Dreamhunter (19 page)

In the morning the rangers at the border post beyond Doorhandle were having trouble with some youths throwing stones. They were locals, who had decided to alleviate their cabin fever by winding up rangers. They had hidden themselves in some bushes by the roadside a little way beyond the stone cairn. In fact they had removed some stones from the cairn as ammunition, and were now throwing them at anyone who came near the landmark.

The rangers couldn’t catch them. They couldn’t get past the border without crossing over into the Place. Stones were sailing through the air at them from a spot only twenty yards away — where they couldn’t ever walk. The rangers had sent someone to the sheriff ’s office for help, and were loitering about just out of range, with a gathering of dreamhunters intent on going
on In that morning. The dreamhunters were feeling the cold. It was still raining, and they had umbrellas, but they had left their heavy winter coats back in their rooms — they wouldn’t need them once they were across the border.

Time passed, and the gathering of dreamhunters clustered under their umbrellas like mourners at a rainy graveside. There was no sign of the sheriff. Doorhandle was having a delightful moment — letting the employees of the Regulatory Body, who had virtually taken over the village ten years before, feel
its
power for a change. The news of the stone throwers made its way back to the shelter, so the dreamhunters who had been filling in their intentions stopped there, where there was a fire in the stove. They waited to hear that the problem had been sorted out, the culprits chased off or collared.

The rangers near the cairn were therefore quite surprised to see a couple of dreamhunters come scampering up the road after word had been sent to the shelter and the flow of people stemmed. They were more surprised when the two rushed past the tortoise-back of joined umbrellas and ran on, headlong, towards the cairn. The two had their packs held up over their heads. When stones began to fall around them, making pockmark splashes in the mud, the big one, the boy, pushed the girl behind him. They continued on that way, like an engine and its carriage, into the shelter of the cairn. They crammed together there, laughing. The
boy picked up a stone from the cairn and tossed it into the bushes. It was answered by a furious volley. Stones clapped and thumped on the far side of the cairn. The two put their heads together and had a consultation. They filled their hands with stones. He ducked out into the road, she followed, threw her handful, then dived through the space beyond the cairn, and vanished. Stones splattered into the puddles where she had been. The boy poked up his head, feinted, provoked another volley of stones, which he ducked. Then he jumped to his feet, threw his handful and plunged through after the girl.

There was a burst of clapping from the watching dreamhunters. Others were inspired to make a dash for it and, after a few more minutes, the wet road was pimpled by flung stones and littered with mangled umbrellas.

WHEN THE LAST
of their followers had overtaken Sandy and Laura, greeted them and hurried on in squelchy shoes, they found themselves alone. Their jackets steamed, and their dripping trouser legs left trails of clotted dust behind them on the road.

Sandy had asked Laura that morning whether she minded if he went along with her. He’d felt surprised — and surprisingly happy — when she said she’d welcome his company.

They walked to where the road forked, into road and track — the track beaten and scoured of dead grass.
There was a sign on a tree; it told them they were only an hour from Starry Beach.

‘I set my alarm and got up really early,’ Laura said. She stretched and yawned. ‘I’m ready for a nap.’

Sandy had kept himself up late. He’d read old issues of the
Founderston Monthly Illustrated
that Mrs Lilley kept in piles in the hall. He had scoured the magazine’s pages for any mention — or better, any pictures — of Hames and Tiebolds. The whole time he had been skimming and swooping, Sandy had felt he was studying for an exam. In what subject he didn’t know.

He had already done the Hames and history. He knew — for instance — that they were one of five families who had come to the country from the island of Elprus after a volcanic eruption. The Elpra who crossed the seas all settled in Founderston — then a jerry-built settlement around a fort and river port. They were welcomed for their highly cultivated skills in silk making — and for the relics, the bones of St Lazarus. The relics were housed in the Temple. The islanders stayed together as a people in the streets they built, in what, over the centuries, became Founderston’s Old Town. In fact, up until eighty years before Sandy was born, the Old Town was predominantly peopled by the dark-skinned, curly-haired people, and would be still, were it not for a cholera epidemic, and the two contaminated wells in the Old Town which caused more than half the epidemic’s deaths.

The Tiebolds were another story. Sandy had encountered plenty of Tiebolds in his history courses at
school. They were impossible to miss — the histories were full of them, sometimes scoundrels, but usually worthy citizens. The family appeared as politicians and soldiers, scientists and churchmen — the current Grand Patriarch, Erasmus Tiebold, was a cousin of Chorley Tiebold’s father.

Of course, the most
famous
Tiebold was, in fact, a Cooper. Grace Cooper was only eighteen when she first entered the Place and discovered she could catch dreams. Her father owned a tobacco shop, and her family hadn’t the resources to rent rooms, and so Grace was at a loss how to sell what she caught. But she had always been an avid reader of the social pages, and it was her knowledge of who was who in society, of the habits, hobbies and tastes of the rich — as reported in
Founderston Monthly Illustrated
— that helped her form an idea.

The story Sandy had heard was this: Grace Cooper had turned up one day at a famous dressmaker’s when a certain racy lady of fashion was there for a fitting. The dreamhunter told this perfumed person, ‘This is what I can do for you.’ She was invited to turn up at a house party at the woman’s country place. The woman said to Grace, ‘You shall be my rabbit in the hat.’

On her first night in the country house, full of a dream she had caught only two days before, and ready to sleep deeply — because she had deprived herself of sleep in order to keep the dream fresh — Grace lay down and filled forty rooms with her dream. The guests
found themselves fleeing cross-country, night and day, as two lovers pursued by enemies who wanted to keep them apart. Grace set the sleepers afloat in boats down dark streams fringed by bulrushes. She laid them down in an embrace in the sweet damp summer grass. Some of the male guests found themselves in the head and body of the woman as she watched her lover defy their pursuers, filled with fear and admiration for him. Some female guests found themselves in the mind and body of the man as he lay over his lover touching her tenderly and gazing into her face. Some sleepers moved from one to the other. And all woke moved, refreshed, excited by their thoughts and their bodies. They could talk of nothing else all the next day. It was beyond anything that any of them had experienced, or even heard reported.

At breakfast their hostess pulled her rabbit out of the hat — she introduced her guests to her young dreamhunter.

GRACE COOPER WAS
an overnight sensation. From then on she was very much in demand in certain circles, at some houses, though it must be said that there were mothers who would keep their daughters away from any house at which Grace Cooper was to be a guest. Grace was the toast of — as the newspapers said — ‘the fast set.’ Grace Cooper and her dreams were disturbing to polite society in a way that Maze Plasir was not. Plasir conducted his business with privacy and discretion, and could only
project his dreams into rooms right next to his own. Grace Cooper, despite the frivolous content of her dreams, had powers of projection rivalled only by those of Tziga Hame. When she dreamed, her dream was shared by as many people as could be packed in comfort into some two hundred square metres space. Many people tasted her dreams, and her influence was great. For instance, it was for Grace Cooper that the first dream palace, the Rainbow Opera, was built. Shortly before the Opera was completed, Grace Cooper had married the dashing, but debt-laden, Chorley Tiebold.

As Sandy walked along beside Laura, this Tiebold/Hame, he wasn’t feeling too star-struck. In fact he felt he could be of some use to Laura, who, after all, had been a sheltered schoolgirl up until only a few months ago. There was so much that Laura didn’t know and should, Sandy thought. She had become a dreamhunter naturally, but haphazardly. Her father and aunt hadn’t bothered to explain the life, had possibly only ever talked about it in a vague, self-glamorising way. Her father may even have hoped she wouldn’t become a dreamhunter — the fact she had attended Founderston Girls’ Academy suggested quite different ambitions. Laura Hame was adrift, dabbling, wasting time and money, buying the texts like a good schoolgirl, wearing the correct uniform, but — to Sandy Mason’s mind — she was adrift. After all, what had she said about catching Starry Beach — that she wanted to ‘have a look at it’? As though the Place was
a big store, and she was a lady of fashion out shopping with a fat purse.

‘So —’ Sandy said, breaking into the perfect, uncanny silence of the Place, ‘you want to catch Starry Beach to “have a look at it”, but not to sell it?’

‘There’s something I want to learn.’

‘About Starry Beach?’

Laura said, ‘Have you ever shared it?’

‘No. I told you I come from south of the Corridor. I only shared dreams once I came north to stay with my uncle.’

Laura nodded. Then she seemed to decide to confide. ‘In Starry Beach the friends around the bonfires wonder about a line of lights moving through the forest on the hills above them. I caught a dream where I was
among
the lights on the hill. My dream was a reverse view of Starry Beach. Starry Beach is a healing dream and my dream was a nightmare. I guess I’m just checking all the angles.’

Sandy was perplexed. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘you want to know what the two dreams
mean
in relation to each other?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a very strange approach to dreamhunting.’

Laura shrugged.

‘And that’s your plan?’ Sandy said. He thought she was very odd — one of those people with an impractical amount of intellectual curiosity.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘my
plan
. I also want to learn how to
walk for days and days. And I want to learn how to make something.’

‘Make what? Are you talking about the material world? You know dreamhunters don’t really deal with the material, except money, water and shoe leather.’

Laura Hame wore an airy, secretive look. She said that all the girls at her former school were making beaded snoods for St Lazarus’s Day gifts.

‘What the hell is a snood?’ said Sandy.

‘A woven bag to wrap around loosely bundled long hair,’ Laura said, informative.

They walked along in silence for a time. Sandy, who felt he was being teased with stories about snood-making, tried again. He said, ‘You know, I think it’s pretty slack of the Body not to have given you your figures.’

Laura said, ‘They might have, I may not have been paying attention. I don’t pay attention sometimes.’

‘You drift,’ Sandy said, pleased to have one of his own views confirmed.

She didn’t answer. She had the look of someone who was listening, trying to identify some distant sound. Then she stopped, squatted and touched the ground. She seemed to pet the surface of the road.

‘What are you doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Whenever I come In, for the first hour or two I get a funny feeling.’ She stood up again and resumed walking. ‘It’s as if it’s telling me something.’

‘You hear the Place talking to you?’ Sandy tried not to sound too sceptical.

‘I don’t hear it. I begin by knowing I’m being talked to, then I get a very strong feeling. I feel I want to
console
the Place, as if it’s crying. Or — or I have to
save it
somehow.’

Sandy told Laura that all that meant — probably — was that she had an affinity with healing dreams. ‘They are all around here. If you feel you want to
stop the suffering
it’s because those dreams are here. Perhaps you’re a healer, like your father.’

‘Maybe.’

This was enough of an invitation for Sandy. He went on to explain some things to Laura, to educate her about affinities. She listened to him with interest. He was right, she had only a sketchy knowledge of what was what — the pedigrees of dreamhunters.

There were Soporifs, Sandy told her. Soporifs like his uncle, who could send people off to sleep. Sandy told Laura he thought she might be a Soporif, if the way she’d nearly knocked out the rangers at Wild River was anything to go by. There were Novelists, Sandy went on. Novelists were very rare dreamhunters who could catch split dreams. Laura’s Aunt Grace was the most celebrated example. ‘Wild River is a split dream, but none of us caught its split version,’ Sandy said.

‘I didn’t even catch Wild River,’ Laura said. ‘I told you that.’

Sandy ignored this. He knew she’d caught a nightmare. But he figured that, since the Body had
licensed her, it must have been an isolated episode. He told her about Healers, with their affinity for healing dreams, and Hames — any dreamhunter with a big penumbra. ‘A whole class of dreamhunters is named after your father!’ Sandy said. ‘Imagine.’

There were Mounters, who may not have big projection zones but could easily overdream others. ‘Your father was a Mounter, too. So is Plasir — he is also what is politely called a Gifter and impolitely a Grafter. Depending on your point of view, he either grafts real people’s faces and bodies on to characters in dreams, or he gives people what they can’t have, or what they’ve lost.’

Lastly, Sandy said, there were Colourists. ‘Colouring is illegal. I have heard a Colourist can infiltrate dreams and suggest things. They’re secret persuaders.’