“The years passed, and finally Azelio said, ‘It’s time I had grandchildren.’ In the hope of provoking a response from his son he added, ‘Do you have the power to make that happen, Amato, or will your co have to do everything herself?’
“Of course there was no reply, and Amata didn’t know how she could keep hiding the truth from her father.
“For twelve days, Amata worked hard to fill every store-hole with food, until there was enough put away for her father to survive for a year. Then, while he was sleeping, she walked away from the farm. She had decided to live in the forest, alone, and only return in secret to replenish the stores.”
Yalda couldn’t help herself now; her whole body shivered with anguish. It wasn’t Amata’s fault that her co had died. What was happening to her was so unfair.
“One night in the forest,” Dario continued, “Amata looked up into the trees and saw the arborine darting from branch to branch. She had grown into a powerful woman, and the fearsome creature that had taken her co looked much more weak and vulnerable now.
“Day and night she watched the arborine, studying its ways. The arborine watched her too, but when it saw that she was doing nothing to take revenge, it grew complacent.
“After a while, Amata made a plan. She dug a nest in the ground, and filled it with four small, carved wooden figures. Then she hid beside the nest and waited.
“When the arborine saw the nest and what it thought were Amata’s children, it couldn’t help itself: it reached down to grab one and take it up into the trees. But Amata had bound the figures to heavy rocks beneath the soil, and covered them with sticky resin. The arborine was trapped, pinned against a branch of the tree by its own two arms that stretched down to the ground.
“Amata climbed up into the tree, and with the shard of stone she’d used to carve the wood, she sliced the arborine’s arms off. As it tried to grow more limbs to fight her, she leaped on it, spread her mouth wide, and swallowed it whole, just as it had swallowed her co.
“When she jumped back to the ground, Amata felt sick, but she forced herself to keep the arborine inside her. She lay down and tried to sleep, but her body was racked by fevers and trembling. After a time, she lost control of her shape: flesh was flowing this way and that, with strange new limbs growing and retreating before her eyes. Amata was sure that the arborine was fighting her from within, so she found the shard again and prepared to cut off its head as soon as it showed itself.
“Sure enough, a head budded from her chest, and its four eyes opened. Amata raised the shard and began to bring it down, but then a voice said, ‘Don’t you recognize me?’ The head was Amato’s; he had survived inside the arborine all this time, waiting to grow strong enough to fight his way out.
“Amata calmed herself, gathered all her strength, and pushed the flesh of her co to one side of her body until nothing joined them but a narrow tube of skin, thinner than a finger. Then she brought down the shard and severed it, setting Amato free.
“They walked out of the forest and back to the farm, where they told Azelio the truth of what had happened. He rejoiced at the sound of his son’s voice, and forgave his daughter for deceiving him.
“In time, Azelio was blessed with four grandchildren, and though he never regained his sight he did all he could to help raise them, and in turn they gave him ease and comfort in his old age.”
As Dario fell silent, Yalda struggled to compose herself. She couldn’t stop her passenger feeling the unsteadiness in her gait, but she still had a chance to appear impassive to her father, to show him that she could take this gut-wrenching tale in her stride.
The story hadn’t left her fearful of their destination; she was prepared to be vigilant in the forest, but even if there were arborines still living there a creature that struggled to lift an ordinary girl would have no hope of abducting the giant lump.
What unsettled her more was the question:
Late in the afternoon they came across two young farmers, Bruna and Bruno, heading into the village. Though no one in the family had met them before, after chatting for a while Dario discovered that he’d known their grandfather’s brother. Yalda didn’t envy them their long trip; it was one thing to walk this far as an occasional adventure, but to fetch routine supplies it would soon become tedious. If there’d been a truck running the length of the road every few days, from the village to the forest and back, everyone’s life would have been simpler. But the trucks only came out here to collect the harvest.
They stopped to eat again just before sunset. The wheat fields still stretched out around them as far as Yalda could see, but the road they’d been following since the start of their journey had begun to meander slightly, and its surface had grown uneven. It was enough to puncture the numbing sense of repetition Yalda had felt when they’d first set out, but it was as hard as ever to believe that the fields would come to an end, and that they really were heading out into the wilderness.
“It’s not too much farther,” Vito promised. “We could stop and sleep here, but that would cost us a night in the forest.” Yalda understood: the whole point was to give Dario the benefit of the wild plants’ light, so delaying their arrival until morning would be a terrible waste.
When they took to the road again Dario soon dozed off. Once Yalda had convinced herself that he was holding onto her securely, she lifted her rear gaze to watch the stars come out. The trails of light that emerged were like multicolored worms struggling across the deepening blackness—though they appeared to be struggling in vain, swept across the sky in a slow whirl but coming no closer to their destinations.
“If the stars are so far away,” she said, “that the red light reaches us after the violet… why do their trails all point in different directions?”
“Because they’re moving in different directions,” Vito replied.
“But they’re not!” Yalda protested. “They’re all rising in the east and setting in the west.”
“Ah.” Vito managed to sound both amused and pleased—as if her question was foolish, but welcome nonetheless. “When the stars rise and set, that’s the world turning, not the motion of the stars themselves.”
“I know.” He had explained the turning of the world to her before, and Yalda hadn’t forgotten. “But what’s the difference? If the violet light reaches us first… and the world turns while we’re waiting for the red light to catch up… shouldn’t
Vito said, “I think you’ve answered your own question. You can see that the trails aren’t lined up east to west.”
“Then I don’t understood anything,” Yalda declared forlornly.
Vito buzzed gentle mockery at her melodramatic verdict. “You understand a lot,” he said. “You just have to think things through a bit more carefully.”
Encouraged, Yalda searched the sky for more clues, but instead of receiving any revelatory insight she merely recalled another source of puzzlement. “The sun has no trail,” she complained.
“Exactly!” Vito replied. “It can’t be the turning of the world that makes the trails, or the sun would have one too.”
Yalda closed her rear eyes and tried to picture what was happening. Never mind the stars; if red light was so sluggish, how could the sun cross the sky
“No, it has them,” Vito insisted. “Blue is strongest in sunlight, but it has about as much of the other colors as the stars do.”
“Hmm.” Yalda imagined the sun as a blazing blue-white disk, and the world as a cool, gray circle off to one side, slowly turning. “Light flies out from the sun, with two colors, red and violet, starting the journey side by side. But as surely as Lucia will beat Lucio in a race, the violet light will strike home first—and then the world will turn a little, moving the sun across the sky before the red light arrives.
Vito said, “You just described a single flash of light leaving the sun. But the sun doesn’t flash, does it? It’s always shining.”
Yalda was bursting out of her skin with frustration. “Then how does it work? How does it make sense?”
