Read Online Enchantment by Orson Scott Card - Free Book Online

won’t hurt
my
feelings, because I take no pride in my cooking, I know it’s plain food, you must have much better food in America.”
    Ivan laughed and kissed her, but he knew he was doomed. If he didn’t want to spend his whole visit hearing how much better American food must be compared to the miserable Ukrainian fare that she did such a bad job of cooking, he would eat copious helpings of everything.
    So he’d better get in a good long run today, and plenty of work. Though what work there might be for him he couldn’t guess—the farm must be fully mechanized by now, and Ivan had never driven a tractor in his life. He wouldn’t know how to begin plowing or planting.
    He jogged to the road, stretched against the stiffness of his joints and the cold of the morning, then took off at an easy loping pace that he knew he could keep up half the day, or longer. To survive Sophia’s copious meals, he would have to have a good long run every day. Maybe two.
    The roads had been improved a little, too. Not much, for these last few years hadn’t been easy in the Soviet Union. Not a lot of money for capital expenditures or infrastructure maintenance. Yet the roads were smoothly graded. Maybe the locals got together and did it themselves, not waiting for government to come in with money. That’s how government began, wasn’t it? Collective labor. And then somebody got lazy and hired a substitute, and pretty soon it was all taxes instead of the sweat of your back. But it began here, on roads like these, villagers with axes cutting down trees, with picks and spades and prybars pulling out stumps, with sledges and scrapers leveling the road. That’s work even I could do, thought Ivan. But it’s already done.
    Then, abruptly, he realized where he was. North through those trees, and then bearing a little to the northwest, he’d find the trees growing tall and massive, with a canopy so thick that no underbrush grew. And then a clearing in the middle, a circular chasm filled with leaves, and something moving within the leaves.
    He couldn’t understand his own fear, but there it was. He half-expected to see some huge creature, the guardian of the chasm, leap out of the woods and slap his head right off his shoulders, as if it had been waiting for him all these years to punish his intrusion. Irrational, he told himself. Pure foolishness. It never happened anyway, it was a dream born of my fears and anger in that time. No chasm, not even a clearing, and certainly no creature swimming in a lake of leaves, an airshark circling and circling, rustling the detritus of ancient trees as it kept watch for the next curious trespasser to topple down within reach.
    Ivan shook his head and laughed at himself, his voice too loud in the suddenly bright light of sunrise, sounding a little forced. Whistling past a graveyard, wasn’t that the saying? He ran on, staying with the road, another mile or two, pretending that he wasn’t thinking any more about that childish nightmare, pretending that he wasn’t remembering the face of a woman becoming visible, a woman lying on a bed on a pedestal surrounded by dangers.
    Since Ivan was currently leaning toward the idea that fairy tales converged because they satisfied innate psychological hungers, he couldn’t help but wonder what fairy tale he had constructed for himself, with this dream. What kind of inner hungers had stirred him as a child, to make him invent a place like that, a woman so beautiful, a danger so ineffable and dream-like? Was he the hero, torn from his home, and so now he needed some goal for his quest? Or some monster hiding in the leafy deep to do battle with? All of it designed to give meaning to the meaninglessness of his parents’ decision to uproot him, not just from his home, but from his name, his identity, his native language, his friends. Or maybe it was just a way of making concrete the nameless dread that all those changes caused in him. In that case it had served its