Ivory and the Horn (38 page)

“So? This means you can’t be friends?”

“Of course not. I was just pointing out that he’s not potential boyfriend material.”

“It’s possible to be enamored with someone on an intellectual or spiritual level, you know.”

“I know.”

“And besides, you already have a boyfriend.”

Sophie sighed. “Right. In my dreams. That doesn’t exactly do much for me in the real world.”

“But your dreams are like a real world for you.”

“I think I need something a little more… substantial in my life. My biological clock is ticking away.”

“But Jeck—”

“Isn’t real,” Sophie said. “No matter how much I pretend he is. And Mabon isn’t a real city, no matter how much I want it to be, and even if it seems like other people can visit it. You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn’t change the fact that some things are real and some things aren’t. There’s a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy.”

“Yeah, but it’s an imaginary line,” Jilly said. “Who really decides where it gets drawn?”

They’d been through variations on this conversation many times before. Anyone who spent any amount time with Jilly did. Her open-mindedness was either endearing or frustrating, depending on where you stood on whatever particular subject happened to be under discussion.

“Well, I’ll tell you,” Jilly went on when Sophie didn’t respond. “A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what’s real and what’s not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.”

“All of which has nothing to do with Max,” Sophie said in an attempt to return to the original topic of their conversation.

“I know,” Jilly said. “So are you going to see him again?”

“I hope so. There’s something very intriguing about him.”

“Which has nothing to do with the way he looks.”

“I told you,” Sophie said. “He’s gay.”

“Like Sue always says, the best ones are either married or gay, more’s the pity.”

Sophie smiled. “Only for us.”

“This is true.”

6

The desert dream starts in the alley behind Mr. Truepenny’s shop—or at least where the alley’s supposed to be. I’m in the back of the store with Jeck, poking around through the shelves of books, when I hear the sound of this flute. It goes on for a while, sort of lingering there in the back of my mind, until finally I get curious. I leave Jeck digging for treasure in a cardboard box of new arrivals and step past the door that leads into the store’s small art gallery. The music is sort of atonal, and the instrument appears to have a limited range of notes, but there’s something appealing about it all the same. I walk down a long narrow corridor, the walls encrusted with old portraits of thin, bearded men and women in dresses that appear far too stiff and ornately embroidered to be comfortable. The soles of my shoes squeak on the wooden floor in a rhythmic counterpoint to the music I’m following. I stop at the door at the far end of the hall. The music seems to be coming from the other side of it, so I open the door and step out, expecting to find myself in a familiar alleyway, but the alley’s gone.

Instead, I’m standing in a desert. I turn around to see that the door through which I came has disappeared. All that I can see on every side of me is an endless panorama of desert, each compass point bordered by mountains. I seem to be as far from Mabon as that city is from the place where my body sleeps.

“What is this place?” I say.

My voice startles me, because I didn’t realize I was speaking aloud. What startles me more is that my rhetorical question gets answered. I turn to see the oddest sight: There’s a rattlesnake coiled up under a palo verde tree. The pale color of the tree’s branches and twigs awakes an echoing green on the snake’s scales which range through a gorgeous palette of golds and deep rusty reds. That’s normal enough. What’s so disconcerting is that the snake has the face of a Botticelli madonna—serene smile, rounded features enclosed by a cloud of dark ringlets.
The Virgin and Child With Singing Angels
comes immediately to mind. And she’s got wings— creamy yellow wings that thrust out from the snake’s body a few inches below the face. All that’s lacking is a nimbus of gold light.

“A dreaming place,” is what the snake has just said to me.

For all her serenity, she has an unblinking gaze which I doubt any of Botticelli’s models had.

“But Mabon’s already a dreaming place,” I find myself replying, as though I always have conversations with snakes that have wings and human faces.

“Mabon is your dreaming place,” she says. “Today you have strayed into someone else’s.”

“Whose?”

The snake doesn’t reply.

“How do I get back to Mabon?”

Still no reply—at least not from her. Another voice answers me. This time it’s that of a small owl, her feathers the color of a dead saguaro rib, streaks of silver-grey and black. She’s perched on the arm of one of those tall cacti, looking down at me with another human face nestled there where an owl’s beak and round eyes should be, calm madonna features surrounded by feathers. At least wings look normal on her.

“You can’t return,” she tells me. “You have to go on.”

I hate the way that conversation can get snarled up in a dream like this: Every word an omen, every sentence a riddle.

“Go on to where?”

The owl turns her head sharply away then turns back and suddenly takes off from her perch. I catch a glimpse of a human torso in her chest feathers—breasts and a rounded belly—and then she’s airborne, wings beating until she catches an updraft, and glides away. A stand of mesquite swallows her from my sight and she’s gone. I turn back to the rattlesnake, but she’s gone as well. The owl’s advice rings in my mind.

You have to go on.

I look around me, mountains in every direction. I know distance can be deceiving in the open desert like this, in this kind of light, with that immense sprawl of sky above me. I feel as though I could just reach any one of those ranges in a half-hour walk, but I know it would really be days.

I find my sense of direction has gone askew. Normally, I relate to a body of water. In Newford, everything’s north of the lake. In Mabon, everything’s south. Here, I feel displaced. There’s no water—or at least none of which I’m aware. I can see the sun is setting toward the west, but it doesn’t feel right. My inner compass says it’s setting in the north.

I turn slowly in place, regarding the distant mountain ranges that surround me. None of them draws me more than the other, and I don’t know which way to go until I remember the sound of the flute that brought me here in the first place. It’s still playing, a sweet low music on the edge of my hearing that calms the panic that was beginning to lodge in my chest.

So I follow it again, hiking through what’s left of the afternoon until I don’t feel I can go any further. The mountains in front of me don’t seem any closer, the ones behind aren’t any further away. I’m thirsty and tired. Every piece of vegetation has a cutting edge or a thorn. My calves ache, my back aches, my throat holds as much moisture as the dusty ground underfoot. I don’t want to be here, but I can’t seem to wake up.

It’s the music, I realize. The music is keeping me here.

I’ve figured out what kind of flute is being played now: one of those medicine flutes indigenous to the Southwest. I remember Geordie had one a couple of years ago. It was almost the size of his Irish flute, with the same six holes on top, but it had an extra thumb hole around back and it didn’t have nearly the same range of notes. It also had an odd addition: up by the air hole, tied to the body of the flute with leather thongs, was a saddle holding a reed. The saddle directed the air jet up or down against the lower reed, and it was adjustable. The sound was very pretty, but the instrument had next to no volume. Geordie eventually traded it in for some whistle or other, but I picked up a tape of its music to play when I’m working—medicine flute, rattles, rainstick and synthesizers. I can’t remember the last time I listened to it.

After carefully checking the area around me for snakes or scorpions or God-knows-what else might be lurking about, I sit down on some rocks and try to think things through. I’d like to believe there’s a reason for my being here, but I know the dreamlands don’t usually work that way. They have their own internal logic; it’s only our presence in them that’s arbitrary. We move through them with the same randomness as the weather in our world: basically unpredictable, for all that we’d like to think otherwise.

No, I’m here as the result of my own interference. I followed the sound of the flute out the door into the desert of my own accord. I’ve no one to blame but myself. There’ll be no escape except for that which I can make for myself.

I’m not alone here, though. I keep sensing presences just beyond my sight, spirits hovering in the corners of my eyes. They’re like the snake and the owl I saw earlier, but much more shy. I catch the hint of a face in one of the cacti, here one moment, gone the next; a ghostly shape in the bristly branches of a smoke tree; a scurry of movement and a fleeting glimpse of something with half-human skin, half-fur or -scale, darting into a burrow: little madonna faces, winged rodents and lizards, birds with human eyes and noses.

I don’t know why they’re so scared of me. Maybe they’re naturally cautious. Maybe there’s something out here in the desert that they’ve got good reason to hide from.

This thought doesn’t lend me any comfort at all. If there’s something they’re scared of, I don’t doubt that I should be scared of it, too. And I would be, except I’m just too exhausted to care at the moment.

I rest my arms on my knees, my head on my arms. I feel a little giddy from the sun and definitely dehydrated. I came to the desert wearing only sneakers, a pair of jeans and a white blouse. The blouse is on my head and shoulders now, to keep off the sun, but it’s left my arms, my lower back and my stomach exposed. They haven’t so much browned as turned the pink that’s going to be a burn in another couple of hours.

Something moves in the corner of my eye and I turn my head, but not quickly enough. It was something small, a flash of pale skin and light brown fur. Winged.

“Don’t be scared!” I call after it. “I won’t hurt you.”

But the desert lies silent around me, except for the sound of the flute. I thought I caught a glimpse of the player an hour or so ago. I was cresting a hill and saw far ahead of me a small hunched shape disappear down into the arroyo. It looked like one of those pictographs you sometimes see in Hopi or Navajo art—a little hunchbacked man with hair like dreadlocks, playing a flute. I called after him at the time, but he never reappeared.

I hate this feeling of helplessness I have at the moment, of having to react rather than do, of having to wait for answers to come to me rather than seek them out on my own. I’ve walked for hours, but I can’t help thinking how, realistically, all that effort was only killing time. I haven’t gotten anywhere, I haven’t learned anything new. I’m no further ahead than I was when I first stepped through that door and found myself here. I’m thirstier, I’ve got the beginning of a sunburn, and that about stuns it up.

The air starts to cool as the sun goes down. I take my blouse off my head and put it back on, but it doesn’t help much against the growing chill. I hear something rustle in the brush on the other side of the rocks where I’m sitting, and I almost can’t be bothered turning my head to see what - made the noise. But I look around all the same, and then I sit very still, hoping that the Indian woman I find regarding me won’t be startled off like every other creature I’ve met since the owl gave me her cryptic advice.

The woman is taller than I am, but that’s not saying much; at just over five feet tall, I’m smaller than almost everyone I meet. Her features have a pinched, almost foxlike cast about them, and she wears her hair in two long braids into which have been woven feathers and beads and cowrie shells. She’s barefoot, which strikes me as odd, since this isn’t exactly the most friendly terrain I’ve ever had to traverse. Her buckskin dress is almost a creamy white, decorated with intricate beadwork and stitching, and she’s wearing a blanket over her shoulders like a shawl, the colors of which reflect the surrounding landscape—the browns and the tans, deep shadows and burnt siennas—only they’re much more vibrant.

“Don’t run off on me,” I say, pitching my voice low and trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.

The woman smiles. She has a smile that transforms her face; it starts on her lips and in her dark eyes, but then the whole of her solemn copper-colored features fall easily into well-worn creases of good humor. I realize that hers is the first face I’ve seen in this place that didn’t look as though it had been rendered by a Florentine painter at the height of the Italian Renaissance. She seems indisputably of this place, as though she was birthed from the cacti and the dry hills.

“Why do you think I would do that?” she asks. Her voice is melodious and sweet.

“So far, everybody else has.”

“Perhaps you confuse them.”

I have to laugh, “
I
confuse
them?
Oh please.”

The woman shrugs. “This is a place of spirits, a land where totem may be found, spirits consulted, lessons learned, futures explored. Those who walk its hills for these reasons have had no easy task in coming here.”

“I could show them this door I found,” I start to joke, but I let my voice trail off. The crease lines of her humor are still there on her face, but they’re in repose. She looks too serious for jokes right now.

“You have come looking for nothing,” she goes on, “so your presence is a source of agitation.”

“It’s not something I planned,” I assure her. “If you’ll show me the way out, I’ll be more than happy to go. Really.”

The woman shook her head. “There is no way out— except by acquiring that which you came seeking.”

“But I didn’t come looking for anything.”

“That presents a problem.”

I don’t like the way this conversation is going.