From the top of the falls, looking down at the flower-shaped cluster of domes in the meadow, Teeg waved. Tiny figures waved back, then scattered to their various labors. One stayed behind longer than the others; Teeg knew her by the blaze of white hair. The old woman did not wave, but just stood there with face uplifted.
“She’s found a daughter after all these years,” Phoenix said, “and now she’s afraid of losing you.”
“I know,” said Teeg.
Diminished by distance, Zuni might have been a fleck of foam. The whole of Jonah Colony might have been froth on the meadow. The slightest breeze, and everything would vanish.
As if reading her thoughts, Phoenix said, “I wonder if there’ll be anything here when we get back.”
Teeg shaded her eyes and studied the sky over the ocean, searching for the long-winged silhouettes of gliders. Blank sky, of course. The powers that swept down on you rarely showed their faces ahead of time.
“Who knows?” she answered. “Will the world still be there after you blink?”
Phoenix shrugged, or perhaps he was merely balancing his pack. Pointing upstream, he said, “Portland, two hundred kilometers,” and set off walking. They retraced the route Zuni had taken, along Salt Creek to its junction with the Wolf, past the burned-out site of her village. Even loaded down with backpacks, they made better time than she had, reaching the repair station after three days. The sight of the gleaming travel-tubes, these outflung arteries of the Enclosure, was unsettling after so long in the wilds.
Knowing better than to invade the protector fields, they gave the station a wide berth, hiking northeast across the broad valley to meet the Willamette River. Teeg was grateful for the flat land after three days of scrambling along creek banks, grateful, after so many kilometers of worming through thickets or ducking under the boughs of trees, for the meadow flowers and grasses that stroked her thighs. She and Phoenix took turns breaking a path. When he led, he would turn around occasionally to ask with his eyes whether he was heading in the right direction. She would point out the way and off he would trudge, the bulky pack swaying as he walked.
Near nightfall of that third day they struck the river, too near nightfall to risk launching the raft. Once the tent was inflated and the sleepsacks unfurled, Teeg went roving in the meadow to gather flowers while Phoenix heated algae-patties. Late bees hummed in the weeds. Off to the west, where the coastal hills rose like the spine of a sea serpent against a fiery sunset, two birds called to one another: Here I am, where are you? What other beasts filled the night with secret language? Teeg wondered. Except for a sluggish ground hog, three rabbits, and a clutch of squirrels, no four-leggeds had crossed her path.
Teeg loaded her arms with spiky purple flowers—Joe Pye Weed? was that what her mother had called them?—and was just standing up when she saw a dark head lifted above the grasses some few dozen meters away. She almost dropped the flowers. Narrow and long, with great shaggy whiskers, the head examined her. Who could it be? A renegade who’d avoided the HP all these years? A mutant? A bear? She was about to cry out—cry something, Help! or Hello!—when two pointed ears twitched forward on the shadowy head. Teeg flinched so violently the armful of flowers shook. The creature’s head waggled. Suddenly Teeg realized that what she had taken for bushy whiskers was a bunch of grass caught sideways in a narrow jaw. Deer! She held very still, not wanting to frighten the animal, wondering how to signal Phoenix to come look. With stately movement the deer turned away from her and ambled toward the river. For a moment the dark body was visible against the even darker, glassy water. Seen thus dimly, it looked perfect, no tumors, no misshapen limbs. The only other deer she had ever seen had been crippled. This one pranced nimbly along the bank.
“Phoenix, look!” Teeg cried, wanting him to glimpse the creature before it disappeared.
Stately and elegant even in flight, the deer went bounding away, tail raised, easily leaping over the tallest weeds. It made scarcely a sound.
Moments later Phoenix came crashing to her side, axe in hand, puffing ferociously. “What’s the matter?”
“A deer,” she said.
He peered in the direction she pointed, but the creature had been swallowed by darkness. “A deer?” He repeated the word as if it were the name of a mythical beast, a unicorn or griffin. “Is it dangerous?”
“No, it’s the gentlest creature,” Teeg answered. Yet she trembled. There were not supposed to be any deer. The teachers had said so. But if deer—what else might thrust its head from the tangled weeds? Maybe a bear, to go with the pawprint Zuni had found?
After supper, while she and Phoenix sat on the bank watching the river flex and sway with the last gleams of daylight, the trembling seized her again. What was the trouble? Reminders of death could shake her like that. But why quake at this reminder of life? Like the deer with its ears pricked delicately forward, its muzzle lifted to catch a hint of anything stirring, Teeg strained all her senses to discover what lurked ahead.
“The river looks like skin over muscles,” Phoenix said, touching her shoulder, “like about right here, or here,” trailing his fingers along her throat, “or here,” gently massaging her back with both hands.
Teeg grew still under his fingers, heavy and powerful and calm like the river. While they made love she imagined the river entering her, filling her, and she became the river, there was only the river, surging and surging toward the sea.
Sunlight shone lemony through the polyfilm bubble of the tent. Teeg was able to savor the exquisite morning only briefly before scuffling noises outside drove her from the sleepsack. The racket came from Phoenix, who was locked in a three-way wrestling match with the aerator and raft, and was evidently losing.
“How does this infernal thing go?” he demanded.
Teeg disentangled him from the clinging blue fabric, spread it out on the river bank, and within half a minute had the raft inflated. “Like so,” she said.
Phoenix stared at the gossamer craft as if she had conjured it out of thin air. “Why did you bring me along on this expedition, anyway?”
“For your cooking,” she replied with a straight face. “You do wonders for algae.” When he appeared to be genuinely downcast she felt a sudden swelling of love for him. Hugging him, she babbled, “And for your rabbity looks, your delirious ways in the sack, the great moony face you get when the world surprises you. For the way you dote on Zuni, for carrying half my gear in your rucksack, for taking off that stupid mask and wig and coming out here with a wildwoman like me. That’s why.”
He looked at her with an effort of soberness, but the corners of his mouth pushed upward. “Is that all?”
“If I listed them all, we’d never get to Portland.”
The Willamette carried them toward Portland on its brawny shoulders all that day and the next and the next. Phoenix squatted in the front of the raft, Teeg in the stern, piloting them around snags and rocks. From repair missions, she was familiar with the buoyant craft and with stretches of the river. Unlike the larger ocean raft, this one was roofless, allowing them to see in all directions. The shore was mostly overgrown with alders and brambles, but here and there a meadow opened, aflutter with grasses and bright midsummer flowers.
It was hard telling how many unburned towns they passed, for these were smothered with vegetation and nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding fields. But the scourged places were easy to count, nine of them, for each was a heap of slag and bubbled rock where nothing grew. In three days on the river they floated past eighteen spots where the soil was bare and chalky. Dump sites, possibly, or spills. Phoenix kept a tally in his notebook, where he also recorded the changes in radioactivity levels.
Twice they glimpsed deer, at dusk. Teeg imagined she saw wolves or hulking man-like beasts on the hills near the river, but invariably the shapes turned out, in the binoculars, to be rocks or bushes. Every now and again the raft would startle a beaver or muskrat, which plopped into the water and swam for cover. Occasionally a gr
eat blue heron would lurch into the air on its ungainly wings, or else sit in dignified composure on its fishing rock and eye them coldly as the raft drifted by. Smaller birds stitched the air constantly with their flight, tree to tree, bank to bank. Watching them, Teeg imagined the air over the river was a garment the birds kept in good repair.
Each evening they tethered the raft and made camp on the shore, while the sun burned down in a vast conflagration behind the sea-serpent mountains to the west. Teeg ate facing east. She doubted whether she would ever be able to look at the sunset again, or at fire, without remembering Sol’s burning.
The third afternoon on the river, Teeg guided the raft to shore early. When Phoenix raised his eyebrows questioningly, she explained, “The map says there’s only two more bends before the outskirts of Portland—or what used to be Portland—and I want to be fresh when we get there.”
By massaging her back that evening Phoenix tried to soothe her, but she could not relax. All night her mother’s face kept rising into consciousness like a balloon. The lips moved, but Teeg could not hear what they said, could not even tell whether they spoke angrily or lovingly. Meditation, riding her breath, summoning the inner light to the center of her belly—none of these exercises brought calm. When at length she slept, dreams of swooping gliders and raging fires exhausted her.
In the morning she blinked awake to find a grotesque antlered face leering down at her. She immediately buried herself in the pouch and screamed “Phoenix!” The beast roared and she screamed again, and then she stopped yelling as she recognized the roar … the laughter. Flopping the covers back and glaring, she cried, “Phoenix, you idiot! You nearly scared me to death!”
The familiar goofy mug grinned beneath the antlers. “Look what I found snagged in a bush,” he said, inclining his skull to display the horns. Clumsily strapped to his head with tape, they wobbled as he moved. “What do you call a male deer?”
“Buck,” she answered, still angry.
“Some buck lost these. Big fellow, too. Look at all the points.”
The rack was indeed a fine one. Teeg found herself admiring the way the points curved up gleaming, branch after branch, like a candelabrum. But she was reluctant to give up her anger. “You look ridiculous.”
“I know it.” He grinned and grinned, as if determined to drive all the night-fears out of her.
Phoenix wore the antlers while he fixed breakfast, still wore them as the loaded raft glided into the river.
“Will you take those stupid things off, so I can see what’s ahead?” Teeg demanded crossly.
Without answering, he undid the tapes and stowed the antlers away. Then she felt bad, knowing he only clowned to distract her from brooding about the journey’s end. But she did not want to be distracted. She had been circling back for too long to this place where her mother had died—or had not died—to give up brooding about it now.
They rode the current in silence. By and by a small stream entered the Willamette from the east. That would be the Clackamas. The snow-scarred peak of Mt. Hood reared up farther to the east. Sunlight dazzled on its frozen slopes. She had seen the mountain often on repair missions, yet each time it seemed to loom up fresh from the underworld, uncannily majestic and remote.
Mind the snags, Teeg thought. She gave her attention back to the river. Noticing Phoenix’s profile, she realized that he had been turned sideways in the raft for an hour or more, contemplating Mt. Hood, with the worshipful look he had shown when contemplating Zuni on her sickbed.
He startled her by speaking. “What do you suppose that noise is?”
At first she heard nothing unusual. Then gradually she distinguished above the river sounds a harsh croaking, like the gasping of some enormous beast. She remembered the deer, with its ears pricked forward, listening. What waited?
* * *
* * *
TWENTY-TWO
Whatever was groaning apparently did not feel much need of breathing. Phoenix calculated it was likelier to be a machine than a beast, for what beast could bellow so mournfully without pausing to inhale? Still, in the wilds you could never be sure. Mutants cropped up all the time. Who knew what roomy lungs some of them might have? Maybe he should put on his antlers and go frighten the thing into silence. Nothing like a fierce pair of horns to stiffen the old backbone.
“It’s getting louder,” he observed, twisting round to glance at Teeg. Her haggard look unsettled him. What if it was a beast? “Maybe we should pull over?”
“It’s probably just a drone they put in to scare people off the river.”
“What people?”
“Anybody. Us, for example.”
“Well,” he admitted, “I think it’s done a pretty good job on me.” His playfulness did not erase the pinched look from her face.
According to the map that lay crumpled over his knees, they were passing through the suburbs of Portland now. But there was nothing remarkable on the shore, except some queer mounds of brush and saplings. Did they cover the ruins of buildings? Where the first bridge was supposed to be, crumbling cement piers thrust up from the river. Grass and brush had rooted on the crowns, where electric shuttles used to run. How odd, to have lived in a city that was open to the sky, with plants actually growing in the yards.
The groaning swelled louder, breathless, a voice brimming over with anguish. Merely a contrivance to scare us, he reassured himself. Meanwhile on both shores appeared the fractured skeletons of what must have been wooden houses. Beams and cross-members, some joining at right angles and some tilting dizzily, formed a latticework through which ivy curled. Ferns rooted on every flat perch of wood. Moss furred the rotting timbers in green. These house jungles were interrupted occasionally by areas of stony desolation, heaps of slag where no hint of green showed.
“This is pretty close to downtown,” Teeg said. She had to raise her voice, because of the interminable moaning.
With a nudge on the tiller she guided the raft to the left of two islands. These must have been dumps, for they were cratered and barren. Chunks of what might have been pavement, maybe a river promenade, were visible through weeds on the western bank. Beyond, the shells of a few brick buildings stood roofless, disintegrating. Vines and ferns spilled forth at every window opening. Farther west the ground of the city rose over a series of knobby hills toward a heavily forested ridge. Phoenix imagined he caught a flash of light from there, a fiery wink. What? Probably sun on newly cloven rock.
“What’s up there?” he asked Teeg, pointing at the ridge.
He had to ask the question a second time to get her attention, and even then she spoke haltingly. “Used to be Washington Park. Rose gardens … disney … observatory … Japanese gardens. All the bluebloods and moneybags lived there.”
With another sway of the tiller she guided the raft into a side-channel. Immediately the groaning sounded closer.
“You have any plans for what happens when we—you know—meet this thing?” asked Phoenix.
“What?”
“I said, the better I hear this thing, the worse I like it.”
She seemed to find it hard to focus on him. “Oh,” she said absently, “didn’t I tell you it must be some kind of wooden gears?”
“No, you didn’t mention that.” He had lost her attention again. Her eyes searched the banks, yet they seemed not quite to fix on anything outwardly.
Wooden gears? A piece of tree could sound so much like a beast in pain? Suddenly he noticed a gigantic thrashing movement on the western bank—a humpbacked creature—and Teeg aimed the raft straight for it, and the beast swelled up enormously and Phoenix was just deciding which point of the raft to dive from when the huge back curved neatly round into a wheel, a wooden paddle-wheel, spinning lazily in the current.
“You see, it’s a water mill,” Teeg announced.
Phoenix examined it with heart thumping. The great wooden wheel, perhaps twice as high as a man, stood upright, its lower paddles in the water, pivoting on an axle that jutted fr
om a shed. The shed was also wooden, bleached and paintless, in excellent repair. It had been neatly carpentered from boards of varying grain and thickness. The nerve-grating howls issued from inside.
Kneeling on her rucksack, with arms braced against the sides to balance the raft, Teeg studied the shore intently. Her hair was drawn back tightly and knotted behind, a splash of red, making her face seem more naked, vulnerable. It was the face of a sleepwalker. Only the eyes moved.
The raft’s blue lip soon bumped the shore just upstream from the mill. While Phoenix tied the lead rope, Teeg leapt ashore and hastened toward the groaning shed. He clambered after, staggering in the tipsy raft, then landing, to his astonishment, on a brick terrace. He stared down in amazement at the meticulous patterns, spirals in the middle with zigzags and stars worked in round the edges. Each brick was outlined brilliantly in moss.
Meanwhile, at the far end of the terrace, Teeg had flung open the door of the shed, and there she stood in the black rectangular opening. “Anyone here?” she yelled above the croaking of the mill. She vanished inside, swallowed whole.
Phoenix ran, but by the time he reached the doorway she had already emerged, blinking, into the sunlight. “A few bins full of grain, shovels, a broom,” she hollered. “Nothing else.”
Through the open door he could see wooden cogs meshing, axles spinning, two great round slabs of stone grinding against one another. The noise was deafening. “Who … how’d it get here?”
Without answering she prowled away over the bricks. He trotted after. “I mean, it couldn’t have lasted all this time!” he shouted. She kept on toward the green mass of vegetation that crowded to the edge of the terrace. He caught up with her and jogged alongside, trying to discover what she had in mind. Just when it seemed they were about to run smack into the tangled thicket, a walkway opened, paved in bricks, broad enough for two people to march abreast. Phoenix drew up short but Teeg darted into the opening and in a moment was gone.
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