Widdershins

by Charles de Lint

  “Dog that is not a dog,” she said in a low voice. “What do you want from me?”

  Grey

  Having promised Jack I’d talk to Raven, I make my way across town to the Rookery on Stanton Street where he lives. I don’t expect much of anything to come of it. These days, Raven might call himself Lucius Portsmouth and look like a man, but he’s still not exactly engaged with the world around him the way the rest of us are. It’s just him, in that big house of his, living inside his head. He’s not supposed to be as bad as he once was, but from all I’ve heard, he firmly believes that people should handle their own problems.

  “That’s how you grow,” is what I’ve been told he says when people come to him looking for help.

  I know it seems harsh, but I guess when it gets around that you’ve made the world, everybody must come by asking for just this one little favour, or maybe just that one, and there’s not enough time in any one day to deal with it all.

  Or at least that’s the argument I use when I’m speaking outside the corbae clans. Personally, I believe that if you can make a difference, it’s your responsibility to do so. Especially when you’re responsible for the world the rest of us find ourselves in. But it’s not like Raven would listen to that coming from me any more than he’d stop whatever he’s doing to come talk to the buffalo.

  I found myself wondering if he even saw the world anymore. When he stepped outside the Rookery, did he ever stop to appreciate this big old sprawl of dirt and green and stone for the grace and beauty that could still be found in it, or did he only see the parts we’d messed up?

  I’m guessing he only saw the mess, or he’d be more proactive.

  But I was still going to talk to him, so I keep on walking.

  The oak trees lining the street are filled with cousins, marking my passage as I follow the sidewalk to Raven’s tall house, my boot heels clicking on the concrete. Though they’re mostly crows, I catch the white flash of a magpie’s tail and spy a few rooks and jays. I can hear them gossiping about me, but they don’t call out to me directly, and the business I have is for Raven’s ears alone, so I don’t try to start up a conversation.

  I get about a half block from where Raven’s house rears up above the treetops when suddenly all those birds take to the air and fly off in a burst of black wings and raucous complaints.

  I turn to see what’s disturbed them and just shake my head. Now there was something you didn’t see too often, a great big lunk of a salmon swimming through the air like he’s making his way through deep water.

  I stop and wait for him to approach.

  I suppose I should be more nervous—on my guard and ready to fight—but I’m really tired of how long this has dragged on, of listening to the ghosts of all the people who’ve gotten hurt through the years because of this stupid enmity between the two of us. Lizzie wasn’t the first; she’s just the latest. I’m ready for this to be over. It’s long past time we finished our unhappy business with each other. But as I stand there waiting for him to come down, I find myself thinking mostly about how Odawa’s timing sucks, the way it always does.

  He changes from salmon to man just before he reaches the ground, landing way more gracefully than a blind man should have been able to. He should have gotten all entangled in that robe he’d taken to wearing. He should at least have had to put his arms out for balance, the way we corbae use our wings on our final descent to a roost. But I’ve learned over the years that you never get what you expect from Odawa.

  It’s no different now. I can’t get a reading from him. No way to guess his emotional state. No sense of what he has planned, how he’ll attack.

  “Your wife cursed me before she died,” Odawa says as he approaches me, his voice conversational. “She cursed me to wander forever, but never reach my destination.”

  If he’s willing to talk instead of fight, that’s fine with me—I don’t see violence as a solution, though I won’t back down from it if it comes looking for me. But I can’t shake the clock ticking in my head. I need to get in to see Raven as quickly as I can, so that after he turns me down, I can rejoin Jack while I can still lend him some help.

  “Your destination,” I repeat.

  The blind man nods.

  “Which was me.”

  He nods again.

  That explains a lot. I’ve wondered why Odawa has never mounted a direct attack against me in all these years. He always comes at me from the side, slipping out of the shadows to hurt the people I’ve come to care for the most. I’d always thought it was just some cruel streak of his, wanting me to feel the loss over time, rather than having it all over with at once by killing me. My wife Mira had been the first he’d taken from me, but she wasn’t the last. That’s why I prefer a solitary existence now. It’s lonely, this life I lead, but it’s far easier on my conscience.

  I’d never guessed it was because of a curse that he’d been kept from me. Trust Mira. Even dying, she’d been looking out for me—the same as I would have done for her.

  Mira.

  She died so long ago, but right now it feels like yesterday.

  Thinking of her, of what Odawa had done to her, I want to rip his eyes out all over again, along with his heart. But I make myself pretend the same calm he’s projecting.

  “And now . . . what?” I ask. “Your destination’s changed?”

  “Hardly. I had help.” He holds up a piece of string with two knots tied into it. The thing stinks of fairy magic. “And here I am.”

  I nod. “You’re here, your bogan pets are out killing cerva, your buffalo army is about to lay waste to this city. You’ve been a busy little fish, haven’t you?”

  I can tell the barb cuts. He pretends differently, but I know him and his pride, which is why I’d called him a little fish. I hoped to put him on edge, annoy him enough that he might make a mistake. It isn’t likely, but it’s worth a try, because I need some kind of advantage here. He’s an old spirit and undoubtedly much more powerful than this corbae jay.

  “I had nothing to do with the gathering of buffalo,” Odawa tells me, his voice stiff.

  I shake my head, then realize he can’t see the movement.

  “You have everything to do with it,” I say. “But then you don’t own up to your mistakes, do you? Any more than you take the time to think a thing through before you set it into motion.”

  The blind gaze stays on mine, leaving me with the disconcerting impression that he can actually see me.

  “After all these years,” he says, “you still know nothing about me. My clan is the clan of wisdom, and what you took from me was the ability to study the ancient texts as they are laid out in the Yisual patterns of the world. I can feel them, but thanks to you, I can’t see them.”

  “No,” I tell him. “Salmon are the clan of knowledge, not wisdom. It’s easy to acquire information. Wisdom comes from knowing how to use that information. So using me as the reason you stayed stupid is no excuse.”

  If his voice was stiff earlier, now it’s positively frosty.

  “I don’t make excuses,” he says. “Just as nothing I do is unplanned. If I’d wanted to orchestrate a war, I could have easily done it. But this nonsense the cerva have put into motion is their own doing, not mine.”

  I don’t know if he’s trying to convince himself or me, but I’m not buying it. One thing with cousins: we know the connectedness of everything, so it’s easy to see where one thing begins or another ends. He might be blind, but he shouldn’t be blind to that.

  “However it got started,” I tell him. “I have to stop this thing.”

  “Since when are buffalo your concern?”

  “A friend asked me to help. Besides, it’s what I do.”

  “You stop wars,” he says, sarcasm thick in his voice.

  “No, I try to help people. It’s just usually not on such a large scale.”

  “Like you helped me.”

  I just look at him for a long moment.

  “We both know how that rea
lly went down,” I say finally. “And I take responsibility for it. But you’ve either got to let it go, or we really have to deal with it here and now. Today.”

  “What about your mission?”

  He’s good with the sarcasm, I’ll give him that. Just the right sneer of superiority in his voice. But I’m not going to play into it, and I decide to take what he’s saying at face value.

  “Why would you care?” I ask.

  “What makes you think I do?”

  I sigh. “We’re not high school kids, Odawa, so can’t we let go of the posturing here for just a minute? I need to talk to Raven, to see if he’ll help stop the buffalo. Will you let me do that before we finish this business between us? The Grace knows, you’ve waited long enough that another few minutes shouldn’t kill you.”

  Until now, I’ve never realized how much I use a person’s eyes to read what they’re thinking. I can’t get anything from Odawa, obviously, not with that milky-white gaze, but I do get the sense that he’s genuinely curious and serious about what he asks me next.

  “That’s really all you’ve been doing?” he says. “Helping people?”

  It’s not something I like to talk about. It always strikes me that if you talk about it, you’re not doing it for the people you help anymore. You’re doing it for yourself.

  “You’ve been following me long enough,” I say. “What do you think?”

  There’s a long pause before he finally gives me a slow nod.

  “I never really thought about it,” he says.

  “So what’s it going to be?”

  “You want to talk to Raven?”

  “It’s more that I promised I would.”

  “Fine,” Odawa says. “But I’m coming with you.”

  I have to look at him for a long moment, trying to figure out if he’s actually being reasonable, but I still can’t read him. So I take the chance, and turn my back on him, heading for Raven’s house. I hear his footsteps fall in behind me.

  Whiskey Jack

  North, in the Kickaha Mountains, Whiskey Jack stood on a high slope where a break in the trees created by slabs of granite gave him a long view of the valley that lay below his vantage point.

  Wetlands stretched from one end of the valley to the other. They’d begun as a small lake, fed by a natural spring, but beaver had damned the stream that drained from the valley, the backed-up water slowly rising to swallow all of the land except for a few small islands supported by granite outcrops. Cedars stood throughout, tall, grey and dead, returning to life and green only on those islands and the surrounding slopes where they rose up out of the waterlogged valley. Where it wasn’t choked with swamp grass and reeds, the surface of the water was still as glass, reflecting back the sky, the cedars, the immediate hills.

  Jack sighed.

  He wasn’t fond of this swampy land. All those dead cedars depressed him, and he didn’t like getting his feet wet. He also didn’t like all the little mosquito and deer fly cousins who made such places their home and eagerly fed on intruders. But he supposed he had to go down there.

  He turned back into the woods and worked his way down through the trees until he reached the edge where solid ground grew marshy. He was just mapping out the route he’d take to reach the largest of the islands where Ayabe was supposed to make his home, when a deep voice came to him from the forest to one side of the lake.

  “So, do you have that thousand dollars you owe me?”

  Jack turned to see Ayabe leaning against the trunk of a tall dead cedar. In human form, he still stood almost seven feet tall, big and broad-shouldered with an impossible rack of antlers rising from his brow. He didn’t seem to feel their weight.

  “You do remember that poker game?” he added.

  “You must be thinking of my brother, Jim,” Jack said.

  “I happen to know that you don’t have a brother.”

  “Then somebody’s been feeding you lies. My litter had two boy pups and one girl. I’m the youngest, and I’m telling you now I couldn’t possibly owe you any money.”

  “And how’s that?”

  Jack shrugged. “When it comes to poker, I don’t lose.”

  “I wonder if it’s only with poker.”

  Jack didn’t see where the knife came from. One moment Ayabe’s hand was empty, the next it held a twelve-inch blade. The cerva smiled humourlessly as he threw the knife.

  Jack moved his head just enough so that the blade went by his ear, imbedding itself in the trunk of a cedar behind him with a dull thunk. It would be so easy to pluck it out of the wood and throw it back. He’d aim for the chest, though, not the head. Head shots were always tricky, but it was hard to miss as big a target as the cerva’s chest.

  It took all his will power not to retaliate. Instead, he schooled his features to remain calm and took a steadying breath.

  “I’m guessing you weren’t actually trying to hit me,” he said.

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Would you have missed?”

  Ayabe laughed. “You’re a cocky one, I’ll give you that.” He waited a beat, then added, “Are you going to show me some respect and offer me a smoke?”

  “Sure,” Jack said. “Why not. It wasn’t like you were trying to kill me.”

  Taking out his tobacco and papers, he rolled a fat cigarette and lit it with his Zippo.

  “Nice lighter,” Ayabe said as he accepted the proffered cigarette and took a drag.

  “I won it from Cody in a game. Like I said—”

  “You don’t lose.”

  Jack shrugged. “Though gambling’s probably the only area in my life where that applies.”

  Ayabe had a second drag and offered the cigarette back to Jack.

  “That’s okay,” Jack said. “I’ll roll myself another.”

  Ayabe looked across the lake while Jack built his own cigarette. The cerva absently rubbed his antlers against the cedar behind him as he smoked, creating a steady snowfall of bark flakes that fell to his shoulders.

  “I’m guessing you’re here about the buffalo,” he said, once Jack got his own cigarette lit.

  Jack nodded. “So you’ve heard about it.”

  “A cousin would have to be dead and long in the grave not to have.” He paused, then added, “Though come to think of it, Minisino’s managed to swell his ranks with a great many spirits of the long dead, as well as the living that make up his own clan.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “He’s got himself an army, so you know this is going to be a mess. A lot of innocents are going to die.”

  “You know where my sympathies lie. A lot of innocents are already dead.”

  “I know, but—”

  “I’m surprised you don’t feel the same.”

  “I suppose I have a problem with laying the sins of the fathers on their children.”

  “The aganesha who have been killing cerva aren’t exactly innocents,” Ayabe said.

  “No, of course not. It’s just . . .”

  “What exactly do you expect of me?” Ayabe asked.

  Jack knew he had to play this exactly right. He was only going to get the one chance to make his argument.

  “I don’t expect anything,” he said. “But I’m hoping for a favour.”

  “You want me to stop them.”

  There was the hint of amusement in Ayabe’s voice, but it didn’t show in his eyes.

  Jack shook his head. “I’d like you to convince them that we can work this out another way.”

  “And what would that be?”

  “The guilty will have to pay for what they’ve done.”

  Ayabe fell silent. He finished his cigarette, his gaze on the distance of the lake’s far shore. Jack didn’t push for an answer. He simply followed the cerva’s lead and finished his own smoke.

  “And you can make this happen?” Ayabe asked finally.

  Crap, Jack thought. He should have known it would come down to this.

  “I can’t promise that it will,” he finally
said, “but you’ve got my word that I’ll do whatever it takes to see this through.”

  “Even if it means your life?”

  Jack hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  “These aganesha mean that much to you?” Ayabe asked.

  Jack shrugged. “Truth us, I couldn’t give a damn about most of them. But I know war isn’t the way to work this out.”

  “Sometimes the board needs to be cleared.”

  “Except this isn’t a game,” Jack said.

  “Which means you might lose.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s not about me. In the long run, everybody’s going to lose. I don’t want to see that. And I’m hoping that even you, living here in the back of nowhere, might feel the same way.”

  Ayabe fell silent and the minutes ticked by.

  “Do you really have a brother?” he finally asked.

  “Ask around,” Jack told him. “He gets some kind of kick out of pretending to be me. I think it’s because I was the runt of the litter, but in the end, I turned out stronger and smarter than he could ever hope to be.”

  “And more humble, as well.”

  Jack shrugged. “I know my limitations. But I know my strong points, too. I’m just stating the facts. I’ve never met you before. I don’t owe you anything. But if collecting what my deadbeat brother owes you is what it’ll take for us to close this deal, you’ve got it.”

  “No, that’s all right,” Ayabe said. “I can collect my own debts.”

  “So, will you help me?”

  “I can try. But I don’t hold the sway over the cerva clans the way you might think I do, and Minisino’s never been one to take advice.”

  “All I can ask is that you try. I’ve got a friend getting the word to Raven. Maybe the two of you together can convince him to let us find a better solution to the problem.”

  “Raven, you say?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  Ayabe slowly shook his head. “No. I’m just . . . surprised to hear that he’ll be involved.”

  “Don’t know that he is—not yet. But we’re working on it.”

  Ayabe pushed himself away from the tree he was leaning against and straightened up.