Spirit Walker

by David Farland

  A child, he thought after a moment. A little girl has a crush on me? Who could it be?

  He’d have to let the girl down gently.

  But another thought came. Perhaps it was someone who had nothing at all, not even some poor necklace that held good kwea.

  He suddenly thought of the one woman who fit that description. His heart began racing in his chest. He stood up to look for her, entered his home, and found Wisteria sleeping on his mat on the floor.

  She woke when the swinging door scraped the dirt floor. Her eyes were red and swollen, as if she’d cried all night, and her hair was sweaty and matted, her blouse and skirt rumpled. She didn’t say a word, just rose from the floor and sidled past him, back out the door. She stepped into the sunlight in the circle and stood with her chestnut hair gleaming, daisies at her feet.

  He could not believe it. “Are you sure?”

  “Sure?” Wisteria said, placing a hand on her forehead as if to test for a fever. “Yes. I’m sure.”

  Tull studied her.

  “I’m tired. I’m hungry. I’m desperate,” she continued. “I’m hurting inside, and I’m mad as hell. You know I’ve always been fond of you—from the time we were children—but I wasn’t sure … if those feelings would last. Then, this morning it all came clear to me. I’m in love with you. I’ve been in love with you for years. But I was afraid that my father would disapprove….”

  “When he stumbled into me last night,” Tull said, “I grabbed him to keep from falling. I didn’t even know who’d hit me, and then I realized someone was trying to escape. I threw him back into the crowd and held him at the same time. I didn’t know it was him. I swear, if I’d have had time to think, I’d have let him go.”

  Wisteria began to tremble. Tears misted her eyes. “I know,” she whispered.

  “We were all crazy last night,” Tull said. “We just stood there and watched it happen. I didn’t have time to think, to decide if what we were doing was right.”

  Even now, Tull wasn’t sure. Had Beremon gotten what he deserved? Tull hated slavers, hated the pain that they caused. Part of him said, Yes, they deserve it. Yet he could never have killed the man himself.

  “I know,” Wisteria said again.

  “And if you marry me,” Tull answered, “You will have to live with that. You’ll remember every day of our lives that I betrayed him.”

  “You didn’t,” she said, wiping her face. “It was an accident.”

  “And if you marry me,” Tull said, “you will still be alone for a long time. I’m leaving in a week, and I won’t be back until midwinter. This will be a lonely time for you. The hardest in your life.”

  Wisteria sat down on the grass and began coughing up great wracking sobs. After several moments she said, “I don’t want to be alone. I don’t want to be without you! I can't stay in this town right now anyway. It hurts too much. Everything reminds me of what happened last night. I want to come with you.”

  Tull studied her. Always before, humans had seemed so … emotionally resilient, or perhaps just emotionally sheltered. They were never destroyed by pain half so much as the Pwi. To see Wisteria this way, weeping in the grass, he could almost imagine she was Pwi at heart, that the evil kwea of last night would drive her away from here. And Tull realized something else—he was trying to talk her out of this marriage in spite of the fact that he desired it, in spite of the fact that he wanted it so badly he couldn’t bear the thought of losing her.

  “You’ve never loved me,” he suddenly said. “Not completely.” She didn’t love him the way that a Pwi woman would.

  She looked up. “I was too young for commitment. When we were younger and I kissed you, I was … crazy with want. When Father sent me away, I dreamed about what life would be like with you, about how it would be to make love to you, and twice I tried to run away from Lady Devarre’s. But last night, when I ached for someone to comfort me, I realized that I needed you. Without you, I’m … only half a person.”

  Tull wanted her, but this all seemed so sudden. For months now he had been thinking about Fava. She was a simple girl, strong, and the quaint scent of vanilla water in Fava’s hair charmed him. But from his youth, Tull had imagined life with Wisteria. The attraction he felt for her was strong. Suddenly Tull understood his fear, his hesitancy to enter the circle. He took a deep breath and almost choked as he offered his last excuse—his only real reason for hesitating, “Wisteria, I’m afraid to marry you. My father—I … I don’t know how to love. When I was younger, I didn’t believe in love. For years I felt dead inside, as if I were the world’s lone witness to a great joke—the fact that everyone else believed that such a thing existed when obviously, so obviously, love was a lie. But over the years, I realized that love exists, that everyone else feels it but me. I want to feel it for you. I feel something. I feel drawn to you. But you’re as human as my father, and I’m afraid of that.”

  Tull didn’t know if Wisteria could understand. She looked up at him, her eyes wet and bloodshot, though no tears flowed down her cheeks. She sniffled, and said very clearly. “I’m not like him. Jenks is a twisted man, even for a human. But love? Love is easy. I’ll show you how to love.”

  Tull found himself staggering into the circle. All the years of waiting to love seemed to collapse inward; all the walls he’d built against it tumbled down. He wasn’t even aware that his feet were moving till he stood in the second circle and took her hands.

  She held her palms out and up, in a beggar’s gesture, and they clasped one another’s wrists. She spoke the words of the wedding ritual, though she had no friend to witness. “I seek shelter from loneliness. I bring all that you see within this circle. But mostly, I bring my heart.”

  Tull’s jaw trembled. “This house, it is empty without you, just as I am empty without you. I offer you shelter, until hand in hand we take our journey to the House of Dust.”

  He kissed her, a long slow kiss, and carried her into his house.

  It did not seem right to make love to her. He knew she had been up all night, knew that she needed consolation. Yet he could not refrain. The desire that was in him pulled him, tore him till he was tossed in the wind like dandelion down in a storm, and she seemed eager to caress him and give herself.

  Wisteria’s voice was husky as he pulled her to him. “You don’t know how often I dreamed of this. I’ll teach you how to love,” she said, cupping his head in her hands. “I’ll show you how.”

  Among the Pwi, it is said that when two people first make love, that the Goddess Zhofwa bends near the land and blows her kisses upon them, and at that moment, their act becomes holy, Thea, and if the love is pure the Goddess will enter them for a time to join the dance of the lovers’ bodies.

  Tull held Wisteria, wanted to drink her with his eyes, learn the colors of every mole on her body.

  The air suddenly seemed fresh and clean. He felt the Goddess kiss him in the small of the back, and an intense cool thrill of pleasure passed down his back and into his groin. It felt as good as he’d dreamed love could be, and for the first time he knew that he could be touched by love, that he could give.

  Chapter 11: Grim Preparations

  After the executions, the town of Smilodon Bay went sullenly quiet. Only six funeral pyres roared that day—for no one even found the body of Beremon—and the smell of charcoal and flesh seemed to loom over the town. Each person mourned the dead in solitude. Though Phylomon stalked through town often that day, no one sought his company, which was fine with him.

  It was foolish for them to grieve. The town should have been celebrating the purge of slavers.

  Still, no one sought to strike back at him that day. Instead, the city brooded.

  The fourth day of Phylomon’s visit, the woodland mastodon that was to pull the wagon arrived from the miners at White Rock. It was a hulking brute, sixteen feet at the shoulder, well over forty years old, with the unpromising name of Snail Follower.

  The miner brought the mastodon into town draggi
ng a redwood log that was fifteen feet around and thirty feet long, convincing Phylomon that if any beast could pull a wagon carrying twelve tons of water and sea serpents over the plains, this one could.

  Theron Scandal grinned all over. “Ayaah, it’s a bad name,” Scandal admitted as he patted the mastodon’s dusty legs and inspected its swollen feet, “but I’ve been assured that the beast is tougher than a Neanderthal’s skull.”

  “But it’s a woodland mastodon,” Phylomon pointed out. “It can’t tolerate the high, cold country in the White Mountains, and it will likely take sick if driven too fast. He’s a powerful brute, but he’ll need to rest often. We can’t have him pull for more than four or five hours a day.”

  Scandal just rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “There’s no mammoths to be had around here,” he said ruefully.

  He was right. Phylomon had an adage: “All you can do, is all you can do.”

  He would not waste time regretting the fact that he only had one good mastodon to pull the wagon. Like this town, he thought, I should be celebrating my good fortune.

  In spite of the upcoming hardships, Tull felt eager to leave Smilodon Bay. The somber mood in town, the fight with his parents, the executions—all had combined to make home an ugly place in the past few days.

  Tull was too near his parents’ house when he went to see the mastodon. He could feel the kwea of his childhood home around the bend, as if the area emanated pain, and he smiled grimly.

  He worried for his little brother Wayan, worried so much that he was tempted to go see the child.

  He wanted to escape the ugliness and fear of this place, and felt that it would feel good to get into the wilderness. It would feel good most of all because he’d be with Wisteria.

  That evening, Scandal met Phylomon in the common room at the inn and said, “Well, I can’t believe it, but over the past two days, I’ve asked every man in town to come with us, and no one will go. You’ve won no friends here.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Phylomon answered. “Executioners are never popular.”

  Scandal’s squirrels hopped from table to table, looking for hazelnuts. His pet snakebird woke, and Scandal cut bits of meat into cubes, held them on the tip of a knife, and waved them in front of the bird.

  The bird hissed and lashed out, grabbing meat between its sharp teeth. “Still,” Scandal said, “I’d hoped someone would come, perhaps a few more Pwi. The only person who has made plans to come is a girl: Wisteria Altair. You killed her mother and father, and now she’s married to Tull Genet, the big Tcho-Pwi.”

  “I told you that I was tempted to kill any human that tries to come on this quest with us,” Phylomon said. “Why should she be an exception?” He peered hard at Scandal, and added. “She’s a plant. Our enemies have sent her.”

  “Now look here,” Scandal said, waving his knife at Phylomon. “If you touch one hair on that girl’s head, the folks here will stick a skewer up your arse and cook you as the main course for a town barbecue. The town may seem quiet, but folks are outraged.”

  Phylomon cocked an eyebrow. “Indeed,” he said. “Go on. I seldom have anyone express their thoughts so candidly.”

  Scandal leaned back in his chair. “You take Wisteria’s father, Beremon. He was a Dicton, and I can’t say he had a close friend. People that smart, they don't have equals. But you had to know that Javan Tech woman. She was the Queen Bitch of the town. Even her ever-mourning husband would tell you that Beremon did this town a favor. Beremon didn’t have a mean bone in his body, and, as for Elyssa—well, no one has ever executed a woman on this entire coast, not unless she’s done murder.”

  “Indeed?” Phylomon said, raising one hairless blue eyebrow.

  “Ayaah,” Scandal said. “I’m afraid that some folks are thinking you waltzed in here and mucked everything up.”

  “It’s easy to forgive a man for a crime he’s committed against someone else, long ago,” Phylomon said.

  “Yet I showed those slavers more mercy than they showed their victims. Javan Tech was put into a whorehouse, chained to a bedpost. The men of Craal gave her to their Neanderthal warriors, trying to tame her. They were brutal. One night, she picked the lock to her shackles and fled. The Blade Kin hunted her by scent, and when they caught her, they broke her ankles so that she could never run again.

  “They put her to work cleaning the floors of the barracks, with nothing but a dirty rag, for she will never walk again. Instead, she scoots herself over the cobblestones on her hips.

  “After years of suffering, the woman I met was so humble, she had become beautiful.

  “You dislike her for the woman she was, I respect and admire her for what she has become. That’s the problem with slavers. They’re blind to the value of human life, to the greatness of human potential.”

  When Phylomon fell silent, Theron Scandal studied him thoughtfully. Javan Tech had been a horrible woman, and if she’d remained in this town, she might be horrible still. Perhaps it was only hardship that had made her a better person.

  “I think,” Scandal said, “that Wisteria can become a beauty, too. You may not trust her with your life, but I am willing to trust her with mine.”

  Phylomon studied him for a long moment, bit his lower lip. “You know her better than I do. If the rest of the party feels the same, she can join the quest.”

  When Tull and Wisteria arrived at the inn later that night, Phylomon studied them. Tull was both larger and stronger than the typical Pwi or human. He was a hybrid, embodying traits from both peoples.

  His eyes shone with a kind of cold anger. Phylomon thought. So this is the man who shall lead an army to destroy Craal. He does not look like a military genius.

  He studied Wisteria. She was tall, strong, lithe—a form that was the favorite among the ancient Starfarers. She looked much like her mother. A thousand years ago, she’d have been considered a beauty. Like most short-lived persons, or temporaries, as Phylomon called them, she had not lived long enough to gain control over her body. Her wrath was evident in the flaring of her nostrils, her fear in the way she shifted her feet and clasped her hands to hide them. Her pupils were constricted, and her jaw quivered.

  Phylomon considered Chaa’s warning a few nights earlier: “Your enemies will have power over you.” Phylomon knew that this girl was trouble. Within him, he felt the symbiote stir.

  I taste your fear, the symbiote whispered.

  Phylomon tried to calm himself. There is nothing to fear for now, Old Friend, Phylomon answered.

  Following Wisteria came Ayuvah, and Little Chaa. Phylomon studied the Pwi. They were more in awe of him than terrified or outraged.

  They sat at one of the big tables in the common room. The hearth had only a small fire lit, just enough to give the room a warm glow. The inn was strangely empty. The people of the town were avoiding it, and that was fine with Phylomon. It meant that when he ordered a tankard of beer or a plate of food, the service would come that much faster.

  Slapping his hands on the table, Phylomon got their little meeting started by addressing Wisteria. “I understand you want to come with us to Seven Ogre River. I’ll tell you to your face, I don’t trust you. I don’t want you there, and I’ll only consent to your presence if these men vote in unison against me. So I ask you plainly, do you come to help our quest, or hinder it?”

  Wisteria considered her answer for only an instant. “I don’t care if this quest succeeds or not. This town means nothing to me, now. I’ve been away for years. The people have changed, my parents are dead. The house that I lived in is just a painful reminder of them. I want to get away from here. I want to be with my husband.”

  “You choose odd company,” Phylomon said, “your parents’ executioner, and the man who captured your father when he would have escaped.”

  Wisteria’s lower lip trembled. “Tull is innocent, but you’re not. If you were to die tomorrow, I doubt that I could refrain from smiling.”

  “I’m sure. But you’ll find that I’m ve
ry durable when we get to the Rough—tougher than you would ever believe.” Phylomon held her eyes a moment. It was an old habit. He wanted to warn her against trying to kill him. “You won't see me die. Yet I admire your honesty.”

  “I don’t want your compliments,” Wisteria said.

  Phylomon looked at the floor reflectively, “I am an enemy to Craal and all its minions, even those who think themselves to be good people. Do you remember the woman your father sold into slavery, Javan Tech?”

  Wisteria shook her head.

  “She remembers you,” Phylomon said. “She worked cleaning in the palace of Lord Thanafir at Greenstone. She was not old, but she was starling thin, a drudge who scrubbed beer and dog piss from the floors in the Lord’s dining hall. Her left breast had been removed, as are the breasts of all women slaves in Craal once the Lords have tired of using them for toys. She coughed frequently when she spoke, sometimes spitting blood, claiming fumes from the lye she used to clean had eaten her throat raw, and she told me of her home in Smilodon Bay. She remembered this place as heaven. She said, ‘It’s such a beautiful place, with redwoods and the mountains and the sea.’ She said, ‘Beremon, when he took me as a slave, he treated me kind. Didn’t beat me bad, or anything. He even let his little girl bring me food and water.’”

  Wisteria’s eyes widened, and she stepped back, as if afraid Phylomon would draw his sword and deliver a killing blow, but the blue man continued, “I won’t kill you for what your parents made you do. Javan said your father was the best master she ever had. She loved this town, wanted to return with all her heart. But even if I had freed her, she was too ill to make the voyage home.” Phylomon watched Wisteria a moment. “You hear only rumors of the evil of the Slave Lords in Craal, but I’ve seen the evil done to that woman. I didn’t kill your parents just because they sold her into slavery—I killed them because of the greater crimes committed to Javan afterward.”