The Magister (Earthkeep) (3 page)

"Dicken!" she shrieked.

Behind her, Donal was stepping out of his jumpsuit.  "She fell outward.  Maybe over there."  He was nodding to a section of the thicket beyond the berry creepers. 

Jez knelt to look at the broken rock that had given way under Dicken, then to the spot Donal had indicated.  She nodded.  "But that brush drops off, too.  I can't see. . ."

"Here, hold on to this."  Donal was reshouldering his backpack and pushing a leg of the jumpsuit toward her.  "I can swing down to the brush."  He sat at the edge of the scarp with the opposite arm of the jumpsuit in his hand.

"Good.  I'll join you."

Donal almost let go.  "You can't. . ."

"I can," she assured him, urging him past his astonishment.  She sat bracing a foot against a small pine tree until she felt the lurch that meant Donal was hanging at the far end of the jumpsuit.  "Are you okay?" she shouted.

Her answer was the release of the tension on their makeshift rope, a quick silence, then a loud thrash.  "Donal?"  She scrambled to the edge of the precipice.

"I'm fine."  His voice was far away.

Through growing shadows she saw him, more than thirty feet below, sprawled on briars and firebroom boughs.  She threw the jumpsuit after him and retrieved her backpack. 

"I'm coming, Big Dicken," she murmured, slipping into the straps.

She closed her eyes, sank into her inside vastness, and swam there a second to recover all her balances.  Then she exhaled and waited a very long moment, breathing slowly, shallowly.  There it came, the image she sought, wafting toward her on pillows of air.  In an instant she was the butterfly, not yet soaring, but hovering above the ground.  She felt her feet leave the earth, and an intoxicating lightness infuse her body.  She opened her eyes and with slow intent moved over the edge of the precipice.  Lightly, like the creature she imitated, she floated downward.

Donal Jain barely believed his eyes.  He ceased his attempts to escape the nest of thorns and underbrush that supported him and watched with careful attention as Jezebel bent her legs and landed beside him, balancing half on the brambles and half on the near vertical slope out of which they grew.

"Do you often do that?" he asked.

"Only when I have to," she answered, silently thanking her butterfly guide.  "No, I know what you're thinking.  I can't lift her out of here." 

She began searching the sea of brush that tumbled downward beyond them.  There were no trees for hundreds of feet. 

"Di-i-cken!" she called.  An echo answered.

Donal clambered up beside her.  "We are in trouble, Jezebel," he said, looking around.  "This brush is supple.  It would snap back and cover any place she fell.  And it will be dark in less than fifteen minutes."

Jez's heart sank.  "Then we have to find her before then.  I can float and scud enough to take a look around," she mused, "but I'm afraid you'll have to do it the hard way.  You don't happen to carry a machete?"

Donal began struggling back into the protection of the jumpsuit.  "No.  And I wouldn't want to use it even if I had it.  The bushes will let me through.  And they will hold me up."

"Here," Jez said suddenly, reaching to take his chin in her hands.  Donal started.  "Relax, I'm putting a vapor greave over your face so those briars don't get to you.  You'll have to crawl."  As her fingers made light passes over his head and neck, droplets formed. "Now your hands." 

He hesitated.  "Wait.  We'll need light."  Before Jez could respond, Donal had closed his eyes and cupped his hands in front of his mouth. 

With growing astonishment, Jezebel watched the man do what she had seen only women do before: He conjured a glolobe, spinning plenum from vacuum, twining the errant spectra spline by spline with such dexterity that she could hardly see them take shape.  He worked quickly, finally moving his hands apart to reveal a network of tiny velocities that fluoresced at last into a bright healthy light. 

With a smile of satisfaction, Donal held the light out to Jez.  "You'll need it sooner than I."

Jez took the glolobe.  "You are a man of many parts, Donal Jain," she said.

"I have sat at the feet of many wise women," he responded.

She cast the vapor protection over his hands and then stood, closed her eyes and lifted again, this time scudding slowly over the expanse of underbrush that clung to the steepening decline.  The air was chill now, and in the gathering night she could barely see Donal as he crawled about the area at the base of the cliff. 

Methodically she hovered in a steady suspension above the brambles and chaparral, moving her light in regular sweeps below her.  As she searched the blanket of darkening sameness beneath her, she reached out toward Dicken, toward the source of deep laughter and blessed comfort, toward memories of work, of. . .

Jez brought herself up short in midair, dipping almost uncontrolled into the underbrush.  Something shiny.  Now it was gone.  No, there, to her left!  She drew herself back and duplicated her last series of moves, waving the light slowly.  Yes!  Something dangled there in the ranks of bigger firebroom brush.  She dove toward it.

"Donal, here!  There's. . ."  The object was at her fingertips: Dicken's dankee necklace, its tiny silver plates hanging in a broken strand from the branch.  Jez pocketed the necklace and swung the glolobe frantically about her.  She forced it deep into the tops of the tree-like brush beneath her, trying to discover where Dicken had disappeared.  Her eyes fell on a broken branch. 

"I'm going down!" she called to Donal.

Activating a vapor greave about her own body, she collected all that she could of strength and drove herself feet first down into the growth beneath her.  She plunged twice her height through a shaft of tangled limbs, one that she prayed had been hollowed out by Dicken's body.  Suddenly her feet swung in a huge nothingness and then crashed onto solid earth.

She opened her eyes to a different world.  And to the body of Dicken.

Jez sat stunned in the silence.  Bare ground made a plateau of the slopes around her, almost level for several yards in all directions.  Dicken lay just beyond her, sprawled wide on the earth in a pocket of space between the trunks of the immature trees. 

Surrounding the small haven, soundless and dark even in the harsh light of the glolobe, was the microcosm of a forest whose floor in another time could have been the wanderground for all manner of small animals up and down the entire slope.  For an instant, Jez saw in her mind the warrens and burrows that once had been a part of this firebroom grove.  Then the foxes, the marmots, the woodchucks and the rabbits invaded her mind, and as she crawled toward her lover, her mind caught the creatures’ ebullient bustle in the flourishing miniature forest.

Dicken was unconscious, breathing shallowly, unresponsive to her touch.  Looking up, Jez could see the opening in the firebroom that she, and Dicken before her, had dropped through.  With deliberate caution she again protected her body and thrust her arms and the glolobe above her head.  Lightly, she lifted herself upward through the passageway, swiveling back and forth where she needed to, until she felt the leafy top branches.  Her head emerged into an almost completely black night.  A light shone some yards away, toward the cliff.  Donal had called up another glolobe. 

"I'm coming," he shouted.

The darkness was heavy on them now, and his light was moving very slowly, revealing his wiry body as he crept like a high-wire walker from the top of one resilient little tree to another, calmly making his way toward her.

"I'll station my light right here where I've gone down!" she shouted to him. 

"Good!"

"When you drop, shield your eyes!" 

She stabilized her own glolobe in the topmost branches beside her suspended body and, without waiting for his response, plunged again beneath the canopy.

In the blackness she scrambled toward the heat of Dicken's body.  Setting her own pack aside, she stretched out parallel to her lover, her arm around her, her temple next to Dicken's temple and her free hand on Dicken's abdomen.  She began breathing in a measured tempo, diminishing her softself by slow decrements until she was a tiny presence hovering in the spinal cord at the base of Dicken's skull.

Merely a breeze of gentle inquiry now, she flowed with fluids and leapt with synapses up through Dicken's brain, down her back, out every spinal nerve, into every sensory track, from central source to every organ and every extremity.  When at last she swam back into the consciousness of her own body, Jezebel encountered the waiting presence of Donal Jain.  Both glolobes were re-energized and hung over Dicken's body.

"She has several cracked ribs, one of them splintered," she announced. 

Donal was removing his jumpsuit again, spreading it over Dicken as Jez continued to talk. 

"Sprains and bruises almost everywhere, and a dislocated shoulder.  She's hit her head, but not hard enough to put her out.  Two cervical vertebrae are out of line, though I can't find any pressure there on the nerves.  Right lobe of her liver is bleeding badly — probably punctured by the rib.  I've relieved its distress and stabilized her systems."  She looked with wide eyes at Donal.  "But I don't know why she's unconscious."

The full recognition of their circumstances assailed her: Her lover might be close to death, in immediate need of healing that was beyond her ken, and they hung on a cold mountainside in a black night, miles from any help, with no transportation and no means of communication. 

"How far are we," she made herself ask, "from Chimney Corner?"

Donal offered her his canteen.  When she refused, he drank a cautious sip.  "Another hour in the air.  Two days overland.  And if we carry her. . . .  There is a village south of us, but almost as far."

Jez dabbed with a handkerchief at the scrapes and scratches on Dicken's face.  "The cushcar?"
"It's not due for two weeks.  And no other aircraft regularly come."

Jez stared at him, then began exploring the contents of Dicken's pack.

Donal pulled a glolobe to him and studied Dicken's dark brown face, almost ashen now. 

"Jezebel," he said, his voice breaking the silence of their tiny shelter.

"What?"  Jez hauled a sweater out of Dicken's pack.

"The flying spoon, how is that working done?"

Jez froze.  She looked up to meet Donal's guileless eyes.

"No," she snapped, restuffing Dicken's pack with its assortment of food and woodsgear.

"No?"

"No!" Jez fairly shouted.  She looked apologetically at Dicken and then, still clutching the pack, she swung around to face Donal.  Her voice was dangerously steady.

"Listen to me, Citizen Jain!  You know a great many things that are important to know.  I respect your knowledge and the way you use it.  But do not be fooled.  All your knowledge ten thousandfold would not entitle you to a hint of women's mysteries!  Women's mysteries cannot be told, not because we hoard the knowledge but because no language can capture it.  The flying spoon is one such mystery, whose power lies in the sacred double vesseling of woman-love, a vesseling that men cannot imagine, much less imitate.  You are a man.  You cannot experience the flying spoon.  Do not even think of trying!"

Donal Jain did not take his gaze from Jezebel.  In the silence of the shelter, Dicken's breathing became a rattling wind. 

"I asked. . ."

"Forget it!"

They stared at each other in the cramped little den.  Jezebel broke the intensity by moving protectively to Dicken.  She placed her fingertips lightly under Dicken's nose. 

Donal Jain closed his eyes.

Jez began laying out a well-worn groundcloth, calculating the odds against getting it under Dicken without disturbing her body too much.  Donal moved to help her, gently placing one hand beneath Dicken's neck.  With his other arm he slowly lifted Dicken's upper torso, raising the head and neck as a unit.  Jez did not protest.  Together they pushed and slid and maneuvered until the cloth lay fully under the unconscious woman.  Jez covered her again with the jumpsuit and her sweater.  Then she laid a light torpor over the inert body for further warmth.  She looked up at Donal.

"Thank you."

Donal nodded and crawled back to his spot beyond Jez.  He sat, his arms locked around his knees.

Jezebel found the sandwiches of sprouts and ginger squash that Beabenet had ordered up for their trip.  She tore off pieces of the bag that protected her food and ate them, occasionally taking a small bite of the sandwich itself.

"Mine is wrapped in seaweed paper," Donal said.  "What is yours in?"

"Rice paper," Jez said, munching.  She resisted the urge to wolf down the whole sandwich and instead returned it to the remains of its ricebag.  She allowed herself a sip of water from the canteen.

"Donal. . ."

Donal held up his hand.  "You told the truth," he said.

She nodded.

He extinguished one of the glolobes and rested his head on his knees.

Jez put out the other light and lay on the hard earth beside Dicken, her mind squirreling with anxiety, longing, despair.  Briskly she formulated a plan for the morrow.  First, she and Donal would fashion a stretcher and, with some help from her levitating powers, get Dicken over the steep underbrush to the mountain path.  Then, by following the winding trails, they would come eventually to Chimney Corner and use whatever technology was available there to reach healing help. 

She tried to embrace hope, but in her chest her heart hung like a stone.  Stroking Dicken's face and body, she chanted softly every blessing that could bring ease.  It was perhaps an hour later that she finally dropped into an exhausted sleep.

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

Her eyes flew open.  The darkness that encircled her was alive with molten energy.  Jez gasped.  Wild fluctuations of a tightly condensed tension alternately rocked themselves outward and withdrew, only to cast themselves forward again, beating without focus or effect upon some invisible barrier.  Jez gingerly reached out her own senses, seeking the source.  First to her lover's near-lifeless body.  Then. . .Donal!  The man was transmitting!  But trying to mindreach with wild splays of frustrated intent.  She drew herself into focus and slipped into link with his flailing energy.