Visions of Power Page 7

  And froze in the middle of his first step.

  The spring water that fell down on him as he crossed the threshold was shocking, not just cold, but spiritually unnerving, as though it was a tool of some higher power. It felt as though its touch had physically frozen him in place, in mid-step, and his muscles, nerves, senses and soul all responded to the overwhelming sensation by ceasing activity. He felt the water falling on him, felt it running down his body, saturating his clothes, bathing his eyes and mouth and ears, dripping off his fingers and elbows, tingling as it coursed. It flowed down his body like an immersing baptism, then met the floor and flowed out of the chamber; it cleansed him and prepared him, carrying away the impurities he brought to the cave with him.

  The water was numbing. He couldn’t feel anything but shock, shock at what was happening to him, what was being removed from him, what was being given to him, an electric shock that ran through him. His eyes were filled with sparks that seemed to form forgotten patterns he couldn’t register. His fingers felt hyper-sensitive to the cold water running down them, even the slight air movement around them. His brain was paralyzed because his thoughts were being transformed too energetically for him to control them. He was being purified, his heart told him. His mind and soul were being cleansed so that he would not defile a holy place. And he was being changed. He didn’t understand what was happening, but something was affecting him that he’d not ever experienced before.

  There seemed to be a presence of great power and sympathy and love. Without the use of his senses, he tried to identify the features around him, wondering if there was some cause of this sensation, but there was no evident source of the diffused compassion.

  Abruptly he was jolted back to mundane reality, such as it was in a sacred cavern, and he felt pushed all the way into the chamber. He stopped in the puddle and looked back, but the shower continued to drizzle down in a clear sheet as though it had never been interrupted, and there was nothing behind him but the sunlight coming in the empty doorway. He looked forward again, took a deep breath of air, shivered, and began to climb the steep stairs that were the only place to go.

  Alec’s feet trod the steps without his awareness, because the only things he noticed were the extraordinary paintings and figures along the walls, the extreme details of which were like items from reality frozen in miniature on the surfaces around him. Each object seemed to jump out at his eyes, and he felt uncountable mental jolts as he espied each tableau while he moved up the stairway. He was compelled by the same impulse he’d felt earlier in the morning when he’d had to leave the camp below, but now it was a spirit that made his legs move and his eyes roam and his ears tune in to every minute sound. The sound of dripping water traveled up the stairwell with him like a melodic chant that drilled into his mind, a message of wordless tones in a strange language that was strong and vibrant and comprehensible but not translatable into human words.

  Up the steps he went through the soft glow, moving slowly as the sensations continued to pour into him. Finally, minutes later or hours, he couldn’t tell, the stairs stopped at a landing, from which a closed door provided the only way to advance. Standing at the door, trying to regain control of his consciousness after his experience on the stairs, Alec placed his hand on the knob and pushed the door open. As he did so he noticed only one thing; he felt a shape on the knob protrude into his palm, the shape of a cross. Then the door moved on its hinges, and a new light filled his vision.

  Momentarily he saw a shallow room with a large window looking out across the same view he’d seen earlier from the ledge, the river valley far below, the stony green mountains around and the blue sky above. A blinding flash erased the view from his eyes as he crossed the threshold into the room. The light was like a physical shock hitting him; the impact was powerful, as stunning as the watery shower at the cave’s entrance had been. The light seemed to penetrate his flesh. He could suddenly see nothing; blinded, he felt his knees start to buckle, so he raised his hands and began to feel around him, concentrating his attention on shuffling his feet so that he didn’t stumble.

  Throughout the time he’d spent in the cave he’d sensed that there was some purpose behind this strange experience, the same purpose that had compelled him to leave Ari and Natalie in the first place. What purpose though, he wondered angrily, could have brought him to this cave, this holy place, then blinded him and left him senseless? “Heal the crown.” He didn’t hear it. He didn’t read it. He didn’t feel it. But the message was meant for him, he knew. What could the cryptic command mean?

  Alec’s hands felt a smooth cool surface, another explosive shock leapt up his arms and filled his eyes, and his vision returned instantly. His fingers were on the window he’d briefly glimpsed, which much to his surprise had glass in it. The glass seemed thick but not wavy, and in fact, didn’t seem to be glass at all. It wasn’t fragile like glass. Looking at the window puzzled him, and he spent moments contemplating the clear substance before him, ignoring the view through and beyond it. Suddenly his focus leaped though the glass and he studied the view, startled, while the mental impact of his strange vision drove consideration of the mysterious glass from his mind.

  The river, the forest, the stones were all visible outside the cavern, but something that was a glow without describable colors seemed to lay upon and within many of the things he saw. Upriver toward Riverside’s murderous ruins, the air had a cloud of painful unpleasantness. He felt pain in his own body from seeing so much of the indescribable atmosphere that hung over the city of death and destruction. Down below his perch, the river looked like it contained a hibernating health, a condition of life that was dormant for the time being, withdrawn and hidden from the presence of evil forces. The mountains of stone seemed unchanged, except for small outcroppings, some of which appealed to him for unknown reasons, and some that he felt a strong desire to avoid. He could sense the depth of those spots for a short distance inside the mountains, before the density of the stone overwhelmed his awareness.

  He stood and drank the new view in, looking from location to location and back again, to some of the same spots repeatedly. He was seeing indicators of life or health or vitality, the energy or power or something he’d never seen before, Alec concluded. But how can that be possible? This wasn’t anything he’d ever heard any one claim to be able to do, not the good ingenairii or magicians or doctors, nor even the worst quacks, Alec mused.

  He looked up at the sun, and was jolted as he realized that it was high noon, past the time he should have gotten back to his friends. He remembered Natalie’s uncertainty, and the unconscious form of Ari, and guilt overwhelmed him for being gone so long. His concentration on his new vision faded, and as it did, so did his sense of perception, as though he had taken off a pair of spectacles.

  Realizing that he had to get back to Natalie and Ari, Alec turned and started back down the stairway that descended into the mountain. I’ve got a long way to go, he told himself, and I need to warn them the lacertii are prowling nearby. I’ve got to see if Ari is any better. And I want to see Natalie, just to see her, he told himself.

  As Alec descended, he noticed that the drawing and pictures on the walls seemed to explain themselves to him now; there’s splitleaf fern, he thought as he passed a drawing; it might help Ari rest easier if he took some in a tea. And there’s melilot, hyssop and fiddlehead root that we could make into a poultice to put on his twisted ankle. As Alec reached the floor of the beginning chamber, he noticed again the picture of the man and woman posed on the couch. The healer will cure her before she even knows she’s ill, Alec mused.

  He stopped at the doorway and took out the drinking skin in his pack. He poured out the water in it and held it under the raining shower of water that fell from the spring in the ceiling, letting the skin fill with the cleansing holy water. Then he opened his own mouth and stepped into the shower himself with his head tilted back, feeling the water cleanse him again, letting it run into his mouth. He felt the water
reinforce and enhance whatever the cave had done to him. After several moments his sense of urgency to return to his friends forced him to step onto the ledge that thrust shallowly out from the steep side of the mountain, back into the mundane world.

  His spear and knife lay where he had left them. He looked at their lethal edges with distaste, although the knife promised good as well as bad, and seemed less loathsome than the spear, a tool only for harming others. Guessing at what he was likely to face on his journey, Alec swallowed the bile in his throat and picked up the weapons, then sat on the edge of the ledge, turned and groped to find the ladder rungs he needed to climb down.

  Down he went to the next ledge, where the dark crevasse awaited his return. As, he assumed, did the body of the lacerta he’d killed. Alec realized he was fortunate to kill his enemy in a location where no other lacertii was likely to find the body; other soldiers in the area wouldn’t immediately be on the alert without evidence of a violent encounter. Alec had to take advantage of that lack of alarm, and hurry to get his companions moving. He stumbled through the twisting crevasse as quickly as he could.

  At the entrance he saw the slumped body of the lacerta still sprawled where he’d fled from the violent battle. He stopped and reached down to check the body for anything of value he might need. He took the pack it had been carrying, a well-made leather bag, and emptied out its contents. Then he began back down the small ravine, stopping before going around each sharp turn to see what was ahead. After three stops, he found himself distracted by a splitleaf fern on the bank next to him. Carefully he selected several dried fronds, and placed them in his leather bag. Then he broke off a crumbly edge from a ledge of crack stone, and added it and the leaves from a greenberry bush to his medicinal bag as well.

  He continued on to the main gully. He stopped and listened. He heard no sound other that insects and wind in the tree branches above. Taking a deep breath, he burst into the main channel of the ravine and began running and stumbling down the slippery stony way back to the valley he’d left before sunrise, stopping from time to time along the way to catch his breath and pick a leaf or dig up a root he felt he wanted for his new collection of medicinal ingredients.

  With the sun descending from its zenith, Alec reached the bottom and spotted Natalie sitting beside Ari, who lay just where Alec had last seen him hours ago. Natalie espied him, and both relief and anger were reflected on her face. “Alec, I’m so glad to see you back. I was terribly worried and didn’t know what to do. I began to think you might not come back. Is everything alright? What took you so long?” her comments and questions tumbled out in a tone of voice that modulated from caring to annoyance as she voiced her thoughts.

  Alec looked at Natalie, then he looked down at Ari, unable to focus on the words Natalie was voicing. “We’ve got to do something for Ari right away,” he said. “Natalie, is there still a spark in that fire pit? Can you get it started up again? We only need enough heat to brew up some tea and warm some salve for him for now.”

  Alec couldn’t understand all the things he saw in Ari. As if a set of visionary glasses had flipped back down over his eyes, Alec saw with something like the vision he had possessed in the cavern with the window. He saw the evidence of twisted ligaments in the ingenaire’s ankle, and already knew what to apply there. He sensed the struggle of his friend’s heart to keep an energetic flow of blood moving throughout the body, and knew what tea to brew for that. A few cuts and scrapes he knew he only had to clean up and let take care of themselves. But something unidentifiable, like an emptiness in a critical spot, a weakness in his soul that wasn’t a sinful spot, was beyond his ability to identify, and he couldn’t begin to understand how to cure it. Worst yet, that emptiness seemed to be the most important of the problems inflicted on his old friend right now.

  “One thing at a time,” he muttered under his breath. He stood up, and felt his head bump against Natalie’s shoulder, as she had been crouched right over his back while he had studied Ari. Apparently he had recited his prognosis out loud without realizing. “You seem to have a lot of ideas about how to make him better,” she stated in a flat voice. “If you knew all these potions you just recited, why didn’t we make them up this morning and give them to him then?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know these things this morning, but now I know they’re the right things to do,” he explained. Let’s get them started, and I’ll tell you an unbelievable story; I wouldn’t believe it myself, except that it happened to me.”

  He grabbed some dry twigs and went to the fire pit. “I kept it fed all day,” Natalie said, as he fed the fire and found their small brass cooking pot. He pulled out his skin of spring water he had carried down from the cave of the window, and as he poured some of the water into the pot he saw within the water itself some special endowment that would help to fill the emptiness in Ari. “Do you have any other water?” he asked Natalie. She gave him her own water skin. He opened it up and poured a small amount into his hand. It had none of the vibrancy the cave water had, none of the evidence of life and power and more.

  “Natalie, I don’t know if I can explain everything that happened today, because I’m still confused by parts of it myself. Right now I think I can help Ari recover, and I think we need to do that as fast as possible, because there are lacertii in the mountains up above us, and we shouldn’t stay here long,” he explained.

  The fire was growing stronger and hotter as he fed fuel into it. “You heat some water up and I’ll see what we can do for Ari,” he directed as he stood and turned to his pouch of gathered goods. “Use the water from my skin.”

  He opened the pouch and prepared to make three piles of ingredients, one for salve for the ankle, to make the swelling go down and mend the stretched ligaments of the joint. He saw in his mind the drawings of greenstem and limestone and brownearth and other items from the stairs’ walls, and felt their uses fit together to form a perfect application for the injury, a remedy that would sooth the pain, strengthen the joint, and promote rapid healing.

  Another smaller pile he created for a tea he wanted to brew first, with the rest of the greenstem and some splitleaf fern and willow bark. That would ease the pain and calm the heart of his friend, while mildly stimulating him as well.

  The third pile was the problematic one. Ari’s strangely drained aura wasn’t something that fit into the deep well of knowledge that had permeated Alec in the cave. Alec looked at Ari and knew that energy of some type, not precisely physical and not exactly spiritual, was missing, but he didn’t know what it was, and couldn’t picture anything offering the right remedy. It was an emptiness not in Ari’s body, but in some connection his body and soul had that extended beyond the world. Alec could sense, but could in no way understand, the problem he detected. The purity of the cave spring water, purity in a way that was more than simply cleanliness, he knew was part of the solution, but not all that needed to be done.

  “How hot do you want this water?” Natalie asked from the fire ring. Alec looked over. “That’s fine,” he said. He took the pile of elements for tea over and dumped them into the water, mixing and stirring for several minutes until the water was a dark green, and emitted a bitter aroma. “I’ll hold him up and you give him some of this tea, just a little at a time, until we give him a half pint,” he instructed as he removed the tea from the fire. She nodded.

  Ari remained unconscious for the twenty minutes they spent dripping the tea between his parted lips. By the time half the mixture was in the ingenaire, Alec had laid him down again and left him to Natalie while the boy began to mix the salve for the ankle.

  He continued to ponder what if anything he could do for the energy missing from Ari. Maybe the ingenaire’s body would regenerate the power on its own, if given time and the other healings. Alec couldn’t reach any more comforting hope than that.

  He stripped the boot and stocking from Ari’s injured ankle, then plastered a thick layer of the still warm salve on the joint, and pulled the stocking
back over the plastered leg to allow it to heal.

  Natalie had finished the tea medication for their companion, and tasted the last drops of the tea herself. “This is bloody awful Alec,” she said through a puckered face. “It’s a good thing he’s unconscious, because no one would drink this if they had a choice!”

  “It isn’t as bad as you think. You’ve got the dregs there and they’re the most bitter because the fern and willow bark have been steeping so long. If we’d been able to strain it after everything had seeped for just a few minutes, it would taste, well, still taste bad, but not as bad,” he finished with a lame grin.

  “Alec, what is going on here? Tell me! You weren’t a notable doctor in the carnival the past few months, and I don’t believe that this is a hidden talent you kept under a basket, because Richard would have sold your skills at every stop if you’d been labeled a healer,” Natalie looked at Alec with an inscrutable expression that seemed both newly respectful and skeptical together.

  Alec stared at her for a long moment, and then willed himself to look at her with his vision of health, staring at her and observing the girl’s state. He realized that the flush of her skin and her breathing were physical evidence of her concern and curiosity. Beyond that he saw a healthy body still using energy to grow and develop as maturity continued to well up within her according to the Creator’s plan. He also recognized that the carnival meals over the past several weeks crossing the wide prairie had not given her many of the nutrients she needed. He mentally inventoried his pack of collected items and their meager food supply and found nothing to solve that problem, one he placed on a back burner. He also saw her shoulder aching, probably from a combination of injuries in assorted battles and falls plus the effort of carrying her pack through their escape.

  “You haven’t complained about your sore shoulder at all,” he broke the silent interlude of examination.

  Natalie stretched her left hand over to her right shoulder. “It’s bearable, considering all that’s going on. I hurt it when the caravan was attacked in Riverside, in the building where you and I fought that lacerta.”