“W-Why?”
The wild tangle of Maerlyn’s brows drew together; his mouth turned down at the corners; suddenly the kindness was gone, replaced by a frightening obduracy. “Not yours to ask, boy. When ka comes, it comes like the wind-like the starkblast. Will you obey?”
“Yes,” Tim said, frightened. “I’ll give it to her as you say.”
“Good.”
The mage turned to the sheet beneath which they had slept and raised his hands over it. The end near the cage flipped up with a brisk ruffling sound, folded over, and was suddenly half the size it had been. It flipped up again and became the size of a tablecloth. Tim thought the women of Tree would much like to have magic like that when beds needed to be made, and wondered if such an idea were blasphemy.
“No, no, I’m sure you’re right,” Maerlyn said absently. “But ’twould go wrong and cause hijinks. Magic’s full of tricks, even for an old fellow like me.”
“Sai… is it true you live backwards in time?”
Maerlyn raised his hands in amused irritation; the sleeves of his robe slipped back, revealing arms as thin and white as birch branches. “Everyone thinks so, and if I said different, they’d still think it, wouldn’t they? I live as I live, Tim, and the truth is, I’m mostly retired these days. Have you also heard of my magical house in the woods?”
“Aye!”
“And if I told you I lived in a cave with nothing but a single table and a pallet on the floor, and if you told others that, would they believe you?”
Tim considered this, and shook his head. “No. They wouldn’t. I doubt folk will believe I met you at all.”
“That’s their business. As for yours… are you ready to go back?”
“May I ask one more question?”
The mage raised a single finger. “ Only one. For I’ve been here many long years in yon cage-which you see keeps its place to the very inch, in spite of how hard the wind blew-and I’m tired of shitting in that hole. Living monk-simple is all very fine, but there’s a limit. Ask your question.”
“How did the Red King catch thee?”
“He can’t catch anyone, Tim-he’s himself caught, pent at the top of the Dark Tower. But he has his powers, and he has his emissaries. The one you met is far from the greatest of them. A man came to my cave. I was fooled into believing he was a wandering peddler, for his magic was strong. Magic lent to him by the King, as you must ken.”
Tim risked another question. “Magic stronger than yours?”
“Nay, but…” Maerlyn sighed and looked up at the morning sky. Tim was astounded to realize that the magician was embarrassed. “I was drunk.”
“Oh,” Tim said in a small voice. He could think of nothing else to say.
“Enough palaver,” said the mage. “Sit on the dibbin.”
“The-?”
Maerlyn gestured at what was sometimes a napkin, sometimes a sheet, and was now a tablecloth. “That. And don’t worry about dirtying it with your boots. It’s been used by many far more travel-stained than thee.”
Tim had been worried about exactly that, but he stepped onto the tablecloth and then sat down.
“Now the feather. Take it in your hands. It’s from the tail of Garuda, the eagle who guards the other end of this Beam. Or so I was told, although as a wee one myself-yes, I was once wee, Tim, son of Jack-I was also told that babies were found under cabbages in the garden.”
Tim barely heard this. He took the feather which the tyger had saved from flying away into the wind, and held it.
Maerlyn regarded him from beneath his tall yellow cap. “When thee gets home, what’s the first thing thee’ll do?”
“Put the drops in Mama’s eyes.”
“Good, and the second?”
“Give her my da’s ax.”
“Don’t forget.” The old man leaned forward and kissed Tim’s brow. For a moment the whole world flared as brilliantly in the boy’s eyes as the stars at the height of the starkblast. For a moment it was all there. “Thee’s a brave boy with a stout heart-as others will see and come to call you. Now go with my thanks, and fly away home.”
“F-F-Fly? How? ”
“How does thee walk? Just think of it. Think of home.” A thousand wrinkles flowed from the corners of the old man’s eyes as he broke into a radiant grin. “For, as someone or other famous once said, there’s no place like home. See it! See it very well!”
So Tim thought of the cottage where he had grown up, and the room where he had all his life fallen asleep listening to the wind outside, telling its stories of other places and other lives. He thought of the barn where Misty and Bitsy were stabled, and hoped someone was feeding them. Straw Willem, perhaps. He thought of the spring where he had drawn so many buckets of water. He thought most of all of his mother: her sturdy body with its wide shoulders, her chestnut hair, her eyes when they had been full of laughter instead of worry and woe.
He thought, How I miss you, Mama… and when he did, the tablecloth rose from the rocky ground and hovered over its shadow.
Tim gasped. The cloth rocked, then turned. Now he was higher than Maerlyn’s cap, and the magician had to look up at him.
“What if I fall?” Tim cried.
Maerlyn laughed. “Sooner or later, we all do. For now, hold tight to the feather! The dibbin won’t spill thee, so just hold tight to the feather and think of home!”
Tim clutched it before him and thought of Tree: the high street, the smithy with the burial parlor between it and the cemetery, the farms, the sawmill by the river, the Widow’s cottage, and-most of all-his own plot and place. The dibbin rose higher, floated above the Dogan for several moments (as if deciding), then headed south along the track of the starkblast. It moved slowly at first, but when its shadow fell over the tangled, frost-rimed deadfalls that had lately been a million acres of virgin forest, it began to go faster.
A terrible thought came to Tim: what if the starkblast had rolled over Tree, freezing it solid and killing everyone, including Nell Ross? He turned to call his question back to Maerlyn, but Maerlyn was already gone. Tim saw him once more, but when that happened, Tim was an old man himself. And that is a story for another day.
The dibbin rose until the world below was spread out like a map. Yet the magic that had protected Tim and his furry bedmate from the storm still held, and although he could hear the last of the starkblast’s cold breath whooshing all around him, he was perfectly warm. He sat crosslegged on his transport like a young prince of the Mohaine on an elephaunt, the Feather of Garuda held out before him. He felt like Garuda, soaring above a great tract of wildland that looked like a giant dress of a green so dark it was almost black. Yet a gray scar ran through it, as if the dress had been slashed to reveal a dirty underskirt beneath. The starkblast had ruined everything it had touched, although the forest as a whole was very little hurt. The lane of destruction was no more than forty wheels wide.
Yet forty wheels wide had been enough to lay waste to the Fagonard. The black swampwater had become yellowish-white cataracts of ice. The gray, knotted trees that had grown out of that water had all been knocked over. The tussocks were no longer green; now they looked like tangles of milky glass.
Run aground on one of them and lying on its side was the tribe’s boat. Tim thought of Helmsman and Headman and all the others, and burst into bitter tears. If not for them, he would be lying frozen on one of those tussocks five hundred feet below. The people of the swamp had fed him, and they had gifted him with Daria, his good fairy. It was not fair, it was not fair, it was not fair. So cried his child’s heart, and then his child’s heart died a little. For that is also the way of the world.
Before leaving the swamp behind, he saw something else that hurt his heart: a large blackened patch where the ice had been melted. Sooty chunks of ice floated around a vast, plated corse lying on its side like the beached boat. It was the dragon that had spared him. Tim could imagine-aye, all too well-how she must have fought the cold with blasts of her fiery breath, but in the end the starkblast had taken her, as it had everything else in the Fagonard. It was now a place of frozen death.