Seeds.
The child had not died digging for roots. The child had died trying to plant shriveled seeds.
She held the kernels in her own palm. Was there untapped life in them, or were they only cold bits of nothing?
“Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here,” Aaron had told her. “But everythin’ died.”
She thought of the apple tree bursting into new life. Thought of the green seedlings in the shape of her body. Thought of the flowers she had grown in dry, dusty earth a long time ago.
“Used to be a big ol’ cornfield out here.”
Swan looked at the body again. The child had died in a strange posture. Why was the child lying on its stomach on the cold ground instead of curling up to save the last bit of warmth? She gently grasped the shoulder and tried to turn it over; there was a faint crackling noise as the ragged clothes unstuck from the ground, but the body itself was as light as a husk.
And underneath the body was a small leather pouch.
She picked it up with a trembling hand, opened it and reached in with two fingers—but she already knew what she’d find.
In the pouch were more dried kernels of corn. The child had been protecting them with body heat. She realized she would have done the same thing, and that she and the child might have had a lot in common.
Here were the seeds. It was up to her to finish the job the dead child had begun.
She scraped away snow and thrust her fingers into the dirt. It was hard and clayey, full of ice and sharp pebbles. She brought up a handful and worked warmth into it; then she put one kernel into it and did what she had done when she planted seeds in the dust of Kansas—she gathered saliva in her mouth and spat into her handful of dirt. She rolled it into a ball, kept rolling it until she felt the tingling running up through her backbone, through her arm and fingers. Then she returned the dirt to the ground, pressing it into the hole she’d scooped it from.
And that was the first seed planted, but whether it would grow in this tormented earth or not, Swan didn’t know.
She picked up Crybaby, crawled a few feet away from the body and clawed up another handful of dirt. Either sharp ice or a stone cut her fingers, but she hardly noticed the pain; her mind was concentrated on the task. The pins-and-needles sensation was strengthening, starting to flow through her body in waves like power through humming wires.
Swan crawled ahead and planted a third seed. The cold was chewing down through her clothes, stiffening her bones, but she kept on going, scraping up a handful of dirt every two or three feet and planting a single seed. In some places the earth was frozen solid and as unyielding as granite, so she crawled on to another place, finding that the dirt cushioned beneath the snow was softer than the dirt where the covering snow had blown away. Still, her hands quickly became raw, and blood began to seep from cuts. Drops of blood mingled with the seeds and dirt as Swan continued to work, slowly and methodically, without pause.
She didn’t plant any seeds near the pond, but instead turned back toward Mary’s Rest to lay down another row. An animal wailed off in the distant woods—a high, shrill, lonely cry. She kept her mind on her work, her bloody hands searching through the snow to find pliable dirt. The cold finally pierced her, and she had to stop and huddle up. Ice was clogging her nostrils, her eye with its fragile vision almost frozen shut. She lay shivering, and it occurred to her that she’d feel stronger if she could sleep for a while. Just a short rest. Just a few minutes, and then she’d get back to work again.
Something nudged her side. She was dazed and weak, and she didn’t care to lift her head to see what it was. She was nudged again, much harder this time.
Swan rolled over, angled her head and looked up.
A warm breath hit her face. Mule was standing over her, as motionless as if carved from gray-dappled stone. She started to lie back down again, but Mule nudged her in the shoulder with his nose. He made a deep rumbling sound, and the breath floated from his nostrils like steam from a boiler.
He was not going to let her sleep. And the warm air that came from his lungs reminded her of how very cold it was, and how close she’d been to giving up. If she lay there much longer, she would freeze. She had to get moving again, get her circulation going.
Mule nudged her more firmly, and Swan sat up and said, “Okay, okay.” She lifted a blood-and-dirt-caked hand toward his muzzle, and Mule’s tongue came out to lick the tortured flesh.
She started planting seeds from the leather pouch again as Mule followed along a few paces behind her, his ears pricking up and quivering at the approaching cries of animals in the woods.
As the cold closed in and Swan forced herself to keep working everything became dreamlike and hazy, as if she were laboring underwater. Every once in a while Mule’s steamy breath would warm her, and then she began to sense furtive movement in the dark all around them, drawing closer. She heard the shriek of an animal nearby, and Mule answered with a husky grumble of warning. Swan kept pushing herself on, kept scraping through the snow to grip handfuls of dirt and replace them in the earth with seeds at their centers. Every movement of her fingers was an exercise in agony, and she knew the animals were being lured from the woods by the scent of her blood.
But she had to finish the job. There were still perhaps thirty or forty kernels left in the leather pouch, and Swan was determined to get them planted. The tingling currents coursed through her bones, continuing to grow stronger, almost painful now, and as she worked in the dark she imagined that she saw an occasional, tiny burst of sparks fly from the bloody mass of her fingers. She smelled a faint burned odor, like an electric plug beginning to overheat and short-circuit. Her face beneath the masklike crust of growths seethed with pain; when her vision would fade out, she would work for a few minutes in absolute blindness until her sight returned. She pushed herself onward—three or four feet, and one seed at a time.
An animal—a bobcat, she thought it was—growled somewhere off to the left, dangerously near, She tensed for its attack, heard Mule whinny and felt the pounding of his hooves against the earth as he galloped past her. Then the bobcat shrieked; there was the noise of turbulence in the snow—and, a minute or so later, Mule’s breath wanned her face again. Another animal growled a challenge, off to the right this time, and Mule whirled toward it as the bobcat leapt. Swan heard a high squeal of pain, heard Mule grunt as he was struck; then there was the jarring of Mule’s hooves against the ground—once, twice and again. He returned to her side, and she planted another seed.
She didn’t know how long the attacks went on. She concentrated only on her work, and soon she came to the last five seeds.
At the first smear of light in the east, Josh sat up in the front room of Glory Bowen’s shack and realized that Swan was gone. He called the woman and her son, and together they searched the alleys of Mary’s Rest. It was Aaron who ran out to the field to look, and he came back yelling for Josh and his mama to come quick.
They saw a figure lying on the ground, huddled up on its side. Pressed close to it was Mule, who lifted his head and whinnied weakly as Josh ran toward them. He almost stepped on the crushed carcass of a bobcat with an extra clawed foot growing from its side, saw another thing that might have once been a bobcat lying nearby, but it was too mangled to tell for sure.
Mule’s flanks and legs were crisscrossed with gashes. And in a circle around Swan were three more animal carcasses, all crushed.
“Swan!” Josh shouted as he reached her and dropped to his knees at her side. She didn’t stir, and he took her frail body into his arms. “Wake up, honey!” he said, shaking her. “Come on now, wake up!” The air was bitterly cold, but Josh could feel the warmth that radiated from Mule. He shook her harder. “Swan! Wake up!”
“Oh, my Lawd Jesus,” Glory whispered, standing just behind Josh. “Her… hands.”
Josh saw them too, and he winced. They were swollen, covered with dried black blood and dirt, the raw fingers contorted into claws. In the palm of her right han
d was a leather pouch, and in her left palm was a single, withered kernel of corn mired in the dirt and blood. “Oh, God… Swan…”
“Is she dead, Mama?” Aaron asked, but Glory didn’t answer. Aaron took a step forward. “She ain’t dead, mister! Pinch her and wake her up!”
Josh touched her wrist. There was a weak pulse, but it wasn’t much. A tear fell from the corner of his eye onto her face.
Swan drew a sharp breath and slowly released it in a moan. Her body trembled as she began to come up from a place that was very dark and cold.
“Swan? Can you hear me?”
A voice—muffled and far away—was speaking to her. She thought she recognized it. Her hands were hurting… oh, they were hurting so much. “Josh?”
The voice had been barely a whisper, but Josh’s heart leapt. “Yes, honey. It’s Josh. You just be still now, we’re going to get you to where it’s warm.” He stood up with the girl in his arms and turned to the clawed-up, exhausted horse. “I’m going to find you a warm place, too. Come on, Mule.” The horse struggled to his feet and began to follow.
Aaron saw Swan’s dowsing rod lying in the snow and retrieved it. He prodded curiously at a dead bobcat with a second neck and head growing out of its belly, then he ran on after Josh and his mama.
Up ahead, Swan tried to open her eye. The lid was sealed shut. A viscous fluid leaked from the corner, and her eye burned so fiercely she had to bite her lip to keep from crying out. The other eye, long sealed, throbbed in its socket. She lifted a hand to touch her face, but her fingers wouldn’t work.
Josh heard her whisper something. “We’re almost there, honey. Just a few minutes more. You hang on, now.” He knew she’d been very close to death out there in the open—and might still be. She spoke again, and this time he understood her, but he said, “What?”
“My eye,” Swan said. She was trying to speak calmly, but her voice shook. “Josh… I’ve gone blind.”
Sixty
Swan and the big dude
Lying on her bed of leaves, Sister sensed movement beside her. She came up from sleep and clamped her hand like a manacle on somebody’s wrist.
Robin Oakes was kneeling, his long brown hair full of feathers and bones and his eyes full of light. The colors of the glass circle pulsated on his sharp-boned face. He’d opened the satchel and was trying to slip the ring out of it. They stared at each other for a few seconds, and Sister said, “No.” She put her other hand on the ring, and he let her have it.
“Don’t get bent out of shape,” he said tersely. “I didn’t hurt it.”
“Thank God. Who said you could go rummaging around in my bag?”
“I wasn’t rummaging. I was looking. No big deal.”
Sister’s bones creaked as she sat up. Murky daylight was showing through the cave’s entrance. Most of the young highwaymen were still asleep, but two of the boys were skinning a couple of small carcasses—rabbits? squirrels?—and another was arranging sticks to build the breakfast fire. At the rear of the cave, Hugh was sleeping near his patient, and Paul was asleep on a pallet of leaves. “This is important to me,” she told Robin. “You don’t know how important. Just leave it atone, okay?”
“Screw it,” he said, and he stood up. “I was putting that weird thing back, and I was going to tell you about Swan and the big dude. But forget it, deadhead.” He started to walk over and check on Bucky.
It took a few seconds for what the boy had said to register: “Swan. Swan and the big dude.”
She hadn’t told any of them about her dreamwalking. Hadn’t said anything about the word “swan” and the hand prints burned into the trunk of a blossoming tree. How, then, could Robin Oakes know—unless he had gone dreamwalking, too?
“Wait!” she cried out. Her voice echoed like a bell within the cavern. Both Paul and Hugh were jolted from their sleep. Most of the boys awakened at once, already reaching for their guns and spears. Robin stopped in mid-stride.
She started to speak, couldn’t find the words. She stood up and approached him, holding the glass circle up. “What did you see in this?”
Robin glanced over at the other boys, then back to Sister, and shrugged.
“You did see something, didn’t you?” Her heart was pounding. The colors of the ring pulsated faster as well. “You did! You went dreamwalking, didn’t you?”
“Dreamwhat?”
“Swan,” Sister said. “You saw that word written on the tree, didn’t you? The tree that was covered with blossoms. And you saw the hand prints burned into the wood.” She held the glass in front of his face. “You did, didn’t you?”
“Uh-uh.” He shook his head. “Not any of that stuff.”
She froze, because she could see that he was telling the truth. “Please,” she said. “Tell me what you saw.”
“I… slipped it out of your bag about an hour ago, when I woke up,” he said in a quiet, respectful voice. “I just wanted to hold it. Just wanted to look at it. I’ve never seen anything like it before, and after what happened with Bucky… I knew it was special.” He trailed off, was silent for a few seconds as if mesmerized again. “I don’t know what that thing is, but… it makes you want to hold it and look down inside it where all those lights and colors shine. I took it out of your bag, and I went over and sat down.” He motioned toward his own bed of leaves on the far side of the cave. “I wasn’t going to keep it very long, but… the colors started changing. They started making a picture—I don’t know, I guess it sounds kind of crazy, right?”
“Go on.” Both Paul and Hugh were listening, and the others were paying close attention as well.
“I just held it and kept watching the picture form, kind of like one of those mosaics they used to have on the walls of the orphanage chapel: If you looked at them long enough, you could almost swear they came alive and started moving. That’s what this was like—only it suddenly wasn’t just a picture anymore. It was real, and I was standing on a field covered with snow. The wind was blowing, and everything was kind of hazy—but damn, it was cold out there! I saw something lying on the ground; at first I thought it was a bundle of rags, but then I realized it was a person. And right next to it was a horse, lying down in the snow, too.” He looked sheepishly over at the listening boys, then returned his gaze to Sister. “Weird, huh?”
“What else did you see?”
“The big dude came running across the field. He was wearing a black mask, and he passed about six or seven feet right in front of me. Scared the hell out of me, and I wanted to jump back, but then he’d gone on. I swear I could even see his footprints in the snow. And I heard him yell ‘Swan.’ I heard that as sure as I hear my own voice right now. He sounded scared. Then he knelt down beside that person, and it looked like he was trying to wake her up.”
“Her? What do you mean, her?”
“A girl. I think he was calling her name: Swan.”
A girl, Sister thought. A girl named Swan—that’s who the glass ring was leading them to! Sister’s mind was reeling. She felt faint, had to close her eyes for a moment to keep her balance; when she opened them again, the colors of the glass circle were pulsating wildly.
Paul had stood up. Though he’d ceased to believe in the power of the ring before Hugh had saved the young boy, he was now almost trembling with excitement. It didn’t matter anymore that he couldn’t see anything in the glass; maybe that was because he was blind and would not look deeply enough. Maybe it was because he had refused to believe in anything much beyond himself, or his mind was locked to a bitter wavelength. But if this boy had seen a vision in the glass, if he’d experienced the sensation of “dreamwalking” that Sister talked about, then might they be searching for someone who really was out there somewhere? “What else?” he asked Robin. “Could you see anything else?”
“When I was going to jump back from that big dude in the black mask, I saw something on the ground almost in front of me. Some kind of animal, all crushed and bloody. I don’t know what it was, but somebody had don
e a number on it.”
“The man in the mask,” Sister said anxiously. “Did you see where he came from?”
“No. Like I say, it was kind of hazy. Smoky, I guess. I could smell a lot of smoke in the air; and there was another smell—a sick kind of smell. I think there might have been a couple of other people there, too, but I’m not sure. The picture started fading and drifting apart. I didn’t like that sick smell, and I wanted to be back here again. Then I was sitting over there with that thing in my hands, and that was all.”
“Swan,” Sister whispered. She looked at Paul. His eyes were wide and amazed. “We’re looking for a girl named Swan.”
“But where do we look? My God, a field could be anywhere—one mile away or a hundred miles!”
“Did you see anything else?” Sister asked the boy. “Any landmarks—a barn? A house? Anything?”
“Just a field. Covered with snow in some places, and in others the snow had blown away. Like I said, it was so real I could feel the cold. It was so real it was spooky… and I guess that’s why I let you catch me putting that thing back in your bag. I guess I wanted to tell somebody about it.”
“How are we supposed to find a field without landmarks?” Paul asked. “There’s no way!”
“Uh… excuse me.”
They looked over at Hugh, who was getting up with the aid of his crutch. “I’m really in the dark about all this,” he said, once he’d gotten himself steadied. “But I know that what you believe you see in that glass you take to be a place that truly exists. I imagine I’m the last person in the world to understand such things—but it seems to me that if you’re looking for that particular place, you might start with Mary’s Rest.”
“Why there?” Paul asked him.
“Because back in Moberly I had the opportunity to meet travelers,” he replied. “Just as I met you and Sister. I assumed travelers might show some pity for a one-legged beggar—unfortunately, I was usually incorrect. But I remember one man who’d come through Mary’s Rest; he was the one who told me the pond there had gone dry. And I remember… he said the air in Mary’s Rest smelled unclean.” He turned his attention to Robin. “You said you smelled a ‘sick’ odor—and you also smelled smoke. Is that right?”
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