Marc Zicree - Angelfire

On the millhouse roof the rope team stood down, except for a lone figure that straddled the ridgepole, apparently waiting to signal us when the gears were engaged.

“Problem!” Delmar yelled in my ear. Water cascaded over his head in a foamy veil. “We just let go this stuff-it hits the wheel-could damage it!”

Damn. He was right. We’d have to dismantle our dam piece by piece, and try to lose as few of those pieces as possible.

I opened my mouth to shout back when I heard music. Flute music. Kevin stood above us on the stream bank, trilling out a melody that cut through the shriek of the Storm in gentle defiance. Around us the roar of water diminished. Less of it poured over the top of the dam. What did come over cascaded in slow motion-lazy banners of foam.

With the Storm winds pressing low enough to whip the treetops, I trained my eyes on that ridgepole silhouette. Praying it would move, would tell us we were ready to put the Storm to flight.

A second later my prayers were answered. The man pulled himself to his knees and waved both arms at us, shouting as he did: “Away! AWAY! NOW! ”

We hauled scrap lumber out of the water as fast as humanly possible. I still had one foot in the stream when Kevin stopped playing and water exploded back into the pond, carrying away the few small pieces we’d missed.

I crab-crawled up the stream bank, panting, and watched as the flood rushed around the boulder, catching the wheel and turning it. There was a great creaking and the clatter of meshing gears, then lines moved on their wheels and the wind chimes stirred. All around the camp’s perimeter, they sang- loudly enough to be heard above the Storm’s fury.

Another sound carried down to us there on the bank of the millstream-a roar of celebration from the millhouse. The men around me echoed it.

Delmar pounded my back and laughed in my ear. “Look!” He pointed to the sky. “Look! It goes!”

I looked. My own laughter bubbled up from someplace hidden, catching me by surprise. I pumped my fist at the sky. Already the Storm was retreating, being replaced by the burnished gold of the Preserve’s strange mist. We had, with a perfect synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical, averted disaster.

“Nice work.” Goldie squatted beside me, grinning like the Cheshire cat. Kevin Elk Sings hunkered next to him, flute still clutched in his hands.

Yeah, it was good work. “Kevin, you really came through there. Thanks.”

He gave me a self-conscious smile. “I didn’t want to let you down. You were all putting yourselves on the line. I don’t have lots of muscle; this is the only thing I do well.” He turned the flute in his hands, then smiled again, rose, and moved away toward the mill.

“That was quite a piece of work,” I said.

Goldie nodded, eyes speculative. “Wasn’t it, though?” He got up and followed Kevin, leaving only his grin behind.

I pulled myself to my feet amid celebratory and congratulatory chatter and looked around for Doc, afraid he might have hurt himself again. I didn’t see him, and before I could go looking, Mary caught up with me.

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said. “You pulled off one hell of a save, Mr. Griffin. Something I doubt I could have done, under the circumstances. This thing blindsided me.”

“I didn’t save a damn thing, Mary. We did it, all of us. And we’re not safe-not yet. This is a temporary fix, a salve. It’s not the cure.”

She nodded, looking away toward the mill, her arms folded defensively over her heart. “The cure is defeating the Source.”

Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then she said, “You were right, Cal. Enid is dying. I don’t pretend to understand why, but I doubt it’s any natural disease. Whether I can afford for him to leave us or not, the simple fact remains that he’s going to leave us.” She turned to look up at me, her frosty eyes bright with tears. “If there were some way you could save his life, Cal Griffin, I would gladly let him go with you.”

I was stunned. “I’m not a miracle worker, Mary.”

“No? What do you call what you just did?”

“ We did. And I don’t know. But it wasn’t a miracle.”

“It might as well have been. I can’t do what you do. I can’t …” She groped for words, her hands making futile gestures in the air. “I can’t drive people the way you do.”

“Maybe not, but you’ve already done something I know I couldn’t do: you’ve molded an incredibly diverse group of people into a thriving community. To me, that’s a miracle. One I doubt I could reproduce.”

“But they needed you to-to focus them just now. I … After Faun… God, Cal, I felt so lost .”

Impulsively, I put my hands out to take her shoulders. “For a moment, Mary. For only a moment. None of us are one-man or one-woman shows. How far do you think I’d have gotten if I didn’t have Doc and Goldie and Colleen with me? Where would any of us have been if you hadn’t rescued us from that dead-end mound cave? I needed you then, you needed me in this emergency. I’m good at emergencies, I guess. But after I’m gone, this community you’ve built will need someone who can hold it together. That’s what you’re good at.”

She took a deep breath and met my eyes, the light in them suddenly wry. “You know, I think you’d make a good lawyer.”

I laughed, dropping my hands from her shoulders. “Yeah, so I’m told. You know I’ve wondered: what were you before all this?”

She shook her head. “Unsatisfied. Tried being an executive secretary-oh, pardon, an executive assistant-tried teaching. I liked teaching, but frankly, it was a depressing occupation. Then I started a day-care center outside of Dayton.”

She’d surprised more laughter out of me.

“What?”

“I had you pegged as an administrator, a judge, or a politician.” Or the Dalai Lama .

She pointed a stern finger at my forehead. “Young man, I ought to wash your mouth out with soap for that last crack.”

A smile tugged at the corner of her mouth, and I suffered another sharp pang of deja vu. She turned and headed toward the Lodge, then paused and glanced back over one shoulder. “I was an administrator’s secretary . Now, don’t you think you’d better get yourself into a change of dry clothes?”

There was, I thought, following her, something to that old truism about who really runs an office.

DOC

“Got a minute?”

I looked up from the table where I was grinding herbs to paste and found Colleen in the doorway of the Preserve’s little apothecary shop. It seemed to me that I often saw Colleen in doorways, as if caught between coming and going. I gestured for her to come in.

She hesitated but entered, nodding to my two assistants, who variously filled containers with homemade remedies or folded bandages, some of which would accompany us on our westward journey, some of which would go to their own infirmary.

She came to stand close beside me, leaning as if to peer into my mortar, and said, “Can we talk someplace private?” “Certainly.”

I picked up the tray on which I worked and carried it to the back room, calling back over my shoulder for her to come help me. There was less light here, but it was private, as she had requested.

“Light me that lamp, please?” I nodded at an antique copper oil lamp that sat on a shelf across the room.

She fetched it without hesitation, lit it, and brought it to the counter where I had set my tray of herbs. She dipped her head toward the preparations, then wrinkled her nose. “What is that?”

“Wintergreen,” I said. “Good for rashes and abrasions. Is that what you came to ask of me so privately?”