Something shifted, and the ragged thing looked down at us.
Lettie Hempstock said, ‘Name yourself.’
There was a pause. Empty eyes stared down. Then a voice as featureless as the wind said, ‘I am the lady of this place. I have been here for such a long time. Since before the little people sacrificed each other on the rocks. My name is my own, child. Not yours. Now leave me be, before I blow you all away.’ It gestured with a limb like a broken mainsail, and I felt myself shivering.
Lettie Hempstock squeezed my hand and I felt braver. She said, ‘Asked you to name yourself, I did. I en’t heard more’n empty boasts of age and time. Now, you tell me your name and I en’t asking you a third time.’ She sounded more like a country girl than she ever had before. Perhaps it was the anger in her voice: her words came out differently when she was angry.
‘No,’ whispered the grey thing, flatly. ‘Little girl, little girl … who’s your friend?’
Lettie whispered, ‘Don’t say nothing.’ I nodded, pressed my lips tightly together.
‘I am growing tired of this,’ said the grey thing, with a petulant shake of its ragged-cloth arms. ‘Something came to me, and pleaded for love and help. It told me how I could make all the things like it happy. That they are simple creatures, and all any of them want is money, just money, and nothing more. Little tokens of work. If it had asked, I would have given them wisdom, or peace, perfect peace …’
‘None of that,’ said Lettie Hempstock. ‘You’ve got nothing to give them that they want. Let them be.’
The wind gusted and the gargantuan figure flapped with it, like huge sails swinging, and when the wind was done the creature had changed position. Now it seemed to have crouched lower to the ground, and it was examining us like an enormous canvas scientist looking at two white mice.
Two very scared white mice, holding hands.
Lettie’s hand was sweating, now. She squeezed my hand, whether to reassure me or herself I did not know, and I squeezed back.
The ripped face, the place where the face should have been, twisted. I thought it was smiling. Perhaps it was smiling. I felt as if it was examining me, taking me apart. As if it knew everything about me – things I did not even know about myself.
The girl holding my hand said, ‘If you en’t telling me your name, I’ll bind you as a nameless thing. And you’ll still be bounden, tied and sealed like a polter or a shuck.’
She waited, but the thing said nothing, and Lettie Hempstock began to say words in a language I did not know. Sometimes she was talking, and sometimes it was more like singing, in a tongue that was nothing I had ever heard, or would ever encounter later in life. I knew the tune, though. It was a child’s song, the tune to which we sang the nursery rhyme ‘Girls and Boys Come Out to Play’. That was the tune, but her words were older words. I was certain of that.
And as she sang, things happened, beneath the orange sky.
The earth writhed and churned with worms, long grey worms that pushed up from the ground beneath our feet.
Something came hurtling at us from the centre mass of flapping canvas. It was a little bigger than a football. At school, during games, mostly I dropped things I was meant to catch, or closed my hand on them a moment too late, letting them hit me in the face or the stomach. But this thing was coming straight at me and Lettie Hempstock, and I did not think, I only did.
I put both my hands out and I caught the thing, a flapping, writhing mass of cobwebs and rotting cloth. And as I caught it in my hands I felt something hurt me: a stabbing pain in the sole of my foot, momentary and then gone, as if I had trodden upon a pin.
Lettie knocked the thing I was holding out of my hands, and it fell to the ground, where it collapsed into itself. She grabbed my right hand, held it firmly once more. And through all this, she continued to sing.
I have dreamed of that song, of the strange words to that simple rhyme-song, and on several occasions I have understood what she was saying, in my dreams. In those dreams I spoke that language too, the first language, and I had dominion over the nature of all that was real. In my dream, it was the tongue of what is, and anything spoken in it becomes real, because nothing said in that language can be a lie. It is the most basic building brick of everything. In my dreams I have used that language to heal the sick and to fly; once I dreamed I kept a perfect little bed and breakfast by the seaside, and to everyone who came to stay with me I would say, in that tongue, ‘Be whole,’ and they would become whole, not be broken people, not any longer, because I had spoken the language of shaping.
And because Lettie was speaking the language of shaping, even if I did not understand what she was saying, I understood what was being said. The thing in the clearing was being bound to that place for always, trapped, forbidden to exercise its influence on anything beyond its own domain.
Lettie Hempstock finished singing.
In my mind, I thought I could hear the creature screaming, protesting, railing, but the place beneath that orange sky was quiet, only the flapping of canvas and the rattle of twigs in the wind breaking the silence.
The wind died down.
A thousand pieces of torn grey cloth settled on the black earth like dead things, or like so much abandoned laundry. Nothing moved.
Lettie said, ‘That should hold it.’ She squeezed my hand. I thought she was trying to sound bright, but she didn’t. She sounded grim. ‘Let’s take you home.’
We walked, hand in hand, through a wood of blue-tinged evergreens, and we crossed a lacquered red and yellow bridge over an ornamental pond; we walked along the edge of a field in which young corn was coming up, like green grass planted in rows; we climbed a wooden stile, hand in hand, and reached another field, planted with what looked like small reeds or furry snakes, black and white and brown and orange and grey and striped, all of them waving gently, curling and uncurling in the sun.