Free A Swiftly Tilting Planet by Madeleine L'Engle Page B

past. Todayis for mirth. Why have you dragged me through tears again?”
    “So that you may leave them behind you,” Reschal said, and raised his withered arms to the sun. The lake, the shore, the rock, the forest behind, were bathed in golden light, and as though in response to Reschal’s gesture there came a sound of singing, a strange wild song of spring and flowers and sunlight and growing grass and the beating of the heart of all of those young and in love. And Madoc’s tears were dried, and thoughts of his lost companions and brother receded as the singing filled him with expectancy and joy.
    The children of the tribe came first, wearing chains of flowers which flapped against their brown bellies as they danced along. Madoc, shining with delight, turned from the children to the Old One. But Reschal’s eyes were focused on the unseen distance across the lake and he was listening, not to the children, but to that sound for which he had been straining before. And now Madoc thought that he, too, heard a throbbing like a distant heartbeat. “Old One, I hear it now. What is it?”
    Reschal gazed across the water. “It is the People Across the Lake. It is their drums.”
    Madoc listened. “We have heard their drums before, when the wind blows from the south. But today the wind blows from the north.”
    The old man’s voice was troubled. “We have alwayslived in peace, the People of the Wind and those Across the Lake.”
    “Perhaps,” Madoc suggested, “they come to my wedding celebration?”
    “Perhaps.”
    The children had gathered around the rock and were looking expectantly at Madoc and Reschal. The Old One raised his arm again, and singing drowned out the steady beating of the drums, and the men and women of the tribe, ranging from coltish girls and boys to men and women with white hair and wrinkled skin, came dancing toward the great rock. In their midst, circled by a group of young women, was Zyll. She wore a crown on her head to match Madoc’s, and a short skirt made entirely of spring flowers. Her copper skin glowed as though lit by the sun from within, and her eyes met Madoc’s with a sparkle of love.
    Nowhere, Madoc thought, could wedding garments be more beautiful, no matter how much gold was woven into the cloth, nor with how many jewels the velvets and satins were decorated.
    The flower-bedecked crowd parted to let Zyll come to the rock. Madoc stooped for her upraised hands, and gently lifted her so that she stood between him and Reschal. She bowed to her father, and then began to move in the ritual wedding dance. Madoc, during the year he had spent with the Wind People, had seen Zyll dancemany times before: at the birth of each moon; at the feast of the newborn sun in winter; at the spring and autumn equinox, dance for the Lords of the lake, the sky, the rain and rainbow, the snow and the wind.
    But for the Wind Dancers, as well as for all the other Wind People with their various gifts, there was only one Wedding Dance.
    Madoc stood transfixed with joy as Zyll’s body moved with the effortless lightness of the spring breeze. Her body leapt upward and it seemed that gravity had no power to pull her down to earth. She drifted gently from sky to rock as the petals fall from flowering trees.
    Then she held out her hands to Madoc, and he joined in the dance, marveling as he felt some of Zyll’s effortlessness of movement enter his own limbs.
    At first, when Zyll had found Madoc half dead in the forest, and had brought him to the Wind People, they had been afraid of him. His blue eyes, his pale skin, reddened by exposure, his tawny hair, were unlike anything they had ever seen. They approached him shyly, as though he were a strange beast who might turn on them. As they became accustomed to his presence, some of the Wind People proclaimed him a god. But then his anger flashed like lightning, and though there were some who said that his very fieriness announced him the Lord of the storm, he would have