Seldom doesn’t understand either. But he won’t say it.
“Did you imagine this after our visit to the reef?” Elata asks.
Diamond shakes his head. “This game was from before. This is one of the first big battles that I ever thought up.”
“It’s just a game,” Seldom says.
Elata shakes her head. “I don’t know.”
The three of them sit quietly, each working with the problem.
“I’ve asked this already,” says Elata. “But what do you remember from before? Before you were living with your folks and us, I mean.”
The boy closes his eyes.
“Nothing,” he says.
“Inside the corona,” she says.
Diamond shakes his head.
Then Seldom sees what has always wanted to be noticed. Leaning forward, he says, “The cone and fort . . . maybe they’re leftover from your life before . . . ”
Diamond thinks for a moment. “Maybe,” is all he can say.
“Maybe you were a soldier once,” Elata says, “and you battled the monsters in the same way.”
“I don’t think so,” Diamond says.
The day is getting old. The evening meal is coming, and two of them will have to hurry home.
“But your memory is so good,” Seldom says. “How can you forget everything from before?”
“Maybe there wasn’t any ‘before,’ ” Elata says.
“I don’t know how long I was inside the corona,” Diamond says.
The finger-dabs have made Seldom hungry. He stands and waits for Elata to stand, ready to walk out together.
But she doesn’t get up.
“I don’t think you were a soldier either,” she says.
“You said he was,” Seldom says.
“I was wrong,” she says. “He was just a baby, and the game came with him from somewhere else.”
She gets up, and Seldom moves toward the door.
“Monsters,” she says.
The boys look at her, each with a serious face.
“I hope your monsters don’t come here looking for you,” she says.
Then both friends hurry out the room’s door and the house’s door, past the waiting guards, running hard and not just because their stomachs are complaining.
Dream has a longer reach than memory.
The boy sleeps, putting him in a realm where the ordinary dances with the fantastic. This is the nature of dream. But there are faces that he sees while he sleeps—reliable, familiar faces—that look so much like his face. The same few voices whisper to him and sing to him in a dense quick language that has never been heard in this Creation. Yet Diamond understands every word. He must understand them because when they talk, he laughs, and then they talk again and he cries. Those known faces are smiling and weeping as they deliver some vital last instruction—shaking him to help him remember—and he tries hard to remember, pulling his limp body out of the sleep, back into the room that he knows better than any other.
Diamond is awake, and what did the dreams tell him?
Quite a lot, but all he remembers is the warm touch of familiar hands.
Good sleeps at his feet, chirping as his dreaming legs twitch. The boy sits up in bed, measuring the darkness, deciding that the night is in no mood to leave. Slipping out from under the sheets, he tiptoes through the bedroom and past the kitchen, entering the tiny closet where a polished coral bowl waits for his urine.
His pee smells different from other people’s pee.
Finished with the chore, he continues touring home, passing his parents’ bedroom where a curtain hangs and two different chests breathe and growl, his mother muttering wet words about being quick and careful.
It seems that everybody is caught up in dreams tonight.
The next turn delivers him to the front of the house. His father’s gray work clothes used to hang inside the one large closet there, but he doesn’t hunt coronas anymore. As a testament to his age and skill, or maybe because his son misses him when he is gone, Merit has been made into a teacher. He works at the Ivory Station on Hanner, when he works. His clothes are normal now. Only one uniform remains—armored fabric closer to white than black and dark goggles and boots designed to protect careless feet—and those items hang at the back of the closet, clean enough to appear new and barely smelling of corona blood and guts.
Diamond likes to stare at the uniform, letting his mind be fooled into seeing a person dangling against the black wall.
The outside door is always locked at night. Steel and choice woods are stronger than the tree. On the other side of that door, on this side of the curtain, sits one of the guards. His stool is tall and easy to tip. The guard is never supposed to sleep. That’s why Diamond uses knuckles to hit the door, and he steps back and counts the moments before his protector thumps at the wood with an elbow, saying hello.
Then the boy returns to his room.
Good stirs long enough to lift his fierce head, staring at the half-naked shape that approaches his nest.
“Sleep,” says Diamond.
“Sleep,” the monkey agrees, curling into a fetal tuck and lost again.
But the other inhabitant is too alert to climb back into bed, much less try to rest. Instead he picks soldiers from the shelves and arranges them in a half-circle, every blind face pointing at their owner, their general.
Nothing about the moment feels special.
Many nights stretch too long, and the boy often wakes early and sits near one of the night lights, playing quietly, waiting for fatigue to claim him.
If he is patient, sometimes the dreams reveal themselves.
But this is not one of those nights.
Diamond moves the soldiers into a perfect circle, every face looking outwards, and he leaves them, walking to the window. A greater richer darkness sits beyond the reinforced panes. The landing juts far out into the air, and the net is a popular perch for the glowing insects and buzzing insects that don’t exist in the day. With an ear to the glass, he listens to the rasping, chittering songs. Sitting to his right is a second guard, barely in view, feet up and eyes plainly closed and the boy wondering what he could throw at the window that would scare the man.
A heavy rubber ball sits inside a toy box, waiting to be used.
Diamond follows his memory to the box and opens the lid, reaching inside with his free hand, memory closing his fingers. The ball is black, but everything is black in the darkness. Remembering the wooden soldiers, Diamond crosses the room again, passing the ball to the other hand and back again, never looking where his bare feet touch.
One of the soldiers isn’t where he expects it to be.
The boy has never been bigger, never heavier, and the heel of his left foot pushes hard against the bayonet and then the helmeted head.
Pain is quick, but he is too distracted to notice.
The soldier fights bravely, jabbing the fake blade into the giant’s foot, but the pressure is enormous and an ancient flaw in the wood reveals itself with a bright sharp crack that makes a monkey jump to his feet.
Diamond drops the ball and then his body. The sharpest piece of tantalize wood is buried inside him, and it hurts no worse than a nuisance. Mostly he is angry and sorry, unsure how the toy was somewhere it didn’t belonged. Two pieces of the body are on the floor, and he yanks the third from his heel, the blood already retreating inside the torn skin while the entire foot warms even more than normal.
The soldier might be repaired.
If Diamond asks, Father will do that.
But the questions of glue and craftsmanship fall away. The burly monkey stands at the edge of the bed, his head cocked to one side while the black eyes gaze at nothing. Maybe he can hear something. That’s why Diamond listens, following Good’s example. And maybe he hears something too. But when it happens and even afterwards, the sensation isn’t so much like a voice or any other sound. No. It is as if the little sounds of the world cease. The endless play of tree trunks bending and winds drifting, insects celebrating the dark while fifty million souls mutter in their collective sleep—all of these noises suddenly fall away.