Sunshaker's War (5 page)

“But they weren't no ordinary clouds, no
siree
,”
Minniebelle confided. “They'uz like them clouds in that movie thing
—Close Encounters
,
or whatever ye call it: that'un 'bout them spaceships, and that crazy man made a model of out of the mashed taters. Only I watched real close, an' I seen shapes in there. Couldn't make 'em out, but they looked kinda like boats, or somethin': long, skinny boats with great wide sails. And then them clouds come back and they all vanished.”

“So you think we've been havin' spacemen visit us up here in Sullivan Cove?” JoAnne managed a serious laugh in spite of her discomfort, for Minniebelle had certainly seen true—just interpreted it wrong.

“I've seen stuff 'bout it in the
Enquirer
:
Folks loses time, or forgets where they were, and all; and they find out them saucer folks has carried 'em off. Shoot, I hear they even carried off Elvis!”

JoAnne rolled her eyes. That clinched it: Minniebelle was about to slip right on off, and she didn't know whether to be grateful for the change of topic or worried about the poor old woman's mind.

“An' another thing ain't natural,” Minniebelle went on blissfully, before JoAnne could reach any sort of conclusion. “All this rain! Why, law, girl, I've seen rain, but nothin' like this. Straight down all day. Clear sky one minute, and clouds the next—and…why, land, the dreams I been havin'!”

JoAnne's eyes narrowed abruptly. “What
kinda
dreams?”

“Bad dreams, gal: dreams 'bout hatred and killin', and…and
monsters
!”

“I been havin' nightmares too, and so has Davy. Can't hardly sleep for 'em.”

“
I
dreamed I got mad at Marcus and stuck a knife in 'im! Woke up in the night and I had one in my hand, and was walkin' out the back door toward his trailer!”

“Jesus, Minniebelle, you be careful!”

“
Jesus
,”
Minniebelle observed pointedly, “ain't got
nothin'
to do with it.”

“Minniebelle!”

“So where's your young 'un now?”

“I got
two
,”
JoAnne snorted with unexpected impatience.

“I got ears to
hear
the littl'un; it's the big'un I was wonderin' 'bout.”

“He's over at the lake with his buddies and their gals, I reckon—'cept his gal ain't up here yet. Some kinda pre-graduation cook-out, or somethin'. He's graduatin' tonight: first honor.”

“Smart boy, I always said. Smart and polite and good lookin
'
—real
good lookin'—'cept he needs a haircut. But weird.”

“I'd thank you not to talk 'bout Davy like that!”

“But he
is
!
Everybody knows it. Why, them things he goes on about—”

“Goin' on 'bout things don't make you weird,” JoAnne snapped, feeling her day's suppressed irritations start to escape their bonds. “Davy knows things, is all. He
likes
to know things. There's two things that makes folks think you're weird, Minniebelle,” she added, her voice rising with every word, “knowin' too much—and not knowin' enough! Up here folks say Davy's strange 'cause he's smart and interested in things most folks ain't. But down there in Athens where he's gonna go to school it's you and me that'd be strange 'cause we're so ignorant! Do I make myself clear?”

“Books don't make you smart, neither, gal,” Minniebelle gave her back promptly, though her usual feistiness was edged with something harder and her blue eyes looked cold as steel.

“They sure don't!” a male voice rumbled unexpectedly, as Big Billy sauntered out of the house, stuffing the tail of a clean white T-shirt into his jeans, though he seemed to have already sweated through it. JoAnne jumped a little, having neither heard him come in the back door nor tromp down the hall.

“Maybe me and Minniebelle was havin' a private conversation,” she flared. “Ever think about that?” (What
was
gettin' into her today? She wasn't this bad when she was on the rag, yet she was picking fights everywhere. This had to stop and quickly, before she went
too
far.)

“Looks mighty public to me,” Big Billy drawled. He sat down on the swing and scratched his belly absently. Davy had finally got him to running, and he looked as good as he had in years. He seemed to have dropped another couple of pounds, too, JoAnne noted, trying desperately to shift her train of thought and thus defuse the potentially explosive tension. It was hard, though; good looks didn't help her husband's tongue or his temper, which were no great shakes at the best of times.

“Minniebelle brought us some strawberry jelly,” she managed finally, reaching down to pick up the tomcat that had arrived along with her spouse.

“Strawberries, huh?” Big Billy grunted, casting a distrustful blue eye toward Minniebelle, whom he was a little afraid of. “Surprised you got any. Everything
we've
got's under water.” He swept his hand in an arc before him indicating the flooded bottoms. “Might as well hire Chinese and raise rice.”

“I got me a greenhouse,” Minniebelle beamed. “Don't rain in there 'less
I
want it to.”

“Good jelly too,” JoAnne observed, relieved at the slackening of the previous moment's hostility.

“Have to try some,” Big Billy replied, and fell silent.

“Least it's not rainin',” JoAnne added warily, checking her watch. “Uh, Minniebelle, I hate to do this, but I really need to start gettin' ready for graduation.” She winked at Big Billy over the old lady's head. “Bill'll run you home, won't you, Bill?”

“I reckon,” Big Billy mumbled sourly, starting to rise. “If you don't mind ridin' in a muddy pickup. 'Course I gotta go get it first. Left it over at Dale's.”

“Can't keep nothin' clean round here,” JoAnne offered.

Minniebelle stood up so abruptly JoAnne started, sloshing tea into her lap.
“Well I never!”
the old lady shrilled, like a cat whose tail had been rocked on. “Why don't you just come out and
say
it, 'stead of pussyfootin' around?”

JoAnne gasped incredulously. What in the
world
had brought this on? Minniebelle was a pretty straight shooter, but she wasn't usually rude—and JoAnne thought she had a thicker hide than to get huffy over honest talk.

“Say
what
?”
she finally choked.

“That I ain't wanted here! You can
keep
the damned jelly,” she added. “But don't 'spect nothin'
else
this summer!” Suddenly she was shaking, her wrinkled face red with rage.

The last bonds on JoAnne's control unraveled. “I don't want
nothin'
!”
she shouted back before she could stop. Big Billy's eyebrows nearly intercepted his receding hairline.

“You ain't gonna
get
it, neither!” Minniebelle raged on, heading for the front steps.

“Well, I…” Jo Anne broke off as she saw the gasp of realization that suddenly rounded the old woman's lips, the sudden horrified brightening of her eyes before they filled with tears.

“Why…I…I don't know what made me say that,” Minniebelle sobbed. “I didn't mean it, none of it. I just got real mad of a sudden, and wanted to…to
hurt
somebody.”

“Yeah,” JoAnne whispered shakily, taking her in her arms. “I felt it too.”

Big Billy looked puzzled but went back inside to begin the trek back to Dale's. “Foolishness,” he muttered, as he slammed the door behind him.

The tomcat scratched JoAnne for no obvious reason.

Chapter II:
…
Prophesying War

(a tower—no place—no time)

Silver
—and gray, and crumbling stone, and the persistent clink of the Iron chains that bound him: these filled Fionchadd mac Ailill's days.

How long had he stared at the ill-made walls of his prison? How many risings of sun and moon had passed him by? Except that he was not certain there
was
a sun or moon in this strange shattered place, at least not as there was in Ethlinn's obsidian tower from which he had lately been spirited—though of his time there he remembered little because he had spent all his Power keeping the pain at bay. Here there was only a sporadic brightening in the silver-white haze of the close-looming sky—a brightening that drew closer every day, as if some celestial body inscribed a slow progression that might sometime bring it in line with the single slit of window that lit the round tower chamber that was his world.

Or might never.

As to the room itself, it had curving stone walls and a floor of concentric circles of precisely cut gray flags inset with spirals of silver that here and there lapped up the walls and in four places reached the domed ceiling and spread out once more, though cracks and flakes and fissures disturbed the complex pattern.

For the rest, he had a silver-framed bed with torn sheets of rough gray silk, and a coverlet of ragged gray fur, and a table and chair of gray wood gilt with silver. The simple breeches and sleeveless tunic he wore were also of that non-color, and made of plain coarse wool; and his pierced and gathered shoes were of nondescript gray leather. He had chains, too: Iron-alloyed bonds lined with wyvem skin that bound his wrists and ankles to the wall and trailed across the floor behind him when he paced out the narrow limits of his freedom. But even that metal was dull: gave off no reflections, so that Fionchadd could not see the green of his own eyes, or the gold of his hair, or the pink of his lips and his tongue. His skin was pale—too pale to offer much contrast, and he had thought more than once of slicing open his veins so that the gush of red would relieve the monotony that drugged his sight. Not suicide that cut, for such was an impossibility with his kind. Oh, he might sever the ties between body and soul for a space of seasons, but the two would rejoin in time, and there was nothing he could do to forestall that reunion. And his captors would still have his body, and when the two reunited, the cycle would start all over with his situation not one whit better.

So Fionchadd had only to sit and wait and gaze out his window at a vista of white-silver water across which four bands of silver light slowly spun with the tower itself as their hub, until they merged with the like-colored sky of this strange, tiny land no one had heard of. Straight Tracks, he thought: roads between Times and Worlds. But who had ever seen them in silver?

He had asked once, queried the friendliest of the Erennese guards; but the man had told him little. Finvarra alone knew of this place, he had discovered, but almost nothing more except that it was not truly a part of Faerie. He still hoped by careful questioning of his captors to learn the full, true tale in time. It was something to do, after all, a puzzle to fill the spaces between more troublesome concerns, the principal one of which was winning his freedom.

But escape eluded him, because of that same pain that dulled his mind and would not let him draw on the Power that should have let him choose any number of shapes and so win free. There were two kinds of pain, too; one he had learned to live with, and one that was troubling and new.

The first, the wound in his soul, had never healed. It ached always, a gnawing between his thoughts, around his movements; so much a part of him he could no longer remember what it was like before. It, he had mastered; it, in a sense, he could numb—as he could ignore the slap and hiss of waves outside and the tangy smell of salt water, and center on other sounds and odors. But that did not mean it was not present.

The other agony was born of the Iron rings that bound him, for the fires of the World's first making yet burned in that metal and never cooled. It was tolerable—barely, if he was careful; but of it, too, he could not be free.

And a final thing he could not elude was fear. For himself, of course, but more importantly for his mother, the Fireshaper Morwyn, whose fate he did not know except that she had offered herself up in exchange for his freedom when Finvarra had demanded she surrender herself for judgment because of her role in the deaths of his half-mad sister and her twin, his own equally insane sire.

Evidently that had not happened, however, for he had not been released, and he had heard vague rumors of the ship that would have delivered her being intercepted by her mother's Powersmith kin. There were tales, too, of a massive battle waged between the Powersmiths and Finvarra's folk, of Finvarra's daughters taken hostage and Finvarra fleeing in the shape of an albatross, then turning his full wrath on Lugh and attacking both north and south, while a third force tried to intercept the Powersmiths en route home. This last had supposedly succeeded, but the Powersmiths had raised a shield of magical fire around their fleet which not even Finvarra could shatter.