I didn’t know then but I knew it had something to do with the Other Place, that land of beauty and magic that Dylan first found so long ago.
I hardly ate the boxed foods at Cold House of Bounty, where we stayed for less than a day and then ran off before another band might come through. I was skinny and weak when we went on to High Tower to shelter from a forest fire, but I climbed the steps to the tallest stacks so I could be alone and think awhile. I thought about the Dream House.
I thought about how evil could eat up beauty.
And how that isn’t the work of only mages.
I thought about what I had seen once from a hiding place in the forest. The look in someone’s eye like there was nothing that could stop him from tearing the whole world apart. The charred and trampled camp.
After sunset that night in the High Tower, the sky went on blazing through the night, orange-red above a distant line of yellow fire. In the morning, the sky would turn to ash and fall down on us soft as snow. But for now, the forest fire was beautiful against the gray-and-black sky. A world of trees was being eaten up by flames, and from a distance there was nothing terrible about it.
I decided upon my work.
“I want to find the Transporting Sanctuary,” I told our Eldest. I thought she would say no, that it was a waste of time and no good reason to put off my coming-of-age. That I was too old to believe in stories of that fabled sanctuary. Instead, her eyes went small, as though her vision were sliding into the past. She nodded her trembling head.
Why else might the Water Nymph have appeared to me except for the Special Work of finding a doorway into such a world?
I had gotten very good at going off on my own—I was used to searching for alder bark and shrub berries for my father, who made most of our medicines. So I went off in search of sanctuaries. I made a catalog of the ones we visited and the ones other bands told us about and the ones I found on my own. I kept track of all the avatars in case they might have any clues about how to find the Transporting Sanctuary.
Our Eldest tells us to pick a certain avatar to hold in our hearts, either for courage or for wisdom or to model ourselves after. The boys all like the Moribund, a man who appears near High Tower far too often, his skin black as he suffers through his death throes. Thankfully he goes almost as quickly as he comes, so you only see him for a few seconds at a time. My best friend, Truley, used to prefer the Melodious, a girl with a bright-painted face who sings about a boy she shouldn’t love, but when I try to sing the song to Truley now, she makes her much-too-old-for-that face and picks up her baby. I have my own avatar to think on, the Water Nymph.
I would remember her when I was afraid, or just weary and hungry. Always when I was alone in the forest I called her to mind.
I kept up my work for years.
Until our Eldest came to talk to me. Our band had welcomed so few babies in the past year, and fewer had survived the winter. A boy had asked about me—Artak, who I guess is a man now, since he survived the ten-day trek along the crevice. Really, he’s no older than I am. Eldest told me it was well past time for my own coming-of-age, when I should travel along the crevice in search of some token to bring back to a husband. Times have happened girls have found bits of gold down in the crevice, revealed there where the earth opened up some generations ago. But Artak would take me even if I failed to find so much as a gold flake.
“My Special Work isn’t finished,” I told Eldest. “How will I search for sanctuaries when I have babies to take care of?”
Eldest kept her gaze trained over my head and told me, “Your work will be for your band now.”
Artak smiled at me for the next three days. He was as nice as any of the other boys in our band. Still had all his teeth. No terrible scars or anything, though his hair had stopped growing along one patch over his ear where he’d been burned. We’d played together as kids. I knew he would treat me nice.
But I’d seen his face set in hatred once over what another band had done—raided our camp and taken all our food. A good enough reason to hate another band, I guess.
I’d seen that look in his eye while I hid—like the whole world was his to tear down. The same as I’d seen on the face of every other man in my band that day when they trampled the other band’s camp and burned it to the ground. When they pulled down some of the men in the forest before they could get away and took home the women they could catch. I had seen what Artak had done to one of the women there in the trees.
It will be different with me, when I return to him. I suppose it will be different, because we’re of the same band.
My days of searching for the Transporting Sanctuary are over. I’ve traveled farther along the crevice than any of the others ever did when they came of age. I saw their old campfires along the way, the remains here and there of a shelter or bed. I’ve come this far in the hope of making up for being so late.