Not long after the War, in a village in Kent, there was a small boy who lived in a condition of deepest winter. Every bulk and shadow of his landscape appeared to be battened down against a dark medieval millennium. He woke to dissembling, unreadable skies and went to sleep beneath the blood-tinged slaughter of old, grieving cloud-calamities. He frequently spent whole afternoons swinging on the wrought-iron garden gate, waiting and waiting for some hint that the core of existence showed signs of a thaw. For this he searched the eyes of passing adults, but they, who had long since lost the language of worldform, and whose faces had collapsed into pursy expressions of swindled disgust, usually thought he was pretending to be a dog. They were probably a bit put out by the looks of accusatory dismay they received when they gamely patted the boydogs head. This was because the boy saw them quite clearly ^___as moving fronts; tough scabgrowth over radical excisions of love.

The boy had no word to describe the effect of wintriness in which he lived, or its cause. Nor could he have comprehended the question, had it been put to him. But if he could, he would have answered it very simply: it was always winter because the Sun was missing. Not the tiny painful sun in the sky ^___obviously that was there^___ but the essential radiance at the core. The whole cumbersome world revolved on a lie, an absence; existence was just a thin plate stretched over nothing. An instinct in him knew that this was not an ultimately natural state of affairs, and in this, at least, he felt not alone. Every night he saw the same parade of sad, saurian spirits lumbering over his house, bewildered and plaintive, till a merciful darkness expunged them. Every morning he saw the bodies of things start out again across the vast frozen tundra which stretched right from his windowsill to everywhere.

The boy struggled to grow round this absence, like a fruit forming greenly round a large hard stone. It took much time; time more usefully measured as horizons scanned or abilities gained than as months or years. The ability, for example, to write his name, albeit in tilted rune-strokes, and the ability to sometimes whistle. These were both significant accomplishments because when he wrote his name on something, that something passed it on, which meant that he had agents (or at least potential allies), and whistling was a fine kind of transposed crying, disguised and private, when actual crying tended to irritate grown-ups. Crying, anyway, was not what he wanted to do, not all that often. Whistling, once perfected, would become a sharp fatalistic lament; a threnodic lullaby for when slow currents of sleep snuffed out the failing day. But, in spite of any such additions to his basic strengths, the boy could see that nothing really changed. If anything the world just shrank deeper into its iced immobility. It became clear to him, faced with the prospect of infinite longevity, that something had to be done.

He did the best he could.

He opted to use his liking for stories. He was a solitary child, so his was the world and his the hand that wired it up for meaning. Because of this, the stories he told himself developed a viny continuity, threading his days and dreams unchecked. Of course, all children use stories to tame the world, ringing changes on thick narrative bellropes, tugging with dogged insistence till phenomena settle into a credible lineage of Becauses; this boy was different ^___if at all^___ only in his rather precocious decision not to attempt to repair the present but to sacrifice it.

What he did would be better illustrated than described, yet it was an act so extraordinary in scope, and so desperate, that some description must be attempted. In effect, he turned himself completely inside out and stretched his innerskin like a canvas over the world. Onto that painfully sentient medium, indistinguishable to sight from the world itself, he proceeded to depict, as nearly as he could, the essence of what was wanting. Several words might be used now to express what it was that was missing: God, magic, grace ^___all too spoiled. Perhaps the term 'Benignity' will suffice.

This Work, this opus, wasn't quite in pictures, not really in words. It was more a construct of tones, promises, misapprehensions and prayer. He found he had, unavoidably, to build in certain limitations. This was mostly a matter of resources, since what he was doing was storing a considerable portion of his life's energy in a spectacular pocket where he would be able to discover it later; and since it was a masterpiece ^___a wonder^___ it had to be limited in duration. Once the Work was finished it had to be forgotten, so there needed to be triggering and recognition devices ^___the "story" of his selfgiving. Naturally, the creation was substance only at this point, the accidental details would form from whatever materials were to hand, though even these were pre-imagined as closely as possible. At the end he had a unique artifact which would lure him like a mystical city for the first part of his life and illumine the remainder like a setting sun.

The Work was not done quickly, it took several months, and was done most often during evening twilight so that the following sleep could be used to set the day's effort, letting it sink slowly, radioactively, deep into unmined strata. Neither did the boy know that he was doing it. He just stared out of the window, his arms on the sill and his chin on his hands, chewing the sleeve of his pyjamas. You may think you would have been charmed by such a sight ^___a slender-bodied Christopher Robin in sweetly pensive mood^___ but you would have been shocked. For one thing, he would have been insensible of your approach. Had you then made him look at you, by loudly calling his name or by touching him, you would almost certainly have felt unnerved by the vacancy of his expression; a kind of changeling autism superseded eventually by a fearful stubbornness. Yet he was saying his prayers.

It is because it had to operate at the deepest levels of causation that the Work had to be undertaken at this early age, while instinct yet ruled and all things befronted the boy foursquare ^___roughly or gently^___ in their true shapes, and while he still had the fluidity of perception that could fill the contours of any experience without the inhibition of understanding. It had to be built before the Great Blizzard of words took hold. This is why he could not be conscious of the Work and why the Work itself had to inform him of its own completion. At the appropriate time, something happened which flashed at him like a secret light from far out on a black limitless ocean: he read, or had read to him, a story which thrilled and moved him, sounding deep magistral chords within, like a racial myth. It was the story of the Red Lion.

With his own myth laid, like a garden hidden in a thick forest of thorns, everything went on as normal, but so much of him was bound up in its formation and maintenance that he had, as it were, to begin paying for it at once. He became more withdrawn, somewhat listless, and showed a passivity to things which had not been typical of him before. Books ^___the hieroglyphic storage of stories^___ began to play an increasing part in his life, but he could still often be discovered, as in those earlier months, staring out of his bedroom window like one who stood watch on the bridge of a ship while the shadows outside merged into a sulphurous half-light of wind and eternity.