Authors: David Farland
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Adventure, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
Spirit Walker (15 page)
He kissed her slowly. They were hidden here in the darkness of the great barrel, so he let his hand ease along her blouse till it cupped her breast. She pushed him away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I'm not in the mood.”
“I’m the one who should be sorry,” Tull said. “My timing is bad. I should not be thinking of you now. Yesterday, we saw the mayor’s Dryad, and she said that men from town are following us, and they have the swivel gun. Phylomon went to hunt them, yet the men from town may well be hunting us tonight. I should go and warn the others.”
Wisteria smiled up at him. “Make love to me quickly then,” she said. She pulled him to the bottom of the barrel and her kisses grew passionate, insistent.
The sun was setting. Tull heard a squirrel bark
pahaa, pahaa,
and sat up. The squirrel barked from the woods on the west side of the clearing.
Wisteria pulled him down, kissed him, and said, “These last few days with you have been the best of my life. I’ve never felt such peace and joy as I feel in your arms.”
Tull gazed into her brown eyes. Her pupils were dilated, and her lips and cheeks were ruddy from kissing. Her breath was warm on his throat. He kissed her softly again, as a deep boom filled the woods to the east, echoing and re-echoing off the hills.
“The swivel gun!” Tull said. He grabbed his war shield, pulled his kutow, leapt from the back of the wagon and ran downhill to camp.
Little Chaa stood with the mammoth beside the brush, peering into the heart of the woods. He shouted, “I heard someone yell!”
Tull stood, not knowing what to do. Little Chaa raced back to the wagon, tore through the weapons, and picked a long narrow spear. Down near the pond, Scandal and Ayuvah waded cautiously through deep ferns toward the forest’s edge.
Tull heard a definite shout, someone barking the word “No!”
But the voice did not seem to come from the woods; instead it seemed to come from a small hill on the other side of the valley. Tull realized that it was only a trick of acoustics, the voice echoing off the hill, but Scandal and Ayuvah scrambled off toward the apparent source of the sound.
Tull took a few hesitant steps into the forest and shouted back to Little Chaa, “Stay with the wagon.”
Wisteria ran up behind Tull. He peered into the growing shadows of the redwoods, and he could hear jays and squirrels shrieking their warnings, too many warnings. Something nearby had them stirred up. He would have raced forward, but he knew that if their enemies had set an ambush, it would be set right in front of him. He studied the shadows behind the trees, tuning his senses to that area.
Just behind him, Little Chaa cried, “Oh, no!”
Tull heard a single slap, and the sound of a body sliding in the grass. He whirled, thinking that men from town had come up behind them, but in the shadows not twenty feet back stood a giant with a long sloping forehead and massive jaws. It had a pale brown body lightly covered with coarse fur. Tull stared into the chest of the beast and watched its rib cage expand and shrink as it breathed.
The beast stood nine feet tall and was at least four feet broad at the shoulders.
Kwea struck Tull—an old terror more powerful than anything he’d ever experienced. He felt as if he’d been climbing a hill and the ground suddenly broke beneath him. He was slipping, falling.
His heart leapt in panic. His legs collapsed, and it seemed to take forever to drop to the ground. He could not breathe, dared not breathe.
The beast bent forward, its arms so long that its knuckles swept the ground. It picked up what was left Little Chaa, and Tull could see that the boy had nearly been ripped in half at the stomach by a blow from this creature’s fist.
Tull’s lungs clogged with the smell of sour sweat and carrion.
Wisteria cried, “Mastodon Men!” and took off running, and someplace in the back of his mind, Tull realized that their mammoth was trumpeting and stampeding away.
The sound of Wisteria’s voice seemed to startle the Mastodon Man, and it turned toward her and roared, flashing yellow fangs, shaking the corpse of Little Chaa in the air with one mighty fist.
Tull couldn’t move. In his mind’s eye, he was a toddler again, cowering in his bedroom. Instead of a Mastodon Man, Jenks stood before him. And instead of rattling the corpse of Little Chaa in the air, Jenks rattled shackles.
Tull heard the distant sound of a child wailing in terror, like a tea kettle as it boils.
He knew that this wasn’t Jenks standing before him, knew he should strike with his kutow or run. Waves of nausea and fear crashed against him, slapping him to the ground. And somewhere beside him, a child was wailing.
The Mastodon Man turned and peered at Tull, casually ripped Little Chaa in two at the waist, then bit deeply into his liver and chewed tentatively, as if to decide whether it liked the flavor.
Suddenly Tull saw two other Mastodon Men stalk across the clearing, stopping to sniff at the wagon. They began pulling out barrels, shattering kegs of wheat and beans with their fists.
Tull wrapped his arms around his legs and curled in protectively, too terrified to move.
Beside Tull, a child was whining.
The Mastodon Man that dined on Little Chaa studied Tull, then stepped forward tentatively, reached out with one giant finger as long and thick as Tull’s jaw, and lightly thumped him on the chest, knocking him over. Tull felt as if he were falling through deep water that crushed his lungs, making it impossible to breathe, where the air carried the cold weight of many atmospheres.
He fell into a world of alternating bands of light and dark, light and dark.
Tull woke to the sound of a child wailing, a keening sound both distant and perilously close. Phylomon stood before him in the dark, swinging a medallion that flashed as if it were an ember from a fire.
“Come now, come,” the blue man said softly, taking Tull by the shoulder. “Terror is for children.”
Tull’s chest began to heave, as if he were coughing heavily, and he realized that there was no child crying beside him, that the sound came from his own throat, and he began to shout. His limbs trembled uncontrollably.
Phylomon held him for a moment. “So, you have met the Mastodon Men before? The kwea of old fear is upon you.”
“No! No,” Tull gasped. “Father. My father!”
Phylomon studied. “Ayaah,” he said. “How old were you when you fled home?”
Tull shook with the chills of old fear and considered. He could not remember, only wanted to vomit. Yet he pondered the question, focused on it. “Thirteen.”
“So, and you are what, eighteen, twenty?” Phylomon calculated. “Then if you were human, I’d say you might recover in another ten years. I’ve found it to be a good rule of thumb—for every year we live in the care of our parents, it takes a year to recuperate.”
Tull listened to Phylomon, and each word seemed complete, yet somehow separated from the others. Words could be strung together, but they didn’t make coherent thoughts. Tull peered into the darkness behind Phylomon. Scandal sniffled, and at his feet was the spindly arm of Little Chaa,
ragged flesh still clinging to the bone.
“Where’s Wisteria?” Tull asked.
“In the hills, I imagine, still running in a blind panic,” Phylomon said. “Ayuvah is tracking her by scent. We should get her back in a few hours.”
Scandal picked up Little Chaa’s arm and placed it in a bag. His face was pale, rigid with shock. “We’ll need to build a pyre,” he said, searching the ground, as if unsure how to build a simple fire. “Then go back home to tell Chaa that his son is dead.”
Phylomon spoke. “Chaa spirit-walked this journey. He already knows.”
The force of his words hit Tull like a blow to the gut. “Chaa knew this would happen?” He remembered how Chaa’s face had been drawn in a horrible grimace of grief after his Spirit Walk. Tull realized why now. He’d known that his son would die.
But what does he hope to gain from this?
Tull wondered. Chaa didn’t just see the future, to a degree he helped to create it. What did he gain by sacrificing his own son?
Then a more terrifying thought hit.
And what other sacrifice will we be required to make?
Phylomon peered at Tull and said, “From the looks of it, you are fortunate to be alive. The Mastodon Men would have eaten you, but when they saw Snail Follower they went for tastier game.”
Could that be it?
Tull wondered.
Did Chaa send his son to die, just so that I would survive this attack?
The notion seemed impossible.
Phylomon stood up straight, and groaned as if in pain.
“Are you all right?” Scandal asked.
“A little bruised,” Phylomon said, holding his ribs. “I’ll recover.”
“They drove our mastodon off!” Scandal said, shaking his head. “We needed that like a lizard needs tits.”
Tull sat disbelieving—Little Chaa dead, Wisteria running blindly in the woods, the mastodon lost. “What will we do?”
Phylomon answered, “We’ll wait for Ayuvah to return with Wisteria. We can walk to Denai without the mastodon, if need be, and perhaps replace it there. But many things could go wrong. Scandal would have to be the one to buy a mastodon, and he would be forced to stay in the city for weeks. The Crawlies are notoriously curious about strangers, and if they suspect him, it could spell ruin. No, I think we had better hope we can get our mastodon back.”
So the four men set out, following a trail in the growing dark. Phylomon led, and Tull imagined that he was searching for Wisteria. Thor began to rise, good and full, and it left a ghostly green light to see by under the trees. Moonlight would have to suffice.
Distorted images flashed through Tull’s mind—the Mastodon Man tearing Little Chaa in half. Wisteria running. Jenks rattling chains.
They raced through deepening darkness, Tull’s thoughts a jumble. He’d heard a big gun firing, suspected that Phylomon had had a run-in of some kind, but could not make sense of things.
He kept remembering Chaa’s words, “You alone must catch the serpents! You alone!” And he realized dully that Chaa had meant it to the core of his soul.
You
alone
must
catch the serpents. The future Chaa had seen so terrified him that he had sacrificed his own son to avert some greater tragedy.
Somehow, until that moment, the quest had seemed a mere lark to Tull, nebulous, not something to take seriously.
An hour later the three men stumbled through the shadows of the redwoods, Phylomon carrying his medallion in hand, so that it glowed like a lantern, and they came on some corpses, laid out side by side, like fish on a dock.
The swivel gun lay on the ground beside them. It was only then that Tull realized that Phylomon hadn’t been searching for Wisteria. He’d brought them to his kill site.
“Do you recognize these men?” Phylomon asked.
Jen Brewer, one of Scandal’s own employees, lay on his back, shot cleanly through the heart with an arrow. Caral Dye, an old sailor, and Denzel Sweetwater, the schoolteacher, had both been hacked with the sword. Saffrey and Hardy Goodman lay on the ground, their skin blackened in places, smelling of smoke, looking for all the world as if they'd been struck dead by lightning.
Only a week before Tull had watched Hardy toss a bee’s nest into an outhouse down in the warehouse district, and Jen Brewer had come bolting out so quickly that he’d left his pants by the toilet.
Tull gazed at Hardy’s thick beard, his staring eyes, mouth still open in terror. It was the first time Tull had seen the simpleton without a smile on his face.
Scandal stared in blank horror, while Phylomon began searching the men. He moved efficiently, nabbing rings, checking pockets, searching for money bags. He’d obviously looted the bodies of many dead men before.
He pulled a mere dozen cartridges for the big gun from a backpack on Hardy’s corpse, and searched in vain for more.
Neither Tull nor Scandal would touch the men.
Phylomon grumbled, “I should teach you all how to use the bow better. You can’t rely on a steady supply of gunpowder in these parts.”
Dire wolves began howling deep in the forest. Phylomon glanced toward the sound and said, “Unfortunately, I only wounded one of our attackers. I suspect the wolves will take him down for us. He left quite a blood trail.”
When Phylomon had stripped the bodies, they lugged the swivel gun back to camp, then fixed it to the wagon with its bolts.
They had hardly got it mounted when Ayuvah returned, carrying Wisteria on his back as if she were a bag of turnips.
He glanced toward the body of Little Chaa, lying not sixty yards off.
Ayuvah gently set Wisteria beneath the wagon, a blanket wrapped about her. Their huge beer barrel was gone, and so she had little shelter. Tull held her as she shivered and sobbed.
“You are lucky she is human,” Ayuvah whispered to Tull. “When she calmed down, she stopped and stayed in one place. It was not hard to find her. If she were a Pwi, she would still be running.”
Tull nodded, and held his wife closely.
Chapter 15: Dark Kwea
The kwea at camp was rife with fear and sadness. Tull tried to help repack the wagon, but his overwhelming despair slowed his movements and dulled his mind. Scandal finished filling the bag with Little Chaa’s parts, and afterward Ayuvah threw himself on the ground and wept for the better part of an hour.
Phylomon pulled Tull aside and walked with him into the woods, a few paces from camp. “You froze when you saw the Mastodon Men,” Phylomon reminded Tull. “Could you have saved the boy?”
“No,” Tull said. “He was already gone.”
“Good. Then you do not bear the kwea of guilt,” Phylomon said. “In the morning, we must track our mastodon. I want you to take Ayuvah away from camp tonight. The kwea of this place will be too much for him.”
“Thank you,” Tull said, blinking in surprise. Phylomon had executed so many men so easily that he'd seemed to be without compassion. Yet now he showed a surprising depth of empathy.
“I know what you think of me,” Phylomon said. “It’s written on your face. Believe me, I do care for you. I understand kwea, even though I am not like you. When I was young, it was common for men to take
seritactates
, drugs to enhance their memories. I say ‘enhance,’ yet that is not quite accurate. In those days, our memories were perfect, and a single treatment would enhance your memory for hundreds of years.
“In those days, I made the mistake of taking a wife—a woman much like Wisteria, a slender girl with brown eyes and hair as soft as corn silk. She did not live to be sixty years old. I married her because I was young and in love, and I thought that even though she would die of old age while I was still young, I would be comforted because I would always carry the memory of that love. I can recall perfectly every moment of every day I spent with her. The way her lower lip trembled on the day her mother died; the taste of a potato she burned when we had been married for three years and seven days; I can recall her exact words when she told me how to cook a rabbit when we had been married for twenty-two years, sixty-six days.
“On the twenty-sixth day of the month of Harvest, in 3111, a Ship came north from Botany bearing linen and oranges. I recall the smell of oranges on her breath the morning afterward as she kissed me. When she bore our first daughter, she developed a dark purple varicose vein on her right shin. I was once surprised a hundred years later when by chance, I saw that exact shape in the vein of a maple leaf where I camped by Fish Haven River. I recall later the smell of death on her breath when I kissed her good-bye at her funeral pyre. I remember perfectly the tinge of violet in her face as we dropped the torches.
“From moment to moment, only two things remain the same—my love for her and the devastating emptiness I have felt ever since I lost her. This is as close as a human can come to feeling kwea.”
Ayuvah said, “I think that would be as bad as losing a brother.”
“Oh, I’ve lost a brother too,” Phylomon said. “A hundred and fifty years ago. We had grown apart for years, and I seldom saw him, and one day I realized that I had neither seen him nor heard from him for a decade. I traveled the land for six years looking for him, never really sure he was dead. The slavers killed him, I believe. He had a red skin very similar to mine. His symbiote was called a pyroderm, for it let
him burn things with fire at will, and I keep hoping that someday I will find his skin half-buried, like the husk of a snake under a rock in the forest. Even after all this time, his symbiote will not have rotted away, you see. Yes, I have lost brothers, parents, children, lovers.…”
Phylomon paused. He raised his eyes to the heavens, and Tull saw the blue man's fill with memories as unknowable as the distant stars.
Phylomon continued, “Among the Eridani whose warships circle our world, they say we are all a million beings struggling to become one man. Yet it only happens as we draw closest to attaining a single, pure emotion. They say there is only one hate. And there is only one joy. And there is only one ecstasy. And to the extent that we share that emotion in its fullness, we become one person. If you and your lover share perfect ecstasy, you are no longer separate people, but in the minds of the Eridani you have become one. We are not Eridani, thinking with a communal mind, but I am like you, Tull and Ayuvah, because I, too, feel. Yet I shall never feel emotions as powerfully as you.” Phylomon stood another moment, reflecting.
“There is a part of the brain called the hypothalamus, and it is the seat of emotions. A Pwi has a much larger hypothalamus than a human, and the Pwi lead an emotional life so rich and complex that I—and possibly even you, Tull Genet—cannot fathom it.
“When a Pwi hunts near a rock and is frightened by a rattlesnake, the incident arouses such anxiety that for several hours he will tremble while the incident fixes in his mind, and the memory of the rock and the snake and the terror become inseparably linked, so that he will forever avoid that rock, fearing that the same snake will lurk nearby.
“The same man with an empty belly might find a tree with hazelnuts and fill himself. The tree and the pleasure of fulfillment become so intoxicating that for hours he holds it in his mind, until he can never think of passing that area without remembering the pleasure of the hazelnuts beneath the tree. It is a simple and valuable mechanism that helped Neanderthals eke out an existence on Earth thousands of years ago.”
Tull gave a bitter laugh, wondering if Ayuvah could understand English well enough to follow the conversation. “You make it sound as if kwea is a blessing to the Pwi.”
Darkness settled among the trees, and crickets sounded an unseen chorus. The smell of leafmould filled the air, and the light of Thor cast the mists of the forest in a greenish glow.
“To the Pwi, yes,” said Phylomon “But not to you. They may feel more deeply than you do, but not in all aspects. You see, the Pwi are protected to some degree from the ravages of terror that afflict you, Tull Genet. Their brains secrete endorphins that diminish the worst terrors. They call themselves ‘the Smiling People’ because their brains are steeped in intoxicants supplied by their own bodies. But from the way you reacted to the Mastodon Man, I suspect that the Pwi endorphins your brain produces bind poorly to the chemoreceptors in your too-human brain. You are unsheltered from some harmful kwea. It is a common affliction among the Tcho-Pwi. Rarely do men like you thrive.”
Tull had only met another Tcho-Pwi once—a small girl who was sickly; a girl with dull eyes who could not speak. “What do you mean?” His heart hammered. He knew what Phylomon meant.
“Being half-human and half-Pwi,” Phylomon said, “you are slave to both sequential memories and emotional memories. Few of your kind are emotionally resilient enough to adjust to this. The fear and despair overwhelm them. Your father gave you the kwea you felt tonight. It is a powerful and dangerous thing. But you handle it well. I think it much more likely that you will be destroyed by love.” Phylomon said these last words as if they were mere observation. “Yet I hope better for you. Sincerely.”
Tull watched the blue man, so tall that he seemed deformed, alien. It was not surprising that such a man thought in alien ways. It
was
surprising that Tull somehow felt the man to be his brother under the skin.
Ayuvah and Tull both slept away from camp that night, but at dawn they returned. In a short ceremony, the party cremated what was left of Little Chaa. A flock of crows came and circled the smoke as it rose to heaven, and Tull could not help but feel that Little Chaa, released from his body, had called the crows to bear witness of his passage.
Wisteria spent her morning beside the party’s wagon, wrapped in a blanket, nursing her scratches and bruises. During the night, no one had been able to see well how much of the food had been destroyed, but now it was plain that nearly every barrel, every sack had been ripped open, and much of the food was unsalvageable.
Tull helped clean up as best he could, scooping beans into broken kegs.
In some deep grass a hundred feet from the wagon, he found a bag of platinum eagles—at least a thousand of them.
“Where did these come from?” he asked.
Scandal answered quickly. “I brought them.”
Phylomon offered, “A fortune like that will do you no good out here.”
Scandal hesitated. “We’re going to Denai,” he said. “The inns there are famed for their cuisine.”
“I had heard that they are only famed for their whores,” Phylomon said. “The Craal slavers breed their whores for beauty, much as other men breed cattle. In over forty generations, not one of Denai’s madams has been sold outside the city.”
“Ayaah,” Scandal blushed. “Well, let us just say that an innkeeper must know how to serve many kinds of dishes.”
Tull looked at the coins in wonder. Scandal had ostensibly borrowed money for the trip, yet here he had enough for a man like Scandal to live comfortably for the rest of his life. With such wealth, he could have bought a fine ship. The innkeeper could not plan to spend more than a night or two in Denai, yet in that short time he would spend his life's fortune on whores!
“Let’s find our mastodon,” Tull said.
Ayuvah offered hopefully, in that Pwi way of his, “Perhaps Snail Follower escaped the Mastodon Men and needs someone to show him the way back to camp.”
Phylomon nodded. “I think that would be prudent, but not everyone should go.”
“What?” Scandal said. “You’d leave me here with Wisteria?”
“Actually,” Phylomon said, “I think Tull should stay with his wife. I’m not so sure the woman is safe with you.”
“But, but—” Scandal objected.
Tull looked at the camp, the food on the ground. He could not help but recall the perverse kwea the Mastodon Man had emanated. The way he had felt so helpless and weak before it. He suddenly felt that he knew what Chaa had wanted from him, why the wizard had let his son die. “I must come with you,” he said. “To face the Mastodon Men.”
Shortly after breakfast, Tull and Ayuvah went down to the pond to prepare for the hunt by performing a Neanderthal hunting rite. It seemed only right to have Ayuvah lead the hunting party.
Ayuvah threw three stones into the water and watched the ripples move over the pond. Then he squatted by the bank and closed his eyes. Tull did likewise.
“Think only thoughts of kindness for the Mastodon Men,” Ayuvah counseled Tull. “Let peace emanate from you, just as the ripples emanate from the stone. You must hunt with this attitude. If your prey smells your bloodlust, they will hide from you. Also, it does not help to be picky. Many times I have gone to hunt for grouse, only to find a silver fox in the bush. Animal Spirits give themselves as they will, and we should not be choosy. This day, we hunt for Snail Follower, but perhaps another mastodon will give itself to us. If that is what the Animal Spirits decide, so be it.”
Ayuvah sat with his eyes closed, and Tull wondered at his strength. He could tell that his friend grieved for Little Chaa, yet Ayuvah held it in. They sat for nearly half an hour.
Tull watched the water and tried to cleanse his thoughts. A giant green dragonfly with a two-foot wingspan hovered over the pond. Tull looked up, startled by the buzzing of its wings, and saw on the other side of the pond, at the edge of the forest, a dark gray dire wolf watching them, panting, its tongue hanging out. The wolf yawned.
Ayuvah opened his eyes, looked at the wolf. “My Animal Guide is with me,” he said. “It is time for us to go.”
Tull looked back at the wolf. It stepped back into the trees, and was gone.
A few moments later, the men began tracking.
The Mastodon Men had battered Snail Follower, leaving a trail of ripped ferns and bloodied tree limbs. The mastodon had scored the thick humus of the forest floor, running blindly one moment, turning to charge its attackers the next. There had been fourteen Mastodon Men in the band. For some arcane purpose, the Mastodon Men had also taken the group’s beer keg, and one of them rolled it along behind the party, obscuring the tracks.
“They are driving him,” Phylomon said in Pwi at one point, jutting his chin in a northwesterly direction. “No matter which way the beast tries to run, they turn him north.”
“Where are they taking him?” Tull asked.
“The Mastodon Men are not smart enough to fashion spears,” Ayuvah answered, “so they club the animal, making it bleed from small wounds until it is exhausted. They will make Snail Follower walk to their camp so they can eat him.” Ayuvah leaned on his spear as he knelt to put his hand in the track of a Mastodon Man. “Even if he broke free, his pain will be great. He will be as crazy as that rogue bull that crushed Shezzah's house a few years back.”
Tull said, “Perhaps he will smell us and remember his friends.”
“Do not raise your hopes for Snail Follower,” Phylomon answered. “He has been hurt. Even should we catch him, we might not be able to harness him for weeks.” Phylomon did not say anything for a moment. “How far would we have to go to get another animal?”
Tull said, “Scandal got Snail Follower from a miner down in White Rock, but that was the only mammoth in town. The loggers down in Wellen’s Eyes have a few. Two hundred miles. That’s the closest.”
Phylomon did not say anything. Two hundred miles south, a journey that would easily take a month. They did not have a month to spend.