Read Online Seeker by William Nicholson - Free Book Online

if you can. If not, have mercy on me. My heart is breaking. I kiss you as you sleep. Good-bye, heart of my heart. Every day at sunrise I will send you my love, till the day I die. Good-bye, beautiful child of my youth. Until we meet again.
    She knew the letter by heart, every word of it. She had only the faintest memory of her mother, but in that memory, her mother was very beautiful, and her nearness flooded the child with sweet protective love. Her mother's name, Mercy, merging with the words in her letter—"Have mercy on me"—had always seemed to her to be beautiful, loving, and fragile.
    Of course she had asked her father why her mother had left them. He replied,
    "She left to serve the All and Only, who is greater than you or me."
    In time Morning Star had come to understand that her mother had joined a community of holy people called the Nomana.
    "It's the highest calling of all," said her father. "Many offer themselves, but few are chosen. We should be very proud that your mother is among their number."
    Morning Star was more than proud. Secretly she had vowed that as soon as she was old enough, she too would join the Nomana. She had two reasons for believing they would accept her. One was that her mother had been chosen before her. The other was that she could see the colors.
    Morning Star had been able to see the colors all her life. When she had been younger, she had tried to tell other people about them, but they never understood. Even her father didn't understand. They thought she was talking about feelings, using the names of colors, in the manner of people who say, "I'm in a black mood." But what she saw was real colors. She didn't see them all the time, and they were mostly very faint, but they were there, just like the red head-scarves of the hill women. The colors came from people, they came out of people, like a soft colored mist that clung round them. Over the years, she had learned the colors had meaning. Angry people were rimmed with red. Sad people, or sick people, gave off a color like straw yellow, or sometimes a dull blue. People who were cheating or telling lies glowed orange.
Kind people had a red color, but a different red from the angry red, a soft, rose red. There were hundreds of colors, all with their shades of feelings, more than she could ever say; but then, there was no need to say. All she had to do was see and feel.
    She knew this was a gift, but it was a gift that brought her no advantages. Her friends and neighbors in the remote hillside village where she lived knew nothing about it. This made her feel strange, as if she didn't quite belong.
    After breakfast was cleared away and her father was at work on his copying and she still hadn't spoken, she sat on the floor by the stove and played with the puppy. She had a short length of knotted twine, which she pulled along the floor, and the puppy hunted it and pounced on it and shook it by the throat until it was dead. As she played, she let her thoughts run free. What she thought about was the puzzle of the mask.
    Morning Star believed she was quite different on the inside from the way she looked on the outside: so much so that it was as if she went about wearing a mask. Her mother had called her beautiful in her letter, and her father often called her beautiful too, but she knew it was not so. She had a pale oval face, with a little nose and a little mouth, and timid pale blue eyes. The masked Morning Star was docile and useful and lived her life without being noticed. But inside, the real Morning Star was quite different: much more knowing and sharp and critical. It wasn't that she was clever, in the sense of being able to talk cleverly. But all she had to do was look at someone and she knew what it was they most wanted or most feared. A lot of what people said was lies, or at best a kind of noise designed to distract. What they actually did depended on what they wanted and what they feared.
    Take the goatboy, Filka. When he had asked