* * *
“You need help, is that what you’re saying?”
It was like that night above Tor Alte, when her small, quiet life was changing forever and Erde found herself faced with a creature out of ancient myth, demanding to be fed. She felt powerless and ignorant and in no way up to the task.
But the Presence had given her food and drink, and those had revived her, so the least she could do was find out what sort of help it thought it needed. At least she had some experience at this sort of thing now. She thought of Rose and Deep Moor, and Rose’s “Seeings.” She settled herself down on the grass and cleared her mind.
“Speak to me, then, however you can.”
But nothing at all came to fill up the mental space she had cleared. Instead, the leaves rattled, and the wood became suddenly animate. Things began to happen around her. A tiny brown mouse scuttled across her feet and pounced on a grasshopper. A swallow swooped right past her nose and snatched up a gnat. A spider spun its web in the grass.
Erde took all this in very thoughtfully. Then she ventured, “Something is after you?”
The leaves stirred a bit more loudly. Erde would swear she heard negation in their dry rustle. Then a large ginger cat with yellow eyes bounded out of the woods with the brown mouse held delicately in its jaws. It crouched in front of Erde and set the mouse down between its paws. The poor mouse darted this way and that, desperate for escape, but the cat’s paws were everywhere it looked.
“Ohh, I see,” murmured Erde. “Something already has you.”
Prey and predator vanished. The wood stilled. Calm again. Gratitude. Assent.
Erde couldn’t imagine how anything could hold this Presence a prisoner. It was so huge and open and . . . well, but it was true, she had to admit. It didn’t feel powerful, at least not as she’d learned to define the word. It didn’t feel strong or aggressive or overbearing. Still, it must have power. It had conjured up food out of thin air . . . or had it? To Erde’s surprise, she heard her stomach grumbling again. Could it be? Had her wonderful feast been only an illusion?
Around her, the trees lifted their branches and sighed with regret, and then they renewed their wordless plea for rescue.
* * *
The front doors hiss shut. The hubbub flows down the hall.
“Jesus H., JP, I can’t see a goddamn thing in this place! Why don’t you people get some light in here?”
It’s the bankroll, N’Doch is sure of it. He remembers the voice from earlier, the sort of voice that’s always louder than anyone else around it, a voice used to giving orders and speaking for attribution. The bankroll himself, heading N’Doch’s way.
“Least you know how to keep a decent temperature! Christ, it’s hot out there!”
N’Doch hears Jean-Pierre, the head flapper, doing an apologetic tap dance at the same time he’s trying to use all these low, calm tones calculated to make the bankroll shut up and listen. N’Doch can’t believe the idiot thinks it’ll work.
“Of course she’s busy!” the bankroll retorts, “She better be busy! She’s gotta pay for all this! She’s got expenses! One of them is your goddamn salary, and you don’t want to be losing that at a time like this. So get your ass in there and tell her I need to see her . . .” He pauses, and N’Doch can almost hear a sharky grin spreading across his face. “. . . as soon as she can make her charming self available.”
They’re right there at the parlor doorway. N’Doch curls deeper into his chair.
“You know, monsieur, I’ll do everything I can but when the call is on her, she . . .”
“I know, I know. She’s ‘apart from this world.’ Isn’t that what you always tell them? Kind of like being asleep, isn’t it?”
“Not unlike that, monsieur.”
“Fine. If she was asleep when I came, what would you do?”
“I’d wake her up, monsieur, of course.”
“Well . . . ?”
“Monsieur, I’m only doing . . .”
“Your job, I know. Look, JP, here’s the story. I’m a good boy. I make appointments. I come here on time, when I’m scheduled. I could just as easily make her come to me—I’m a busy man and the world’s in crisis. But I don’t do that, do I?”
“No, monsieur . . .”
“So when something exceptional comes up, I expect a little respect, you know what I mean?”
“Yes, of course, monsieur. I’ve sent . . .”
The bankroll sighs. “Don’t send, JP. Go. You go. Now. You get me?”
N’Doch can’t hear Jean-Pierre’s reply. He figures the guy’s mouth’s gone too dry to manage even a syllable. N’Doch has about zero sympathy for the flapper flunky. You get, he quips silently, what you get paid for. He hears the bankroll come into the parlor, trailed by placating voices.
“Please have a seat, monsieur.”
“Would you like a drink, monsieur?”
“Perhaps you are hungry, monsieur?”
“The PrintNews is right here, monsieur.”
The bankroll snorts. “Get it away from me. I got enough problems already without having to read about ’em. Give me a big brandy and a little privacy. I don’t plan to be staying long. Come to think of it, I’ll take the privacy first. Get out of here, all of you. I’ll see to myself.”
A flat, deep voice says, “Sasha and me’ll be right outside, sir.”
The bodyguard, N’Doch surmises.
“Thank you, Nikko. Sasha, if Marco calls, I’ll take it in here.”
The bowing and scraping and whining dies down until all N’Doch can hear is the bankroll pacing about at the other end of the parlor.
“Jesus Christ!” he exclaims again, and lets out an explosive sigh.
N’Doch smiles, picturing the bankroll’s tension dissipating into the room in radiating lines of cuss words and insults to the staff. This dude he can almost feel sorry for. Then the pacing turns purposeful and heads N’Doch’s way. He tenses. But it stops partway, replaced by sounds of glass clinking and liquid being poured. N’Doch’s just dying for a peek at this guy. He figures he could sneak a look now, while the dude’s busy at the bar. He eases his body forward just enough to peer around the high winged back of the chair, but the leather creaks and he’s gotta make like a statue before he’s moved far enough for the full view. All he sees is half a dark, slick-haired head on the well-tailored, medium height shoulder of a man in a business suit. European or mixed. Ordinary enough, as far as it goes.
Finally, there’s Lealé’s voice, trilling down the hall. The bankroll moves back toward the door with his brandy to meet her.
“Oh, hello, Nikko. Is he in there?” She rounds the corner. “Ah, darling! Back so soon? You should have warned me—I’d have sent the car.” It sounds to N’Doch like Lealé’s thrown herself bodily into the bankroll’s arms.
“Stow the car. Haven’t you heard what’s going on? Food riots at the Ziguinchor, right outside your door!”
Lealé takes on a pouting tone. “Oh, dear. Again?”
“Your man out front was smart enough to lock the gates.”
“I hate that! You know I hate that!”
“This is no joke, Glory. Word got out somehow about the next price hike, and the shit hit the fan. Why’d you have to pick this neighborhood, right in the middle of everything? There’re plenty of safer places.”
“Oh, darling, it couldn’t be any other place! You know what the dream told me. It’ll be over soon out there, like it always is. I come from there, remember? People must just stand up and shout about things every once in a while, but they’ll settle down again, once they remember that shouting doesn’t do any good.”
“This time, I’m not so sure . . .”
“Ooo, you’re so grumpy! You didn’t come all this way to be grumpy. Come here. Oh!” Lealé giggles. There’s the small clink of a glass being set down, then the rustle of her robes and a moment of heavy breathing. “See? You just couldn’t wait to hold your Glory again. Here, let me close the door.”
“Awww, what is it? Another bomb threat?”
“There are always bomb threats. There’s not enough explosive made to supply all the bomb threats we get in a month.”
“Poor darling . . .”
N’Doch is sort of relieved there’s gonna be none of “that,” just a mini-lecture on the perils of doing business. Sitting over here in the dark is like watching the daytime vid when only the sound is working. But the news of the food riots crowds into his mind. Close call, he thinks. We were just there. It must’ve all started when the marché opened up again for the afternoon.
“Look, Glory, I just had the damnedest dream.”
“Now, darling, what has Glory told you about sleeping in the middle of the day?”
“That’s what’s so damn peculiar. I wasn’t asleep.”
Lealé laughs, low and throaty. “A daydream, was it? Was Glory in it?”
“Yes. You were.” But there is no intimacy in his reply.
“Excuse me, sir.” A soft male voice chimes in at the door. “Mr. D is on the line.”
“About time. Ask if he’s seen the numbers this morning. No, give it here . . . Marco! You seen the . . . yeah! What’s the deal? All of a sudden, they’re killing us! . . . yeah . . . no, I’m at . . . I’m in a meeting right now. Shouldn’t be long . . . well, get on it, man! I’ll be back to you.”
Now N’Doch gets his first real twinge of envy for the bankroll. Before the music thing grabbed him so hard, and he was running with the Needles Gang, he’d had a phone for a while. Some deck jockey had fixed it so it fed off a random selection of purloined access codes. He could call anywhere, for as long as he liked. Now, that was power. He can still feel the lightness of it in his hand, like it was nothing, but that phone was more lethal in its way than any hand weapon. Then one day he up and sold it to buy his first set of amps. It seemed like the right move at the time, but since then, there’s been times he’s wondered. Hindsight’s twenty-twenty, he tells himself, so meanwhile, back to the soap opera. . . .
“Sasha, here! Get this thing outa my sight! And hold the calls now, got it?” The bankroll paces a bit more. N’Doch guesses that Glory’s just sitting there watching, waiting for him to work it out. “It’s a bad time, Glory, a bad time. You better be making enough to support the two of us.”
“Oh, darling . . .”
“No bullshit, Glory, and to tell you the truth, it’s not just me. Things are about to fall down around our ears, I can feel it. And then there’s this damn dream! It was . . . like the ones you have.”
“Kenzo, dearest, you’re not supposed to be having that kind of Dreams . . . let Glory do that for you! She’ll take the worry out of it.”
Kenzo? N’Doch’s not sure he’s heard her right. He supposes there’s more than one “Kenzo” in the business world, but . . .
“Fine,” the bankroll growls, “but I had it anyway.”
“Then you better just sit down and tell Glory all about it.”
As the bankroll spins out the long and torturous dream-strand that’s shaken him so badly, N’Doch listens hard, not to the words, but to the voice, which he is now trying like crazy to identify. But he can’t quite be sure, and finally he knows he’s got to risk it. He has to get a real look at this dude.
He moves as slowly as he knows how, tries to time his moves with the rhythm of the bankroll’s speech, so the voice’ll cover the creaking of the damn chair. No good spy, he thinks, would ever sit in a leather chair. He gets his head and shoulders twisted around, then leans out over the arm of the chair. He gets a clean shot, a full-face view of the guy with his hands in the air, sketching a particular detail in his narrative. Once the input from his eyes reaches the processing part of his brain, N’Doch nearly stops breathing.
Omigod. Baraga!
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Now that she knew the truth about her less-than-substantial meal, Erde was no longer so confident about how recovered she felt, or about the apparent comfort of her current situation. If the Presence was a prisoner in this wood, could that not mean that she was also? If she couldn’t leave and couldn’t eat, starvation became a real possibility. And how could she even be sure the Presence was telling the truth about itself? Perhaps it was holding her prisoner.
Certainly, she needed to talk to it further, but an in-depth discussion was going to prove difficult if the only way the Presence could communicate was by making the wood and its creatures act out each intended meaning. There was a game at home something like that, intended for long winter afternoons by the fireplace. But Erde didn’t feel much like playing games, even in the interests of communication. It seemed that the Presence could manage to convey its emotional state, particularly assent or dissent. It just wasn’t very good at actual information. So perhaps if she asked only questions with yes or no answers, she might make more progress.
For instance: “Do you know a way out of this wood?”
The leaves rose and fell, rose and fell. Negation.
“Does that mean I’m a prisoner, too?”
A definite stirring. Negation.
Erde pondered the apparent contradiction. “You mean . . . I can get out, but you can’t?”
A stillness, tinged with melancholy. Assent.
Perhaps it would tell her about its own situation. “Are you a prisoner because of something . . . you did?” she asked carefully.
A sudden rotating gust snatched at Erde’s clothing and tousled her hair. Fistfuls of leaves detached and threw themselves in her face.
“Please! Please! I’m sorry! I apologize!”
The gust died as if it had never been. Fallen leaves were nowhere in sight.
“If you have all this power, why can’t you just leave?”
No response at all. Not a yes or no question.
Erde chewed her lip. “I can’t say why, but I believe you. And of course I’d like to help you, but I don’t see how I can.” She found herself thinking about the dragons again, both of them this time, and recalling how Earth had at first been able to talk to her only in mind pictures. Finally, an understanding bloomed.
“Is it the dragons’ help you want?”
Not a leaf or blade in motion. Total assent.
She couldn’t figure out a way to shape, “How did you know about the dragons?” into a yes or no query. If the Presence had known she was thirsty and hungry without her saying so out loud, probably it had learned about the dragons the very same way.
“I’m sure they would help you if they knew, but they’re never going to unless I find a way out of here.”
The silent wood came alive again. The ginger cat, the brown mouse and the blue swallow all appeared from different directions and met on the grass at Erde’s feet. Once there, all three of them promptly settled down and went to sleep.
Erde stared. This really was like a child’s game. “Is it something about sleeping?”
Assent.
“You need to sleep now?”
Negation.
“Ummm . . . you think I need to sleep?”
Assent.
“But I don’t want to sleep! I want to get out of here!”
A long silence. Assent and reassurance.
And as she watched, the three sleeping creatures woke up, not as animals usually do, instantly on the alert, but stretching and yawning like humans. Then, as one, they looked up and about them, as if in realization, then jumped up and took off joyfully, each in the direction it had come.
“Oh, dear,” said Erde. “I think I understand. I’m still not awake yet, am I?”
Assent, softened with sympathy.
“So, to get out of here, I have to go to sleep in my dream, this dream that I’m still in, then I have to wake up, and hope that I’ve woken up for real this time.”
Assent. Assent. Assent.
She had said she didn’t want to sleep, but suddenly, she did
. The urge was so overpowering that even she knew it wasn’t her own. She wondered if the Presence understood that the chances were about even: She could end up in 2013 with the dragons, or a thousand years earlier. She thought of Köthen, and decided it didn’t matter. Either would be preferable to starvation for an eternity in this weird, weird wood.
As she lay down and tried to prepare herself for any eventuality, she noticed a queer thing: A long line of soldier ants were picking out a very eccentric trail through the velvety grass. They were . . . Erde yawned. Sleep was approaching faster than she’d expected . . . spelling out letters? Words? Why not? In a dream, anything was possible.
She lifted her head the barest inch, all she could manage as sleep rushed toward her. Words, definitely words.
They read: RESIST TEMPTATION.
* * *
He flattens himself back into the deepest part of the chair. At first, he can’t even think.
Baraga. Here.
His heart races. He stares into the fireplace, sees only darkness.
Baraga. Baraga!
But the roof doesn’t cave in, and the man at the other end of the parlor continues his recitation as if nothing has changed, and finally, N’Doch gets hold of himself.
Kenzo Baraga, the Media King, the man he now and forever most loves to hate, is sitting not thirty feet away from him. The slick-black Asian hair of Baraga’s Japanese mother might have clued him in if he’d been thinking, but . . . whoever would have thought? Kenzo Baraga, in person, right in this room. And what’s he doing? Not forging dreams and deals or ending careers and hopes, like he’s supposed to be, no—he’s complaining about some stupid dream he’s had! N’Doch can’t believe it.
Not that he supposed the Big Man wouldn’t have problems. But they should be world-class problems, and Baraga should be eating ’em for breakfast, not be sitting there pouring his heart out like a schoolboy to some fawning woman! But in a way, N’Doch likes it that the Big Man’s got a soft side. It humanizes him.
“I’m on this road,” the Media King is saying, “and it’s hotter ’n hell, and dusty. The road is crap, like it was paved once, a very long time ago and never kept up. And I’m alone, and walking, can you imagine? My . . .” He stops, and in the still room, everyone listens as sirens wail past outside the gates. “So my clothes are all torn, and all I can see, everywhere around me, is burned-out buildings.”
The Book of Water Page 28