Moon-Flash (15 page)

Orcrow made a soft sound in the back of his throat. “They live in our past,” he murmured. “Yet they dream of us.”

Nara was smiling again. “So you asked the Hunter with the stone. When I left, you had just begun to talk, and already you were asking questions. All day long, you would bring me things. A leaf, a berry, a frog. ‘What is this? What is that?’ You weren’t happy until I answered, until I gave you a word to learn. And you made me remember all the questions I had
inside me when I was growing up. I wanted to find someone who could answer my simple questions the way I could answer yours.” She shook her head a little. “I thought I could go a little way and come back. I didn’t know that once you leave the Riverworld, you can never return.”

There was a silence. Kyreol swallowed. “It’s easy. I mean, it won’t be easy because of the people and animals, but you just follow the water—”

“Well.” Nara looked as though she was sorry for what she had said. “We can talk about that later—”

“But Terje—he has to be home at the next Moon-Flash. He has to be betrothed to Jage.”

“Moon-Flash.” Nara’s eyes went past her then, to Orcrow. There was almost an appeal in them. Orcrow drew breath audibly, in response to some question hidden in the air. Terje shifted. His face seemed calm, and the edge of fear in Kyreol died away. He doesn’t believe her, she thought. Why should he? The River is the River, and it will lead him home. She felt confused again, suddenly lonely, as if he had already left her, and then he met her eyes. He looked annoyed. She felt her cheeks burn.

“Jage,” Nara murmured. “Jage. Oh, I remember. Of the Turtle-Crossing family.”

Kyreol nodded, a different well of emotion making her forget the problem of returning. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to ask you. Why did you betroth me to Korre instead of to Terje?”

“But Kyreol,” Nara said, half-laughing. “I did that the day after you were born. How could I have known you and Terje would become so close?”

“That made me angry,” Kyreol said darkly.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right.”

“It’s hard,” Nara said apologetically, “when babies are so tiny, to know who they might grow up to love.”

“I suppose so.”

“And most Riverworld children are very much alike.”

“Except us.”

There was a little silence. Nara was smiling, but there was a faint worried expression in her eyes, as though she were seeing something even more confusing than everything the River had led toward. It made Kyreol uneasy again. She moved, then touched Terje impulsively, drawing from his calm.

For some reason, that made the worry in Nara’s eyes deepen. But she only said, “You must be very hungry. I’ll get some food.”

She went into the next room. After a moment, she called, “Regny, there are all kinds of messages for you on my channel. Call the North Outstation, call Arin Thrase, call the Cultural Agency, call Domecity security, call the Dome Comcenter to clear your calls. And call home.”

Orcrow sighed. “I almost wish I were back in the desert.” He joined Nara, leaving Kyreol and Terje among the silent trees.

Terje spoke finally, breaking their own amazed silence. “I just wanted to see the rainbows . . .”

“Terje.”

“What?”

“What did she mean we can’t go home? I was afraid to ask.”

Terje stared at her so incredulously she smiled. But
her brows were still puckered. He shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t think she meant—”

“Because you have to go home.”

“Will you stop saying that!” The sudden anger in his voice startled her. They faced each other silently again, tensely. Then he picked at the green carpet and the flush faded out of his face. “Do you think I want to leave you?”

“But Terje,” she said in a small voice.

“I followed you all the way down the River. I’m sitting here with you beyond the edge of the world—”

“Pretend it’s a dream,” she said helplessly. “You’ll wake up, and there will be Jage—”

His voice rose again. “Why?”

“Because what will you do here? There’s no place to fish. The birds are caged. The River ended. You only came to see rainbows—”

“Kyreol.” He stopped and sighed. “You aren’t making any sense. What are you thinking? That nobody will notice that I vanished with you one day and came back without you? You think they won’t ask why?”

“I don’t want them to ask!” she said vehemently. “Anything!”

“Then what do you—”

“I don’t want any changes! You go back, you marry Jage, and never say anything—never tell anyone. Oh, Terje—” she cried softly, as his face began to understand. “I want the Riverworld to be always alive. I never want it locked behind cases or nailed to walls. You go back, you keep it alive.”

“I can’t,” he said softly, reaching out to her. She
shifted, pushed herself close to him, her eyes wide, unseeing.

“I’m afraid again,” she whispered.

“Of what?”

“I don’t know. Terje, the Riverworld itself is like something kept in Arin Thrase’s house. It’s guarded, protected, just like my mother’s betrothal skirt—”

“No.”

“Yes. We—we look at the world one way. A simple way for a tiny world. But I wonder what—how these people look at the world. They watch our world so it doesn’t change. But what is it they see surrounding the Riverworld? They see something. That’s why they won’t let us go back. Because they know something—something that can’t live in the Riverworld. And if we stay here long enough, we’ll—”

“Kyreol, how can you say that?” he protested softly. “How can that be true?”

“Why else did my mother say we couldn’t go back?”

“Do you want to go back?”

“I want—” She stopped, frowning at the deepening shades of green in the carpet. Then her face cleared a little and she sighed, leaning back against Terje’s shoulder. “I don’t want to give anything up. I wish I could be here and there at the same time. And you. What do you want?”

He scratched his head. “I would like a boat like Orcrow’s,” he said, and she shifted, laughing.

“Terje—”

“I do. And I want—” His hands moved vaguely in the air. “It’s hard to say. I want . . . just to live. To see new worlds, or see the same world, and know that
everything is new. Or that there’s no difference. Between this world and the Riverworld. Everything is the same. The dreams change shape, but the dreamer never changes.”

She was silent, her lips parted, glimpsing now and then what he was trying to say. She turned her face, kissed him, as though she could understand him that way. “But Terje,” she said tentatively, feeling stupid, “what do you want to do?”

He smiled. But he looked a little bewildered, too. Nara came in then, with trays of steaming dishes. The smells were familiar: fish stew, warm bread made with nut flour, a sauce of berries and plums. There were even wild honeycombs to dip the bread into. Kyreol, aching with hunger, remembered the sound of bees swarming on a sun-soaked afternoon, with the green River dreaming in the distance. She saw herself picking up Korre’s little sisters, telling them stories . . . Where was that Kyreol now?
Maybe I should have stayed,
she thought. There was no reason not to love something so simple.

“Eat,” Nara said gently. Kyreol broke off a piece of bread, got it past the burning in her throat, and felt better.

Orcrow joined them again, looking tired. “I told the Agency I was back. They seemed surprised that you were feeding me instead of firing me. I tried to explain to them that the lure of the world drew the children, not some stranger wandering around their home dressed in feathers. But all they can envision is two terrified children, like aliens off another planet, understanding nothing.”

“I don’t understand anything,” Kyreol said with
dignity. “But I’m not terrified. Will they stop you from going back to the Riverworld?”

“They want to,” Orcrow said. “But the final decision is your mother’s. She is the head of the branch of the Agency that watches over the people along the river. And she trained me.” He filled his plate, but didn’t eat. With his head bowed, his hands motionless, he seemed to be waiting for Nara’s judgment.

“Orcrow,” she said softly, “you brought my child safely down the river to me. When I was young, going down that river, not even the thought of the baby I left behind could stop me. I was very angry with you at first. I trained you; I couldn’t understand how you could have let such a thing happen. But since it was my own child you brought me, I know that if you hadn’t been there, she would have gone alone. And perhaps not survived. So all I can do is thank you. Besides,” she added, as his face eased into a smile, “I want you to go back to the Riverworld.”

The smile vanished. “Now? I just got here.”

“I know. But this time you can fly home. I want you to—”

“Icrane,” he said abruptly, and she nodded, looking away from him.

“I want—first I disappeared. And then his daughter. I want—”

“What do you want?” he asked gently. “Do you want me to tell him where you are?”

There was a little silence. “It’s against the law,” she said reluctantly, but she still couldn’t meet his eyes. “Orcrow, I was his wife. The wife of the Healer of the Riverworld. He knows I’m alive. He can’t even mourn me and then forget me. And now Kyreol has
left him, too. And Terje. You know the Riverworld.

I won’t ask you to break the law, but just—somehow—let him know that we’re safe and well.”

Kyreol said suddenly, “You sent him a message, Orcrow. I dreamed it.”

He gazed at her silently. “I left him a stone.”

“With three signs painted on it. So he would know I was alive and making my mother’s journey.” She added, “You could give him another message like that. You know that language.”

He drew breath, turning again to Nara. “You see? They dream our thoughts, they reach out to our world. If children of people who know nothing at all about the world are driven within themselves to explore it, I wonder how long we will be able to disguise ourselves among them. It seems wrong to me that the law should forbid a man’s wife to travel across the world to see him once again. I’ll return, of course. I’ll find some way to tell him. But I think we should begin to go openly at least to the Riverworld, tell them the truth about ourselves. Perhaps then they can teach us to dream again.”

“Perhaps,” Nara said softly, and gave them a glimpse, for a brief moment, of the longing she still felt for her home. “But, Regny, the very peace and orderliness of their lives might be the source of their dream-power. If we disturb that, we might destroy the very thing we are searching for. Besides, how could we begin to tell them the truth? Where does truth begin, in the Riverworld? With a dream? A place-name? A fire on the moon?”

“You wouldn’t have to tell them that—”

“That the Moon-Flash they worship, which blesses
their betrothals, brings good fortune, good hunting, children, is no more than . . .” Her voice faltered suddenly. Kyreol, her hands frozen above her food, felt her mother’s attention even before Nara turned her head slowly, reluctantly, to meet Kyreol’s eyes. Kyreol wanted to speak, but her lips refused to shape the words.
What? No more than what?
As though Nara’s words held her under a spell, she couldn’t even blink. Nara continued finally, shaping her words very carefully, her voice thread-thin, as though it hurt her to speak, “. . . the flare of a supply ship’s engines as it makes its final descent to the moon. As it has done every year, on the same night, for four hundred and seventy-nine years, since the Dome realized that people of this world had begun to worship it.”

AS IN A DREAM, Kyreol felt herself surrounded by night-shadowed people of the Riverworld, their faces turned toward the full moon rising above the white, feathery water rolling down the Face. Fire struck the moon’s side, and small drums began to sound. She saw the Sun-Woman’s blue cheek with the Moon-Flash painted on it, the sign on the desert boy’s painted wrist, the circle and the flame carved into black rock that cradled within it a dead man’s bones. Moon-Flash. Life, betrothal, ritual, love, power, death.

“A ship.” Her voice made no sound. “Like the one that brought us up here.”

“Yes.”

“It makes a fire—”