Shaman's Crossing (65 page)

I saw Tree Woman then, and my other self. She stood at the crest of the hill where a line of unharvested trees remained, her back close to one of the towering giants, and looked down on us. She judged us from that vantage point, but I also knew she could not go far from the living forest. My other self did that for her. He hunted deliberately across the bare hillside among the drifting spirits, his concentration making him far more real than the wandering wraiths. He moved purposefully, a predator among prey.

Tree Woman called encouragement down to him. “Oh, yes, get that one, hurry before he is gone. He had far more power than he knew, far more wisdom. But he had no tree to put it in; the fools never learned to save a place to store their magic. Go, hurry, and consume his magic before it disperses. Your people have little magic to them. You will have to devour many more before you are full. Eat!”

That other self that was somehow still me in spite of the antipathy I felt toward him hurried to obey her. He had grown, and in that place of ghosts, he seemed substantial. He was round of belly, heavy of arm and leg. Leaves were his only garments. His scalp-lock had been smeared with pine pitch and plaited down his back and interwoven with green vines. He rushed to the puddle that had been Sergeant Rufet and dropped to his knees beside it. He scooped up the white liquid before it was sucked into the earth. He used no leaf cup now. Instead, my other self lowered his mouth to his cupped hands, eagerly lapping the thick porridge of what had been Rufet’s soul. For a moment, I was he. I felt the stickiness on my hands and chin, and I felt myself grow stronger for having consumed his essence.

Magic. I was filling myself with magic. I would be a great man if I gained enough magic. If I filled myself with the magic, I could turn back the intruders and save the People. For that moment, his ambition was mine, and I understood it in a profound way. I was essential. I was the crossroads. In me, the magic of the People and the magic of the intruders would be combined and joined. From that combination would come the answer. Tree Woman knew that her magic alone could never stop the destroyers. It would have to be mingled with the magic of the intruders, for only a people’s own magic understood that people’s weaknesses well enough to defeat them. The magic of the People could hold the intruders, but it would take their own magic, the magic that lived in their bones and flesh but never truly died, to defeat them completely and send them back whence they had come.

That was Tree Woman’s ambition.

And it was mine, too, while I shared that other self’s awareness. For he loved the People as I had never loved my own kind.

That thought jolted me, and in my distant body, I felt a twitch and a gasp. I think that tiny vestige of life attracted Tree Woman’s attention to me. She had been watching approvingly as my other self devoured Sergeant Rufet. Her eyes scanned the mournful crowd that pushed slowly across the bridge, cattle in a slaughter chute. Then she saw me, still standing upon the bridge. I had nearly reached her side of the crevasse, where, I now saw, that the end of the bridge was secured by a cavalla saber thrust into the stony ground. I knew the weapon. It had been mine. Dewara had shown me how to summon it to his world, and I had. Now it held the bridge fast, anchored my world to hers.

When she saw me, Tree Woman suddenly flung her arms up to the sky. She grew taller until she stood great as any live oak, and then larger still. She soared in size, to fill half the sky over the stripped hill. She pointed toward me, her fingers long as branches. “Go back!” she commanded me in fury. “You are not to be in this place. Go back! Inhabit the body until we are ready!”

What gave her such power over me? She seized me by my hair, jerking me from the trudging queue of spirits and hurling me back across the chasm. I landed on my back, and my eyes flew open and I gasped. Wan daylight filled the room around me, pressing painfully into my eyes. Someone seized my wasted hand and gripped it so tightly the bones rubbed together. “He’s not dead! Doctor, come here! Nevare is not dead!”

The doctor’s voice was more distant than Epiny’s. “I
told
you he wasn’t dead. This plague sometimes mimes death. It’s one of the dangers. We give up on people too soon. Get some broth into him. That’s about all you can do for him. Then change the sheets on the empty cots. We’ll have them filled again before evening, I fear.”

My fever dreams had been so vivid and strange that for a brief time I simply accepted that Epiny was sitting on a stool between my bed and Spink’s. She wore a stained smock over one of her ridiculous dresses. Her cheeks were red and her lips chapped. Her careworn face and bundled-back hair made her look more womanly than I’d ever seen her before. I stared at her and forgot to resist her as she spooned broth into my mouth. When I began to shiver violently, she set the cup and spoon aside and tucked my blankets more securely around me. “Finishing school?” I said to her. My cracked lips had difficulty shaping the words.

She frowned at me momentarily, and then a sour smile came to her pinched mouth. “Finished with that!” she said, and managed a small laugh. She leaned closer to me. “I ran away. And I went to Dark Evening and had a wonderful time with Spink. And then I went home and told my parents where I’d been. I knew full well my mother would tell me that I was a ruined woman, and ‘damaged goods,’ and all those other quaint phrases powerful women apply to women who don’t fall under their control. But I also knew, because I’d filched the letter, that Spink’s family had already made an offer for me. When she told me no decent man would ever have me now, I set it on the table before both of them, and told them that as it was the only offer they would ever get for me, it was therefore the best and they’d be wise to take it. Oh, what a terrible scene she made.” Her voice went suddenly thick and for an instant she fell silent. I knew her triumph was not free of pain. When she went on, her voice was tighter. “My parents will have no choice except to take it. No one else will have me now. I made sure of it.”

I was puzzled. “Spink said…he never met with you.”

She looked startled, then smiled. She turned away from me and reached out her hand to touch his face. “Such a dear little lie. It probably cost him a great deal to lie to you to protect my ‘honor.’ He thinks quite highly of you, you know. He wants our first son to be named for you. We intend to be married as soon as we can, and to start our family immediately.” And with that sentence, she suddenly sounded as girlishly domestic as any of my sisters. “We will share a wonderful life. I can’t wait. I hope we are posted on the frontier.”

“If he lives,” I said huskily. I had seen past her to the lax body in the next bed. The boyish roundness was gone from Spink’s face. His mouth hung ajar and his breath came and went unevenly. Yellow crust caked around his nostrils and eyelids. He was as unlovely as anything I had ever seen.

Yet Epiny looked down at him with her heart in her eyes. She took his limp hand in hers. “He must,” she said decidedly. “I have gambled everything for him. If he dies and leaves me alone”—she looked at me and tried to hide her fear—“I will have lost it all.”

I turned my head on my hot pillow. “Uncle Sefert?”

“He isn’t here.”

“But…how are you here, then?” The effort of that string of words set me coughing. With a practiced touch that told me she had done this before, she braced my shoulders to sit me up while she offered me water from a cup. She did not answer until she let me down again.

“I came here when the reports began to reach my father of how bad things were at the Academy. Your letter came…the one about Dark Evening and Caulder, and being culled with only a future as a scout now. Father was wroth. He set out immediately to the Academy, but at the gates he saw a yellow banner and guards turned him back. By the time he got back to the house, my mother had had messengers from her friends, warning of sickness in the city that was spreading fast. My mother declared that none of us would budge from the house until the contagion was past. She lived through the black-pox when she was a girl, and still remembers those days.

“I stood it for three days, being shut up in the house with her. When she was not prophesying that we would all die of the plague, she was scolding me for my shameless behavior, or weeping over how I had ruined my chances and soiled the family name. She vowed she’d never let me marry Spink. She said I’d have to live at home with her the rest of my life, a disgraced old maid. You cannot imagine how awful that future would be, Nevare. I tried to explain to her that she was treating me as her mother had treated her, disposing of her like a commodity, for it has become obvious to me that women are most responsible for the oppression of women in our culture. And when I tried to speak rationally to her, and point out that she was only angry because I had seized control of my own worth and traded my ‘respectability’ for a future I wanted instead of letting her sell me off for a bride-price and a political connection, she slapped me! Oh, she was furious when I said that. Only because she recognized it was true, of course.”

She lifted a hand to her cheek, remembering the blow. “It’s her own fault for educating me,” she said regretfully. “If she had kept me at home and ignorant as your family keeps your sisters, I’d probably have been quite tractable.”

Epiny’s words washed over me like waves against a beach. The sense of them faded in and out of my mind. It took me a time to realize she had stopped talking, without, of course, answering my question. I summoned my strength. “Why?”

“Why did I come here? I had to! There were dreadful reports that the infirmary here was overcome with so many sick cadets. After the first scare of plague passed, people began to venture out and the newspapers to print again. The Academy is still quarantined. The plague still rages here, as if it has taken root and will not be satisfied until it has consumed all of you. The city leaders decided to send everyone with the plague here, to keep it away from the general populace. The papers spoke of rows of bodies laid out on the lawns, draped only with sheets and a light fall of snow. They are burying the corpses on the grounds, with quicklime to try to control the smell.

“I came when the paper said that the doctors were allowing the bodies to simply pile up in the halls of the infirmary, and hiring beggars off the streets to fill in for the nursing assistants, who themselves had fallen to the plague. I could not stand the thought of you and Spink here and sick, with no one to look after you. And I knew you were sick because no more letters came. So I left the house in the middle of the night. It took me most of the night to walk here, and then I had to get past the quarantine guards. Luckily, I found a tree with its branches leaning over the wall. I was up and over in no time. And of course, once I was inside, Dr. Amicas had no choice but to let me stay. I’m as quarantined as anyone now. When I pointed out to him that there was no sense in refusing to let me help, he gave me a smock. He told me I could help until I, too, dropped dead of the plague. He’s a sensible man but not a very optimistic physician, is he?”

“Go home,” I told her bluntly. This was no place for her.

“I can’t,” she said simply. “My mother would not let me back in the door, for fear I would bring the plague with me. And under the circumstances, there is nowhere else I could go. I’m not only a disgraced woman, I’m probably a plague carrier now.” She seemed quite cheery about both fates. Then her voice dropped, and she said soberly, “Besides. You need me here. Both of you, but especially you. Whatever it was that hovered over you the last time I saw you has grown more powerful. When I thought you were dead…that was what horrified me. You had no breath I could detect, no pulse at all. You—now do not laugh at me—your aura had faded to where I could not detect it. But the aura of that, that other that is within you had grown stronger. It raged about you like fire devouring a log. I was so frightened for you. You need me to protect you from it.”

No I didn’t. That was the one thing I was sure of. For Epiny to come here, at risk to herself, was the only thing that could have made me feel worse. Bad enough that helping Caulder had condemned me to disgrace. I could die, and my shame would die with me. She would have to live with her dishonor, as would my uncle. A lingering memory of myself as I was in that other world wafted through my mind, like half-recalled perfume. I was suddenly certain that whatever Tree Woman was, I did not want Epiny near her.

She was staring at me, round-eyed. I saw then that she was not well. Little crusts were starting at the corners of her eyes. I should have known from her cracked lips and her red cheeks. She already burned with the fever of the plague. Dr. Amicas had been right again.

She reached timorously to touch my head, and then jerked back her fingers as if scalded. “It comes and goes,” she whispered. “It shimmers around you, weak and then strong. Now it glows above your head. Like flame shows through a sheet of paper before it bursts through and consumes it.”

As she spoke those words, I could feel him. The other self had grown strong. I suddenly saw with his eyes. Epiny was a sorceress, a mistress of the iron magic. He looked at her and gloated, for powerful as she was, she was doomed. As clearly as I could see Epiny herself, I saw the tie of green vine that bound her wrist to Spink’s. I recognized Tree Woman’s “keep fast” charm.

As my true self, I mustered my will. I reached for Epiny’s free wrist and seized it. I pulled on her as she pulled back from me with a little squeak of alarm. “I have to free you!” I whispered hoarsely. “Before it’s too late.” With my other hand, I tried to make the “loose” sign over the twist of vine that bound her. Once the making of that sign had been my betrayal of my people. Now it would free Epiny. But my other self was too strong for me. I could lift my hand, but my fingers would not move as I commanded. He laughed with my mouth, cracking my dry lips.

“Nevare! Let me go! You’re hurting me!”

At Epiny’s cry, Spink took an uneven gasp of air. Then he sighed it out. Distracted, Epiny turned to him. “Spink? Spink!”