River of Blue Fire (14 page)

T
HE voices seemed to be arguing. They were small voices, and far away, and they did not seem terribly important.

Was it his mother and father? They did not argue much—usually the older Jonas treated Paul's mother with deference bordering on contempt, as though she were a poorly-made object that could not stand even ordinary handling. But every now and then his father's air of benign disinterest would vanish, usually when someone outside the house had rejected one of his ideas, and then there would be a brief flurry of shouting followed by silences that lasted hours—silences which had made the younger version of Paul feel that everyone in the house was listening for him to make a noise and thereby spoil something.

On those very few occasions when his mother stood up for herself and argued back, still in her fumbling, apologetic way, the shouting would not last any longer, but the silences might stretch for a day or more. During those long, deadly days, Paul stayed in his room, unwilling even to go out into the silence, calling up maps of faraway places on his screen instead, making plans for escape. In the endless middle hours of a still afternoon, he sometimes imagined that the house was a toy snow globe—that outside his room the corridors were slowly filling with clouds of settling, silent white.

The voices went on arguing, still distant, still unimportant, but he had noticed in an offhand way that they were both male. If one was his father, then perhaps the other was Uncle Lester, his mother's brother, a man who did something to help banks make contacts overseas. He and Paul's father disagreed famously about politics—Uncle Lester thought that anyone who voted Labour understood nothing about the way the world
really
worked—and sometimes would argue semicordially for hours, while Paul's mother nodded and occasionally smiled or made a face of mock-disapproval, pretending to be interested in their extravagant assertions, and while Paul himself sat cross-legged on the floor in the corner looking at one of his mother's precious books of reproductions, old-fashioned books on paper that her own father had given to her.

There was one in particular Paul had always liked, and listening now to his father and Uncle Lester argue, he saw it again. It was by Bruegel the Elder, or at least he thought it was—for some reason he was having trouble summoning names just now—and showed a group of hunters marching down a snowy hillside, returning to a feast in the town below. The painting had moved him in ways he could not quite describe, and when he had gone to university, he had used it as the default on his wallscreen; on nights when his roommate had gone home to his family, Paul would leave it on all night, so that the white snow and the colorful scarves had been the last thing he saw before falling asleep. He did not know why it had become such a favorite—just that something about the conviviality of it, the shared life of the villagers in the picture, had moved him. An only-child thing, he had always supposed.

Thinking of that picture now, as the argument grew louder and then softer in slow waves, he could almost feel the sharp cold of Bruegel's snow. White, all white, sifting and settling, turning all the world uniform, covering up all that would otherwise cause pain or shame. . . .

Paul's head hurt. Was it thinking about the cold that had done it, or the continuing prattle of those people arguing? In fact, who were those people? He had thought one of them might be his father, but the other certainly could not be Uncle Lester, who had died of a heart attack while on vacation in Java almost ten years back.

In fact, Paul realized, more than his head hurt. His entire body was being bounced, and every bump was painful. And the pain itself was touched with frost.

Even as he thought this, he dropped for half an instant straight down and thumped onto something uncomfortably solid. Solid and cold. Even through the dizziness, the heavy-headedness, he was sure of that. The ground was very, very cold.

“. . . With his blood,” one of the voices was saying. “That brings a curse. Do you want the curse of a man from the dead lands?”

“But that is Birdcatcher's spear,” another said. “Why do we give it to this one?”

“Not give, leave. Because Riverghost's blood is upon it, and we do not want him drawn back to our place by his blood. Mother Dark Moon said so. You heard her speak.”

The cold was growing worse. Paul began to shiver, but the motion made his bones feel as though they were grinding together on their raw ends, and he let out a whimper of discomfort.

“He wakes. Now we go back.”

“Runs Far, we leave him too close to our place,” the second voice said. “It would be better to kill him.”

“No. Mother Dark Moon said his blood would curse us. Did you not see how just a little of it made Birdcatcher ill? How it called out to the bad thing in Birdcatcher's child? He will not come back.”

Paul, his head pulsing, aching like one great bruise, still could not decide how exactly he should go about opening his eyes, so he felt rather than saw someone bending down and bringing a face close to his.

“He will not come back,” Runs Far said next to his ear, speaking almost as though for Paul's benefit, “because Mother Dark Moon has said that if he comes back, then it is he who will be cursed, not us. That the People will kill him then without fear of his blood.”

The nearness of the man grew less, then something thumped down beside Paul. He heard a rhythmic noise that, after a few moments, he realized was the People's footsteps crunching away.

Some idea of what had happened was beginning to come back, but what was coming even more swiftly was the freezing cold. A vibrato of shivers ran through him, and he doubled up like a blind worm, huddling into his own body for warmth. It did no good—the cold was still touching him all the way down one side, sucking the life out of him. He rolled over so that he was facedown, then struggled until his knees were under his belly. He set his hands flat and tried to lift himself up. A wave of nausea and dizziness ran through him, and for an instant blackness came and drove even the cold away—but only for an instant.

As the inner darkness receded, Paul opened his eyes. At first nothing changed. The night sky stretched above him, an unimaginable, velvet black, but as his vision returned, he saw that this black was pierced with merciless, glittering stars. The uppermost edge of a wide yellow moon peered from behind the trees on one side of the hilltop. Beneath the sky lay a hillside, all whiteness, so that the world seemed to have been reduced to the simplest of dichotomies. And Paul himself was the only other thing in the world, trapped between black and white.

Why me?
he wondered sorrowfully.
What did I do, God?

A wind came down on him. It only lasted a moment, but that moment was like knives. Paul shuddered violently and dragged himself to his feet. He swayed, but managed at last to find balance. His head was throbbing, his bones felt broken. He tasted metal, and spat out a dark glob of blood that made a tiny hole in the white hillside. A sob hitched his breathing. A distant howl—like a wolf's, but much deeper—rose and fell, echoing across the white moonscape, a terrifying, primordial sound that seemed to mark out his hopeless loneliness.

They've left me to die
. He sobbed again, furious and helpless, but swallowed it down. He was afraid to cry in case it might knock him to his knees. He didn't know whether he'd be able to get up a second time.

Something long and dark lay in the snow by his feet, bringing back Runs Far's words.
Birdcatcher's spear
. He stared, but could only make sense of it at the moment as something to lean on. He wrapped the fur cloak more tightly—what kind of death sentence had they passed, that he had been left his clothing?—then bent carefully. He almost overbalanced, but steadied and began the intricate process of picking up the spear while his legs threatened to buckle and his head suggested that it might explode. At last he wrapped his hand around it, then used it to push himself back upright.

The wind freshened. It stabbed and scraped.

Where do I go?
For a moment he considered following the footsteps back to the cave. If he could not persuade them to let him back in, perhaps at least he could steal their fire, like the story Dark Moon had told. But even with his head full of blood and broken crockery, he knew that was foolishness.

Where should he go? Shelter was the answer. He must find some place where the wind could not reach him. Then he would wait until it got warmer again.

Until it gets warmer
. It struck him as so blackly funny that he tried to laugh, but could only summon a wheezing cough.
And how long will that be? How long is an Ice Age, anyway?

He began to trudge down the hillside, each step through the deep snow a small, exhausting battle in a war he had no real hope of winning.

The moon had climbed above the tree line, and now it hung full and fat before him, dominating the sky. He did not, could not, think of what he would have done had the night been moonless. As it was, he still failed to recognize many of the treacherous deep spots in the silvery snow in time to avoid them, and each time he fell into a hole it took longer to extricate himself. He was shod in some kind of thick hide turned fur-side-in, but his feet were so cold anyway that he had begun to lose track of them some time ago. Now it seemed his legs ended several inches above his ankles. It didn't take a university education to tell him that was a bad sign.

Snow
, he thought, stumbling hip-deep in the stuff.
Too much snow
. This and other maddeningly obvious thoughts had been his companions for the last hour. It took strength to chase them away, to stay focused, and he did not have enough strength left to spare.

Snow—snow-white, snow-drop, snow-drift
. He picked up a foot—he wasn't quite sure which one—and put it down again, sinking through the crust. The wind bit at his face where the cloak sagged away from his cheeks.
Snowdrift
.

Drift was the world, all right. That was all he'd ever done. Drifted through life, drifted through school, drifted through his job at the Tate Gallery, making the same tired jokes over and over for ladies' luncheon parties. He had thought once that he would become something, be a person who made a difference. As a child, he had wrestled with the idea without even realizing it, unable to envision what that someday person would do, who that person would actually be. Now, as if some God of Underachievers had noticed his directionlessness and mandated a punishment to fit his crime, he had apparently been condemned to drift through time and space as well, like a man lost after closing time in an endless museum.

Yes, that was exactly what he had done—drifted. Even here in this cold, primitive place, with his memory returned—or most of it—he had allowed others to choose his directions. The People had dragged him from the river when he could not free himself, and had decided that he was . . . what had Runs Far said? . . . a man from the dead lands. And he had acceded, just as ineffectually full of self-pity as if someone had set down a briefcase on the last empty seat in the Underground, forcing him to stand,

Riverghost
, they called him. They were more right than they knew. Certainly everywhere he had been since this mad ride began, he had floated like a homeless spirit. And everywhere he had been, he had found himself at one point or another adrift in a river, as if it were all the same river, a perfect metaphor for his unguided life, the same river over and over. . . .

A sudden memory cut through Paul's wandering thoughts. “
They will look for you on the river
.” Someone had said that to him. Had it been a dream, one of his strange, strange dreams? No, it had been the voice from the golden crystal—in his dream it had been a singing harp, but the crystal had spoken to him here in the Ice Age. “
They will look for you on the river
,” the crystal had told him. So it was true—the river did mean something. Perhaps that was why he could not escape it.

Paul paused. Through the pain and confusion something else struck him, not a memory, but an idea. It filled him with a painful clarity that for that instant pushed everything else away. He had drifted and drifted, but no longer. If he were not to float and tumble forever like a leaf in the wind, he must take some control.

The river is where I pass from place to place
. He knew it with certainty, though the thought had not come to him until just this second.
The Looking Glass land, Mars, here—I came in from the river each time. So if I look for it
 . . .

If he looked for it, he had a direction. If he found it, things would change, and he would come closer to some sort of understanding.

He struggled to remember how the People's hunting party had traveled, tried to make sense of the moon's position, but he had never learned to do such things in his other life and felt a fraud even trying here. But he did know that water found the lowest places. He would continue downhill. He would go down, and he would get out. He would not drift. He would not drift any more.

The moon had passed most of the way across the black reaches above him, but still not far enough to suggest that dawn would be coming soon. Every step was an agony now, each surge forward coming only after he made promises to his body he doubted he could ever keep. The only solace was that he had traversed the steepest part of the hillside; as he tottered through the shrubby, snow-covered trees, the ground before him was almost level.

But even such a small slope was difficult in these conditions. Paul stopped, leaning on the spear, and thanked Birdcatcher for having stuck him with it, thereby rendering it taboo with Paul's own blood. Then he wondered if that were really so. Runs Far and Dark Moon's interpretation of what might be dangerous had resulted in Paul not being killed in the first place, and then being dumped with warm clothes and a spear. Perhaps in their own way the two of them had been trying to give him a chance.