Gossamer Axe (29 page)

On the last evening of April, Christa picked up the new guitar, snapped on her amplifiers and digital delays, checked her tuning. Across the basement, proud and upright in its stand, Ceis gleamed in the light of the fluorescents.

Christa had spent the last three weeks preparing for this working, meditating late at night with her arms wrapped around the harp and guitar, losing herself in the ambience of willow and bronze and plastic and steel until the material world—the sound of traffic, Monica sleeping in the guest room, the odor of the steaks she had cooked for dinner—had slipped away, and she had been conscious only of the instruments.

Ready, but still unwilling to start, she fiddled with the settings on the delays, assured herself that they were correct, then checked and rechecked to be sure that the amplifier was adjusted to give the bright, lyrical sound that she preferred. Everything had to be right tonight. Everything had to be perfect. Otherwise—

*Chairiste*

“Ceis?” Faced with the outcome of its decision, was the harp going to back out?

*do*

She set her guitar down, picked up the harp, cradled it in her arms. She rested her cheek against the old wood and felt the dampness of her tears.

*do*

Ceis could communicate only in single words, but Christa sensed that it was attempting to comfort her, to demonstrate its confidence in the working at hand and in her skills.

*do*

She looked over her shoulder at the still-sleeping guitar. A harper? Where were her harps? One, much loved, had been sawed up into fragments and incorporated into an absurdly modern contrivance of steel strings and integrated circuits. Another, a dear friend, would tonight become a comparative stranger.

Symmetrically, perhaps fittingly, she had finished Kevin’s harp and had returned it to him with a lesson that morning. She supposed that this night found him practicing in the dark, fumbling for notes with all the discipline and concentration that he had gained from his guitar, striving now for another kind of music, listening for magic.

Comfortable with the old Gods, trusting of himself, open and generous, Kevin seemed to her now more Gaeidil than Irish. Like the sun, he had waxed from winter to spring; and now at Beltaine, though he would not be with her to celebrate the changing of the seasons, he would himself greet the dawn in front of his mountain home with his own words and a cup of wine lifted at the gate of summer.

The world was full of change, and the same turning of the year that had brought Kevin his flowering had also, seemingly, dictated that Christa change her own form from the white-mantled innocence of a novice harper to the black leather and vengeance of a rocker. Monica had been right. Everything was just a phase. The seasons changed, and people did also. By what right had she held herself aloof so long from something so universal?

*Chairiste*

“Ceis…” She wept openly, rocking back and forth like a little girl in need of comfort, half hopeful and half afraid of what lay ahead of her that night.

*do*

“Indeed, Ceis,” she whispered. “I’m delaying, am I not?”

She replaced the harp in its stand and tried to dry her eyes on her sleeve, but the leather would absorb nothing. She shrugged. There would be more tears that night: it mattered little that she began with a damp face.

She picked up her guitar, dropped the strap over her shoulder. “Ready, Ceis?”

*do*

“All right, old friend. Brigit bless.”

If she heard the harp reply, she would lose her nerve, and so she swung immediately into the opening licks of the solo she had created for this working. Even, flowing, strong, the music reached out to the harp and held it as she had often held it in her lap.

The guitar sang, lilting out melodies that, at first, imitated the sound of a harp with the clean ringing of plucked strings. Gradually, though, Christa developed the music into a roar of distortion that penetrated deeply into the being of both instruments.

From the guitar she felt the soft seasons of the forests of Eriu: cool rainy winters, warm summers that culminated in the blood of autumn. A willow tree grew near a brook, sent down roots, lifted leaves, stretched branches up into the clear, unpolluted air, waiting for someone to come along with an idea, waiting for a young woman who wanted to be a harper and who needed a tree to love…

But there were other trees, too: growing in tropical forests, making hard and unyielding woods out of the violent life that teemed among rank moss and the sluggish rivers. They also waited—and dark, sullen men came to cut them down and send them to other lands.

The deep, deciduous woods of New England that grew within sight of still lakes mirroring unspeakably blue skies. Trees. Waiting for a hand to shape them.

She saw Roger Best smoothing wood, soldering wires, spraying and burnishing coat after coat of lacquer…

The guitar was a complex involution of events and processes brought together by fate, will, and need. And Christa herself was as much a part of its existence as its woods and metals and plastics. Were it not for her, for Judith, for the Sidh, this guitar would not have been made. But, in the same way, she stood in her basement on this last evening of April, teetering on the threshold of summer, because of this guitar. As much as it itself had been summoned, it had called forth the Gaeidil.

Ceis, though, was something else, and Christa found herself grappling with an entity that had no earthly history, that had sprung directly into existence just as the first star had coalesced and kindled in the pitch of the mortal Void. With a shriek of amplified guitar strings, she stared utter nothingness in the face and saw, from out of heavings and sudden brilliance, the inbreaking of
presence
.

Teeth clenched, eyes shut tight against the vision that had taken her, throat contracted against a scream which her harper’s pride dictated she would not utter, she faced the reality of Ceis and offered welcome and friendship to something she knew could rend her very atoms into a cloudy assortment of wave forms and probabilities.

She held a long, wailing note, stretched the string up, shook it, let it throb with an acceptance of whatever might come. That which was Ceis turned to her—could not but turn, was always turning—a consciousness unlimited by concerns of time or of life. It met her gaze with its own, returned her greeting, her acceptance, bowed to her need, gave itself.

For a moment, she was still Chairiste Ní Cummen. But, caught between the two extremes that she was attempting to meld, she slid into both, found herself making music under her own hands, discovered that she contained everything that was, that could be, in a blinding instant of union.

When she opened her eyes, Monica was bending over her, her dark face drawn and frightened. Christa blinked at her and tried to talk, but her mouth was not functioning. Monica swam out of view for a moment, faded back with a glass of water, and held it to her lips. The liquid flowed through Christa like electric current, its wetness and fluidity nearly overpowering.

Monica’s lips had been moving, but Christa did not realize that she had been speaking until sound suddenly returned as though a switch had been thrown.

“—sus Christ! What the hell’ve you been doing? Chris, can you hear me? Wave your hands or something.”

“I’m… fine…”

“Don’t give me that jive, girl. I come home from
Psycho III
and find you in the middle of the floor. What the fuck’s going on?”

The nouns in Monica’s sentences slammed through Christa’s thoughts like sledgehammers. She shook her head to clear it. Her hands were empty. Why were her hands empty?

She took the glass from Monica, held it as though her fingers encircled the weight of a planet, gulped the rest of the water. The world pinched back toward normalcy. Monica helped her to sit up, and Christa rubbed her face with empty hands.

Empty… why empty?

The tang of ozone in the air slapped her in the face like a cold rain and she instinctively looked at her amplifier. It was on, its preamp indicators glowing red, but it was silent. Where was the usual hiss?

She stared at her hands. Empty…

With a lurch, she pulled herself to her feet and staggered to the Laney. Her boots crunched on pulverized glass as she stretched up on tiptoe to peer into the back of the amplifier head. Every vacuum tube in it had exploded. The inside of the head was littered with shards of glass and bits of tube elements.

“Serves me right…” she mumbled as she groped to turn it off. “I’ll have to retube.”

Monica had been hovering anxiously. She looked over Christa’s shoulder. “What’d you do?”

“Poured the whole universe through my amp.” Moment by moment, the room seemed to be growing more solid, no longer threatening to melt and flow into some other form.

“You been doing drugs, Chris?”

Christa sorted painfully through words, decided which she wanted to use. “Indeed not, Monica. Magic.”

Monica looked more frightened. “This is out of my department.”

“It’s all right. You’re safe. Ceis—”

Her hands ached. Empty. She grabbed Monica by her shoulders. “Where’s Ceis?”

“The ghost? In the whole house, I thought.”

“The guitar, Monica. Where’s the new guitar?”

Monica’s brown eyes were wide. “It was on top of you. I put it in its stand.”

The basement blurred as Christa swung around, then settled into focus. The guitar gleamed in its stand, but to Christa’s addled vision it seemed faintly transparent, as if it were an amber-colored window that looked into other places, other times. Stars floated in its depths, moons spun along their courses.

She ran to it, picked it up, cradled it against her breasts. “Ceis? Ceis?”

Inches from her heart, the guitar stirred.

“Ceis? Are you… are you there?”

Seconds crawled by as she strained her mind for a reply.

*Chairiste*

“Ceis…”

And as she hugged the guitar, she lifted her eyes to the place where the harp had stood. But instead of a shining instrument of wood and gems, she saw only a handful of gray dust that shuddered as though it found itself bereft of life and faded into the pale concrete floor.

Christa put Monica off with sketchy explanations about ghosts and magic. Monica was obviously not satisfied with the half-truths, but Christa could say no more. The band was already close to breaking up. To throw more difficulties into an already complicated situation made no sense.

Monica insisted that Christa go to bed immediately, and Christa insisted that she would do so only with the guitar in her arms. Monica shrugged: one more crazy thing she was not going to be told about.

It was a violation of trust, and Christa felt a pang of guilt. Monica had given her friendship and had brought a sense of youth and exuberance into her house. She deserved better than to be treated like a child. “I’m sorry, Monica,” said Christa. “I really can’t tell you. It’ll have to be later.”

Monica dropped her eyes. “You’ve been pretty straight with me before, Chris. Why the change?”

“I don’t want to scare you.”

“I’m not scared now? Girl, you haven’t been looking.”

A few hours of dead, dreamless sleep did much to restore the world to its customary appearance, and Christa awoke to find herself wrapped about Ceis like a vixen about her kit. In the kitchen, Monica had left her a pot of coffee and a note:

Chris—

I guess I should say I’m sorry. You’ve done a lot for me, and you got a private life too. I should know better than to push. Take it easy today. See you when I get home. Love.

She smiled as she read.
Take it easy
. She did not see that the next six weeks were going to be in any way easy.

Kevin called from the guitar school. “How did it go?”

“I blew out my tubes, but it worked.”

“You two okay?”

“We are. Will you be able to run sound during my solo tonight? I’m afraid that the house engineer might become distraught and kill the PA or something.”

“I know Fred. He won’t mind me horning in for a few.”

“Good. I have to get to work now, so I’ll see you before the show.” She caught herself before she hung up. She had birthed Kevin at the Solstice, and she was now watching him take his first steps. “How did your rite go this morning?”

“It was great. I wanted some music, but the harp’s still a little more than I can handle. So I used Frankie’s guitar and played the blues.” He laughed. “Beltaine will never be the same. But, you know, I’m starting to understand what you and Frankie said to me. It’s just like sex. It’s just like everything. It all… it all flows together. It makes
sense
.”

She smiled. He was walking. “Happy Beltaine, Kevin.”

“Brigit bless, Chairiste.”

Her amplifier had suffered no damage save to its tubes, and after replacing them, she spent the day in the basement, practicing the licks and melodies that she would use that night. The guitar learned its new abilities quickly and worked with her to fine-tune the magic so that Melinda would be traumatized as little as possible.

“She’ll need strength, Ceis,” she said over lunch. “I think we’ll all need it. Devi already knows about magic, but Boo-boo and Monica are going to see some disturbing things.”

*agreed*

There was a different feeling to Ceis now, one that went beyond cosmetic matters. Over the years, the harp had learned passion, love, and friendship; and in melding with her, it had gone on to absorb something of the nature of the mortal woman who played it.

Christa sensed a hidden anger in it: anger at the Sidh, who held Judith against her will; anger at Carl Taylor, who was destroying a friend; anger at the smug complacency of Orfide; even a little anger at Melinda.

As she ate, she considered her own feelings. Yes, she was angry, but anger at Melinda would be foolish. Melinda had been weak, and she had fallen. In much the same way, a young Gaeidil woman had once succumbed to a cocky disregard for caution and had lost everything, including her lover, as a result.

“Ceis,” she said, “we have to be gentle with Melinda.”

*gentle*

“Agreed? You know Melinda. She had harp lessons with me for months. And she’s probably someone I knew at the harpers’ school—she has dreams about it. You’ve seen her good side. She hurt herself years ago, and she never quite recovered. Be good to her.”

*compassion*

“Indeed, Ceis. Compassion.”

Monica came home from work, but said nothing about the previous night. She changed out of her office clothes and, together, she and Christa began dismantling equipment, preparing it for transportation to InsideOut for the evening’s gig. Devi and Lisa showed up a little later and joined in.

“Where’s Melinda?” Lisa grumbled.

“She’ll be at the club.”

“We have to move her stuff for her?”

Devi stood up behind a stack of cases, rolls of cables in her arms. “She’s having a hard enough time getting herself around, Boo-boo.”

“Yeah… yeah…”

“At least this way we know she’ll be set up and ready to go.”

“Will she be there, do you think?”

“Well…”

Christa picked up one side of her heavy speaker cabinet. Monica grabbed the other. “She will,” said the harper.

“How do you know?”

“She’ll be there.”

Christa did not want to consider the alternative.