The Skrayling Tree: The Albino in America Read online

  White Crow was opening the gateway for us. We were attempting to pass between the realms. The land of the Kakatanawa lay not in the looming mountains, but in the world beyond them, where this strange tribe guarded their treasures and their secrets in mysterious ways.

  As he danced I soon became aware of another presence, something drawn not by his summoning, but by the smell of his magic. And then at last I confirmed the identity of my particular enemy. An elemental but also a powerful Lord of the Higher Worlds, Shoashooan, the Turning Wind, who was native to this realm and therefore more dangerous.

  I heard rumbling. A distant storm gathered and moved in our direction. Purples, crimsons and dark greens flooded the sky. They drew themselves across the horizon like a veil, but almost immediately they began to join again, shrieking and threatening and forming into that familiar leering, shifty, destructive fellow: Shoashooan, the Demon Wind, the Son Stealer, the Lord of the Tornadoes, the undisputed ruler of the prairie, before whom all spirits and creatures of the plains were powerless. Lord Shoashooan in all his writhing, twisting, shouting forms, his bestial features glaring out of his swirling body.

  Standing on the right side of the Bringer of Ruins stood the Two Tongues, his body burning as his own life stuff was fed to the summoned spirit. Ipkeptemi would not last long. On the other side of the furious spirit, his ragged buffalo cape flapping and cracking in the blustering force from his new ally, was the ghastly, half-frozen figure of Klosterheim.

  He might have been dead, turned to ice where he stood.

  His lips were drawn back from his teeth.

  For a moment I thought he was smiling.

  Then I realized he was profoundly terrified.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The White Path

  Tread the path that shines like silver,

  To the city made of gold,

  Where the world-snake slowly dies.

  Where a lance moans like a woman,

  And the pipe denies all lies.

  W. S. HARTE,

  “Onowega’s Death Song”

  Klosterheim’s face was the last human thing I saw before the whirling Elemental Lord screeched and rose into the air. His limbs and organs proliferated so rapidly that he now had a hundred hands, a thousand legs, all writhing and spinning. And every limb held a shivering, slicing blade. The terrible, beastly face glowering and raging, he roared and railed as if something were pulling him back where he had come from.

  Still the Two Tongues burned, and still his life stuff fed the Chaos Lord, giving him the substance he needed to remain in this realm. Yet it was an inexpert summons and therefore perhaps only a partial manifestation. The shaman burned for nothing.

  Something was driving Lord Shoashooan back.

  White Crow was singing. His voice covered two octaves easily and rose and fell almost like the movement of the oceans. His song was taken up by the mountains. Notes rippled from peak to peak, achieving their own strange, extended melody. Raising his arms from where he stood beside that great black pachyderm, he flung back his head and sang again. His handsome, ivory face shone with ecstasy. The red hawk feathers in his white hair were garish against his delicate coloring, emphasizing the gemlike redness of his eyes. Behind him, in its quiver, the Black Lance began to vibrate to the same notes. It joined in the song.

  Lord Shoashooan growled and feinted and turned and keened, came closer and retreated. Then, with an angry howl, he vanished, taking the two men with him.

  “Those fools,” said White Crow. “They have neither the skills nor the powers to control such an entity. My grandfather banished him. No human can destroy him once he has established himself in our world. We can only hope he failed to find true substance and could not make a full manifestation.” He looked around, frowning. “Though here, it would be easy enough.”

  I asked about the two men. He shook his head. He was sure they had not gone willingly.

  “They summoned a monster, and it devoured them,” said Ayanawatta. “Perhaps that is the end of it. If Lord Shoashooan had been able to secure his manifestation, he would be free to feast however and wherever he chose. We can only hope that two amateur sorcerers were enough for him. Lord Shoashooan is infamous for his lethal whimsicalities, his horrible jokes, his relish for flesh.”

  Glancing to my left I saw the strain on White Crow’s face. Here was proof that Lord Shoashooan’s disappearance had not been voluntary. I was impressed. Few had the strength and skill to oppose a Lord of the Higher Worlds. Had White Crow’s magic driven the creature back to his own plane, taking with him as trophies those who hoped to evoke his aid?

  A light wind danced around us.

  White Crow lifted his head and began to sing and drum again, and again Ayanawatta joined with him in the music. I found that wordlessly I, too, was singing in harmony with my comrades. Through our song we sought to find our accord again, to set ourselves back on our path, to be true to our stories.

  White Crow’s small hand-drum began to pound more rapidly, like the noise of a sudden downpour. Faster and faster he moved his stick back and forth, back and forth, around and around, down the side, against the bottom, back up the side to finish in a pulsating rhythm which would strengthen our medicine. Slowly the beats grew further apart.

  The wind began to flutter and die away. The sun came out again in a single silver band slanting through billowing clouds and cut a wide swathe across the prairie.

  White Crow continued to beat his drum. Very slowly he beat it. And his new song was deep and deliberate.

  The shining path of cold sunlight fell until it lay before us, stretching out from our strange ice temple and disappearing towards those wild, high mountains. This silvery trail surely led to a pass through the mountains. A pass which would take us to the land of the Kakatanawa. A pass which began to reveal itself like a long crack in the granite of the mountains.

  The clouds boiled in, and the sun was lost again.

  But that gleaming, single, silvery beam remained. A magic path through the mountains.

  White Crow stopped drumming. Then he stopped singing. The light of day dimmed beneath the heavy snow clouds. But the silver road remained.

  White Crow was clearly satisfied. This was his work. Ayanawatta congratulated him enthusiastically, and while it was not good manners to show emotional response to such praise, White Crow was quietly pleased with himself.

  He had sung and drummed a pathway into the next realm. He and Ayanawatta had woven it from the gossamer stuff of the Grey Fees, creating the harmonies and resonances necessary to walk safely perhaps only a short distance between two worlds.

  Ironically I reflected on their envy of my skills. I could walk at will across the moonbeam roads, while they had immense difficulty. But I was not a creator as they were. I could not fashion the roads themselves. The only danger now was that Shoashooan would follow us through the gateway we had made.

  With light steps we restored the saddle to Bes’s back and adjusted our canoe canopy. White Crow then urged his old friend to move on.

  I watched her set those massive feet on the pathway we could now see through the snow. She was confident and cheerful as she carried us forward. When I looked back, I saw that the road had not faded behind us as we progressed over it. Did that mean Klosterheim or one of his allies could now easily follow us?

  Bes trod the crystal trail with an air of optimistic familiarity. Indeed there was something jaunty about the mighty mammoth as she carried us along, her own brilliant feathers now held securely in a sort of topknot. I wondered if there were any other mammoths to whom she could tell her stories, or would she be remembered only in our own tales?

  The prairie lay under thick snow. There was nothing supernatural about it. You could taste the sharp snowflakes, see the hawks and eagles turning in the currents high overhead. In a sudden flurry a small herd of antelope sprang from cover nearby and fled over the snow, leaving a dark trail behind them. There were tracks of hares and raccoons.

&nbs
p; We had plenty of provisions, and there was no need to leave the tentlike interior of the makeshift howdah. While the mammoth plodded through deep snow, for us this journey was sheer luxury.

  Once in the distance we saw a bear walking ahead of us along the trail, but he soon blundered off into the brush near a creek, and we lost sight of him. For some time Ayanawatta and White Crow discussed the possibility that this was a sign. They eventually decided that the bear had no special symbolic meaning. For several hours Ayanawatta expounded on the nature of bear-spirits and bear-dreams while White Crow nodded agreeably, occasionally confirming an anecdote, always preferring to be the audience.

  Slowly the mountains grew larger and larger until we were looking up at their tree-covered lower slopes. The silver trail led through the foothills and into the pass. The two men became quietly excited. Neither had been sure the magic would work, and even now they were unsure of the consequences. Would there be a price to pay? I was in awe of their power, and so were they!

  The snow started to fall steadily. Bes seemed to enjoy it. Perhaps her great woolly coat was designed for such weather. Snow soon banked itself on both sides of us, as the trail grew rockier. We entered the deep, dark fissure which would lead us to the land of the Kakatanawa. Here little snow had settled, and it was still possible to see the trail ahead.

  I had not expected further attack, certainly not from above. But in an instant the air was thick with ravens. The huge, black birds swarmed around us, cawing and clacking at us as if we invaded their territory. I could not bring myself to shoot at them, and neither could my companions. White Crow said the black ravens were his cousins. They all served the same queen.

  The noise of the attack was distracting, however, and disturbing to Bes. After some twenty minutes of enduring this, White Crow stood up in the saddle and let out a tremendous cackle of angry song which silenced the ravens.

  Seconds later the big birds had settled on outcrops of rock. They sat waiting, heads to one side, black eyes shining, listening as White Crow continued his irritable address. It was clear how he had come by his name and no doubt his totem. He spoke their language fluently, with nuances which even these rowdy aggressors could appreciate. I was amused that he spoke so little in human language and could be so eloquent in the tongue of a bird. When I asked him about it, he said that the language of dragons was not dissimilar, and both came easily to him.

  Whatever he said to the ravens, he did not drive them away. But at least it stopped the noise. Now they sat along both sides of our path, occasionally croaking out a complaint or chittering among themselves. Then with a snap and shuffle of their wings, the ravens took to the air, flooding upwards in a long, ragged line towards the distant sky, cawing back at us after they had gained a certain distance. Birds usually felt benign towards humans, but these were clearly the exception.

  As we continued down the great cleft in the rock, surprisingly I began to feel a claustrophobia I had never known on the moonbeam roads. The day became so overcast and the cliffs so steep that we could not easily see the sky. The pathway shone no brighter, and we might not have known it was there, save for the banked snowdrifts.

  Night fell, and still we followed the glistening path until we came to a place where the trail widened. Here we camped, listening to the strange sounds in the cliffs, where unfamiliar animals scuttled and foraged. Bes was eager to continue. She had not wanted to rest, but we thought it best to catch our breath while we could.

  In the morning I awoke to discover that we had again been camping in an ancient holy place. Our shelter was the neglected entrance to a huge stone temple whose roof had long since fallen in. Its walls were carved with dozens of regular pictograms in an obscure language. The elements had worn them to an even more mysterious smoothness. Two vast nonhuman figures on either side of the pass were obviously male and female. The natural rock overhead had been carved into an arch to represent their hands touching, symbolizing the Unity of Life.

  Ayanawatta asked if we might pause while he studied these massive pillars. He smiled as he ran his hands over the figures. He seemed to be reading the glyphs, for his lips were moving. Then I thought that he might be praying.

  He rejoined us in a good mood and climbed up to find some of his herbs and smoking mixture in his stowed bundle. These he held in one hand while he dismounted again from Bes and ran quickly to both pillars, sprinkling a little of the mixture at the base of each statue.

  He sighed his contentment. “They say these two are the first male and the first female, turned to stone by the Four Great Manitoos. It was their punishment for telling the Stone Giants the secret path to the tree which the Kakatanawa now guard. We call them the Grandsires. They gave birth to our world’s four tribes. They are monuments to our past and our future.”

  He frowned at the carvings as we rode past them. He seemed surprised they were so inanimate. “When I was last here, they had more life. They were happier.”

  He looked up into the dark crags and sighed. “There is great trouble now, I think. There’s no certainty we shall save anything from the struggle.”

  After we passed under the arch, the quality of light subtly changed. Even the echoes were of a different nature. If we were not already in the land of the Kakatanawa, we were beginning to enter their jurisdiction. I thought I saw shadows above us, heard the skip of a stone, a muffled exclamation. But perhaps it was only the clatter of our own progress.

  I wondered if the tree the Kakatanawa said they guarded was really a tree or perhaps merely a symbol, a contradictory core lying at the heart of their beliefs.

  For long periods in that dark crevasse, I thought we were never going to be free of a universe of rock. The sheer sides threatened to narrow so much as to become impassable, yet somehow we squeezed through even the tightest gap.

  The path went relentlessly forward, and relentlessly we followed it until it widened and we saw before us a huge lake of ice which the mountains encircled. Spectacular and vast under the clearing pewter sky, the pale, frozen lake was not, however, what captured our attention.

  Ayanawatta let out a high, long whistle, but I could not speak for wonder.

  Only White Crow knew the place. He gave a grunt of recognition. Nothing I had heard could have prepared me for my first sight of the Kakatanawa “longhouse.”

  While it was easy to see how the phrase fitted the conception, the reality was utterly unlikely. Their long-house was not only the size of a mountain, it appeared to be made of solid gold!

  Standing about a mile from the shore, this mighty, glittering pyramid rose at the center of the frozen lake. The Kakatanawa longhouse dominated even the brooding peaks which completely surrounded it.

  Under a paling blue sky reflected in the great plain of ice, Kakatanawa gleamed. An immense ziggurat, as high as a skyscraper, it was an entire city in a single structure. The base was at least a mile wide, and the tiers marched up, step by enormous step, to a crown where what might be a temple blazed.

  The city was alive with activity. I could see ranks of people moving back and forth between the levels, the gardens which draped startling greenery over balconies and terraces. I saw transports and dray animals. It was an entire country in a single immense building! While it sat on an island, I guessed that it also extended below the ice. Was there never a time when the ice melted, or were we now so far north that the lake remained forever frozen?

  I could not contain myself.

  “A city of gold! I never believed such a legend!”

  Ayanawatta began to laugh, and White Crow smiled at my astonishment. “All that glistens is not gold,” he said ironically. “The plaster contains iron pyrites and copper powder, perhaps a little gold and silver, but not much. The reflective mixture produces a more durable material. And it suits their other purposes to make Kakatanawa shine like gold. I do not know whether the city or the myth came first. There is a legend among the Mayans about this city, but they think it is further south and east. No Kakatanawa can ever
reveal the location of his home to strangers.”

  “Are we not strangers?” I asked.

  He began to laugh. “Not exactly,” he said.

  “The name of the city is the same as that of your tribe?”

  “The Kakatanawa are the People of the Circle, the People of the Great Belt, so called because they have traveled the entire circle of the world and returned to their ancestral home. Everywhere they went they left their mark and their memory. They are the only people to do this thing and understand what they have done. Even the Norsemen have not done that. This is Odan-a-Kakatanawa, if you prefer. The Longhouse of the People of the Circle. It is this people’s destiny to guard the great belt, the story of the world’s heart.”

  “And is that where I will find my husband?” My own heart had begun to beat rapidly. I controlled my breathing to bring it back to normal. I longed to see Ulric, safe and well and in my arms again.

  “You will find him.” White Crow for some reason avoided my eye.

  There was no doubt in my mind that the Kakatanawa had kidnapped Ulric and brought him here. Now perhaps all I had to do was storm a city-sized pyramid! I hoped that my association with White Crow would make that unnecessary.

  I believed I was approaching a people whose motives were mysterious and possibly thoughtless, but who were not malevolent. Of course, my feelings were subjective. I could not help liking the youth, who might have been a son, and there was no doubt I felt a daughter’s security in the company of the older sachem, Ayanawatta, so talkative and humorous, so full of idealism and common sense. There was a fitting unity about our trinity. But it was Ulric who remained my chief concern. While certain I would find him here, I still did not know why he had been brought here or, indeed, how White Crow had known where to find the medicine shield.

  A sharp wind was beginning to blow from the east, and we sank deeper into our furs. I could smell every kind of sorcery on that wind. I remained confused, uncertain of its source or its purpose.