Home. Remember it.
The car was five miles down the road before she remembered what she'd left out in the rush. One of those new names had been Rowanlea. Sounded more English than Welsh to her, not Latin either, but God only knew what it had been before one of those half-literate priests puzzled out what to scratch on the crude parchment.
Rowan-lea, Rowan-meadow, a name that might hold considerable power to the Old Believers. More like a title than a name.
Sometimes shortened to Rowley. But Aunt Alice would pounce on that, first time she read the notes. And Caroline had a plane to catch. She could call back from the airport.
And she could call Kenny. The thought warmed her, somewhere south of her belly. God, she'd missed that man.
*~*~*
Not jet-lagged, not really, but Caroline blinked and reminded herself that the sun's height didn't need to match her body clock. A couple of time zones west and considerably south, the sun should still show above the mountains. Even at the beginning of October.
Grandmother Walks, Walks-with-the-moon. The old woman rested in the shade of a cottonwood, skin and bone as gnarled and weathered as that beacon of water in this dry land. Caroline felt her own skin relax in the change from parched to merely dry. The shadows even seemed cool, by contrast.
Caroline had damn near frozen when she flew to Maine in June. Now she'd jumped back into the oven, little over a day of flying and driving and hiking the last five miles under the desert sun because she didn't want to junk her rented Chevy on the so-called road. Clear pounding desert sun, temperatures hitting 90 when she'd just left 50s and rain, with fog rolling in off the bay. Even the scruffy little pines smelled different, baked resin and dust rather than a cold moist tang mixed with salt and seaweed and wet earth.
Grandmother Walks. Caroline found herself looking at the trees, at the dusty sand and rock, at the brown mountains rimming her sight, not at the old woman propped up on pillows on a bed set outside for breeze and shade and view.
The old woman's family went on with life around her, not a wake or death-watch but regular life — bread baking here just like back in Maine, but an outdoor mud-brick oven instead of the wood stove. A small boy, probably great- or even great-great-grandchild, feeding and watering a horse. A youngish man with his head buried in the engine compartment of a sandblasted battered pickup damned near as old as Kate's relic. Life flowing on around the old woman moved outside so she could die with her sacred mountains forming her last horizon.
Caroline closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She had to face this. It twisted her guts like seeing Aunt Alice in that damned hospital, a tiny figure dwarfed in the huge bed with wires and tubes and blinking beeping monitors and the indignity of a catheter bag. But her aunt had been going to live, verdict passed before Caroline even got in to see her. Grandmother Walks was not.
It felt like seeing a volcano dying. Some kind of force of nature.
Grandmother Walks had been the focus of any place she stood, any group she entered. Strong, vital, active, she'd left Caroline sweating and gasping in her wake when they climbed to her sacred places. Now the old woman could barely lift her hand, had to pause between words to catch her breath.
Probably cancer, Caroline thought. Breathing too much radon, drinking too much arsenic in the water. Eating dust from one of those H-bomb tests sprinkled on her mutton stew. Something like that, some one of the thousand ways this land kills people, but we'll never know which one because she won't go to the white doctor for a diagnosis. Not that she'd be treatable at her age, anyway.
"Granddaughter."
Caroline opened her eyes. The old woman was staring straight at her, not at one of her real granddaughters.
"I came." The old woman had used English, not the People's speech, giving Caroline permission to do the same. The kindness brought tears to her eyes.
"You came. It is good." Grandmother paused to breathe.
"It is good." If Caroline spoke into the gaps, it made them less obvious.
"I have lived. I have done. Enough. I am finished."
"You have lived." Damn, that was an epitaph anyone could envy. This was hard.
Tears felt cold here, evaporating so fast. Strange. Caroline looked around, thinking of the daughters who were old women themselves, the granddaughters older than Aunt Alice. Even with short generations, Grandmother Walks was old. Old like the bristlecone pines high in the hills.
"I gave you. A task."
The words jerked Caroline back to Grandmother Walks, back to the withered body on the bed. "You have given me many tasks, Grandmother. Some I have finished, some I have not. I had to leave and help my aunt."
"I remember. You had. To leave. That. Was. Good."
She stopped and coughed, quietly. Caroline found a damp cloth, leaned forward, and wiped the old woman's lips and chin. One finger brushed a withered cheek in passing, and it felt like the parchment of those Morgan archives, dry and stiff and cool.
"The Hunter. Of Ghosts. Have. You. Found her?"
The Hunter of Ghosts. That was the name they'd given her for the "doll" that Gary sought at the university. Not its "real" name, most likely. A description of its function, instead, something that an outsider could safely know. Caroline wondered if even Grandmother Walks knew the "real" name.
"My brother seeks the Hunter. He has found records, but this thing is hidden, locked away, and the record may call it by another name. Name it to another People."
Grandmother Walks nodded twice, barely moving her head. "Talk to. That woman. Call her. The Hunter."
