“The same as you know of knights and great deeds,” Callie said, then looked away from him. Lately, she seemed always to be thinking of babies and marriages and a home of her own. She and Talis had always laughed at such things, thinking that courting couples were a ridiculous sight, but in the last few months it was as though everything about her was different.
Today they had escaped Will’s never-ending chores, and Nigel had escaped his always-questioning pupils, so she and Talis had gone to their favorite place on the side of a hill under a huge, spreading copper beech. The branches of the tree hung so close to the ground they almost formed a room, a place where she and Talis could be alone.
Now, she was standing with her back to the tree, watching him as he thrust about with the rusty old sword Nigel had found for him. Over the years the physical disparity between them had grown. Talis was only sixteen years old but he looked twenty. Already he was six feet tall, broad shouldered, and was developing more muscle with each day. Nearly a year ago, his voice had abruptly changed. No months of cracking, squeaking tones for him. He just woke up one morning and had a deep, and quite gorgeous, voice—the voice of a man.
Talis had not been humble about the good fortune of his maturity. He lorded it over Callie at every opportunity, for adulthood seemed to have passed her by. For all that she was also sixteen years old, she had no curves of a woman. Talis was taller than most adults; Callie was inches shorter than girls her own age.
Her height was not Callie’s only worry, for there were no other signs of maturity on her. She told Meg that bread could be kneaded on her chest, since it was as flat as a bread board. And Will could use her body for a straight edge to build the new chicken coop. One night at supper Callie said that her stomach was so flat that if she swallowed a cherry pit it would show. She said that other girls had red lips and pink cheeks but her face was so pale that if she closed her eyes no one would be able to see her. When Will was planing a narrow, flat board of pale new oak for a bench, Callie said, “I think she’s my twin sister.”
Meg tried her best not to laugh whenever Callie made one of her self-deprecating remarks, but the men howled. Even Will couldn’t keep from laughing when she made one of her disparaging remarks. At least Nigel and Will had the courtesy to make no replies to her woeful comments. But not so Talis. He was a monster; never passed up an opportunity to remind Callie of her little-girl looks.
Handing Callie a mushroom one day, he said she could use it to shield her from the rain. Pea pods were boats. On market day, he once persuaded (he could persuade anybody to do anything) a six-year-old boy to kiss Callie on the cheek and ask her to marry him. Once Talis was arguing with Nigel (a common occurrence), talking about a toy boat Nigel was making. Talis said the bottom of it wasn’t straight but Nigel said it was. In the heat of the argument, Talis held the boat against Callie’s chest. “There, I told you,” Talis said. “Measured against an absolutely flat surface, you can see that it’s not level.”
Will got angry once when a wagon load of gypsies stopped in the village on market day. Talis was astonished when a lushly endowed girl started flirting with him. For a moment he stood gulping in air, his eyes as big as horseshoes as the girl came to stand very close to him, her breasts almost touching his chest.
When she saw them, Callie went into a blind rage, ran at the corner post of Will’s produce stall and with amazing, even unbelievable, strength, knocked the entire booth down on top of Talis. Ignobly, he went sprawling to the ground in the midst of a load of cabbages and tomatoes. To Talis’s mortification, the whole village, and especially the gypsy girl, had a long laugh as he sprawled amid the ruined vegetables.
Talis, hating the laughter at his pride’s expense, took after Callie with murder in his eyes. She further humiliated him by escaping each of his attempts to catch her, finally seeking safety behind Will, who was furious at what had been done to his stall. When Talis demanded that Callie be severely punished (not that he’d actually allow anyone to hurt her, but at that moment he thought that’s what he wanted), Will further angered Talis by taking Callie’s side. “If you’d been tending to business instead of panting after girls twice your age, none of this would have happened.”
Both Callie and Talis were shocked by this statement, but the truth was, Will was worried about Talis’s adult looks. His body was near to being a man’s but his mind was still that of a boy. That was not a good combination. And in spite of his laughter, Will felt sorry for poor Callie with her thin, straight body. In his opinion, the children were the same age and they should look the same age.
The villagers thought the whole episode was enormously entertaining and thereafter teased Talis so often about his gypsy “girlfriend” that he began to be nicknamed “gypsy.” It started out to be a derogatory name given him by the jealous boys, but, much to their dismay, the girls of the village thought the nickname suited Talis’s dark good looks, so they kept calling him that.
Now, Callie and Talis had run off to their favorite place under an enormous copper beech tree; it was where they could be alone, away from others. Here they could be themselves; here they were equal. It didn’t matter that their bodies were so different, for when they were alone, they were the same.
“What’s going to happen to us?” Callie asked seriously. Lately everything seemed serious to her.
“I don’t know. Maybe I can apprentice to a knight and become like Lancelot.”
“Pssph!” Callie said. She hated it when Talis mentioned stories not created by her. Many of her stories were quite as good as that thing about a man who had fallen in love with another man’s wife. She was glad the illicit lovers had both been punished. Talis, however, thought the story was grand. What really bothered Callie about the story was that Lancelot got his strength from remaining a virgin, from never marrying anyone.
Callie glanced down at her flat chest, not so much as a ripple showing in her clothes. Every morning she looked at her body, hoping it had changed into a woman’s body during the night, but it hadn’t. In the village there were girls her age who were married. More important, there were girls in the village older than she who openly said they wanted to marry Talis.
She saw the way he looked at them, watching them as they sauntered by him on market day, their hips twitching, their heads turned away as though they weren’t aware of him. But Callie knew that their sole purpose in life was to get Talis’s attention.
She tried to make jokes about her lack of feminine curves, because she made jokes about everything that hurt her. The truth was, she was worried. What if Talis fell in love with one of them?
She’d tried to talk to Talis about this, but he would jus
t look at her blankly, then start talking about knights and armor and swords. She tried to talk to Meg about girls her age who were married, but Meg wanted Talis and Callie to remain children, so she wouldn’t answer Callie’s questions. She was terrified that the two of them would leave her. Talis joked that if it were left up to Meg she’d still be spoon-feeding them.
Will was the most understanding of Callie’s “problem.” He’d smiled at her and said, “You and Talis are mixed up. In here,” he said, tapping her forehead, “you’re a woman, but nowhere else.” He was too polite to look down at her shapeless body. “Talis is the opposite. He looks like a man but he still thinks like a boy.” When Callie looked sad at this, Will smiled at her. “It’s often this way. Don’t worry, your body will catch up with you and when it does, Talis’s mind will be ready.” He tweaked her under the chin. “One day he will look at you and he will trip over his tongue.”
Callie giggled at this thought and it had sustained her for days. But nothing satisfied her for very long. She always seemed to feel restless. If she was sitting, she wanted to stand, if she was standing, she wanted to walk, if walking, she felt desperate to run. Nothing pleased her. Sometimes she wanted to climb onto Meg’s lap; sometimes she wanted to push Meg away from her.
The worst of everything was the way she had come to look at Talis. He had always been Talis, the person who was always with her. She could not imagine a day without him. They always seemed to want to do the same things at the same time, go the same places. Sometimes she’d be feeding her rabbits and she’d hear Talis “call” her. Within seconds she’d start running and be able to find him wherever he was, whether it was on the banks of the river or even hiding in a tree.
But in the last months it was as though she could only look at him. He was so very, very beautiful. She looked at the way he moved, the way his hair curled. Sometimes when she looked at him, she could feel her blood rush hotly through her body. It was as though she had too much blood for her body to contain.
Talis still wanted to chase her and play as they had always done, but sometimes when he caught her and whirled her about in his strong arms, her heart started pounding. This feeling would make her angry, so she’d jump away from him, sometimes afraid even for him to hold her hand.
Now, everything seemed to have changed. Even sleeping. She and Talis had two separate chicken feather mattresses on the floor of the attic and that’s where they had slept since they were old enough to climb the ladder. But nearly every night, Callie had left her bed and gone to sleep with Talis. He slept so easily and she always felt better cuddled near him.
When Nigel arrived seven years ago, their sleeping together had stopped. Nigel had insisted that curtains be put between the two of them, with his mattress at the foot of the two beds.
Nigel’s arrival had changed a great deal in the Watkins’ household. Meg loved his fine manners and was a bit intimidated by him. But Will treated Nigel as though he were on probation and as though at any moment he could turn into a demon.
From the first moment of his arrival, Nigel said he thought Callie and Talis were odd. Neither Talis nor Callie liked that. No one had ever before said they thought they were strange. The village children accepted them but they saw them only on market days, and the only thing they seemed to think was odd was that Callie and Talis were not brother and sister. Whenever anyone called Callie his sister, Talis adamantly set them straight. And the same was true for Callie.