Zadayi Red (34 page)

“It’s nothing.” She stroked Su-Li’s ruff.

“She didn’t tell you,” said Tsola. “She’s deeply connected to Su-Li. Without him she wastes away.”

“But he’s back now,” said Sunoya, stroking him.

Zeya grinned at her. “You came fast to get him.”

“Actually,” said Sunoya, “I came to kiss you and send you off to the Land beyond the Sky Arch. It is the journey of a lifetime.”

He looked at Tsola. “Now?”

“Are you ready?”

“I’m famished,” he said.

Klandagi rolled to his feet, stuck his face in a corner, padded over to Zeya, and from his jaws dropped a big deer roast.

Zeya gaped at it and said, “I think I’ll cook it.”

“Don’t cook my part,” said Klandagi.

When they finished eating, Zeya said to Sunoya, “Is it time?”

“It’s time.”

“We have to swim there,” said Tsola.

“Swim beyond the Sky Arch?”

She laughed. “No, swim to the Emerald Dome. You haven’t heard of it. Sunoya knows, she’s been there. Only Medicine Chiefs go there, to start their journeys. It’s a beautiful and miraculous room, but the main thing is, it’s a launching point, like a high rock for a bird to start its flight.”

“A-a-ark!”

Zeya said, “Do you want to go home, Su-Li?”

The buzzard looked from face to face.

“Funny, you’re not answering me. Well, anyway, Sunoya needs you right now.”

“There’s something you should know,” Tsola said. “The people closest to you, all of them, have given you certain gifts. I can’t tell you what they are, but they’re waiting for you beyond the Sky Arch. You’ll need them there.”

“Am I crazy for doing this?”

“Let’s go,” Tsola said.

“Take all your clothes off,” said Tsola.

Zeya hesitated. He could hear rustling, and he didn’t want to see a hundred-year-old woman naked. Not that he could see a thing in this absolute blackness.

“Don’t dally,” said Klandagi. “I have all my clothes off all the time.”

Zeya did as he was told.

The world he had now was sounds. He could hear Klandagi’s breathing. The stream nearby, flowing. Tsola’s feet as they padded here and there. He could feel a very gentle stirring of the air in the cavern, but he couldn’t hear it.

Tsola splashed into the water. “Follow me downstream,” she said. “It’s underwater part of the way. Do you feel disoriented?”

“Very.”

“Darkness does that. You can’t get into trouble underwater as long as you go downstream. Don’t turn around and try to swim upstream, that’s all that matters. You’ll run out of breath.”

“Okay.” He could feel a squirming in his guts.

“When you run into me, stand up. It will mean we’ve come back to the air.”

The squirming turned to terror.

“It’s best if you don’t think about it. Remember, your mother did it, every Medicine Chief has done it. Relax and don’t worry. Let’s go.”

He heard her step into the water.

“Reach your hand out to the left.”

He did and she took it. Then he remembered that she could see in the darkness, and was embarrassed.

She gave his hand a little tug. “This way.”

He hesitated.

“Go!” roared Klandagi.

He put one foot into the chill water, and then the other.

She pulled him and they splashed gently along. “In a moment we’ll come to a wall.”

After a few steps she put his hand on the rock. “I’m going to let go, then swim underwater. You follow.”

She did. Taking an enormous breath, he dived in.

A
ir. I need air.

He swam.
Alive, but no air.

Tsola’s voice sounded inside his head.
Relax and don’t worry.

He made a deliberate effort to relax his body and make the swimming motion easy.
My mother did it. The hundred-year-old woman in front of me is doing it.

He imagined himself as a turtle. He peered into the dark, watery universe with turtle eyes, he thought with a turtle brain. He felt what it was to be an aquatic animal.

I need air.
His chest was swelling with desperation.
Turtles take a big breath and hold it, too. They’re easy with keeping breath in and swimming along.

He told himself that the current was helping him.
Yes, I can feel it.
He kicked his feet and swept his arms back, going faster. He had liquid arms and legs, boneless, like a turtle’s. He made his head flow back and forth, like a turtle’s. Sometimes his turtle claws scraped the sides.
Am I in a tunnel?

What I’m touching, it might be stars, it might be fish, and I may be beyond the moon. I may be in the depths of the ocean.

His turtle body spun. He lost track of which way was up, which was down, which was sideways. After a pang of fear, he discovered he didn’t care.

He gave up. His body was turning, and, yes, he might gulp water instead of air.

His head banged into flesh. Rising, he discovered that he was standing back to back with Tsola.
I was swimming upside down!

He touched her in the dark with his hand. That made him hope it was her back he’d bumped into.

She took his hand. “Now we walk.”

They did.

“Now we swim again. This one’s not as long.” She gave his hand a squeeze. “You’ll know when you get there.”

She was gone.

He didn’t want to do it. Fear dribbled down his body like icy rain.
I can’t do it. Crazy to throw myself into the arms of fate like that. I’ve seen dead men the last few moons. Dead men live inside my skull now. I can’t do it.

He looked around. He felt the blackness more than saw it.
I am standing alone, deep in the earth, absolutely blind and helpless.

He ducked his head under and went.

Topsy-turvy, turning round and round, and now it was worse than before—he had vertigo. He couldn’t control his body, couldn’t control his mind. He could identify nothing of the universe.

He began to sense light.

He thought to open his eyes.

In the center of darkness a faint spot of light!

An illusion, idiot!

The light grew, it widened, it reached out to him, it welcomed him.

I’m dying!

Light engulfed him, bright as a sky.
But there is no sky down here!
It was like blackness flip-flopped, and in its place was the center of the sun.

He stood up.

Light everywhere. Green light.

Impossible.
He was in a room that was half a dome, cupped above by limestone, held below by a lake. The water was dark green, the air light green. Here, deep in the mountain, light was banished—yet the room was bright. The stone ceiling was a green sky.

Tsola smiled and said, “Welcome. Now you see why my home is called the Emerald Cavern.”

They sat on the bank entirely naked. Tsola was building a fire. She kept all the materials for a camp here, including food, firewood, and utensils. Zeya noticed a drum, and next to it a pile of the scarlet lichen,
u-tsa-le-ta.

“We don’t wear clothes here. The Immortals require us to be our undisguised selves.”

Zeya was surprised that it didn’t bother him, and that in her way Tsola was beautiful.

He said to her back, “How can you swim all that distance? I could barely do it.”

She half-turned to him and said, “Well, I’m used to it, and I age at about half the normal rate. I’m in my fifties.”

“Half?”

“All the Seers do that, and their families. It’s a secret, and
you must keep it. The waters of the Healing Pool? Within the cave they have even greater powers. Anyone who drinks that water every day ages slowly.”

“That’s why you don’t let all the people know.”

“We would be overrun. Only the Medicine Chiefs know, and one of them will be the next Seer.”

Zeya couldn’t take it all in. Finally, he said, “What makes the water green? What makes the light?”

Tsola shrugged. “Why question miracles? Just enjoy them.”

Zeya nodded. He watched Tsola set up a tripod of sticks above the fire and hang a buffalo stomach from it. He looked around, and now he noticed bones here and there on the banks of the lake. “What are those?”

“Human skeletons.”

He watched her drop heated rocks into the water into the buffalo stomach. He said, “I don’t get it.”

“Could you swim back through the tunnels, the way we came?”

He thought of the force of the current, how it swooshed him along, yet how near he came to running out of air. “No.”

“Medicine people come here to make the journey to the Land beyond the Sky Arch. Some get here and can’t cross the threshold. They won’t go on, and they can’t go back.”

She dropped a handful of
u-tsa-le-ta
into the hot water.

“How does the seeker go on?”

“He dives down into this lake and doesn’t come back to this place.”

“How deep is it?”

“As deep as life and death.”

“But the seeker doesn’t come back?”

“After you’ve been beyond the Sky Arch and gotten what you went for, the Immortals send you back to my home in the cave. Klandagi and Sunoya are waiting for us there.”

Zeya pondered this. “How do you get back?”

“A secret way.”

“And the ones who don’t go beyond the Sky Arch?”

“You see them there.” She gestured to the skeletons. “Fortunately, over many generations, very few have failed. But from here, Grandson, there is no turning back.”

Zeya got up and walked around the bank of the lake. The light was eerie, the beauty was woven of fantasy, and his destination was macabre. He stopped and looked down at the bones of a human being. He wondered about this man or woman—he would never know which.

He looked into the eye sockets of the skull and into the cavity where no consciousness lived. He wondered about the person’s experience of ordinary life, sun, wind, water, food, family, fun. He thought how it all had turned to phantasms day by day, as someone lay here and starved to death. Probably the last days were chimeras of dream, mere imaginings, shadowed and cold.

Fear. My enemy.

“The tea is ready.”

He walked back to Tsola, and she handed him a cup.

“It will take me to another world,” he said.

She nodded. “Take your mind ahead of your body.”

“Paya gets it for you, doesn’t he?”

“The dear Crab Man. He gathers it and sells it to me and the other Medicine Chiefs. Only to us.”

“What do you use it for?”

“Everyone has to go to the Land of the Sky Arch for the first time through the bottom of the Emerald Lake. After that, he or she can go just by saying the right prayers, drinking the
u-tsa-le-ta,
and drumming his or her way across.”