"Hard to believe this will be Arthur's last one," she replied. "Seems only yesterday I wondered if he'd ever graduate at all." She turned in Joby's embrace to smile at him. "Then you came along, Sir Joby, and turned him into an honors student."

"Aw. T'weren't nothin', ma'am," he drawled, looking down, abashed, to scuff a shoe on the pavement. "Any ol' knight woulda done the same."

She leaned up to kiss him on the lips. The kiss he gave her in return was, as always, perfect. Perfect lingering length, perfect tenderness, followed by a perfect smile. Just like the kisses he had given her in high school.

Laura leaned away, covering her discomfort with a smile she hoped was as perfect as his own, then turned back to look at the parade as a float advertising Taubolt's upcoming Whale-Watching Festival passed by. Astride a huge, somewhat misshapen whale of papier-mache, which there'd apparently been no time to paint, sat Karl Foster, the Chamber of Commerce's president, waving at the crowd, like Captain Ahab riding Moby Dick. A banner on the whale's side proclaimed, TAUBOLT: PARADISE BESIDE THE SEA!

"Look." Rose grinned. "There's your mom and Joby."

"Where?" Hawk said.

"Down there, across the street. See? They're kissing." Her eyes became as bright as her smile. "When's he going to marry her anyway?"

"I don't know," Hawk sighed. "When he finally gets off his butt and asks her, we should have another parade."

"Sometimes you sound like it's you he's supposed to marry," she scoffed.

"No way." Hawk grinned, leaning in to kiss her again. "Only one person I'll ever want to marry."

"I hope that's not a proposal," she smiled, dodging his lips to peck his cheek instead, " 'cause you know what I'll say."

"Not until after college," he sighed, shrugging away from her to watch the parade again. "I know. You must have told me about two hundred times."

"It's hard to know when you're listening." She grinned mischievously. "If we both get into Brown-"

"When we both get into Brown," Hawk corrected with a smile.

"When we're at Brown," she smiled back, "we can take all our gen-ed classes together, and study together every night. It'll be almost the same thing."

"No it won't," he said, "but I can wait. Long as we're together. That's all I care."

"That's all I care too," she said, throwing her arms around his neck, and starting to rhapsodize again about going off to college and living in the wider world at last. Hawk couldn't suppress the silly grin that always crossed his face when she talked this way. He'd known that wider world all too well once, but never believed it could be lovable until she'd begun to show it to him through her eyes. Now, he couldn't wait to share it with her. Solomon had told him once that a true bard was only fully forged by pleasures and pains far greater than any Hawk had yet known. Listening to Rose now, Hawk felt sure that everything Solomon had meant awaited them at college. Just one more year.

"It's kind of strange," she said at last, watching the ladies of Taubolt's Historical Preservation Council pass in their old Model A Ford, decked out in antique frocks and wide, flowered hats. "Half our friends may never leave Taubolt at all. Don't they ever wonder about what's going on out there?" She gave him an earnest look. "I know some of it's awful, but there must be so much worth doing!" Her expression became dreamy. "Sometimes being cooped up here feels like," she smiled, "like sleeping through a parade."

"You think Taubolt's boring?" Hawk laughed. "Look at all these people! They'd have given anything for five minutes of what you took for granted growing up here!"

"I know," Rose sighed, pulling him back into the shop entryway where they could talk more privately. "I love Taubolt with all my heart, Hawk. You know I always will. But what are we doing with everything we have here? What's it for? Do we ever ask that? All these people seem so desperate for what we've been given, but we just hide it here, where it's nothing but a game-a game for children."

"It's not just hidden here," Hawk murmured gravely. "It's protected. Their world destroys what it needs as quickly as it destroys anything else, you know. Maybe Taubolt's little game is all that's kept what we have here alive."

"Maybe," Rose sighed. "But we must be keeping it alive for something more than just," she shook her head impatiently, "just keeping it alive." The excitement came back into her eyes. "Haven't you wondered why Taubolt's borders have suddenly failed after all these years? Maybe it's time to bring what we have out of hiding, Hawk! You know none of this is really ours, certainly not the-" Hawk started and looked around to remind her they were not alone. "Certainly not it," Rose whispered, looking chastened.

"That's one thing I'm not looking forward to," Hawk said, taking her hand and leading her around the building into a small patch of garden away from the noisy street with its prying eyes and ears. "What's it going to be like," he asked softly when they got there, "living so far away from the Cup for so long? I can't even remember how that felt now, and I don't think I want to."

"We'll handle it," she assured him, "because we'll have each other, Hawk, and because we know there is something to believe in, and that there must be some way to share it. There must be a thousand ways! All we'll need to find is one."

Agnes Hamilton took a petite sip of iced tea, set her glass on the lawn table, and heaved a long-suffering sigh. A sudden blare of discordant horns from the parade route three blocks off was followed by a muffled swell of applause and laughter. "Listen to that racket, Franny! Did we move up here just to be assaulted by a bunch of yahoos trying to wake the dead?"

Franny shook her head obediently.

"Karl wanted me to ride with him on that ludicrous whale, if you can believe it," Agnes scoffed. "Imagine. Up on that monstrosity waving like some circus performer. I do wonder about the man sometimes."

"He's very proud of the new Chamber," Franny said with apologetic deference. "You did encourage him to form it."

"I encouraged him to organize this town's unruly flood of merchants into some more manageable body, not to make a spectacle of himself-or me! Parades! What next? A kissing booth?"

"Oh, I'm sure he would never ask you to do that," Franny gasped.

Agnes gave her a sidelong glance, wondering, not for the first time, whether Franny's dim front were just disguised recalcitrance. "If he had to raise such a din," she growled, "he might at least have kept rabble like that Greensong woman out of it. It's disgraceful to legitimize such a harridan by letting her march down Main Street."

"What could he do?" Franny asked timidly. "It's against the law to stop her."

"Oh!" Agnes exclaimed sarcastically. "And laws are so important here, aren't they?" She was suddenly wracked with something close to despair at the overwhelming obstacles she faced. "No one seems to understand the price I've paid to help protect this town," she moaned. "The historical society was a useless gossip refinery before I took it under wing. Preservation hadn't even occurred to them! Can you imagine? Now we've got the teeth to keep people from painting their houses any old color they want, or plastering Main Street with neon signs, or . . . who knows; growing cactus in their yards! Just look at this influx of people, Franny! Taubolt's character would have been swept away completely by now if not for me. Just tell me I'm wrong."

Franny looked a bit unsure about whether to obey. "I know how hard you work, Agnes. So does Karl. . . . A lot of people do."

"Well, they don't work very hard to show it," Agnes pressed, speaking not so much to Franny anymore, as to some larger internal audience. "The school board still refuses to close that high school campus at lunchtime," she huffed. "You'd think they might remember who got them going in the first place. I mean, really, Franny! The school board, the Chamber of Commerce, the Botanical Council, even the committee to explore incorporation. None of these had even crossed this town's backward minds before I came." She exhaled as if some large animal had stepped on her chest. "Who knew it would be so much work to manage a little dolls' house like Taubolt?"

"It's a very nice little dolls' house though," Franny reassured her.

"Yes," Agnes conceded wearily, "but between the yahoos moving up here, and the native simpletons, one of me may not be enough to save the place." Somewhere down the street, a string of firecrackers exploded in rapid staccato. "Ugh!" Agnes exclaimed, sloshing her drink onto her blouse in alarm. "Oh! Those hoodlums!" she complained, brushing ineffectually at the wet spots on her breast. "If we had a standing police force here, these lawless children might develop some respect for the rights of decent citizens!"

Franny nodded solemnly, getting up to offer Agnes her napkin.

"It's disgraceful that we're reduced to importing officers all the way from Heeberville for events like this circus of Karl's! God knows what bedlam might erupt amidst such a mob!" Her tirade was cut short as a low-flying helicopter thundered over her rooftop and across her yard on its way toward the parade route.

"God almighty!" she exclaimed, sucking breath like a landed fish. "Ferristaff! A man with his money has no excuse for such manners!"

"The earth is our mother!" Greensong shouted into the video camera trained on her cadre of protesters as they marched under signs and banners decrying Ferristaff's local logging operations. "They're calling Taubolt paradise! Would men rape their mother in paradise? We want Ferristaff out of here NOW, with all his macho men stinking of money and steel!"

"News crews in Taubolt," Franklin muttered, overlooking the angry spectacle from up on the Crow's Nest Bar and Grill's sundeck with Gladys Lindsay and the Connollys. "That I should have lived to see it."

"And policemen," Gladys lamented, gazing down at the two bored-looking officers escorting Greensong's company down the street.

"Came up here for a public interest story," Tom sighed. "Looks like they got it."

"Trouble in paradise," Gladys said grimly. "Far more titillating than the quaint parade they expected, I'm sure. She does put on quite a show. Look at her scream."

"Seems to me she might hate men a little more'n she loves trees," Franklin grunted. "Feelin's mutual from what I've heard. Not sure I like seein' so many of our kids out there beside her either. Couple of 'em came into the store last week to get stuff for those banners. Said she told 'em the planet's proper human population was zero."

"She opposes Ferristaff." Clara shrugged. "Of course the children back her. They're angry about what he's doing to our forests too. Aren't we all?"

"Not like that," Franklin said. "That anger's got nothin' to do with justice."

"For what it's worth, Rose agrees with you," Clara conceded.

"Smart girl, your Rose," said Franklin. He looked up and down the parade route with distaste. "Awful lotta bad seed gettin' spilled in our yard these days. Turns my stomach to watch 'em fight over Taubolt like we'd never even been here."

"There's a television executive from Los Angeles staying at my inn this weekend," Gladys said. "Some friend of Ferristaff's apparently. He tells me they're preparing to film a one-hour special here." She shook her head sadly. "I still can't understand how all this happened so quickly-or at all!"

"Ain't natural. I'll tell you that," Franklin grumbled. "Jake can say what he likes. This ain't just an overcrowded world stumblin' up against us. There's gotta be somethin' behind an invasion like this. Wish I knew what it was, much less how to stop it."

"Well, between the way Hamilton's buying up this town, and Ferristaff the woods," Tom said, "I don't know how much there'll be to save soon. I hate to say it, but maybe we should be looking for someplace else to go."

"Things here that're awful hard to move," Franklin said without looking away from the parade. "You know that well as I do, Tom."

"Yes, I do," Tom sighed. "But we may have to find some way to move even those, Franklin. Ferristaff's already started looking north."

"He won't find it," Franklin said. "Never get in on the ground, and we both know what he'll see from the air."

"Men like him destroy things they can't see all the time," Tom pressed.

"He tries," Franklin said quietly, "I'll do things to him personally that'll make any plans Ms. Greensong's got seem lovesick."

A rhythmic thrumming in the distance made them all look up, along with everyone on the street below, as a helicopter appeared above the roofs at Main Street's far end, and turned in their direction.

"Speakin' of the devil," Franklin spat.

"There you go, Mr. Benzick," Ferristaff said, banking the copter to give his passenger a better view of Main Street. "Not exactly the Macy's parade."

"If it were, I wouldn't be here." Benzick smiled. "Wish we had cameras down there. This is exactly the kind of stuff we're going to want for the special."

"Oh, you'll have no shortage of quaint spectacle." Ferristaff grinned. "Not if the Chamber of Commerce has anything to say about it. Anyway, I heard something about a news crew up here today doing some kind of PR section for a Bay Area station. You'll probably be able to grab some of their footage." He searched the parade route. "There's the cameraman, in fact, ogling the latest little thorn in my side." He nudged the copter forward a few blocks until they were hovering right over Greensong's little band. "Hello, darlin'!" Ferristaff drawled under his breath as everyone below stared up at them. Green-song shook her fist at him, shouting in obvious rage. One more thing to like about helicopter travel, he realized; couldn't hear a damn thing from outside the cockpit. "We've probably ruffled enough feathers here." He grinned. "What next?"

"Well, I'd love a better look at the coastline," Benzick said. "North this time?"

"No problem." Ferristaff banked to head back across town.

"I appreciate your taking time to show me around like this," said Benzick.

"My pleasure," Ferristaff replied. "Shadwell and I go way back. If you all do this TV special, I hope he'll get up here himself, and visit me. You tell him I said so."

"I will." The young man smiled. "The show's already been green-lighted actually. I don't know if you're aware of it, Mr. Ferristaff, but this little town has become quite the hot ticket. You'd think it was Disneyland and Yellowstone rolled into one, the way people are panicking to vacation here now." He fell silent, gazing down at flocks of seabirds wheeling about the surf-washed cliffs, amber fields of grass, and wooded knolls farther inland. In diplomatic deference to his host, he said nothing about the wide, muddy tracts of clear-cut scarring numerous slopes east and south of town. "It is beautiful," he mused. "I still can't imagine how all this went undiscovered for so long."

"Well, that might have something to do with Taubolt's stiff-necked natives," Ferristaff said dryly. "You say 'growth' to them, they think tomatoes and summer squash. Hell, this place has more potential per square acre than Laguna Beach. Every last one of them could be rich for life by now if they had the tiniest bit of business sense. But I'll tell you, Mr. Benzick, these are the sorriest tribe of backward yokels you will ever meet." He grinned humorlessly. "Though I can see that might be a source of some delight to your program director."

"Why antagonize her like that?" Laura asked in disbelief as Ferristaff's craft veered from its brief pause up the street and headed away from town. "Isn't she causing him enough trouble without him poking at the wasps' nest?"

"You'd think," Joby said, as the distant ruckus subsided, and the parade began to move again. "Though she pokes plenty too. Can't expect the logging crowd to hug her for it." It seemed to Joby that there was altogether too much poking going on in Taubolt these days. Even the tourists had changed. Gone were the bemused, accidental visitors that had once wandered so cheerfully in and out of Taubolt's shops and restaurants. Now, the guests at Gladys's inn spent half their time complaining. Stressed and disgruntled couples in bright plastic sun hats and plaid Bermuda shorts moaned about the places they had come from, or irritably listed the ways that Taubolt wasn't living up to whatever they'd been told by magazines or travel agents, while their tetchy children cried or argued in the background. It all left Joby feeling not just glum, but vaguely anxious.

By any rational assessment, Joby's life here had gotten better with each passing year. He had a solid position now in the most idyllic place he could imagine. He was blessed with scores of remarkable friends, and, most wonderfully of all, he had Laura back; a gift he'd never hoped for in the dark years since he'd lost her. And yet, despite all this, there was still some small, hard, fearful knot at the center of him that Taubolt had never managed to reach; some elusive artifact of his unpleasant past. Unable to expunge it, he'd just done his best to ignore it altogether, but it seemed unwilling to ignore him.

To Joby's carefully concealed dismay, that dark lump had settled very quickly between himself and Laura. A creature filled with light and beauty, she gave him fistfuls of the treasure she contained whenever they were together. But each time he reached inside himself to reciprocate, he found that mute, intractable core of empty darkness where the laughter and delight he longed to give her in return should have been. The closer she came, the more frightened he felt that she would see what sat there inside him, and recoil. For more than a year now, he'd done all he could to keep her near, fearful of losing her again, but unable to let her in. Struggling all the while to find some way past the turmoil that stood between himself and all he most wanted, he feared Laura would not let him hide from her much longer.

"Uh-oh," Laura teased. "Better get out your can of crystal repellent."

Abandoning his ruminations, Joby looked up the street to find Molly Redstone, Taubolt's recently arrived New Age maven, and her circle of disciples, all in flowing gowns and ribbons, gliding toward them to recorded strains of ethereal music under a huge purple banner that read, HARMONT HOUSE HERALDS THE COMING DAWN.

Molly had appeared the previous year, insisting that Taubolt sat at the convergence of no less than five geological power vertices, and promptly opened Harmony House, a shop selling every accoutrement required by devotees of alternative health and spirituality. Her weekly meditation and discussion group was very popular among the newer brand of townie now, and her business thrived.

"God will not suffer a witch to live!" shouted a balding man in white shirt and black trousers standing nearby. Joby felt Laura tense in his arms as the man leapt into the street, pointing, rod-armed, at Molly. "A witch is an abomination before the Lord!"

Joby groaned, unable to believe this was happening so soon after Ferristaff's disruptive appearance. A shocked silence rippled through the sea of bystanders in both directions as Molly and her followers sped their pace in stone-faced silence.

"Behold the whore of Babylon!" the man shouted. "It's no dawn she heralds. It's the darkness!" Rushing forward, he tried to grab one of the poles supporting her Harmony House banner, but the woman holding it managed to bang him in the head with it instead, sending him reeling back to the curb, clutching his forehead and looking around as if expecting someone to come to his defense.

"Your god is a bigot, and a murderer of women and children!" one of Molly's disciples spat scornfully at the man.

Molly stopped her with a glance, and said with a sad smile and a voice pitched to carry, "The enlightened are above such bitterness, Alicia." She looked theatrically at her wider audience, and added more loudly, "In becoming the enemy, only the enemy is served. Victory lies only in peace. Be peace." She turned serenely, and moved on, her contingent hurrying after.

"Concubine of the devil!" the man shouted after her, then fled the street, muttering something about the rejection of prophets in their own land as Joby saw the Heeberville police officers who'd been guarding Greensong and the crowd from each other come running in an attempt to intercept the lunatic.

"Laura, let's go," said Joby, as the knot of darkness he'd just been pondering seemed suddenly to squirm and kick inside him like a restless fetus. "This isn't the kind of celebration I was hoping for."

The wind brought gusts of parade noise from the other side of town as Swami and Ander helped Father Crombie slowly up the chapel's back stairs. His hips and knees had grown much worse that winter. Even short walks were a painful labor now.

"Thank you for allowing this, Father," Swami said apologetically.

"We thought it might be safest while everyone is at the parade," said Ander.

"It's like a migraine," Swami groaned, "the constant press of all their greed and grief and . . . and anger. We wouldn't've bothered you, but we didn't know where else-"

"Boys," Crombie interrupted, "there is nothing to explain or apologize for. This is my sacred, and, frankly, most fulfilling task in life. I am well aware of how the particular gifts you two possess must chafe in such troubled times, and I am deeply gratified to help you bear these burdens in whatever way I can." After all these years, it still caused Crombie awe that such creatures should require anything from him at all, and pity, now, that they should reach manhood with so few tools, or even language, with which to cope with what had come at last to Taubolt's doorstep. Crombie took the key from his pocket, and turned it in the back door lock. "Ander, will you go make sure the chapel is empty, and lock the front doors, please?"

When Ander had gone in ahead of them, Crombie continued to lean on Swami's steadying arm as they approached the golden box against the wall behind the altar. Crombie fumbled beneath his shirt for the medallion Jake had given him.

None but the Council were allowed near the Cup now without Crombie's consent. Since the broken world had started pouring through Taubolt's borders, the unpredictable object had been given more and more frequently to spontaneous, sometimes spectacular displays of . . . who knew what? Anger? Fear? . . . Grief? It was impossible to know. But since its outbursts often involved strange plays of brilliant light and sudden flows of sound, soft and eerie or fierce and beautiful, which would be difficult to explain to those best ignorant of Taubolt's secrets, Jake had set wards around the Cup's housing now that none but Crombie and the other Council members could pass.

"Some say the Cup could leave us," Swami said anxiously. "Is it true, Father?"

"That it has a will of its own, and the power to come and go as it wishes is beyond dispute," Crombie replied. "What it will choose, or why, is as much a mystery to me as to anyone else," the priest concluded.

"What would we do if it were gone?" Swami asked even more fearfully. "I have had such terrible dreams."

From this particular boy, the remark was deeply disturbing, but Crombie kept concern from his voice as he replied. "I cannot presume to reassure you about the unreliability of dreams as I would most others, Swami. But it is God who protects us here, and the Cup serves God, just as we do. Even were it called away, our true protector would not abandon us. That much comfort I can offer with confidence."

As they reached the tabernacle, Crombie began to murmur the words only his voice could instill with power. At once there was the sound of choral song as if from very far away, innumerable vocal harmonies, lovely beyond any skill of human composition. As the tabernacle doors unsealed themselves, a warm radiance the color of sunlight through magnolia petals streamed from the widening seams. Father Crombie and his young companions were on their knees before the doors were fully open. What Crombie marveled over most at that moment was not the spectacle before them, but the utter absence of pain in his legs as they had knelt and the certain knowledge that he would have no trouble rising afterward. What the boys might be receiving, he could not guess, but their rapt expressions told him they had all they'd come for.

22.

( Reunion ) "Well, I'd say you're a hit!" Joby enthused as he drove Laura home from her opening at Alice Mayfield's gallery. "Think you can paint fast enough to meet demand?"