Kate sighed again.
With his eyes narrowed against the biting wind, Alan watched the snowy banks give way to rock and shingle, moist with a scum of yellow-green algae. He murmured, “And you, what did you feel back in the cave?”
“Nothing I could put into words any better than you can. Just as you say, it was more a sort of feeling. A sort of communication. It was like I remember when I was seven years old and had my first communion. I felt a kind of overwhelming sense of fulfillment. Like . . . like grace.”
Alan stared across at the passing landscape.
When Kate left him to go and talk to Mo, Alan searched out Kemtuk. He found the shaman on the foredeck with Siam, both men alert for every whim of the wind or weather. Already it seemed that they were fearful of an attack from either bank.
Alan asked Siam, “Why not an attack by water?”
The Olhyiu chief shook his head. “On the river we are the masters. The attack will come from land, and at a time that disadvantages us and favors their malengins of war. Not for nothing are they called Storm Wolves.”
“Tell me more about these Storm Wolves.”
“They are soldiers blood-sworn to the Tyrant of the Wastelands.”
“Who is this tyrant?”
“The enemy of all who live in this continent of Monisle. For years beyond count we fought against him, continent against continent, through an ocean of blood and destruction. But then, and the shaman here claims to understand what I do not, the High Architect of Ossierel, our spiritual capital, lost the will to fight on.”
“Ussha De Danaan did not lose the will to fight,” interrupted Kemtuk. “She abandoned her own protection, though for reasons none have ever understood.”
Siam’s eyes darkened with anger. “Yet the shaman cannot deny that she allowed the Death Legion to massacre all on the island capital. And the consequence is our domination by these cruel forces. These are a hard and dangerous enemy, trained to live and fight in these wastelands.”
“The Storm Wolves are part of this Tyrant’s army?”
“They are the most northerly of his army of occupation, which calls itself the Death Legion.”
While absorbing this, Alan noticed how Kemtuk’s eyes were avoiding his. Was it possible that the shaman had grown frightened of him? Alan realized that the old man was not to be persuaded or hurried. He left the Olhyiu leaders and made his way to the stern rail, prepared to bide his time for a more suitable moment.
“My goodness! It’s suh-suh-suh-so lovely. Huh-huh-haunting!”
Alan hadn’t heard Mo approach. But now he smiled at her. “You’re right, Mo. It is haunting.”
Maybe she wanted to talk to him about Mark. He decided he would let her bring it up if it was what she wanted. For now he relaxed in her company as they stared out into the continuing thaw in the wilderness that was gliding by. Black tors still filled the gaps between the trees, shoulder pressed against shoulder, crushing the light from two thirds of the sky. Shags posed on the frosted crags of rock under the shadows of the banks and they disappeared, with barely a ripple, into the surface stream.
She said, “There’s fuh-food enough for the fuh-fuh-fish and the buh-birds buh-buh-buh . . .”
“But not for hungry people?”
Mo nodded.
Always on the threshold of starvation in the ice-bound lake, the Olhyiu were already low on food. Alan knew that there was plenty of food in the river and on the banks but to get hold of it they would have to stop. And to stop meant delays and the ever-present risk of attack.
On the evening of the fourth day, after they had made a rapid passage with long hours of sailing, Siam felt that it was safe to draw up the keels against a bank of shingle. Hunters made preparations to enter the forest in search of meat. Some of the elders disembarked with the hunters to sit around fires on the snow-covered shore.
Alan joined the shaman’s group around one of the campfires.
Inland the ash-white barks of birch trees faded into shadows, while at the waterside, the bleached forms of the boats were glimmering with moonlight.
He shook his head at the leaf of tobacco offered by one of the Olhyiu. But he welcomed a bowl of broth, warmed in the embers around the edge of the fire. Sipping it gratefully, with his shoulders hunched against the cold, he watched the shaman’s wrinkled face, the glitter in the pupil of his right eye. The old man was deeply thoughtful, his pipe aglow. Alan had grown fond of Kemtuk, and he was reluctant to intrude on his reflections. Waiting until the shaman was filling a new pipe, he broached the curious nature of the Temple Ship.
“As you suggest, such a wonder was not constructed by the Olhyiu—nor by any craftsmen known to us. Its origins date from before the age of the wandering.”
“How far back is that?”
For a moment or two, Kemtuk drew on his pipe in a thinking silence against the glowing bowl of his pipe.
“Older than we might dream. In the earliest days, when the Tilikum Olhyiu were spread three thousand miles along the coast from Carfon in the south to this northern world of the Whitestar Mountains, the ship was ancient even then.” Kemtuk shrugged. “Its makers are a mystery. But what is a world without mystery?”
Alan nodded, welcoming the approaching Kate to share his rug. Shivering with cold, she snuggled up to him for warmth. It was obvious that Kemtuk had nothing more to say, since his face had fallen into contemplation. Alan stroked Kate’s face, then kissed the top of her head as she found a comfortable position against his neck. His eyes wandered about them, toward the red glow that played about the shining faces of the other elders. He pulled his cloak tighter around them both.
Mark felt too tense to fall asleep with the others, reflecting back on the stupid impulse that had resulted in him shattering his own crystal. In the moonlight he could see them—Alan, so proud of his ruby triangle, spending all that time earlier chatting to the shaman, and now falling asleep by the fire with Kate snuggling up against his shoulder. He had never seen Kate look as beautiful as she looked in this world. Her body was filling out, growing into the figure of a woman, and her auburn hair seemed to grow thicker and more luxurious day by day. And just looking at her now as she lay there, lovely and vulnerable in her sleep, with her fingers trailing around Alan’s neck, he couldn’t bear to see them so warm and cozy under their shared rug!
Still sleepless an hour or two later, Mark slid out from under his own rug and walked softly away into the snow, stooping twice, first to lift a leaf-roll of tobacco from a sleeping elder’s pouch, and then to pick up an ember from the fire. He felt so angry, and lonely, he could hardly bear it. Soon, he was hidden behind a coppice of birch saplings. He blew on the ember to heighten its glow before lighting the leaf-roll with it.
“They are so lovely together, are they not?”
Mark spun around, looking for the source of the whisper, which had been softer than the breeze. “Who’s there?”
He caught a hint of movement, something diaphanous gliding closer behind some shrubbery. The ember fell from his hand, guttering in the snow.
With his heart pounding, he saw the shrubbery part and in a moment a young woman was standing there. She had picked up the ember and was blowing on it through pouted lips, now and then flicking her eyes in his direction. The ember grew to a tiny blaze and in the reflection of its glow he saw that she had platinum blonde hair brought forward over her shoulders, falling all the way down to her waist. Her eyes were a lustrous turquoise in a face like porcelain. She was too beautiful to be real, more perfect than any actress or pop star he had ever seen, more like a princess from a fairy tale.
His taut lips struggled to speak. “Who . . . ?”
“I can see,” she whispered, “why you might envy him.” She glided up closer, so close he could breathe in her fragrance. She glanced across to where, through the trees, his friends and the Olhyiu were sleeping around the fire. “Yet she is but a child and I am a woman.”
His mind told his legs to run but his legs refu
sed to obey. His muscles were frozen. “You’re not real. . . . You can’t be!”
“I am Siri.” She laughed, a bewitching sound, like the tinkling of a musical box. “Do you not have wood sprites in the world you come from?”
He tried to swallow, but his mouth was ash dry. “You—you’re a mirage—some kind of a trick of the light!”
“Touch me, then. See if I’m real.”
Mark tried to take a step backward, but his legs wouldn’t move.
She put the leaf-roll in her mouth and inhaled the smoke, then reached up to press her lips against his. She parted his lips and teeth with her tongue, breathing the honey-sweet smoke into his mouth and nostrils.
It’s a dream. It isn’t happening. Not wildly possible . . .
But it was happening. And it was the most enchanting dream he could ever have imagined.
In some distant corner of his mind, he heard the gravelly warning of Granny Dew in the cave: Daaannngggerrr!
But his heart didn’t care. His heart was lost to the dream. His heart wished it would never stop when she kissed him softly. It faltered when he felt her scented breath move across his cheek and neck as her lips drew back.
Mark moaned. He felt dizzy. He had a throat full of smoke and he coughed and spluttered. But he couldn’t move. The doll-like face studied him with her head aslant. He wanted to inhale her beauty so it filled his lungs, but he just stood there, his eyes staring at her, his mouth agape.
Her long-fingered hand reached up to cosset his cheek. Her touch was as delicate as the wings of a butterfly. “Will you share a secret with me, my lovely, and tell me what the old crone said to you in the cave?”
Mark tried to think beyond the desire for her lips. His heart felt faint and his legs felt jittery. “How . . . how did you know?”
She cradled his face with her hands, cupping the boyish smoothness of his cheeks, bringing his mouth to hers with a deeper kiss, moving upward, with a feathery touch, to brush her lips over his momentarily closed eyes. Then she put her arms about his neck and she kissed him again, passionately and languorously. No girl had ever kissed Mark like that in his life. He could not turn from her kiss, his lips drinking in the padded softness of her mouth. Her delicate pink tongue pierced his lips again, moistening his own tongue with a caress that thrilled him with pleasure. “Oh, my lovely, I would dearly like to know what she said to you.”
In his spirit he groaned aloud while his mouth could not stop itself from intoning hoarsely, “She said that one day I would find . . .” With all of his will, he forced it to stop, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he thought he was going to die.
“Yes! Yes, my darling, what would you find?” She pressed the wonderful curves of her body against his, thrilling him so he felt gooseflesh rise over his entire skin. Her lips brushed against his ear, her breath tingling in his very mind, a whisper of delight. “Oooh, my lovely—you only have to let me help you make true your secret longing!”
Tears erupted into his eyes. “I . . . I would find love.”
“Ah!”
As if waking from a dream, Mark found himself sitting beside her in the snow. How long they had spent together, he didn’t know. He stood up, staggering with weakness in every muscle, and attempted to turn away. She took his hand, which appeared to have a will of its own, helping her to her feet. There was no gooseflesh on her skin, no response to the cold at all. Her body was so lithe, it might have been weightless.
“I must go now, my beautiful boy.” She was already receding from him into the pitch-black shadows of the trees.
His voice quavered. “No. Don’t go.”
“I must.”
The anguish of her leaving, of losing her, crushed his heart.
“Will I never see you again?”
“If you wish, I might come to you in your sleep.”
A mixture of delight and dread caused a sweat to erupt over his brow and cheeks. “Only in my sleep?”
“Oh, my dearest love!” She came forward and embraced him again, as if she couldn’t bear to let him go, her hands stroking his hair, then falling to caress the skin on the back of his neck. “Every night, if that would please you.”
He was trembling uncontrollably. “Yes.”
“But beware. If those others knew! This boy they call Mage Lord—the one you recognize to be your enemy—he would stop me coming to you. You must be discreet or he would part us forever.”
Mark was panting for breath, his heart breaking. Still his reedy voice proclaimed, “Alan is not my enemy.”
“Oh, beloved, give me your word. Will you promise me, upon your heart and soul?”
“Yes.”
“I must hear it—you must speak the words.”
He sensed the spirit dying in him as his lips spoke the words, “Upon my heart and soul, I give you my promise.”
“Go back now and tell them nothing. Go now. Hurry, before they notice your absence! And I will come to you every night, without fail.”
When the youth had gone, two figures with folded, membranous wings emerged from the deep shadows behind the woman. They were gigantically tall and skeletally thin, with bat-like heads that peered down at her from between the lower branches of the trees, and their gray-blue oily skins reflected the moonlight in iridescent gleams. They watched the retreat of the boy, following his stumbling progress until he had rejoined the primitives by their campfires.
The woman gloated, in a harsh purr very different from the silken tones she had employed in addressing the youth, “He is mine!”
This was observed with liquid hisses of pleasure, and a chameleonlike darkening of the creatures’ skins. A thumb extended from the first bend of a great wing and pointed directly into the woman’s face. From the thumb, a single claw, as long as a dagger, emerged to exude venom only inches from her eyes. She averted her face, but it was more from the stink of the creature’s secretion than from fear. When the bat creature spoke, it was through a series of clefts high up in its neck, somewhat like gills, so that its voice emerged as a warbling hiss.
“You have done well, succubus!”
Her lips drew back wide in triumph, and there was a flash of ivory, as four needle-point canines captured the white glitter of the moon.
“My mistress will be pleased.”
The Dragon’s Teeth
On the second week they lost one of their company—the old woman who had seen her ancestors on the bank. Kemtuk told them that she had given up the will to live and so had slipped away during a hunting stop to die ashore. A party of men, led by Turkeya, followed her tracks for a few hundred yards among the rushes and sedges lining the bank until they found her body, frozen to the ground. They left her there, erecting a small mound of stones over her body to mark her grave.
The old woman’s death startled the Olhyiu, and fearful eyes peered more anxiously at the snowbound forest as they moved out again into the increasingly turbulent river. The landscape was unchanging, always that frighteningly stark contrast between the snowy ground and the shadowy indigo of the trees.
Kate did her best to keep track of the days.
Today was two weeks and six days since they had first sailed out from their ice-bound captivity. She estimated they were traveling from twenty to fifty miles each day, depending on the difficulty they experienced with navigating the river. And those difficulties were mounting.
Later in the morning they came to a complete stop while the women passed out ropes to the men standing on the bank. They had to edge each boat past treacherous rapids, while all still on board pushed on the river floor with poles from the decks. For the Temple Ship, progress became a major undertaking. The steam of their breaths bathed their heads like haloes, and on the banks thick reeds, coated with hoarfrost, crackled like gunshots under the feet of the men as they heaved and tugged on ropes attached to the prows. Hearts faltered when one of the fishing boats ran aground on a trap of breakers. With anxious eyes scanning the trees, this family home was finally saved by cantil
evering it over the rocks using fulcrums hacked out of young tree trunks and lubricated by slippery inner bark.
But they had lost an entire day negotiating a few miles of water, and meanwhile the sense of menace increased as the food reserves dwindled. The meat caught by the hunters had long run out, and even their stores of fish and oil were almost spent. Kate’s heart sank with the plaintive sound of children wailing from hunger. That night, sitting around another fire on the bank, with her sleepy head against Alan’s shoulder, she heard a loud flapping in the air, a leathery sound, like great wings beating. Craning her eyes through the dark, she saw nothing more than shadows. But to her nostrils came a foul stench, left on the air in the wake of the wings. Shivering involuntarily, she peered into the forest, blue-black against the virgin white of the snow, as the sighing, lapping river carried them ever southward through the alien landscape.
“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. “Mommy 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.
The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) Page 22
