Weaveworld

XI

CAL, TRAVELLING NORTH

1

al’s journey North dragged on through the night, but he didn’t weary. Perhaps it was the fruit that kept his senses so pretematurally clear; either that or a new-found sense of purpose that pressed him forward. He kept his analytic faculties on hold, making decisions as to his route instinctively.

Was it the same sense the pigeons had possessed that he now navigated by? A dream-sense, beyond the reach of intellect or reason: a homing? That was how it felt. That he’d become a bird, orienting himself not by the stars (they were blotted by clouds), nor by the magnetic pole, but by the simple urge to go home; back to the orchard, where he’d stood in a ring of loving faces and spoken Mad Mooney’s verse.

As he drove he ransacked his head for other such fragments, so that he’d have something fresh to perform next time. Little rhymes came back from childhood, odd lines that he’d learned more for their music than their meaning.

‘Naked Heaven comes and goes

,

Spits out seas and dyes the rose

,

Puts on coats of wind and rain

And simply takes them off again.’

He was no more certain of what some were about now than he’d been as a child, but they came to his lips as if fresh-minted, secure in their rhythms and rhymes.

Some had a bitter sting:

‘The pestilence of families

Is not congenital disease

But feet that follow where the foot

That has proceeeded them was put.’

Others were fragments from poems which he’d either forgotten or never been taught in their entirety. One in particular kept coming back to him.

‘How I love the pie-bald horses!

Best of all, the pie-bald horses!’

That was the closing lines of something, he presumed, but of what he couldn’t remember.

There were plenty of other fragments. He recited the lines over and over as he drove, polishing his delivery, finding a new emphasis here, a fresh rhythm there.

There was no prompting from the back of his head; the poet was quite silent. Or was it that he and Mad Mooney were finally speaking with a single voice?