by Paula Guran
And she could hear voices.
She crept nearer, a small shadow hidden in deeper patches cast by the fat yellow moon.
“—never a matter of choice,” a man’s voice was saying. “The lines of our lives are laid out straight as a dodman’s leys, from event to event. You chose your road.”
She couldn’t see the speaker, but the timbre of his voice was deep and resonating, like a deep bell. She couldn’t recognize it, but she did recognize Merlin’s when he replied to the stranger.
“When I chose my road, there was no road. There was only the trackless wood; the hills lying crest to crest like low-backed waves; the glens where the harps were first imagined and later strung. Ca’canny, she told me when I came into the Wood. I thought go gentle meant go easy, not go fey; that the oak guarded the Borders, marked its boundaries. I never guessed it was a door.”
“All knowledge is a door,” the stranger replied. “You knew that.”
“In theory,” Merlin replied. “You meddled.”
“I was born to meddle. That was the part I had to play.”
“But when your part was done,” the stranger said, “you continued to meddle.”
“It’s in my nature, Father. Why else was I chosen?”
There was a long silence then. Sara had an itch on her nose but she didn’t dare move a hand to scratch it. She mulled over what she’d overheard, trying to understand.
It was all so confusing. From what they were saying it seemed that her Merlin was the Merlin in the stories. But if that was true, then why did he look like a boy her own age? How could he even still be alive? Living in a tree in Jamie’s garden and talking to his father . . .
“I’m tired,” Merlin said. “And this is an old argument, Father. The winters are too short. I barely step into a dream and then it’s spring again. I need a longer rest. I’ve earned a longer rest. The Summer Stars call to me.”
“Love bound you,” the stranger said.
“An oak bound me. I never knew she was a tree.”
“You knew. But you preferred to ignore what you knew because you had to riddle it all. The salmon wisdom of the hazel wasn’t enough. You had to partake of the fruit of every tree.”
“I’ve learned from my error,” Merlin said. “Now set me free, Father.”
“I can’t. Only love can unbind you.”
“I can’t be found, I can’t be seen,” Merlin said. “What they remember of me is so tangled up in Romance, that no one can find the man behind the tales. Who is there to love me?”
Sara pushed her way out of the thicket where she’d been hiding and stepped into the moonlight.
“There’s me,” she began, but then her voice died in her throat.
There was no red-haired boy standing by the tree. Instead, she found an old man with the red-haired boy’s eyes. And a stag. The stag turned its antlered head toward her and regarded her with a gaze that sent shivers scurrying up and down her spine. For a long moment its gaze held hers; then it turned, its flank flashing red in the moonlight, and the darkness swallowed it.
Sara shivered. She wrapped her arms around herself, but she couldn’t escape the chill.
The stag . . .
That was impossible. The garden had always been strange, seeming so much larger than its acreage would allow, but there couldn’t possibly be a deer living in it without her having seen it before. Except . . . What about a boy becoming an old man overnight? A boy who really and truly did live in a tree?
“Sara,” the old man said.
It was Merlin’s voice. Merlin’s eyes. Her Merlin grown into an old man.
“You . . . you’re old,” she said.
“Older than you could imagine.”
“But—”
“I came to you as you’d be most likely to welcome me.”
“Oh.”
“Did you mean what you said?” he asked.
Memories flooded Sara. She remembered a hundred afternoons of warm companionship. All those hours of quiet conversation and games. The peace that came from her night fears. If she said yes, then he’d go away. She’d lose her friend. And the night fears . . . Who’d be there to make the terrors go away? Only he had been able to help her. Not Jamie nor anyone else who lived in the House, though they’d all tried.
“You’ll go away . . . won’t you?” she said.
He nodded. An old man’s nod. But the eyes were still young. Young and old, wise and silly, all at the same time. Her red-haired boy’s eyes.
“I’ll go away,” he replied. “And you won’t remember me.”
“I won’t forget,” Sara said. “I would never forget.”
“You won’t have a choice,” Merlin said. “Your memories of me would come with me when I go.”
“They’d be . . . gone forever?”
That was worse than losing a friend. That was like the friend never having been there in the first place.
“Forever,” Merlin said. “Unless . . .”
His voice trailed off, his gaze turned inward.
“Unless what?” Sara asked finally.
“I could try to send them back to you when I reach the other side of the river.”
Sara blinked with confusion. “What do you mean? The other side of what river?”
“The Region of the Summer Stars lies across the water that marks the boundary between what is and what has been. It’s a long journey to that place. Sometimes it takes many lifetimes.”
They were both quiet then. Sara studied the man that her friend had become. The gaze he returned her was mild. There were no demands in it. There was only regret. The sorrow of parting. A fondness that asked for nothing in return.
Sara stepped closer to him, hesitated a moment longer, then hugged him.
“I do love you, Merlin,” she said. “I can’t say I don’t when I do.”
She felt his arms around her, the dry touch of his lips on her brow.
“Go gentle,” he said. “But beware the calendaring of the trees.”
And then he was gone.
One moment they were embracing and the next her arms only held air. She let them fall limply to her sides. The weight of an awful sorrow bowed her head. Her throat grew thick, her chest tight. She swayed where she stood, tears streaming from her eyes.
The pain felt like it would never go away.
But the next thing she knew she was waking in her bed in the northwest tower and it was the following morning. She woke from a dreamless sleep, clear-eyed and smiling. She didn’t know it, but her memories of Merlin were gone.
But so were her night fears.
The older Sara, still not a woman, but old enough to understand more of the story now, fingered a damp leaf and looked up into the spreading canopy of the oak above her.
Could any of that really have happened? she wondered.
The electric charge she’d felt in the air when she’d approached the old oak was gone. That pregnant sense of something about to happen had faded. She was left with the moon, hanging lower now, the stars still bright, the garden quiet. It was all magical, to be sure, but natural magic—not supernatural.
She sighed and kicked at the autumn debris that lay thick about the base of the old tree. Browned leaves, broad and brittle. And acorns. Hundreds of acorns. Fred the gardener would be collecting them soon for his compost—at least those that the black squirrels didn’t hoard away against the winter. She went down on one knee and picked up a handful of them, letting them spill out of her hand.
Something different about one of them caught her eye as it fell, and she plucked it up from the ground. It was a small brown ovoid shape, an incongruity in the crowded midst of all the capped acorns. She held it up to her eye. Even in the moonlight she could see what it was.
A hazelnut.
Salmon wisdom locked in a seed.
Had she regained memories, memories returned to her now from a place where the Summer Stars always shone, or had she just had a dream in the Mondream Wood where as a child she�
�d thought that the trees dreamed they were people?
Smiling, she pocketed the nut, then slowly made her way back into the House.
“CALYPSO IN BERLIN”
ELIZABETH HAND
Yesterday morning, he left. I had known he would only be here for those seven days. Now, just like that, they were gone.
It had stormed all night, but by the time I came downstairs to feed the woodstove, the gale had blown out to sea. It was still dark, chill October air sifting through cracks in the walls. Red and yellow leaves were flung everywhere outside. I stepped into the yard to gather a handful and pressed my face against them, cold and wet.
From the other side of the island a coyote yelped. I could hear the Pendletons’ rooster and a dog barking. Finally I went back inside, sat and watched the flames through the stove’s isinglass window. When Philip finally came down, he took one look at me, shook his head, and said, “No! I still have to go, stop it!”
I laughed and turned to touch his hand. He backed away quickly and said, “None of that.”
I saw how he recoiled. I have never kept him here against his will.
When Odysseus left, he was suspicious, accusatory. They say he wept for his wife and son, but he slept beside me each night for seven years and I saw no tears. We had two sons. His face was imprinted upon mine, just as Philip’s was centuries later: unshaven, warm, my cheeks scraped and my mouth swollen. In the morning I would wake to see Philip watching me, his hand moving slowly down the curve of my waist.
“No hips, no ass,” he said once. “You’re built like a boy.”
He liked to hold my wrists in one hand and straddle me. I wondered sometimes about their wives: were they taller than me? Big hips, big tits? Built like a woman?
Calypso. The name means the concealer. “She of the lovely braids”—that’s how Homer describes me. One morning Philip walked about my cottage, taking photos off the bookshelves and looking at them.
“Your hair,” he said, holding up a picture. “It was so long back then.”
I shrugged. “I cut it all off a year ago. It’s grown back—see?” Shoulder-length now, still blond, no gray.
He glanced at me, then put the picture back. “It looked good that way,” he said.
This is what happens to nymphs: they are pursued or they are left. Sometimes, like Echo, they are fled. We turn to trees, seabirds, seafoam, running water, the sound of wind in the leaves. Men come to stay with us, they lie beside us in the night, they hold us so hard we can’t breathe. They walk in the woods and glimpse us: a diving kingfisher, an owl caught in the headlights, a cold spring on the hillside. Alcyone, Nyctimene, Peirene, Echo, Calypso: these are some of our names. We like to live alone, or think we do. When men find us, they say we are lovelier than anything they have ever seen: wilder, stranger, more passionate. Elemental. They say they will stay forever. They always leave.
We met when Philip missed a flight out of Logan. I had business at the gallery that represents me in Cambridge and offered him a place to stay for the night: my hotel room.
“I don’t know too many painters,” he said. “Free spirits, right?”
He was intrigued by what I told him of the island. The sex was good. I told him my name was Lyssa. After that we’d see each other whenever he was on the East Coast. He was usually leaving for work overseas but would add a few days to either end of his trip, a week even, so we could be together. I had been on the island for—how long? I can’t remember now.
I began sketching him the second time he came here. He would never let me do it while he was awake. He was too restless, jumping up to pull a book off the shelf, make coffee, pour more wine.
So I began to draw him while he slept. After we fucked he’d fall heavily asleep; I might doze for a few minutes, but sex energizes me, it makes me want to work.
He was perfect for me. Not conventionally handsome, though. His dark eyes were small and deep set, his mouth wide and uneven. Dark, thick hair, gray-flecked. His skin unlined. It was uncanny—he was in his early fifties but seemed as ageless as I was, as though he’d been untouched by anything, his time in the Middle East, his children, his wife, his ex-wife, me. I see now that this is what obsessed me—that someone human could be not merely beautiful but untouched. There wasn’t a crack in him; no way to get inside. He slept with his hands crossed behind his head, long body tipped across the bed. Long arms, long legs; torso almost hairless; a dark bloom on his cheeks when he hadn’t shaved. His cock long, slightly curved; moisture on his thigh.
I sketched and painted him obsessively, for seven years. Over the centuries there have been others. Other lovers, always; but only a few whom I’ve drawn or painted on walls, pottery, tapestry, paper, canvas, skin. After a few years I’d grow tired of them—Odysseus was an exception—and gently send them on their way. As they grew older they interested me less, because of course I did not grow old. Some didn’t leave willingly. I made grasshoppers of them, or mayflies, and tossed them into the webs of the golden orbweaver spiders that follow me everywhere I live.
But I never grew tired of Philip.
And I never grew tired of painting him. No one could see the paintings, of course, which killed me. He was so paranoid that he would be recognized, by his wife, his ex, one of his grown children. Coworkers.
I was afraid of losing him, so I kept the canvases in a tiny room off the studio. The sketchbooks alone filled an entire shelf. He still worried that someone would look at them, but no one ever came to visit me, except for him. My work was shown in the gallery just outside Boston. Winter landscapes of the bleak New England countryside I loved; skeletons of birds, seals. Temperas, most of them; some penand-ink drawings. I lived under Andrew Wyeth’s long shadow, as did everyone else in my part of the country. I thought that the paintings I’d done of Philip might change that perception. Philip was afraid that they would.
“Those could be your Helga paintings,” he said once. It was an accusation, not encouragement.
“They would be Calypso’s paintings,” I said. He didn’t understand what I meant.
Odysseus’s wife was a weaver. I was, too. It’s right there in Homer. When Hermes came to give me Zeus’s command to free Odysseus, I was in my little house on the island, weaving scenes into tunics for Odysseus and the boys. They were little then, three and five. We stood on the shore and watched him go. The boys ran screaming after the boat into the water. I had to grab them and hold them back; I thought the three of us would drown, they were fighting so to follow him.
It was horrible. Nothing was as bad as that, ever; not even when Philip left.
Penelope. Yes, she had a son, and like me she was a weaver. But we had more in common than that. I was thinking about her unraveling her loom each night, and it suddenly struck me: this was what I did with my paintings of Philip. Each night I would draw him for hours as he slept. Each day I would look at my work, and it was beautiful. They were by far my best paintings. They might even have been great.
And who knows what the critics or the public might have thought? My reputation isn’t huge, but it’s respectable. Those paintings could have changed all that.
But I knew that would be it: if I showed them, I would never see him again, never hear from him, never smell him, never taste him.
Yet even that I could live with. What terrified me was the thought that I would never paint him again. If he was gone, my magic would die. I would never paint again.
And that would destroy me: to think of eternity without the power to create. Better to draw and paint all night; better to undo my work each dawn by hiding it in the back room.
I thought I could live like that. For seven years I did.
And then he left. The storm blew out to sea, the leaves were scattered across the lake. The house smelled of him still, my breath smelled of him, my hair. I stood alone at the sink, scrubbing at the pigments caked under my fingernails; then suddenly doubled over, vomiting on the dishes I hadn’t done yet from last night’s dinner.
/> I waited until I stopped shaking. Then I cleaned the sink, cleaned the dishes, squeezed lemons down the drain until the stink was gone. I put everything away. I went into the back room, stood for a long time and stared at the paintings there.
Seven years is a long time. There were a lot of canvases; a lot of sheets of heavy paper covered with his body, a lot of black books filled with his eyes, his cock, his hands, his mouth. I looked up at the corner of the room by the window, saw the web woven by the big yellow spider, gray strands dusted with moth wings, fly husks, legs. I pursed my lips and whistled silently, watched as the web trembled and the spider raced to its center, her body glistening like an amber bead. Then I went to my computer and booked a flight to Berlin.
It was a city that Philip loved, a city he had been to once, decades ago, when he was studying in Florence. He spent a month there—this was long before the Wall fell—never went back, but we had spoken, often, of going there together.
I had a passport—I’m a nymph, not an agoraphobe—and so I e-mailed my sister Arethusa, in Sicily. We are spirits of place; we live where the world exhales in silence. As these places disappear, so do we.
But not all of us. Arethusa and I kept in touch intermittently. Years ago she had lived on the Rhine. She said she thought she might still know someone in Germany. She’d see what she could do.
It turned out the friend knew someone who had a sublet available. It was in an interesting part of town, said Arethusa; she’d been there once. I was a little anxious about living in a city—I’m attached to islands, to northern lakes and trees, and I worried that I wouldn’t thrive there, that I might in fact sicken.
But I went. I paid in advance for the flat, then packed my paintings and sketchbooks and had them shipped over. I carried some supplies and one small sketchbook, half-filled with drawings of Philip, in my carry-on luggage. I brought my laptop. I closed up the cottage for the winter, told the Pendletons I was leaving and asked them to watch the place for me. I left them my car as well.
Then I caught the early morning ferry to the mainland, the bus to Boston. There was light fog as the plane lifted out of Logan, quickly dispersing into an arctic blue sky. I looked down and watched a long, serpentine cloud writhing above the Cape and thought of Nephele, a cloud nymph whom Zeus had molded to resemble Hera.
