Moonscatter (46 page)

On the ninth day out from Low Yallor, Serroi settled into a tense brood, stopped thinking and started trying to trust the new things working in her. She sank into a trance. The biters crawled over her, into her eyes, nose, ears, along her legs, into every crevice they could find.

She is aware that this is happening but it doesn't touch her.

She sees Hern staring at her. He stretches out on the narrow deck between the two hulls, reaches out to her and wipes the biters off her face. She thinks of telling him she is all right, that he doesn't need to be troubled about her, but she lets the impulse fade.

The sun moves from near the horizon until it is a double handspan above it.

The trance changes. Now she sees nothing. She sits in darkness, a profound nothingness that is wonderfully restful.

Now she sees a fire burning before her, what it burns is not clear at first, then she sees it is burning her body. She is no longer in that body, yet somehow she is in a body. She knows that because she stretches out a hand. She can see the hand. It is solid, small, green. Her hand. She puts her hand in the fire that is burning but not consuming her body. Her hand burns, the bones are black inside translucent, fire-colored flesh.

The burning hand moves.

It touches: a feather-headed reed. The reed crisps to ash.

It touches: the water. Steam rushes up about the hand. Red and yellow fish swim between the fire-colored fingers, swim unconcerned past blue-white billows of steam, evade the groping fingers with ease.

It touches: a trumpet-shaped bloom, a bright blue bloom with a golden throat. Smooth blue, cool blue. So cool it cools the fingers' fire, cools the fire to water, the water drips away. The hand is green and opaque again.

Green hand holding cool blue bloom.

A vine coils tender tendrils about the slim green wrist.

The slim green fingers stroke the vine, trace it down and down, into the water, into the mud. In black ooze green fingers close around a fat knobby root, feel the slick glassy skin, wrench the root free of the ooze.

The hand is out of the water. The tuber rests on its palm and begins to seethe and boil, reduces itself after a moment to a creamy white liquid. Black biters hover over the liquid, then dart away.

Serroi blinked. There were no longer any biters around her. Hern was back in the other hull, free of biters also. The craft was skating along across the water, wind-driven, humming, hissing, creaking.

“So you're back.”

“So I am.” She robbed at burning eyes with a hand that felt numb. Carefully she straightened her legs, began massaging her aching knees, first one, then the other as she looked about for any sign of the vine in her dream. Nothing. She wrinkled her nose. Yesterday nearly every clump of reeds seemed to sport the nodding blue blooms, right now she couldn't see a single one. She sighed, glanced at the sun. “Time to eat soon.”

“Umph.”

“You're grumpy today.”

“Nipped to death, bite by bite.”

“With a little luck no more of that.”

“What?” He sat up; the boat lurched, water splashing over the sides.

“I think so.” She patted a yawn. “Depending on if we can find one of those vines.” She yawned again. “The ones with the blue flowers.”

“Like that?” He pointed.

Beyond the edge of the sail she saw a touch of blue. “Right.” She crawled forward and began uncleating the halyard. “You want to be helpful, you could toss the anchor overside when I get the sail down.”

The juice from the crushed and simmered root spread over their skin kept off the biters but did nothing for the tedium.

Day in, day out, sitting or lying without moving because the boat answered to most movements, lurching, dipping, swaying. Air warm and moist, heavy and humming, the wind always blowing, day and night blowing inland. The boat skating over water three feet deep or less some of the time, blundering by chance into the channel of the river that rose in the mountains and emptied by Low Yallor into the Sinadeen, the channel they kept losing and finding again. One day melting into another, all the same, eternally the same. Sleeping at night, sail down, anchor overside, boat tugging at the anchor line, never sleeping well, never tired enough to rest without nightmare and constant waking. Picking through the diminishing supply of charcoal. Measuring out grudged handfuls of the herbs for the herb tea of the fenekeln. Endlessly netting fish to supplement meager trail rations.

Tedium, tedium, TEDIUM.

They fretted at each other and fretted at themselves. Hern began to brood about what was happening in the mijloc. For days he kept gnawing at it like a chini pup gnawing a boot, kept going over and over and over the same ground until Serroi felt like screaming. Did scream. A bitter shouting match relieved some of the tension but both began to wind tight again when day after day passed and the mountains were not even a hint on the horizon.

As he brooded, Hern grew steadily more certain that the whole quest was a mockery, there was no Coyote, no Mirror. All this was just to get them both out of Yael-mri's hair. He fussed with this idea, argued with Serroi and stared past the sail at the empty western sky.

Near sundown on a day that was like all the rest, they saw a jagged blue line etched into the cloudless blue of the sky. A ghostly guess at first, on the next day the line bloomed into a mountain range.

Each day the mountains were fractionally higher and clearer.

The wind began to grow erratic. One day it was only a pat against the cheek and the boat sat still in the water, the sail flapping idly against the mast. They unshipped the poles and tried moving the boat that way. And went from disaster to disaster, sending the boat in complicated caracoles, getting the poles stuck in the mud, left clinging to them while the boat slid gently from under their feet, nearly capsizing their craft more than once. By necessity, they learned finally how much pressure to apply and how to apply it together, and learning this earned an unasked-for bonus, a good night's sleep.

They woke stiff and sore to hear the wind blowing again, to feel the boat rocking under them as it fought the anchor.

The patches of reeds closed in around them and the water shallowed even more. On the tenth day after they sighted the mountains, the double bow knifed into a hump of mud and stuck there. Hern used his weight to rock the boat while Serroi shoved with the pole, trying to push them off the hump. The boat didn't budge. Cursing fervently Hern stripped, slid into the murky water. Rope biting into his shoulder he planted his feet in the ooze and hauled the boat free.

Half an hour later the craft was stuck again on a narrow mudbar that lay just beneath the surface of the water. This time they managed to pole it off. It grounded again and again that day before they gave up and settled for the night. They were slathered with stinking black mud, thumbnail leeches plastered over legs and feet, borer worms coiled thick in their flesh. They lay staring at the sky, too weary to attempt anything more strenuous than breathing.

Serroi twitched, gritted her teeth and rolled up onto her knees.

Hern opened one bleary bloodshot eye, saw her grinning at him. “You're no eye's delight yourself,” he said.

“No.” She dipped the waterbucket overside and brought it up half full of water. She eased herself and the bucket onto the mid-deck. “Get yourself up here if you can without sinking us.”

“Hah.” He crawled up beside her, stretched out flat.

Serroi washed the mud from his legs, set rag and bucket aside and began stroking her fingertips down along the solid flesh of his leg. As she moved from groin to toes, she felt dozens of sharp twitches like minute fishhooks set into her own flesh. Humming softly, she curled both hands about his thigh, thumb to thumb, slid them slowly down over his knees, along his sturdy calves and feet, driving out ahead of them the borer worms, dislodging the grey and swollen leech discs, healing the holes and sucker wounds. When she finished the second leg, she sat up and rubbed at her back. “You're clean. Be nice, Dom. Fetch me some more water.”

He sat up, scratched at a knee. “Yes, mama.”

“Fool.”

“Your fool, love. Value me.”

“Oh I do. More on dry land though.”

“Hah. Hand me that bucket.”

She flattened her legs on the deck, looked them over, sighed “Done for now. I hate to think about tomorrow.”

He grunted. When she looked over her shoulder, he was pouring water through the strainer. He saw her watching. “Thought we could use something hot.”

“One of your better ideas.” She swung around and eased herself off the mid-deck into the other hull. “There's a round of cheese and some waybread left. I don't feel up to fooling with much more. You?”

“No.” He gathered the ends of the straining cloth and lifted it off the sooty cookpot. “We'll have to leave the boat fairly soon. Be more trouble than it's worth.” He reached over the rail and sloshed the cloth about in the water. “Shouldn't be too far to the edge of the Dar. I can already see the brush on the hillsides.”

Serroi looked up from peeling wax off the cheese. “Dry land. You know how good that sounds?”

He chuckled, wrung the cloth out and draped it over the rail to dry. “I'm growing webs between my fingers and toes.” On the mid-deck he opened the firebox, got the fire going and set the water on to boil. “Any idea where that damn river is now?”

“Not the faintest.” She set the cheese on the cutting board and began slicing it into thick chunks. “I did try searching for it. All this water, it messes up my outreach.” She pushed the hair off her face closed her fingers about the small leather pouch that held the tajicho, ran her eyes along the line of mountain, stopped as she saw something she'd seen a hundred times before but hadn't taken in. “Hern, look.” She waved the knife at the mountains.

“At what?”

“Didn't Yael-mri say we were to look for a dormant volcano?”

“Yael-mri, hunh!”

“Forget all that, isn't that a volcanic cone right there?” She waggled the knife. “Look at it.”

A truncated triangle, it rose above the rest of the peaks, its elegant simplicity of form notably other than the jagged, irregular summits of the lower mountains. “Mount Santac,” she said. “Coyote's Mirror.”

Hern looked down at his feet, flexed his toes. “Zhag,” he muttered.

Serroi laid the knife beside the cheese and began unwrapping the waybread. “I know. A long miserable walk and we can't even be sure he … it … will be there.”

The next day was a repetition of that slow painful slogging through the marsh. And the next. Then they broke through a solid band of reeds into the river channel. With the help of the reeds they kept to the channel from then on, following the wide loops and twists of the river. The wind rose and died, rose again, blowing in the wrong direction. Foot by foot they fought the strengthening current until they left the reeds behind and with them the Dar.

Just before midday on the nineteenth day since they sighted the mountains they reached the first rapids. They beached the boat for the last time, assembled the things they would need for the trek to the mountain and set out walking along the riverbank.

By sundown they were some little way into the foothills, eating roasted fish and groundnuts beside a river now small and noisy. Serroi sipped at her herb tea as she watched the flames flicker above branches neatly layered within a ring of stones. She had a feeling of unfolding as if she'd been wrapped tight about herself for so long that she'd forgotten how to stretch out. The cool crispness in the air, the trees in spring bud here where the seasons mirrored those on the far side of the Sinadeen, the green smell of the spears of new grass pushing through the old, these things woke in her a lightness of the spirit and a feeling that the long troubling struggle was near its end. She smiled at the flames, the pungent tea warm inside her, looked up and met Hern's questioning gaze. He was rubbing thoughtfully at his calves, flexing his feet, working his ankles.

“Two days. Three maybe,” she said. “If we hold out and the way doesn't get too bad.”

He straightened, drew his thumb across his chin. “Coyote's Mirror,” he murmured. “Hunh. Coyote's Mirage.”

“Thought of what you might look for in that mirage if it's not.”

He shrugged. “What are we fighting? Nearga-nor. Your Noris. Floarin and her army. Seems to me I'd better get something to fight the army and let you and your friends in the Biserica take care of the magic.” His eyes narrowed. He stared past her, reached for the Sleykyn sword.

Serroi swung around. A small grey beast with a bushy tail, big ears, a pointed nose, hovered on the edge of the circle of firelight, slanted eyes glinting red. It had a raffish, jaunty look, an un-beastlike intelligence in its red eyes. She thrust her hand palm out at Hern. “Wait.” Her eyes on the beast, she called, “Coyote?”

The beast canted his head to one side, ears pricking. He grinned at her, red tongue lolling, then swung around and trotted off, the last thing she saw the insolent waving of that scruffy tail.

For two days they followed the river, climbing laboriously up the steeply canted bank, the perfect cone of the volcano hovering always over them, the grey beast scampering effortlessly before them. And he haunted the campfires each night. Though Serroi grew more certain with each appearance that the beast was indeed Coyote or at least had something to do with him, Hern watched it with angry eyes, convinced that she was fooling herself, that the wit she claimed to see in the beast was as much a mirage as the whole quest.

On the evening of the fifth day of the climb they reached the timberline. The snowclad slope stretched another quarter mile above them, steep, radiantly pure line. The stream they followed came from a high thin cut in the rim of the cone, fell in a foaming rush half the distance, smoothed out for the rest, flowed past them in a black glass slide. There was no sign anything lived here but coneys and rockhoppers.