Moon-Flash (30 page)

Worn out, he fell asleep beside the still figure under the dark cloud of feathers. Even in his sleep, he found himself talking to the Healer, explaining why nothing had been prepared yet for the burial.

Nara’s coming,
he said.
She’ll know what to do. You see, I don’t know what to do, I don’t know anything.
You left without telling me anything. But when she comes, everything will be done as it should be.

It will be good to see her again,
the Healer said peacefully.
Tell her I said that.
His voice seemed to come from two places: from beneath the shadow of feathers and from beside Terje, just out of eyesight, as if the Healer sat once more at his own firebed, sipping tea while Terje slept.

I will,
Terje promised.

You see,
the Healer said.
Nothing was really lost, was it? The world dreams itself. The rituals are preserved. They aren’t lost; they’re simply in a different place within the dream.

But how can I chant to the Moon?
Terje pleaded.
Make me understand that. The Moon-Flash is just—

The Moon-Flash.
There was a soft sound, as if a teacup had been placed on the ground.
Why are you so afraid? What have I said to make you so afraid?

I can’t become you,
Terje said to the dark.
I know too much, and I don’t know enough. I can’t dream for anyone—

You love the Riverworld,
Icrane said simply.
That’s enough for the Riverworld.

But—

Now you sound like Kyreol.

Kyreol. She won’t come here. I won’t leave her.

Terje,
the Healer said gently.
Stop worrying. Here. Drink this tea. You’ll feel better.

He stretched out his hand, not toward the firebed, but toward the motionless feathers.
Dream,
the Healer said from beneath them.
Dream
 . . . The feathers
swirled over his eyes, settled over him, covered him with their airy darkness.
I’m dead,
he thought. Then:
No, I’m Icrane.

I’m Terje.

I’m a bird.

Flying between the River and the Moon, he saw the simple silver curve of water away from the Face that was the Riverworld. He felt such a confusion of love and fear for it that he reached down, picked the River up, held it protectively. The water flowed in and out of his grasp; he felt its endless life and strength. With his other hand, he reached toward the full moon . . .

He woke, blinking. The house was grey with dawn. The world outside was silent, still asleep. He sat up, looked down at his hands as if he expected to find the river still in them.

His lips parted. “They should be there,” he whispered. “They should be . . .” He stood up, still half-asleep, enveloped in dreams, and soft feathers, not daring yet to think. He searched the Healer’s pots until he found his paints.

He had painted the Moon-Flash on one hand and the River on the other, and he was painting his face, using a bowl of water for a mirror, when the light from the rising sun falling in the doorway was blocked and he couldn’t see. He looked up.

They stared back at him: Regny in his feathers, Nara in a dark flightsuit. He felt the blood leave his face suddenly beneath the paint.
It’s wrong,
he thought at their expressions.
I’m doing it wrong—

“Terje?” Nara said. Her voice shook. He rose
silently. There were black and white birds on his cheeks and a long stroke of fire across his forehead. Beneath the fire was his sign: Three Rocks. Beneath the signs, his skin was a mask of white paint.

He couldn’t speak. She took a step toward him. He held out his palms, half in explanation, half out of a need for confirmation.
I am the Healer,
the signs said, and Nara stopped.

“Terje,” she said very softly. “This is correct. I don’t—” She stopped to swallow. “I don’t understand how you knew. You may have two people to help you: one man, one woman. You sent for me. You do not speak until you begin the ritual chant.”

He closed his eyes, felt himself tremble. But the time to think was later, later. When he opened his eyes again, Nara knelt beside Icrane’s body, her hand lightly smoothing the feathers, over and over, that covered his hand.

*

STEP BY STEP, like someone walking an ancient, well-worn path, so familiar underfoot the walker was scarcely aware of it, Terje performed the ritual of the Burial of the Healer.

He finished painting himself, in the silence of the sunlit house. Nara handed him the colors he needed. She didn’t speak; the colors spoke for themselves, formed shapes in his mind, which he painted on his face, his wrists, his feet. The entire Riverworld waited patiently beyond the door, trusting him beyond question to know what he was doing. Finally he rinsed
his fingers in the water and stood up. Nara set the bowl aside.

He looked down at the hidden figure on the pallet. Nara waited behind him. Regny sat like a statue in a corner, observing, his eyes never leaving Terje’s face. The feathers seemed to rustle under Terje’s gaze. He lifted his arms suddenly, straight out from his sides, and Nara, beyond questioning herself, gathered the black mantle of feathers up and settled it over Terje’s shoulders.

The Healer’s body lay exposed, smaller and frailer than Terje remembered. He glanced around quickly, feathers stroking his face. Nara waited until he recognized what he was searching for: the long, worn carpet, plain but for the Healer’s sign woven into its center, that the Healer had sat on, year after year, while he explained dreams and brewed his teas.

He bent, but Regny anticipated him. Moving swiftly, urgently, as if he too had become, for a time, completely absorbed into the Riverworld, he lifted the carpet, shook ashes and a scattering of tea leaves out of it, and handed it to Terje, who laid it carefully over Icrane’s body, giving it back its privacy.

Terje’s shoulders loosened; he sighed softly. For a few moments he stood without moving, an awesome figure in light, wearing a dead-white mask patterned with signs, cloaked from shoulder to sole in black feathers. His mind walked for him: out of the house, up the River, toward the Face. But that was wrong, he sensed. The Healer’s body should be in a boat.

A boat poled upriver? But the river current quickened toward the Face, became shallow, furious.

Downriver?

But there was no place of mystery downriver for a Healer to be taken to, except the wide, unnamed mystery beyond Fourteen Falls.

Then he knew. It was, as the Healer had said, simple.

The dead Healer was given back to the River. It was for the new Healer to make the journey, on foot, to the Face.

He turned, looked outside. Icrane’s small boat bobbed at its mooring a foot beyond the bank. Things fluttered in it: feathers, late-blooming flowers, small gifts tied and weighted with nuts or shells.

He swallowed a burning in his throat, a looming wonder. They knew . . . as he knew. Looking back into the house, he saw Nara’s eyes, wide and glistening with tears. Her expression shook him; he looked away from her quickly, not wanting to become aware of himself.

“The body must be placed in the boat,” she said softly to Regny, for Terje had already moved, in his mute certainty, to the head of the pallet.

Regny nodded briefly. His face looked grim, rock-hard, but he moved like a man in a dream, like Terje, not permitting himself to think. They tucked the white carpet around the body, then lifted the pallet. It came up easily; they carried it out into the morning.

The silence, Terje sensed, from the boats had a stunned feel to it; not even a baby cried. Only the wind spoke; the Riverworld people might have been ghosts viewing the face of their new Healer. Then
Nara appeared, another ghost, the Healer’s vanished wife, dressed strangely in black, wading into the River to pull the boat close. Terje and Regny laid the covered figure into it gently on its bed of gifts. Then Terje stood still again, his eyes caught by the bareness of the carpet.

Something . . . needed to be there at the Healer’s feet.

Something simple.

He went back into the house and the entire Riverworld focused its attention on the empty doorway. He reappeared finally, carrying the Healer’s teapot.

Nara’s face broke into a smile beneath her tears. Terje laid the pot gently between the Healer’s feet. Then he looked at her, waiting. She was the Healer’s wife. Her gift would lie on his breast.

She already held it in her hands: the star of the Healer’s dream, the voice that had led Kyreol out of the Riverworld. She put it between the hands folded beneath the carpet: the com-crystal, catching light like a tear.

The boats began to separate. Slowly, easing back, away from each other, they were poled toward the opposite bank to form a long, long line that began opposite the Healer’s threshold and ended somewhere out of sight. The drifting and maneuvering took time. At last, as the sun crept higher above the trees, the River people passed a stillness up the line from boat to boat. They waited.

Terje, his eyes stinging drily, loosed the mooring line and stepped back.

The River took the boat slowly, little by little,
tugging it lightly away from the bank. It caught on a snag; the water coaxed it free. Its prow swung uncertainly, then steadied. For a long time they watched. A leaf drifted into the boat, clung to the carpet. A bird darted low over it. The River took a firmer hold of it, drew it into midwater, into its slow, deep currents. It began to glide silently past the boats. The strange figure on the shore, the new Healer, masked with signs and mantled in darkness, broke his silence.

The chant was simple: a plea to the River to accept the greatest gift of the Riverworld, its Healer. It was picked up by the people; they spoke it softly, in a wind-murmur, as the boat drifted downriver. It held its course steadily, unwaveringly. Terje had a sudden image of all the Healers from the world’s beginning, whose spirits dwelled within the River, reaching up with their hands to guide it. Then he saw Icrane himself, as he had been in life, steering the little boat placidly through the currents, making his own journey into the mysterious world beyond the River.

The vision of Icrane turned into a shaft of sunlight. Terje stirred, no longer able to see anything but the painted stern and the calm parting of water behind it. As he moved, he felt his own body, too warm under the feathers and the stiff, uncomfortable mask of paint on his face.

He knelt down at the River’s edge, needing to remove the mask, needing to become Terje again. For a moment he saw himself as Regny and Nara had seen him: a man with a face out of no world they had ever seen or would ever see.

He splashed water over his face quickly, again and
again, until the moon and the fire and the river disappeared, and the last of the white paint washed away. As he stood up, he let the cloak of feathers fall to his feet. The River people still chanted, but they watched him, and he saw the smiles on their faces at him, Terje, who had returned to take his place in the Riverworld.

He drew a quick breath, torn, panicked, and whispered his own plea: “Kyreol.”

Then Nara was embracing him, and his fear eased at her touch. He looked at her, dazed, bewildered, while she said huskily, “Terje, thank you. Thank you for bringing me back. For preserving the peace of the Riverworld. For all you did for Icrane in his last hours that I would never have had the courage to do.”

“I told him you would be coming. He said—he said to tell you it would be good to see you again.”

Her hold slackened; she stared at him. “When?”

He shook his head a little, remembering. “After he died. I’m sorry—I only dreamed it.”

She was mute a moment, amazed. Then she took his arm. “Come into the house where we can talk.”

“I can’t. I can’t, yet.”

“Ah.” She nodded. “I forgot that part”. Then her voice dwindled to a whisper. “Terje, how did you know? Who taught you the ritual?”

“Just—it was just there.” His eyes went past her to Regny, as if he might hold some key to understanding. But there was only wonder in his eyes.

“The Riverworld,” Regny said softly. “Year upon year, century upon century of rituals spoken, woven
into the fabric of a small place—trees, the birds, the river itself must know them by now.”

“I suppose so,” Terje said. He felt his body tugged toward the Face; his mind had already begun to walk the trail toward the Falls, toward some secret place, a Healer’s place he would not know until he came to it. “I have to go. Please,” he begged them. “Wait for me. Don’t leave yet.”

“We’ll be here,” Nara promised, “when you return.”

He nodded, mute again, calmed by the promise, and turned away from them to the Face.