Knave of Dreams

by Andre Norton

  “The other man—a little older—body suit, too— gray, and over it some type of jacket—but also gray—no fancy trimming except a small patch of red on the right-hand side of the chest. Both men dark skinned—but not blacks—dark hair and eyes, too—Indian?” He underlined the questioned word. “Man in gray busy with the machines, going from one to another. Feeling of excitement—as if they were very tense about something that was going to happen. Impression that this was another room in the same building or place I dreamed about before. Old man not there, though. What came through most was their feeling—all tense—as if a lot depended on what they were going to do.”

  He did not add his last impression as he closed the book and laid it down—the impression that he had an important part in what was going to happen. Of course, that was normal. It had been his dream.

  Ramsay snapped off the light, thumped the pillow straight, and lay down. There was a streak of moonlight reaching from the window. He lay watching it with no desire to go back to sleep now.

  Perhaps he was feeding all this from his own imagination because of Greg Howell’s interest. Subconsciously, he wanted to please Greg, maybe make himself important, so he dreamed. But he was sure these were not ordinary dreams. In the first place, they were like fragments of a play. He saw a bit here and a bit there—though the plot eluded him. They seemed to be in a kind of sequence, though, and the reality of the people moving through the scattered bits of action, the background, was certainly stronger than he had ever found in any dream before.

  Greg had been excited, of course, because of his project, and because Ramsay was half Iroquois. He kept talking about how an Indian had to dream up a spirit guide or something of the sort before he was considered a man. Sure, that happened in the old days. But a medicine dream, as far as Ramsay could learn through reading, was about an animal or some kind of object a man could afterward claim as a totem. This collection of strange scenes certainly could not be included under the heading of any ancestral memory.

  The Dream Project at the university was new, and Greg was all wrapped up in it. They worked on dream telepathy—with a control studying a picture and the dreamers trying to pick up what he saw. But Ramsay had not been interested. After all, he had graduated and it was time he was working. There were no funds to expand the project—

  If he had only not mentioned it to Greg when these dreams began! Ramsay grimaced at the moonlight. Now Greg was after him all the time—keep an account, try to find out what spiked them. Certainly nothing he saw on TV or read or encountered during the days had any relation to these dreams. Greg had questioned him exhaustively, and they were both convinced that that was so. Then—why did he dream? And they—the dreams—grew more vivid and real each time. He had felt in this last one as if he could reach out and tweak the coat or vest or whatever it was that the man in green had been wearing. Ramsay was oddly restless, as if the excitement he had sensed in the two dream men were beginning to infect him also. There was no chance of getting back to sleep; he was sure of that.

  He pulled out of bed and went to the window. The bit of moonlight had vanished; so had the moon. There were clouds rolling up. Ramsay shivered and glanced back over his hunched shoulder. He had an odd sensation of being watched, which intensified as the moments passed. All his imagination! This settled it! He was through trying any more experiments with Greg.

  Thunder muttered low in the distance. Ramsay began to dress with a furious haste which a part of him did not understand. He could not stay in this room another minute! He looked at his wristwatch.

  One o’clock. It was Greg’s night to monitor at the lab. All right. He himself would go over there right now and say he was through—

  As Ramsay tightened his belt, he shook his head. Why was it so necessary to talk to Greg now, at this hour of night? He must be going crazy—those dreams—Yes, maybe if he told Greg it was over, he could come back and get some reasonable sleep. He had that appointment to see the personnel manager at the Robinson place at ten tomorrow. And he was not going to blow that. Tell Greg that he was finished, come back and take an aspirin, and get a good night’s sleep.

  He was down the hall, realizing he was nearly running, yet unable to account for this urgency that moved him. Ramsay only knew that he must get out of the apartment, down to the lab. He found the car keys clenched in his hand, though he did not remember picking them up.

  Outside, the banners of the storm were very dark across the sky. He got in the car in the parking lot, was pulling out before he forced himself to take it slow. There was no need for all this hurry. Why—

  But there was! The unease inside him was growing, insisting on speed, while the unease itself was swiftly developing into a kind of fear that made him glance twice into the back of the car, almost expecting to see someone crouched there behind him, willing him to hurry.

  What had happened to him? He had to see Greg—find out if this was some normal reaction to the type of intensified dreaming he had been doing. But—this was not the way to the lab! He should have turned right at Larchmont, and he was two streets past now. Now he deliberately swung left into Alloway, which would take him straight on up to the lake and the park.

  He did not want to go that way—what made him—?

  Fear dried his mouth. His hands were on the wheel of the car, his foot on the gas—but he did not want to go this way! Yet he could not will himself to turn, to elude the control that made him drive on and into the dark.

  The storm broke, and it was a furious one. Driving rain walled him in; his headlights could not cut far through that flood. The sensible thing was to pull up and wait, but whatever possessed him now would not allow that. He could no longer see the lights of any house—or street lamp. He must be already approaching the park, and the road was climbing. Its curves were not to be negotiated in the rain, not such a rain as this.

  Still, he could not stop.

  The headlights picked out dimly the white paint of the railing to his left, he was above the river ravine here with a drop—

  Then—

  In the faint reach of his headlights a figure. Ramsay yelled involuntarily, swerved to avoid the floundering shape. The car skidded straight for the fence. There was a crash. He had a last moment of utter fear when he knew that the car was going over and down.

  TWO

  Scent—the scent of flowers. Ramsay was aware of that first. He might be slowly climbing some steep hill out of the darkness into a garden. Yet this scent was more concentrated, stronger than the fragrance of any garden he could remember.

  He tried to remember more, then was chilled by a flash of fear as his mind sluggishly fitted together events of the immediate past. That mountain road in the dark, his skid as he fought to avoid the man caught in his rain-dimmed headlights. He must have gone over.

  Flower scent—a hospital room?

  Now he tried to feel some pain, some sign that he had been smashed up in a wreck. There was nothing. Again fear struck—hard! A broken spine? Complete paralysis? His acute terror at that thought made him afraid to try to move arm or leg.

  As he lay, immobilized by his own dark suspicion, sound returned, as scent had earlier. Very near him, a voice spoke. But he had no understanding of the words. There was a rhythmic pattern to the flow of those sounds which was not unlike a chant.

  Slowly Ramsay opened his eyes. He was lying on his back, yes. But above him was no hospital ceiling; it could not be. Arches swept up, to meet in peaks, and from the center of those peaks hung a chain with a pendant in the form of a cage of elaborate latticework holding a globe of light. Though its glow was not brilliant, Ramsay blinked and blinked again.

  He could catch designs in color that were painted or inlaid between the arches with a flamboyance and richness unlike anything he had seen before. The chant continued at his right.

  Ramsay edged his head around, seeking the source of it. The flower scent was almost overpowering. He could see a massing of blooms near him. They must be banked
against the bed on which he lay, but— why—?

  Beyond that massing of flowers, someone was kneeling. Ramsay could make out only a rounded head, the suggestion of shoulders, for the figure was enshrouded by thick veiling, completely hiding it from his sight. Only hands, small dark hands, were raised to the level of his vision. Clasped between those was some object that glinted when the light reached through the encircling fingers.

  He tried to understand the words the veiled figure was saying. But there was not one word that he knew. There were only sounds. What had happened?

  Now he was determined to test the mobility of his body.

  Try his right hand— To his overwhelming joy, he could raise his hands. Though it moved oddly, stiffly, as if it had lain in one position long enough to cramp a little. As he raised it, he dislodged whatever his fingers had been clasped about, and that in turn slid across his body into the bank of flowers.

  The veiled figure started—went silent—pulled away from his side—stood up. The veil fluttered as one hand lifted it and revealed the face underneath.

  A girl—but one he had never seen before. Yet there was something familiar about her face. If he had not seen her exactly, he had seen someone like her in cast of features, dark color of skin. In the dreams!

  He was back in the dreams again. Perhaps he was actually in the hospital and unconsciousness had returned him into that series of subconscious-triggered imaginings that had grown so vivid over the weeks just past.

  However, Ramsay was shaken out of his own thoughts by the expression on the face of the girl. She had eyed him first with—he supposed fear would be the best description. Now that was easing, and there was something else, though he could not read the emotion that made her eyes narrow a little, her lips press tightly together.

  Her skin was smooth and delicately flushed beneath the brown. She could have been full-blooded Amerindian, except that she lacked the width of cheekbones. Rather, her face was a delicate oval, her nose high-bridged, perhaps a fraction too prominent for real beauty. But her eyes were the most remarkable of all. As Ramsay gazed straight into them, they seemed suddenly to grow larger and larger, until, in an odd way, he was aware only of them.

  Then there came a delicate touch against his cheek. He realized she had lifted one hand, her fingertip sliding down to rest at the pulse point of his throat.

  “Kaskar?” A single word asked as a question.

  Only it was one Ramsay could not understand. This was the most vivid dream he had ever had. Could it be born from some drug, used to help his hurt body, that had this effect on intensifying his dream?

  He found that he could not willingly break the gaze with which her eyes held his. She might have been probing him in some way, trying to awaken a response that she needed desperately.

  Then once more he saw her frown of surprise. Whatever response he could not give had alerted her to danger. He knew that as well as if she had audibly warned him of peril. She glanced to right and left and then back to him. The finger which had sought for his pulse was now set to her lips in a gesture that he could readily understand.

  She drew her veil tightly around her, though she did not hide her face, and pressed out of his range of sight in a quick movement. Because she had made him deeply aware of some peril, he obeyed her command and remained quietly where he was.

  But where was he?

  The ornate ceiling above him, the flowers, their scent now so strong as to make him feel rather sick— He tried to deduce what these meant. Ramsay did not remember ever being aware of smells in a dream before. While the touch of the girl’s finger on his cheek and throat—somehow he could still feel it.

  Where was he? What had happened?

  Desperately he recalled as best as he could those final few moments before he had crashed out into the dark maw of the river gully. The rain, that figure blundering into his headlights. Both of those were clear. But no clearer than this present scent about him. Only this could not be real!

  Wake up, he told himself firmly. Wake up—right now!

  If this dream was drug-induced, would such tactics work? It seemed not. He was not waking; the flowers, the place remained. Would the girl come back? What had she said? Ramsay tried to shape the word correctly with his lips but not utter it aloud—

  “Kaskar.” Was Kaskar a person, a state of bodily being, a place? What was Kaskar?

  And why should he lie here?

  He brought his right hand up into his line of sight. The skin was certainly a shade or two darker than usual, and on the thumb was the wide band of a ring, a ring with an elaborate casing of what must be gold holding a dark stone-carved intaglio, as if meant to serve as a seal. There was a band of gold about the wrist also, folding in the bottom of a sleeve of a rich coppery shade—a color he had never worn in his life.

  Always before in dreams he had been aware of others, but never of his own body or clothing. In those dreams he had seemed a disembodied spirit of some type, watching the action before him, but not caught in it. But this reality of the hand with its ring and wristlet was awesome.

  There was a flutter of movement; he looked up quickly. The girl stood there again. Now her hand advanced to clasp his with a commanding firmness, pulling toward her. Her message was clear enough. She wanted him to get up and come with her.

  Ramsay levered himself up. That stiffness that had cramped his hand and fingers seemed to have spread throughout his body. He realized he had not been resting on a bed’s comparatively soft surface, but rather on a long slab as hard as stone, over which there was only a thin draping of crimson cloth. At head and foot stood candlesticks as tall as himself when he at last reached his feet, where he wavered unsteadily, clutching at the flower-rimmed slab to keep erect. Each of those sticks held a candle as thick as his forearm from which thin ropes of scented smoke coiled lazily.

  Again the girl tugged at his hand, urging him away from the slab—back into the shadowy space beyond the reach of either overhead lamp or candles. He was startled to see four men, their backs to him, one at each corner of the place where he had lain. Their heads were bowed, their hands clasped upon the hilts of swords which rested, bared point, on the pavement.

  None of them stirred as Ramsay lurched forward in obedience to the girl’s guidance. As he passed the nearest man, he could see that, though the man’s eyes were fully open, he stared only at the sword hilt in his hands with a curious fixed intensity. Yet this was no statue, but a living man. Ramsay could see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

  Their complete stillness, the fact that they were ignoring any movement made by Ramsay and the girl, did not strike him as peculiar. After all—this was a dream. And in a dream one expects the unusual. What bothered him was the continued feeling that this whole episode was far too vividly detailed. His dreams of the past few months had never equaled this.

  All four of the men, Ramsay noted, were dressed much like those he had seen in the lab scene, with form-fitting undersuits and loose vest jackets coming to mid-thigh. Their undersuits were a dull black, the overvests gray with a large device of red stitchery spread almost completely across the chest. He looked down at his own body to find it clothed in a similar fashion but with other colors.

  The undersuit, which appeared to have all the elasticity of a finely knitted garment, was the coppery color. His vest, a deep gold with a red breast device, was embellished by what could only be small gems sewn into a highly intricate piece of embroidery. On his feet were smooth, soft boots, ankle high and of the same coppery shade.

  The girl had drawn her veil back over her face, and now only the hand that gripped his so tightly was still in evidence. Like his own, her thumb was encircled by a massive ring bearing a blue engraved stone. But she wore two other rings as well. One on the forefinger was formed as an odd mask of a horned creature in gold, the eyes green gems; the other, a wide band around her little finger, had a deeply incised design which Ramsay could not distinguish. Otherwise, she was only a moving
shadow among other shadows as they drew farther away from the light around the slab on which he had awakened.

  They passed pillars, which he could only half see in the gloom, to approach a wall covered with stone panels carved with figures he could not clearly distinguish. The girl went to the middle one of these and thrust the fingers of her other hand into a deeper portion of that carving. Perhaps she released some fastening, for under her touch the tall length of the panel swung outward like any other ordinary door. Thus they came to a narrow flight of stairs lighted by a globe at the top.

  There was a hallway at the head which the globe more fully illuminated. It ended in a door resembling those Ramsay had always known. This his guide pushed open, that they might enter a chamber far more clearly lighted than the scene in which he had awakened.

  His interest won over his conviction that this was some drug-induced dream. Instead of any uneasiness, he felt an avid and growing curiosity about what would happen next. As the girl dropped his hand, left him standing just within the chamber, he stared about him.

  There were some features of the room he found familiar. These had appeared in early dreams, such as those that had been dominated by an elderly man wearing a long black-and-white robe.

  The walls were paneled, covered here and there by long strips of what must be embroidery. The subjects were plainly fanciful, with oddly shaped and improbably colored vegetation and beasts which were not of the world Ramsay knew. There was a fireplace with a large hearth on which crackled a fire that did not a quarter fill its black cavern. Flanking that stood two long seats covered with a stiff cream-white cloth on which was sprinkled a glitter of gold dusting.