Burning Tower (51 page)

T
he last baskets were gone. The river was wild, but
Little Rainbow
stayed just above the water.

There, a bright ribbon of manna in a rash of rocks and white water. Reg steered into it. The boat lifted high above the water, and now he could barely steer. The boat drifted toward a dark patch, and Reg threw the tiller hard over to avoid the rocks, never mind the manna current. Too low, too low. If they broke a cursed window, they'd flood and sink.

“Harder than it looks, isn't it?” Egret said cheerfully.

“You'll never know,” Regapisk said. “Egret, can you get me some water? Sandry, I can do without you watching me quite so closely. You can see the boat's still afloat.”

“He's doing as well as Egret. We're still up,” said Burning Tower. “And missing rocks is a good thing.”

Sandry said, “And we're missing our wedding night.”

Regapisk pointed with his nose, to the hatch that led into the boat. “Go below. Send the rest of them up here, and it's all yours. We can have the deck.”

Sandry looked at Tower. She blushed. “I am as impatient as you, my husband, but you may be needed here. Squirrelly, can't they find new spells to lift those baskets?”

“They can,” Clever Squirrel said unsteadily.

“It grows dark,” Flensevan said.

“I can see the manna and steer to it,” Regapisk shouted. “But I don't know how to see rocks at night!”

“Deep water,” Squirrel said. “Make the water deep enough and the rocks won't matter.”

“How?” Burning Tower said. A look of amazement came to her face. “Oh! Make storms!”

“And that's the way to stop the baskets,” Sandry shouted. “Get me storm arrows!”

“The cost,” Flensevan moaned. “But yes, it must be. Pink Rabbit, bring arrows.”

Sandry nocked an arrow and aimed high above the stern of the ship. “Ready.”

Clever Squirrel stood beside him. She sang a wild song that suggested storms and lightning in its very rhythms, and as it reached its climax she gestured.
Now!

Sandry released the arrow. It flew straight and true, high above the river, then suddenly flashed jagged blue-white. Storm clouds grew in the wake of the arrow. Before it was out of sight, Sandry had nocked another arrow, and Squirrel began her song.

Arrow after arrow flew upriver. Lightning danced.

“Listen!” Regapisk shouted.

A rumbling sound, growing louder. Sandry stared upriver. Something white flashed in the black clouds, something white and low on the water.

“Water stampede!” Burning Tower shouted. “Stampede!”

Sandry almost laughed. Stampede. Animals did that. Not water. But there was a roaring wall of water coming down the river toward them! “Reggy! Look behind you!”

“Can't,” Regapisk shouted.

Sandry felt the stern of the boat rise. It lifted higher and higher, and he was looking down the boat at a steep angle toward the water ahead of them. Rocks!

Somehow they missed the rocks.
Little Rainbow
's bow lifted. The boat wasn't level, but it wasn't diving down the wave straight toward the bottom any longer. The roaring waves crashed around them.

Regapisk shouted in triumph. “It's working!”

Something was working. They were riding that wave, moving faster than Sandry had ever moved in his life.
No,
he thought,
not quite.
“As fast as the High Road!” Sandry shouted.

“We're faster, I think,” Regapisk said. He was staring ahead into the river, paying no attention to anything but the water just ahead, making tiny movements of the steering oar.
Little Rainbow
skimmed just above the crest of that rushing flood. Regapisk shouted again.

Burning Tower huddled against Sandry in the pitch dark. Canyon walls loomed above them. She couldn't see the walls, only that there were no stars on either side. Blackness, except for a river of stars directly overhead. The water beside them seemed almost calm, but she knew that was an illusion, that they were racing down the stream at the speed of the flood.

Wedding night,
she thought. It wasn't anything like her dreams. But when other wives told the tales of their wedding nights, she'd win.

Little Rainbow
raced onward.

D
awn came slowly, light from behind without direct sun. It shone high on the walls that rose above them while they were still in darkness. The sounds of rushing water echoed from the canyon walls. Gradually the light filtered downward as the sun rose.

They were deep in the Earth. Painted walls rose on either side, dark at the bottom near the river, brightly lit above and ahead where the invisible sun fell on them. Up high there were colors, wild colors, jumbled together, here in patches, there in stripes. Odd shapes, pillars of rock with boulders on their tops. Arches. Burning Tower stared in disbelief. Colors everywhere. As the light grew brighter and came lower into the canyon she could see the river ahead. They were just above the water to either side, but if she looked ahead they were, two, no, three manlengths above the river! The water ahead was strewn with boulders, but the flood they rode was higher than any of the rocks, and they stayed just above the top of the wild waves.

There was color everywhere. Patches of color, blotches, stripes. The canyon walls looked layered as if a mad cook had been making an enormous cake. There were other shapes, arches and mounds and hoops and heaps, all in different colors. She had never seen anything more beautiful.

Land on either side rushed past. She had no way to know how fast they were going. Faster than Spike could carry her. As fast as the High Road, perhaps faster. The dawn light was tricky.

Then she gasped and pointed.

“The walls are getting higher!” she shouted. She pointed ahead. “Higher! Or else we're going deeper. The earth, it's swallowing us! Sandry, wake up—look!”

Sandry stirred. They had slept fitfully on the deck. Sandry had passed a loop of rope through a deck fitting and around them so they couldn't be shaken off when, sometimes, Regapisk sent the boat through wild turns and gyrations. Once Tower had wakened from fitful sleep to see Sandry watching over her. He must have fallen asleep finally. Now he was waking.

Flensevan was lying on a blanket on the other side of the deck. He woke at Tower's shout and looked ahead. “I know of this place,” he said. “Zeph told me of a cut to the heart of the world about halfway to Aztlan from Crescent City.”

“Halfway?” Sandry said wonderingly. “Halfway in a night?”

“An afternoon and a night,” Flensevan said.

“But how far?” Sandry said. “We were moons crossing that wasteland! Now we have come halfway back?”

Tower looked back to see Regapisk still standing at one steering oar. He seemed barely able to stand, and he steered by muttering directions to Egret. “Right a little. Follow that riplet.” Regapisk's voice was infinitely weary. “Straight now.” He shook his head like a man afraid of sleep.

“How long can he last?” Tower asked Sandry.

“Not much longer, I'd say. Better find your sister,” Sandry said, “my love.”

She tried to smile. “What a night,” she said, “my love.”

 

By noon the walls were shrinking. The river twisted and turned now. Clever Squirrel and Regapisk took turns directing Flensevan's sons, who acted as steersmen. Sandry strained to see any signs in the water, but there was nothing: whatever Squirrel and Regapisk saw, he could not.

“I can't see it either,” Burning Tower said. She moved closer.

“I thought Reggy was making it all up,” Sandry said.

The sky overhead was clear. They had left the storm far behind them, and Sandry could see no trace of it.

They were still riding the wave, but it was tamer now, no longer the wild storm-driven stampede. Some of the wave had passed them, so that when he looked ahead, it was down a long slope of water. Far ahead he could see rocks, but the flood engulfed them long before
Little Rainbow
was in any danger. Behind them the slope of water continued upward.

“Left a little,” Regapisk said. “Sandry, I'm getting hungry.”

“I'm starving,” Burning Tower said. “Didn't we bring any food?”

Flensevan's head appeared from the hatch amidships. “No time. I've been looking for anything we stashed. Nothing. We had some bread, but it dissolved.”

“Dissolved,” Sandry said. “There's water down there?”

Flensevan laughed. “One of the windows got smashed by a rock.”

“So what's keeping us up?” Sandry demanded.

“It's an Atlantean boat.” Flensevan's voice took on a tone of infinite patience. “Manna keeps it up. Water magic. Only we don't have enough of it.”

Regapisk laughed bitterly. “We have chests and chests of magic. Enough talismans to keep us all young for all our lives! And the only thing that keeps us afloat is me, and I'm hungry.”

“Reggy—” Sandry said.

Clever Squirrel looked like a pile of rags at Reggy's feet. She stirred. “He's right, Sandry. We have manna, but it's the wrong kind, and none of us knows how to weave Atlantean magic to renew the floating spell on
Little Rainbow.
”

“So—”

“So the only ones here who can see the streaks of manna in the water are Lord Reg and I, and he sees them better than me. And the boat knows how to use water magic to stay above the water.”

“But not to steer to it,” Burning Tower said.

Regapisk looked surprised. “No. I don't know why, but no.”

Clever Squirrel grinned. “Ships that sail themselves don't need wizards.”

“Reggy's no wizard,” Sandry insisted.

“Started too late,” Squirrel said. “If he'd had proper training when he was young, he'd have learned.”

“I told them,” Regapisk said. “Right just a little, Rabbit. I told them I shouldn't be in that school getting beat up in weapons practice. And I never did like iron weapons even after I learned to fight. And I learned to talk to the mers. I could have been a wizard!”

“You're wizard enough for us right now,” Burning Tower said. “Thank you, Cousin.”

Regapisk tried to grin.

Egret, the stronger of Flensevan's two sons, had been crouched in the bow with a fishing spear. He shouted in triumph and pulled out a trout the size of his leg. He threw it onto the deck and drew his knife.

By the time Sandry reached the foredeck, Egret had filleted the trout. “It tried to talk to me. You don't think it could really have granted me two wishes, do you? But I was hungry!” He held up the boneless fillets. “I guess we'll have to eat him raw.”

“No.” Clever Squirrel looked horrified. “I may not be able to use the manna on the boat, but I sure know how to cook fish!” She looked down at the fish. Its eyes were open but dimming. “Why didn't you wish for bison steaks?”

 

Evening came. The canyon walls were gone, replaced by steep banks not much higher than the wave they rode. The water behind them was higher still, rising upward as far as Sandry could see.

He pointed upriver. “The storms must still be filling the river.”

Clever Squirrel nodded. “How many storm arrows did we use?”

“I lost count,” Sandry said. “A dozen, maybe.”

“Enough,” Squirrel said. “As long as the water is higher behind us, we'll move fast, and it's sure deep enough to cover the rocks.”

“Could Reggy have become a wizard?”

She shrugged. “I never heard of anyone with real talent who couldn't learn enough magic to be useful,” she said. “Of course, sometimes that's not very much. Some big wagon trains will have two or three wizard assistants to do routine spells. They never learn much more, but it's a living. No telling how good Regapisk might have been.”

No telling?
Sandry thought.
Regapisk won't see it that way. He'll know—

“Getting dark,” Squirrel said. “I'd better get some sleep so I can keep Reggy going.”

“You mean take over finding the manna streams?” Burning Tower asked.

“No, little sister. Little married sister. Reggy really is better at seeing water manna than I am. Do you Lords have Atlanteans in your ancestry?”

“I doubt it,” Sandry said. “The Memory Guildmaster has stories about times before we met the Lordkin, but they don't lead to Atlantis.”

“Well, Atlanteans can find manna when no one else can, and Reggy has a natural talent for seeing dim manna traces. He's sure better than me. I'm always scared when I pilot this boat.”

“Scared? You?” Sandry was incredulous.

“Scared. Me. So what I do, I use the manna in a talisman to keep Reggy awake and inspired, and I talk to him, and he steers the ship. It works.” Squirrel went back to the steersman deck.

“And you have to sleep,” Burning Tower said. “So you can steer.” She nestled against him. “Will this ever be over?”

“You mean, will we ever be alone?”

“Yes.”

“Soon, I think.”

“South! We're going south,” Clever Squirrel shouted from back on the steering deck. “The river turned—look at the stars!”

Sandry looked up. It was quite dark now, and the skies were clear. There were no canyons to block the view, and the sky overhead was filled with stars, with only a faint glow of red to mark where the sun had vanished. The stars were thousands of points of varying brightness in the black, except for a mighty river of stars that cut the night sky in half.

Burning Tower was pointing. “There's the Bear, and the Snake. The Snake's Eye is north.” She pointed upriver. “So we've turned south; we were going west, right into the sunset.”

“South.”

“Sandry, when we went to Aztlan, we went much farther east than north!”

“Oh.” He shook his head in wonder. “I'm not used to traveling this fast.”

“None of us are,” Burning Tower said.

The night closed around them. “Hard right,” Regapisk called. “Hold. Okay, left, straight down the river.”