Is that really you? Kim asked silently, appalled by how much the old man had changed. Or is this some hideous, ill-shaped copy sent to haunt me?
"Marshal . . ." he said, subdued.
The golden hand lifted wearily and beckoned him. "Come closer, boy. I cannot see you in the shadows."
He moved toward the bed, feeling a heavy reluctance. The covers had been perfumed, the room sprayed with strong disguising scents, but still he could smell the old man. A stale, unhealthy smell.
And in his mind—like some dreadful mockery—he saw Tolonen as he best remembered him, stripped to the waist and exercising, muscled like a god. Where had that gone? Where in the gods' names had that gone?
Kim stopped, an arm's length from the bed, looking down at Tolonen. A pair of watery gray eyes stared back at him, one focused, one drifting in its orbit, let down by the muscles surrounding it.
"How is she?"
Kim smiled sadly. "She's well," he said. "And the boy. He's a healthy lad. He has his mother's nature."
"I miss her," the old man said, the enhancer making the words sound flat, unemotional. "It's been unbearable without her."
Kim nodded, understanding. "She misses you."
The old man swallowed painfully. His good eye blinked. "I ... I was wrong."
"No," Kim said. There was a speech here he'd rehearsed, an angry, bitter speech about the wasted years and the stupidity of pride, but it meant nothing now. All that mattered was to heal the wound. To end this senseless feud.
"She loves you," he said.
The old man's mouth quivered, twisted strangely.
"What's done is done," Kim said. "Let it go. Come and live with us. It's what she wants. What we all want."
He waited, seeing how the old man struggled with himself. Even to agree to see him, he knew, had cost the old man greatly. His pride, his stupid, senseless pride—yet if he threw that away, what would remain of him?
"I ..." He saw the last shred of defiance vanish like a wisp of smoke. The old man nodded stiffly, more a spasm of the neck than a nod, then closed his eyes. Slowly a tear rolled down his cheek.
Kim knelt and took the old man's golden hand between his own.
"It's over," he said, smiling, all the bitterness and anger purged from him. "You're going home, Knut. Home to Kalevala."
SAMPSA LAY ON HIS BACK in the sunlight, the smooth surface of the rock warm beneath him as he listened to the gentle slush of the waves lapping on the shingle farther down the beach.
Beside him a crab scuttled in the shallow rock pool, the pattern On its back like the Han symbol erh, the complex pictogram night-black against the meat red shell. He watched it through half-lidded eyes, then looked up, studying the shapes of clouds.
Significance. Suddenly the world seemed to have significance.
He felt the tickling again, a dim presence at the back of his mind. The boy was searching for him, trying to find him with his mind.
For a moment he resisted, a faint reverberation in his head like an insect brushing against the glass of a fastened window, then, as if he'd unlocked it and thrown up the sash, the words rushed in.
Did you see the pearl?
He frowned, then answered. Yes.
Sampsa shifted slightly on the gently sloping rock, then stretched lazily, spreading his toes. The dream. The boy was talking of the dream he'd had last night. For a second or two the silence in his head seemed vast, like the inside of some huge, sepulchral building, and then it came again.
That cloud . . . it's like a tiger. . . .
He watched the air show pass, the sun riding the great beast's back, feeling himself a channel, a window for the other's eyes.
Sampsa? Where are you?
He sat up and looked about him, letting the other see. "I'm on the island," he said, as if the other were blind and was seated beside him on the rock. "That house—" he looked up at the tower built into the rock face to his right—"that house is Kalevala. My home."
He stared at it awhile, tracing its ancient shape, letting his mind fill with his memories of the place, then looked down into the pool. The crab was resting now, its huge front pincers slowly opening and closing. Erh . . .
The double. Sampsa leaned forward and, lightning quick, breached the surface of the water with his finger and touched the marking on the shell. As the crab scuttled away beneath a ledge of rock, he could hear laughter in his head.
He turned, looking south. "Why can't I see where you are?" You can, the other answered. Just close your eyes and look. He closed his eyes and looked. The blood-red of veins on the back of his lids faded to darkness and then . . .
The cottage seemed embedded in the hillside, the white of its walls vivid against the green. Beyond it similar cottages climbed the hill. And beyond that . . . "What is that?"
That's the City. Its walls surround the valley. "Ah ..."
He felt the boy turn; saw fields and trees and then . . . The bay. Slowly he moved toward it, past the charred remnants of an outhouse and down through fields until he stood beside it, looking out across the gray-green water. "Where are the waves?"
Again there was laughter. Then, beyond what he saw, he sensed the memory of waves coming in across a pale white rock that juttled from a beach of yellow sand.
"What is that?" he asked, confused, but he could hear someone calling now, and as he turned to look the vision flickered and was gone.
Tom. The other's name was Tom.
Sampsa opened his eyes and shivered. From its place beneath the rock ledge the crab eyed him warily, the message on his shell hidden from sight.
For the briefest moment he had glimpsed her, dark as his own mother was light, voluptuous where she was austere. And about her neck, the pearl; the same black pearl he had seen in the dream.
At once he saw himself in the water, forcing himself down, down, into the sunless depths, his legs kicking strongly, his arms pulling him down through the hostile dark. For a moment he had glimpsed it, there on the shining open shell—a perfect night-dark pearl, as large as the tip of his little finger—and had stretched to take it, but even as his fingers reached for it, he had felt himself drawn upward and, lungs bursting, had kicked hard for the surface high above.
He had woken suddenly, gasping, his head ringing, his chest tight with imagined pain. The pearl. He had opened his hand and stared at his empty palm, the sense of loss powerful, unaccountable.
And then, that morning, diving with his father from the rocks, he had found himself searching the rocky bed of the bay, looking for it, expecting it almost, even though he knew no oysters grew in that frigid northern sea. And once again, his sense of disappointment had been sharp. But now he knew.
Did you see the pearl?
This time he smiled. Yes. I saw it.
"Sam-psa! Sam-psa!"
He turned and looked up at the house. His mother was leaning from the kitchen window.
"I'm coming," he yelled, beginning to make his way across the rocks toward the steps. Yet even as he did, he had the faintest sensation of grass brushing against his bare legs, the vaguest impression of an overpowering whiteness at the back of everything.
Doubled. Suddenly the world was doubled.
"Later on I'll show you the cave and the place where the trees were burned."
Yes, Tom answered. And maybe we can row across the bay to where the ground is fused glass-black. There was a house there once. . . .
Sampsa smiled, then began to climb the steps, deciding he would say nothing to his mother.
At the top of the steps he turned, letting Tom look out through him a moment, sharing with him the rugged beauty of the view.