Gossamer Axe (4 page)

The morning sun topped the peaks on the east side of the valley and splashed its light across the meadows around Kevin’s house. Indian paintbrush glowed red-orange on rocky slopes that led up to pine forest, columbine was a blue and white maiden in the shade of aspen trees, wild roses twined along the split-rail fence beside the road.

Kevin washed his face in the kitchen sink to clear away the sleep and looked out from his front door while he dried off. Saturday morning in the Rockies. Blue sky. Yellow sun. Green fields. Old Wester’s mare had foaled that spring, and now the mother and child were having a fine run along the stretch of pastureland that ran beside the big pond where birch and cottonwood grew. The foal slowed near the fence and prepared, his forelegs beating the air and his hooves flashing in the new light.

“Hey, dude,” said Kevin. He smiled and waved at the animals. Bless them, he thought. They’ve got nothing more to do than be horses.

While his eggs were cooking, he wandered into the living room and picked up the old slide guitar that he had brought back from the school. Since the night he had been given it in a dressing room in Cincinnati, it had always been with him; and every scratch and dent in its battered body was a story about the long-dead bluesman who had once played it. A chip on the neck came from a rickety stage in Detroit where the old man had played nearly doubled over from the ulcer that had killed him a few years later. And there was a burn in the headstock from the time that Frankie had shoved the filter end of his cigarette under the taut strings behind the nut—
Just a minute, Kevvy: gotta show you something
.—while he demonstrated some old lick, forgetting, as he showed the skinny white boy how to play the blues, that the cigarette was there until it had burned down and scarred the finish with a brown smear the color of old coffee.

Kevin took up what had once been a bottle of Coricidin, fitted the empty glass cylinder onto the little finger of his left hand, and lightly touched the strings with it while he picked, scraping short, taut glissandos out of the old guitar. Blind Frankie. No one could play the blues like Frankie. No one. Not B.B. Not Clapton. Not Duane. No one. It was one of the incredible but unremarkable ironies of the music business that Frankie had died in a slum bar on the outskirts of Cincinnati, unknown, unrecognized.

Kevin scraped away at the strings, searching for the same response, the same feeling that had sprung so effortlessly from the hands of the old black man. This guitar had cried, wailed, wept when Frankie had played; and in the dim corners of smoky bars from Harlem to New Orleans, bars ripe with the odors of whiskey and cheap cologne, people had cried, wailed, and wept along with it, bright tears starting from dark eyes, running down ebony cheeks.

Frankie had always played the same songs, but they had nonetheless always been different, changing in a thousand different ways that Kevin still could scarcely name. Now and again, the old man had shoved the guitar and slide into Kevin’s hands, and there had been indulgent smiles throughout the bar at the sight of the white boy on the stage. But Kevin had played anyway, and one night a tall man in a fur coat had come up to him afterward.

“You play… uptown,” he had said, his teeth glittering white in the darkness. And with a smile and a bow, he had vanished into the smoke and the shadows.

But that was a long time ago, and Kevin could not even remember what he had played that night, or how he had played it. “Stormy Monday”? Had he in those early years possessed such gall that he had picked the classic? And—even supposing for a moment that he had—where had he gotten enough feeling that the tall man had pronounced his playing
uptown
!

Or rather; where had that feeling gone?

Sighing, he put the guitar down and tossed the slide onto the sofa. Wherever it had gone, it had undoubtedly taken out a long please and was not intending to return any time soon.

Irony. Frankie had died, unknown, in his dressing room, and this pasty-faced honky had gone on into rock and roll, cut himself a little bit of a name, even gotten a contract offer. His feeling was gone, but that did not matter. The irony had taken over long ago, and so it was perhaps not overly surprising that, after showing enough honesty to turn down the contract, he had put together a guitar school where he taught others to play music for which he himself had lost any empathy.

He stared out through the front door at the horses running back and forth in their pasture. He envied them their freedom and their purpose.

What, he wondered, was that lick the old man had showed him ages ago? If it was important enough that Frankie had scorched his guitar, then perhaps, like the Ossipanic ballad that had escaped him, there was something to it that would break the music free once again, entice it away from the Florida condo that it was probably sharing with such things as inspiration and love…

The odor of something burning seized his attention. Running into the kitchen, he found his eggs charred and unrecognizable, a brown smear of color of old coffee.

“Hmmph?”

It took Melinda a moment to realize that she had the wrong end of the phone receiver to her mouth. Half in, half out of her waterbed, she hitched herself up on one elbow while she attempted to turn it around. Mistake. It slipped from her fingers, bounced once on the side rail, and hit the floor with a thud. Across the room, the strings of her harp thrummed in response.

Leaning over, she grabbed the phone by the cord and pulled it up as she fell back among the rumpled sheets. “Hang on,” she called hoarsely, hoping the caller could hear her, though in her opinion anyone who called at the ungodly hour of—she squinted at the clock—eleven in the morning deserved no courtesy whatsoever.

She got the receiver to her ear finally. “Hello?”

“Hey, how’ya doing, Melinda?”

The caller was a man, and he knew her name. She figured that she must know his. “Okay,” she said. “Listen, I’m a little sleepy. Who is this?”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“I’m not kidding. It’s eleven A period M period, and you got me out of some nice dreams—”

“Was he good?”

“Fuck you.” She started to hang up, but the man squawked loudly enough that she put the handset to her ear again.

“Hey, I’m sorry. It’s me, Tom.”

“Tom? Tom who?”

He sounded exasperated. “Tom Delany.”

“Oh,
Jesus
. What the hell are you bothering me for?” Now she remembered why she did not recognize his voice: she had tried to forget it.

“I’ve got some contacts out in L.A.,” he said, “and they’re interested in bankrolling me. I’m going to put a band together.”

“Real nice. Count me out.”

“You’re the best bass player I know.”

“Yeah, because I’m the only one willing to cop to knowing your name. Forget it. I want to get back into a band, but not that bad.”

“Melinda—”

“Look—”

“Just a—”

“Will you buzz off? The only thing I ever got from you was screwed. Your idea of a band is a mobile dope ring that plays music… sometimes.”

“Whatever happened to the Melinda Moore I once knew?” His voice was that of a patient man faced with an unreasonable female. “My gosh… she’d do anything to make it…”

Melinda winced. He had not even been that good in bed.

“… work hard, practice, rehearse six nights a week. She had stars in her eyes—”

“And a fucking vacuum in her brain!”

“Melinda, be reasonable.”

“I
am
being reasonable. Yeah, I want to make it. Yeah, I want to get a record contract and get checks for tons of money. But the times when I’d go after something just because of somebody’s so-called contacts are long gone. I’m over it. Got that?”

“Melinda, you’re going to be stuck in an office job for the rest of your life—”

“It’s better than getting shit-faced and stoned every night at one of your so-called rehearsals.”

Tom was silent for a minute. “Okay, Melinda. I give up. You still got my Strat?”

“Yeah, I still got it.”

“Can I have it back?”

“You owe me four hundred and fifty bucks in rent and bills from when we lived together, remember?”

“I’ll pay you later. I really—”

“No, No later. I got a bellyful of that two years ago. I told you when I threw you out that I was keeping the guitar in payment, and you said that was okay.”

“I was wrong.”

“You sure as hell were.” In the back of her mind she was trying desperately to hang on to that last fading memory of the dream that the phone call had shattered. “And you know something else? You’re a bad fuck, too.”

Satisfied, she slammed down the receiver and jerked the plug out of the wall.

Tom had all the right moves and all the right words. It was tempting to believe him, very tempting. But Tom was a road that led to big words, grandiose plans, and nothing else. Oh, yes: sex too. Lots of that. And drugs.

It was a part of her life that she was trying to forget, one that pricked her conscience in the dark hours of the night and kept her from sleep, one that made her hands tremble with suppressed rage and frustrated hope. Tom’s guitar was, perhaps, representative of it all: custom painted a faintly ridiculous avocado green, it stood in her front closet, leaning against the wall behind her coats like a corpse hastily buried.

“I ought to spell the damned thing.” She slouched forward, scratching at her scalp. She pulled a strand of hair from her mouth. Terminal hairspray, she thought. The stuff feels like balsa wood.

A few minutes later, she was brushing out hairspray and backcombing as she tried to remember her lost dream. It had been pleasant, peaceful; and with Tom’s voice still buzzing in her ear and dredging up old unhappiness, she wanted even more to recapture some fragment of it. But, like most dreams, it slipped and slid away from her, flitting into obscurity, daring her waking mind to relive the events of the night.

She tried for a general image, letting her mind find its own way into its fantasies. Green fields and a lake. And a little cluster of houses… huts, rather. A girl in a loose white cape was playing a harp, and her hair was long and red and unbound.

Melinda had been bending over while she brushed, but she abruptly stood up straight, her blond hair falling over her face and half choking her with the powdery remnants of hairspray. The girl had been Christa. In fact, the dream was very similar to the momentary vision that had come to her at her harp lesson.

Why should I be dreaming about Christa?

Well… why not? The lullaby had certainly helped her to sleep that night. Maybe it was gratitude, a tip of the hat to the harp teacher from her frontal lobes.

She recalled the Malmsteen concert that night and nodded inwardly at the thought of getting to know Christa a little better. She found that she was immensely flattered that the woman had accepted her invitation, and hoped that she would not be offended by the experience of a heavy-metal concert.

“Can’t forget those earplugs,” she murmured to herself as she headed for the shower.

As she turned on the water, she idly wondered what Christa would look like in stage clothes, and the thought of the gentle harper clad in leather and spandex, draped with chains, her wrists wrapped in studded bracelets and her red hair backcombed and spiked, made Melinda laugh amid the clouds of steam.

If your students are not your children, then you’ve no business touching harpstrings. There is a reason that our order is called the
Cruitreacha,
that the name takes the same plural suffix as
mother.
Think about it
.

So Sruitmor, master of the harp school at Corca Duibne, had taught. So Christa lived. Though angry at Orfide and frustrated with the limitations of mortal life, she nonetheless had smiles and kind words for her students as they passed in and out of her front door. Perhaps their fingers were less skilled even than those of the rank novices of the Corca Duibne school, and perhaps they did not have the same dedication, but she loved them. And if they heard in their comparatively clumsy music, even for an instant, the magic of harpstrings, and if that gave them joy, then she was satisfied.

But her days were long, and this day, Midsummer, was a constant reminder of Judith, of the Sidh, of the arrogant bard who had consistently thwarted her struggles to free her beloved. The sight of the apple and the yew, tokens of two Gaeidil lovers who were fated never to meet in life, but who had met nonetheless, dimmed her smile and clouded her eyes. When her last student left, she shut the front door and leaned heavily against it.

If your students are not your children
…

“They are, master,” she murmured. “They’re all I have.” In her mind, she saw the old man leaning toward her, lifting an admonishing finger as he lectured.

The same suffix as
mother
. Had he not, in spite of his stern words and his lifted finger, mothered her throughout her time at the school? Manly he had been, and yet womanly too, as though Brigit, the order’s Patroness, had given him something of Herself through the music he played.

But he was gone. Gone to the Summerland. Everyone was gone, swept away by the endless cycles of change that flowed throughout all that was mortal.

She went into the kitchen and filled a cup with wine. On an impulse, she lifted it. “To you, Sruitmor, with thanks. And maybe I’ll reach the Summerland myself one of these days.” She drank, set the cup down. Her eyes clouded again. “Some days I’m so tired of being alive.”

The doorbell rang. She looked up. “Who on earth?”

*Melinda*

She had forgotten about the concert. “Thank you, Ceis,” she called as she went down the hall. “But maybe you could have reminded me earlier?”

**

She opened the door, “Goodness.”

“Hey, this outfit is conservative,” said Melinda. “You should see me on stage. Are you ready to rock?”

“Ah… does that include single combat?” Christa hardly recognized her student. Black spandex jeans gave way to boots that rattled with lengths of chain. Leather jacket. Studded belts. A T-shirt that had been deliberately slashed into a borderline state between legality and indecency. Bandannas fluttered from ankles, elbows, wrists. Melinda had added perhaps a good six inches to her height with a teasing comb and a liberal application of hairspray. Her blue eyes sparkled at Christa from within dark wells of eyeliner and shadow.

“Relax,” she said, “half the fun of this is dressing up.”

Christa looked down at her pale silk blouse. “I won’t do as I am, will I?”

“Well… you’re not exactly rock and roll, but… you got some jeans and a T-shirt?”

Christa beckoned her in, poured her a glass of wine, and went upstairs to change. As she ran a brush through her hair, she studied her reflection in the bedroom mirror. Eighteen. Hardly more. She might well have been, once again, the young woman who had prepared to go off to another kind of concert in sixth-century Ireland, one that had ended in disaster and loss.

She felt around inside the dresser drawer for something to confine her hair, and her hand came up against a flat box. Her old jewelry.

Well, why not? Half the fun is dressing up.

But she noticed that her eyes looked sad as she coiled the
buinne
around her ponytail and slipped the open bracelets over her wrists. She had worn these same ornaments the night that the Sidh—

“Christa!” called Melinda from below. “We’re pushing time a little.”

“I’m ready,” she called back. Ready for Malmsteen, perhaps, but not for the Sidh.

Melinda lifted her glass as Christa came down the stairs. “That’s better.” She took off a zebra-stripe bandanna and knotted it about Christa’s ankle. “Gotta do something about the general effect. I mean, people are gonna talk if they know I’m hanging around with a
harper
.”

“To be sure.”

Melinda drove, heading south on Colorado Boulevard, then east on Evans. When they paused at a stoplight, Christa noticed that the man in the car next to them was staring. Melinda saw also. She bared her teeth at him, and he looked away quickly.

“Give him something to tell his grandchildren,” said Melinda. “Oh, yeah: in the glove box, Christa. There’s some earplugs there. This stuff gets loud.”

Christa found the plugs, examined them for a moment, slipped them into her purse. She felt uneasy, and her stomach burned with the wine she had drunk. In contrast with the reckless optimism with which she had approached the Sidh hill on that fatal evening centuries ago, she found now that her nerves were on edge.

She fidgeted with her bracelets, farewell presents from her father when she had set off for the Corca Duibne school.
You take after your great grandmother, my little
cruitaire.
She was a harper too, and the high king himself gave her these
failge
after she played to heal his son. Take them now: they are all I have to give. Brigit bless
.

“I need to thank you,” Melinda said. “That tune you showed me was dynamite. I slept real well. In fact, I had a dream about you. It was pretty strange.”

“Hmmm?” Christa was watching the traffic. Ahead, the Rainbow Music Hall came into view.

“There was this lake,” said Melinda, “and these little houses made like baskets…”

Christa stiffened.

“… and you were there playing a harp, like that old one you’ve got that’s made of willow.” Melinda glanced at her passenger. “Come to think of it, you were wearing jewelry like you’ve got on now. And a white cape. You looked real young.”

“Indeed?” Christa kept her voice steady. “And did you dream anything else?”

“Nah. This bozo that I used to know called me and got me up.”

She found herself envying Melinda. Summerland, and rest, and then the sweet oblivion that accompanied a new incarnation and a fresh start. New friends and perhaps an old lover returned with a different name and a different face. She smiled sadly. “It’s quickly you’ve picked up the harp, Melinda,” she said. “I can’t help but feel that perhaps you’ve played it before. In another lifetime.”

The Mustang bumped into the parking lot. Christa glanced at the line of young folk waiting outside the door of the music hall. Leather jackets, pale faces. Hair that ran the gamut from shaved to spiked.

Melinda found an empty space in the rapidly filling lot, parked, and shut off the engine. “You mean, like reincarnation? Huh. Maybe. Are you some kind of a Buddhist?”

Christa shrugged, opened the door. “No,” she said. “I’m a Heathen.”

“Hey, sounds great. Wild parties?”

The harper smiled.

The line started to move shortly after they joined it, and Christa blinked as a police officer frisked her at the entrance. “Melinda? Was I right about the single combat?”

“It’s okay. This is normal.”

Amplified rock was already pouring from the sound system, and accompanying videos flashed on fifteen-foot screens to either side of the stage. Christa fumbled for the earplugs, but the volume was only a small part of her distress: in this crowded hall, the packed adolescent energies crawled like hot spiders across her skin. She sensed youth, but also anger, and rage, and a frantic grasping at power and release; the ability to scream… and be heard.

She stumbled, blinked, gripped Melinda’s arm as they fought their way through the tossing crowd toward a pair of vacant seats. Sitting down gratefully, she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She mentally ran through the
sian
that she had taught Melinda, taking it through several variations she knew to be effective against fear. When she opened her eyes, even the sight of a demon face on the video screens was tolerable, and, muted by the earplugs, the steadily pulsing rock seemed oddly reassuring.

Melinda looked concerned. “You okay?”

“I’m fine now.”

The videos faded, the lights dimmed. “This is going to be Fant’mbalz,” said Melinda in the silence that had fallen abruptly over the audience. “It’s a local all-girl band—real good, too—and they’re opening for Malmsteen. Nice break for them.”

About them, people were climbing onto the seats.

“Looks like it’s a standing-up concert.” Melinda helped Christa up. “Stay forward or the seat’ll fold. You sure you’re okay?”

Christa nodded. Despite the
sian
, she still felt a vague apprehension. Something was going to happen.

The sound system switched to full, and the stage lights flared in parti-colors. The drummer smacked her sticks together in a four-count and the crowd’s cheers were drowned out by a wave of sound that crashed through the room like a white-hot sea. Christa felt it as a solid mass that went straight for her heart, ripping through her chest, grappling with her body and her mind.

“Brigit!” But she could not even hear her own voice. A guitar blasted out of the whirl of music, notes climbing one over another in a shrill, rising cascade; reaching up, screaming…

And something
was
happening. Midsummer. There was something
here
…