Overheard in a Dream. Torey Hayden

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СКАЧАТЬ of chalky white stone. The soil itself was white. Not crumbly like in the Badlands, but actual rock that was pushed up in great, distinct ribs to form the cliff, as if a giant had slammed together a handful of blackboard chalk. Below us was this massive broadleaved forest that stretched off in all directions. Sort of what I’d expect the Amazon Basin to look like, if you viewed it from high up. I remember the trees undulating restlessly in the breeze, almost like waves in an ocean. That’s how it got its name. From that point on, I always called it the Forest because of that view from the cliff.”

      Laura paused pensively. “When I say ‘I went there’ or ‘I went with her’, that’s not quite right. It’s hard to describe what really happened, because I was aware ‘I’ myself wasn’t there. This was one thing that was different about the Forest from my other fantasies. In all of those, I was always at the centre of the action, imagining myself as the star, doing things with the characters I created. The Forest was completely different. It was more like seeing a movie.

      “At first I couldn’t figure out what Torgon’s role was. It was immediately obvious that she was a leader of some kind. You could tell that straightaway from the way people treated her. I assumed at first that she was a queen, but came to realize that she was, in fact, a kind of holy person. Not a priestess exactly, but of that type. The word in the Forest people’s language for her role was benna.”

      “So they had their own language?” James asked.

      “Yes. Although the only time I was aware of it was with words like benna that didn’t have an equivalent in English. I’d ‘hear’ those words.”

      James listened with fascination. He had always found children’s imaginary companions intriguing, partly because he’d had no similar companions himself so it was hard to conceptualize the experience. Becky, however, had gone through a phase at three when an invisible tiger named Ticky had accompanied her everywhere, so that had given him a valuable second-hand experience. He knew that imaginary companions, outlandish though they could seem, were a normal, healthy part of childhood and usually indicated a child of above-average intelligence. It was unusual that Laura’s imaginary world had come into being so late, as the more usual age for this sort of thing was between three and six, but it wasn’t unheard of, especially in highly creative children

      James looked at Laura. As she talked about the Forest, she relaxed. The anxiety of the previous session had entirely gone and she sat back in an open, comfortable position. Her eye contact was excellent, her smile ready.

      “Torgon didn’t live in the village where the others lived she said,” because she was considered divine by her people, an embodiment of their god, Dwr. So she lived in a walled compound in the forest, a sort of monastery. There was another high-status holy person living there as well. His name was Valdor, but he was always called the Seer because he had divine visions. This was actually his role, sort of like an oracle. He wore long, heavy white robes with gold embroidery on the edges and he was very old when I first saw him – in his mid-seventies, perhaps. There were some women also living in the compound. Like nuns. And children. Lots and lots of children of all ages. They came from the village, from wealthy families mostly, to get an education at the compound. They were called acolytes, even though they didn’t do anything very religious.

      “That first night I went …” Laura gave a small quirky smile. “I was actually a bit disappointed to find out all this. Up until then my life had been all about comic books and TV shows. I was passionate about Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and I can remember thinking, why couldn’t it have been Dale Evans who popped up in Adler’s lot? But it took no time at all for me to fall in love with Torgon. She was this amazing person. Very charismatic. And intelligent. Really savvy, you know? In a streetwise sort of way. But she was also very emotional. Her moods could change with breathtaking suddenness and she was never the least bit inclined to rein them in. Yet she could still be so appealing, so charming, even in the midst of the most unreasonable behaviour. I loved that about her, that complicated wildness.”

      “Who knew about Torgon? Did you tell anyone? Your father, for instance?”

      “Kind of,” she replied and became thoughtful for a moment.

      “I’m hearing something more in your voice,” James said. “Did your father not approve?”

      “It’s not so much that he disapproved. Just that he didn’t get it, so there wasn’t much point in telling him. I spoke to him about it, but he didn’t ‘hear’ me, if you know what I mean.”

      “Can you clarify that a bit?”

      She considered James’s request, then nodded. “Like, for example, I remember once when I was eight. I was on my annual visit to his house here in Rapid City. I came every August to stay a week with him and my brothers. It was the highlight of my life in those days. Not Christmas, not my birthday, but that last week in August when my dad took his vacation and I got to come and stay with him.

      “I slept on this rollaway bed that he put in the corner of his bedroom. For a long time, it had become my practice to go to the Forest during that period between getting in bed and falling asleep. I liked to do it then as it was a nice relaxing time and I didn’t get interrupted. At the Meckses no one ever even noticed because I was up in the attic, so I’d never paid much attention to whether I was talking out loud or not. But, of course, in Dad’s small apartment, he heard me and came in to see what I was doing. I remember him silhouetted in the doorway, asking, ‘Are you talking to one of us?’ I said no, that I was just playing.

      “He came on into the room then and sat down on the edge of the bed and said, ‘You seem to be having an awfully good time in here by yourself. What are you playing?’

      “Torgon had been coming to me for about a year by then and I was really into all the details of her life. For example, she was the elder of two daughters and had this sister four years younger who was named Mogri, and I knew all about the kinds of things they had done together growing up. I knew tons of other stuff too. The Forest society had an incredibly rigid hierarchy of castes and which caste you were born into counted for everything there. It determined who you were, what work you could do, which other members of society you could associate with. The highest caste was a religious ruling class that consisted of the Seer, the benna and their offspring. They were almost like a royal family, because they had absolute rule. The next highest caste was the elders, who made laws and arbitrated on civil matters. Then it was the warrior caste, and then the merchant caste and the traders, and so on and so forth. The very lowest caste was composed of the workers, the people who did manual labour. They weren’t even allowed to live in the same part of the village as those of the higher castes. They were actually walled off and kept out of the main village, except to do their work. Torgon and her family belonged to this lowest class. Her mother was a weaver, and her father built and repaired carts. Because she was low-born, it had come as a huge shock to everyone – including Torgon herself – when she was identified at nineteen as the next benna. So suddenly here she was, thrown from the lowest class to the highest. She was twenty-three at the point she had appeared to me in Adler’s vacant lot, and even then, she was still finding it hard to adjust in her work.”

      “Goodness, that is all complex,” James said, thinking these were most extraordinary thoughts for an eight-year-old to be having. Trying to envisage Becky saying things like this to him, he could easily imagine how disconcerted he would feel as a once-a-month father to find out Becky spent most of her time playing pretend games about holy people and caste systems, and worrying over an imaginary twenty-three-year-old’s vocational problems.

      “The thing is,” Laura replied, “I did know that. By the time I was eight, I had already realized other kids didn’t think about these kinds of things, or if they did, then not in this kind of detail. I didn’t know СКАЧАТЬ