I was also beginning to realize very rapidly that these events were all connected with the ongoing struggle we wanted to think finished when the war against Hitler was won.
"Do you journey back to your people?" I asked.
"I must not return empty-handed," he told me, and changed the subject, pointing and laughing with joy at a flight of geese settling in the shadowy shallows of the river. "Did you know you are being observed?" he asked almost absently as he admired the geese, graceful now in the water.
A whoop from the trees, and Ayanawatta, holding a couple of birds aloft in one hand and his bow in the other, called his pleasure. His friend could join us for breakfast.
The two men embraced. Again I was impressed by their magnetism. I congratulated myself that I was blessed with the best allies a woman could hope for. As long as their interests and mine were the same, I could do no better than go with them in what they were confident was their preordained destiny.
I waited impatiently in the hope that White Crow would again raise the subject of our being watched. Eventually, when the two had finished their manly exchanges, he pointed across the river to the north. "I myself have known you were on the river since I took the shortcut, yonder." He pointed back to where the river had meandered on its way to this spot. "They have made camp, so it is clear they follow you and no doubt wait to ambush you. It is their usual way with our people. A Pukawatchi war party. Seventeen of them. My enemies. They were chasing me, but I thought they had given up."
Ayanawatta shrugged. "We'll have a look at them later. They will not attack until they are certain of overwhelming us."
White Crow expertly plucked and cleaned the birds while I
drew up the fire. Ayanawatta washed himself thoroughly in the river, singing a song which I understood to be one of thanks for the game he had shot. He also sang a snatch or two of what was evidently a war-song. I could almost hear the drums beginning their distinctive warnings. I noticed that he kept a sideways eye on the northern horizon. Evidently the Pukawatchi were an enemy tribe.
I asked White Crow, as subtly I could, if he had ever been to an island house with two stories and had a vision there. I was trying to discover if he remembered me or Ulric. He regretted, he said, that he was completely ignorant of the events I described. Had they happened recently? He had been in the south for some while.
I told him that the events still felt very recent to me. Since there was no way of pursuing the subject, I determined to waste no more time on it. I hoped more would come clear as we traveled.
I had begun to enjoy Ayanawatta's songs and rituals. They were among the only constants in this strange world which seemed to hover at the edges of its own history. I became increasingly tolerant of his somewhat noisy habits, because I knew that in the forest he could be as quiet as a cat. As he was a naturally sociable and loquacious man, his celebratory mood was understandable.
My new friends added their share of herbs and berries to the slowly cooked meat, basting with a touch of wild honey, until it had all the subtle flavors of the best French kitchen. Like me, they knew that the secret of living in the wild was not to rough it, but to refine one's pleasures and find pleasure in the few discomforts. Ironically, if one wished to live such a life, one had to be able to kill. Ayanawatta and White Crow regarded the dealing of death as an art and a responsibility. A respected animal you killed quickly without pain. A respected enemy might suffer an altogether different fate.
I was glad to be back in the forest, even if my errand was a desperate one. A properly relaxed body needs warmth but no special softness to rest well, and cold river water is exquisite for drinking and washing, while the flavors and scents of the woods present an incredible sensory vocabulary. Already my own senses and body were adapting to a way of life I had learned to prefer as a girl, before I had become what dreamthieves call a mukhamirin, before going the way of the Great Game or making my vows of marriage and motherhood.
The multiverse depended upon chance and malleable realities. Those who explored it developed a means of manipulating those realities. They were natural gamblers, and many, in other lives, played games of skill and chance for their daily bread. I was a player in the Eternal Struggle fought between Law and Chaos and, as a "Knight of the Balance," was dedicated to maintaining the two forces in harmony.
All this I had explained as best I could to my now missing husband, whose love for me was unquestioning but whose ability to grasp the complexity and simplicity of the multiverse was limited. Because I loved him, I had chosen to accept his realities and took great pleasure from them. I added my strength to his and to that of an invisible army of individuals like us who worked throughout the multiverse to achieve the harmony which only the profoundly mad did not yearn for.
There was no doubt I felt once more in my natural element. Though fraught with anxiety for Ulric's well-being and my own ability to save him, at least for a time I knew a kind of freedom I had never dared hope to enjoy again.
Soon we were once more on the move, but this time Ayanawatta and I joined White Crow upon Bes the mammoth, with the canoe safely strapped across her broad back. There was more than enough room on her saddle, which was so full of tiny cupboards and niches that I began to realize this was almost a traveling house. As he rode, White Crow busied himself with rearranging his goods, reordering and storing. I, on the other hand, was lazily relishing the novelty of the ride. Bes's hair was like the knotted coat of a hardy hill-sheep, thick and black. Should you fall from her saddle, it would be easy to cling to her snarled coat,
which gave off an acrid, wild smell, a little like the smell of the boars who had lived around the cottage of my youth.
White Crow dismounted, preferring, he said, to stretch his legs. He had been riding for too long. He and Ayanawatta did their best not to exclude me from their conversations, but they were forced to speak cryptically and do all they could, in their own eyes, not to disturb the destiny God had chosen for them. Their magical methods were not unlike different engineering systems designed to achieve the same end and had strict internal logic in order to work at all.
While White Crow ran to spy on whoever was following us, we continued to rest on the back of the rolling monster. Ayanawatta told me that the Kakatanawa prince had been adopted into the tribe but was playing out a traditional apprenticeship. His people and theirs had long practiced this custom. It was mutually advantageous. Because he was not of their blood, White Crow could do things which they could not and visit worlds forbidden or untraversable by them.
As we moved through those lush grasslands growing on the edge of the forest, Ayanawatta spoke at length of how he wanted to serve the needs of all people, since even the stupidest human creature sought harmony yet so rarely achieved it. His quick brain, however, soon understood that he might be tiring me, and he stopped abruptly, asking if I would like to hear his flute.
Of course, I told him, but first perhaps he would listen to me sing a song of my own. I suggested we enjoy the tranquil river and the forest's whispering music, let the sounds and smells engulf us, carry us on our fateful dream-quest, and like the gentle river's rushing, draw us to the distant mountains and beyond them to that longhouse, lost among the icy wastelands where the Kakatanawa ruled. And I sang a song known as the Song of the Undying, to which he responded, echoing my melody, letting me know his quest was noble, not for self, or tribe or nation, but for the very race of Man. In his dreams the tree of all creation was threatened by a venomous dragon, waiting in angry torment, his