Moon-Flash

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  The twig burned itself out as she ran back into the light. But what she saw there was as incomprehensible as the paintings. There were nuts and berries scattered all around the fire. But no Terje.

  5

  SHE SEARCHED for him everywhere. She went down the cliff wall and looked for him on the small beach; then, when it was too dark to see, she called him again and again from the cave. Her voice battled the wind mournfully: Terje! She kept the fire going all night, waiting for him to return. Near dawn, she fell asleep and dreamed.

  She dreamed of the Hunter, standing beside the fire, saying her name again and again. Kyreol. He looked at her, but couldn’t see her, and she thought in the dream, I am invisible. He couldn’t hear when she answered, and his voice grew more and more urgent. She woke, trying to speak to him. There were footprints all around the fire.

  She got up swiftly. The fire was dead, and she was cold again. The footprints were different sizes; they came into the cave mouth and left by it. Ghosts, she thought numbly, even though she knew the dead moved like shadows, disturbing nothing. As she stumbled, half-asleep and bewildered, to the cave mouth, a figure loomed into it, blocking the dawn.

  She put her hands over her mouth. A face woven out of reeds, with two square eyes and a slit mouth stared back at her. The rest of the figure was cloaked in black fur. It came toward her, half-crouched, step by slow step. She stood transfixed, her heart hammering. The figure moved closer, leaving human footprints on the ground. When it was almost close enough to touch her, a hand came out of the cloak, shook a string of bones at her.

  She squealed, then turned and ran. The painted passageway, which had been so dark at night, was dimly lit with shafts of grey. As she ran down it, her panic mingled with indignation, that a person dressed as a thing had come out of nowhere, stolen Terje away, and then rattled old bones at her. The paintings, muted in the light, swirled past her. Their faces were friendlier, their masks—the fish, the sun—were more cheerful than the gloomy reed-face. She stopped finally, pressed against a crevice, and listened. Then she ran again.

  She slowed finally, panting, beginning to cry a little. Reed-Face was still behind her; she heard the rattle of its bones. But she was too tired to run any more, and too upset. She pushed herself into a shadow, tried to become flat, like a painting. The dark figure rounded a comer. Its square eyes peered left, right, then into her still face. She gathered her muscles and sprang at it with a shriek.

  The dark cloak, the bones, the mask fell to a heap on the ground. She caught a glimpse of a blue face beneath the mask, and then whoever it was disappeared back down the passageway.

  She wiped a tear away angrily and put on the cloak. It was soft and warm, covering her from shoulder to ankle. She hesitated a moment, then picked up the mask, looked at it curiously. It was tightly woven, with a cap attached to keep it on the head. It looked new; some of the reeds were not yet dry. Someone had spent days making it. But why? She gazed at its strange eyes, and it seemed to speak to her.

  Why would anyone want to wear a face like yours?

  Because, it said, I make you invisible and you cannot be harmed.

  She put it on. Now I am Reed-Face, she thought, and picked up the bones. No one can scare me again. She continued down the passageway, not knowing where she was going, but not wanting to return to the cave. The world was square, now; the paintings seemed even stranger, seen from Reed-Face’s eyes. But she felt protected.

  The walls began to speak to her slowly, catching her eye with paintings repeated over and over. The stories they told drifted into her thoughts. Now there was a great rainstorm, and the river flooded. A boat full of fishermen is sinking. Twelve moons in a row. A new year. The great Fish-Man is dead. His mask is taken off, and put on the new Fish-Man. The Fish-Man marries the Sun-Woman. There is a big feast, and everyone is wearing masks that smile. A new year. The Sun-Woman has a sun-child. A girl. Here a boy enters a black hole. A cave full of terrifying things. Is it a dream-cave? He passes through. When he comes out, he carves a mask. Now he has a new face. Now the painter is painting himself painting. Did he run out of things to say? Or did he want to say, “I am the painter?” Another year…the Moon-Flash. She stopped in surprise, for there seemed to be many moon-flashes, all at once, circles with fire in them. Stick-figures were doing a confusing dance among the Moon-Flashes. Then the dance became clear, and her blood ran cold.

  People are killing people.

  “Terje,” she whispered and began to run again.

  The history faded into a colorful jumble around her. She ran past years, not knowing if she were going toward the beginning or the end of the story on the walls. The bone rattle shook a warning at her, but she paid no attention until, running finally out of history into daylight, she found herself surrounded by masks.

  She stopped, panting. They all stared at each other: reed-faces, mud-faces, wood-faces, feather-faces. They had been waiting for her. Impulsively, she crouched, shook the bones at them to frighten them away.

  They laughed and, murmuring among themselves, turned away from her to follow a trail down the cliffside. I am still Reed-Face, she thought surprisedly Then she saw Terje.

  She recognized his hands, paler than hers or any of the marked figures’. He wore a face carved out of wood, with a terrible scowl on it. She wanted to laugh at such a fierce mask on Terje’s face, and she realized then how frightened she was. They were together again, close enough to touch each other, but she couldn’t speak to him. He, too, was cloaked in fur, but his hands gathered the fur, closed in front of him, and his shoulders were hunched as though he were still cold. He didn’t know her behind her mask. Maybe, she thought, if I get close enough to him, we can run. But all the mask-people merged into a single line, then, with Terje near the front. They began walking on a trail along the cliff that sloped gently toward the River, and Kyreol could do nothing but follow.

  She saw boats moored in the distance and cheered up slightly. We can steal a boat and sail away… They were odd-looking boats, like little quarter-moons in the water. In the distance, she began to hear drums.

  For some reason they frightened her more than anything else. Their voices were deep, hard, fast. A reed-face turned to a mud-face then and said something. Kyreol realized for the first time that, like birds, they spoke a different language.

  Even her bones felt cold, then. She wondered if the River had tossed them into an entirely different world, if it were a path between two points in the sky, or between two dreams. How can I say my name? she thought, panicked. That I am Kyreol of River-Tree and Turtle-Crossing, a safe place where people don’t wear masks or steal each other away?

  Fortunately, no one said anything to her. The trail ended on a sandy shore where the boats were moored. They all clambered into the boats, their big masks bumping together as they knelt down. They faced downriver, and Kyreol wondered if they scared the fish. She watched the dip and circle of oars as they sped through the water toward the deep, violent voices of the drums. In a boat ahead, Terje sat still, his head bent. She wondered what he was thinking.

  The boats angled across the river. The dark cliffs rose higher, towering against the sky. They changed as Kyreol looked at them. One moment they were simply stone walls bordering the river, with odd patterns of ridges and holes in them. The next moment, the patterns turned into stairs, walkways, doors, windows, carved into the rock. They live in the cliffs, Kyreol thought, and remembered the painting of the cliff-dwelling inside the caves.

  More masks met them as they got out of the boats. The drums roared in triumph, then stopped abruptly. The crowd waiting on the shore parted, and a sun-mask walked through them.

  The mask was a huge, round disk woven of reeds, then painted gold. The Sun had round eyes and a round mouth, and cheeks painted with green growing things. The masks from the boats greeted the Sun, and a woman’s voice spoke in answer. Terje was brought forward. They took off his mask, so Kyreol could see his dirty, startled face. The Sun-Woman touched his h
air. Then she took off her own mask.

  Her hair was fair as Terje’s. The crowd murmured behind her. The drums sounded again, softly. The woman said something to Terje. He shook his head a little. She snapped her fingers, and people from the crowd moved forward.

  They took his fur cloak off, replaced it with a long cloak of tanned hide, painted with a swirl of masks and bodies. They put a spear in one of his hands and a bone knife in the other. When they began painting a moon-flash on his face with dye from a bowl the color of blood, something deep inside Kyreol that responded without words to dreams and the world lurched her whole body forward a step.

  The Sun-Woman glanced absently toward the movement. Since she had already taken one step, Kyreol took another. Then another. Reed-Face moved strangely, jerkily toward Sun-Face, who had begun to frown. The bone rattle in Kyreol’s hand dropped to her feet. She moved close enough to smell the various herbs that hung in little pouches from the Sun-Woman’s cloak—herbs her father used. The Sun-Woman’s face was painted sky-blue, with the blood red moon at moon-flash on one cheek and a ring of stars at the other. In the sudden silence, her voice curled upward in a question. Trembling, Kyreol removed the reed mask from her face.

  Both Terje and the Sun-Woman stared at her. Before either of them could speak, Kyreol knelt down in the sand. She drew rapidly, without stopping to think. The River-sign. The sign for River-Tree and for Turtle-Crossing. She drew jagged lines for Fourteen Falls, with the rainbows arched over them, and the Sun-Woman made a soft noise. She drew the Moon-Flash and the Face beneath it, and then, in memory of her betrothal ritual, she laid her hand flat in the sand and made her handprint. She stopped a moment and realized that the jumble of pictures made no sense. So she began drawing again, more slowly.

  This is the Face. This is the River. This is the boat with Terje and me in it, going toward the Falls. This is the boat, breaking in half, with two tiny people falling out of it. This is the cave where I slept. She drew a square face with square eyes over the sleeper The cave where the mask-people came.

  The woman squatted and stopped her hand then. She tapped at Reed-Face several times, saying a word over and over, until Kyreol understood what she wanted.

  Where is Reed-Face?

  She turned, pointed up the river, and the Sun-Woman nodded shortly. Then she looked at Kyreol for a long time out of her shrewd, wrinkled eyes. She snapped her fingers again, speaking, and two mud-masks came forward with bowls and began to paint Kyreol’s face blue.

  She and Terje huddled together later in a vast, firelit cave full of paintings of dreams and nightmares. They were alone; the cave entrances were guarded. Kyreol was surrounded by pots and bowls of paint, and Terje by weapons, drums, fierce masks, and round red shields with the flash of light hurtling into them.

  Terje, scowling back at the masks, only answered Kyreol’s questions in grunts until Kyreol asked in wonder, “Terje, did you forget your own language?”

  He stirred. “No.” His frown moved from the mask to her. But he wasn’t seeing her. “They made me—They were waiting for me just outside the cave. They scared me. I tried to run, but they caught my arms and all the berries scattered all over the cave. I didn’t understand for a while that the masks weren’t their real faces. It was raining; night was coming; it was hard to see. They came out of the shadows like bad dreams… Then they put a face on my face, and I knew they were people. Like us. Only…” He paused, drawing breath. He let his head drop back against one of the dreams on the wall. “They took me to another cave. They kept touching my hair, looking into my face. I think they think I’m a ghost. They kept trying to teach me to throw a spear. At a mask and a bunch of twigs. Maybe they needed a hunter. Only the mask was a man’s skull.” He touched a spear point. “They kill each other.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  His brows pinched together. “I can’t think of any reason. How could people on the River come to be so different from us?”

  “They have signs. They have a dream-cave. They know the Moon-Flash. Only here it doesn’t mean good fortune or betrothal. It means—”

  “Killing.”

  “That’s so strange,” she breathed. “The Moon-Flash has nothing to do with that. Everyone knows what it means.”

  “Maybe they’re younger than we are. Their world hasn’t been on the River as long as the Riverworld. So they make mistakes.”

  “Maybe,” she said doubtfully. “Terje, how can people see and dream the same things, yet have a different language for them?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Kyreol, let’s go home.”

  “You dream.” She sighed. “And then you tell me your dream because nobody else can understand you, and I paint it on the wall. Then they’ll let us out. This isn’t the world I wanted to find. I wanted the Hunter’s world. He knows everything.”

  “How do they expect me to dream here? I can’t sleep.”

  “Terje, this morning, just before I woke, I had a dream warning me of danger. Then I woke, and the mask-people found me.”

  “You dreamed—”

  “Of the Hunter.”

  “The Hunter.” He gazed silently at the full red moon of a shield. Then he said softly, “Well. Paint that on the wall. Then we can leave.”

  She lifted her head, smiling. So, on the inner walls of the dream-cave, among the frightening masks and animals and death-dreams, she painted a tall dark man cloaked in feathers, with the speaking crystal in his hand. She grew absorbed in her work, coloring the feathers neatly and accurately, so absorbed that she didn’t hear Terje’s sudden gasp, or see him rise and stumble against the weapons. When she turned finally, satisfied, she found two people watching her.

  She whispered, when she could find her voice, “I painted you, and you came.”

  6

  THE HUNTER had cloaked his feathers in fur. A wooden mask dangled by its strap from his hand. He was staring at the painting with a peculiar expression on his face, as if, Kyreol thought, he were seeing a turtle fly, or a boat sitting in a tree. He looked at Kyreol finally, with the same expression.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Well,” she said shyly. “Terje couldn’t dream. This is a dream-cave. So I painted my dream about you.”

  “Me.”

  “I dreamed you were trying to find me.”

  “I was,” he said. “But how do you know what this place is?”

  “I saw it in the paintings. The young boy enters the dark cave… He sees frightening things, or dreams a terrible dream. When he comes out, he makes his mask. Maybe Terje was supposed to dream his mask-face. But he couldn’t, so I painted you. So we could leave.”

  The Hunter’s mouth eased into a faint smile. “I see. Kyreol, I thought you and Terje must have died going over Fourteen Falls. I found the broken pieces of your boat. But here you are, deep in the sacred caves of another world, painting my face on the wall.”

  “You followed us,” Terje said. He was back against a ferocious nightmare; his face seemed calm but wary.

  “Yes.”

  “So you’re not—you’re not of the Riverworld.”

  “No.”

  “Or of this place.”

  “No.”

  “Oh.” His shoulders eased a little against the stones. “How—why can we understand you? I couldn’t understand the Sun-Woman.”

  “The world is full of languages.” He contemplated Terje a moment, his face motionless as a mask. “Kyreol was the one who found me. Who asked the questions. What are you doing here?”

  The side of Terje’s mouth curved upward. “I just wanted to see the rainbows.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Kyreol…she tells me stories, and then they come true. I had to come with her. Besides, the boat was ours together, and she needed it. And—”

  “And?”

  “She—we were always together, until she got betrothed. I didn’t want her to go off by herself.”<
br />
  “I see.”

  “She wanted to find the end of the world. But it hasn’t come to an end yet, and she won’t go home.”

  “Even now?”

  “Ask her.”

  “I want to see your world,” Kyreol said patiently to the Hunter. “You know all the answers.”

  The Hunter smiled, the dark, grave lines in his face softening. “You,” he said, “are going to get me into trouble.” He took out his crystal; it sprang open in his hand. “Channel two,” he said softly. “Regny Orcrow. North Outstation Five. Acknowledge. Acknowledge.”

  “Acknowledged,” the stone said. “Orcrow, where are you? Did you find the children?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you coming in? You missed the pickup craft; there won’t be another here for two weeks.”

  “I know.”

  “Well, where are you?”

  “I’m in the Cliff-Dwellers Passage of Dreams.”

  “You’re… What on earth are you doing there? Are you hurt? In disguise? Do you want assistance? Where are the children?”

  “Right here in front of me.”

  The stone’s voice rose. “Orcrow, you’re fired!”

  The Hunter’s mouth crooked ruefully. “Probably. But listen, it’s a bit complicated—”

  The stone didn’t listen. It spoke steadily, angrily. The Hunter listened impassively, his eyes focussed on a distant point, as though he were watching an animal move slowly toward him. Finally he broke into the torrent of words. “All right. All right. I know. Ultimately I’m responsible. So right now, it’s more important for me to get these two out of here than listen to you chew my ear off. Send a message to Domecity for me, will you? This might take longer than—”

  “Orcrow! Take the kids back home and get to Outstation Five immediately. I’ll request a pickup craft. Is that clear? Orcrow? Acknowledge—”

  “Just send the message,” Orcrow said. “I won’t let any harm come to the children. Out.” He closed the stone and sighed slowly. Then his head turned, with a hunter’s alertness, toward some sound. He breathed, “Come.”