Three Slices (6 page)

He grunts and we depart without me saying a word to him, and I understand that this is by design. Loki could have spies in Gladsheim.

Frigg leads me to a room decorated in bronze and ivory. We sit upon a divan together, I set my weapons aside, and Orlaith folds herself around my feet as a helmeted Valkyrie brings us a wide bowl of fruit. I take a fuzzy peach because I want to make a T-shirt saying “I dared to eat a peach in Asgard” and have it be true.

“He will not be long,” Frigg assures me, and I nod, biting into one of the most glorious peaches I have ever tasted. J. Alfred Prufrock definitely should have dared.

Odin enters as I’m finishing with Hugin and Munin perched on his shoulders, all three of them alert and focusing their gaze on me.

“Granuaile,” he says, nodding once by way of greeting. “We have not formally met before now.”

As I stand to greet him, I’m not sure what to do with the remainders of my peach. There is no protocol that I know of that deals with how to surreptitiously dispose of fruit in the presence of a god. “I’m honored, Odin, if slightly embarrassed to be caught eating.”

He grins gracefully. “The honor is mine. And not to worry.” A Valkyrie appears at my elbow and takes the remainder from me, leaving my hands free. Odin thanks her and then his eye shifts down to my left arm. The beaks of his ravens tilt in tandem. “Please show me Loki’s mark and explain to me precisely how it was made and what he said about it.”

I lift my arm and Odin cups it in his callused hand, peering closely at the mark as I recount how Loki lured me into a forgotten room buried in India to procure the Lost Arrows of Vayu, enchanted weapons that would fly true and pierce their intended target no matter the ambient weather conditions, much like Odin’s spear, Gungnir. And once I was rendered immobile by a creature guarding the arrows, Loki branded me with a round, runed chop he carried with him, from which I had been unable to heal.

The bearded god spends several silent minutes examining the mark from several angles and pressing the skin with a thick finger. Finally satisfied, he drops my arm and meets my eyes with his single one.

“I have a plan,” Odin said.

“I’m very glad to hear it. This should be good.”

As a Druid, I can bind myself to the mind of a creature and calm it if it is feeling aggressive or fearful. If sufficiently worried and I feel like bothering, I can also ask the elemental to prevent animals from attacking me, which Oberon calls “cheating.” But if I’m going to hunt, I’m on my own. I can’t ask an animal to lie down and die for me, and the rules are clear from Gaia: No magic may be used to take another creature’s life. I have to do that on my own.

One of the lookout hartebeests saw us coming and bleated a warning to the herd. They sprang into flight and the ground thundered with the collective drumbeat of their hooves.

Oberon and I stayed close together at first; we had to split off a chunk of the herd that had a kid in it. We positioned ourselves to the right of center behind the herd and Oberon barked. It didn’t take many before the animals directly in front of him tried to turn one way or the other, and their efforts pushed others, and in moments, we had a widening schism. We followed the right-hand group and then we had to split up on either side of it, a dangerous game of turning the herd this way and that until the kids they were protecting in the middle eventually snapped out of the end like a whip tail. Oberon leapt onto the back of one and brought it down, the herd kept moving, and then the hunt changed into a protect-the-flag operation.

High-pitched chattering announced the approach of a pack of hyenas. It took me a moment to orient myself and figure out where we had left Mekera, but once I spotted her in the distance, I shape-shifted back to human and drew Fragarach from its scabbard. I waved it overhead, hoping the sunlight would flash on the blade and signal that she should come down.

Speaking through my bond to the earth, I asked the elemental to redirect the attention of the hyena pack elsewhere in a live-and-let-live arrangement. There had been enough blood shed for my divination already. The hyenas kept coming, though, fanning out to surround and harry us because that was how they operated, lacking the speed to chase down many animals themselves. I thought I was going to have to cut a few of them and risk Oberon getting hurt, but just as one lunged toward me, armed with teeth and hyena death-breath, it abruptly changed its mind, backed off, and then the entire pack skirted us and trotted away after the herd. I sighed in relief and Mekera arrived with my clothes shortly thereafter, untroubled. It was only an hour and a half after we took off through the grass that we returned to Mekera’s house with everything she needed, and she had her cheese started before noon. Normally, separating the rennet from the stomach lining takes days or even weeks, but I sped that process along with some careful binding.

Below her living area and another level for her private suite, Mekera had a lab for bacteria cultures, a mixing room, and shelves for aging completed wheels of cheese. All of these were additions I’d made in the nineties.

Oberon was awed by the variety of cheeses on display in the aging room.

You just ate, Oberon, back on the savanna.

No, those are off-limits. We’re not here to eat cheese. We’re here to make cheese.

While Mekera heated the milk and watched the temperature gauge, I found a chair by the wall and sat down, staying out of her way, and Oberon lay down beside me.

Sort of. Do you want me to explain it or just say it’s magic and leave it at that?

All right. Divination works to some extent because our world is a system with certain predictable constants built in like clockwork. Creatures act according to their desires and most of those desires are somehow related to hunger or sex.

I can predict that you would like a sausage or some quality time with Orlaith without the help of divination. But human behavior can get a little more complex, especially when people change their minds in reaction to other people or for no reason at all. Still, their behavior tends to follow patterns, and those patterns can be predicted with a fair degree of accuracy if you have the right medium and the ability to interpret it.

It is for Mekera. I could never do what she does.

I suppose I could learn, but I wouldn’t want to. It took her years, and I have already spent years learning other methods. Plus, look at the setup she needs to practice her art. It’s a lot of equipment and you need the proper ingredients.

Because she gets much better results than I ever could with my wands or with augury. I mean, she told me fifty years ahead of time that Tempe would be a great place to hide for about ten years starting in the late nineties. I was supposed to come back to see her after that but never did until now. Everything she’s ever predicted for me has been spot-on, though—she’s as close to infallible as you can get.

No, it’s pattern recognition. She watches the cheese as it transforms from one state of being to another, spurred by a natural catalyst. The pattern of the milk or cream as it curdles mirrors the pattern of the future transforming in response to the catalyst of the question she holds in her mind during the divination. The patterns created in the process of curdling the milk are almost fractal in their complexity, allowing her to see far more than anything I could manage with the juxtaposition of five wands tossed in the air.

Your memory is very impressive, Oberon.

I haven’t actually asked her yet. When she’s ready, she will say so.

I was hoping she would be ready soon. Most cheeses took days to complete, and if we had the time, I would have asked for one of those, but we were doing something simple and fast because we had a deadline of sundown looming. We still hadn’t seen the vampire’s thrall, but he had surely called in reinforcements and we could expect them to descend upon us a couple hours after sunset. We had to reach a tethered tree well in advance of that, and there weren’t any nearby.

Mekera cranked a timer and its rapid clicking as it counted down signaled to me that she was available to talk for a few minutes. Too late, she realized the same thing. Her eyes darted to me, panic around the pupils, and I spoke up before she could pretend to be busy with something else.

“Hey, let’s talk about something fascinating, like why you’ve been living here all alone since the end of World War II.”

Mekera cursed. “I
knew
you were going to bring that up.”

“Have you ever talked about it with anyone? You’ve had more than seven decades to brood about whatever you’re dwelling on.”

“I find solitude therapeutic.”

“Excellent. You’ve had lots of therapy, then, and should be able to discuss it freely.”

“No.”

“Help me understand, Mekera. I know we don’t see each other often, but we’ve known each other for a long time. We met in Bahir Dar and you introduced me to coffee. Back then, you liked people. What happened?”

I got stony silence and a glower for a while, but I returned her look with patient expectation. She finally shifted her chair around so that the back faced me and she straddled it like that, hugging the frame with her arms and resting her chin on the top of it. Her eyes fell from my face and she stared at a spot on the floor, but I know that’s not what she was seeing; she was visiting a memory. Her mouth drooped at the corners, then her lip quivered a bit and her eyes filled. The left one ran over and a tear trailed down her cheek.

“I lost somebody I loved,” she whispered. “I know that doesn’t make me special. Happens to everyone. She made me feel special, though, more than anyone else I’d met in five hundred years.” She wiped at the tear on her cheek. “I don’t know if we would have made it last forever, but damn if we weren’t going to try.”

“I’m very sorry,” I replied, and didn’t ask for any further details. None were necessary. Lost loved ones could be crippling sometimes.

Silence stretched out between us—apart from the ratchet noises made by the timer and Oberon’s occasional snore. Like most dogs, he had the ability to nap at will.

“You had a wife back then,” she said, no longer whispering but keeping her voice low. “Down in Tanzania? Married for a long time, lots of kids?”

“Yeah.”

“What was her name?”

“Tahirah.”

“That’s right. I remember it rhymed with mine. What happened to the kids?”

“I don’t know. They were all adults when I lost her, and I said goodbye and took off. Kind of like what you’re doing, except I didn’t isolate myself. I just went elsewhere to try to heal, try to forget. Funny thing is, I was on my way to try to reconnect with my family when I met you.”

“And did you?”

“In a manner of speaking. It was a couple hundred years after I left, so I was really trying to track down descendants, and was only partially successful.”

Her voice rose with irritation. “A couple hundred years? And you’re giving me grief for seventy or eighty?”

“Yes, because I pulled out of it by living in the world. The kind of funk you’re in doesn’t appear to have an exit strategy except the final kind.”

That stung her and she sat up and back, letting go of the sides of the chair and instead resting her arms on the top where her chin had been, locking the elbows and letting her hands dangle in the air. One of them twitched in my direction and her tone was brisk, impatient. “Let me ask you something, Siodhachan.”

“Okay.”

“Was Tahirah the love of your very long life?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever love again?”

“Yes. Rather recently, in fact. Her name is Granuaile.”

“Ah, so there’s hope for me!” Her mouth split into a wide but false grin. “Now, how many hundreds of years was it between Tahirah and Granuaile, exactly?”