Five years is a long time to spend your days playing beneath the sun, and especially if they are your only five years. Passing along the forest floor, swinging himself from each nearby branch, the little boy had almost forgotten what day this was--until he heard his name called in the distance, and remembered.

"Yaltring! Come! I have something for your birthday!"

His mother’s voice came faintly, and he recalled her promising him a special gift--a hidden window to the Upper World, she said. The Upper World! The moon and the stars and the sun lived there, walking on the sky. Yaltring wondered if there were doorways in, and if his own world was only a small container.

It was certainly too small for him. He already knew almost every patch of his little island. Somehow he had to get out and find new worlds to explore. Perhaps if he sailed across the sea to where it touched the sky, he could climb into the Upper World.

"Where are you?" his mother cried worriedly.

That was a question she often had to ask; for he was always disappearing. Many times he had run through the woods, often past these very trees, until he tired and collapsed upon the ground. Or he would track the seashore that was not two miles in any direction from where he now stood, careening on and on over scarp and surf--until, suddenly and inexplicably, he settled into the deep wet sand to ferret out every shell he could find within a tiny circle, his bare feet touching the waves, looking out at that sea that opens up onto the great wide world.

"Aren’t you ever coming back to me?"

But at that very moment, his eyes fixed upon a strangely powerful glint of light amidst the treetops at the far corner of his vision, and he did not even hear her call. What could it be? Though surrounded by the woods, the little light was as brilliant as the sun. Indeed, it seemed to Yaltring that the sun was calling him to join him in his splendid world above.

"Yaltri-ing!"

The light suddenly, strangely disappeared. He got up and ran, thinking of the far seas he would have to cross, wondering what the Upper World would be like.

"Yaltring, is that you?" she called, standing in the clearing behind their house, not quite as worried now, hearing a considerable ruckus in the woodland in front of her. Still, it was a ways off...

...or not such a ways...

...a little boy came bursting through the trees.

"Well! It looks like you’ve been all the way through without stopping!" she said as he leaped into her arms, panting. She laughed, and kissed him on the head. "Yaltring akhrishana!" she added, which, in that other language she sometimes used, means something like, "Crazy Yaltring!"

After a while he regained his breath, dropped from her arms, and looked up at her, cocking his head to one side. She brought out a small wooden box from the folds of her dress. "This is for you!" she said, turning to him with a flash in her entrancing dark eyes.

"What is it?" asked Yaltring, taking the box in one little hand, an old woody brown stained with gray. A tiny lever dangled from one side.

"The moon," said she.

He stared at her. "Where?"

"Look inside!"

He lifted the top. Within was an inky black, but around the edges were tiny silver specks, glittering inside a box in the middle of the day.

"How do I get in?"

His mother laughed. "You are not that small, Yaltring. No, don’t put your fingers in. You cannot go inside."

"But I want to get to the moon!"

"It’s the stars you’re looking at," she said in her lilting accent. "The moon is their mother."

"Who is the moon’s mother?"

"She has none. She was before time. But now she is strung on time’s harp. For all her speedy flight, she always returns to her beginning. Turn the handle, and you will see!"

When his finger touched the lever, then he saw the moon at last, a slim crescent lighting the darkness between the stars. As the handle turned the moon grew larger, and the stars spun swiftly around the edge. Each time the handle turned once, so did the stars. Each time the handle passed the top of the box, the moon glowed briefly incandencent before fading back to a wan silver. Slowly, it waxed to a circle, full almost to the limits of the box’s narrow inner space.

But as he kept cranking, a darkness emerged and spread, devouring the moon from its outer edges. Now as the handle reached the top, it was not the moon but the dark of the moon that briefly glowed, a dull, ominous red, and his fingers felt a grinding as they turned. As the encircled silver contracted to a crescent, the grinding feeeling grew when the red glow appeared, till he started hearing a roar, faint and ominous, sullen growl of the moon’s afterbirth. The crescent vanished, leaving only the spinning stars, and the completed red disk growled its last before fading to black.

Then for a fleeting moment, he thought he glimpsed a flash of sunlight in the center of the box--a stark golden circle, brilliant but broken, as if riven from below by a dark finger. The image vanished before he was sure it was there, and the crescent moon reappeared.

He turned his wondering eyes to his mother’s face. "Will it take me up to the sky?" he asked.

"Not that way. The moon inside the box and the moon above are tied by an invisible thread. It is only by looking down that you will get there. You hold her captured already in your eyes."

He gave her a puzzled frown. "But what if I sailed all the way across the ocean? Could I get into the Upper World then?"

She shook her head. "The pathways are too high and fast for us. Only the Sky People can find the place where the sky meets the sea. They are the Fearless Ones, dwelling in the Upper World. Beyond them is the void, which you or I could not bear to look at; but it does not frighten them. And she is past the reach of them all."

Her voice became soft and earnest as she cupped his cheek in her hand, kneeling to his level and looking straight into his eyes.

"To the moon, Yaltring, our world is like this box, as she looks in on us from above. Keep it with you, always, and remember that she is always there. Remember before she rises, and after she sets. Remember when clouds cover her, and when she disappears into her monthly dark. Remember in the day, when the sun’s violent light overpowers everything seen. Remember it as the unseen that you, unlike any other, carry with you.

"This I give you, a gift from my grandmother, passed on through the hands of women, washed up on the shores of Tizrach long ago. It was not meant for a boy. But you will keep it. It has a greater power than you know. Remember."

"Where does the ocean go to, daddy?"

The man stopped digging in the garden and looked up to see Yaltring walking around the house into the front yard. "Anywhere you want it to, if you know how to ride it," he replied in his rich voice, earthy and deep. "Wherever a fair wind will carry you."

The boy stared back at him. "How do you know if a wind is fair?" he asked.

"If it blows the way you want it to! But, there are ways of getting there, whether it does or not."

The front door opened, and the mother strode into the yard, a bunch of carrots dangling from one hand. "Don’t encourage him, Drengo!" she exclaimed. "Five year old boys have enough ideas about running from home, without their fathers telling them how to sail away."

"I’m not telling him how to sail away," Drengo replied with some amusement. "If sailing could be taught by telling, there’d be a lot fewer fools at the bottom of the sea."

"All the same--"

"Hey, daddy, what’s the farthest place there is?"

"Well, there’s the Western Isles--"

"Drengo, please!"

The man laughed, shaking the shaggy hair that hung in loose coils upon his heavy-set shoulders. "Don’t worry, Sila," he said to his wife. "I’ve never heard of a five year old sailing to the Western Isles. Not even a six year old." He gave Yaltring a wink.

Sila shook her head in disgust.

"Actually," Drengo continued with a grin, "I think the Far North is further, but you wouldn’t want to go there--it’s too cold. But that’s all right. You can always try to find Essin instead. That’s so far away, no one even knows where it is."

"What’s Essin, daddy?"

"It’s supposed to be it’s the greatest land in all the world, though nobody’s ever been there. Umba’s the biggest known land. That’s the one they call the Mainland. Everything else is just an island."

"Does the ocean go to the Mainland?"

His father smiled. "Yes, it does--if you sail on it for a month or two." He pointed to the afternoon sun, and the horizon beyond. "You follow the setting sun. Of course," he nodded to Sila, "you have to know exactly what you’re doing before you sail so far."

Yaltring stared out into the sky, following his father’s hand. Then he turned around. "What’s out that way?" he yelped. "Out where you’re building the boat?"

"Water."

"Water?"

"Salt-water. Sea-water. No land. Many people died trying to find land out there. Some were from this island." Drengo paused, frowned. "It’s best not to sail out of sight of land in that direction," he said.

"It’s best not to wade in above your waist," Sila replied tartly, "until you are at least seven. And if a boat sets out, and no one on board knows how to sail, the only land they’ll find is at the bottom of the sea."

"Very true," Drengo said.

"Come on, Yaltring," said Sila, taking the boy by the hand, "help me with the vegetables. They have a wisdom of their own. And if you want to become a man, you, too, will have to learn how to grow without moving."

The boy turned and followed her back through the house. "The rhythms of the earth are like the rhythms of the sky," she murmured, "blossom and wither, wax and wane. It’s the same with us: rooting our feet like plants on the ground, wandering with the sun and moon, but like them always returning to the same place. Later on, I’ll show you what I mean."

That night, just when he was ready for bed, she took him by the hand and wordlessly led him outside. They strode through the cool crisp air, laden with the chirps of crickets and ribbiting frogs. The sky above was clear and brilliant, raining with stars, scattered droplike around a great milky river. And presiding over the whole was the moon, queen and mother to them all, like a pool of starlight gathered in a single house. A pale shadow was barely visible in the sheared space above her, where three days before she had been full and round.

The woman pointed to the moon. "Look at her," she whispered, "alone in the sky, fleeing even her children. She runs, she never stops running. But it is only to find the dark, empty space.

"Open your arms, Yaltring, and close your eyes. Feel the whole world close at hand. It runs over your skin and seeps inside. Feel how it possesses you, caresses. Can you feel it?"

The little boy said nothing, but with closed eyes swayed slightly back and forth, in rhythm with a fitful breeze that made the leaves rattle softly on the eaves of the forest in front of them. His mother smiled, and started to move in the same rhythm, never shutting her eyes, watching him and moving as if with his movement, with a lithe, self-assured lilt against the boy’s wobbly motions.

After a time, she took him in her arms, so lightly that they barely touched, her hands pressing the sides of his wrists, her breasts leaning against his back. In rhythm together, they rocked on and on under the cool currents of the evening, until at last the panting boy stopped, turned, and looked into her eyes, leaning against her body and wrapping his arms around her.

She picked him up and carried him into the shadowy house, built of the woods behind it, as enclosing as her arms, endless and restless as the sea. Blacker it was than the sunless sky, the world that awaited him there; brightened only with the self-staining light, from the furnace of dreams.