The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (20 page)

Kemtuk stood a few paces apart from them before the rail. He had taken a handful of pollen from a pouch near his heart and was sprinkling it on the wind so it would be carried to the boats of his people, blessing them as he did so. That completed, the old man stood gravely still, his tall frame silhouetted against the smoke and flames, watchful as the elderly among them, and the remaining Olhyiu women and older children, all raised their hammering to a new crescendo.

Alan glimpsed a new movement, a gathering flurry of snow between the trees in the distance, a few miles
beyond the bloodied snow where the bodies of wolves were now rent and scattered. Suddenly a new deep-throated howling tore through the air.

“Leloo!” muttered the shaman. “Worse than wolves—they pull their sleds!”

Alan heard a tinkling sound, like distant sleigh bells. The Storm Wolves were arriving, with machines of war pulled by giant snow beasts. Here were battle-hardened troops armed with glittering weaponry. Now the howling of the Leloo carried for miles as the harnesses sent a twinkling glitter across the ice. They were moving much faster than he could have anticipated.

There was a final great roar from Siam, and the Olhyiu, several limping and bloodied, turned and ran back in the direction of the boats, where the gangways were lowered to welcome them back.

Mo’s hand, clutching Alan’s arm, was shaking with terror. The thunderheads above them spurted lightning.

There was a hammering of heavy feet on wood as the blood-covered bear bounded back up the gangway to the Temple Ship. Alan felt the impact as the giant grizzly leaped the final yards to the mid-deck, where it howled, as if impatient for the arrival of Kehloke. Within a few minutes she ran up the gangway to join her husband and lay down in the curl of his almighty embrace, panting heavily. Alan entered the bear’s mind again and felt the ebbing of power from the shadow being. Siam was returning to his wife and his people.

The sleds of the enemy were easily visible now, no more than half a mile distant. Alan caught his first clear sight of the Storm Wolves themselves, powerful warriors with chainmail glittering under their overcoats of fur, with guns strapped across their backs and helmets of a matte-black metal. As they approached the edge of the ice, the air carried their curses and the cracks of their whips, the snarling Leloo driven to a frenzied galloping under the lashes of the drivers, with perhaps ten or so of the soldiers astride every sled. As they got closer, Alan confirmed that these beasts were not wolves. The Leloo were bigger and meaner. He glimpsed their bright yellow eyes, rippling shoulders and big splayed feet, fur-padded against the cold and through which curved talons scored the ice under its covering of snow.

While the main group slewed around to a halt and began to set up cannon positions at the edge of the ice, at least thirty sleds invaded the frozen lake. He heard the lick of metal on snow, even the labored panting of the beasts that pulled them as they ate up the ground between them and the ice-locked boats.

Kemtuk took hold of Alan’s left shoulder and shook it to draw his attention. Alan felt the familiar shape and weight of the Spear of Lug pressed into his right hand.

“Forgive us, Mage Lord! Help us—help us now! Or all is lost before ever we begin our journey!”

He felt Mo’s renewed trembling under his left hand. He said, quietly, to Kemtuk, “Tell your people to raise their sails!”

“But the ice still holds.”

“Tell them to do it—now!”

Kemtuk’s eyebrows lifted incredulously, but he picked up a great horn and blew it hard and long into the wind. Over the little cluster of boats the waxed leathers climbed the masts. Alan heard the final blessing of the shaman, “Grant us your protection in this peril, as you protected our fathers before us through many perils. Whether it leads to death or salvation, yet your will be done, O great Akoli.”

“Alan?”

He heard Kate’s tremulous voice add to Mo’s trembling fear.

“I know.”

He looked up into a sky that seemed to fill his mind with violent notions. The triangle in his brow was pulsing fast and powerfully with his heartbeat. Tentatively, relying on nothing more than instinct, he raised his right arm, the spear firmly grasped in his clenched fist. He felt the throbbing power of the Ogham invocation invade his fingers and thumb. Through the channel of the blade he directed the power of the ruby crystal into the fury of those whirling masses. Fashioning the command within his mind, he entered the wheeling thunderheads and opened his senses to the gathering storm.

The Storm Wolves were among them. He ignored the murderous hatred on their faces, the bloodlust in the slavering jaws of their beasts, the leveling of weapons on board the sleds. All his senses streamed upward, on
the flickering tongues of lightning that were leaping from cloud to cloud. He heard the thunder of cannons. An explosion of green fire ravaged the sail and superstructure of one of the boats. He heard the screams of the injured on the deck as they were consumed by the living furnace. Anger rose in him. Through the triangle on his brow, Alan became one with the immensity of the elements. He forced his being into that communication.

His eyes followed a single flickering river of lightning that played over the black underbelly of the tempest, and as his mind found the mark, one river of lightning joined another, until they coalesced to become a single great cataract of force, and the cataract itself began to twist and turn about the point of his focus.

A second boat erupted into foul green fire. Still the Olhyiu men and women maintained their furious hammering while the timbers of their boats cracked and splintered against the huge force of wind bending the sails against the rigid entrapment of the ice. Several Olhyiu gave up their hammering and hurled their harpoons at the encircling enemy.

Alan steadied his arm as the tempest raged over the frozen lake, and then, holding the eye of the storm above, he turned a new awareness onto the Temple Ship.

“Now!”

He gave the command with his lips drawn back over gritted teeth, his focus never faltering upon that center of seething energy in the sky. His arm tensed and his fingers closed even tighter on the Spear of Lug, until it felt
as if it were one with his white-knuckled fist. Abruptly, he brought the spear down and directed all of his will at the ship. The bolt of lightning struck the central mast with a brilliant explosion of light, which cascaded downward, over decks and rigging, before finally erupting out over the lake. Where the army of sleds had been circling, a fountain of ice and water now erupted, a spuming mushroom of dissipating energy, flooding the landscape from the white-glowing superstructure of the great galleon. Alan stood rigidly still, his eyes blinded by the light, his hearing deafened by the thunder. From what appeared to be some distance away, he heard a great roar of triumph from the Olhyiu as the surface of the frozen lake shattered into myriad fragments, the boats tossing and bucking as they began to move under the wind. The tempest billowed sails as their ears were filled by the roars of beasts trapped in their harnesses and the shouts of drowning men against the gale.

As his vision began to clear, Alan beheld a new wonder. The Temple Ship was moving, heaving about in the fractured ice. His gaze snapped skyward to witness the rigging. The great sails were rising and unfurling, although no hands were pulling at any ropes. All the holes in the leather were self-healing before his bewildered eyes.

Beside him Siam, a fur cape wrapped around his naked body, also gazed aloft, his voice husky in an exhausted throat, his face bleeding from several deep lacerations. He placed his heavy hand on Alan’s shoulder, his eyes aglow with astonishment.

“Truly the Temple Ship has found its master!”

All around them, the small scattering of sailors were staring up open-mouthed. Mark spun the great wheel, laughing like a maniac at his newfound role, his legs parted wide for balance. He swung the enormous vessel around through an arc of one hundred and eighty degrees, its bow inclined at such an angle that the starboard deck was struck with splintered shards of ice. Overhead the sails snapped at their summit, tensing sheets of leather as broad as a two-story house, catching the full swell of the wind and causing the superstructure to murmur and groan like an awakening titan. In moments, they overcame the inertia of the heavy galleon and the prow surged forward, cutting through the fissured ice that still stood between the fishing fleet and the central thaw in the nearby river.

As they neared the safety of the channel, Alan lowered the spear, which now felt too heavy to bear. He passed it back to Kemtuk, his eyes meeting the good eye of the shaman. There was relief in the old man’s gaze, but also more. Things to think about, things to question in the days that lay ahead. The main force of Storm Wolves had not been destroyed. They were already pulling back, redirecting their sleds around the shattered ice in pursuit of the fleet. But for the moment that could be put to one side. There was room only for joy as the fleet, flagged by the majestic beauty of the Temple Ship, broached the central melt of the Snowmelt River and turned its prow southward, following the stream.

The Song of the River

With the sails billowed by the following winds, they soon left the ice-bound lake behind them. The sky was still laden with storm clouds but the reflective snow illuminated the waves that spread from the prows of the fleet, with the Temple Ship cleaving the way. On every boat voices grew hoarse from cheering. Meanwhile, from the makeshift kitchen area in the stern of the Temple Ship, the smell of cooking filled the air, the scent of grilled slabs of winter salmon reminding everyone that they had not eaten since yesterday. Mo left Mark at the wheel so she could talk to Kate, who was helping Turkeya cook the food.

Kate said, “Turkeya is amazing. Did you know he can recognize more than fifty different herbs? The trouble is he doesn’t write anything down. He keeps it all in his head. But he’s promised me that when we get the
chance he’ll teach me to recognize some of them—and what they’re used for.”

Mo looked over to where Turkeya was pulling wry faces as he turned the chunks of fish over so they cooked in their own oil. She realized that the cooking must seem very strange to him.

Kate spoke softly. “Mo, will you for goodness’ sake tell me the truth—do you have the slightest inkling of what happened back there?”

Mo could only shake her head.

Kate peered forward to where Alan’s figure stood on the foredeck, his dark hair tossed by the wind. “I’m not sure I know him any more.”

“Wuh-wuh-we’re all chuh-changing.”

Frowning pensively, Kate accepted a bowl of steaming soup from Turkeya, while gazing around herself at the passing landscape of snow-covered forest. Mist coiled over the water so that it seemed that they were journeying into an enchanted world of cloud and light.

There was a perpetual cacophony of hissing and sighing from the river. By degrees the free channel widened so that by late afternoon of the first day the ice had receded to both banks. Still the mist swirled about them, solid enough to blur the passing landscape. At times snow fell so heavily they could see nothing at all of the way ahead, relying on the helmsmanship of Mark to keep the ship in the central stream. The nearby trees were like gray shadows against the milky haze of light, with ice glittering in their beards of lichen. Seen in gaps in the mist, the giant conifers at the forest edge were so laden with snow they
resembled a great cliff wall. On the first night of their journey the mist lifted and there was a cry of wonder from an old woman, who believed she saw the spirits of her ancestors observing their passage from among the trees. And peering through snow-grimed lashes into the shadows of dappled grays and silvers, Kate could imagine that the ghosts of her parents were there also, Daddy and Mammy, and that of her brother Billy.

Tears filled Kate’s eyes as she thought about her family, and what had happened to them, tears of anger and resentment at what she herself had lost, at the fact she had been robbed of all she had ever wanted—just an ordinary life. Her heart brooded on the unfairness of it all as she gazed, hour after hour, at the wraiths of mist that peeped back at her from between the darkening trees.

The four friends gathered together about midday on the second day in the empty great chamber, sitting on a pallet of rushes spread out over the floor beneath the harpoon and surrounded by the murals of the Olhyiu history.

Kate couldn’t hide her feelings. “Have you boys gone altogether mad? Look at you. You’re behaving as if this is some great adventure. It’s bonkers. We could all have been killed back there!”

Alan’s fingers brushed self-consciously against his brow. “Okay—so what’s been happening to us is crazy. But crazy or not, we’re here. We’ve got to make the best of it.”

Kate refused to be placated. “What if we never go home?”

Alan shrugged. “Hey, don’t think I wasn’t scared too!”

“You boys are just enjoying yourselves. It’s time the girls were allowed to speak. We, that is Mo and I, have something we want to say.”

“Okay—let’s hear it.”

Mo, through the impediment of her stammer, explained to Mark and Kate what she had already intimated to Alan, the fact that she could understand the Olhyiu without needing a crystal.

“So what does it mean?”

Kate held up her left hand so everyone could see the green matrix, flecked with gold, that had been impressed into her palm from her crystal. “I don’t have a clue what it means. All I can say is that I don’t need to hold the crystal any more to understand the Olhyiu.”

Mark shook his head.

Mo stammered, “I’ll tuh-tuh-tell you what. Kuh-Kuh-Kate is telling you thuh-thuh-the truth.”

Kate nodded. “Mo and I, we’ve been talking things over. Granny Dew, whatever it was she did to us—”

“The bag lady?”

Kate slapped Mark on the shoulder to shut him up. “You realize that whatever Granny Dew put into the crystals—it’s in
us
now.”

“There’s another explanation,” muttered Mark. “It’s some kind of mass hallucination. We’re all kidding ourselves.”

“Mark, we’re not!” Kate exclaimed.

“You’re the one who needs to get a grip on yourself.” Alan also allowed his impatience with Mark to show.

Kate reached out and tried to look at Mark’s left hand, which still grasped his silver-speckled obsidian crystal. But with a look of disgust, he hurled the crystal against the opposite wall, where it shattered into glassy fragments. He stared at the fragments for a moment, as if shocked at his own action, then stormed out of the chamber, his steps clattering up the wooden stairs in the direction of the main deck.

Kate urged Mo to stay while she ran after Mark. She discovered him in the sleeping cabin he shared with Alan. He was squatting on a pallet of rushes, playing a blues number on his harmonica. Kate touched his shoulder. The muscles there were tensed, making her heart go out to him.

“What’s up with you?”

“Go squeeze your zits!”

“I don’t have any zits.” She sat cross-legged on the floor and began to beat with the flat of her hands on the bare wood planks.

He stopped playing the harmonica. He refused to look at her. “He’s not one for sharing, is he?”

“You have to stop resenting Alan.”

“Kate—oh, just get lost!”

“No, I want to talk to you about things—about what is happening to us.”

Mark muttered, “It’s taken you long enough to notice that this is a seriously weird place!”

“Perhaps it’s much weirder than where we came from?”

Mark thought about that. “Okay, so you’ve done your good Samaritan stuff. Now get lost!” He turned the harmonica over in his hands.

Her voice softened. “Your crystal’s broken.”

“I don’t care!”

“But you’ve still got its magic in you.”

Mark held out his palm and put it right in front of Kate’s face. The pattern had gone from the palm of his hand.

Alan left the chamber feeling uneasy about Mark. He was joined by Mo in climbing the oak staircase, emerging onto a swaying deck that smelled of wood smoke. Snow drifted like the breath of winter over the riverbanks. For the moment, Mark appeared to have abandoned the wheel to Siam.

Kate appeared from the sleeping area and huddled with Mo, after which Mo went in search of Mark.

“I guess we’ve got problems?”

“I don’t know what to think.” Kate told Alan the markings had gone from Mark’s palm.

“What’s eating that guy?”

“Don’t tell me you’re not frightened by what’s happening. What you did, back there on the ice?”

“I don’t rightly know how I feel. Heck, Kate—how could I possibly know what’s going on!”

Kate shook her head. “Where’s the spear?”

“Kemtuk is looking after it.”

She sighed.

“I know it’s unbelievable, what’s happening.” He spoke softly into the cold air, without looking directly at her.

“I was hoping you might know some of the answers.”

Glancing astern, Alan saw that the following boats looked as insubstantial as shadows in the mist. He allowed his senses to wander—his ears lulled with the rush of water and his eyes filled with those haunting woods against the backdrop of the high snow-covered mountains.

“Honestly, I’m as baffled as you are.”

“You did it, Alan. You lifted the spear into the air and the lightning struck.”

“Yeah, I know!”

In all that had gone before, he had been a passive ingredient. But he had influenced the storm over the lake. He mulled that over without understanding it.

“It must have been something Granny Dew did to you. She made it possible. Do you remember what she did to you, what you felt?”

“I don’t really know what she did to me, Kate. All I recall . . . I just felt something fantastic was happening to me. I guess like I was invaded by a sense of . . . of power.”

“It must have felt awesome!”

“Hey—scary, Kate.” He recalled those growling words, coming out of that strange being, the implication that he asked too many questions and failed to see what should be obvious. “It feels as if I’m discovering some kind of instinct. Like I just sensed what to do back there. But don’t ask me how such a thing is possible.”

Kate sighed again.

With his eyes narrowed against the biting wind, Alan watched the snowy banks give way to rock and shingle, moist with a scum of yellow-green algae. He murmured, “And you, what did you feel back in the cave?”

“Nothing I could put into words any better than you can. Just as you say, it was more a sort of feeling. A sort of communication. It was like I remember when I was seven years old and had my first communion. I felt a kind of overwhelming sense of fulfillment. Like . . . like grace.”

Alan stared across at the passing landscape.

When Kate left him to go and talk to Mo, Alan searched out Kemtuk. He found the shaman on the foredeck with Siam, both men alert for every whim of the wind or weather. Already it seemed that they were fearful of an attack from either bank.

Alan asked Siam, “Why not an attack by water?”

The Olhyiu chief shook his head. “On the river we are the masters. The attack will come from land, and at a time that disadvantages us and favors their malengins of war. Not for nothing are they called Storm Wolves.”

“Tell me more about these Storm Wolves.”

“They are soldiers blood-sworn to the Tyrant of the Wastelands.”

“Who is this tyrant?”

“The enemy of all who live in this continent of Monisle. For years beyond count we fought against him, continent against continent, through an ocean of blood and destruction. But then, and the shaman here claims to understand what I do not, the High Architect of Ossierel, our spiritual capital, lost the will to fight on.”

“Ussha De Danaan did not lose the will to fight,” interrupted Kemtuk. “She abandoned her own protection, though for reasons none have ever understood.”

Siam’s eyes darkened with anger. “Yet the shaman cannot deny that she allowed the Death Legion to massacre all on the island capital. And the consequence is our domination by these cruel forces. These are a hard and dangerous enemy, trained to live and fight in these wastelands.”

“The Storm Wolves are part of this Tyrant’s army?”

“They are the most northerly of his army of occupation, which calls itself the Death Legion.”

While absorbing this, Alan noticed how Kemtuk’s eyes were avoiding his. Was it possible that the shaman had grown frightened of him? Alan realized that the old man was not to be persuaded or hurried. He left the Olhyiu leaders and made his way to the stern rail, prepared to bide his time for a more suitable moment.

“My goodness! It’s suh-suh-suh-so lovely. Huh-huh-haunting!”

Alan hadn’t heard Mo approach. But now he smiled at her. “You’re right, Mo. It is haunting.”

Maybe she wanted to talk to him about Mark. He decided he would let her bring it up if it was what she wanted. For now he relaxed in her company as they stared out into the continuing thaw in the wilderness that was gliding by. Black tors still filled the gaps between the trees, shoulder pressed against shoulder, crushing the light from two thirds of the sky. Shags posed on the frosted crags of rock under the shadows of the banks and they disappeared, with barely a ripple, into the surface stream.

She said, “There’s fuh-food enough for the fuh-fuh-fish and the buh-birds buh-buh-buh . . .”

“But not for hungry people?”

Mo nodded.

Always on the threshold of starvation in the ice-bound lake, the Olhyiu were already low on food. Alan knew that there was plenty of food in the river and on the banks but to get hold of it they would have to stop. And to stop meant delays and the ever-present risk of attack.

On the evening of the fourth day, after they had made a rapid passage with long hours of sailing, Siam felt that it was safe to draw up the keels against a bank of shingle. Hunters made preparations to enter the forest in search
of meat. Some of the elders disembarked with the hunters to sit around fires on the snow-covered shore.

Alan joined the shaman’s group around one of the campfires.

Inland the ash-white barks of birch trees faded into shadows, while at the waterside, the bleached forms of the boats were glimmering with moonlight.

He shook his head at the leaf of tobacco offered by one of the Olhyiu. But he welcomed a bowl of broth, warmed in the embers around the edge of the fire. Sipping it gratefully, with his shoulders hunched against the cold, he watched the shaman’s wrinkled face, the glitter in the pupil of his right eye. The old man was deeply thoughtful, his pipe aglow. Alan had grown fond of Kemtuk, and he was reluctant to intrude on his reflections. Waiting until the shaman was filling a new pipe, he broached the curious nature of the Temple Ship.

“As you suggest, such a wonder was not constructed by the Olhyiu—nor by any craftsmen known to us. Its origins date from before the age of the wandering.”

“How far back is that?”

For a moment or two, Kemtuk drew on his pipe in a thinking silence against the glowing bowl of his pipe.

“Older than we might dream. In the earliest days, when the Tilikum Olhyiu were spread three thousand miles along the coast from Carfon in the south to this northern world of the Whitestar Mountains, the ship was ancient even then.” Kemtuk shrugged. “Its makers are a mystery. But what is a world without mystery?”