Sunlight and Shadow Read Online Free

his cheeks, the first he had shed since he was a boy. And so it was that my great-grandfather came to experience the one kind of bitterness he had never known: the bitterness of remorse. And thus was he justly punished.
    But this was not all. For my great-grandfatherhad done more than blight his own life. He had taken the life of another. And so the powers that watch over the universe now turned to his descendant, to my grandmother. And, through her, to those whose lives had not yet been dreamed of, let alone begun.
    This means me, of course.
    The powers that watch over the universe gave my grandmother, then a young woman, a set of bells. In number, twelve. Mounted on a board of mountain ash. To be struck with a hammer whose head was polished stone cut from the mountain at the heart of the world. And this is what they told her about them: If she could hear the melody of her own heart and sound it out upon the bells, she would call to her side her heart’s true match. Its one true love.
    Kind of sappy. Yes, I know. Also somewhat predictable. Great, nameless powers often make pronouncements of this sort, or so I’m told. Deceptively simple too. Hearing the melody of your own heart, then rendering it up, is not such an easy matter. You can trust me on this one. I know.
    Not only that, but in the meantime, while you’re practicing, there are many other creatures who may be listening, and the melody you play may be the one that calls to their heart, even though it doesn’t match your own. A thing my grandmother discovered the day the grizzly bear showed up in the garden.
    The first she knew about it was a great screech issuing from the house next door. My grandmotherdidn’t pay much attention at first. The neighbors on that side were always making noise about something or other. It was the ominous silence that followed the screech that finally got her notice. That and the great, dark shadow that had suddenly come between her and the morning sun.
    My grandmother looked up from the bench upon which she was sitting. There was a grizzly bear standing at the edge of her vegetable garden. As grizzly bears are primarily carnivorous, it seemed reasonably safe to assume it hadn’t come to pick greens for a salad. In fact, being eaten right there and then was pretty much the only thing that came to my grandmother’s mind.
    In her astonishment and fear, my grandmother let drop the hammer with which she had been playing upon the bells. It struck the largest one on its way to the ground. At the sound it made, the bear made not a roar, but a soft, crooning sound. Its dark eyes gazed straight into my grandmother’s, as if beseeching her for something.
    Slowly, hardly daring to breathe, my grandmother bent and retrieved the hammer. Then, her hand shaking so much she feared the hammer would slip back out again, she began to play the bells once more.
    As she did, the grizzly gave a great sigh of perfect contentment, turned around three times just like the family dog, curled up and went to sleep in the sun. Right on the bed of zucchini, which turned out to bea fine thing as my grandmother had, as always, planted too many of them anyhow.
    And in this way did she come to understand that playing your heart’s true melody upon even so beautiful an instrument was a thing much easier said than done.
    She didn’t give up trying, of course. Would you? I thought not. Soon the grizzly was joined by a brown bear, a sun bear, and a beaver suffering from an identity crisis of magnificent proportion. It was right about then that the neighbors began to murmur the word witch, and my grandmother and great-grandfather, who was now much nicer, began to contemplate leaving town.
    Fortunately for them, the next living, breathing thing my grandmother’s attempt to get her song right summoned was a carpenter. A young man as finely made as any house he hoped to build, who looked at my grandmother with dreams of castles in his