River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  Dark Moon reached her hand out to Birdcatcher, who shied away as though he feared being burned. She shuffled a few steps closer and reached out once more. This time he permitted her to touch his arm, which she encircled with her birdlike claws.

  “He will go to the child,” she said.

  “No.” Birdcatcher almost whispered, as though he spoke through great pain. “He will take my boy child away.”

  “If the dead call to your child, they call,” said Dark Moon. “If they do not, they do not. You cannot keep away death with a spear. Not this kind of death.”

  Birdcatcher darted a glance at Paul, as if to remind her that he had been doing just that, but her hand tightened on his arm, and he dropped his head like a sullen adolescent.

  Dark Moon turned to Paul. “Come to the child, Riverghost.”

  No one in the tribe offered to help him up, so Paul struggled to his feet alone. The place where Birdcatcher had jabbed him throbbed painfully, and when he put his hand to the spot he felt wetness on his fingers. The old woman and Runs Far turned and began a slow progress across the cave. Paul stepped in behind them, his reluctance increased when Birdcatcher followed him and rested the spearpoint lightly but eloquently against his back.

  I have to get out of here, he thought. These are not my people, and whatever this place is, it’s not my place. I don’t understand the rules.

  They led him toward a tent, one of the last in the line, so far from the fire that it had a small blaze of its own burning in a stone circle before it. Paul could imagine Birdcatcher sitting before the flames, brooding, working up his courage. If his grudge was over a sick child, it was hard to hate the man.

  A swift shallow jab at his back when he hesitated at the camp’s edge restored a little of his earlier dislike.

  Birdcatcher’s tent was smaller than some of the others; Paul had to stoop to make his way through the door flap. Three children waited in the tent, but only two looked up at his entrance, a goggle-eyed infant wrapped in furs and the little girl he had seen earlier. Mouths open, both had gone completely still, like startled squirrels. Between them lay a small boy, apparently being tended by the older girl, wrapped in hides so that only his head was exposed. His dark hair was matted on his forehead, and his eyes had rolled back beneath the trembling lids, so that the firelight spilling through the tent flap exposed two slightly pulsing slivers of white.

  Paul knelt and gently touched his hand to the boy’s forehead. He ignored Birdcatcher’s angry murmur and kept his hand in place as the child weakly tried to turn his head away; the flesh seemed as hot as one of the stones on which the People cooked their food. When the boy, who looked to be nine or ten years old, brought up a feeble hand to push at Paul’s wrist, he let go and sat up.

  He stared at the small, pale face. This was another way in which this entire mad dream was disastrously unlike a good old-fashioned story. In flicks, in science fiction tales, one of the visitors from the future always knew modern medicine, and could make a jury-rigged defibrillator out of palm fronds, or whip up a quick dose of penicillin to save the ailing chief. Paul knew less about doctoring a child than had his own mother and grandmother, who at least had been raised in the fading tradition of women’s special wisdom. Penicillin? Didn’t it grow on moldy bread, somehow? And who was to say the child had an infection anyway, and not something far more difficult to cure, like a heart murmur or kidney failure?

  Paul shook his head in frustration. He had been a fool even to offer to see the child, although he doubted that he had given the boy’s father any false hope. He could feel Birdcatcher breathing on the back of his neck, could sense the man’s tension as though the air in the immediate vicinity threatened a sudden storm.

  “I don’t think . . .” Paul began, and then the ill child began to speak.

  It was little more than a whisper at first, the barest scratchings of breath across dry lips. Paul leaned toward him. The boy twitched and threw back his head, as though fighting to shake loose some invisible thing that clung to his neck, and his rasping voice grew louder.

  “. . . So dark . . . so cold . . . and all gone, all gathered, gone through the windows and doors and across the Black Ocean . . .”

  Some of the People gasped and whispered. Paul felt a shudder run up his spine that had nothing to do with the spear pressed against his back. The Black Ocean . . . he had heard that phrase before. . . .

  “. . . Where are they?” The boy’s grimy fingers scraped at the tent floor, snatching at nothing. “All I have is the dark. The voice, the One . . . took them all away through the windows. . . .”

  His voice dropped back to a whisper. Paul leaned closer, but could make out nothing more in the fading, rustling speech which eventually became too quiet to hear. The fretful movements subsided. He stared down at the boy’s pale features. The sagging mouth again seemed nothing but a conduit for wheezing breath. Paul had just lifted his hand to touch the child’s forehead again when the boy suddenly opened his eyes.

  Black. Black like holes, black like space, black like the inside of a closet door after it swings shut. The gaze roved a moment, unfocused, and someone behind him cried out in fear. Then the two pupils fixed on him and held him.

  “Paul? Where are you?” It was her voice, the painful music of so many dreams. Hearing it here, in this shadowed place, he thought his heart would stop from the shock. For a long moment he could not breathe. “You said you would come to me—you promised.” Trembling, the boy reached up and caught at his hand with a grasp stronger than he ever could have imagined from such small fingers. “Before you can find the mountain, you must find the wanderer’s house. You must come to the wanderer’s house and release the weaver.”

  Catching his breath at last, gasping it in like a man surfacing from ocean depths, he pulled away, struggling to fight free of the child’s grip. For a moment the boy half-rose from the bed, hanging onto Paul like a fish on a line, but then his hold slipped and he fell back, silent and limp, his eyes shuttered once more. He had left something in Paul’s hand.

  After he uncurled his fingers, Paul had only a shivering moment to stare at the feather lying on his palm before something struck him explosively on the side of his head, tumbling him to his knees. There was a noise and stir at his back that seemed as distant as an old rumor, then something heavy collapsed onto him and fingers curled around his throat.

  He could not see who he was fighting and did not care. He thrashed, trying to shake free of the vicious, unfair weight on top of him. Everything was stripes of light and dark and a wash of incomprehensible noise, but the roaring blackness in his head was fast blotting out all of it. He struggled with a force he did not know he had, and one of the strangling hands slipped from his neck. When it could not find its hold again, it gripped and gouged at his face instead. He tried to claw it away, then threw himself forward, struggling toward air as though he were in deep water—but his breathlessness went with him and could not be shaken loose. Something sharp scraped along his side, leaving a cold trail, and a little of his madness went away at the painful touch.

  He rolled until he felt something stop him, then tried to get to his feet. The thing that clutched his face lifted away again, and once more something cold and sharp jabbed at his side. Paul threw himself forward and the thing restraining him gave way. The light changed as he fell forward, and the noises around him now came with echoes.

  Something bright was right beside his head. He was filled with a fury, a frustrated rage that he somehow knew had long been trapped inside him, and had only now escaped. When he understood that the bright something was the blaze of the small campfire, that he had smashed his way out of the tent, he rolled toward it and tipped the murderous shape clinging to his back into the stone ring. Screaming as the elk in the hunters’ pit had screamed, it let go of him and scrambled up and away, beating at the places where the fire had caught. But Paul
was no longer interested in mere survival: he leaped across the campfire and pulled his enemy down, caring nothing for the flames that scorched his own skin. For a brief moment he saw Bird-catcher’s terrified face beneath him. Something round and heavy and hot was in his hand—a stone from the firepit, a part of him realized, a cold, remorseless part. He raised it up so he could smash Birdcatcher and everything else back into darkness, but instead he himself was struck, a sudden and surprising blow to the back of his head that sent a jolt like an ungrounded electrical wire along his backbone and threw him down into nothing.

  THE voices seemed to be arguing. They were small voices, and far away, and they did not seem terribly important.

  Was it his mother and father? They did not argue much—usually the older Jonas treated Paul’s mother with deference bordering on contempt, as though she were a poorly-made object that could not stand even ordinary handling. But every now and then his father’s air of benign disinterest would vanish, usually when someone outside the house had rejected one of his ideas, and then there would be a brief flurry of shouting followed by silences that lasted hours—silences which had made the younger version of Paul feel that everyone in the house was listening for him to make a noise and thereby spoil something.

  On those very few occasions when his mother stood up for herself and argued back, still in her fumbling, apologetic way, the shouting would not last any longer, but the silences might stretch for a day or more. During those long, deadly days, Paul stayed in his room, unwilling even to go out into the silence, calling up maps of faraway places on his screen instead, making plans for escape. In the endless middle hours of a still afternoon, he sometimes imagined that the house was a toy snow globe—that outside his room the corridors were slowly filling with clouds of settling, silent white.

  The voices went on arguing, still distant, still unimportant, but he had noticed in an offhand way that they were both male. If one was his father, then perhaps the other was Uncle Lester, his mother’s brother, a man who did something to help banks make contacts overseas. He and Paul’s father disagreed famously about politics—Uncle Lester thought that anyone who voted Labour understood nothing about the way the world really worked—and sometimes would argue semicordially for hours, while Paul’s mother nodded and occasionally smiled or made a face of mock-disapproval, pretending to be interested in their extravagant assertions, and while Paul himself sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner looking at one of his mother’s precious books of reproductions, old-fashioned books on paper that her own father had given to her.

  There was one in particular Paul had always liked, and listening now to his father and Uncle Lester argue, he saw it again. It was by Bruegel the Elder, or at least he thought it was—for some reason he was having trouble summoning names just now—and showed a group of hunters marching down a snowy hillside, returning to a feast in the town below. The painting had moved him in ways he could not quite describe, and when he had gone to university, he had used it as the default on his wallscreen; on nights when his roommate had gone home to his family, Paul would leave it on all night, so that the white snow and the colorful scarves had been the last thing he saw before falling asleep. He did not know why it had become such a favorite—just that something about the conviviality of it, the shared life of the villagers in the picture, had moved him. An only-child thing, he had always supposed.

  Thinking of that picture now, as the argument grew louder and then softer in slow waves, he could almost feel the sharp cold of Bruegel’s snow. White, all white, sifting and settling, turning all the world uniform, covering up all that would otherwise cause pain or shame. . . .

  Paul’s head hurt. Was it thinking about the cold that had done it, or the continuing prattle of those people arguing? In fact, who were those people? He had thought one of them might be his father, but the other certainly could not be Uncle Lester, who had died of a heart attack while on vacation in Java almost ten years back.

  In fact, Paul realized, more than his head hurt. His entire body was being bounced, and every bump was painful. And the pain itself was touched with frost.

  Even as he thought this, he dropped for half an instant straight down and thumped onto something uncomfortably solid. Solid and cold. Even through the dizziness, the heavy-headedness, he was sure of that. The ground was very, very cold.

  “. . . With his blood,” one of the voices was saying. “That brings a curse. Do you want the curse of a man from the dead lands?”

  “But that is Birdcatcher’s spear,” another said. “Why do we give it to this one?”

  “Not give, leave. Because Riverghost’s blood is upon it, and we do not want him drawn back to our place by his blood. Mother Dark Moon said so. You heard her speak.”

  The cold was growing worse. Paul began to shiver, but the motion made his bones feel as though they were grinding together on their raw ends, and he let out a whimper of discomfort.

  “He wakes. Now we go back.”

  “Runs Far, we leave him too close to our place,” the second voice said. “It would be better to kill him.”

  “No. Mother Dark Moon said his blood would curse us. Did you not see how just a little of it made Birdcatcher ill? How it called out to the bad thing in Birdcatcher’s child? He will not come back.”

  Paul, his head pulsing, aching like one great bruise, still could not decide how exactly he should go about opening his eyes, so he felt rather than saw someone bending down and bringing a face close to his.

  “He will not come back,” Runs Far said next to his ear, speaking almost as though for Paul’s benefit, “because Mother Dark Moon has said that if he comes back, then it is he who will be cursed, not us. That the People will kill him then without fear of his blood.”

  The nearness of the man grew less, then something thumped down beside Paul. He heard a rhythmic noise that, after a few moments, he realized was the People’s footsteps crunching away.

  Some idea of what had happened was beginning to come back, but what was coming even more swiftly was the freezing cold. A vibrato of shivers ran through him, and he doubled up like a blind worm, huddling into his own body for warmth. It did no good—the cold was still touching him all the way down one side, sucking the life out of him. He rolled over so that he was facedown, then struggled until his knees were under his belly. He set his hands flat and tried to lift himself up. A wave of nausea and dizziness ran through him, and for an instant blackness came and drove even the cold away—but only for an instant.

  As the inner darkness receded, Paul opened his eyes. At first nothing changed. The night sky stretched above him, an unimaginable, velvet black, but as his vision returned, he saw that this black was pierced with merciless, glittering stars. The uppermost edge of a wide yellow moon peered from behind the trees on one side of the hilltop. Beneath the sky lay a hillside, all whiteness, so that the world seemed to have been reduced to the simplest of dichotomies. And Paul himself was the only other thing in the world, trapped between black and white.

  Why me? he wondered sorrowfully. What did I do, God?

  A wind came down on him. It only lasted a moment, but that moment was like knives. Paul shuddered violently and dragged himself to his feet. He swayed, but managed at last to find balance. His head was throbbing, his bones felt broken. He tasted metal, and spat out a dark glob of blood that made a tiny hole in the white hillside. A sob hitched his breathing. A distant howl—like a wolf’s, but much deeper—rose and fell, echoing across the white moonscape, a terrifying, primordial sound that seemed to mark out his hopeless loneliness.

  They’ve left me to die. He sobbed again, furious and helpless, but swallowed it down. He was afraid to cry in case it might knock him to his knees. He didn’t know whether he’d be able to get up a second time.

  Something long and dark lay in the snow by his feet, bringing back Runs Far’s words. Birdcatcher’s spear. He sta
red, but could only make sense of it at the moment as something to lean on. He wrapped the fur cloak more tightly—what kind of death sentence had they passed, that he had been left his clothing?—then bent carefully. He almost overbalanced, but steadied and began the intricate process of picking up the spear while his legs threatened to buckle and his head suggested that it might explode. At last he wrapped his hand around it, then used it to push himself back upright.

  The wind freshened. It stabbed and scraped.

  Where do I go? For a moment he considered following the footsteps back to the cave. If he could not persuade them to let him back in, perhaps at least he could steal their fire, like the story Dark Moon had told. But even with his head full of blood and broken crockery, he knew that was foolishness.

  Where should he go? Shelter was the answer. He must find some place where the wind could not reach him. Then he would wait until it got warmer again.

  Until it gets warmer. It struck him as so blackly funny that he tried to laugh, but could only summon a wheezing cough. And how long will that be? How long is an Ice Age, anyway?

  He began to trudge down the hillside, each step through the deep snow a small, exhausting battle in a war he had no real hope of winning.

  The moon had climbed above the tree line, and now it hung full and fat before him, dominating the sky. He did not, could not, think of what he would have done had the night been moonless. As it was, he still failed to recognize many of the treacherous deep spots in the silvery snow in time to avoid them, and each time he fell into a hole it took longer to extricate himself. He was shod in some kind of thick hide turned fur-side-in, but his feet were so cold anyway that he had begun to lose track of them some time ago. Now it seemed his legs ended several inches above his ankles. It didn’t take a university education to tell him that was a bad sign.

  Snow, he thought, stumbling hip-deep in the stuff. Too much snow. This and other maddeningly obvious thoughts had been his companions for the last hour. It took strength to chase them away, to stay focused, and he did not have enough strength left to spare.