The High Missouri (3 page)

Ian Campbell’s owl eyes clicked sideways, toward Dylan, and clicked back. Stared straight ahead.

“Stupid,” he muttered.

“Daddy Ni,” Dylan whined.

His father stood up, fixed Dylan with an imperious eye. “You’re a fool,” he said. “What would the Church want with you?” He took his pince-nez off the little table by his chair and clamped them onto his nose. Set down his snuffbox. Lifted his snifter. Glared at Dylan through the glasses.

Dylan turned his back on Ian Campbell. He heard his father move to the buffet, pour himself beer. Dylan twisted his insides until he could hold them still.

“Daddy Ni,” he began, “I need help getting started in the world.”

His father, stalking with owllike awkwardness, moved back toward Dylan holding the snifter of porter. He put his owl-beak nose into his son’s face. “You spit on my help,” he said.

It was intended to provoke. But Dylan couldn’t help himself. He felt the hot words rise through his gullet like vomit.

“You bloody hypocrite,” rasped Dylan, “you—”

Ian Campbell flung the beer onto Dylan’s neck and chin. It soaked his neck cloth and dribbled down his waistcoat.

“Bastard!” screamed Dylan, and grabbed for his father, and missed.

Dylan was surprised at Ian Campbell’s agility, for a sick man. Campbell stepped back and picked up the small side table. Dylan felt transfixed by the sight, unable to move. Campbell hoisted the little table overhead. The snuffbox sailed into space. Campbell cocked the table and crashed it toward Dylan’s head.

Their movements seemed retarded in time, as though for permanent memory. Dylan raised one arm. The table banged off that arm, but he didn’t react. He simply looked at his father’s face. They faced each other as enemies.

In this suspended time, Dylan shot his right fist slowly into the middle of that enemy’s face. Mashed into the nose and pince-nez.

The pince-nez fell away. A thin cut marked the bridge of his father’s nose. One drop of blood beaded up brightly on the cut, broke, and trickled down.

Dylan registered a glimpse of that owl eye, irate, stymied, confused, lost.

A scream palpable as bloody meat filled his throat, choking him.

Dylan brought it forth—a primal howl, raw, malignant, father-killing.

Chapter Three

The dark figure in the garden waited. Dylan would come hurtling out the front door in a moment, he was sure of that. When the lad comes, this man said to himself, I will shadow him through the dark streets.

Through the French windows he took a last glance at Ian Campbell, his rival of more than twenty years. On one knee now, a hand to his cut nose, looking after the fleeing son.

The man in the garden, who was known as the Druid, had watched the Campbell family occasionally through these windows for twenty years. He had felt himself an outsider, shut away from hearth and home. He had wondered whether it was worth it, to give this up to go adventuring, to roam the world seeking the true face of the trickster life. Now he felt what else he had missed—the rivalries, the disappointments, the griefs, the bitterness native to families. And he felt compassion for Ian Campbell.

They always flee, thought the Druid. Don’t you know that, Mr. Campbell? Because they must.

The front door slammed, and it was time to shadow Dylan Elfed Davis Campbell. After twenty years, this was the Druid’s chance.

He stepped lightly behind Dylan, flitting from tree to tree, melting into shadows. First to the grocer, who was closed but sweeping up, and now where, laddo? Mr. Gleason’s stable, perhaps? Dylan crossed the muddy street toward the back of the property. Yes, a good place on a night like this for a homeless boyo. The Druid himself and many another
voyageur
had slept on Mr. Gleason’s hay.

A homeless boyo indeed. Well, the Druid believed the most precarious situations offered the greatest possibilities. Now to see if he could convince the lad.

He’d go into the loft and wait for his chance.

Dylan eased through the shadow toward the door. It was a wretched night, raining harder now, black as the souls of the godless, and no one was about. He was getting soaked making this careful and quiet approach to the barn. He was trying to be stealthy. With his mind shrieking at himself:

I have struck my father. I have struck my father.

His body shook, trying to slough off this impossibility. The fingers of the guilty fist trembled.

I have struck my father.

His soul shuddered.

He touched the edge of the big, wide-swinging barn door.

Cre-e-ak!

Holy Mary Mother of God, and I only touched it.

He waited for some irate proprietor or a watchman making rounds to holler out an alarm, or just to bash the head of the intruder.

Which he deserved. Shame raged in him.

No proprietor. No watchman.

Boldly he swung the big door a couple of feet. The hinges squalled like a stepped-on cat. If no one came, no one was around. Probably the rain killed the sound anyway.

Shame.

He went into the hay barn, with its smells of fodder, mold, manure, and the sweat and flesh of horses. The animal smells came from the front, where the horses were stabled. The rear of the barn was for storing hay. He knew it well enough—as a lad he’d often mucked out the stalls for a few pence. It would get him out of this nasty night. He closed the door behind him.

Pitiful accommodation, but welcome enough to unaccommodated man, he mused. The aggrieved old king, Lear, had to weather the storm on the heath, a terrible storm with howling winds—something about cataracts and volcanoes and oak-cleaving thunderbolts, as Dylan recalled. The old man called on the thunderbolts to singe his white head, and they did, and drove him mad.

If truth be told, he was an old man who wouldn’t get out of the way and let the young live. So Dylan said to himself, anger sidling in on shame.

Now Dylan was unaccommodated—no family, no home, no lodgings, no job, no money, nothing.

Bloody hell, it was dark.

He groped forward until he felt one of the big supporting posts, and sat with his back against it. He looked around in the dark. He was not looking for avenging furies, he told himself.

He was starved. He took half a loaf of white bread out of his pocket, and an apple. He tore at them with his teeth, savaging them. In a minute or two all was gone. Not enough to eat. But then he had only a few bob left, mustn’t waste it on luxuries like food and lodging, he thought sardonically.

Probably Claude would have sneaked him into the flat if he’d gone back and asked. But he’d be damned if he would. Ask the MacDonalds for aught, no more than ask Ian Campbell.

He’d make this place more congenial with a light. Since he couldn’t afford a candle, he had bought a can with some oil from the grocer, and flint and tinder. He fished his handkerchief out of a pants pocket and mucked it around in the grease. Out of a coat pocket came a small box with his flint and tinder.

He struck sparks.

Came a voice from above, “Bloody idiot!”

Dylan shot the light high over his head.

A dark form dropped out of the loft above, like a giant bat, arms webbed.

Dylan lurched back against the post.

The bat figure lit on the dirt floor easily, as though floating to a perch. Leaned into Dylan’s eyes. An old, leathery face, more or less human, a face that had seen many weathers. Grabbed the tinderbox and spat on it.

“Idiot,” the creature repeated in the dark.

Dylan stammered, “I’d really like some light.”

“Sit down and be still and close your eyes for a couple of minutes.”

A hand guided Dylan down, his back against the post. The hand stayed on his arm, comforting.

“Can’t you see the floor’s covered with straw? Bloody good tinder to torch us all. Are your eyes closed?”

“Yes. Us all?”

“You and me and the horses. Naught else in here tonight, though there might have been,
engagés
and the like.” The voice made a grunt that might have been a chuckle.

Engagés
. The canoe men, the white men turned to beasts by the Indians, according to Dylan’s father. Was this creature one of that riffraff?

“Eyes still closed?”

“Yes.”

“Open them, sit still, and let yourself see.”

He did. The barn was changed. Where there had been impenetrable blackness, there were now shapes, indistinct, yet… He could make out two lines of posts, humps of hay, walls, even a handle that might go to a pitchfork leaning against a post.

“See now?” The shape next to him was obscure, featureless, deep in shadow. It might be human or demon.

“Yes, sort of.”

“Still want light?”

“I think so.”

“All right. Use your eyes, get that broom, and sweep a big circle clean, right down to the dirt.”

Dylan didn’t think he could do it—too dark.

He managed without difficulty.

“Now light your rag. I could see all you were doing from the loft. That’s how it is when you let your eyes adjust to nature.”

Dylan set the can in the center of the circle and used his flint and tinder again. The creature blew hard on the sparks, and the handkerchief ignited. After a little more blowing, they had light. It made a queer pattern of flickering light and shadow on the old man’s face.

The creature smiled. It sat on its haunches comfortably and looked up into Dylan’s face.

Dylan squatted and studied the creature at eye level. All but the face was wrapped in a blanket—that’s why his arms looked webbed. A knobby face, the surface hard and bumpy, as though cobbled, and of indeterminate age. Gray hair pulled straight back like an Indian’s, braided and hanging nearly to his waist. The smile of a fellow who was amused, perhaps at his naivete. The crinkles of a man who liked to laugh. One eye normal, rather an attractive green. The other eye the strangest color Dylan had ever seen—aquamarine, he supposed, but luminous, brightly beaming, as from a lighthouse at sea. Dramatic, eerie eyes, one ordinary, mundane, the other a beacon.

Dylan pushed back thoughts of the devil. Nursery-tale stuff.

“Would you like some real food, boyo? You tore up that bread and apple like paper.”

“Yes, sir,” said Dylan.

“Away with that sir, laddo, I’m not a bloody officer, just a working Welshman like yourself.”

“Welshman?”

“Aye, laddo, like you.”

“How do you know me?”

“I knew your mother right well enough, God rest her soul, Dylan Elfed Davis.”

“Campbell,” Dylan added automatically.

“Aye, Campbell, ill enough, but you don’t have to admit it. Dylan Elfed Davis is a right good name by itself.” The creature was grinning. “Davies, perhaps even better, more traditional Welsh.”

Don’t admit to the Campbell part—Dylan liked that idea, after today. Go stuff it, Father.

“And who are you, to know so much?”

The creature put out a paw to shake. Dylan took it. “Morgan Griffiths Morgan Bleddyn,” he said, “of the NorthWest Company, venturer to Rupert’s Land. You may call me Dru.”

He leapt up and scrambled up a post into the loft. At least he didn’t fly. Dylan was relieved to see, when Morgan Bleddyn was gone into the dark recesses of the loft, that the post was studded with rods for climbing.

Morgan leapt out, flew on blanket wings like a bat again and landed next to Dylan, grinning. He really seemed to land featherlike, as though he had no weight.

He held something Dylan had never seen, wrapped in leather. He peeled back the leather to show… was it sausage?

“Pemmican, laddo. A man with true understanding is never afraid, a man with a woman is never without a fire, and a man with pemmican is never hungry.” He cut a chunk off with his big belt knife and offered it to Dylan.

Dylan tasted. Good. Kind of like cold sausage. Sewn tight into a deerskin casing.

“Buffalo meat mixed with fat and berries,” said Morgan. “Best winter food there is.”

Buffalo meat. So Morgan Bleddyn, called Dru, was a beaver man. Well, said Dylan to himself, when you sleep in barns, you fall in with a low crowd. He looked up into Morgan’s one eerily bright eye.

Dylan put out his hand for another chunk. The buffalo stuff was good. He’d heard his father’s tales of
voyageurs
surviving on it for entire winters. Lies, no doubt, considering the source.

“Why are you called Dru?”

“Short for Druid,” Morgan said. “They call me that because I’m Welsh. And other reasons.”

“How did you know my mother?” he asked Morgan.

“Everyone knew your mam, laddo. She was a beauty.”

“I’ve never met anyone who knew her… who could tell me anything about her.”

“Is that right, laddo? Withholding of your birthright, that is. Has your father been raising a fine Welshman as a bloody Scot?”

“I’m Welsh and Scottish, half and half.”

“Not from the look of ’ee, laddo. You’ve your mam’s eyes, truly, and her brow. More, you’ve got the Welshman’s long head and dark hair. A thorough son of Cymru, I’d say.”

“Koom-ree?”
repeated Dylan phonetically.

“Aye. Our word in our own language for what the bleedin’ Br-r-itons”—he exaggerated this word sardonically—“call Wales. And our people are called the Cymry. That’s thee and me, laddo.” He paused and eyed Dylan. “Would you say you’re more poet or merchant, laddo?”

Dylan didn’t hesitate. “Poet.” His father was the bloody merchant.

“Welsh, then, you see, not Scots.”

Dylan shrugged. “Welsh, Scottish, British—what’s it all come to, anyway?”

Morgan Bleddyn turned on Dylan his strange eye, like a blue lamp.

After a moment he said, “Well, laddo, long as it’s yet winter, and we’ve got a fire, perhaps you’d hear a story of the ancient Cymry.”

Dylan affected not to be too keen.

“Have you heard of Madog ap Owain Gwynedd, laddo?”

Dylan shook his head. The oily rag was burning low now. The lamp eye of the Druid creature seemed to shine a brighter blue still.

“Madog, son to the royal House of Gwynedd, is the true discover of this continent, boyo, whether you call it North America, like the white people do, or Turtle Island, as the red people do.”

“Oh, there are wild tales that credit Norsemen and Irishmen and mystic monks as well,” said Dylan in a lightly scoffing tone.

The storyteller recognized a challenge and took it with a glitter of aquamarine eye. Strange, how plain the other eye was. “All true, laddo, all true. All the old tales are true. None but tells us something of the human heart. The old tales of the Welsh, our bardic epics, are the stuff of the truth stone. You know the nursery stuff, the King Arthur legends. I’ll tell ye some of
The Book of Taliesin
one day. Know ’ee not that ‘tales’ rhymes with ‘Wales’?

“For tonight, Madog. He’s ours, for us Welsh of Turtle Island, our true forefather.

“He left Wales with thirteen ships in the Year of Our Lord 1170. He left fleeing the arguments of his father the king and his brothers. We Welsh are great and foolish arguers when we mischannel our gift for words. He came to these shores—not Iceland, like your mystic monks, or Greenland or Nova Scotia, like your Norsemen. No, to the shores of the Carolinas, laddo, no man knows just where. Some say otherwise, true, the American state of Alabama, perhaps even Mexico, but these are the corruptions the word is heir to. The Carolinas. And there he founded the first colony in the Americas and claimed the entire continent for the king. Not the upstart king of England, mind you, the king of Wales, his father. All this is ours by right, there is truth it is.”

The Druid swept one hand wide. To Dylan its compass was not North America, just the close barn walls in a French-English city.

“He went back to Wales, did Madog, some twenty years later. He and his men had befriended the Indians—there was no thought of conquering them, a million people upon their own land! No, they befriended them, and lived among them and learned their language and their ways, and became leaders among them, and taught them ways of herding and farming and metalworking, and married them, and raised up children with two races in their veins, the breath of two ways in their nostrils.

“Madog came back to get more men. He left, and returned once more, ten years later—for more men.

“At that point, about the year 1200, he became one of the Triads, the Three Who Made a Total Disappearance from the Isle of Britain.