Chapter 7a: Depths (Mountainside, Afternoon of the Second Day)
Like a picture in front of him, Blair saw himself and Jim asleep. He wanted to fall into that picture. He could feel it pull at him, like a cord. Simon crouched down and shook the sleepers. Jilcu was crying. But that wasn't where they were.
Fog and sand. The fog writhed and the sand blew, until the world seemed to roll like a snow globe. Blair shivered in the cold. If not for the warm hand on his shoulder, he would shatter like an icicle.
Or was it fear that made him shake? A great black cat snarled in front of him. Every time he looked away it got closer. Something skulked, grey in the grey fog, always at the edge of his sight. It too was moving closer, moving in to kill.
"They won't let us leave." Jim said.
His voice had the flatness of fear under tight control. Did he feel the tug toward their other selves too? Did he feel the urgency to it, the cord drawn so tight it began to fray?
"What are we supposed to do?" Blair asked.
The jaguar's yawn was a threat display. 'I have fangs and I know how to use them.' Jim stepped in front of Blair. He leveled a spear at the jaguar.
"I won't let it have you."
Turned back to back with him, Blair stared at the other threat. The wolf bristled, head down, white teeth glinting. Blair spread his arms. Even if he had a weapon he couldn't use it. He couldn't kill the spirit that guided him.
Jim would kill his. Or try to, in Blair's defense. What would happen to the sentinel then? What would happen to the directionless man?
The fog was making him nauseous. He wanted to leave it, get back to a real world of solid shapes and sharp edges. The way the fog hemmed them in, Blair and Jim and the two beasts that ducked in and out of its billows, he could imagine this was all there was. How did the origin myths put it?
"In the beginning the earth was not divided."
The wolf froze and its ears came up. He was doing something right. The panther must have backed off enough to give Jim the same message.
"Chief, keep talking!"
"Uh, is this Chaos then? Tiamat. Undifferentiated potential. I guess that means we're supposed to do something to, um, pin it down?"
The ears went back again, but the wolf didn't stalk any closer. What were the mythological precedents? Were they supposed to butcher a monster and shape its remains? The closest thing to monsters that Blair could see were the two spirits. He didn't want to kill them. And he sure didn't want Jim or himself to be the sacrifice, even if their bones became mountain ranges afterward.
So, choose some other narrative. Killing was terrible karma, and not his thing, even killing a mythological construct. Diving for the pat of mud from which earth was made, that would be okay. Or stealing fire from the gods. Something creative.
"Jim, can you keep them back a little longer? I've got an idea."
Blair sat down without waiting for the grunted assent. He closed his eyes. Thought drifted without attention. The lotus growing out of the muck. Beginnings. 'The force that through the green fuse drives the flower.' Shaping raw energy into form.
He was a scholar, not an artist. But hadn't he shaped something new? Taken rumors and legends and the casual essay of a nineteenth century adventurer, and imagined a guardian? Put aside prejudice and fear for Jim's friendship? Made himself into a guide and teacher who was sometimes, on a good day, worthy of a sentinel's trust?
Blair opened his eyes. A cedar cone bobbed in front of his face. He held out his cupped hands. The cone dropped into them. The wolf lay down, with its ears forward and a canine grin.
"The jag backed off." Jim reported.
He let the butt of the spear thud to the sand, and stepped back alongside Blair. Something was watching them. Or somebody. The animals ignored it, and he couldn't feel hostile intent, but he didn't like voyeurs.
"Hey, Jim, lookit," the kid asked, holding up a cone.
"Where'd that come from?"
The kid bounced. Sitting down. Jim's eyes narrowed. Blair's enthusiasm was a dangerous and unpredictable force. When you saw a tornado on the horizon, it only made sense to check out the storm cellar.
"I made it, man. That's me, well, a bit of me. My, uh, soul. I got the idea out of a comic book. The original was an acorn, but we're in the wrong climate for oaks. Check it out, will you?"
Jim took the cone gingerly, holding it like it was made of glass.
"It looks like you. Shaggy."
"Man, use your senses! Is it rotten or infected or anything? In the original context that was kind of important, and I don't know how closely we're adhering to the storyline here."
Obediently Jim opened his senses to the cone he held. Touch, tracing the structure of each scale down almost to the cellular level, measuring weight and charge and temperature. Sight, and the diffraction of light, gradations of color as varied as a peacock's feather. Scent and taste together, the pure rich smell of cedar so pungent he could feel it in his throat. Even sound, the reverberation of the scales against his fingers like a whisper of drums.
So easy to be lost, to search through the Brownian hum of the air for any sound that had meaning, to lose form in the endless glare of reflection, to feel breath like a cudgel and drown in the bitterness of fear. He would never dare this journey, he would drown in the seas of it, if he did not keep some pilot part of him fixed on an unchanging beacon. Slowly he withdrew, came safe back to the harbor Blair defined.
"Is this some kind of trick? It looks like a regular cedar cone to me. Smells like one too. We scrambled across enough of them yesterday that I should know."
"Okay, that's good. Hand it back. I think I know what to do next."
As Jim started to reach down, a broad head butted the back of his legs. He threw his hand out for balance. The cone flew out in an arc. The wolf leaped to retrieve it and pranced away, flinging his head to toss the cone into the air and then catch it again. The jaguar leapt in pursuit. Jim took two steps, raising the spear for a throw.
"Bring that back!"
Blair's voice stopped him.
"Wait. Watch. I think this is supposed to happen."
The jaguar seized the cedar cone from the wolf's jaws. Scales sprayed out across the cutting sand. Blair inhaled sharply, as the wolf snapped at the jaguar's tail and raced after it. His arms crossed his belly and he folded across them. Jim caught his guide's shoulder. Blair shook his head.
"I'm okay. Look, man! Look what's happening!"
Shadows rose in the mist. Dark tall shapes loomed in the blue-white mist. Jim crouched, raising the spear. And the fog eddied, swirled back among the black wet trunks of a forest. Wherever any scale of the cone had landed, a tree grew. The sand beneath them was earth; wet, rich earth.
The spirit animals looked out from among the low hanging branches. The wolf grinned and vanished. The jaguar turned its back on Jim and Jim's spear. Before it walked away, it scuffed its back feet ostentatiously. Blair fell over laughing.
"Hey, big guy, guess who isn't happy with you holding a spear on it!"
"What? What are you talking about?"
"You never had a cat, right?"
He sat up.
"This is a little chilly for a jungle cat. My timber wolf put up with a Peruvian jungle for a long time though. Your panther can visit the rain forest for a change."
"Can we go home now?" Jim asked plaintively.
Maybe the animals were gone, but he could still feel more than one presence watching. And he had enough difficulty making one world comprehensible. He didn't want to deal with this realm as well. Just watch. Blair was going to start talking about a 'sixth sense' again. He'd get out those cards with stars and lines on them. Jim never told the kid that the set he used had been marked by a previous owner, with crimps that sentinel sight could make out right across the room.
"My work here is done." Blair intoned.
His words fell into a teacher's rhythm.
"See the cord connecting you to your body, and imagine yourself travelling along it. All we have to do is follow . . . the . . . cords . . . ."
Jim could see (although "see" wasn't really the right word) the glowing cord that linked him to someplace else, right in front of him and very far away, where he and Blair lay sleeping and Simon worried. And he had seen Blair's before, but now he didn't.
Blair held his hand flat across his belly. His eyes were very wide.
"I guess there had to be a sacrifice after all." he said.
ooooooo
Kelso's voice was harsh.
"Banks! Blair stopped breathing."
As Simon scrambled to check breath and pulse, as he tilted the kid's head back to start rescue breathing, he was thinking the same phrase over and over."
"Not again."
