ROWAN-11
Freezing water rushed into my mouth and nostrils. I flailed, with the wild energy of shock. A creature with flaccid but enormous and insistent hands clutched at me, covering my face and head with its hands. Turning head over heels, I fought it with primal desperation, even as I sought the way to the surface of the water. I managed to thrust the thing from me, but by the time I had, I had completely lost my bearings, I was running out of air, and the cold was quickly draining away my strength.
An instant before my effort to hold my breath crumbled beneath the body’s impetus to gulp for oxygen, I felt a hand smaller but stronger than the creature’s flaccid one grab one of my wrists, my right one, and pulling, propel me through the water with surprising swiftness. After a moment, I glimpsed light, my passage through the water slowed, and the hand let go of my wrist and grabbed me under my right arm just as I felt another hand grab me under my left arm; and I was lifted up, out of the water.
I was blinded by the sun for a moment; then I realized I couldn’t breathe, even though I was out of the water. Before I could panic, however, water poured out of my nose and mouth in a powerful exhalation, I gasped for breath and found it, and found I was face to face with a person: a woman, the first female I had ever seen in person. (I had seen a few on the Grail, and at the end of the bright road.)
She said something, and I recognized her voice as the one I had thought of as the river voice; but what she said I was still too addled to comprehend. When I asked her much later what she’d said, she said, with a mischievous smile, “I said, ‘You’re beautiful.’” Whether she actually uttered those words in that moment, I don’t know. I doubt it; but she did say it, in the way she looked at me, with a tilt of the head and a half-smile, and an expression on her face of belief arising from disbelief, as if regarding something that cannot be true but since it is, then other things that cannot be true must be true as well—as I had looked upon the sights before me when Mulgar had removed my blindfold my first time outside in what seemed already another time, another life.
She had a strange blazing clarity about her: that is, I somehow saw her more clearly than ever I had seen Mulgar, Bowusuvi, or the Fatheads, even Romulus. They were all gray and indistinct in comparison. Of course, this impression could have been nothing more than an effect of the brightness of the outdoors, of the sun and the river, accentuated by its contrast to my struggle in the underwater darkness; but in that moment of first seeing her, she seemed more real than everything else, with her fierce gentle open face, her watery eyes of deepest green, the white scar under her right eye (mirroring the entry point of the eye thing on my own face), stark against the russet of her face and the black of her hair.
Transferring me to one arm, she beckoned with the other to someone behind me, out on the river. I craned my head to see who she was motioning to, and as I took my eyes from her, I noticed two things: One, behind her, at the top of the slope, the bush under which I’d been hiding was still unattended, no Fathead or other pursuer having decided to look for me there; and two, I was no longer wearing a shirt; water ran down my body in cold sheets and rivulets. Then, my neck having completed its crane, I caught sight of the recipient of her motion, and presumably the owner of the other voice I’d heard while hiding under the bush.
It was a boy, a little bigger than Romulus, who, when I first saw him, put me in the mind of, well, dirt. His skin was the color of the dirt of the deserts I’d seen on the Grail, his longish impetuous hair was a shade lighter brown than his skin (which I thought strange, since most people’s hair, even Romulus’, was darker than their skin), and even the clothes he was wearing—long pants and long sleeves—were dirty brown, ever-so-slightly darker than his skin.
He was leaning forward on a raft, of logs strapped together with thick rope, paddling towards us determinedly. A fishing pole lay crossways behind him, along with a stouter, longer pole, a pine box, a canvas bucket, and some shoes. As he neared and I got a better look at him, it seemed to me at first that he looked mean or angry, with heavy brow and an air of sullen rebelliousness, or challenge.
The river woman lifted me bare-chested, muddy, and dripping wet onto the raft, and then swung herself up beside me with smooth ease. The massive logs under me, dipping and swaying, felt simultaneously as solid and reliable as the ground and as ponderous as the water.
“Turn us around,” the river woman said to the dirt boy, her voice soft as the wind but clear as the river. The dirt boy bent even farther into his paddle-strokes, his tongue peeking out from between his lips, and in due time had us traveling slowly up the river, against the gentle current. He steered the raft closer to the shore, then traded the paddle for the long stout pole, and began pushing us along using the bottom of the river as leverage.
I watched him work, and as I did so, the river woman watched me and I watched her, and she him, and he kept looking up from his labor to steal glances at me, as well as at her. I discovered, as he propelled us forward in a somewhat zigzagging course, that the mean-ness or anger of his face, the sullen-ness, was a thin façade, masking a lonely wonder, a lumpy kindness. This of course, I wasn’t noticing in those terms, I was just marking expression and feature that later I would equate with such qualities, but I was perceptive enough then to know that I liked him.
The river woman, I liked, too, as you can imagine. With a strange (since all of her movements were so sure and decisive) and somewhat endearing uncertainty, she began dipping her hands into the water, and washing the mud from my body. The water was well nigh icy, and yet her hands felt warm, like biscuits, on my torso, my neck, and my arms.
“He’ll be freezing soon,” she said to the dirt boy, “stop at Grandil’s place.”
The dirt boy’s eyes widened, and he frowned in a way that asked, “Really?” but he nodded and went on.
After cleaning the mud from me, the river woman began cleaning her own feet, which were caked with mud. Her gray breeches, which went down only to her knees, revealing lean strong legs as dark as her face, were a bit muddy, too, but these she let alone. Her shirt, gray as well though touched here and there with thick red thread, wasn’t muddy at all, just wet. Its sleeves, like her pants, were only half-length, revealing arms just as lean and strong as her legs.
After finishing with her feet, she resumed her silent examination of me, as I continued my silent examination of her and the dirt boy and the florid greenery thickening the descending shoreline. Thickets of willow rose above endless and overlapping conglomerations of roseweed and silvertail, sweetbay and whispertail, reeds and bullspears, and farther within the forest, ferns and broadleafs, with massive oaks and dragonleafs overlooking it all, and the sun, now reddening as it descended down the sky in front of us, casting an alpenglow hue upon the tops of the trees and creating a shadowy sparkling-ness all around us.
Several times the river woman seemed on the verge of saying something to me, but inhibited by that strange shyness of hers, held back; and so we just looked at each other as the dirt boy, watching both of us whenever he could spare a glance, piloted us up the river with grunting pole-stabs.
As the river woman had predicted, I began to grow quite cold as the sun’s rays became less direct and an evening breeze chapped at my wet body; and soon, I found that I was, indeed, shivering. The river woman, noticing this, was leaning forward to attend to me, when I espied two men on the shore behind her standing on either side of a broad-leafed plant I now know to be a hello bush. Not Fatheads, but, I thought, unquestionably pursuers, and more intimidating than the Fatheads, because intelligent-looking. They were both tall, dark-haired, bronze-skinned, angular-faced, sharp-eyed, and wore uniforms of orange and black, like many of the men in the place Mulgar worked. Long swords hung in black scabbards at their hips. And they were looking at us—at me, it seemed like.
I was terrified, these men seeming to combine in their personages the physical size and strength of the Fatheads with the intelligence of Mulgar, and something else besides, an official-ness, maybe, that subtly, subconsciously, informed you that they weren’t just them, they had a whole organization behind them—but I sensed that making a desperate escape attempt, or a desperate plea to the river woman to protect me from them wouldn’t be the right thing to do, so I just looked at them, or tried to, with bland indifference.
The river woman, seeing my expression, froze in her forward-lean. Froze for the slimmest fraction of a second, that is (I noticed it, I think, only because she was so close to me, and because my senses were heightened by terror), before commencing to rub my arms and body in short, quick, chafing strokes, offering no acknowledgment of their presence. The dirt boy worked on, battling the river with his head down, oblivious to this subtle interplay of wits.
The river woman continued to chafe me, holding my gaze in what seemed intended to be a reassuring way, until one of the men said, “Ma’am?”
At this, she turned to face them. Watching her, only, I would have said that she turned slowly, almost ponderously, yet out of the corner of my eye I saw the dirt boy’s head jerk up; and her slow, ponderous turn was executed with greater alacrity than his sudden movement. She turned with such smooth grace, I think, that her movements, though actually swift, seemed slow. Her muscles were utterly slack—they seemed to have shifted into some kind of ultra-relaxation mode—and yet she, herself, seemed taut, ready. Her breaths came long and slow and silent. She raised a hand in greeting, but said nothing.
One of the men, his voice youthful but commanding, said, “Ma’am, a boy is missing, about the same age as your son, there, we were wondering if you could be so kind as to help us out.” As he spoke, he looked with shrewd discernment at her, at me, and at the dirt boy, who had stopped poling us along and was gaping at the men in amazement. The other man, who close-up I could tell was older than the first one, his hair touched with gray, examined us as well, seeming to organize us in his head, to ponder, to calculate.
The river woman weighed the man’s words, but said nothing for a long enough time that in the interval of silence in which he waited for her reply, marked only by the soft buzz of a nearby dragonfly, I began to think she simply wasn’t going to reply to him at all. But then she said, “Okay.”
“Well, first of all,” the younger of the men went on with officious immediacy, “Have you seen a boy—about his age,” he nodded at me, “or seen or heard anything at all unusual?”
“Unusual?”
“A chase. The sounds of a hunt, or chase.”
The river woman laughed—a beautiful sound, like the turn of a downhill stream through a cluster of rocks. “Hunters are silent around here.” The implied, “You’re obviously not from around here,” she left unsaid.
Without the slightest impatience, the man explained, “Running, or tearing through the trees, maybe, or yelling or screaming, or perhaps you’ve seen people, men, you might not have recognized, dressed in a way that would be unusual out here.”
“No nothing out of the ordinary,” the river woman said, her voice as soft and clear as ever, devoid of tension. “We saw a heron earlier, but I suppose that’s not what you mean.” She wasn’t looking at them with the same intensity with which they were scrutinizing her, rather with what I would call a respectful innocence, but I got the sense that her mind was working just as quickly as theirs were, sizing them up, sizing up the words they were saying, sorting things out in her mind.
The second of the men, his voice older but less commanding than that of the other, asked, “Do you know this area well, Madam?”
The river woman shrugged. “Fairly well.”
“Where might a child go around here, a scared child, perhaps who thinks he’s running away from something or someone dangerous?” He looked at the river woman with penetrating black-brown eyes, as if trying to pry into her mind, find out what she was thinking.
The river woman, unflinchingly good-natured, scratched her forehead. “There’s some houses down yonder.” She pointed in the direction we’d come from. “Maybe he’d head for those?”
“No, probably a non-house area.” His penetrating look was easing, though, as if satisfied that the river woman wasn’t hiding anything. The first man appeared to me to be faintly relieved.
“The forest is old, with a lot of dead trees, down the same way, but east, on the other side of the river; there could be some hollow trees to hide in, there. There’s a bridge a few hundred paces down.”
The men thanked her for her time, and bowed their heads, before heading downriver.
“Polite fellows, eh?” she said to the dirt boy with a crooked smile, and he smiled, too, before bending forward with the long pole to resume his ragged navigation. Once the two men had disappeared from sight, he questioned, “Leopards, out here?” His voice was high and low at the same time—a teenager’s voice, I learned later (he was an early-maturing twelve at the time, it turned out).
The river woman nodded but said nothing.
The dirt boy pressed, “They wouldn’t hur…they wouldn’t do anything, would they?”
“No, I suppose not, but something doesn’t add up. Maybe Jay can figure it out.”
The dirt boy nodded his agreement.
I was getting colder by the minute, in the dying sun, in my wet breeches. I could see goosebumps on the river woman’s arms, too, though she wasn’t shivering like I was.
“Get us on to Grandil’s, we need a couple blankets.” As if responding to the dirt boy’s previous look of query, she explained, “Grandil’ll need fish, and this will give us an excuse to give him some. It’ll be a trade for blankets—the use of his blankets.” I looked around for fish, didn’t see any, though I did smell something fairly strong, and finally decided they must be in the canvas bucket behind the dirt boy.
Most adults, I suspect, would have asked me a bunch of questions, about who I was, where I came from, what I was doing, and so on; and would have advised me, reassured me, that kind of thing, but Vonnae didn’t. At some point, she said, “I’m Vonnae, by the way, and this is Dirk,” but that was all, otherwise just observing me with appreciative wonder. Dirk, too, just watched me, saying very little, smiling every now and then, his lumpy smile, as if to say, “I’m nice, despite my heavy brow.” And I watched him, and watched Vonnae, they were so clear, just kept looking at them, and at the silvertail and sweet bay and roseweed, and willows and towering oaks, and cattails, and flowers and clumps and clusters of all the river plants along the glowing way, and smelling the water and the fish, and seeing in the water darting little fish, and the sparkles of sunlight and dragonflies and birds and red-lined clouds crossing above. At some point, I said, “I’m Rowan,” and enjoyed seeing how surprised they were at how clearly I spoke.
My shivering had become pretty uncontrollable by this time, though, and my teeth were chattering, so the river woman, Vonnae, scooting closer to me, started chafing my arms again. Soon, her gaze shifted to the dirt boy, and in an apologetic tone, she asked him, “Dirk, uh, until…”
He looked puzzled for an instant, then understanding dawned on his face, and without any hesitation, he pulled off his shirt, which was dry, revealing a pudgy but strong-looking body a lighter shade of dirt than the rest of his skin. He passed it to Vonnae, and she wrapped it around me, its heavy texture and pleasant warmth helping control my shivering, and actually stilling the chattering of my teeth.
“We’ll have some blankets pretty soon, don’t worry,” she assured me, “We’re going to the House of Falcon, if that’s all right with you.”
I just looked at her, her words meaning nothing. I was too tired to express, or to realize, even, that I had no idea if she meant she was taking me with them to this “House of Falcon,” and if not, where I could, or should, go. I was adrift, a raft not on a river but on a sea.
It was then that on the far bank of the river, barely discernible in the shadows between two willow trees, I saw a figure.
The two of them, following my eyes, saw him too.
“Is that an elf?” Dirk cried, “Yes! It is! A real Forest Elf! Wow! Vonnae, a Forest Person, they’re real!”
“Romulus,” I said, and as I said it, he raised his hand, the way humans do, the way Vonnae had acknowledged the Leopards, “He’s my friend.” Vonnae received that statement with a slight widening of her green, but said nothing, just filed it away with the other puzzling things she’d seen that afternoon.
Dirk raised his hand in reply, mirroring Romulus’ gesture, as did I, and Romulus melted into the forest. Dirk smiled to himself; he seemed deeply satisfied. This was the first contact, minimal though it was, between the two of them, whose adventures together were to span the world.
Vonnae asked me, “You want to come? To the House of Falcon, I mean.”
I may have asked Mind to show me House of Falcon; or memories, as Mind would call them, of my life there may have come to me unbidden; but in a few seconds, I glimpsed what was to come.
I saw myself on Vonnae’s shoulders as she carried me through the woods, teaching me the names of trees and flowers; I saw her spreading ointment on my legs, I saw her reading to me, and the two of us eating together, sometimes with others; I saw her preparing my food, washing my clothes, I saw myself asleep, cradled in her loving arms, and I saw in her eyes the imbhyran that is said to hold civilization from chaos, and I knew from where it came, from mother to son, tonokna to innikno.
I saw myself with Dirk, my neighbor at House of Dog, romping across field and forest and stream; and I saw him sharing with me the secret places he’d found or made, explaining to me what he’d discovered or was discovering about the world.
I saw myself, then, touching the big belly of a small woman with a pale, freckled face, and she saying to me, “Her name is Yaan,” and as she said the name and I felt a kick, the light of the fabled Summerlands that lie beyond the northern mountains surging through me.
And then I saw those northern mountains looming before me, the great white abyss that I would cross alone.
“You want to come?” Vonnae asked me as we floated up that evening river, and I may have nodded. I may have just looked at her. But, if she can say that she said “You’re beautiful,” when she pulled me from the river, then I can say that when I saw House of Falcon and the Norgold Mountains at the end of the bright road, I said, “Bring me home.”