Across the Great Barrier

CHAPTER 26

THE YOUNG WOMAN BURST INTO TEARS AS A BUZZ OF CONVERSATION and questions broke out. I found out later that she was Martha Anderson, Olaf’s wife, so she had plenty of reason for tears. A couple of the women came and huddled around her, but nobody else moved. Mr. Macleod frowned, and then he started snapping at people to do as he’d said, and didn’t they have more sense when a man’s life was at stake, and a few other choice words. That got people going, right enough, though there was still plenty of jawing about what kind of spell accident he could have had.

I stayed long enough to see them carry the man into Mr. Macleod’s house, then I went back to the longhouse. I’d heard tales of all the amputations in the Secession War, when the doctors had only been able to save half their patients, and neither Wash nor Mr. Macleod was a doctor. Even if I didn’t know the man, I didn’t want to be anywhere near when they started working on him.

Lan stayed just inside the gates with most of the settlers. Mr. Karlsen took Nils Anderson back to his house, away from the operation. I heard later that he got Nils roaring drunk so as to take his mind off what was happening to his brother. Olaf Anderson was the man who was losing his leg; the third rider was Pierre Le Grise, the Acadian fur trapper that Mr. Macleod called Greasy Pierre.

Just before dark, Professor Torgeson came in to say that they’d gotten the leg off and Olaf was still alive. If he hadn’t died by morning, they could stop worrying about the shock of it killing him and start worrying about infection and gangrene. They had hopes that it wouldn’t come to that; that’s what they’d wanted the whiskey for. Everyone knew that if you poured whiskey over a bad cut, it wasn’t so likely to take an infection. Nobody knew if it’d help something this bad, but at least they would try.

We still didn’t know what had happened. Except for Nils Anderson, everyone who knew anything was holed up in Mr. Macleod’s house, and Nils was passed out at Mr. Karlsen’s. When Wash and the others finally came out, they were too exhausted to say much except that they needed folks to sit with Olaf and Olaf’s wife in case he needed more caring for in the night than she could handle. Lan offered straight off, but so did everyone else in the settlement, and they thought familiar faces would be the best if he woke. So Lan slept in the men’s half of the longhouse after all.

It wasn’t until the next morning that we found out what had happened. Olaf was still alive and looked to be staying that way for a while, so Mr. Macleod left Martha to sit with him and gathered everyone else into the longhouse. “I know all of you want to find out what happened to the Andersons,” he told us. “This is the best way I could think of for everyone to get the whole story as soon as possible.”

“And without it getting twisted when it gets passed along,” Wash added sternly.

Several people shifted uncomfortably.

“Nils, you first,” Mr. Macleod said.

Nils Anderson stood up from his place next to Mr. Karlsen. He seemed a little hesitant at first, but once he got going he didn’t seem to want to stop. He and his brother had started off looking to hunt deer or bison — they didn’t much care whether they got one of the natural varieties or a magical one, as long as they could eat it. They’d run across Pierre at one of the fords where the trappers and hunters were accustomed to water their horses, and the three of them had gone on together. They figured that whatever they shot, the Andersons could take the meat and Pierre could take the skin.

They hadn’t expected the trip to take very long, but about all the game they could find were rabbits and squirrels and such like. Everything larger seemed to have gone missing. Then they came across a stone bear with its paws full of early bison-berries, and they decided that if something was turning things to stone and had scared off all the game, they ought to be scared off, too.

The three of them cut back toward Big Bear Lake. Back by the ford, they found some strange tracks. “Not more than two hours old, and the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” Nils said. “The prints were flat and stretched out, like a hand pressed down on a tabletop, and all four toes were thin and triangular, almost like fingers.”

“I have never before seen such a thing,” Greasy Pierre put in, nodding. “Not even in the Far Northwest, where I am one of the few who are bold and daring enough to lay traplines in winter.”

Several folks snorted at this, and then someone in the back called, “How big were the prints?”

“So,” Pierre said, measuring what looked like four or five inches between his two hands. “It would be the weight of a young horse, I think.”

The three men had dismounted, and Pierre and Nils went to examine the tracks, while Olaf took the packhorses a little way downstream to water them and adjust their loads. Pierre had his rifle handy, but the other two were relying on the travel protection spells to at least give them warning of anything nasty coming their way.

Wash frowned when Nils said that, and Greasy Pierre sniffed and looked superior.

“It was my turn to hold the travel protection spells,” Nils said. “They were fine, I swear — no sign of anything for half a mile out. And then the horses spooked. Olaf grabbed the lead line for the pack animals, but his riding horse took off for the far side of the ford — ripped the branch right off the bush Olaf had him tethered to.”

“He should have used a larger branch,” Greasy Pierre commented, but not very loudly.

“I went to try to calm the other horses,” Nils went on. “And then … it felt like something hit me on the back of the head. I went out like a blown candle. When I woke up, Olaf …”

He choked up and stopped speaking. Mr. Macleod told him to sit down and let Pierre take over, since the trapper was the only one who’d seen all the rest. Pierre stood up with considerable relish; I could see he liked being the indent of attention. He didn’t tell a straightforward story, the way Mr. Anderson had; he kept gussying it up with comments about his other adventures and how brave he was. The heart of it wasn’t hard to come at, though.

When the horses spooked, Greasy Pierre jumped for cover and raised his rifle. He saw the three packhorses dancing around Olaf, and Olaf’s horse bolting. Then he heard a noise like an owl hooting, only he said the hoot went on a lot longer than an owl’s would have. He saw Nils collapse, just as the travel protection spells came down, all at once. An instant later, Olaf let out a yell and fell over backward into the creek, and all three of the packhorses turned gray-white and froze motionless. It wasn’t until Pierre had a chance to look at them later on that he realized they’d all turned to stone.

Pierre let off four rifle shots as fast as ever he could, aiming for the brush along the bank where he thought the hooting might be coming from. The hooting stopped abruptly, and he heard rustling heading away from the ford. He didn’t figure he’d hit anything, only maybe scared it off, but that was good enough for the time being. He peeked out from behind the tree and fired again a couple of times, just to make sure, then went to the creek to fish Olaf out.

Olaf was pale as a new sheet, and when Pierre got a good look at him, he didn’t blame the man one bit. His left leg had turned to stone from just above the knee on down. Pierre hauled him out of the water and left him by a tree with the rifle while he went to see what had happened to Nils. He was a mite surprised to find Nils still alive but unconscious.

“It was a state most dire!” Greasy Pierre said dramatically. “For alone, I could not hope to return two injured men to safety, and the creature might return at any moment! What could I do? I approached the stone horses to see what I could learn!”

What he was after was the medical kit in the Andersons’ pack, and whatever else he could salvage. Turned out he could salvage as much as they could carry. The packhorses had turned to stone, but their packs and gear hadn’t. Pierre grabbed another rifle and all of the ammunition, and the medical kit, but he didn’t figure on taking much more than that. It was more important to get out of there — and bring the news of what had happened back to Big Bear Lake — than to try to haul their supplies back to the settlement.

By the time Pierre finished digging through the packs, Olaf had passed out and Nils had woken up. Nils was too drained to cast even a fire-lighting spell, and he had a headache powerful enough to make his eyes cross, but he could ride. Pierre got him up on one of the two remaining horses, and between them, they loaded Olaf in front of him, and then they left. They didn’t even take time to recast the travel protection spells, though Pierre had sense enough to do a strong speed-traveling spell once they were away from the ford. They’d covered what was normally a day’s ride from the ford to the settlement in less than an hour, hoping that Mr. Macleod would know what to do for Olaf.

There was a long silence when Mr. Le Grise finished his tale. Then someone in the back said in a shaky voice, “Turned to stone? His leg just … really?”

“I can attest to that,” Mr. Macleod said. “Or if you’d like to look for yourself, we have it under a preserving spell, so that the magicians in Mill City can take a closer look at it.”

“You don’t need a preserving spell for stone,” a hard-faced man in front objected.

“You do if it used to be somebody’s leg and it’s still flesh for about half an inch around the bone down the indent,” Mr. Macleod said grimly. “At least, it is as far as we could tell.”

Several people in the audience turned green, and Mr. Anderson made a strangled noise. Mr. Macleod shook himself and said, “Yonnie, why don’t you take Nils back to my place and let Martha come on here? You can sit with Olaf. Pierre can tell us anything else we need to know.”

“What else do we need to know?” someone muttered as Mr. Karlsen and Mr. Anderson left.

“How to stop the thing, whatever it is,” someone else said.

“Why did it get all three of the packhorses, but only Olaf’s leg?” the hard-faced man demanded.

Pierre shrugged. “He was standing behind the horses; perhaps they blocked the spell, so that it only struck his leg. Or perhaps it is because he fell into the water, and that is what saved him. I was not watching closely to see exactly what turned to stone when, you understand.”

“You said it took down your travel protection spells?” a woman in a blue calico dress asked.

“But yes,” Pierre replied. “Without a warning or any signal. It was most sudden and mysterious.”

“I’d call a bunch of spooked horses something of a signal,” Mr. Macleod said dryly.

“Might be,” Wash put in. “Though it’d help to know exactly why they spooked. And not all of them did spook, right at first, if what Mr. Le Grise says is true.”

“Of course it is true!” Pierre said indignantly. “I do not lie!”

“It’s just a turn of phrase, Pierre,” Mr. Macleod said. “Nothing to get peeved about, especially since we’ve more important matters to hand.”

“We don’t know enough about this critter,” an older man grumbled.

“You are welcome to go back to the ford and investigate further,” Greasy Pierre said politely. “You cannot miss it; there are three stone packhorses in the middle of the path.”

“Barely a day’s ride away,” a woman whispered. “What if it comes here?”

“There’s no reason to think it will,” the hard-faced man snapped. “We’ve been here for three years now. We’d have seen some sign of it before, if it was common. Or the trappers would have.”

“Perhaps,” Professor Torgeson said reluctantly. “However, there have been indications that some animals that usually live in the unexplored West have been moving eastward over the past four or five years. Possibly longer than that; we don’t have observations from much earlier.”

“Indications?” the hard-faced man said, narrowing his eyes. “What kind of indications?”

“Over the past five years, the Settlement Office reports have noted more frequent sightings of unique and unknown animals within settlement territory or within sight of settlements,” the professor said with more assurance. “The number of unusual creatures brought in by trappers such as Mr. Le Grise has also increased by a small but significant amount along the entire length of the Mammoth River during that time.”

“The Settlement Office has adjusted the protection spells twice in the last five years,” Mr. Macleod commented. “Both times on account of needing to keep out new critters.”

“Why haven’t we heard of this?” a woman cried angrily.

“Because it’s my job to handle the settlement spells, not yours,” Mr. Macleod shot back.

Professor Torgeson cleared her throat. “Be that as it may, it seems at least possible that this incident may, like the mirror bugs, be a case of a previously unknown creature moving in from the wilds of the West.”

“Why? Why would it come here?”

“I have no idea,” Professor Torgeson said in her best classroom lecture voice. “There are a great many possibilities, but we do not have enough information to speculate about which of them might be true. There may have been a fire in the Far West that’s driven animals eastward, or some other act of nature. We know little about the country between here and the Grand Bow River, and nothing at all about the unexplored land west of that.”

I thought of the pride of saber cats we’d killed that shouldn’t have been anything like so far east. I could surely understand why they’d come east, if some creature that turned things to stone was moving in from the Far West. But what would drive a critter east if it could turn things to stone?

“Why isn’t important at the moment,” said a man who’d been quiet up till then. “Why is for later on, when we can stop worrying over what’s happening and start worrying over how to keep it from happening again. The real question right now is, what can we do about it if this thing that turns people to stone shows up here?”

“I still say it’s unlikely,” the hard-faced man repeated. “Why would it come farther east after Nils and Pierre here gave it such a scare?”

“Why not?” the quiet man said. “Better to be ready for trouble that doesn’t come than have trouble arrive when we’re not ready.”

“There’s another possibility to consider,” Wash said, “and that’s that these critters are more drawn than driven.”

Half the settlers looked at him with blank expressions.

“The most recent batch of critters that we know came from the Far West were the mirror bugs,” Wash said. “We still don’t know all the hows and whys, but we do know they were attracted to strong magic. Could be that there’s other critters that are like that.”

“That’s speculation,” the professor said sharply. “There’s no evidence for it in this case whatsoever.”

Some of the settlers looked relieved, but then the woman in the blue calico said, “There’s no proof against it, either. And it’s like Christoffer said — better to be ready than not.”

The talk ran on like that for quite a while. Mr. Macleod let it go without saying much, except when someone’s temper looked to be running a mite high. About all that happened in the end was that the settlers decided to call the stone-making critter a “medusa” after the old Greek stories about the lady with snakes for hair who turned folks into stone with a look. Nobody knew what the critter looked like, though we were pretty sure it wasn’t a lady of any kind, but putting a name to it made folks feel a bit better.

Eventually, the meeting broke up so people could get back to their everyday tasks, though most everyone who’d planned to head outside the settlement palisade decided it’d be a better day to stay home and fix up something they’d been putting off. Professor Torgeson went off to Mr. Macleod’s place to look at the stone leg and double-check the preservation spells Mr. Macleod and Wash had put on it. She asked if I wanted to join her, but I turned her down.

Mr. Macleod and Wash set up a roster of folks to reinforce the settlement protection spells, which gave everyone something constructive to do and perked a lot of them right up. I noticed Lan didn’t volunteer to help, which he normally would have, so when the settlers filed out of the longhouse at last, I took him aside to ask about it.

“The last time I tried helping with settlement spells, it almost got me and everyone else killed,” he said.

“The last — oh! At the Little Fog settlement two years back,” I said. “But if you hadn’t helped, we wouldn’t have worked out how to stop the mirror bugs.”

“And if you hadn’t been at Oak River for me to call on, or if you and Wash and William had been a little later getting there, the whole settlement would be dead, and me and Papa along with,” Lan retorted. “You can say ‘what if’ as much as you like; it was still a harebrained thing to do.” He hesitated. “Besides, I think Wash could be right.”

“About what?”

“About that medusa thing being like the mirror bugs. Drawn to strong magic,” he explained. “The way it took down the travel protection spells … well, it sounds awfully similar. If it is —” He shivered.

“If it is, the medusa will be following along after Mr. Anderson and Mr. Le Grise,” I said slowly.

“Speed travel takes a lot of power,” Lan said, nodding. “And it leaves a trail for at least a day. Even if the medusa can’t move very fast, it’s had plenty of time to get pointed in this direction.”

“And once it gets close enough, it’ll sense the settlement spells,” I finished. “I can see why you wouldn’t be keen on pumping a lot of extra power into them just now.”

“Of course, the settlement spells may keep it off, the way they’re supposed to,” Lan said. He didn’t sound any more convinced than I felt.

“At least there’s only one medusa,” I said after a minute.

“Probably,” Lan added.

I nodded very slowly. We were both in a very sober frame of mind when we left the longhouse to see what help we could be.