Sword and Song Page 9
Where is she? Ari’s question comes to him. Is Ophelia she?
When he runs down for breakfast, his father greets him. “How’s the nose?”
“Still hurts.” Rowan’s managed to avoid his mother seeing it thus far—a good thing. She’ll be angry at Rowan for hurting himself. He and his father, without talking about it, have kept it between them.
His dad hands him a sheaf of paper. “Had a chance to look these over, my boy.”
It takes Rowan a moment to recognize the lyric sheets he’d given his dad, because they’re bristling with Post-it notes.
When his father says he might have some feedback to give, he isn’t kidding.
Rowan mumbles, “Thanks.” He has almost half an hour before he has to leave for school; he runs back up to his room, pages rustling in his hands.
The pages are covered with his own terrible handwriting, lyrics written and crossed out, rewritten; familiar, like old friends.
These pages now crackle with yellow squares. They curl and rustle under his fingers like dry leaves.
First page: the song he’d sung to Ophelia, a song about longing. He’d been trying to capture the mysteriousness of his world. And, he realizes now—now that Ophelia’s heard it—the song is about something else, so deep in his heart he can barely put words to it. . . .
This is my wishbone. Wish for me.
Cliché, says his father’s first Post-it note. What are you getting at with this image? says another. Implausible, says a third.
Rowan considers the notes. Well, maybe it is a cliché. A sort of pre-teenage boy fantasy, his fantasy, the other place he goes to. Wanting to be somewhere else, not here, anywhere but here. And that bit about love . . . it’s childish.
The song diminishes, it falls away.
Quickly he flips to the next lyric page, a song about trying for honour in a world where things get so complicated. Precious, says a Post-it note. Derivative, says another. He turns to the next song, reads with growing pain. Every page is stuck full of notes, a new layer covering over the rough directness of his lyric sheets.
Rowan reads each and every one of the notes.
He hears his father calling. “Don’t you have school?”
“First two periods are a study break,” Rowan lies, yelling through his closed door. Please, please, please don’t come up here.
He listens, hears his father’s study door click closed.
Rowan reads through the notes again.
Then he tears them off and throws them onto the floor. They stick and curl, skitter away, a yellow leaf-drift of paper.
He gathers them into a poisonous rustling sticky ball and stuffs them under his bed.
If there wasn’t a part of him that believed what the notes said, it would hurt less.
Rowan lies on his bed, arm over his eyes. His nose throbs with every beat of his heart. Savage criticism, cold; it’s a wholly other side of his father, this critic. He’s always thought his father was a softie. Lately he’s become aware of a temptation to side with his mother when she picks on his dad—to be allied with her vivid sharpness, her strange, edgy charm. And he’s watched his father take it all with a vague smile, averting the worst of it with his mild English humour.
But now there’s this. When Rowan was a kid, he remembers, his father had taught creative writing. Had he been this pointed in his comments? How many students had he helped? Or did they just stop writing, dry up after hearing that their poetry was actually shit?
Rowan tries to see this newly revealed side of his father.
He doesn’t like it. He prefers his father staring vaguely into the fridge, tapping the side of his nose. He prefers his father oblivious in the study.
What kind of son is he, to prefer a passive ghost for a father?
From under the bed he hears a rustling. He sits up. The Post-it notes and lyric sheets lie, drifted and crumpled on his floor; some peek out from under the bed. So many . . . Have they moved?
No, that’s impossible.
He should go to school. He stands, skirting the papers like they nest poisonous vipers.
He gets halfway down the stairs before he hears his mother’s voice. It’s a surprise; he’d thought she was already at work. “Things can’t go on like this, Martin! I’m sick from it. It’s an anchor on my thigh.” Sometimes his mother translates an Icelandic saying directly, especially when she’s angry.
Rowan hears his father’s voice, a murmur.
“Don’t correct me in that patronizing way,” his mother answers.
More murmurs.
“We are setting a timeline. Some goals. I don’t want to stay in this . . . marriage like this.”
She says the word marriage like it makes her want to spit.
Rowan backs up the stairs, quiet as a mouse. They don’t fight very often, his parents. They hardly ever even see each other. But this sounds like an ultimatum. It sounds like something may be breaking.
There’s nothing he can do about it.
Rowan sits on his bed. He realizes he feels nothing more than a kind of dull relief.
He hears the front door slam, a car start up. His mother is driving away.
Rowan listens, hears the study door close again. He pictures his father, sitting with some book on his lap. Even though his wife just threatened to leave him? Yeah, even so. His father’s probably relieved.
Or maybe those murmurs he couldn’t hear were like the Post-it notes: cold barbs, striking straight to his mother’s heart.
Rowan lies down, closes his eyes, and reaches. Reaches. Feels the beginning of the pull, the slide.
A flash of bright light.
Chapter Twenty-One
Relief Like Sunshine
The shock of the cold is quickly trumped by a slap from a freezing wave.
Birds scream as they swoop through the air, and waves hiss, swelling and falling.
“You’re back!”
It’s like the last time, undeniably vivid. Rowan’s heart swells with joy.
He and Ari grin at each other.
“We’re going to be hard put to make land,” Ari says, “sailing against the wind like this.”
Rowan laughs. “I’ll be late for school!”
“That’s the least of our worries.”
“Cheer up.” Rowan hangs off the side of the boat, teeth chattering. Now that he has a chance to get a good look at it, he realizes that the boat is made of leather. Rowan can see the stitching holding the thick hides together; the boat smells awful, like animal skin and rancid grease. It bellies in and out with the pressure of the sea, like it’s breathing.
Ari’s patterned forearms work as he grips the tiller. The tattoos or whatever they are have changed, Rowan sees: the curves are gone and now they are all parallel lines, from elbow to wrist.
“Ari, what’s happening?”
“When the land—” Ari begins, then stops.
There’s a word for someone like Ari. Ophelia would know it, Rowan thinks, and the feeling of wanting to see her runs through him like electricity. Taciturn. That’s the word. He wishes Ophelia was the one saying it to him.
“The land?” prompts Rowan.
“This land.” Ari gestures at a purple shadow in the distance, beautiful and ominous. “See for yourself,” he says and he nudges a cylindrical leather casing on the floor of the boat toward Rowan.
Rowan fumbles with cold fingers at brass buckles. Inside is nestled a gorgeous brass telescope, figures engraved on it: boats on curly waves, sea birds, a whale, seals, mermaids. Rowan puts it to his eye and adjusts the instrument. He sees rolling clouds, changeable, pouring over invisible crests toward the boat. And under those, the huge mountain, capped in snow. Green runs down its sides, rivers and waterfalls streak the slopes. A large white cloud hovers over the top of the mountain . . . no, it’s smoke. The mountain has smoke and ash pouring out of it. As Rowan watches, it begins to shred, boiling in the wind from the approaching storm. He puts the telescope away.
“You see it?”
/> “The mountain.”
“And the smoke. There was a big tremor. It is beginning.”
“What is beginning?”
“The split.” Ari narrows his eyes at the boiling clouds. “And see that?”
He gestures at the water. It takes Rowan a moment to see what Ari’s referring to: debris. Bits of wood, feathers . . . no, those are broken bodies of sea birds and trees, torn out by the roots.
“Ari, those are palm trees.”
“Yes. Something bad has happened on the southern coast. But then, down there, they are insane.”
“What could have happened?”
“I think a wave. I have heard of this happening. The ground has been shaking, and if the ocean floor split in the southern ocean . . .”
“Tsunami,” Rowan says.
“What is this word?”
“A big wave.”
“Yes. More than one, I think, from what I’ve seen.”
There’s a big gust of wind, and the boat leans hard.
“Weather is worsening. Take this.” Ari jerks his head toward the tiller.
Rowan scrambles back to grab the tiller. He doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but holds it at more or less the same angle as Ari had been. “What’s the split?”
Ari adjusts the two square sails, made of something like rough red silk. “Usually Antilia is peaceful. The land is still. But once in a long while, in a long cycle, the mountain erupts. And near that time, the borders between our world and yours become . . .” He secures his rope and turns to Rowan, knitting the fingers of both hands together and then pulling them apart a little.
“Leaky?”
“Yes. Ha. Leaky. There’s a relationship . . . When the land is in danger of splitting, the Chosen ones—lovers—come from your world, and . . .”
“The Chosen ones?” Rowan’s heart beats fast. Lovers?
Ari’s face darkens. He clamps his mouth shut and drops his eyes. “Get closer to the wind, Rowan.”
Rowan twitches the tiller in what he hopes is the right direction. “I’m confused.”
“I have said too much.”
“Too much? You’ve hardly said anything, as usual.”
Ari looks miserable. “I’m sorry about your nose.”
“What?” Rowan stares.
“Your nose. I’m sorry.”
Ari never looks miserable; he’s the kind of keen bastard who gets more cheerful the worse things get. “It wasn’t your fault.” Rowan feels with numb fingers at his face. “I fell off my bicycle. No big deal.”
“No, you fell because I came through a . . . hole.” Ari knits his fingers again, and again, pulls them apart.
“You came to where I live?” Rowan’s head spins. At the same time, he wants to laugh. It’s so strange to see quicksilver, cocksure Ari shuffling his feet around the bottom of this soggy, stinking boat.
“I was impatient. A problem that I have. You weren’t seeming to come through. The Render said to leave it alone, but he is always telling me to leave things. . . .”
“The Render?” Ari is a veritable fountain of mindboggling information today.
“Yes, yes,” Ari snaps. “He is always telling me to leave things and I didn’t want to wait. I took advantage of a hole, a small one. I wanted to see . . .” He mumbles the next word but Rowan is almost sure he says hell. Then Ari lifts his head and looks directly at Rowan. “But it’s not like you coming here. I can barely make it through to your world, and can’t stay for more than a moment before Antilia pulls me back. And then your machine tripped in the hole, and you fell. There was a lot of blood. I am sorry.” He sits looking mournful. He seems to be waiting, but for what?
“What is the Render?” Rowan asks again.
Ari looks even more uncomfortable. “Who. The Render is a man.”
“Who is he, then?”
“I should not have said anything.”
A thought strikes Rowan. “I forgive you.” Is that what he wants?
“You do?”
“Yes. I forgive you for breaking my nose.”
Relief spreads across Ari’s face like sunshine. But he clams up. No matter how much Rowan bugs him, he says no more about the split or the Chosen ones or the Render. “I have said too much already,” is all Rowan can get out of him.
They pitch and mow. Ari takes over the tiller, black eyes fixed on the horizon. He asks Rowan to adjust the sail at the front of the boat and Rowan does his best; his sailing experience is limited to borrowed time on friends’ boats at cottages up north. On lakes. Not this ocean. He gets slapped around by the wet, heavy sail and struggles with the recalcitrance of soaked rope. Rowan’s stomach quivers inside his body, shuddering like an empty bag. “How far is it before we land?”
Ari points to the island. “We need to get around that headland there. Then I will take you to the Render and he will explain everything.”
“Will we make it?”
Ari shrugs. “I say nothing.”
Soon the misery of seasickness overcomes Rowan entirely. He can see the island coming closer. Grey cliffs topped with green: no safe harbour, no city. Behind Ari, the ocean seems to be rising up. Rowan has the distinct impression that they are below the water level. Surely that’s not possible?
He points. “Ari?”
Ari twists around. He stares behind at the swelling water for a long time. Then looks back at Rowan.
Rowan is scared then, because the look on Ari’s face is fear.
“Hang on,” is all he says.
The swell is a wave, Rowan sees now. High, and getting higher.
The debris . . . “Have there been others like this?” Rowan asks.
“Not that I have seen.”
“But you’ve been out at sea, right? A tsunami wouldn’t seem like much, where the water’s deep.”
“Do you know what this is, Rowan?”
“Sometimes tsunamis come in several waves,” Rowan remembers. “Sometimes the first waves aren’t the biggest.” Since it feels so real now, Rowan wonders if perhaps it is possible that he could die here in Antilia. “And they don’t get tall until they hit shallow water.”
“We are close to shore.” The wave is looming over the boat now, green and purple and black. White water at its crest trickles down its face like a waterfall. Wooden sticks toss within it. No, trees, those are trees, tiny in the water’s fist. “Hang on, Rowan.”
The wave will drown them. Rowan wishes he knew how to pray. Ari hangs on to the tiller with all his strength. He looks not back at the wave, but forward.
The wave noses under the boat. It is picking them up. Up and up. Up they go, twenty feet high, maybe more. They are on top of the wave, it carries them forward. Fast, it’s like riding a terrible rollercoaster.
Rowan feels the world beginning to shift. He’s being pulled away.
“Rowan!”
“I . . . can’t . . .” Rowan doesn’t want to die here, but doesn’t want to leave Ari either. “I can’t!” He sees Ari reaching for him, feels the boat sliding down the back of the wave, feels himself being pulled out. “No!”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Whispering Voices
Rowan lands on his bed.
Heart pounding, soaked and freezing, he sits up. Something crackles on his face.
Four Post-it notes nestle in his hair, and a couple are stuck to his cheek.
With a strangled yell Rowan crumples them tight in his fist and throws them across his room.
Has he left Ari to die?
And what has Ari told him?
That Antilia, once in a long while, threatens to split. The mountain erupts and the island shakes, is in danger of splitting in half and . . . What would happen then? It’s not a big island. An eruption from that vast mountain would be cataclysmic.
But somehow the Chosen ones come from Rowan’s world and . . . What? Rowan doesn’t know. This Render person is supposed to tell him.
Rowan isn’t sure he wants to meet anybody called the Render.
He remembers his shy, fumbling conversation with Ophelia at The Spill. That’s some kind of childish fantasy, isn’t it? To be a chosen saviour? Rowan shakes his head like the idea is a fly, buzzing around his brain.
Ari had also said that the Chosen . . . he’d said that the Chosen are lovers.
Rowan knows, then—he is sure—that somehow Ophelia is bound up in this. He can’t explain it. But it’s her. Certainty blooms in his chest like a flame.
He jumps to his feet. Crumpled papers lie in a drift across his floor, white and yellow. Some peek out from under his bed. So much paper. He kicks the papers back under his bed. They mound up, sliding and crackling, whispering malevolent voices.
Have they propagated?
Impossible.
Everything is impossible.
He looks at his phone and sees it’s not even eleven. He has time to make third period, if he hurries.
He wants to laugh. If he starts laughing he won’t be able to stop.
Rowan strips out of his wet, salty clothes, takes a quick shower and dresses, and runs down the stairs.
Mail shoots through the front-door slot just as his feet hit the bottom step.
Something makes him pick it up off the floor. A yellow envelope, his name on it.
From the NAU Department of Homeland Security and Defense.
Rowan opens the envelope. His body begins to shake.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Somewhere We’ve Never Been
All day, all through school, Ophelia swings between despair and ecstasy.
Pim. Alone at sea, abandoned, swimming the wrong way.
Her mother. The new plan to forcibly move the entire family to Newfoundland.
Rowan. She’s going to see him.
“What’s up with you?” Candace asks at lunch.
“What do you mean?” Ophelia keeps her eyes down. Candace has an uncanny ability to make people tell her everything.
“You’re acting like a cat in a box. Like you’re going to claw your way out of something.”
“Oh.”
“Well?”
The brass in Candace’s voice compels Ophelia.