Gossamer Axe (10 page)

Glasluit’s hand is strong, but his grip is not proprietary, like Lamcrann’s, nor is it the cool, efficient touch of the guards who dragged her back from the land of rolling fields of wheat. He seems, instead, to hold to her mortality as a child might seize the skirts of his mother.

Siudb is puzzled. Since Chairiste left her, she has heard no offer of aid, has seen no hand extended in friendship. The Sidh do not know pity, and the eternal stasis that envelops the Realm bars their ever learning.

Or so she thought. Here is Glasluit, and here is his immortal hand, and here is his silvery Sidh voice. Help?

“Why?”

Glasluit answers with difficulty. “You do not belong here, Siudb Ní Corb. My people are not yours. You should be among your own kind.”

“I have not heard the Sidh speak this way before.”

“Maybe the Sidh do not. Maybe I am Sidh no longer.” He gestures at the landscape, a gently rolling vista of hills and lakes and forests, all shrouded in twilight, all tranquil, still. “This is my home. I know it, and I wander through it. But it is dead.”

“Dead?”

“It does not change. Do you understand, Siudb Ní Corb? Do you not know why the Sidh capture mortals and hold them in this place? Maybe the Sidh themselves do not know, but I can guess. It is because we crave their mortality.”

Siudb does not understand. “But you have everything.”

“Pah! We have nothing.” He stops at the brow of a hill and looks off toward the distant glow of the Sidh palace. His eyes are damp. “We have this existence, this… prolongation. We ape the motions of the mortal world, for we have no substance of our own. We have no past and no future. I am not even certain that we really think, for how else could we endure this endless sameness, this consummate emptiness?”

Siudb hears the pain in his voice, the loneliness. Glasluit is forever estranged from his people, from his world. “Have you always thought this?”

“I have not. I said that we bring mortals here for their mortality. But we do not wish to partake of it ourselves. Therefore Lamcrann merely seeks to bed you, Orfide to torment you, Cumad to cling to you. They assume only the semblance of that which they crave. But you, woman of the Gaeidil, you are strong and vibrant with the colors and the sounds of your world. And though you may yourself be a cative of our spells, yet you have ensnared me. My world is pale, my people are mere shadows. I have watched you, and I have… changed.” He looks up at the black, starless sky. “I want sunlight. I want seasons. I want lovers who pledge their hearts, not just the occasional use of their bodies.” There are tears on his face, glittering like pearls in the half light. “I… believe… that I belong here… no longer.”

She takes his arm. The Sidh do not weep, and yet he weeps; and as he has offered his help, so she is reaching out to him.

“But I myself have no home to which to return,” he says. “There is no escape for me. I could die, perhaps. But I do not know how.”

Even in sorrow, he is courageous. He weeps, but he weeps from admission, not from denial. Siudb finds that she has changed also, for until now she has hated the Sidh with all the hot temper of the Gaeidil; and yet her heart has softened almost to breaking with the sadness of Glasluit.

“I too have thought of death,” she says.

He is almost frightened. “Do not, my lady. Live. You will return to your own.”

“I have no great hope, Glasluit, even though you offer to help me. Orfide has lost patience: he would gladly make me forget everything. I am no master harper. In fact, I think now that I was never a harper at all, that I gave up my own strength to follow Chairiste. I cannot fight Orfide, nor can you.”

“There is no need to fight Orfide.”

“Stealth? I have no harp.”

“I am of the palace guard. I know where your harp is.” He has stopped crying. Once more like his people, he is almost passionless, but there is a purpose behind his words and his actions that delves deep below the shallow theatrics of the Sidh. “If I were to bring you your harp, at regular times, and if you were to practice without Orfide’s knowledge, could you not eventually master the magics you need to win your freedom?”

She did not dream of this. “I could, but—”

“No one would know. I will have the harp back in its place when you are not using it. I ask but one favor in return.”

“Name it.”

“When your time comes to leave this place, I pray you take me with you.”

“So be it.” Siudb is weeping now herself. Glasluit’s face blurs into a pale shadow.

But faintly, very faintly, Siudb hears the sound of a harp. It is not Orfide who plays, though. The hands that touch the strings are light, agile, but strong and mortal also, and Siudb recognizes the style, the tune, the quick turns and graces that come to her ears as though from an infinite distance. The distance between universes, maybe.

She turns, her eyes searching the twilight. She sees nothing. The harp sounds from beyond the Realm.

Her voice is hoarse. “
Chairiste
.”

The Eagle jounced and bumped over the potholes and ruts in the trail, and Ceis was saved repeatedly by the seatbelt looped through its forepillar. The roads within Gunnison National Forest were not intended for casual driving.

Christa stopped near a picnic area, locked in the front hubs, and set the transfer case for four-wheeling. The terrain ahead—mountain slopes and muddy ditches— looked even more forbidding than that through which she had just passed.

*close*

“Are you sure, Ceis?” Christa unfolded a topograhic map, spread it out on the steering wheel. A bluejay flitted across the clearing and perched in the window. It peered over her shoulder at the lines and dots. Christa glanced at it. “Good afternoon.”

*certain*

The jay squawked once and took off, heading in the direction of Sawtooth Mountain.

*follow*

She regarded the road—steep, rocky, overgrown—and wrinkled her nose.

*follow*

With a shrug, she tossed the map into the back seat and eased into gear. About her, forest closed in and opened out, mountain vistas appeared and vanished. The August sun was hot, but the air was cool and filled with the sweet smell of pine and a trace of moisture from a nearby lake.

**

“I smell the water, indeed, Ceis.” An ugly pothole threw the wagon to the side, and Christa fought with the wheel for a moment. Looking up, she saw a cliff with a mineral vein streaking it, and she swerved onto a narrow, little-used road that was no more than two parallel ruts amid the bushes. Branches scraped against the sides of the wagon. Leaves and needles dropped in through the open window and tangled in her long hair.

The lake was a smooth oval of still water backed by an almost sheer wall of rock. A broad meadow lay before it: deep grass and kinnikinnick spotted with alpine buttercup and pink fairyslipper.

When Christa switched off the engine, she heard the jay calling over and over. “We’re here, Ceis,” she said. She unstrapped the harp, lifted it out after her, and went down to the edge of the water.

Though she listened carefully, she heard nothing except the wind, the birds, the pattering of distant falling water. No dirt bikes, no chain saws, no sounds of speech or horses. The last turn she had taken was almost overgrown, and she sensed that campers did not often come to this area. In order to be certain, she would have to use Ceis, but she had other matters to attend to first.

She settled herself on a rock outcropping above the water, put Ceis on her lap. “Gently now. This is but a test.”

And with all her skill, she struck a chord that ran from one end of the harp’s compass to the other, a rolling shimmer of sound that hung in the air like a curtain of mist. Before it faded, though, she was off into a gentle melody, one that always reminded her of Judith, of Siudb, the brown-eyed, darkhaired woman that she loved. It rippled out from the strings, and in her mind she felt out the extent and solidity of the potential gate.

There was something disquieting about this gate, and it was not long before she understood it: real though the gate was, it was less so than the one she had found in the Catskills. And that, she realized, had, in turn, been less solid than those in Britain.

The Realm had been drawing away from mortality, distancing itself further with each passing decade. The gates were closing, fading. Materialism, loss of belief, the cataclysms of two world wars and the horror of mass death were bricking them up, pushing the Realm back, relegating the Sidh to the status of dream and fancy.

And Judith was with the Sidh.

Christa’s hands were shaking when she finished her work. Ten, fifteen years, and the doors would be shut forever. Judith would be beyond reach. She covered her face.

*tears*

“Indeed, Ceis,” she said, wiping the eyes. “I nearly lost her.” She thought of the prayer she had offered to Brigit, thanked the Goddess again for answering it. “It’s next Midsummer I’ll have to fight him. And I’ll have to win. I have no more time for defeats.”

She lifted her eyes to the faint turbulence that hovered above the water just at the edge of sight.

“Siudb. Beloved. I’m coming.”

In some ways, Christa changed. In others, she did not.

Kevin noticed that she had become more at ease in the company of the long-haired rockers at the school. She bantered with them while she waited for her lessons. She showed them licks and muting techniques that could only have been derived from the skilled maniulation of harpstrings. She watched appreciatively as they demonstrated their prowess with flash techniques and the tremolo bar.

Frequently now, with the heat of late August turning muggy, she exchanged her twill slacks and silk blouses for simple jeans and Tshirts, knotting a bandanna about her ankle to contrast brightly with her powder-blue sneakers. Her hair, long and flowing, still lent her an air of antiquity—just an old-fashioned gal at heart, someone his parents would have approved of—but she seemed to Kevin less distant, more real, as though she had finally stepped out of an Irish storybook and onto the gritty, concrete sidewalks of Denver. Legs crossed, eyes closed, unconsciously biting her lip as she worked to coax the last bit of emotion out of her Strat, she seemed human, vulnerable, a pretty young woman with immense talents and a kind heart.

But during her lessons she still spoke enigmatically of energies and powers, and she left Kevin with a feeling that if he were to actually hear all of what she had to say on the subject, he would finally give up, throw his guitar onto the rubbish heap, and turn to something mundane and useless at which he might actually do well.

“This section here…” She was back to Malmsteen again, commenting as she played. “He was right to shift to electric guitar…” Her hands blurred across the fingerboard. “… because if he had not, he would have released the darker aspects of nightmare, and that kind of confrontation can be too destructive. I doubt he knew, though.” Broken staccato chords now, intersersed with a high, wailing lead line. “I changed this to lydian. It is more of a woman’s voice that way: life to balance death.”

And on and on. He had given up any pretense of teaching Christa technique, for her command of her hands was flawless. And she took interpretation and emotion into aetheric realms that made him feel the beginner again. She was paying him for his ears and his experience, not for his lessons, and he was coming to the conclusion that she was paying him too much, that perhaps he should have been paying her, for he was more her student than she had ever been his.

“What do you mean by energy, Christa?” He sat facing her in his small office, his hands resting idly on his guitar. He never played during Christa’s lessons.

She looked up. “Energy… is energy. It’s the energy that makes things grow, that makes the seasons change.”

“Like the sun?”

She shook her head slowly. “The sun is a manifestation of that energy, just like you are, like I am. It’s something more subtle I’m talking about. I suppose that since it’s always around us, and we see it every day we wind up not seeing it at all. The Druids…” She fell silent, biting her lip, frustrated with herself. “I’ll put it this way: music grows. If I play a lead break, and I’m improvising, the music is growing like a tree, or a flower… or even like a mountain. Like sex. I’m giving to the music, and the music is giving to me. Together, with the back-and-forth flow of our energies, something comes into being. And with that can come changes in the world.”

He looked up at the slide guitar on the wall. Music was like sex: Frankie had said the same thing. But changes in the world? “Are you talking about magic?”

She hesitated, then: “I am, surely. That’s what music is.”

Magic. He looked down at the guitar on his lap. Such a far cry from Father Lynch’s sermons about the evils of Transcendental Meditation this was! “After my folks threw me out,” he said, “I lived in Frisco for a while. Out in the Haight. There were some guys there into ceremonial magic. Aleister Crowley and all that. But music as magic… I never thought of it that way.”

She was suddenly earnest, hopeful. “Could… could you? Think of it that way? Is it possible?”

“Rock and roll?” The idea seemed preposterous. The Beatles? Elvis?

“Anything. Harp, guitar… there were pipers who could raise a wall of flame from one side of Tara to the other. Once—” She stopped, shook her head. Her blue eyes were intent on him. “What say you, Kevin? Is it possible?”

“Well… anything’s possible, I guess.”

She dropped her eyes, faintly disappointed at his words, as though she had failed in some way. “Am I good enough to join a band?”

“Shit, Christa, you’re good enough to own the world. There’s damned few like you.”

She did not look up. “I know.” Her voice was faint, almost a whisper.

“Look,” he said, trying to find something that would help, “we’ve all got our ways of looking at things, and if yours is magic, then more power to you. Look what the Eastern stuff did for John MacLaughlin.”

“True.”

“It’s probably time for you to play some music with some other people. Sometimes you’re a little rarefied, and rock and roll sounds best with some grease in it. I found some guys that need a good lead guitarist. You want me to give them your number?”

Her eyes were clouded. “You think I’m too… rarefied?”

He shrugged, feeling that it was almost a sacrilege to criticize such perfect playing. “Well, rock and roll’s pretty down and dirty. A band would be good for you.”

That night, in his cabin, he felt like a fool for having said it. Grease. Dirt and grit. Human beings: loving, giving birth, dying. The entire world was bathed in semen and sweat. And Christa, with her bloody harpstrings and her instinctive likening of music and magic and sex, was infinitely closer to the truth than was he.

Maybe her playing was aetheric, lofty. But maybe it would be good for rock and roll to have something spiritual in it besides the aesthetic posturings of early Yes and the bastardized classicism of Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.

And, dropping off to sleep with only the soft glow of a waning moon slanting in through the windows to keep him company, he wondered: just how much did he himself really know about sex and blood? Guilt-ridden fucking… and Father Lynch’s vitriolic lectures in the confessional… His parents had slept in twin beds for as long as he could remember.