Gossamer Axe (9 page)

“You’ve changed a lot,” said Melinda.

Christa eased the wagon through midday traffic. Behind, on the cargo deck, was the speaker cabinet and head, two digital delays, and her guitar. “Have I?”

“Oh, come on. I take you to one rock concert, and suddenly you’re Denver’s next guitar hero. What happened?”

“I liked what I heard.” Christa smiled at Melinda. She tried to remember when she had last had a friend besides Judith, drew a blank. Maybe her father. Maybe Dennis Hempson, the old blind harper who had helped her with her English. No one else. Had she been alone that long?

“You’re not telling me everything.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. So I won’t.”

Melinda cast her eyes upward for a moment, shook her head. “Where did you say you were from?”

“Ireland.”

“No: I mean, what planet?” Melinda laughed. “Where to now?”

“Soundtrack. I need a good stereo. Kevin told me to start listening to as much rock as I could—so as to develop my feeling for the idiom.”

“You’ve got bucks, lady.”

Christa shrugged. Two hundred years of thrift—and a little prescience—had given her a fair-sized bank account. She was making a sizable dent in it today, but she would have given up everything for Judith. “I want to thank you for all your help.”

“No problem. Glad I can do something.”

Christa pulled into the parking lot. “Excellent. You can do even more: you can help me carry the Laney down to my basement, and set up my stereo.”

“I can? Gee, thanks.”

“You’re most welcome.”

Melinda spread her hands. “You going to feed me?”

“Oatcakes and the champion’s portion of the beef.” And though Melinda stared at her, Christa laughed at her own joke.

In all her days at the school in Corca Duibne she had never dreamed of this: that she would spend a day driving the streets of Denver in the company of a woman as audacious as the most wild-eyed hoyden of the Gaeidil, enjoying a world far stranger even than that of curdled milk oceans and meat-clad doorkeepers in the dream of Anier Mac Conglinde.

She was opening up, and the darkness of her endless twilight memories of the Sidh had been riven by the blue sky of Colorado and the bright lights of a rock concert.

Renouncing at last the anesthetic life that had kept her loss from overwhelming her with grief, she was crawling out from behind her harp.

It was early evening by the time Christa pulled into her own driveway, and, with Melinda helping, she muscled the equipment inside and down the stairs. She had spent the last several days cleaning out her basement, trashing the accumulated rubbish of eighty years of Denver living, pitching old furniture, out-of-fashion clothes, cardboard boxes gritty with the talcumlike dust of the past. Now the sheetrock walls were covered with carpet scraps to keep down the echoes, and the otherwise empty room was soon occupied by the Laney, the delays, a new stereo, and several stacks of records that Melinda had insisted on lending to her.

“You’re going to have to get used to listening to this stuff, Chris,” said Melinda as she staggered down the stairs with a foot-high pile of cardboard and vinyl in her arms. “Might as well start now.”

Melinda made Christa do the actual hook-up of the amplifier and the stereo, insisting that if she did not start learning about electronics immediately, she would be lost in rock and roll. Sitting amid a tangle of wire and patch cables, Christa puzzled through the directions while Melinda translated the unfamiliar terminology.

“Positive to positive and negative to negative,” said the bassist. “Otherwise your speakers will be out of phase.”

Christa held the speaker cord up to the light and examined the bare copper ends. “Energy is energy, Melinda. What is this positive and negative?”

“Take it on faith.”

“You sound like a Christian.”

“I
am
a Christian.”

“My apologies.” Christa squatted behind the stereo, squinting in the dim light as she attached the cables.

“You’ve never done this before?”

“Never. This is my first stereo.”

“Brother.”

“You have to understand…” Christa stood up. “I grew up in the sixth century.”

Melinda made a face. “Yeah, sure.”

Christa plugged in the power cord and snapped on the switch. KAZY blasted through the speakers. The Doors. “Light My Fire.” Manzarek’s organ solo. It was dispassionate, aloof music, a lead that cared little for anything made of such paltry stuff as flesh and blood.

Christa listened, evaluated it. Everything that she heard, she could use, and though this lead lacked the brute force that characterized heavy metal, she heard the terrible potentials that it contained; for if Manzarek had changed his inflections just a little, held a note a trifle longer here, altered the emphasis there, the music, with surgical objectivity, could have killed.

“Good stuff,” said Melinda.

Christa gestured at the speakers. “Do you hear it, Melinda?”

“Hear what? The organ?”

“Do you hear the magic?”

Melinda looked surprised, but she closed her eyes and listened intently. Finally: “I hear the music. They’ve got good chops. I’m not sure what you mean by magic.”

The song ended. A commercial came on. Christa turned off the stereo. It was risky, but she had to ask. In order to win Judith, she needed to work with others: she needed a band. Her Celtic pride sneered at anything short of single combat with the Sidh bard, but that pride had been tempered by two hundred years of loss and by over a century of American practicality. Let Find Mac Cumaill and the Fianna concern themselves with personal glory. Christa Cruitaire now sought only results.

“Do you believe in magic, Melinda?” she said softly.

“Like what? Princes into frogs and that stuff?”

“Like what I talk about during your harp lessons. That
sian
I taught you: you can sleep now. Doesn’t that seem like magic?”

Melinda was plainly uncomfortable. “Magic? Isn’t it more like psychology, or something like that?”

Christa wanted to pick up her guitar, plug in, and do something. She was not sure what. Something that would show Melinda what she was talking about. But that would have been too much. “I suppose,” she said, “that it has a lot to do with the way you look at the world. You can see it as solid and immovable; or as fluid, changeable. Music operates on a number of levels. The base is, of course, the vibrations in the air, but it also touches other worlds, other parts of ourselves. And it can change them.”

“This… uh… sounds more like religion than music, Chris.”

“They are the same thing, Melinda.”

“But…” She was shaking again. “Religion is… like going to church, and being holy.”

“Exactly. That’s what I’m saying.”

Melinda’s blond hair had suddenly grown damp at the roots. “I’m a nice Lutheran girl, Chris. I don’t understand this. When do we eat?”

Christa bent her head and discovered that, in setting up the equipment, she had chipped one of her nails. “We can eat now,” she said, trying to sound cheerful.

They settled for fast food: there was a Burger King a few blocks away. A Double Whopper with cheese was a pale shadow of the champion’s portion, but Melinda seemed satisfied with it. While they ate, they watched the traffic passing on Colorado Boulevard and chatted about harps and guitars and rock and roll, staying far away from such subjects as religion and magic.

“You got plans tonight?” Melinda asked.

Melinda’s inability to understand magic hung like a lead weight at the back of Christa’s mind, but she put it aside. There was time. For now, she had a friend, and she had advice and help. “I thought I’d go home and practice.”

“You want to go out to a club with me? We can head up to InsideOut. Some cute guys there. Tom Del—” The name stuck in her throat. “Uh…”

Christa noticed her unease. “I’m not really in the market, Melinda.”

Melinda shook herself out of her thoughts. “Whatever. Little Sister is playing tonight. They’re hot. Good moves, good songs, the whole schtick. Kevin told you to listen to a lot of rock, but that’s really only half of it. You gotta go see the bands. If you’re going to perform, you have to work on your moves.”

“Moves?”

“Like you saw at the Malmsteen concert. You have to jump around, play with your guitar, show the audience what you can do. You know: strut your stuff.”

Christa laughed.

“I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious, Melinda. I was just thinking what my harp teacher would say.”

Melinda leaned across the orange formica tabletop and poked a finger at her. “He’d think you were hot stuff, girl. That’s what he’d think.” She finished her soft drink. “Tell you what: let’s get crazy tonight. You want to borrow some of my spandex? I’ve got something in electric blue that would look great on you.”

Her blue eyes were bright. They reminded Christa of someone she had known once—someone who had taught her the precision of the harp, just as Melinda was instructing her in the cocky insanity of rock and roll.

Stage moves. Spandex. It all seemed absurd, but Melinda would doubtless think that twelve hours a day of blind practice and the white mantle of a novice harper were absurd. Different worlds. And Anier had dreamed of a doorkeeper dressed like a side of beef.

Christa smiled softly. “Why not? It’s been at least a century since I’ve been crazy.”

Orfide is playing.

Head bent, fingers agile, he recreates once again the timeless, limpid melodies that Siudb has heard so often that she knows every string, every pause, every rubato, every duration of every note. Had she a chance to practice, she too could play these pieces, evoke these magics. But time and opportunity are denied her, and so she must sit at Lamcrann’s side, stifling the scream of frustration that wells up within her. She can only listen. She is a toy.

Orfide finishes, and—as usual, as always—pale hands applaud and the bard rises and bows. Lamcrann thanks him and takes Siudb by the arm. Siudb pulls away. Cumad intervenes as the mortal woman flees to the isolation of the gardens and meadows that surround the palace.

It disturbs Siudb that she has fallen into the endless repetition and the eternal theater of the Sidh. As well as she can predict each nuance of Orfide’s performance, so she knows her own part in the ritual: she must listen, and then she must run. Perhaps she is being ensnared by some subtle spell woven by the bard. Perhaps she has already been caught, and, like her captors, can now only reenact prior motions.

She passes through the gardens, climbs a slope, enters a grove of myrtle. The trees are shadowed, fragrant, but she longs for the virile oaks and rowans of her mortal past. The forests of Eriu betokened change, honest sexuality, fertility; the Realm offers only perfumed invitations to endless, unfulfilled dalliance. Her garments rustling across the tall grass and the twilight-blooming flowers, she leaves the grove and finds herself beside a reflecting pool. The water is still, but there are no stars for it to mirror.

She has been here before, too. How many times? She does not know. Merely a player she is, fallen hopelessly under the spell of the Sidh.

A footstep, a sigh of a sandal across the grass. A Sidh has followed her, one who is pleased to appear as a youth, a lad no older than herself. His hair is light, his eyes gray; but unlike the men of Siudb’s folk, he is as barefaced as a woman.

He approaches her, bows. He wears the livery of the palace guard. “I am Glasluit.”

“Siudb Ní Corb. What is it you want?”

He fumbles for a moment with his words. “I would speak with you, my lady.”

Arms folded, she looks out across the blank surface of the pool. “Speak, then.”

He is ill at ease, almost shy. “I… I have… that is to say…”

Surrised, she looks at him. His face is flushed.

“I am not accustomed to speaking in this fashion,” he says. It is almost a confession.

Change. Of a sudden, out of nowhere, something is different. Terribly different.

Glasluit fidgets. “I want to help you.”

Lugnasad. Away to the east, where the mountains gave way to the rolling plains that led into Kansas, the August harvest was beginning as fields of golden wheat and barley were gathered in: foodstuff for the future, nourishment from sun and earth.

But where the fields of Eriu had been cleared by brown-backed men and women wielding scythes and singing songs of the God Lugh, their coppery hair bleached as blond as cornsilk by the long summer, the fields of Colorado and the plains were harvested by machine. Christa had seen them: dark, clattering reapers and roaring combines that spewed out a shower of yellow grain. There was no singing, no worship. A day’s work, a good supper, and then a night’s rest—no more. Worship was for Sundays, in church.

Christa snorted softly, but the sound was masked by the rush of air past the windows of her station wagon. She had been on the road since before dawn, following highway 285 to the south and southwest, taking the steep grade of Kenosha Pass down to the wide valley below just as the ever-rising sun called back the shadows of the mountains in a fast-receding tide of darkness that left herds of grazing cattle stranded upon wide green pastures.

*distance*

Ceis rested on the seat beside her, the lap belt slung loosely over its forepillar. Its gilt and gems flashed in the clear light.

“ ’Twill be a ways, Ceis,” she said. “From my feelings, it’s at least as far as Gunnison we’ll have to travel, maybe farther. We’ll pick up U.S. 50 near Salida, but we’ll do a check there and see if we can’t triangulate on the gate.”

*mountains*

“I daresay. We’ll cross Monarch Pass, and there’s a lovely view from there. Would you like to play a little at the Continental Divide?”

*always*

She paused for a quick breakfast at a truck stop in Fairlay. The burly, unshaven patrons in the diner looked at her curiously and stared at Ceis without reservation. A yawning waitress with a name tag that said
Bobbie
took her order for oatmeal, milk, and bacon, and paused for a moment before she left the table.

“What is that thing you’ve got there, honey?”

“It is a harp.”

Bobbie shook her head. “Never seen one that small. You play?”

**

Christa smiled at Ceis affectionately. “I do.” While she waited for her food, she watched the morning grow outside. It was a fine day, the air warm, the sky clear and blue. Even Eriu had not possessed such a sky: a deep azure the color of a master harper’s robe.

And from the kitchen came the crisp rattle of cups and plates, the slow, murmured drawl of the cook, the lilting, girlish tones of the waitress. About her, truckers read newspapers, lingered over coffee, grunted comments to one another. Christa ate, knowing full well that most of them were talking about the odd stranger who traveled with an even odder instrument, and she smiled inwardly with the thought that, carrying a harp, she was as outlandish to these people as she would have been had she walked in wearing the spandex she had donned the other night.

It had been a strange evening, as foreign to her usual lifestyle as the modern harvest was to the holy days of grain gathering. The club to which Melinda had taken her pulsed steadily with the harsh accents of hard rock, and the air was filled with tobacco smoke and a faint undertone of marijuana. Christa was clad in garments that made her feel almost naked, but the look in her black-rimmed eyes kept the curious and the prurient away as much as did the studded belts and chains that adorned her.

Stage moves. She watched the band. She learned. At first, she wondered what it would be like to play for such a party-minded audience, and then she considered what she might do against Orfide, who, immersed in the intricacies of a spell woven of twilight and harpstrings, could not but be unsettled by the gleeful, casual arrogance of a rock performer.

Near dawn, she had dropped Melinda off at her apartment. “Good night.”

“Night.” Melinda had reached for the doorhandle. “You know something, Chris? You’re deceptive.”

“Me? I don’t understand.”

“You come on all sweetness and light. But I can see now that you’re definitely not someone to fuck around with.” She had swung out of the wagon with a wave. “Later. See you at my lesson.”

Christa had smiled. “Later.”

She finished her coffee, hoping that Melinda was correct. Sweetness had helped her to survive throughout the years, but the violence and anger had been building. She hoped that Orfide would indeed find that she meant business, that she was not someone to fuck around with.

The waitress took her money at the front counter. She looked at Ceis again, her lips pursed, thinking.

Christa knew the look. She smiled in site of Orfide and picked up the harp. “Would you like a tune before I leave?”

Bobbie shrugged apologetically. “It’s been a slow morning. And the radio’s busted. It’d be nice. Would you?”

“Surely.” Making sure that she had a view to the south, she settled herself in a chair by the front window and put Ceis on her lap. “What say you, old friend?” she murmured to the harp. “Shall we?”

*play*

South and west. Putting her hands to the strings, she began one of the old melodies. It had been, perhaps, the first she had learned, a bittersweet mixolydian tune redolent of love and longing, but hopeful nonetheless, the flatted seventh tone leading graciously to a tonic that shone like a moonstone.

But while Christa played for Bobbie and the cook and the truckers, she was also playing for herself. She wove the melody into her awareness, into her view of the mountains to the south, and then—expanding the song, increasing the intervals between melody and accompaniment, contrasting ascending scales with descending arpeggios—she also increased her vision.

The diner went away. She saw mountains, valleys, forests of pine and aspen, fire roads, highways. With a discipline acquired through years of practice, she held the memory of the gate in her mind and let her instincts guide her hands until, with a shimmer and a sensation of opening in her mind, she saw once again the lake and cliff with the mineral vein.

And still the music expanded. From her vantage at the mountain lake, Christa looked back toward the truck stop, her split consciousness regarding itself over the intervening miles, taking notes of landmarks that would give her a true bearing toward the gate.

Satisfied, she returned to herself and let her fingers blur into an old jig that danced up and down, now high, now low. She smiled as she played a staccato run from the bass to the treble—harper’s flash, nothing more— and finished in a rolling arpeggio and a slash of the highest strings.

Bobbie’s eyes were closed. The truckers stared into their cups of coffee, one of them surretitiously wiping his eyes. Even the cook had paused in his work, and aside from the crackling of frying eggs and the brown gurgle of the coffee-maker, the diner was silent.

“God.” The waitress’s word was barely a whisper, but it broke the spell and freed the applause. Christa stood, bowed, and turned for the door. “Wait a minute, honey.” Bobbie opened the register and reached into the till. “You pain’t paying for your breakfast after playing like that.”

Christa shook her head. “It was freely given, and I have been well paid already.” And she was out the door then, heading for the light-blue Eagle in the parking lot.

After strapping Ceis in, she reached behind her seat for a state map and a compass. She sighted toward the landmarks she had noted and traced a pencil line that slanted steeply to the southwest.

*tell*

“Somewhere between here and Durango. If we check in Salida and in Gunnison, we’ll know fairly closely.” A semitrailer rumbled by, and Ceis’s strings thrummed in response. Christa, lips pursed, watched it fade into the distance. “And then it’s just a matter of convincing a bunch of rockers to come help me kill something that’s immortal.”

She dropped the Eagle into gear and pulled out onto the asphalt, following 285 southward across the valley.