“Salamander?” she asked timidly.
“Summer,” he said suddenly. “I have until the solstice. They will move then.”
“How can you fight them?” She shook her head. “Salamander, they are suspicious of me, but even I know that every clan is being turned against you. Deep Hunter is rabid, especially after Anhinga wounded and scarred Saw Back.” She clenched her teeth. “The Speaker, my uncle, suspects you of murdering Eats Wood. The young man has disappeared, and no one knows where.”
She was watching his face, searching for any reaction as she asked, “Did you have words with him? Did he threaten you?”
“I said nothing to him.”
She heaved a sigh. “Snakes, I was worried.”
His head tilted, the birdlike image ever sharper. “You may have to choose: Light, or Dark. You may have to Dream with us.”
She closed her eyes, souls dulling. Blessed Sky Beings, what am I involved in here? “Don’t ask me to go against my clan, Salamander. Don’t put me in that position.”
“Would you chose the clan,” he asked, “or the People?”
“I am nothing without the clan. Kinship is who we are. Without it, we are lost. Nothing. Faceless and nameless.”
“Nothingness is all there is,” he told her sadly. “It is the One. You can only understand when you Dance with it. The clans, this struggle to dominate, it is all empty, Pine Drop. In the end, it is as bitter as a green nightshade stem. Illusion, spinning around us like a waterspout.”
“So you will just let them destroy you?”
“You stand at the center of the world, Pine Drop. When the time comes, you will reach out and pick a direction.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The navel,” he answered. “The place where life starts, and peoples are born. Something special is happening here. See it growing? Carried by the Trade, borne by the bonds we form. The future flows from within our ridges. Like that infant in your womb, Pine Drop, we have made the future. Sun Town is the starting point. The clans don’t understand. They are bound, circumscribed by their mighty mounds.”
“Is that bad?” she felt herself lost, adrift in the peculiar ideas spinning out of his Dream.
“When the time comes, you can reach out to them. Accept their canoes, and make the future.”
“I can reach out to whom? What are you talking about?”
“I can Dream the future, Pine Drop. You have to live it!”
Blessed Owl, tell me he is not insane!
As the words formed in her souls, he threw back his head and laughed.
Sick! So very sick! Salamander curled on his side, eyes closed against the violence in his aching head. He kept one arm on his stomach, feeling the painful knots that had tied themselves in his guts. Between breaths, they pulled tight, only to twist and then loosen. The watery tickle of vomit hung behind his palate.
“Salamander?” Anhinga’s voice came from far away. He barely felt her cool hand on his sweat-ridden forehead. “I went for help.”
Anhinga? Where had she come from? Where was he? Floating. Floating above a dark pool of death.
“How are you feeling?” Pine Drop asked, also from a distance.
“Can’t … Dance …” he whispered, and in his fractured souls, the images of what he had experienced tried to form. Like bent and distorted memories, they wavered and refused to coalesce. As if part of his souls could just reach out. There. In the red-black haze beyond his consciousness.
“Drink this.” The thick rim of a ceramic cup was placed to his lips.
He opened his eyes to slits. The misery of white light burned the backs of his eyeballs, searing his thoughts into charred meat. Cool liquid rolled around his tongue, only to make him gag as he tasted the bitterness. Nevertheless, he drank, each swallow knotted agony, until the cup was pulled away. He let his eyelids slide closed, accepting small relief in the hot acid darkness.
I am sick. Dying. The mushrooms are going to kill me, I wasn’t strong enough. Help me! Help! By all the Beings in the Sky and Earth, Help me!
His calls echoed away like thunder over a distant and dark land.
He felt himself turning, ever so slowly as his body slipped away. His souls had begun to float, carried on the waves of fever, spasms, and chill. A burning sensation, like half-dead embers, lay heavily on his gut.
A dull glow—like a forest burning in the distance shone crimson in the darkness.
Dying.
The glow continued to grow, filling the horizons of his consciousness.
Help!
“Help you with what?” a crone’s reedy voice asked.
Why are the mushrooms killing me this time?
“Because they want you to die.”