Spirit Walker Read online

  A powerful cold whirlwind whipped through the room, making Scandal’s hair stand on end. It was such a startling change from the sweltering summer heat that Scandal sat back in his chair, thinking that the wind might knock the plates from the table. But when he looked, even the feathers on Ayuvah’s necklace hadn’t stirred.

  Scandal felt a pillar of cold off to his right. He reached out and touched it. It stood a few inches in front of him, and Scandal felt it as plainly as if it were the bole of a tree. A green nimbus, roughly shaped like a man, formed in the air beside Tull.

  Scandal jutted his chin, pointing beside Tull. “Spirit Walker,” he said, in equal parts surprise and wonder.

  Tull turned to his left, looked at the green figure.

  Scandal spoke to the Spirit Walker, “Chaa, get back to your body! You’ve been gone for days. For God’s sake, the Pwi are getting scared!”

  The green nimbus stretched out, touched Tull. The young man grabbed his stomach, and his eyes opened wide. For a second Tull seemed frozen, an expression of shock on his face.

  “I can feel him, inside me,” Tull said, holding his belly.

  Scandal watched Tull. “In another five minutes he’ll know more about you than you do,” Scandal said. “He’ll know the moment you’re destined to die … how it will come … whether you’ll ever marry.”

  Scandal could not hide the awe in his voice. The Pwi Spirit Walkers never walked the paths of tomorrow for humans. Scandal had never even heard of a Spirit Walker who’d walked the future for a halfbreed like Tull.

  The Pwi had a word for halfbreeds: Tcho-Pwi, the un-family, the no-people. It was not a word used maliciously as an epithet; it was merely descriptive. Halfbreed Neanderthals did not belong—not with humans, not with Pwi. The biological differences between the descendants of the human Starfarers and the Neanderthals were too great to be bridged in a generation, and children born to such a marriage seldom survived through infancy.

  Tull held his stomach, and Ayuvah said, “This is bad! This is bad! If my father has resorted to walking the future for no-people, he must not have seen a good future for the Pwi.”

  Scandal considered a moment. I’ll never get them to come with me to Craal, he thought. But I have one chance—Chaa could send them. For the Spirit Walker, they’d ride a scimitar cat into hell.

  Chapter 4: The Spirit Walker

  Tull and Ayuvah got up from the table in Scandal’s inn and went to the door, where circling flies glittered, emerald and sapphire. Tull looked out into the sunlight. Down the street, old Caree Tech stood in her yard, stirring a stone cooking pot full of lye and lard as she made a batch of soap. Her eyes were red from the fumes, and the acrid greasy scent carried on the wind.

  “I can feel your father’s spirit in me,” Tull told Ayuvah. “He’s moving from place to place, as if my body were filled with rooms, and he is flinging open forgotten doors. He is so cold. There—he has opened a door to my left lung.”

  Ayuvah chuckled. “I think he is making Connection with you. He cannot walk the paths of your future until he becomes you.”

  “He’s moving up, toward my head.” Tull gasped and as the cold touched his sinuses, he staggered a bit.

  “He is taking his time, learning you.” Ayuvah said. “He would not do this for a human, they are too alien.”

  “There … he is moving out now.”

  “No, he is still within you, just more Connected,” Ayuvah said. “Feel him, just the slightest cold. You’ll feel it at the top of your belly. He is walking your future.”

  Tull sensed it now, a cold lump in his stomach, much like a rising fear. “How long will he take?”

  “It depends,” Ayuvah said. “Your future may be short, it may be long. Your path will branch a thousand, thousand times. He will try to travel all of your futures, see all of your potential. He may be with you for only an hour, or perhaps he will be there all night.”

  Tull imagined carrying Chaa inside him for a day, and wondered if he would become accustomed to the sensation.

  He looked downhill toward Pwi Town. The shanties there were made with faded gray planks, bleached by salt spray and sun. The walls of many homes leaned at odd angles, their foundations sagging under the weight of many years. Tull felt intimately familiar with every stone, every board, and every person in this town.

  A fisherman across the street, Beremon Smit, waved good-bye to his wife and four children and set out south of town, heading toward the mines down at White Rock.

  Another man gone, Tull thought. One less to protect the town, just as Scandal said.

  A cloud floated overhead, casting a sudden shadow. Caree wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her leathery hand and looked up. Behind Tull, in the inn, a guest began shouting drunkenly, “You mutant! I’ll abort your mutant butt! Where’s my knife! I’ll abort you!”

  Scandal shouted, “Here sir, calm yourself!”

  But the man growled, “I don’t know which is worse here—the food, the booze, or the company.” It was a line meant to offend everyone in the inn, but meant to offend Scandal most of all.

  Scandal broke a bottle over the counter and shouted, “All right! He’s mine! He’s mine!”

  Tull did not turn to see the fight. He imagined Scandal, big bear of a man, waving the bottle as he threatened the guest into submission. Scandal was a businessman, and if it came to fighting, he would fight like a businessman, beating the customer into submission with slow punches calculated to minimize the damage, as if he were beating dust from a rug. No profit in killing the customers. Tull knew Scandal too well, knew this town too well.

  Tull smiled. He’d had many good meals here at Moon Dance Inn, and the accumulated emotions, the kwea, of those good meals left him feeling intoxicated and fulfilled.

  He felt inside him, felt the icy presence still there. A Spirit Walker is walking my future, he thought. He will know everything about me. The sense of wonder and fear that came with this knowledge tainted the kwea of satisfaction.

  Tull’s trick ankle was bothering him, and he began limping home, downhill and across the river to Pwi Town.

  Ayuvah must have sensed Tull’s need for quiet, and said nothing.

  The wind surged through Tull’s hair. After sunset the force of the gravitational winds combined with the nightly thermal winds that swept down from the mountains. The little town of Smilodon Bay was perched on the east coast of the Rough, a wilderness so large and rugged that the Slave Lords of Craal had never conquered it. Yet on such nights, Tull felt small and powerless, as if the Slave Lords sent the winds, as if his footing were inconsequential and force of those winds would lift him and blow him out to sea.

  On the road north of Moon Dance Inn was the section of town where Tull had been raised. The kwea from that part of town was powerfully evil, and Tull did not go there, for he could feel a shadow looming over it. So Tull skirted that part of town and walked past a wine shop; in an alley behind it, Tull had once necked with a young human girl, Wisteria Altair. He could not pass that alley without feeling the kwea of hot arousal from his youth.

  Each place they passed held kwea, and as Tull walked through town, he felt like a blind cave spider that spends its entire life in a single web that both defines his world and binds him to it.

  Mayor Goodman’s hounds barked from their pens. Outside the mayor’s front door, in a small iron cage, sat the mayor’s pet Dryad. She was a small girl with silver hair and skin as white as aspen bark, mottled with horizontal black and gray blotches. Her natural coloring blended with her native aspen forest. She was a strange, wild creature who never spoke. Three young boys were standing outside the cage, poking at the captive girl within. One of them was Little Chaa, Ayuvah’s younger brother.

  “Get away from there!” Ayuvah shouted. He ran and grabbed his brother and shook him by the shoulders. “Touch a Dryad, and she will destroy you!” he said.

  Little Chaa laughed. “I could beat her up,” he said, and he ran off to the woods with
the other boys.

  “And she can steal your soul,” Ayuvah shouted, shaking his head at the ignorant youth.

  The men reached the redwood bridge over Smilodon River, and the sun shone on both banks. Like the gravitational wind, the steely-gray water was just beginning to hiss out to sea as the tides turned. Within hours the river level would drop thirty feet.

  Now that the fresh water was running, several Pwi women were finishing their washing on the rocks, while naked toddlers played at the river’s edge. The riverbank was choked with wild raspberry bushes, and clothing was draped over every bush. Blackberry vines crowded in upon the wash women, and they had tied a brown-and-white goat to a tree so it could eat the bushes down. There on the Pwi side of the river, lopsided Neanderthal huts made of driftwood and crooked boards, with weathered hides for doors, sprung up in mockery of the fine houses in the human settlement.

  Ayuvah asked, “Friend, I saw you frown when Scandal gave us those papers. You are disturbed. What do the words on the paper mean?”

  Tull held out his receipt for their day’s labor. “Scandal says he paid us for drudge work. He said we are drudges.” Being halfbreed, Tull could speak the human word, but his accent was nasal, and he pronounced the word as drege.

  “What does that word mean?” Ayuvah asked.

  “It means we are the lowest of the low,” Tull answered. “We are like cattle.”

  Tull flexed his hands, massive hands with strong fingers and knobby joints—the kind of hands made for throwing spears or ripping the hides from animals or digging in the earth. Though he was only half Pwi, Tull’s thumbs were tilted so that if he laid his hand on the table, his thumb and fingers would all lie flat. Because of this, he could not easily hold objects between his thumb and forefinger—could not touch his little finger at all. Like the Pwi, this lent him a degree of clumsiness unknown among the small, clever-handed humans.

  Tull felt inside him. The Spirit Walker was still there. Tull wanted to speak privately to Ayuvah, to say something he was hesitant to speak in front of others.

  The Spirit Walker knows it all now, anyway, he thought.

  “Remember last year, when I took a job as apprentice to Debon, studying medicine?”

  “Shez,” Ayuvah said. Yes.

  “I studied his books for months, and when Tchema cut her leg, Debon wanted me to sew it. But when Tchema saw that I was going to sew her leg, she said, ‘No! I want a human’s clever hands! I’d rather be mauled by a dire wolf than let you do it!’”

  “You would have done your best,” Ayuvah said.

  Tull laughed derisively. “My best is not good enough. Debon talked to me later, and what he said was right. No woman would want me sticking these big hands up her if I have to turn a baby. He was hoping it would work, that I would be accepted among my own people, among the Pwi. But I had to remind him that I am Tcho-Pwi, no-people.” The kwea of the memory was sharp and painful.

  Ayuvah watched Tull’s face. “The paper means nothing. Paper is only good for starting fires.” He took the receipts from Tull's hands and ripped them in half, threw them off the bridge into the Smilodon River.

  “Tomorrow, we can get work picking apples up at Finger Mountain, or we can cut firewood. We can be field hands or loggers. We will not be drudges then.”

  Tull laughed. “You do not see—in Benbow, the humans have reopened the glass factory,” he said, speaking of the legendary Benbow glass, carbon and cesium lain down in a matrix tougher than diamond. “They make drill bits strong enough to drill the rot from a wormy tooth, and in Wellen’s Eyes a man is trying to build a machine to speak to humans on other stars. In South Port, they build ships that move by steam. Someday, the humans will live in castles on the stars, while we will live in houses made of mud and sticks and tend their fields. We will always be drudges.”

  Below them by the riverbank, a woman shouted and there was an audible gasp from a dozen others. Tull whirled just as the water churned by the wash women, and something large whipped away the waves. He saw only a huge gray shape.

  At first he thought it must be one of the great sea serpents. Wash women screamed and grabbed their toddlers, while some children whirled and raced up the embankment. Tull’s heart thudded, and a cry rose from his throat, for he felt sure that a serpent had taken a child.

  A Pwi woman shouted, “It was a saur! A saur ate the goat!”

  All among the Pwi, the cry went up that a dinosaur was in the bay.

  The great beast remained in one spot for a moment, then turned, and its shadow in the water moved under the bridge, heading downriver. Tull watched its massive shadow, sixty feet long, with huge fins arcing out to either side like wings. It seemed to fly underwater.

  Tull and Ayuvah raced along the street to follow it, heading uphill through the human part of town, up to the lookout point by the inn.

  Everywhere, people were running and shouting, pointing at the shadow in the water, for never in all of memory had a dinosaur managed to swim across the ocean from Hotland.

  Tull and Ayuvah rushed up to the lookout point, scattering the peacocks that thought they owned the street, and stood, staring.

  Smilodon Bay sat between two fingers of mountains, and the bay widened just past the inn, so that it turned from a narrow river into a wider sea lane. The saur swam past the ships anchored in the harbor, then dived.

  The sun glinted off the rolling swells in the bay like beaten copper, greened by age. Tull watched the water for all of five minutes, and then the saur rose and lay in floating at the surface, his great front flippers spread wide, his tapering neck as long as a small boat, sunning himself. A great school of fish had gathered, and the saur sat, head tilted to one side, and waited for a fish to scrape his flippers; then he casually dipped his head underwater and came up with a wriggling salmon between his teeth. Resting in the water that way, the monster looked much like a giant green sea turtle.

  “I’ll be damned,” a human said beside Tull, “That's a plesiosaur.”

  Tull was tense, knowing the plesiosaur was out of place, that a serpent should have devoured the monster while it crossed the channel from Hotland, and he waited for a moment to see the water churn in a maelstrom beneath the plesiosaur, the rush and roar of the serpent’s bony gray head and barnacle-encrusted body as it wriggled up to grab the plesiosaur in its scimitar teeth and pull it under. The sailors in town all said that the sight of a serpent making its strike would stop your heart for an hour, stop your breath for a week. Until one saw a serpent strike, one did not know the meanings of the words awe or majesty.

  Yet the plesiosaur kept sunning, and there was no sign of a serpent.

  “What should we do?” someone shouted, and Tull looked back toward Pwi Town to see a dozen young Neanderthal men grabbing their spears, heading toward a rowboat. They were shouting and laughing, thinking to kill the plesiosaur.

  “The Saur must taste bad!” a young Pwi boy said, “So the serpents won’t eat it! One taste, and they spit it out!”

  “We shouldn’t let those young men go out in the water in that boat,” Ayuvah said. “This isn’t like hunting on land!”

  Tull agreed, but the young men were already in the boat, eager to prove their courage.

  A tyrant bird flew out of the redwoods from shore, soared over the water and circled the plesiosaur. Its genetic programming told it to kill the plesiosaur, yet the small dragon could not quite get down into the water to strike a blow with its poisonous horn.

  Suddenly, one of the ships in the bay fired two of its cannons, and the tyrant bird dropped, startled, and then caught itself and flapped away. The plesiosaur had been a mere hundred yards from the ship, and it took a ball in the neck and dove. Red water boiled to the surface, and everyone cheered the sailor who’d shown such skill.

  The young Pwi men rowed their boat into the harbor, watching the water, spears in hand, but the plesiosaur never surfaced.

  Tull stood there for a long time, breathless, filled with anticipation. It wa
sn’t just the plesiosaur, it was the expectancy that arose from what he felt inside.

  A Spirit Walker was trekking the paths of his future. What will Chaa find? Tull wondered.

  An hour before sunset, Tull went home. He lived in a small stone cottage set on the shelf of a cliff overlooking the ocean a mile past Pwi Town. It was a secluded spot, without a neighbor or roads; only the tinkling of a small creek that ran past his doorstep gave him company. Wisteria grew at one side of the house, and the sweet scent of the white flowers filled the cliffside and carried the kwea of stolen kisses.

  Tull had bought some plums and a small melon at the market, and he put them in an earthenware jar, then wetted a cloth in the stream and placed the cooling cloth over the jar so that he would have the fruit later in the evening.

  He looked out at the sea, still watching the water for sign of a serpent, or sign of the plesiosaur. The gravitational winds were blowing Tull, as if to lift him, and the hair rose on the back of his neck.

  For a thousand years great sea serpents had formed an eco-barrier, a living wall of protection, from the beasts in Hotland. But now a plesiosaur had made it across the ocean, and Tull could feel that wall crumbling. He could almost feel himself being borne like a leaf on the wind, and he knew his world would never be the same.

  The thought left Tull unsettled, and he felt a need to open himself to this new idea. In a while, I need to go see the Pwi. Fava will be concerned about her father on his Spirit Walk, and we have two deaths to mourn. But for now.…He stripped off his bracelets and necklace of colored clam shell, pulled off his long black cotton loincloth with the emblems of the silver wolves sewn into it, and stood in the wind. He let the evening sun shine over every inch of his skin.

  He thought of Craal, and felt the shadow of Adjonai to the west, the God of Terror. Certainly, Adjonai sent the plesiosaur to frighten the Pwi, Tull thought, and he chuckled, for it was a strangely Pwi thought. He opened himself to the fear he’d felt upon seeing the plesiosaur.