The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (19 page)

“Then the leviathan, Akoli, he that would henceforth be known as the Creator, took form in the eternal chaos of the deeps. From there he rose against the howling of beginnings, for then he came as the moon and as the fury of the storm. With wind and cloud he filled the skies and the world below, and then he wept so that the rain of his passion might make fertile the land and his joy would become the rainbow. Finally Akoli sang, and it was the music that made the tides rise and fall and the wind roll the clouds upon the air. He called together the
mountains and the sky above, the stars and the planets that live within the sky, and he told the heavens: ‘Let there be night and day.’ He made the golden sun and bid it wander over the sky. He made the silver moon and had it swell as a woman with child each month. So sun and moon would rule the mysteries of creation as they made their journeys from the sea to the sky and back again.”

Alan focused on the figure of the shaman. A storm of energy was whirling around Kemtuk, flapping his ceremonial clothes and lifting his white hair in a startling nimbus. There was something profound beyond the words, something Alan desperately needed to understand.

Suddenly he moaned aloud, clenching his fists against his brow. The sudden swell of longing was so overwhelming, he fell to his knees. Kate helped him back up onto his feet. She was pointing—Alan’s eyes followed her finger to the men with the brushwood.

“What’s going on?” He had to shout to be heard.

“They’re burning the Temple Ship.”

Alan whirled around, his eyes back on Kemtuk. He understood now. The shaman’s homage was guilt, asking forgiveness for the great wrong the Olhyiu were about to commit.

Alan heard the closing words of the lament: “At last Akoli, the leviathan, leaped over the oceans he had made with the flash of the rainbow. Then, tired from his labors, he pulled about him the blanket of the icy peaks, and closing his eyes, he rested there.” Kemtuk’s
silver eye had fallen onto the men, who waited for his word to fire the brushwood. But still the shaman hesitated, as if weighed down with the enormity of what he was about to command.

People were having difficulty staying on their feet in the wind. Still they continued to lay the path of fire directly to the ship, piling the oil-soaked brushwood against the massive out-curved hull.

Mark shouted into Alan’s ear, “We all sense that it’s wrong. But you’re the only one who can stop it.”

But then what if he did? He’d be condemning them all to be killed by the Storm Wolves.

Alan thought back to the experience in the cave. To Granny Dew and her words.
“Duvaaaalll aaassskkksss—yeeesss! Duvaaaalll seeesss—nooo!”
What did he ask but not see? A meaning deeper than words? He shook his head, bewildered by riddles. He would have to trust his own feelings.

“Kemtuk—stop!” Alan shouted out his opposition through the triangle on his brow. “Kemtuk, you must stop the burning!”

But Kemtuk was lost in his own grief, standing as stiff as a statue, his face like ravaged stone. His right hand fell, holding a thick bundle of oiled twigs.

Only then did Alan notice the standing crucible behind the old man, a small stone altar of whorled carvings—an altar on which he had prepared the signal: the fall of the lighted torch onto the brushwood directly below the center deck.

The thunderheads were erupting with lightning. Alan could smell ozone in the charged air. In a sudden violent swell of wind, all three of his friends were blown backward, at first staggering, then completely losing their footing, crashing onto the ice. But the force of spiritual communication kept Alan erect. Whirling around on the trampled snow, he broke free of the communication with the shaman, and suddenly the maelstrom quietened. It was as if some other force, even greater than he or Kemtuk, had snuffed it out.

Alan was already pushing his way through the gathering throng to get to the gangway. Above him, Kemtuk had raised the blazing torch.

“Stop!”

Still the shaman was not listening. His mind was closed to the instrument of communication.

Running up the gangway, Alan stood, breathless, before Kemtuk. He grabbed the torch and snatched it away from the startled shaman’s hand. Kemtuk’s gaze turned gentle once more, and his hoary old head fell to face Alan.

“Tell me, Mage Lord, what I must do?”

“We have to save the ship!”

Kemtuk turned to look at the upturned faces of Olhyiu below the deck. The huge figure of Siam stood out among them. Kemtuk picked up the lance of the narwhal and raised it aloft. “The Mage Lord commands that we cannot burn the Temple Ship. We must find another way.”

But, judging by the look of surprise on their faces, Alan’s command was having very little effect. With a sudden roar from Siam, they began to apply their own torches to the brushwood. Then suddenly, in the center of the turmoil, a running figure snatched the flaming bundle from Siam’s own fist and hurled it away, across the ice. The huge Olhyiu reacted furiously. The figure turned its face up and Alan recognized Mark. A fight broke out, in which the Olhyiu easily overcame the youth. Mark was sent flying with a blow but he was immediately back on his feet, facing Siam’s anger. Mo and Kate rushed to stand by him.

Kemtuk bent to whisper to Alan. On his face was a look of shame. “Siam knows that in the night the traitor Kawkaw slipped his bonds, taking the lives of the two good men who guarded him. He has gone to forewarn the enemy. Though it grieves us, we must sacrifice the Temple Ship.”

Alan was shocked to hear of Kawkaw’s escape. But this was not the time to dwell on it. “No, Kemtuk. If we burn the ship, we’re lost. I sense this.”

Kemtuk stared at Alan for a moment, as if in contemplation, then he raised himself erect and brought back his arm, hurling the lance of the narwhal so it struck the ice directly in front of Siam. There it quivered, like an omen, before the huge man, causing him to raise his alarmed eyes once more to the shaman.

“Death at the hands of the Storm Wolves will be slow and unpleasant,” roared the chief. “We have women
and children. How, other than by the heat of the burning ship, do we break the grip of the ice?” Siam waited for counsel, and when none came from the shaman, he waved once more to the men with the torches.

Out there on the ice, Alan saw groups of Olhyiu arriving from a central brazier, carrying new torches.

“No!” Alan’s voice roared out through the triangle. Even Siam stopped dead in his tracks. “You know I carry the soul eye in my brow. And the soul eye tells me that you don’t right a wrong with another wrong. You cannot burn the Temple Ship. With the help of the soul eye, we’ll find another way. Meanwhile, Siam, please command the men to move the brushwood from around the ship and use it somewhere else. Add it to the piles they’ve already gathered over there!” Alan pointed to an area thirty or forty yards away, yet still close to the center of the ice-trapped village.

Kemtuk shook his head. “But it’s futile anyway. Even if we preserve it, none can master the Temple Ship. Not even Siam, a seaman all his life. We dragged it here through ropes attached to the fishing fleet. We’ll have to leave it behind, burned or not, since it would only hinder us.”

Alan surprised himself with what he now said. “I will be the master of the ship.”

“You—but you’re merely a youth! One empowered, and perhaps more stubborn, than most—but a youth nevertheless.”

“You’ve got to trust me. I’ll find a way.”

Alan left the shaman and went down onto the ice to put his hand on the powerful shoulder of the chief. “I was foolish. I focused all of my attentions on your shaman, Kemtuk. I failed to realize the real leader of the Olhyiu. No one is braver or stronger than you, Siam.” He touched his brow. “Here, I sense that you are a great leader. We should all put our trust in you.”

Although he looked like a man laboring under a dreadful burden, Siam accepted this challenge. He shouted to the people, who had crowded up close. “You men—you cannot burn the ship. Burn elsewhere, wherever you deem it best to weaken the ice. And hurry! Meanwhile you women gather every family aboard the boats and use the harpoons to break open the ice.”

The First Power

The morning had turned to dusk under the towering thunderheads. On the central deck of the Temple Ship Alan’s ears were full of the crackles of flames, his nostrils choked by the tarry smell of the burning brushwood. The air was filled with the sounds of drumming. The womenfolk were following Siam’s order, hammering the ice around their boats with long iron-tipped harpoons. Distant figures were also attacking the ice where it had been softened by the fire, using mallets to drive in staves of cedar to crack it open. But a glance confirmed what Alan already suspected: whatever their efforts, the thickness of the ice would prove too much. Even the burning of the great ship would ultimately be futile since it would take far too many hours to create enough heat
to enable the flotilla to break through to the river. And with the escape and treachery of the renegade Kawkaw, there wasn’t enough time for the villagers to make their escape.

Alan listened to the sizzling of the melting ice, to the oaths and grunts of the men carried on the wind, to the steady hammering of the women. He gazed down at the frightened masses of elderly and children clambering on board their various boats. On their faces he saw growing panic.

He hadn’t noticed that Mo had come up beside him until she tugged at his arm to attract his attention. There was an intense look on her face.

“There’s suh-suh-something huh-happening to me.”

“What is it, Mo?”

“Muh-muh-monkey!”

“Monkey?”

Mo gazed up at him, willing him to understand. “I suh-suh-sensed it too.”

“What did you sense?”

Then his eyebrows lifted in astonishment at the realization of what she was telling him.

Mo had heard the word “monkey” on the lips of the Olhyiu woman.

Alan recalled that it had been Mo’s song that had discovered Slievenamon, and that it had also evoked the symphony of the stones. It was another mystery. But it was no good trying to figure it now. “I don’t even pretend to know what’s happening to us, Mo.”

She looked directly into his eyes a moment. “I’m wuh-wuh-worried about whuh-whuh-what’s happening to us!”

He reached out and held her shoulders, feeling how her whole body trembled. “We’re all scared by what’s happening, Mo.”

Even as he tried to reassure her, from nearby there was a crackling of fire. Siam had ignited the pyre not twenty yards away, at the center of the ice. Alan could see the burly man, swaying slightly as if he were drunk but showing the way to the others, applying a torch to a second place in the smoking pile of tinder. The chief tottered back as the flames sprang as high as the mastheads on the lesser boats.

“Time to call the others together, Mo. We need to gather here, on the Temple Ship.”

As if Mo’s anxiety was contagious, Alan felt a constriction of alarm tighten about his chest. The Storm Wolves were nearing, close enough for him to sense their approaching minds and their vicious intentions. He shouted out to Siam over the heads of the crowd below, “The enemy is almost here. Get your people to prepare the boats. Ask them to get ready to raise their sails to the wind. We, the huloima, will master the Temple Ship. But you’ve got to give us some experienced sailors to help man the sails.”

Siam lifted his face to growl up at him, “Thirty of our best men would not suffice to man the sails, even if they were not already decayed. And once raised, the art of
managing such a tangle of rigging—I doubt that all the men in this village could help you.”

“Well, let us have what help you can.” Alan turned to the silent but watchful shaman beside him. “Will you stay on board to guide us? Can somebody else take care of your boat?”

Kemtuk inhaled deeply. “I’ll stay. But such actions will prove futile. Siam knows this, as I do. The ice has not melted.”

Alan turned back to gaze out over the rail and found the burly figure of Siam. In the chief’s despairing mind he read the fear:
How can I make the people listen when we give them no reason for hope?

“There is hope!” Alan shouted back at him.

“Where—where do I find it?”

“Look within yourself, Siam. To the spirit within you—to the courage and strength of the Olhyiu people.”

Siam waved him away, but nevertheless he began calling out to the men, gathering them about him, wiping his brow with his wide-brimmed hat before struggling to find the words to address them.

“I am not a clever man, and you all know that. But I love Kehloke and I love my son, Turkeya, and my daughter, Loloba.” He struck his chest, like a bass drum. “It is true that I got drunk with those accursed abominations, the Storm Wolves, many times, when they came to our village. I would get drunk with them now if I thought that it would save us. So these are the words of a very stupid man. Maybe I am too stupid to lead the Tilikum Olhyiu.”

He crumpled his hat between his hands while a fresh squall of snow blustered about his bare head.

“But the youth above, whom the shaman calls Mage Lord, has asked me to remember with pride when we, the Children of the Sea, were warriors. We didn’t fear the deep. No more do we fear these abominations who would rob us of our pride. They underestimate us if they think we have forgotten the ways of battle. Perhaps it is time we blew alive the embers of our ancestors.”

Kemtuk drew back in shock and closed his eyes.

“What is it?” Alan asked him.

“Siam calls for the blood-rage.”

Alan shook his head, failing to understand. He watched as Siam walked out to where the brushwood was burning. He picked up some glowing embers in the cup of his hands. Ignoring the scorching of his flesh, he walked among his people with his smoking offering held out before him.

“Blow on these embers. Punish with fire this oaf whose stupidity knows no bounds.”

When none would blow on the embers, Siam wiped the ash over his grizzled face. “I am a stupid man who looks at death and still asks for a sign. But the gods have sent us a sign. Great Akoli! You have sent us this Mage Lord, Alan Duval, and three strangers. The shaman, Kemtuk Lapeep, tells us their lives are important. It seems that this Mage Lord, young as he is, is the one who will lead us. He will help us to escape to the sanctuary of Carfon by the Eastern Ocean.

“Now, go tell your women to prepare the sails. You men, join me in preparing for battle. If we die, let us die as warriors. I call upon the gods to grant me the blood-rage of legend.”

“Explain blood-rage to me, Kemtuk.”

Kemtuk shook his head. “It is nothing more than a legend, grown foolish with time. A sacrilege even to invoke it.”

Alan thought back. He recalled Kemtuk closing his eye, the deep blue crystal gripped in the palm of his left hand, while his right hand . . . had changed. Five long bear-like claws had appeared from the tips of the fingers. Alan thought about that. He thought, perhaps, he understood why the shaman refused even to consider what blood-rage might mean.

There was a renewed outbreak of shouting, then the sight of old men and younger boys running here and there, taking over the fanning of the flames. All men of fighting age were now gathered in a circle about the chief. With a cry of determination a tall sleek figure broke through into the circle. Kehloke lifted her fist into the air. “If fight we must, then let us women shed our blood together with our men!”

A cheer erupted from the people, and the drumming of ice harpoons against the ice became as loud as thunder.

Kemtuk dropped his head. His voice was a whisper. “It is merely a dream, born of despair. It is worse than a dream, it is madness.”

But Siam stood large beside his wife, his two fists raised high into the air, his eyes wide and staring. His voice was a battle cry. “All my life, and that of my father and many grandfathers before him, the Olhyiu have waited to find one who could master the Temple Ship. That too was thought to be legend. Yet the young Mage Lord tells us he will master it. If one legend be true, why not another! May we not invoke the blood-rage of legend?”

As another great cheer swept through the Olhyiu, the shaman took up a position at the head of the oak gangway, gazing not at Alan but outward, to the periphery of the ice, his head tilted as if listening. Alan was startled to hear Mark’s voice, his friend now on board, asking help to unfurl the leather sails of the three great masts. He turned to see Mark taking hold of the great wheel. Mark was doing his best to help. In moments, Kate and Mo were by his side. He reached out and put a protective arm about each of them, all three looking out over the ice and waiting.

“Kemtuk—where’s the spear I brought with me?”

The shaman shook his head. “I cannot tell you.”

“Surely Siam can trust me now?”

Kemtuk’s eye fell from contact with Alan’s.

Alan turned his face away from the shaman, his eyes falling on the frantic scene below.

The lake itself was a few hundred yards across within a clearing that extended for at least three miles to a scrabble of snow-covered pines. Soon Alan heard a sound in the far distance that caused the hairs to
prickle on the back of his neck. It was a fearful sound, buried deep in the folk memory, even for somebody who had grown up in cities: the howling of wolves. His grip around the girls’ shoulders tightened.

Kemtuk informed him, “First they send their wolves to bite and maim. They will harry us until the war machines arrive.”

The Olhyiu started to chant in support of Siam, a deep-throated anthem of clan and blood, in time with the hammering of the harpoons against the echoing ice. Alan shook his head. “Kemtuk! You’ve got to let me help them!”

Through the triangle Alan focused his attention on Siam, who was pacing among the great gathering of men and women.

In the turmoil of the chief’s thoughts, Alan searched for something, anything—a feeling, a mood, some vestigial memory the chief was looking for—a truth beyond words, yet a truth that Alan might understand. It was as if, within the very spirit of Siam, Alan found himself at the eye of an intensely personal storm. Somehow, in this strange landscape, he must find the ancestral inheritance. In an inner projection of all his outward senses—of vision, hearing, touch, smell and taste—Alan hunted for what he imagined must be a kind of soul spirit common to Siam’s people.

At first he encountered nothing but confusion. Recalling the advice of Granny Dew, he did his best to abandon his logical self. The hunter that moved through
the spiritual landscape of Siam shed all assumptions until it felt as if one shadowy being hunted another.

When he first sensed what he was looking for he barely recognized it. He had expected a force of power and violence, lost from memory but imprinted in some deeper, unfathomable trace of being. What he actually found was no more substantial than a wisp of longing, curled up on itself, an abandoned embryo of what once had been. Alan focused on that tiny essence, breathed passion into it, as if to give it life. But there was no response. No matter how hard he tried, it seemed inadequate.

He poured his own being into the attempt. His heartbeat rose to become a rolling drum in his ears and a black mist of unconsciousness threatened to blind both his external and internal vision. Still he persisted, willing life into the embryo of longing.

He reminded it of the feel of rain, the visions of clouds and sunsets, and the smell of blood and soil, until the soul spirit appeared to blink alive and notice its own existence. He felt it begin to take a feeble strength from him. He encouraged it to do so, reminding it of the visions he had seen in the mind of the shaman, of how the leviathan, Akoli, the Creator, took form from chaos and rose against the howling of beginnings to become as the moon and as the fury of the storm. He felt the longing grow and expand as, like a spiritual cannibal, the embryo devoured what it needed from his own soul spirit to become real flesh and blood, real sight and smell, now snarling to break free.

Staggering against the supporting arms of Kate and Mo, Alan opened his eyes and all three of them recoiled with shock.

In the center of the Olhyiu, where Siam had stood with his fists uplifted, now stood an enormous grizzly bear. The bear, which looked as tall as a house, reared at full stretch on its hind legs. It wheeled about in fury. Alan glimpsed the fallen indigo hat and the shreds of clothing torn asunder by the metamorphosis of size and power. Suddenly the giant grizzly threw back its head and its jaws gaped wide to show a steaming red maw, glistening with huge yellow fangs. It roared a challenge so deep it appeared to reverberate from a chasm, shaking the ice and ships, echoing around the lake and causing a hysterical cheer to arise from every throat.

The approaching wolves slowed a moment as the roar was carried to them on the wind, then resumed their headlong rush toward the lake.

Alan closed his eyes once more and was one with Siam’s soul spirit. He smelled the burning torches, a thousand times stronger now, but there was a more important smell—the hated smell of wolf. That hatred mushroomed until it had become a red mist of loathing. In moments, the great shape was bounding over the trodden ice, huge feet designed for snow, six-inch claws extended for battle. Alan shared the violent swell of Siam’s emotions, the blue-white blur of snow passing below his racing form, the swell of massive muscles in a coordination of four instead of two feet pounding and
pressing the land until it seemed the very world was spinning beneath the flash of fur and claw. The focus was already clear ahead, fixed in the glare of those rage-filled eyes. Behind the great bear streamed the charge of the Olhyiu, including Kehloke, with sharpened harpoons at the ready. There was no fear in their hearts any more.

Battle was engaged, sudden and fierce.

Slavering shapes leaped upon the great bear, snapping for its throat. There was no time for thought, only the automatic lunge of jaws and lash of paws, with bared teeth and outstretched talons. All senses dissolved in the mountainous impact of brute force against brute force, the lightning flash of combat, the violence of vision, the overwhelming smell and taste of blood . . .

Alan withdrew his senses from that terrible confrontation. Siam and the others were merely buying them time.