Phoenix Without Ashes Read Online Free PDF Page B

meager supper of bread and cheese. Earlier he had checked his snares; they were simple traps of wire and bent branches. Apparently they were not sophisticated enough to fool the rabbits. Two loops lay untouched. The bait, cheese from Rachel’s last gift of food, was missing. The third snare had been sprung, but nothing was caught in the dangling loop. Again, the cheese bait was gone.
    Devon reset the traps, this time using bits of bread for bait. Then he returned to his vantage point above Cypress Corners. He had yet to determine in his own mind why he was living in temporary exile on the very frontier of the Elders.
    Early on, he had tramped across the relatively narrow band of hills until he neared the sky itself. There he stopped short, heeding the childhood admonition never to approach the sky. It occurred to him later to wonder why not. But at the time, it was a virtually automatic impulse to turn around and return to the margin of civilization. So he showed his back to the hard, blue-gray sky and retraced his steps to the top of this hill overlooking Cypress Corners.
    Below, the bells sounded for late vespers. In the east, to Devon’s right, the moon had begun to rise. Its white aureole extended above the hills. As Devon watched, wrapped in his ratty woolen blanket and gnawing on a chunk of cheese rind, the moon rose into full frame. In its six-sided austerity, the moon cast a glow across the valley. Shadows sprang out in sharp relief. The moon was nearly full; a harvest sign.
    Cypress Corners lay perfectly still, the final chimes for vespers fading on the night wind. The village houses with their lighted windows made up a perfectly set ornament in the night. From this perspective, the town possessed a deceptive brightness, almost an air of warmth and cheer. Yet no one knew this but Devon, for no one but Devon looked down on Cypress Corners.
    And even had they looked down, not one in a hundred would have thought anything less prosaic than: Were the night but shorter! I have wheat to harvest, apples to pick, sheep to shear.
    Devon looked down and thought of Rachel. He turned his head to the west and tried to pick out the farmstead of Aram and Old Rachel. He thought he could see the illuminated rectangle of Rachel’s loft window, but finally decided he was imagining it.
    He continued to fantasize it as he pulled together the stuff of his bed, the boughs and brush that made a slightly more comfortable mattress than his usual pallet in Cypress Corners. Devon pulled the blanket around himself and checked to be sure that his knife was close by his right hand. The predators of the hills had not yet bothered him, but there might always be a first time.
    Devon lay so that the opaque crown of the pine screened him from the direct glow of the full moon. Half his sky was the dark tree; the other half was the stars. He lay on his back and watched them blink.
    Then something struck him which had not occurred to him before: there was a pattern to the twinkling of the stars. He had been picking out the constellations his father had taught him years before. The Cross. The Altar. The Ring of Order.
    His eyes skipped back to the crossbar of the Cross. The bright star on the left end blinked twice to the three blinks of the lesser star on the right. Again. Over and over with no variation. The crux star in the center winked three times, but in opposition to its neighbor on the right.
    The patterns repeated as Devon watched.
    Is there really infinite order? he thought. Can nothing change? He realized he was falling asleep and decided not to resist the gentle falling away of his consciousness. Never?
     
    Once again it was the same dream for Devon, but this time it took an odd tangent:
     
    A speck, a dot that slowly magnified in his vision. It ballooned in gigantic size and complexity until it was he who was the speck.
    It swelled until Devon could not see the whole of it with his eyes. It reminded him of the grapes he had helped harvest