The Book of Dreams (23 page)

The drums were beating faster. Or was it her heart pounding?

She let out a cry.

No longer in the canoe with the
coureurs de bois
, she was airborne in the spirit boat. High above the ground, she was flying like an arrow into the heart of the storm. Below was the rushing torrent of river, above was the tempest.

Kneeling amidships, Dana was the only human aboard and the only one paddling. Behind her, astern, was the gray wolf that was
grand-père
; ahead, in the bow was the black. He turned around to look at her. His golden gaze was somber.

“Jean,” she whispered, and her heart lifted.

He turned back to stare ahead into the storm.

Dana felt strengthened by the presence of the wolves as well as the two others who had joined them. The great black ravens perched on the gunwales on either side of her. She wasn’t alone as she flew into the darkness to face her enemy.

The attack was sudden and horrific. On the winds of the storm came the most terrifying creatures, screeching and chattering like nightmarish gulls. They appeared to be human skeletons with some organs still intact—the tongues, windpipes, and lungs that allowed them to scream. Their voices were dreadful to hear. Swooping down like vultures, they rushed at the canoe. Dana felt faint. Each time they dove near, it took all her willpower not to jump overboard.

One of the ravens cawed at Dana, then lighted on her shoulder. A familiar voice sounded in her ear as Grandfather spoke.

“They are hungry ghosts. Bag o’ Bones we call them. They live in the clouds. In the fall, when the wild geese leave and the winds and the snows come, you can hear them in the treetops as they chatter and cry. From the northwest they come, out of the lands of Hudson Bay. To the southeast they go, deep into Labrador. Your enemy has called them. Darkness will go to darkness.”

The great raven spread his wings and flew into the sky. The other raven that was Roy followed after. With sharp beaks they pecked at the skeletons, with talons they clawed them, and with strong wings they beat them back. The screeches of the creatures were deafening. The ravens cawed. Black feathers fluttered, white bones rattled.

Dana fought back her horror as she realized what was happening. Once again, Grandfather and Roy were buying her time. She had work to do. She must name her enemy.

“I know the name he goes by,” she thought wildly. “It’s Crowley.”

But she already suspected that the name had been stolen, along with the life of the man who owned it. So this was a new name on an old evil to cloak the truth.

Now the storm clouds parted like a black veil above her. Over the beat of the drums came the sound that Dana had come to dread, even as the metallic smell soured the air. The buzzing noise drilled through her brain. All ability to reason or reflect was lost. Panic choked her.

“Be of good courage,” came Grandfather’s voice. “When all is lost, grab hold of the truth.”

And suddenly she understood. Here, be it dream or other world, nothing could hide. She was about to see her enemy as he really was.

The ragged shape took form in the air, a greenish, writhing mist. Inside the clammy mass wavered Crowley’s tortured features. Then another human face flickered briefly. A slash of red streaked through the green. Shocked, Dana recognized her enemy from the time she had quested in the Irish mountains: the monster who killed her wolfguardian!

“I know who you are!” she cried out, though every part of her reeled with the knowledge. “You’re the shadow of the Destroyer!”

The green cloud exploded, sending out shock waves of air and water.

The spirit canoe was thrown into a tailspin. Capsized in midair, Dana was flung out.

She was falling

falling

into the country far below.

Free of the waspish noise, she could feel her mind expanding with the view.

A great river wound across the land like a cold white serpent scaled with ice.
Dehcho.
All around the river, the land slept beneath a blanket of snow, frozen muskeg laced with small lakes. The ground bristled with dark fir. As far as the eye could see was a vast terrain of ice, snow, frost, and cold.

• • •

Mon pays ce n’est pas un pays, c’est l’hiver.

(My country is not a country, it’s winter.)

• • •

Her free fall was slow and oneiric. A dream of flying, not falling. Slowly she grew aware of a pattern in the flow of ice on the water. Was it deliberate? The ice seemed to speak in the way it moved. Now she sensed the same message in the creep of moss over frost-shattered stone. What could it mean? Who was speaking to her? Something moved in the east. She strained to see it. Like a line of spilled ink it came trailing through the snow.
La Foule.
The Throng. The mass migration of the caribou, a flowing river of the wild reindeer’s run. They too seemed to say something in the way they ran, their grand movement a cipher inscribed on the earth.

Here was a script far older than any mankind had invented. The secret language of the land. This was the heart of the message in her journey. If only she could read it! What was it telling her?

Now she was falling into a dark rug of land pitted with lakes. She recognized the forest where she and Jean had landed in the spirit boat. The treetops quivered with Bag o’ Bones like ragged crows. When they came flying at her, screeching and chattering, she fell right through them. She could see the clearing where the Medicine Lodge stood. It looked so tiny, like an anthill in life’s forest. She looked for Jean and Roy, but she was falling too fast. Everything was a blur.

With a thump, she landed inside her own body, back in the tent, beside the Medicine Wheel where Grandfather was drumming. Was the journey over? Her heart sank. She had named her enemy but she hadn’t found what she was looking for.

The drum was still beating. She took encouragement from that.

“I won’t leave the wheel till I find the answer!”

As she sent her cry out into the universe, she opened her eyes to gaze on the Medicine Wheel. The deerskin, which she now realized was caribou, bore markings she hadn’t noticed before. She was surprised to see the chevrons and spirals. They were the same designs carved on the ancient stones of Ireland and the portals of Faerie.

Grandfather’s drum was sounding a new beat. Low and chthonic it came from deep in the earth, from the heart’s core. Stronger magic was being made.

Dana’s head throbbed. She could hardly breathe. Swirls of tobacco smoked the air. She was getting closer, she could feel it.

The markings on the Medicine Wheel began to quiver. They looked like stars spiraling in a galaxy. No, like birds in flight, high in the atmosphere. Or were they clouds racing across the sky? She kept her eyes on the designs as they played over the deerskin. She had seen these patterns only a short while ago, in the ice and the moss and the wild run of the caribou. She struggled to understand them, to decipher their code. If she could read the patterns, she would have the answer.

“
Roth Mór an tSaoil
,” she murmured. “This is the great wheel of Life.
My
life.”

Suddenly the pieces fitted together. They made the shape of a book.

“The Book of Dreams!” she cried, reaching out to grasp it.

But before she could touch it, the book fell open and the pages of white paper fluttered like wings. They flew upward in a flurry of white leaves, white feathers. Whitewinged birds were swirling around the tent, around Dana’s head. They sang in a beautiful tongue, a language she didn’t know, though it was strangely familiar. Painfully so. Her ears ached to hear the words. Her heart longed to understand them.

She caught the gist of what they were singing, something about a Promise and a Faraway Country.

Tears filled her eyes. The song was so grand, so beautiful, so true.

And now another marvel in that marvelous journey. She was so taken by surprise, she let out a cry. The caribou hide suddenly leaped to its feet, a great wild deer with antlers branching. It still bore the designs of the Medicine Wheel on its flanks. For one quivering moment, it stood there paralyzed, nostrils flared, eyes wild with terror. Then it bounded out of the Lodge and into the night.

Dana didn’t stop to think. She jumped to her feet and chased after it.

Outside the tent, she paused at the sight of Jean and Roy. They stood guard by the fire, watching the trees around them. They didn’t appear to see her, but
grandpère
hunkered down and growled low in his throat.

“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”
Jean asked him.

But Dana was already away, racing into the trees, after the caribou.

At first she thought she was a wild deer herself, running on four legs with speed and agility.
Hind’s feet in high places.
But she didn’t feel like a deer. She felt savage and ferocious, propelled by a hunger that raged through her blood. She was beginning to realize what she was when she saw the others, running alongside her. Hair bristling gray and black, they streaked through the trees: two fierce wolves with fiery eyes. She was hunting in a pack with
grand-père
and Jean! Above the treetops, cawing loudly, were the birds known to hunt with wolves, two black ravens.

Dana’s blood was afire. She could smell her prey, smell its fear and its death. In the heel of the hunt, it all made sense. The deer was the answer, the secret she sought. She had to pursue it, to track it down, to eat and drink it.

Both were caught, the Hunter and the Hunted, on the Great Wheel of Life.

The trees began to thin out. Dana was gaining on her quarry. She could hear it panting. There were flecks of foam on its flanks. Her heart almost burst with the strain of the chase. It was just ahead of her now. Something huge and nameless, but she could almost name it. Something on the tip of her tongue, at the edges of her vision, in the back of her mind. She was approaching the answer.

The deer ran into a clearing. The mists of morning rose from the ground like the breath of the earth. A fire had been lit. An early breakfast was being cooked. There were figures seated around the fire, faint shapes barely visible like trails of sunlight. They turned at the sound of her arrival.

She couldn’t see them clearly. They were already being dispelled, all flickering and flashing and fluttering in the air, a spray of white feathers, white leaves, white pages.

“Please!” she cried. “Don’t leave me! Tell me!”

Boom! Boom! Boom!

The drum was loud and rapid. Like someone hammering on the door, banging to be let in. She knew it was Grandfather calling her back from the journey, calling her home.

“No, wait!” she cried. “I’ve almost got it! I’m almost there!”

Her wail quickly changed to a howl when the caribou suddenly crashed out of the trees. Antlers lowered, it charged at Dana. She didn’t stop to fight. She turned and ran, back through the woods the way she had come.

The Great Wheel had turned. It was her time to be hunted, her turn to feel the terror of the stalker, Death.

Ears flattened against her head, eyes white with fear, she fled the thunder of the hooves behind her. At any moment the horns could impale her.

With a final gasp of desperation, she broke from the trees where the Medicine Lodge stood and flung herself through the door into the tent.

The drum was silent.

She opened her eyes.

Grandfather was rolling up his bundle. The air was thick with stale smoke.

“I was so close!” she sobbed. “I almost had the answer!”

There was no time for tears or regrets. No time for reflection. The tent was shaking violently. The ropes that bound it together were coming undone. The hide was flapping against the framework. The poles strained and snapped. Things were falling apart.

“What is it?” Dana said, though she had already guessed.

Grandfather finished wrapping his bundle. He stood up. A storm was raging outside the Lodge. Gusts of wind battered the tent. The cry of the gale grew louder, moved closer.

The Old Man’s eyes were dark.

“Your enemy is here.”

O
utside the tent, the three guardians were still on duty. The fire had gone out in the lashing rain. The ground was being churned into an icy sludge. Both Jean and Roy were drenched, while
grand-père
’s fur clung to his skin. Each time the wind gusted, all three were whipped with streaks of water, like cat-o’-nine-tails. Heedless of their misery, they stayed at their posts.

“Home!” Grandfather shouted as thunder rumbled in the distance.

They all ran for the jeep and piled inside. Though morning had broken, the storm darkened the air. Trees tossed and swayed in threatening motions around them. Trunks creaked, branches snapped. As soon as Roy attempted to move the vehicle, the wheels spun vainly, spewing up snow and ice and mud. The storm was pitched to a frenzy. Lightning raked the sky. Peals of thunder crashed above.
Grand-père
buried his head in his paws with a whine of pain. The wheels continued to spin.