Chapter One

Leave me a-lone. Leave me a-lone

Mark’s sneakers hit the sidewalk in time with each syllable. “Just leave me alone” he muttered. It was as though he was pounding nagging sisters, schoolwork, everything into the pavement as he ran.

He hardly knew where he was headed until he found himself turning into a grassy strip between two fenced yards. It was a right-of-way leading to three stubby posts that marked the beginning of the path into the ravine. Mark slowed down, considering, and realized that the ravine was exactly where he wanted to go for a little peace.

Beyond the posts, a path dipped down into the ravine. As he followed it into the early-June rustle of bushes and grass, all the other noises fell away behind him — cars, lawnmowers, even the quarrelling in his head. The tiny creek that ran along beside the path hadn’t dried up yet, as it would later in the really hot months. It still made a trickling thread of sound.

He found his steps slowing and his breath coming a little easier. Finally, he left the main path and climbed down through the brush to get closer to the water. He poked along beside the creek for a while until he found a large flat rock in the bank where a patch of sunlight filtered through the leaves high overhead. He sat down, drawing his knees up to his chin, and stared into the brown water that trickled past the base of the rock. Absent-mindedly, he pulled a leaf from the bush at his shoulder and ran his thumbnail back and forth along the centre vein, half wishing he could just come and live here, away from everything.

“Lay off,” he muttered to himself again, reliving the scene with his older sister Ariel, telling her what he thought of her. He knew perfectly well how much time he needed for homework. It would make more sense to nag Joss, who always left things to the last minute and then got the whole house caught up in a panic attack. But Mark got decent marks in school. He knew he could do better but it didn’t seem worth trying a lot harder.

He sat there for a long time, his mood shifting back and forth from angry to peaceful like the sunlight coming through the moving leaves overhead. At last, he started to feel the rock get uncomfortable. A mosquito whined at his shoulder. And then he heard a new sound.

A few low, musical notes. At first it was just a couple of notes and then silence. He strained his ears, and a few moments later, caught it again. He got to his feet and looked across the creek. There was another path there, opening between two bushes. It seemed as though the music came from that direction.

Mark’s long legs made the jump across the water easy. He only slipped slightly when he landed on the soft earth at the other side. A tickle of spider webs made him wave his arms in front of his face as he walked between the bushes, and he stopped. It didn’t seem as though anyone had come along here in a while. But as he stood, uncertain, he heard the notes again further along the path. This time he counted—five notes, low and sweet. It repeated. Repeated again. He hummed them over to himself as he walked along.

He kept on until, in the exasperating way that ravine paths have, the track he was following dwindled off into nothing. He kept pushing through the underbrush, pausing after a while to take his jacket off and tie it around his waist. The morning sun had heated up and he was starting to sweat. The music stopped.

By now he was uncomfortable. He’d lost the path entirely. The familiar ravine had become strange territory, unexpectedly large. Mark paused to think. If he got back down to the creek, he could follow it as far as the viaduct and get back to the main path from there. He followed the downhill slope as best he could, making his way through the thick brush, climbing over fallen tree trunks. A breeze came up suddenly and shook the leaves into a rustling surge overhead. He didn’t even hear the trickle of the creek until the water opened out just in front of him and he found himself standing on a bank, looking down at another large flat rock like the one he had been sitting on. At its base, the creek collected into a wide pool.

He had found the musician.

The figure standing on the rock was the most bizarre creature Mark had ever seen. It looked like a tattered bird of prey. A woman—at least, he thought it was a woman, although the face was so seamed and puckered with age that it was hard to tell for sure. Her dress, if you could call it a dress, was made of furry animal skins sewn together in long strips. Its crazy zig-zag hem came below her knees. Over this, she wore a long cape stitched all over with bunches of black and green feathers and dangling discs of something like horn.

The most remarkable part of her costume was on her head. A metal band fitted snugly around her forehead to support what looked to be a pair of branching antlers, like those of a small deer. From below this, wiry black-and-white hair straggled past her shoulders.

From his position above her, he couldn’t see her face, and the wind sounds obviously kept her from hearing him. But he could see quite well what she was doing. She had arranged five stones in a line on the rock. She had a small flute-like instrument in her hand. She sounded the first note, then took a long stick from the belt at her waist and tapped the first stone. Then played the second note and tapped the second stone.

She was certainly weird, but seemed too small and fragile to be afraid of. Mark tiptoed a little to the right, to where the bank sloped down sharply towards the water, then jumped lightly down to the level of the creek. She still hadn’t heard him, and kept playing and tapping in a kind of trance. But when he stepped towards her, she spun around with a high shriek. He felt himself towering above her. “It’s okay,” he tried to say, but she backed away from him..

“It’s okay,” he said again. But she only answered in some high, incomprehensible gibberish reaching for something that hung from her belt. He stepped towards her, holding out his hand. She spun and leapt off the rock, vanishing into the underbrush a little ways up the creek. Mark tried to follow her, but she had moved as quickly as a small animal into hiding.

He came back to the rock. The five stones were still laid out there. So was the long stick, which she had dropped while she scrabbled at her belt. He crouched, studying these objects. The stones were regularly shaped crystals of something he recognized from the days when he had a rock collection on his bookcase.

“Rutilated quartz,” he murmured, holding one of them up to the light. The thin needles of rutile glimmered in the pale gold crystal like a straight, silver rain. The stick had a kind of weight attached to the end of it—a dull green disc of smoothly polished stone, heavy for its size. He rubbed it thoughtfully, then picked the stones up and put them in his jacket pocket. Carrying the weighted stick, he made his way downstream, trying to find his way back to something familiar.