Dream Thief (49 page)

He had been sitting half-asleep beside the boy's sickbed, nodding through the third watch. The boy's mother crouched at the foot of the bed dozing fitfully. Adjani and Gita lay sound asleep in a far corner of the tent; Gita snored softly like a slumbering buffalo mired in his favorite wallow.

At first Spence thought that the rattle, like the gurgle of a broken water pipe, came from outside the tent nearby. He roused himself to look around. The sound came again and he stared in horror at the boy's blue-tinged body. The pale lips parted, the eyes sunken, head tipped back, the young face aged beyond its years by the illness and the glowing fire of fever; the eyelids snapped open and unseeing eyes burned out like black coals. The hideous sound bubbled forth from his young throat.

He watched in mute terror as death grappled hand-to-hand with life for the body of the youngster. Death was winning the contest.

Spence called out in the darkness to Gita and Adjani, fearing to leave the boy's side for an instant lest the inevitable happen. No sound came from his friends; they slept on.

Then, suddenly, the gasp was cut short and an expiring hiss escaped from between the boy's teeth. Spence stared down helplessly. That was it. He was gone. The boy's mother, now fully awake, her eyes wide with terror, sprang forward in a sudden rush of grief, clutching at her child's legs, burying her face in them. For a moment she lay there as though stricken dead herself; then she raised herself up and looked at Spence with eyes full of sorrow and reproach and rushed out of the tent.

Spence was alone with the body.

“No!” he cried. “You can't die!”

He grabbed the small, fragile body in his hands and shook it as an angry child would shake a rag doll. Then, thinking more clearly, he placed his mouth over the boy's nose and mouth and blew gently. He laid the body down and placed the heels of his hands over the boy's heart and gave a quick downward thrust. He blew into the open mouth again and alternated with quick blows to the chest.

“God, don't let this boy die!” Spence prayed, beating on the little chest with the heel of his hand. “Please, God, save him. Please!”

Spence was only partially conscious of the prayer, but he offered it over and over again as he worked, transforming the words into an urgent litany. Sweating and quivering at the same time, head quivering at the same time, he worked like a robot gone berserk, performing his ritual over and over again and mumbling under his breath the plaintive prayer for God to spare the boy's life.

He labored this way for many minutes without response from the child. At last, muscles aching, sweat stinging his eyes, Spence collapsed lightheaded over the still body and began to cry.

“God, in this stinking land of death is it too much to ask you to save one life? Where are you? Don't you care?” He sobbed, more out of anger and frustration than sorrow. “Where
are
you?”

It was no use. God did not intervene in his creation anymore—if he ever did. His eyes and ears were elsewhere, attending the birth or death of a galaxy perhaps, but not to be bothered with the passing of an insignificant
goonda
boy.

Spence sat up, drying his eyes. He looked sadly at the small body, pale and still in the lamplight. He groaned. “I could have believed in you, God. I almost did.” He shook his head; a stirring of regret, as much for his own broken faith—so tentative and unformed—as for the death of the child, passed through him.

“I almost believed.” He placed a hand on the boy's forehead and felt the warmth of the fever diminish as the body cooled.

It made no sense, this stupid waste. The sights of the last days flooded back on him. He saw a horde of stump-legged, hunchbacked beggars and starving children pressing gaunt faces toward him. He saw whitened corpses bobbing in the rancid river like so many thousand buoys. He saw the teeming darkness spreading over the city and knew this to be mankind's ancient enemy seeking to destroy the hapless victims cowering beneath its shadow.

“God! Why?” Spence pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Why, why, why?”

The challenge went unanswered.

Spence looked at the young corpse lying so still and light upon the bed. It almost seemed that the slightest breeze would blow the small shell away like a leaf in the wind.

As if in answer to the mental image Spence felt a slight movement in the air and heard the rustle of the wind in the leaves outside the tent. He raised his head and listened to the night sounds. In the jungle all had become deathly still. Spence fancied he heard footsteps outside the tent, and then heard the bark of a camp dog.

The breeze stirred again, becoming stronger. He felt its coolness on his damp skin. The walls of the tent rippled under it; the lamp flickered and brightened.

And then everything became quiet. The wind stopped. The tent fell into flat folds again. The lamp flame still and dimmed.

The world seemed for a moment to hang balanced on the edge of a thin knife blade. One breath would send it toppling off on one side or the other. Spence held his breath to keep it balanced. He stared down at the dead boy.

In that moment eternities were born, time evaporated. Spence felt its barriers dissolve and flow away. He saw everything in crystalline clarity, hard-edged and in microscopic detail.

The dead boy's pale, almost translucent skin, the tiny black sweep of his eyelashes, the fine rounded curve of his nostrils, the delicate line of his thin, bloodless lips, the silken shaft of each black hair brushing his temples—all this and more Spence saw in a marvel of dumbstruck awe. Each object in his gaze had taken on a fierce, almost painful beauty. He was overwhelmed. He wanted to look away, to close his eyes to keep the sight from burning out his eyes, but dared not. He was held by a power stronger than his own and knew he could not escape it.

Then, as his eyes took in the terrible wonder of the dead boy's body, he saw a tiny flutter just inside the tender hollow of the throat. He heard a sound which seemed to thunder inside his brain, though it must have been barely audible. It was the long, shuddering whisper of breath being drawn into the nostrils and filling the lungs. It was the sound of life reentering the young boy's body.

The breath stopped—Spence wanted to gasp for air himself—and then it was released. The small chest sank. It seemed like an age before the chest rose again.

Slowly the breathing continued, becoming steadier, stronger, and more regular. Spence's mind reeled as he saw color seeping back into the boy's cheeks and the pulse in the throat beating rhythmically.

He knew then that the boy would live and not die. The miracle was complete.

Spence threw himself on the frail body and hugged it to him. He placed a hand on the boy's forehead and felt the warmth of life returning. But the fever was gone.

When Spence raised himself up, dashing tears from his eyes once again, two dark eyes were watching him with curiosity. They blinked at him and then a little hand reached out for his. Spence grabbed it and held it tightly.

He was sitting there, looking into those bemused young eyes, clutching the small hand, when a commotion arose outside the tent. He heard voices, shouts, half-angry cries, and then suddenly the tent was filled with people.

Foremost among them was the
goonda
chief. Spence glanced around as the crowd tumbled in with a rush. By the expression on Chief Watti's face Spence knew the moment should have been his last—the man held a long dagger in his hand ready to strike. The mother of the boy crouched at his elbow biting the back of her hand. The others hung back—mostly women, already raising a lamentation for the dead boy, and other
goondas
with their rifles at the ready.

But the bandit leader took one look at his son, lying there with a feeble smile on his lips, holding the hand of his physician, and let out a whoop of jubilation. The dagger spun from his hand. His wife leaped to her son and cradled his thin figure to herself.

Spence stood slowly and looked around. Adjani and Gita, staring and blinking at the confusion around them, rose up and came to stand beside Spence.

“What happened?” said Gita, eyeing the rifle-toting
goondas
warily. These stared back at the prisoners and shook their heads incredulously.

“You wouldn't believe me,” said Spence. “I scarcely believe it myself.”

“Did we miss something?” asked Adjani. Spence turned to regard the boy, now completely enveloped in the embrace of his father. “No; nothing much.”

A
RI SAT ON THE
small balcony of her room in the tower.

The sunlight bathed her upturned face with its warm light and touched her golden hair, transforming it into spun sunbeams. She looked an angel wearing a mortal cloak, but dreaming of its celestial home.

Her thoughts were far from angelic. She had, in the days since Hocking first enlisted her aid, begun to fall into reverie and melancholy. Her father watched her withdraw into herself by degrees until she hardly spoke at all and sat daydreaming for hours at a time on the balcony.

When he ventured to move her from these fits of solitary introspection she would smile wistfully and say, “Oh, don't worry about me. Daddy. I was just thinking …” Though what she was thinking about she would never say. The elder Zanderson had begun to believe that she herself did not know.

He also believed, and rightly so, that it had to do with the visits Hocking paid her, and their trips to who knew where, to do who knew what. She did not speak to him of what went on, and increasingly she resented his continued asking about those secret sessions.

So, he had become a silent worrier. He held his tongue, though it crushed him to see his daughter's spirit withering before his eyes. To fend off the growing sense of dread and doom he felt encircling them he had begun a course of conversation designed to keep her mind occupied and centered on the present.

But even his ebullient monologue failed to prevent the girl's odd moodiness. She would get up in the middle of a sentence and go out on the balcony to sit and stare out into the courtyard or, as she sat now, with her face toward the sun in an attitude of reverence.

His worst fears of a lifetime were taking flesh before his eyes: his daughter seemed to be slipping into the same strange malady that had claimed her mother. And that was almost too much to bear.

“Ari,” he said gently, coming to stand beside her on the balcony. “What are you thinking about, dear?”

“Oh, hi, Daddy. I didn't hear you come out.”

“I asked what you are thinking about.”

“Oh, nothing really. I don't know.”

“It must be something. You've been out here a long time.”

A sad smile played on her lips. “Have I? I'm sorry. I left you sitting alone again, didn't I? Oh, well…”

“Ari, look at me.” The girl rolled large languid eyes toward him. “I don't want you to go with him when he comes.”

“Who, Daddy?”

“Hocking. He's putting you under some kind of spell. He's stealing your mind.”

“Nonsense!” She laughed, and the sound pattered down like light rain into the courtyard below. “Why would anyone want to do that? It's impossible besides.”

“I'm not so sure anything is impossible anymore. But if he hasn't put you under a spell, you tell me what he
has
been doing. Where do you go? What do you do?”

“We don't go anywhere, really. A room, I think. We don't do anything. Honestly, I
have
to go … I am helping.”

The last was added almost as an afterthought. Zanderson pounced on it like a hungry cat. “Helping? Who are you helping?”

Ari turned her eyes away and gazed out across the wall to the green hills beyond. “I'm … helping …” She could not say more.

“Ari! Look at me! Don't you see what's happening to you? You don't remember why you're doing it. You're
not
helping, Ari. You're being used. He's using your mind—you're becoming a … a vegetable!”

The outburst brought a wispy smile to Ari's lips. She raised her hand to her face and rubbed her cheek distractedly. “I do feel a little funny sometimes. It's so strange …” She turned away again. Her father brought her back, taking her shoulders and turning her around.

“What is strange? What do you remember? Tell me!”

“It's so strange—I feel so sleepy inside, like my head is stuffed with cotton.”

“Ari"—he took her hands and pressed them in his own— "promise me you won't go with him any more. You have to stop now before there's nothing left. Will you promise?”

“All right, Daddy. If you like.”

“No, darling. It's not for me. It's for you—do it for your own sake. He's destroying you. Don't let him. Resist.”

She looked at him vaguely; he wondered if she heard him at all. He decided to try a new approach to make her understand. “Remember when you said that we'd be rescued soon? I believe it now. I do.”

“Rescued?”

“You said that Spence knew where we were and he'd come and free us. Well, I think you were right. I think he's coming now. He'll be here soon.”

“Who's coming, Daddy?”

“Spence! That's what I'm telling you. Spence is coming.”