“Afraid.” Kelada covered her face with her hands. “Niklas and I were banished by a tribunal of magi, but not by Tremien. Tremien is—he is supposed to be a good man, but he is very powerful. I am afraid of him. Afraid for myself. For us.”
“Don't be,” Jeremy said, wishing that he could somehow fight down the churning dread that rose in his own stomach.
Kelada took three long breaths. She lowered her hands and gave Jeremy a tremulous smile. “I don't know why I should worry about Tremien. We probably won't survive the dream-whorls we'll have to visit to find Melodia.”
“Cheerful thought,” Jeremy said. He sighed. “Now, I guess, we only have to wait.”
“Hold me,” Kelada said, and for a long time they sat together, each wrapped in thoughts and fears not spoken but there all the same.
Night must have come to Thaumia, for in the Between the dream-whorls began to appear, spinning from air into shimmering existence, very pale and gray at first, then becoming opaque and purple. “I ought to try alone,” Jeremy said, though to say it he had to swallow his heart.
Kelada took his arm. “We should go together.” She paused, then added, “If you die, I have no hope anyway.”
“All right,” Jeremy said. “Together, then.”
But they agreed that, at least, Jeremy should go first. Melodia, after all, would not expect a battered-faced waif to trouble her dreams, and so Kelada would try her best to hide, to stay as long as possible out of the dreamer's sight and notice. They discarded their packs—what good would they be in someone else's dream?—and, after the barest hesitation, Jeremy strode into the twilight swirl of the nearest whorl.
At first he had hopes, for he encountered animals, cattle, horses, and goats browsing and growing fatter before his eyes. This looked promising for a healer of animals, but he found no human anywhere within the dream, only the placid gazes of the beasts. Fine-looking animals, to be sure, but still only animals.
“It's a farmer's dream,” Kelada whispered to him, and immediately Jeremy knew she was right. Kelada took his hand and began to edge back—even in the altered reality of a dream her gift of knowing direction held true—until they stood on the gray plain beside the little clutter of their packs.
“Not so bad,” Jeremy said. “If they all are like that—”
“They won't be,” Kelada told him, her face and gray eyes grim.
Nor were they. The next they tried was inchoate, unformed, loud noises, bright lights, half-created things rearing and groaning from the surface beneath them. The very land turned into liquid, sucking, stinking mud, and the two of them floundered, splashed, struggled to pull one leg out of the cold grip of muck, thrust it forward, and then pull the other out. They were exhausted and gasping by the time they collapsed outside the whorl, but they crawled paces farther away. The noisome mess covering them, a slimy brownish-green filth that reeked of excrement and rot, seemed to dissolve as they crept on, until at last they lay panting but clean.
“Nightmare,” Jeremy said.
“A baby's dream. Or a madman's,” Kelada said, and with that it all fell into perspective for Jeremy: a baby's view of the world, huge things moving around him, frightening changes of light and dark, the discomfort and stench of one's own waste products—a baby's nightmare, more horrifying in some ways than purposeful evil.
A few moments’ rest, and then back to the task. They successfully moved in and out of three dreams without attracting attention, two of them anxious and threatening, one—a farmer's wife's dream, it seemed—dull and boring. A woman merely sat at the center of that one, a slight smile on her face, and in the circle of the whorl nothing changed, all remained the gray emptiness of the raw Between. After they left, Jeremy said, “What's wrong with her? She dreams of nothing.”
“Nothing wrong,” Kelada snapped. “You try bearing five children in six years, arising before dawn each day, keeping the chickens and the cow, cooking for seven or eight, cleaning, mending, making. Try that for a week, and then if you dream of doing nothing for a little while, then say there's something wrong with the dreamer.”
“I'm sorry,” Jeremy said. “I didn't know—in a place where magic works, I'd think life wouldn't be so hard—”
Kelada tossed her head. “A man wouldn't. But everything must be bought and paid for, and no magic comes free. The universe is always the same; it all equals out in the end. And besides, she may be unlucky, like me, and have no talent or small talent.”
“Sorry,” Jeremy murmured again, not sure of what else to say.
They rested. Outside the Between, night on Thaumia must have been progressing. Some of the whorls they saw winked out, and others started fresh. All at once Kelada straightened, her very attitude electric. “We're near,” she said. “I think we're very near.”
Jeremy leaped to his feet, scanned their surroundings. “That one,” he said, pointing. “Is that it?”
Kelada got up more slowly, trembling slightly. “Yes. I believe it is. Yes.”
They edged into the newly formed whorl. It was quiet inside, dim and cool with the blue filtered light of a moonlit room or an underwater grotto. “Speak her name,” hissed Kelada, somewhere behind Jeremy.
Jeremy tried, squeaked, got control of his voice, and called quietly, “Melodia?”
A feminine murmur called him farther in. Ahead was a glow, dim but growing stronger, and as he approached he saw that a woman lay at the center of the glow, a woman asleep on richly embroidered cushions of gold, scarlet, emerald, deep blue. She wore a silky gown of white, clinging and so nearly translucent that he could see the pinkness around her nipples, the darker triangle at the base of her belly. Her dark hair spilled like black ink across the cushions, and her eyes, when they opened, hit him almost physically with their blue-green impact. She smiled. “My lord. You've come.”
“I—yes, I am here,” Jeremy stammered. God, she was beautiful! Languorous, lazy, long-legged—and her sleepy smile was heated wine to his blood. “I have come, Melodia.”
“I'm so glad.”
“Uh—the speculum. Where is the speculum?”
“It is here,” she said, and there it was, behind her, an oval full-length mirror, its border decorated with gilt carvings of unicorns, gryphons, grotesques.
“Melodia—my love,” Jeremy said, his voice halting, “I can visit you if you will open the way.” He spread his arms wide in a gesture of invitation, his purple robe rustling like the insinuations of silk with the movement. With his right hand he stroked his beard.
“I'm so glad you've come,” Melodia said, and her voice, true to her name, was chiming music, soft, clear, and unutterably sweet. “I have something so important to tell you.”
“Yes, well,” Jeremy said. “If you'll just open the way—”
“Who is behind you?” Melodia asked.
With an involuntary spasm Jeremy's hand clenched in his beard. It hurt. “A servant,” Jeremy said, that being the story that Kelada had suggested. “She will make us comfortable and see that we are not disturbed. The speculum, love—”
“Don't call me that,” Melodia said, and her voice now held the plangent notes of sadness and regret. “Sebastian, it hurts me so to say this, but I don't love you anymore.”
“If you'll just—what?”
The beautiful eyes, the emerald blue of the sea, brimmed with crystal tears, and for a dizzy moment Jeremy ached with the sure knowledge that he would surrender everything, Kelada, his own life, the whole world, to prevent just one tear from spilling. “I did love you, once, but that was wrong of me. I had no understanding, then, that you truly wished to destroy the world. I've thought about it, and I cannot love anyone so evil. I am sorry.”
“Uh, right,” Jeremy said. “Sure. I see. But, uh—I've changed, Melodia. That's why I came tonight. To tell you I'm different now, I've decided to be good. Really.” Behind Jeremy, Kelada struck him sharply above his right kidney.
Melodia frowned. “I don't understand. How can you change?”
Jeremy sh
rugged and tried to smile. His beard got in his mouth, and he had to smooth it away. “These things happen. You know, you're banished to the Between, you have a lot of time on your hands. You sort of think over what you've done—what's happening?” For, without his moving, Melodia was receding, going away; so was the speculum.
“It hurts me still to think of you,” Melodia said, her voice faint. “Farewell, Sebastian, for the sake of the love I once held for you.”
“Wait!” Jeremy shouted. “Melodia! Wait! I—damn it, wait, I said. I'm not even Sebastian!”
Melodia, by now a tiny figure, near and yet distant, a drifting wisp of smoke about to dissolve, hesitated, grew slightly more solid. “What?”
“I, uh, Sebastian tricked me. I only look like—ouch!” Behind him, Kelada had pinched Jeremy, a vicious pinch in a tender place.
But at least Melodia seemed to be growing larger again, or else coming near; dream perspective was very tricky indeed. “Who are you? And who is behind you?”
“Please,” Jeremy said, “open the way for us to use the mirror. I'll tell you all about it, I promise. But we have to get through before you wake up.” After a moment he added lamely, “We mean you no harm.”
“I dare not,” Melodia said. “Even the ancient inviolacy of home-rights would not protect me if I did so. My father, Tremien, the other magi, none would show me mercy if I let you back into Thaumia. I—I am sorry, Sebastian.”
Again she started to fade. Desperate, Jeremy leaped forward, but still she receded. “Wait a minute!” he shouted. “Wait a—damn it, what sort of woman are you? You'd help a horse, wouldn't you?”
Once more Melodia teetered on the very brink of leaving them. “A horse?” Her voice was so faraway, so tiny, like the gentlest whisper imaginable.
“Once a stranger came to you,” Jeremy said, extemporizing for all he was worth. “A dark stranger on a night of storm. He told you his horse was dying, and you passed with him without question, without pause to consider perils or evils.”
“That is true.”
“Well, we need the same kind of help. We're more than horses,” Jeremy said in his normal tone. “We're people. Two people. And if you don't help us—Melodia, we'll die.”
He heard a gasp behind him, from Kelada. Jeremy felt it, too, a heaviness in the air, a sense of an immense, immaterial balance weighing, swaying with the problem of decision. The moment stretched into eternity before Melodia whispered, “I believe you, Sebastian Magister. Come.”
And then it was so simple. Jeremy couldn't believe how easy it would be, couldn't understand how a moment before he hadn't known how to pass through the portal. Why, all you had to do was this, and this. He reached behind him, found Kelada's hand, grasped it, and stepped through, feeling an electric prickle, the brush of cobwebs against all his skin at once, the crawling sensation that his skin was independently alive and moving. For a moment things went dark. No, not dark; things just went, into some realm of noncolor, nonbeing; and then the cool blue light came, light that he was hungry for, that he ached for, as a swimmer in deep water sees the light of air above and yearns for it. He gasped in a deep breath of the light, of the air.
Disorientation. He saw the same scene, Melodia asleep in her bed rich with cushions, but now from a wildly different angle, the whole world had shifted, and now he stood where the speculum had been. But he heard something, a deep, regular sound, the sound of Melodia's breathing. Soft snoring, rather, he amended, a homely sound, as real as the—why, as real as the stone beneath his bare feet, as real as the lingering scent of sandalwood from an oil lamp on a little table beside the bed. It was all real, the bedroom, the moonlight streaming through the casement.
He was real, he recognized with a shock, knowing now that for the longest time he had not been real, he had been the stuff and substance of dreams, that his body had been thinner than mist, thinner than the gauzy veils of the matter between the stars, had been nothing more than a very special kind of dream-whorl, held perilously together by his own consciousness, by his thin sense of who and what he was. But now he was real again, real, warm flesh, surging blood, sturdy bone. Another wobbling step, and behind him Kelada stumbled into reality, too.
The woman on the bed moaned, stirred, suddenly sat upright, the coverlet falling from her bare shoulders, her eyes opening wide in the dim light. She screamed once.
“Easy,” Jeremy said, nervously reaching to stroke his beard.
He didn't have a beard. He had only the same shadow of whiskers that he had gone to bed with back on Earth, all that time ago.
He didn't have anything else that he had dreamed, either. And, as a quick glance told him, neither did Kelada. Dream-stuff, it seemed, did not survive in worlds of reality.
Both he and Kelada stood in Melodia's bedchamber stark naked.
Chapter 5
Melodia's second scream broke apart into a silly—yes, silly, little-girlish, undignified—giggle.
Kelada moved faster than Jeremy; she lunged forward, tugged a blanket off the bed, scattering cushions as she did so, and wrapped herself in it. Melodia scrambled out of bed on the opposite side of them, carrying the rest of the bedclothes with her. “Oh,” she gasped.
Jeremy crouched and retrieved one of the cushions from the floor. It was too small to do much good, but it was something. He clutched it in front of himself, shivering partly from the shock of finding himself suddenly, really there—but even more from the chilly air in Melodia's bedroom.
“Sebastian?” Melodia asked. “Is that really you?” Her voice had lost much of its dreamed music, was really a very ordinary sort of voice, feminine and pleasant, but not a seductive siren call.
“Yes—” Kelada started.
“No,” Jeremy said at the same moment. When Kelada glared at him, he said, “No. I'm not Sebastian. I look like him, but I'm someone different, from another—another place.”
“I'm going to make a light,” Melodia said, and in the dim moonlight Jeremy saw her reach for something on the bedside lamp table.
“Wait,” he said. “I'm, ah, I need something to wear.”
Melodia giggled again. “Look in the cabinet behind the woman. I think there is a sleep robe of Sebastian's still in it.”
“Move, Kelada,” he said. The apprentice thief edged past him, brushing against his bare back. He took two sideways steps, then fumbled behind him to find the door of the cabinet. He tugged it open and got behind its protection, but the inside of the cabinet was very dark.
“Here,” Melodia said. She did something quickly with her hands, and a bright spark leaped into flame. She touched the wick of the bedside lamp with it, and in a moment a strong yellow light, smelling of sandalwood, grew from the lamp. Jeremy was painfully aware that the open door of the chest barely provided cover for him, but in the increased light he was able to sort through the hanging garments and find a silky black robe. Slipping into it, he struck the door of the cabinet with his elbow, momentarily revealing himself and making Melodia laugh again.
“Uh—thanks,” he muttered at last, having cinched the robe at his waist. It was short, coming only to his knees, and its thin fabric did nothing to warm him.
“You—you really look very much like Sebastian,” Melodia said. Jeremy found it hard not to stare at her: tall, raven-haired, wearing the same translucent white gown he had dreamed her in. She tilted her chin, her sea-emerald eyes intent on his face. “Younger, without the beard. Somehow, I don't know—somehow softer, maybe.”
Kelada's laugh was quick and scornful. “He's softer, all right,” she said.
Melodia blinked at her. “Oh, my dear, what happened to your face?”
With a start that allowed the blanket to slip low enough to reveal her small left breast, Kelada shot her hand to cover her broken nose. Above it, her gray eyes glared at Melodia.
“I'm sorry,” Melodia said. “I meant no harm.” She smiled at Jeremy. “I'm not much of a hostess, am I? The kitchen fireplace has a fire laid ready. Take this"—she
passed him a flat wooden box about the size of a paperback book—"and light the fire. Warm yourself by it while I get dressed and find some clothes for—what is your name, dear?”
“Kelada. Kelada the thief.”
“For Kelada here. Go on. Through the door, turn left, and then left again. Not that door, that's the bathroom. Yes, that's right.”
Jeremy, the box in his left hand, felt his way into the hall, turned left, and at the second turn found himself in a large, dim kitchen, its general features just visible in the moonlight that streamed through two narrow, arched casements. The fireplace was against the wall that adjoined Melodia's bedchamber. Jeremy opened the box, could see nothing, and took it to the window to sort through its contents.
He had to move aside a few small flowerpots with delicate plants growing from them. Then he was able to see that the box contained a smooth piece of metal—steel, he supposed—a rougher, elliptical stone that had to be flint, a little round metal saucer, and a quantity of dry, fluffy stuff. Tinder, he guessed. He put a pinch of the tinder onto the metal plate, then took everything but the box back to the stone hearth. He knelt there, the stone floor cold and hard against his knees.
Holding the flint in his left hand, Jeremy gave it a tentative strike with the steel. He succeeded in bruising his left thumb. His second try was more accurate, and a little spray of sparks leaped into the darkness and died.
Well, if Melodia could do it in one movement, he would be able to get it sooner or later. He struck more sparks, and more, and even managed to send some of them into the little pile of tinder, but not a one caught. It was cold in the room, wintry cold, and he was starting to shake from it. He fluffed the little pinch of tinder out a bit, giving the sparks more breathing room, and struck some more.
On the fifth attempt after that, one spark lodged in the tinder, glowed red, and began to smolder. Jeremy leaned so close to it that it went out of focus in his eyes and gave it his breath, blowing steadily but gently, very gently. The spark expanded, and in a couple of seconds a little lick of yellow flame sprang up.
Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 8
