Gossamer Axe (30 page)

The club was empty when they set up, and, like a theater without an audience or motion-picture sets seen from the wrong side, the big room held a sense of hollow and unrelieved artifice. The backgrounds were, after all, just painted canvas, the props terrifyingly insubstantial.

Rock and roll was little different. Behind the glitter, the arrogant assurance of the young, the adolescent scorn for mortality, was an empty darkness in which prowled the unadmitted fears that propelled the music and the lights, that added a sense of urgency to the gyrations of the performers.
Run. Run while you still can. Age is coming, skeletal and grinning, and the world is a cesspool that is ever rising
.

But to that darkness, Christa had brought not only the courage and pride of an ancient culture that had put its trust in its people and its Gods, but also a compassion that was the product of ten-score years of lonely wandering; and when she struck her first chord that night—the ringing notes sustained by overdrive and digital delays long beyond anything ever achieved by a harp, feedback shrilling through upper harmonics until the sound coruscated at the edge of sight—she was lifting a voice to counter the age and the pollution: the defiant voice of a woman, a harper, a rocker who had come to heal.

Melinda was no better tonight. Her sense of rhythm was gone, and she played without feeling, mechanically pumping out notes as though her mind were elsewhere. Squinting into the lights, Christa made out the face of Carl Taylor at the edge of the dance floor.

*death*

“I forbid it, Ceis,” she said between lines of the chorus. She kept a smile plastered brittlely on her face as she climbed on the drum risers and jumped down in time with a massive chord that was a blue-white presence on the stage.

Lisa’s eyes were wide. The magic was manifesting visibly. Christa dropped her high frequencies with a turn of a knob. Not until her solo.

During the break, Melinda disappeared with Carl. Christa waved the rest of the band into the dressing room.

“Do we have to keep up with this farce, Chris?” said Lisa. “Melinda’s just the same.”

“Wait for my solo in the next set. That’s going to change.” Ceis hung from her shoulder, glittering, beaded with drops of sweat.

“She means it, Boo-boo,” said Monica. “Something’s up.”

Devi nodded. “I’m game, Chris. You won’t hurt her, will you?”

Lisa stared at them. “What’re you going to do?”

Christa regarded Ceis for a moment. “We’re going to solve a problem,” she said, lifting her head. “Melinda will try to disappear again when I start, so you all need to grab her. Hold her down, sit on her—do whatever you have to, but keep her on stage and out of sight. I’ll tell the light man to keep the spot tight on me.”

No one spoke. The canned music thudded through the door.

“Do you trust me?” Christa asked softly. “This is the only way I know.”

Lisa said it: “We trust you, Chris. We’re just damned glad you’re on our side.”

Melinda was late for the next set, and Christa’s hands were tight on the neck of her guitar when she finally saw the bassist stumbling toward the stage. Lisa was tapping her foot—impatient or apprehensive, Christa could not tell—but Devi seemed calm. Monica hovered nearby as though for security.

Christa turned to the others, lifted an eyebrow. Lisa bobbed her head. Devi gave a thumbs-up. Sliding an arm about Monica’s waist, Christa pulled the singer against her. “You all right?”

Monica’s brown eyes were frightened. “This is part of what happened last night, isn’t it?”

“That, and more,” said Christa. “Sing as well as you can, Monica. ’Tis all I can ever ask. But this time, sing for Melinda. Show her that we all care about her.”

Monica nodded, put a hand to her throat, swallowed to loosen the muscles. With a small, strangled laugh, she whirled around to the club as the stage lights came up. “Here we go!” she screamed. “Boston! ‘Hollyann’! Rock on!”

On the other side of the song, looming like a wall of water, was Christa’s solo: ten minutes that would, by necessity, change everything. It might save Melinda. It might put an end to the band. Christa would not know until she played it.

Monica sang for Melinda. Christa heard the wellsprings of comfort in her voice. Devi’s synths were rich, warm, and her brief keyboard solo shimmered like a beckoning hand of starlight. Lisa powered out the beat as though she saw the approaching flood.

Alternately crystalline and distorted, Ceis added its voice to the music. The song was about past times of innocence and belief, and through it, Christa called to Melinda, trying to rekindle something of those qualities in the bassist, to mirror them to her so that she might see what she could become once again.

“
We were for life

And we would never

Concede it…

Hollyann.
”

Hollyann? Or was a different name on her lips tonight? Melinda? Maybe Judith?

“
We held the line

Can you believe it
?”

Her solo. The wave, breaking, thundered across the stage. Christa threw her volume knobs to full, stepped on the control pedal for her delays, swirled her sound into incandescence. Here was a harper from Corca Duibne, come now with music, with change.

As the spotlight narrowed in on her, she saw Melinda set down her bass and start for the edge of the stage. In a moment, Lisa had exploded out from her drums, piled into her, dragged her back behind a stack of speakers.

Melinda was struggling, but her cries were drowned out by the wall of sound from the PA and the stage monitors. Quickly, Christa shifted to a delicately structured countermelody that hovered between the dorian and the phrygian mode, twined like a growing vine, reached out and enveloped Melinda. Christa felt her friend jerk and lie still as her consciousness was smothered with blossoms.

Lisa looked up, her face white. “It’s okay,” Christa mouthed at her. The drummer shut her eyes and laid her head against Melinda’s, and Christa lunged into the main theme of the solo.

Clearing the drugs from Melinda’s system was comparatively easy: harpers in Eriu had been performing similar tasks for centuries, though they had been ignorant of the precise physical effects their music had wrought. But clearing a mind was phenomenally difficult. Melinda had never dealt with her previous mistakes, preferring instead to deny and run from them; and now she had become deeply addicted, with an addict’s ingrained weakness. Any magic on Christa’s part would, by necessity, have to reach deeply into her psyche and alter some basic assumptions.

Christa had ten minutes.

Those in the audience who saw her confident smile and watched her slender hands tossing off melody, lick, and ornament did not know with what deliberation she framed her music. Melinda’s body twitched violently as Christa’s spell felt through her flesh and blood and slowly converted the heroin and cocaine into a few simple sugars and trace elements. Double-stopping precise harmonies, Christa stabilized Melinda’s breathing and heartbeat, held them constant until she was sure that her friend’s body was echoing the rhythmic regularity of the music, then drove in again and blocked the withdrawal symptoms.

It took time. Five minutes left.

She shut her eyes and, carried by the music, entered Melinda, felt her identity, sifted through the wreckage. Left alone, the bassist would be dead in a few months. She had no reason to keep on living. She had realized that her dissoluteness was destroying the band, that Carl was going to cast her aside in another week or so, that all her efforts had gone for nothing…

*Sruitmor*

Christa started and nearly lost track of her fingers. Sruitmor? The master harper of the Corca Duibne school?

What did he have to do with an abused young woman on a Denver rock stage?

Ceis?

The guitar replied by seizing the music and bending its timbres into a gush of energies that washed through Christa in a prismatic flood. She found herself facing the quiet lake to the north of the harpers’ school. Melinda was there. Or rather, Melinda was all around her. Though fourteen centuries and thousands of miles separated Melinda from any trace of the school, Christa realized that this was the bassist’s memory, not her own.

Holding to her dual consciousness—continuing her solo on the stage at InsideOut, she was at the same time standing on the ancient soil of Eriu—she saw approaching her a man clad in the azure mantle of a master of the
Cruitreacha
. His beard and hair were white, but his eyes mirrored the blue of the sea on a fine day. Sruitmor.

Four minutes.

He approached her, and she almost knelt; but he shook his head vigorously. “No time for that, Chairiste. Nor is it seemly for one master to kneel to another.”

She blushed as she thought of the guitar she held. “I’m no master.”

“Ach, you still talk like a farmer sometimes, Chairiste. Listen to the music you play. No novice could do that.”

“I’ve not been initiated.”

“You want another chalice pushed at you? perhaps a wand with the proper Ogham cut into it?” Earthy and spiritual both, the master harper of Corca Duibne took her arm. “You don’t need them. You know that. Walk with me. We have little time…”

Three minutes.

“… and I must talk to you.” Together they skirted the shore of the lake. As they passed, curlews flapped up from the reeds, their wingbeats stirring the water.

Christa examined her black spandex, compared it ruefully with Sruitmor’s graceful robe. But she knew that she had no time for humility. She clasped her master’s gnarled hand. “You’re Melinda, aren’t you?”

“I am,” he said. “Come back for you.”

“
Why
?”

His eyes lost some of their luster. “You’ve forgotten much, Chairiste. You remember your music, of course, but you don’t remember how dear you were to me. Did you really think that an old man who had lost his only daughter to a fever could look at a young woman from the coast and not see some echo of his own blood? Did you think that I was so tolerant and encouraging merely because I recognized your talent?”

Christa wanted to embrace him, but she contented herself with his hand. “You were both father and mother to me.”

“I tried. And I failed.” His voice shook a little. “I should have foreseen that you and Siudb would go to find the Sidh.”

“It was the action of a fool. And I am paying for it.”

“I grieved when you vanished,” he said. “We all grieved, but I… I wept because I had lost my daughter again.”

Two minutes.

On the stage in Denver, Christa shifted into her most rarefied melodies: pointillistic licks that left in their wake only an aural impression of tension and of movement.
Change, Melinda. You can change
. Dimly, she saw the other women clustered around Melinda, and she gestured to Lisa with the headstock of her guitar. The drummer understood: the music was too intricate for solo work. It needed a beat.

Lisa climbed behind her drums, listened carefully for a moment, then, improvising, began rapping out a syncopated rhythm full of rim-shots and clanging ride cymbals, turning Christa’s work from an abstraction into something concrete, something that could be danced to.

The sand of the lakeshore crunched under Christa’s boots as she turned to her teacher. “What can I do?” she said. “You’re dying. I have to cure you. How?”

Sruitmor regarded her calmly, though his tears dampened his beard. “I failed you, daughter. I failed to guide you away from your arrogance, which was a grievous mistake. I came back from the Summerland to try to help you, but I forgot the limitations of an incarnate personality, and I made further mistakes. Now I have almost done away with everything.”

“What—”

“I need your forgiveness.”

One minute.

Christa gripped his hand. “Master, you have it a thousand times over. If I’m anything today, if I have any chance at all of winning Siudb, it’s because of what you gave me. I can’t be perfect, nor can you. Surely the master harper of Corca Duibne knows that. If there is any regret between us, any sorrow or pain, I release you from it. I forgive you. You need to forgive yourself.”

His face shone, and he bowed deeply. “The words of a master harper. You are indeed of the
Cruitreacha
, Chairiste.”

“Now help Melinda.”

He straightened. Though old, he held himself like a young man. “We will help Melinda together. Ceis? Once more?”

Sruitmor, the lake, the curlews vanished, and the stage came back. But Christa felt the presence of the master harper as surely as she held her guitar in her hand. With seconds left, she reached out to Melinda, flooding her with the knowledge that she was loved, sweeping away the mistakes and the failures.

We forgive you. Forgive yourself. If you need us, we’ll be there. Come back. Come home. Come, now, quickly.

The bassist gasped, sat up, stared with clear eyes. Monica and Devi hugged her. Pale, shaking, Melinda turned to Christa, who had already begun the introduction to the next song. Christa grinned at the audience, held a chord, bounded across the stage to her friend. Just a part of the show.

“Melinda?” she shouted above the music.

“Chris…” Melinda was crying, mascara and liner streaking down her face. “Chris, what did you do to me?”

“I’m trying to help. Can you make it through this set?”

Melinda hesitated, looked at her bass.

Please, Melinda. For the sake of who you used to be. Play. Play music.

“Can you?” Christa shouted again.

With a grimace, Melinda grabbed her bass and spun up her volume knobs just in time to join in. Gritting her teeth to keep back the sorrow and the tears, she punched out the rhythm in perfect time.

The music sparkled. The magic was back. Gossamer Axe sucked in a deep breath…

… and lived.

Monica was only a little pale as she ran to the front of the stage, microphone to her lips:

“
Are you surprised to see me

Standing here at your door
?”

The song surged out into the club, a defiant shake of the fist at the powers that still remained to be battled. Monica’s arm encircled Melinda’s waist during the first chorus, and the bassist shared the singer’s microphone, screaming out the lyrics: “
I’m back