When at last I look at them again, Firescape has her eyes closed and Hoot is checking out the scenery. The Moment collapses, just like that.
I look at Creepy Lou. He smiles, scratches his head and says, “Wow.”
Before I can ask why, Hoot says, “You know, this road goes straight up through the trees for quite a bit. Wanna ask your invisible compadres if it’s worth a look?”
I peer in the direction Hoot specifies. The road does just what he says, it goes straight up into the trees and disappears. It don’t look like much, just chewed up tarmac trail covered in leaves and needles. In the middle of it, a sea gull pecks at a fir cone, looking seriously out-of-place up here in the piney woods.
Is this it? I ask Pedro and Doug and all their respective kith and kin in the worlds of tree and spirit. Is this the road to the Sacred Place?
Perhaps there is no such place, says a Voice from a dark corner of my head.
There is a momentary scuffle in my noggin between it and me. I determine to win.
Of course there’s such a place, I tell it (or tell myself, depending). I take a deep sip of the fir-tangy fog and try to picture the Place, and suddenly I see it, clear as if I’d been clobbered on the head by a fairy godmom: an overturned bowl made of branches and patched with mud spills smoke into a clearing in the middle of a grove of trees. I know that, inside, the Place smells of smoke and evergreen and sweat. I been there. I also know that there is not here.
“Let’s go,” I say and lead on up the road. The sea gull squawks at us, all indignant, and flaps away, fir cone and all.
We drive the Vespas as far as we can, then, when the road gets too rough, we walk them and walk them and walk them and walk them.
“When will be there?” asks Firescape.
I want to tell her “soon.” But, the vision has faded and I am tired and cold and sweaty and my throat is on fire. So, this simple question hits me sideways and I realize in this big, chilling, awful Moment that I just don’t know if we’ll ever be there, or if there’s even anywhere to be.
Yeah, sure, I had this epiphany and all. But I have epiphanies every day, and the fact is, I’m not sure how real they are. I mean, it strikes me suddenly that a lot of the stuff that happens to me is a little weird and that I’m the only one who hears the whispers of Douglas firs and dead Indians.
Well, okay, supposedly Lou hears dead Indians, too, but somehow I don’t find this terribly comforting. I’m willing to bet I’m the only one who sees dead Indians, and magical threads and even Chinese Dragon wizards.
And that’s the most awful thought of all: I realize with the suddenness of lightning that I am the only one who has ever seen Master Chen or heard his Voice. Okay, except for Squint, you might say. But Squint is not here for me to consult, ni dong, so that does me squiddle in my present frame of mind.
But the shrine! whimpers my brain. Creepy Lou saw the shrine, and the monk who told me about Chen, and the ninja who told me Chen was sleeping. And someone has to be before he can be asleep.
This is not helping. I seize on the fact that Jade saw the monk, too. My brain wracks itself trying to remember if she heard the monk tell me about Chen and wondering what would happen if I just asked her. Meanwhile, a more collected part of me informs the various uncollected parts that we don’t have time for this.
This is when I have another sort of epiphany: it strikes me that even though I am the only one who has seen Chen or talked to Pedro or heard and understood a Whisperer, these people have followed me up this Mountain as if I knew what the hell I was doing.
Great. Now I got guilt on top of a stunning lack of self-confidence. And on top of both, I am suddenly scared spitless. What if there are no Whisperers and no Chen? What if Doug is just a garden variety fir tree?
I’ve had doubts before, ni dong. But they were doubts about me, not about stuff that counted. Not drag-the-earth-out-from under-my-feet doubts. Now it’s like I’m standing in a North Beach undertow with Whisperers inside my head, only these Whisperers are from the Dark Side of Taco Del.
I am having a crisis. Problem is, my Collected Part is right: I don’t have time for a crisis. There are people looking at me, believing in me, waiting for me to do something, to lead them somewhere.
You may lead them straight to hell, says that nasty Voice from the Dark Corner of Taco's brain.
I tell it to shut up, to go away, to friggin' frag itself. Then take a deep, shaky breath. Fir perfume rides in on it and my life flashes before my eyes. I scramble to take inventory. Since it’d take too long to go over it all, I just hit the high points: mi madre y padre, Hoot, Bags, Kaymart, Doug, Jade, the Dolores, Pedro. I see, immediate, that all the high points of my life are people (if you interpret "people" pretty loosely). Then, I see all the connections between them and me and realize that those connections are a lot like the threads that bind the magics together. You can’t see them — not really — but you know they’re there.
A question forms in my head. I look at my friends and my wife — who are still waiting for me to say something — and say, “Do you believe we’re gonna find the Place?”
There’s this truly awful silence, during which Jade’s lovely brow furrows most prodigiously.
“Duh, Del,” she says. “I only asked when we’d get there.”
Well.
“It’s a shortcut,” I say, and head on up.
oOo
Something about walking in silence makes the brain work. This is because this really cool mechanism called autonomic reflexes knows how to put one foot in front of the other over almost any kind of terrain, so the brain, which might otherwise be busy directing footwork, has nothing to do but take in scenery. In a shabu dong, there ain’t much in the way of scenery to take in, so the brain is at loose ends and finds itself something else to do.
In this case, my particular brain starts to work on Chen’s riddle. I fall back beside my inestimable wife and pant, “I am thinking about who Chen is, or at least, who he thinks he is.”
“Sounds like a good think,” she says, not panting much at all anymore.
“He gave me a riddle to solve,” I say. “Wanna hear it?”
She spocks an eyebrow at me. “When’d he have time to give you a riddle?”
“Tonight — I mean last night — in the alley, while all hell was breaking loose and ninjas abounded.”
“He was in the alley?”
“Yeah. You were otherwise engaged, or you might’ve seen him. Squint sure got an eyeful of him,” I add, and try not to make it sound as if I am defending my grasp on reality. “Which is why I ended up with this coat and the spirit rattle. Chen went off after Squint.”
She nods. “Let’s hear the riddle.”
I recite: “I am unity and I am duality. I am one and I am legion. Before the Flood, I sired a nation; after the Flood, the soul of a nation. Because of me, all spirits cried in agony, as the innermost secrets of nature were revealed by my command. Immortals fear me, for I have quested and sought out the elixir of their wealth — and, behold, I shall seize it.”
“Sounds like a bad case of multiple personalities,” says Jade.
“Or past life regression,” offers Hoot from just behind us. “He’s talkin' like he’s been a bunch of people.”
“I’m not sure it’s past lives, exactly,” I say. “He made some crack about being around before the Gam Saan. And then there’s that bit about the wealth of the Immortals.”
“Which’d be immortality,” says Hoot.
“You’d think. So, he’s been legions of people, but right now he’s one. I mean, he can only be one at a time.”
“We hope,” says Jade Berengaria Firescape with some feeling. “’Cause he also says he’s two.”
“Well, then maybe he is talking re-incarnation,” I say. “The body takes a dive, the spirit repeats.”
“But why two?” asks Firescape.
I don’t have an answer for that, so I forge on. “He says, ‘Before the Flood, I sired a nation;
after the Flood, the soul of a nation.’”
“As in Noah’s Ark?” asks Lou.
“No,” says Firescape. “The Great Flood of China. The Yellow River overflowed its banks bigtime for years, says the history. So, it sounds like he’s saying he was a pretty big deal on both sides of the Flood.”
“Yeah, I’ll say,” snorts Hoot. “You’d have to be a pretty big deal to sire a whole nation.”
“No, no, no!” Firescape bounces a little. “He’s the father of China! Huang-ti, the Yellow Emperor! He was the one who unified China, who made laws and set up trade. Before the Flood.”
“Okay, father of a nation,” says Hoot. “Kinda like Jerry Steinmetz is the father of Embarcadero. But what about the soul of the nation? Did he, like, found a religion or something?”
Firescape shakes her head and tugs at her lower lip. “Not Huang-ti. But he’s somebody else after the Flood, right? Lemme think on this,” she says. “I know this.”
“But what about the crying spirits?” I ask. “What’s that about?”
Firescape waves her hand as if I’m a pesky mosquito. “That’s about Huang-ti, too. Or it’s about his minister, anyway. The legends say this minister made the spirits of all things cry out by revealing their innermost secrets.”
“How’d he do that?” asks Lou.
“Same way we do, I guess,” says my no-nonsense wife. “In books.”
“Did they have books in ancient China?” I ask, then, thunderclap, blinding flash of insight. “He invented writing!”
“Yeah. Huang-ti thought it’d help unify the people, so he commanded that the language be written down. Now if you guys don’t mind, I’d really like to think, okay?” She sweeps us all with an especially pointy look.
We decide unanimously that it’s best to observe silence while Firescape thinks.
During our silence, Lou and Hoot get ahead of me and Firescape — so far ahead we can’t see them any more. But we hear them when my good buddy Creepy Lou yells, “Looky-dooky!” at the top of his lungs.
With a glance at each other, Firescape and I hustle our bikes up the trail as fast as we can.
At the top of the grade, we burst out of the trees and onto the edge of a road. It is a shiny black road with a bright yellow stripe down the middle. I suspect this might even be the same road we were on earlier, just doubled back.
Across the shiny black road from where we have come up are twin pillars made of white stone. Between them is a black wrought-iron gate. A big gate. It’s closed over the smooth, black tarmac and it is what has beckoned to Hoot and Lou.
“Blackhawk,” says Firescape. She is reading from the larger-than-life gold letters on a huge polished boulder. “Is this the place?”
I don’t think this is the place, as it happens, but Hoot and Lou obviously think it’s something, because Lou is bouncing up and down on his Vespa like he’s spring-loaded, and Hoot is standing in front of the closed gate, tinkering with something on the front of it where it meets the left-hand pillar.
Before I can yell out a wherefore, the gate glides open and Lou just up and scooters right on through. Hoot throws a leg over his bike and takes off after him, leaving me and Firescape sitting there, across the road, staring at each other.
Naturally, we mount up and follow.
Inside the gates and around a curve is this little house. Two guys in dark blue unis are leaping all over its itty-bitty patch-o-grass and gesturing up the road in the direction we are going. As we putter by, they commence to yelling. I suspect they are border guards and are excited because we have just invaded their barrio. I feel bad about foregoing protocol, but I figure this is an emergency.
I gotta wonder, though, about their lack of weaponry and knightly aplomb. The thought of Embarcaderan knighties jumping around like toads while their border is penetrated by guys on Vespas sends me into a fit of giggles.
Damn, but I’m tired.
The giggles stop most quickly when I see the kind of place this is. It is a ghetto of castles and palaces, each one with its own Farm. I can’t get a clear look at any of these palaces, ni dong — only a ridge-pole here, a chimney there, a row of windows or pillars. But I can still tell that these are unlike anything we got even up on the Knob. These are like little Camelots, and I gotta wonder if the aliens come from a land of kings and queens with very tiny realms. Maybe these are the homes of John Makepeace’s mysterious and mythical Backers who, according him, are pretty loaded. If this is so, I also gotta wonder how these folks maintain their realms with guards as feckless as those guys in the little guard house.
Maybe, I reason, this is what happens when dudes become knighties. I mean, women are much better suited to this function as they got finely tuned protective instincts, are truly crafty, and are not overly impressed with hardware. It’s a rare jake who can handle the power invested in a knightie without getting a little jinked up by it. This is why most Embarcaderan knighties are women and why we have such a well-disciplined police force.
My giggles are long gone when Firescape cries out and comes to a stop. I see right off what has caught her eye — in front of a righteously Tudorian castle worthy of the Arthur, hisself, our missing compadres are confronted by two golf carts topped with flashing lights. They are painted like black-and-whites — an Old World police vehicle which I have seen in videos — but in form they are, well, golf-carts, just like the ones Felicidad uses out on the Presidio to tool around and about his fields.
Hoot is talking to one of these Peace Officers — a female, to my relief — and gesturing about, while Creepy Lou bounces up and down and twitches extravagantly.
These knighties have weaponry, I note, which is presently sheathed. Not for long. The alien knightie sees us and draws her weapon, after which Firescape whips out her magic AK and Hoot waves his arms and shouts.
“Outta here!” I yell, spin my Vespa and give it full throttle. I hear no shots. Firescape and I buzz back out the way we came in, past the border guards. They are no longer leaping, toad-like, but shake their fists at us as we putter by.
“Damn kids!” one of them cries.
Behind us, I hear something that sounds a lot like John M’s singing demons only tinny. I am galvanized. Unfortunately, this galvanization is not communicated to my Vespa. At what seems a crawl, we escape through the gates and swing uphill — which I immediately think is a tactical error. Fear does a wild tap dance through my veins.
But the song of the demons stops at the Blackhawk gates. The little black-and-whites do not come out, and their officers seem to think chasing us is less effective than simply closing the gates behind us.
Neon. Still, as they might change their minds, and as I have a quest to get on with, when I see a little dirt track running almost straight uphill, I go there. Hoot, I know from experience, can take care of himself. I’m gonna trust he can take care of Creepy Lou right along with.
The track I’ve chosen is narrow and made of hard-packed earth, and I know before we’ve gone 50 feet or so that the Vespas won’t make it. I also know, without knowing how I know, that this is The Way.
I stop my scooter. Firescape pulls up on my tail. There’s not enough room for us to ride side-by-side.
“These scooters aren’t going to make it,” I tell her.
“Okay,” she says and glances back down the hill. “I guess we can back them down to the road.”
“No. This is The Way, Jade.”
She gives me her LOOK. “Okay, so we leave them and hike it.”
“I hike it,” I say. “You...stay and — “
“And what — guard the friggin' Vespas?”
“Well, yeah....”
“Like someone’s gonna steal ‘em?”
“Jade....“
“No sale, Taco Face. You really do got a chickpea brain if you think, for one molecule of time, I’m gonna sit here like a lump while you go off questing without me.”
“Jade, you’re pregnant,” I remind her.
She rolls her eyes,
granting me a moment of respite from being glared to a cinder.
“So you keep reminding me. Look here, husband: nobody on this planet knows I’m pregnant more than me. And the fact of the matter is that I’ll be in better physical shape when I’m nine months ripe than you’ll ever be, ‘cause you don’t eat right and you don’t sleep enough and you’re always doin' dangerous shit like pokin' your loco nose into the affairs of wizards. I hate it when you do shit like that and then try to leave me eating dust in your tracks. There is no way in this wide woolly forest that you are gonna go any further up this Mountain without me. You got that?”
Yeah, I got that. And it simultaneously warms the cockles of my heart (whatever the hell those are in a ventricle context) and scares real tears out of me. I nod and salt water trickles down my cheek.
“Oh, jeez-Louise,” says General Firescape, and grabs my face between her able hands and kisses me.
Thus inspired, I lead the way up the narrow trail...which somehow manages to get narrower as we climb. It twists around a lot, too, running almost level in one direction, then doubling back the other way for a while. The trees thicken until they form an awning overhead. I wish Doug could be here to see this. Not, ni dong, that I regret not having to drag his pot all over this Mountain, but you know what I mean.
It occurs to me, even as I have this wistful thought, that he is here, only I have got him tucked away in a sack. I open the amulet bag and take the Doug branchlet out, carefully straightening the little firry fingers. Then, in a fit of inspiration, I guess, I decide to tie the branch to the spirit rattle.
I go through my pockets in search of something to do this with. Nothing. Next I try to yank out a handful of my hair. This does not work and it hurts like hell.
“What’re you doing?” my wife wants to know.
“I need a knife,” I say. “You got a knife?”
“Does Hismajesty have an ego?”
Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny Page 28
