Dreamquake: Book Two of the Dreamhunter Duet (16 page)

“What about you, Da? How good were you?”

“Marta was a better musician than I was. So it was probably just as well it was me and not her who fell.” He hauled himself up, gripping the housing of the light. Then he turned to Laura, and she was forced again to regard the ruin of his face, and that frightening look in his eyes—a kind of tremulous pulling together of his attention. He said, “Laura, you know I wasn’t in my right mind when I wrote you that letter.”

Was this an apology? she wondered. “That letter was all I had left of you,” she said. “Of course I took it seriously.”

He touched his scarred forehead. Then he reached for Laura, put an arm around her, and held her.

She closed her eyes and simply basked in being held. She shouldn’t ask any more than this. He couldn’t answer—wasn’t
answerable anymore. When she looked into his eyes now, she saw watchfulness and uncertainty. His love for her was intact—but his understanding wasn’t.

Laura’s father released her.

She said, “Here, let me give you a hand,” and took the bucket from him. They left the lighthouse. Partway down from the tower, Laura stopped. She had spotted something. She shaded her eyes and squinted into the wavering air.

There was someone out there, standing still and straight on the bared beach. The figure was far off, but Laura felt that he or she was looking at her.

Laura clattered down after her father, checking now and then on that watching figure. At the foot of the steps, she returned the bucket to her father, then took a few bounding steps backward, making excuses. “I’m just going for a walk, Da—” Then she was off, running barefoot on the springy stems of beach grass, under the pines, then onto the sand. She ran in a long curve, for the watching figure was moving off the beach and into the dunes, and she had to alter her course in order to intercept him.

As she came closer, Laura could see only bright skin, no clothes. It was Nown, and he was waiting for her, just leading her in among the dunes where they wouldn’t be seen. As she closed the distance between them, she could see that his head was lifted and that he was checking the lines of sight between himself and the top of the lighthouse.

Laura came to a skidding stop before him. She staggered, panting, then folded over a stitch in her side. For a moment all she could hear was her own breathing. Then she heard the sea, and a tern crying as it flew along the line of low breakers. She straightened up and faced her sandman. He held out his arms to her.

She looked over her shoulder at the lighthouse.

“There must be things you want to say,” he said.

She went to him and let him pick her up.

He stooped over her and hurried away, skirting the base of the dunes till they were screened from the lighthouse, and from the sound of waves on the western shore.

Nown stopped within the shade of a high, crescent-shaped dune. Below the dune was a salt pan, and when he set Laura down, her feet cracked its crusted surface and she found herself standing in a shallow trench surrounded by sliding, dirty-white plates of salt.

Nown stood watching her and waiting for her to speak.

She said, “You got my note?”

“No.”

“I sent a note enclosed in a letter to Sandy. I asked him to leave it in the forest.”

“I left the forest when you moved west. I followed you.”

“How did you know where I was?”

“You made me, Laura. You are my compass.”

Laura sat down abruptly in a patch of smashed salt crust. The air was uncomfortably hot nearer the ground, but she wasn’t able to get up again. She had thought of something, and her thought had taken the strength from her legs.

Nown was speaking, volunteering his story—something he didn’t do before she freed him.

“There were many rivers to cross,” he said. “I followed the foothills of the Rifleman Mountains and struck only tributary streams. Sometimes I crossed over into the Place, but the distances there are too great. And at the coal mine beside the river—I don’t know its name, Laura—there were miners, and barges coming and going, and a river ford with a ferry on a rope. I had to wait till it was dark and disguise myself under a blanket. I had to steal the blanket. The ferryman was drunk. There was one threatening deluge on my journey—and I had
to burrow in under a bank. It took time, but I got here without getting my feet wet.”

“Your literal feet,” Laura said.

“The feet you gave me.”

For some reason this sounded like an accusation. Laura couldn’t tell whether she was being blamed for the shortcomings of Nown’s feet or for failing to respect them
as
feet. “Nown,” she said. “If you knew where I was because I made you, does that mean that you—I mean the eighth you—knew where my
father
was when he was missing?”

“Yes.”

She took several deep breaths before asking, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I did tell you that since
I
was, then he was still alive. And you strode ahead of me smiling and crying. You didn’t ask me where he was.”

In the shelter of the dune, the salt filled the still air with its dry fumes. Laura was having difficulty thinking. She got up and kept walking. Her sandman followed her. His weighty steps made wider circles of cracks in the crusted salt.

After a time she asked, “Does anything I say matter to you the way it did before you were free?”

“I don’t yet know.”

“But you followed me here.”

“Yes.”

She led him out onto the beach again. The tide was coming in, and, as she looked back between the gap in the dunes, Laura could see that it was making more progress on the western shore than where they were, so that the sea seemed to pile up against the barricade of the Spit.

She was more comfortable in the open air. Nown had come close to her until she was standing in his shadow. She was sure he’d done it deliberately—had noticed that she was
panting and that she’d put up a hand to shade her eyes. Without looking at him, she pressed her hand against his side, his gritty skin and mock ribs and ridges of muscle. She said, “From now on, could you please tell me anything you think I might need to know?”

He was silent.

“Nown?”

Laura could have sworn she heard him sigh. She glanced at him, but his face had no expression, or none she could interpret. Perhaps she had only expected to hear a sigh. He was looking at a bank of cloud closing in on the Spit faster than the light sea breeze. Or at least he seemed to be looking at it. She asked, “Can you see that?”

“There are layers of wind. One is warmer,” he said. Then, “Laura—my experience of freedom is limited. So, therefore, is my experience of making judgments. I cannot yet know what I will have to consider each time I am considering what you need to know. My knowledge of your needs has been guided by your instructions. At times I have tried to imagine, without guidance from you, what you might need. I have made mistakes. After you caught the nightmare, you were weeping, and I picked you up to rock the tears out of you—I had seen that done. You did stop crying, but you didn’t approve of my action. I cannot trust the sympathy I have for you to guide me. We are too different, you and I. If you ask me to take care of all your needs, are you then giving me your freedom? Why would you free me only to hand over your own freedom?”

“Nown!” Laura had to stop him. He was retreating into a thicket of philosophical complications, and she was sure that it was a deeper and thornier thicket than either of them could imagine. She stepped onto one of his feet in order to stretch up and cover his mouth with her hand. “Shh,” she said. “That’s enough.”

He pulled her hand away. “Besides,” he said, “if you ask me to tell you anything you might need to know—to remember to tell you from now on anything you might need to know—are you asking me to
promise?
I think a promise must be like a law. I understand laws. They are what I’ve lived by. If a promise is like law, then, even free, I think I might do whatever I promised. Come what may.”

“But—no—I released you,” Laura said. “You’re free.”

“I’m free to promise,” Nown said. “And if I choose to make promises, I’ll honor them.”

“Don’t promise then!
Don’t
tell me what I might need to know.”

Nown’s eyes blackened and glittered. “Don’t say that.”

“You can’t possibly still be susceptible to my orders.”

“I find I am. I still want to do what you want.”

“Well—stop!” Laura ordered, exasperated.

“No,” Nown said.

She started to laugh, stood laughing, turned into the wind and the sunlight, which was fiercely hot, concentrated by the encroaching cloud. She felt happy, in a crazy way. Nown was a fearful responsibility, but when she was with him, the feeling she had of being trapped and baffled just disappeared. He was so contradictory—scrupulous and untamed at the same time—that in his presence all the things that had hemmed her in seemed to melt away. Her father was broken and beyond reproach, Rose was right to hate her, and she had been wrong to keep her own promises. But Nown made her feel like God on the first Sabbath; he was a great responsibility, but he was
good
, like the world, and being with him made Laura sleepy with happiness.

They kept wandering along the Spit, away from the sentinel lighthouse and Laura’s human company. They didn’t talk. It seemed that Nown had nothing further to tell Laura, and she, finding herself so content with him, stopped thinking altogether.

The massed gray clouds closed in on them, and a wind came up, a constant, cool, gritty wind. It scalped the dunes and scattered sand into the waters of Coal Bay. As the tide came in, and the waves grew bigger and steeper, water began to percolate through the Spit itself, so that the dunes grew damp and gave differently behind each step they took. Nown hiked up to the spine of the dunes and walked there. Laura followed him with difficulty, till he picked her up again and went along with her, rocking her as he swayed.

“Can you see the sea at all?” she asked.

“No.”

“Is it like walking on a bridge, then? A bridge over nothingness?”

“But there are birds,” Nown said.

Laura looked where she supposed he was looking and saw the diminishing dunes and bleak, choppy sea and, at the very end of the Spit, flashes of white, not foam on whitecaps but the myriad bodies of roosting gannets. Even in the stiff wind there were gannets out over the sea, weaving back and forth, scanning the water for prey. Hard-pressed and hopeful now, for it couldn’t be easy for the birds to spot fish under the agitated waves. Still, every few seconds one of the great, gliding creatures would pause, and close its wings, and fall, an accelerating white dart, into the water. The bird would disappear and would surface sometime later, shaking itself off, clutching at the air till the air shouldered its weight, and flying up to rejoin the rest of the hungry patrol.

Laura asked Nown to set her on her feet. She leaned
against him, sheltered from the worst of the wind, and watched the gannets fish. She felt she should applaud these dives as the lighthouse keeper’s son did.

They stayed watching for a long time, till it was too cold and gray, and the birds became hard to see because the day was coming to a close. Then Laura put up her arms, and Nown picked her up and set off along the narrow backbone of the Spit toward the pale streak of the distant lighthouse.

Laura had her sandman crawl in under the keeper’s house, where tangles of harvested seaweed were drying among the timber piles. She told him to stay still and hidden.

In the early hours of the morning, when the dependable westerly had dropped again, she climbed out of her bed—a mattress on the floor beside her father’s—and crept out of their hut and under the keeper’s house. She found Nown by touch. She lay down with her back against his body and drew his arms around her. Then she went back to sleep again, cradled in a nest of shaped sand and snarls of seaweed.