Book of the Just Read online

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Two

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Three

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Part Four

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  For the love of a dog:

  Koko, Gracie, Philos, and Artemis

  PROLOGUE

  It’s time for bed, Luc,” the young woman said.

  “I don’t want to go to bed.” The heavy-lidded little boy tucked his arm under his head and sluggishly kicked at a stack of blocks, sending them tumbling to the rug.

  The father leaned against the doorjamb of the nursery, smiling at his son’s tantrum, curious to see if the boy would win this battle of wills against his orderly nanny. As the father watched, a snippet of a story came to him: “‘Keep back, lady, no one is going to catch me and make me a man.’” The father, who never forgot anything, mentally flipped through the rest of Peter Pan’s tale in search of parental insight and wondered if it was time to move his son into a room of his own, away from the babyish decor and the low toddler bed.

  Based on the date of the boy’s birth—and assuming a typical human calendar—Luc should have been celebrating his second birthday. But neither dates nor calendars were relevant to someone like Luc—or to his father. And since the boy had never celebrated a birthday, he didn’t know to miss it.

  In the first days of parenthood, Luc’s father had meant to follow all the typical human customs and let his son grow up like any other boy. But then his patience had worn out. He wanted a son he could train, not one who needed diapers changed and lullabies sung. So the father had traveled the dark planes between place and time as only he could, his newborn son tucked against his chest. He’d pulled his cloak around them both and disappeared into the shadows, reappearing somewhere else with the newborn suddenly grown into an infant. Someday, when the boy reached maturity, the aging would stop altogether. But in the meantime, the father would manipulate his son’s growth as it fit his need and whimsy.

  He had tried again to care for his infant son, but it was not in his nature to handle teething well. He’d considered finding a foster family to care for the boy until he reached an age that would be less demanding, but the father had seen the consequences of letting someone else raise a child. He had lost his daughter forever because of it.

  Determined, he had wrapped himself up once more and traveled again. The infant had become a toddler, and his father had managed as best he could, until he couldn’t manage any longer. Father and son had taken one last trip though the dark planes. Now the toddler was a child, and they had been happy together for months. Luc was less focused on basic needs and far more interested in his desires. That was the fertile playground his father knew so well.

  “I said I do not want to go to bed!” Luc sat up, yanking the zipper of his footed pajamas up and down as if he was ripping open his chest over and over again. Up and down. Up. Down.

  “Little boys don’t always get what they want,” the woman answered as she sprayed lavender oil on the pillow.

  With a growl, Luc grabbed a wooden train car from the floor and threw it at the nanny’s head.

  She crossed the room quickly and took the boy by the arm. “We do not throw things, Luc!”

  “I don’t like you anymore. I wish you were dead!” he screamed. “Die, nanny, die!”

  Shock flashed across the young woman’s face, her skin turned pasty like glue, her eyes vacant like those of the toy soldiers at war on the table behind her. The bottle of lavender slipped from the nanny’s hand, shattering on the floor as she pitched forward like a puppet cut loose from its strings.

  Luc backed away, wide-eyed, until he ran up against his father’s legs. The boy gaped at the work of his words, his dead nanny lying among the disheveled blocks and train cars with a sickly sweet pool of lavender seeping into the floor. His eyes brimming with unshed tears, he turned to look up at his father.

  Luc’s father chuckled. “Did I ever tell you about a boy named Peter Pan? He killed people, too, but he didn’t cry about it.”

  He patted his son on the head and led him out of the nursery.

  PART ONE

  It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

  —William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

  CHAPTER ONE

  A dream for a dream,” the old woman said to Mouse as the wails of the dingoes rose up from the dry riverbed below.

  Mouse knelt on an outcropping in the hills above. The day’s warmth, which was still trapped in the stone, seeped into her bared skin. She looked out over the wide Australian outback. The sun had sunk below the edge of the world, leaving only the thinnest line of light, like a last gasp, bloodred along the horizon.

  “Are you ready, little one?” Ngara asked.

  Mouse looked up into the old woman’s round face, chiseled with lines, and nodded. “I am ready.”

  “Sisters, come.” Ngara motioned with her hands, and a group of Martu women stepped out of the shadows cast by the fire at the side of the outcropping. Their bodies painted with bone-white dots, they looked like skeletons with gaping mouths. They encircled Mouse, each of them laying hands on her, touching her head or back or arms in blessing, a community of women giving her strength for what was to come. Not long ago, Mouse would have shunned such contact. But love changed a person, even someone who had lived as long as Mouse. So did dying.

  Ngara took Mouse’s face gently between her calloused hands and drew her fingers across her forehead, leaving behind streaks of white and black paint. The women started to dance, the gentle slaps of their feet on the stone beating out a hypnotic rhythm.

  “Give us your dream and we show you ours,” Ngara said. “Something that was and is. Something that will be.”

  Mouse sat back against her heels, a thrill of anticipation running through her. The women’s ceremonies were intimate and private, closed even to the Martu men. To be invited to join was like being asked to be part of the family. Mouse had always longed for a family.

  But Ngara wasn’t asking for any normal dream. For the Martu, the Dreaming, or what they called the Jukurppa, was Truth—the secrets of the gods and the ancestors wrapped up in stories. These stories didn’t just tell what once was. Sometimes the stories showed the dreamer what was coming. Ngara was asking Mouse to tell them a story that gave away a secret. Mouse wasn’t used to sharing such private details with anyone because her secrets—her truths—were dangerous.

  “It will be well,” Ngara whispered to her as she painted lines down Mouse’s neck and then thrust them across her collarbone and around her breasts. “Do not be afraid.”

  Mouse took in a deep breath filled with the sweet scent of an herb the women had put on the fire. She would have to be careful to give Ngara what sh
e wanted, but not give away too much. She nodded to herself as she settled on the story she would tell, one that would give the women the truth they most needed to hear.

  She closed her eyes and surrendered to the beat of the women dancing and to the song of the dingoes and the patterns Ngara continued to paint on her naked body. And Mouse let a dream come.

  “I am a little girl,” she said. Her voice sounded far away, like an echo calling back. “I am walking in the Mary Garden with Father Lucas. He is a wise man. He loves me.” She smiled as the image came to her, more memory than dream, just as she intended. “We are alone because the others are afraid of me.” Mouse’s smile slipped as she carefully turned her thoughts. “Father Lucas and I are talking about a book, and I am not watching the path. I fall and cut my leg on a rock. The sharp edge of it slices me to the bone. I bleed. Father Lucas pulls me to him and tears a bit of cloth from his habit, then presses it against my wound.”

  Mouse had an unnatural and perfect recall, a consequence of being her father’s daughter. She never forgot anything. She remembered exactly what had happened all those years ago with Father Lucas—which birds had been singing, where the sun had been in the sky, what flowers had been in bloom. But as Ngara started to sing, a deep, vibrating hum without words, Mouse felt the memory change and her control slip away. All those details in her mind scattered like dried leaves on the wind. Pushed by Ngara’s incessant humming, the remembered sun spun and danced across the sky, the delicate lilies of the valley turned their heads up, stretching into roses, and ran crimson red. The twitter of the garden finches grew shrill and sharp, like the bark of jays. All of it had gone wrong somehow.

  Mouse shook her head slowly, trying to get control of her dream again. She knew the truth she wanted to give Ngara: a story of a man who had loved Mouse like a daughter and died because he knew her secrets. But the dream wasn’t Mouse’s anymore. It was a thing of its own, alive. And it was hunting for another secret to tell.

  “The Father’s hands are covered in my blood,” Mouse continued. “I look up at him, frightened. I see worry in his eyes as he pulls the cloth back to study the wound.” She could hear the fear in her voice as if it belonged to someone else. “He snatches his hand back, pushes away from me, and I look down to see what scared him.”

  Her mind screamed out that this had not happened. Father Lucas had never pulled away from her. He had not been afraid. Had he?

  “I watch my skin knit itself back together—so smoothly there is no scar, no proof that it ever happened, except for the blood on Father Lucas’s hands.”

  Ngara drew the paint down Mouse’s arm and into her palm, letting it pool and swirl.

  “Now Father Lucas is screaming. Why is he screaming?” Mouse tried to open her eyes but couldn’t; she felt cut off from her body, paralyzed. “The blood is burning him. My blood is killing him! I wipe at it with my hands, with the cloth, but it only spreads. Please, make it stop.” She tried to lift her hands to her face but was held still by Ngara’s hum and the rhythm of the dancing women.

  Tears streamed down Mouse’s face. “Father Lucas is dead. He is on a stone table. I am washing his body for burial. I am a woman now.” She rocked slowly to the beat of the women’s song. Her jaw clenched. “There is another man in the room.”

  The dingoes howled out of time, a haunting countermelody to the women’s music.

  “It is my real father, the one who gave me life. I want to kill him.” Mouse went still again. “He is standing over me. I see the stars behind him. He is laughing. He has a secret.” Her breath came shallow and quick now. “I reach for him. He wraps me in the darkness of his cloak and I am gone.”

  The women danced fiercely, their feet pounding the stone as Ngara sang faster and louder, each note hitting Mouse like a torrent of rain. And then the old woman’s hand slammed into Mouse’s chest, and it was like someone had turned on a spotlight in her mind. Though her eyes were still closed, Mouse squeezed them tight against the brightness of the light. She didn’t want to look. She didn’t want to see the secret this dream had found.

  But Mouse had no choice. “Someone is here, but it is hard to see,” she said. “There is a shape, a hole in the light. I think it is my father.” Her hands balled into fists, the paint oozing up between her fingers. “He is turning toward me. I am afraid.” Her face tilted back like she was looking up.

  “Oh, no.”

  Mouse’s eyes snapped open. Her vision suddenly crowded with the brilliance of the Australian night sky, the Milky Way illuminated like a thunderous wave about to break against the earth. Disoriented, she threw her hands out to keep from falling into the stars.

  Ngara caught her by the wrists, bringing Mouse’s focus back to the rock, back to the women tightening the circle around her, their feet now still but their hands beating out rhythms on their thighs and chests. One of the women blew against a leaf at her lips and an eerie, rattling whistle played out into the night. The dingoes had gone quiet.

  Mouse looked at Ngara. The old woman’s eyes were wide with awe and fear.

  “What was that? What did I—?” Mouse tried to ask, but the old woman laid her finger against Mouse’s mouth, silencing her.

  “You must see the Jakulyukulyu now. The dream of the Seven Sisters.” She pulled Mouse’s face back up to the stars with one hand and ran a stone knife quickly down Mouse’s sternum with the other, making a long, shallow slice in the skin. Mouse gasped but did not look down at the cut, or at the blood she could feel seeping down her chest. She was caught by what she saw in the wide sky.

  The stars were moving.

  “This is the songline of the Seven Sisters, the first women, the women who dance in the night. Our sisters, and now yours.” Ngara wove the tale into the new song the Martu women played.

  “In the Jukurrpa, there were the first women and the first men. The women had their laws apart from the men. The women followed their own law.” As Ngara spoke, Mouse watched the stars play out the story, dancing in a circle together. The high whistling seemed to come as much from above as beside Mouse.

  “But then a man, Yurla, wanted one of the Seven Sisters. He did not care what the women wanted. He chased them through the land until he caught one to make his own.”

  In the sky, Mouse saw the Pleiades pull away from the larger group of dancing stars. Another star crept behind them, stalking them.

  “But the Sisters would not leave the one. They tricked Yurla, made him think they would all stay. They made him happy.”

  The Pleiades circled around the lone star.

  “When he grew complacent, they blinded him, snatched up their sister, and went to hide in the sky. Yurla searched all around him, but he could find nothing. He was lost. And the Sisters had their vengeance.”

  Ngara eased behind Mouse and crouched beside her, her mouth at Mouse’s ear.

  “Watch now,” Ngara whispered as she pointed at the sky. “The Sisters show you what you want. Watch.”

  The Pleiades slid into their familiar, blurred cluster while the single star fell away, as if a string tying it to the universe had suddenly snapped. The star sank quickly at first and then slowed as it neared the horizon, the dark outline of the hills to the north made visible against the starlight. It hovered a moment above a single peak and then went dark.

  “The Sisters’ secret is now yours,” Ngara said as she moved back in front of Mouse and laid her hands on either side of Mouse’s face. “You understand?”

  “No.”

  “The Sisters will give you something there in the cave of the kurdaitcha—the vengeance seekers.”

  “I don’t want revenge,” Mouse said, shaking.

  The old woman shrugged her shoulders. “Dreams show only truth.”

  “And what about my dream?” Mouse asked.

  Ngara took a step back.

  “You saw everything I saw, didn’t you?” Mouse didn’t need the old woman’s answer; she could see the truth in her face. “What did it mean?”

&nbs
p; Some of it had made sense to Mouse—Father Lucas’s love and Mouse’s guilt over his death, in particular. And the vision of Mouse’s father looking down on her, laughing, was also a real memory, though not one she had meant to show the old woman. That was the last time she’d seen her father, atop Megiddo in Israel two years ago, when her father had left her for dead. He had told her something important, but Mouse, who normally remembered every word she’d read, every place she’d been, every face she’d met, could not remember her father’s last words to her. In the quiet of the night, Mouse sometimes thought she might capture that moment again, but the harder she tried, the further it seemed to slip away.

  The one secret Mouse had pushed into the far shadows of her mind was the truth of who her father was. That was the secret the dream had gone hunting for—and found.

  “What did you do to me?” she asked the old woman as the other Martu broke the circle and went back to the fire.

  “I bring dreams.”

  Mouse narrowed her eyes, studying Ngara with a new awareness. “You’ve known since I got here, haven’t you? Known what I am?”

  Again, Ngara shrugged. “You walk long, like the ancestors. You are dusted with the First Dreaming. Part of the old ones, you are.”

  “You thought I was special and took me in.” Sadness weighted Mouse’s words.

  “You are special.”

  Mouse shivered at the old woman’s voice. In the year that Mouse had been living with the Martu, Ngara had always spoken to her like a grandmother. It hurt to think that from now on, her words would be laced with awe. But Mouse needed one more answer, an explanation for what had happened at the end of her dream.

  “Special—maybe—but not in the way you imagined. Now you know the truth.” Mouse again saw the image in her mind of the figure silhouetted in the bright light, turning toward her, but the face—it wasn’t her father’s. It was hers. She hesitated, but swallowed her fear. “Why did I become my father?”

  “The truth is in the dream,” Ngara said.

  “No. You were shaping it, controlling it. I could feel it.”