Darkthunder's Way (33 page)

“Good luck, man,” was all David could say at first, but then he added, “and thanks for the advice, Fargo. No hard feelings, I hope.”

Calvin clapped a hand on his shoulder. “None.”

“Luck,” Fionchadd said, and suddenly enfolded David in a hearty hug, then kissed him on each cheek, leaving
him
blushing in confusion. “Luck, my friend—and farewell, for we may not meet for long and long, though I
hope
it will be far sooner.”

“Luck,” David gave him back, and impulsively returned the kisses.

“Luck,” called Uki, raising his hands skyward and clapping. Thunder sounded, and a veritable fusillade of lightning crackled across the clear sky.

And then they were walking. David turned his face to the north, to where a cool wind was drifting down from among the trees. He did not look back, did not dare, not to see Calvin and Fionchadd start away to the east, not to see Uki and his sisters turn back toward the cliff that housed his best friend. He was doing what he had to do, he told himself. That would be enough. He would do this thing,
then
think about what came after.

Trees closed around him, and he was suddenly alone with the wild. Beauty surrounded him, and life, and with it came a ghost of healing, as sunlight swept the darkest of his thoughts aside. When he did look back, it was only to see the tops of a thousand maples, and beyond them a rainbow arching above the sound of thunder.

*

A little more than an hour later David passed the site of the struggle with the uktena, but he did not turn aside to survey the scavengers’ progress, though they rose in indignant masses of flogging black wings at his coming. Rather, he moved on as quickly as he could, for with his return to that place came a return of his memories of Alec. Fight them though he would, he could still see the images: his slim, dark-haired friend astride the back of a vast red-and-white serpent, his runestaff plunging deep into the seventh spot. And then that friend lying bruised and broken on the ground with his hands in ruins and his face contorted with pain.

Unsummoned the inscription he had put on the staff came to him:

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.

These runes were wrought, these spells were spun,

By David Kevin Sullivan.

He patted the small backpack he wore beneath the bearskin piled upon his shoulders. What remained of Alec’s staff was still in there: his signature reworked and carved deeper from the earlier version: David, son of Sullivan. It was all he had of Alec now, all the proof that remained of the bond between them.

He passed the uktena place quickly, and headed downhill, but the smell of decay and the cacophony of the birds stayed with him for more than a mile.

Slowly the day grew warmer, and at times he cursed the hot weight of the skin. In early afternoon he stopped by a lazy river and swam for a while. Afterward he found a patch of blackberries and ate so many he had to bathe again to remove the stains from this hands and face. A strip of sassafras bark served as a toothbrush as he walked on, climbing one mountain, then sighting another, descending the narrow valley between, and moving on again.

All day he tramped, at a steady pace, not so tired as he had been the first day he had come here; and he knew that even his own strong legs had strengthened under the constant stress of use. Uki had rubbed his blistered feet with a salve before he left, and they were also feeling much better. He was hungry, a little, but he found walnuts, which he cracked with stones, and hickory nuts, which he treated similarly, though the sweetmeats were so small and hard to get at he almost abandoned the effort in futility. And there were blackberries aplenty, as well as mushrooms. More than once he was grateful for the woodcraft David-the-elder had taught him, and his stint in the Scouts, for not everyone could tell which plants were edible, and certainly not among the fungi. For drink he had berry juices and water from the streams that seemed to trickle down from every mountaintop. But in spite of all this, his stomach soon began to knot and growl.

Eventually the sun nudged the horizon, and he began to search for a campsite. It would not require much: the sky did not look threatening. A place by the river would be ideal, one with high rocks to his back to guard against unwelcome intrusion would be even better.

He found such a site in a steep-sided gorge so overgrown with moss and conifers it was like twilight there long before the sun had truly set. It reminded him of an area near his mom’s old stomping grounds in North Carolina; Nantahala, they called it: the Valley of the Noonday Sun. Well, this was Nantahala in spades.

There was even a stream, a wide shallow one tinkling melodiously across the golden rocks. And there were steep banks and mounds of granite, and over to the left by the blasted skeleton of a pine, three good-sized boulders together, all taller than he was and open toward the river. He stopped there, bathed again while the air was still warm, and built a small fire while he could still see to do it, collecting driftwood from up and down the bank. It was strange to see smoke there, he realized, as he stretched himself out in the last of the sunlight to dry.

At some point his thoughts turned to Liz. He wished she was here now, Lordy Jesus did he wish it, and not just because he was naked and feeling a little bit horny. No, he needed her because he didn’t want to be alone, and he was, and he was afraid he was going to screw up his mission. Liz wouldn’t let that happen. She’d know what to do; would keep him from acting rash or stupid. Shoot, she’d have known how to stop Alec from that foolishness with the uktena.

“Liz,” he whispered to the sky. “Girl, I want you with me.”

Her name on his lips, he dozed—to jerk awake a short while later to a vision of the smoke drifting into the darkening heavens. Suddenly he felt guilty. Here he was, as conscientious an environmentalist as you could want, sullying the skies of a pristine World. Almost he put the fire out, trusting on the day’s heat imprisoned in the rocks and the promised warmth of the fur to sustain him through what he had been warned would be a cold night.

But then rationality spoke, and he could almost hear Alec’s voice in that supercilious tone he sometimes used, though it also carried a hint of wind among evergreen needles:
Yeah, sure, Sullivan. You can do without fire if you want to, but don’t forget fire’s good for keeping things off, and you don’t know what’s in the woods around here.

And then Liz’s voice answering, one with the tinkle of the river:
And just ’cause you haven’t seen anything bigger than a rabbit doesn’t mean they’re not there. Remember the uktena.”

Bobcats
—on the wind.

Wolves
—from the riverside.

Mountain lions
—from the standing pines.

“And bears,” David said aloud, shaking himself from the half trance into which he had fallen: “Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!”

He dressed quickly and took a final long drink from the stream, then banked the coals and laid aside a pile of driftwood for predatory emergencies. One final careful survey of the site, and he set himself to digging a body-shaped hollow in the sand between the rocks. That accomplished, he wrapped himself in the bearskin and snuggled down to sleep.

For a time he dozed dreamlessly, but then came suddenly awake. Something was poking him. He started up, grabbing for his staff that lay close by, then realized what it had been and laughed. The moon had risen and poured its light into the gorge. The stream sparkled like molten silver, the woods hung dark as velvet against a deep blue sky. David could see by the light of that orb—uncannily huge and ruddy—that what had awakened him was nothing more than one of the bear paws that had come adrift when he had wiggled, and had slapped against his side. He batted it away playfully—to be rewarded with an unexpected wash of pain across his palm. He jerked it to his mouth, then brought it to eye level, squinting in the moonlight at the thin lines of blood welling out there. He shook it irritably, wiped it on the fur without thinking, then dabbed a bit of shirttail on it until it stopped. A quick check of the camp, an augmentation of the fire, and he returned to slumber.

This time his sleep was the heavy, dead falling of the truly tired—and yet he dreamed. Not of sights, though; but of sounds: a chant that began, one with the wind in the trees and the song of the river:

He-e! Hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa,

Tsistuyi nehanduyanu, Tsistuyi nehanduyanu—Yoho-o!

He-e! Hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa,

Kuwahi nehanduyanu, Kuwahi nehanduyanu—Yoho-o!

He-e! Hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa,

Uyahye nehanduyanu, Uyahye nehanduyanu—Yoho-o!

He-e! Hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa, hayuyahaniwa,

Gategwa nehanduyanu, Gategwa nehanduyanu—Yoho-o!

Ule-m asehi tadeyastatakuhi gurmage astu tsiki.

Once more a part of him half understood the words, but only when the last line had come around again for the fourth time, could he truly make them focus:

And now, surely we and the good black thing, the

best of all, shall see each other.

David awoke with the sun shining on his face and something hot and heavy half suffocating him. He had slept soundly: the sleep of the dead, his ma would have said. And even now, as consciousness returned, he could not shake the notion that something was not quite right, that perhaps he was still dreaming. He rolled over, tugged at the fur—and found that it did not follow. Rather, he heard a heavy grunt, smelled a strong musky odor, and saw a black-clawed paw slide onto his chest—and keep on moving, while muscles twitched there and the claws clicked against each other as tendons flexed them.

David did not dare move, though he had to fight the rush of adrenaline that suddenly tensed his every muscle and erected his every hair. This was no longer merely skin, the empty shell of a creature, but actual, living flesh, which meant—

He twisted his head slowly to the left, to where the bulk of fur should lie—too far, and something snorted.

Not wishing to disturb whatever it was, he tried to relax, and suddenly became aware of a sort of low-pitched gurgling growl that, now he thought of it, sounded exactly like someone snoring. Risking a further glance to the left, David discovered that his first wild notion had been correct. He was asleep in the arms of an immense black bear.

All at once the words to the song returned to him:
surely we and the good black thing, the best of all, shall see each other.

The good black
thing…
surely not this.

Another grunt, and the bear moved; though it did not release David from its casual grasp. Well, he couldn’t stay here like this all day, not when he had to get going, never mind the strange behavior of this critter. As cautiously as he could he eased back around and began to snake his left hand across the sand and toward his staff, thinking that any weapon when he truly tried to move was better than nothing. But as he did, his palm scraped something hard, and he winced, almost cried out, and then remembered that he had cut it last night on the bear’s claws. He turned it over and stared at it in the pale light of morning, and saw the wound reduced to a line of red.

And then the bear moved in truth, and he felt hot breath on his neck.

“Ah, so that is what brought me back,” a guttural voice whispered. Abruptly the weight across his body lessened, and David struggled up and around into a half crouch—as before him a vast shape unfolded itself from the sand, reared onto its hind legs, and raised a fanged and pig-eyed head ten feet above the ground.

“Jesus!”

The bear ignored him completely, sank to all fours, and ambled toward the river, leaving him gaping incredulously beside the remnants of the fire.

The bear slipped briefly into the water, then emerged and shook itself, showering David with spray.

“Thanks are in order, I suppose,” it said. “For surely it was your blood that brought me back from the Ghost Country.”

“My blood?” David stammered. “How?”

“But you must know, human, if you have come this far in Galunlati, that blood and life are one.”

David suddenly felt very stupid, for now that he thought on it, remembering what Uki had said, it made a sort of sense.

“In fact,” the bear continued, “I owe you a special debt, for I could not reclaim my body until blood brushed my hide—and stronger blood than now exists in this land—which is how I know you are a stranger here.”

David relaxed a little, though it was hard to get used to talking beasts—harder, even than it had been when he first met the Sidhe and they began to speak to him in animal guise. At least then, once the shock had worn off, it was possible to accept that the minds that ruled the shapes were human. But beasts that had always been beasts—and still talked: that was much harder to swallow.

As if reading his mind the bear spoke again. “Ah, but I see confusion. You wonder how I speak so well, and the answer to that is simple: you and I are
kin
.”

“Kin?” David gasped incredulously.