Windmaster's Bane

by Tom Deitz

  One of the crowd laughed loudly, and they all looked in David’s direction. A female voice called out something, but David couldn’t catch it, and then the view was blocked by the bulk of a familiar black Ford pickup that pulled into the lane beside him.

  His face lit up when he saw who it was.

  A slender, red-haired girl stuck her head out the passenger’s window. “Well, hello, David Sullivan, how’re you a’doin’?” she drawled, her slightly pointed features sparkling with amused self-mockery. It was the way she always began a conversation with him.

  “Well, Liz Hughes! I ain’t seen you in a bear’s age!” David took up the ritual greeting in his best mountain twang. He was at once delighted to see a friendly face, especially Liz’s, and a little uncomfortable about the proximity of the group across the street—who might get ideas he was not quite ready for them to get yet. Liz had been a recurring theme in his thoughts lately, and David found that a touch unsettling. She’d always been a friend, but recently . . .

  Beyond her, David could see Liz’s mother talking animatedly to a red-faced Earl Berrong, who looked as though he would like to escape soon but didn’t dare.

  “What’s up?” David asked after a moment’s pause.

  Liz answered promptly. “Oh, nothing much. What’re you doing?”

  “Going camping with Alec tonight, up on Lookout Rock.” He hesitated. He and Liz had been good friends since elementary school, but her parents had separated the previous spring, and she had spent most of this summer with her father in Gainesville, which was fifty miles away. David was thus not quite certain how things stood or where to direct the conversation.

  Liz solved the problem for him. “Gonna take me to the fair?” she asked abruptly, her eyes twinkling.

  David glanced at the gas pump: eleven gallons. “I thought you might take me to the fair.”

  “Ha! Just ’cause I’ve got a driver’s license now doesn’t mean I’m gonna haul you around—though, now I think of it, I might ought to at that; we’d probably both live longer, considering your driving.”

  “What’s wrong with my driving?” David glared at her as he drew himself up to his full five-foot-six, then jumped as a froth of gas shot unexpectedly out of the filler and onto his hands. He blushed furiously and looked around frantically for something to wipe them on, finally settling on his pants.

  Liz raised an amused eyebrow. “Oh, there’s nothing wrong with it—if you happen to live in Daytona or Talladega or somewhere. But don’t change the subject. When you gonna take me to the fair?”

  “When you wanna go?”

  “Last time you asked me that we still went when you wanted to.”

  “Beggars can’t be—”

  “Hush, David. I want to go Sunday and try to catch the bluegrass show.”

  “The bluegrass show? Oh, come on, Liz. You know I can’t stand that stuff.”

  “It’s our heritage, David.”

  “Your heritage, maybe.”

  “Yours, too, David.”

  “Look, Liz, I don’t feel like arguing music with you just now. I know better than to argue that subject with you any time.” He sighed. “But if it’ll make you happy, we can go, I guess—but I get to play my whole Byrds tape on the way.”

  “Ugh,” said Liz, mostly to harass David, though she did not find the music at all offensive. “You limit yourself too much. But it’s an even swap, I guess.”

  David snorted. “Limit myself indeed!”

  Liz’s dark-haired mother peered through the window behind her daughter. “Hi, Davy, how’re you doin’? Liz’ll be livin’ with me for the rest of the summer, so why don’t you come see her some?” She winked at him.

  “Mother!” Liz hissed, her face reddening, then turned back to David. “Oh, and David, this little trip’s just you and me, okay? None of your shadows.”

  David looked confused. “My shadows?”

  “Little Billy and young Master McLean.”

  “My brother and my almost-brother? You got something against my brothers?”

  “At some times and places, yes.”

  “Liz, if I didn’t know you better . . .”

  “Hush, David, not now. I’ll have to check the show time and get back to you. Just be sure to bring plenty of money.”

  “I don’t have plenty of money.”

  “Well, enchant some leaves or something. You’re the one who’s always calling himself the Sorcerer of Sullivan Cove,” Liz called back as the pickup roared to life and rumbled away.

  “Nice lookin’ girl,” observed Earl Berrong.

  David nodded thoughtfully. “She is, I guess, now that you mention it—and getting better all the time.” He handed Earl a wrinkled twenty-dollar bill, the fruit of his rather begrudged work on the farm. It wasn’t much, but it kept him in gas and comic books.

  “Sullivan’s got a girlfriend,” a male voice sang out from across the street as David got into the car.

  He turned on the ignition and revved the engine, drowning the voices in the growl of dual exhausts and the Byrds singing “Eight Miles High.”

  “Alec, my lad,” he said aloud to nobody as he shifted into second, “we gonna get at least partly that high tonight, just by walking up an old dirt road. High on life, I mean.”

  Six minutes later David crested the gap between two small mountains and beheld the tiny college town of MacTyrie drowsing in the valley below. A network of fields and tree-lined streams surrounded it, and above all reared the flat-topped mass of Huggins Ridge, its lesser slopes bracketing the village like protective arms. Expensive resort homes made incongruous warts along the lower ridge lines.

  Closer in, a long curved bridge spanned one arm of the man-made lake that sent cold fingers probing far among the dreaming mountains. Many a once-sunny hollow lay drowned forever under that dark water, giving the otherwise pastoral landscape a quality of ominous mystery that appealed to David even when he saw it in the bright light of day. He slowed unconsciously, captivated by the image. It was as if he saw the whole valley with new clarity: The edges of things seemed somehow crisper, more sharply defined; their shapes more three-dimensional, their colors richer beneath the clear blue sky.

  And how remarkably blue that sky had become! It was almost like a sheet of stained glass framed by encircling mountains. A solitary bird floated there, drifting in a lazy circle half as wide as the sky: something almost unbelievably huge. An eagle maybe—if there were eagles in Georgia. It was a little disconcerting. David blinked once, and the bird was gone, as if it had never been.

  An unexpected shudder shook him as he flung the Mustang down the mountain curves and sped onto the bridge. A second tremor followed, token of another kind of fear he suppressed so deeply he did not consciously admit it even to himself: He was afraid of bridges. Unfortunately there was no way to get to MacTyrie without going over one, or else going miles out of the way. The solution, then, was simply to cross them as quickly as possible. David floored the accelerator and looked out at the water, half expecting to see an arm clothed in white samite flourishing something above that silver surface. He held his breath. And then he was over the bridge. A roadside sign read MACTYRIE: 2 MILES.

  Alec’s house was on the first street on the left, a rather incongruous Cape Cod with dormer windows and a green shingled roof. Ivy covered most of the street side and flanked the driveway. A regiment of dogwoods that were Dr. McLean’s pride screened the rest. There was precious little real yard.

  Alec himself was waiting patiently beside the driveway, his backpack and tightly rolled sleeping bag stacked carefully beside him. Clad in clean jeans, hiking boots, and an immaculate black R.E.M. T-shirt, he was tall—taller than David, anyway—slender and dark-haired. And as perpetually neat as ever, David observed as he brought the Mustang to a screeching halt behind Dr. McLean’s maroon Volvo. He didn’t think he’d ever seen Alec look really disheveled, not even after a week of camping. As he got out of the car he cast a somewhat bemused glance down at his own scr
uffy clothing: a faded denim jacket from which he had ripped the sleeves, worn over his customary plain white T-shirt and faded jeans.

  Alec was holding the hiking stick that David had given him for Christmas the year before. A runestaff, David had called it; he’d laboriously composed an appropriate verse, translated it into Norse runes using the dictionary as a guide, and then carved them on the ash staff:

  Whoever holds to hinder here

  From Road that’s right, from Quest that’s clear,

  Think not to trick with tongue untrue,

  Nor veil the vision, nor the view;

  Look not to lose, nor lead astray

  Who wields this Warden of the Way.

  And as an afterthought he had carved two more lines:

  These runes were wrought, these spells were spun,

  By David, son of Sullivan.

  David had capped the ends with iron in shop class, to his teacher’s amusement, and had wrapped the grip with leather. Alec had not known quite what to make of it, but had been proud nonetheless, for whatever else it was, it was a thing made well and with affection. And, as Dr. McLean had observed, he was probably the only person in the country to get a runestaff for Christmas.

  “Glad you could make it, old man,” David began in a properly clipped British accent as he opened the trunk. He was good at accents, and at languages as well, another talent David-the-elder had encouraged.

  Alec carefully laid his gear into the cramped compartment, noticing as he did David’s own runestaff, a near twin to the one in his hand, almost hidden amid the clutter; then slammed the deck lid—too hard, so that David winced. “And only an hour late,” he chided. “You did set the mountains on fire, didn’t you? Tell me, Dr. Watson, will the headline in next week’s Mouth of the Mountains read ‘Air Force Jets Scramble as Unidentified Red Blur Terrorizes County’?”

  David looked at him solemnly. “I was delayed, Alec. Had to get gas . . . saw Liz Hughes.”

  “Liz Hughes, huh?”

  David nodded. “Wanted me to take her to the bluegrass show at the fair.”

  “The fair, huh?” Alec raised an eyebrow.

  David jingled the keys. “You said something about being in a hurry?”

  “Liz the one who spilt gas on you?”

  David inhaled deeply, wrinkling his nose as he and Alec climbed into the car.

  “Sulfurous and tormenting fumes.”

  Alec’s brow wrinkled in puzzlement.

  “Hamlet—sort of.”

  “Shakespeare! Yecch! That’s what I go camping to forget!”

  “Infidel! Heretic!”

  “You don’t have to live with it all the time.”

  David looked Alec square in the eye. “For every minute you sit there profaning the Bard, I will drive five miles an hour over the speed limit.”

  Alec fell instantly silent.

  “Harpier cries: ’Tis time, ’tis time!” David hissed nasally in his Peter Lorre voice.

  Alec bit his lower lip to keep from laughing as David turned the ignition key.

  Chapter II: Trumpets Heard

  Alec closed his eyes and held his breath around one final curve before the Mustang hit the long straightaway through the riverbottom below David’s house. When his stomach told him it might be safe to open them again, he was greeted with the familiar sight of the Sullivan farmhouse, with its one front and two side porches, squatting halfway up a steep, treeless hill, the irregular line of outbuildings behind it seemingly the only rampart between it and the forest that grew up the mountain beyond.

  David slammed on the brakes at the last possible instant and turned right.

  “We are going to Lookout Rock, aren’t we? You haven’t changed your mind or anything?” Alec asked a little shakily as the car lurched to a halt in a hail of gravel a moment later.

  “And where else would we go? It is my Place of Power, after all.”

  Alec relaxed visibly. “Well, that’s good; I don’t think I could face going anywhere else in your car.”

  David ignored the insult, but shot his friend a good-natured glare as he opened the door. “Nope, we’ll go afoot. I just need to pick up a few things here.” He tossed the keys to Alec and sprinted toward the house, leaving his friend behind to unload.

  Little Billy met him in the yard, grinning like a possum. “Pa says next time you run off like that when he’s got work for you to do, he’s gonna skin you alive!”

  “Ha!” David snorted as he leapt up the steps—just as his father came out of the kitchen and onto the porch.

  Stocky and shirtless, Big Billy Sullivan was covered with red mud almost from the neck down, mud nearly the color of his sunburned skin, and not much different from his auburn hair. A fire elemental, David thought as the westering sunlight struck full upon him. Or a storm giant, he added as he noticed Big Billy’s frown. He slowed reluctantly.

  “I don’t recall you askin’ me if you could run off to MacTyrie,” Big Billy rumbled.

  “I was in a hurry, Pa. This is the first halfway clear day we’ve had in weeks, and I told you that me and Alec were going camping as soon as there was decent weather for it.”

  “Or if I didn’t have anything for you to do, which I did. You knowed I needed help gettin’ Uncle Dale’s truck outta the mud. But soon as you thought I might be thinkin’ ’bout sendin’ for you, off you went.” Big Billy folded his arms across his massive chest and glanced into the yard where Alec continued to unload the car.

  “I’m sorry, Pa, I—”

  “I don’t wanna hear it. But since you done got your buddy here, you may as well run on this time. Better be back early in the mornin’, though, ’cause I’m gonna work your butt good tomorrow.”

  “I gather Papa Sullivan was not pleased with his oldest boy,” said Alec when David returned a few minutes later.

  David smiled and shook his head, but did not elaborate. He had acquired a number of small bags and packages wrapped in brown paper. “Venison,” he stated simply.

  “All right!” Alec exclaimed, his face suddenly breaking into a smile. “David, my friend, there are some things you do well and some things you don’t do well, but one of the former, I am glad to have been a part of, is your cooking of venison.”

  David laid an arm across Alec’s shoulders and bent his head close, whispering conspiratorially. “My pa taught me, and he learned it from his pa. There’s a secret that the men of our family share; the women don’t know and won’t know. I’ll pass it on to my sons after me.”

  Alec raised surprised eyebrows. “Your sons? Didn’t know you had any!”

  “None to speak of, anyway,” David said, and grinned smugly back.

  “Didn’t think so . . . unless you and old Leigh Smith . . . ?”

  “Not likely!”

  “Or Debbie Long?”

  “Come on, I can do better than that!”

  “Randi Huggins?”

  “I wish.”

  “So does she, so I hear.”

  “But she’s not really my type.”

  Alec’s eyes narrowed slyly. “Liz Hughes?”

  “Alec! That would be like . . . like incest!”

  “But they say incest is best.”

  “Well, it’s a thing to think about, anyway.”

  “If I were you, I’d do more than think.”

  “Ha!”

  “You brought it up.”

  “But can you keep it up? That is the question.” David giggled and slapped his friend on the back.

  Alec ignored him. “Just keeping my information current.”

  David began picking up his gear. “Maybe so, but I didn’t expect to have to compose a dissertation on the topic. If anything changes, I’ll let you know. Now, if you’re through analyzing my sex life, can we get down to business?”

  Alec grinned and nodded.

  David shouldered his pack and pointed up the mountain with his runestaff. “That way, old man.”

  They began to walk—past the barn and the corn crib an
d the car shed, turning onto the dirt logging road that became the Sullivans’s driveway further down. There were signs of “civilization” at first: beer cans and food wrappers left by parking couples who defied Big Billy’s POSTED signs. David stopped at the first sharp curve in the road and gazed back down the mountain to where the family farm lay, framed by the dark and dreaming pines, a patch of light between the shady trunks. He checked his watch; it was almost six o’clock. They turned and climbed higher, soon lost the sound of the cars on the highway. The air became cooler, crisp and clean, and smelled of pine.

  A little after seven they reached their destination. Halfway up the mountain, a spur trail broke off to the right, running more or less level beneath overhanging trees for a quarter mile or so before opening abruptly into an almost circular clearing atop a rock outcrop that jutted from the body of the mountain.

  Once trilobites lived here, David thought as he glanced to the left where the hard stone of the mountain proper pushed through the encircling pines like the old bones of the earth wearing through the thin, tree-clad skin. A shimmering waterfall slid in what seemed like unnaturally slow motion down those black rocks to create at its bottom a small pool, maybe fifteen yards across. Mountain-born, it was always cold, even in high summer.

  Without a word, the two boys picked their way among lichen-covered boulders and fallen tree trunks to the precipitous ledge that gave Lookout Rock its name. David’s eyes misted slightly, as they always did when he beheld the expanses of furry-looking mountains, now beginning to purple as the sun lowered. Most of the towns were invisible, hidden behind the ridges, but here and there bits of highway showed themselves like a network of scars. The dark silver mirror of the lake lay silent and mysterious in this less populated end of the county. David’s own four-times-great grandparents on his father’s side had built a cabin that now lay beneath a hundred feet of that cold water. Their graves were there too. He sometimes wondered what they dreamed.