The smile never wavered. “The deed was done. The bargain was kept.” He sounded truly puzzled, and Maggie began to grasp just how far from humankind this creature was.
“Where is the stone now?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
His expression grew shifty. “I gave it away.”
“To whom?” she persisted, asking the questions rapidly so that he wouldn’t grow bored.
“To a mage,” he answered.
“Which one?” she shot back.
“You know there’s more than one? Very good. I gave it to the mage who stands in the west.”
Maggie did a quick mental calculation. “That’s the Woodmage, if I remember right.”
His eyes brightened with surprise that she knew this. Good. He wasn’t bored now. He was staring at her with great interest.
“And what did the Woodmage do with the stone?” she asked, the words sounding like a riddle from a folktale, as did his answer.
“She swallowed it,” said Crow.
Maggie blinked. “And that was that?”
“And it grew, and it grew.”
“And then what?”
“She gave birth, in a dry wash bed, nine years later.”
“Nine years?”
Crow gave a bark of fox laughter. “Time is different for us than for you.”
Maggie sat down suddenly, feeling dizzy again, aware that she stood at a cliff’s sharp edge. “She gave birth in a wash bed. Cooper was there. She wouldn’t name the child, or tell him the father’s name, and so he called it after Johnny Gutiérrez,” she said, more to herself than to Crow.
“And I know the story is true for I danced at their wedding and drank at their feast.” said Crow, repeating a line that often ended the folktales of old Europe.
She looked at him sharply. “You told me Johnny Foxxe was human,” she accused.
“But he is. He’s Anna’s and Cooper’s child. It was only his birth that was … unusual.”
“Then María is the foster mother. The Woodmage.”
“The wood wife,” Crow agreed.
“From Cooper’s poems,” Maggie said, understanding at last. “He gave her that shape in his poems. An almost-human shape. She gave birth, she aged—she even loved him in her way,” she added, remembering the tender look on María’s face when she’d showed the old woman Cooper’s journal. “Did Cooper ever know who the child was?”
Crow yawned elaborately. “Cooper, Cooper, Cooper. Always Cooper. Ask him yourself if you want to know.”
“Perhaps I will. If I walked on the spiral path, would I be able to return?”
“If I showed you how.”
“Will you show me how?”
“And what will you give me?” he said. “Now tell me quick!”
She frowned. “What do you want?”
“Your firstborn, the donkey who shits coins of gold, the thing that stands behind your house,” he said.
“No, no, and no. What else do you want?”
“Your poems, your passion, your heat.”
“No,” said Maggie. “What else?”
“Johnny Foxxe.”
“He’s not mine to give,” she said flatly.
“You think not? Well then, Black Maggie, you must make an offer to me.”
“The first poem I write, or the last one.”
“It’s not enough. Quick! Make another.”
“My mother’s ring, that I’ve worn all my life.”
“Almost enough. Quick, quick! Make another.”
Maggie bit her lip, thinking hard. She had information that Tomás Yazzie had said was important—Crow might think so too. But Tomás had also said not to give that information to anyone she didn’t trust.
She said, “All right, here’s my final offer. Take it or leave it.”
“You’re bluffing.”
“Am I?”
“What is it then?” he said, his eyes bright with interest.
“I’ll give you my friendship. Besides poetry, it’s the only thing I’ve ever been good at. Tell me, quick, quick! Do you want it?”
“Interesting. No one’s ever offered that before.” He looked her up and down, eyes narrowed. “But is it worth it?”
She rose to her feet. “Davis Cooper thought so. And Tatiana Ludvic. And Johnny Foxxe.”
Crow smiled a feral and sharp-toothed smile. “I accept your bargain,” he said.
“Then we’re agreed,” Maggie told him. She’d worry later about what she’d just agreed to. Her head was spinning with riddles and answers … and the riddles that the answers posed in turn.
“Come,” said Crow, “we’ll prepare you for the journey. The path is not easy for one of your kind. You must become as One of Us.”
“And if I do, will you promise that I’ll return home safe, to my own human shape?”
“No. I make bargains, not promises. It’s not in my nature. I am what I am. But I will hold your essence here like a rock in my hand while your shape walks the past,” Crow told her. “Others have walked on the spiral path and come home again.” The shape-shifter’s face was serious now, and she found that for once she believed him.
She said, “If I walk into the past and talk to Cooper there, what if I say something or do something that changes what happened back then?”
He shrugged, unconcerned. “Then the present is changed, and the future shall be changed as well.”
“Could it change so much that I never came here? Or never even knew Cooper? Or Fox?”
“It could. But what does that matter? It is all what it is. It is all dammas.”
“It matters to me,” Maggie told him firmly. “I want the life I have, not another.”
“Those of your kind who would say that are rare indeed; that’s why you interest me.” Then he advised, “When you find Cooper, say little and listen much. Small changes are only ripples in Time—it is only the big ones you need fear.”
She nodded. “I’ll be careful.”
Crow cupped his hands, and she saw water in them. He let the water pour down to the earth. When it touched the ground, it burst into flame. The flames died out, leaving reddish-brown dust. Crow dribbled more water from the palm of one hand, and stirred the dust into a thin paint. He dipped one finger into it, and beckoned for Maggie to step closer.
He painted spiral lines on her cheeks and intricate knotwork patterns around each slim wrist. He unbuttoned her shirt, and painted more lines on her belly, and in the hollow between her breasts. He took off her boots, and painted jags of lightning on the soles of her feet. He untied a string of small bells from his ankle, and wound it around one of hers.
He said, “You must hold on tightly to the image of the place and the time where you wish to go. The spiral keeps turning; the motion will pull you into other directions. Don’t let it, or you may not be able to return. Stay clear. Stay focused. Don’t let your fear distract you. Think about Cooper in that house you know so well.”
“And when I want to return?” she asked.
“Then you must think of the mountain, and of me. I’ll hear the bells. I’ll know where you are.” He untied a white feather from a braid in his hair, and knotted it into Maggie’s. Then he held her wrist lightly, and led her to the edge of the cliff, where the path was waiting.
The midday air seemed to shimmer around her. The clouds looked almost solid underfoot. She said, “Why wasn’t Anna able to walk it? She knew so much. She had worked so hard.”
“She couldn’t take this next step,” he told her. “Anna lived a protected life. In her parents’ house. In Cooper’s house. And then in the house of her Christian God. This is a solitary path. She wished to walk it. She could not.”
“I’m not sure that I can either,” said Maggie, looking down at the valley far below. And yet she’d had a lifetime’s practice of stepping out into the great unknown. She thought of the day that she’d left West Virginia. She thought of the day she’d left Nigel.
Crow said, “Cooper did it. He walked the path. And y
ou are no less than Cooper.”
She met his eyes. “Thank you for saying that.”
“Don’t thank me,” Crow growled back at her.
Maggie took a breath. She looked straight ahead. And she stepped into the sky.
The clouds held firm under her feet. The sky grew dark around her. Absurdly, the images from old Roadrunner cartoons were running through her head: Coyotes spinning in the air; coyotes hurtling to the ground. Don’t look down, she told herself. Don’t think about that now. She thought about Cooper; she pictured his house; she pictured the man from the photographs stepping through a freshly painted blue door and onto the wooden porch. Around her the sky darkened into black; the spiral was a pathway of stars underfoot. It moved. It carried her, spun her into motion. She herself was dammas, that-which-moves. She heard a low humming, a soft, steady whisper, chanting in the language of the stars.
She thought about Cooper. She could see the house, a glimmer of light through the mesquite trees … but the stars spun her past it. She couldn’t get back. There was somewhere else that they wanted to go, pulling her to an image even more integral to the core of her being than Cooper’s.
She felt mud underfoot. The stars hung overhead. The night was cold, with a winter’s bite. Rain was sleeting down, drenching her unbuttoned shirt, gleaming on the black surface of a road. Where was she? The smell of the place was familiar. It made something ache deep inside of her bones. Then she saw the car come. A white Oldsmobile. She knew that car, and what it would look like the next morning when they dredged it from the silted riverbed. She watched it skid, flip over onto its roof, slice sideways through the thin guardrail to the steep bank of the river beyond, the faces of her parents both looking so pale, so small, so very young…
“No,” she whispered, staring at them. Time stopped. Collapsed. It was not dammas, this emptiness, this horrible stillness, frozen between one moment and the next. She pushed against it. Time moved, and its grinding motion pulled Maggie back to the path, her heart pounding, the blood roaring in her ears, spinning her away from that terrible place as she reached for something solid to hang onto.
It was the railing of a stairway. The stairwell was dark; the bulb was busted overhead. She knew this smell too: cigarette smoke, turpentine, rain on the London streets outside. She climbed steel stairs to a warehouse landing and stood before a familiar red door, her heart swelling with a thousand memories she’d thought she’d long forgotten. The door was plastered with postcards, smudges of color, a painter’s fingerprints.
In her hand was a key, and with it she opened the door. Inside, the huge half-empty loft was covered with dust. She looked slowly around the room at industrial windows, Tat’s bright monoprints, her own old desk, their jerry-rigged kitchen. Two women sat in some battered chairs, Tat, and herself, so young, so young, looking up at her in surprise. She started to speak—the spiral pulled, and she clung to the door, but it pulled her away. It flung her back into the night sky, away from the girl she’d once been.
Cooper, Maggie told herself, concentrate on Cooper and the mountain. Or she would drown in the past, the path like a flood of water, pushing her under. Concentrate. That light. The blue door. The black trees of the mesquite wood. She breathed in; she breathed out. The whispers, the chanting, they rose and they fell with the rhythm of her breath. She saw the blue door. She walked toward it, ignoring the grey-and-white images flickering past: her grandfather in that awful coat he loved and always used to wear; a sculptor walking the streets of Florence, looking like he’d lost something precious; Nigel, in a crowded room, his movements eloquent of great weariness… At the sound of her footsteps Nigel turned; she saw that his face was lined, his hair thinning, his blue eyes wide with fear or wonder… No, not that way; don’t get pulled into Nigel’s future. Think of Cooper, of walking to Cooper, and that light, that dusky, silver light…
She felt solid, sandy ground underfoot. The mountain smelled fresh, as it did after the rains. Dusk had fallen. A lantern was lit on the porch, where Davis Cooper sat. He stared, as though Maggie were a ghost, which she was, coming out of the wood.
She crossed beneath the Three Graces and stopped just short of the front porch steps. His eyes were wide. The clean lines of his face had started to weather into cragginess from the Arizona sun, alcohol, and grief. He might have been Maggie’s age, not much older, yet he put down his glass with a shaking hand, and his voice was the gruff voice of an old man. “Are you one of Anna’s, or are you one of mine?”
She swallowed. “I’m neither. I’m Marguerita Black, and I’m as human as you are, Cooper. I’ve come from … a long way away. Another point in time. On the spiral path.”
He took this information with equanimity. Maggie realized the man was very drunk. “Where are my manners?” Cooper said to her. “Sit down. Can I get you a cup of tea, or some gin?”
Maggie smiled, for Dora had been right—even on this mountain, he was still an Englishman. She shook her head. She could feel the spiral’s pull. “I don’t think I’ll be here long.”
“Why have you come then?” He sat very still, as if she might disappear if he moved.
She dropped her eyes, feeling suddenly shy of the stranger before her. “I came because you’ve been good to me. Will be good to me, years from now. And I never had the chance to meet you face-to-face while—” She stopped abruptly, but he finished the sentence for her.
“While I was alive?”
She nodded silently.
“How very interesting. You walked here on the spiral path. And you say that you are not a mage, a shape-shifter, or a witch?”
“I’m a poet,” she told him.
“Ah, now, that explains it,” Cooper said. She felt the ground shift underfoot.
“No, not yet,” she cried aloud, but the earth heaved, flinging her sideways, sending her rolling across the hard stones of the yard; the wind pulled at her, pulling her back to the roiling clouds and the stars.
Cooper, she chanted silently, over the song of the stars in her ears, Cooper, let me stay here with Cooper.
But the stars kept turning, the wind kept blowing; Time moved again, and the earth spun below. She stood at the center of the great spiral, the stars pulsing hot and cold around her, the lights of the valley spread beneath her, cradled by the dark mountain slopes. She thought about what Crow had told her: On the spiral path, the past and the future are simply two different directions. I stand in the present, and I can walk as easily to one as to the other of them.
The Cooper that Maggie needed to talk to was the man he had been these last twenty years, the man she had known, just before his death. She concentrated on that point in time, on a blue front door, more weathered now, and the old house as she knew it. She took a breath. Breathe in; breathe out. She breathed to the rhythm of the pulsing stars. She took several steps. She walked from here to there, and stood in the mesquite wood. She crossed over Cooper’s yard again, following the path she had taken before.
She saw lights inside, heard movement, and she went right in through the blue front door. Cooper was in the living room, taking paintings down from the adobe walls. He looked up in anger as Maggie walked in, then his face softened with his surprise.
“Marguerita,” he said, his voice as full of wonder as a child’s on Christmas morning.
“Cooper,” she said, feeling even more shy than last time, if that were possible—for this was a Cooper to whom she was real, and not just a ghost from the wood.
“You’ve come to me on the path again, after all these years,” the old man said.
“Yes.” She stood and just looked at him, the Cooper she’d wanted to see for so long, the face of the man who had been her mentor-—and more than that, her friend. Then she roused herself. “But I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay this time either.”
He frowned. “All right, then, my dear. Why don’t you come into my study? We’ll talk for as long as we can.”
Maggie followed him and was startled by the
change in the room where the poet worked. The place was a flood of papers and books, dirty dishes, laundry, stale pipe smoke. Cooper sat down in the middle of the chaos, and pushed books off of another chair for her.
He reached out, gently touching her cheek. “It’s you, in the flesh. I’m not drunk, and you’re here.”
“Goddamn it, Cooper,” Maggie said to him, “I would have come anytime, if you’d have let me.”
“How could I?” he said. “When you appeared on this mountain, when I was forty-two years old, you said that we’d never met in my lifetime. And so I dared not let you come.”
“Oh,” she said, startled laughter breaking from her. A broken piece of herself began to knit. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted her here. The look on his face was proof of that.
“If we only have a little time,” said Cooper, “then let us speak frankly. The Nightmage is still missing, I presume, and that’s why they have sent you here?”
“The Nightmage? Do you mean the stag man himself, or the painting of the stag man?”
“Both. For if the painting is found, surely the other will be found as well.”
“I know where the painting is,” she said carefully, without naming the place. “But that’s not why I’ve come. I don’t know why the painting is so important.”
“You don’t?” he said, puzzled. “Then why are you here? I thought they would have sent you on the path in order to search for it again. That’s why they come, when they come to me. Several times their Hounds have searched this house, but the scent of the stag eludes them. They don’t believe me when I tell them that I don’t have Anna’s painting, or know where it is.” He frowned. “Yet you say the painting has been found. Then why have they let you come here?”
She hesitated. She couldn’t begin to guess why Crow did anything he did. And she didn’t want to admit to him that she’d come to learn the reason for his death.
She looked away, and her eyes rested on the bulletin board above Cooper’s desk. The envelope was there, the letter to her, jutting out from the picture by Brian Froud.
Cooper followed Maggie’s gaze, and he paled. “You recognize that letter, don’t you? Then that means that I will fail.” He bowed his head. “I knew that was a risk. That’s why I was locking up the paintings, to keep them safe, just in case.”
The Wood Wife Page 27
