The plant’s deadly Spirit must have allowed him to call to the Thunderbeings. What Power! It intoxicated him.
He’d intended to change himself into a short-faced bear tonight and go hunting. But he’d lost his body somewhere in the first moments of glory. Now he seemed to be floating off of the forest floor, suspended between the worlds of earth and sky.
I feel like a tiny Thunderbeing cocooned in clouds, feeding off of the rain. Maybe… is that why you came? You want me to become one of you? The thought had never occurred to him… but why not? He floated higher and higher, until he looked over the tops of the trees. Against the Star People, the flights of the Thunderbeings wove a flaming web of light. It resembled a net, caging… caging?
The Dream tattered like sun-warmed mist, and Catchstraw let out a scream as he fell.
He awoke with his face buried in the tall grass of the forest floor, panting. Terrified, he flopped onto his back to look up. The Thunderbeings had vanished.
A huge amber halo encircled the crescent of Above-Old Man that hung over the eastern horizon.
“What happened? Why did I fall? I wanted to fly! Come back! AH of you!”
The dark forest whispered malevolently around him, and he could sense presences growing in the shadows. Like poisonous vines sending up shoots after a summer shower, they grew, and grew … “I want to be one of you! I’m tired of becoming animals!” Catchstraw shouted. “Give me wings!” Silver eyes coalesced from the glitters of moonlight scattered in the forest.
“Oh, there you are. I thought you’d gone. You hate me, don’t you? Well, I don’t care. You hear me? I’ll grow wings whether you like it or not.” He pouted. “I must have dragonfly wings!”
The eyes blinked, off and on, off and on, like a million tiny stars falling through the trees.
Catchstraw scrambled to his feet. “I will be a Thunder being!” he bellowed in rage. “I can do anything!”
“Father? Father, do you hear me?” the Boy asked from the dried mouth of his smoked body. “Father, wake up.”
Lambkill roused and blinked at the gloom of the brush lodge.. The lean-to walls had gaps so wide that moonlight flooded the interior, shadowing the packs and haloing the bedding hides with a burning line of liquid silver. “What? Who called me?” He propped himself up on his elbows and scowled. His jowls looked like white sacks in the darkness.
“I did. Father,” the Boy replied through a weary exhalation. “I have something to tell you.”
“What is it, my son?”
It hurt the Boy to do as this human asked. What greater punishment could have been inflicted upon him? He wondered why the Man had commanded him to tell Lambkill what he wanted to know.
“Mother is on the seacoast, near Pygmy Island. She is alive and well. And that witch I told you about? He is growing too arrogant for his own good. He’s tired of running and flying in the bodies of animals. Now he wants to join the ranks of the Thunderbeings.”
Lambkill sat up suddenly. “Does your mother know I’m following her?”
“She suspects. That’s all. She can’t believe that you would ever let her go.”
“And where is this witch I am to seek out?”
“In the foothills. Don’t worry. Soon another Trader will tell you how to get there. He’ll tell you that—and much more.” Things that I cannot bear to, no matter what the Man might say.
The Boy’s soul coiled into a tight spiral and lay restlessly in that dead body, watching the man he hated more than any other drift back to sleep.
“Man? Man, can you hear me?”
“Yes, Boy. I hear you.” The voice whispered on the eddies of night wind that penetrated the brush lodge.
“I can’t stand this, Man! I feel filthy. I—I hate myself as much as I hate Lambkill! Why are you making me do this? What am I supposed to learn from betraying my mother?”
The Man’s voice took on a wavering, windblown timbre. “Oh, a very great deal, Boy. Only when a soul learns to do violence to its own will, for the greater sake of Power, can it hope to save the world.”
The Man paused, and Boy thought he heard a moan of despair on the wind. “Boy, do you know that after I died and went to the Land of the Dead, I spent a full millennium in despair, mourning the fact that Power had forced me to kill my own brother?”
“You… you had to kill your brother?”
“Yes.”
Boy thought about that. How could Power make its chosen Dreamers do such terrible things? What purpose could Power have in generating such misery? Man wouldn’t ask him to kill his own mother, would he? Fear quivered in Boy’s soul. He couldn’t force himself to ask that question, so he asked instead, “What made you stop grieving, Man?”