The Snowmelt River

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The Snowmelt River Page 23

by Frank P. Ryan


  ‘Isn’t it awful,’ she murmured to Alan, ‘that Mark and Mo only have bad memories of home?’

  His sigh was a vibration deep in his chest.

  Kate blinked away the moistness in her eyes. ‘It’s just that I don’t want my memories to be just the bad things. I want to remember some of the good things. Like when Daddy would forget his work and play with us.’ Kate recalled her father’s face, his kindness not of touch or declared affection but of simply being with them, a shyness about the eyes which extended even to his only daughter. ‘Mammy had a beautiful singing voice. She’d sing African songs from the Mission School. Have you ever heard the Missa Lumba?’

  Alan squeezed her. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s the mass, sung in an African language. It’s haunting.’

  With a small smile, Kate also recalled her grandad, Liam, who had introduced her to his love of plants, and she remembered the small comforts her kind but distracted uncle had been able to provide for her in the heartbreaking time after the death of her parents, and in the awkward years that followed. The fact that he had offered her his home instead of packing her off to boarding school, allowing her to live half-wild with Darkie and her dreams.

  ‘I really miss my family – don’t you?’

  ‘I sure do.’

  At dawn Alan didn’t hear Turkeya come up beside him. The youth’s voice cut like a knife through sleep, waking him. ‘I worry about the journey ahead, Mage Lord.’ Alan moaned with the stiffness in his back, sitting up on the bank next to the ash of last night’s fire. He yawned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and then climbed to his feet. Kate was still sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her so he kept his voice down until he and Turkeya had walked a short distance along the shore.

  ‘Please call me Alan.’

  Turkeya looked uncomfortable at the suggestion of such intimacy. A breeze ruffled the more youthful version of Siam’s whiskers that thickened the fine fur at the sides of his face.

  Alan looked at Turkeya. ‘What’s worrying you?’

  The Olhyiu raised his right hand, in which a single claw sprang like a pointer aimed down the river. ‘There are hazards close ahead. The water will boil over the rocks we know as the Dragon’s Teeth.’

  They walked on a short distance further while Alan thought about this, sharing the steam of his breath with the river mist. ‘Tell me – are all the tribes like you, the Olhyiu?’

  ‘Few live as we do. Once our people left the oceans to live in the cities, where we offered our labours for menial work or toiled on the land as farmers. But we could not settle there. We rediscovered our wild hearts.’

  Alan hesitated, looking thoughtful. ‘Is there no way around this obstacle ahead?’

  ‘None other than we might fly.’

  Hunger was so pressing that after only a few more miles Siam ordered the keels to be drawn up against a shingle shore. High cliffs reared on either side, making ambush difficult, while within the undergrowth of the narrow river valley were bushes laden with snow berries. As the women set out with their baskets, the children gathered on the decks and watched fretfully for their return. Soon happy cries sounded out as hungry stomachs were filled with the honey-sweet fruit. Alan watched as Turkeya led a party of several men into the forests by the water’s edge, aware that the shaman was somewhere close to him. The old man smelled of tobacco even when his pipe was unlit.

  Refreshing his face with a handful of snow, Alan spoke as he turned to face him. ‘You’re kind of watching me and all the while you’re avoiding me, Kemtuk. There’s no need for that. You and I should be friends.’

  The old man was carrying the Spear of Lug. When he spoke it was with a voice husky with anxiety. ‘If I am anxious, it is for other reasons. Take back your weapon, warded with magic – you may have need of it.’

  ‘What’s going on, Kemtuk?’

  ‘I have felt hostile eyes upon us these last few days.’

  Alan was shocked. How could Kemtuk stand there so calmly, knowing what he did? ‘We’ve got to get the people back into the boats.’

  ‘Do not distress yourself. Siam knows. That hunting party is also a scouting party.’

  Alan’s eyes darted about, worrying about Kate. How right she was when she complained of how dangerous this world really was. He sat down on a rocky projection and took a good look at their surroundings. The river was mere yards away, with coils of mist rising from its surface like phantoms. In full daylight the wilderness looked more desolate than ever. The vastness of the landscape dwarfed their presence. They seemed insignificant here, minuscule and vulnerable.

  Lost in his brooding, Alan was hardly aware of Mark until his friend came up alongside him. He tried to be cheerful. ‘Hi! How’s it going?’

  ‘I’m fine. Just bored.’

  Alan was startled by the bitterness in Mark’s voice. ‘How’s Mo?’

  ‘She has a cold. Sneezing and blowing her nose like a bitch!’

  Mark seemed different somehow. Alan tensed as Mark sat next to him on the rock and took the harmonica out of his pocket. Hunching forward, to rest his elbows on his knees, he played a few bluesy riffs. Then, abruptly he played ‘Little Red Rooster’, so brilliantly everybody just stopped what they were doing and stared.

  Alan clapped. ‘That was really something. You ever thought of forming a band at that boarding school?’

  ‘Nobody at school was interested in blues – other than me.’

  ‘You don’t say!’

  ‘I just said it.’

  ‘Aw, c’mon, Mark – loosen up.’

  Mark snorted, went through the pantomime of shaking out the joints of his arms and rolling around his shoulders, as if taking Alan literally.

  They both laughed, if a little awkwardly.

  ‘Ooh, lovely! Are you going to play us a dance tune!’ The Clonmel accent caused them both to swivel around to see Kate join them, blowing steam through the tunnel of her red-raw hands.

  Mark opened up with ‘Cajun Girl’. A group of children came up close in the snow behind Mark and they started laughing and dancing to the music. Kate joined them, clapping her hands in time.

  ‘Aren’t they gorgeous!’

  Alan grinned. The Olhyiu had such a natural feel for dancing he could have watched them all day, these little ones, with the tips of their noses and their lips blue-black and their bewhiskered faces cherry pink with underlying cold, their tufts of brown and silvery hair poking out from fur caps and bonnets. Steam rose from Mark’s breath, shrouding his face even while he was playing. The tune complete, he rose to his feet, bowing ceremoniously to Kate before playing dodgem with the little ones, who chased after him, calling for him to play some more.

  Kate took Mark’s place, sitting next to Alan. A little girl – they called her Amoté – darted up behind her and ran her fingers through Kate’s auburn curls before she ran away, shrieking. Everybody laughed, gazing after the little girl, who had bright red poppies painted over her cheeks. Then Alan joined Kate and Mark in a snow fight, with the Olhyiu children joining in. Afterwards, breathless and tousled, Mark smiled at Kate in a wistful way. He spoke softly, almost a whisper. ‘I’d never do anything to hurt you – you know that?’

  Kate flushed in embarrassment before turning away.

  When Mark left them to play a little more with the children, Alan frowned at Kate. ‘Something’s eating him. I don’t rightly know what.’

  Kate agreed with him. ‘He’s never been happy since breaking his crystal.’

  ‘Yeah. But whose fault was that?’

  ‘Ah, sure, I know. But still, maybe I should go and talk to Mo and see if she knows what’s going on.’

  The tension only served to remind Alan of what the shaman had told him earlier – that danger still surrounded them. After Kate had left he picked up the spear and returned to Kemtuk, not caring that many of the elders were close and listening. He indicated the triangle in his brow. ‘I need to understand this – what it is and how it works.’

  T
here was a prickling silence, and then a murmuring of muted voices among the elders, who glanced from one to another under lowered brows. The shaman puffed at intervals on his pipe, so that Alan began to wonder if he would answer at all, until eventually he spoke.

  ‘All can read the worry in your eyes. But I cannot help you.’ The old man took his pipe from his mouth and tapped the bowl against a stone, while looking towards the nearby river. ‘I would help if I could. But I do not have the knowledge. Only one mage in all the land has such knowledge, or so legend has it. He lives in Isscan, where we are headed. He is known as the Mage of Dreams.’

  Later that same evening, sitting on his bunk by the porthole in the Temple Ship, Mark peered out at the campfires spread over the shore. Even his sister was resting in the warmth of one of them, deep in conversation with Kate. How he wished that he could join his friends. But Mark could no longer share his sleep with anyone. He couldn’t possibly afford to let them see how, with the dark, things changed. How, at the very edges of sleep, things became distinctly weird – and more than a little scary.

  Something in him really was changing, just as it was in all of the others. In spite of the fact he had smashed his crystal and there were no marks he could see in his hand, or anywhere else, he still understood the Olhyiu when they growled and grunted. And every night, whether truly in sleep or in some peculiar half-awake state, his wood sprite, Siri, came to visit him. She kissed and caressed him and made him hunger for more. Tonight he would beg her, as he begged her every night, to become real for him. He longed for a real girlfriend, somebody he could fool around with during the day, somebody he could really touch and hold, somebody he could talk to about his hopes and worries, like Alan talked to Kate.

  When, later that same night, she came to him, he beat his fists against the hard oak of the porthole. ‘It isn’t fair. It isn’t.’ Tears rose in his eyes.

  ‘Oh, Mark – my lovely, do not distress yourself. I am here for you. I shall always be here for you.’

  ‘It’s no good.’ He buried his face in his hands. ‘A dream is not enough. It’s not! It just isn’t.’

  He felt her tapering fingers curl about his neck, like wisps of silk, gently stroking his skin. ‘Does it not feel real when I am by your side?’

  ‘But you’re not really here. You’re just a dream. You’re tormenting me – worse than Grimstone!’

  ‘Uncover your eyes and look at me. Here, remove your hands from your face and let me kiss your tears away.’

  Her hands took hold of his and moved them down so they were encircling her waist. Through the veil of his tears he saw her incline her face to kiss his lips, then, with that sharply pointed pink tongue, she licked the tears from his cheeks and eyes.

  ‘If … if only it was really happening, like that first night.’

  ‘Perhaps there is a way we could be together.’

  His heart leaped. ‘How?’

  ‘There is one who could make it possible. If you could persuade her that you truly deserve her favour.’

  He snorted. ‘What – some stupid goddess, like the Trídédana that old Padraig was going on about?’

  ‘Such beings are hardly stupid. Truly one such goddess might make your dreams come true.’ She kissed him again, lingeringly, and coiled his hair around her fingers, tugging him down to lie with her on his bunk.

  ‘There are no goddesses.’

  ‘Oh, but there is one powerful enough to make it happen.’

  ‘Yeah? Like who?’

  ‘My mistress has that power.’

  Mark sighed. ‘All right – so how do we persuade your mistress to make you real?’

  ‘This you might achieve by demonstrating to her that you no longer love the auburn-haired girl.’

  ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘I watched you today, when you made the children dance. You could not hide your longing for her.’

  ‘But I wasn’t trying to—’

  ‘As ever, you allowed this mere girl to humiliate you. Oh, my lovely – all your friends saw the unrequited love in your eyes.’

  ‘I don’t love her. I love you.’

  ‘Well then,’ she nuzzled her lips over the naked skin of his neck before lifting her mouth to nibble his ear with the tantalising pin-pricks of her needle-sharp teeth, ‘prove that you no longer harbour desire for the girl in the deepest reaches of your heart. Show my mistress how you spurn her.’

  He sat up on the bunk, trapped in a twilight world of being half-asleep and half-awake, his hands gripping his head, trying to discover some level of understanding. The freezing air through the open porthole dusted his gooseflesh with ice-crystals as her turquoise eyes gazed longingly, cravingly, into his. ‘If you would only make it so we could truly be together, you must push this girl away from your thoughts.’

  ‘Push her from me?’

  ‘You must do it soon. When the opportunity arises. I will come to you and whisper the moment in your ear.’

  ‘But where – how?’

  ‘On the deck of the ship, by the rail over the torrent – where and when hidden eyes can confirm your love for me.’

  ‘Push Kate? You mean, just push her away from me?’

  ‘Oh, my lovely, is it not such a small thing to ask for our love?’

  Yes – yes, he thought, again and again, over the extending hours of darkness. He pondered and mulled it over, again and again, his thoughts confused, as his arms and legs jerked with the cold invading his muscles. He pondered it over and over, his hands rubbing at his face, making the frozen skin crackle, like leather encased in a morning’s hoar frost. He would shake his head before nodding, or nod, then shake his head. No – not actually push Kate! But then, Yes, he thought. Just one small push. It is such a simple thing. It surely couldn’t hurt Kate, other than in her feelings – Kate, who had never held back from hurting him from the day that they had first met.

  At daybreak Alan heard the murmur of the rapids. An hour later the murmur had risen to a thundering. Siam roared instructions that had the Olhyiu running here and there, yet it seemed to Alan that the rigging was adjusting itself, the great sails furling in until only one tiny sail at the front, the spinnaker, billowed for the assistance of navigation. Mark’s fair-haired figure clung to the wheel on the afterdeck as Siam continued to bellow orders to all the following boats that children should be stowed safely beneath the decks. Alan suggested to Kate and Mo that they should go below to their sleeping cabin but they took no notice. They went forward to the prow to watch what was happening up ahead.

  The valley sides became jagged cliffs, like sinews of iron tethering the mountains about the swollen river. Between them the torrent was squeezed between a narrow pass, whipped into a frenzy by the speed of its passage. The current broke into heaving waves, seething where it struck the sharp edges of submerged boulders. The sails were all down but still the boats raced among the breakers, and pole-wielding men and women were hard-pressed to keep their keels clear of the rocks. Alan saw how the poles bent with the pressure. From time to time one splintered, the cracks inaudible against the background thunder.

  Beside him, he heard Kemtuk groan aloud, ‘These are not the normal rapids. A madness has invaded the pass!’

  Jagged teeth of rock gnashed at the keels. Siam was hoarse from shouting to the sailors on board the Temple Ship, every hand pressing their long poles against the rocks. Just moments later the ship shuddered as it crashed against a reef. The decks shelved at a crazy angle, and an immense wave swept over them before the craft righted itself again. From the boat closest to them, a woman was flung, with a single heart-rending scream, into the maelstrom. Her husband fought to save his family but in moments all were lost, the boat disintegrating, as if caught in an explosion.

  Kate and Mo hugged each other, their fingers white around the forward rail, fallen onto their knees to get as close as possible to the deck. Suddenly Mo clutched Kate’s arm and stared back. Kate saw that Mark had appeared at the top of the staircase to the forede
ck and was making his way towards them against the gale, his eyes blank in a face that was as white as moonlight. Mo was looking back at her brother, her head shaking from side to side, her voice stammering.

  ‘Guh-guh-guh-go back!’

  ‘Mark – stay where you are!’ Kate shouted her agreement with Mo. ‘You can’t help us. We don’t dare move.’ She had to cling to the rail to avoid being thrown off her feet.

  But Mark appeared to take no notice. He lurched away from the head of the stairs, clinging to rigging and bulkheads to try to keep to his feet. His lips were moving and he was shaking his head, as if arguing with the storm about him. With a massive lurch of the ship, he fell onto his side and skidded across the foredeck until he collided with the rail, about fifteen feet from where Kate hung on next to Mo. He struggled back to his feet, braced his legs wide, then began to inch his body in their direction.

  Kate called out to him, ‘What are you doing?’

  Mark’s eyes were bloodshot and staring.

  ‘What’s the matter with him?’ she murmured into Mo’s ear.

  Mo stared at her approaching brother, her eyes wide with fright.

  From just five feet away, Mark appeared to turn his face to the sky, and she could see his mouth opening as if he was shouting aloud. She caught snatches of words, but she couldn’t make sense of them.

  Then he lowered his gaze to Mo, his face distorted by the howling wind, his eyes tormented.

  ‘Run!’ he shouted.

  Mo clutched at Kate’s hand, hanging on to her friend with a desperate grip. Kate whispered, ‘What, for the love of God …?’

  Mark lurched a foot nearer. Kate could see the tendons of his wrists standing out as his hands clutched the rail against another huge lurch of the ship. Suddenly he was within arm’s reach. He reached out and tried to grab hold of Kate’s arm. Instinctively, she jerked herself away.

  ‘Mark – you’re frightening me!’

  Amidships, with the Spear of Lug stowed safely below deck and a pole clenched in his spray-soaked hands, Alan added his efforts to those of the Olhyiu to keep the ship off the rocks. A movement on the foredeck caught his eye. Two figures were struggling to keep themselves from being washed overboard. He could barely make them out in the spray-fogged air, but he could see that they were too small to be Olhyiu. They had to be Kate and Mo. They were holding onto each other with one arm, their other arms gripping the rail for dear life. He shouted encouragement, but his words were lost in the thunder of the water. Suddenly he glimpsed a third figure, pushing itself between the two girls. He glimpsed fair hair. It had to be Mark.

 

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