The Sea Peoples(22)
“What do you want us to do?” Pip said.
“Be close; take his hand.”
She did, in her left.
“You are linked as closely as by blood, now.”
Thora’s swordbelt clanked as she hung a loop of it around a bedpost and lay down on John’s other side.
“Wherever he’s wandering, I don’t think he’s enjoying it,” she observed as the Prince’s firm lips parted in the ghost of a groan.
Deor nodded, arranging himself cross-legged at the foot of the bed. “Get comfortable. We may be here for a while.”
He began to tap on the drum, locking his muscles into the rhythm. “Try to relax—” Viewing their tense faces, he forced a smile. “This has got to be easier than storming that fortress.”
“I’m not so sure,” Thora replied. “When someone comes at me with a sword at least I can hit him back.”
“If you need them, spirit weapons will come to you,” Deor answered. “Remember the weight of your sword and it will come to your hand.”
“A sword made of thoughts?” she said.
“Thoughts have power even in the waking world,” Deor said. “You’ve seen the Sword of the Lady, oath-sister. In the place we go, thoughts make the very substance of things.”
She nodded soberly, and he continued: “And call on your allies. Mine is a meadowlark. You may see him when we’re in the Otherworld. Thora’s protector is the Bear, the Grizzly.”
He looked at Pip, who shook her head in bafflement.
“She’s a lion . . . lioness, if you want to get technical,” growled Toa from the floor. “Mine’s te Kiore, the bush rat—that’s what my lot call the war-party’s scouts who go out through the forest in front of the main force.”
“So—” Deor tapped the drum until they had all settled once more.
Tha-ba-da . . . tha-ba-da, sinking into bone, into blood, into pulse and gut.
He relaxed his throat muscles, let his voice go smooth. “Sink down . . . let each limb relax . . . The bed supports you, the floor is Earth, our guards protect you, the wights—”
He reached out, felt a watchful, if slightly confused, awareness.
“—grant permission for our work this day. Let your eyes close. . . .”
As he shut his own he felt awareness begin to alter, at once expanding and shifting focus. He could feel Thora’s steady disciplined strength and Pip’s vivid energy, reached to add them to his own. As he touched the sparkle that was Pip he felt her surprise.
She’s more sensitive than I expected, he thought. Maybe more than she herself knows.
Show me your love for John, he sent. Make your yearning a beacon!
He reached deeper, searching for the point of light that was the child, and then for the brighter blaze cradled in Thora’s womb, seeking the vibration of identity they had inherited from John. He brought to mind his memories of the Prince and Thora sparring, laughing as they danced with steel and each other. He had tried not to imagine them in bed together, but he opened his awareness now. John would need some powerful memories to come back to.
And what about my own feelings? Deor thought wryly.
By the time he met Prince John, he had known all too well how to tell when a man, however unwillingly, felt interest—and when he did not. The Prince was as completely a man for women as he had ever seen, but that did not change Deor’s own appreciation, only its expression.
Remembering, he brought to mind all his admiration for John’s intelligence and his feeling for the complexities and delights of music, the occasional, well-hidden, diffidence, his love for his family and for Montival and that youthful eagerness for the sight of new lands and peoples that reminded him so much of his own self half his lifetime ago. And that sudden burst of wild raw courage that had led him over the rail of the Tarshish Queen to rescue First Mate Radavindraban from the great saltwater crocodile; not for kinship or oath, but because it needed doing for a comrade.
Thora and I followed him then, and we returned despite the terror beneath us in the waves. Now we’ll lead him back. Láwerce guide me . . . Woden guard me . . .
He began to build up the visualization of the path. He drew on his feeling for these lands, the times he’d sailed these waters and walked jungled hills like these. Bits and pieces came from the trip inland to the fort; the triangular gateway of a temple, the sight of a great drum hanging below a carved spire, the smell of paddy and the rustle of palm leaves.
“So”—he began to tap a little more quickly—“let us fare forward. Think of it as a long patrol.”
His expanded awareness could feel each of them behind him now. Toa added a bass note to it, something deep and massive, scarred by wounds within but stronger for it. A fluttering rose around him, as of a bird with a white body and a red beak. And something peeked out from behind a massive log, something with beady eyes full of cunning.
“See in your mind’s eye the jungle through which we came, but now the path we are following dips down beneath the earth.”
BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW
He could smell the mingled scents of the jungle, both fetid and fertile, moist earth and the heavy perfume of frangipani blossom. And as they went farther, a reek of old blood and the alkaline dust of drying bones.
Suddenly those scents were alive in his nostrils, carried on a hot moist wind. There was rutted mud beneath his feet and wisps of mist in the jungle to either side. He was in Mist Hills dress, a linen tunic and cross-gartered hose, leather shoes and seax and sword at his belt and his harp in her case of tooled boiled leather slung over his back. A rift in the fog showed a tall building on a hill nearby with a tower at one end; for a moment he thought it was a Christian church because of the field of grave markers at its foot, until he saw that atop the tower was not a cross but a circle, and within it a spiky three-armed symbol in black on gold. Then the drifting tendrils showed it again.