The Multitude, стр. 11
“My daughter is the reason for this visit.”
A lovely, dark-haired girl of perhaps three appeared within the circle of the gateway. She flashed a wonderful smile, but the dancing butterflies above her head stole the show. They circled counterclockwise before breaking away and scattering into the garden.
Gabriella gasped. What were the odds a migration of butterflies would swarm into a stone entranceway and dance this way yet again, forty years to the day after Hiroshima?
Carmella’s voice came at her through a fog. “Can a prophet stop my child from speaking in tongues?”
The air became harder to breathe. Words spoken in tongues came directly from God, did they not? Gabriella gazed into the girl’s eyes. “You are Maynya?”
The child nodded.
“And you speak in tongues.”
“No.”
“Come here, Maynya, and sit beside me.”
The child scurried over to the opposite bench, climbed onto it, and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder.
Carmella picked thistles out of the girl’s hair. “If the elders label my daughter a witch—”
“Hush. She’s no such thing.”
“Maynya,” Carmella said. “Say one of the words.”
The girl kept her face buried and said nothing.
“Maynya, please.”
“You said I shouldn’t.” The girl muffled her words into her mother’s arm.
Carmella lifted Maynya onto her lap. Gabriella leaned forward, reached across the narrow path, and ran her fingers through the child’s hair. “Your mother has nothing to worry about. I see a perfectly normal child.”
The perfectly normal child stiffened. She stared past Gabriella with thousand-mile eyes. “My mommy takes me to Burnet Park every day.” She spoke the words in perfect English.
The rushing in Gabriella’s ears rose above the crickets, the squawk of a crow, and the rustle of a breeze through the garden. Gravity lost its grip on her. She grabbed the bench with both hands to keep from floating away.
Carmella took a braid in her hands again and twisted it into a nervous tangle.
Meanwhile Maynya came out of her trance, squirmed off her mother’s lap, and ran to a patch of dandelions sprouting from beneath the garden wall.
“You warn about raiders,” Carmella said, “but we both know the elders cast witches and their mothers across the border to be rid of them. You speak of crucifixions. Do you know what the barbarians would do to us?”
“Maynya, come back for a moment.” Gabriella struggled to keep her voice from trembling.
The girl ambled over and offered a yellow flower.
“Thank you, dear. Tell me now, where did you hear those words?”
“They live in my head.” She had reverted back to Latin.
“Always?”
“Mostly when I dream.”
“And you dream about…?”
Maynya picked another dandelion, this one gone fuzzy. She puffed her cheeks and blew the parachutes apart. “My other mommy,” she said, in English.
CHAPTER 5
Burnet Park, Syracuse, New York (in our world), the next day
A V-shaped shadow diverted Gabriella’s gaze from the children on the playground to a flock of geese overheard. Forty of them—no more, no less—and who wouldn’t find God’s voice in the sum?
The Bible used forty as a period of testing—the duration of the great flood, the Israelites’ years of enslavement, the days Jesus spent in the desert. Gabriella had endured her own long trial, waiting, wondering, searching for answers, until Maynya appeared in her Sanctimonia garden on the fortieth anniversary of Hiroshima.
Carmella’s daughter mentioned regular visits to Burnet Park with her “other mommy.” Gabriella hadn’t found any sign of the mother and daughter yet, but with forty geese honking encouragement from above, something fantastic was bound to happen.
She glanced over her shoulder at the portal lurking behind her. Although she always cloaked the roiling curtain invisible and silent to everyone else, the murmur of rushing smoke still rose in her ears above the white noise of nearby traffic. “I’m hoping you’ll soon be obsolete, old friend.”
Yes, superseded, because a possible second portal between the two worlds had been revealed. How else could Maynya have learned English, visited this park, and referred to a different mother? The child had most likely found a World of Mortal Dreams passageway into the dreams of an American girl.
Extrasensory links often moved in both directions, offering the breathtaking possibility that if Gabriella located the American kid, she could access the same dream channel and travel in the other direction to any part of Sanctimonia and beyond, not just to a stale old cabin surrounded by an invisible barrier. She could widen her search for a messiah, or perhaps play the role of one and tame the barbarians in Virtus. Her heart beat fast, but she chided herself for putting too much stock in a possible pipe dream. The long, heretofore fruitless wait had bred a measure of cynicism even in her.
After all, she’d already searched the children’s spray fountain and the zoo, places where other mommies brought their kids every day. This playground had been the next logical stop, but the boys and girls on the swings didn’t provide any clues…only the meandering thoughts of young children. Parents, siblings, toys, pets, backyards, Hot Wheels, ice-cream cones, churches, schools, day care, and goldfish swimming laps in a bowl.
Gabriella clenched her fists. Suppose the dream visits had been one-sided? If the American girl had never reciprocated by traveling into Maynya’s dreams, she wouldn’t carry a single hint of Sanctimonia in her head. No words of Latin, no images of forest, no memories of peasant women who braided their hair or men who brandished crossbows when heading off to work. Without such a marker to distinguish the child, Gabriella wouldn’t find the right girl if she searched every young mind in the country! She’d never get to explore Sanctimonia and Virtus.
She couldn’t even be sure she had the right location. Maynya might have meant Burnett Park in Jacksonville or some other park with a different name entirely. A young child schooled in Latin couldn’t be expected to pronounce an English name correctly.
“Excuse me.” The voice of a woman approaching from behind almost startled her off the bench. “Are you one of my friends’ daughters? I’m sure we’ve met.”
“She’s Gabriella!” a