Dreamfisher (2 page)

Making herself like a willow wand, she dropped a berry. She saw the mystery flash up out of darkness, shining so close—the sight quivered her whole body and sent her lunging toward it, her hands opening like stars—

In her ears something roared like a dragon as she flew down into the water-like-a-night-sky, cold, its icy coldness thick all around her and in her, ears, mouth, nose—breathing water hurt very much. But then it became like sleeping, dark and blurry, like the inside of her mind when she closed her eyes. And then there was not even darkness.

* * *

She awoke to find herself lying beside a blazing fire, shivering even in its warmth, wrapped in—what was this thing?

“If you desire to go fishing, young woman,” said a man’s gruff voice, “you should do so by means of the proper equipment.”

She was home, somehow, with one of her people? But—whoever he was, he spoke her language, yet she could not understand what he was talking about. Fishing? Means? She sat up to peer at him over the flames of the fire.

He was not one of her people. She had never seen him before, a strong old man with flossy white hair and beard, his skin lizardy and much lighter than hers—that frightened her, and so did his eyes, pale like a watery sky between saggy lids. She had never seen such sky-colored eyes. But they seemed not unkind, although it was hard to tell in firelight.

Firelight? Why was it night already?

The pale-eyed man nodded at her as if she had done well to sit up and gawk at him. “Greetings from the civilized world,” he told her. “I am Herodotus, at your service. And what might be your name?”

There again, he spoke and she understood yet she did not understand at all. Civilized? Name? Hero dotus? She felt herself frowning from listening to him.

“It is a pleasure to meet you also.” Nodding, he turned the spit he had rigged up over the fire, upon which something sizzled. It smelled good, the girl’s belly noticed, but her mind did not wonder what it was, being all taken up with the stranger. Where had he come from?

“I first became aware of your whereabouts when I sighted your fire,” the old man said as if in answer. “For the past two days I have been observing you at a discreet distance. But when you performed your remarkable feat of fishery, I essayed to pull you out. I did not care to let a perfectly good barbarian drown.”

The girl gave up listening and only heard, her eyelids drooping, no longer trying to understand but only to know what he was like.

“Up you popped,” he went on, “hanging onto an exceptionally large, exceptionally placid trout with both your little brown paws. I jumped about, I offered you a hand, I called to you, but you would not let go of the confounded fish. Not even when you went under again. I had to grapple you out by the hair. You are fortunate to have such long, strong hair, young lady.”

He was like…he was perhaps a god? One who gave names to things?

Despite this thought, she felt not at all afraid of him any longer. He had put her by the fire, had wrapped her in something not a deerskin but soft and warm. She lay down again and closed her eyes.

The next thing she noticed he was shaking her by the shoulder to awaken her. “Dinnertime.”

She peered at him.

“Time to eat.”

She sat up. The old man brought her something on a dock leaf and laid it on the ground beside her. His clothes, pale like his skin and eyes, were very odd, made of some sort of thin droopy hide that was not hide, for no hide was colored so white, as white as his hair. What had he called himself, Hero—a hero… It did not matter. The food smelled good, fatty, like meat, but it did not look like any she had ever seen.

“What’s that?” she whispered.

“Eureka! She speaks!”

She stared at him.

“Excuse me. I beg your pardon. Dinner is your precious trout, that’s what it is, the most enormous trout I have ever seen. More than large enough for both of us. I’m obliged to you for catching my supper as well as your own.”

“Trout?”

“Fish,” the hero man said. “Eat it.”

She understood nothing except the last two words. Eat. Yes. She felt weak, her gut ached with hunger, and whatever the flaky white meat was, it smelled wonderful. She ate.

* * *

She stood at the narrow mouth of a cave, stones hitting her from behind. Her people stoned her because they wanted her to go into the darkness under the mountain and face the dragon for them. The stones hurt and she could not understand what they were yelling at her, but her mind leaped like a deer, flew like a winged flint, and she understood that there was something they needed, her people, something they wanted the dragon to give them or give back to them. She sweated with fear but she had to do it, because she, the girl who said “looks like,” was the only one who could. She went in…

“Water eyes,” she murmured. “The dragon had water eyes.”

“Go back to sleep,” said a man’s gruff voice. “It was just a dream.” As usual, she did not understand.

Odd. It was night, and she lay by a campfire, that was all, wrapped in something warm. Sleepy…

Her mother wept, her mother was a greatness the size of the mountain, her mother’s tears ran down over crags like snowmelt falling in cataracts ever greater until tears filled the world like water in the palm of a god’s hand. In the face of the water—no, it was her mother’s face, eyes red from weeping, eyes like bunchberries. They
were
big red berries awash in tears. The girl flew, she could fly in water, she had winged hands, she flew to the surface and gulped her mother’s red berry eyes. They filled her and made her content.

She woke up. The hero old man crouched over the fire, feeding twigs to the embers. The sky glowed all fire colors. It was morning.

* * *

“Because I am evil,” the girl explained.

Sitting beside her on the lowest crag overlooking muchwater, the old man eyed her with his shaggy white eyebrows raised. “They gave you those bruises because you are evil?”

“Yes.”

“And in what way, pray tell, are you evil?”

“I—there are wrong things in me.”

“Such as?” As he questioned her, the hero pulled out of his pack a stick around which was wrapped the thinnest sinew the girl had ever seen.

“There are oddnesses in my mind and they leap from my mouth. I say wrong things. I said the sun was like a cake.”

“Well, so it is, sometimes.” He flipped a rock, plucked a grub from under it, and skewered it upon a feathered device at the end of the sinew.

“I said the man they wanted me to mate was like a turd.”

The hero laughed and unwound sinew from his stick.

“I said he
was
a turd. That was evil.”

“It was rude, perhaps, but true?” The hero tossed the grub-feather thing to settle on the top of the muchwater. Like a serpent made of cloud wisp the sinew followed. “What is your name, little one?”

To name a thing meant to say what it was—an enormity. But perhaps a god was allowed to ask. The girl pointed at the deep-tree-sky-gleaming wonderwater.

“Your name is Pool? Lake? Tarn?”

Instead of answering—if she could have answered—the girl gasped, for the selfwater roiled and she saw the dark-moon eyes, the maw, the moongleam jaws seizing. The old man shouted and yanked his end of the sinew, pulling the shining mystery clear out of the water.

With a scream the girl leaped up, standing rigid. It flapped like a wing, but it was not a wing. It shone like running water, but it was not water. It writhed like a serpent—

“It’s just a fish!” the hero yelled at her. “Big one! Dinner!”

He hauled it in. On the rock it thrashed wildly, and behind its eyes, red slits opened like wounds. It suffered from being brought out of the wonderwater, the girl saw. But the hero quickly put an end to its suffering with a stone. It lay still.

“I have never seen such huge trout as are in this tarn,” he said.

The girl took two cautious steps forward and crouched by the dead—thought?

“Fish?” she whispered.

“Yes. Trout. Big one.”

With one tentative finger she touched its gleaming flank, all the colors of a wet dawn.

“Do not touch the fins. Or the gills. They’re sharp.”

Fins? Gills? She pulled her finger away.

The old man said, “It’s a pity when they flop so. The one you caught didn’t struggle. Not at all.”

Her mind thrashed like the hooked trout, then leaped free and flew. She whispered, “You gave me a—a one like this to eat?”

“Yes. Why?”

“Because—because it is a thing from out of my mind.”

For once he was the one who did not understand. He raised his cloud-white brows at her, his rain-blue eyes peering.

“When I ate it,” she said, “in my mind there was a dragon under the mountain. And the berries were eyes—”

“Dreams,” the old man hero said. “It gave you dreams. Sometimes if you eat heavily before you sleep—”

“Dreams?”

“Yes.”

“But I never—I never did dreams before.”

* * *

Sleep became like the wonderwater; sleep was a dark surface under which mysteries shone, a black cave in which shining dragons dwelt, a deep womb in which every night she was reborn.

In the days the hero taught her the names of things. Fish, fins, gills, swim, bait, hook. Mantle, robe, toga. To the hero everything had a name or ought to have, even the mountains—Mount Etna, Mount Atlas, Mount Olympus. The hero told her stories of his village, called Athens, where the huts were made of stone. And he wanted to know stories of her village, but she knew none.

“My people do no stories,” she explained as they sat by the fire after yet another excellent dinner of cresses and wild onions, seedmeal cake and roast trout. “My people do no dreams either.”

“And names?” the hero teased her, for every day he asked her name and she did not answer. “Do your people do no names either?”

“Just to say girl, boy, man—” She thought of the turd man. “It was because I named him that they drove me away.”

The hero gazed at her, his brow troubled. After a moment he made a long arm and plucked a wildflower from somewhere in the dark. He asked her, “What is this?”

“A flower.”

“Yes, but what kind? Do you know?”

She shook her head. Kind? “It looks like a little sun,” she said.

He smiled. “It’s called daisy, day’s eye. The sun flower.”

“Flowers have names?”

“Indeed they do. And so do trees. And fish. And so should you.”

The girl sat mute.

The hero asked her, “What are you like, girl?”

And yes, yes, she knew exactly. “The tarn.”

“Why?”

She could not quite explain the darkness, the mystery. “Because odd things leap out of me.”

He laughed, but not the way the men of her people had sometimes laughed at her; his was a good laugh. “Wonderful things leap out of you.”

“My people did not think so.”

“Your people were mistaken. Beautiful things swim in you, is it not so?”

She nodded yes. “Dreams,” she said. It was the most important name she had yet learned from him.

“Would you like me to name you? Shall I call you Dreamfisher, little one?”

She nodded.

“Will you go back to Athens with me, Dreamfisher?”

She shook her head. “I must go back to my people.”

The words jolted him so that he sat up like a rock rat, rigid with shock. “But why? They are cowardly, ignorant—they might kill you!”

“I have to.” Dreamfisher thought of the deep pool with shining fish in it, the midnight depths of her own mind into which she dove and flew, the great undermountain darkness in which a dragon grew, guarding a nameless treasure. “I have to. They need me. No one else can help them.”

* * *

“How dare you!” snarled the Turd, hefting a stone the size of his head in both hands. Others stood poised to hurl stones almost as large. Dreamfisher stood unsurprised, for she had not attempted to conceal her return, toiling up the mountain under her heavy packs. The hero had fashioned the packs for her out of the strange not-hide stuff he called cloth, and he had given her a robe of white cloth to wear. If it were not for the white robe making her people wonder, making them hesitate, they would probably have stoned her to death by now.

Without giving the Turd more than a glance she eased the packs from her back to the ground. The packs also were making them wonder, she knew. Standing tall now, she thought of the tarn and the hero to strengthen her voice as she said, “I have returned—”

Someone burst through the crowd and hurtled toward her. Sobbing, her mother lunged to embrace her, arms around her neck, head on her shoulder, crying, “Go, flee now, do not come back. They will kill—”

“Hush.” Feeling a campfire warmth in her heart, Dreamfisher patted her mother’s back. “Don’t cry, brave one.” She risked the name because her mother deserved it, putting her body between her daughter and the stones. “I have come home to stay. You will see.” Gently she pushed her mother aside.