The World Above the Sky (15 page)

With one last wash of the red cliffs, the sun slipped into the sea. The land began to cool instantly. Eugainia unrolled a beaver robe and drifted into a shallow, restive sleep.

On a dream-time moonlit beach, not this one on which she slept on this island called Apekwit, but a granite cove on a distant coast to the north, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk threw flat, hard stones into the grey rolling sea. Though distant in the dream, his voice was near. She dreamed his thoughts, as clear to her and as present as though he stood not beside but, somehow, inside her. The farther I throw this stone, she heard his dream-voice say, this perfect round stone which I choose with the greatest possible care, the farther I throw it, the more Eugainia will admire me.

Why does he throw those stupid stones? she wondered. Why won't he come talk to me?

Swift as thought, without moving a muscle, she was behind him. Not high in the realm of illusory dream time. Not on the shore of some distant land. Not asleep in a dream. Here. On Apekwit. In a dream awake and standing.

This island. This beach. This island. Him. Standing before me. You.

When he turned, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's quick regard was a question.

He stepped inside her.

Eugainia didn't find it at all odd when he bent down then straightened through her torso, as though she were a column of smoke without substance in which he had taken habitation. Her body didn't resist the intrusion. Rather, she felt herself expand to absorb him. He bent, her with him this time, to choose another stone, a flat, round smooth stone the size of his palm. He turned back to sea, stepped away and outside her, prepared to throw the stone.

Eugainia felt bereft. She cried out in her sleep, terrified. I will be alone forever. She woke. The sky had cleared. Night had fallen. A small fire burned nearby, sputtering sparks high into the air where they faded, like children lost in the stars. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, very real, stood distant at the tip of an outcrop in rising water.

Under the full moon, the Sturgeon Moon of late summer, Apekwit gave her heat to the night. The offshore breeze fell light and steady, cooled the whispering pines. A nightbird sang. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's voice flowed through Eugainia's thoughts, in a tongue she recognized, a tongue she knew no mortal man or woman, none but she and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk would ever speak.

If I throw this stone out past the fifth wave, his thought resonated inside her, you will touch my arm. I'll turn, lift your chin…

He yearned to turn to her and lift her chin but knew it was too soon. He struggled, held his gaze to the horizon.

Don't turn to her now, fool. The beauty of the light of the moon on her hair will cause your eyes to weep. I'll strike the moon by accident. It will fall from the sky in a shower of stars and crush my bursting heart.

He leaned, inclined laterally, and cast the stone. The lustrous hank of black hair, normally braided with tight precision, fell loose around his shoulders. Black bolts of tattooed lightning glistened on the oiled skin of his flanks. As he tested the weight of the second stone, the tattooed serpent form, sinuous on his forearm, seemed to climb as the muscles below the skin flexed and stretched. River and stream tattoos, blue and green, flowed up his belly where they merged with clouds afloat on his upper chest, flowed over his shoulders and fell, etched as rain on his back.

A densely packed flock of shorebirds, preparing for long days and nights of migration, swept low, close to the surface. Wheeling swiftly as one, they obliterated the reflected moon. Nearby, the cry of an unseen loon....Beyond that, the barking of a solitary seal.

His powerful calves, tight thighs and buttocks flexed then contracted as Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk launched a second stone. He straightened to watch its progress. The stone skipped the surface in declining intervals until it slipped below the surface leaving barely a ripple.

Eugainia stepped out of the beaded doeskin dress Keswalqw had made for her. Her hair fell and fanned loose at her waist. She walked naked down the beach toward Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk turned to her, still some ten or twelve paces distant. His urge to stride up the beach and possess her faded at the sight of her moonlit beauty. Was he worthy of her sweet red mouth? Would she offer the tender breasts for which he yearned, curtained now beneath the honey-coloured hair curling down past her slender waist? Would the long tapered legs part in ecstasy for him? Would his child swell the flat belly and narrow waist until they rivalled in girth then exceeded the full circle of her broad hips? Would she invite him to drink from the salt ocean of her dreams until his thirst was quenched, if only for the moment, then let him drink again when thirst returned insatiate?

Could she love him as he loved her, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk wondered?

Fragments of an ancient Irish air rose in Eugainia's memory. She refashioned the lyric, as a cobbler at her last transforms skin and hide. In my dream I make a pair of shoes for you, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk. Made from the skin of a loon. You, my love, are the seabird who soars where I may follow. In my dream, I made for you a pair of gloves...made from the skin of a fish. For you are the whale fish and I am the sea, which you alone may enter.

He turned away. He cast a third stone.

In my sleep, the plover and the curlew spoke your name. Now I am awake. Your strong right arm throws perfect stones far into the sea. I'll touch this strong arm of yours. You'll turn, touch my face, I'll look into you bright black eyes. You'll hold me close. Your hand will cup my breast. You hand caress my belly. My thigh...

She touched his shoulder. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk looked deep into her moon-washed eyes. They did not waver. Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk felt himself swell, then rise.

“I'll make for you a purse, my love,” she said aloud, “of morning dew and whispers.”

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk bent to choose the final stone. “If this stone goes past that round red rock—I've never thrown a stone so far—I'll turn and greet you. I will shout! I'll see the white moon in your grass- and sky-coloured eyes. I will kiss your high white brow. I'll press my mouth to your rowanberry lips. I will show you the north and south, the east and west of my heart, my heart that beats for you. We will join our bodies and our spirits. We will make a spirit quest. You'll give me your Power. I'll give you my Power. As one, we'll walk the Six Worlds of L'nuk.”

The People.

He gathered his strength. He launched the stone. The spinning sandstone disk skipped the surface in long intervals, losing no power or wavering in direction. The stone gained momentum as it passed the red rock outcrop, sped across the water below the wheeling birds, flashed beyond the last ripple of the moon, fell from sight beyond their range of vision.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk turned, amazed, to Eugainia. “Never have I thrown a stone so far! I believe it's still going! Ha!” He cupped her face and gently kissed her lips. Before she could respond, Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk threw back his head. “
E'e
,” he cried. “
E'e
!”

He splashed through the shallows, then dove beneath the surface of the black water. Eugainia followed. The late-summer miracle of light and water had finally bloomed. She dove into the spiralling trail of phosphors in Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's wake. As though waiting for the lovers to ignite them, in their billions, the late-blooming phosphorescent plankton, radiant pinpricks of light, shimmered blue and green, streamed from their fingertips, their hair and their eyebrows as the lovers sped beneath the surface. Trails of light shot like falling stars past Eugainia's unblinking eyes, swirled in eddies around her breasts. The white length of her shone, awash in luminescent brilliance. She rose to the surface and floated on her back. Or did she? Was that great field of light the stars? Or was she still underwater, face down, eyes open, absorbing a million points of phosphorescent light? Stars. Yes. Black sky and water. Yes and yes. And the moon. Yes. She was on her back. She was floating.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk, sleek as an otter, slipped from view. Eugainia felt the delicate ripple of a current along her back. Or were his fingertips trailing down her spine?

Still fully submerged he urged her legs apart. Eugainia did not resist. Light coursed from Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk's hair as his head broke the surface. Eugainia opened herself to him.

Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk buried his face in the salt sea of eternity.

THE WORLD BELOW THE EARTH

Autumn/Winter 1398, 1399

• • •

Two hours by canoe and a short portage across a narrow isthmus brought Henry and Athol to the headwaters of Turned Up Whale Belly Bay, named for the belly-up sexual displays of fin-back bulls, roused to flopping turbidity in their behemothic battles for mates. Sheer rock faces buttressed the windswept promontory on which the Sinclair kinsmen stood. The soaring wedge of rock and tumbled glacial shale offered unobstructed water vistas to three points of the compass, divided the northern extreme of Turned Up Whale Belly Bay into two dynamic basins, one due east, the other spreading westward. Tidal rivers snaked far inland through salt marshes to the arable heart of the peninsula. Twice daily out-rushes of heavily silted water drained the basins and their rivers: masses of incoming sea water, forced up the narrowing funnel the great bay formed, raced inland with what seemed to the visitor's eyes unnatural speed and power. The tidal outrace was equally astonishing, not only for its power, but what the fallen tide revealed. The disagreeable image of expansive flats of hip-deep mud laid bare, then drowned by the in-rushing sea twelve hours later, suited Henry's grim frame of mind.

Across the turbulent basin to the east, a second towering cliff appeared cloven as if by a blow from a mighty axe. Some nine leagues distant, so-named Cape Split mirrored in height and latitude their current point of observation. Farther west, hills ablaze with autumn's ambivalent exuberance marked the horizon. Beyond the rippled line of gold and scarlet foliage, crisp in the slanting sun, sprawled the New World.

Henry paced the cliff, dangerously close to the edge. An unfamiliar passion gripped him and would not let go. His thoughts were knotted with worry; his conscience a tangle of contradictions. The day Eugainia and Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk disappeared, his first thought was of the map to the Well of Baphomet. He'd found a clamshell and dried flowers in its place. He had no doubt as to Eugainia's intentions. Nor the source of the knot of anger in his heart.

She'll unearth the Grail without us, heal herself. She'll disappear, taking the Sacred Vessel with her. What died with my father will stay dead forever. All my work on his behalf, on my own, will come to nothing. Our tattered order will lose what little heart remains; without Her, the Temple Knights will never reassemble. Why would they?

“The Place of Boiling Waters,” he murmured aloud, mesmerized by the roiling foam below. He stepped closer to the edge. He wavered.

Sir Athol lay a firm hand on his cousin's shoulder. “Steady there, laddie.”

Henry stepped back.“‘Laddie' indeed! It's been awhile since anyone called me ‘laddie,' laddie.”

“Aye. Take no offence, Henry. It popped out. I say, it just popped out!”

“No doubt an echo from our boyhood cliff-hopping days.”

“No doubt.”

“The People named this place well. These waters do indeed boil with contrary currents. I've never seen such extremes of ebb and flow.”

“Magnificent. I say—”

“Yes, yes. Magnificent. I heard.”

“It bears repeating. Magnificent!” Athol persisted, exulting in the crisp blue and white beauty of the sky. “And singular. We've measured fifty feet vertical rise and fall between low and high tide.”

“Extraordinary.” Henry's concern was his former ship, not the turbid waters, no matter their extraordinary rise and fall.
Reclamation
rested at anchor below the cliff. In an informal ceremony after the noon meal, some three hours earlier, the ship had reverted to her owner. Antonio had what he came for. The terms of agreement struck in Venice two years past came due. Antonio would return. Henry and his chosen few would stay.

Any seagoing excursions would await the construction of a new ship. There was little possibility of that, Henry knew, before spring. Though the loss of her cut like a knife, Henry knew he had no further need of
Reclamation
. Sooner than intended, Henry the grudging navigator had become, by force of circumstance, Henry the land-based explorer.

Antonio Zeno's crew—Arcadian volunteers disheartened and eager for a chance to reunite with their families—and several young men of the Pictook band seduced by the promise of adventure, had sailed
Reclamation
around the great peninsula the preceding day. The capricious winds of the open ocean, then Turned Up Whale Belly Bay's contrary currents, set the final tests of the ship's seaworthiness. Masters and crew, green as they were, rose to the challenge:
Reclamation
's very presence in these difficult waters, where she awaited the falling tide and her return to Venice, affirmed their mastery. On the turn of the tide, not half an hour hence, Henry's fate, along with those of Sir Athol, Eugainia and the few men who remained loyal to Henry's vision, would be sealed.

The alternate heat and frost of mid-October bred conflicting desires in The People, and in Henry's men. In this, Athol was typical: he required a nap. He succumbed to a full-belly urge to snooze in a nearby rock-and-spruce bower flooded with afternoon sun, perfumed with sweetgrass, intruded upon by dolorous flies and the last fat bee, its progress random, its haunches two bright pantaloons stuffed with yellow pollen, its striped abdomen—loaded with nectar—drooping like an old man's drawers. The buzzing lummox was determined to return to the hive, fully loaded, one last time, despite a trajectory skewed by an intermittent acquaintance with the horizontal, impossible aerodynamics, and the onset of late-season senility.

It was a season of plenty. For anxious man and senile bee alike, the compulsion to conserve won over the desire to lounge. Hips, busts, waistlines swelled as the harvest peaked. The People, Athol reflected, strained to absorb the last of the wavering light, along with every root, briar and berry.

Henry's men took direction from The People, embracing their gather-cure-and-stow zeal. Their methods, they discovered, were not so different from those of Rosslyn and the Scots country people surrounding the great castle fort. Dried fruits and berries; sun- and wind-dried fish and the flesh of lesser animals; smoked haunches of venison, moose and bear; great vats boiled then cooled, meat from the butchered creatures sealed and stowed in congealed masses of their own fat, awaiting the liquefying fires of winter. The most efficient storage vessels were The People themselves: the cheeks of the children, in Keswalqw's happy words, grew round with fat.

Henry sat cross-legged on the cliff edge. His attention shifted from the loss of
Reclamation
to Eugainia. Keswalqw had impressed the dimensions of the continent upon him. As he scanned the westward horizon, his anxiety flowed from the turbulent waters of the bay to vast incomprehensible territory marked on his charts as “
Terra Incognito
.” Mimk
ɨ
tawo'qu'sk and Eugainia disappeared in a land mass vast beyond comprehension.

Inland oceans—Keswalqw could find no better word for bodies of water too large to be contained by the word
lake
—lay in the interior of a contiguous land mass. Fresh water. Not salt. Five in all, she told him. Oceans in all but tide and salinity framed by wide horizons, their waters folding beneath the northern wind, rolling into waves of size and power to challenge those of the open sea.

On August tenth, to honour his patron saint's feast day, Henry named the river draining these ocean/lakes, and the gulf into which it flowed. They'd bear the name and title of a monk grilled for apostasy to eternal perfection some one thousand six hundred years ago. The unfortunate St. Lawrence would become associated with the great river of The People for centuries to come. The mighty St. Lawrence, fed by her five central inland seas, opened paths to lesser rivers, rivers draining numberless lakes leading to still more rivers and lakes—an intricate network of waterways and trade routes ranging north past the treeline, west to the mountains and south to southern seas.

Keswalqw described another broad, fresh river The People's western cousins called
Misi-ziibi
. The Mississippi (Sir Athol's best approximation) flowed south, draining fertile inland planes and forests beyond the five ocean lakes, feeding fresh water to another great gulf far to the south where summer was perpetual and winter dared not come. Farther west, beyond the
Misi-ziibi
, a great treeless meadow, a seemingly endless grassland plain Henry's Norman cousins would call a
praierie
, stretched to impassable mountains. Beyond the mountains themselves (here Keswalqw's topographical information remained speculative) a second salt sea was said to spread westward to the far distant horizon.

Though it may have seemed wild and majestic to the conquer-then-subdue European eye, it became clear to Henry from Keswalqw's description that much of this New World was as carefully managed as any feudal lord's ancestral estate. Henry's New Acadia was not new at all. Nor were its people simple or in any way unsophisticated. Vast numbers inhabited this ancient world, gathered in all manner of tribes representing widely varied, ancient and honourable traditions. The People were engaged in all manner of practice, holding worldviews as ancient, varied and complex as those of the warring fiefdoms and city-states of Europe and Arabia.

Henry had much to learn and was an apt, attentive student. Long conversations with Keswalqw expanded his and Sir Athol's vocabulary. Their survival depended upon information; The People were as generous with knowledge as they were with clothing and food. A deep desire to know brought The People close to Athol and Henry's hearts and illuminated their imaginations. Need spurred dedication: conversation, increasingly fluid and intense, brought the foreseeable future into sharp focus.

Keswalqw spoke of great cities a little to the west, then due south where a temperate climate allowed close relatives of The People to farm vast tracts of land. They led settled lives in great cities supporting thousands upon thousands of peace-loving, law-abiding citizens, whose systems of government surpassed in sophistication and human intent many practised in a Europe rendered dissolute by centuries of plague and plunder.

Most northern tribes, they learned, remained seasonally nomadic. Coastal tribes, like Keswalqw's, harvested seal, walrus, cod, halibut, small offshore whales—and, in particular, the giant sturgeon favoured by The People and their far distant trading partners for its succulent smoked flesh and abundant, fat-laden roe. The People were careful stewards, sharing their abundance when their near neighbour's plenty failed. Though his acquaintance with The People was recent, Henry felt he knew the Piktook Mi'kmaq as he had known no others. Perhaps it was Keswalqw's reverent stewardship that touched his prudent Scottish heart.

The People, like Henry, were widely travelled traders and adventurers. In times of excess—much more frequent than times of want—a trading excursion would take the hardiest men (often, as at present, a party led by the chief...hence clan mother Keswalqw's temporary, elevated status of tribal elder and leader) from their villages for several years. The trading missions led them halfway across the continent or deep into the great coastal plains and forests to the south.

Keswalqw knew of the customs and laws of distant peoples first hand. Willful and adventurous in her youth, she'd accompanied her young husband on long voyages of trade and discovery, to the shock of tribal elders and certain clan mothers. Her cache of antelope hides and buffalo robes confirmed oft-told tales of wealth and prairie abundance...and the great trade expeditions required to bring such treasures from such great distances this far east.

The People of the Buffalo, she told Henry as she displayed three large hides dense with rough brown hair, managed the grasslands with controlled prairie fire. The plains were burned annually, the grass lands refreshed, new territory cleared of trees. Antelope and the ungulate bison populations expanded continuously with the prairie People's careful tending. Seas of thundering buffalo swept across the prairies, shaking the earth and filling the bellies of man and wolf alike.

Woodland hunters in the boreal forests of the north, Keswalqw explained, managed a careful balance beneficial to their own populations, and the populations of bear, wolverine, lynx and caribou on which they depended for survival. Farther north still lived the Ice Hunters. Henry, as it turned out, had more information than Keswalqw (much of it secondhand, all exaggerated) on the lives of these eaters of raw meat. He shared his tales of the great white ice bear with adults and children whose minds spun with wonder at the power and beauty of the ferocious white-as-a-ghost-person predator.

“I would give much,” Keswalqw admitted one day, “to possess the pelt of such a creature. White and warm. So much Power, such
Kji-knap
against winter.”

“One day I'll take you there, aboard
Reclamation
,” Henry replied, fully aware the possibility of such an adventure aboard the ship he had come to love as one loves a person faded as the moment of Antonio's departure loomed.

That day is now upon me, Henry thought. God and Goddess help us. Scant hope of help, now she's gone. My Kingdom of the Grail is a ship with no rudder, running nose first before a gale of wind in a hard, contrary tide.