YAAN-4
“I saw a nameless dancer out on Lake Latalla this morning.”
Those were the first words I ever heard Mrs. Camden utter, and as Rook ran across the big cowyard, I knew now, after all these years (for I had been but four or five at the time), it had been he who she had seen.
She came like a nameless dancer herself, emerging from the gray and mist of Lohu’s field one afternoon late in Ellukim as of out of a story, or the idea of a story before it is told, or known, a soundless, nameless place of flame and wild dark: as she came out of the gray and tromped across the fresh padding of snow covering all but the tips of the weeds in our yard, her entity pattern sparkled and undulated in a solemn but joyous dance.
Sitting by the stove whose pleasing warmth, already ornamented by the satisfying aroma of wood and cooking fruit, was accentuated by the sight and memory of the bitterness of outdoors, I gazed out our one window watching her come, seeming, she, because this apparition, this nameless dancer, to be a messenger from the outside, the unknowable world beyond the mundane solitude of our isolated corner. I watched the beautiful dance of her pattern, and the calm fearless cadence of her stride, as she followed the path of her ribbon flower to our door, and there, removing a brown woolen glove, knocked, a light and almost timid tap, bone and flesh against sousewood.
I watched her as she stood in the doorway amidst the swirling of snowflakes, seeming a stocky frumpy old lady, bundled up in scarves and a thick green coat and boots and bulky baggy pants; and I watched as she and Mom exchanged glances, she smiling shyly as she said, “I saw a nameless dancer out on Lake Latalla this morning,” and Mom closing her eyes and nodding, not at the statement but in greeting, in an expression of joy that I had never seen her evince except with me, and I watched as the tendrils of connection between them, which were multi-fold, each knot a bright and beautiful node, glowed with yammial mist.
I watched her as she entered our abode, and divesting herself of her winter clothes, which she folded up and, after questioning Mom with a look, laid in the proximity of the stove, revealed herself to be not a stocky old lady, but tall and still young, dark-skinned, with, what I remembered the most because it fit with her pattern, a scar under her left eye.
I say it fit with her pattern: it was beautiful; it seemed a material continuation of her entity, a rare physical emanation of the nature of her self. It, this scar, began about the width of a pinky finger under the nadir of the underneath arc of her eye, crossed the eye socket bone vertically, and then curved outward in a gentle arc, a thread of white in the dark of her face, like a vein of quartz in the red clay of the northlands.
It was beautiful: I remember sitting on her lap and following it with my finger, and when I did, she smiled. She didn’t draw away, or say to my mother, “She’s fascinated by my scar,” or something in that vein; the nature of her reaction, and the nature of her expression as I touched her suggested that she thought I was touching her face in the way that any child might touch the face of any adult. She didn’t, in other words, act as if she realized she had this blemish. She smiled as I touched her as she smiled at many things I said or did, and it was a smile that had the basic shape of a sad smile but which yet radiated life and joy, the smile of an entity that should have been scarred or damaged, but was so full of life and joy that she was not.
At five, I wasn’t conceptualizing these things, I just saw that her smile and her scar mirrored each other, and that both fit with the pattern of her being, which tended to red, but was brilliantly highlighted by every other color imaginable, and very fine, as fine as any pattern I’d ever seen, spider-web thin in many places, delicate like gossamer, but with each thread twined with nibun, and vibrating with a sweet silent music—a pattern of exquisite beauty, and also scarred:
Patterns of being—and I’d seen enough of them even at five to understand this in an unarticulated way—often are damaged, in some way or another: parts twisted or distorted, strands torn asunder, whole sections destroyed. When this happens, sometimes the pattern doesn’t heal at all, sometimes, even, the hole or damaged area gets bigger as time goes by, the damage itself doing further injury to the pattern; sometimes, some of the strands heal, grow back together, and the pattern re-forms in an imperfect replica of its former shape; sometimes, the pattern rearranges itself to counterbalance the missing part. In the pattern of Mrs. Camden’s being were several areas, not small ones, either, where it was obvious that violent destruction had taken place, strands of entity torn apart, burned away, shattered; and in these areas, none of the usual rearranging or imperfect growing back had occurred, but rather a new and totally different pattern had been woven which yet blended with the whole, the whole pattern now more complex and to my mind more beautiful, even, than what it must have been with only its original strands. Imagine a quilt that has a hole in it, and when you mend it, the new patch accentuates the rest of the quilt even though it’s different from the patch that was there before.
So, watching her, which consisted of experiencing her entity pattern at the same time as beholding her physical appearance, I took note of the parallel, the overlap, of the two. As I watched her, she observed me—shyly—and Mom, noticing this, said, “This is Yaan. Yaan, this is Mrs. Camden.”
She lifted her hand to about shoulder-level, and opened her fingers in a shy wave. I responded with a similar motion, and then said, “What’s Lake Latalla?”
Mom raised an eyebrow. When Rook raised an eyebrow, it could be either the right or the left one, and he might do it for any number of reasons; when Mom did, it was always the right one, and it almost always meant she was restraining me. Not chiding me, just pulling me back, harnessing my ebullience in some way, in this case, telling me to let Mrs. Camden have her space, let her settle in, relax, don’t bombard her with questions yet.
Mrs. Camden, however, responded only with ebullience herself, restrained but unmistakable. “Well, do you know Lake Twell?” She looked right into my eyes, hers, green like a young acorn, seeking connection.
I nodded. It was the upland lake just west of the four farms. From our home, we had but to cross the Gerbils’ farm to get there, or more precisely, to get to the Brushknot, as we called it, which was, in my imagination, the welcoming party for Twell: At the western border of the Gerbils’ farm, a short stick fence served as a puny but effective partitioner of worlds: on one side of it was farmland, and on the other a rambling underwood of goldtip trees, various herbs and wildflowers, broad swaths of switchgrass, and an array of tall shrubs standing like guardians around an abundance of squat, childlike tornleaf bushes. This underwood sloped upward in gentle undulations from the farm, thickening within a few hundred paces into a crowded but not unwelcoming brush of Fierce trees, eastern redfern, birdgrass, star-round, brell, wild violet, jaymoss, and other briars and brambles, before reaching a crest from which you could look down a slope of violet upon purple-blue Lake Twell, ringed but for the slope of violet by spindly trees, hanging willows, swirls of knee-high lakegrass, and a few clusters of reeds where cormorants and baga birds dawdled and dove.
Seeing memory and fondness in my nod, Mrs. Camden asked, “Have you ever been up past Twell—on west? Into the deeps?”
I shook my head. I loved weaving through the twarkle of the leafy places beyond the farms, and that thickening of wood, the deeps, as Mrs. Camden called it, upslope from Lake Twell, promised a splendid overture of sound and color, but the far shore of Twell was the border of my world. Mom and I never went any farther than that: we might spend an afternoon in and around Twell convening with the cormorants under an infinite sky, but whether we did that, or we just rounded the lake once and headed home, saying hello, as it were, to the vale’s thousand little denizens, yeomen, Calib would say, according to Mom, of leaf and wing and blossom and claw, we never went on upward into darker wilds beyond. “We’ll twell the deep another time,” Mom would say when she saw me looking in wonder at the unfamiliar, and inviting, play of pattern in that western growth, but we never did.
I never went any farther than Lake Twell when wandering alone, either. At five, and without Mom to carry me when I got tired, Twell was at the edge of my endurance; and perhaps more importantly, Mom had forbidden me from going beyond it, or I should say beyond “the Sky Field,” as we called the whole setting—Twell, the surrounds, the sky, the birds, the bugs—of our afternoon stops because of the multiplicity of crisscrossing patterns that I discerned there. “Don’t go past the Sky Field, Yaan,” she would say whenever she discerned a particular jubilant adventurousness about me as I set out on a trek. Such an arbitrary and capricious mandate wouldn’t necessarily have kept me from continuing on once I had gained our usual stopping point, but added to the fact that I was usually quite fatigued when I got there, it did check me. Mom might not figure out that I had disobeyed her, but she had a way of knowing things, and it was possible, quite possible, in fact, that if she did know I had gone on beyond Twell against her wishes, she would level additional unreasonable mandates upon me. She might tell me that I couldn’t even go to Twell, for example, or she might become more vigilant in her surveillance of me. So, for now, better to enjoy my current degree of freedom than to reach for more and lose what I had.
“Well,” Mrs. Camden explained, with a face eager to share knowledge, “if you go around Lake Twell, and keep going for awhile, a few hundred paces, maybe a thousand…” She paused and peered at me, presumably to determine whether I understood “a thousand,” which I didn’t other than to comprehend from context that it was a considerable but not prohibitive distance, and then continued, “The forest thickens. It gets real thick, like fairy thick, you know, and the land keeps going up and up, and just when you’re starting to think you’re going to walk up to the sky, it levels out, and you’re on a cliff overlooking Lake Latalla. A thick wood of tildoyas and oaks surrounds it, except on the north side. It’s much sparser, there. There’s trees there, and they’re real real tall, but there’s not that many of them, and then it thins out into a plain. The lake was frozen today, and there was a dancer out in the middle of it.
“Are they there?”
“Are they there…who do you mean?” Mrs. Camden looked puzzled, though not confused or lost—that is, she didn’t know what I meant but was expecting me to say something she hadn’t considered, and was eager and ready for whatever I might say.
“The fairies. Did you see any?” Of everything that she had said, what had most caught hold of my heartstrings was her description of the deepening woods above Lake Twell as “fairy thick.”
“No,” she said, with a smile of disappointment, “They were probably avoiding me. I am human, after all.” After a pause, she added, “I expected that; but I was hoping to see some Nokans down on the plain, like I did last time. But I didn’t; that was a little disappointing.”
“Nokans?” It was my turn to be puzzled, and to wait for an unexpected and delightful response.
By this time, Mom had retrieved the berries and apples and claycups of milk that had been warming on the stove, and dragged our makeshift couch, which consisted of a wool duvet stuffed with straw, hay, sawdust, feathers, and callaweed leaves spread over a willow frame that Mom had crafted, a little closer to the stove; and the three of us now huddled together under the extra blankets that in winter-time were always draped on the arms of the couch ready for use, warm fruit in hand; and stayed, thus, as my beautiful Tahain would say, in a pocket of gold at the center of life, as Mrs. Camden and I talked and Mom sat there listening in quiet joy.
“You might have heard of the Nokan bulls?” I hadn’t, but I didn’t want to hinder Mrs. Camden’s narrative, so I made no indication as to whether I’d heard of them or not, and she continued, “If you travel around Lenima very far, you’re sure to hear someone gush about seeing a herd of white bulls out on the central plains. The Nokan Plain, if I understand my history, is way out west beyond the Mantle, but the Nokans have migrated, and in fact I’ve heard that they’ve been sighted as far east as Port Small. They’re celebrated far and wide, admired for their beauty and the beauty of their herds. It is quite breathtaking to see them, but I call them ‘Nokans,’ rather than ‘Nokan bulls,’ because there are just as many cows in those herds as there are bulls, probably more, and they’re just as beautiful as the bulls. ‘Nokans’ is a more inclusive word. Anyway, I was hoping to see them like I did last time, down on the plain, grazing among the giant tildoyas. It was quite a sight; there were thousands of them, and they seemed so bright white among the green. Of course, with the land dead and frozen and a little white with snow like today, the sight might not have been as impressive, but I was hoping to see them even so. I always think I might see a unicorn among them. I think they might be descended from unicorns, or the white stag. I’ve never seen a unicorn—or the white stag.”
Seeing my question, “What are unicorns?” in my eyes, she said, “Your mom hasn’t told you about unicorns?” Giving Mom the slightest of disapproving looks, she continued, “Unicorns are part horse, part goat, and all magic. I think they probably wander into our world through folds and creases in a dimensional fabric of some sort. Or,” she added with an at-once ironic and loving twinkle in her eye, “Maybe they’re created when the repulsion strong magic has to strong magic is overcome by the bonding power of pure love.”
As I was considering the complex pattern her words suggested, she went on, “I think I did see a winged one, today, though.”
My ears perked up at this, because by “winged one,” I thought she meant dragon. Excited, I asked, “A dragon?” I had often scanned the sky for dragons; I wanted to see one. I don’t know why, or how, but I sensed that in addition to the beautiful magic of their flight and the beautiful strength of their winged forms, that their bodies would be their entity patterns, and their entity patterns would be their bodies; and this I wanted to see.
“No, it wasn’t one of those vagabond souls, the dragons; it was a human-shaped flyer, way up there, golden like the sun, Sunbright Ramblers I call them, or Creatures of the Sun—it depends on my mood—I see them every now and then. Most often, it’s a sunny day, but today I’m pretty sure I saw one up there among the clouds.”
“It was music?” In the subtle change of her tone when she spoke of this being, I heard, and saw the pattern of a delicate, empyreal chanson of mirth.
Mrs. Camden’s pattern glowed and her acorn-green eyes lit up with the joy of mutual insight. “Yes! You can barely hear it, maybe you can’t actually hear it, but can only sense it; but there’s a definite music about them—maybe, like, like, a comet tail, and the music, like dust, falls to the earth and echoes soundlessly wherever it lands.”
“Mom makes music.” Mrs. Camden’s mention of music brought to my mind the beautiful memory of Mom strumming her mandolin. She often had played it when I was quite little.
My earliest memory, in fact, is of listening to Mom playing the mandolin and singing to me. She’s a pretty good mandolin player, if you judge her not so much by the complexity or accuracy of what she can play, but in the sensitivity of it; and I was always absorbed by the physical texture of the sound of plucked strings (notwithstanding the skill of the player), so I loved listening to her play. She didn’t have what would be considered a good singing voice, not a strong one, a little husky, without a rich timbre; but it was beautiful, utterly beautiful, to me. It was a golden-brown color, splashed with flecks of purest yellow. It would tumble like smoke into all the angles and corners of our little house, weaving an ever-changing picture, intermingling with the red-and-blue streaked currents and swaths of the mandolin’s notes, the voice and the strings together caressing my eyes, tickling my ears, inter-mingling with my mother’s and my own strands of entity and the many strands of connection between the two of us, and soaking into me, soaking into the old walls, the fire pit, the meal table, and the old raggy couch, and seeming to make those old inhabitants of the home happy.
If we happened to be outside when she decided to weave her spell of song—and she did sing outside many a warm day, especially in Autumn—with me either sitting on her lap or beside her, or playing in the grass with a little trinket of some sort, the golden-brown of her voice and the red-blue of the mandolin would spin together into the leaves of the trees, dance with the sunlight there, weave a sky-tapestry with the patterns of the wind, wrap our little stone house in multi-colored ribbons, and touch the cows in the nearby hayfield, as well as any fieldworkers there, or passing entity, just kiss against them, shading them with gold and red.
Once, as I was basking in the interplay of sound and color produced by her song, just sitting there existing in the endless tiny space of my body and being, watching the beautiful intricate play of the strand and thread and tendril of the infinite patterns of existence, she began to play a strand of music that she had played before that I thought of as her memory of my father (whom I had never met). As her voice caressed the sound of the music with a sorrow and longing that nobody but me could have discerned, my eye caught a little spot of black, or what I describe as black only because our language has no word for it, but is really a color that tears at the eye, erasing sight, or that ends existence and seems to erase sight because beholding it you’re seeing non-existence. It was just a tiny little sphere of this black, or non-color, about the size of the head of a pin, in the midst of all the brilliant color around me, but I focused on it, because it was unusual, and as I looked at it, it grew, or I should say it took up a larger share of my vision, as if it were coming towards me, or I going towards it. It kept growing, soon becoming a discernible spheroid, and as it did, I became aware of the sensation that I was floating, which made me pretty sure I was going towards it, not it towards me. Soon, it had consumed almost all of my vision, and additionally, was overwhelming my senses. It had a forceful, not malevolent but insistent, unavoidable, dominating vibration that affected hearing and touch and smell and balance and even the senses of time and space, stunning them, as I thought a prolongation of thunder might.
As the now-huge sphere swallowed me, I thought I might cease to exist, but instead everything became clear. I floated in a crystalline bubble above a vast city where thousands of entities lived, many of them screaming, some in rage some in agony, many doing unspeakable things to one another. I watched these entities as they lived, and as my focus became sharper, their screaming became deafening, drowning out and finally extinguishing my mother’s music. For a moment, I could see nothing—the screaming filled my eyes with blackness—but then I landed on solid ground, on a beautiful sunny plain of flowing green grass, the screams far behind me, and the sun in front of me. I knew, somehow, that this place was called the Field of Infinite Sky, and it seemed to me that I could either cry or laugh, whichever I chose.
I laughed in delight at the beauty around me, the patterns of the wind. Music arose from within me, different music from what Mom had been playing, music I’d never heard before, music I knew, without considering why, that I’d made myself, and I started to run. I was still quite little, and could only run with tiny steps, but I moved with ease, and as fast and graceful as Mrs. Camden’s white stag. I bounded, and I looked back, expecting many others to be following me, escaping that dark place of screams, but none were. I felt despair that they weren’t coming with me. I thought they must somehow be trapped there, but the music moved my legs onward, and the joy of running overcame my despair, and when I looked back again, a boy a few years older than me was following me on the plain, and off to his left another boy, a few years older yet. But their strides were slow and awkward, their faces etched with effort and covered with sweat, and they kept falling down. This puzzled me, because they were older and stronger than I was, I who could go so effortlessly, and again I despaired because I thought something had happened to them in that place of screams that had hurt them forever. I wanted to go back to help them, but I knew I could only look back, I couldn’t go back, my place was in the Field, and this made me sad because they were trying so hard. Again, though, the music moved my legs forward, and again joy overwhelmed sadness, and I kept going. When I looked back a third time, others were following the two boys, all of them stumbling and staggering along like drunken wildebeests but nevertheless making some small progress across that Field of Infinite Sky, away from the Place of Screams.
Mom still pulled her mandolin out now and then but not often enough that music wasn’t a rare, and missed, treat. She always dusted it off at some point during Mrs. Camden’s visits, however, and played long and well, which even though I loved Mrs. Camden apart from any effect she had on Mom, was not the least reason why, of the few visitors we got, Mrs. Camden was my favorite.
Mom strumming and singing was a joyous event for me in and of itself, but it signified an overall change in her that occurred during Mrs. Camden’s visits. For one thing, as long as Mrs. Camden stayed with us, she didn’t make me go to bed until I was actually sleepy, and when I finally ran out of energy and went to bed of my accord, or just fell asleep, she and Mrs. Camden would stay up, and just talk. Mom wasn’t a garrulous individual; sometimes, she’d go days without saying anything that didn’t pertain to chores and tasks that had to be done; so it was a treat to listen to her trade words with Mrs. Camden (who, despite her friendliness when she and I first met, wasn’t particularly garrulous, either: she loved to tell stories, but once the stories had been told, she was a quiet soul). Mom’s small, husky voice and Mrs. Camden’s flowing gemwater cadence wove together independent of the words they spoke, these two quiet souls, as I fell through velvet into dreamland, and all the while, and all through the days Mrs. Camden stayed with us, Mom’s entity sang.
Once in awhile when Mrs. Camden came, Mom went away, leaving me in her friend’s care for a few days, and those were joyous times, even though I missed Mom. Mrs. Camden was shy and reticent with me, though not wary or unaffectionate. She was not at all reluctant or hesitant to play with me, or to hold me—we got along as well as a couple of kittens from the same litter, I would say—it was more as if she were being deferential, somehow. It sometimes seemed as if she were the child and I the favorite aunt or grandmother that she didn’t want to annoy by demanding too much attention. If, for example, she sat down beside me while I was playing with some pebbles, her manner would be reticent; and then if I regarded her without a bright smile she would say, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to bother you,” and make as if to leave me be, until I assured her I wanted her to stay.
Ultimately, she knew she was the adult, though: whenever a knock came at the door, many tendrils of her entity snapped into a taut, smooth, organized formation, and I found that no matter what I did to reach the door before her, I couldn’t. Over time, it came to be a challenge to do so, and I employed a bevy of feints, darts, and dashes to get past her, but somehow she always stayed between me and the door until she knew that the conveyor of the knock meant no harm.
She was a better cook than Mom was, so we ate well when she was there, or at least enjoyably, the casseroles, pottages, and stews of fruit, vegetables, beans, and meat that were our regular fare having a more palatable texture to them when she prepared them than when Mom did, along with a more agreeable combination of herbs and spices, and probably most importantly, some sugar added.
She and I played a plethora of games, too, just little activities we—mainly she—made up on the spot, using any of the various little trinkets we had available to us: rocks, sticks, leafs, coins, strings, spools of thread, eating utensils. I think my love of games started during those short vacations with Mrs. Camden. And she’d read to me when I asked her to, particularly at bedtime, since that was the time it was Mom’s habit to read to me; and she was a quiet but very expressive reader. I loved listening to her, almost as much as I loved listening to Mom—more so, at times.
The longest stint that Mrs. Camden ever took care of me was during the summer of my ninth year. Mom was away for about ten days during Hobwan, and along about the eighth day of her absence, a knock came at the door, and it was Rook.
I knew it was Rook even before the knock came, because the game Mrs. Camden and I were playing at the time involved observing our old souse door and imagining the smallest possible change of it that would metamorphosize the entire spirit of its appearance; and I saw him approaching. I rushed to the door to open it, or I should say I tried to rush to it, because as usual I found that Mrs. Camden had somehow slid unnoticeably between me and it.
“Can I help you?” she said, upon answering it herself, even as I yelled, “It’s Rook! It’s okay!”
He effected a double-eyebrow raise, which was unusual for him—normally, he preferred one eyebrow or the other—and said, “Hey!”
She studied him but didn’t respond, and he, as if to explain his unaccustomed excitement, said, “I was the kid.”
Mrs. Camden softened then, her pattern de-mobilizing, and she said, not with a smile, but a nod and a look of compassion that suggested a smile, “Oh yes, sorry, you’ve grown. How…” I lost her words as she joined him outside, somehow getting the door shut before I could wedge through the crack. They talked for a few moments in increasingly hushed tones; I could hear their voices but couldn’t decipher their words, and when she came back in, I knew there was a disruption in the pattern of the four farms. Something was amiss.
She told me we were taking a walk out to Lake Twell, which was a thing we did, Mom and I as well as Mrs. Camden and I, but never under orders, from Mom, let alone Mrs. Camden. Always, either of them would ask me if I would care to take a walk—and that only if I didn’t ask them if they wanted to first; and if I said I didn’t want to take one, that would be that. Mrs. Camden was one of those rare individuals whose pattern isn’t affected by fear, so I couldn’t determine whether real danger was at hand, but I thought so. She laced my shoes quickly, which was strange since I could lace them myself by then. The deftness of her fingers was amazing; they were a blur.
With this unusual prologue, we went out into a warm, hazy blue Hobwan day, and headed in quick silence to Lake Twell. The unusualness of the situation evolved at the onset of our journey: instead of heading across the Gerbils’ farm, as we always did when we went to Twell, we went south, through Dallidoe property, right through a cornfield, in fact, the stalks of which reached above my head, and to Mrs. Camden’s shoulder. This route, while not unpleasant—I always liked the silent simple muggy bugginess of a Hobwan cornfield—was strange, and contributed to the feel of danger that Mrs. Camden’s behavior suggested. Yet, her pattern remained as still as ever as we crossed Dallidoe territory from cornfield to cornfield, until swinging west near the southern border of the farms, we crossed into Gerbil territory where Rook and Jake, grimy and dirty-shirted, were waiting in a hayfield, Rook lounging on a hay roll, and Jake astride Ordvod, the porse, or hony, as some called them, a species native, Jake had once told me, to this area of Lenima, who Farmer Green had caught and tamed many years ago.
Jake greeted Mrs. Camden, “Shamodes told me you had replaced the little captain; nice to see you, you look as slackjawed and glazed-eyed as ever.”
Mrs. Camden responded with a distantly brusque, “Your flattery needs work,” and then swung me up onto Ordvod in front of Jake, in a circle made by his arms and the reins, and then with no more words than, “I’ll go ahead, Rook why don’t you drop back,” she strode ahead, waist-high in the clover-green nattagrasi, her green cloak camouflaging her.
Jake waited until she was some paces ahead of us, then got Ordvod going with a flick of his wrist, Rook fell in another few lengths behind us, and we went, thus, in single file, in silence across the Gerbil hayfields, which I’d not known they had. The last time I’d been down that way, it had all been cornfields and cowyards. Jake smelled like a mixture of man sweat and manure, but I refrained from telling him that he stunk. Even though I knew he’d appreciate such honest bluntness, I could never bring myself to tease him. Not until we had crossed the Gerbils’ hayfields did we head back north along the stick fence that marked the border of their farm, coming at length to the broken part of the fence, which was where we usually left the four farms and headed to Lake Twell, and where we did today, as well.
I loved going places with Mrs. Camden, and I loved going places with Jake and Rook, listening to them talk as my consciousness spread into the patterns of the surrounding world, and I thought it would be wonderful to listen to the three of them converse, and to see their spirits and entity patterns intermingle, but I could see that wasn’t going to happen, so as we made our gradual ascent up the brushknot, picking our way through the shrubs and wildflowers and switchgrass and little goldtip trees there, I settled in to enjoy a quiet trip to Lake Twell. Rocked into a state of sleepy serenity by the calm gait and earthy smell of Ordvod, the reassuring presence (and earthy smell) of Jake, the sl