A Dream of Ice (7 page)

“Is it related to the Technologists or the Priests or both?”

“Just the Technologists.”

“Ben, is there anything about expansion in an—
internal
sense?”

“I don't follow. You mean like a soul?”

“More like an expanded consciousness.” She stopped there, unwilling to say anything that might lead to a discussion of why she was asking. Ben was a friend, but not an uncritical one. The kind, in fact, her mother wished for her.

Ben studied her for a moment. “A psychiatrist walks into a bar,” he said, grinning, “and sees herself sitting on a stool.”

She smiled back. “Cute.” It was an old joke of theirs, dating back to their college days. Ben used it whenever he had to pull her from what he called her “Hamlet reflections.”

“To answer the question—seriously—there's no talk of their inner lives, except for the
cazh
, which is really about an outer afterlife. Maybe this wasn't a very inward-minded people?”

“I doubt that,” said Caitlin.

“Why? We don't know if they had art, songs, poetry—”

“They loved,” she replied. “It wasn't just physical love. I felt it when I eavesdropped on their lives and relationships.”

“Quite possibly,” Ben agreed. “Then again, we did keep encountering them in crisis mode, which would explain an outward focus.”

Caitlin fell into a sudden depression. Earlier, she had thought something might have come back with her from the past; she wondered now if it weren't just the opposite: that something of herself had stayed behind, connected to these people,
hurting
with them.

And then, just as suddenly, she came out of it, as cold poured down her spine again as it had at the apartment. She forced herself to focus on the screen. That's where reality was, she told herself.

“Cai,” Ben said, “I see my time is running down and I have a more important question.”

She looked at him expectantly but when he didn't respond to her cue, she raised her eyebrows, further encouraging him to speak.

“When we have dinner tomorrow night,” Ben said with a direct gaze and a light tone, “how romantic should I make it?”

Caitlin glanced away but had to look back at him. She adored his sweet face, she truly did. But he had the most inelegant way of transitioning between topics she had ever experienced.

“I don't know, Ben. Can we wait till we're together to see?”

“Human to human,” he said, nodding.

“Yes, human to human,” said Caitlin.

Ben only broke their gaze for a second and then he was back to his buoyancy. “All right,” he said. “I've got another few minutes and I'm gonna use them. Gaelle—over the past day I've been studying the recording of her when she was having her crisis in the marketplace. In Maanik's episodes,
she
seems to be talking about the Priests and Technologists equally, as if she's caught between them. But Gaelle—the camera didn't capture much of her, only a few sentences, unfortunately, and she spoke exclusively of the Technologists.”

“That fits,” Caitlin said. “I mean that Gaelle would be talking about them, since in her vision she died trying to leave Galderkhaan with them. Physically, I mean. Not spiritually.”

“Which brings me to this,” Ben said. “When you were—back there, while we were at the UN, did you see anything in the air? In the sky, I mean.”

“Like what?”

“I don't want to feed it to you.”

“Okay.” She shut her eyes and carefully, tentatively drifted back to that night. It was all instantly real again and she snapped herself back.

“Cai?”

“Yes,” she said. “I saw clouds, the moon, volcanic ash spreading, and of course the rising souls, though I wouldn't quite describe that as
seeing
them, more like sensing them.”

“That's it?”

“Well, yeah. No birds. Also the columns of the Technologists,
which were tall, very tall, and wide. They reminded me of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. That kind of stone, I mean.”

“Hm. Well, there's a word in Gaelle's video that—trust me, I have doubted this and struggled to prove I'm wrong, but it's unmistakable. ‘
Aikai.
' ‘Ship of the air.' ”

Caitlin sat up straight.

“What?” Ben asked.

“Like zeppelins!” she said. The thought had occurred to her before, when she'd considered how the Galderkhaani might have mapped the region. “Ben, the Technologists' columns were absolutely tall enough for that.”

“For what?”

“To be docking stations. Remember, like they tried do with the Empire State Building right after it was built?”

“They did?”

“Yeah. Just like the columns, it was low enough to use stairs to disembark, yet not high enough to get clocked by upper-level winds.”

“But you didn't actually see any airships?”

She shook her head. “Not one. Besides, if they did have airships, why wouldn't they have tried to escape on them?”

“Maybe they could only fly at certain times?” Ben suggested. “Or they were being prepared, perhaps enlarged, for the coming catastrophe? Remember, the eruption seemed to come earlier than anyone expected.”

“Maybe,” Caitlin replied. “Then again, I wouldn't necessarily want to fly through air filled with rocks spewing from a volcano
.”

“Good point,” Ben said. “Better to die trying to outrace a pyroclastic outpouring.”

“People's instinct is to outrun something. That's animal, human nature. Like with the tsunami. I heard it in Thailand over and over, ‘I thought I could run faster than the waves.' Some of the Galderkhaani might have been running to the sea to try to escape.”

“That does make some sense,” Ben agreed. “Anyway, before you
go, here's what set me off on this, Caitlin. Gaelle says the word ‘
tawazh
.' The Norse had a god named Tiwaz. A sky god.”

“The Norse again?” The prow of a Viking ship had been one of their first clues about the existence and potential reach of Galderkhaan.

Ben nodded. “It doesn't mean that someone escaped on an airship, but maybe part of the language made it out somehow.”

“Meaning people did,” Caitlin said. “By sea.”

Ben nodded again.

Caitlin considered the repercussions of what he was saying. “That's a big thought. Living descendants.”

“It's a possibility,” he said, correcting her.

“Yes, but there's something else. Remember, the earliest I saw of Galderkhaan was just an hour before it was destroyed. They could have been sending airships anywhere, any time before that. Maybe some of them never came back.”

He grinned.

“What?”

He laughed devilishly. “Are you conceding that I might be onto something?” Before she could answer he continued, “Remember the Varangian Rus? The Norsemen who traveled east as far as Mongolia?”

“A little,” she said.

“Well, listen to this: those Norsemen also traveled south, and they became some of the most trusted guards and soldiers of the Byzantine emperor. Most of them started their careers in the navy before they moved into the palace. And on their ships, they used what was called ‘Greek fire'—a substance that burned on water as well as land. It would burn just about anything anywhere, and we still can't figure out what it was made of.”

“I don't follow,” she said . . . and then she did. All the people she had seen erupt into spontaneous flame—she forced herself to push away images of melting flesh. “But, Ben, didn't the Greeks—”

“Invent it? Who says history's always right?”

She answered without thinking, “Those of us who actually witnessed it.”

“Cai . . .”

The certainty of her answer, the conviction, stopped Ben hard.

“Hey, I have to pick up Jacob,” Caitlin said. “Safe trip—I'll see you tomorrow, okay.”

Ben managed a wary smile before she shut her laptop.

W
hen Caitlin and Jacob arrived home, she suggested they cook something that neither of them had made before. Jacob was always game for new things and right now Caitlin needed a distraction that had start-to-finish directions.

The result was a frittata that nearly made it out of the skillet intact. They laughed as they poured the runnier parts into their mouths and for a moment, Caitlin forgot everything that wasn't egg, cheese, ketchup, and her son. After dinner she shooed Jacob off to do his homework. He went gleefully, eager to return to Captain Nemo and find out what had happened to the troubled submariner.

Just as he was about to shut the bedroom door, Caitlin knocked on the table and called out to him. Jacob emerged again into the hallway to catch her question.

“What do
you
think will happen to him?”

Jacob shrugged, obviously content to let Jules Verne do the heavy lifting.

“Isn't he out there sinking ships with his submarine?” Caitlin asked.

“Yes, but people hurt his family,” he signed. “He's mad.”

“Angry or mad?” she asked, making the loopy sign beside her head.

Jacob scowled. “He's pissed, Mom. Very, very pissed.” With that, he shut the door.

The initial question hadn't been answered, but Jacob seemed to be in Nemo's corner. She supposed he could have worse father figures in his life than a brilliant scientist who was sick of war.

Jacob finished reading and then asked her permission to watch a movie in his room. Caitlin considered joining him despite her work overload. Alone, she felt overwhelmed. She didn't want to think, didn't want to answer e-mails, didn't want to communicate with anyone. She wanted temporary oblivion. She walked into Jacob's room, gave him a kiss good-night, and walked straight to the bathroom to pop half of a sleeping pill, regardless of the early hour. She pulled the shades in her room. Then, lying in bed with headphones on and the sheet pulled over her head, she listened to Pachelbel—less familiar than Bach, more focus required to stay with each note—until she slipped into unconsciousness.

As she slept, there was a drumming on the wall. It was slow and low at first, then grew louder. The cat jumped on the bed and slunk low across Caitlin's legs, its tail dragging like a chain. Arfa mewed, stopped just beside her knee, then pawed at the air.

A cool wind rustled the tissues in a box on the night table, blew across the cat's low back, swept under the door and into the hallway. It moved like a low mist, rolling out, surging unevenly toward Jacob's room.

It entered.

The drumming grew louder, more insistent.

“Ma. Ma. Ma.”

Jacob's voice was a dreamy monotone, like exhaled breath that somehow formed the same word with each cycle.

“Ma. Ma
. Ma.
”

The drumming grew more desperate, like someone trapped behind a door with something they had to escape—

The cold mist unfolded toward the boy's bed. It stopped and slowly
rose up, towering above Jacob with a slow, writhing presence that stirred the drawings pinned to his walls and rippled through the open pages of Verne on the bed, then it stealthfully lay across him.

There was a whisper, a breath warmer than the rest. It touched the boy's cheek and the knocking slowed, then stopped. A word swept into his ear.

Tawazh.

•  •  •

At breakfast, Jacob was grumpy. “Did you take a pill last night?”

“Half of one. Why?”

“You never hear me knock when you take those.”

“Jacob, you're always asleep when you drum on the wall.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Sorry, kiddo,” she said. “Really, I am.” She got up and crossed to hug him but instead tickled him out of his grump.

“I heard something in my sleep,” he said.

“Oh? What was it?”

“A word,” he replied.

“What word? ‘Nemo'? ‘
Nautilus
'?”

“No,” he answered. “I can't remember. But I heard it,” he insisted. “Inside my ears.”

“A dream,” his mother said, kissing him on both ears.

After a relatively cheery breakfast and warm good-byes at the school gate, her mood quickly reverted to unease. She was eager for her morning appointment with Barbara and headed straight uptown to arrive early.

Barbara's apartment was one of the high-ceilinged gems hidden above Manhattan's flower district, though only a handful of shops there still sold potted trees and orchids. Six floors up, with wood-paneled walls and tall, sun-filled windows, the apartment always reminded Caitlin of an old but beautifully restored ship. The impression
was inevitable, given the number of intricate knots displayed around the room—in table legs, fabric runners, throw pillows, and various media framed and mounted on the walls. Barbara's first career had been as a mathematician specializing in topology. Her friends and family had decided that knots were her thing, and despite the fact that it had been ten years since she'd changed professions, they continued to gift her display-worthy examples for her collection.

Barbara had a round, open face with a strongly pointed chin and sculpted eyebrows. But what everyone noticed first were her crystal-blue eyes. If you stayed with them, they shone like hopeful, helpful lights.

The women embraced warmly at the door before Caitlin found the familiar comfort of the armchair across from Barbara's. Concise and controlled, she then told her everything that had happened, from the first trance with Maanik to the “journeys” to Galderkhaan to Odilon's energy to the strange woman on the train.

When she was finished, Barbara smiled warmly. “How many times did you rehearse that in your head?”

Caitlin laughed. “Twice on the way here. I wanted to give it to you as objectively as possible.”