Spirit Walker

by David Farland

  He put his arm over her shoulder, but neither of them spoke, and neither could sleep.

  Chapter 18: The Love that Burns

  The next day, as the men pushed their wagon ten grueling miles through the forest with the scent of the giant red women all about, Theron Scandal acted as a nursemaid to Tirilee.

  The men pushed the wagon, grunting and straining to get it up hills, or over tree branches. They stationed two men behind the wagon to push and two at the front to pull on the axletree, while Wisteria walked ahead to clear a trail.

  Every mile they stopped to rest, and Scandal would wipe the sweat from his forehead, get a dipper from the water barrel, and offer a drink to Tirilee before he drank himself. While the others threw themselves on the ground in sheer exhaustion, Scandal stood beside the Dryad, speaking softly.

  Wisteria did not have to wonder at his kindness. There’s something he wants from her, she knew. But she wasn’t sure what it was. Did he hope to keep the girl himself, she wondered, or did he just want to sleep with her in her Time of Devotion?

  The Dryad did not utter a word from the wagon, not to thank Scandal, not even to whimper in pain when the wagon bumped over a limb.

  So Scandal went back to work without hearing her voice. He put his back into pushing or pulling the wagon and showed that he had muscle hidden beneath his beer belly. Afterward, he cooked dinner while everyone else sprawled on the ground like dead things.

  When Wisteria went to feed the Dryad, Scandal insisted on doing it himself. In his spare time, he went to hunt in the forest for healing herbs. He was doing double duty, taking an unfair burden on himself, and Wisteria told him so.

  “It’s nothing,” Scandal said. “It's my obligation as a gourmet.”

  “I don’t understand,” Wisteria said.

  “Simple,” Scandal said. “Back in the days of the Starfarers, when men lived a thousand years, gourmets were something! A man started as an apprentice, and for the first hundred years he learned only tactile cookery—the art of pleasing the palate, the nose, the hands. The Starfarers knew that everyone tastes things differently, so gourmets devised tests to see how different palates responded to a meal, and then cooked each dish to please the individual customer. Why, at a banquet, everyone would eat the same thing, yet each plate would be subtly different, to match the tastes of the customer. And they didn’t care about just taste, either. Texture—both in the mouth as you chew and on the fingers as you picked it up—color, everything was geared for that one person. Back then, you couldn’t be a gourmet until you had been at the job for a hundred years and passed your boards. Then, you graduated to whole new levels of cookery: nutritional, where you fine-tuned your diets to meet customers’ nutrient requirements; medicinal.…”

  “Holistic cookery,” Phylomon put in.

  “That’s right, a holistic chef,” Scandal said. “I try my hand at everything: tactile, nutritional, medicinal. If ever the red drones are destroyed and we get back to space, that’s what I want to be, a holistic chef. Learn their secrets.”

  Everyone has their dreams, Wisteria thought. For some reason, that day she felt a keen sense of loss. She’s lost her home, her family. Her people had lost the stars.

  During that day, the scent of cheese had always been with them. Wisteria saw the Dryads twice—slender women for all their height, with nipples dark as chocolate. Wisteria looked over at Tirilee, so thin and childish and innocent.

  Scandal fed the girl, who, though still bruised and beaten, recovered some strength. He spoke soothingly as he spooned a hearty stew down her throat, and Wisteria listened to Scandal’s words. He did not seem to care if everyone in camp heard him.

  “How old are you,” Scandal asked the child, “thirteen, fourteen?

  “You must be close to reaching your Time of Devotion, right? I understand that—devotion. I’ve spent a lifetime devoted to preparing meals for others, grinding my own grains to make my breads, collecting and drying my own herbs, distilling the flavors from mint and anise and vanilla beans. Do you understand me? Can you speak English?”

  Tirilee did not say anything, just watched him with dark green eyes.

  Scandal warmed some water, dipped a rag in, came back and washed some dust from her face. He held the rag to a purpled bruise under her chin for a moment and said, “You are a Dryad of the aspens, right? We have something in common.” He sang a child's rhyme, in a husky voice;

  “I’ve ever loved the aspens,

  “Most beautiful of trees.

  “Their bark is pale as buttermilk.

  “Silver dancers are their leaves.”

  Scandal let go of the rag, stroked Tirilee’s pale arm as he began to speak, almost chanting. “When I was young, I lived in the lovely mountains and climbed among the deep folds of their skin, searching for white forests of aspen, flowing among the trees, searching for deep, dew-wet grottoes where I could lie myself down.”

  It was a form of Omali verse, a kind of poetry left over from days when everyone had dictionaries genetically implanted in their heads, where the poet composed the poem as he went and spoke in metaphors. Sailors still chanted Omali verses in the bars, on occasion, and it was considered something of an art.

  The Dryad frowned at Scandal and pulled her arm away, but Scandal fondled her silver hair—”The rich humus of the forest, the wildflowers, smelled as earthy and pleasurable as a woman in love. And I’d stand on those mountains, gazing at meandering rivers and the green valleys below, dizzy with lust for living, and imagine I stood upon the breast of the world. Often in those moments, the joy of living, the ecstasy of drawing breath among those clean forests, melted the marrow of my bones, emptied me of my darkest cravings, left me shuddering—”

  The Dryad pushed Scandal’s hand away; he took a deep breath and intently gazed into her emerald eyes. “At times I’d sleep among the mountains in the daylight, lying in the grass, listening to the steady throb of my own heart. At dusk I’d spread my tent over the ground, erect my pole—”

  Tirilee slapped his face. “I think you should take your erect pole into the bushes and tell it about your dark cravings.” Her voice was as musical as the notes of a flute.

  “So, you do speak English!” Scandal crowed. “And all this long day you have played dumb and never answered me a word. Ayaah, you're cruel and hard!”

  “Not nearly as hard as you!” Tirilee snapped back.

  “If I am hard,” Scandal said, “then you have made me hard!”

  “Not me,” Tirilee answered. “Perhaps it is because you play with your pisser like a toy.”

  “Why, your breasts have not yet budded, yet you talk like a common street whore!” Scandal smiled with delight.

  “Of course,” Tirilee said. “I learned half my words listening to your whores call to the sailors.” Even to Wisteria it was clear that the girl lied. She spoke English too well to have learned it in only a couple of months.

  “Ah, that would be Candy and Dandy,” Scandal said. “Those aren’t whores! Those are … goddesses!”

  “If they are goddesses,” Tirilee said. “I know what you worship.”

  Scandal chuckled. “In another month, when we hit the mountains and see those aspen trees shining white on the hills, every fiber of your being will flame with desire for a thick one under the starlight! By God, I’ll make you pay to ride my unicorn then. You’ll be my goddess, and I’ll worship beneath you on a blanket of aspen leaves.”

  “And if you’re the only excuse for a man who comes around, you keg of lard, I’ll make do with a chipmunk!”

  “Oh, I’ll come around,” Scandal said. “I'll come for you.”

  The girl’s face turned dark with rage. “When my Time of Devotion comes, I’ll call for you. And when you are groaning with ecstasy from a single kiss and you are helpless as a sparrow’s egg in my hand, I’ll use my knife to relieve you of the burden of manhood.” The child’s voice held such fierceness that Wisteria could not discount the threat. She wondered if Tirilee coul
d be a potential ally—someone who hated men as much as Wisteria hated the men of Smilodon Bay for what they’d done to her father.

  Would she help me foil the quest? she wondered.

  “Why are you so mad?” Scandal demanded. “Certainly men have spoken to you of desire before?”

  “Oh, yes, your precious Garamon—he never fed me without talking of it. And he planned to sell me after my Time of Devotion, claiming I was a virgin. Yet he was more honest than you, he did not speak in the language of love!”

  “I said nothing of love!” Scandal countered. “I was talking about lust, pure and wholesome.”

  “You spoke of devotion, and devotion is purer than love!”

  Scandal scratched his head. “Oh, that. You can’t blame a man for trying.”

  “I can,” Tirilee said. “I want devotion from the man I give myself to.”

  “A lifetime of devotion for a single night of pleasure?” Scandal asked. “Only a thief would demand so much! Yet you’d take it, wouldn’t you? You’ll demand it and then devote your own time to your trees. It’s in your nature.”

  “I can fight my nature,” Tirilee said weakly, as if the conversation had worn her. She turned away, pulled her blanket tight against her pale white throat.

  Wisteria thought long on it. Over the past days she had felt tenderness for Tull, a warming, and she had been playing house—treating him as if they were both newlyweds in love. But it would be a big mistake to believe I’m really in love, she thought. I too must fight my nature. I must remember my hatred, nurse it.

  Pushing the wagon through the mountains was harder than the men expected, yet they moved more swiftly than they had imagined. Poor old Snail Follower had taken them to the summit of the mountains on only the second day of the journey, and from there they had seen the golden fields of the Mammoth Run Plateau, but that inviting open country was still far from the deep redwood forest. Shoving the wagon along for a week took its toll in sore shoulders, knotted calves, and blistered feet.

  Added to the labors of the journey, Phylomon insisted on weapons practice at first light and again in the evening.

  As Tull’s muscles tightened, the blue man eventually gave up trying to spar with him. “You have great strength in those arms of yours,” Phylomon told him. “No human can match it. With your kutow, you can bash through my best parries, and you’re fast enough that I think you’ll get the first swing on most men. If you keep working on it, in a few weeks you could develop your skill to the point that only the strongest Neanderthal could hope to parry your blows.”

  From then on, only Ayuvah dared spar with Tull. Ayuvah made an excellent sparring partner. With his long spear and his lunging style, Ayuvah could stand back, balanced on his heels, and dodge Tull’s blows while waiting for an opening.

  Thus, Tull was forced to match Ayuvah’s speed, to dodge his lightning thrusts. Decisiveness, reaction time—these were the traits that Tull was forced to learn, and Ayuvah was the perfect sparring partner until he stepped on an old spearhead, and his foot became so badly infected that he took to the wagon. Phylomon guided them to some hot springs, and Ayuvah soaked his feet while sitting on the white alkali that rose from the deep green pools.

  Tirilee stayed in the wagon for the first two days, but walked alongside from then on. Crossing the small creeks where the wagon would get mired in mud was the hardest part of the trip, and after a long day the men threw themselves to the ground and often slept for hours before they roused for dinner. Wisteria fixed dinner for the company only once, then Scandal silently insisted that he take over the job. In spite of all his hard work, his belly did not seem to shrink. He remained, as ever, the fat man.

  One evening, Wisteria helped wash and dress Tirilee. Wisteria found the girl to be strange and beautiful, with her long silver hair and deep green eyes, and she washed the girl’s emerald dress and put her in some of her own clothes, then decided to brush her hair. Yet when she took her brush to the girl, she realized that the Dryad didn’t need it. The girl’s hair felt extraordinarily clean and smooth, and not a strand was tangled, and Wisteria thought it strange, for she had not seen the child brush her hair.

  “When was the last time you brushed your hair?” Wisteria asked.

  “I don’t brush my hair,” the Dryad answered.

  “Never?” Wisteria asked.

  “We Dryads are not like humans,” Tirilee answered.

  Wisteria ran her fingers through the girl’s hair, stroked her cheek. The Dryad tilted her face up, inviting her to continue the petting, and Wisteria laughed. The girl’s face was smooth and unblemished, yet when Wisteria touched Tirilee's shoulders, her muscles were unbelievably firm.

  “Tull,” Wisteria said, “Come here.”

  Tull had been mending his moccasins, and he sauntered over, stood looking down at the Dryad. Wisteria took his hand quickly. “Feel this,” she said, touching his hand to the Dryad’s hair.

  He jerked his hand away.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Wisteria laughed. “She won't bite.” She took Tull’s hand and ran it over the Dryad’s hair. “Feel how smooth it is, and she never has to brush it. And feel this,” she said, brushing the backs of his fingers across the Dryad’s cheek. “Have you ever felt anything so soft?”

  Tull held his hand on Tirilee’s cheek and looked down at her. The Dryad reached up with her own small hands and held his mitt against her face a moment, caressing it. Then her face seemed to blank, and she kissed the back of his hand.

  “Ah!” Tull said, pulling his hand from her grasp.

  “What happened?” Wisteria asked.

  “She—burned me,” Tull said, holding up his hand. It had no mark on it.

  Wisteria gaped for a moment, and worried. Perhaps the girl’s Time of Devotion was coming sooner than Wisteria had imagined.

  On the tenth day of the journey, at dawn the band made an easy journey down out of the mountains into a small valley between rolling hills. The path was easy, nearly all downhill, with few windfalls to block the way.

  The redwoods thinned and gave way to smaller deciduous trees—alders, maples, and hawthorn, yet the red women followed, always remaining in the shadows. Several times that morning, Tull would walk beneath a tree and recognize the lingering scent of cheese.

  In the early morning, the party forded a clear shallow river thick with crayfish, and smelled the sweet scent of dry grasslands. Heavy brush filled the bank, and the ground along the river was scored with huge claw marks from giant sloths, and prints from woolly rhinos.

  In another half mile the redwood forest ended suddenly, as if an invisible finger had drawn a line in the dirt, decreeing that the trees should spread no farther.

  Golden grasslands yawned ahead, with a few enormous rhinos out grazing in the dew-wet dawn. Tull and the others pushed the wagon to the shadows bordering the grass, and like mice watching for a hawk, they surveyed the clear summer skies and studied two great-horned dragons wheeling on the horizon, vast wings stretched.

  “At last we’re out of the woods,” Ayuvah said.

  Scandal shook his head glumly, watching the dragons. “Only sixty-five miles in ten days. We must do better.”

  “We’ll do better now that we’ve got clear ground,” Phylomon said.

  A twig snapped behind them, and when they turned, forty naked red women stood blocking their path back to the forest.

  The party took one look at them, pushed the wagon into the open air, and set up evening camp. Ayuvah was feverish and in great pain from the cut to his foot, and Phylomon boiled some water and soaked Ayuvah’s foot in a poultice made of leaves and sugar.

  Tull sat up that night and watched Ayuvah’s leg swell. Tull became angry that he might lose his guide and best fighter to something as insignificant as a spearhead in the dirt.

  Tull kept the water boiling, wrapping Ayuvah’s foot time and again, letting the cooling cloth act as a poultice. The day’s journey had been hard on Tull’s trick ankle, and he was limping. For the
first time in years, he wrapped it, too. The others slept in the grass.

  Out above the fields, a screech owl cried.

  The night was warmer down here in the grasslands, and though only the small moon Woden had risen, its “white eye” was enough to silver the plains.

  “Do you think you’ll be able to make it to Denai?” Tull asked Ayuvah, his voice laced with worry. “Or should we leave you at Frowning Idols?”

  Ayuvah laughed. “If we must, we can limp together!”

  Tull asked, “What more can I do?”

  “You’ve done all you can for me tonight,” Ayuvah said. “I will not ask for anything more. Go to bed with your wife.”

  Tull looked out over the camp. Wisteria slept beneath a big bear hide that protected her from mosquitoes. “I do not know if she wants me in bed with her,” Tull said. “Sometimes she acts as if she does, but then she pushes me away. I … I watched you and Little Chaa, the way you would curl up with him at night, the way you cleared rocks away from his bed.”

  “Of course,” Ayuvah said. “How could I fail to do that for someone I loved?”

  Tull could see the pain in Ayuvah’s face. The grief he felt for the child was still strong. “I’ve been trying to follow your example,” Tull said. “But I don’t know how to love a woman. I’m trying to learn, but she does not want those things from me.”

  “Give her time,” Ayuvah counseled, yet he frowned as if worried. “Even a bobcat is tamed by tenderness over time. She knows you love her. Be patient.”

  Chapter 19: The Okanjara

  The next morning the party turned north and skirted the fields. The Mammoth Run Plateau was a lush plain that ran six hundred miles in a north-south direction. In summer the valley was thick with wild bison; herds of short-nosed pigs; elk; and small dark brown, three-toed horses with yellow zebra stripes on their rumps. Near the rivers, sloths larger than the biggest bears fed in willow thickets beside giant capybara. In winter, mammoth and woolly rhinos moved down from the north. And as always, there were cats.