The Snowmelt River (The Three Powers) (36 page)

He staggered back to the tiny cabin, sat on his bunk, hugging his shoulder. Sweat ran in rivulets over his face and dripped off his chin. He staggered over to the basin of water, examining his reflection in the pallid lamplight. His face was haggard and drawn, with blue crescents under his eyes. He went to dip his hands into the icy-cold water, thinking that he could splash it onto his burning skin. In doing so, he saw in his own reflection what was happening to him. A dark oval, like scorched flesh, covered his left shoulder. With a cry of anguish, he twisted his upper body one way and then another,
to examine it closer. Within the black oval, whorls and arabesques of silver were pulsating with his heartbeat. That same heartbeat quickened to a sickening acceleration. It pounded in his head and throat. He fell back onto the bunk and just lay there in a daze.

Mark spoke not a word to Alan when, exhausted by some duties on deck, he arrived back in the sleeping quarters an hour or so later, threw off his clothes and fell into his bunk. He no longer cared that he couldn’t sleep. He spent the night thinking about what had happened.

What did it really mean? Was he forgiven? Was the mark on his shoulder the hope he had begged for?

He was still lying there, sleepless, as the first pale rays of dawn peered in through the porthole. Moments later, he heard the shout—it was the deep throaty voice of Qwenqwo from high in the crow’s nest. The words appeared to expand, like the light, as they entered the chamber, and they invaded his half-dazed mind. Mark ignored his sleeping friend and walked out onto the deck even as the dwarf mage shouted again, his cry flowing like a liquid, half proclamation and half warning, over the decks of awakening figures, and through every crack and crevice that led into the coursing labyrinth that was the ship.

“Behold the Pass of Kloshe Lamah! Behold the face of Magcyn, keeper of the accursed Vale of Tazan and last king of the Fir Bolg, whose spirit in truth still guards it!”

The Vale of Tazan

Alan woke to excited voices shouting and calling. He dressed hurriedly and joined the multitude gathering over the decks. His searching gaze found Mark, who had taken up the helm in the stern. Then he headed forward, taking the steps to the foredeck two at a time to get to the prow, where Kemtuk Lapeep stood like a sentinel, peering through the dawn mists at the extraordinary vision that confronted them. Here the river had become deep and fast-moving, its great waters compressed to no more than a hundred yards wide. Siam and the Olhyiu lined the rails, peering up into the ragged crags and escarpments that reared to dizzy heights on either side of them. Towering above them—it seemed impossible, for the scale appeared beyond any human undertaking—was a great figure of
stone rising out of the bedrock and soaring to several hundred feet above the river.

People were shouting aloud the name of the figure carved out of the mountain—Magcyn, last king of the Fir Bolg—and indeed you could not mistake the figure as anything other than a great and formidable king. He was seated on the shelf of rocky outcrop on the port side, as if on a throne, with his legs crossed at the ankles and his arms folded around the unmistakable double-bladed battle-axe.

Alan stared up at the massive sculpture, feeling so awed by its scale and power he had to hold onto the rail for support.

More than any other aspect, it was the head, a tumulus of granite as big as a two-story house, that cast a brooding warning over their forward passage. The face was square, the nose broad, with prominent nostrils flattened across the bridge, and the eye sockets were caves of shadow. The likeness to Qwenqwo was unmistakable.

Alan’s attention wheeled to the portal on the starboard side, but there, though equally massive as the figure on the left, the shape that remained was only vaguely human. Some calamity more destructive than wind or rain had ruined the image—and recently too. The upper portion was shattered into a profusion of jagged ledges and scattered fragments. Boulders of detached rock had tumbled down over the shoulders and torso, masking the presence that had once reigned opposite the figure of the king.

“The profaned image was that of the youthful queen, Nantosueta!” Alan heard Milish’s shocked whisper from his side as the council woman came to join him. And now, as they dropped sail to slow their passage, Alan did sense a bedraggled femininity in the desecrated right portal.

“What does it mean?”

“A malignancy has preceded us. As to what terrible malignancy would dare to profane the guardian—surely we journey into a vortex of danger!”

With a grim set to his jaws Mark piloted the ship deeper, passing through Lamah’s Pass and into the blue-black shadows of the crooked throat, or Kiwa Hahn. Towering cliffs overhung their passage, as if they were gigantic beasts that had slunk down to the water’s edge to drink. Even the Shee who stood guard on the deck looked apprehensive. The air became still and humid, and it seemed that the beating of their hearts echoed back at them from the massive keeps to either side for the hour or more that Mark picked his course, twisting and turning between these dreadful cliffs. And judging from Siam’s expression as he paced the decks, at every moment he expected those jaws to close about them and end it all in a splintering of oak and bone. All the while, the eagle followed their course, soaring high overhead, as if wherever the dwarf mage journeyed, his guardian would follow.

But then abruptly, as if entering a new dawn out of the darkest night, they were through the pass and a secret world opened before them.

The sails were once more hoisted to catch the moisture-laden winds that drenched the decks with a blustering rain. Lichens, thick and furry, carpeted every rocky outcrop. A tributary rushed to join the river in a white-water furnace over timeworn rocks, its spray sending up clouds of water droplets in which a series of rainbows shimmered. Kate joined Alan and Milish in the prow to watch a pair of dippers, their gray-brown plumage dusted with a chalky blue, diving and bobbing in the gossamer curtain.

“Oh, Alan—it’s gorgeous!” Kate exclaimed.

After the barren cold of their approach to the pass, it was a wonderland. And its wonder extended for mile after mile.

The weather would change without warning. One minute a clear rain washed the view to a sparkling clarity. The next minute a wetting fog would close about them, plunging the day into twilight. Everywhere life proliferated, wild and strange. They might have been entering the primeval forest at the beginnings of time.

She felt the muscles in Alan’s arm tighten and wondered why. Her first glimpse of the trees was of great boughs, festooned with living curtains over green-carpeted banks. Every branch and twig was so bearded with moss and lichens it was difficult to make out their forms. In places the secondary growths were so dense
as to become hanging gardens in the canopies. The giant green fingers of ferns proliferated in the sunlit openings.

In a hushed voice Milish spoke of a forest of giants. Meanwhile Alan, beside Kate, nodded, awestruck.

But still Kate sensed these trees meant something even more special to Alan. They had seen massive trees in the forests north of Isscan, but they had been no more than saplings in comparison. Great boles of trunks soared into the distant sky, their upper reaches lost in the fusion of mist and canopy. Kate struggled to identify even a few of the species—Douglas fir perhaps, and Sitka spruce and cedar—only to be forced to withdraw her gaze from leaf shapes that were completely unknown, or colors so bright they dazzled her eyes like spears of sunlight. Back in Clonmel, many of these plants would have been listed as rare, or more likely unknown.

Over the splintered caps of the encircling mountains to the northeast, smoke and fumes fed the discolored clouds. She saw now that many of the peaks were volcanic cones, and she heard the cracks and rumbles of their restless violence, even at this great distance. Part way up the slope, heated air rose from vents in the rocks, billowing steam that fell down into the forests and ran like a tidal race between the trees.

Hour after hour they watched in amazement as the great ship sailed deeper into the pass, past streams yellow with sulphur from the discharges in the distant peaks. Here and there age had thinned out the
woodland, where bedraggled survivors of some natural calamity lay scattered about open spaces, supporting an explosion of parasitic mantles, each its own intimate garden of delight.

Then, as they rounded a bend into a sunlit valley, Kate’s breath faltered and her heartbeat rose into her throat.

Rising, as if through an immense struggle from the arid rock of the waterside, was an extraordinary tree. Its roots were a gnarled battle of intertwining shapes, as ancient as the stones, and from that complex skein of roots, the trunk and branches were grotesquely twisted, their ends broken and repaired through the storms of thousands of bitter winters, until the golden heartwood was exposed, whorled and twisted like the eddies of whirlpools.

Although she knew it only from pictures, she recognized the tree. She whispered to Milish, “What do you call these trees?”

“Ah—these are the Oleone. They are revered as the most ancient of living spirits in all of Tír, the elders of the Forbidden Forest.”

Kate put her hand on Alan’s shoulder.

He reached up and cradled her hand. “Yeah—I know!”

They both recognized the species from their own world, where it was also revered for its great longevity, known to live for six thousand years. Though gnarled and contorted almost beyond recognition, they were looking at a bristle-cone pine—it looked like the oldest bristle-cone pine that had ever lived.
Its significance overwhelmed Kate, even as she heard Alan sigh with grief.

“What is it, Mage Lord?” Milish spoke softly.

“These are the trees of my native land, Milish.”

“What land is this, that it should arouse such passions?”

“America.”

“A-me-ri-ka!” The council woman tested the syllables, a look of astonishment on her bronzed face.

“Seeing them so unexpectedly—they reminded me of my loss, my parents . . .” Alan couldn’t speak any more of it.

Kate hugged his arm, recognizing other familiar trees among these leviathans. The rust-colored tannin of their barks was unmistakable. These had to be giant redwoods, sequoia. The river hinterland was dense with them, tall and upstanding amid the Douglas firs and spruce.

For the first time Alan realized what should long have been obvious—that there must be a link, a sister-like relationship, between Earth and this very different world. That thought stirred him at a level he could not altogether logically understand.

After another day and a half’s journey, the river expanded until it became a mile or more in width. Ahead of them its stream divided around a pinnacle of rock. Sailing closer, they saw that it was the northernmost prow of an island around which the river split into two unequal branches.

The main branch flowed right, while a lesser stream flowed left through a shadowed inlet.

On Siam’s direction, Mark began to pull hard on the wheel to direct the prow into the broader tributary when a dreadful foreboding seized Alan.

“Hold it! Don’t head that way!”

Siam turned round to confront Alan. “We cannot take the leftward channel. That way leads to forbidden places.”

Through the pulsating oraculum, Alan sensed an even greater danger waiting for them on the broader tributary. That danger was so overwhelming he took a firm hold of the chief’s shoulder.

“We have no choice. I’m sorry—but we have to turn aside! We’re in great danger.”

A chorus of voices erupted into the air about them as the Olhyiu clustered around their chief.

“The Mage Lord is right.” It was the clear strong voice of Ainé that cut through the rising panic. Alan saw that the Kyra’s oraculum was also pulsating strongly. “I too sense the trap that awaits us upon the greater channel of the river.”

With a groan of disbelief and a continuing shaking of his head, Siam nodded to Mark, who brought the helm around so the ship was heading into the left channel. The chief glanced at Kemtuk, whose face was haggard with worry.

Alan and Kate were also joined in the prow by Mo, all watching intently as the island flowed steadily by them for mile after mile. “Ossierel was the name of both the
capital and the island itself, from ancient times,” said Milish. “Such was it called in the tongue of those who first settled the valley.”

They saw that the island was densely forested over its lower reaches, and rising in a series of scarps to a broad plateau on which they glimpsed walls and buildings of ruined stone—the fallen citadel. Blue in the distance, and capping the plateau, more scarps buttressed a tor that soared almost vertically upward, so steep and high its peak was lost in the mists of what was now afternoon.

“There is a tower, at present obscured by the mists, on that soaring pinnacle.” Milish’s finger led their gazes far inland.

Then Siam’s voice sounded from behind them. “We sailors know it better as the Rath of the Dark Queen.”

“The Rath of Nantosueta!” echoed Qwenqwo Cuatzel, who had only just descended from his watch in the crow’s nest to join their gathering on the prow. “It is all that remains of the temples of her dark arts, elevated above forest and river, from where long ago her witches’ coven could cast their spells over forest, mountain and river, and over the kingdoms of men.”

An hour and a half after entering the narrow channel Alan could see a small alluvial plain that broke out of the dense forest of the island’s lower slopes, and now, as they approached it, he could make out the faint outline of a track winding up through the forest that cloaked the slopes over the river. It had to lead to the plateau, and ruins, high above. It looked like a difficult
place to get to. Now, peering aloft through gaps in the mist, he was awed by the vast ascent that took his gaze to the level of the plateau, and beyond it, to the level of the clouds.

Suddenly Mo startled them all. She was standing stiffly before them, her face racked with alarm. In a piping voice she warned them, “We must stop here—it’s where we’ve been drawn to.”

Alan wheeled around to face her. He took her shoulders in his hands and gazed down into her startled eyes. “What is it, Mo?”

“Don’t you feel it too?”

Even as he began to shake his head, he felt it rise in him, so overwhelming with its closeness that he was almost thrown backward. The ecstasy of contact came in a single great wave, causing gooseflesh to erupt over his skin. He heard the sighs of his friends and knew all of their mouths had fallen open.

The calling!

All four friends, even Mark, farther back on the aft deck, looked upward, toward the high plain on the mysterious island. The calling had come from there.

A chill of presentiment swept through Alan as he waited for the wave to ebb, then looked at Mo and Kate, then across to Mark, whose arms had fallen from the great wheel. He asked them, “Are we all agreed?”

The two girls nodded but Mark was silent.

“Mark?” He had to call out across the intervening decks.

Mark shrugged, as if to say, “What choice do I have?”

Alan realized that Mark, more than anyone, would naturally be reluctant to leave the ship. He turned to Ainé and Siam, his face pale. “I’m sorry, but we have no choice but to leave the ship and answer this calling.”

“Abandon the Temple Ship?”

Alan heard the incredulous growl of Siam even as he felt his oraculum begin to pulsate so strongly his entire brow seemed to throb with it. The chief was insistent. “You cannot ask this of my people. Not here!” His fearful gaze lifted up to look at the distant ruins that towered over them.

“Siam—I know you don’t want to leave the safety of the ship. My friends and I have no choice, but you do. You don’t have to come with us. We’ll make our way up to the plateau on our own.”

Kemtuk’s hand reached for Siam’s shoulder, as if supporting him in his fears for the people now gathering about them in consternation.

“The Mage Lord asks that we abandon the ship,” Siam groaned to the sea of anxious faces. “Here, in the very shadow of the Dark Queen’s Rath!”