Moonheart (32 page)

She looked up to find Pukwudji regarding her with interest.

"They are tragg'a," he said.

"So?"

Pukwudji shrugged. "The elders say that when the Darkness coupled with a wolverine bitch, then were the tragg'a brought forth into the world."

Something slipped into place with a click in Sara's mind. She knew where she'd seen these creatures before— or at least something very similar. In her dream. She'd seen the granddaddy of them all. She bent over the image again, studying the thing. Did it know it was being watched? The perspective drew back again and she saw the whole pack once more. They appeared to be casting for a scent as though they were stalking something.

"They hunt you," Pukwudji said.

"Me?" She looked up to meet his gaze.

Pukwudji nodded. "You don't seem frightened."

"It's hard to be scared," she said, "when the threat's so... so intangible. I mean, I've had a couple of bad dreams and... It just doesn't seem very real. How could it be?"

"You're here, aren't you?"

"There's that, isn't there?"

Sara sighed and looked back at the image reflected on the water. "I think I liked you better when you were full of jokes," she said unhappily.

"Me too," Pukwudji said. "But..." He pointed at the image. "You had to be warned."

It was disconcerting, Sara thought, the way the little man switched from seeming like a kid out to have a good time, to a wise old man delivering warnings.

Pukwudji sighed, catching the thought.

"Don't you like me?" he asked.

Sara smiled. "Of course I do. You're just full of unexpected surprises, that's all. You fit the name of manitou better than the quin'on'a do."

He made a quick motion with his fingers and the image dissolved. For a moment longer the water remained clear and still, then it started to steam and in the time between one breath and the next, all that remained was a shallow hole in the ground. Standing up, Pukwudji kicked it full of pine needles. When he was done, he turned to regard Sara. She met his gaze steadily, waiting for him to speak.

"What should I do, Pukwudji?" she asked when it seemed he had nothing further to say.

The little man pulled his flute from his belt. He toyed with it and looked away across the lake.

"They will send you back," he said. "The quin'on'a. When they are done with your friend, they will send you both back to the World Beyond."

"That's not so bad," Sara replied. "I can always..." She let her mind fill with an image of her going from her own world to the beach where she'd met Taliesin.

Pukwudji shook his head. "Here you can timewalk," he said. "Here the worlds are thin and close together. They overlap and time flows into time, world into world. It's not the same in the World Beyond, in your world. There the borders are thick and the pathways few that lead between."

"It's only worked once for me so far anyway," Sara said.

"That is because the other times you were trying too hard. To tap the something-in-movement, you must be very still inside yourself. Not try, try, trying. Go softly— like the Wind Children. Then it is easy. If you are here. But if the quin'on'a send you back, you will be trapped in your own world. Trapped and helpless when the tragg'a come for you."

Sara said nothing for a long moment, while she rolled and lit a cigarette.

"What do they want with me?" she asked.

Pukwudji pointed to the ring on her hand.

"But why? What's so special about this ring?"

But as she spoke, she remembered Taliesin and herself exchanging rings, how each ring fitted itself to each finger, how none of this had happened to her until she'd found the ring in the backroom of The Merry Dancers.

"Mal'ek'a wants that ring," Pukwudji said. "Mal'ek'a who is the Dread-That-Walks-Nameless that even tile quin'on'a fear. Mal'ek'a who has sent the tragg'a to fetch you to him, even while he searches for you himself."

"What should I do then?" Sara asked again.

"Go to your craftfather. Go back to the time when Taliesin Redhair lived before the quin'on'a return you to your own world. I would go with you, but I am already there.

"Timewalking has its own rules," he explained. "One cannot be in a time when one already exists in it. So it is that you can go back, for in that time you have yet to be born. But I am already there."

"But you won't know me," Sara said.

Pukwudji smiled. "And yet I remember meeting you then. Why else would I warn you now?"

Sara shook her head, trying to clear her spinning thoughts. Everything Pukwudji had said made a certain confused sort of sense, it was true. At the same time the paradox of it seemed to have the same sort of logic that the Mad Hatter or the March Hare from
Alice in Wonderland
might espouse.

"So you think I should go?" Sara asked. "Back to Taliesin?"

"How else can I meet you?" Pukwudji asked with some of his old humor twinkling in his eyes.

"But we just met— oh, never mind!" She took a last drag from her cigarette and carefully butted it out.

"Don't be afraid of failure," the little man said. "I will help you go back this time."

Sara nodded. "What about Kieran?" she asked, but then she thought to herself, what about him? He was the enemy.

"No," Pukwudji said, wagging a finger at her. "Mal'ek'a is the only enemy— the common enemy that both you and Kieranfoy face."

"Yeah. Except he thinks Mel'ek'a is Taliesin."

"You will have to teach him better then, hey?"

"I suppose so. If I ever see him again." She paused as she remembered something. "I thought you warned me to be careful of Kieran— when I first met you by the lake."

"The only threat Kieranfoy poses to you is that he belittles your potential to grow horns."

"What?"

Pukwudji smiled. "Amongst the quin'on'a, and the honochen'o'keh as well, a being who lacks magic is called a herok'a— a 'hornless one.' You will grow horns, but only with encouragement."

"Oh."

Sara wasn't sure that she wanted to have a set of horns protruding from her forehead. She regarded the little man, looking for signs in his features that she was being put on, but he returned her gaze with guileless eyes.

"You think I should go now?" she asked.

"Yes. While you can."

Sara had one more question that she didn't bother to articulate since he could just take it out of her mind: Why should she trust him? But hard on the heels of it, the reason for not asking came: It didn't really matter. She wanted to go back to Taliesin.

She picked up her guitar case and laid it across her knees. Then she leaned across the case, taking a last look at Pinta'wa Lake and the village below.

"Pukwudji?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks," she said, then she closed her eyes.

"Think of where you wish to go," he instructed. "Hold the image of it firm in your mind."

There was a moment's silence, then she heard the little man's flute take up the moonheart tune that Taliesin had taught her.

Now how did he come to know...? She started to ask herself, but then the world rushed away from under her and she hurriedly concentrated on willing herself to the beach under the shadow of Percé Rock. Not being exactly a pro at this sort of transportation, she didn't want to end up... well, God only knew where.

The sound of Pukwudji's flute faded, replaced by the sound of waves falling to shore. Filled with anticipation, Sara opened her eyes to find herself sitting at Taliesin's old campsite. Only there was no one there. No trace of where the fire had been. No harp. No dog. No harper.

There was some sort of mistake, she thought. Maybe she'd come at the wrong time... The skin at the nape of her neck prickled uneasily. Oh, Lord! Time. If she was traveling through time, who was to say when she'd end up? It might be years before Taliesin had even come to these shores. Or years after he'd left them.

She bit worriedly at her lip. Had she been mistaken to trust Pukwudji? He might have sent her anywhere. Or did the fault lay with her? She'd concentrated on the beach, but not on Taliesin himself...

The only thing to do was try again. She closed her eyes and whistled the moonheart tune, but this time there was no clearing of her thoughts. No shift of the world underfoot. Pukwudji's powers had brought her this far. Without him... Panic reared, sudden and full, but she fought it back.

Easy, she told herself. Think before you freak out. She had to relax, to clear her head of everything but Taliesin. She thought back to the time she'd managed it successfully. She hadn't had a moonheart tune then. What had she done that was different, that
worked?
And then, as she fiddled nervously with the band of gold on her finger, she knew.

She looked down at the gold ring. It was a twin to Taliesin's, might even
be
his, for all they knew. It was the rings that had called out to each other, or else why had she come to meet the bard in the first place?

Come on, she told the ring. Do your stuff. She rubbed it with her finger and, keeping her thoughts on the harper, started to hum the tune again. And this time the shift underfoot came. The beach fell away behind as the magic took her up and away.

"There
is
an enemy," Sins'amin said when Kieran finished his story, "and it did come from across the Great Water many summers ago, but its name was not Taliesin."

"Mal'ek'a we named it," Ko'keli said. Her fingers, still tapping her drum, rapped out an off rhythm that sent a chill up Kieran's spine. Her blue heron mask bobbed as she nodded her head.

"Nameless, no one may harm it," she added, "though it may harm us. Find its true name, young warrior, and you will gain our favor. Too many of our tribe have fallen prey to it— for too many summers."

"Mal'ek'a is our enemy?" Tep'fyl'in asked, shaking his tomahawk. "It keeps us strong, like the wolves do the caribou, and the fox the grey goose. Is that the work of an enemy?"

"Would you go to the Place of Dreaming Thunder before your time?" the Healer Shin'sa'fen asked. "For that is where the Dread-That-Walks-Nameless would send you were you to meet him, drum as you might, or shake your totem stick until your arm grew too weary to hold it."

Kieran could almost feel the grin behind Tep'fyl'in's wolf mask.

"If I am slain by Mal'ek'a, old woman," he replied, "then my time
has
come."

Sins'amin broke in before the Healer could frame her reply.

"We may argue the good or ill of Mal'ek'a's presence until the day that Grandmother Toad herself Dreams her own Thunder," she said, "and still come no closer to the truth than we are now. Yet it was not for that we gathered in council today." She looked to either side of her, the bearmask fierce in the fire's highlights.

"Kha," Tep'fyl'in said brusquely. Understood.

Shin'sa'fen tapped her birch totem stick against her knee. The bone beads clicked together until she stilled them with her hand.

"Kah," she said softly. By the intonation she put on the word, she added a further meaning to it. Understood, but unfinished.

"You spoke of dreams," the Creator Hoth'ans said to Sins'amin. She pointed to Kieran. "I have dreamed twice of this herok'a. Once he rode a Stag to the edge of Pinta'wa where a Swan caught him by the shoulders and bore him north. I followed their flight until the Swan alighted on a high cliff. The worlds spun below, layer upon layer of worlds, and the Swan gave him a choice: To take up his own Drum, or to take the life of a caged Wren.

"He chose the Wren."

The others sat in silence when she was done Speaking. Kieran, versed as he was in the symbols of the Way, understood as well as the quin'on'a what the dream meant. The Stag and Swan were forces of benevolence and creation. The choice he was offered was to maintain the tradition, or Drum, that his mentor had given him with the Way, or to kill Taliesin, symbolized as the Wren.

Dreams had a power of their own. Unspoken by the quin'on'a Creator, but nevertheless lying there between her words, was the judgment that by choosing to kill the Wren he had closed himself off from the Way. He was about to ask why that should be, to explain yet again that it was not he who sought the harper, but the harper who sought his mentor, but then Ko'keli, her slender fingers still tapping on her drum-skin, asked:

"And the second dream?"

Hoth'ans tapped her bone totem stick against the reed mat that floored the lodge.

"In the second dream the herok'a grew horns," she said.

A herok'a who grew horns was a shaman or Wayfarer who filled his or her potential.

"Which dream will you give truth to?" the Creator asked Kieran.

He chose his words carefully. "You say that Taliesin is already dead. How then can I harm him?"

"Time does not flow like a river here," Sins'amin replied. "Not as it does in the World Beyond from which you came. Here time is like an eddy or a whirlpool. If you seek Taliesin Redhair, you will not be drawn to wherever it is that Mal'ek'a lairs, but back to a time when Taliesin has not yet fared to the Place of Dreaming Thunder."

Kieran was having trouble following her logic. "So he's still alive?" he asked.

"Not in the sense that you use the word," Ha'kan'ta said, speaking for the first time since he'd told the council his story.

"The question I ask," Tep'fyl'in said, "is why do we allow this herok'a to question us?" He fingered his tomahawk and it seemed that the wolf mask bared white fangs for an instant as he turned to Kieran. "Do you consider our words twice-tongued?"

"Ill luck it is to threaten one in council," Ko'keli murmured. "He is not
of
our council," Tep'fyl'in retorted grimly.

Sins'amin lifted a hand and, except for Ko'keli's soft drumming, all sound ceased in the lodge.

"We have given your enemy what name we have for it," she said to Kieran. "Will you trust us enough to seek the one we have named Mal'ek'a? Or will you persist in seeking Taliesin Redhair's death?"

"And if Mal'ek'a proves to be Taliesin?" Kieran countered.

"If that proves true," the quin'on'a Beardaughter replied, "then we will aid you ourselves in bringing about his death."