Perilous Dreams Read online

  “I hunger, Mouth of Olava; I hunger not for that which will feed the body, but for that which satisfies the mind.” The old woman leaned forward a little. Her voice might be the thin one of age, but it carried with it the force of authority, of one who has not had her word or desire questioned for a long time.

  She must improvise, Tamisan knew. She was a dreamer and she had wrought in dreams many strange things, let her but remember that. Her damp skirts clung clammily to her legs and thighs as she came forward, saying nothing to the woman in return, but seating herself in a chair facing her client. She was drawing on faint stirrings of a memory which seemed not truly her own for guidance, though she had not yet realized that fully.

  “What would you know, First Standing?” She raised her hands to her forehead in an instinctive gesture, touching forefingers to her temples, right and left.

  “What comes to me… and mine.” The last two words had come almost as an afterthought.

  Tamisan’s hands went out without her conscious ordering. She stifled her amazement. It was as if she were repeating an act as well learned as her dreamer’s technique had been. With her left hand she gathered up a palmful of the sand from the cream bowl. It was a shade or two darker than the container. She tossed this with a sharp movement of her wrist and it settled smoothly as a film on the tabletop.

  What she was doing was not of her conscious mind, as if another had taken charge of her actions. By the way the woman in the chair leaned forward, and by the hush which had fallen on her companion, this was right and proper.

  Without any order from her mind, Tamisan’s right hand went now to the blue bowl with its dark blue sand. But this was not tossed. Instead, she held the fine grains in her upright fist, passing it slowly over the tabletop so that a very tiny trickle of grit fed down to make a pattern on the first film.

  It was a pattern, not a random scattering. What she had so drawn was a recognizable sword with a basket-shaped hilt and a slightly curved blade tapering to a narrow point.

  Now her hand moved to the pink bowl. The sand she gathered up there was a dark red, more vivid than the other colors, as if she dealt now with flecks of newly shed blood. Once more she used her upheld fist, and the shifting stream fed from her palm became a spaceship! It was slightly different in outline from those she had seen all her life, but it was unmistakably a ship, and it was drawn on the tabletop as if it threatened to descend upon the pointed sword. Or is it that the sword threatens it?

  She heard a gasp of surprise, or was it fear? But that sound had not come from the woman who had bade her foretell. It must have broken from some other member of the company intent upon Tamisan’s painting with the flowing sand.

  It was to the fourth bowl now that her right hand moved. But she did not take up a full fistful, rather a generous pinch between thumb and forefinger. She held the sand high above the picture and released it. The green specks floated down… to gather in a sign like a circle with one portion missing.

  She stared at that and it seemed to alter a little under the intensity of her gaze. What it had changed to was a symbol she knew well, one which brought a small gasp from her. It was the seal, simplified it was true, but still readable, of the House of Starrex, and it overlaid both the edge of the ship and the tip of the sword.

  “Read you this!” the noblewoman demanded sharply.

  From somewhere the words came readily to Tamisan. “The sword is the sword of Ty-Kry raised in defense.”

  “Assured, assured.” A murmur ran along the divans.

  “The ship comes as a danger.”

  “That thing, a ship? But it is no ship.”

  “It is a ship from the stars.”

  “And woe, woe, and woe.” That was no murmur, but a full-throated cry of fright. “As in the days of our fathers when we had to deal with the false ones. Ahta, let the spirit of Ahta be a shield to our arms, a sword in our hands!”

  The noblewoman made a silencing gesture with one hand. “Enough! Crying to the revered spirits may bring sustenance, but they are not noted for helping those not standing to arms on their own behalf. There have been other sky ships since Ahta’s days, and with them we have dealt—to our purpose. If another comes we are forewarned, which is also forearmed. But what lies there in green, oh, Mouth of Olava, which surprised even you?”

  Tamisan had had precious moments in which to think. If it were true, as she had deduced, that she was tied to this world by those she had brought with her, then she must find them; and it was clear that they were not of this company. Therefore, this last must be made to work for her.

  “The green sign is that of a champion, one meant to be mighty in the coming battle. But he shall not be known save when the sign points to him, and it may be that this can only be seen by one with the gift.”

  She looked to the noblewoman, and, meeting those old eyes, Tamisan felt a small chill rise in her, one which had not been born from the still damp clothing she wore. There was that in those two shadowed eyes which questioned coldly and did not accept without proof.

  “So should the one with the gift you speak of go sniffing all through Ty-Kry and the land beyond the city, even to the boundaries of the world?”

  “If need be.” Tamisan stood firm.

  “A long journey mayhap, and many strides into danger. And if the ship comes before this champion is found? A thin cord I think oh, Mouth, on which to hang the future of a city, a kingdom, or a people. Look if you will but I say we have more tested ways of dealing with these interlopers from the skies. But, Mouth, since you have given warning, let it so be remembered.”

  She put her hands on the arms of her chair and arose, using them to lever her. So did all her company come to their feet, two of the women hurrying to her so that she could lay her hands upon their shoulders for support. Without another look at Tamisan she went, nor did the dreamer rise to see her go. For suddenly she was spent, tired as she had been in the past when a dream broke and left her supine and drained. But this dream did not break; it kept her sitting before the table and its sand pictures, looking at that green symbol, still caught fast in the web of another world.

  The woman in green returned, bearing a goblet in her two hands and offering it to Tamisan.

  “The First Standing will go to the High Castle and the Over-queen. She turned into that road. Drink, Tamisan, and mayhap the Over-queen herself will ask you for a seeing.”

  Tamisan? That was her true name; twice this woman had called her by it How is it known in a dream? Yet she dared not ask that question or any of the others she needed answers to. Instead she drank from the goblet, finding the hot, spicy liquid driving the chill from her body.

  There was so much she must learn and must know; but she could not discover it, save indirectly, lest she reveal what she was and was not

  “I am tired.”

  “There is a resting place prepared,” the woman returned. “You have only to come.”

  Tamisan had almost to lever herself up as the noblewoman had done. She was giddy and had to catch at the back of the chair. Then she moved after her hostess, hoping desperately to know.

  III

  Did one sleep in a dream, dream upon dream, perhaps? Tamisan wondered as she stretched out upon the couch her hostess showed her. Yet when she set aside her crown, laid her head upon the roll which served as a pillow, she was once more alert, her thoughts racing, or entangled in such wild confusion that she felt as giddy as she had upon rising from her seer’s chair.

  The Starrex symbol overlying both that of the sword and the spaceship in the sand picture, could it mean that she would only find what she sought when the might of this world met that of the starmen? Had she indeed in some manner fallen into the past where she would relive the first coming of the space voyagers to Ty-Kry? But the noblewoman had mentioned past encounters with them which had ended in favor of Ty-Kry.

  Tamisan had tried to envision a world of her own time, but one in which history had taken a different road. Yet much of
that around her was of the past. Did that mean that, without the decisions of her own time, the world of Ty-Kry remained largely unchanged from century to century?

  Real, unreal, old, new. She had lost all a dreamer’s command of action. Tamisan did not play now with toys which she could move about at will, but rather was caught up in a series of events she could not foresee and over which she had no control. Yet twice the woman had called her by her rightful name and, without willing it, she had used the devices of a Mouth of Olava to foretell, as if she had done so many times before.

  Could it be? Tamisan closed her teeth upon her lower lip and felt the pain of that, just as she felt the pain of the bruises left by her abrupt entrance into the mysterious here. Could it be that some dreams are so deep, so well woven, that they are to the dreamer real? Is this indeed the fate of those “closed” dreamers who were worthless for the Hive? Do they in their trances live a countless number of lives? But she was not a closed dreamer.

  Awake! Once more, stretched as she was upon the couch, she used the proper technique to throw herself out of a dream, and once more she experienced that weird nothingness in which she spun sickeningly, as if held helplessly in some void, tied to an anchor which held her back from the full leap to sane safety. There was only one explanation, that somewhere in this strange Ty-Kry one or both of those who had prepared to share her dream was now to be found and must be sought out before she could return.

  So, the sooner that is accomplished, the better! But where should I start seeking? Though a feeling of weakness clung to her limbs, making her move slowly as if she strove to walk against the pull of a strong current, Tamisan arose from the couch. She turned to pick up her Mouth’s crown, and so looked into the oval of a mirror, startled thus into immobility. For the figure she looked upon as her own reflection was not one that she had seen before.

  It was not the robe and the crown that had changed her; she was not the same person. For a long time, ever since she could remember, she had had the pallid skin, the close cropped hair of a dreamer very seldom in the sunlight. But the face of the woman in the mirror was a soft, even brown. The cheekbones were wide, the eyes large and the lips very red. Her brows… she leaned closer to the mirror to see what gave them that odd upward slant and decided that they had been plucked or shaven to produce the effect. Her hair was perhaps three fingers long and not the well known fair coloring, but dark and curling. She was not the Tamisan she knew, nor was this stranger the product of her own will.

  It would follow logically that if she did not look like her normal self, then perhaps the two she sought were no longer as she remembered either. Thus her search would be twice as difficult. Could she ever recognize them?

  Frightened, she sat down on the couch facing the mirror. She dared not give way to fear, for if she once let it break her control she might be utterly lost. Logic, even in such a world of unlogic, must make her think lucidly.

  Just how true was her soothsaying? At least she had not influenced that fall of the sand. Perhaps the Mouth of Olava did have supernatural powers. She had played with the idea of magic in the past to embroider dreams, but that had been her own creation. Could she use it by will now? It would seem this unknown self of hers did manage to draw upon some unknown source of power.

  She must fasten her thoughts upon one of the men and hold him in her mind. Could the dream tie pull her to Kas or Starrex? All she knew of her master she had learned from tapes, and tapes gave one only superficial knowledge. One could not well study a person going through only half-understood actions behind a veil which concealed more than it displayed. Kas had spoken directly to her, his flesh had touched hers. If she must choose one to draw her, then it had better be Kas.

  In her mind Tamisan built a memory picture of him as she would build a preliminary picture for a dream. Then suddenly the Kas in her mind flickered, changed; she saw another man. He was taller than the Kas she knew, and he wore a uniform tunic and space boots; his features were hard to distinguish. That vision lasted only a fraction of time.

  The ship! The symbol had lain touching both ship and sword in the sand seeing. It would be easier to seek a man on a ship than wandering through the streets of a strange city with no better clue than that Starrex’s counterpart might be there.

  It was so little on which to pin a quest: a ship which might or might not be now approaching Ty-Kry, and which would meet a drastic reception when it landed. Suppose Kas, or his double, is killed? Would that anchor me here for all time? Resolutely Tamisan pushed such negative speculation to the back of her mind. First things first; the ship has not yet planeted. But when it came she must make sure that she was among those preparing for its welcome.

  It seemed that having made that decision she was at last able to sleep, for the fatigue which had struck at her in the hall returned a hundredfold and she fell back on the couch as one drugged, remembering nothing more until she awakened. She found the woman in green standing above her, one hand on her shoulder shaking her gently back to awareness.

  “Awake, there is a summons.”

  A summons to dream, Tamisan thought dazedly, and then the unfamiliar room and the immediate past came completely back to her.

  “The First Standing Jassa has summoned.” The woman sounded excited. “It is said by her messenger, he has brought a chair cart for you, that you are to go to the High Castle! Perhaps you will see for the Over-queen herself! But there is time, I have won it for you, to bathe, to eat, to change your robe. See, I have plundered my own bride chest.” She pointed to a chair over which was spread a robe, not of the deep violet Tamisan now wore, but of a purple-wine. “It is the only one of the proper color, or near it.” She ran her hand lovingly over the rich folds.

  “But haste,” she added briskly. “As a Mouth you can claim the need for making ready to appear before high company, but to linger too long will raise the anger of the First Standing.”

  There was a basin large enough to serve as a bath in the room beyond, and, as well as the robe, the woman had brought fresh body linen. When Tamisan stood once more before the mirror to clasp her silver belt and assume the Mouth crown, she felt renewed and refreshed and her thanks were warm.

  But the woman made a gesture of brushing them aside. “Are we not of the same clan, cousin? Shall one say that Nahra is not openhanded with her own? That you are a Mouth is our clan pride, let us enjoy it through you!”

  She brought a covered bowl and a goblet, and Tamisan ate a dish of meal into which had been baked dried fruit and bits of what she thought well-chopped meat. It was tasty and she finished it to the last crumb, just as she emptied the cup of a tart-sweet drink.

  “Wellaway, Tamisan, this is a great day for the clan of Fremont, when you go to the High Castle and perhaps stand before the Over-queen. May it be that the seeing is not for ill, but for good. Though you are but the Mouth of Olava and not the One dealing fortune to us who live and die.”

  “For your aid and your good wishing, receive my thanks,” Tamisan said. “I, too, hope that fortune comes before misfortune on this day.” And that is stark truth, she thought, for I must gather fortune to me with both hands and hold it tight, lest the game I play be lost.

  First Standing Jassa’s messenger was an officer, his hair clubbed up under a ridged helm to give additional protection to his head in battle, his breastplate, enameled blue with the double crown of the Over-queen, and his sword very much to the fore. It was as if he already strode the street of a city at war. There was a small griffin between the shafts of the chair cart and two men-at-arms ready, one at the griffin’s head, the other holding aside the curtains as their officer handed Tamisan into the chair. He briskly jerked the curtains shut without asking her pleasure, and she decided that perhaps her visit to the High Castle was to be a secret matter.

  Between the curtain edges she caught sight of this Ty-Kry, and, though in parts it was very strange to her, there were enough similarities to provide her with an anchor to the real. The sky towers and
other off-world forms of architecture which had been introduced by space travelers were missing. But the streets themselves and the many beds of foliage and flowers were those she had known all her life.

  The High Castle, she drew a deep breath as they wound out of town and along the river, had been part of her world, too, though then as a ruined and very ancient landmark. Part of it had been consumed in the war of Sylt’s rebellion, and it had been considered a place of misfortune, largely shunned, save for off-world tourists seeking the unusual.

  Here it was in its pride, larger and more widely spread then in her Ty-Kry, as if the generations who had deserted it in her world had clung to it here, adding ever to its bulk. It was not a single structure, but a city in itself. However, it had no merchants or public buildings. It provided homes to shelter the nobles who must spend part of the year at court, all their servants and the many officials of the kingdom.

  In its heart was the building which gave it its name, a collection of towers, rising far above the lesser structures at the foot. The buildings’ walls were gray at their bases and changed subtly as they arose until their tops were a deep, rich blue. The other buildings in the great pile were wholly gray as to wall, a darker blue as to roof.

  The chair creaked forward on its two wheels, the griffin being kept to a steady pace by the man at its head, and passed under the thick arch in the outer wall, then up a street between buildings which, though dwarfed by the towers, were in turn dwarfing to those who walked or rode by them.

  There was a second gate, more buildings, a third gate and then the open space about the central towers. They passed people in plenty since they had entered the first gate. Many were soldiers of the guard, but some of the armed men had worn other colors and insignia, being, Tamisan guessed, the retainers of court lords. Now and then some lord came proudly, his retinue strung along behind him by threes to make a show which amused Tamisan. As if the number of followers to tread on one’s heels enhanced one’s importance in the world.