Powers (26 page)

She hadn’t packed any medicines, either. Bandages and elastic wraps and other “first aid” supplies yes, but no antibiotics or anything beyond a small plastic bottle of aspirin. After all, gods don’t get sick.

Besides,
if
she was sick, since gods don’t get sick, he didn’t have a clue whether it was bacteria, a virus, or some kind of parasite like malaria. He wasn’t a doctor, but he knew that the treatment for one could kill you if you had the other.

He didn’t know whether he could catch whatever she had.
If
she was sick, and not just crashing from pushing her powers too far. Two of them down and dying wouldn’t help Legion even a little bit.

The fish jumped, a bright splash against the dark water, and dove again. It looked heavy-bodied, at least two feet long. Not an eel, he’d been hoping against an eel. Good to eat, most of them, but not as much meat as a fish and he disliked slime. Get someone else to clean it, he’d be glad to do the eating.

Steady, hand over hand, more line tangling at his feet, and he could see a dark shadow under the river surface. It could see him, probably, against his light. It jerked sideways and fought harder, thrashing the surface into froth. Strong. Heavy. Frantic. Then Albert saw another shadow in the water, larger,
much
larger, and he jerked the line and fish—
My
fish,
my
meal, you can’t have it!—clear of the water to flop on the moss and rocks at the river’s edge. The other fish vanished in a swirl.

Did we swim over
that
thing’s head? Six feet long if it was an inch, and a hunter. Long and lean like a barracuda.

His
fish flapped wildly, snapping at the air with impressive teeth. Everything in this world had teeth. Albert drew his own, the knife, and tried to figure out a way to use it. He finally planted a boot on the silver flashing tail, tightened up the line until he had slowed the head into a target, and just slashed. He barely felt the jerk as his blade took the head clean off as easy as lopping a dandelion. It
was
a good blade.

The body kept flipping, the teeth kept snapping, but they couldn’t work together. They finally slowed and stopped. He pried his hook from the jaws, multiple rows of vicious backward-pointing needle teeth, and threw the head out into the darkness. He heard a double splash out there, smaller and larger, the head and whatever ate it.

Stay out of the water at night.

Hell. Stay out of the water, period.

He was left with the body, pounds and pounds of meat, dark green scales on top and silver on the bottom, dark stripes the length of the body, spiny fins. It reminded him that he didn’t know this world. A pike, maybe? With those teeth? But heavier and deeper-bodied than any pike he’d ever seen, and the nose had curved down to meet the mouth. More like a bass.

Food. To hell with Carolus Linnaeus. It’s food, and anything that’s food attracts other feeders in this world. How long until we attract the fireflies?

He gutted it, skinned it rather than wasting time trying to scale it, cut two heavy filets of meat free of the bones and diced them small for quicker cooking and wrapped them in a plastic bag, tossing everything left over into the water. Double splashes again. He hoped that whatever lurked out there wasn’t amphibious, like a crocodile. Then he washed down the moss and rocks where he’d worked, washed his knife, his hands, his boots—didn’t want to leave any food-smell, blood-smell, behind.

He might revere bears, but didn’t want to invite one into his camp.

Then he untangled and coiled the fishing line on a thin slat he’d cut from a driftwood plank. Set the hook in the wood, stowed it in a pocket—he might need it again. He fumbled and stumbled back through the wet shadowy brush and trees to their camp, such as it was. Faint green light glowed through the mottled camouflage of Mel’s tent, a small camping nightlight he’d left on so she could tell where she was if she woke up lucid. It had been a coin-toss, risk either way—attract animals or humans, or have her panic in the night.

If she had the strength to panic.

“Hani? Hani?”

Okay, he could hear whatever she was babbling now. Which also proved that she was still alive. He hadn’t decided yet whether that was a good thing. Risk either way.

“HANI?”

What or who was a Hani? That wasn’t a word
or
a name he recognized. He dumped the fish chunks in the larger pot with some chopped-up cattail roots and wild onions and garlic he’d gathered and cleaned and already part-way cooked while he still had light. Fish stew. But before he started up the stove—complicated dance in the wind and rain and he’d better watch it for a while until the cooking settled down—he thought he’d better check on his patient.

Flashlight on, not shining full on the tent but bright and moving, he didn’t want to startle her. At least three guns in that tent . . .

“Mel? Lieutenant? Goddess?” Cover all the bases. “It’s Albert.”

Silence.

It continued long enough, he was debating whether he dared open the zipper. He did
not
want to startle her. She was the kind of person who, if you startled her, you could end up hurt.

“Hani’s dead.” Her voice came across almost dead, itself. But at least rational.

He wrestled with the zippers, two of them, storm flap and then insect netting, and didn’t get shot even though the flashlight threw his shadow ahead of him. Maybe she was waiting for a clear target, couldn’t tell which way his shadow offset from his body.

She looked like hell, green wan light reflected off the camouflage tent not helping. Hair soaked with sweat and tangled. Eyes hollow over hollow cheeks. Hands almost skeletal plucking at the Mylar rescue blanket he’d spread over her, but not bothering to pull it up to cover her soaked underwear. She’d thrown off the coveralls again—too hot in the fever.

“Hani’s dead.”

Even so, it looked like she was home. She focused on him. She appeared to know who he was, where she was.

“Who was Hani?”

“A man. He made the Kali. Centuries ago.”

Oh,
hell.
What did the kids say, these days? Been there, done that? “I quit having human lovers. They die. Every damn time, they die.”

Mel shook her head. “He didn’t die. I killed him. There was a woman . . . ”

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me . . . ” Albert couldn’t help himself, the words just slipped out. Jealous gods. Everywhere, the jealous gods.

She managed enough strength for a glare, looked around as if searching for one of the guns. The shotgun lay right next to her . . .

“No. She was a slave. He beat and raped her. Strangled her as he raped her. I killed him. He’d just finished the statue. We’d—” She buried her face in her hands.

It’s not as simple as it looks. It’s
never
as simple as it looks. You’d think you’d learn that, after a few centuries.

Albert started to ask her why her winds hadn’t warned her, and then didn’t. People, even gods, get stupid when sex enters the picture. He knew
he
had.

And she kept the statue. She set it right in front of her Great Wheel, part of her meditations. Life is struggle, life is pain, life is illusion. Life is death. Endless. Life is a wheel, ever turning and ever coming up again to repeat. He flinched away from the image.

“I’ve caught a fish. I’ll be cooking it with some wild vegetables. Should be done in half an hour or so. Do you think you’ll be able to eat any?”

She looked up. “You haven’t left. You know what I am, and you’re still here. Why haven’t you left?”

Good question. “Fish stew, in about half an hour. Think about it.”

He zipped the screen and the storm flap closed, leaving her to whatever he was leaving her to.

Albert ducked back under the plastic sheet he’d rigged for some minimal shelter against the wind and rain. The pot felt dead cold, of course, more than twelve hours since he’d boiled the roots with salt from the pack and a few herbs he’d found along the creek. Not what he’d call an elegant stew, but hunger provides a reliable sauce.

The tiny gas stove didn’t have a pump—preheat the tank enough to force gas into the burner, he’d puzzled that out by the scorching on the bottom, then shut the valve and ignite the puddle of gas around the burner stem. Open the valve again just before the flames around the burner guttered out. Do it right, you got a jet of vapor and then a roaring blue flame. Do it wrong, you got liquid gas and went through the steps again.

He did it right. He’d always been good at studying a machine and figuring out how it worked.

This time he could
hear
the roar, just inferred on the previous run. Setting the pot back on the burner took another delicate touch, really too big and heavy a pot for the small stove, but he got it balanced and solid enough. Cautious, he set a couple of rocks where they would block wind and keep the pot from tipping over if it shifted. He sat back, watched, and waited for the first wisps of steam. Once the lid was bouncing over a strong boil, he cut back the heat, another temperamental thing, until he had a decent simmer.

Hunger sauce, the steam smelled
good.
Good enough he was tempted to cut back on the cooking, take at least a sample early. But he wanted that fish to boil long enough to cook clear through—meat and anything living in it. He did
not
trust sashimi. He’d seen a short pale worm crawl out of a plate of sliced raw fish once, and had to assume this world had its own.

After all, those mosquitoes had wanted his blood. No reason to think intestinal or muscle worms wouldn’t.

Cook ’em long enough, they’re just added protein.

He nodded off again, twelve hours apparently hadn’t been enough sleep, but he heard the tent zippers rasp and snapped awake and the pot hadn’t boiled over or boiled dry or fallen off the stove and spilled. He checked his watch—more than twenty minutes into the half hour he’d said.

A flashlight beam climbed out of the tent and stood and headed off into the bushes toward the stream. He wondered where she would find anything to shit or piss after the last two days—nothing had gone in that needed to come out again.
If she was a human, she’d be dead.

Back from the stream, stepping into the almost-light of the candle lantern hanging in his kitchen, her hair shone slicked down with fresh water. Face wet. She’d been washing up. She’d left the top of her coveralls unzipped a bit, from washing, and he could see that she’d put on both the leotard and the bulletproof vest. That probably meant she felt she was fit for duty. He assumed she’d stowed her arsenal as well.

I should have warned her about the fish. Either the one I caught, or the bigger one that wanted to eat
it.
Dip water out of the stream into a pot, don’t splash your hands around like bait. Something might decide to take the invitation . . .

There’s other things I don’t think we want to talk about, just yet. Find a safe tangent to keep our tongues out of mischief.

“Helps the soup a lot, but any
particular
reason I’ve been hauling a pound and a half of kosher salt up hill and down dale for a week? That pack’s heavy enough without it.”

She blinked and stared at him, then nodded. Fast brain there, even just staggering out of a sickbed. “I don’t like slugs. Plus, a complete circle of pure salt, thick enough to mound and overlapping all the way around, keeps some things out or in. It’s a simple magic, no words or gestures or secret ingredients needed.”

He looked around at the shadowed pattering rain, steady like it intended to settle in for days. “Wash away before you could get much done, right now. You think it would work on Legion?”

She cocked her head to one side, considering. Then she smiled, tight lips and narrowed eyes. “I’d like to
try.
Just as an experiment . . . ”

He nodded. Just as an experiment. A chance to test his blades.

“Okay, I’ll keep carrying it.”

Steam billowed out into the damp air when he lifted the pot lid, steam fragrant with onion and fresh fish and the wild tarragon he’d found. He poked at chunks of meat and they fell apart under his spoon. Cooked through. The peeled cattail roots had softened. He set the pot off the heat and shut down the stove. Wind and rain and the rushing water of the creek filled the silence. That stove made a
lot
of noise for its size. He hadn’t noticed, before.

He scooped stew into the deep pot lids and set them on rocks to cool. His stomach growled that it didn’t care if the tongue got scalded.

A couple of pounds of fish, a couple of pounds of starchy roots, a quart or two of water—they vanished. He could have saved more meat, gathered more cattails, but they wouldn’t have fit in the largest pot. He didn’t want to keep food in the camp. It could attract Things.

She scraped the last dribbles out of her pot lid and then licked the aluminum. Then started to gather stuff for cleaning. “You cooked, I’ll wash.”

But she staggered when she stood up, and caught herself against a cedar trunk.

He took the pots and lids away from her. “No. Get back in the tent. I just hope that all stays inside of you.”

She blinked and sagged back onto a rock. “Silly Mel, thought she couldn’t get sick. You cook good. Think I’ll marry you rather than kill you.”

Her voice slurred as much as if she was drunk. Then she twisted herself onto hands and knees and half-crawled back to the tent. He listened to the rasp of the zippers, open and shut again, and shook his head.

I’m not sure that’s an attractive choice. And I don’t expect you’ll remember it in the morning, anyway.

He shook his head again and went to scrub the pots in the stream. He kept his hands out of the water as much as possible, and used a shallow eddy of water rather than the main channel. Then, bit by meticulous bit, he packed the stove inside the pot inside the other pot, blew out the candle lantern, and listened to the rushing water and the rain in the darkness. He didn’t hear anything else, which was just what he hoped to hear.