Tigerheart (16 page)

“Tiger skin,” Princess Picca said. “Prepared special for you. Wear mantle of tiger. Great honor. Greatest Picca can give. And new name. ‘Storyteller’ no longer best word for you. New name is…” and she paused for what seemed effect before thumping his chest lightly, “Tigerheart.”

Paul’s gut instinct was to run from the circle and hide back in the wigwam. He was utterly repulsed by the notion. Indeed, he was now remembering times when his mother would be wearing one of her furs, and he would nuzzle up against it and stroke it lovingly because it felt so soft and real. He’d never given a thought to the animals that had once been adorned by them. Now the previous owner of the fur was all he could think about.

And
Tigerheart
? A name earned at the expense of his oldest, dearest friend? What a terrible insult to the memory of his beloved snow tiger. It wasn’t even accurate. “Chickenheart” would have been the more appropriate, for his own boy’s heart had been thudding with terror against his rib cage during the entire encounter.

He was about to stammer out that he wanted no part of it—not of the skin and not of the name—but suddenly Gwenny was at his side, one hand resting on his shoulder. “Tigerheart thanks you for your gracious gift, and accepts it gratefully,” she said in a loud voice. This response garnered smiles from the Piccas, and a number of the braves who were holding spears thudded the bottoms of the poles on the ground approvingly.

As the fur was brought toward him, Paul said to Gwenny in a low, desperate voice between clenched teeth, “I don’t want it!”

“If you refuse it,” Gwenny whispered back, “you will be insulting the Piccas. Worst-case scenario, they take such offense that they attempt to fill us full of arrows. The best-case scenario is that they simply refuse to ally themselves with us. Should that happen, not only do you never complete your quest but your tiger died for nothing. Now if any of those are acceptable to you, by all means, refuse it. But know the consequences if you do.”

Paul trembled with indecision, guilt, angst, and a desperate wish that he was absolutely anywhere else than where he was at that moment. And while he vacillated, the Indian braves walked up to him and, with great ceremony, draped the skin of the snow tiger around his shoulders. They fastened it around his throat with a clasp. “Tigerheart, Tigerheart,” they kept saying.

The instant the soft pelt was upon him, Paul felt an almost unnatural calm. More than calm, in fact. It was a sort of quiet inner strength, the type which he was quite certain his tiger had possessed. Although he knew that physically he hadn’t changed, suddenly he felt taller. Stronger. The burning anger, the frustration, the despair…all of these melted away, leaving him quiet and confident in a way that he could only come up with one description: grown-up. He felt very grown-up.

Princess Picca walked toward him; and she was nodding, as if she understood what was going through his head. “You feel it, yes? You feel bravery. You feel greatness. You feel that which tiger felt. Yes, Tigerheart?”

“Yes,” Paul said, not understanding why he was feeling that way or how Princess Picca could possibly have known.

“Was meant for you,” she said. “You two sides of one rock. Same same. What was his, yours. Yours, his. Same same.”

Her words made sense to him. Not only that—and he was fully aware that he might be imagining it—but he was certain he could hear the voice of the tiger in his head, telling him that this was all right and proper. That he had no use for the fur anymore and, if anyone was going to be wearing it, it should be Paul. That the tiger could now still feel the wind against him and continue to have just the faintest taste of what it felt like to be alive.

And more…if Paul had the heart of a hunter, the heart of a tiger, then wearing the tiger’s fur gave him a sense of that heart and emboldened him in ways he would not have thought possible.

“I think maybe it happens all at once,” he told Gwenny. She looked blankly at him at first, but then she understood and smiled.

“I thought it might,” she said.

Paul turned to Princess Picca and bowed deeply. He was still somewhat uncomfortable with the fur and, particularly, the name, but at least he could acknowledge the Indians’ good intentions.

The princess bowed in return, and then the Indians began the steady beat of their drums. Paul typically felt self-conscious when the prospect of dancing came up, but not this time. His feet began to move almost of their own accord. As the drumbeat increased, he bounded across the circle, spinning in front of The Boy, the edges of his tiger skin cape whipping out. The Boy grinned and vaulted toward him. The two of them began to do a mock version of hunter and hunted, each of them taking turns in which was which.

Other braves joined in, each leaping into the circle in turn. Princess Picca entered the dance as well, as did Irregular and Porthos and even Gwenny, who felt it wasn’t really proper decorum to prance about with half-clad savages; but still she wanted to be polite.

The wind began to whip up far more fiercely, and the tops of the trees were shaking, but no one noticed. Or if they did, they simply took it to be an extension of the wild savagery in their hearts, and thus part of their celebration.

The entire circle was filled with gyrating bodies, slick with sweat and leaping about in a manner that seemed both chaotic and yet amazingly controlled, since they weren’t crashing into each other willy-nilly.

So seized by his celebration of primal energy was Paul that he felt the very ground shaking beneath his feet and thought it merely part of the dance. It was The Boy who first began to sense that something was wrong. Smack in the middle of the celebration and its most enthusiastic participant, The Boy suddenly stopped dead center of it all, his feet planted firmly on the ground and his gaze riveted to the skies. Since he stopped moving, naturally this caused others to careen into him. This could easily have been calamitous if they had taken offense at it. But when they righted themselves and glared at The Boy, they saw that his attention was fixed elsewhere and not upon them at all, not even in the slightest challenging fashion. Naturally they did what anyone does in such a situation: They looked at where The Boy was looking to see what it was that had so garnered his attention.

In short order, more people were standing still than were dancing, and finally everyone was looking up. Even the drummers had ceased their steady beat and were looking skyward.

They were staring at a full moon that had gone, for no apparent reason, blood red. If it were any more so, it would have been dripping.

“Is that…normal?” Paul whispered.

The Boy shook his head. “I’ve never seen it.”

It was at that point that Paul realized something else, as everyone else did as well. Despite the fact that everyone had stopped dancing, the ground was continuing to shake. It had been mild at first, but it was beginning to increase in intensity.

The clouds had taken on the same sanguinary tint as the moon; and now the distant rumble of thunder rolled toward them, with flashes leaping across the sky. Paul had experienced many thunder and lightning storms in his life, and so had gotten into the habit of counting the period of time between sighting the lightning and hearing the thunder. The first time he saw lightning lash from the storm clouds, he rattled off a solid six-second count. But a couple of seconds later, when there was more lightning, he barely made it to three before he jumped from a crack of thunder. The storm was moving toward them unconscionably quickly.

And the ground was continuing to rumble.

“Something’s coming,” said The Boy grimly. “Something big.” With that, he threw his arms to either side and rose into the air, soaring above the trees, trying to reconnoiter and get some sense of what was wrong.

There was the smell of both water and ozone in the air. Rain started to pour down upon the Piccas, first a few drops, but then a full-blown cascade. They began to run for their wigwams, but huge gusts of wind came roaring through. The wigwams were torn from their moorings, thrown about like leaves from a tree. Paul pulled the tiger skin tightly around himself, suddenly grateful for the warmth and security.

He looked up toward the treetops, trying to make out what The Boy was up to, and was shocked to discover that The Boy was nowhere to be seen.

The Boy, meanwhile, was soaring high above the trees, battling against the wind that seemed determined to toss him around like a ball skittering across a billiard table. The Boy was accustomed to battling enemies, but it was most disconcerting for him to be slapped around by what was essentially nothing…except it was nothing with the pounding power of a thousand hammers. The Boy flipped, flopped, boomeranged around, and fought to regain his equilibrium with every ounce of energy he possessed.

He managed to move beyond the edges of the island, his eyes searching for some hint of what was transpiring. And then he saw something in the distance; and the sight of it struck him cold.

The three Seirenes had relocated their nest to a very high point on an outcropping of a cliffside. They were singing, and even from the distance at which he was hovering, The Boy was able to discern the general tone and direction of the song. It was a song steeped in anger, jealousy, and frustration. He had heard them sing variations on the theme every time that he had taunted them into believing he would be theirs, only to bound away laughing at their foolishness for trusting him.

But that tone and direction were merely the melody line. There were grand embellishments now, a reedy tune transformed into a full concerto. Nor was the wayward Boy the target of their song, oh no.

The Seirenes were calling their parents.

Children of sea and sky they were, patron saints of the tempest tossed. The Boy was able to see vast, pounding waves reaching higher and higher, and in the folds of the waves he was able to discern a huge, bearded, scowling male face with black eyes and a beard of sea foam. And high above, the skies were black and terrible, and the rolling storm clouds bore a distinct resemblance to a woman’s face. Lightning danced around where her hair would have been. The storm clouds and waves worked together too, feeding off their mutual energy and their mutual indignation over the story of woe and heartbreak being shared with them by their offspring.

Great gouts of water washed over the Anyplace, but The Boy knew those were merely precursors. Warning shots. He saw the true power of the Seirenes—or rather of their parents—building toward a frightening climax.

At that moment, his instinct was to battle his way through the air to the Seirenes. To try and sweet-talk them. Appeal to their better natures, presuming they had any. The Boy was very much a creature of the moment, and his solution for the moment was to tell the Seirenes anything they wanted to hear if it would put an end to the current siege.

He tried shouting to them, but the wind batted his words right back at him. He tried to fly toward them, to confront them, but the fearsome gusts shoved him away.

The Boy was helpless.

We must now take the briefest of side steps to address what we’re sure has just occurred to you, in order to make clear that certain apparent inconsistencies are, in fact, not. And if these have not occurred to you, be not angry with us that we are interrupting our narrative for a short time to deal with them, but rather focus your ire on the quality of your education that you didn’t notice what we are about to tell you.

The Boy had boasted earlier that nothing transpires in the Anyplace without his cooperation. Remember how we warned you that this was both true and false.

For all his abilities and bravado, The Boy remains a boy. Imagination is a two-way lane, and that which The Boy is able to convince is equally able to convince The Boy.

To put it as simply as possible: If The Boy believes that he is in trouble, then he is in trouble. If he believes he can be hurt, he is vulnerable. If he believes that forces are building that he is unable to deter, then whether or not he
could
stop them is beside the point. And if he believes he can die, then he is as mortal as any of us and will die.

If The Boy had been of sufficient resolve to believe that he could have used his boundless charm to talk the Seirenes out of their present course, then he might have been able to.
Might
have been. Nothing is for certain in the Anyplace, no matter how much The Boy might wish it otherwise.

Besides, if The Boy consistently engaged in such actions, then nothing would ever be a challenge for him. The Anyplace would be a realm of endless tedium and no fun. And The Boy, as you’ve gathered by now, places fun above all…even his own safety and the safety of others.

Thus is our digression ended, except to say this: Despite whatever influence The Boy may have over the Anyplace, at the moment, he is as helpless in the maelstrom of events as any leaf fallen from a tree.

The Boy saw not only the source of their troubles, against which he could do nothing, but also even greater difficulty and impending danger on the horizon, were there any horizon to speak of. Instead, the line at which the skies and sea came together had blurred, creating one great black mass. And from that great black mass was surging a great black wave, thundering in The Boy’s direction and promising no end of grief once it arrived.

The Boy didn’t hesitate. Instead he hurtled back toward the Indian encampment as quickly as he could. He arrived just as Princess Picca was urging her people to get to the caves for shelter, and then he swooped down and said, “No! Not the caves! We have to get to high ground! The highest ground there is! There’s a tidal wave coming and the caves will be underwater!”

“Highest ground is Spire!” said Princess Picca, and she pointed to a great tower of rock that had been used for ceremonies long forgotten even by the elders of the tribe. “Only high ground there is!”

Paul looked where she was pointing. He didn’t like what he was seeing. It was narrow and not easily climbable and quite a distance. He shouted up to The Boy, “Can we make it there before the wave gets here?”