Ghostcountry's Wrath (5 page)

“Now wait a minute!” Calvin began hotly, his hands already balling into fists, as an anger he had never before aimed at Uki roared to life.

“Silence?”
Uki spat. “You will keep silent until I say otherwise! The women will not be harmed, and if you act as you ought, you will see them again. No more will I say.”

Calvin had to clamp his jaws down hard to keep from telling Uki he was full of crap—and from lashing out with his still-clenched fists.

“Cool it,” David hissed through his teeth. “Go with the flow, remember?”

Calvin's reply was a wordless growl, but at a grim, resigned nod from Sandy, he fell in behind the Red Man as Uki led the way from the clearing. David came next, with Alec following. Then came the Black Man, with the Blue Man of the North bringing up the rear.

They did not head south, though, toward Uki's house in the cliffs beneath the rumbling waterfall Calvin could only just hear. Rather, they turned into the deeper woods to the north, where Calvin, though he had visited Uki more than once, had never fared.

*

Calvin did not know how long they trekked along, only that they traveled due north through unrelieved forest, that he was unaccountably hungry, given the food he'd scarfed at the wedding reception—and that he was bloody tired, which was not so unaccountable, seeing how little sleep he'd had the last week or so. He was also feeling guilty for not having told his friends about the statue when he'd had the chance. He could've given them the short form, for God's sake: how he'd watched Spearfinger construct it down in Willacoochee County, then send it marching into the earth in quest of Dave. Now…who knew when he'd get to lay out the whole tale?

Never mind that both Dave and Alec were probably pissed as hell at him. And certainly never mind whatever it was that had Uki's breechclout in a wad.

Uki…. His mentor had held ruthless silence since this journey began, as had everyone else in their odd party. And whatever was up had the feel of ritual.

Which could be either good or bad.

Not until sunset did the situation clarify even a little, but when it did, the switch was abrupt. One moment they were panting along the trail between close-grown maples, the next they were confronting a seemingly impenetrable barrier of laurel. Uki simply walked into it. The Red Man went next, whereupon Calvin gritted his teeth, closed his eyes, and followed.

The leaves did not prick as much as he'd expected, though, and as soon as a brush of clearer air touched his face, he was blinking across fifty yards of open ground at a mound. Three times as high as Uki was tall, he guessed it was, and close to thrice that across; conical and covered with grass, and with a more steeply walled projection thrusting to the right like the entrance to an igloo. A trickle of white smoke drifted from the apex—or was that steam? He relaxed a fraction. If this was what he hoped it was, maybe things would be okay.

Still no one spoke. And as the light faded, casting the whole site into a study in red and black, Uki led them to the east, toward what Calvin presumed was the entrance.

He was right. For when they halted, he could see a low, log-framed opening, beyond which a packed-earth tunnel pointed into darkness. He glanced at Uki, then at his stone-faced companions. None of them acknowledged his presence. His stomach growled. As if in sympathy, David's followed suit. Finally Uki eased around to stand between him and the dark archway. “Remove your clothing. Do not speak unless I tell you.”

And with that, he and his fellows backed away.

Calvin rolled his eyes in resignation at his companions and fell to applying himself to buttons, snaps, and zippers. What choice did they have, after all? At least, he observed, when he'd stepped out of his gaudy boxers, it wasn't cold.

David was also naked now, but Alec was hesitating over his dangling-dagger earring. Calvin saw him catch Uki's eye and raise a quizzical brow. Uki spared him a curt, almost contemptuous, nod. Alec grimaced, but unhooked it and set it neatly in one of his sneakers. Calvin took the cue and lifted his medicine bag from around his neck. A thoughtful pause, and he likewise removed the uktena scale that had depended on a thong beside it.

Silence, still, but when Calvin straightened from depositing bag and scale, Uki pointed toward the mound's extension.

Calvin started that way, heard David, then Alec sigh and fall in behind. An instant later, he ducked through the opening he found there. The skin of a black bear hung beside it, he noted, probably to shut out cold and retain heat. A pause for a final deep breath of fresh air, and he continued on, forced by the low ceiling to walk hunched over.

Fortunately it required no more than nine paces along a narrow tunnel walled with fresh-made mats of woven cane: not so far that he couldn't see at all, but far enough that he ran head-on into a second bearskin marking the opposite end. Swearing silently, he eased it aside and paused on the threshold of a round chamber nearly thirty feet across and shoulder high at the sides.

Or that's what he thought it was; it was hard to be certain, for the air was so thick with cedar-scented steam it was like walking into burning fog. As best he could tell, however, the room was walled with more cane mats above a low earth platform that followed its circumference at sitting height. Four thick cedar trunks halfway in braced the conical ceiling and quartered the cardinal directions. A fire burned in the enter of the packed clay floor—or had; mostly it was embers now: embers that yet gave their heat to a number of large glowing stones, atop which a huge pottery vat of water boiled and bubbled with a violence that would have done Old Faithful proud.

Calvin swallowed hard, took a deep breath—and regretted it, for the heat seared his lungs.
Sweat lodge for certain, then—
as
the beads on his skin were already proving.
Could be worse,
he added, one this big couldn't get
too
hot—whereupon he squared his shoulders and stepped in. As was proper upon entering such structures, he moved left, described a clockwise path, and took a place to the right of the entrance. David followed by example, and Alec, after a flurry of hand signs involving securing the door flap, as well.

As so they sat in the northeast quadrant, bathed in a steamy, golden half-light, and waited.

Very quickly the chamber grew dark, filled only with the dim glow of the persistent embers and the sounds of increasingly vocal stomachs and nervous breathing. Occasionally an ember popped or hissed, or a red-hot rock split with an explosive crack.

And still they waited.

Unfortunately, the heat was increasing by the second, the air becoming thick and close; presumably because the smoke hole in the ceiling had been sealed. Already reality was shifting away as Calvin's awareness focused on his senses, on his body and what it was experiencing. The sweat that had beaded him from the start turned to torrents. Streams of it gathered on his forehead and dripped into his lap, or slid like lazy waterfalls down his back, shoulders, and arms. Beside him, he could hear Dave and Alec stirring restlessly, and thanked whatever gods looked after him that they had sense enough not to act up. They'd been in similar situations before, after all, and had read at least
some
of the right books—or Dave had.

If this was what he hoped.

Liquid splashed onto his head—probably their own sweat condensing on the ceiling to drip back down. The air was beyond muggy: hot and dense, with more than a hint of tobacco smoke or resin incense wafting through it that made it doubly hard to inhale. He tried to calm himself, to take shallow breaths, to use as little energy as possible. He sought also to turn his awareness inward, away from the torments of the body to that place were his
self
dwelt, inviolate and secure.

Longer and longer, hotter and hotter; and Calvin found reality shifting ever further away. More than once he started awake, having drifted to sleep—or passed out. Several times he thought he heard voices or drums, or saw lights. But the reflexive twitches those instances prompted brought him sufficiently aware to conclude they were mere tricks of his mind.

Finally, however, he was roused by what he truly could not distinguish between heat on his skin, the twisting in his gut, the tightness in his lungs, or the throbbing in his head—and saw true light: a man-high rectangle to his right, whose glimmering surely marked an exit from this place of torment. And even as he saw it, he felt a breeze—a
cool
breeze—and with it came fresh, clean air. As he rotated his head to clear the stiffness, and breathed deep to fill his tortured lungs, he heard a voice.

One word it said—Uki maybe, or maybe not. And that one word was,
“Come!”

Chapter III: The Warriors

(Galunlati—morning—high summer)

Calvin rose stiffly, saw Alec and David doing likewise, their faces grim and apprehensive beneath their sodden hair and sheen of sweat. He blinked—they all did—as he pushed aside the bear skin and half-staggered up the now-sunlit tunnel and thence back into—not the
real
world, he told himself firmly, but at least one more tangible than that inside his skull.

Asgaya Gigagei, the Red Man of the Lightning, awaited them alone outside the earth lodge, his face as passionless as it had been since they had entered Galunlati. It was morning, presumably the one following their arrival—which meant that Calvin was now officially late for his final go-round with the Willacoochee County authorities regarding the Spearfinger affair.

Not that he could do anything about it. Not that he even wanted to on a morning such as this.

The sun had barely risen, its lower rim still masked by the treetops to the east, and the air—blessed respite—was cool and smelled of honeysuckle. Wisps of fog wove in and out among the more distant trunks like misty dancers tying the night to dawn with cobweb scarves.
Their
clothes, however, were nowhere in sight, which neither surprised nor concerned him. “Follow,” the Red Man grunted, striding eastward, where an opening between two hickories marked the beginning of a trail. Having no reasonable choice, they obeyed, first at a walk, then a jog, finally at a steady ground-eating trot. At some point the Red Man began to chant:
“Yo, yo, yo, yo…”
Calvin hesitated at first, then joined in, Uki's ban having been on speech, not obscure monosyllables. Apparently the Red Man approved, for he began to blend his tones with Calvin's, and eventually David and Alec chimed in.

Fortunately, they did not have far to go—no more than half a mile. And their destination was precisely what the pattern of the ritual so far had led Calvin to expect. David knew it, too, to judge by the increasing confidence with which he moved. And even Alec, though still tense and edgy, looked marginally more serene.

It was a river. Not the wide one that thundered over Uki's cliffside home, however; this one was no more than thirty feet across and, by the darkness of it, deep. Its banks were mostly overgrown with laurel, save where a strip of coarse-sanded beach marked the terminus of the trail. Calvin didn't need to be told what to do next. With a final “Yo, yo,
yo
!”
he darted forward to launch himself into a flat dive straight into midstream.

The water was far colder than he'd expected, and made him gasp and shiver. But even as the cold stabbed into his heat-slackened muscles, it likewise reawakened his senses and brought tingling new life to his skin. For an instant he foundered, then found his depth and trod water while he waited for the others to join him. David did, whooping loudly. Alec followed more calmly, but likewise showed a relieved grin. The Red Man merely watched from a round-topped boulder on the shore—and lit a long soapstone pipe with a cedar stem. The smoke was pink and did not smell of tobacco.

For maybe five minutes they sported there, silent as river rocks but, as they grew accustomed to the frigid water, enjoying themselves nonetheless. Eventually Calvin waded to the shallows, where he made a stab at scraping a day's worth of dirt off his body and at untangling his badly snarled hair. When the Red Man motioned them back onto the beach, the sun had cleared the trees and was warm on their skin. And by the time they had jogged another quarter mile—still chanting “Yo, yo, yo, yo…”—Calvin, at least, was quite dry. Eventually he realized that their cadences had merged with a pounding of drums that grew louder as they approached the lodge.

But the place they returned to was not that from which they had departed—not hardly! Instead of a small clearing centered by a single mound, he stared down from a low ridge at an open area of perhaps ten acres, enclosed by a palisade of sharpened, head-high stakes. A little way inside rose the east slope of the nearest of the four-sided earthwork mounds that marked the cardinal directions around a flat courtyard of roughly one acre, in the center of which stood a single wooden pole, easily twelve feet high and capped by what was likely a bear skull. Each mound was maybe fifty yards on a side, and all bore on their summits thatch-roofed, wattle-and-daub structures that Calvin assumed were temples—assuming this was some sort of ceremonial complex, which it almost had to be. The presence of staircases leading up the mounds' inner sides reinforced that suspicion.

He had never seen this particular place before, but it smacked of several historical sites in his own world: Etowah over near Rome, Georgia, for one; Kolomoki down by Albany, for another; Town Creek out past Charlotte, for a third.