Sunshaker's War

by Tom Deitz

  “I have no doubt,” Uki said. “For weather depends on very little things indeed: dust, the weight of the air, the direction of the wind…”

  “And magic?” Calvin smiled.

  “If you wish,” Uki replied. “And now I think it is time you were gone. If you learn aught, return here; I will be waiting with eagerness.” He fished in another pouch and produced an uktena scale identical to that Calvin had burned to arrive there.

  Calvin took it and pulled out his cigarette lighter, but Uki shook his head. “The old way would be better.”

  “Whatever,” Calvin grunted apprehensively, and stood. At a sign from Uki, Calvin squared his shoulders and closed his eyes, and at a word, he raised the scale above his head, clutching a point with either hand.

  Uki clapped his hands a certain way, and Calvin had only time to feel the air go still and thin and cold when a bolt of lightning stabbed down from the heavens to engulf the scale—and spread to enfold him as well, consuming him with the familiar agony.

  Before he could even gasp, he was standing once more in the center of his Power Wheel. It looked exactly the same as before, except that the sky was lighter. By the length of the long tree shadows and the filigree of red on their topmost branches, he guessed it was almost dawn.

  Sandy met him halfway to the cabin: a tall figure in denim and plaid taking shape from a remnant of mist.

  “You look like death,” she said. “I was just coming to look for you.”

  “I feel like death too,” he sighed. “And you couldn’t have found me until just now.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Coffee’s on.”

  He wrapped an arm around her waist. “Good. And then I’d best be goin’.”

  “Going where?”

  “Down to Georgia—to try to save the world.”

  A low chuckle. “Damn, and I’ve still got papers to grade!”

  “I’ll be back, love, never fear. And then we’ve gotta do a lot of talkin’. I may just have found the key to your questions. Trouble is, the room beyond’s full of a whole lot bigger puzzles.”

  She stopped in place and regarded him seriously. “You weren’t lying, were you? About having to save the world?”

  “No,” he whispered sadly. “But I wish to hell I was.”

  Chapter IX: Company

  (Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Saturday, June 14—morning)

  David would have liked to have stayed in bed much later the morning after his dream than he was allowed, but as it was, the sun was shining fitfully through the grimy window in the eastern wall when he was awakened by the sound of something smashing downstairs. Glass, it sounded like, and there were words close on its heels, heated words accented with profanity. Which meant that, sunshine or no, it was still business as usual at Sullivan Manor—though given the temperaments of his folks, it was hard to tell if this was an ordinary disagreement or a magically induced one. Having no desire to make his debut in the middle of an altercation, he vented a mournful groan and dragged the covers back over his head.

  A door slammed and he winced, then heard footsteps coming up the stairs. He tensed, suddenly alarmed, since he’d gone back to bed bare-assed. Not that it mattered, really, at least not as far as Liz was concerned, though the notion of her catching him naked in bed in his own house with his folks downstairs was suddenly a lot more alarming than the both of them that way by the lake or up on Lookout, or in his long-lost magical boat under the stars. He sat up quickly, checked the cover—and breathed a vast sigh of relief when the head that emerged at the top of the stairwell proved to be that of his younger brother.

  The little boy (not so little now actually; he was seven and had finished first grade with straight A’s, of which he was vastly proud)—pranced over to the bed and plopped down atop David’s left leg.

  “So what’s up kid?” David asked him, twisting round to ruffle his hair.

  “Pa sent me to get you up.”

  David yawned. “Figured that much. What else is goin’ on? What’s the ruckus about?”

  “Ma burned the toast and the coffee was too weak, ’cordin’ to Pa. He throwed the butter dish on the floor.”

  “Threw the dish,” David corrected. “God, I hope Liz didn’t see that.”

  Little Billy rolled his eyes. “She did, though. Me and her just about laughed at ’im!”

  “She and I,” David corrected again.

  His brother frowned, “Aw, Davy, how come you’re always changin’ me? You say stuff like that.”

  “Yeah—when I’m bein’ careless, and around here who cares? But you gotta know better. You’ll grow up and be seriously brilliant someday, and we can’t have you talkin’ like a mountain hick.”

  “You don’t talk like a hick.”

  “No, but I have to watch it when I’m away from here, or I’ll backslide. But anyway, so what’s Liz doin’?”

  “Foolin’ with breakfast, I reckon.”

  “You’re a big help.”

  “Davy!”

  David made a sudden dive for his brother and managed to catch an arm before Little Billy could escape. It took more effort than he expected to reel him in (the little booger was surprisingly strong), but eventually David got him in range of his other hand and began tickling him unmercifully. Little Billy giggled and twitched and wiggled and tried to retaliate (dangerous, since David was himself far more susceptible than he liked to admit), and eventually their gyrations brought them closer to the edge than David could compensate for, and the whole kinetic mixture of boys and bedding flopped noisily to the floor. An on-the-fly check that neither was hurt and they were at it again—until heavy footsteps sounded downstairs and Big Billy’s voice rumbled up the stairwell like distant thunder.

  “You boys quit actin’ crazy and get down here. I gotta headache!”

  They froze instantly, faces locked in resigned glee, David with his right leg and a hunk of blanket wrapped around Little Billy’s lower body, and his left arm prisoning both his brother’s while he assailed an unprotected side; and Little Billy with his right hand snaked free and stuffed into David’s especially vulnerable armpit.

  A quick set of smirks followed an exchange of knowing looks from almost-matching sets of blue eyes, and David released his prisoner, flinging a substantial hunk of bedclothes over him as he scrambled back to the bed and dived for the gym shorts he’d left on the bedpost. His brother was ahead of him, though; and finally realizing David’s atypical state of undress, snatched them from David’s startled fingers and ran for the stairs, grabbing the bathrobe as an afterthought.

  “Why you little—!” David shouted, then flopped back on the bed and shut his eyes against the violence that had suddenly erupted in him, that had made him, for the tiniest instant, want to chase down his brother and literally break his neck.

  “David! Breakfast!” His ma’s voice this time.

  “Just a sec!” he hollered back, trying very hard to regain control. A glance down at his naked body and the humor of the situation finally dawned on him. He exhaled the breath he’d been holding as a giggle.

  *

  The upshot of Little Billy’s thievery was that David was forced to make his entrance downstairs in much the same garb as a Roman senator, but with rather less dignified effect.

  Liz, whom he could see from the foot of the stairs, was on the phone in the living room. She lifted a brow in amused surprise as he rolled his eyes in her direction and darted into his room to don a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt. He looked very sheepish when he entered the kitchen.

  Big Billy was nowhere in sight, though the Saturday Atlanta Journal and Constitution seemed to have been hastily abandoned; and his mother was sweeping up the detritus of a broken plate and muttering to herself. The smell of charcoaled bread permeated the room.

  “I just don’t know what’s got into him,” JoAnne complained as David poured himself a cup of coffee. “He’s crankier’n an old she-bear.”

  “We all are, Ma,” David said, taking a sip of the contro
versial beverage, which really was pretty weak. “It’s like I told you: all the hostility in Faerie’s sloppin’ over. We’ll just have to be extra careful.”

  She rose and eyed him wistfully. “That’s easy for you to say; you can think things like that and keep ’em in your mind; me and your pa’s a lot more set in our ways.”

  “You gotta be the one to do it then, and just cut him some slack.”

  “What do you think I been doin’?” she snapped, then caught herself. “And damned if I didn’t just do it again. Don’t know what’s gonna happen if this keeps up.”

  “Something’s gotta give,” David said flatly. And with that remark, he fell silent.

  —Which allowed him to key into Liz’s conversation.

  “…Yeah, right, Mom; but it’s like I told you, I don’t have to have clean clothes. I’m just stranded, not shipwrecked. I’ve got plenty of stuff back in Gainesville and I need to study more than I need to look good. We’re talking chemistry here, not home economics.”

  A voice chattered back rapidly, and Liz grimaced expressively then: “Yeah, I know I could come around—if I didn’t mind going through Clayton or Hiawassee, but it’d take longer to do that than it would to get back to Gainesville. I mean this is the only road north for miles. I—”

  She was cut off by more angry-sounding chatter, but finally managed to break in again. “No, Mom, the car’s fine; it’s not stuck or anything, and I already called the patrol, and things are okay over the mountain—shoot, you can tell that by looking out the window!”

  Curious about that last remark, David stood and wandered to the eastward back door, pausing in transit to retrieve a sliver of plate his ma had missed. The sun was still shining fitfully, illuminating the porch’s gray boards and the long slope of side yard above the scrap of cornfield that separated the Manor environs from the main highway and the larger field on the other side—the one where he had first seen the lights of the Sidhe two summers before. But what caught his attention now was the road: an almost-stationary line of cars that snaked down off the mountain to the right, and an only slightly faster moving one that appeared from beyond a hump of mountain to the left. David guessed the road was still out and the G.S.P. was re-routing traffic—turning it back, really, as there was no effective way to detour them. As he watched, a mammoth earth-moving machine hove into view from the southern side.

  Shrugging, David turned back into the room and took a slice of toast. Just as he sat down he caught the last snatch of Liz’s conversation. “…Sure, Mom, I’ll be careful. I’m gonna stay here a little longer and see if traffic clears a little, and then head out. I’ll call you soon as finals are over.”

  She hung up the receiver and returned to the kitchen, where she plopped down beside him and helped herself to the remains of a cold cup of coffee. “Lord, Davy, mothers are such a pill,” she announced, for the moment apparently forgetting the puttering Jo Anne.

  “Yeah,” Little Billy agreed, transiting through with the funnies in tow on his way to a rendezvous with the morning’s cartoons. “Big, ugly, nasty pills!”

  “William Thomas!” JoAnne snapped.

  “Watch it, kid,” David chuckled. “You’ve gotta live here a while longer yet.” He looked back at Liz. “So what’s up?”

  “Well, I called the patrol and they said things were fine over the mountain, just the culvert out here which has blocked the whole highway, so there’d be some traffic but no problem. No rock slides, or anything. Unfortunately, they won’t have the road fixed until this afternoon sometime, and probably only one lane then, and I’ve gotta get back as soon as I can so I can study. So I’m gonna hang around here till after lunch and then go straight to Gainesville. That’s what I was calling Mom about. I left some laundry over there last time I was up, and she was making a big deal about it, and I just about went wild trying to convince her that everything was okay, that I could get to school fine, and that your mom washed my muddy clothes and loaned me some clean ones.”

  David started at that. He’d never considered that Liz and his ma were close enough to a size to swap clothes, though now he looked, he realized those were his ma’s jeans Liz was wearing, along with one of her blouses. Come to it, though, his ma was in pretty good shape for a woman in her early forties, and she’d worried off a bit of weight in the last year as well. Even without makeup she was still pretty good-looking, though the crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes were getting more prominent by the month, and her hair a little duller. She was also beginning to acquire a trace of looseness in her cheeks and neck.

  A lingering glance at Liz confirmed it: they really were almost the same. For the first time in his life it occurred to him that Liz was really not a girl, but a woman. He wondered, though, if she—or anyone—would ever really think of him as a man. At five-foot-seven, with white-blonde hair and still only once-a-week stubble, he really did wonder.

  Liz appropriated the last of the bacon. “You still going over to Alec’s?”

  “Do bears perform necessary bodily functions in the woods?”

  “You know more bears than I do. Do they?”

  David grinned back, catching the reference to the bears he had met in Galunlati. “Yeah, well… But seriously, I don’t see any way around it. Knowin’ bad news is better than not knowin’ anything sometimes. So I guess I’ll head on over as soon as I can. I don’t think I really dare call.”

  “May be a while, then,” Liz said. “But hey, the sun’s back out anyway.”

  David looked up. “It is, isn’t it?”

  Liz swallowed her last mouthful of toast and polished off her coffee. “Think I better go move my car, too. I didn’t look real closely at where I parked last night, just tried to get it out of the main drag.”

  “Mind if I come along?”

  “’Fraid I’ll get lost?”

  Something about the flip tone of her reply rubbed David the wrong way. He started to tell her to can the sarcasm, then frowned. Was she being sarcastic? Or just conversational? He frowned further and bit his tongue. Jesus, it was getting to him, making him irritable and fractious and jumpy. None too soon for her to leave. Maybe he ought to go with her.

  “Sorry,” he began, “for what I nearly said just then.”

  She studied him seriously. “Yeah…I think I know what you mean. Lord, I hope the whole summer’s not like this.”

  “Me too,” David said, and opened the back door. By the time they reached the bottom of the hill she had almost caught him.

  *

  As he and Liz neared the turn-off that led from the Sullivan Cove road to the Sullivan Cove Church of God roughly an eighth-mile from his house, he caught sight of an image so absurd it made him laugh out loud.

  The little white church was set back a fair bit from the road, perched on a low hill that had been partially denuded of trees except for a smattering of oaks and walnuts. There was a small graveyard before it and to their right, by the gate of which Liz’s car sat. But what caught David’s eye was further up by the church proper. It was mid-morning of the first day of their annual all day revival, and though the main highway was blocked, that didn’t mean that the congregation meant to be cut off from the sweet love of Jesus. Apparently no members lived on the Sullivan Cove side of the main highway, either, because there wasn’t a single car in the parking lot. But there was a steady file of suited men and well-dressed women picking their way down the low mountain behind the church. The sight of them—tottering old folks, loud teens, taciturn adults, and fractious children—all parading through the woods, occasionally slipping and sliding as they made the last slope above the churchyard, was more than he could stand. His laughter rang loud through the valley.

  Liz looked sternly at him. “Don’t do that Davy. It’s not nice! One of those old folks could fall and get hurt!”

  “But I can’t help it!” David chuckled, eyes wet. “They must have parked across the mountain up in Coker Hollow and be comin’ across that way. It’s not but a quarter m
ile or so as the crow flies.”

  “If you want to go with an old crow…” Liz finished.

  “Well they can’t get through this way, the road’s blocked. I’ve gotta admire their dedication.”

  “Yeah,” Liz said as she unlocked her door, “and I need to be admiring the way back to your house.” She paused. “Think I’ll take a look at the damage first, though.”

  David sighed. “Want a passenger? Maybe I’ll get some idea when I’ll be able to get over to Alec’s.”

  “Let me know what happens with that, okay?”

  “Of course! But shoot, girl, you’re not even gone yet. You did say you were stayin’ through the afternoon, didn’t you? I mean, jeeze, why don’t you just spend the night and let ’em get the road really fixed and the traffic straightened out? You can study up here, I’ll be quiet, I promise.”

  “Yeah, but my books are down there! I did that deliberately so I wouldn’t be tempted!”

  “You devil!”

  “You should talk,” she said mischievously. “You’re the one doing the tempting now.”

  He grabbed her suddenly and planted a sloppy wet one on her mouth.

  “Jesus, David! Not here in front of these folks!”

  “Give ’em something to preach about!” David laughed. “Show ’em some sin just waitin’ to happen!”

  “‘Get thee behind me, Satan!’” Liz giggled in turn, as she slid out of David’s grip and climbed in, reaching over to unlock the passenger door.

  “If I’m Satan,” David continued from inside, “then that makes you…?”

  “Missus Satan?”

  “We’re not married that I notice,” he protested, wishing he hadn’t mentioned that word, which Liz had a time or two. Not that it was a bad idea, but not yet…not quite yet. The image of the papoose returned, but coupled with it was Liz in bathrobe and curlers holding a copy of Soap Opera Digest in one hand and a coffee pot in the other, while he balanced tiny replicas of a sprawling brick ranch and a station wagon in either hand. He’d seen too many cartoons, he knew. Far too many.