Gossamer Axe (14 page)

My fault.

Danny Larkin pulled his down jacket close to his body as a child might pull the sheets over his head to keep away the darkness. Snow was falling in Sheridan, large white flakes that stuck to street signs and curbs, that made the sidewalks slippery and caked up on automobile glass at the end of the wipers’ travel. It flecked his lashes as he squinted up at the dark sky, and he shivered.

Always my fault. My fault that ma almost died. My fault that ma and da can’t sleep together. My fault that they’re going to hell. My fault that Benji’s going to have a corpse on his hands in a few…

Though he was sweating, he shivered again; and he forced himself away from the entrance to the medical center and bullied himself down the walk to the parking lot. The windshield of his car was opaque with snow and ice, but he made no move to clear it off. He merely climbed in, closed the door, and stared at the whiteness, shivering.

It was something he should have expected after the months he had spent cruising the bars, picking up fast-talking, skinny little faggots who thought of liaisons in terms of hours and fist-fucking. He himself had been one of them, flitting from bed to bed, from bathhouse to bathhouse, rebelling against the lifetime that had been planned for him while he was still in his mother’s belly, showing the seminary, his parents, and Father Lynch just what he thought of them. An angry little boy with a toy gun.

A fit of coughing took him, and he put his forehead against the cold steering wheel as he hacked uselessly. His lungs would not clear. They would never clear. And whether pneumonia or cancer or any one of a thousand ills killed him first, he had nothing to complain about, for he himself had marked out his future death from a failed immune system more unalterably than his parents had ever committed him to the life of a priest.

My fault.

He would have to get out of the car and scrape the windshield eventually, but for now he wept. The snow isolated him from the stares of the curious, and he pulled his collar up and huddled in the driver’s seat, wishing that he could indeed pull the covers over his head and hide from the darkness.

My fault. What am I going to tell Benji?

Christa’s days were still filled with harps and harp students, but her evenings were devoted to a different music. As darkness fell across Denver—the shadows of the Rockies racing eastward, the lights of the city blinking on in star-scattered fields of tungsten yellow and mercury-vapor blue—her basement reverberated with the sound of drums, bass, and white-hot guitar. It was not a band… yet. But it was a beginning.

Devi showed up a week after Lisa had hauled her drums down Christa’s back stairs. She pulled up in a white van, opened the side doors, and pulled out, piece by piece, an assortment of keyboards, stands, and cables that took her an hour and a half to assemble. By the time she was finished, she was virtually buried in electronics.

“I mean no offense,” said Christa delicately, “but does it really take this much equipment to make music?”

Devi’s mouth tightened. “Am I hearing the old
keyboards are firewood
routine?”

“Not at all.” Christa squeezed through a narrow gap between two synthesizers and stood beside Devi. “It’s not a great deal I know about such things. This is… impressive.”

“You can do a lot with one good keyboard,” said Devi. “But you can do a lot more with several.” She gestured to the synthesizers around her. “I’ve got these three MIDIed together so I can control them with the MKB-1000 over here, and I brought the microcomputer because I’ve got a bunch of sounds stored on floppies. I can sample your guitar onto disk, for instance, and then I can keep a good crunchy rhythm going for you when you go off into a lead.”

All the while she talked, Devi’s black eyes constantly flicked back to Christa, examining, evaluating. Christa could understand it to a degree, for there were two sides to any audition: the band checked out the prospect and the prospect checked out the band. She herself was maintaining her silk-blouse-and-pink-nails persona, just as she had for several other keyboardist auditions, but Devi did not appear to notice such superficialities. She seemed, rather, to be trying to pierce the mild persona that Christa had built up over the course of two centuries: the civilized, socialized woman that hid, for the most part, the wild Gaeidil.

Did she see? Devi herself, Christa sensed, was a carefully constructed mask, one that lacked depth but allowed its wearer to function from day to day. It was as though, just beneath the soft features and rounded body of a woman, there was a shell, an iron carapace that blocked any deep knowledge or empathy. Who better to recognize a mask than another mask?

Christa faced her. “You’re good, aren’t you?”

Devi’s eyes narrowed as though she were examining the question for a trap—an ounce of explosive, perhaps, designed to sever a finger, or amputate a hand. Satisfied, she nodded. “Yes. I am.”

“Excellent. Let’s make some noise.”

“What do you want to play?”

“Do you know ‘Don’t Tell Me You Love Me’?”

“Night Ranger? Sure. Simple synth parts, though.”

Christa smiled, her face responding to the orders of the woman hidden within. “ ’Twill be enough.”

In Dark Power, Christa had been confronted with a keyboardist who knew a little technique, a little feeling, and a little synthesizer theory. Jerry had been an adequate player, but what Christa had wanted was beyond his ability, and he had not been able to understand her when she had tried to explain.

Devi was different. Christa was almost startled by the surging chords that welled up out of the speakers. To Jerry she had given the images of tree and river, but Devi seemed to have her own sources of inspiration. Head down, eyes on the keys as though she were commanding the sounds to come forth not through simple electronics but rather by force of will, she made music that sobbed and wept, as though jerked bloodily out of her heart.

And though there was no microphone stand before Devi, Christa saw her mouthing the words of the chorus.

Don’t tell me you love me.

Don’t tell me you love me.

She did not know to whom the keyboardist sang, but she knew from the expression on Devi’s face that she uttered the words with a seething mixture of anger and hate that would not have been adequately conveyed by any amount of amplification.

Don’t tell me
—
I don’t want to know
.

If the words had been razors, Devi would have hurled them.

The song ended. Christa nodded slowly, wondering at the emotion she had heard, then bowed to Devi. “You are indeed good.”

The black eyes bored back at her from across the room. “Thanks. You’re good too.”

Christa looked at Melinda and at Lisa. They had already auditioned several keyboardists, and though one or two had demonstrated considerable skill, none had possessed Devi’s abilities. Did they hear the difference?

Lisa nodded to herself. “That was good,” she murmured. “That was it.”

Melinda was grinning, lounging back against her speaker cabinet. The overhead fluorescents gleamed on the black Fender Precision. “Devi, you were always hot shit on keys, even back when. What was that band you were in when we first met?”

“Teenage Sluts From Hell.” Devi smiled, but the expression went no further than the iron plates that rose up a quarter of an inch past her pupils.

“Yeah. That was it. You emptied a beer on my head in between two of our sets.”

“What did you expect? You guys threw us out of the dressing room.”

“Well… yeah… we were kinda rowdy…”

“I trust,” said Christa politely, “that we won’t have any problems involving old band rivalries.”

“Hey,” said Melinda, “I owe her a can of beer.”

“You sure as hell don’t,” said Devi. “You deserved that.”

Christa turned to the keyboardist. “We rehearse three times a week, six to ten in the evening. We will be playing cover tunes, but I will be writing some originals, and I plan that they will eventually comprise about half of our material. I don’t know how commercial this will be, so I would advise you to keep your day job.”

“Are you intending to play out, or is this a basement band?” Devi was cool, professional, but Christa sensed her eagerness.

“We’ll be playing out. But we won’t be going on the road. I have… commitments.”

“Fine with me.”

Devi wanted something. Christa was certain of that. “The position is yours if you want it.”

Devi nodded. “Thanks. I do. When is the next rehearsal?”

“Tomorrow. How quickly can you learn twenty-five songs?”

“Week. Ten days.” Devi looked at her keyboards, then at Christa. An iron wall stood behind her eyes, and it seemed now to be glowing red with the intensity of whatever was shut up behind it.

Outside Christa’s house, a cold rain was falling, pattering softly on the roof, rustling in the’branches of the maple trees that were leaved in the blood of late October. The pages of the tablet before her glared whitely under the desk lamp, and she rubbed her eyes often. Notes and melodies came easily to her, but words were halting things that struggled and fought with her pen. In neat Gaelic letters she tried to capture the songs she needed to write, songs that she would hurl against the opalescent walls of the Sidh palace; but it was hard, frustrating work, and she labored on into the night.

There was a sense of futility about the edges of her thoughts, though, for as yet she labored in a vacuum. Even after several weeks of constant auditions, the band was still without a vocalist, and the quality of the prospects had been uniformly low.

Lisa called them wanna-bes: attractive, stylish young women and men who knew nothing of music other than that they could sing along with the car stereo. It was easy, they thought. Anyone could sing. It took no equipment save a voice and a microphone, and it was a glamorous lifestyle.

“They’re hard to find,” the drummer had said. “A good vocalist is as hard to find as a good fuck. Better, too. Lasts longer.”

Pessimistic sentiments. Christa had considered giving up the search, but her own voice was reedy and thin, unsuitable for anything more than back-up vocals. Melinda and Devi were little better. Lisa hardly sang at all.

Judith sang…

Christa straightened and turned toward the window to rest her eyes. The rain rustled on, threatening sleet and snow. A drop traced its way down the glass, and the streetlamp was a full moon patterned by tossing leaves.

Judith sang. On winter evenings at the steadings, when the families of Cummen and Corb had joined together to pass a few of the long, dark hours, Christa’s untrained harping had accompanied her as she sang old airs and ballads in a voice as rich as the fresh-plowed earth of the fields. Even before she had reached womanhood, Judith’s voice had possessed a warmth that belied her years, a depth that glowed like the amber of a priestess’s necklace.

And Judith had given it all up.

Christa put a hand to her face. Did she still sing? Did she have anything to sing about?

Pattering, running down the windowpanes, rustling in the leaves, the rain continued. It sounded cold. As cold as the touch of a Sidh.

She went back to the tablet. The song she was writing was a challenge, something to let Orfide know that she was back. She whacked out a series of power chords on her guitar, mentally turning the faint, unamplified twang into the full-throated roar of the Laney. The words did not have to be Gaeidelg. They could be English. They could be anything: it was the music that would tell the Sidh bard exactly what he did not want to know.

Are you surprised to see me

Standing here at your door?

Thought it was over between us?

Thought you could forget about it all?

She struggled, weighing the sounds of the words. She wanted the feeling of heavy metal: the power, the anger, the straightforward, rough-hewn verses that were not so much sung as screamed. This was no place for the niceties of bardic convention. Let the old kings of Eriu sleep peacefully, their long-dead ears full of elegant phrases and skilled poetry. Orfide would hear something different.

Did you really think I’d just

Give up and walk away?

Did you really think I could?

The words yielded a little more, the colloquial idiom slowly adapting to the form she imposed upon it. She battered her way through the chorus:

I’m here

And I’m calling you out

So get your ass out here, boy
,

’Cause it’s time to get down

To the firing line!

Tipping back in her chair, she played the song through, singing the words under her breath. There was plenty of room in the melody for lead lines that would lash out at Orfide like keen blades. A challenge and a weapon both.

“Good,” she murmured. “Another verse it could probably use, but this is a beginning.” She looked at the time. Near midnight. She had students early the next morning.

She put her guitar aside, went into the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of milk. She had just set it in the microwave when she heard a car pull up suddenly in the street, brakes screeching faintly, tires sliding a foot or two on the pavement with the sound of wet gravel. A metallic slam, and a moment later someone was frantically ringing her doorbell.

Christa ran down the hall. The woman on the porch was shivering in the cold, her nightgown soaked with rain. Blood flowed from a cut in her face and one eye was swelling shut.

“Monica?” Christa hardly recognized her.

“Can I come in, Chris? Ron’s after me, and he’s really pissed.” Monica glanced over her shoulder as a pair of headlights rounded the corner. “Omygod, he followed me!”

The harper pulled her in, slammed and locked the door. Monica was crying, tears mixing with rain and blood, mascara spreading panda-like over her dark face. Christa took her thick cloak out of the hall closet and cast it around the woman’s shoulders. “Into the living room with you,” she said.

“But… Ron…”

“If Ron has nerve enough to come to my door, I’ll handle him. Come on, you’re freezing.”

In the living room, Monica huddled into a corner of the big sofa, looking small and frail in the wide blue Kinsale. Water dripped onto the shag rug from the hem of her nightgown. “I took your advice.” Her voice was a whisper, and tears were close to the surface. “But he got mad when I told him it was over. He’s been mad before, but he never hit me. This time…”

Her eyes widened and she gasped hoarsely at the sudden pounding on the front door. “Chris,” she said, “he’s drunk. Maybe you should call the cops.”

Christa stood up, her face flushed. Ron had insulted her on several occasions, had questioned her dedication to music, and now he was at her door, threatening violence.

Violence? He did not know what violence was.

“Maybe,” she said. “And maybe it’s a poor excuse for a woman of my clan I’d be if I could not stand for myself, or for those that come to me for help.” She went down the hall and paused with her hand on the deadbolt as another bout of pounding shook the door.

“Where the fuck are you, slut?” Ron shouted.

Christa turned the bolt, jerked the door open. Ron was a head taller than she, but the look in her eyes made him step back a pace. “What do you want?” she said.

There was threat in her voice, but Ron’s bravado came back. “You know what I want, bitch. I want my woman.”

“You have no woman, sir. She left you. And I’d suggest you keep a civil tongue when you talk to me.”

“I’ll fucking talk to you however I want. And you keep your dyke hands off her.”

“So you can beat her up? I think not. Please leave.”

He lunged for her. Her reactions were sluggish after decades of disuse, but she managed to grab his hair. Pivoting, she slammed his head into the doorjamb as he grappled for her throat.

“You fucking bitch…” For a moment, he staggered, and she drove in, slashed his face with her long nails, and sent him reeling back off the porch. He fell flat on his back. She was on top of him in a moment.

“The Romans found out about us,
fuidir
,” she screamed as she pummeled him, “and by the Gods you’ll find out too!”

He was struggling, but now he was clawing to get away from the raging Celt who had planted herself on his chest. He managed to turn over, and as she battered at his head, he inched his way down the brick walk.

He did not protest when she leaped off his back, seized his coat, and dragged him to his car. The odor of beer and cigarettes choked her as she shoved him in. His eyes were bloodshot and frightened, and they peered through the steamy window at her as he hastily closed and locked the door.

Head high, she strode back to the house through the freezing rain. Her hair was wet and matted with leaves, her blouse ripped and covered with mud, but a warm pride was burning within her. She was Chairiste Ní Cummen, a woman of her clan. She had not forgotten what that meant.

Monica looked up as she entered. “I watched through the front window. You’re… fantastic…”

Christa shrugged in reply and picked up the phone. She was still shaking with anger, and she fought to reestablish the quiet harper of Denver. The handset was of smooth beige plastic, and the numbers and letters glowed softly at her, reminding her of where she was, of who she needed to be.

“What are you doing?”

Christa took a deep breath, let it out slowly. The flush left her cheeks. The harper of Denver came back. “He’s been drinking,” she said. “I don’t want him driving, but I don’t want him staying, either.” She riffled through the directory with a muddy hand, found the number she wanted, punched it in. “My name is Christa Cruitaire,” she said into the handset. “I’m at 72 Eudora Street. There’s a man in an old Impala out front, and I’m sure he’s drunk. Could you have some officers come out and take a look? Thank you.”

When she hung up, Monica was still wide-eyed. “Where’d you learn to do all that?”

“My father taught me. He thought that his daughter should be able to take care of herself. My mother, though…” Christa laughed quietly, sadly. Bretan Ní Coemgen had been well schooled by the bishops. Stay at home, take care of your man—whether he be father, brother, or husband—and you will, in turn, be taken care of. As a Christian man to his God, so the Christian woman to her man.

She shook her head. It never really worked that way. Absently, she began picking sodden leaves out of her hair. “What happened?”

Monica shrugged within the cloak. She had stopped shivering, and the cut on her face was slowly scabbing over. “Pretty much what I told you. I finally got fed up with Ron. He was drunk, and I was in bed, so I guess I was kinda stupid. We got in a big argument, and it took a while for me to get out. I found your address in the phone book. There aren’t too many Cruitaires in Denver.”

“Nor anywhere else, Monica.”

Monica tried to grin, but it hurt too much. “I liked you. You talked to me straight. Ron and the others never did. Just a bunch of fucking games.”

A soft creak from Christa’s studio made Monica jump. “What’s that? Is that Ron?”

The room was very quiet: the rain pattering outside and the ticking of the wall clock only intensified the silence. “Be easy. My harps are in the other room, and they become a little vocal when the humidity changes.”

“I didn’t know you played harp.”

“Indeed. I am a harper.”

“That’s pretty neat.”

Outside, a motor grew louder. Doors slammed. A police flasher lit the curtains with staccato bursts of light, and there was a squawk of a radio.

Christa went to the window. “Ron’s being taken care of.”

“That son of a bitch.” Monica gasped, wiped at her face. “I put up with so damn much from him, and then he turns around and pulls this shit on me. Do this, and do that, and give up this, and feel grateful ’cause you’re going out with a white man… Fuck.”

“It’s over. You’re your own again.”

Monica sniffled. “Haven’t got much.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Yeah. Receptionist. Dumb, pretty meat that fills a hiring quota and gets paid zip. I gave up the singing for Ron.”

Christa suddenly felt cold, but not because of her sopping clothes. “Gave it up?”

“He said he didn’t like the way other guys looked at me up there.”

Christa had picked a handful of limp leaves out of her hair, and as she wandered into the kitchen and tossed them into the trash can under the sink, she noticed that the cup of milk was still in the microwave, still warm. She brought it back with her and put it into Monica’s hands. “What did you sing?”

Monica sipped at the liquid. “Warm milk? Jeez, I haven’t had this since I was a kid and ate
menudo
for lunch.” She laughed. “I was in a band. We did hard rock and metal. I’ve got one of those nasty Lita Ford voices. It was fun. We had a bunch of bookings—almost got to open for Van Halen when they played Red Rocks.” She touched her swollen eye, winced again. “Be a damn long time before anyone’ll hire me for singing with this mess. Besides, Ron’s got connections.”

“Not with everyone, I daresay.”

“I’d be stuck in some basement band. We’d never get out.”

I gave up the singing for Ron
. And what had Judith said to herself as she struggled with harpstrings in the pitch darkness of the practice cells?
I gave up the singing for Chairiste
?

“I’m…” Christa bit her lip, turned half away. Rain streaked down the windows. “I’m putting together a metal band. We need a vocalist. Would you like to try out?”

“But Ron said—”

“Ron said a great many things.”

Monica deliberated. “You’re… real good, I know.”

“Do you want to try out?”
Is that what you said, Judith? O Brigit
!

Monica shook her head a little. “I’m out of practice.”

“The remedy for lack of practice is practice,” said Christa. “And I can promise that you won’t be stuck in the basement.”

Wrapped in a cloak that seemed overlarge, her feet tucked under her, Monica sipped at the cup of milk. “I dunno. I guess…” She blinked her dark brown eyes at Christa. “I guess I can give it a try. What’s the name of your band?”

“We don’t have one yet.”

“Ummm. You ought to get one. Maybe put something about harps in it. That’d be classy.”

Something about harps. Later in the night, with Monica warm and safe beneath the covers in the spare bedroom, Christa, bathed and in a robe, stood in the doorway of her studio, drinking cocoa, thinking about it.

The band needed a name. Up until now, she had been reluctant to discuss or consider such a thing. It was enough that she was finding the musicians she needed. To name the band before the personnel had been found seemed to be the action of a wanna-be, or a
crossain
. Names were holy, not to be used wantonly.

In the night, shadowy and indistinct, the yew and the apple framed Ceis. The Sidh harp was silent. Its’ wires glinted in the spill of light from the kitchen, a web of gold, a gossamer net that could enmesh the mightiest spells.