Spellbinders Collection

by Molly Cochran

  Slowly he got to his feet, fighting the dizziness that threatened to overwhelm him, and rummaged through the stock of leather pouches that contained the old man's medicines. He would need a poultice of some kind for his shoulder and something to prevent infection in the head wounds. Some salt water, painful though it was, cleared the blood and mucus out of his good eye, but the other was utterly blind. Yellowish fluid seeped constantly out of the socket and the eyeball itself, when Saladin could steel himself to touch it through the lacerated lid, had flattened. He had seen the condition only once before, on a hare which had been attacked by some larger animal. A shard of bone from the hare's shattered skull had pierced the eyeball and deflated it. The hare had convulsed for two days before Kanna had killed it out of pity.

  He felt himself trembling. His wounds were too great. The fever would come soon, and he would be unable to care for himself. Without the Stone, he would die.

  He thought frantically. His legs were still strong. He could walk back to Kish, find a doctor. He would say he was a wanderer, lost from his tribe; no one would know him for the boy who had vanished during the earthquake seven years before. Then, after he was healed—if a doctor existed who could treat such wounds—he would escape once more, come back . . .

  Come back here, he thought. Back to the mountain, to live like an animal. To wander alone among the rocks until some wild beast killed him for food. To become Kanna, but without Kanna's assurance of everlasting life.

  A low wail escaped from his lips, growing, echoing through the cave until it became a scream of rage and despair.

  "Kanna!" he shouted.

  But Kanna was gone. To another part of the mountains, to . . .

  Saladin's head snapped toward the wall. The medicines. The old man had left the medicines. Some of them had taken years to gather and distill. Some were made from plants that no longer existed. Some were taken from animals that had not lived in the valley for millennia. Whenever they had moved in search of game or water, the medicines had been the first things Kanna packed in his animal-skin bundles. He would never leave without them.

  But they were here, in the cave. His other belongings, too, were still here. The old man had taken nothing. Yet Saladin knew he had left for good. Kanna would no longer trust him. The boy would attack again. Kanna had to know that.

  But he loves me.

  That knowledge was as sure as the fingers on his hand. Kanna regarded Saladin as his son. The old man had not moved; he had fled, brokenhearted, from his child's betrayal.

  He could have killed Saladin, but he had not. He had left his medicines for him.

  And he had gone to the one place where the boy would not dare follow.

  Along the dry river, past the tree of stone . . .

  He had gone east, into the desert.

  By the time Saladin reached the remains of the petrified tree, the fever had already been upon him for two days. His eyes had begun to fester and stink in the baking heat beneath the reed bandage he had fashioned, and his shoulder joint was swollen beyond recognition.

  The landmarks Kanna had spoken of had been a virtual map. After Saladin could no longer follow the outlines of the ancient river bed, he had spotted the speck on the horizon which was the tree of stone.

  And he had been lucky. A day before he reached the tree, it had rained. The desert was no longer the lush grassland it had once been, but neither was it the trackless waste of windblown sand it was destined to become in the centuries ahead. The hardscrabble earth still sprouted clumps of hearty weeds that held enough moisture to keep rainwater from evaporating. In the stretches between the weeds, the rain sat on the drying earth like a cloak, turning only its thin surface to mud before baking hard again in the sun.

  Saladin was lucky, because it rained at night, although at the time he did not feel in the least fortunate. The desert was cold at night. When the rain came, there was no shelter. Saladin stretched out an antelope skin to replenish his water supply, then sat down shivering in the mud. He dared not walk without the light of the moon to illuminate the speck on the horizon. If he lost sight of that, he would surely die.

  But I'll die anyway, he thought miserably. He was too tired to feel the shock of fear that had propelled him on this journey; too tired, even, to give much thought to the terrible pain of his body. It was dying in segments. His eye was already dead. His melon-sized shoulder would go next. As the rain fell he took a stone knife from his pack and lanced the obscene boil of his shoulder. As it spurted, he screamed mindlessly into the emptiness of the night. Then he slept, trying to keep the new wound away from the mud.

  In the morning, the earth steamed. The sun drew the water out of the ground so quickly that Saladin could see it rising all around him like smoke. He stopped short, staring at it in wonder. If Kanna had not told him that there was a land beyond the desert, he would surely have believed that this place was the end of the world.

  His shoulder worsened during the day. The fluid that wept from it was no longer red, but a thick greenish yellow. Hot air streamed from his nose. Chills racked him, despite the unrelenting sun.

  The second day was worse. He could not bring himself to eat even a scrap of dried meat, but he drank thirstily. Before noon, his water supply was gone. He threw his gourd away without a thought, his legs moving automatically, his blistered, seeing eye fixed and unblinking on the speck which had become the shape of the massive petrified tree.

  The tree was the end of his journey. At the beginning, he had felt certain that he would find the old man before he reached it. Kanna walked slowly, and hadn't had much of a head start on Saladin. The boy had not given thought to the possibility that his own injuries would slow him down.

  Now he had found the tree of stone, but the old man was nowhere in sight. He had moved on, or perhaps had never come this way at all.

  Saladin sat down woodenly. He stared off toward the limitless horizon, where the sandy earth crested in an unending ridge, took the filthy bandage off his ruined eye, and laughed, softly at first, then wild and racking.

  What if Kanna had never come to the desert?

  What if he was back in the cave in the Zagros Mountains, tending to his medicines, wondering what had happened to the boy who had so angered him for a moment? The old fool had no intellect to speak of; he might have forgotten the entire episode by the next day. And here was Saladin, his face disfigured like one of the clay masks the priests in Kish would don before they climbed the ziggurat to the gods, his fifteen-year-old body disintegrating before his own eyes, dying in the sands for nothing.

  He laughed until he shrieked, pounding the back of his head against the trunk of the fallen tree, then pitching forward to vomit out the last of his water. When he was finished, he lay on the ground. He would die here, he decided. It was as good a place as any. He touched his finger to an indentation in the dirt and closed his eyes.

  And then opened them.

  The indentation was a footprint.

  Saladin whimpered as he scrambled to his knees, touching the sunbaked outline of Kanna's foot. The old man had halted here, at this very spot, to shelter from the rain. And after the rain stopped, he had gone on, leaving his trail in the mud.

  Luck had given Saladin another signpost, the next section of the map. He looked overhead. The sun was directly above him, blazing in full heat. Kanna was only a day and a half ahead of him, and the old man walked slowly.

  He crawled to the next footprint, and the next, then staggered to his feet and began to run on the dry, hard earth. He paid no heed to his shoulder, which jolted with pain at every footfall, nor to the thirst that already caused his tongue to stick fast to the roof of his mouth. He had a chance to live, and he would take it.

  By mid-afternoon he could barely see the footprints. The sun had dried the mud quickly. Ahead of him lay a stretch of empty brown land. But the footprints had followed a straight line from the stone tree, and Saladin concentrated all his thoughts on staying on course. He picked up some pebbles a
nd tossed them one by one ahead of him to focus his mind on the invisible straight line of the old man's path. He forced away all pain, all suffering, all fear of death. The old man was near, beyond the ridge, perhaps . . .

  Near nightfall he stumbled and knew he could not rise. He raised his head, then dropped it once again onto the ground. If he slept this night, he knew, he would be dead by morning.

  With wildly trembling fingers, he pushed himself to a sitting position and took out the knife he had used to lance his putrid shoulder. Barely feeling its touch, he drew the chiseled blade across the back of his hand and drank blood from his own body.

  Then, with an effort greater than he had ever known, he willed himself to stand and move, one foot after another, toward the top of the ridge.

  "Kanna," he whispered without moving his blood-caked lips. "Kanna . . . Kanna . . . Kanna . . ."

  He was there, at the bottom of the bare hill and to the east, but near enough so that Saladin could make out the unmistakable figure of a man.

  The boy stopped and blinked. The night came quickly here and played tricks with one's eyes.

  He was no longer certain of what was real and what he imagined. He wanted to see Kanna, surely, wanted it so much that his heat-boiled brain might have invented him. Or the figure below might be death himself, come to claim him at last.

  "Ka . . ." It was no more than a croak, but the old man stopped and turned.

  With the last of his strength Saladin held his arms out in supplication. His knees buckled beneath him. He fell to the earth in the position of a beggar, arms outstretched, head back, eyes closed. He rolled, insensate, to the bottom of the ridge while the old man loped toward him.

  Kanna knelt before the boy, moaning softly over the festering wounds. The starry night was cold, but Saladin was burning with fever. His eyes were half-open and glassy. His breath was coming in ragged gasps, rattling with the grotesque music of death.

  Hurriedly, the old man pulled the small metal bowl from its pouch in his belt and filled it with water from a skin slung over his back. He cradled the boy's head in his arms and tilted the Stone against his lips.

  The first stream of water spilled from the sides of Saladin's mouth, but soon he began to drink. Kanna parceled it out in small sips, so that the boy would not choke on the water he so needed. When he finished one bowlful, the old man refilled it and wrapped Saladin's wasted fingers around its smooth sides.

  Slowly the boy's eyes opened. He sat up, sucking air through his teeth as the wonderful Stone did its work. His shoulder shrank to normal proportions as the green poison inside it dried and disappeared. The deep wound where Saladin had pierced it narrowed to a thin line, then vanished. The marks on his hands and face were replaced by soft, perfect skin. His blisters faded to nothing. Inexorably, the ruined eye in his face rounded, filled, and healed. And through it all the Stone sang its song, thrumming through Saladin's blood with its own powerful heartbeat.

  He looked up. The old man was nodding happily, smiling like a little dancing troll.

  "Thank you, Kanna," he said. He bent forward and kissed the hermit's cheek. "Will you forgive me?"

  The old man's eyes welled. He touched the boy's face with his gnarled hands. He lowered his head.

  "Good," Saladin said softly, a moment before he threw the Stone into the night.

  Kanna looked after it in bewilderment, but before he could rise to fetch it, the boy took the knife from his belt and drew it across the old man's throat.

  The hermit's arms flailed in the gush of blood. He pulled himself to one knee before tumbling onto his back where he lay twitching, his eyes wide with confusion and fear.

  "It won't last long," Saladin said.

  Kanna clasped his hand on the boy's wrist. He was trying to speak, but he no longer had the means.

  "I know," the boy said gently. "You would have wanted me to have it." He smiled, then pried the old fingers loose and rose to find the Stone.

  When he got back, Kanna was dead. Saladin removed the belt and pouch from the body and strapped the metal cup around his own waist. Then he slung the old man's water-skin over his shoulder and continued east, to the land beyond the desert.

  That had been so long ago, Saladin thought from his perch above the city of Kowloon. He had scarcely given Kanna a thought for years. He smiled. Dr. Coles would have loved to hear about him.

  He uncoiled himself from the white wicker chair and stretched his long arms with a sigh. He would miss China. During his incarceration, he had dreamed often of its teeming cities and boundless enticements. Revisiting rural England was the last thing he wanted to do, especially so soon after fleeing it. But there was work to be done. The cup—Kanna's "Stone"—was missing again, and he knew he had to act quickly. He had been lazy once, during a holiday with a woman, and had lost the cup for more than twelve years as a result.

  This would not be so difficult a quest. He could probably pay the American boy for the cup and have an end to it.

  He crinkled his long nose. No, that would be a bore. He had spent four years in a single room with nothing but an occasional novel to distract him. He would give himself a small adventure. Some horses, some costumes . . .

  He laughed out loud.

  A servant scurried out to check on him, cocking his head with curiosity.

  "Some traveling clothes, please," Saladin said.

  The servant nodded and left.

  Yes, yes. It was good to be free again.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Hal felt out of place in London. Not because of the black eye, which had faded to a ripe yellow. It had been planted on him personally by Benny the barkeep after Hal had explained that the Grand Prize he'd won on the now nationally famous episode of Go Fish! could not be exchanged for ready cash to pay Hal's bar bill. After the episode with Benny, Hal had wisely chosen to hide out from his other creditors until his travel arrangements could be made.

  It was June, and his room at the Inter-Continental was stocked with a vase filled with fresh flowers, a bottle of Moet et Chandon, and a complimentary breakfast for two.

  Those, essentially, were the reasons he felt strange. The room was too clean, the vase too fragile, the champagne too expensive. He had pompously given a five-pound note to the porter, who registered no sign of surprise at the large tip, and had made what he hoped were appropriately ceremonious sounds as he sniffed the cork from the Moet in imitation of what he believed sophisticated people did with champagne. But after the porter left, he took off his shoes, rubbed his travel-swollen feet, wished for a beer, and felt like a hick.

  What the hell was he doing in London? He had never set foot out of New York City until he was twenty-three years old and then it was to the FBI training facility in Quantico. After that, he had traveled wherever the Bureau sent him, but he had never lingered to visit those places, and he had never been alone.

  That was it, he supposed. The complimentary breakfast for two was the kicker. The double bed. The two glasses set on the table by mistake. Human beings traveled in pairs, at least when they were supposed to be enjoying themselves. The Grand Prize had been a trip for two.

  And Hal had considered taking someone along with him, until he realized that there was not one individual among his entire lifelong circle of acquaintances whose company he could tolerate for two solid weeks. Except perhaps for the pimp from O'Kay's; but he would have gotten both of them arrested within twenty-four hours of their arrival.

  So Hal sat alone in his flowery hotel room until the champagne was gone and his big toe had stopped pulsating and his hunger forced him back onto the street, where he felt more at home.

  He settled on a small pub with a basket of dirty plastic flowers in the window and a clock advertising Guinness stout over the bar. It wasn't Benny's, but it didn't have ferns, either, and the two sausage-and-onion sandwiches he wolfed down were magnificent.

  "Nothing like it this side of Little Italy," he said. "But you wouldn't happen to have a cold beer in the place, w
ould you?"

  The barman shook his head and smiled politely as he wiped off the bar in front of Hal. "Enjoying your stay, sir?"

  "Just got here."

  "Business?"

  Hal grunted. He did not want to elicit the barman's pity by proclaiming himself a pleasure seeker.

  A bell above the door tinkled, announcing the arrival of a new customer.

  "To tell you the truth . . ." The rest of the sentence was forgotten. An elderly gentleman walked in a stately manner toward the bar. Hal recognized him at once.

  "It's you," he said as the Englishman sat down beside him.

  "Indeed," the old man said with a noncommittal smile and a nod of his head. Clearly he didn't remember Hal.

  "I think we've met. In New York, a couple of weeks ago. You were going to a game show."

  Slowly the light of recognition came into the Englishman's eyes. "I say, it's Mr. Woczniak, isn't it?"

  "Hal. Sorry, I'm not good at names."

  "Taliesin." He offered his hand. "Bertram, but no one calls me that."

  "Taliesin," Hal repeated in a whisper. An ancient name. "That's right, I remember. Like the bard." He saw the man's hand and shook it quickly.

  "Ah. So you're a student of medieval literature."

  Hal laughed. "I guess the people at Go Fish! think so." He related his experiences as a contestant on the show, leaving out the weirder parts of the story. He did not mention that he'd had no idea where his answers came from.

  "Anyway, I ended up winning the Grand Prize trip to London. So here I am."

  "Jolly good!" Taliesin said, chuckling heartily. "And our paths cross again. I'd hoped they would."

  "Yeah." The smile faded from Hal's face. "It's funny."

  "Funny?"

  Hal shrugged. "I meet you on the street, you give me a ticket to a game show, I win. That's funny. Peculiar. And now I'm in England for maybe four hours, and I meet you again."