SPIRIT WALKER

Chapter 7: Blue Holiday (part 2 of 3)

Tull's mother wiped her eyes and looked up into his face. "Jenks and I are one," she said. "He is my beloved. So we must both be dead to you." She turned and walked down the street, shaking like an aspen leaf that trembles in the smallest wind.

Tull cursed under his breath.

Wisteria glanced at others on the hill, realized that she was still standing next to Tull, and though she'd hoped for a private conversation, everyone was staring at them. The humans had watched Tull and his mother in amusement. Here and there people reported the gist of the conversation to those who did not understand Pwi. Ayaah, they came for a show, she thought, and by God's lolling tongue, they got one.

She felt that she needed to talk to Tull, try to explain away what had happened five years ago in the alley. At the same time, she wasn't sure yet if she wanted to push him away, or pull him closer. She squeezed his hand.

A shout from downhill interrupted her plans. "Phylomon!" someone shouted. "Phylomon of the Starfarers has come to our town!"

The name of Phylomon was a legend.

Several people began pointing to the south, and Wisteria peered toward the bend in the road by the redwood bridge. From here she could see the warehouse district and Pwi Town across the river, but she couldn't spot the renowned blue man. Children ran toward Pwi Town.

Everyone knew of the blue man-the last living child of the refugee Starfarers who had terraformed Anee. Phylomon had wandered the planet for well over a thousand years, outliving his brethren by centuries, kept alive by ancient technologies. Everyone had heard the legends of how he'd led the attack that decimated the holds of the Pirate Lords at Bashevgo. Phylomon's wisdom was famous. Every adage that sounded as if it had a ring of truth to it was attributed to him.

A man stepped from the shadows of a pine tree onto the redwood bridge. He was tall, nearly seven feet, and willowy slender, as legend said all men were in the days of the old Starfaring race. His skin was blue, the color of a robin's egg.

His face looked eternally young, like that of a twenty year old. He wore a knee-length breechcloth made of buckskin, and his naked chest was crisscrossed with heavy leather straps and bangles-a strap for his quiver, a strap for the long narrow sword sheathed on his back, a strap for his packsack. In his right hand he carried a bow of onyx-black dragon horn.

He wore a necklace with pale silver medallions on it, each made from glowing metal unlike anything native to the metal-poor planet Anee. He had no hair on his head or chest, nor on his arms. He could have been a salamander his skin was so smooth.

Wisteria began running toward him, but the blue man raised his hand to ward people back, and the entire town seemed to stop at once. The blue man eyed the mayor's pet stegosaur, and everyone in town watched to see what Phylomon would do.

The mayor's stegosaur had wandered down from feeding in the hills and walked underneath someone's clothes line. The bony plates running the length of the stegosaur's back had snagged a dark green dress, and it waved in the breeze like a flag. The stegosaur stood in the roadway scratching its belly by rubbing against the wheel of a wagon. A cowbird fluttered above the stegosaur's back, as if angered at being pushed off so comfortable a resting place.

The dinosaur was only three years old, no heavier than a huge bull. The wagon it scratched against creaked as if it would shatter.

Ancient laws made it illegal for the creature to be here.

But Mayor Goodman had eight brothers, and people in town had long since learned to look the other way when the mayor's pet monster tore up a wagon or accidentally speared a dog on its tail. "Someday that thing will grow up and trample a child!" all the women in the neighborhood would say. "And then it will have to go!" But, so far, the children had managed to keep from under the stegosaur's feet, and no one dared to demand that the mayor get rid of the dangerous beast.