The Skrayling Tree by Michael Moorcock Read Free Book Online Page A

else?”
    “If I have a choice, you can call me the Countess of Bek,” I said. In the language we were using this name came out longer
     than the one he had employed.
    He smiled, accepting this as irony. “I trust, Countess, you will accompany me, if only because together we are most likely
     to find your husband. Can you use a canoe? We can be across the Shining Water and at the mouth of the Roaring River in a day.”
     Again, he seemed to speak with a certain sardonic humor.
    For the second time in twenty-four hours, I found myself afloat. Ayanawatta’s canoe was a superb instrument of movement, with
     an almost sentient quality to itsresponses. It sometimes seemed hardly to touch the water. As we paddled I asked him how far it was to the Kakatanawa village.
    “I would not call it a village exactly. Their longhouse lies some distance to the north and west.”
    “Why have they abducted my husband? Is there no police authority in their territory?”
    “I know little about the Kakatanawa. Their customs are not our customs.”
    “Who are this mysterious tribe? Demons? Cannibals?”
    He laughed with some embarrassment as his paddle rose and fell in the crystal water. It was impossible not to admire his extraordinarily
     well-modeled body. “I could be maligning them. You know how folktales exaggerate sometimes. They have no reputation for abducting
     mortals. Their intentions could easily be benign. I do not say that to reassure you, only to let you know that they have no
     history of meaning us harm.”
    I thought I might be assuming too much. “We are still in America?”
    “I have another name for the continent. But if you lived after Longfellow, then your time is far in my future.”
    Such shifts of time were not unusual in the dream-worlds. “Then this is roughly 1550 in the Christian calendar.”
    He shook his head, and the breeze rippled in the eagle feathers. I realized I had never seen such brilliant colors before.
     Light sparkled and danced in them. Were the feathers themselves invested with magic?
    He paused in his paddling. The canoe continued toskim across the bright water. The smell of pines and rich, damp undergrowth drifted from the distant bank. “Actually it’s A.D. 1135, by that calendar. The Norman liberation of Britain began sixty-nine years ago. I think the settlers worked it out on
     the date of an eclipse. Well, they just picked a later eclipse. They were trying to prove we took the idea of a democratic
     federation from them.”
    He laughed and shook his head. “And before them was Leif Ericsson. When I was a boy I came across a Norseman whose colony
     had been established about a hundred years earlier. You could call him the Last of the Vikings. He was a poor, primitive creature,
     and most of his tribe had been hunted to death by the Algonquin. To be honest I’d mistaken him for some sort of scrawny bear
     at first.
    “They called this place Wineland. He was bitter as his father and grandfather were bitter. The Ericssons had tricked his ancestors
     with stories of grapes and endless fields of wheat. What they actually got, of course, was foul weather, hard shrift and an
     angry native population which thoroughly outnumbered them. They called us ‘the screamers’ or ‘skraelings.’ I heard a few captive
     Norse women and children were adopted by some Cayugas who had survived an epidemic. But that was the last of them.”
    Though he was inclined to ramble on, he was full of interesting tales and explanations, making up for his years of silence.
     Now that I knew we sought the Kakatanawa, I devoted myself to finding Ulric as soon as possible. There was a remote possibility
     that wewould arrive before he did, such was the nature of time. But somehow Ayanawatta’s endless words had comforted me, and I no
     longer felt Ulric to be in danger of immediate harm; nor was I so convinced that Prince Gaynor was behind the kidnapping.
     The mystery, of course, remained, but at least I had an