Episode Seven

The girl had been watching him for a long time and was hiding from him. He was coming, ready or not. This time he saw her. She was crouched down with little him and they were both dressed in leaves and feathers. When her tree-feathers blew out he saw her arm underneath. Dalyon edged his way around so that he could see more of her.

Like him, she was small, or a bit bigger. Her hair was the colour of the sky at night. It hung over her arms nearly to the elbows, and twisted around and around itself like a wound-up swing stopped at the point where it is ready to unwind. She made a smile showing her teeth with her eyes down, looking at the ground. She was holding little him’s hand. Little him was staring straight at Dalyon’s face, learning him. The girl showed him that she wanted to learn him too. Her eyes flicked up to look at his face and back to the ground.

She began to sing, ‘Why do you sit? Why do you go? Why do you sit and go, why sit and go, why are you looking at me in that tree?’ Her voice was clear and green like Ma’s very special glass flower jar.

Little him joined in. He had a lower voice that changed the sound she made in the most beautiful way that Dalyon had ever heard. He wanted the song to go on and on, but they stopped it all at once, still as a rock. Now she looked at him, straight in the face, just like little him. They were waiting for him to answer. Dalyon put a song-join into the sound-space that they had left.

‘Why do you sit and go, sit and go, sit and go, why are you looking at me in that tree, that tree, you sit and go and look at me in that tree,’ he sang. They joined him and all three found the most beautiful song Dalyon had ever sang-heard. She and little him and Dalyon were flying in the song that they were making, high above the forest. All the other birds around them stopped to listen. The tree birds stopped to listen. The feather birds stopped to listen. In her long sleep, Ma listened and saw him flying with his little flock. 

Far off at the other end of the forest, even the tracking animal stopped to listen.

*

Dalyon was staring at a picture of a dog with three heads. One head was looking to where he had come from, one was looking to where he was going and the other head was staring straight back at him. The dog-picture had been drawn in the rock with a sharp knife and filled up with red. There were two words written underneath, one beginning with the letter ‘C’ and the other with the letter ‘H’.  Ma once tried to show him how to read words but Dalyon had not wanted to read words because he liked Ma to sit with him and show him the story, so they could live in it together. Now with Ma away from him, he would have liked to be able to read the words about the dog with three heads.

Little dishes of water had been put in front of the the dogs to drink, but the dogs were not drinking. One was looking back, one was looking forward, and one was looking straight at him. He didn’t like this one that stared and stared at him. He edged past it, watching it the whole time.  It looked back.

Past the dogs was a cave room, which was the house where she and little him lived. Dalyon knew this because it was where they had brought him, and because it was here that they moved about without having to look at what was there. Dalyon did not live here so he looked at everything, picking up what he could, biting on it to test its usefulness, placing it against his cheek to feel its texture, turning it over, putting it back to pick up something else.

It was very light inside the cave room, even though they had walked down and down and down in the dark on bumpy steps, holding each other’s hands, and leaning against the cold walls. They had walked into a blackness so thick that they could only move blindly as a line joined at the hands, but the black got thinner, and now they could see everything quite clearly. The sun seemed to have been caught and pulled inside for them to see by. Dalyon thought that this is what had happened because just inside the cave room there was another picture painted on a plate of tin - a man on a horse that was trying to stand up on its back legs. Dalyon knew it was a horse with a cowboy, from a book about horses and cowboys that Ma had. The cowboy was hanging onto a rope that was tied around the sun. The man was pulling on the rope. Next to this was another picture that had lines and circles and numbers, more words, and not a very good picture of the sun shining on some glass plates with a line joining the pictures of glass plates to pictures of lights that were the lights inside the cave room.

Inside the cave room, past the dog with three heads was the place where she and little him had their beds and some boxes for their tables, and some smaller boxes for their chairs. On the floor was some old carpet with a pattern of double black triangles. Dalyon saw that the pattern on the carpet was just like the triangles inside the glass ball that Terry and Bob gave him to play with sometimes, except that it was bigger.

Later they would all be able to talk in their language and say that their names were Jilda and Lucan and Dalyon, and show each other things in the forest to play with, and things they had brought back here to use, and things that were good to eat and bad to eat. Jilda and Lucan would hold hands and show Dalyon the place where they had pushed away the tables that were already there, but felt scary and brought in the ghosts. Jilda and Lucan would be able to show Dalyon that they had dragged them further into the tunnel that led on from the cave room, and they would be able to tell him that sometimes the ghosts woke up and moved about in there, but that they never came into the cave room. Nobody else ever came to the cave room either, not even a fire that passed over them last summer. Not even the tracking animals. This was a secret place.

But now they were all hungry and thirsty. There was another cave in the wall of the cave room where Jilda kept food and water that she had collected from the forest. She took some out to prepare a meal for all of them.