Sunshaker's War

by Tom Deitz

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Sunshaker’s War

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Prologue I: Time A-wastin’

  Prologue II: Behind the Lines

  PART I

  Chapter I: Ancestral Voices…

  Chapter II: …Prophesying War

  Chapter III: Carolina Reverie

  Chapter IV: Commencement

  Chapter V: By Diverse Waters

  Chapter VI: A Summoning

  Chapter VII: Dark Night of the Soul

  Chapter VIII: Universal Secrets

  Chapter IX: Company

  Chapter X: Eavesdropping

  Chapter XI: Dark Days Ahead

  PART II

  Chapter XII: Battle Plans

  Chapter XIII: Just Visiting

  Chapter XIV: Shuttle Diplomacy

  Chapter XV: Into the Breach

  Interlude: A Call

  Chapter XVI: A Night in the Woods

  Chapter XVII: Diving In

  Chapter XVIII: Rescue

  PART III

  Chapter XIX: Panic City

  Chapter XX: Running on Empty

  Chapter XXI: In the Dark About Things

  Chapter XXII: Trouble in the Woods

  Chapter XXIII: Playing ’Possum

  Chapter XXIV: Wooden Ships

  Chapter XXV: Wingin’ It

  Chapter XXVI: Changing Places

  Chapter XXVII: Blood Talks

  Epilogue: At Loose Ends

  About the Author

  Sunshaker’s War

  By Tom Deitz

  Copyright 2015 by Estate of Thomas Deitz

  Cover Copyright 2015 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Tom Webster

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  Previously published in print, 1990.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Tom Dietz and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Windmaster’s Bane

  Fireshaper’s Doom

  Darkthunder’s Way

  www.untreedreads.com

  Sunshaker’s War

  Tom Deitz

  For

  Gilbert, Bob, Mike, and Paul:

  veterans of the old campaigns

  and

  A.J., D.J., Buck, and Paul II:

  warriors of the new

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  thanks to:

  Boo Alexander

  Chris Durance

  Ben Matcher

  Christie Johnson

  Jim Jones

  Adele Leone

  Buck Marchinton

  Paul Matthews

  Chris Miller

  Jon Monk

  John R. Newell

  Vickie Sharp

  Kerry Stroud

  and a special thanks to

  K. Michael Waldrip, for a needed distraction

  and to Larry and Betty Marchinton for many others

  Prologue I: Time A-wastin’

  (Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Saturday, June 7—mid-afternoon)

  By the time three o’clock had finally dawdled around, David Kevin Sullivan was getting almighty tired of shoveling gravel and busting up rocks. And of getting sunburned and dirty and sweaty and sore—especially on the last Saturday afternoon before high school graduation when there were a lot more interesting things to do than engaging in impromptu slave labor on a certain waterlogged farm in the wild south end of Enotah County. Especially when it was the first decent day in over a month.

  The mere futility of it made his blood boil: half a precious weekend blown to hell because his pa had finally felt compelled to try to salvage the driveway, when David knew with the absolute conviction of the much-put-upon that just ’cause the sun was shining and the roadbed dry enough for them to haul half a dozen loads of rock and gravel from the county quarry to the steep bit of defunct logging trail that provided access to Sullivan Manor was no guarantee at all that the dratted monsoons wouldn’t return by nightfall and wash it all away again. After all, why should today be any different from the last thirty-five?

  Futility for sure then; and it was all his pa’s fault. A whole day gone from his life because Big Billy had decided he was tired of parking at the foot of the hill.

  Ha! David snorted to himself as he paused in mid-swing to check his watch. More like the old sot was tired of having to tote his endless six-packs an extra hundred yards. Certainly Big Billy had made no move to fix the drive when the ruts got too bad for either his wife’s Crown Victoria or his son’s beloved Mustang-of-Death to navigate. But when he couldn’t get out, then it was suddenly a problem. In the meantime, the Vic was becalmed in the backyard until David’s ma felt confident her oil pan wouldn’t go bye-bye on some rain-exposed rock, and he’d taken to leaving the Mustang at Uncle Dale’s for much the same reason, even if it did mean a half-mile jog to fetch it.

  “I’m payin’ you to work, not lean on that there hammer!” Big Billy’s admonition rumbled up to him from where he was shoveling their latest load off the back of his old Ford pickup.

  David sighed. Just like a bleedin’ chain-gang, he thought, once more lofting an impressive sledgehammer above his rapidly reddening shoulders before thunking it angrily into his latest obstacle: a recalcitrant white quartz boulder that dead-centered the miniature Grand Canyon of ruts and bare rocks he was ensconced in. Just like bleedin’ Reidsville State Pen.

  Another blow, and another, but his efforts had little effect except to free a runnel of sweat from under the red bandanna that bound his thick, white-blond hair and send it snaking through black brows and into his bright blue eyes. He blinked at the sudden stinging and let the hammer thud into the ooze by a Reeboked foot. A forearm across his face cleared his vision passably but caught the headphones of his Walkman. He swore softly and readjusted them, then retied the soggy rag tighter, taking special care to secure the controversial mid-back ponytail. —Controversial, because his ma hated it, his suddenly balding pa was jealous of it, his kid brother and most of his non-track-team friends loved it (the team, whose emblem it was, went without saying), and his favorite uncle and girlfriend hadn’t yet made up their minds. As for himself, he hadn’t decided either, because he could not divorce the fact of it from its symbolic function as both a gesture of defiance against institutional authority (he fully intended to wear it to deliver his valedictory oration in spite of Principal Taylor’s protests), and as a sigil of a goal acquired.

  Defiance indeed! What he wanted to do now was defy these blasted boulders—either that, or defy his pa, who had set him at them. Except that he didn’t think that Big Billy was in much mood for defiance just then.

  A final pause for a swig of Dr Pepper from the can on the grass behind him, and to flip over the Led Zeppelin tape he’d been listening to, and he was at it again: swinging the hamm
er in long, clean arcs that made his hands throb and the hard, smooth muscles of his bare torso tense and relax in syncopy.

  “Don’t pick at it, hit it,” Big Billy admonished grumpily. David glanced up, scowling, to see his pa expertly flip a pile of gray and white granite chips into a particularly muddy depression.

  “I’d like to hit it—or something,” David muttered back.

  It was bad enough to have his afternoon co-opted, but to have his technique criticized as well—that really made him crazy.

  As if in sympathy to his sudden burst of mental agitation, “When the Levee Breaks” began on the Walkman, and David swung harder, smiling grimly at the appropriateness of the tune as he let the grinding rhythm add its own energy to his rising spleen.

  Thwack—crack, thwack—crack, and by God let Pa call that tickling! Thwack—crack, and a section of boulder shattered, leaving one insolent, sharp-edged excrescence that looked to David exactly like the damned thing was giving him the finger. He dealt it a solid one and saw it fly off to the right downhill.

  “Incoming,” he hollered absently.

  “Shit!” Big Billy yelled back, then: “Damn, boy, watch what you’re doin’! That ’un like to ’uv took out my eyeball!”

  David didn’t bother to look up. “Sorry,” he grunted, though he wasn’t, much.

  “Cut my damned face,” Big Billy continued incredulously, and then David did look up, to see his pa lower a hand from a ruddy and mud-spattered cheek and stare at a thin smear of the blood that decorated both it and his left cheekbone an inch below the orbit. The blood was scarcely redder than the hair Big Billy had started growing longer in back as it abandoned the front and top.

  “I said I was sorry,” David offered.

  “Well just watch it! We’ve had ’nuff trouble ’round here lately.” Big Billy eyed the flooded riverbottoms across the nearby highway meaningfully.

  “That’s for sure,” David mumbled, and reapplied himself to his roadwork.

  Trouble! That was for sure, too; and most of it his fault. After all, he’d been the one who’d insisted on prowling around the woods when his pesky younger brother had thought he heard music outside two years ago this coming July 31st. And he’d been the one who had got (or been given, he’d never quite figured out which) the Second Sight, which had allowed him to see the source of that music, whence it had led him to a series of adventures that had kept his life out of kilter ever since. For that warm summer night David had learned that his everyday world was not the only one; that there were others that lay about the familiar terra-firma like wet tissue paper thrown against a globe, and some of them were inhabited. That night he had met the denizens of the closest: Tir-Nan-Og, one of the three principal realms of the Sidhe—the old gods of Ireland, maybe; had seen them as they embarked on one of the periodic processional Ridings that marked the quarters of their year. That was before he had gotten tangled up in their politics, before the last in a series of ever-more-perilous encounters had resulted in their king ordering the border ’twixt Earth and Faerie closed and commerce between the Worlds forbidden.

  But there were other Worlds as well, lingering tantalizingly among the golden Straight Tracks that linked them. Galunlati, for instance, the Overworld of the Cherokee Indians, where he had journeyed in a vain attempt to thwart a war among the widespread tribes of Faerie. He had lost a Faery friend on that adventure—or been unwilling participant and first cause of his betrayal and subsequent capture, which amounted to the same thing—and his conscience had not truly left him alone since.

  “Trouble for sure,” David repeated aloud, “trouble with a capital T.” And then Big Billy decided to fetch another load of gravel, which was trouble of a different kind entirely.

  *

  Sprawling sleepily in the bathtub two hours later, with his buddy Darrell Buchanan’s latest homemade acoustic blues tape slowly winding down on the Walkman, David was certain there was no part of him that was neither sunburned nor worn to a frazzle. Or if not every part precisely, then at least a considerable number of large and/or conspicuous ones. With a deft twist of toes, he adjusted the hot mix to a gasp shy of intolerable, and set himself to compiling an inventory of those ills for possible guilt-tripping applications. Sunburned shoulders, back, and arms to start with, and ditto cheekbones and nose, all because there hadn’t been enough clear weather this spring for him to get his usual tan. And sore muscles in all the same parts (or at least the movable ones) not to mention hips and thighs in the bargain. Nor could he ignore shovel-born blisters on six fingers, a splinter in his right palm, and a numbed-and-blood-blistered toe where he’d dropped the hammer on it right before quitting.

  And that didn’t even count being pissed, which—he supposed—was also pain of a sort, though in this case not of the body but of the mind.

  He flopped back against the porcelained rim to let the rising tide draw the stiffness from his body, eventually finding the gumption to corral the soap and actually tackle some of the grime that patterned his torso like a Jackson Pollock painting. And recapitulated his litany of lost opportunities.

  He could have been gaming with Gary and Darrell and Aikin, for instance: exploring imaginary paper worlds with the half of the MacTyrie Gang that had no particular interest in studying for finals and would not have sacrificed a Saturday for them even if they had. But that, at least, he was just as glad he had missed. He’d seen enough of real alternate Worlds to last him a lifetime. The worst thing was knowing they were still there: a temptation barely out of reach, waiting and—he sometimes suspected—watching.

  And speaking of watching, he was suddenly having a fine time watching the soap slide and spiral over his body. Unfortunately, the patterns began to remind him of the interlaced designs the Sidhe used, and there he went again, thinking about a chapter of his life that was over—except, he feared, it wasn’t. That’s what his best friend, Alec McLean, had told him time after time. “You ain’t seen the last of old Silverhand, I promise you.” Or, “Wonder what Oisin’s doing now,” or, “Wonder if the war ever started.” Yeah, Faerie might be closed off, but it damn sure wasn’t forgotten.

  Not when everything he encountered reminded him of it, including Alec, who wasn’t even interested in such things.

  Alec! He was another defunct entertainment possibility, though in this case not one entirely out of the picture yet. In fact, after supper he was going over to Casa McLean to brush up on his chemistry (his weakest subject, and Alec’s second best), and to bounce a couple of ideas about his valedictory speech off him, to see if they found a better reception with him than they had with his in-absentia girlfriend, Liz Hughes, when he’d bounced them off her across the phone lines for forty-five minutes the night before.

  And that brought him to that same Liz Hughes, who was the person he had really wanted to spend time with this weekend. But she had a bodacious final art project to complete, down at the private school she’d been attending in Gainesville for the last two years, and wouldn’t be coming up this weekend anyway. He quickly banished thoughts of her though, because it didn’t do to be naked and wet and soaping one’s body while thinking about one’s remarkably pretty lady, because it put him in mind of her plying the bar of Coast…

  At least he still had Liz’s token, indeed had never removed it since she’d surprised him with it last Christmas.

  It lay on his chest now, right between his pecs: a coin-sized disc of cloisonned copper she’d made in jewelry class, that bore on one side a full-faced human head (rather like his own, he thought), and on the other a conventionalized heart. Head and heart: his and Liz’s years-old conflict: the dichotomy that ever confounded him.

  A swirl of heat into his armpits made him realize that the tub had finally filled to acceptable level, so he turned the water off with another twist of his foot and set himself to soaking. A drip remained, though, a steady trickle that he found somehow soothing.

  He was tired, so tired. He slid down lower, let the water float the soap from
his body.

  His eyes closed and he dreamed.

  There was rain in that dream, and already he didn’t like it because his dreams had been unpleasant lately—dark visions of war and death and conflict he suspected were slopping over from some unseen altercation in Faerie—never mind that he’d seen enough rain the last few weeks to last him a lifetime. But then the dream-self wrested free of even semi-conscious control, and there was nothing for a while but the hiss of sheeting water and vague, drifty images of running through a darkness full of cold prickles and slashing droplets all aligned at precise forty-five degree angles. He was lost on a stormy winter night, slogging along a road that might be the Sullivan Cove road, or might not, or maybe through woods where the long pine needles added their own prickles to the falling water. And there was something following him, something huge and cold and evil, with glowing yellow eyes. Something that hissed and made a rustly, squishy sound where it dragged itself across the sodden land.

  Abruptly it was on him: a serpent that had no end he could see through the driving rain—a monstrous red thing with a triangular head the size of his car and ivory horns sweeping back from it and a kind of stony searchlight between that played back and forth and suddenly transfixed him so that he could only run in the slow motion pace of terrified dreamers, while the dreadful creature got closer. Its maw gaped; he tried to flee but could not; and then it had swallowed him, and he had climbed up into its forehead (which was, for some reason, hollow), and was gazing out its eyes. And then he was the serpent himself and gliding through the woods in search of…

  What? Prey? Yeah, that’s what he wanted: prey and vengeance. Vengeance, and…

  Light ahead of him, and he slid into a clearing where the rain had drawn back to form a dry circle in the center of which a young man sat on horseback, facing away. No, not a man, the captive rational part corrected: one of the Sidhe, one of Lugh’s black-cloaked guards. The figure twisted around in his saddle, and fear crossed the parts of his face visible below his helm, and he screamed—except that David couldn’t hear it, only see the full lips pop open. Suddenly he knew the face. It was Fionchadd mac Ailill, his one true friend in Faerie, the one he had inadvertently helped betray, and he shivered reflexively because he knew Finny probably hated him now and would hate him more if David ate him. But suddenly he was no longer the monster but Fionchadd, and he was scared, not because he was about to be eaten, but because there were people coming at him with chains, with iron chains, and already he could feel their heat, and then that other became aware that David was watching him, and somehow turned around in his own head and said, very slowly and distinctly, “It is all your fault, you know.”