was but a child and never, never spoke of it.

We had lived on this small spinning ball through the time of space travel and intergallactic war, through plague and pestilence, invasion, and we had fallen back to a simpler time, medieval, in its way, but much better once we were taught by the Invaders of 2442 that we could use our brains for more than storage and retrieval. I would not foretell doom when we had just finally come to know a way of life that was tolerable.

I heard the rustling of wings outside the open window, turned to spy a red-tail bird try to perch on a slick broad banana leaf and, failing, fly off again.

When I turned back to Mabina, she had finished with the fire and now she sat across from me on a footstool, her prim hands lying quietly in her lap. The brocade of her dress shone with silver and metallic green thread. Her hair, gold, as was mine so long ago, caught the glow from the table lamp. She wanted something and I couldn't think what it might be. I waited for her to say.

Finally, "Grand, why do people die?"

"I don't know, Mabina. It seems unfair to me and no one's ever fully explained it to my satisfaction. It's just part of the cycle, the Invaders say, though what that might mean beyond living on faith, I could not tell you."

"Then what good is magic and intuition and healing if we don't know why people die?"

"Magic helps us to cope with the torment of those unanswerable questions."

I waited. It was the chief tool I owned, patience. Given the benefit of time, every man and woman talked, every solution possible was found, every illness of the mind set at ease.

"My mother says I am mind-sick and need you." Mabina glanced away and now I saw her profile in the lamp light, the strong line of the nose, the soft dip from her chin to the gracefully arched throat. She looked nothing at all like me, except for the color of her hair. I had never been a beautiful creature like this.

"I am here to help," I said. "Shall we eat now and talk afterward?"

She rose and joined me at the set table. A breeze came through the windows from the forest, a night breeze fragrant with scent from white blooms larger than my hand, with soil fertile and ripe, and with the spice of a multi-green, impenetrable jungle. Miles away was the shore and the flat wide sea.

I did not have to live in the crumbling cites, under protection of a lord. I was free to live wherever I wanted just so long as the sick could be dispatched to me and able to find a way to my door. I had chosen this tropical paradise in Baja California when a young woman, this haven a hundred miles from civilization, and it did not prove too far, but it did give me my earned peace when I had no patient to attend. And now, at the last, with time passing rapidly through my fingers, and life leaving inch by inch, I was glad to be in the land down under the tree canopy, hidden from the open sky. The shadows stole around and urged me, in sibilant hisses, to join them. I would ignore them until I had no other choice.

Would I have time left to repair my lovely granddaughter?

I partook little, as food now set unsteadily in the pit of my stomach no matter how well prepared or how tasty. Mabina ate hardly more. There was a gloom in her aura and a hidden chamber behind her eyes where her soul thrashed about, ravished by something I did not yet understand.

When she took our plates away, I said, "Don't wash them just yet. Let's sit on the porch."

She helped me from the chair, guided me through the door and to a wicker settee. Fireflies sailed dances in front of us, their tails twinkling like dying-birthing-dying planets. "I used to catch them in my hands," I said. "And hold them cupped to study their light until they expired." I smiled at Mabina. "I was not a very smart girl at one time, curiously enough."

Again, I waited. I studied the vine that grew wild around the legs of the wicker. The leaves were shaped like hearts and the scarlet flowers were funnels for butterfly nectar. I breathed deep, smelling the loam just beyond the porch, and dew settling on peppermint plants and lemon balm and marjoram.

Mabina sighed as loudly as any actor from a stage. I watched her carefully while her eyes followed the fireflies come out to play. "I want to marry this man," she said. "but I can't let myself."

"Why is that? You're of a marrying age. It's time for love, dear child. Love is all that should appeal to you at this time of your life."