The little man grinned. “This is the first time that you’ve met me, but not the first time that I’ve met you. That’s how I know!”
“And besides,” he added before Sara could ask him to explain that curious statement, “under everything else you’re thinking, you’re always thinking of him.”
And so she was. It bothered her, this fixation she had about the harper. Why was it that she couldn’t keep him out of her thoughts?
“Maybe you love him.”
“Maybe I do,” she said, though it seemed to have happened very suddenly. Maybe that was the way it happened in magic lands—in the Otherworld. She was certainly attracted to him as she’d never been before to anyone else. Maybe he’d put a spell on her. . . .
“What’s your name?” she asked the little man.
“Pukwudji.”
Sara smiled. “It suits you.”
“It should, as it’s my own.”
“My name’s Sara.”
“I know,” Pukwudji said and grinned.
Well, we’ll let that pass, Sara thought. “Are you quin’on’a?” she asked.
The little man shrugged. “I am what I am.”
Sara had to smile as a picture of Popeye came into her head. Pukwudji frowned as he caught the image.
“Not me,” he said. “A honochen’o’keh I am—one of Kitche Manitou’s little mysteries. When Grandmother Toad first smiled, I was there. I am always alone, but never on my own. The otter is my friend, and the heron. I run with the fox and sleep in the badger’s sett. I am Pukwudji and all the world is my home.”
Sara laughed. “And what are you doing here?”
“Here?” Pukwudji looked about himself with exaggerated care. Then leaning forward, he said in a stage whisper: “I’ve come to see if you’ll walk with me.”
“Where to?”
“Anywhere.” He pointed to a pine that stood taller than the others on the ridge behind the quin’on’a village. “There.”
“Okay,” Sara said. “Let’s go.”
“And as we walk,” Pukwudji added, bouncing to his feet, “I’ll tell you a secret.”
“A secret? About what?”
“Not yet, not yet. First we walk, then we talk, hey?”
Her curiosity piqued, her heart feeling lighter than it had in ages, Sara scrambled to her feet.
“Lead on, MacDuff,” she said.
“Pukwudji MacDuff,” he said. “That’s me, hey?”
He did a cartwheel, landed with a thump, and turned to face her. From a hidden place amongst the stones, he brought out a small reed flute and tootled a quick tune on it before sticking it in his belt. “Don’t forget your music-maker,” he said.
Sara shrugged and picked up her guitar case. “And now?” she asked.
“Now we walk, hey?”
“Now we walk, hey!” she agreed, and followed him up the hill.
It was dark and smoky inside the lodge and it took Kieran a few moments to adjust his eyes to the dim light. Looking to Ha’kan’ta for guidance, he sat down cross-legged in the place she indicated and looked around himself. Sins’amin had taken a seat across from the fire that burned in the center of the lodge, ranking herself between the four silent figures who were already there. From the reed mat in front of her, she lifted a wooden mask carved in the semblance of a bear’s features, and slipped it on.
“It is because of the bear totem,” Ha’kan’ta explained in a soft voice, “that this tribe of the quin’on’a are so close in spirit to my own people, the rathe’wen’a, and so we are all kin to the Great Mother’s spiritual vitality—sen’fer’sra. Something-in-movement. That is what your craftfather has termed your ‘taw.’ ”
While the council sat silently communing with each other, she gave him the names of the other elders. To the left, in the long mask of a moose with spring antlers, was Hoth’ans, Elk-Sister, who was the tribe’s Creator. On her left, wearing a shorter mask decorated with a doe’s small horns, was Shin’sa’fen, She-Who-Drums-Healing, the tribe’s Healer. On Sins’amin’s right was a broad-shouldered man in the mask of a wolf. His name was Tep’fyl’in, Red-Spear-of-the-Wind, and he was the tribe’s War Chief. Lastly, in the mask of a heron, was Ko’keli, Lake-Wise, who was the tribe’s Shaper.
By the knee of each elder was a small drum. Lying across their knees were totem sticks. Ko’keli’s was bound with blue feathers. Hoth’ans’s had a length of curved bone carved with ideographs. Tep’fyl’in’s was a tomahawk with wolf claws twined in the leather where the shaft was attached to the head of the small axe. Shin’sa’fen held a length of polished birch, hung with bone beads and three white feathers. Sins’amin’s knees were bare, but around the brow of her mask was a headband of bear’s claws.
The firelight flickered on the crudely carved and painted features of the masks. There was a sensation of power in the air, as though an invisible presence had settled among them. As the inner silence of his taw flooded him, Kieran found that the masks took on life, as though he faced a council of the beasts that the masks represented.
Shin’sa’fen tossed a handful of crushed bark onto the fire. The flames leaped up, two feet high, then settled down. Ko’keli in her heron mask took up her drum and began to tap out a soft rhythm.
“Kieranfoy,” Sins’amin said, “craftson of the spirit-waker Toma’heng’ar. We will hear you speak.”
Kieran glanced at Ha’kan’ta and she nodded encouragingly to him. He swallowed dryly and tried to think of where he should begin. He wanted a cigarette very badly. In fact, given his druthers, he wanted to be anywhere else except here, trapped in some Otherworld, Mother Mary only knew where, surrounded by beings that his own mentor had warned him against angering, trying to explain why he wanted to put an end to someone they already thought was dead. Someone further whose memory they appeared to hold in high esteem. He wiped his brow, then clasped his hands together on his lap to stop them from trembling.
What right did they have to demand this of him anyway? Power, he supposed. He was in their power.
“No,” one of the masked figures said.
Kieran looked up to see it was Ko’keli who spoke. Her heron mask dipped as she acknowledged his attention.
“Not by the right of power,” she said, “but by right of kinship. Taliesin Redhair was drum-brother to A’wa’rathe, who in turn was our brother-in-blood. Just as your own craftfather is.” Her fingers continued to tap out a rhythm on her drum, low and insistent.
“We would know,” Tep’fyl’in added, fingering his tomahawk, “what war there is between our drum-brothers.”
“How can there be war when Taliesin drums in the Place of Dreaming Thunder?” Hoth’ans in the moose mask murmured. She picked up her own drum, adding a counterpoint rhythm to Ko’keli’s.
“Let him speak,” Sins’amin said.
The others inclined their heads and the masked faces turned back to regard Kieran, eyes glittering bright in their slitholes. Kieran swallowed again, then began to relate in a husky voice all that Tom had told him of Taliesin and Maelgwn’s druid and the troubles that had begun on Gwynedd’s shores.
“Pinta’wa sleeps,” Pukwudji said.
Sara looked down at the lake and nodded. They were sitting on a carpet of pine needles, under the tall pine tree that topped the ridge behind the village, and for the moment she’d put all her troubles aside. It wasn’t hard to do in Pukwudji’s company.
“I suppose it does,” she said lazily.
The simple walk to the pine tree had been lengthened by the roundabout route the little man had chosen that entailed as much cavorting and impromptu dancing as it had walking. Never one to be overly dignified herself, Sara had fallen in with his mood, laughing at his antics, racing to catch up with him, then running back to pick up her fallen guitar case and hurrying to catch up again.
Pukwudji grinned at her response. “Pinta’wa’s always sleeping, hey? Except in a storm,” he added. “Then she rises and speaks with anger against the shore.” H
e scratched his chin. “Sometimes I wonder if that anger comes because she is confined and the storm reminds her of that.”
“You were going to tell me a secret,” Sara reminded him.
“I was. I will. Watch.”
Rolling up the sleeves of his buckskin shirt and looking like some stage magician, he brushed away pine needles until he’d uncovered a small bit of earth. He dug a shallow hole in the ground, then cupped his hands over it. He blew across his hands and, when he opened them slightly, water began to trickle from his empty palms, filling the hole. When it was full, he blew on his hands again, and, theatrically, opened them wide. They were dry.
“Nice trick,” Sara said, impressed.
“No trick.”
“Okay. What’s next?”
“This.”
He spread his hands over the tiny pool of water and it grew dark and still as a mirror. As Sara leaned forward, images formed on the liquid surface. First she saw a heavily forested slope and nothing more. But then, in amongst the pines and larches, she could make out shadowy shapes, thin as the limbs of spiders. Pukwudji made another motion with his hands and the image’s perspective narrowed until one of the shapes was brought into sharp focus, filling the image area.
It had skin that resembled a cross between black scales and a boar’s bristled hide. Two tusks protruded from either side of its upper canines and a flat, pushed-in nose added to its piggishness. Its body was comprised of spindly limbs and a stocky powerful torso. But it was the eyes that drew Sara’s fascinated gaze. They had all the mad cunning of a weasel, but seemed disconcertingly out of place, as the creature had none of a weasel’s sleek grace. They reminded her of something, these spidery creatures, though she couldn’t place just what. The face, now that she looked at it again, had an ursine quality to it as much as a pig’s features—more a wicked cross between the two.
She looked up to find Pukwudji regarding her with interest.
“They are tragg’a,” he said.
“So?”
Pukwudji shrugged. “The elders say that when the Darkness coupled with a wolverine bitch, then were the tragg’a brought forth into the world.”
Something slipped into place with a click in Sara’s mind. She knew where she’d seen these creatures before—or at least something very similar. In her dream. She’d seen the granddaddy of them all. She bent over the image again, studying the thing. Did it know it was being watched? The perspective drew back again and she saw the whole pack once more. They appeared to be casting for a scent as though they were stalking something.
“They hunt you,” Pukwudji said.
“Me?” She looked up to meet his gaze.
Pukwudji nodded. “You don’t seem frightened.”
“It’s hard to be scared,” she said, “when the threat’s so . . . so intangible. I mean, I’ve had a couple of bad dreams and. . . . It just doesn’t seem very real. How could it be?”
“You’re here, aren’t you?”
“There’s that, isn’t there?”
Sara sighed and looked back at the image reflected on the water. “I think I liked you better when you were full of jokes,” she said unhappily.
“Me too,” Pukwudji said. “But . . .” He pointed at the image. “You had to be warned.”
It was disconcerting, Sara thought, the way the little man switched from seeming like a kid out to have a good time, to a wise old man delivering warnings.
Pukwudji sighed, catching the thought.
“Don’t you like me?” he asked.
Sara smiled. “Of course I do. You’re just full of unexpected surprises, that’s all. You fit the name of manitou better than the quin’on’a do.”
He made a quick motion with his fingers and the image dissolved. For a moment longer the water remained clear and still, then it started to steam and in the time between one breath and the next, all that remained was a shallow hole in the ground. Standing up, Pukwudji kicked it full of pine needles. When he was done, he turned to regard Sara. She met his gaze steadily, waiting for him to speak.
“What should I do, Pukwudji?” she asked when it seemed he had nothing further to say.
The little man pulled his flute from his belt. He toyed with it and looked away across the lake.
“They will send you back,” he said. “The quin’on’a. When they are done with your friend, they will send you both back to the World Beyond.”
“That’s not so bad,” Sara replied. “I can always . . .” She let her mind fill with an image of her going from her own world to the beach where she’d met Taliesin.
Pukwudji shook his head. “Here you can timewalk,” he said. “Here the worlds are thin and close together. They overlap and time flows into time, world into world. It’s not the same in the World Beyond, in your world. There the borders are thick and the pathways few that lead between.”
“It’s only worked once for me so far anyway,” Sara said.
“That is because the other times you were trying too hard. To tap the something-in-movement, you must be very still inside yourself. Not try, try, trying. Go softly—like the Wind Children. Then it is easy. If you are here. But if the quin’on’a send you back, you will be trapped in your own world. Trapped and helpless when the tragg’a come for you.”
Sara said nothing for a long moment, while she rolled and lit a cigarette.
“What do they want with me?” she asked.
Pukwudji pointed to the ring on her hand.
“But why? What’s so special about this ring?”
But as she spoke, she remembered Taliesin and herself exchanging rings, how each ring fitted itself to each finger, how none of this had happened to her until she’d found the ring in the backroom of The Merry Dancers.
“Mal’ek’a wants that ring,” Pukwudji said. “Mal’ek’a who is the Dread-That-Walks-Nameless that even the quin’on’a fear. Mal’ek’a who has sent the tragg’a to fetch you to him, even while he searches for you himself.”
“What should I do then?” Sara asked again.
“Go to your craftfather. Go back to the time when Taliesin Redhair lived before the quin’on’a return you to your own world. I would go with you, but I am already there.
“Timewalking has its own rules,” he explained. “One cannot be in a time when one already exists in it. So it is that you can go back, for in that time you have yet to be born. But I am already there.”
“But you won’t know me,” Sara said.
Pukwudji smiled. “And yet I remember meeting you then. Why else would I warn you now?”
Sara shook her head, trying to clear her spinning thoughts. Everything Pukwudji had said made a certain confused sort of sense, it was true. At the same time the paradox of it seemed to have the same sort of logic that the Mad Hatter or the March Hare from Alice in Wonderland might espouse.
“So you think I should go?” Sara asked. “Back to Taliesin?”
“How else can I meet you?” Pukwudji asked with some of his old humor twinkling in his eyes.
“But we just met—oh, never mind!” She took a last drag from her cigarette and carefully butted it out.
“Don’t be afraid of failure,” the little man said. “I will help you go back this time.”
Sara nodded. “What about Kieran?” she asked, but then she thought to herself, what about him? He was the enemy.
“No,” Pukwudji said, wagging a finger at her. “Mal’ek’a is the only enemy—the common enemy that both you and Kieranfoy face.”
“Yeah. Except he thinks Mel’ek’a is Taliesin.”
“You will have to teach him better then, hey?”
“I suppose so. If I ever see him again.” She paused as she remembered something. “I thought you warned me to be careful of Kieran—when I first met you by the lake.”
“The only threat Kieranfoy poses to you is that he belittles your potential to grow horns.”
“What?”
Pukwudji smiled. “Amongst the quin’on’a, and
the honochen’o’keh as well, a being who lacks magic is called a herok’a—a ‘hornless one.’ You will grow horns, but only with encouragement.”
“Oh.”
Sara wasn’t sure that she wanted to have a set of horns protruding from her forehead. She regarded the little man, looking for signs in his features that she was being put on, but he returned her gaze with guileless eyes.
“You think I should go now?” she asked.
“Yes. While you can.”
Sara had one more question that she didn’t bother to articulate since he could just take it out of her mind: Why should she trust him? But hard on the heels of it, the reason for not asking came: It didn’t really matter. She wanted to go back to Taliesin.
She picked up her guitar case and laid it across her knees. Then she leaned across the case, taking a last look at Pinta’wa Lake and the village below.
“Pukwudji?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks,” she said, then she closed her eyes.
“Think of where you wish to go,” he instructed. “Hold the image of it firm in your mind.”
There was a moment’s silence, then she heard the little man’s flute take up the moonheart tune that Taliesin had taught her.
Now how did he come to know . . . ? She started to ask herself, but then the world rushed away from under her and she hurriedly concentrated on willing herself to the beach under the shadow of Percé Rock. Not being exactly a pro at this sort of transportation, she didn’t want to end up . . . well, God only knew where.
The sound of Pukwudji’s flute faded, replaced by the sound of waves falling to shore. Filled with anticipation, Sara opened her eyes to find herself sitting at Taliesin’s old campsite. Only there was no one there. No trace of where the fire had been. No harp. No dog. No harper.
There was some sort of mistake, she thought. Maybe she’d come at the wrong time. . . . The skin at the nape of her neck prickled uneasily. Oh, Lord! Time. If she was traveling through time, who was to say when she’d end up? It might be years before Taliesin had even come to these shores. Or years after he’d left them.
She bit worriedly at her lip. Had she been mistaken to trust Pukwudji? He might have sent her anywhere. Or did the fault lay with her? She’d concentrated on the beach, but not on Taliesin himself. . . .