The talesman dreams in different ways
Bardelys looked out across the fine sunlit day and felt his loss. Mowing the false orchard two days before he had hurt his back, twisting about with the scythe as the book told; it cut broader and made fine windrows but his body was unfamiliar with this dance, or else he moved wrong; either way his lower back now pinched on his left even with each step, and he must give up work today. Another day lost, gone from a dwindling stack! It pained him. More than that, it grieved him, for grief seemed to be Bardelys’ natural state.
In the enforced idleness he felt once more the tug of dreams. They called him from two sides — from Eartherea first of all, the shifting land, the land of heart’s desire. And on the far side the dreams called him from the vast Sea of the dead, the ghosts that walked and drove around the country in cars, and went to malls and movies as though the past and its dead ways could come again out of the grave their conceiving had made.
But he knew that the ghosts were dead even if they themselves did not, and he had all his life mocked the vanity of men who said they were gods. As for sweet Eartherea, though he loved Her dearly, he knew there was nothing to trust in Her seduction unless it be the symbols and shadow of what She showed.
Dreams… He had slept cold under a blanket in the night, until he got hot and slid into vivid dreams. In these dreams he had become aware that they would make good tales. He had then set to shaping them, even as he would have shaped tales he told when he was awake.
He had known that the dream about the dwarf boy, now, had needed a scene where he heard the lad express hope for his future — and the boy’s mother shared his hope. This scene would prove stronger if Bardelys himself (for he was a friend to the boy in the dream) had found a letter from the doctors about the boy’s chances of growing taller when he got older. The letter should be for the mother, but somehow it fell into Bardelys’ hands and he had opened and read it, and had kept quiet about it. (Just why Bardelys had read the letter and kept it a secret, he couldn’t remember now, sitting in the afternoon sun, but he did remember thinking in the dream in the moment he had thought to add this bit, that it would draw admirably on the tears of the audience to hear the little boy speak with cheer about his future, while we all knew he would never get any bigger than he was then.) He also, Bardelys himself, would shed tears, and at that point in the tale, would be unable to bring himself to tell the mother — how could he break her hope that way?
He had awakened in sweat and heart-sickness, and even so he had rolled over and tried to fall asleep again to take back the dream.
Often enough in his life, Bardelys had sought to go back into dreams, even nightmares. But he took it as another mark of his calling that now he would try to rewrite his dreams as he dreamt them. It wasn’t that he became lucid in the dream, for he never became aware that he was dreaming. Rather it was as if he dreamed twin dreams at once — the dream of the dwarf boy wherein Bardelys was a friend to the family, and a second dream wherein Bardelys was writing the tale. He felt moved to tears in both.
(Composed on pen-top Monday 28 July 2008)
