John Bowman's Cave

by Erron Adams

  “Alright. But you'd better...” his voice trailed. He made a low, exasperated, barking sound and turned away.

  “John Bowman, how is your arm?” Oyen asked.

  Bowman held the arm out straight and observed the minor miracle of it flexing and rotating under his mental command. For a moment he was too stunned to reply to Oyen, and it was true that the arm ached the instant fresh demands were placed on it. Still, the sentence had been lifted, and he smiled.

  “It's... good. God, I don't think I need the cast!”

  “You don't,” Yalnita said, coming over with a strip of a rag and some Blood Moss. “One more day wrapped in the moss and you're free. Free to heal, or to foolishly ask too much, too soon, and plunge right back to where you were.”

  He beamed, speechless and appreciative, and nodded at the warning.

  ***

  Part IV

  Citadel

  Chapter 13

  A Hippy Went Hunting

  The earth goes on the earth glittering in gold,

  The earth goes to the earth sooner than it wold,

  The earth builds on the earth castles and towers,

  The earth says to the earth, All this is ours.

  - Inscribed in Melrose Abbey

  “You don't like me, do you, Rain Dog?”

  It was the first time conversation had strayed from Rain Dog’s mechanical instruction in the art of hunting. Instruction The grudgingly dispensed, and in miserly portions.

  Up until now, Bowman had been content with the minimal communication. As Yalnita had intended, he'd gleaned much from observation.

  Walking had been a different matter. The getting-somewhere-quick gait of the street, where the heel strikes hard and rolls around the outer edge to the ball and toes, was a sure way to send shock waves of vibration and sound through the forest. Rain Dog wasted no time disabusing him of the habit. When the third group of deer they'd stalked had fled, he flung his bow down and glared at Bowman. “Idiot! Learn to walk like a wary animal. You stomp like some marching fool from Burnt Pines!”

  Other rudiments had been explained at the outset. “We stay downwind, to get their scent, not the other way around. In these parts animals rarely see a human and are not afraid of us. But closer to home, where you will have to hunt - may the gods forgive such an insult! - if your quarry smells you first, you might as well give the game away.”

  Perversely, Bowman was almost enjoying getting under Rain Dog's skin. But his stomach was smaller, tighter and noisier than he could ever remember, and it was a relief when they entered a cool, winding glade full of rabbits that were feasting on moss and short, sweet grasses. Rain Dog killed three in quick succession, one with a headshot so they wasted no chest flesh in cleaning it.

  The successful hunt meant the heroes could return to camp with fresh meat. Rain Dog quietly hummed bits of a song, or several songs; Bowman couldn’t recognise them and didn’t care. He only hoped such relative contentment allowed an opportunity to broach the issue of the Rory's resentment. Hence the question.

  “It's not a question of like, John Bowman. I don't trust you; you're an Outlander. I won't allow myself to like you.”

  “What's wrong with Outlanders?”

  Rain Dog snorted. “What's right with them?”

  A long wait ensued for Bowman. Finally, he said, “Well? You haven't answered me. I mean, I'm the only Outlander I know here. I may not be a hero, or even much of a man in your world. But I did all right in mine, and I'm not evil.”

  “Really, did all right in yours? So why are you here?”

  All the lightness Bowman had felt left him, for here was the central question in all these questions: why was this happening to him? Why was he happening to these people? If he just knew what the plan was, he wouldn't need answers. In fact, he could probably dispense with conversation altogether.

  “I don't know, Rain Dog. I'm not here by choice, and believe me if I could stop inflicting myself on you I would. But I give you my word that I mean no harm. And until I find out what my purpose is, I need help here, and in return I'll help as best I can, those who help me. I need your friendship, Rain Dog.”

  “Well, you can't have it. Friendship can't be had for the asking; it is sometimes earned, it sometimes happens. It is unlikely between us. As I said, you are an Outlander. It’s nothing personal, as you seem to think. I have learned through experience that Outlanders have no allegiance to offer, at best. At worst, they are treacherous, like that one Keemon. You saw him. He’s one of yours, an Outlander. So is Caylen, who deserted us to fight her own private war. And you saw how Keemon treated her. No, there’s little good in any Outlander, from my observations.”

  Bowman turned away. He wanted to talk more about the traitor, Keemon, the mysterious man from his own world. But he was too deflated by Rain Dog’s tirade, and said only, “We might as well get back then.”

  ***

  They camped two nights at the dead-end of a ravine, taking turns to watch the narrow opening they’d entered by. Here they rested from their exertions, while Lowery's battering mended.

  Rain Dog's instruction continued, and from the unsuspecting local herds of small deer, he and Bowman finally managed to take a fine doe, plump with late spring feeding. It was a moment of some triumph for Rain Dog, who allowed a small smile as he stood over the kill, brandishing the knife with which he would bleed and skin and butcher. “Enough to last us a week here,” he muttered and bent to the task.

  Fed, rested, somewhat healed and finally, bored, the Pack quit the gorge on a morning of misty rain. The path climbed almost straight up through loose rock and shale. They slipped and slid about in the wet, collecting cuts and bruises, but the Rory homing instinct never faltered, and the monotonous alternation of toil and rest numbed their pain. Towards evening on the third day, Yalnita crested a knife-edge spine of rock and stopped a few feet down on a small ledge.

  The others spanned either side of her and faced West across a deep valley. Bowman scrambled to the line's end. As he found his feet on the ledge and looked up, Oyen leant towards him and whispered, “Dragonspine.”

  Through evening cloud the rays of the setting sun softened and splayed across the mountain range. In that light it came alive; the backbone of the world was a thing of mutating shapes and colours. Its peaks, away to the East, ascended beyond the reach of sight - like the views from Lake Mountain – and were swallowed in the vaporous nothing where sky and vision petered out.

  It seemed indeed reptilian, a skin of seamlessly joined facets under which something lightly slept. Something subliminal about the place animated it. Some smell, or sound, or barely detectable movement - a flicker the eye could never quite catch - prickled Bowman’s skin. He was thankful to be seeing it for the first time in this attenuated light. The midday sun, he reasoned, would grant it refuge, its flashing scales blinding those who looked on as it slithered behind the rock of everything.

  “It’s getting dark; we’ll camp here tonight,” Yalnita said...

  Bowman looked up. “Where’s Grealding?”

  Oyen answered him. “Part of the Dragon. See if you can pick it!”

  Bowman scanned for the expected walls, turrets, towers or spires which would denote substantial settlement. Sight failed him. He shrugged. Oyen pointed to their left.

  Bowman followed Oyen’s finger to a place his undirected eyes had passed over. On closer scrutiny, the shapes here appeared to meet more often at right angles than elsewhere. Small dark circles could be windows. Here and there what might be smoke wisps smudged the harsh angular lines. If it was Grealding, it seemed to have been hewn straight into the rock, and to have folded itself into the mountain.

  Bowman felt let down. Clever disguise though it may have been, it was no monument to architectural masonry. This was the gateway to the lands of the Rory? This, the home of the mighty warriors with whom he travelled? It lacked even battlements from which to repel attackers. But when he ventured the opinion that it was vulnerable, the Pack
laughed.

  Roop’s face was a cheery red in the sun's lowering glow. “What do you mean, John Bowman? Grealding marks the only pass into the upper reaches of the Dragonspine. None have ever passed without our consent.”

  “Have any ever tried?”

  “Some, who soon regretted it!”

  “I still can't believe it's impregnable, having met the Kasina.”

  Rain Dog was the only Rory not smiling. “What’s with your sudden interest in our defences, anyway?”

  “Leave it, Rain Dog,” said Yalnita. She turned to Bowman. “You are forgetting Grealding's one invincible weapon.” She spread her arms to indicate the Pack. “Us!”

  ***

  In the morning it all looked different, as if during the night the entire Dragonspine had risen a moment, re-arranged itself, and settled back down. Was that tree there yesterday? Had that peak sprouted while he slept? Bowman stalked back and forth, scrutinizing the enigmatic surface of the valley’s far side. He couldn’t even make out where Grealding had gone.

  The Rory weren’t in the least surprised by whatever changes had occurred. They rose and left without eating, eager to be home.

  Rain Dog sauntered by Bowman. “Get your things, Outlander, we’re leaving.”

  Next came a torturous descent that took the larger part of morning, followed by an even worse climb up the other slope. Bowman swept the sweat from his eyes. Ahead, the Rory single-filed into a channel in the rock-face. He hurried after.

  The sheer walls pressed in like a vice, rising so high overhead that torches had been placed every twenty feet or so, to provide light. He could stretch his arms and touch both sides. His fingers skimmed the smooth surfaces that seemed to have been machined, or else the mountain had fissured straight down, flaking like a sheet of slate. The channel switched this way and that like lightning. Claustrophobia snuffed the sense of time so that he had no idea how long they walked until the path abruptly widened to a large, oval space.

  Sand covered the ground. They stood on a lake of the stuff whose edges lapped the base of a rock cliff. Bowman turned right around and the cliff circled with him; he was at the bottom of a hollow tower of rock.

  Each Rory scooped up some of the sand and let it flow back. The grains softly hissed through their spread fingers. It sounded like a distant prayer, and dust puffed where the streams landed.

  Rock surrounded them. Rock piled on rock, bluffs that were breaking down into rock, columns and buttes and collapses of it. Waterfalls of the broken stuff were caught in the liquid moment of cascade over still more rock.

  They headed for the far wall, and as they got closer features edged out of the grey. A sheer, flat surface appeared. Slightly taller than a man, and little wider, it shimmered translucence like a sheet waterfall. Bowman tugged Roop’s shirt and nodded towards it.

  Roop explained. “The Mirror Guard! It knows every friend of Grealding by their heartbeat, and crushes anyone else who tries to pass.”

  “How does it know?”

  A shrug. “This is Jindi magic, the earliest power in the world. It was born with time. No one has ever learnt how it works. It is a mindfulness that keeps our enemies out; that's all we know, and care.”

  The Rory filed straight for it. When the last of them had vanished, Bowman stood before the mirror and realized his mind had gone chill blank. It took the sinuously unmistakable arm of Rain Dog to rejoin him to the Pack. Flowing out of the wall its gnarled hand gripped Bowman by the shirt and hauled him through.

  Now it seemed they were underwater. Inside the mountain was a liquid place, peopled by shadows and shapes that whorled and swirled around them as they went. When there was light, it was blood red and blurred out everything else. Then it died away into outline and graduated dark. There was no sound here, but what the mind and inner ear produced, or reported from the gurgling, pumping, pulsing organs of the body.

  When they stepped from the other side of the mirror, they were in a village square. The shapes of stone houses loomed from the deepening dusk. Evening light glimmered faintly from some of the higher slate roofs and every so often a lamp showed in a window. But the Rory strode past these beckonings into a dark, cobbled street.

  A challenge halted them. “Hold! Name yourselves!”

  Yalnita spoke. “As if you can't see, Fool!”

  A chuckling face emerged from the dark. “As if indeed; I'd know your scent anywhere, vixen.”

  She slapped his cheek hard, but her hand stayed as she said, “So you should!” Her arms slid around him. He hugged back.

  Bowman felt a twinge of something, either jealousy, or at least longing for what had passed from his own life.

  Yalnita broke from the embrace and spoke. “You’re a welcome sight, Regrais.”

  “I’ve been idling by the Mirror Guard since Challa and Caylen returned, hoping to be the one to greet you.”

  The Rory pressed round him. It was Oyen who got the question out, though he had to hold his companions back with both arms spread, to earn the right.

  “My sister, how is she? And Challa, of course! How are they?”

  “She is well enough, Oyen, though still weak. Nothing remains injured in her body that won’t heal with rest. Challa heals well, also. But some of the blade wounds were deep, and his broken leg has made him something of an invalid. It is a fate he doesn't relish.”

  “Regrais, I want to see them. Now!” Oyen said.

  And so they swept off, first to Caylen and then, to what Regrais termed, “The Mourning Room Of The Fallen Warrior, Challa.”

  ***

  Chapter 14

  Grealding

  As they made their way through the mostly deserted streets to Challa’s house, Roop took Bowman aside. He watched the departing backs of the other Rory until they were out of earshot. “A word to you, John Bowman. Something you should know about Grealding,” he said.

  Bowman frowned. Most of his interactions with the Rory had been, until now, straightforward, often downright blunt. Roop’s conspiratorial manner was something new. Still, if anyone could bring Bowman up to speed on some matter of Rory import, it was the eloquent Roop.

  “Yes, Roop?”

  “It’s about Elsis, Caylen’s mother. In case you meet her un-forewarned.”

  Bowman almost laughed at the prim speech, but Roop’s obvious discomfort stopped him. The normally loquacious Rory was actually wringing his hands! Bowman put a hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Well, out with it!”

  Roop took a breath and spoke. “We are talking of a somewhat mad, bitter woman. Say nothing to Oyen; being the older sibling, duty places him in an unenviable position.”

  “How do you mean?” Bowman asked, trying to piece the family politics together.

  “Oyen is Elsis’s natural son; Caylen is adopted. In fact, Oyen found Caylen in Animarl. She was only a young child then, and it’s the custom among my people to adopt foundlings, even Outlanders.”

  There was little news in this for Bowman. Still, he’d come to accept Caylen’s Rory connections so well, the mention of her other-world origin rekindled the inquisitiveness he’d felt when Argilan had first mentioned her. He frowned. “Are you sure she’s an Outlander?”

  “No question of it. We could tell by the strange clothes, and her speech was strange to us at first, as was yours. Besides, she talked incessantly of the other world, for a while. Until Elsis silenced her.”

  “What, how? Why?”

  “She beat the girl until she no longer mentioned her old world. Elsis hates Outlanders; it’s as simple as that. She’s not alone, you understand: most Rory have no time for Outlanders. No offence; that’s just the way it is.”

  Bowman snorted. “Yeah, I’ve already had the drum on that from Rain Dog!”

  “Sorry, John Bowman, I just thought you ought to know: there’s no great love between Caylen and her adoptive mother. None at all. And I advise you to avoid Elsis as far as possible, since you’re also an Outlander.”

  As Roop strode o
ff to catch up with the other Rory, Bowman realised he’d only just begun to understand Caylen. Her formerly irritating strangeness suddenly seemed no longer quite so irrational.

  ***

  They stood in the small main room of the Rory home, its yellow stone and mortar walls reflecting the light that poured through windows. On the way there Bowman had more closely observed Grealding’s houses, finding them lockless to the passing world and open to its moving air. The Mirror Guard evidently kept the world’s evils at bay, and the city of stone relaxed behind its sleepless sentinel.

  In personality, Grealding exuded no fanfare, extravagance or boast. It was a simple, practical place, expressing the solidity of the mountain from which it had emerged and the steadfastness of the people it housed.

  But Challa’s incapacity rattled him. “Really, they won't let me do anything for myself; I just lie here, getting stiff and sore and fat!” He indicated the door to the next room, where bustling and cooking sounds filled the air. As he moaned on, Bowman watched Caylen.

  She seemed distant, as if part of her was still captive. While the Rory chuckled and fussed around Challa, her eyes kept drifting from the bedside scene to one that seemed to float about the room, something at once ethereal and entrancing to her. Her body had mostly mended, there was no denying that. But Regrais' report had been loaded with the unspoken. While her physical injuries had healed, something indefinable remained hurt, something that care and rest hadn’t reached.

  Then she looked at him, and what she saw he couldn't guess. She might have been looking through him to the wall behind; her facial expression was that of someone searching for something of great value, at the moment of recognition that it was forever lost.

  “Isn't that true, John Bowman?” It was Oyen.

  “Sorry... I drifted off. Isn't what true?”

  “That you hunt, now. John Bowman, the Rabbit Slayer - that's what we call you!”

  Through the fog of laughter Bowman looked back at Caylen. Her eyes had lit, and she was smiling. He laughed too, in relief, seeing how the curious child-woman could be rejoined to the world. Events had cut her mind loose to wander like a balloon, but it could be drawn back by long strings from the heart, and in time might be re-anchored, if it found the earth where it belonged.