The Whirlwind in the Thorn Tree (33 page)

A few minutes later, Walter turned to me. “On second thought...I think I can see why you like our world so much more.”

The Whirlwind

T
HE MAPLE FESTIVAL JUST SEEMED TO
happen
once the sun went down. Sawyer, Noreen and I were sitting in a little cafe eating bacon sandwiches when the drums started up. I don’t know if it was just this way tonight or if I just hadn’t noticed it the first night, but they had a tribal, unsettling urgency I didn’t like. I didn’t want to go outside this time. I voiced my reticence to my friends.

“Me neither,” said Noreen.

Sawyer agreed. He made to look at his watch, and seemed to remember he wasn’t wearing one. “I think I might just head to Walt’s house and hit the hay. We’ve probably got an early morning ahead of us.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

I’d been sitting there at the table listening to the drums for a while, lost in my thoughts, before I noticed my friends had left. I wondered if we’d exchanged good-nights.

I got up, feeling a little guilty, wadded the last bite of my sandwich in my mouth, and wandered out into the chaos.

The square’s activity was too much for me tonight, for some reason. The lights were too bright and the people were too noisy. I aimed myself away from the whirling center of that frenzy and delved deeper into the alien city, so familiar in its flavor, yet so different in its mien.

I was troubled. I knew if I went back to my room, I wouldn’t be able to sleep, so I settled on walking around Maplenesse until I felt like going home. The farther I walked, the more déjà visité I experienced, until I stopped even paying attention to what was going on around me and just watched my feet eat up the cobblestones.

I didn’t hear her call until the third time she said something. “Kyt ifirurk, md’herkih.”

A slender Tekyr, taller than most I’d seen, leaned on the second-story railing of a walkup, holding vigil over the street. She wore a dangling droop of necklaces that covered her bare chest and a thin chain around her waist from which hung a delicate white silken panel that stopped just short of the platform she stood on. On the panel was embroidered a strange sort of catlike creature I didn’t recognize.

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking up at her. “I don’t know any Tekyrian.”

“I said, ‘good evening, stranger’,” she said, smiling. Her voice had a sensual rasp that reminded me of cats’ purrs and late-night radio DJs. “Welcome to Leb Cirimmi.”

“Good evening. And thank you.”

“My name is Memne. What is yours?”

“Ross.”

“Rosh,” she said. “I like that. It is the name of a warrior.”

“Thanks,” I replied, rubbing my overgrown buzzcut. “I guess.”

“Why don’t you come up and listen to the music with me,
la cyfi
?” asked Memne. “I am not so much for the dancing and the singing and the lebci-zuri. The drunken men, thorgeht’m, they are too crazy, they cannot leave me be. I am up here all by myself.”

As she spoke, she traced the cords of her necklaces with one light finger. She spoke Ainean/English with a faint Tekyrian accent, which sounded eerily like a Russian’s trill of Rs and stringing of Es. Something peculiar occurred to me as I looked up at her, something about the speaking of English, but at the sight of her sweet, fine-featured face, I couldn’t quite get a lock on the feeling.

I hefted the little leather satchel I’d found in Ed’s cottage. I listened to the jingle of money inside.

At the top of the stairs, Memne cat-crept over to me on bare feet and smiled up at me. I could see her retinas globing gold through the glassy pupils of her eyes, like the man at the bath-house, as if there was a tiny star hiding in her skull. She took my hand and I was comforted by the warmth. I’m not sure what I expected.

Her fingertips were warm and soft, yet scaly in a subtle way, like the belly of a snake, and the dark cerulean surface of her arms was covered in a fine, plush peach-fuzz. She looked to me like the Egyptian goddess Bast, bestial and lethally beautiful.

I wanted to tell her I didn’t have much money, but I didn’t want to offend her by being wrong about what she was. I contented myself with simply standing at the railing with her, listening to the distant bands play their muffled, cacophonous rendition of Latinized zydeco. I could hear the warble of childrens’ whistles and then a shooting scream. A swirling streamer sailed high into the sky, exploding in a burst of light with a cracking
BOOM,
resolving into a nebula of gold sparks, fading as it fell.

I leaned against the banister, the Tekyr girl between my arms, her downy, vulpine left ear against my right cheek. She was nearly a foot shorter than myself. Her hair was long and raven-black, cool and down-soft against my face, tumbling down her shoulder-blades. She smelled tropical and floral, like coconuts and tulips.

An obscure rumbling came from deep within her—she was actually purring through the Tekyr blowholes on her chest. I didn’t know what to say, and I was happy just being within arms’ reach of a woman for the first time in almost two years.

Her sweet closeness was more than enough for me.

My heart beat lightly in my chest, a faint stirring inside of me that radiated throughout my body and made me profoundly aware of my physical self. The cool breeze beat against the heat of my face. A sourceless welling of adrenaline told me to move my hand just
this much
...and caress the velvet of her arm.

She nuzzled my cheekbone with that exotic nasal ridge she had in place of a nose. I took this as approval, and closed my arms around her slight frame.

She turned and the nasal ridge brushed against my cheek again, and she caressed my lips with her own. I smelled the citrus tang before I tasted it when she kissed me. Her smooth, sharp tongue was a nimble explorer, and then Memne had leaned back against the wrought-iron bar and she was grinning. Her bottom lip lingered between her teeth, her gaze alternating between my mouth and my eyes.

I reached into my shirt and took out the simple gold chain that had been hanging around my neck the last three years. It was looped through a gold circle like Frodo bearing the One Ring. I pulled the chain until it broke, shattering into three pieces.

I hesitated for a moment in consideration and doubt, just long enough to see the gold catch the light, glittering, and then I let the ring slide out of my hand. A hundred memories hung in the air, spilling through my mind, dragging regret, panic, relief behind them like a needle and thread as I watched my old wedding band slip away.

I still don’t know where it fell.

She put her tiny three-fingered hands on my now-ungilded chest and guided me backwards through a doorway, where I gladly spent half the money in my satchel. I didn’t think Ed would begrudge me the use of his coin collection in a situation like this.

For a night, at least, I loved somebody with all my heart again.

_______

I got back to my room and slept for four hours, slept like a dead rock at the bottom of a well. I woke up to the sound of knocking at the door and found Sawyer on the other side of it. As soon as he saw my face, he broke into a tremendous grin and walked away.

I called after him, “Shut up,” and closed the door to take a much-needed bath, still redolent of Memne’s scent. I lay in the hot water, grinning like an idiot and feeling like Captain Kirk.

Yesterday’s buffet was a banquet compared to today, just a platter of croissants and pancetta sitting on the island in the Rollins’ modest kitchen. Walter had filled a metal thermos with coffee and we were out the door. I was still eating my breakfast as we wound down the foothill into the valley.

We didn’t have to pay for tickets since we were with the Deon and he was on business. Walter, Noreen, Sawyer and I boarded the train and took our seats. I sat down, put my feet up on the seat across the cabin, and the warming morning breeze knocked me out as easy as a haymaker.

Sometime later, I jerked awake, my heart slamming. “What the hell was that?”

“The hell was what?” asked Noreen. They were eating what looked like jam on toast points.

I looked out the window. The sun was directly overhead. I’d been asleep for at least three hours. “I heard a voice.”

I shut the window so I could hear better. A rasp in my head,

(rammatica, my name is hel grammat)

words whispered into the center of my brain like creme

(can only talk to you like this a few time)

injected into a Twinkie. I stood up and walked out of the private cabin, into the hallway, where I leaned against the wall to steady myself as the train rocked from side to side. Noreen came outside and took my arm. Her touch was reassuring. She didn’t ask me about myself like I’d asked after her so much the past week, but I knew from the concern on her face.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something—somebody’s talking to me. In my head.”

I leaned against a nearby railing, facing the windows that ran the length of the exterior corridor.

“Maybe you need more sleep, Ross. Maybe you’re hallucinating. Who knows what it could do to your mind, what we’ve done, what we’ve been through?”

“I don’t think that’s it.”

“Just come back in and sit down. Or lie down,” she said, gently tugging my elbow. “You can lie down and put your legs in our lap.”

It dawned on me that it had gotten considerably darker in the room, very quickly. I put my face against the cold window and looked outside at the clouds. In other circumstances, the dark, billowing anvil in the sky would have simply foretold the coming of rain. However, I knew that it was something else.

I pointed at the funnel cloud spiralling down from the stormclouds and said, my heart racing, “Something is coming.”

I pulled Noreen back into the
private sitting-room, leaving the door open. Everybody was immediately alarmed by my expression. Walter pulled his hat off and looked at me, his face growing dark. “What is it?”

“Something is coming,” I said again.

A panic crawled into my system and began to take me over. I felt a furious listlessness and my eyes cut back and forth, looking for safety. Whatever was outside was serious business, and I didn’t need the voice in my head to tell me so. I could feel the evil emanating from the tornado-sapling worming down from the air when I saw it.

In the few seconds I’d lingered at the window, watching the cottony blackness whip itself into a funnel, I took a sinister inspiration from the sight of it, felt the malice inside of it like a snake in a stocking.

It wasn’t natural...it was threaded through with a
wrongness
that threatened the reality around it like a glitched video game or damaged tape cassette.

We stepped back into the corridor and surveyed the coming tempest.

It had reached the ground by now and what filled me with dread was to see that it did not pull dirt into the air and throw it around—instead, the darkness of the tornado seemed to infiltrate and devour the
real
around it in an ink-blot sort of insidious way, billowing, seeping, eating, taking away.

It was not an agitator, it was not a destroyer. It was a
subtractor.

“That’s not good,” said Sawyer.

The twisting oblivion raced toward the track, promising to cut the train off as it went.

“We need to get off this train,” said Walter, and he pushed through us, moving to the rear of the car. He opened the door and went outside. We followed him.

There was only room for the two of us on the coupling outside. Beyond the car door, the wind was deafening, but the swirling black maelstrom in front of the train made no noise except for the high-pitched electronic whistle one might hear when a television is turned on in another room. It was the song of nothing, the eulogy of logic.

Walter looked down at the desert blurring past the platform under our feet.

“It’s too fast,” he said.

I agreed. “Yeah, if we jump we’ll break our legs and necks.”

He shoved past me and back into the car. I followed him again, and we raced into the next room, which was the dining car.