Cloven Hooves

by Megan Lindholm

  I lose track of the days very quickly, for each day is now divided into two wakings and two sleepings. Likewise, I have no idea how far we have traveled. Pan leads the way in a veering path that avoids all but the smallest towns. Twice, he terrifies me by taking me straight through small towns during the dark hours. Once it is right down the main street, lit by street lamps, where his hooves echo on the pavement. We pass a tavern that snores out a blast of country-western music, and a little convenience store where a bored clerk leans both her elbows on the counter and stares out past us as we go by. No one sees us, and I fall asleep that night wondering if I am real anymore.

  The second time is even scarier, for he takes me down alleys and through backyards, up and over fences, ignoring barking dogs roused by the sounds of our passage. One Labrador sets up a baying at sight of us. Even my dull nose scents the change in Pan’s identity, to a mingling of wolf and bear that sends the Labrador backing under its porch even as a snarl wrinkles its nose. Dogs all over the neighborhood go off, a siren of barkings at the stranger scented in their midst. We drop into the next yard, race across, and scramble up the fence even as I hear the creak of a screen door and an angry male voice exclaim, “Damn kids!”

  But after that second town is left behind, we are in the woods for days, skirting low hills, occasionally climbing over them. I miss the human gardens and hen houses, but Himalayan blackberries are everywhere, heavy with dark fruit. There are cloudberries, too, the color of pale salmon eggs. Wild hazelnuts are ripening in their green husks and rabbits are plentiful. Pan and the forest provide.

  He seems to know where he is going. Not just north, even I could manage that, but when to follow a river and when to leave its banks, when to climb over a hill and when to go around it. He never takes us near sprawling suburbs or big cities. Somehow, he wends his way north through a patchwork of places left wild or nearly so.

  The nights are growing cooler. It is the ageing of the year as well as our northward progression that carries us into a cooler world. Few words have passed between us in our migration, but one evening, I ask him, “Do you think we will get there before winter?”

  “Get where?” he asks me.

  We are under a cedar tree, sleeping in a huge fragrant pile of dry needles we have scraped together. My head is pillowed on his shoulder, and the front of me is warm where I press it against him. But my backside is cold despite the blanket over us. “Wherever we’re going,” I reply. A small pang of worry hits me as I realize I no longer have any fixed destination at all in mind. Once it was Fairbanks, then it was Alaska—now it is up to Pan. Each day I’ve been following him without thought. His arm snugs me up against him and he turns his face to kiss me gently on the forehead.

  “Don’t worry about it,” he tells me. “Winter, fall, spring, summer—it doesn’t matter. I can keep you safe. You’re in my world now, and even though I may no longer be counted a god, some things still bow to my will.” He pauses, then asks gently, “Why do you ask? Are you getting tired?”

  I have to think before I answer. He’s right. The last few days I have felt more weariness than before. It is harder for him to wake me, and easier for me to drop off to sleep, no matter where we are. My lower back and legs ache at the end of the day. “A little,” I tell him, somehow ashamed to admit the weakness.

  “Don’t worry,” he tells me again, and holds me close, his hands moving soothingly over my back, easing the aches I had scarcely been aware of. “We’ll go more slowly, if you like.”

  “I’m okay,” I tell him sleepily. The varying pressure of his hands on my back is almost hypnotic. A bubble of question rises in my mind. “If you’re not a god anymore, what are you?”

  “Sshh,” he tells me softly, fingers treading my spine gently. “I am what I am,” he adds, almost unwillingly. “Just as you are what you are.”

  “What am I?” I mumble into his neck.

  “You, oh, you,” he says, his voice going deep and purring, becoming almost a lullaby as he half sings the words, “you are a memory reawakened, a tie re-formed, the woman who kisses us fresh with humanity’s lips. You’re the life-giver, the warm breast, the cradling arms. You’re what we need and what we love best, the forest in the woman, the woman in the forest …”

  There is more, but the deep idling of his voice has spelled me, so that the sound of him speaking is more important than the words. I spiral down into sleep within his arms.

  The next morning I come awake on my own. I have overslept, dawn is already greying the skies and the last stars are no longer visible. He is not beside me, and for a moment I know panic, not at sight of him, but at his absence. I start up, but there he is, by a small fire burning almost smokelessly. Spitted meat is toasting over it. He is carving something with my sheath knife. When he sees I am awake, he tosses a handful of whittlings in the fire. He comes to me, and I lift our blanket, inviting him in, but he only crouches beside me. “Hungry?” he asks, stroking my hair.

  “A little,” I say, puzzled at this break in our routine. He sees it in my eyes.

  “I’ve been thoughtless,” he tells me gravely. “Too demanding, for oh, your sweetness is hard to resist.” He cups my chin in his hand. “Lie still and let me bring you food.”

  He brings me not only the meat, but berries, miner’s lettuce and watercress, and some scrubbed roots I do not recognize. He sets it all out on a mat of maple leaves. I feel uneasy. He has obviously been awake for some time, to gather all this. “Aren’t we going to travel today?” I ask him.

  He smiles, and any fears I have at his unusual behavior melt with his smile. He knows me too well. “You don’t like me gentle and considerate?”

  “I do. It’s just … why?”

  “Why do the flowers open up in the sunlight?” he asks me, and again there is that singing tone to his voice, as if words are not enough for what he must say. “Why do plantlets uncoil from their seeds in spring’s warmth?” He pauses, and laughs aloud, visibly delighted at my confusion.

  “I want to be gentler with you,” he tells me softly, reassuringly. “That’s all. To take better care of you.”

  It is all very puzzling, but I know from past experience that I will get no answers from him until he wishes to give them. We eat together, but he allots me the lion’s share, for the food seems to make me aware that I was, indeed, very hungry.

  We do travel that day, but only for about two hours. Then he calls a halt. It is probably a hot day in the world of pavement and freeways, but here beneath the trees it is merely fine. The canopy of leaves and needles overhead gentle the sunlight to a restful dimness. When I sit down to rest, he sits beside me and pulls me to lean against him, but makes no move to mate me. Instead he lifts his pipes and plays for me. The tune is very sweet, and strangely familiar, but for once I cannot tell what it is he is playing. This seems to please him, for he plays it over and over again, ever softer and slower, until I drowse off to the notes softly breathed by my ear.

  When I awake in late afternoon, there is food again, in enough variety that I am amazed at his foraging. We eat slowly, and then travel again. We strike a deer trail and follow it. The going is much easier than it has been, and soon I am aware that our pace is slower than it was before. “Is something wrong?” I ask his back, and he turns that smile on me once more.

  “Everything is better than right,” he tells me, and reaches back to take my hand.

  And so we go on, stopping before night is truly black, near the banks of a river. I listen to it as he builds a tiny fire, and I know from the sound that it is swift and powerful. Rocks are grinding along in that flow. I wonder if we must cross it, and how. I think I should go and look at it, it is no more than a five-minute walk from the sound of it, but I am suddenly just too tired. I am drowsing off until he awakes me and nudges me into a nest of pine boughs. Instead of joining me, he tucks the blanket in all around me. He sits at my feet and, limned by the fire, lifts his pipes and plays again. He is a black silhouette against the amber glo
w of the firelight. Occasionally sap pops in the wood, and then sparks float up to join the notes of his music in the night. Tonight he plays the river, and a heron fishing the quiet shallows. The last thing I remember is hearing the notes of silver droplets flying from the struggling fish the heron lifts in its beak.

  I awaken the next morning with a slight headache. Again there is a plenitude of food and solicitude. But my headache makes me snappish and critical. “Stop treating me like an invalid,” I tell him as he crouches by the bed with food. “You make me feel as if I’m made of glass.”

  “Of crystal, dear heart, and amber, and shards of emeralds in your eyes,” he tells me, and grins delightedly when I glare at him. I am sick of his coyness.

  “What is the matter with you?” I demand angrily.

  “Only that I am too delighted to quarrel, my love.”

  “Why don’t you want me anymore?” I demand, and surprise myself by realizing that this is at the core of my anger.

  “Not want you? Sooner would I not want air in my lungs. It is only that you are tired, and sometimes I am … overly enthusiastic.”

  “I haven’t complained,” I point out awkwardly. His poetics are starting to jar. I want to burst out crying, for no reason at all, and this more than anything annoys me and sets the headache to throbbing fiercely.

  “Oh, my love,” he says sympathetically, and the sappiness of his tone and the fact that he knows I have a headache without my telling him only make my anger grow.

  “Stop it!” I command him.

  “All right,” he says meekly, but sits looking at me with eyes as dumbly adoring as a cocker spaniel’s.

  “I mean it!” I cry out, and hear my own shrewishness. But I cannot stop myself from pleading, “Please, just be like you used to be. Stop being so smarmy!”

  “I’ll try,” he says earnestly. “I promise.”

  It is the best I can get from him.

  TWENTY

  * * *

  He leads me upriver. The banks of the river are all large rounded rock and river gravel, with occasional narrow belts of sand between the gravel and the water’s edge. The footing is treacherous, for hoof or foot. The river shifts enough in its course from year to year that there are no large trees close to it, only white snags that have been washed down, and small brush and trees footed in silt and sand, doomed to an early death some floodtime. The bright sunlight glances off the water, dazzling my eyes and leaving spots of light flashing before me every time I blink. The river seems to possess a wind that blows along with it, and as the chill air races past my ears they ache. I put up my hands to cover them but drop them away when I catch Pan looking back at me anxiously.

  I have always hated it when people are solicitous of my health. To me, it seems the ultimate invasion of privacy, and to find Pan so concerned smacks of betrayal. I feel patronized. What I want of him, I am finding, is for him to be one hell of a good friend. Yes, and a sexual partner who is in it for the wild and romping side of it as well as the slow erotic touches. His tender poetics and coddling grate on my nerves. It’s a little like being with someone who gets sloppy, weepy drunk. No matter how much you like the person, the out-of-character behavior gets old in a hurry. But then there is something in me that wants to be touched by his careful sidelong glances, that appreciates the way he holds the branches that cross the trail so they will not whip back in my face. Yet another side of me hisses that he did not always think I was such an idiot that I’d let a tree branch hit me. Actually, I can remember times when, as children, when we were following each other, we’d deliberately try to snap each other. Friendships like that never really end, I comfort myself. Yes, but romances do. Lovers almost always quarrel and part, and then what becomes of the friendship they traded in for the romance?

  Pan has halted and is staring out over the river. Here it is, the sign is plain, this is a place where larger animals sometimes cross. A gravel bar makes a foaming barrier across the current, and reaches almost but not quite to where another bar stretches from the other side. It can be done. The deer sign proves it. But Pan stands and stares at it long. Then he glances back at me.

  “There’s another place,” he suggests. “A better ford, only a couple of miles farther upriver.”

  “This one looks fine to me,” I reply contrarily. I know I sound brusque.

  He looks at me quietly for a few moments, then reaches back to take the strap of my bag. “Let me carry that for a while,” he suggests. “It looks heavy, and I know you’re tired.”

  I am, I suddenly realize, drained and weary, just from this morning’s brief hike. He tugs at the bag, and suddenly I am furious at my weakness. Human frailty, I scoff at myself, and already the satyr is thinking I am too weak, thinking I need to be coddled and comforted. Thinking I don’t belong in his forest, his world.

  “It’s fine,” I snap, and push past him on the trail, step and slide down a short bank of gravel and sand and out into the river.

  The water is cold, glacier fed, and it closes around my ankles like vise grips. Gravel shifts treacherously under my sneakers as I wade out. The current is stronger even than I expected, and as the water gets deeper, I feel myself sway in its grip. “Evelyn Sylvia!” the faun breathes like an invocation, and suddenly he is beside me, up-current from me. “Hold on to me!” he commands me.

  “Hold on to yourself,” I reply, intending the crudeness, and plunge ahead of him, out of his reach. The cold water is near knee-deep; the grinding song of the river as it tumbles gravel in its bed is all around me. The silty river shatters the sunlight and throws the sharp shards up into my eyes. I take a step, and suddenly the gravel slides loose around my foot, and I am in above the knee. More than half the river is still before me. I feel Pan catch hold of the strap of my bag. “Let’s go back,” he shouts above the sound of the water. “It’s a bad crossing, too many hot days lately. Too much glacier ice turned into water?”

  I know he is right, but a madness is on me, I feel compelled to prove myself.

  “Hell, we can make it,” I shout in tones of daring and bluff camaraderie. “Don’t be chicken!”

  Another step, and I am thigh-deep. My legs are shaking, both with cold and resisting the flow of the water.

  “It’s too deep,” he protests, and I feel the drag of his grip on the bag.

  I take another step. It all happens at once, the rocks rolling under my feet, the river seizing me, the strap of the bag giving way. I lurch sideways, the sky seems to roll, and then boiling grey milk closes over me. The icy shock of the water on my torso squeezes a gasp from me, and I snort in river water. Cold in my sinuses, funny thing to think when you’re drowning. I’ve never been good with deep water, never learned to swim, but panic triggers instincts, and I am striking out, flailing at the water. My feet brush tantalizingly against gravel, I feel myself spin in the current. My eyes are open, but the thick silty water is opaque, I can’t see a damn thing. The strap of the bag is tangled around my arm, I can’t get free of it. Suddenly my whole body is washed up against a gravel bottom. With a surge of adrenaline strength, I roll to my knees, stand, and stagger into knee-deep water.

  My hair is streaming into my eyes, all I can see is light. I choke and sputter, trying to take in air at the same time I gasp out water. Water and the roar of the river dampen my hearing. “Pan!” I call, shuddering off water like an animal.

  The reply is a splash and a gargling shout. I rub water from my eyes, open them despite the fine grit sanding them. He is a dozen feet from me, in deep water, struggling against the current. I hold out my hands, take two steps toward him, into chest-deep water that sucks wildly at me. He flings himself desperately toward me, our hands touch and grip. Fear is wild in his face, and then his feet find the bottom, and like a galvanized frog leg he is leaping and jerking us both to shore.

  Milky water streams from both of us. The thin sunshine of the day is impotent to warm us. I am shaking too violently to speak as we crawl, hands and knees, up the sliding bank to
the sparse shelter of river bushes. At least here the wind is less. I sink down immediately, almost on top of Pan, angrily claw the bag and strap free of my arm. “Idiot!” he barks, the word rattling past his chattering teeth. “You ass! You nearly got us all drowned.” He clutches me and pulls me tight against him. His skin is cold against my hands, but we hold tight to each other. When the shuddering becomes only shivering, we rise and stagger farther from the river, into an area of tall, sun-browned river grass.

  The wind seems less when we sink down here, but I am still cold. Gritting my teeth, I pull off my soggy clothing, wring it out, and spread it to dry. Everything in the pack is soaked as well. I drag it out, spread it in the sun. Pan is still lying on his side in the grass, half curled, his eyes closed. His face is screwed up as if he’s in great pain. I kneel by him, ask, “Are you hurt?”

  His eyes fly open, and I have never seen such fear. “The worst moments of my life; of any lives I can remember! You went in and the only thing I could do was jump in after you, knowing it was useless.” A shudder runs over him. “Evelyn. I can’t swim. None of my kind can. I knew we were all going to drown.”

  I lie down beside him in the crackling, poking grass and curl around him. My belly is to his back as I put my arms around him and think about his words. Biblical. Greater love than this hath no man, that he lay down his life for another. Probably applied to fauns as well. It is not something I can understand, someone loving me that much. It is not something I can accept. I don’t want it, it’s too big a responsibility. “Don’t love me like that,” I tell him softly. “I don’t know how to be loved that way.” Being already asleep, he doesn’t answer me. It takes a long time for me to doze off beside him.