Word & Void 02 - A Knight of the Word

by Terry Brooks

  “We have to go,” Ariel said suddenly, and she started to move away.

  “Wait!” Nest called out to her, saying the word so loudly that heads turned. She tried to look nonchalant as she detached herself from the pier railing and walked over to where Ariel hovered, glancing out at the boats as she did so. “Go where?” she whispered fiercely.

  Ariel pointed north, down the trolley line, away from the direction they had come. “Someone is waiting to see you.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone you know. Hurry, we have to go.”

  Ariel moved out to the sidewalk and Nest followed reluctantly. They turned north along the waterfront, passing Elliott’s on Pier 56 and the shops on Pier 57. The wind whipped off the bay, cold and sharp, and in spite of the sunshine, Nest hunched down into her windbreaker, wishing she had brought something warmer.

  Her mind raced as her eyes followed the movement of her feet. She spoke without looking up. “Ariel, were you in the building with me at Fresh Start, when I talked to John’s friends?”

  The tatterdemalion nodded. “I was.”

  “Was the demon stink there, too?”

  “Yes, everywhere.”

  “Was it as strong?”

  “Yes, as strong.”

  Nest tried to decide what this meant. Something had made her violently ill inside the rooms of Fresh Start. Could it be demon stink? If there was demon stink all over John Ross, wouldn’t she have felt sick around him, too? Besides, she hadn’t been able to detect demon stink five years ago, when her demon father had come back into her life, so why should she be able to detect it now?

  Had something changed since then’?

  Maybe something about her?

  She walked up Alaskan Way, keeping pace with Ariel, her head lowered against the bite of the October wind. The tatterdemalion seemed unaffected by the cold and wind, her ephemeral form a steady presence, her light silken coverings hanging limp and unruffled. Ariel did not look at her, but kept her gaze directed ahead, toward wherever it was they were going.

  They crossed Alaskan Way at Pier 59, which housed the Seattle Aquarium, passed under the viaduct, and moved toward the broad, concrete steps of a hillclimb that led up to the city. There was another possibility, she realized, still thinking about what Ariel had said. Maybe what had happened at Fresh Start had nothing to do with demon stink. Maybe it had to do with the demon itself. If there was demon stink all over Fresh Start and John Ross, then it stood to reason the demon made its home close to both. So maybe the reason she became sick at Fresh Start was that the demon had been right there beside her.

  One of Ross’s friends and coworkers.

  One of the people he trusted.

  It made sense. The Lady said that the Void would send someone to subvert Ross, that maybe it had already happened. Ariel seemed to think it had. Ross did not. But maybe Ross couldn’t see what was happening and that was the whole problem. Maybe her job in coming to find him was to make him take a closer look at himself.

  Had she done that by speaking to him as she had? Had she given him enough cause to reexamine his situation? She couldn’t be sure. But she knew now that she had to find out.

  She climbed the steps past a small Mexican restaurant and a series of shops to Western Avenue, then turned up toward Pike Place Market. She knew where she was from the time she had spent studying the map of Seattle. Pike Place Market was a Seattle landmark, a long, low building that consisted of stalls and kiosks and display tables that were leased by vendors of fresh fish, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and crafts. Western ran below the market through warehouses and buildings that had been converted into microbreweries, restaurants, retail shops, and parking garages. The street sloped steadily upward from where she left the hillclimb, passing beneath several overpasses that connected the waterfront to the market and the surrounding shops. The crowds had dissipated to a scattering of people working their way between the parking lots and shopping areas. She wondered anew where it was that Ariel was taking her.

  They passed a ramp leading down into an open-sided parking garage that abutted the expressway, and the sound of passing cars was a dull whine of tires on concrete. Then a park came into view. It was a small park, barely more than an open space with a grassy knoll at its center, clusters of small trees, and a sidewalk winding out from the street to a railing that overlooked Elliott Bay. Wooden benches lined the sidewalk and quarter-slot telescopes pointed out toward the Olympics. A juncture of streets leading down to the Market from the city fronted the little park, and traffic crawled past sluggishly in the afternoon sun.

  A blue and red sign at the edge of the lawn proclaimed that this was Victor Steinbrueck Park.

  “Here,” said Ariel.

  Nest walked up into the park for a closer look, drawn by the vista of the bay and the distant mountains, by the bright, sunny mix of blue water, green trees, and white-capped mountain peaks. She glanced around at the people in the park. They were an eclectic group. There were schoolchildren clustered at the railing with their supervising teachers and parents. There were shoppers on their way to and from the market. Businessmen and women were reading newspapers and magazines in the warmth of the sun as they munched sandwiches and sipped coffee.

  But mostly there were Native Americans. They occupied the majority of the benches, particularly those fronting Western. They sat together in small groups on the grassy knoll. One or two lay sleeping in the sunshine, wrapped in old blankets or coats. They were a ragged, sullen group, their copper faces weathered, their black hair lank, and their clothes shabby. The ones sitting on the benches fronting the sidewalk on Western had placed paper cups and boxes in front of them to solicit handouts from passersby. They kept their faces lowered and their eyes on each other, seldom bothering even to look up at the people they begged from. Some drank from bottles wrapped in brown paper sacks. Most were men, but there were a few women, as well.

  Nest turned to find Ariel, to ask who it was that they had come to meet, but the tatterdemalion was gone.

  “Hello, little bird’s Nest,” someone growled from behind.

  She knew the voice instantly, and even so she couldn’t quite believe it. She turned around, and there stood Two Bears. The Sinnissippi was as ageless and unchanging as John Ross, his copper-colored features blunt and smooth, his long hair ink black and woven into a single braid, and his eyes so dark they seemed depthless. He wore the familiar army fatigue pants and boots, but here, where it was cooler, he also wore a heavy jacket over a checked flannel shirt. The silver buckle of his belt was tarnished and the leather scarred. He was as big and imposing as she remembered, with huge shoulders and thick, gnarled fingers. He was a solid and immutable presence.

  “O’olish Amaneh.” She spoke his Indian name carefully, as if it were made of glass.

  “You remember,” he said approvingly. “Good.” “Are you the one I’m supposed to meet?”

  He cocked his head. “I don’t know. Have you come here to meet someone, little bird’s Nest?”

  She nodded. “My friend Ariel brought me. She said …”

  “Your friend? Have you come with a friend? Where is she?”

  Nest looked around. “Gone, I guess. Hiding.”

  “Ah, just like your friend in the park five years ago. Mr. Pick.” Two Bears seemed amused. His broad face creased with his smile. “All your friends want to hide from me, it seems.”

  She colored slightly. “Maybe you frighten them.”

  “Do you think so?” He shrugged, as if disclaiming responsibility. “You’ve changed, little bird’s Nest. Maybe I can’t call you that anymore. Maybe you’re too old, too grown up.”

  “You haven’t changed,” she replied. “You look just the same. What are you doing here?”

  He looked around speculatively. “Maybe I’ve come to be with my brothers and sisters. The Sinnissippi are gone, but there are still plenty of other tribes. Some of them have prospered. They run casinos and sell fireworks. They have councils to gover
n their people and rules to enforce their proclamations. The government in Washington recognizes their authority. They call them Native Americans and pass laws that give them special privileges. They don’t call them Indians or Redskins anymore. At least, not to their faces.”

  He cocked an eyebrow at her. “There is even a segment of the population who believes that my people were wronged once, long ago, when white Europeans took away their land and their way of life. Can you imagine that?”

  Nest shook her head noncommittally. “Are you sure Ariel didn’t bring me here to see you?”

  His face remained expressionless. “Why don’t we sit down and talk, little bird’s Nest?”

  He led her to a bench facing out toward the water. A group of weathered men was sitting there, passing around a bottle and speaking in low voices. Two Bears said something to them in another language, and they rose at once and moved away. Two Bears took their place on the bench, and Nest sat down next to him.

  “What did you say to them?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I told them they have no pride in themselves and should be ashamed.” The copper skin of his blunt features tightened around his bones. “We are such a sad and hopeless people. Such a lost people. There are some of us, it is true, who have money and property. There are some who have found a way of life that provides. But most of us have nothing but empty hearts and alcohol and bad memories. Our pride in ourselves was stripped away a long time ago, and we were left hollow. It is a sad thing to see. Sadder to live.”

  He looked at her. “Do you know what is wrong with us, little bird’s Nest? We are homeless. It is a bad way to be in the world. But that is how we are. We are adrift, tiny boats in a large ocean. Even those of us who have land and houses and friends and neighbors and some sort of life. It is a condition indigenous to our people. We bear a legacy of loss passed down to us by our ancestors. We bear the memory of what we had and what was taken. It haunts us.”

  He shook his head slowly. “You can be homeless in different ways. You can be homeless like those of my people you see here, living on the streets, surviving on handouts, marking time between the seasons. But you can be homeless in your heart, too. You can be empty inside yourself because you have no spiritual center. You can wander through life without any real sense of who you are or where you belong. You can exist without purpose or cause. Have you ever felt like that, little bird’s Nest?”

  “No,” she said at once, wondering where he was going with this.

  “Indians know,” he said softly. “We have known for a long time. We are homeless in the streets and we are homeless in our hearts as well. We have no purpose in the world. We have no center. Our way of life was changed for us long ago, and it will never return. Our new life is someone else’s life imposed on us; it is a false life. We struggle to find our home, our center, but it is as faded as the Sinnissippi. A building is a home if the people who inhabit it have memories and love and a place in the world. Otherwise, it is just a building, a shelter against the elements, and it can never be anything more. Indians know.”

  He bent close to her, pausing. “There are others who know this, too. A few, who have been uprooted and displaced, who have been banished to the road and a life of wandering, who have lost any sense of who they are. Some of these are like us—men and women whose way of life has been taken from them. Some of them are looking for a way back home again. Maybe you even know one.”

  Nest stared at him in silence.

  “Do you still have your magic?” he asked suddenly. Caught off guard by the question, she fumbled for an answer. “I think so.”

  “Not sure, are you? Perhaps it has changed as you have grown?” He nodded his understanding. “It may be so. Everything changes with time’s passage. Only change itself is constant. So you must adapt and adjust and remember to keep close what is important and not to forget its purpose. Remember when we sat in the park and watched the spirits of the Sinnissippi dance?”

  She did. On the Fourth of July weekend five years earlier, at midnight, she had gone into the park she had grown up in, the park that Pick warded, to see if the spirits would speak to her. The spirits had come on Two Bears’ summons, and they had danced in the starlit darkness and shown to Nest in a vision a secret her family had hidden from her. It had been the catalyst for her terrifying confrontation with her father, and it had probably saved her life. She had not understood it that way at the time; she had not understood much of what had happened to her that weekend until much later.

  “We were searching for truths, you and I—me, about my people, and you, about your father.” He shook his head. “Hard questions were needed to uncover those truths. But the truths define who we are. They measure our place in the world. That is why they have worth. We search and we learn. It is how we grow.”

  He looked out over the bay. “Do you think this country has changed much since we spoke last, little bird’s Nest? Since you were a girl, living in the park of the Sinnissippi? This is a hard question to answer, but the truth it masks needs uncovering. As a country, as a people, have we changed? On the surface we might appear to have done so, but underneath I think we are still the same. Our change is measurable, but not significant. We remain bent on destroying ourselves. We still kill each other with alarming frequency and for foolish reasons, and we begin the killing at a younger age. We have much to celebrate, but we live in fear and doubt. We are pessimistic about our own lives and the lives of our children. We trust almost no one.

  “It is the same everywhere. We are a people under siege, walled away from each other and the world, trying to find a safe path through the debris of hate and rage that collects around us. We drive our cars as if they were weapons. We use our children and our friends as if their love and trust were expendable and meaningless. We think of ourselves first and others second. We lie and cheat and steal in little ways, thinking it unimportant, justifying it by telling ourselves that others do it, so it doesn’t matter if we do it, too. We have no patience with the mistakes of others. We have no empathy for their despair. We have no compassion for their misery. Those who roam the streets are not our concern; they are examples of failure and an embarrassment to us. It is best to ignore them. If they are homeless, it is their own fault. They give us nothing but trouble. If they die, at least they will provide us with more space to breathe.”

  His smile was bitter. “Our war continues, the war we fight with one another, the war we wage against ourselves. It has its champions, good and bad, and sometimes one or the other has the stronger hand. Our place in this war is often defined for us. It is defined for many because they are powerless to choose. They are homeless or destitute. They are a minority of sex or race or religion. They are poor or disenfranchised. They are abused or disabled, physically or mentally, and they have forgotten or never learned how to stand up for themselves.

  “But you and me, little bird’s Nest, we are different. We have advantages others do not. We have magic and knowledge and insight. We know of the ways men destroy themselves and of the reasons they do so. We know the enemy who threatens us all. Because we know these truths, we are empowered and we can choose the ground we would defend. We have an obligation and a responsibility to decide where we will stand.”

  He paused. “I chose my ground a long time ago, when I returned from the Nam. I did so because after I died and came back to life, I was no longer afraid. I did so because even though I was the last of my people, I was made strong by the fire that tested me, and I was given purpose. You have been tested and given purpose, as well. You have been made strong. Now it is your turn to choose where you will stand.”

  Nest waited, impatient for the rest, guarded and edgy. On the sidewalk in front of her, close by the railing, the schoolchildren shrieked as a seagull dove over their heads in a wide sweep and soared away.

  Two Bears locked her eyes with his. “Let me tell you a story. It is just a story, but maybe it will speak to you. A long time ago, a servant of a very powerful lady car
ried a talisman to a man who had agreed to become her champion. This man was conscripted to fight in a good and necessary cause. He was to wield the talisman as a weapon in an effort to help turn aside an evil that threatened to destroy all. He was fearful of his responsibilities, but he was determined as well. He took the talisman from the servant and bore it into battle, and for many years he fought bravely. His task was not easy, because the people he fought to protect often acted badly and foolishly, and by doing so they did harm to themselves. But he remained their champion nevertheless.

  “Then something happened to him, and he lost faith in his cause. He abandoned hope; he gave up his fight. He became one of those who are homeless in their hearts. He despaired of who he was, and he thought to change everything about himself. He ran away to find a place to start over.”

  Two Bears looked around speculatively. “He might even have come to a city like this. This is the kind of city a man might flee to, if he were looking to begin again, don’t you think, little bird’s Nest?”

  Her heart was hammering in her chest.

  “Now the lady who had sent her servant to give this man her talisman was very disappointed in his failure to keep his promise to her. Shhhh, listen now, don’t interrupt. Ask yourself what you would do if you were the lady in question. Your talisman is in the hands of a man who will not use it, but cannot give it back. A talisman once given cannot be returned. The magic does not allow for it.”

  He smiled. “Or so the story goes. At any rate, the lady sent someone to talk to this man, a young woman. As a matter of fact, she was someone very much like you. She was the man’s friend, and the lady thought she might be able to persuade him of the danger he faced if he continued to ignore who he was and what he had promised. The lady thought the young woman was his best hope.”

  His eyes glistened. “Picture how this must be for the young woman. She is faced with a difficult task. She must find a way to help her friend, even though he does not wish her help. She must help him, because he has no one else and no other hope. The young woman is like you, little bird’s Nest. She has magic at her command, and she has been tested by fire. She has a strength and purpose lacking in others.”