Across the Great Barrier (Frontier Magic)

by Patricia C. Wrede

  “Professor Torgeson is from Vinland,” I said. “I’m Columbian, same as you.”

  The girl looked confused; Wash looked like he was trying to hide a smile. “What are you talking about?” Lattie asked suspiciously.

  “You were born here in Promised Land, right?” I said. Lattie nodded warily. “Promised Land is in the North Plains Territory,” I went on. “The North Plains Territory is part of the United States of Columbia. I was born out East, in Helvan Shores, but that’s still in the United States. So we’re both Columbians.”

  “Now you’ve got that settled,” Wash broke in, “I’m thinking you’d best go let Mr. Ajani and Mrs. Turner know we’re here, Lattie.”

  Lattie gave me one more resentful look, then ran off. “That was an interesting argument,” Wash said to me once she was out of hearing.

  I smiled, remembering. “Lan and I had that exact same discussion with William, back when we were ten and he was nine. William argued a lot longer, but he’s always been stubborn.”

  A few minutes later, we saw Lattie approaching with a man and a woman. The man’s hair was short and snow white, and there was a grayish undertone to his dark skin that made it look like a cloth that’s been washed so often that the color’s started to fade. His companion looked to be a few years older than Wash. Her hair was still solid black, and she had it gathered up in a ball at the nape of her neck; her skin was about four shades lighter than her hair, more brown than black. They had the sort of look about them that made me want to check that my collar was straight and my hair wasn’t windblown.

  As they came up to us, a shiver ran all down my spine and a coolness spread across my chest. It felt familiar, but I couldn’t place it. At that exact minute, the woman gave me a sharp look.

  “Mr. Ajani, Mrs. Turner,” Wash said, nodding politely. “It’s good to see you again.”

  “I am always glad to see you, Mr. Morris,” the older man replied. “Even when you come to tell me of my most unsatisfactory grandchildren.” His voice was deep and precise, and his eyes had a twinkle that told me he didn’t mean that the way it sounded.

  “Those would be the same grandchildren you spoil unmercifully whenever they’re here?” the woman said.

  “The very same,” Mr. Ajani said, smiling. “I find it most unsatisfactory that they do not spend more time listening to their grandfather.”

  The woman just rolled her eyes. “Who have you brought to meet us, Wash?” she asked, with a pointed look at Mr. Ajani.

  “This is Professor Aldis Torgeson and her assistant, Miss Eff Rothmer,” Wash said. “Mr. Ajani, Mrs. Isabel Turner.”

  “Torgeson?” Mrs. Turner said when we were all done murmuring pleased-to-meet-you. “From Scandia?”

  “Vinland,” Professor Torgeson said.

  Mrs. Turner smiled and nodded, and asked if we’d come inside out of the sun. Mr. Ajani led the way down a few steps into one of the houses. Inside it was as cool as a root cellar, even though it wasn’t anywhere near as deep or dark. The windows were a little higher up than I was accustomed to. The floor was made of flat rocks fitted together, with a big rag rug in the indent, and a wooden wall split the inside of the house into two parts. The front room, where we came in, was plainly for cooking and eating and talking, just like Rennie’s house; I figured the back part would be the sleeping rooms, though we didn’t see them.

  We sat on wooden benches around a plain table with a white tablecloth over it. Mrs. Turner brought out some cups and a pitcher of cool water, then fussed around with plates and biscuits and fixings, while Mr. Ajani asked the professor very politely why we were out riding circuit with Wash.

  The professor explained about the survey of plants and animals west of the Great Barrier Spell, and Mr. Ajani got interested right away. Next thing we knew, the two of them were hip deep in talking and it looked as if we wouldn’t ever find out why the settlement had sent a message out asking for Wash.

  Mrs. Turner sat down at last and passed a honey jug. She looked at Mr. Ajani and shook her head, but she had a bit of a smile, too. “He never changes,” she said to Wash. “Now, as it appears we’ll be a time getting to business, maybe you’ll tell me more about your student here.” And she nodded at me.

  I couldn’t help staring, though I knew it was rude. And then I recollected Wash saying, “That pendant only moves one way. Teacher to student,” and suddenly I knew that Mrs. Turner had something similar. I’d felt it when I first saw her, and she must have felt mine. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that shiver, either; there was that woman in West Landing, too, only I hadn’t known then what it meant. It made sense that there would be more than one, if the pendant was a tool for teaching. I just hadn’t thought about it before.

  Mrs. Turner’s eyes flicked to me just once, then held steady on Wash, but I knew she was aware of every move I made. I froze, the same way the childings had at the mention of her name, though I wasn’t sure why. I just knew that I didn’t want any more of her attention than I already had, and I had a sight more than she was letting on in public.

  “She’s more Miss Maryann’s student than mine,” Wash said calmly.

  Both Mrs. Turner’s eyebrows rose, but she didn’t say anything. She just kept on looking at Wash. Wash smiled. “Five years at the day school in Mill City,” he said.

  “You think that’s more important?”

  “I do when it’s Miss Maryann.”

  “She agreed with you?”

  “After.”

  “When it was too late,” Mrs. Turner said.

  “I didn’t say she was best pleased by it.” Wash sounded right irritated, though I couldn’t have said why.

  “I see.” Mrs. Turner gave a small sigh. “I do hope you know what you’ve done.”

  “After nigh on thirty years, I’d hope so, too,” Wash said, looking back at Mrs. Turner just as steady as she’d been looking at him.

  By that point, I was getting as irritable as Wash sounded. I’d only just met Mrs. Turner, and I didn’t see that she had any call to disapprove of me yet. It wouldn’t have been polite to say anything, though, and besides, I was a little nervous of giving her a real reason to dislike me, so I sat up straight and put on my company manners and sipped at my water, pretending they were talking about someone else and I wasn’t interested in the least.

  There was the sound of a throat clearing. “Isabel,” said Mr. Ajani in the same warning tone that I remembered Papa using when Robbie and Lan and Jack were starting to get out of hand.

  Mrs. Turner hesitated, then sat back. “All right, if you insist,” she said.

  “I do,” Mr. Ajani said firmly. “We didn’t ask for Mr. Morris’s presence in order to scold him for decisions that were his to make in the first place.”

  “I’m right happy to hear that,” Wash said. “And I confess to a considerable curiosity as to why you did ask me to drop by.”

  “Daybat Creek has gone dry,” Mr. Ajani said. “All at once, about three weeks back.”

  Wash set his cup down, frowning. “All at once?”

  Mr. Ajani nodded. “And we’ve had more than enough rain, before and after the creek stopped running. Enough to keep the rice lake from dropping much so far, at least.”

  “You sent to Adashome?” Wash said, staring out into the air like he was concentrating on something that wasn’t there to be seen.

  “First thing,” Mrs. Turner put in. “The creek is running fine at their end of it.”

  “So there’s more than likely a problem in the Forth Hills,” Wash finished. “Giant beavers, maybe; they’d have an easy time of dam building with all this dead wood.”

  “We’d like to be sure,” Mr. Ajani said.

  Mrs. Turner frowned. “More than that, we’d like to get the creek flowing again,” she said tartly.

  “Can’t work on that until we know what the problem is,” Wash told her. “I’m sorry, Professor Torgeson, but unless you want to ride upstream to the Forth Hills, I’m afraid you and Eff are going to
be spending a week in Promised Land.”

  “Nonsense,” Professor Torgeson said before my heart had time to do more than lurch at the thought of staying behind. “It would be foolish to miss a chance to register the plants and animals of an unpeopled woodland. Of course we’ll come with you.”

  I breathed a quiet sigh of relief. I had a notion that I wouldn’t have enjoyed spending a week in the same settlement as Mrs. Turner, and now I wouldn’t have to.

  CHAPTER

  15

  MRS. TURNER DIDN’T SEEM TO LIKE THE NOTION OF PROFESSOR Torgeson and me going off to investigate with Wash, but there wasn’t much of anything she could do about it. She tried to talk Wash into bringing a whole group of settlement folks with us, in case we needed help with whatever was blocking the creek, but Wash pointed out that Promised Land couldn’t spare either the men or the horses for just an “in case.”

  She did talk him into taking along one extra person — a tall, weedy, cheerful boy about two years younger than me. His full name was George Sergeant Robinson, but everyone called him Champ on account of him winning a shooting contest when he was a childing. He reminded me a lot of my brother Robbie. He brought along a well-worn rifle that his father had used in the Secession War. The first day, he shot a duck for dinner, and didn’t waste even one bullet. Wash thanked him, but said that we’d be best off not starting a cooking fire with so many dead trees all around, and after that Champ left the ducks alone.

  Quite a few ducks had been nesting along the banks of Daybat Creek. We saw them poking in the muddy creek bed, looking puzzled, or dozing at the edges where the water should have been. Wash made us stay out of the creek bed, though it would have been easier riding. He said that we didn’t know what had blocked up the creek, and we didn’t know when it would come unblocked, but we for sure knew that we didn’t want to be in the creek bed when the water came roaring back.

  Between the two settlements of Promised Land and Adashome, the land was forested and hilly. It wasn’t easy traveling. Away from Promised Land, most of the trees were grub-killed, and we ran into another blow-down on the second morning and had to go around. Champ thought maybe the blow-down was what had blocked up the creek, but when we finally got past it, the creek bed was still dry and we had to keep going.

  It took us nearly three days, but we finally reached the source of the problem. We’d just gotten into the Forth Hills, and riding was hard going. The hills were close together, and the creek had narrowed and cut a deep gash through them. We had our choice of riding up the creek bed or climbing the hill and making our way along the top edge of a thirty-foot slope too steep for horses or people.

  Wash was still worried about the creek unblocking itself suddenly, so we climbed. The trees and the bad footing made it hard to stay within sight of the creek. We were just past the top of the second big hill, and Champ was worrying out loud that we’d miss our mark, when Wash pulled up.

  “I do believe we’ve found the problem,” he said. “Watch that you don’t get too near.”

  Champ gave a long whistle, while the professor and I just stared. Right in front of us, half the hill looked to have just collapsed into the creek in a huge mess of mud and dead trees. The creek had backed up behind it in the low spot between hills, but it didn’t have much place to go. The water was only about halfway to the top of the dam, but it had already made itself a small lake.

  “What happened?” Professor Torgeson said after a minute.

  “Looks like a landslide,” Wash said. “Mr. Ajani said there’s been rain recently —” “A lot of it!” Champ put in.

  “— and the grubs ate away all the roots that held the earth in place before.” Wash nodded at the dead trees that surrounded us. “Could be a few more spots like this elsewhere.”

  “Like all the blow-downs,” I said, and Wash nodded.

  “Well, this looks like a wasted trip,” Champ said cheerfully. “It’ll take a while for all that to fill up, but by next spring the creek will be back, I’m thinking.”

  “Maybe,” Wash said in the tone that meant you’d possibly missed seeing something important. “I want a closer look.”

  “So do I,” the professor said.

  Wash looked around. “Best make camp here, then. We can’t get the horses down, and I’m not leaving these two here without protection spells. These woods may not be as dead as they look.”

  Champ scowled like he was insulted, but I thought about the nest of razorquarls we’d almost stumbled over, and nodded.

  It wasn’t that simple, of course. Nobody wanted to camp right at the edge of the slope; even if we’d been sure the ground wouldn’t collapse again, we couldn’t count on all the dangerous wildlife being gone. Even if the magical creatures hadn’t come back yet (and we’d already seen signs of the smaller ones), some of the natural ones were just as bad. A hungry family of bears or a pack of timber wolves could trap us against the slope, if they got riled enough to attack.

  So we scouted around for a good spot, then spent an hour or thereabouts making it as safe as we could. We had it down to a routine by then — it had been a while since Wash and the professor and I had been able to stay at a wagonrest or settlement every single night, and of course there hadn’t been any ready-made protected areas since we left Promised Land. Champ and I unloaded the horses while the professor cast a couple of close-up protection spells to cover the camp for the night.

  Meanwhile, Wash took his rifle and walked out into the forest, circling the area a ways out to look for signs of anything dangerous living in the area. The first night we’d had to camp out, he’d found a skunk’s den less than ten yards out, which was enough to get us to move the campsite even though a regular skunk isn’t exactly a threat to life and limb. I was sure Wash was also doing some longer-range magic, though he didn’t say and I didn’t ask.

  This time, Wash came back in half an hour without spotting anything chancy, so we finished stretching a tarpaulin between two trees to sleep under and went looking for stones to line a firepit. Nobody was completely sure that building a fire would be all right, but all of us were sick to death of cold meals, and Wash said that the woods were still damp enough from all the rain that we could risk a small one, if we were determined on it.

  Finding rocks was easy, though I’d never seen any like the ones we hauled back to camp. They were grayish white, of all sorts of sizes and shapes, as if an enormous stone tree had shattered into bits. Some of them had rough textures on one side that looked almost like deliberate patterns. The stone itself was hard, but it broke easily if you dropped it or knocked two pieces together. I commented that the rocks seemed odd, but Champ just laughed.

  “A lot of those wash down the creek,” he told me. “Just small ones. Miss Blanchard collects them and smashes them up to add to the clay she uses to make pots. She says it makes the clay smooth and shiny, and the pieces come out almost like Cathayan porcelain once they’re fired.”

  “That doesn’t make these rocks any less odd,” I said.

  “Odd appears to be normal in the West,” Professor Torgeson said in a dry tone. “We’ll take a sample back for the college, though I doubt it’ll be anything new to the geologists.”

  By the time we finished setting up camp, it was late enough that we left heading down to the creek for the next morning. The professor was eager to see what plants were coming up along the creek, and if they were different above and below the dammed-up part, but even she wasn’t crazy about the notion of trying to climb back up the slope in the dark.

  Next morning, after we’d fed and watered the horses, the four of us made our way down to the dam that was blocking Daybat Creek. It was a tricky business; the whole hillside had sheared away and there were no plants or bushes to grab on to if you slipped. I spent most of the climb down wishing for a rope, or wishing I could have stayed back in camp.

  Wash made it to the bottom first. Champ and I were next, almost at the same time. Professor Torgeson was over to the side, about three
-quarters down, when we saw her pause and bend over the ground. A minute later, she was scrabbling toward us as fast as ever she could, waving her fist and calling, “Wash! Eff! Look at this!”

  I’d never seen her so excited before, not even when we found all the magical plants around the mirror bug traps. She slipped as she reached us, but Wash stepped forward and caught her before she fell into the dam. The professor straightened herself up and caught her breath, then slowly opened her dirty fingers.

  Resting in the palm of her hand was one of the grayish white rocks like the ones we’d used to line the firepit — only this one was about two inches long and the exact shape and size of a squirrel’s front paw and forearm. If you looked close, you could even see where two of the claws had broken off.

  “Huh,” Champ said after a moment. “Looks like somebody’s been here before us. So?”

  “How could that be?” I said. “Nobody’d come all the way out here and bury a broken statue in the middle of a big old hill, especially one that’s been around long enough to grow trees all over it. I don’t see how anyone could do that.”

  “Maybe it slid down from the top in the landslide.”

  “That is possible,” Professor Torgeson acknowledged. “Though I think it is more likely that it was uncovered when half the hill slid away. If we can find the rest, or even a few more pieces, we may be able to get an historical excavator interested enough to come out and do a proper job.”

  “Is it magic, then?” Champ asked.

  I reached out to the stone with my world sense, the way I’d been taught, and flinched. That bit of rock was even colder and deader and more drained of magic than the land the mirror bugs had been over. I took a deep breath, and realized that Champ and Wash had flinched right along with me.

  “No,” said Wash. “It’s not magic.”

  The professor looked at him curiously. “We should try to find the rest of the statue,” she said. “I hope the pieces are still large enough to identify.”