The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (21 page)

Alan nodded, welcoming the approaching Kate to share his rug. Shivering with cold, she snuggled up to him for warmth. It was obvious that Kemtuk had nothing more to say, since his face had fallen into contemplation. Alan stroked Kate’s face, then kissed the top of her head as she found a comfortable position against his neck. His eyes wandered about them, toward the red glow that played about the shining faces of the other elders. He pulled his cloak tighter around them both.

Mark felt too tense to fall asleep with the others, reflecting back on the stupid impulse that had resulted in him shattering his own crystal. In the moonlight he could see them—Alan, so proud of his ruby triangle, spending all that time earlier chatting to the shaman, and now falling asleep by the fire with Kate snuggling up against his shoulder. He had never seen Kate look as beautiful as she looked in this world. Her body was filling out, growing into the figure of a woman, and her auburn hair seemed to grow thicker and more luxurious day by day. And just looking at her now as she lay there, lovely and vulnerable in her sleep, with her fingers trailing around Alan’s neck, he couldn’t bear to see them so warm and cozy under their shared rug!

Still sleepless an hour or two later, Mark slid out from under his own rug and walked softly away into the snow, stooping twice, first to lift a leaf-roll of tobacco from a sleeping elder’s pouch, and then to pick up an
ember from the fire. He felt so angry, and lonely, he could hardly bear it. Soon, he was hidden behind a coppice of birch saplings. He blew on the ember to heighten its glow before lighting the leaf-roll with it.

“They are so lovely together, are they not?”

Mark spun around, looking for the source of the whisper, which had been softer than the breeze. “Who’s there?”

He caught a hint of movement, something diaphanous gliding closer behind some shrubbery. The ember fell from his hand, guttering in the snow.

With his heart pounding, he saw the shrubbery part and in a moment a young woman was standing there. She had picked up the ember and was blowing on it through pouted lips, now and then flicking her eyes in his direction. The ember grew to a tiny blaze and in the reflection of its glow he saw that she had platinum blonde hair brought forward over her shoulders, falling all the way down to her waist. Her eyes were a lustrous turquoise in a face like porcelain. She was too beautiful to be real, more perfect than any actress or pop star he had ever seen, more like a princess from a fairy tale.

His taut lips struggled to speak. “Who . . . ?”

“I can see,” she whispered, “why you might envy him.” She glided up closer, so close he could breathe in her fragrance. She glanced across to where, through the trees, his friends and the Olhyiu were sleeping around the fire. “Yet she is but a child and I am a woman.”

His mind told his legs to run but his legs refused to obey. His muscles were frozen. “You’re not real. . . . You can’t be!”

“I am Siri.” She laughed, a bewitching sound, like the tinkling of a musical box. “Do you not have wood sprites in the world you come from?”

He tried to swallow, but his mouth was ash dry. “You—you’re a mirage—some kind of a trick of the light!”

“Touch me, then. See if I’m real.”

Mark tried to take a step backward, but his legs wouldn’t move.

She put the leaf-roll in her mouth and inhaled the smoke, then reached up to press her lips against his. She parted his lips and teeth with her tongue, breathing the honey-sweet smoke into his mouth and nostrils.

It’s a dream. It isn’t happening. Not wildly possible . . .

But it was happening. And it was the most enchanting dream he could ever have imagined.

In some distant corner of his mind, he heard the gravelly warning of Granny Dew in the cave:
Daaannngggerrr!

But his heart didn’t care. His heart was lost to the dream. His heart wished it would never stop when she kissed him softly. It faltered when he felt her scented breath move across his cheek and neck as her lips drew back.

Mark moaned. He felt dizzy. He had a throat full of smoke and he coughed and spluttered. But he couldn’t
move. The doll-like face studied him with her head aslant. He wanted to inhale her beauty so it filled his lungs, but he just stood there, his eyes staring at her, his mouth agape.

Her long-fingered hand reached up to cosset his cheek. Her touch was as delicate as the wings of a butterfly. “Will you share a secret with me, my lovely, and tell me what the old crone said to you in the cave?”

Mark tried to think beyond the desire for her lips. His heart felt faint and his legs felt jittery. “How . . . how did you know?”

She cradled his face with her hands, cupping the boyish smoothness of his cheeks, bringing his mouth to hers with a deeper kiss, moving upward, with a feathery touch, to brush her lips over his momentarily closed eyes. Then she put her arms about his neck and she kissed him again, passionately and languorously. No girl had ever kissed Mark like that in his life. He could not turn from her kiss, his lips drinking in the padded softness of her mouth. Her delicate pink tongue pierced his lips again, moistening his own tongue with a caress that thrilled him with pleasure. “Oh, my lovely, I would dearly like to know what she said to you.”

In his spirit he groaned aloud while his mouth could not stop itself from intoning hoarsely, “She said that one day I would find . . .” With all of his will, he forced it to stop, his heart pounding so hard in his chest he thought he was going to die.

“Yes! Yes, my darling, what would you find?” She pressed the wonderful curves of her body against his,
thrilling him so he felt gooseflesh rise over his entire skin. Her lips brushed against his ear, her breath tingling in his very mind, a whisper of delight. “Oooh, my lovely—you only have to let me help you make true your secret longing!”

Tears erupted into his eyes. “I . . . I would find love.”

“Ah!”

As if waking from a dream, Mark found himself sitting beside her in the snow. How long they had spent together, he didn’t know. He stood up, staggering with weakness in every muscle, and attempted to turn away. She took his hand, which appeared to have a will of its own, helping her to her feet. There was no gooseflesh on her skin, no response to the cold at all. Her body was so lithe, it might have been weightless.

“I must go now, my beautiful boy.” She was already receding from him into the pitch-black shadows of the trees.

His voice quavered. “No. Don’t go.”

“I must.”

The anguish of her leaving, of losing her, crushed his heart.

“Will I never see you again?”

“If you wish, I might come to you in your sleep.”

A mixture of delight and dread caused a sweat to erupt over his brow and cheeks. “Only in my sleep?”

“Oh, my dearest love!” She came forward and embraced him again, as if she couldn’t bear to let him
go, her hands stroking his hair, then falling to caress the skin on the back of his neck. “Every night, if that would please you.”

He was trembling uncontrollably. “Yes.”

“But beware. If those others knew! This boy they call Mage Lord—the one you recognize to be your enemy—he would stop me coming to you. You must be discreet or he would part us forever.”

Mark was panting for breath, his heart breaking. Still his reedy voice proclaimed, “Alan is not my enemy.”

“Oh, beloved, give me your word. Will you promise me, upon your heart and soul?”

“Yes.”

“I must hear it—you must speak the words.”

He sensed the spirit dying in him as his lips spoke the words, “Upon my heart and soul, I give you my promise.”

“Go back now and tell them nothing. Go now. Hurry, before they notice your absence! And I will come to you every night, without fail.”

When the youth had gone, two figures with folded, membranous wings emerged from the deep shadows behind the woman. They were gigantically tall and skeletally thin, with bat-like heads that peered down at her from between the lower branches of the trees, and their gray-blue oily skins reflected the moonlight in iridescent gleams. They watched the retreat of the boy,
following his stumbling progress until he had rejoined the primitives by their campfires.

The woman gloated, in a harsh purr very different from the silken tones she had employed in addressing the youth, “He is mine!”

This was observed with liquid hisses of pleasure, and a chameleonlike darkening of the creatures’ skins. A thumb extended from the first bend of a great wing and pointed directly into the woman’s face. From the thumb, a single claw, as long as a dagger, emerged to exude venom only inches from her eyes. She averted her face, but it was more from the stink of the creature’s secretion than from fear. When the bat creature spoke, it was through a series of clefts high up in its neck, somewhat like gills, so that its voice emerged as a warbling hiss.

“You have done well, succubus!”

Her lips drew back wide in triumph, and there was a flash of ivory, as four needle-point canines captured the white glitter of the moon.

“My mistress will be pleased.”

The Dragon’s Teeth

On the second week they lost one of their company—the old woman who had seen her ancestors on the bank. Kemtuk told them that she had given up the will to live and so had slipped away during a hunting stop to die ashore. A party of men, led by Turkeya, followed her tracks for a few hundred yards among the rushes and sedges lining the bank until they found her body, frozen to the ground. They left her there, erecting a small mound of stones over her body to mark her grave.

The old woman’s death startled the Olhyiu, and fearful eyes peered more anxiously at the snowbound forest as they moved out again into the increasingly turbulent river. The landscape was unchanging, always that frighteningly stark contrast between the snowy ground and the shadowy indigo of the trees.

Kate did her best to keep track of the days.

Today was two weeks and six days since they had first sailed out from their ice-bound captivity. She estimated they were traveling from twenty to fifty miles each day, depending on the difficulty they experienced with navigating the river. And those difficulties were mounting.

Later in the morning they came to a complete stop while the women passed out ropes to the men standing on the bank. They had to edge each boat past treacherous rapids, while all still on board pushed on the river floor with poles from the decks. For the Temple Ship, progress became a major undertaking. The steam of their breaths bathed their heads like haloes, and on the banks thick reeds, coated with hoarfrost, crackled like gunshots under the feet of the men as they heaved and tugged on ropes attached to the prows. Hearts faltered when one of the fishing boats ran aground on a trap of breakers. With anxious eyes scanning the trees, this family home was finally saved by cantilevering it over the rocks using fulcrums hacked out of young tree trunks and lubricated by slippery inner bark.

But they had lost an entire day negotiating a few miles of water, and meanwhile the sense of menace increased as the food reserves dwindled. The meat caught by the hunters had long run out, and even their stores of fish and oil were almost spent. Kate’s heart sank with the plaintive sound of children wailing from hunger. That night, sitting around another fire on the bank, with her sleepy head against Alan’s shoulder,
she heard a loud flapping in the air, a leathery sound, like great wings beating. Craning her eyes through the dark, she saw nothing more than shadows. But to her nostrils came a foul stench, left on the air in the wake of the wings. Shivering involuntarily, she peered into the forest, blue-black against the virgin white of the snow, as the sighing, lapping river carried them ever southward through the alien landscape.

“Isn’t it awful,” she murmured to Alan, “that Mark and Mo only have bad memories of home?”

His sigh was a vibration deep in his chest.

Kate blinked away the moistness in her eyes. “It’s just that I don’t want my memories to be just the bad things. I want to remember some of the good things. Like when Daddy would forget his work and play with us.” Kate recalled her father’s face, his kindness not of touch or declared affection but of simply being with them, a shyness about the eyes which extended even to his only daughter. “Mommy had a beautiful singing voice. She’d sing African songs from the Mission School. Have you ever heard the
Missa Lumba
?”

Alan squeezed her. “No.”

“It’s the mass, sung in an African language. It’s haunting.”

With a small smile, Kate also recalled her grandad, Liam, who had introduced her to his love of plants, and she remembered the small comforts her kind but distracted uncle had been able to provide for her in the heartbreaking time after the death of her parents,
and in the awkward years that followed. The fact that he had offered her his home instead of packing her off to boarding school, allowing her to live half-wild with Darkie and her dreams.

“I really miss my family—don’t you?”

“I sure do.”

At dawn Alan didn’t hear Turkeya come up beside him. The youth’s voice cut like a knife through sleep, waking him. “I worry about the journey ahead, Mage Lord.” Alan moaned with the stiffness in his back, sitting up on the bank next to the ash of last night’s fire. He yawned and rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and then climbed to his feet. Kate was still sleeping and he didn’t want to wake her so he kept his voice down until he and Turkeya had walked a short distance along the shore.

“Please call me Alan.”

Turkeya looked uncomfortable at the suggestion of such intimacy. A breeze ruffled the more youthful version of Siam’s whiskers that thickened the fine fur at the sides of his face.

Alan looked at Turkeya. “What’s worrying you?”

The Olhyiu raised his right hand, in which a single claw sprang like a pointer aimed down the river. “There are hazards close ahead. The water will boil over the rocks we know as the Dragon’s Teeth.”

They walked on a short distance farther while Alan thought about this, sharing the steam of his breath
with the river mist. “Tell me—are all the tribes like you, the Olhyiu?”

“Few live as we do. Once our people left the oceans to live in the cities, where we offered our labors for menial work or toiled on the land as farmers. But we could not settle there. We rediscovered our wild hearts.”

Alan hesitated, looking thoughtful. “Is there no way around this obstacle ahead?”

“None other than we might fly.”

Hunger was so pressing that after only a few more miles Siam ordered the keels to be drawn up against a shingle shore. High cliffs reared on either side, making ambush difficult, while within the undergrowth of the narrow river valley were bushes laden with snow berries. As the women set out with their baskets, the children gathered on the decks and watched fretfully for their return. Soon happy cries sounded out as hungry stomachs were filled with the honey-sweet fruit. Alan watched as Turkeya led a party of several men into the forests by the water’s edge, aware that the shaman was somewhere close to him. The old man smelled of tobacco even when his pipe was unlit.

Refreshing his face with a handful of snow, Alan spoke as he turned to face him. “You’re kind of watching me and all the while you’re avoiding me, Kemtuk. There’s no need for that. You and I should be friends.”

The old man was carrying the Spear of Lug. When he spoke it was with a voice husky with anxiety. “If I am
anxious, it is for other reasons. Take back your weapon, warded with magic—you may have need of it.”

“What’s going on, Kemtuk?”

“I have felt hostile eyes upon us these last few days.”

Alan was shocked. How could Kemtuk stand there so calmly, knowing that? “We’ve got to get the people back into the boats.”

“Do not distress yourself. Siam knows. That hunting party is also a scouting party.”

Alan’s eyes darted about, worrying about Kate. How right she was when she complained of how dangerous this world really was. He sat down on a rocky projection and took a good look at their surroundings. The river was mere yards away, with coils of mist rising from its surface like phantoms. In full daylight the wilderness looked more desolate than ever. The vastness of the landscape dwarfed their presence. They seemed insignificant here, minuscule and vulnerable.

Lost in his brooding, Alan was hardly aware of Mark until his friend came up alongside him. He tried to be cheerful. “Hi! How’s it going?”

“I’m fine. Just bored.”

Alan was startled by the bitterness in Mark’s voice. “How’s Mo?”

“She has a cold. Sneezing and blowing her nose all morning!”

Mark seemed different somehow. Alan tensed as Mark sat next to him on the rock and took the harmonica out of his pocket. Hunching forward to rest his elbows
on his knees, he played a few bluesy riffs. Then, abruptly, he played “Little Red Rooster” so brilliantly everybody just stopped what they were doing and stared.

Alan clapped. “That was really something. You ever thought of forming a band at that boarding school?”

“Nobody at school was interested in blues—other than me.”

“You don’t say!”

“I just said it.”

“Aw, c’mon, Mark—loosen up.”

Mark snorted, went through the pantomime of shaking out the joints of his arms and rolling around his shoulders, as if taking Alan literally.

They both laughed, if a little awkwardly.

“Ooh, lovely! Are you going to play us a dance tune!” The Clonmel accent caused them both to swivel around to see Kate join them, blowing steam through the tunnel of her red-raw hands.

Mark opened up with “Cajun Girl.” A group of children came up close in the snow behind Mark and they started laughing and dancing to the music. Kate joined them, clapping her hands in time.

“Aren’t they gorgeous!”

Alan grinned. The Olhyiu had such a natural feel for dancing he could have watched these little ones all day, with the tips of their noses and their lips blue-black and their bewhiskered faces cherry pink with underlying cold, their tufts of brown and silvery hair poking out from fur caps and bonnets. Steam rose
from Mark’s breath, shrouding his face even while he was playing. The tune complete, he rose to his feet, bowing ceremoniously to Kate before playing dodgem with the little ones, who chased after him, calling for him to play some more.

Kate took Mark’s place, sitting next to Alan. A little girl—they called her Amoté—darted up behind her and ran her fingers through Kate’s auburn curls before she ran away, shrieking. Everybody laughed, gazing after the little girl, who had bright red poppies painted over her cheeks. Then Alan joined Kate and Mark in a snow fight, with the Olhyiu children joining in. Afterwards, breathless and tousled, Mark smiled at Kate in a wistful way. He spoke softly, almost a whisper. “I’d never do anything to hurt you—you know that?”

Kate flushed in embarrassment before turning away.

When Mark left them to play a little more with the children, Alan frowned at Kate. “Something’s eating him. I don’t rightly know what.”

Kate agreed with him. “He hasn’t been happy since breaking his crystal.”

“Yeah. But whose fault was that?”

“Ah, sure, I know. But still, maybe I should go and talk to Mo and see if she knows what’s going on.”

The tension only served to remind Alan of what the shaman had told him earlier—that danger still surrounded them. After Kate had left he picked up the spear and returned to Kemtuk, not caring that many of the elders were close and listening. He indicated the
triangle in his brow. “I need to understand this—what it is and how it works.”

There was a prickling silence, and then a murmuring of muted voices among the elders, who glanced from one to another under lowered brows. The shaman puffed at intervals on his pipe, so that Alan began to wonder if he would answer at all, until eventually he spoke.

“All can read the worry in your eyes. But I cannot help you.” The old man took his pipe from his mouth and tapped the bowl against a stone, while looking toward the nearby river. “I would help if I could. But I do not have the knowledge. Only one mage in all the land has such knowledge, or so legend has it. He lives in Isscan, where we are headed. He is known as the Mage of Dreams.”

Later that same evening, sitting on his bunk by the porthole in the Temple Ship, Mark peered out at the campfires spread over the shore. Even his sister was resting in the warmth of one of them, deep in conversation with Kate. How he wished that he could join his friends. But Mark could no longer share his sleep with anyone. He couldn’t possibly afford to let them see how, with the dark, things changed. How, at the very edges of sleep, things became distinctly weird—and more than a little scary.

Something in him really was changing, just as it was in all of the others. In spite of the fact he had smashed his crystal and there were no marks he could see in his hand,
or anywhere else, he still understood the Olhyiu when they growled and grunted. And every night, whether truly in sleep or in some peculiar half-awake state, his wood sprite, Siri, came to visit him. She kissed and caressed him and made him hunger for more. Tonight he would beg her, as he begged her every night, to become real for him. He longed for a real girlfriend, somebody he could fool around with during the day, somebody he could really touch and hold, somebody he could talk to about his hopes and worries, like Alan talked to Kate.

When, later that same night, she came to him, he beat his fists against the hard oak of the porthole. “It isn’t fair. It isn’t.” Tears rose in his eyes.

“Oh, Mark—my lovely, do not distress yourself. I am here for you. I shall always be here for you.”

“It’s no good.” He buried his face in his hands. “A dream is not enough. It’s not! It just isn’t.”

He felt her tapering fingers curl about his neck, like wisps of silk, gently stroking his skin. “Does it not feel real when I am by your side?”

“But you’re not really here. You’re just a dream. You’re tormenting me—worse than Grimstone!”

“Uncover your eyes and look at me. Here, remove your hands from your face and let me kiss your tears away.”

Her hands took hold of his and moved them down so they were encircling her waist. Through the veil of his tears he saw her incline her face to kiss his lips, then, with that sharply pointed pink tongue, she licked the tears from his cheeks and eyes.

“If . . . if only it was really happening, like that first night.”

“Perhaps there is a way we could be together.”

His heart leaped. “How?”

“There is one who could make it possible. If you could persuade her that you truly deserve her favor.”

He snorted. “What—some stupid goddess, like the Trídédana that old Padraig was going on about?”

“Such beings are hardly stupid. Truly one such goddess might make your dreams come true.” She kissed him again, lingeringly, and coiled his hair around her fingers, tugging him down to lie with her on his bunk.

“There are no goddesses.”

“Oh, but there is one powerful enough to make it happen.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

“My mistress has that power.”

Mark sighed. “Alright—so how do we persuade your mistress to make you real?”