The desert heated rapidly. She passed saguaro standing tall, arms raised, filled with woodpecker holes. A thrasher called from the top of one, and she had to shade her eyes and see if it was actually a mockingbird.
There were no shadows on the tracks. The saguaros folded their arms to prevent it, and they were the only thing tall enough to cast a shadow here.
She walked until the sky was turquoise hard, until she had emptied one water bottle and begun another. Then she shaded her eyes and looked ahead, and there were five saguaros standing together, and a hill beyond them, crusted with stones.
Grandma Harken nodded to herself.
The tracks did bend there, an abrupt turn that no train that was not a god could have navigated. The metal rails held together, but the wooden ties were twisted up as if they were made of dough and not creosote-soaked wood.
There is a bend in the tracks.
“Quite a bend, too,” she said aloud.
A coyote trotted by, ears alert. It glanced at her, interested, and flicked its brush.
“Don’t you start,” she added.
The coyote grinned, that being the natural expression of coyotes. It trotted on.
She walked back and forth along the bend, and absolutely nothing happened.
“Huh,” she said. She’d been hoping … well, nothing was ever easy.
She went back a third time.
The coyote was back. Its eyes were the coldest thing in the desert.
She couldn’t see any edges. The shadows on the hill were clean and crisp.
The coyote was circling her.
I’m not looking to die just yet. Go find some other meat.
She knew that coyotes couldn’t hear thoughts, but sometimes she thought they could smell them. It winked at her, and then it passed on the far side of the tracks and vanished completely.
Grandma Harken grunted.
“I’ll be damned,” she said aloud.
Well. The enchanter—whatever or whoever he was—had folded up the world here, folded it so hard that it doubled back on itself, so that something on the far side vanished completely from view. The tracks had pulled away from the fold, like skin sloughing away from a burn.
The trains run in three worlds. We will not speak of the fourth.
Dammit, Anna.
Suppose the enchanter had folded all three worlds around him, to keep the trains away, and was living in the fourth world?
“Blessed Saint Anthony …”
The coyote reappeared on the far side of the hill. It trotted up to the tracks and sat down, tongue lolling, God’s dog amused at something.
Waiting to see how I do, I suppose.
She studied the hill carefully. It looked like any other small hillside in a desert, not large enough to be a mesa, merely a rise in the landscape, dotted with mesquite and teddy-bear cholla. An ocotillo spread a hundred fantastical arms near the base, where there might be a small seep of some sort. Ocotillo liked more water than other plants, when they could get it.
If there was water here, the Hohokam might have built near it. If there were a people better at using water in the desert, Grandma had never heard of it.
The hill had nothing that looked like ruins, though, not even two square stones beside each other. Not a temple mound nor—
Her eyes narrowed. The coyote tilted its head.
On a rock above the ocotillo, there was a pale splotch. She ambled over to it, and there it was, pecked out of the surface, a round-bodied lizard.
“So they were here,” she murmured. Her eyes tracked over the petroglyphs—a human, a set of concentric circles, another lizard, bigger than the last one. A human upside down, which generally meant “dead.”
The coyote had stopped grinning and was watching her intently.
“Don’t suppose you can tell me anything,” said Grandma Harken.
“What’ll you give me?” replied the coyote.
“I’ve got sage and cigarettes.”
The coyote scratched pensively at one ear. “Let’s see the cigarettes.”
Grandma Harken took one out and laid it on a stone, then stepped back.
The coyote sniffed at it, unimpressed. “Poor stuff.”
“You eat sheep afterbirths,” said Grandma.
“Yes, but only the quality ones,” said the coyote, and grinned again.
“I should know better than to try and deal with coyotes,” muttered Grandma Harken.
“You should.” The coyote licked up the cigarette and held it dangling in its mouth. “Look! I’m a human. Do this. Do that. Stand here. Don’t eat that.” It cackled at its own cleverness.
Grandma Harken shook her head and turned back to the railroad tracks.
“Go underneath,” called the coyote after her, and when she turned her head back toward it, it was gone.
Go underneath. She turned the words over in her mind. Go underneath.
Coyotes were liars, of course. Worse than ravens. But this one had taken the tobacco.
She walked along the track, into the sharp bend. The rails buckled, and the gaps between the ties were deeper than they should have been. And yet the hillside was seamless, not even a shadow out of place.
Almost perfect, she thought. No one would ever notice, if not for the trains.
She stood at the farthest point of the bend, a foot on each tie. The world dropped away underneath the rails.
Go underneath.
The gap should have been too narrow for a grown human to fit, but one of the ties was twisted out of the way, on the end nearest the ruins. And she was made of bone and sinew and wire, and was no longer young.
She wiped sweat from her palms, grabbed the metal rail—it was hot from the sun and burned her hands—and swung herself down through the gap, and into the next world.
Immediately everything changed.
The hillside was no longer a small rise but a large one, cleft in two, with a narrow stone defile between them. Petroglyphs marked the stones on either side, layered over each other into incoherence.
Grandma Harken took out her water bottle and spilled a little over her smarting palms.
She turned her head and the tracks were gone. That was going to make getting out … interesting.
“Oh well,” she muttered. “If I were sensible, I’d still be at home with my tomatoes.” She started forward into the defile.
There was a dragon in the sand.
It was thirty yards long, thick bodied, with a blunt wedge of head. Its scales were dusty black and mottled orange.
Grandma knew Gila monsters well enough and did not fear them, but the largest one that she had ever seen was smaller than the smallest claw on this one’s foot.
“Oh,” she said aloud. “Oh, my.”
She heard herself say it and hated her voice for sounding like an old woman. But even Saint Anthony, who wrestled demons in the desert, might have been taken aback by the size of this one.
The dragon’s eyes were glossy, beetle shell black, and they were fixed on her.
She swallowed hard.
“Give me water,” said the Gila dragon, in a voice like sand hissing over the desert floor.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” said Grandma Harken, but she sounded more like herself in her ears.
“They are not here,” said the dragon, “or I would ask them for water.”
And it laughed, then, a little choking hiss, and it seemed to Grandma that it was the sound of a creature in pain, not a monster on the edge of devouring a victim.
Not that that won’t change in very short order, mind you …
Grandma Harken unfastened one of her water bottles. She suspected that she was going to die very shortly, but there were rules. If she lived long enough to talk to the cholla-bone girl again, she would tell her this one.
When someone in the desert asks you for water, you give it to them.
The Gila dragon’s mouth cracked open and a long blue-violet tongue slithered out towards Grandma.
She
upended the water bottle over it.
The dragon swallowed, and then there was a crack like thunder.
She hadn’t noticed the shackles on the dragon’s leg. They were the same dusty black color as the scales.
There were three of them. Two still held, and the third had broken and fallen away. The skin underneath was raw and clear fluid oozed from beneath the scales.
“Give me water,” whispered the dragon.
She gave it the next water bottle to drink.
The second shackle broke. She could not see where the chain was anchored. To hold a beast that size, they must have been bolted to the center of the earth itself.
“Give me water,” said the dragon a third time.
One shackle left. And when it breaks, it could lunge forward and devour me. It wouldn’t even need the poison. One bite ought to do it.
Only a fool would set such a monster free.
“Please,” said the Gila dragon.
Grandma Harken cursed herself for a fool and poured the last of her water out over the dragon’s tongue.
The crack that followed was louder than the others and split the air like lightning, like the sound of mountains splitting.
In the silence that followed, she heard the tiny metallic clunk of the shackle falling to the ground.
The dragon looked down at its freed leg. That would have been the moment to run, but Grandma Harken thought perhaps she should just sit down. Her heart was hammering in a way that she didn’t like, and her vision pulsed in time to her heartbeat.
It’d be entirely too stupid, to drop dead of a heart attack out here in the desert before the beast lays a claw on me.
It lifted its great mottled head. It was a low, flat beast, for all its size, so it did not tower over her. She looked into its eye and saw her face reflected back.
“Thank you,” said the dragon. And waited, like a penitent awaiting absolution.
Grandma licked her lips. “Weren’t nothing,” she said.
It moved then. She fell back against the canyon wall and watched it go by. It was like a train-god passing, long and dark, and then it was past and the bright blunt tail was vanishing around the curve of the defile. She heard the sound of its scales scraping the stone, and then, much too quickly for something so large, it was gone.
Stepped out the world, she thought, back into one of the other ones. I hope it doesn’t get hung up on the rails.
She slid down until she was sitting and put her forehead on her knees. There had been a time, when she was young and immortal, when beasts like that were part of her world and she could have danced in the tracks that they left in the sand.
She felt old and mortal now.
She had a few sips of water left in one of the bottles. When the pulsing sparks in her eyes faded, she drank one of the last sips.
She got up.
There was a scale on the ground before her. Not a large one, a little smaller than her palm. She picked it up, and it was warm and felt like leather. She put it in her pocket, because something the desert gives you an answer, and it is your job to find the question.
She had to keep one hand on the stone wall as she walked. She could feel chisel marks under her fingers. The way was mostly natural, but someone had smoothed down the stone a little, long ago.
Grandma Harken followed the turn in the wall and there it was.
It was adobe and it was old. The roof had fallen in on one side and the tops of the walls had the slumped-pottery look of weathered clay.
It was not a large building. The entire structure was not much larger than Grandma’s house, though it had been at least three stories tall before the roof fell. If she tilted her head back, she could see the remains of shattered floors sticking out from the high, broken wall.
The world was folded so tightly around it that the desert sun had turned the hazy gray-green color of the sky before a storm.
There was trash around the outside. Bird bones and rotting scraps of fruit made a scattered midden, although she could not smell anything. A few flat weeds crawled across the ground and despite everything, Grandma Harken felt a gardener’s urge to pull them.
Not the time. Although if I don’t die in the next few hours, I’ll get them before I leave.
The opening to the ruins was a narrow rectangle of darkness. She watched it for a long time before she approached it.
She had taken only a step or two forward when someone came out.
He was young, perhaps in his late teens, and clad in the same strange, feathered skin that Marguerite had been. By that, she thought he was likely a victim. He had a dark crest and his cheeks were stained brilliant scarlet.
Roadrunner, thought Grandma Harken.
He saw her.
His mouth fell open in surprise—she saw a glint of silver in his tongue—and he said something frantic in O’odham.
Grandma could understand about twenty words of O’odham if the other person spoke very slowly and clearly, which he hadn’t.
Probably warning me off. He’s not the enchanter, anyhow. Poor kid must have gotten caught like Marguerite.
He does like turning people into birds, doesn’t he?
From inside the ruin came another voice, thick and rumbling. She could not tell what it said, either, but the roadrunner-boy put his hands to his mouth and grimaced.
“It’s all right,” she said. She’d never had much of a plan anyway, and apparently stealth wasn’t part of it.
Whether he understood her words or her tone, she didn’t know. He took her arm, his eyes apologetic. She followed him inside.
It took a long moment for her eyes to adjust. The gray-green light through the broken ceiling did little to illuminate the shadows.
It was colder inside the ruin than it should have been.
“Ah, hell,” said Marguerite, somewhere off to her left. “I told you to stay away.”
“I’m bad at that,” said Grandma cheerfully, as she tried to pierce the darkness.
There were broken pots in the corners, and a few intact ones, draped with old flower sacks and coarse-cured hides. It smelled rank. Whoever lived here was a poor housekeeper.
At the far end, something moved.
She heard the thick, rumbling voice again. This time, it spoke English.
“Where do you come from, old woman?” asked the voice. “And why are you sniffing around what is mine?”
Her first thought was that it was a bear.
Her second was that bears generally had better manners, and certainly kept themselves cleaner.
It was a man, more or less. He was huge and hairy and his head was sunk down between his shoulders. He sat on a throne, like a king, but the throne was made of broken stones and rabbit skins and there were flies crawling in and out of it.
He did not belong in the desert. He stank of cold and forests and distance, of magic from another place and another time. More than that, he stank of power—his own power, wrapped up in that bear-like hide, not a power that could give itself to a place and be given back in return.
There were things that could come to the desert and learn to live with it, like the trains, but this was not one of them.
“You’re not from around here,” said Grandma Harken to the cold-king.
He made a noise like bubbles breaking in glue, and maybe that was laughter.
“I have been driven out,” he said. “Someone found the soul I had hidden in a duck egg. It takes time to grow it back.”
“Seems a fragile sort of place for a soul,” said Grandma Harken. “Better than a chicken egg, but not by much.”
“I shall wrap it in a snake next time,” said the cold-king. “I have learned.”
Marguerite and the roadrunner boy shifted in the corner. Grandma spared them a look and saw that Marguerite had put her arms around the boy for comfort.
Well, and now I know why she wasn’t entirely keen on curse-breaking. Had nothing much to do with flying after all.
She had no idea what she w
as going to do, but it seemed like she should probably start doing it.
“I’ll ask politely,” said Grandma Harken. “Let these people go and stop twisting up the world hereabouts. The land doesn’t like it.” She considered this, and then added, “Please.”
“I do not care what the land likes,” said the cold-king. “This is a dreadful land.”
“Then why’d you come here at all?”
The cold-king stretched. “I did not choose. I hid myself in the seeds of a thistle and when I woke again, I had crossed an ocean and was rolling and rolling across the hills of this terrible, dry place. But soon I shall be done growing back, and until then, my old enemies will not find me.”
Grandma Harken sighed. She had never thought it was going to be easy. “Well,” she said, planting her feet, “I’m afraid you’ve made a new one.”
The cold-king flung out his arm and power raged through the ruined building. Marguerite cried out and the roadrunner-boy spoke a short, sharp curse.
The cold-king’s power struck Grandma Harken and would have knocked her down, but she let it spin her around instead. She’d been a dancer in her youth, the wild kind, so she spun like a top and landed, breathless, on her feet.
Well, this is going to end badly, she thought.
Her right hip let it be known that it was not up for any more of that.
She reached down and pulled out her kitchen knife. It had seemed very large when cutting tomatoes in her kitchen. Now it was a small bright wedge against the bulk of the cold-king.
He laughed his bubbling laugh again. “Pretty,” he said.
The next blow came sideways and there was no spinning with it. It slammed her into the ruined adobe wall. Her head struck it and spawned a universe of stars across her vision. The knife went skittering across the floor.
She slid down the wall and into a jumble of shattered pots. One dug into her back, in the same place that the ladle had, and for a moment Grandma wondered if she was still in her chair on the porch, watching a glowing bird fly across the garden.
Was that a dream? The dragon and the train and …
She remembered the cholla-bone girl’s face. No, she had not been a dream. Her mouth was full of blood.
“No!” cried Marguerite. The mockingbird-woman lunged across the floor, her orange eyes shining in the dark. She caught the cold-king’s arm and tugged at it, fierce and ineffectual. “Stop! She’s old! She can’t hurt you!”
Jackalope Wives And Other Stories Page 17
