The Dancers of Noyo (28 page)

             
"Well, don't say I didn't warn you," Jeb answered.

             
"How did you get the fetch?" Glorious said to me.

             
"You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

             
"Um.
That was a pretty rite you and your girl did with the knife."

             
I raised my eyebrows. So he'd been looking! The Jenner people seemed to have a talent for watching unobserved. I wondered where he'd been watching from. Well, neither Franny nor I was especially modest physically. "Yeah," I answered evenly.

             
"Real pretty.
A lot better than all that stuff with the fetch. I can't think why our Dancer wants it so much. The thing makes me uncomfortable. Jeb feels the same way about it, don't you, Jeb?"

             
"You talk too much," said Jeb. "I'm not afraid of it."

             
"Oh, dry up, Jeb. All you do is tell me not to talk. What was that stuff you said about 'covenants' when you cut the cord with the paring knife?"

             
I considered. "I'm not quite sure myself," I said after a moment. "The words just seemed to come into my mind. When I said it, I had the feeling that it referred to the future."

             
"Interesting," said Glorious judicially.
"Very interesting."
He was trying to sound older than he was. "It
sounds like some sort of magic, doesn't it?
"

             
"
I suppose so," I answered.

             
"Covenants," Glorious repeated thoughtfully. "Maybe we need something like that. Are you a medicine man?
"

             
"
Uh-huh."

             
"I've often wondered whether
I
have any talent in that direction." He gave a modest cough.

             
People say this kind of thing to me rather frequently, and it always embarrasses me. "It's perfectly possible you have," I said. "There's nothing very exotic about it."

             
Thus encouraged, Glorious told me quite a lot about himself. He'd always wanted to see visions, thought it would be wonderful to help people and work for the good of the tribe, etc. etc. I listened fairly sympathetically, though I couldn't help thinking that a lot of his interest in medicine-manning stemmed from his frustrations with the girls. Jeb had left off trying to shut us up.

             
It was now quite dark. Franny had got up and gone to the window. "What's that light?" she said suddenly.

             
I saw the fetch, quite diaphanous but outlined in pale blue light, floating eight or ten feet above the ground and rising slowly toward our window.

             
"Go 'way," Franny said to it in a choking voice. "Go somewhere else, you nasty, nasty thing." I felt she was frowning fiercely and compressing her lips.

             
The fetch turned head-over-heels, came through the glass of the window, reversed itself, and went out through the wall into the hall. I heard a stifled gasp from somebody, probably Jeb.

             
Franny was muttering something. It must have had some effect on the fetch's behavior, for after a moment Jeb said in a trembling voice, "I have to go to the latrine.
Got to take a leak.
Maybe a crap."

             
"Oh, sure, go on, Jeb," Glorious said in a slightly less tremulous voice, though only slightly so. "Get out and go to the can before it touches you again. It's awfully wet."

             
I heard Jeb's feet, not quite running, in the hall. "He's gone," Glorious said, "and I'll bet he doesn't come back tonight. Now we can talk better. Can you get rid of that thing, though? When it touches me, it feels so wet."

             
"I can try," Franny said. It was the first time she had spoken to him. Once more she muttered. Glorious sighed, so deeply that I could hear him through the door. "That's better," he said. "Thanks."

             
"You were talking about being a medicine man," I prompted.

             
"Oh. Well, another thing I think would be nice about it would be having all that power."

             
I thought of my actual limitation, and grimaced. "The object isn't getting power, especially," I said.

             
"Oh, I suppose not, but—"

             
"I could do a preliminary test on you," I said, "but we'd have to be on the same side of the door for me to do it."

             
"I
couldn't do that
...
Well, if you'd promise you wouldn't try to escape—"

             
His voice was uncertain and nervous.

             
"I
promise we won't leave unless we have your free permission," I said. I was .beginning to have hopes of Glorious.
"On my youth initiation word of honor."

             
"OK." There was the click of the lock, and the door opened. The hall was quite dark except for the light of a candle—home-dipped, I thought—burning in an abalone shell on the floor.

             
I got the copper disk from my medicine bag and had Glorious look in it. "We're going to share a dream," I said. I began describing to him, in soft, simple phrases, what it had been like to be Alice the cadaver. He listened, breathing shallowly. Actually, he was in a light hypnotic sleep. His knees began to buckle. I had him sit down against the wall. Franny was a silhouette against the weak light of the candle.

             
I kept on with my description. He was sighing heavily. I put my right hand over his eyes, pressing with my thumb and third finger against his temples, and I changed from the account of my experiences as Alice to a morbid vision of the two of us suffocating under layers
—
slabs—of pale flesh slimy with beginning decay. It was straight out of Poe, and it almost made me
sick
myself, but it was very effective. Glorious was wriggling like an eel.

             
I let him go. He stopped threshing around. Then he drew a deep breath, and coughed. "
Brrr
!" he said. "That was awful. Are all medicine man dreams that bad?"

             
"Oh, no, but you have to go through a number of bad ones." (Pomo Joe had never put me through anything as bad as the rotting flesh one, but I wanted to impress Glorious.) "... I think you could be a medicine man, yes, if you wanted to work at it."

             
"I'm not sure I do," he answered, getting shakily to his feet. "But you must have a lot of power." It was the second time he had mentioned power.

             
"What would you use power for if you had it?" I asked.

             
The light was poor, but he seemed to be blushing, literally and actually blushing. "You, you, unh, ever make, make charms for people?" he asked with difficulty.

             
"Sometimes.
What kind of a charm?" I was pretty sure I knew, but I wanted to be sure.

             
"To make girls—" Here Glorious stuck, seeming to think that he'd said enough. He looked at me imploringly.

             
"Oh, that kind of-a charm.
Well, I can't make one for you now. I haven't the materials. But I promise solemnly to get a first-rate charm to you, something to make you popular with the girls and people generally, within a week after we get to Bodega. I promise as a medicine man, as well as on my youth initiation word of honor. Of course,
I'll
have to get to Bodega first."

             
His face lit up, but he hesitated. "I'm not supposed ... Would the charm really work?"

             
"Of course.
I make good charms. Meantime, find an older woman who likes you and tell her all about yourself. Tell her your troubles and the things you're anxious about." I figured that if he could get himself seduced the charm would be quite sufficient to make him OK with all the girls he could handle.

             
"Thanks," he said,
"thanks."
He was
smiling
almost as happily as if he already had the charm and the girl—or girls—he wanted, "Come around to the back of the hotel," he went on. "We don't want anybody to see you leaving. Your bike's parked on the far side of the dance circle." He led the way.

             
"Will you get into any trouble for letting us go?" Fran asked softly. We were picking our way over the piles of rubble by the uncertain light of the candle.

             
Glorious shrugged. "Not too much. I may get a lashing, because our Dancer will be disappointed. But he's not a cruel man. I'll tell him that I let you out to go to the toilet, and that the fetch tried to strangle me then. The Dancer knows the fetch is scary. Jeb will back me
up
—
Glorious, I thought, had at least one attribute of a successful medicine man: he was good at thinking up convincing lies.

             
We got to the dance circle—deserted now, under a waning moon—and found the bike. We got astride it. Farewells were said. Glorious reminded me once more about the charm. A few moments later we were rolling down Highway One toward Bodega.

             
Bodega was not many miles distant. I began to allow myself to hope. Franny coughed. "Don't look around," she said in a rather odd voice, "but
I
think the fetch is following us."

-

             
The fetch had had nothing to do with our capture. It had gone floating off into the night a little while after Franny had mentioned it. But a mile and a half below Jenner we had run into six Avengers, on their way back from Bodega. There had been a wild chase back up Highway One; since my bike was carrying two, we were quickly overtaken. It made me sick now to think how close we had been to Bodega and freedom.

             
The Avengers had taken us to Gualala, the terminus of the Grail Journey. There, after a long confab with the local Dancer, we had been stashed in the sweathouse. Our hands and feet had
been tied together, and we had been gagged, though the gags weren't very tight. Franny was sitting opposite me. Her long ha
ir
was in her eyes, and she kept tossing her head to try to get it out of the way. Looking at her, I felt a vivid regret for our initial continence toward each other. It had seemed well-motivated at the time; we hadn't known each other very
well,
and there'd always been some immediate danger. But now I regretted every moment that I'd been with her and hadn't been between her legs.

             
We were to be tried. I suppose simply shooting us would have been a little too raw, even for Avengers, in
view of all the publicity their continued pursuit of us had caused. Or maybe they wanted to make examples of us.

             
I wondered what the charge would be. Endangering the comfort and security of the Mallo Pass Dancers? Whatever they got us on, the trial was certain to be rigged. I had very little hope of surviving it.

             
Franny had stopped tossing her head back and seemed to have gone to sleep. Her motionlessness didn't impress me as quite natural. It reminded me of how still she had been when she had lain in O'Hare's love trap at Point Arena.