Hoot’s bike is parked up under some ancient cedars and so well hidden, I don’t have clue one of how he even recognizes the spot. He’s just flung his leg over the thing when sudden light pours down on us from somewhere above.
“Dios mio!” yells Mushu, “they got a search light!”
We scramble. At least, everybody scrambles but me. My bike doesn’t want to start. I keep turning the throttle, but it just sputters, almost catching, then not catching.
Over the whining of the little engine, I can hear the footsteps of Islanders on hillside above me. I glance down the hill and see red tail lights. I glance up the hill and see torches and, against the glare of the search light, the silhouettes of a whole lot of people.
My heart’s about to give out when the Vespa finally comes to life under me. I almost cheer. That is until I realize that someone else’s hands are also clamped on my handlebars — very, very big hands. I look up into the face of the First Mate, who makes a truly prodigious roadblock.
We are frozen like that for an instant, then he draws back a fist. I close my eyes and pray.
“Yo!”
The voice comes from the hillside.
A quick glance shows that its her, Captain Ahab. From this angle, back-lit by the searchlight with her yards and yards of silvery hair flying loose in the rising wind, she looks like the Angel of Death — what’s her name? — Izrá’íl?
“Let them go,” she says.
Huh. Well, maybe it’s a different angel, then.
“He tried to kill me!” objects Number One.
“No. He tried to save her.” Her head tilts down hill where the red tail lights have all but disappeared. “Let him go, Mate. There’s no sense in keeping any of them here. They can’t do us any harm whether they’re lying or telling the truth. But if they are telling the truth, they aren’t the enemy. The enemy is on the other side of that Bridge.”
After a moment of thought, the Mate takes his hands off my handlebars, straightens and steps out of my way. With a last glance at Ahab, I rev my bike and light out down the hill, putting Treasure Island behind me.
Twenty-second: Diablo
They are on their way back up the hill when I meet them. What’s left of them, anyway. Mushu and Rollerskate have already disappeared into the Tunnel.
I explain as coherently as I can what happened with the Islanders; after that we don’t talk much at all, but just make our way to the end of the Bridge.
Here, I stop, ‘cause I can barely believe the sight that meets my eyes. Coiling away from us into the darkness are wet, gleaming rivers of concrete. It’s like being in a giant’s bowl of chow mein. After a long moment of awful staring, I consult the map in my head, choose a noodle that points Southeast and we go.
I got ooga-boogas running up and down my spine the whole time, ‘cause beyond our headlamps there is a murkiness unbroken by any manmade light. A lazy huichen dong makes a filmy bubble around us, scooting fore and aft — now close, now far. After a while, we enter into a canyon of sorts. The walls are manmade and pretty tall. Over the tops of them, I see occasional pinpricks of light up in the hills, but that is all. If there are people here, they stay out of these canyons at night. I gotta hope we don’t find out why.
The only sound we hear is the purr of Vespas, which I sincerely hope are gassed up and carrying full reserves, ‘cause otherwise, this is gonna be one short quest.
Every so often, one of Firescape’s knighties glides up from behind to signal that there is no one on our back trail...yet. What they mean is, they can’t see anybody, but I know Somebody is there. Nothing I can do about it. All I can do is follow the map in my head and pray that we have enough of a head start.
We are out of the strange canyon when the huichen becomes a polvo and then dries up and just stops. So do we, ‘cause such a sight as we are seeing demands some boggled ogling. A moon is up and it has laid a silver blanket over hill and dale. There is, in addition, one hell of a lot of hill and dale. A lot more than is suggested by any of the maps I been studying.
Above, there are stars — more stars than I’ve ever seen, and muy, muy brighter. With the lights and fog of the Gam Saan, and the smoke of Potrero, you sometimes forget they’re there at all. Now, over our heads is this humongous black bowl full of glittering lights.
I have a moment of prodigious vertigo and shut off the engine of my scooter. One by one, my traveling companions do the same. Then, we hear something I realize we have never heard before — complete and total silence. The Farm is pretty quiet, ni dong, but that’s a close, cozy quiet in which you can hear the wind singing lullabies and animals going about their animal-type business. You can wrap yourself up in the quiet of the Farm. This is a big, wide-open, cold, awesome quiet in which there is no sound whatsoever.
“Whoa,” somebody says.
“Amen,” says somebody else.
“Can you see the Mountain?” asks Firescape, then, “Which one is it?”
The answer to this is I don’t know, ‘cause nothing looks at all like the map in my head. I scan the awful darkness, but see nada that makes any sense to me. There is the black of the sky, which is looking more and more like a watercolor, bleeding purple at the horizon. And there is this other black that is immense and looming. Those are the mountains, but I can’t tell one monster lump from another.
I remember seeing a vid at the Wiz about high-tech field glasses that let you see long distances in the dark. I sure wish I had a set of those now. But I don’t.
What I do have is that I am wearing a ton-o-magic and Dougness. I also have Pedro’s story. Pedro talked to the Mountain. More to the point, the Mountain talked to him. As I am a shaman of sorts (or at least, Pedro says I am), there is an outside chance I can talk to the Mountain, too.
Well, duh — of course I can talk to the Mountain, it’s the reciprocal that’s problematic.
While I am chewing my lip and stewing on my lack of shamanly aplomb, Fresca glides out of the huichen at our collective backsides and whispers to Firescape (loud enough for me to hear), “There’s somethin' back there, General. Behind. We best zhou.”
Firescape nods, but holds up her hand. She is watching me like she expects I’m gonna do something miraculous like maybe smack a 97 mph fastball into the Bay in a one run game at the bottom of the proverbial ninth. Instead, I pull the rattle out of my inside coat pocket and the little Doug bough out of my amulet bag. I crush two tiny needles on one finger of the branch and inhale, holding the rattle up before me like I’ve seen old-time knights-o-the-realm hold their swords. Believe it or not, the Doug branch twitches.
This brings a thought into my head, which is that if Chen thinks a combination of magics will work for him, it might just work for me. I lay the Doug branch alongside the handle of the rattle and hold both out in front of me like I’m dowsing. The end result of this is that I start twitching.
Yowza, as Mr. Lopez-Alvero was wont to say, what a rush!
I am hot and cold and tingly all at once, and I feel like I’m getting ready to levitate. Neon, I think. But then I gotta wonder what good all this twitching and tingling does if I don’t get clear instructions from on high.
I send my mind back to the smoky dream lodge, where I sit across from Pedro.
The Mountain came to you, Pedro, I think. How can I get it to come to me?
Shaman! whispers a Voice like many voices.
I sit up straighter on my scooter. “Yes,” I answer.
Behind me I hear someone ask, “What’s he doin'? Who's he talkin' to?”
Would you become a shaman?
“He’s envisioning.”
“You betcha.” No disrespect to Pedro, but I can surely learn from someone else’s mistakes.
Come to the Mountain.
“He alright?” someone else asks.
“Lead me,” I say.
“He’s fine,” says Hoot.
Then I feel the tug, sure as I’ve ever felt any tug — Doug’s or Jade’s or Chen’s. This, though,
this is like double-Doug, triple-Doug even. This is a whole mountainful of Doug.
Holding out the rattle, which is chattering like a squirrel ‘cause I’m shakin' so bad, I start to turn around in a circle just like the incomparable Inigo Montoya does when to find the Man in Black in one of the classic tomes of Questing. I let the Mountain tug that old rattle and that little Tree branch wherever it wants to. And when it’s done tugging, I open my eyes.
In front of me, across the fields and hills, I see The Mountain. It is bigger, blacker and loomier than anything around it, and it is wearing an aura of light.
Suddenly the road we’re on is a long, glowing silk ribbon and all the turns we will have to make are written on the back of my eyes. A trail of magic leads from here to there. All I gotta do is follow it.
I put the Doug bough next to my heart, wedge the rattle into the handlebars of the Vespa and fire it up. In a heartbeat, the other scooters are purring too. I lead off again, hair and coat tails flapping in the breeze, the others strung out behind me on the gleaming tarmac.
Definitely a Moment.
Music pops into my head: We don’t need another hero; we just need to find the way home. Yeah. Mad Max on Vespas.
This strikes me funny and I laugh, feeling for a little bit like I’m flying above a river of molten glass. Okay, so the glass got potholes, weeds and tar bubbles, but I feel very cool and very electric in spite of this. With Hoot to my one side and Jade to my other and Creepy Lou straggling along right behind like always, I also feel very put back together.
Funny what moonlight, a righteous quest, and lack of sleep will do for a guy.
oOo
By the time we reach the foot of the Mountain, the sky is the color of the Bay. And here, as we pause at the edge of a dead little town to fuel up our Vespas from our reserves, a muy strange thing happens. A green-tea mist comes sneaking up behind and around, and pretty soon we are up to our eyeballs in moist silky stuff.
It is very like a shabu dong, which makes me feel...comfy somehow. But I gotta say that out here on this Mountain, it takes on a whole different personality. The natural shapes of bushes and trees and rocks are a lot spookier than the angles and planes of the stuff people make. For one thing, natural stuff moves when the wind blows. This makes me feel as if there are a thousand ninjas watching from just where I can’t see them. I can’t help but twitch a little as I recall Fresca’s warning about Something being on our trail. Neither, I guess, can Hoot, for when he takes a reckoning of all the gasoline tanks, he makes a defensive suggestion.
“I think we need to consolidate our shit, Taco Face,” he tells me, and then proceeds to expand upon the nature of this consolidation.
In the end, we leave Firescape’s four knighties where the road begins to climb seriously. This, Hoot assures me, will save gas. The knighties have instructions to fire off flares if they see pursuers and are unable to stop same.
This reasoning is sound enough, it’s just that I have a small attachment to affording the magical stuff (and our collective asses) as much protection as possible. Now Hoot is in immensely good shape for a man in his mid-to-late-twenties, but beyond that, our protection amounts to a pregnant lady, a slightly crazy dude with a twitch and a pint-sized merlin with delusions of shaman-hood.
I mention this, but Hoot is derisive.
“A merlin,” he tells me, “is not to be judged by the size of his person, but by the size of his magic.”
I recognize this speech. It’s one of Bags’s favorites.
“You,” he continues as we prepare to ascend, “are letting your natural tendency to self-deprecation influence your confidence level. You got a self-esteem problem, Chickpea. And you gotta lick it right here and now, or you’re not gonna be any use to Pedro or the Mountain, or anybody. So, remember — it’s not your size, it’s the size of the magic. How big’s the magic, Del?”
I look up at the Mountain. It looms like a lumpy pyramid. Even in the fog it’s got one awesome Presence. The road snakes away into the curling fog, the yellow stripe down its middle gleaming in the Vespa light. This bothers me, for some reason I cannot put my finger on, but I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with the size of the magic, which is huge — bigger than me, bigger than Pedro, bigger than Chen even (I hope).
It suddenly hits me and knocks me about off my scooter that I have let the smallness of me limit what I think the magic can do. I have a muy strange and paradoxical revelation, which is that there is such a thing as too small an ego, and that having too small an ego can cause as much trouble as having to big a one.
“The magic,” I say, “is as big as this Mountain.”
For which Hoot slaps me on the back and says, “That’s the spirit!”
“Yeah!” echoes Creepy Lou. “Thaththethpirit!”
We go up. And we go up. And we go up some more.
We are on the northwest slope of the Mountain, so sunrise, which I think is in progress, is having damn little effect on our foggy little world. The purr of Vespa engines sounds, in the fog, like a hundred very happy cats. The wheels turn, but that is the only sign we are really moving.
We have gone some miles when the shifty gloom ahead is lit up as if by an army of flashlights. Suddenly we are facing a spread of headlamps that would do any alien craft proud. The very fog rumbles.
Then It is upon us — a Vehicle such as I have never seen before. A veritable Behemoth. It is yellow and looks like any sensible person’s worst nightmare. It’s roaring like a storm and trembling the ground like a 4.5 roller and worst of all, it is astride the yellow line — there is no place for us to go that will not be in Its way.
This is all happens so suddenly, all we can do is hug the uphill side of the road, with me in the lead and praying like there is no tomorrow, appropriately. I swear I can feel the hot breath of the thing all over us.
In an act of desperation, with the Beast almost upon us, I grab the spirit rattle out of my handlebars and hold it aloft. The Behemoth answers with a blast of light and sound.
I think I can speak for all of us when I say that I have never in my life heard such a sound. It shreds the air and rattles my teeth and makes my eyes water. Every spell and incantation I know flashes before my eyes. None seem appropriate to the occasion.
You ever notice how, in a crisis, time sort of turns itself into pulled taffy? This is happening now, as my spells flash through my head along with various prayers (Remover of Difficulties uppermost) and my whole Universe collapses down into the space between the headlamps of the Beast.
And that’s when a little road opens up just ahead and to my right. I almost don’t see it ‘cause there are tree limbs hanging down, but the trees are Doug firs and as I draw near, they beckon me to the road between them. I hit my brakes once, put down a foot and spin that scooter for all I’m worth. Meanwhile, I pray that everybody else makes the turn too.
I go up the little road some yards and spin back, trying to swallow my heart. I’m barely turned around when they pop out of the fog — poot! poot! poot! — Hoot and Lou and my Jade, like the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, only on Vespas.
I go to jelly. “Damn!” I say, and that’s all I can say for the next five minutes or so. In fact, that’s all any of us can say. So, we sit and "damn" each other for a while as the world lightens up around us.
“What,” pants Jade when we are all damned out, “was that?”
“Some kind of alien vehicle...I think,” I pant back.
“Thought it was something else for a moment there,” admits Hoot.
“I thought it was a dragon,” says Lou. “Dragonth live on mountains, don’t they? That's what the Books of Kingdom thay.”
Creepy Lou with a case of nerves is a lot like a leaky faucet. You can’t stop it, so you might as well just get used to it. While the rest of us catch our breath, Lou gives forth a rolling commentary on the mysterious ways of dragons.
This is really okay, ‘cause listening to him has a strangely soothing effect. In the back of m
y mind, though, I gotta wonder where that thing came from and if there are any more like it at home. It occurs to me, now, why that yellow line was so bothersome. There used to be yellow lines on the streets around the Gam Saan, too. They wore off a long time ago cause no one kept them up. These lines clearly do not suffer from that kind of neglect.
Creepy Lou finally runs down.
A while after, Jade asks, “Anybody catch why the Treasure Islanders were trolling for trespassers when we came through their Tunnel? I mean, it occurs to me to wonder why, if they were so happy to do business with John Makepeace, they were setting traps along his back trail.”
“Precaution,” answers Hoot. “While he was visiting and handing over trinkets for toll, some of his guys got a little high-handed with the village maidens. According to Mushu and Rollerskate, who had it from the doc, Captain Ahab just wanted to make sure the appropriate payment was exacted upon Makepeace’s return.”
My wife snorts. “Like as if that fishnet was gonna stop a winnebago.”
“Not stop it, maybe,” agrees Hoot, “but it’d surely slow one down.”
“We gotta go through there on the way home” asks Creepy Lou.
“Yeah,” I answer, “we do. But let’s cross that bridge when we come to it.”
Then Jade asks, “How far?”
“Huh?” I ask.
“How far to the Place? How do we know we’re there?”
Well. It occurs to me at this auspicious moment that I have not clue one of where "there" is. I been following my nose, I realize, for the smell of Doug is sharp and tangy in the moist air.
“I don’t know how far,” I admit, “but I’ll know when we’re there. They’ll tell me.”
“The Doloreth?” asks Lou awfully.
“And this.” I hoist the rattle and give it a shake.
I can feel everyone’s eyes on me and on it and on magic I don’t even know if they can see. I can see it, bouncing every-which-way, charging the fog with silver light that is not light at all, if you know what I mean. We are caught in a Moment...or at least I am.
Taco Del and the Fabled Tree of Destiny Page 27