Gossamer Axe (31 page)

And I’m calling you out

So get your ass out here, boy,

’Cause it’s time to get down

To the firing line
!”

Christa noticed Bill Sarah at a nearby table. As usual, he was wearing his business suit, looking very much like a lawyer, an incongruous presence amid the youthful bodies and tight jeans. She gave him a wink and a smile, and he straightened, returned a vigorous thumbs-up, and began applauding.

Beyond him, though, but for his familiarity almost lost in the darkness and the faceless young people come to listen and to dance, was Carl Taylor. He was staring at Melinda. He looked puzzled.

*death*

“Ceis!”

*death*

The guitar had absorbed something of her during their union, and although it was willing to treat Melinda with compassionate discipline, it had no compunctions about Carl. Christa realized that the lead break was upon her, knew that Ceis was fully capable of carrying out its wishes.

I forbid it, Ceis.

She might as well have bade the sea be still. As she started the lead, she tried to reduce it to common blues licks and minor scales; but the guitar was having none of it. She felt the music slipping away from her, felt Ceis taking control as it prepared to exact its own conception of justice.

Carl, unaware of the danger, was coming forward across the dance floor. He seemed puzzled by the change in Melinda.

Ceis whipped the lead into a fury of darkly minor riffs laden with chromatic arpeggios. The lethal power built quickly, hovered in front of the PA speakers like an animate shroud, roiled with a terrible potency.

Melinda had seen Carl. Eyes wide and terrified, she backed away, withdrawing as far as her cord would allow. Carl smiled quizzically, took another step forward, waved at her.

Ceis struck. The guitar shrieked with wrath, and Christa had a momentary vision of a shaft of light, like a pale, spotted snake, darting at Carl, coiling about him, sinking its head into his chest.

The puzzled look did not leave his face, but one hand flew to his heart as he staggered back into the crowd. A dancer bumped into him, and he fell.

Someone turned and pointed. Carl was lost in the darkness, but people were suddenly gathering about something, something on the floor.

Lisa stirred and rolled over, listening as she had been listening ever since she had crawled into bed in the predawn darkness, straining her ears even as she slept.

She sighed, rubbed at her eyes. She was not waiting for Melinda to get home. Melinda was home already, and in bed. Christa herself had tucked her in and kissed her good-night as though ministering to a frightened child; and, yes, Melinda had stared at her like a blond-haired moppet and had obediently closed her eyes.

The brash, cocky Melinda was gone. She seemed now to be a broken thing, a frail, young girl who had seen too much of the world and realized too much about herself. And although while onstage she had radiated confidence throughout the remaining sets, the mask had fallen away when she had put down her bass. She had stayed in the dressing room during breaks, staring silently at the wall, tears streaking singly down her face.

A truck rumbled by outside, and, in the silence left behind, Lisa heard what she had been listening for. She got up, pulled on a robe, and scuffed across the living room to Melinda’s door.

The soft, gentle sobs of a young woman. Lisa paused with her hand on the knob. “Melinda?”

“Boo-boo?”

Lisa might have simply opened the door and entered, but Melinda had already been intruded upon enough that night. She needed love, but she needed respect and privacy also. “Can I come in? Is it all right?”

Silence. Then: “Yeah.”

Lisa found Melinda huddled in the big waterbed, her arms wrapped about a small harp that was dusty with long disuse. “You want to talk?”

Melinda’s face was pale against the pastel sheets. “I can’t seem to stay asleep,” she said. “I keep dreaming that I’m in Carl’s bed, and that he’s coming in…” She shuddered and made as though to pull the covers up about her shoulders.

Lisa tucked them in. “Carl? Carl Taylor?”

Melinda hung her head. The tears were still coming. “Yeah. He got me hooked. Used me like a washcloth.”

Lisa’s temper flared. “That son of a bitch. I’d like to—”

She broke off, staring. Carl Tayler had died that evening. A heart attack, the paramedics had said. But Lisa had seen something on stage that she had, at the time, dismissed as imagination: a pale streak of light darting from Christa’s amplifier straight at the club owner.

Melinda did not notice her expression. “I really blew it. Bad.”

Lisa dragged herself away from her thoughts. “It happens.”

“I’m just a stupid bitch.”

The drummer recalled all the anger that she had kept pent up for months. It was gone now, and she would have gladly given it up again and again if doing so would have made Melinda feel better. “It’s over, Mel,” she said softly. “It’s done.”

“What did Chris do to me? Do you know?” Melinda sounded almost afraid to hear.

“No,” said Lisa. “I don’t. She did something… with the music. She’s talked to us about magic, and I guess for her it’s the same thing. I don’t understand it, but… well… she’s a friend.”

Melinda was a friend, too; and Melinda had been hurt, nearly killed, by Carl Taylor. What, Lisa wondered, would she herself have done? Nothing? When someone she loved had been so treated?

“You scared?” said Melinda.

“Yeah, kinda.”

Melinda turned her face into the pillow. “I know she did the right thing, but, God, when that… that whatever-it-was hit me, it was like…” She shuddered as though she felt the soft blanket of unconsciousness crawling over her again. “I don’t know what it was like.”

“She cares about you, Mel.” Lisa wondered how she could sound so reassuring when her assumptions about reality had been so thoroughly shattered.

“What…” Melinda’s arm tightened on the harp. “What do you think she is? Or who? I… I don’t know what to ask anymore.”

Lisa shook her head slowly. “I don’t know either. She just doesn’t seem to be from around here.”

“I asked her once what planet she was from. I thought I was joking.”

Lisa tried to fit the pieces together and shrugged inwardly when she failed. “I guess she’ll tell us about it when she’s ready. But she’s a friend. She’s a good friend.” There was pride in her voice. “I’d trust her with my life.”

“Me too.” Melinda lifted her head and blinked at Lisa with hollow eyes. “You guys… still want me in the band?”

“You bet.”

No bravado here: only a stricken timidity. “Even after all the shit I pulled?”

Lisa reached out and touched Melinda’s face. How would Christa say it? She did not know. She found her own words.

“Yeah,” she said. “C’mon back.”

The light-blue Eagle lurched and bumped up the road in Gunnison National Forest. Sawtooth Mountain winked in and out of sight behind the aspens and the pines, but Christa did not have time to look. Winter had been hard on the road, and she was busy dodging potholes that threatened either to swallow the wagon or shake it apart.

“You say it gets worse ahead?” said Kevin. He studied the topograhic map, then the scenery. His hand found the strap at the top of the doorframe, and he held on as the wagon swayed violently.

“Much worse,” she said. “Here…” She swung the Eagle into the bushes, and Kevin flinched; but the bright green leaves fell away to reveal a pair of deep ruts separated by a swatch of high weeds and hemmed in by tall foliage. For a minute she followed the track, but then she braked to a stop, deliberating. The mid-May air was cool and fragrant with flowers; but the spring overgrowth had changed the land. She could not see her destination. “Ceis? It’s confused I am.”

The guitar play on the back seat. *right*

She slewed the Eagle off the road, the four tires clawing for traction in the mud. The bushes parted. Straight ahead was the low cliff, and the lake—still, quiet, blue— play at its feet.

Kevin whistled. “That’s it?”

“Can you see the gate?”

“A little. The air over the water looks… different.”

Two weeks of harping, and he was already seeing magic. He had the touch, and he had the talent, and if his parents had given him anything besides their fears, they had given him a little of the old blood. The former was gone, the latter was awakening.

She parked and stepped out onto the grass. Kevin rounded the wagon carrying a small, battery-powered amplifier. “Will they hear this?” he asked.

“Who?”

“The twig-pigs. You’re going to be making some noise.” He hefted the amp. “Now that I think of it, you’re going to be making a lot of noise come Midsummer. This is just a rumor, you understand, but I hear that the park rangers don’t like having rock concerts in the forest.”

“They’ll not hear,” said Christa. “They’ll not notice us at all.” Kevin’s eyebrows lifted in surprise, and she explained. “Keeping folk from hearing what one doesn’t want them to hear is one of the first things a harper learns, Kevin. Do you remember that air I taught you yesterday? The one that climbs up into the high strings and hovers there with the curious little suspensions? That’s the beginning of the spell.”

“You’re teaching me magic?”

She lifted Ceis out of the back seat. “Surely. You’re going to be a harper.”

Blushing at the title, he followed her down to the shore of the lake, handed her one end of a guitar cord, and plugged the other end into the amplifier. “This has some on-board chorusing,” he said, examining the controls. “And reverb. You want that?”

“I’ll try the chorusing. And give me a little reverb.” She dug a pick out of her pocket. “Crank it, Kevin.”

Though small, the amplifier had a large voice, and the melody Christa played spattered off the rock wall that backed up the lake. She made no effort to downplay the visual effects of the magic: the energy built about her like a blue-lit fog, spread out on the ground, formed itself into a protective circle a thousand feet in diameter.

That done, she felt out toward the gate. As she had expected, it had shrunk noticeably in less than a year. The fact was distressing, but not fatal: with Ceis, and with the massed power of a rock band backing her, she would have little problem enlarging it to suitable proportions.

Ceis surged forward, urging, eager.

With a frightened jerk, she pulled her hands from the instrument. “Ceis. Old friend. You must work with me.”

**

“You know better than that. A man lies dead because of your vengeance.” Her words were true, but there was a sense of uncleanliness about them, for she could not but say that she approved of the manner in which the guitar had dealt with Carl Taylor. Gaeidil justice was swift and decisive, but—in the eyes of mild little times— brutal and vengeful. Caught as she was between the sixth century and the twentieth, Christa could not but agonize over the death.

Kevin came up beside her. “Ceis pushing?”

“It is.” She unknotted the bandanna from her throat and wiped her brow. Could she trust the guitar anymore? Could she trust herself?

Kevin read her train of thought. “If you’d killed him with your bare hands, Chris, would it have been better?”

“It would,” she relied without hesitation.

“Why?”

“In the name of the Goddess, Kevin! The man didn’t have a chance!”

“Did he give Melinda a chance?”

A sticky question. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe in Corca Duibne I’d have an answer. Hard it is to be a Gaeidil among another people. The world’s changed.” Almost pensively, she hefted the guitar. “I’ve changed, too.”

She looked about her. The sky was as blue as any that Eriu could have boasted, the trees as straight, the water as cold and clear. And yet a difference was blazoned upon the land as brightly and unmistakably as the white contrail of a jet streaked the azure vault above her head. Not for the first time, she wondered how she would explain it all to Judith. She could not even explain it to herself.

“I hope she’ll be happy here,” she said softly. Kevin picked up the amp, put his arm about her, led her back to the car.

Kevin took the wheel for the long drive home, but he seemed thoughtful. He had grown up, but he had also grown backwards. He was seeing the world in light of old memories and was, perhaps, as much in conflict as she.

His eyes were on the road, but he seemed to be looking beyond the asphalt. “What happened to us, Chris?” he said at last. “To Ire—to Eriu? It’s… I mean, it just… went away.”

Went away. Went far away. For all that Eriu had influenced modern ways, it might never have existed. “I wasn’t there to see it, Kevin. I was with the Sidh. I missed the changes.”

“Any ideas?”

Christa shifted, reached back between the bucket seats, and laid a hand on Ceis. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve a few ideas.”

“Tell me. It sounds crazy, but I miss it.”

It did not sound crazy to her at all. “I’ve told you about the cycles,” she said. “The big ones that make up the seasons. That’s what we’re celebrating on the holydays: the way winter gives way to summer, which in turn yields back to winter. It’s a circle. Well… a spiral, really, but think of it for now as a circle.”

If Gossamer Axe was a circle, it was turning once more. Bill Sarah was happy, and had even apologized to Melinda for some of his words—Melinda, on her part, bursting into tears and returning the apology—and the gigs were building up again.

“A people is a circle, too,” Christa went on, still thinking of the band. “Everyone is a part of it, and everything flows around it. Commerce, religion, art… all depend upon one another.”

Not surprisingly, the women of the band had become her family, her circle; and by necessity, their beliefs, their loves, their joys and sorrows mingled inseparably. Melinda’s tragedy was the band’s tragedy. Monica’s fear was shared by all. Christa’s need…

Mid-May. Only a little over four weeks left. Time for confessions, revelations: the final test of the band. Would it hold together?

“Chris?”

She pulled herself back to the present. “I’m sorry, Kevin. My mind’s wandering.”

“If this is painful for you…”

“Not at all. I saw something once that gave me a clue about what happened. When I lived in London in the 1860s, I traveled about, trying to learn something of the people I’d found myself among. In a museum I came upon a reliquary from Monymusk, and there was piece of circular knotwork design on one of the bosses that I found disquieting. I looked at it for a long time. I wanted to know why it bothered me.

“It finally struck me that the entire design was perfectly symmetrical save at the top. Instead of replicating the rest of the loops, the line bent down and took a different turn. The symmetry, the circle, was destroyed.”

She wondered whether, in telling Gossamer Axe who and what she was, she would complete the pattern of the band… or destroy it.

“And what did that tell you?” said Kevin.

“This: that so long as Eriu was a circle of people, she could not fall. But with time came other beliefs, other ways. Patrick and the Christians were only the last, but in many ways the most telling, for some of their beliefs were similar to those of our own religion. The poets and the
filid
drew one parallel after another, and eventually most everyone forgot just where the differences were. A single loop in the pattern that was Eriu was forever altered, and the circle was destroyed.”

Kevin stared ahead through the windshield. “Forever?”

“Until we learn to trust the Gods again.”

“You think they’ll forgive us?”

Would Melinda forgive her? Would the rest of the band?

“Chris?”

“The Gods will forgive anything,” she faltered, “given true repentance, and true love.”