John Bowman's Cave Read online

  John skipped over this, asking, “So, where is she?”

  “In hiding.”

  “Where?”

  “In the body of a little girl.”

  “What?”

  “I changed her from a woman into a girl, so the Rory would adopt her. I thought then, that it would give me time to make her see sense, as she grew. Foolish of me really, though it seemed the right thing to do at the time. At any rate, it fooled the Rory. Their culture welcomes orphans, so they took her with them. She’s quite safe.”

  “Where? Where did they take her?”

  “To Grealding, their stronghold, their home. What is this woman to you?”

  “I think she may be my wife.”

  Argilan frowned. John saw it. “Why? What’s the problem?”

  “As I said, she is now a little girl. You won’t recognize her.”

  John walked away. The dream had gotten weird again. But it was his dream, damn it, and if he couldn’t be its director, he’d be no puppet actor either. He remembered childhood photographs of the woman he’d married.

  “I’ve seen her as a girl! I’d recognize her.”

  “No, this was no simple going back to whatever it was she looked like as a girl. I made her to the image I recall of girl children. She will be strange to you.”

  “Even her manner, her character?”

  “Perhaps not, her soul’s the same. But the temperament of childhood, and what has happened to her, are sources of confusion. It would be better for you to continue your journey to the White Lands alone. She can join you later.”

  “Forget it! I want to see her.”

  “That isn’t possible, at least for now. As I said, she went with the Rory to Grealding, a long way from here. And you’re not ready to travel there, nor should you. You must go on, to the White Lands, to your destiny.”

  “Why not her destiny, too, since I assume she died in shock, in order to be here? Why did you let her stay in this world?” John was pleased with the way he outsmarted the dream.

  “Oh, don’t think I didn’t try to send her through the Soul Gate! As a whole Outlander – like you – she was the ideal Key. But she’d have none of it. Quite a stubborn woman. I had a hard time explaining anything to her, she kept babbling about finding a way home. Poor thing, as if there is one, for her, or you, or any who come here, really, until Soul Gate is opened again. Then the way home will be clear and easy, though not necessarily what you expect.

  At any rate, when I changed her into a girl, it only made her anger worse, though being a girl, she couldn’t hit so hard. Anyway, then the Rory came and took the problem out of my hands.”

  John smiled. He could see in the woman the tough traits he’d admired in his wife. If only all dreams made as much sense as this. One thing was certain, he would never find her here, the way this perverse dream kept hiding her. Clearly, it was time to wake up; he had a life to go back to, and something left undone.

  “Look, it’s been fine meeting you, and this has been an interesting dream. Now it’s time for me to leave. Let’s make a deal. You want something from me; I want to go home. Tell me what it is you want. I’ll see if I can make it happen. Then I want you and all this,” he waved his hand about, “to go away. You say I should head for the ‘White Lands’, and you know, I think you’re right. I want that whiteness at the end of a dream, just before waking, to start. Deal?”

  “You talk as if you still inhabited your old world. As if there was only one world. I’ve already told you different. There is another world, and you are now in it.”

  “What world? What damn world? All I see is what’s around me now. Tell me how that’s different from what a man might dream, lying on his back in his own bed, in his own world?”

  “As you say, what you sense is your belief. I can’t disprove perceptions, but in time they may melt away. Like mist. Like your forgetfulness.”

  This pulled John up. He still didn’t know his own last name; he could hardly argue. Not even with a dream. Inquisitiveness struck him.

  “So, what’s this Soul Gate you want opened, and why?”

  The old man smiled. “The why is what Animarl is all about. You are passing through here. As I said, this is a place of rest for those on their journey to the White Lands. But something at the core has broken, something I can’t fix. So, their journey is held up until the Soul Gate is re-opened. Meanwhile, those who die here will never make it to that place of rest. Imagine that, Outlander, never! Those souls simply cease to evolve. Can you allow that, knowing you can buy them peace? Knowing you are the Key that can open Soul Gate?”

  “Simple as that, huh?” John laughed.

  “Yes, truly, it is. Believe it, John: it only takes for you to think ‘Home’ in the Soul Gate’s presence, and the gate will open!”

  “But if you’re the ‘Gatekeeper’ or whatever, why don’t you open it, why do you need me, or someone else, this so-called key?”

  “I am the Gatekeeper, but the key was lost,” Argilan answered evenly. “As to the others I have asked, and they are few - they must be whole, as I said - it isn’t an easy thing to lay down your life a second time, voluntarily. To come here from the moment of death seems such a blessed reprieve. And it’s no easy thing you’re faced with. To pass through the Soul Gate is a lot to ask of anyone.”

  “I’m glad to hear it up front, Argilan. It makes it so much easier for me to also say no!”

  Argilan scowled. “The message isn’t getting through, is it? No matter, there’s time, or what you sense as time passing.” He refilled their glasses from a stone jug and handed one to John. John took the offering and they sat in silence, avoiding one another’s gaze.

  Eventually, the impasse made them edgy and they resumed the conversation, making the kind of small talk people who don’t know what to say to one another make. What seemed an hour to John passed. At some time, he found himself looking at his left arm, where the now tattered cuff rolled to one side. There was a strip of whiter skin where his wristwatch band had been. Looking further he started at the way his jeans belt hung loose where leather loops once held a buckle. More insistent was the almost throbbing absence on his wedding band finger.

  “God, my ring’s gone!”

  “Yes, all exposed metal perishes in the passage.”

  John’s face creased and he looked up at the old man. “I feel almost naked without it, I’d worn it so long.”

  “Here, wear this.” Argilan snapped up his hand and slipped a black, stone ring on the aggrieved digit. It seemed no more strange to John than anything else in Animarl, that the ring was a perfect fit, as if it formed itself to the shape of the finger. Pinpoints of light shone deep in its black band.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Think of it as the path of stars you walk under; it will show the way home.”

  John frowned and looked away from Argilan. He looked at the ring, they both did, lost for what seemed to John a long time in its gritty-black iridescence. It was left to Argilan to re-kindle conversation.

  “So, can you remember anything else yet? The rest of your name?”

  “Not really. I guess I'm just a John Doe. Well, 'John' feels right anyway. I mean it'll do for now; I'll fill the rest in as I go.”

  “John. Just John? Nothing more?”

  “No, that's it. John Just John. That's what I am.”

  “Well, I’ve said what I want from you. It’s your turn now. What do you want?”

  John looked up. He sucked air in hard, waiting for the words. When the realization hit it lanced something, and his breath running out between his teeth was like the last of a beaching wave as it sighs into sand.

  “I need another chance.”

  ***

  Chapter 3

  Taken In

  The girl called Caylen led John into the chamber where her brother Oyen sat, eating the first meal of the day with the rest of Yalnita’s Pack. John followed dumbly, holding her hand as a simpleton might. He stared at her back. He
was in shock. Who was this young girl who’d interrupted the conversation with Argilan? The old man had vanished when she appeared. She’d simply walked up to John, announced “I’m Caylen” and led him away from Argilan’s room. But it just couldn’t be; she looked nothing like the Caylen John knew.

  Oyen jumped up as they entered. His focus flicked between Caylen and the bedraggled Outlander behind her.

  “Where’ve you been? It’s almost time, we’ve been waiting, we ….”

  “You’ve been eating, I see,” Caylen said. “That’s good, I’ve brought someone who needs food.” It was a bold start to what she knew would be a hard task: persuading the Pack to let the Outlander live. Too many had come lately, and even if this one’s good health made him remarkable, the enmity the Rory bore Outlanders usually sealed their fate on sight. She was counting on her intercession as an adopted Rory to save the man.

  But another Rory was on his feet now, drawing his short sword. “He needs a sharp tap with a sharp blade, blasted Outlander!”

  “Damn right, we stick arrows in him, see how full his stomach really is!” said another, taking up a bow and quiver of arrows from where they lay.

  Caylen backed against the man she’d brought, and spread her arms wide.

  “No: he lives! He’s whole, he’s healthy.”

  “Seen that. So kill him quick before he shows his true face.” Rain Dog advanced on her, patting the sword blade against one hand, his eyes flicking to either side of her young woman’s frame, looking for a way past to his quarry.

  “Hold up, Rain Dog!” Oyen’s voice boomed in the small cavern. He’d seen the look on the face of the woman. Even with the years she’d spent among her adoptive kin, he knew she still held soft feelings for her old world. And now she’d found this Outlander - only the Old Ones knew how or where – and brought him back like a winter-orphaned fawn. Oyen looked at her, the Outlander in his peripheral vision. Such a young’un still, he mused.

  This Cave is where they’d found Caylen, too, when they’d come for Blood Bonding, seven rings ago. They’d taken the little firecat in despite misgivings about her Outlander origins, her strange speech, and her temper. Oyen had adopted her as a sister on behalf of his own absent family. Warrior tribe though the Rory were, they never turned away a foundling.

  But this Outlander’s untimely entrance they could do without. They were already late for this trip’s Blood Bonding, when the Pack cemented unity with ritual. Every completed circle of the seasons, the trees threw a new ring, and every ring, the Packs made their annual pilgrimage to this sacred place in the Cave of Origins, deep inside the mountain where the Rory first appeared in Animarl, to renew their oaths of loyalty and kinship.

  They were late; Yalnita would be waiting. And the Huntress didn’t like to wait. Not one bit.

  Oyen moved past the half-crouched figure of Rain Dog. He eyed the man before him. Filthy and bedraggled as all Outlanders when they first came to Animarl; the passage between worlds cared little for those who used it. This Outlander however, like the girl Caylen, had not been maimed by the journey. A whole one from the outer world, found by another who came the same way? Who knew what sort of sign that was? Who knew the usefulness they would bury with this man, if they killed him now?

  “What’re you named, man?”

  “Um, John. Sort of.”

  “Umjunsortiv! What?”

  Sensing his mistake, John came back stronger. “No, it’s John, just John.”

  Oyen looked over at his sister, who jerked her head in vigorous encouragement. Yes, yes, believe him, her eyes said. The Rory scowled at the Outlander, trying for Caylen’s sake to allow that this uncertain man knew his own mind.

  “John Just John? Are you sure?”

  “Hah! He doesn’t know, the skin’s okay, but he’s still broke inside! Just like all Outlanders, can’t trust ’em. Looking good outside’s just a trick, kill him now!”

  “Shut up, Rain Dog!” Oyen rejected his Pack mate’s logic with brute force. He looked back to the Outlander. “Well, at least your name, real name. Be sure now, no fooling. Is it really John Just John?”

  John’s eyes roamed the room. So real, he thought, as though all surfaces were just the convincing membrane of the dream through which he drifted.

  But, he sensed, there was also a clue here. Something hidden in the picture that might unlock it, dissolve the dream. Every question is a trial, a thrust to keep me on the back foot, to stay a prisoner of my own maddened mind, forever parrying.

  Then he found it. Hidden in a corner of the conversation seconds back, a mention of archery. “Bowman. I'm John Bowman. That's my name.” His relief was palpable.

  Oyen's, less so. “John Bowman, John Bowman” he repeated several times, each time chewing the words a different way, seeming to find at last the satisfaction a hungry man derives from gristle. “Well, John Bowman you say, John Bowman it is.” Oyen took a deep breath. “Come on then, you can’t go around like that, you’ll have to wash.” He looked around at the Pack. “He’ll need clothes, too. Give up what you’ve got spare.”

  “I’ll do that,” said Caylen. “Rain Dog, he’s about your size, what did you bring extra?”

  Oyen seized the opportunity along with Bowman’s arm and steered the newcomer out the way he’d come in, leaving the others to squabble.

  He took Bowman to a small room formed where a cave tunnel came to an abrupt end and hollowed a spherical space out of the mountain.

  “Stay here till I’m back,” he said and left.

  John Bowman paced the perimeter of his new room. It seemed a smaller version of the one Argilan had taken him to. The packed dirt floor joined seamlessly with the rough rock walls. A low, vaulting roof came down and broke in just one place, where he and Oyen had entered. A single chair kept a small desk company. To one side was a small wooden bed, with a mattress of plaited golden cane, and at its foot, three colourful woven rugs.

  As he walked he scanned the curved walls. They were bare of distinctive features. Other than the doorway no window or exit interrupted the curving surface. And the doorway itself led into a maze of passages that kept him in this room just as any bolted door might do. It occurred to him that he wasn’t really looking for a way out, it was just that the pacing helped to work off tension.

  How does it remain so light? he thought, noting the candle unlit on the desk, and as he thought it, light danced in the room. Soft, furry tongues of light: little flames that coalesced in front of him to a ball, so brilliantly white he could barely look straight at it, but friendly light, beckoning. Mindlessly he extended one hand towards it and watched with fearless detachment as the hand, then his arm disappeared into the sphere.

  It’s the most natural thing in the world, he thought as his entire arm was drawn into it, then his head, his neck. And there he pulled up sharp. On the other side his eyes froze on a landscape so familiar it made his viscera knot: the house, in the street, in the town he lived in yesterday. He yanked back from the tube. Its rim rolled softly round him and he slopped into the world his feet stood in, wavering on those feet, arms flitting crazily in front, trying to grip the insubstantial edges of a world that stood in air, hold it at appraisable length.

  “How do you like your new home?”

  He whirled around. Caylen was standing in the doorway, carrying garments in one hand and something, a book, he thought, in the other.

  “Don't you knock? Don't you ever knock?!”

  “What's there to knock on?” She laughed, glancing behind her as she crossed the room to his bed. She placed the clothes on it and turned to him with the book in both hands, cradled to her chest. Her face was placid, and if she’d seen his odd behaviour of a moment ago, she said nothing.

  He glowered at her. “Let’s establish ground rules, shall we? One, we’ve only just met. Well ...” he thought back to when she’d found him a scant hour back, arguing like a madman with the spectre called Argilan. “And I guess I should thank you for that. But I'm a man, you�
�re a girl…” He was starting to lose the thread of what he wanted to say, looking at her face. She hadn’t been the woman he sought, not even a younger version, despite the incredible coincidence of their names. None of her features matched those of his wife. Even the eyes, which would surely tell - though the same colour as his wife’s - burnt with an entirely different fire. But then, what could you expect from a dream?

  So, he finished quickly. “And I’m getting out of here, first chance I get!”

  Suddenly she was businesslike too.

  “Good, I'm relieved to hear it. Here.”

  She shoved the book at him.

  “For you.” It was as if the force of his rebuff had blown out a candle in her.

  “Oh. For me? Um, thank you. What is it?”

  “A book, John Foolman! What does it seem? I made it to draw the birds I saw in Animarl, when I first came here. They were so pretty. But now I’m a warrior, I won’t have time for that. You can use it now.”

  He smiled at the grownup pretence, then fumbled for the right words to accept the gift. “Oh, I see. For keeping a journal of what I learn?”

  “Perhaps. Sometimes you can write or draw things you need to remember.”

  “Yes, that's what I meant.”

  She looked at him quizzically. “Here, I can start it for you - it’s allowed, it used to be my book, so I can help you at the beginning. After that you'll have to make it yourself,” she said and her child enthusiasm was back as she flicked past her crude stick-drawings to the first blank page. Taking a length of thin charcoal from the spine of the book, she wrote:

  The Book of John Bowman,

  who was once so lost

  it took a whole world to find him

  And she child-guffawed at her masterpiece. Then she turned to the next page and looked up at him.

  “Now you will have to learn what it is to be truly a man of the bow, Mr Lost.”