PULL ME UNDER - Leaf And Stream - Nine
(Author’s note: I’ve gotten a few new subscribers since the last chapter (welcome!) So just a reminder, the Table of Contents link below also has an intro to the serial, the blurb, pronunciation notes etc. If you’re curious, I suggest giving that a read first!
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming…)
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Nine
Tanner, still in exile, sat on the fallen tree where Lauren was last seen. In the camp the Grandmothers were both discussing the direction in which they needed to travel next, and he didn’t care. He wanted to stay where he was, if Lauren might come back.
What did they think, when they got up in the morning, two empty sleeping bags… Were they expecting bear-torn blood and guts, or some machete-wielding maniac?
Police search. UFO or sasquatch conspiracy nuts setting up cameras and looking for proof of abduction. Maybe Mom or Dad cried. Well, that might have been the most fantastical part of his thoughts, but still, the fact was that they had both gone then the same way Lauren had gone a few nights before.
An oxy, a fucking smoke, and he needed, wanted, needed. A migraine gave him tunnel vision, every noise stabbing his ears, if only he could be hit by a train, can’t someone come up and brain him with a club?
Something upset her to the core, she had been so quiet since… since Orman, maybe earlier. Maybe they were mistaken about the footprints, maybe she really did just wander off. No, her sneakers left very distinct prints, they’d know.
It’s all my fault. All of it. Trace a line to the day I was born. A tear fell on his jeans.
Don’t hit him, don’t hit him. Lauren’s voice, from years ago. Young enough it was at their father. A little older and it was at Tanner. By the time she left he was old enough to hit back, but never hit his father. Couchsurfed with friends instead. Expelled from school, kicked from hockey. Got away with sleeping in a communal gig space and no one noticed for a while, he was just that kid that hung around and knew where to score dope. Everything was nothing, all of that happened to someone else. Don’t hit him.
“Tanner.”
He jumped at the voice, wiped his face before turning.
Rudda stood, bow in hand. “They’ve decided. We’re leaving tomorrow. Seasons are changing soon.”
“I’m not going.”
“Let’s go hunting, then. Before we part.”
Tanner nodded, a weak smile.
Rudda was keen to the forest floor, scenting any evidence of game. Tanner followed his cues, keeping silent, low to the earth, the leaves and soil and sweetness of wildflowers and poisonous berries. His head still pounded. Rudda offered up a piece of what looked like wrinkled shoe leather—bark that Rudda assured him would help with the pain, instructing him how to ball it up, and to swallow his saliva.
It tasted bitter, but the chewing itself helped distract him. Felt like coarse gum, once softened he held it like dip in his cheek. His stomach felt numbed as he swallowed his spit, cottony gut.
Scat examined, fur in branches. Tanner could close his eyes and see Grandpa, before he died, the sherpa-lined corduroy and mesh trucker hat, hunter-orange vest with a perpetual cigarette dangling, stories of loose women before Tanner was old enough to get the jokes. No care at all if it was going to scare the game away, it wasn’t about the hunt, not really. He missed his grandpa.
Rudda held out a hand, and Tanner froze. A tight cluster of trees over the river hid a trio of deer, and they looked around with dark, vacant eyes, jaws grinding leaves from saplings. Tanner propped his rifle on a fallen tree and felt the moisture of the earth seep up through his clothes, wad of chewed bark still held in his cheek. Rudda whispered to him some words of guidance that he didn’t hear, not listening but processing the sound of his own breath. Hands steady, the thing shot high remember, sights on the buck, a perfect rack on him, finger slid in the trigger guard, wait for the right turn of the head—before Rudda could say “now” the trigger was pulled, a satisfying punch to the shoulder. He put a good hole through the lungs, red spilling out as the animal fell and thrashed, attempted one last climb up to run but it was no use, it just hadn’t noticed it was dead yet. Rudda gripped Tanner’s sleeve with a celebratory crow. Tanner didn’t notice anything but the mirage.
“Look at that! Look at that!” Rudda forgot the hunting formality, so exultant, ready to jump up to run across the shallow river to see what the bullet had done. “We must leave an offering of thanks for this. Look at that. What a beautiful kill.”
Tanner didn’t see the deer. A curtain dropped with the body, the buck’s fall revealing a shimmer just beyond the branches of trees that made a false archway, and within the arch the shimmer brightened. Lauren was standing there, at her back a glittering body of water with blue mountains against a pink sky, the sun rising. There was a dock, with fishermen preparing their nets, he could almost hear the waves splashing up, the longer he looked the more clear it became. “Lauren?”
Rudda paused his excitement. “What?”
“Do you see it?” Tanner spat the bark and dropped the gun, running across the slippery river bottom to the vision, but as he passed the buck it vanished. Tanner fell to his knees, screaming her name again.
***
Had he hallucinated, the bark did something that Rudda failed to mention? His migraine was really a brain tumour pushing on something that made him see things? Ddun listened to Tanner’s disjointed rambling either way. He got to hunt, how swell, but who cares about that if it was Lauren. Sweat poured off him as he described his vision, every detail right down to what the fishermen wore.
“Kaddusk,” Ddun said. “Our summer capital. Lake Kadd is the only one I know of with mountains to the east and north.”
Rudda nodded in agreement.
“How—how can we know it’s even here? You know? She c-could be back home, isn’t that possible? Or… That could be any lake on the planet.”
“It’s not.” Ddun wasn’t only believing what Tanner saw, but encouraging the fantasy. Tanner didn’t know whether to thank him or puke.
But despite the uncertainty, it was their only lead. Worth a shot. “How far is it from here?” Tanner asked.
“Just us? Sixteen days give or take, if the Sky Father favours us and we have good weather.”
Tanner pinched the bridge of his nose, frustrated, disgusted, heart sunk. We’ve already wasted time. “Tell the dick at the stables I’ll really kill him this time if he doesn’t give me the fastest horse.”
“That would be my horse. You get the second fastest.”
***
It was a half-lie. All their horses were made the same, something neither Tanner nor Lauren understood, treating them as if they were alive. It wasn’t the speed of the horse, it was the speed of the rider. Tanner was faster, but Ddun wasn’t going to let him know that, not yet.
Tanner dressed Dvarri again, bathed and ready for travel, but kept the jacket, his strings of coins returned to him and he tied them happily. Ddun figured the jacket was akin to a spirit mask and said nothing. When Ddun brought out the horse, Tanner’s eyes lit up, but he hesitated to take the reins. “What happened to ‘no mask, no horse?’”
“This is a special occasion.” Another half-lie.
Rudda and Antoll insisted on accompanying, and the four of them set off after everything was made ready for their journey while the camp packed up for their own trek to new pasture. Grandmother told them where that would be and made sure that the men were given anything they’d need. Ddun asked Grandmother to hold on to Tanner’s antlers when they had a moment alone, and she accepted them, knowing Ddun’s intent, should they return.
The four rode hard the first day, Tanner complaining with good-natured laughter as they set up the tent. “Never had my ass this sore before, I’ll be walking funny for a while!”
“I’m pretty sure I’ve heard that from a woman!” Antoll said with a slap on his legs, and they were all guffawing like idiots, even Rudda cracked a smile.
It felt good to leave the formality of the clan behind, masks propped up on their heads or tied at their belts while they prepared a fire. Tanner had a strange black thing in his fist that, with a flick of his thumb onto a red tongue, started a fire—quicker than flint, like summoning the flame out of his palm. Ddun had never noticed it before, and held out his hand, Tanner obliged. It felt strange, not metal or wood, except the silvery top. He shook it and heard liquid, sniffed at it, and was ready to put the thing in his teeth to test the material with a bite, but Tanner leapt up and took it from him before his molars applied pressure. “It’s plastic.” He gave a couple flicks of the jagged disk, to show how it worked, how the sparks ignited with a hiss and a strange smell.
Ddun chuckled at the clever little thing. “I would very much like to visit your world one day. Just to see all the things that have allowed you to grow so soft.”
“You’d get fat and bored. ‘Give me convenience, or give me death,’” Tanner said, then held a stalk of grass in his teeth and reclined against a tall waystone.
“You really are a society of kings then, aren’t you?” Antoll prepared the tripod over the fire with a pot hanging, Rudda skinned a freshly caught rabbit. “Ddun would fit right in. His mother was a piss-haired Stenya whore, even their whores aspire to royalty.”
Ddun knew Antoll was trying to get a rise out of him. “I never knew my mother and can’t claim to guess any of her aspirations.”
“Every cock in her mouth a king’s sceptre!” Antoll nudged Tanner’s foot, he was grinning like an imp. “But don’t hold it against him. Anyway, the rest of him is his father. Why do you think our clan is so fucking large? Not the first time we’ve joined with others. The bitegrass bends to us as we march through, get any bigger and the spirits themselves will shriek in terror at the sight of us. It’s enough! I’m a plainsman, I prefer the company of the open sky, Ddun here thinks his cock isn’t a sceptre but a shepherd’s staff, I suppose. But enough about that lout. Ride with us and kill with us, that’s all we ask, we’re very easy-going people, aren’t we, I suppose Ddun is good enough at it, perhaps it is that piss-hair that makes him so eager for a kill, eh? Look at him, a gods-damned proud mongrel thinking he can command attention.”
“I can put my foot up your arse well enough.”
“Too many laws at home trying to keep you from killing anybody,” Tanner said. “You’d all be locked up for life.”
“No wonder you left,” Rudda joked in his dry way.
“No killing anyone when we get to Kaddusk,” Antoll said with a crooked smile and a mocking, waggling finger at his friends. “Especially not any Stenya or Peiransi shits.”
“Don’t we westland boys have a reputation to uphold?” Rudda punctuated his question with a pop of raw heart into his mouth.
“I fucking hate the capitals.” Antoll made it no secret his preference was to be as far away from civilization as he could. The fact that the Stenya were encroaching on their clan lands with their own civilization especially chaffed him. At least Kaddusk was Dvarri, even if they were a different breed.
Wild animals yapped in the distance, birds dove after prey, and the wind rustled the grass. “Then why’d you come?” Tanner asked.
“I couldn’t stand the thought that you three were going to have all the fun.”
“Is Lauren safe there?”
No one could say.
While they waited for food under a darkening sky Antoll drew a game board in the dirt and tossed his bag of carved bones down, inviting anyone to play. Tanner was eager to volunteer and learn the rules, only to stop Antoll with a crack of a laugh. “This is chess!” Tanner rubbed his face with a low grumble before returning to the game. Ddun caught a small nap to the tune of Tanner losing and laughing about it. “Even here I suck at chess!”
“You’ve got to have a sharp mind for it,” Antoll said, only for Rudda to remind, he was only winning because Tanner was worse. Their voices lulled Ddun into a water-thin sleep.
Another group of travellers came by and shared their fire, waking Ddun. They had chests of foreign wine and dried fruit and spice, beads and reams of cloth, and gargantuan men to guard it. The merchants only took out enough to show off and persuade a trade, hungrily eyeing the coins adorning the four men. It worked, Tanner happy to haggle the price of the wine, glinting his coins in the sun.
From the vantage of their fire, Tanner’s smooth hands left Antoll and Rudda exchanging looks and turning away, as if what the man was doing was none of their business… but during the exchange Ddun watched with a furrowed brow, wondering what it was they didn’t witness. After the merchants went on their way, Tanner snickered and showed off the coins the wine seller didn’t get, and upended a jug with a red trickle down his chin. “They were assholes,” he shrugged as if answering their silence with his reasoning.
He wasn’t reprimanded, not with that logic—the merchant was Peiransi anyway which made Tanner correct in his assessment—and especially since he was happy to pass the jug around. The merchants must not have noticed the trick that night, because they never returned.