Twil, twilfti, twillo, twillorio, twillorinio.
Liana had been thinking about her father, Ralkino. The counting had calmed her. Now she was dreaming.
A platform in Fountain Square. The square filled with people chatting happily. Celebration after the harvest.
Liana looks up at the platform. Somehow she knows it's a dream, but it feels so real. Trentaya, her mother, alongside her, her friend Herago behind. Silmoa, Herago's big sister, long-haired and pale-skinned, next to him, looking superior.
'This is a happy time,' Liana tells herself. But is it? Something will be lost. It comes as a sharp revelation. What's going to happen?
'Have you tried the new food, Liana?' Herago asks. 'It's really, really lovely. Try some.' Something about his voice, something about his round, smiling face, is wrong. Different.
'What food is this?' Liana listens to her own voice. Something different with that, too.
'Wheat, ground up and mixed with water, then rolled out flat and dried.' Herago's squeaky voice.
'Dried? Eugh!' Liana's dream voice was squeaky and strange.
'No, they boil it and mix it with vegetables and stuff,' Herago says, excited. 'It goes... soft and slippery. It's really, really good.'
Liana takes a stick and wraps some of the ribbons of food around it. Delicious.
'I don't like it,' says Silmoa.
Liana knows this food. Delicious, but the taste makes her sad. She doesn't want to eat any more. Liana looks around at the smiling faces. People from the House of the Green Jewel, their learning house. Older people she doesn't know so well, friends of Trentaya and Ralkino. Some members of the Counsel of the Wise.
The big gong sounds. Quiet settles.
Piacho appears.
There was usually something comforting about Piacho – his beaming face, his straggly beard – but now the sight of him disturbs her. Liana is worried.
Piacho's Trowster cloak, with its swirling patterns, is beautiful – like the smoke swirling above the mountains surrounding them. She had learned the names of all the mountains, but now she remembers only Greblara, the highest one.
Something is going to happen.
Liana has been here before. When? Liana looks around. The faces of the people she knew are fine and glowing. And young. Trentaya's face has lost all the lines that came – when?
Liana looks at other people's face, the faces of people she doesn't know, but they slip and slither away. She looks at the smoke from the mountains. Patterns of lines and circles she'd seen so many times before.
But now, the smoke forms shapes. Shapes of letters. The letters form... words! 'R ... G O E S'. Liana looks again. No. She imagined the letters. She remembers that she's dreaming.
'This is a happy time' she tells herself. Piacho raises his hand.
'Ha! Fellows of Seren-ila,' says Piacho. 'We rejoice in the harvest, we give thanks to those who prepared our wonderful food, and we savour the company of all friends. This evening, after hard work, we turn to enjoyment.' A murmur of anticipation. At the back of the stage, musicians move forwards, take up their places. They carry colourful instruments made from many different vegetables, some with strings, some filled with stones, some with pipes to blow into.
Piacho again: 'This day – something very special.' The musicians play softly. Dream music. 'You have all heard about Ralkino's stories, but not all of you have heard them told by the master-story teller himself. Ralkino has made a special story, a story to transport you to the farthest edges of the universe.' Another murmur from the crowd. 'Ha! Of course, by the end you will have returned to Seren-ila, but in between, just enjoy the thrilling journey.' The music swells. Piacho's bearded face turns to look at the man walking forward. Piacho raises his left hand, 'Ralkino!'
Ralkino. Liana's father. Everything becomes clear.
No, not this. Please, not this.
Trentaya, with her long flowing black hair, smiles broadly. Herago's round face grins with anticipation. Silmoa looks intrigued. None of them knows. Only Liana knows.
Ralkino moves centre stage.
Liana wants to leave this dream. She can't.
Ralkino speaks. The musicians play:
'Long, long ago, before the dark and dangerous times, before the Great Heat, the time when people knew the whole of this planet, there lived a young girl...'
Yes. The story of a girl who travelled through the universe. Who found a way to tunnel through time and space. Liana looks down. Her hands are small. Her body that of a small child. Fay years old.
Liana is dreaming of what happened long ago. How many years? Tag? Something terrible is going to happen.
But perhaps it doesn't have to happen. Not in her dream. She's in control. She looks at Piacho, standing at the side of the stage. She could make him go to the middle of the stage and stop the story. She wills it to happen.
Her father speaks again. 'This girl was called "Linda". Linda lived at the beginning of the time of heat. She saw people doing foolish things – things that would make the heat worse. Linda wanted to stop this happening. But what could she do? She was only a child.
'But there was something special about Linda...'
Liana looks to where Piacho had been. He's gone. Where? She had noticed the same thing on that day, tag years ago.
The story of Linda. Had there really ever been a Linda? Her father knew a lot about the world of the past, so maybe it was true. Linda. A strange name. Like 'Liana' but different.
But this is not the time to think of such things. She must stop the disaster that's about to happen. She has to think about it in a new way. She looks hard at Ralkino. He looks back at her. Yes, their eyes meet. She wants to speak, but can't. She wills Ralkino to stop. 'Stop telling that story,' she shouts, inside her head. Ralkino falters.
Yes! Liana was succeeding. At least in her dream, she would get to the end of this evening without that terrible thing happening.
But then Ralkino starts again. 'Linda had a way of thinking that was different...'
Liana had never heard the end of the story. Neither had anybody else. Again, Liana wills Ralkino to stop. But this time he doesn't even slow down. So instead of trying to stop her father, she will make him continue. She'll hear the story through to the end, as she and everybody else had been unable to do in real life. She needs to concentrate.
She stands to see Ralkino more clearly. Nobody notices. Looking down at herself, she sees that she's was no longer a small child of fay; she's her present self, fully twil-ir years old.
Ralkino is telling how Linda grew up realising that the foolishness of the people of her time meant the heat was going to get worse and worse. She would use her talents to change this.
Liana listens carefully; more carefully than she did before. There's a problem with this story.
The story's end can't be a surprise to anyone. 'Linda' didn't actually change anything. Everybody knows about the heat, and what happened to those foolish people. It took many twillorinios of years before people could build a better life. What was the point in the story of Linda, who never actually changed anything?
Ralkino's story-telling is wonderful. The music and the words carry everyone along.
Liana had to control this scene. She starts to rise. She floats above the crowd, as if using the most powerful of wrist-flyers. Looking down, she sees people in their brightly coloured clothes, a few of them wearing the Trowster cloaks of the Wise Ones. Then she saw herself - her fay-year-old self. A little girl watching her father telling a story. She feels sorry for her younger self. She feels giddy. And sad.
Liana is now too far away to hear what Ralkino is saying. She wants him to finish the story and leave the stage. What happens in this dream can't change things in real life. But the dream can end happily, at least.
The smoke from the mountains makes intricate, wonderful patterns, and seeing it from this height is very different to seeing it from the ground. From here you can even see beyond the smoke. She's higher than wrist-flyers could take her, higher even than Trentaya could fly. What's beyond the smoke? Liana stares hard. The light of the sun shining behind her. Can she see... a tower? No. Everyone knows there's nothing on the other side of that mountain. But...
The tower fades away, like a shadow does when the sun goes behind a cloud.
Now the dream plays other tricks. Again the smoke spells out words. A word. 'Ralkino' repeated over and over again. Then the writing goes blank from the bottom upwards, as though rubbed off a writing-slate.
Suddenly a loud gasp from the crowd below. She looks down. It had started.
Ralkino was disappearing. Liana saw and also remembered.
Beginning with his feet, and slowly moving upwards, there was empty space where the previously solid Ralkino had been. Ralkino carried on speaking, unaware.
If this had just been the usual sort of dream, Liana would eventually wake up and everything would be OK. But she knew now that she wouldn't wake up to a world in which this had never happened.
Why couldn't she just stop this? She looked around at the mountains and the smoke. She tried to imagine the smoke stopping, just so that she could feel that she had some more control. And the smoke did seem to slow down. Some was actually going back into the mountains. If she could manage that, then surely...
But it was no use. Ralkino was disappearing. People in the crowd below were running around, trying to see the stage from another angle, thinking that if they only managed to get to the right place they would understand this trick of the light. Wherever they stood, they saw the same thing.
Suddenly, Liana was down where she had been before. Trentaya was next to her. People all around were shouting, calling Ralkino's name in the hope that he would return. Could this be a part of Ralkino's story? Trentaya called for Piacho, but he was nowhere to be seen.
'Stop the story!' somebody shouted. But Ralkino continued. What was he saying? Something about Linda on a stage? Something about laughter? She couldn't hear him. Too many people were shouting. Ralkino's head floated above an empty space, still speaking calmly and carefully, as though looking at another audience. Liana's eyes blurred with tears, and she was a small child again. She wanted to wake up.
Then she heard her father say 'laughing', and thought what a strange turn Ralkino's story was taking. Ralkino's beard vanished. Then his mouth. Liana looked hard at Ralkino's eyes, and they looked back at her. She could tell that he was still speaking, even though she couldn't hear any words. Then the eyes were gone, then the forehead, and finally the hair on the very top of Ralkino's head.
Everybody went silent.
Piacho appeared at last, running on to the stage. He was no longer wearing the Trowster cloak. Piacho looked all around, then faced the audience, frozen with shock.
Liana awoke from her first ever control dream.
***
Lying in bed, Liana thought about the dream. A dream about the worst thing that had ever happened to her. In Seren-ila, which means 'the best place'. How did such a bad thing happen in such a good place?
She should feel pleased to be in the best place that had ever been, or ever would be, but she didn't. Not just because of Ralkino's disappearance – her feeling about that was like a sharp pain in her chest whenever she remembered. But there was another feeling. A vaguer feeling of disappointment.
Nothing will change, she told herself, because nothing needs to change.
If only Ralkino were still here. Ralkino! He would have explained things. A tear started to roll down the side of her face. The tear was Ralkino, she thought, moving away from her. It fell onto her pillow and disappeared.
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