Besieged: Stories from the Iron Druid Chronicles(70)

“Ah! Hello, deer,” she says in her own language, and then looks to me with doubt in her eyes, as if she’s made a mistake. She’s often anxious about doing something wrong; her father, Sonkwe, says this is new behavior for her since her mother left them, and he suspects Thandi blames herself for it even though there’s no reason to. But he is perhaps the most patient and kind man I’ve ever met, and he shows me exactly how to handle Thandi: constant reassurance. She will find her confidence again in time.

“The language you use now doesn’t matter, Thandi. Your thoughts and emotions will be communicated, not the words themselves. Go ahead. Just ask the doe to come say hello to us and tell her we’re friendly.”

She does, and then the other apprentices follow her example, one by one, until we have seven deer standing in front of us, some curious about us, some grazing. We don’t pet them; our scent might bother the rest of the herd.

I teach them how to unbind the connection. “Say thank you, wish them good health and farewell, and we’ll let them be about their business.”

We back away and the deer wander off to rejoin their herd, some of them nodding at us first, and then I remove the true vision from my apprentices’ eyes.

Ozcar squints and pinches the top of his nose. “Ay, mi cabeza!” Then he switches to English. “Archdruid, I have a headache.”

Some of the others agree—they’re all strained by the experience. But they are still in a good mood, and as we hike back to Greta’s house, I tell them they’re a fine wee grove and learning so quickly, but we’ll work on languages the rest of the day, to give their eyes a rest, and practice binding with other animals tomorrow until it’s time to travel.

It’s me first time on an airplane. Greta tells me that by having a private charter we’re missing a lot of nonsense at the airport that most people have to suffer. No real security check, no endless wait for baggage, very little in the way of dehumanizing shite. I get me fair share of that at customs, though, once we all deplane in Tasmania and have to show passports and declare why we’re there and provide some guarantee that we’re going to leave soon. I note that Mehdi and Mohammed get quizzed more carefully than the rest of us.

“Why are they so suspicious of Mohammed?” I asks Greta, once the rest of us are through and we’re looking back, waiting.

“Because that right there is racial and religious profiling.”

“I still don’t know what you mean.”

“Well, you skipped over a lot of history on that time island of yours, including 9/11, so I’ll have to catch you up on it later. What they’re doing is wrong and illogical, but if we want to get on with the work we’re here to do, we’ll have to put up with it for now.”

I want to stomp on the nuts of every damp and frowning government toad there.

“Gaia’s one planet,” I growl in a low voice to Greta, because she’s told me that whenever I get frustrated about modern life I should complain to her and I’ll get in less trouble that way. “We’re all on it together, and we should all be able to live and work and play where we want, ye fecking brainless, poxy shitgibbons!”

Heads turn in my direction, and I realize me voice might have grown a bit too loud at the end there.

“Sorry, he wasn’t talking to you,” Greta says to the immigration officials, flat-out lying and smiling as she does it. “Keep it down, Owen,” she whispers to me, even as the kids ask their parents what a poxy shitgibbon is and they shrug because it’s more convenient to pretend they don’t understand me either. Me temper still gets the best of me sometimes, but I figure it’s fine so long as I never blow up at the kids. I really don’t want to cock that up.

We can’t get out of that airport too soon to suit me. But when we do clear customs, we rent a couple of vans and drive toward Sorell and the Sandspit River Forest Reserve, which is in the general direction of where the first case of the devil cancer appeared. Greta finds a place to park, and once I get me feet in the soil I’m ever so grateful.

They have some mighty huge trees in Tasmania. Bunch of eucalyptus varieties—one in particular, called the swamp gum or mountain ash, is a towering thing, only second in height to the giant redwoods of the California coast. But along the Sandspit River you have blue gum eucalyptus, under which live ferns and shrubs that look mighty lush and inviting until ye remember those are home to poisonous spiders and snakes and some vicious ants called jack jumpers that kill people more frequently than the spiders and snakes do.

I get all this knowledge from Tasmania, the elemental, once I finally make contact and ask about dangers. Then I have the apprentices line up in front of me and take off their shoes so Tasmania can sense them.

//Apprentices will help// I say. //Need stones to talk Work through you/

//Harmony// Tasmania responds. //Bring forward one at a time//

“Tuya, please take three steps forward,” I asks her, and she does. “Kneel down. Tasmania will give ye a stone, and I want ye to put it in your locket and give your Colorado stone to your mother. When that stone appears, pick it up and say hello and learn about the animals here while the others get their stones.”

She obeys, and after a few seconds a pale-green sphere emerges from the earth—the bright yellow-green of algae drying on rocks after water has receded. And there are little droplets and veins of rich violet in there too. It’s as attractive as any stone I’ve seen, and I find out later that it’s a combination of green serpentine stone and stichtite that occur naturally together only in Tasmania, so it’s called tasmanite.