cross-legged apart from them, preoccupied (Smoky wondered if he had ever seen him otherwise occupied) and tossing an apple up and down in his hand. He was looking sharply at Smoky, and Smoky wondered if he meant to shy the apple at him. Smoky smiled, thought of a joke to make, but since Auberon’s expression didn’t change he decided against it, and, standing up, changed his place again. (In fact Auberon hadn’t been looking at him at all; Lilac sat between him and his father, blocking his view of Smoky, and it was her face he looked at: she wore a peculiar expression, he would have called it sad since he had no better word, and he wondered what it meant.)
He sat down next to Daily Alice. She lay with her head pillowed on a hummock and her fingers interlaced over a full tummy. Smoky drew a sedge from its squeaking new casing and bit down on the pale sweetness. “Can I ask you something?” he said.
“What.” She didn’t quite open her sleepy eyes.
“When we got married,” he said, “that day, you remember?”
“Mm-hm.” She smiled.
“When we were going around, and meeting people. They gave us some presents.”
“Mm-hm.”
“And a lot of them, when they gave us things, said ‘Thank you.’ ” The sedge’s green ear bounced in rhythm to his speech; he could see it. “What I wondered was, why they said ‘Thank you’ to us, instead of us saying ‘Thank you’ to them.”
“We said ‘Thank you.’ ”
“But why did they? That’s what I mean.”
“Well,” she said, and thought. He had asked so few things over the years that when he did ask something she thought hard how to answer him, so that he wouldn’t brood. Not that he tended to brood. She often wondered why he didn’t. “Because,” she said, “the marriage had been promised, sort of.”
“Yeah? So?”
“Well, they were glad that you’d come. And that the promise had come out like it had been promised.”
“Oh.”
“So that everything would go on like it was supposed to, You didn’t have to, after all.” She put a hand on his. “You didn’t have to.”
“I didn’t see it that way,” Smoky said. He thought. “Why would they care so much what was promised? If it was promised to you.”
“Well, you know. A lot of them are relatives, sort of. Part of the family, really. Though you’re not supposed to say it. I mean they’re Daddy’s half-brothers or sisters, or their kids. Or their kids’ kids.”
“Oh yes.”
“August.”
“Oh yes.”
“So. They had an interest.”
“Mm.” It wasn’t precisely the answer he’d been looking for; but Daily Alice said it as though it were.
“It gets very thick around here,” she said.
“Blood’s thicker than water,” Smoky said, though that had always seemed to him among the dumber proverbs. Of course blood was thicker; so what? Who was ever connected by this water that blood was supposed to be thicker than?
“Tangled,” Alice said, her eyes drifting closed. “Lilac, for instance.” A lot of wine and sun, Smoky thought, or she wouldn’t have let that name fall so casually. “A double dose; a double cousin, sort of. Cousin to herself.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you know, cousins of cousins.”
“I don’t,” Smoky said, puzzled. “You mean by marriage?”
“What?” She opened her eyes. “Oh! No. No, of course not. You’re right. No.” Her eyes closed again. “Forget it.”
He looked down at her. He thought: follow one hare, and for sure you’ll start another; and while you watch that one scamper out of sight, the first one gets away, too. Forget it. He could do that. He stretched himself beside her, propping his head on one arm; they were posed like lovers then, head to head nearly, he above looking down, she basking in his regard. They had married young; they were still young. Only old in love. There was a tune: he raised his eyes. On a rock not quite out of earshot, Tacey sat playing her recorder; now and then she stopped to remember notes, and to brush from her face a long curl of blond hair. At her feet Tony Buck sat, with the transfigured look of a convert to some just-revealed religion, unaware that Lily and Lucy a ways off whispered about him, unaware of anything but Tacey. Should girls as skinny as Tacey, Smoky wondered, and with legs as long, wear shorts that short and tight? Her bare toes, already sun-browned, kept the rhythm. Green grow the rushes-o. And all the hills around them danced.
A Getaway Look
Doc meanwhile had also drifted away from his wife’s discourse, leaving her only Sophie (who was asleep) and Great-aunt Cloud (who was also asleep, though Momdy didn’t know it). Doc went with Auberon following the toiling caravan of ants bearing goodies to their hill: a good big new one, when they found it.
“Stocks, supplies, inventory,” Doc translated, a look of quiet absorption in his face and his ear cocked to the little city. “Watch your step, watch your back. Routes, work-loads, chain of command, upper echelons, front-office gossip; drop it, forget it, circular file, pass the buck, wander off, let George do it; back in line, the old salt mines, in harness, in and out, lost and found. Directives, guidelines, grapevine, schedules, check in, knock off, out sick. Much the same.” He chuckled. “Much the same.”
Auberon, hands on his knees, watched the miniature armored vehicles (driver and vehicle in one, and radio antenna too) tumble in and out. He imagined the congress within: endless busyness in the dark. Then he half-saw something, as though there were a darkness or a brightness in the corner of his vision, gathering until it was large enough for him to notice. He looked up and around.
What he had seen or noticed was not something, but something missing. Lilac was gone.
“Now up, or down, at the Queen’s, that’s very different,” Doc said.
“Yeah, I see,” Auberon said, looking around. Where? Where was she? Though there were often long periods when he didn’t exactly notice her presence, he had always been aware of her, had always sensed she was there by him somewhere. Now she was gone.
“This is very interesting,” Doc said.
Auberon caught sight of her, down the hill, just going around a group of trees antechamber to the woods. She looked back for a moment, and (seeing that he saw her) hurried out of sight. “Yes,” Auberon said, sidling away.
“Up at the Queen’s,” Doc said. “What is it?”
“Yes,” Auberon said, and ran, racing toward the place where Lilac had disappeared, apprehension in his heart.
He didn’t see her when he entered that stand of trees. He had no idea which way to follow further, and a panic seized him: that look she had given him as she turned away into the woods had been a getaway look. He heard his grandfather’s voice calling him. He stepped carefully. The beechwood he stood in, smooth-floored and regular as a pillared hall, showed him a dozen vistas down which she could have fled…
He saw her. She stepped out from behind a tree, quite calmly, she even had what appeared to be a bunch of dog-tooth violets in her hand, and seemed to be looking around herself for more. She didn’t look back at him, and he stood confused, knowing deeply that she had run away from him, though she didn’t look now like she had, and then she was gone again, she’d tricked him with the bouquet into standing still one moment too long. He raced to the place she’d disappeared, knowing even as he ran that she was gone for goodnow, but calling: “Don’t go, Lilac!”
The woods into which she had escaped were various, dense and briary, dark as a church, and showed him no prospects. He plunged in blindly, stumbling, torn at. Very quickly he found himself deeper in The Wood than he
