Crossing Over (35 page)

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Authors: Anna Kendall

BOOK: Crossing Over
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I crossed over.
It was strange to leave a calm spring afternoon in the land of the living and arrive in storm in the country of the Dead. Always before, it had been the other way around. Now the sky here was as wild, the sea as high, the wind as howling as on the night of the wreck on the other side. The only differences were that no rain fell, and underfoot the ground shook as if it, like the
Frances Ormund
, were about to come apart.
Bat remained where I had left him all those months ago, sitting on a tree stump beside the track from cabin to cliff. He jumped up as soon as he saw me. He looked the same: flat head, big nose, greasy hair, slurred voice. A child in the tattered clothing of a shipwrecked sailor, the knife handle carved like an openmouthed fish still in his huge hand.
“Sir Witch!”
“Yes, Bat.”
“Ye come for Bat!”
“Yes. Are you well?”
The simple question confused him, not unreasonably. What did “well” mean—either in Witchland or the country of the Dead? Bat said nothing. He eyed me with a mixture of fear, respect, and hope. I had no idea what time had meant to him, waiting here on his stump. Nor did I think too deeply about the matter. I was too busy pushing away pity for what I was about to do to him.
It was Bat who first showed me that the Dead do not always know they are dead. It was Bat who first showed me that, lacking this essential knowledge, a dead man could will himself to fly up the cliff face. That was what I had later used to save Cat Starling from the Blues intent on burning her. Instead I had sent her to flying away through the air, and so further convincing the soldiers that they were in Witchland. It was with Bat that I had first devised that stratagem, and it was with Bat that I was now going to test a further idea. I could not risk Cecilia for the experiment; she was too precious. First would have to come Bat.
I said, “Why do you not kneel to me, Bat? I am, after all, a lord of Witchland!”
Hastily he got down on his knees, muttering apologies I could not understand.
“I am going to release you from Witchland,” I said. “Come closer.”
On his knees the sailor inched toward me, until I could see the flaking white part in his greasy hair. I stepped closer, too, and our bodies touched.
“Stay completely still, Bat.”
“Aye, sir.” His voice trembled, but he obeyed.
I put my hands under his armpits and pulled him to me, like a child or a lover. I held him as close as possible. Then I crossed over.
Dirt in my mouth—
Worms in my eyes—
Earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs—
But this time it went on and on. I was trapped between, buried in the earth forever and ever and the other rotting skeleton buried with me, screaming in my nonexistent mind. . . . It went on and on and
ON—
And then I was through, gasping on the fresh spring grass, and Bat sprawled at my feet, howling and terrified and alive.
 
 
It took me a long time to recover my breathing, and Bat even longer. Gasping, wheezing, the only thing I could think of was Hygryll. The men and women in the round stone room covered with earth, who had followed me—the
hisaf
—in a gray fog to the country of the Dead. They had existed in the country of the Dead only as wisps, but then, they had not actually been dead. Bat, on the other hand, had been fully in the country of the Dead, and he was now fully here.
But was he?
As soon as I had recovered enough breath and wits—
dirt in my mouth, worms in my eyes, earth imprisoning my fleshless arms and legs
—I examined Bat. He had jumped up and stood gazing wildly around, panting in great sobs, waving his knife as he looked for something to attack. I said imperiously, “It’s all right, Bat. I have brought you back from Witchland. Kneel!”
He did, looking glad to have a clear order. Orders were something he could understand. Nothing else was. On his knees, he raised his face to mine. “Bat be saved from Witchland?”
“Yes.
Yes
.”
What convinced me was his smell, so strong that I had to back away. In the country of the Dead, odors were not strong. I’d had to hold Cecilia in my arms before I could catch the fragrance of her hair. But now Bat reeked of sweat, of piss, of dirt, of the sea salt dried on his tattered clothes. He was solidly
here
, embodied in the land of the living. He was alive, and he stunk to the sky.
All at once my legs gave way and I had to sit on the ground.
Bat was alive
. And I had done this. I, Roger, the
hisaf
.
“So it is with a
hisaf.
So it was with your father. Or you could not be.”
Could my father have done this? Perhaps this was what Soulviners meant by “living forever”—that the Dead could be brought back to life. If my father had not left us before she died, could he have brought back my mother? And if he could have done so, and had chosen not to . . .
Hatred exploded in me for this unknown man, and it was the hatred that finished me. Too much, too fast. Maggie, Bat, Cecilia . . . I burst into uncontrollable tears. Shamed, I rolled over, hid my face, and sobbed like the six-year-old I had been when my mother died. I cried and I could not stop crying.
Bat tended me. Murmuring nonwords, he covered me with my own cloak. He found water somewhere and fetched me a few drops in a young leaf. He sat beside me, a huge and stinking man, and patted my shoulder until the paroxysm passed.
“All right, Bat. All right. I am fine.”
“Sir Witch,” he slurred. “Ye fine?”
“I’m fine.”
“Ye fine?”
“I’m
fine
. Thank you, Bat.” Now another problem occurred to me—what was I going to do with him? “Do you know where you are?”
He gestured toward the beach and said simply, “Sea.”
Of course. He was a sailor. Wherever the sea was, Bat was at home. He would accompany me to where the coastline flattened, find a ship to sign on to, and resume the life that Hartah had stolen from him—and all without ever realizing that same life had ever been extinguished. If he spoke of Witchland, mumbled of it in his feebleminded slur, no one would believe him.
Suddenly I wanted him gone. I wanted to be alone, to cross over and bring back Cecilia. Nothing else mattered, nothing else filled my mind. . . .
Why did
hisafs
not always bring back their beloved Dead?
The question needled me, and would not go away. One possible answer:
Perhaps they did
. But if so, why had my father not retrieved my mother? That brought me back to my oldest questions: Why had he left her in the first place, and what had happened in Hygryll to cause her death? If I had found her in the country of the Dead on Soulvine Moor, I could have asked her these questions. But I had not found her, and I was not returning to Soulvine Moor just now. I had to bring Cecilia back over.
But first I had to rest. Everything in me had gone weak, used up with unnatural effort. From my pocket I fished out six pennies and gave them to Bat. “Here, find a cottage—or someplace—and buy bread and cheese. Bring it here.” Almost before the words were out, I was asleep, lying there on the track between the cliff and the clearing where the yellow-haired youth had died kicking the empty air. I must have slept around the clock, because when I woke, it was once again afternoon, the sun blazing through the half-unfurled leaves, and Bat was gone.
 
 
A loaf of bread, already crawling with ants, lay on the ground beside me. The goatskin water bag was full. Bat had thought of my needs before running away from Sir Witch, who might at any moment send him back to Witchland. I didn’t blame him. I brushed the ants off the bread and ate half, forcing myself to save the rest.
Next I found a stream, bathed, and washed my clothes, longing for the strong soap in Joan Campford’s laundry. The stream, racing down from the mountains, was so cold that I yelled when I first ducked into it and the icy water hit my privates. Nonetheless, I scrubbed myself with gravel until my skin was red. I wanted to be clean for Cecilia.
When I and my clothes had been dried by the bright sun, I ran my fingers through my hair to comb it and shaved my face with my little knife, a business that resulted in blood I then had to stanch. When all this was done, I picked a bouquet of spring flowers and a clutch of wild strawberries, made my way back to the cabin in the clearing, and crossed over.
For a long, terrible moment, I thought I was back at the wreck of the
Frances Ormund
.
Rain lashed my face, so hard and thick that I could barely see. Rain, in the country of the Dead! The storm blew me sideways, off my feet. I picked myself up and groped my way across the clearing, calling, “Cecilia! Cecilia!”
A tree crashed to the ground, barely missing me.
I couldn’t find her
. The howling wind whipped my cries away as soon as I uttered them—and why was I calling her anyway? She could not hear me, could not respond. . . . Where was she? What if the country had stretched, as it so often did, so that the clearing was not here but miles away . . . in all this pelting rain. . . .
Crack!
Lightning hit the ground a league away, deafening me.
But this storm, like those on the other side, waxed and waned. During a lull, when the wind and rain abated a little and the lightning moved off, I could see better. The Dead were still here, sitting or lying on the trembling ground, serene amid the chaos. I stumbled over an old man, who roused enough to snap something at me in an unknown tongue before returning to his eerie calm.
There, ahead
. . . But no, it was another girl in green, sitting beside a small child. . . .
Then I saw her.
Cecilia sat tranquilly at the very edge of the cliff above the sea. She could not have moved, so the cliff must have. Her green dress was as sodden as Mistress Conyers’s had once been, as sodden as if Cecilia herself had been in a shipwreck. Her rich hair whipped in the wind, long tendrils writhing like snakes. I lurched forward and snatched her back from the cliff edge.
The sea below boiled. The rocks were hidden by surf and spray and rain. If there were figures on the beach below— Hartah, Captain James Conyers, my aunt Jo—I could not see them. I did not want to see them. I clamped my teeth hard enough on my tongue to bring blood, and with Cecilia in my arms, I crossed back over.
Another crossing that seemed to go on and on, with dirt filling my mouth and the sockets of my eyes, so that I could not see the soft body I clung to so ferociously. But it was not soft, it had turned as skeletal and bony as my own, both of us were trapped here forever in the grave—
Then I was over, and she was with me.
We lay at the top of the cliff above the beach, in a tangle of spring weeds. Cecilia went very still in my arms. Her green eyes blinked: once, twice. A puzzled expression settled on her features like mist on glass. Then she jumped up, looked around, and began to scream.
“Cecilia, no! It’s all right, it’s all right! Cecilia!”
She stopped screaming but backed away from me, clutching her wet skirts, her eyes wide and terrified. “Roger! Where am I? What have you done?”
And then I saw the moment that memory returned in full. What was she seeing? The round stone house in Hygryll—or had her murder happened somewhere else? How had they killed her? Had she—
Cecilia’s eyes rolled back in her head and she crumpled to the ground.
I wasn’t in time to catch her. She fell facedown, and for a long terrible moment I thought I had lost her again. But she breathed. I rolled her over, laid her head on my lap, and rubbed her cheeks. She opened her eyes.
“Roger? ” she said, so softly that I barely heard her. And then, “I died.”
I couldn’t bear the look in her eyes. Pain, bewilderment—she was like a small animal that cruel boys had hurt for sport, a kitten mewling and beseeching
Make it stop, oh please make it stop. . . .
I lied to her. “It was a dream, my lady. You had a bad dream.”
For just a moment some hardness flashed over her face, some glint of a Cecilia I had never seen. Then she seized what I had offered her.
“Yes, of course, a dream! A silly, bad dream—silly me! And we’re here because we . . . because we . . .” Frantically she glanced around the clearing. “A picnic! Yes, of course, I remember now, a picnic—a bad dream—really, Roger, what are you doing? You must not hold me like that! Bad Roger!” She sprang up and took a few steps away from me, hysteria and flirtation mixed horribly on her face.
“Cecilia—”
“You must remember who you are!” She wagged a finger at me, stopped the gesture halfway. Again panic twisted her face, and again she drove it away. With coquettishness, with silliness, with sheer granite will. “You must remember who I am! Even on a picnic, it is not fit for you to touch me, you know!”
An enchanting smile, covering terror.

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