Tyler's Dream

by Matthew Butler

  “You have a sister?”

  “Brothers, sisters, uncles, cousins …”

  “Sorry, I thought … Do you miss them?”

  The ghatu stirred at the question, a dangerous gleam appearing in those wide eyes. Tyler swallowed. Was he on the edge of invoking another rage? But Varkon was apparently not in the mood for strangling people today, and finally he answered, “In my way.”

  And just like that, the overwhelming detachment that had numbed Tyler’s senses since he had found out about his family’s death parted just a little. “OK, I’m ready. Let’s go.”

  Tyler trudged with his arms crossed and his shoulders hugged together into the night that had cascaded about them. Varkon still strode purposely forward, as he had done all day. Tyler’s eyes strained to see from beneath their bruised lids, and he cast them downwards, watching the gaping holes left in the snow by Varkon’s enormous feet.

  The tracks ended. Varkon had stopped. “Far enough. We will sleep here.”

  They were standing in a small clearing cut against the side of a flattened hill. The river was out of sight, but its sloshing water was still audible. A rock, sides separated into distinct layers like a stack of pancakes, defined one edge of the opening. Varkon brushed away a patch of snow at its base and motioned that Tyler should sit, which he did unquestioningly, resting his back against the rock and curling himself into a small and steaming ball of exhaustion.

  “Wait here. Be watchful,” Varkon warned before slipping away between the trees.

  Tyler was so hungry that he couldn’t fall asleep. From time to time his belly would emit a violent groan. Varkon was taking a long time, whatever he was up to. He rubbed his eyes. Something flickered between the trees. He stared outwards with more attention. Was he was seeing things? The consequence of blurry vision and a tired train of thought, perhaps? Then there was a glint from the woods, a definite flash; he was sure of it this time. Suddenly alert and warmed with a nervous energy, he cleared his throat.

  “Varkon?” He coughed and tried again. “Is that you?”

  No sound. The trees stared blankly back.

  He unearthed a suitably weighted rock next to him. “Great. This will do a lot of good if I’m found by a ghatuan search party,” he whispered sarcastically.

  His back was too close to the trees. The thought hit him with a simultaneous wave of discomfort. The rock was providing a false sense of security. He stepped out swiftly to the centre of the clearing, twisting his head.

  Standing on the rock was a terrifyingly large animal, mottled in the moonlight. It looked like an enormous cat the size of five men at least. The wind gently massaged the silky snow-white fur that covered its long, lean body. A set of intense yellow eyes were fixed upon him.

  Carefully Tyler pivoted the rest of his body so as to face the same direction as his head. The creature remained motionless; only its tail betrayed movement as it flicked from side to side like a pendulum, counting off the last moments of Tyler’s life.

  The creature crouched. It’s going to pounce, thought Tyler. He wound back his arm and yelled.

  The cat paused. It cocked its head, and in a white flash it slipped away into the night.

  Varkon burst into the clearing at the same instant. “What’s wrong? I heard a shout.”

  Tyler fell to his knees with relief, adrenaline rushing madly around his body. “I don’t know. It’s gone.”

  “What is, boy?”

  Boy. Tyler realised that Varkon had never called him by his real name; perhaps he did not know it. Why this random insight mattered suddenly was beyond him. “An animal, all white. Looked like a large cat.”

  “A snow lion? Are you sure you did not mistake it for a wolf?” One look at the quivering Tyler seemed to convince him otherwise. “I won’t leave you alone again. I’ll stay guard tonight, giving you a chance to rest.”

  Tyler nodded in ready agreement. Varkon bent down and offered him … a root? It had been washed in the river and was still dripping with icy water. “Eat this,” the creature said.

  Tyler snatched the root from Varkon’s hand rudely without meaning to, and he bit into it. It was extremely dry and had a strange, chalky taste. He finished it in no time.

  Varkon’s face contorted into an assorted smile of hooked teeth as he watched Tyler eat. “Like that, eh? Good. It’s all we have to get by on. I found a decent patch not far from here. It’s called krus, a tulip that remains hidden under the ground until it shoots out a bright red flower in the summer.” Varkon patted his back, which had about twenty krus secured skilfully to it with pieces of cloth. Half of his shirt had been used to achieve this, so the dark flesh across his chest was now exposed, revealing new coils of tattoos. If the ghatu felt the cold, he didn’t show it. “You should rest; tomorrow will not be easy. If we don’t find a way across the stream, it will only be a matter of time until we are captured.”

  Tyler was too tired to care. As he dozed off, he could hear Varkon softly singing.

  Child of troubles, Child of strife,

  Sleep, sleep deeply.

  Then awake, Child of life.

  Tyler did indeed sleep deeply. He woke briefly only once, and he saw Varkon close by, watchful and attentive, staring into the night.

  He sat, waiting and watching. For almost half a day, he had patiently remained in his position, nÿmph-feet perched carefully upon a swaying branch. His ears searched the wind for some sound of his hunt. His prey was the duik, a small, hoofed animal. Tradition held that it was forbidden to hunt one with a bow. Instead, the ultimate triumph was to catch one using only bare hands and keen wit. One of its small black horns could then be kept as a token of success.

  A slight rustle of leaves down below signalled the emergence of his prey. He stemmed his excitement and hooded his eyes, soaking in every detail. Timing would be everything. After arching his back, he rose and ran nimbly along the fragile branch on which he had been waiting. Suddenly and without pause, he sprang through the air, landing quietly upon a jutting tree limb in one swift step. Then he was in the air again, cutting through the wind like a deft arrow and catching hold of a feeble acara bough. The leaves barely rustled. Now he was directly above the duik, who was still grazing blissfully. He let his fingers slip, and he fell the remaining fourteen feet with a faultless twist, landing neatly with his feet either side of his quarry. He slid his knife from his belt and slashed at his mark. The duik startled before hurtling away into the bush. Smiling, he picked up the small, twisted black horn that lay propped on the grass.

  Tyler opened his eyes. He had been having such vivid dreams lately. He wearily shook his head and blinked at the rising sun. Varkon was standing in the middle of the clearing, watching him.

  “Get up. You’ve had a long rest,” the creature gruffed.

  “It’s light already?” asked Tyler. “I thought the plan was to travel much earlier than this.”

  “Tomorrow I will not be so kind. Come – we must cross the stream by this evening. Take this krus; it will help to wake you.”

  Tyler took the root and began to gnaw on it as he followed Varkon. It didn’t taste nearly as good as the night before.

  The day was much the same as the previous one, except that for a long while Tyler was plagued by cramps. Fortunately this fell away as he began to sweat with the effort of ploughing forward. The morning passed as before, with the exception of one odd moment when the companions spotted two cows wandering blissfully on the other side of the riverbank. Tyler could only dream as to what strange path they must have taken to end up there! At noon they made a brief stop to dine on another krus.

  During the long stretches of mindless plodding Tyler had time to reflect on Hargill’s untruths, the mysterious snow lion, the spider-curse that had been inflicted upon him (for he had begun to see it as a curse), Varkon’s fickle moods, the murder of his family, the purpose of this “quest”,
why he was being chased by the Dhimori … So many questions, but he had no answers to any of them.

  “Varkon?” he called one point in a moment of bravery. “Why did you kill those men?”

  “Who?”

  “Innor and his friends, from the cart.”

  Tyler noticed the ghatu raised a tentative hand to his bandaged arm. “One of our scouts was spotted by your outer encampment.”

  “Firith,” said Tyler.

  “I was sent alone by the Sa-Tsu to kill a party that was sent out to warn your village. The scout reported only two men in the group. The miserable creature lied – there were six. I’m lucky to be alive and have this to show for it,” Varkon gestured to his bandaged arm. “From an arrow that missed my heart.”

  They continued in silence after that until dusk, but there was still no way to bridge the river. Varkon called their grinding pace to an end. “If we stay by this river any longer, we will be discovered.” Tyler nodded, too tired to verbally agree. “Last chance,” said Varkon. “Can you think of any way over?”

  “No. Besides the mad thought of swimming, I cannot.”

  “Let us trust in madness, then, to take us further.”

  “You want to swim?” Tyler thought Varkon had lost his mind. “Well, perhaps you could survive the cold, but I cannot. Besides, the current is too strong. How could we hold our own against it?”

  Without further comment Varkon took hold of his long hair and tucked it into what was left of his shirt.

  Tyler rubbed his hand against his forehead with weary disbelief. “Do you remember the other night?” he asked doubtfully. “I was barely in the water for a few moments, and I almost died.”

  Varkon reached behind his back to make sure all the krus was secured. He then slapped his huge hands together with such a bang that a flock of birds startled from a nearby tree. “Are you done complaining?”

  Tyler flung up his hands. “Varkon, I will die. Please understand.”

  “You will give me a headache if you keep acting so precious. All right, grab hold of my back.”

  “What?”

  “Grab hold of my back,” Varkon said slowly. “I’ll swim across with you.”

  “How can you possibly swim with me dragging you under?”

  “I’ll be the judge of what I can and cannot do. Move, boy, do as I say.”

  A frosty silence marked Tyler’s surrender to Varkon’s will. There was no possible way that they would make it, and yet what choice did he have? He slowly pulled off his boots, secured them to a buckle on his pants, staggered reluctantly over, and took hold of the ghatu’s shoulders.

  “No. Not there. Here,… and here.” Tyler wrapped his arms around Varkon as tightly as he could. This was without doubt the most reckless thing he had ever contemplated. And to think: a few days ago he had been hesitant to break a window! Now he was hopping into a deadly cold stream on the back of a ghatu.

  “Is this the best time to do this, Varkon?” asked Tyler as he watched the scarlet horizon, the first sign before the impending night.

  “Another miserable word, and I’ll drown us both.”

  And with that Varkon fell forward into the water.

  Varkon turned out to be a far worse swimmer than he had claimed, and Tyler was forced to let go of him immediately for fear of drowning them both. He cursed the ghatu and half considered turning back before quickly deciding against it. To retreat to the bank and risk being found by a search party was nothing more than suicide.

  After blowing out air from his cheeks, Tyler kicked as hard as he could with the intention of swimming straight ahead, but the river had other ideas and pitched him along mercilessly, just as he had predicted. His arms were beginning to tire; already he must have travelled further down the stream than he had walked all afternoon. Hopefully Varkon could swim better than he had at first demonstrated.

  As Tyler kept his face up from the water, he realised the opposite bank was looming surprisingly close ahead. He gave one last, fantastic effort. The tug of the current lessened, and the pebbly bank rose up under his feet.

  He coughed up a lungful of water, dragged his half-drowned body onto the shore, and collapsed onto his back, his chest heaving. As soon as he could, he rose onto his elbow, teeth clattering, to look for Varkon.

  The ghatu was striding along the bank while dripping wet, a huge grin plastered across his face. “Ha, we made it! You see, child? I told you we would.”

  “What h-h-happened t-to your grand p-plan of carrying me on y-y-your back?” Tyler said through chattering teeth.

  “I confess it was only to get you into the water. But it worked, didn’t it? It worked.” Varkon bellowed this last comment loudly like a conquering giant as he strode the last few paces to where Tyler lay in a dejected heap. He reached out one shovel-sized hand to help him up.

  The stream had pulled them a long way downstream. Varkon thought that more than made up for any distance they did not travel during the night and set about making a fire not far from the water. Tyler had worried about the light, but Varkon was in too good a mood to care. “Anyway, you’ll need the heat,” the ghatu said, and he was probably right. Tyler had been shuddering violently and had turned a worrisome shade of blue. Varkon had forced him to strip off his wet clothes, so he sat quivering and naked in the dark. The ghatu too had thrown off many of his own garments, but he didn’t seem as affected by the cold. Instead, he explored the nearby darkness for firewood and soon had a large fire blazing merrily. Tyler lay out his clothes to dry beside the flames and began to feel much better; he even asked for another krus. Once he was fully clothed again and warmed, he realised that the success of the day had caused Varkon to become far more talkative.

  “And that one?” Tyler asked, pointing to a part of Varkon’s tattoos that curved across the left side of his chest. It was an image of a many-leaved tree engulfed with dark flame. The great number of birds that had been roosting within the shelter of its branches had taken to the sky.

  “My first kill,” said Varkon with pride. “I lit a fire at the base of the tree, and as the birds scattered, I shot an arrow straight through the neck of one.” He tapped an image of one of the flying birds. An arrow was sticking through its neck, spraying many black drops of blood. “It was a perfect shot. I still have this here …” Varkon rummaged through the ornaments on his neck until he found the cherished object. It was a beak, twine laced through its nostrils to form a simple necklace. “Another ghatu would have known all this without asking. See how the birds change form as they move away?”

  Tyler looked: the further the birds were from the tree, the more their shapes distorted until they entirely transformed into thin and tortured ghosts. “Spirits,” said Varkon. “The first kill in my culture is of great importance, my rite of passage. The spirits of my ancestors entered me that day.”

  “And behind them, is that a sun in the background?”

  “Nothing on my body is without meaning. It is an eye – my father’s, a tribute to the watchfulness and care he took in raising me. The clues in the artwork should tell you this. See that the pupil of the eye is a baby still coiled within my mother’s belly, as though unborn.”

  Fascinated, Tyler bent forward to take a better look. As he did so, he noticed a flash of white out in the middle of the stream. Before he could say anything, an arrow slapped into the trunk of the tree under which they were sheltered, vibrating the branches so that wayward clumps of snow rained about them.

  “Ghatu!” cried Varkon, leaping to his feet. “On the other side of the river.”

  Sure enough, the shadowy shapes of a party of ghatu could be seen dancing themselves into frenzy on the other bank. There were two more whistling sounds. One of the arrows whizzed over their heads and disappeared; the other thudded into the ground not a yard from Tyler’s foot.

  “Tyler, move!” Varkon roared.

 
They raced away as fast as they could, taking care not to lose sight of one another among the trees. Only once the cries of the ghatu became too faint to hear did the companions come to a panting halt in the pine needles, their icy breath puffing into luminous clouds of moonlight.

  “There will be no rest tonight, then,” said Varkon wearily.

  Tyler groaned. He was exhausted.

  “I doubt those ghatu will risk a river crossing now,” speculated Varkon.

  “But I’m guessing they will not hesitate to alert somebody – something – on our side of the riverbank?” Tyler ventured.

  “So we dare not tarry. We must travel east from here until we cross the Klinha Mountains and reach the sea. Look on the bright side, boy: for the first time we are travelling in the right direction!”

  Considering how tired they were, their progress through the night was good. Tyler mentioned the white flash that he had seen earlier.

  “And you think it was your snow lion? Perhaps it is what guided the ghatu to us. It is rumoured She can speak the tongues of beasts.”

  Tyler quickened his pace and flitted his eyes more attentively about the shadows. The full moon had eroded a little since the winter feast, but the stars were bright tonight, emblazoning the sky like a billion fireflies perched on the dark dome of the world.

  They continued up a shallow slope and then along a segment of flat ground for some time. The trees bunched together, and the wind blowing through their leaves fuelled Tyler’s paranoia. Perhaps they are whispering the location of a certain human and ghatu to each other – and rumours of this are right now rippling to the very edges of the forest, he thought. Who knew what was possible anymore.

  Rocks and boulders of varying sizes sometimes forced the companions to divert substantially from their path. They had just navigated their way past a particularly enormous one when there was a sharp movement alongside them, behind a row of trees.