The Land Down Under
by Billie Sue Mosiman

I had taken an apprentice and taught her all I knew. She was ready, she said, but I knew she was timid as a field mouse. Her confidence, for all her intuitive powers, yet went lacking. She stayed in her oceanside home not far from me, practicing, gathering the necessary strength she needed to be of service.  So I worked on.

It was Mabina, my daughter's youngest child, who has been with me in these, the very last moments of time. And I would go gladly now, were it not that Mabina is ill and needs my help.  If I cannot save one I love most, then my life is not finished and I will die impoverished of spirit.

"Shall I stoke the fire?" Mabina asked.

I could hear her across the room, but I could not see her well.  The light, the little of it that we were privileged to get beneath the great forest canopy, had fallen out of the sky, and the room was dim.  "Please," I said. "I'm cold. It seems the nights aren't as warm as they used to be -- when I was young," I added, not meaning to. A skilled one should not take unto herself pity the way I just had. Of course, I was cold and the nights as they slithered forth were colder to my bones. Of course, I was old and nights never bothered me when I was young.  Nothing did. Nothing bothered me then, not the fluctuation of temperature or material deprivation, not the loss of my mate, or even the thought that an age was passing before my eyes, never to be seen again upon all the earth, unto all time.

This was something I knew I had not told. There would be no more centuries. No more visits from Invaders to save us, no more beings with strange machines to explain our natures. There was an End, and though it was still decades away, I knew we were all heading toward final extinction. I had seen it when I was but a child and never, never spoke of it.

We had lived on this small spinning ball through the time of space travel and intergallactic war, through plague and pestilence, invasion, and we had fallen back to a simpler time, medieval, in its way, but much better once we were taught by the Invaders of 2442 that we could use our brains for more than storage and retrieval. I would not foretell doom when we had just finally come to know a way of life that was tolerable.

I heard the rustling of wings outside the open window, turned to spy a red-tail bird try to perch on a slick broad banana leaf and, failing, fly off again.

When I turned back to Mabina, she had finished with the fire and now she sat across from me on a footstool, her prim hands lying quietly in her lap. The brocade of her dress shone with silver and metallic green thread. Her hair, gold, as was mine so long ago, caught the glow from the table lamp. She wanted something and I couldn't think what it might be. I waited for her to say.

Finally, "Grand, why do people die?"

"I don't know, Mabina. It seems unfair to me and no one's ever fully explained it to my satisfaction. It's just part of the cycle, the Invaders say, though what that might mean beyond living on faith, I could not tell you."

"Then what good is magic and intuition and healing if we don't know why people die?"

"Magic helps us to cope with the torment of those unanswerable questions."

I waited. It was the chief tool I owned, patience. Given the benefit of time, every man and woman talked, every solution possible was found, every illness of the mind set at ease.

"My mother says I am mind-sick and need you." Mabina glanced away and now I saw her profile in the lamp light, the strong line of the nose, the soft dip from her chin to the gracefully arched throat. She looked nothing at all like me, except for the color of her hair. I had never been a beautiful creature like this.

"I am here to help," I said. "Shall we eat now and talk afterward?"

She rose and joined me at the set table. A breeze came through the windows from the forest, a night breeze fragrant with scent from white blooms larger than my hand, with soil fertile and ripe, and with the spice of a multi-green, impenetrable jungle.  Miles away was the shore and the flat wide sea.

I did not have to live in the crumbling cites, under protection of a lord. I was free to live wherever I wanted just so long as the sick could be dispatched to me and able to find a way to my door. I had chosen this tropical paradise in Baja California when a young woman, this haven a hundred miles from civilization, and it did not prove too far, but it did give me my earned peace when I had no patient to attend. And now, at the last, with time passing rapidly through my fingers, and life leaving inch by inch, I was glad to be in the land down under the tree canopy, hidden from the open sky. The shadows stole around and urged me, in sibilant hisses, to join them. I would ignore them until I had no other choice.

Would I have time left to repair my lovely granddaughter?

I partook little, as food now set unsteadily in the pit of my stomach no matter how well prepared or how tasty. Mabina ate hardly more. There was a gloom in her aura and a hidden chamber behind her eyes where her soul thrashed about, ravished by something I did not yet understand.

When she took our plates away, I said, "Don't wash them just yet. Let's sit on the porch."

She helped me from the chair, guided me through the door and to a wicker settee. Fireflies sailed dances in front of us, their tails twinkling like dying-birthing-dying planets. "I used to catch them in my hands," I said. "And hold them cupped to study their light until they expired." I smiled at Mabina. "I was not a very smart girl at one time, curiously enough."

Again, I waited. I studied the vine that grew wild around the legs of the wicker. The leaves were shaped like hearts and the scarlet flowers were funnels for butterfly nectar. I breathed deep, smelling the loam just beyond the porch, and dew settling on peppermint plants and lemon balm and marjoram.

Mabina sighed as loudly as any actor from a stage. I watched her carefully while her eyes followed the fireflies come out to play. "I want to marry this man," she said. "but I can't let myself."

"Why is that? You're of a marrying age. It's time for love, dear child.  Love is all that should appeal to you at this time of your life."

"I dream...of bandits who kill him. Of the sea swallowing him whole. Of the mountains falling to crush him beneath tons of rock."

I thought of all these things as dreams, as nightmares, and saw how it could turn her mind away from all youthful pursuit.  "Does he know you fear for his life?"

"I never spoke of it until now. Every time I looked on his face, I saw it -- a great disaster befalling him." She squeezed shut her eyes. A dragonfly, iridescent aqua wings wide and eager in the twilight, landed hovering on her shoulder, but Mabina did not notice.

Perhaps that was it. My intuition told me to ask. "What do you ponder when you are alone, child?"

She opened her eyes. "Alone?"

"Yes. If you were sitting here on the porch alone, what would you consider, what would collect your attention?"

"Oh, I would think of him. And know he is to die. I would grieve."

I took one of her pale cool hands in my own. "Do you not see the trumpet vine flower, the way it holds the droplets of moisture for the butterfly? Or do you not notice the light dripping into the earth from the sky, filtering down all around us and soaking into the ground at our feet?"

Mabina looked around her. "I never see it. I don't know morning from evening, night from day."

"You see inside your head. You live inside your head. You have forsaken the world, Mabina, for the land where you walk alone in fear."

"How can I stop? I would stop if I could, wouldn't I? Oh, Grand, help me, find me courage."

I was taken then by pain that traveled like a cock through a hen yard -- taken boldly, leapt upon against my will. I clutched my granddaughter to my bosom to keep from falling forward. I could not breathe for the pain, could not see any further than her shoulder where blackness camped, ready to whisk me into Death's arms.

"Grand..?"

I could hear her calling to me and I made an effort to come back toward her, away from the encroaching dark. "I...I..."

She slipped from the settee and lowered me down onto the pillows. I grasped her hand tightly to hold onto the world a little longer.

And it passed. As it has done before. But the pain is stronger each time it comes. It will sweep me soon to oblivion.

"What shall I do, Grand? Tell me what to do!"

I patted her hand and said, "Help me up. I'm better."

"If you leave me now, I'll never get well. I need you so, Grand, please don't leave me yet."

It is like the young, or is it just the living, whatever age?, that they ask of the dying that they wait. They don't mean to be selfish. It is part of being alive. The largest part. The part I let go of more each day.

"Help me inside. I should lie down on the bed."

She is a gentle child, worth any agony to save. She has loved me so many years. When she was young, my daughter sent her to me for training to be a lady. She possessed no magical skills so her only future lay in society. She listened well and learned quickly. She snuggled against me and told me often how much she loved me and how she wished she could have been gifted so that she too might be apprenticed. Yet she accepted her fate as one of the highborn will, and she went away from me polished, pleasant, mannered enough to sit with any lord and not embarrass our name.

After five years she found a love and he came to kneel before her, asking for a life together, for children and home. That's when the trouble started, I was told. Soon after the courtship and proposal, when again she looked on him, she saw her heart shriveling in widowhood. She, without second sight, without any gift at all, had fallen into sickness instead.

Now she has been sent to me again, when I am least capable and most needed.

I lay on my back, staring at the rough board ceiling overhead.  I never pretended I could take someone from the Inside to the Outside in so short a time left to me. I didn't know if it was possible. I felt her climb onto the feather mattress and snuggle the way she did when a child. I put my arm around her and said, "Tell me what you're thinking."

"This minute? Must I?"

"Please."

"I see the ground covering you. The dirt thick, shutting you away from me. I see funeral wreaths and everyone wearing a head covering. I see myself weeping and lonely."

I blinked my eyes and saw the same vision. Soon enough it would be so.  If only it was not too soon. "Why do you not see my old liver-spotted hand on your arm, child? And the weave of my dress? And the light shimmering over the ceiling from the fire?  These things are here, now, just beyond your nose."

"I want to. I truly do, Grand."

"You don't have the sight, Mabina. You were denied all skill the day you were born. That is not a failing or a punishment, and it is nothing you have control over. You see me dead, but not through any prior knowledge save what any human could project knowing how old and how decayed my body. Do you understand?"

"I'm making it up, is that what I'm doing?"

"Not exactly. Not with my death, that's ordained and any decently empathetic person could know it by looking at me. But with your young man, that is a different case. You fear losing him, is that so?"

"The way I fear losing you."

"You see? It is not the same. I have used up my years. Your young man has decades to go and you dream of losing him young, but there's no truth in those visions. It is like the man who thinks himself sick until he is sick. Remember Uncle Devlini?"

I heard her give a slight giggle and stuff the pillow in her mouth. I smiled at the ceiling.

"Remember how he went around all the time complaining that his back hurt, his legs hurt, he could not move his bowels?"

"He couldn't eat duck or it would poison him! He thought a mosquito bite must be from a snake! He thought the Invaders had infected him with a slow-killing virus."

"Yes, that's what he made himself believe, didn't he? For years he did this. He would not come to me to be cured of the mind-sickness. He rather liked the puny feeling he got when he complained, don't you think?"

"I suppose he did. But Grand, this isn't the same. I don't like seeing someone dying."

"I didn't say that, now did I? I said we must investigate these things.  You're living inside and as long as you do that you make the world full of danger and despair. Just as Uncle Devlini did."

She was quiet a long time. I waited, hoping she could find a way to understand.

"How do I make the dreams stop?"

"Embrace the world, Mabina. Hug life and hold tightly to it.  Live now, now when you can hear my voice, when you can feel my arms around you, when the night is cooling and blowing through the windows to caress us with fresh breezes from off the sea.  Now when the fire shadows dance across us. When the flowers fill the air with such sweetness."

She slept then, never moving from where she lay cuddled at my side. I did not wake her to undress or to find us cover. We would be warm until we got cold, we would sleep until we woke, we were in perfect harmony with our surroundings. It was said that in the twenty-first century humans had finally learned to turn from material possessions and pleasures to the inner life, but then mankind forgot again and did not remember until the Invaders came. It seemed to me it was beginning all over again, men and women forgetting the interior landscape for the outer, the joy of small pleasure for the sudden, quick excitements of solid reality. It was as if we learned and unlearned at alarming rates.  How could we let what the Invaders taught us go by the wayside so easily? It probably spelled our downfall and the extinction I foresaw in the vision I had as a child. There had been no explanation.
Only...emptiness. A great silence and stillness over all the earth.

I slipped my hand up from her arm and pressed my fingers to her forehead where damp locks of golden hair covered her sleeping brow. I demanded her dreams be filled with joy, not distress.

It was toward early morning when I woke to her screams. She sat up, eyes wide, waking to the last of the sound echoing in the room. "Oh! He was run through with a sword! Blood spilled down his legs and he fell dead."

Could she be under a spell, one put there by an enemy of the family?  There were dark practitioners of the Art, oh yes. Why or what caused her mind to sink into such low, perilous places?

I shushed her. Had her lie down again. "It will take practice to carry the good cheer of day into the dream world of sleep, child. There, there. He is well, I swear it."

She fell into my arms and sobbed with a broken heart. I felt my pain return and bit into my lip. I asked it to leave me, I had work to do, I couldn't be   That morning I slept late, deep sleep that kept me groggy until I had crawled from the bed and eaten the food Mabina prepared for me. She had been up hours, it seemed, and she looked livelier than the day before. There was a bloom of pink in her cheeks that matched the baby soft color on the bodice of her dress.

"What do you notice?" I asked, lifting the utensil to my old mouth to eat.

"You have a fine appetite!"

I laughed. "What else?"

She now looked around the house.

"It isn't fair that you hunt for life. What did you notice before you looked?" It was so difficult to teach her.

She shut her eyes and clasped her hands in front of her apron.  "There were spots of grease on the griddle. They swirled and made a face, a funny little gnome-like Invader face."

"Good. Go on."

"When you sleep, you whistle-snore. Air goes in your nose and out your lips in a whistle."

"I hope that is not a secret you will tell just anyone."

"There was a bird..."

"What color?"

She paused and her brow furrowed. "Two colors. Green and yellow. A small bird, it would have fit into my hand. It landed on the window sill while I baked."

"What color was its eye?"

"Eye?"

"You did see the bird's eye. If it landed on the sill, it was close enough for the two of you to exchange looks."

She cocked her head to the side, the way a bird will do, unconsciously imitating what she had seen. "It had a black eye."

"Good! Anything else?"

"It put out one wing, yellow, with green edging like lace, stretched it out fully, then it flew away."

"A good omen. This is indeed fine progress. Tell me, with your eyes closed, what do you smell, Mabina?"

"Camomile tea."

"Have you made tea?" I looked over to the stove. My tea pot sat just off the burner. I could not smell it, but my senses were so dim these last days I had to be right on top of a thing to smell its scent.

"Oh yes, but I forgot to bring you a cup."

"Never mind. What else can you smell? You are blessed with fine nostrils. You must use them, unlike an old woman who uses hers for snoring fits."

She giggled, but kept her eyes closed. Concentrating. Not thinking about me in the ground, I hoped, or of her young man struck down in battle in one of our rebel village skirmishes.

"I smell my skin."

"And what does your skin smell like?"

"Like...horse flesh...and washed silk."

"Horse flesh!"

She opened her eyes now and they were merry. "I made that up."

"A fine joke on your grandmother. Bring my tea."

We spent the day in game. She never tired of it for she was better than I at spotting the tiny insignificant bit of matter that made up the universe. The trail of a slug who has lost his shell. The chewed leaf that hid below the healthy leaves on a thousand-leaf tree limb. The whorl of an ant trail leading into the green wall of jungle beating against my little clearing.

She never once told me her mind had slipped into the dungeon of sick imagining. It was not a spell. She was not so ill she could not be brought back to happiness.

That night we donned our gowns and sat before the fireplace to ward off the dampness. There had been a thunder storm. We could hear it crack and boom, but we could not see the sky lighting up with streaks of molten silver. I told her that under the canopy we lost the stars and the firmament, the clouds and the sun rays, but the shadows suited me best and always had.

She sat too long brooding while I lived a while in the flames of the fire. When I came to myself, I caught her lost in reverie much as I had been. "What are you thinking?"

"He will leave on an errand for his father and while staying overnight in an inn, he will burn to death, burn down to embers."

I wanted to beat my hands on my forehead in exasperation.  "You're living inside again. Where there are fabrications and where ugliness and sadness resides."

Her eyes, hollowed by shadow, fastened on my face. She could be me. She would be me one day, old and dying.

It was contagious! Her sorrow had slipped from behind her eyes and slithered on dead feet to hide behind mine. I would not have it.  "Mabina, you must make an effort. I can't help you if you persist in wallowing in these horrible daydreams."

I hadn't wanted to be curt, but my words must have stung for she turned away and wiped her eyes.

"I'm sorry, child. It's just that if you continue telling me about these gruesome visions, you infect me. Think of this: if all I ever did was speak of evil, then the world from my viewpoint would be an evil place. If you heard me speak evil and only evil, always evil, it would rot your mind and take it over. You mustn't give in so easily to what floats through your thoughts."

"Perhaps it is too late," she said.

I stood then, bones aching from sitting too long. "I think we should go to bed. I want you to bring your mind back to the present. Keep it fettered in this house. Keep it close to you where you can watch it.  Don't let it free to roam imaginary scenes that have not and will not happen."

A messenger came the next morning with a scroll for Mabina. He left quickly, never asking if there was a response. I watched Mabina read it and watched, horrified, as she rocked on her feet and fainted dead away. She struck her head as she fell. I hurried to lift her. To pray for her. And then my gaze fell on the scroll's lettering. It was from my daughter. Mabina's young man had died in an accident on one of the old torn freeways we still use to traverse between city states. A bridge had collapsed and he was crushed beneath tons of concrete.

I looked down on Mabina's slack face. A dribble of blood came down from her gold hair, staining it strawberry.

Some time later, after bathing her head, she came awake. She cried until I thought her heart would surely beat its way through her chest.  I could not appease her grief or deny that her visions had been true warnings of things to come. But how could it be? She had never shown a gift before now. A woman rarely proved to be skilled this late in life.  I had shown talent before I was four. Everyone I knew had experienced knowledge of their gifts when still small children. The Invaders had given us wondrous machines that indicated who was gifted and who was not. Not a light glowed when the state applied it to our little Mabina.

That night I woke with a pain that doubled me. I reached to feel for Mabina and found her. I shook her awake. I couldn't speak. I heard a deep groaning and wondered who it might be, who was in my house, in my bed, wailing with such vehemence and lack of self-control?

Mabina sat up in bed, frantic, and tried to straighten my limbs, but I couldn't untwist, the pain had me in its great hands, squeezing my life through claws.

Mabina stilled. Her voice came through my endless ribbon of pain like a song sung to a babe in a cradle. "You'll go soon and lie in the ground.  I'll weep over you and miss you more than anyone else, more than your own children will I miss you.  And when I call from this place, you'll hear me for I see there is no death so deep that it keeps us silent forever."

I wanted to say, wanted to say, wanted to...say...

If you are right and I have been wrong, then you are more skilled than I. If you are right and I am wrong, I bless you, and forgive myself for all my ignorance.

It was like falling into the darkness, my consciousness a star burning down, with a fierce trail left behind me so I would know I had gone.

Mabina bent to my ear and she said, "Let go, Grand. Let go this time.  Think of fireflies on the porch and moon vines twirling around the posts. Think of the high green canopy and this land down under. Do you smell the rain soaked earth? Do you feel my tears falling warm on your cheeks? Think of me, Grand, and live on, live free."

Still I fought to come back, not willing to give up earth for whatever came after. I struggled from the dark and fluttered open my eyes.

She helped me to sit. My breath came even and regular, though I felt perspiration on my face. "I'll give in soon, Mabina.  Soon."

"You know now that I can take your place," she said, not resigned, but sure of what the future held for her.

"I think you should, yes. You'll need to register with the Council of Five."

"Not until you have left me."

"Do you know...do you know if you'll be happy?" I asked, lying back in her arms, too weary to hold up my own weight.

She glanced around the room at my four-poster bed, at the stove, at the fireplace, and then to the open door to the porch and the jungle beyond. "I'll try. I don't know more than that.  Not about my own fate."

I closed my eyes to rest. I was glad she did not see the future that I had seen. I'd have to find the strength to send away my apprentice. The Council would have to renotify the farflung villagers of the status change.

"Death does not keep us silent forever?" I asked.

"We live on, you say? Some way? You're sure of that?"

She leaned to brush her lips against my old cheek. "Yes," she whispered. "I know that much. I can't tell you how or why, but I just know we do."

It was more than I had ever known. It was enough to serve me well in my last days, and I knew others would come to know Mabina's truth, too, and it would give them strength in this last primitive age of humankind, in the planet's last failing hour before the gathering dusk.

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