All Swylet knew how she looked as well as I did: lithe and strongly built, with hard brown hands and a face that seemed to be all bones and eyes until one looked carefully and saw the curve of the lips, the flare of the nostrils, the way color came and went in her cheeks. I thought her very beautiful, though in a quiet way, the way a great tree is beautiful or a mountain. Between the straps of her summer sandals, her feet were brown as her hands. She wore a leather apron with many pockets over ankle-length dresses that were green in spring, gold in summer, red in fall, and blue in winter. Her hair was usually covered by a fine linen wimple topped by a wide-brimmed and battered leather hat. I never saw her wash herself, but she was always clean, and she smelled of flowers.
The people of Swylet also knew the Gardener’s cats, very large, round-headed ones who came to the gate whenever a supplicant rang the bell. They were mostly tabby cats, a few black ones, and always at least one with slanting blue eyes in a narrow, speculative face. Each had a name, and the Gardener spoke to them in baby talk as she walked: “There, Bounce, beneath that borage a burrow. See to it tonight. Lightfoot, linger by the lilies. Someone starlit has left them in tangles. Tell me what creature is dancing there, do…” Then she would laugh, and so would the cats, in strange high voices, as though they were playing a game. The villagers stated as absolute fact that the cats sometimes danced on their hind legs and spoke among themselves.
I could not tell whether the villagers believed this was truth or had merely invented it for amusement, though Grandpa Vinegar and his ilk never allowed themselves to be amused. Grandpa Vinegar had grown old and sour from loneliness, for his marriage had ended long ago when his wife hanged herself by her neck from the barn loft, despairing over his having brought calamity home to taint her blood and kill the babe in her womb. This calamity came from his chasing after women in the sea cities before he came back to his betrothed in Swylet, barely in time for the marriage feast. So said the Gardener when the woman brought the stillborn to her, begging to know why. The Gardener took the baby to lie among her lilacs. She always took dead babies to lie in her gardens, and certain mothers claimed they could hear their children laughing as they danced upon the Gardener’s meadows in the moonlight.
So, they talked about the Gardener, and when they first met me, they talked about me, but no more than they talked about the weather or the crops or the latest scrape the children were into. Generation after generation, the Gardener came down the path among her cats, talking to them as she came, and no matter what the supplicant asked for, the Gardener always gave something that would help. Babies were born and named and taken in their mother’s arms to the Gardener’s gate to receive her traditional gift of honeycomb on their lips. “That his life may be sweet,” the Gardener always said, her voice humming softly among the droning of the bees. “That her life may be sweet.”
And there I lived, and I worked hard learning what she taught me. I learned to plant and gather what I had planted and make elixirs from it and to mix them with others to treat specific conditions. I slept well at night because I was tired, and my hands grew callused and hard, like hers. Still, my life was sweet, and she took me on many journeys, including one that was unusual but very important for mankind.
You will need to imagine this:
A volume of amorphous, immeasurable space scattered with stars, singly or in clusters; some bright, some dull; each surrounded by a halo of luminescent mist that swims and wavers, sometimes penetrating the cloud that surrounds another star, sometimes separating from it; everything shifting, neither spiraling nor whirling as a whole but separately erratic, as though each point of light has a different destination.
Or this:
A forest. Here a tree immense past reckoning, its saplings gathered at its feet; there a huge, moss-hung hulk looming lonely at the edge of things; here a copse of fluttering leaves or a brushy labyrinth of old trees, branches intertwined. Imagine the whole underlain with shrubs and ferns over liverworts and fungi, while in the soil below little worms and bacteria writhe and multiply; everything moving slowly, undetectably, chaotically, one part going there, another coming here, all without apparent direction.
Or this:
An ocean inhabited by a thousand life-forms, some solitary, some in schools, some reef dwellers living by twos and threes, here a fanged eel, there a sinuous serpent, here a cloud of clown fishes, striped like a carnival, and over them all the colossal bulks of great basking sharks or whales, they, too, surrounded by clouds of diatoms and krill and bits of floating weed, all moving in separate routes toward indiscernible ends.
Imagine watching any of these for a million years or so as new stars come and old ones die, as old trees rot away and saplings grow tall, as whale bones litter the abyss and young fry hatch, as all the parts within each scene shift in relationship to one another, some touching, some separate, sometimes so remote that the individual seems undetectable by any perception save its own. Imagine that they speak, that space hums and bellows with their voices:
Star calls to star: “Here I am, who is like me?” Tree calls to tree: “I am I, who knows me?” Submarine dweller calls to other dwellers, innumerable calls: some subsonic, some deep, rhythmic pulses, some shrill eeps and squeals. When a response is detected, the thing that uttered moves separately but implacably toward its responder, as by
