Moon-Flash (5 page)

“It was a stone like a star.”

“This is my hunting stone. My fortune.” Then he asked slowly, “What is your mother’s name?”

“Nara. Of River-Tree and Turtle-Crossing. Everyone knew her.”

He stood very still. He seemed to have withdrawn into himself, like water seeping into earth, leaving only his shape, motionless, shadow-dark, which a grazing animal would hardly notice. She took a small step forward, her voice small in his silence.

“Please. Please tell me. I want to know so many things. I want to—”

“Go back,” he said brusquely. “Go back to the rituals. Your answers are there.”

“No!” she cried despairingly. “There’s only one answer: ‘This is the way the world is.’ But it doesn’t tell me about the world. What makes trees grow, why birds and people are different colors, where the River comes from, where it goes, what the Moon-Flash is. If you don’t tell me, I’ll go back to Korre and have babies, and I’ll tell them stories, but I’ll never know anything, never.”

He didn’t move; he almost didn’t seem to be breathing. “I am a hunter. Why do you ask me these things? You should ask the Healer.”

“I’ve heard you speak to your stone. You know words my father doesn’t know. You know—” She stopped, watching the expression well into his eyes. “You know,” she whispered.

He was silent for a long time. He was the Hunter, but something in his face made her feel that she had
trapped him and he could not escape. He shifted finally, looking completely bewildered, and asked gently, “Who are you?”

“Kyreol, of River-Tree and Turtle-Crossing. You saw me betrothed.”

“Oh, yes. Your face was painted then; I didn’t recognize you.”

“What does ‘interface’ mean?”

“It means—it means two worlds touching. Yours and mine. It means I may not be able to return to the Riverworld, now that you’ve seen me.”

“Why?” she asked puzzledly. “Are you a ghost? Are you from a dream?”

He smiled. “No.”

“Then where are you from?”

He gazed at her again, silently. Then he squatted down, drew a circle with his fingers on the sandy floor of the cave. “This is the world.”

“It is round!” Then she asked suspiciously, “Is it flat-round, or round like a berry?”

“Like a berry.” He drew the wavy line she recognized down the center of the world. “This is the River.”

“I know.” She touched the top of the world. “And this is the Face.”

“No.” He made a tiny dot halfway to the center of the world. “The Face is here.” He made another tiny dot, very close to the first dot. “There is Fourteen Falls.”

“Wait—” she whispered. His hand stopped. She was shaking her head; her body made a step back from him. “Nothing can be that big. It’s only a tale, you dreamed it.”

He opened his hand quickly, brushed the world away and rose. “It’s only a dream,” he said gently. “I am a hunter. Go back to the ritual. You will never see me again. I am part of the dream.”

She stared down at the sand where his drawing had been. “Past Fourteen Falls. Are there other place-names? What—what is the name of the place you came from?”

He was motionless again before her, a hunter, another teller of tales. “The River is the world. There is nothing beyond Fourteen Falls.”

She stood staring at the sand where he had left his handprint long after he had gone.

The sun had risen; she could hear shouting and laughter from the distance. She walked back down the River slowly, thinking,
It is true. It isn’t true. But he knew where my mother went. I could see that in his eyes. He is a hunter, he is a dream. The world is little. The world is huge. I forgot to ask him what the Moon-Flash is.
She didn’t realize she was back among people until Korre shouted at her.

“Kyreol! Kyreol!” He ran to her, threw a necklace of flowers over her head, and kissed her cheek. “Where have you been?”

“Here,” she said simply, because the world was either so huge there was no room for “here” and “there” in their tiny piece of it, or else the River was the World, and everywhere was “here.” Korre shook his head bewilderedly.

“No one could find you.”

“I was thinking.”

“Oh.” He still looked puzzled, but he ignored the
puzzlement. “Did you get the musk-berries? Come and eat—” He put his arm around her, but she stood still, pulling against him.

“I’m not hungry. I’m still thinking.”

“Kyreol . . .”

She shrugged him away, suddenly irritable. “You go eat.”

“No,” he said calmly. “You come with me. I want you with me.”

“Korre—”

“You are betrothed. This is ritual-time. I want you with me.”

She eyed him. His face was young and stubborn. She wondered what it would look like old and stubborn. His voice would be deep; he would be taller than she.
Kyreol. Come with me.
She would have no reason to argue, for the Hunter was gone forever and even his handprint would be brushed away by the footprints of other curious children. He was no dream, she knew. He had drawn her a picture of the world and then gone somewhere into it. Somewhere past Fourteen Falls, beyond the Face.

“Kyreol.”

“Wait,” she pleaded. “I want to see my father. I haven’t given him his gift yet. You eat. I’ll join you—”

“I’ll go with you.”

She swallowed an exasperated sigh. If she had to live with him, she might as well do it peacefully. “Korre,” she said very patiently, “I am a Healer’s daughter. Sometimes I see things, and then I have to be alone to think about them.”

Unexpectedly, that made sense to him. “All right,” he said reluctantly, “but come back soon.”

“I will.” She kissed his cheek suddenly, surprising both of them. “Save me some turtle eggs.”

He smiled at her shyly, pleased. “I will. Hurry.”

She walked through the crowd without seeing her father. She didn’t really want to talk to him anyway; he didn’t know how to draw her a picture of the world. The River was full of children’s rafts following the floating gifts. They passed her noisily, shouting, splashing, pushing each other into the water. The River carried them away finally. She reached her favorite place on the bank near her father’s house and sat down in a coil of tree roots to think.

A little while later, she stirred and threw a stone in the water. Thinking did no good whatsoever. Then, unexpectedly, the River sent her a gift. She cupped her hands to her mouth and called, “Terje!”

He was sailing past her, stalking a River-gift, in the boat that they had made. When he saw her, he angled the boat in the current, poled over to her. His face seemed odd to her, distant, as if he had forgotten her name, and the strange jumble of things she wanted to tell him dwindled away. The River-gift, a necklace of seed pods, drifted past them.

He jumped off the boat and pulled it partway up the bank, his head turned toward the gift. “It’s Jage’s gift. She wanted me to see how far it went.”

“Oh,” Kyreol said. Jage was Terje’s betrothed. She assumed dignity, her shoulders drawing back, her chin lifting, though she felt suddenly lonely. He looked at her finally.

“What?”

“Oh. Nothing.”

“Well, what? You called me.”

“I just wanted to tell you something. But it doesn’t matter. You have Jage to think about now.”

He gazed at her, his face puckering in bewilderment. “What did you want to tell me?”

“I need to use the boat. That’s all. But we can follow Jage’s gift first.” She climbed in. “Hurry. You can still see it. It’s important, too. Maybe more important, if you’re right about everything. The world will be as you see it.”

He got in beside her, shoved the boat away from the bank with his pole. “Kyreol—”

“Her handprint will be on that wall, next Moon-Flash. She’ll come to live with you. That’s the way things should be.”

“Kyreol—”

“I’m just going for a little way. Then I’ll be back.”

They caught the current again. The seed pods spun gently in an eddy, then drew them on. Terje poled to catch up with them. “What,” he demanded, “are you talking about? How far are you going?”

“Just a little way. To Fourteen Falls.”

He stared at her, his face blank with astonishment, clinging so long to the pole he nearly fell overboard. “That’s the end of the world!”

She stood like a dark figurehead at the prow of the boat, turned backward, saying goodbye to her world, or maybe only leaving it so that she could greet it again. “Kyreol . . . of River-Tree and Turtle-Crossing,” she whispered, so not to forget. Behind her, the River-gift
of Terje’s betrothed caught in a snag and stopped moving. Terje lifted the pole out of the water and sat down.

“Can we be back by Moon-Flash?”

“Of course,” she said, annoyed. “You won’t miss your betrothal.” Then, listening to his words, she smiled.

FOURTEEN FALLS, the River’s end, was the birthplace of all the rainbows in the world. They grew like seedlings in the water, blossomed, and when they reached their full size, detached themselves and drifted through the world. Long ago, during a terrible famine, a hunter had strayed too far downriver, farther than anyone had ever gone, and he had seen more rainbows than he could count. He had broken his bow so, braving the wild currents, he had picked a small rainbow and strung it. Wherever he shot his arrows, they struck plump birds and beasts, until he had enough food to feed everyone in the Riverworld. Since then, a rainbow meant good luck to whoever saw it, and hunters carved rainbows on their bows in memory of the first man who had plucked the magic out of Fourteen Falls.

Terje and Kyreol got to the rainbow garden at the end of the world much faster than they expected to.

On the first day, the River took them at a leisurely pace past all the place-names they knew. Most of the houses stood empty, sunning their round baked walls
like mud turtles in the light. At Little Spring an old man, who was too frail to make the journey to the ritual-place, bent over his fishlines, catching his supper. He wore the mark of a silver stream on his forehead and a black feather for the dead tucked behind his ear. He waved to them, smiling, his black face wrinkled like water.
Farewell.
Kyreol waved back. The River bore them onward.

The current quickened; by midday they no longer needed to pole. Kyreol took the rudder and Terje baited fishlines, trailed them from the stern. Then he sat beside Kyreol and unwrapped a leaf full of nut bread, which he had taken from the feast. They ate it together.

“Why?”

“Why what?” Kyreol said with her mouth full.

“Why are we going to Fourteen Falls?”

She told him about the Hunter. He listened silently, without eating, his eyes big, dark in his face. When she finished, his throat made a noise, as if to clear away a breadcrumb. He opened his mouth, then turned as his fishline twitched. He pulled the fish in. “It’s a dream . . .” he whispered. “It’s a Hunter’s dream. It means something to him, and he gave it to you, the Healer’s daughter.”

“Maybe,” Kyreol said doubtfully. “But I think it’s not a dream.”

“It’s a dream.” His voice came back again, flicking away her uncertainty the way the fish, trapped in his hand, was flicking droplets off its scales. He eased it into a clay water jar. “You’re just not old enough to know what it means.”

She scowled at his complacency. “Then why are you coming with me?”

“To see the rainbows, of course.”

By late afternoon the place-names grew few. Only hunters lived so far from the Face. Black Cove, Flower Marsh, Sun’s Carpet, the clearing where hunters cured hides, swept past them. The River narrowed; its voice began to rumble. When the world grew dark, they tied the boat to a tree. Terje made a fire from the spark in his oil lantern and cooked the fish. They ate, then slept on the boat under the icy shower of stars.

The next afternoon they left the forests behind. The River seemed to burrow downward into the stony heart of the world. Where the soft bank had been, steep shining walls of black rock rose high above them. The thunder of water bounced from wall to wall and echoed all around them. Kyreol felt uneasy, but Terje, handling the rudder, his hair wet with spray, was grinning. He swung the bow away from a patch of rocks that had grown abruptly out of the water and Kyreol slid to the bottom of the boat.