Moon-Flash (7 page)

The ground was soft, chilly underfoot. There was no sound but her breathing. She walked slowly, peering forward at the tiny ring of light until she realized that a mystery lay not at the edge of the light but all around her on the walls.

She stopped, her breath catching. She raised the light, and a strange animal painted red stared back at her. She moved the light. The sun, the moon, a pattern of stars. Another animal, big, lumbering, with strange teeth. A face painted gold, with an unfamiliar pattern of markings on it. Stick figures fishing in the river, hunting animals. A cliff full of eyes and mouths . . . No. Windows and doors. A village inside the cliffs . . .

Her skin prickled as if a hot wind had blown over her. She said, “Terje,” and her voice came tiny and faraway, as if she had spoken in a dream. The paintings grew larger, more elaborate. A man with a fish’s head arched over her, his toes on the bottom of one wall, his fingertips touching the bottom of the other. A woman with a sun-head. A huge blue bird, wingtips spanning the walls. How far the passage went, what lay at its end, she didn’t know.

People.
The word gusted through her like a wind. People not of the Riverworld, who wore strange signs on their faces, different clothing. They had painted the walls and gone away, leaving no footprints, nothing, no one to say why the paintings were there.

“As if,” Kyreol whispered, “someone a long time from now walked into the betrothal cave; all she would see is gold hands. A waterfall, a cave, and the gold hands . . . She’d have to tell herself a story . . .” She heard her voice chattering, but she couldn’t stop. “The animals are different. They drew the Falls with the rainbows. The River goes on and on, but they never saw the Face . . . There’s no story in the Riverworld to explain the paintings. The Hunter wasn’t dreaming. The Riverworld is a tiny dream inside the huge world.”

The fire ate her twig, began to nibble at her fingers. She turned abruptly, ran back through the silent passageway. “Terje! Terje!”

The twig burned itself out as she ran back into the light. But what she saw there was as incomprehensible as the paintings. There were nuts and berries scattered all around the fire. But no Terje.

SHE SEARCHED for him everywhere. She went down the cliff wall and looked for him on the small beach; then, when it was too dark to see, she called him again and again from the cave. Her voice battled the wind mournfully:
Terje!
She kept the fire going all night, waiting for him to return. Near dawn, she fell asleep and dreamed.

She dreamed of the Hunter, standing beside the fire, saying her name again and again.
Kyreol.
He looked at her, but couldn’t see her, and she thought in the dream,
I am invisible.
He couldn’t hear when she answered, and his voice grew more and more urgent. She woke, trying to speak to him. There were footprints all around the fire.

She got up swiftly. The fire was dead, and she was cold again. The footprints were different sizes; they came into the cave mouth and left by it.
Ghosts,
she thought numbly, even though she knew the dead moved like shadows, disturbing nothing. As she stumbled, half-asleep and bewildered, to the cave mouth, a figure loomed into it, blocking the dawn.

She put her hands over her mouth. A face woven out of reeds, with two square eyes and a slit mouth stared back at her. The rest of the figure was cloaked in black fur. It came toward her, half-crouched, step by slow step. She stood transfixed, her heart hammering. The figure moved closer, leaving human footprints on the ground. When it was almost close enough to touch her, a hand came out of the cloak, shook a string of bones at her.

She squealed, then turned and ran. The painted passageway, which had been so dark at night, was dimly lit with shafts of grey. As she ran down it, her panic mingled with indignation, that a person dressed as a thing had come out of nowhere, stolen Terje away, and then rattled old bones at her. The paintings, muted in the light, swirled past her. Their faces were friendlier, their masks—the fish, the sun—were more cheerful than the gloomy reed-face. She stopped finally, pressed against a crevice, and listened. Then she ran again.

She slowed finally, panting, beginning to cry a little. Reed-Face was still behind her; she heard the rattle of its bones. But she was too tired to run any more, and too upset. She pushed herself into a shadow, tried to become flat, like a painting. The dark figure rounded a corner. Its square eyes peered left, right, then into her still face. She gathered her muscles and sprang at it with a shriek.

The dark cloak, the bones, the mask fell to a heap on the ground. She caught a glimpse of a blue face beneath the mask, and then whoever it was disappeared back down the passageway.

She wiped a tear away angrily and put on the cloak.
It was soft and warm, covering her from shoulder to ankle. She hesitated a moment, then picked up the mask, looked at it curiously. It was tightly woven, with a cap attached to keep it on the head. It looked new; some of the reeds were not yet dry. Someone had spent days making it. But why? She gazed at its strange eyes, and it seemed to speak to her.

Why would anyone want to wear a face like yours?

Because, it said, I make you invisible and you cannot be harmed.

She put it on.
Now I am Reed-Face,
she thought, and picked up the bones.
No one can scare me again.
She continued down the passageway, not knowing where she was going, but not wanting to return to the cave. The world was square, now; the paintings seemed even stranger, seen from Reed-Face’s eyes. But she felt protected.

The walls began to speak to her slowly, catching her eye with paintings repeated over and over. The stories they told drifted into her thoughts.
Now there was a great rainstorm, and the river flooded. A boat full of fishermen is sinking. Twelve moons in a row. A new year. The great Fish-Man is dead. His mask is taken off, and put on the new Fish-Man. The Fish-Man marries the Sun-Woman. There is a big feast, and everyone is wearing masks that smile. A new year. The Sun-Woman has a sun-child. A girl. Here a boy enters a black hole. A cave full of terrifying things. Is it a dream-cave? He passes through. When he comes out, he carves a mask. Now he has a new face. Now the painter is painting himself painting. Did he run out of things to say? Or did he want to say, “I am the painter?” Another year . . . the Moon-Flash.
She stopped in surprise, for there seemed to be many moon-flashes, all at once, circles with fire in them. Stick-figures were doing a confusing dance among the Moon-Flashes. Then the dance became clear, and her blood ran cold.

People are killing people.

“Terje,” she whispered and began to run again.

The history faded into a colorful jumble around her. She ran past years, not knowing if she were going toward the beginning or the end of the story on the walls. The bone rattle shook a warning at her, but she paid no attention until, running finally out of history into daylight, she found herself surrounded by masks.

She stopped, panting. They all stared at each other: reed-faces, mud-faces, wood-faces, feather-faces. They had been waiting for her. Impulsively, she crouched, shook the bones at them to frighten them away.

They laughed and, murmuring among themselves, turned away from her to follow a trail down the cliffside.
I am still Reed-Face,
she thought surprisedly. Then she saw Terje.

She recognized his hands, paler than hers or any of the marked figures’. He wore a face carved out of wood, with a terrible scowl on it. She wanted to laugh at such a fierce mask on Terje’s face, and she realized then how frightened she was. They were together again, close enough to touch each other, but she couldn’t speak to him. He, too, was cloaked in fur, but his hands gathered the fur, closed in front of him, and his shoulders were hunched as though he were still cold. He didn’t know her behind her mask.
Maybe,
she thought,
if I get close enough to him, we
can run.
But all the mask-people merged into a single line, then, with Terje near the front. They began walking on a trail along the cliff that sloped gently toward the River, and Kyreol could do nothing but follow.

She saw boats moored in the distance and cheered up slightly.
We can steal a boat and sail away
 . . . They were odd-looking boats, like little quarter-moons in the water. In the distance, she began to hear drums.

For some reason they frightened her more than anything else. Their voices were deep, hard, fast. A reed-face turned to a mud-face then and said something. Kyreol realized for the first time that, like birds, they spoke a different language.

Even her bones felt cold, then. She wondered if the River had tossed them into an entirely different world, if it were a path between two points in the sky, or between two dreams.
How can I say my name?
she thought, panicked.
That I am Kyreol of River-Tree and Turtle-Crossing, a safe place where people don’t wear masks or steal each other away?

Fortunately, no one said anything to her. The trail ended on a sandy shore where the boats were moored. They all clambered into the boats, their big masks bumping together as they knelt down. They faced downriver, and Kyreol wondered if they scared the fish. She watched the dip and circle of oars as they sped through the water toward the deep, violent voices of the drums. In a boat ahead, Terje sat still, his head bent. She wondered what he was thinking.

The boats angled across the river. The dark cliffs rose higher, towering against the sky. They changed
as Kyreol looked at them. One moment they were simply stone walls bordering the river, with odd patterns of ridges and holes in them. The next moment, the patterns turned into stairs, walkways, doors, windows, carved into the rock.
They live in the cliffs,
Kyreol thought, and remembered the painting of the cliff-dwelling inside the caves.

More masks met them as they got out of the boats. The drums roared in triumph, then stopped abruptly. The crowd waiting on the shore parted, and a sunmask walked through them.

The mask was a huge, round disk woven of reeds, then painted gold. The Sun had round eyes and a round mouth, and cheeks painted with green growing things. The masks from the boats greeted the Sun, and a woman’s voice spoke in answer. Terje was brought forward. They took off his mask, so Kyreol could see his dirty, startled face. The Sun-Woman touched his hair. Then she took off her own mask.

Her hair was fair as Terje’s. The crowd murmured behind her. The drums sounded again, softly. The woman said something to Terje. He shook his head a little. She snapped her fingers, and people from the crowd moved forward.

They took his fur cloak off, replaced it with a long cloak of tanned hide, painted with a swirl of masks and bodies. They put a spear in one of his hands and a bone knife in the other. When they began painting a moon-flash on his face with dye from a bowl the color of blood, something deep inside Kyreol that responded without words to dreams and the world lurched her whole body forward a step.

The Sun-Woman glanced absently toward the movement. Since she had already taken one step, Kyreol took another. Then another. Reed-Face moved strangely, jerkily toward Sun-Face, who had begun to frown. The bone rattle in Kyreol’s hand dropped to her feet. She moved close enough to smell the various herbs that hung in little pouches from the Sun-Woman’s cloak—herbs her father used. The Sun-Woman’s face was painted sky-blue, with the blood red moon at moon-flash on one cheek and a ring of stars at the other. In the sudden silence, her voice curled upward in a question. Trembling, Kyreol removed the reed mask from her face.

Both Terje and the Sun-Woman stared at her. Before either of them could speak, Kyreol knelt down in the sand. She drew rapidly, without stopping to think. The River-sign. The sign for River-Tree and for Turtle-Crossing. She drew jagged lines for Fourteen Falls, with the rainbows arched over them, and the Sun-Woman made a soft noise. She drew the Moon-Flash and the Face beneath it, and then, in memory of her betrothal ritual, she laid her hand flat in the sand and made her handprint. She stopped a moment and realized that the jumble of pictures made no sense. So she began drawing again, more slowly.