Path of the Crushed Heart: Book Four of the Serpent Catch Series (13 page)

Tull suddenly realized that Chaa had been working toward this moment all along, had been waiting for a genuine commitment. Chaa had known that Tull would first have to lose himself before he could learn to give himself. Tull looked into Chaa’s narrow face, into his deep eyes, knowing that Chaa had somehow arranged it, had at the very least permitted Tull to taste death.

“I know you are weak, but the moment is coming when you must take your Spirit Walk. Once you learn this art, you will find that in the past you were a child living in a small town, someone who had come to know the meadows and the bushes around his house well, but now you will be stepping into a far larger world, with ice fields and jungles and forests that no single man has ever explored.

“This is what it means to be a Spirit Walker. At this moment you taste freedom, and you think it is ecstasy. Now you will explore the bounds of it. I want you to bring that ecstasy to others, help me give them their freedom. That is what the art of Spirit Walking is for.”

Tull closed his eyes, an ancient Pwi sign of acceptance. “When will I be ready to learn?”

Chaa sighed deeply. “Learning to connect is a difficult act. It can only be done when you are at the gates of death.”

“I’m not afraid,” Tull said.

“I know,” Chaa answered. “If you are to connect, it is best to do so with a small child. The weight of a short life is easier to bear.”

“Wayan,” Tull said. “I want to connect with Wayan.”

“He is not good,” Chaa answered. “Though he is small, he has endured much.”

“I lived through as much,” Tull answered. “I too had Jenks for a father.”

“Very well.”

“When should we do it?”

“Now, if you wish,” Chaa said. “There are many paths to the Land of Shapes, as many ways as there are to die. I’ll take you to the border for only a moment, if you wish.”

Tull nodded.

Chaa said, “All right. Lay your head on my lap.”

Tull found that his heart was pounding just a bit, with controlled fear. The night seemed deep and quiet, yet somewhere in the distance a dog howled.

Nearby in the fireplace the pitch in a log popped, and the log shifted, stirring the coals. Tull lay down, his head in Chaa’s lap, and Tull sought for his own inner peace.

Chaa whispered, “Close your eyes, Tull. Trust me. I have no seer’s tea to make this easier, so you must not fight me.”

Tull nodded, and closed his eyes. He felt Chaa’s fingers steal over his nose and mouth. Tull tried not to fight, tried not to push Chaa away, but nature took over and he twisted.

Chaa held on, and Tull became dizzy as his lung sought for air, tried to shove Chaa’s hand away.

“There are as many paths to the Land of Shapes as there are ways to die,” Chaa said. “Do not worry, my friend.”

He held tight.

Tull gasped, struggled for air. His lungs were burning, and he kicked wildly, and spun as if he were in a great whirlwind.

Suddenly he found himself floating free, the fire of his soul rushing south over barren lands. He thought of Wayan, south somewhere, and moved toward the child as if following a distant voice.

Tull found Wayan held captive at Muskrat Creek in the dingy storage cellar of a burned-out home. Six Blade Kin held Tchavs, Vo-olai, Wayan, and several others as they waited for a ship to carry them back to Bashevgo.

Tull floated over their sleeping forms.

The lightning of Wayan’s soul flashed in shades of turquoise as he hovered between fear and despair. Tull floated nearby, and tried to manipulate the lightning of his own soul, tried to force the pale fronds outward. They would not bend to his will.

Do not force it,
Chaa whispered.
Close your eyes. Let your spirit eyes see, let your heart touch him.

Tull relaxed, imagined only that he wanted to touch Wayan, and the pale fronds slithered outward, across the gulf.

The fingers of light touched Wayan, moved through the clot of his soul, and Tull sensed the boy’s uneasy sleep. He imagined caressing Wayan.

Taste him now. Taste his hungers and his passions.

The lightning wriggled across the shadow of Tull’s soul, entwined itself around Wayan’s own fiery tendrils, and Tull felt images come to mind, brief flashes like snowflakes blurring past his eyes in a blizzard, blinding images that melded into one another: Jenks was in many of them, a beefy-armed giant more than twice Wayan’s height.

The great man often roared, sometimes slapped Wayan hard enough to knock him to the floor. There were images of Wayan hiding in thickets and under his bed, brief confused explosions where Jenks would capture him and chain him to his bedpost, memories of nights listening to the whistle of wind or the sound of squirrels scurrying over the roof.

In one particularly strong memory, after Jenks had slapped the boy hard enough to knock him across the room, Wayan’s mother had warned Jenks to go easier.

“He’s all right,” Jenks had answered. “Pwi kids are indestructible. You might as well try to break an anvil with a hammer.”

“How many Pwi kids did you try to kill before you figured that out?” his mother had asked, and after that, Jenks called Wayan “Stonehead,” as if to somehow reinforce in both the child’s mind and in his mother’s that you could beat a Pwi all you want and never really hurt him.

Yet for every memory of violence, Wayan cherished three or four of kindness—being held by his mother and resting his head on her breast, the treats Jenks gave out when feeling guilty for one of his crueler outbursts, playing in the tidal pools down in Smilodon Bay.

And then Tull saw himself through Wayan’s eyes, rescuing Wayan from his natural father.

Tull was taller and stronger than other men, but Wayan saw him as a giant with rippling muscles, a giant who could protect him from everything.

Wayan, at age four, did not conceive of Tull as a mortal. Instead, he was an absolute—a sun that rose every morning, a mountain that never moved. Tull was protector and friend, and Fava was the feeder and the source of all wisdom.

Tull found that Wayan’s love for Fava was more than a little arousing. The child was enamored by her touch, by the smell of her hair.

And suddenly, Tull was being pulled back to his body, over the barren, rock-strewn earth.

Tull lay for a long while, reconnecting himself to his own physical shell.

The emotions came, threatened to rend him. The comfort he often took by curling to sleep by the fireplace. The fear of Jenks as a giant—a towering beast with unimaginable intent who dished out pain and favors without reason. The dull ache of teething. The thrill of sleeping next to Fava. The nightmare of listening to squirrels on the roof crack nuts, fearing that they were small monsters cracking bones with their teeth. Dreams of grasshoppers eating his legs. Being captured by Blade Kin in a swamp and carried to a land rumored to be ruled by Adjonai, the God of Fear.

All the horror and hope of Wayan’s short life came at once, unmooring Tull, threatening to sweep his sanity into oblivion the way a tide sweeps sand sculptures from the beach.

Chaa was there holding Tull, calming him with a touch as if Tull were a child himself. Tull’s heart was pounding and his very skin seemed to ache. He wanted to scream the pain out, but Tull found that he could only whimper.

“You did well,” Chaa said. “You did well. For a few nights, you will have horrible dreams. For a few days, you will live in pain. But it will pass. You two have become one.”

***

Chapter 23: Woman’s Magic

Two days later, in the first shadows of evening, Fava and Darrissea and Chaa got up and prepared to sneak Tull down to the docks.

The group gathered in the doorway of the old apartment, while the men made final preparations upstairs—putting on their disguises.

Fava’s younger sisters clung to her legs, trying to keep Fava from leaving. Zhopila cast her eyes around as if to keep from having to look at Fava. Outside, the moon Thor was setting with the sun, and a strong gravitational wind hissed through the streets, rattling the walls of the old apartments, seeping through cracks.

Fava went to her mother, held the woman. Zhopila hugged Fava back, her arms weak, loose. Fava rested her head on her mother’s shoulder, smelling the familiar scent of her hair, and said quietly, “The kwea of this day is good, for I am leaving Bashevgo with my husband. Soon, we can all return home.”

“I will never see you again,” Zhopila cried. “I feel it. You are going to go to the island of the Creators, and you will die there. You might not even get free of Bashevgo. What if the Blade Kin catch you trying to steal a boat?”

“You worry too much,” Fava whispered.

“That is my duty,” Zhopila said, “to worry for my children when they are too stupid to worry for themselves.”

“I am worried, too,” Fava admitted. “I will take care of myself.”

Zhopila pushed Fava back at arm’s length, held Fava’s shoulders, and looked deep into her eyes. “No, you will not take care of yourself,” Zhopila said, as if gauging her. “I have seen you—always giving, always helping others. You will not take care of yourself. You will take care of others.”

“Is that so bad?” Fava asked.

Zhopila reached down, touched Fava’s belly. “If you take care of anyone, take care of this one first. You must stay alive, if only for your child.”

“I will,” Fava said.

Zhopila nodded sincerely. “You are a woman of the old blood, with a child in your belly. Soon, the child will open, and a spirit must enter it. This is a very important time. Did old Vi teach you how to Summon a spirit?”

“No,” Fava whispered. “She did not know I was pregnant.”

The men were stirring by the door, packing up bundles as they prepared to leave.

“That is a shame,” Zhopila said. “As the daughter of a Spirit Walker, you should be able to choose the spirit of your child. When I Summoned you, there were many spirits nearby in the Land of Shapes, anxious to enter your body.

“But I saw the lightning of your soul, so brilliant beyond all others, and I called to you. I knew you were special.

“When you return, I will teach you the woman’s magic, prepare you to Summon a powerful spirit to the body of your child.”

Fava nodded and hugged her mother once again while the others stood by the door. She kissed each of her little sisters one last time and smiled at them, hoping to leave them with good kwea, and then Fava, Darrissea, and Chaa made their way down to the docks. Tull was still weak, too weak to make the journey without resting, but even Wertha remarked at Tull’s rapid recovery.

The streets bustled with people, and the docks smelled strongly of fish and seals, for the fleets were beginning to work in the Straits of Zerai. No one stopped them.

Tull was formidable in his Blade Kin disguise, followed by Chaa dressed as a sorcerer, so deeply robed and cowled and exuding such fierce power that anyone who saw him would merely step aside.

So they passed the guards at the dogs, who merely saluted Tull’s uniform.

They found a tugboat, a newly painted steel vessel with two great turbine engines. It was smaller than Tull wanted—at only forty feet—yet Chaa argued that it would serve their needs well, for it had a broad hull and a deep keel and would not flip over in a storm, and since the engines were powered by one of the Starfarer’s ancient energy cubes, no one would have to feed it fuel.

The harbor master spotted them cleaning the boat, preparing it to sail, and questioned them.

Chaa told him some story, off at whispering distance. The harbor master looked frightened, then allowed them to work in peace as they loaded the boat with food and supplies. The job took the entire day.

Long after dark, under the cover of night, Phylomon crept down to the docks and joined them.

He immediately set sail into the uncharted waters of the north, where ice floes were so common that only Craal’s bravest sailors would go there to hunt giant Pleistocene walruses that sometimes weighed as much as a young mammoth.

The ice in the north was thick, still breaking up, and they took four days in a zigzag course, trying to navigate to an island drawn on a crude map—written from memory by a blood-eater.

The map was little help, but the creature had known the number of days it had sailed, and the general direction it had come from.

The northern winds bit down on the small boat, freezing those inside. Brief winter storms buffeted them often, sometimes arriving and passing in minutes. All but Phylomon spent their days huddled in thick blankets.

By day, they searched the horizon for signs of an island, and at night they let their vessel float, keeping their bow to the wind in hopes that they would not be thrown too far off.

After searching for the island for nearly a week, Phylomon finally admitted that perhaps they had drifted too far off course.

“We can be sure only that we are in the right ocean,” he said. “We probably passed it in the dark during a squall.”

The wind had been blowing them west, and he set the course farther east for two days, then zigzagged, heading north and south.

After a week, he imagined they had missed it again, and they sailed east-west courses, then sailing north a little at a time.

Steadily, Tull’s health improved, so that he could get out of bed for an hour at a time. Fava nursed him, and found him to be pliant, undemanding.

Though she had never thought of him as trying before, she now saw his behavior as something unnatural. So one day while Phylomon slept in the hold and Darrissea sat in the cabin, driving the ship while watching through the glass windows, Fava asked Tull about the change.

“Okanjara,” Tull said, I Am Free. “Every slave who has escaped Craal or Bashevgo has said those words, but I feel it. I am free.”

“Of course you are free,” Fava said. “We’ve all escaped.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Tull answered. “When Mahkawn stabbed me, I saw you on the far side of the room, and I had been thinking of all the things I want in life, and suddenly I saw everything—my family, my friends, my dreams—all ripped away, and something strange happened.

“I realized suddenly that for all my life, I’d been carrying a weight on my shoulders, all these little burdens. I had all these dreams of happiness, and I’d always thought that if I worked hard enough, they would all come true.

“I would get married and father a child and build my house and make my fortune and I would somehow reach this moment when it would all be mine—everything that I had ever wanted or dreamed of would be mine, and happiness would be like an apple plucked fresh from the tree, and I would finally grasp it.

“Instead, when Mahkawn tried to kill me, in that moment when all my hopes were crushed, nothing mattered anymore. I didn’t need the apple. I could already taste perfect freedom. I still taste it.”

Tull stopped talking, took a deep breath. Fava looked at him, puzzled. “What are you saying? That hope is evil, or that it doesn’t matter? In a world like ours, what more can we have than hope?”

Tull studied the horizon. “You hope for peace. I have peace. I think that if you were destroyed, perhaps you would find it, too. That is all I can say.”

“But not everyone can have peace, not when there are Slave Lords and Blade Kin,” Fava said, “all trying to take it from us.”

“Yes, you can have peace,” Tull said. “Inside you. The Blade Kin and Slave Lords cannot steal it away. They search for it too. The Slave Lords
consume
—wealth, land, people—heaping riches upon themselves. They think that if they can gratify themselves enough, then they will attain it. I guess, in my heart, I was a Slave Lord.

“Then there are the Blade Kin—Pwi who imagine that if they can free themselves of kwea, they will find peace. You think that the Blade Kin are purposely cruel, but they do not see themselves so. They have so trained out their own compassion, and then fear that they cannot be touched. They see themselves as tools, like iron blades, that exist only to bend others to their wills. Perhaps if they were not misled, many of them would also find peace, but they have been fooled by the Slave Lords into believing that they, too, will find happiness through gratification.”

“Does this mean that you won’t build me that big house you promised?” Fava joked.

Tull laughed. “I wish you would come live naked with me in the forest until you learn that houses do not matter.”

“I think you say that only because you want to see me naked,” Fava said, and she kissed him.

Tull held her for a long moment, kissing her tenderly. “I mean it. Sometimes, when I am sitting still, I feel inside myself, and I am flying without strain. It’s like I am diving through clouds, the wind ripping at me, tasting the snow and rain on my tongue, and I am all alone.

“Other times, I feel as if I were in a forest, when all the trees around me close others out, and in that place, I feel perfect contentment. I want to share it with others, but I don’t know how.

“Should I burn their houses and chop off their limbs, then threaten them with death hoping that when their dreams are destroyed, they will find peace inside? Could such a plan even work? I can’t even imagine words to tell you what I feel. And I wonder, if you were destroyed, would you feel it too?

“Every moment I feel as if I am a redwood, with my branches touching the naked sky, and the sun is rising and I want to sing anthems to all the small creatures on the shadowed ground below me, ‘Listen, listen, let us taste the light.’ All I can hope is that you can find it.

“So I ask you, will you come live naked with me in the forest?”

Fava shook her head. “It wouldn’t work. Zhofwa has blown her kisses on us. When I am with you, I think I too have found happiness. How could I keep searching for something I already possess?”

Tull looked her in the eyes. “I love you. I’ve known the taste of that happiness in your arms,” he said. “It is the closest thing that comes to what I am talking about. But your peace is not lasting. When you watched Mahkawn stab me, I saw you. You lost all the happiness you thought you had.

“I wanted to share this feeling with you. I wanted you to relish it as I do. That is why I came back from the Land of Shapes. To tell you. But now I find that there are no words.”

The wind blew Tull’s dark-red hair in wisps across his face, and Fava thought momentarily of braiding it. She looked down into the cold blue water, felt the salt spray bite her tongue. The wind, the water felt good, but all were colored by kwea, by her fears of the Blade Kin and of the Creators. She touched his hand.

“Don’t give up on me,” she said seriously. “I want to feel what you feel. I wish I were a Spirit Walker, and could touch you, and taste that freedom. In Bashevgo, they say that when the Okansharai comes, he will free us all. So perhaps it can be done.”

Tull glanced up at the sky to the north, at dark gray clouds. “Perhaps we should go inside,” he said, shivering. “It looks as if we are heading into another storm, and I’m getting tired.”

Fava looked up, thought it odd that the storm was not heralded by any stronger winds. Then she saw the island on the horizon, beneath the clouds. “Those are not clouds,” she said after a moment, “those are birds!”

***