Free Merlin's Wood (Mythago Wood) by Robert Holdstock Page B

awry, he was spread-eagled against the window, his arms stretched above him, his fingers, one with a metal thimble on it, rapping on the pane. His face was pressed to the glass, his mouth gaping and emitting with every exhalation the single,musical note. His eyes were wide, sightless, reflected in the window.
    He jumped suddenly when Martin touched him, then turned and let his father cradle him. Small fingers traced the features of the man who lifted him into his arms. Daniel’s chin was wet with saliva. He was smiling and silent, now. He was heavy for his age, dead weight as he curled into a ball, carried back to his cot.
    Rebecca was suddenly in the doorway, dishevelled and sleepy. ‘What’s going on?’
    ‘He was singing,’ Martin said, his heart racing, his mind still unable to grasp fully that Daniel had made this sound!
He was singing!
    ‘I suppose you could call it singing …’ he added.
    She came over and brushed fingers lightly over the silent boy’s brow.
    ‘I was dreaming of him,’ she said. ‘We were sitting together below bright stars, in a wide, cool desert. It was a dream of Australia. Together we were singing up a path, rocking side to side, but aware of each other. He was an older boy in the dream, Daniel as a grown lad, with good sight and a vibrant life. We sang together …’
    With a shiver of recognition, Martin said, ‘You were singing together just now. You in your sleep, Daniel by the window. A single note, not very musical.’
    Rebecca smiled sadly. ‘There you are then. Mother and son on the same wavelength, the same line. What was he doing at the window?’
    ‘Kids on the path. The Breques children. He was tapping the window as they passed with one of Eveline’sthimbles, but he couldn’t have been aware of them. Could he?’
    ‘I’m sure he could,’ Rebecca murmured. ‘Christ, he’s got to be aware of something …’
    Exhausted, they took Daniel into their room, and as always the boy fell into peaceful sleep between them, even though his eyes were open.
    The two years since his birth had been terrible, more for the failure to make a decision on Daniel’s future than for the fact of his disabilities. Should he be sent to a home, nursed by professionals, where his blindness and deafness could be addressed at every hour of every day? Or should he stay with parents who loved him, but who could do nothing practical to improve his physical condition? Daniel was not difficult. He loved being outside. He walked with Martin, hand in hand, and seemed, oddly, aware of that which was surely beyond his senses: the forest, the rolling sky, the passing storms, the animals in the fields.
    The boy never complained. His worst moments were at night, when sometimes he would howl ferally, or scream in an hysterical way, always becoming silent after a few moments in either of his parent’s arms.
    Father Gualzator had blessed him and prayed for him. Yvette Valence, the local herbalist who lived above the local post office, had prepared all manner of rubs and potions, from camomile to dogwort, from belladonna in honey to the crushed skull of an owl, whose night sight was the most perfect in the animal world. No amount of sympathy had allowed this sympathetic healing to have effect.
    Yvette, like the priest, was from Basque country. After feeling ‘called away’ from the high passes and airy forests of her native land, she had followed the path that wound north, through the painted caves of the Perigord and the dense oakwoods of the Dordogne, to where Broceliande straddled the way to the coast, cutting across the ancient route. The place had felt right to her, and she had settled. She had been a close friend of Eveline’s, and was a doting friend and helper for Rebecca and Martin now, but she became frustrated with Daniel, perhaps confused and distressed by the failure of even the simplest of her healing cures. It was as if, she said, Daniel were aware of the charm she used and was blocking