Mountain Echoes wp-8

by C. E. Murphy

  “You are strong with spirits,” she said to me, and to my shock I understood. Renee clicked with satisfaction and I sent a wave of gratitude toward her, then nodded as respectfully as I could at the ancient shaman. She sniffed and stalked around us the other direction, but she certainly wasn’t lifting the power circle. If ar cirits,” nything she was strengthening it with a counterpart, walking widdershins to her first and redoubling the magic flexing through. I’d never seen anyone do that before, and didn’t dare call up the Sight to take a good look at it. I honestly had no idea what would happen if I started pulling down power within the confines of her circle. I didn’t think it would end well for me.

  When she’d completed the second circle she stood in front of us, arms folded and scowl magnificent. Better than anything the Almighty Morrison had ever thrown at me, and he’d come up with some doozies over the years. “You do not belong here,” she informed me, with exactly the right inflection to suggest I had better get explaining, Or Else.

  I genuinely did not want to find out what her Or Else constituted, and equally genuinely didn’t think I could convince her with anything less than the truth. “I’m a Walkingst—”

  She cut me off with a motion so sharp I actually felt a slice of power touch my throat, numbing my vocal cords. “Use the language of the People.”

  Jesus. I glanced nervously at Morrison and muttered, “Can you understand me when I speak Cherokee?” in that language. His expression went carefully blank and I ground my teeth. In English, I said, “Sorry. She wants me to use Cherokee and I don’t know how to make the magic translate so you understand.”

  “We have bigger fish to fry, Walker. Talk to her.”

  There were a thousand reasons I loved that man, but his determined practicality had to be in the top ten. I gave him a grateful and perhaps slightly soppy smile, then turned back to the elder.

  Her black eyes were sparkling, and I had the distinct impression she’d understood us. If I ever got hold of whoever made shamanic translation magic work, I was going to eat their brains until I understood it all. Speaking slowly, because even if my memory of the language had resurfaced, the centuries had still changed it, I said, “I will speak the language of the People if you will forgive my clumsiness with it. My family spirit is the Udalvnusti.”

  “The unchanging,” she said. “But you are greatly changed from our ways.”

  In English, under my breath, I said, “You have no idea,” then gave an explanation my best shot. “My spirit guide has brought me here to find my son, who was stolen by sorcerers and brought to this time.”

  “He is not here. There is no one here corrupted by sorcerers, or dressed as you dress.”

  “I think they took him to this time but another location. Do you know of…of a place of great pain? Of great fighting or illness?”

  Her eyes darkened. “Everywhere. Stories came with the traders, stories of people with skin like his—” and she nodded at Morrison, who was as fair-skinned and Irish as his name “—and with the stories came sickness, though we never saw men with skin like yours.” She included me this time, fairer-skinned by far than she was, though I had a slightly gold burnish compared to Morrison. “We are what is left of ten villages, we who were not sick or became well again. We came to this valley, where there is water and game, and where we thought the sickness could not follow. Did sorcerers bring it?”

  “No.” I sighed. “Sickness can be carried on blankets and clothes, on trade items. That’s why your people got sick before they ever even saw white men. I…” I had to try. It was useless, it would make no difference in the long run, but I had to try. I switched to English, because I knew she underkneer stood me and I didn’t have words in Cherokee to describe a vaccination process. “If the pox sickness comes, there’s a way to protect your people against it. Take scabs from the wounds and grind them up, then sniff them. It’ll make most people a little sick, and some will get very sick and die. Maybe one in ten. But if you don’t, it might be as many as nine in ten.”

  “Walker?” Morrison sounded horrified.

  “It’s how the Chinese vaccinated against smallpox for hundreds of years.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I used to play the what-would-happen-if-I-got-thrown-back-in-time? game, back before I started getting thrown back in time. I used to look things up to prepare myself for not having running water or penicillin or whatever.” I could tell from Morrison’s expression that this was not a game he was familiar with. “Look, it doesn’t matter, but it’s a real vaccination process and…and I have to try.”

  The elder’s attention was hard on me. “You know of our future. It pains you.”

  “Yeah. Yes,” I said more politely, and the stone in her turned to granite.

  “Then retreating deeply will not help. The darkness comes no matter what we do.”

  I remembered, vividly, how Méabh and Caitríona had both seen a darkness on the horizon, an oncoming storm, and for a heart-wrenching moment I was desperately grateful that visions of the future were not part and parcel of my usual skills. “Tell your grandchildren to adopt white men into their families, and to have those white men buy land. That land will be all that belongs to you, when the darkness comes.”

  She looked utterly blank. “Buy and belong?”

  “Just remember the words,” I said unhappily. “Teach them to your grandchildren, and to theirs, and someday it’ll make sense.”

  Morrison said, “Walker?” again, and, tense with frustration, I muttered, “Most of the Eastern band of Cherokee, the people who managed to stay in the Carolinas and Georgia instead of being forced onto the Trail of Tears, were allowed to stay because a white man they’d adopted owned hundreds of acres of land and let his adopted people live there. That and the Qualla were all the Cherokee had left. It doesn’t matter, all right? I can’t help, and I know it, but I have to try.”

  “Maybe you are helping,” he said quietly. “Maybe this moment is why they end up with the land they do, instead of everyone being relocated to Oklahoma.”

  “If it is,” I said bitterly, “it isn’t enough.”

  “No.” All the compassion in the world was in that one word. “But it’s all you can do.”

  For a moment I could do nothing but stand there with my eyes shut, hoping the tears wouldn’t leak through. The old woman touched my chest, fingertips light against my breastbone. I opened my eyes, looking down at her as she spoke.

  “There are always sorcerers and darkness in the world. We will never do enough. But we hear, and listen, and try, and for that the Great Spirits love us, and gather us to them when our battles end. I will teach my grandchildren your strange words, and we will breathe the sickness in hopes of remaining well, and remember you for the gift of trying.”

  Tears spilled down my cheeks, both for her gratitude and for my futility. She wiped them away and tasted one, which at least shook a startled la a p>

  I made an instant resolution to eat only organic vegetables and moderate amounts of grass-fed meat for the rest of my life, but shook my head. “I would love to, but I can’t. I have to find my son. Do you know of where sorcerers would go to gather death magic and pain and hatred?”

  “That is not a way any of the People should live, even those who are not of the People. But when our scouts and hunters go far, they return from the north with tales of war. They tell stories of the Northern and Eastern tribes driving each other further to the West, into the plains lands where they fight again with new enemies. They say the land is as red as the Lower World, stained with blood of the People.” She brought down the power circle around us, face strong and sorrowful. “Go that way, and you may find the heart of darkness.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  They insisted on feeding us before we left, and since I wasn’t sure when I’d eaten last, I was glad to accept. They fed us a veritable feast of deer and possum and a few things I couldn’t identify, all of which was enough to make my constantly hungry
belly round and content for a little while. The elder, whose name I never did get, thought we should wait until morning to leave, and it was hard to argue on a full belly and a couple of days of no sleep. Morrison and I were given blankets to share, blankets woven and patterned in styles I’d never seen.

  “This is what it looked like,” I said to him, under the cover of a crescent moon and the blankets. The Milky Way sprawled above us, clearer than I’d seen it since I was a kid in the wilderness with my dad. The only sounds were the wind carrying light voices and the avid songs of horny bugs, and the only scents of small fires and clean human beings. “This is what America looked like before Europeans got here. All of this life and all of these images we’ll never see on our end of time, because it’s all been destroyed.”

  “Then hold on to every minute of this,” he suggested, “because we’re the only ones who ever get to see it. Walker, do you have any idea…do you have any sense of how incredible this is? I’m not sure you do.”

  I turned my face against his shoulder and closed my eyes. “Which part, that we’re chasing black magic across time, or that we’ve just finished having dinner with a people who nearly went extinct?”

  “Either,” he said, quiet and steady. “You do that, Walker. You phrase everything like that, making light of it. Some things deserve more respect than that. The power that pulled us into that deserves more respect. You deserve more respect, even from yourself. Especially from yourself.”

  “Heh.” It was sort of a laugh, muffled against his shoulder. “You’re probably right.”

  “I am right.”

  “I can’t, Morrison. I can’t take it seriously that way. I’d be overwhelmed. Making stupid jokes is the only way I can cope. I don’t know how you and Gary take it in stride. I mean, Gary, God. Gary goes charging along just asking for more all the time. I wish I was like that. I wish I was like you, unflappable.”

  Morrison chuckled. “You think I’m unflappable? Even with the number of times I’ve blown my top at you?”

  “It’s not like I haven’t given you cause. But when it counts, yeah. You’re unflappable. Witness our current situation, for example. I told you we’d time traveled and all you said was, ‘So what do we do next?’”

  “I’ve spent a lot of years cultivating an unflappable exterior, Walker. Would it make you feel better to know I was as amazed as a kid on the inside?”

  “Maybe.”

  We lay down, Morrison taking my hand and putting it over his heart, which beat a lot more quickly than a quiet evening stargazing might account for. “I am,” he said quietly, “in awe. It’s hard to doubt you, Walker, even if what you’re selling is outrageous. I’d like you to be able to see that.”

  “I’m still not used to this. I know it’s been more than a year and I should probably have adjusted by now, but I still feel like I’m running to catch up. There are so many fires burning, and apparently I’m the one with the skill set to put them out. If I could just get them doused so I could sit back and breathe for a while, maybe I could take the time to be impressed. I’m just afraid if I take the time now I’ll lose whatever handle I’ve got on things. I have to be sarcastic and unimpressed so I don’t scare myself into immobility.”

  “It might be easier from the outside,” he conceded. “I can afford to be impressed, from out here. But you should be proud of yourself, Joanne. You’ve come a long way.”

  “‘Joanne.’ That’s not fair. I can’t get my head around the idea of calling you Michael.”

  “You’ll adapt. I’ll wait.”

  “Good, because I think you’re going to have to. Maybe when we get back to Seattle we can practice. I’ll say Michael and you’ll turn around and respond naturally, just like it was your name or something.”

  “We don’t even have to wait until we get home.”

  “No, I’m sure that’s important. I’m sure there’s some kind of rule about not making drastic changes to your lifestyle when you’re not in your home environment, because otherwise it won’t stick when you go home.”

  Morrison laughed. “All right. We’ll work on it being all right for you to be impressed that we’re time traveling first. Time traveling, for God’s sake, Walker,” he said, and suddenly sounded like a kid, bubbly and full of excitement. “We’re stuck at the beginning of European contact with the Americas. That’s incredible.”

  “Yeah.” I grinned against his chest and wrapped my arm around him, pulling myself closer. “Yeah, actually, I guess it kind of is. We should…” I laughed. “We should go find a rock in this valley and carve our initials in it, or something, and check for it when we get home.”

  I could hear Morrison’s grin. “In the morning.” He curled his arm around my shoulders, nestling me close, and fell asleep with the efficiency of a soldier. I stayed awake a while, listening to him breathe, watching the moon edge across the sky and the bands of the Milky Way change colors, until movement caught my eye. I pushed up a few inches.

  The elderly shaman was watching us with a smile. She nodded at my sleeping partner, tapped the side of her head like she was suggesting the man had wisdom worth listening to, then slipped away into the darkness. It wasn’t until morning that I realized she’d built a power circle around us again, keeping us safe from nightmares and restless sleep.

  *

  It also wasn’t until morning that I thought to ask how far north the scouts meant, when they said they’d seen war to the north. The answer came back days, and I was a little numb with worry as we accepted some water skins and deer jerky to see us on our way. We followed the river until it disappeared into the hills, me silent and Morrison surprisingly chipper. When the water went underground, he stopped and scraped dirt away until he’d exposed rock, then crouched by it thoughtfully. “What is this, anyway? Granite?”

  It had been a long time since my high school geology classes. I peered at the rock. “I think so. Granite and, um. Quartz, maybe.”

  “Quartzite,” Morrison suggested. “That’s the sparkle in the stone. So I’d need a diamond cutter. Can you do it?”

  “Do what?”

  He looked over his shoulder at me, blue eyes mirthful. “Carve our initials in a heart, Walker. Leave a mark to know ourselves by.”

  “Oh. Oh! Really? I was joking.” I leaned on the exposed rock beside him, palms against it, feeling the slow ancient wearing down of the mountain. Its patience ran deep. Much deeper than my own, and made me think that, “Initials in the rock seems kind of crude.” The mountain’s life echoed in my hands, undisturbed by the idea of being carved. It didn’t mind what I did to it—it would endure far beyond my brief years, but that was why I didn’t want JW+MM carved into it forever.

  Morrison straightened up, looking faintly disappointed. “If you say so.”

  “Hey, Mr. Pouty Pants. Give me a minute before you get all sullen.” The stone was surprisingly malleable under my magic’s questing pressure. I’d done body work on dozens of cars, and the mental process wasn’t so different. Heat bent metal, water pitted stone; I combined the images to build cold fire in my palms, and spread it out across the exposed rock face. Stone shifted and deepened, lines melting into existence instead of being chipped or ground. After a few minutes I released the magic and stepped away, letting Morrison examine my handiwork.

  His smile was slow in coming, but as strong as the hills themselves. He pulled me into his arms, offering a kiss to go with the embrace, and we departed the valley hand in hand, the petroglyphs left behind.

  *

  “We’re never going to get there.” Morrison surveyed the mountains running north and east of us and shook his head. “Even assuming we don’t run into unfriendly natives, I don’t see how we’re going to cover the distance we need to. If Aidan’s out there being used as a repository, we’re on a schedule.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that. Not about the schedule. The schedule’s not our problem. He got pulled where they wanted him, and I didn’t have the presence of mind to lock on an
d go with him. Which is probably just as well, because it would have stranded you in that valley, out of time and with no idea what had happened. So I’m going to work under the assumption that if there’s war, death, misery and mayhem going on, that they’re going to stay there sucking it down until they’ve drained everybody dry.”

  Morrison eyed me. “All right. If the schedule isn’t the problem, then how do we solve the problem of traveling through hundreds of miles of unfriendly territory?”

  “You’re not going to like it.” In fact, he was going to not like it so much I couldn’t help grinning with anticipation. >

  He took in the grin and became suitably wary. “What is it?”

  “You made a very pretty wolf, Morrison.”

  It took a full five seconds for the implication to sink in. Then his eyes widened with genuine horror. “Oh, no. No way, Walker. No way are you turning me into an animal again.”

  “Wolves can travel thirty miles a day just hunting, and they’re top-of-the-food-chain predators. Nothing except humans and maybe a desperate puma is likely to attack one, whereas as humans we’d be much more vulnerable to any predators and very, very slow by comparison. Thirty or forty miles a day in clear territory, which the pre-Columbian Eastern seaboard forests are not. Do you have a better idea?”

  Dismay stretched Morrison’s mouth downward. “Walker, do you have any idea what happened while I was a wo—” Color stained his cheeks and his mouth snapped shut. I suspected we both very much wished he hadn’t started to ask the question.

  I didn’t, in fact, know what had happened. Not specifically, because about thirty seconds after I’d gotten him back into human form I’d jumped on a plane to Ireland, and we’d mostly been talking about me since we’d been reunited. I had an unpleasant idea of what might have happened, though. Tia Carley, the werewolf I’d ended up neutering, had been as attractive a wolf as Morrison, and I was pretty sure she’d taken a fancy to my boss. There was no delicate way to ask, and besides, I really didn’t want to know. After a few seconds of mental fumbling, I answered with what I did know: “You saved five people’s lives while you were a wolf, and got me out of that cave system in one piece.”