Gossamer Axe (5 page)

One of those days.

Starting with the burned eggs, Kevin’s Saturday had progressed juggernaut-like from one niggling but aggravating disaster to another. In loading his car for the trip into town, he had dropped Frankie’s guitar and added another dent to its patina of injuries. He had been late for his first student at the guitar school, thereby delaying each subsequent lesson by thirty minutes. Come evening, his car battery had died, and somehow his gas tank had, in addition, mysteriously emptied itself. When he had finally reached a service station, he had discovered that he was low on cash.

So this night was perhaps appropriate for a heavy-metal concert. For a few hours he could scream out his frustration and slide into a world where pounding music and an overwhelming sense of sheer power would wipe out the annoyances of the day in a cathartic rush of volume.

He arrived late.

The doors were shut, but he could hear the bass lines pulsing out of the building from across the parking lot. It was all right after all. Fant’mbalz was still playing. He had not missed Malmsteen.

The girl behind the ticket window looked up from bundling stubs. “Hey… Kevin!”

He squinted at her through the heavy glass. “Liz, how are you?”

She shrugged. “Doing okay. The old man’s got a gig up at InsideOut tonight, the baby’s with my mother, and I’m making a few bucks. You here to see Yngwie?”

“Yeah… some head-banging to top off the day. Good crowd?”

“All sorts—come to see the maestro. We even got some kids from the guitar school at D.U. Kinda geeky. But Ken’s here. And Bethanny and Laura. You remember Melinda?”

“I think I met her once. Little blonde?”

“That’s her. She brought a friend. Young chick.” Liz laughed. “Looked totally weirded out when Harv frisked her. But…” She touched her brown curls. “… boy, what I wouldn’t give to have hair like that.”

Applause from within, screams, shouts. She glanced over her shoulder. “Break time. You probably should go in, but don’t expect to find a seat. Real full house.”

Kevin shrugged. “They’re all standing up anyway, right?”

Liz laughed again and gestured to someone in the darkness behind her. The door opened, and Kevin slipped into the intermission crowd.

Acquaintances tapped him on the shoulder, shook his hand, waved good-bye—the men lean and shaggy, the women sensual and aloof. Glitter and glam, spandex and denim. A few hours ago these same superstars had doubtless been working construction and waiting tables.

Kevin shouldered through knots of teenagers clutching tour shirts and quart-sized Cokes, slid past clumps of young men with shaved scalps who compensated for their lack of hair with an abundance of leather and chain.

“Hey, Kevin.”

“How’ya doin’, guy?” Proffered hands, backslaps, a half-timid, half-fierce cordiality that made him wonder what they had been saying three seconds before.

Of course they shook his hand, called him by name, asked with all sincerity how he was. He had once been offered a contract. And in the intricate mythology of popular music, that meant that Kevin had connections, that he must
know somebody
, that anything was possible if one were his friend.

He continued on his way, his scalp dampening with the heat in the room. Looking up, he saw Melinda, suitably attired in the very best metal fashion, and beside her—

He laughed to himself. It was the chick with the harp. Her fiery hair flashed over her shoulder in a blaze of bright color when she turned to Melinda to ask a question. Her eyes were bright, focused, intent, as though she were staring through a window at something unimaginable.

The lights dimmed. From behind the backdrop came a characteristic series of arpeggios—phrygian mode interchanging with harmonic minor—dark, exotic harmonies reminiscent of the florid violin of Nicolò Paganini.

Malmsteen.

People were screaming suddenly, raising hands, fists, jumping up and down, fighting their way back to their seats. Kevin edged his way past a girl in a T-shirt on which was painted
Yngwie is God
in scarlet letters that had run slightly, as though carved in living flesh. He climbed up the two-inch pipe railings against the rear wall and wedged himself in.

Darkness.
One-two-three-four
…

The stage exploded into light.

The courtyard is empty. High above, pennants and oriflamme flutter whitely against the dark sky. Silvery laughter spills out of an upper window of the palace, cascades down the milky walls, swirls amid columns of jasper and chalcedony, falls into silence.

As usual. As always.

Siudb peers through the archway. Orfide’s harp lies beside the bench, unattended. She tries to calm herself. Even if she is caught, there is little that Orfide can do. Lamcrann is infatuated with her, and the bard would never risk the displeasure of the king by harming a royal toy.

She slips into the courtyard, follows the deeper shadows beneath the walls, nears the harp.

*who*

“Siudb Ní Corb. I would play upon you.”

*play*

Her Sidh garments rustle as she lifts the ornate instrument. The strings sigh, and she feels a wash of energy across her skin.

*play*

“I shall, fair one. Might I know your name?”

*Clesac*

“I am honored.”

*play*

The ornate harp pressed to her side, she makes her way through the shadows to the archway, then out into the fragrant gardens. Her own harp is of plain willow, uncarved, without decoration. It is, she supposes, within the palace somewhere, perhaps resting among Lamcrann’s curiosities in the upper rooms where she is not allowed to go.

Tears come to her eyes. She sang while she made that harp, hoping that her song might bring to it more melody than her hands alone ever would. It was the last music she made with her voice, for, under Struitmor, the study of the harp was all consuming, and she was not as skilled as Chairiste.

Her voice was her strength. And she put it aside to follow her lover.

Lost in her thoughts, she does not see a tall, silver-haired figure move out of the darkness of the palace door.

… dark, violent whirlwinds of sound, of energy, spilling out in a murderous torrent, pouring through the packed fans who, shoulder to shoulder, hand to hand, crowded before the stage…

… light…

… music, or thunder, or the roots and branches of terrifying oaks and yews, spectral in the blue-white flashes of incandescence, reaching into other worlds, shattering earth and sky… screaming…

…
Yngwie… Yngwie… Yngwie
…

… pouring out of an ivory-colored Strat and black Marshall amplifiers… the fat, electronic shriek of circuitry pushing overload, vacuum tubes glowing red hot, speakers vibrating in unnumbered frequencies, innumerable harmonics…

Music had changed since Christa had studied in Corca Duibne. The stately, unmodulated modes had, over the centuries, given way, first to the strict and predictable division of major and minor, and then to the polymorphous fire of chromatics, the black flame of harmonic minor and diminished scales.

But Christa had paid little attention. She had had her instrument and her life. The branching, interweaving evolution of classical and popular music could not, would not, affect her.

Until now.

Even through the earplugs, her head was ringing with the volume and with the steady, pounding drive of heavy metal. This was nothing like the rock and roll she had heard from car radios as they passed her in traffic, the music distorting into a nightmare parody as it squeezed through three-inch speakers. This was real, immediate, an apocalyptic reification of sheer sound.

Trained in music as both art and magic, Christa felt and heard the energy that fireballed from one side of the stage to the other. Uncontrolled, without direction, it hovered on the edge of sight in shades of red and gold, of electric blue and near-luminous black. But, were it channeled, it could manifest, it could heal, it could do almost anything.

Malmsteen handled his guitar effortlessly, tossing it into the air, lifting his hands away from it to let waves of feedback inundate the hall while his vocalist stood his ground and spat lyrics at the audience.

She could not understand the words. English had deserted her. She was a Gaeidil again, and what thoughts she could muster in the hurricane of sound beating against her face were in her old language. But she understood the music, the energy, the fire, and the power of what was happening on stage; and she knew what she herself could do with them. If gates had to be opened, she would rip them off their hinges. If Orfide had to be defeated, she would bury him.

Her lover was being held captive by creatures of ice and twilight, and Chairiste Ní Cummen was, this night of Midsummer, finding it within her power to free her. She lifted an arm adorned with golden bracelets, her hand balled into a fist, and in a voice loud enough that Melinda heard it even over the sound of the concert and turned, half puzzled, half afraid at the change in her teacher, Christa screamed out her challenge to the Sidh:

“
Rock and roll
!”

The melody grows under Siudb’s fingers, and Clesac, with aloyal devotion, strives in its own way to make her wishes real. On a hillside, looking off into the dimness of the Realm in which shadowy rivers flow through fields of muted color, woman and harp fight to bridge the gap between worlds.

Siudb’s hands are stiff. Painfully, she makes her way through the turns and variations of the song, and the air before her begins to glow with the outlines of a gate: a wide archway, etched in blue flame.

Working from memory, she recreates the variations that Chairiste once played. This one, in triple time, works its way into the fabric of the worlds, and then, with the division of the rhythm into multiples of two, dissolves the barriers between them.

The ruddy glow of a setting sun suddenly invades the Realm, shadows of blue and gray fleeing before it. Siudb looks through the gate. A vast, golden plain stretches off to the horizon, an unbroken sea of tossing wheat.

The mortal lands. She struggles on, firming the gateway. She smells ripe grain and rich earth. Cirrus clouds burn scarlet on the horizon, their edges gilt with sunlight. The air that pours into the Realm is warm and dry, dusty and alive.

But her hands are aching already, and she has still an even mightier spell to harp into existence. For unless she can undo the effects of the timeless Realm upon herself, a single step into this land of sunset and wheat will be fatal.

And Chairiste
might
be alive. It is still possible, in spite of Orfide’s words.

Again she turns to the harpstrings, fighting her hands. Clesac tries to help, but the fault is with the harper: Siudb cannot negotiate the intricacies of the spell.

The mortal lands are within her sight, but not within her grasp. Tearfully, she sets Clesac down, goes to the edge of the Realm, stands, hopeless, at the border. The warm wind is fragrant. The sunset glows on her skin.

She is very tempted to cast herself upon the dusty ground and accept the consequences. At least she would gain the Summerland. There would be a chance then. Chairiste would find her… someday.

But before she can decide, before she can act, she is seized from behind and pulled back. A practiced hand is playing Clesac, closing the gate. The land of wheat and sunset fades, and the Sidh guards turn her around and bring her face to face with Orfide.

The bard’s face is a studied mask of indifference, though Siudb knows that he is raging within. “Little
timanach
,” he says softly, “would you leave us so suddenly? And without even apologizing for your words to me?”

“I have nothing to say to you, Sidh.”

His long-nailed hands caressing Clesac, Orfide eyes her up and down. “The king allows you too much freedom, I think. If matters were left to me—”

“But they are not left to you.”

Orfide’s jaw hardens, but in a moment he is indifferent again. “Perhaps,” he says, touching a string of his second-best harp, “I should take away your knowledge of music.” He looks down at her hands. They are still shaking with the strain of the magic she attempted to work. “But perhaps I do not have to.”

He gestures to the guards. They release her. Carrying his harp, the bard starts back toward the palace, and the guards follow. Siudb stands for a moment, then turns silently and touches the ground where, a few moments before, she had seen wheat, and sunlight, and scarlet clouds.

Christa decided that she had become soft and passive over the years, taking refuge behind her harp, hiding from the changing world. The fierce Gaeidil woman who had run off to the
Cruitreacha
, who had challenged the Sidh and battled with their master bard, had become timid and uncertain. In striving for the same stasis as that which enveloped the Realm, she had, like the beings she hated, diminished.

If nothing else, rock and roll had shown her that. But its fierce barrage had also shown her both a way back to herself and a means of freeing Judith. As she sat in the fluorescent light of a Denny’s, eating a late dinner with Melinda, her harper-trained mind was analyzing what she had heard that night: tearing the music apart, combining the sounds and the magics with what she already knew, synthesizing the whole into what she sensed could be a devastating weapon.

And at the same time she asked questions, probing at the history of rock and roll as she had once queried Sruitmor about the evolution of the harp and its music. Melinda answered her as she could. “I just play the stuff, Christa,” she said over the rim of her milkshake. “There’s a history to all this, sure, but it doesn’t mean shit. Rock survives because it’s always
now
. I can tell you that there’s jazz in it, and blues, and there’s hillbilly stuff in it from way back, but everything changed when it all came together.”

“When did it come together?”

“Back in the ’50s, with Elvis and Buddy Holly and the rest. But the stuff you heard tonight… well… some people say that it was Eric Clapton that started it. He was with this band called Cream, and he took blues licks and riffs and combined them with a heavy rock beat. That was in about ’68. They played a tune called ‘Crossroads’ that way. Incredible. Blew everyone away. Led Zeppelin came along the next year. That was the first band you could really call heavy metal. But it was still based on the blues. There were classical influences too, all along, but later on some guys started to specialize in them. Uli Roth started working with diminished scales a few years ago, and then Yngwie… well, you heard what Yngwie does.”

Yes, she had heard. Out of the sixth century had come intricately weaving melodies and countermelodies that contrasted and reinforced one another, chiming out of bronze strings plucked and muted by long nails and agile fingers. In the twentieth, the brute power of elementary chords and primal rhythms had developed into a firm foundation for harmonically sophisticated solos that blasted out of the meeting of plastic pick and steel strings.

Fatigue was plucking at her sleeve, but her rejuvenated body paid no attention. She finished her hamburger. “Have you records of this that I can listen to?”

“Christa, this is weird.”

“Indeed?”

“You’re a harper.”

“I am, surely.”

Melinda spread her hands. “What’s going on?”

Christa smiled, stretched. She had been hiding too long. “I’m becoming a real harper, Melinda. And I need to go back to school.” Melinda stared at her. “Now, about those records…”