An hour after sunset--or perhaps it was two; Tim's sense of time had gotten lost--a ghastly screeching sound joined the howl of the wind. The tyger opened its eyes. Tim cautiously pulled down the top edge of the sheet and looked out. The tower above the Dogan had begun to bend. He watched, fascinated, as the bend became a lean. Then, almost too fast to see, the tower disintegrated. At one moment it was there; at the next it was flying bars and spears of steel thrown by the wind into a wide lane of what had been, only that day, a forest of ironwood trees.
The Dogan will go next, Tim thought, but it didn't.
The Dogan stayed, as it had for a thousand years.
It was a night he never forgot, but one so fabulously strange that he could never describe it . . . or even remember rationally, as we remember the mundane events of our lives. Full understanding only returned to him in his dreams, and he dreamed of the starkblast until the end of his life. Nor were they nightmares. These were good dreams. They were dreams of safety.
It was warm beneath the sheet, and the sleeping bulk of his bunkmate made it even warmer. At some point he slipped down their covering enough to see a trillion stars sprawled across the dome of the sky, more than he had ever seen in his life. It was as if the storm had blown tiny holes in the world above the world, and turned it into a sieve. Shining through was all the brilliant mystery of creation. Perhaps such things were not meant for human eyes, but Tim felt sure he had been granted a special dispensation to look, for he was under a blanket of magic, and lying next to a creature even the most credulous villagers in Tree would have dismissed as mythical.
He felt awe as he looked up at those stars, but also a deep and abiding contentment, such as he had felt as a child, awakening in the night, safe and warm beneath his quilt, drowsing half in and half out of sleep, listening to the wind sing its lonely song of other places and other lives.
Time is a keyhole, he thought as he looked up at the stars. Yes, I think so. We sometimes bend and peer through it. And the wind we feel on our cheeks when we do--the wind that blows through the keyhole--is the breath of all the living universe.
The wind roared across the empty sky, the cold deepened, but Tim Ross lay safe and warm, with a tyger sleeping beside him. At some point he slipped away himself, into a rest that was deep and satisfying and untroubled by dreams. As he went, he felt that he was very wee, and flying on the wind that blew through time's keyhole. Away from the edge of the Great Canyon, over the Endless Forest and the Fagonard, above the Ironwood Trail, past Tree--just a brave little nestle of lights from where he rode the wind--and farther, farther, oh, very much farther, across the entire reach of Mid-World to where a huge ebony Tower reared itself into the heavens.
I will go there! Someday I will!
It was his last thought before sleep took him.
In the morning, the steady shriek of the wind had lowered to a drone. Tim's bladder was full. He pushed back the sheet, crawled out onto ground that had been swept clean all the way to the bone of underlying rock, and hurried around the Dogan with his breath emerging from his mouth in bursts of white vapor that were immediately yanked away by the wind. The other side of the Dogan was in the lee of that wind, but it was cold, cold. His urine steamed, and by the time he finished, the puddle on the ground was starting to freeze.
He hurried back, fighting the wind for every step and shivering all over. By the time he crawled back beneath the magic sheet and into the blessed warmth, his teeth were chattering. He wrapped his arms around the tyger's heavily muscled body without even thinking, and had only a moment's fright when its eyes and mouth opened. A tongue that looked as long as a rug runner and as pink as a New Earth rose emerged. It licked the side of his face and Tim shivered again, not from fright but from memory: his father rubbing his cheek against Tim's early in the morning, before Big Ross filled the basin and scraped his face smooth. He said he would never grow a beard like his partner's, said 'twouldn't suit him.
The tyger lowered its head and began to sniff at the collar of his shirt. Tim laughed as its whiskers tickled his neck. Then he remembered the last two popkins. "I'll share," he said, "although we know thee could have both if thee wanted."
He gave one of the popkins to the tyger. It disappeared at once, but the beast only watched as Tim went to work on the other one. He ate it as fast as he could, just in case Sai Tyger changed its mind. Then he pulled the sheet over his head and drowsed off again.
When he woke the second time, he guessed it might be noon. The wind had dropped still more, and when he poked his head out, the air was a trifle warmer. Still, he guessed the false summer the Widow Smack had been so right to distrust was now gone for good. As was the last of his food.
"What did thee eat in there?" Tim asked the tyger. This question led naturally to another. "And how long was thee caged?"
The tyger rose to its feet, walked a little distance toward the cage, and then stretched: first one rear leg and then the other. It walked farther toward the edge of the Great Canyon, where it did its own necessary. When it had finished, it sniffed the bars of its prison, then turned from the cage as though it were of no interest, and came back to where Tim lay propped on his elbows, watching.
It regarded him somberly--so it seemed to Tim--with its green eyes, then lowered its head and nosed back the magic sheet that had sheltered them from the starkblast. The metal box lay beneath. Tim couldn't remember picking it up, but he must have; if it had been left where it was, it would have blown away. That made him think of the feather. It was still safely tucked in his belt. He took it out and examined it closely, running his fingers over its rich thickness. It might have been a hawk feather . . . if, that was, it had been half the size. Or if he had ever seen a white hawk, which he had not.
"This came from an eagle, didn't it?" Tim asked. "Gan's blood, it did."
The tyger seemed uninterested in the feather, although it had been eager enough to snatch it from the breath of the rising storm last evening. The long, yellow-fuzzed snout lowered and pushed the box at Tim's hip. Then it looked at him.
Tim opened the box. The only thing left inside was the brown bottle, which looked like the sort that might contain medicine. Tim picked it up and immediately felt a tingle in his fingertips, very like the one he'd felt in the Covenant Man's magic wand when he passed it back and forth over the tin bucket.
"Shall I open it? For it's certain thee can't."
The tyger sat, its green eyes fixed unwaveringly on the tiny bottle. Those eyes seemed to glow from within, as if its very brain burned with magic. Carefully, Tim unscrewed the top. When he took it off, he saw a small transparent dropper fixed beneath.
The tyger opened its mouth. The meaning was clear enough, but . . .
"How much?" Tim asked. "I'd not poison thee for the world."
The tyger only sat with its head slightly uptilted and its mouth open, looking like a baby bird waiting to receive a worm.
After a little experimentation--he'd never used a dropper before, although he'd seen a larger, cruder version that Destry called a bull-squirter--Tim got some of the fluid into the little tube. It sucked up almost all the liquid in the bottle, for there was only a bit. He held it over the tyger's mouth, heart beating hard. He thought he knew what was going to happen, for he h
ad heard many legends of skin-men, but it was impossible to be sure the tyger was an enchanted human.
"I'll put it in drop by drop," he told the tyger. "If you want me to stop before it's gone, close thy mouth. Give me a sign if you understand."
But, as before, the tyger gave no sign. It only sat, waiting.
One drop . . . two . . . three . . . the little tube half-empty now . . . four . . . fi--
Suddenly the tyger's skin began to ripple and bulge, as if creatures were trapped beneath and struggling to get out. The snout melted away to reveal its cage of teeth, then reknit itself so completely that its mouth was sealed over. Then it gave a muffled roar of either pain or outrage, seeming to shake the clearing.
Tim scooted away on his bottom, terrified.
The green eyes began to bulge in and out, as if on springs. The lashing tail was yanked inward, reappeared, was yanked inward again. The tyger staggered away, this time toward the precipice at the edge of the Great Canyon.
"Stop!" Tim screamed. "Thee'll fall over!"
The tyger lurched drunkenly along the edge, one paw actually going over and dislodging a spall of pebbles. It walked behind the cage that had held it, the stripes first blurring, then fading. Its head was changing shape. White emerged, and then, above it, a brilliant yellow where its snout had been. Tim could hear a grinding sound as the very bones inside its body rearranged themselves.
On the far side of the cage, the tyger roared again, but halfway through, the roar became a very human cry. The blurring, changing creature reared up on its back legs, and where there had been paws, Tim now saw a pair of ancient black boots. The claws became silver siguls: moons, crosses, spirals.
The yellow top of the tyger's head continued to grow until it became the conical hat Tim had seen in the tin pail. The white below it, where the tyger's bib had been, turned into a beard that sparkled in the cold and windy sunshine. It sparkled because it was full of rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and diamonds.
Then the tyger was gone, and Maerlyn of the Eld stood revealed before the wondering boy.
He was not smiling, as he had been in Tim's vision of him . . . but of course that had never been his vision at all. It had been the Covenant Man's glammer, meant to lead him on to destruction. The real Maerlyn looked at Tim with kindness, but also with gravity. The wind blew his robe of white silk around a body so thin it could have been little more than a skeleton.