The voice of the river becomes louder as she descends into parts of the cave where there is no further human sign. No walkways here, no blank lamps hanging from iron stanchions to mar the beauty of the great vault above her. Effortlessly she glides down the spill of petrified waterfalls, past small pools where eyeless fish swim. With a breath, she ascends sheer walls rising ten meters or more to make her way along a path along the high wall, no more than inches wide. The dust here has not been disturbed for centuries, yet she can make out the marks left by human feet along the ledge. Here the pull is exponentially stronger, and she knows in some part of her soul that the holy one whose footprints she walks in without disturbing a grain of sand came, one day long ago, from the very place where she is going.
She comes upon it suddenly, where the path ends abruptly at a fissure in the sheer wall. Like a breath of smoke she passes through it, to find herself within a geological miracle. The dome is perhaps twelve feet across, and lined from floor to apex with clear crystals. Some are slender as pencils; others as large as her forearm. Energy pulses from them to the rhythm of the water that seems to flow no more than a meter or so above, sometimes slipping lightly over its stone bed, sometimes roaring. In the center of the chamber is a stone slab perhaps a meter high. Around its sides are painted spirals, blazing suns, the forms of bear and wolf, eagle and puma. Carved into its surface are the shapes of hands, one to either side, and a hollow for the back of a human head.
Kirsten understands that it is a place of vision. She understands, too, that it is perhaps mortally perilous.
But danger is irrelevant. She approaches the slab and stretches her incorporeal body out upon it, head in the depression at one end, hands in the carved prints. She is not surprised to find them exactly to her measure.
As she lies there, the voice of the river changes, grows deeper, begins to form words. It is not any language she knows, but she understands its meaning nonetheless. It is the earth herself speaking to her—of violation, of anger, of terrible grief at the murder of her children. Images shift before her eyes so fast that she can barely keep track of them.
The terrible wound of a strip mine gouged out of the sacred Black Hills.
Forests falling to the rasp of saws and lumbering mechanical behemoths.
A yellow butterfly, last of its kind, dying in the summer sun on a strip of asphalt.
Dead buffalo lying skinned in their thousands.
Dead men and dead women, skins bronze and coppery red, lying dead and mutilated across fields of snow and grassy meadows.
A coyote with its rotting foot caught in a trap like a shark’s jaw.
And last, the world she has just left, humans slaughtered by the tens and hundreds of thousands, corpses left frozen in the snow or rotting in the heat of a tropical beach, scavenged by gulls.
And suddenly she finds herself once again on the surface of the world, in the forest now lit by a full moon. The cold does not touch her nakedness, nor the wind burn her skin. Before her stands a woman clothed in fringed buckskin worked with porcupine quills in the shape of a hummingbird across her breast, bands of turquoise and white shell circling her neck and wrists. Her long black hair drifts on the air, framing a face that is old an wrinkled and wise beyond knowing in one instant, young radiantly beautiful the next.
Kirsten folds down on her bare knees before her, wailing soundlessly. What must I do, Mother? It is too much, too much!
Of course it is too much, my daughter, the woman answers. Too much and too long. Yet you will not be alone.
I have Asi.
Him, too. The woman smiles. But not only him. See, and remember when the time is right.
The woman vanishes, and in her place stands the wolf of her dream. Its fur gleams white as the snow it stands in, and its eyes are blue flecked with gold like lapis. Above it circles a red-tailed hawk. Its hunting cry rises into the night and is answered from a half-dozen other circling shapes above. Moonlight glints off their wings like silver.
For time uncounted, Kirsten kneels in the snow looking into the wolf’s blue eyes. It regards her with a cool and level interest, nothing of hostility in it, nor of warmth either. Then it turns and trots into the thicket, followed by the cry of the hawk and the strange birds swarming above them.
And without warning, Kirsten finds herself slamming back into her body with a force that should kill her outright but somehow does not. Her sleeping form jerks once where it lies; Asimov rouses slightly with a grunt and a sound that is not quite a bark. Then he turns and lays his great head on his paws, dreaming peacefully. After that, there is only the dark and the slow, steady beat of her own heart.
5
She sleeps.
And as she sleeps, she dreams.
She is standing in a pure white vista, cold and sharp as the edge of an obsidian knife. Gone are the houses, the trees and the mountains. Gone are the animals of land and sky. The white is everything, and everywhere. Nothing and nowhere. It is the alpha, and the omega.
The bitter wind is a constant shriek, like the souls of the damned in a Hell that really has frozen over.
The tone of the shriek changes, melding, as it will in dreams, into a cry she knows well. Looking up into the vast white sky, she watches, smiling, as a dot on the horizon grows larger and larger still until it is directly overhead, gliding on the currents of the icy air.
Their eyes meet, two wild souls bound by mutual trust and respect, and with no effort at all, Koda is swept up and welcomed into the body of Cetan Tate, an old and cherished friend.
The wind is not so biting now, buffeted as it is by down and feathers. Her vision is sharpened; crisp, like a winter morning after a long spell of snow. As she flies, the mountains thrust up out of the ground, granite giants rising from their winter dens. Trees spring up and gather into communes of forestland, their tips swaying and nodding in the constant wind, speaking to each other in a language as old as time.
Recognizing the landmarks, she knows they are headed north. Land passes beneath them with incredible, heart stopping speed. Mountains rise up and fall away, at times close enough to touch, at others, seeming only a dim memory of a murky past. Forests blend, separate, change, making fanciful patterns in the virgin snow, like clouds marching slowly by on a fine summer day.
After a seeming joyful eternity, Cetan Tate circles once, a wide, looping arc, and gives a piercing cry. When Koda looks down, she recognizes the place beneath immediately. With a silent thank you to her cherished friend, she closes her eyes, and feels a sense of quiet displacement. The feeling is not one of pain, as such, but rather a sorrowful emptiness.
Till we meet again, old friend.
With another cry, the hawk is gone, winging toward the east and a rising sun.
Koda is falling.
When she lands, she knows without looking that she has assumed the form of her dream spirit.
Shugmanitu thanka.
The wolf.
She pads through the snow, a silent shadow. She takes in the beauty and stillness around her, allowing it to calm a soul far too weary for far too long. This dreaming place gives her comfort, and she soaks it up greedily, storing it deep within against the horror that has become her waking reality.
A rock altar comes gradually into view, and she sits on her haunches, waiting for the One she knows has drawn her here.
She feels it then; a warm, comforting sensation that reminds her of childhood and being wrapped by her mother in a woven woolen blanket, warm and safe and very much loved.
The Wise One appears before the stone slab and places a gnarled hand on Koda’s broad head, giving her a fond scratch behind the ears. Koda lowers her eyes in respect. The old woman laughs and tips Koda’s jaw up, and their eyes meet, shining.