The Library at Mount Char (9 page)

Alicia took his hand, laced her fingers through his. “We've been taking little walks together every so often for a while now, Carolyn,” she said dryly. “No one thought much of it today. I just sort of assumed that you knew?”

“Why do you take—oh! I, ah…oh. I see.” Carolyn rubbed her forehead. “Sorry. The evidence is mounting that I need to be a bit more observant. But never mind that. Nobununga is here.”

“He is? Where?”

Carolyn pointed down at Highway 78. Nobununga was padding down the eastbound lane. A car zipped by in the other direction. The driver,
Carolyn saw, was yawning. Father had done something to make sure the neighborhood never seemed very interesting to Americans, but no one was quite sure what.

“That's
him
?” Alicia said.

“He's a
tiger
?”

“Oh, sorry guys,” Carolyn said brightly. “I just sort of assumed that you knew! Yeah, that's him. Quite the specimen, isn't he?”

“I don't think I've ever seen a tiger up close before,” Peter said.

“You have,” Carolyn said. “Me too, actually. There was one at the feast when I got back from…from my summer away.” Her summer with Isha and Asha. “That almost had to have been him. But I left early. If we were introduced, I don't remember it.”

“Oh, right,” Peter said. “I remember now.”

“
That's
what—who—Michael has been apprenticing with?” Alicia said. “I thought Nobununga was, you know…a guy.” She watched him walk for a moment. “Wow. Just…wow.”

“Not
only
Nobununga, I think,” Carolyn said. “Every time I talk to Michael he's back from somewhere different—Africa, China, Australia—but Nobununga always makes the introductions. He's well regarded.”

“Fierce-looking fellow, isn't he?”

Carolyn nodded. “Yeah. Really, you have no idea.” She paused. Then, almost idly, “I wonder if it might have been him.”

“What do you mean?”

Carolyn rubbed her temples. “I hate to admit it, but David has a point. Father has never been away this long.” She gave them a long, level look. “It's conceivable that something has happened to him. Something bad. Fatal, even.”

“You don't seriously think—”

“I just said ‘maybe.' ” Her fingertips were trembling again. She pressed them into her palm. “But…I think you'll agree that the pool of creatures who might do violence to Father is relatively small. Off the top of my head I can think of only three—David, the Duke, and Nobununga.”

“There might be others,” Alicia said. “Some of the ones we don't see much. Q-33 North, maybe?” But she was looking at Nobununga, thoughtful.

“Is he the one with the tentacles?”

“No, that's Barry O'Shea. Q-33 North is the sort of iceberg with legs, remember? Up in Norway.”

“Oh, right.”

“I still think it had to be David,” Peter said. “You remember what—”

“I remember,” Carolyn said. “On balance, I think I agree with you. It almost
had
to be David. That's why I suggested that we meet—if David has moved against Father, he must have some sort of plan for dealing with Nobununga as well. Nobununga needs to be made aware of that. He could be walking into a trap.”

“Nobununga is old,” Alicia said. “Some say sixty thousand years. Some say a lot more. I myself am not quite thirty, Carolyn. In his eyes we're barely children. Are you sure he needs advice from us?”

“Father was old too,” Carolyn said. “Where is he now?” She waited, but no one had an answer for that. “Come on,” she said finally. “We don't want to be late.”

They set out toward the bull, following along the edge of the bluff. All three of them watched Nobununga as they walked, fascinated. He had walked down the steps and across the road. He was standing in front of the Garrison Oaks sign. A pickup truck zipped by on Highway 78. The dog in the back gave a couple of bewildered barks, but the driver didn't seem to notice.

Nobununga paced back and forth in front of the sign—once, twice, three times. Peter was enchanted by the sight of him. Alicia had to pull him back from walking off the edge of the bluff.

When they were about two hundred yards away, Nobununga roared, calling out to Michael. Michael scrambled down the steps and across the street to attend his master. They spoke to each other for a time, deep growls that Carolyn couldn't quite hear, and gestures. Then Nobununga rubbed his shoulder against Michael's chest.

Michael flailed about, wild, obviously upset. The tiger let him carry on for a moment, then roared. Michael went silent. He walked back across the road and squatted down on the lowest of the steps to the bull, head in hands, dejected.

I wonder what that was about
.

Nobununga turned his back to the highway. He faced Garrison Oaks and set one massive paw on the road that led to the Library.

Slowly and deliberately, he began to walk forward.

“Wait…what's he doing?”

“What does it look like?” Alicia said. “He's going to look for Father.”

“But,” Peter said, “if the…whatever-it-is…”

“Yes,” Carolyn said. “There
is
that.” She called out to Michael. “Michael, did you tell him about—”

“Be
quiet
, Carolyn!” Michael screamed. Carolyn was a little alarmed to see that he was crying. “Be
quiet
! He has to
concentrate
!”

Carolyn nodded, more grimly this time. “He is. He's doing it. He's going to look for Father.”

The sign at the entrance to the subdivision marked the boundary of the barrier keeping them from the Library. A step or two past the sign and you'd begin to feel the effects—headache, numbness, shortness of breath, sweating, whatever. It was different for everybody—everybody affected by it, at least. Not everyone was. The others held their collective breath, waiting to see whether Nobununga would be immune. Carolyn, fingertips trembling under the weight of her lies, pretended to hold hers as well.

Nobununga walked past the sign slowly, with no obvious symptoms of distress.

“He's really doing it,” Alicia said, awed. When she'd tried, she had made it two steps past the sign. There her eyeballs began to bleed. She turned back after that, and though Jennifer had stopped the bleeding, she hadn't really seen well for days.

David made it the farthest—eight steps. Then he turned back, blood streaming out of his ears, eyes, nose. He hadn't screamed—it took a lot to make David scream—but at the farthest point, just before he turned back, he had made a little moan, a suffering animal noise.

With four long strides Nobununga was past the point that had stopped David.

“It doesn't seem to be affecting him,” Peter said.

“Possibly not,” Carolyn said.

It was about three blocks from the gateway to the entrance to the Library. Nobununga made his way down the first block without showing
any signs of distress. He stopped at the first intersection and looked back over his shoulder at Michael.

“This is
reissak ayrial
,” the tiger called out. He spoke not in the language of tigers, but in their common language of Pelapi. His voice was a little growly, but perfectly understandable. “I understand this now. It is the will of Ablakha that I hunt the token—and destroy it, if I am able.”

“He can talk?” Peter said.

“What's
reissak ayrial
?” said Alicia.

“It means ‘the denial that shreds,' ” Carolyn said. “Shh! I want to watch.”

Nobununga took another step.

“He
is
immune,” Alicia said, hope rising in her voice. “I knew it. It looks like we're going to go home after—”

“Look,” Carolyn said.

Three steps past the stop sign marking the first intersection, Nobununga paused. He lifted one massive paw. Carolyn, whose vision was very good, saw that he was trembling.

Nobununga turned again to Michael. Now tears of blood dripped from his green eyes, ran down his muzzle.

“No!” Michael screamed, then said something in the language of tigers. He set off running.

“Michael!” Carolyn screamed in her turn, “No!” She watched, transfixed with dread, as Michael sprinted toward Garrison Oaks. She had thought she was ready for what came next, the things she had to do, but…

Not Michael. Not yet
.

She set off after him. She was quick—Carolyn was quicker than any of them except David—but Michael was far ahead. She scrambled down the steep bluff, almost falling. But by the time she reached the asphalt, Michael was across the road.

“No!”

Michael covered the twenty feet or so between the road and the Garrison Oaks sign too fast for Carolyn to intercept. Momentum carried him another eight feet or so beyond that.

“No!”

Then he fell as if he had been shot in the brain. He lay very still.

“Michael!” Carolyn screamed again, real anguish in her voice. She flashed on the day he had come back from the ocean to visit her, his skinny arms golden tan, the salt smell of his skin. A gold BMW bore down on her, coming fast, horn wailing. She shrieked back at it, teeth bared, apelike. The driver swerved onto the shoulder, not quite losing control, then sped off in a spray of gravel. She covered the hundred feet between her and Michael in a matter of seconds, sprinted past the boundary and, precisely as Michael had done—she hoped, anyway—fell flat on her face on the concrete.

But where Michael only lay still, Carolyn rose up.

She lifted herself onto her elbows, her knees. Her nose was broken. Blood streamed down her face from gashes in her nose and cheek. She crawled one step forward, then another. Her motion was spastic, halting, as if her nerves were no longer firing properly. She thought it was a good performance. Her twitches were indistinguishable from the real thing, and had the side benefit of camouflaging the completely genuine tremble in her fingertips.

A third step. Two more and Michael's ankle was in reach.

She grabbed him by the ankle, then vomited up a flood of lemon soda and egg. When she had a good grip she turned and began moving back toward the main road, dragging Michael after her.

Inch by inch, she muscled the two of them to safety. Just outside the iron gate, right where the effects stopped, she flopped onto her belly, exhausted. A moment later Peter and Alicia approached, slow and cautious.

“Are you OK?” Alicia asked.

Carolyn rolled over on her belly and dry heaved a couple of times. Her face was covered in blood. “I will be, I think,” she said. “Michael…?”

Michael coughed, gagged.

“Turn him…turn him on his side. So he doesn't choke.” They did. Michael coughed some more, spat out blood.

“We need to get him to Jennifer,” Carolyn said. She wiped blood from her eyes with one trembling finger. “What about Nobununga? Where is—”

Peter, looking off in the distance, was shaking his head. “He made
it about a block and a half before he fell over. He's lying on his side. For a while his chest was heaving but”—he glanced down at Carolyn—“…not anymore.”

Carolyn squeezed her eyes shut. “
Ebn el sharmoota!
” she said in Arabic. Then, “Fuck!
Neik! Merde!
Poopy-goddamn-cacka!” She rolled over on her side and pushed herself up to a sitting position. She squinted down the block and saw that Peter was right.
Not so much as a twitch
. She suppressed a chilly little smile. “Even if I could get in that deep, which I don't think I can, he's too heavy for me,” she said. “I couldn't move him. Not alone.”

Peter was looking at her with something between admiration and horror. “Is there a word that means ‘brave' and ‘stupid' at the same time?”

“There is,” she said, “lots of them.” A little irked by Peter's implied jab, she considered explaining how the American word “wussy” might be applied to
him
. She didn't, though. It would have been counterproductive. Instead she crawled over to Michael and checked his pulse with her fingertips. At her touch his eyelids fluttered. “Carolyn? Carolyn, where's—”

He read the answer from her eyes, then moaned. His mouth worked, but nothing came out. His grief was too deep for words.

“Shhh,” she said, stroking his hair. “Shhh, Michael. Shhhh.” It was all she could think to say.

A
n hour or so later, it became clear Michael was going to be OK—physically, at any rate. His heart was broken. He wept the guileless, unaffected tears of a small child. Carolyn wanted to get somewhere a little less exposed—being by the road made her nervous—so together they helped Michael climb the steps that led to the clearing of the bull. But instead of making for the bull itself, they went into the woods. That was Michael's true home.

Not far away a stream flowed over a small cliff, burbling pleasantly. Carolyn remembered the spot from her summer with Isha and Asha.
Better still, you couldn't see the neighborhood from there, couldn't see Nobununga's body. The three of them helped Michael to it—he couldn't quite walk under his own power. There they lay him down by the stream to rest.

Perhaps misunderstanding, Peter and Alicia left the two of them alone.

Carolyn and Michael were not lovers. They had tried to be, once, when they were—what?—in their early twenties? That was about a decade ago, though it seemed longer. She thought that night must have been her idea, though she couldn't imagine what she might have been thinking. She had never had any real interest in sex that she could remember, certainly not after the thing with David. Had that one night been some symptom of her desperation, or maybe simple loneliness? She didn't know.

One night when the others were away she seduced him, sort of. Or at least tried to. It ended badly. For reasons she never completely understood, Michael was unable to perform. He wanted to, she could tell that from the way he kissed her, the hungry way he pawed at her once he understood what she was about. But no matter what she did, his penis stayed limp in her hands, and even her mouth. After a long, awkward time of trying Michael pushed her away, very gently. That night they slept by the same fire, but did not touch. She woke in the night and heard him crying out in his sleep. He left before dawn the next day. After that she saw him less and less.