Windmaster's Bane

by Tom Deitz

  “I mean how bright. Bright enough to read by? Bright enough to barely feel your way around in if you’re not in shadow? How bright?”

  Alec returned David’s intense stare. “Not bright enough to read by, that’s for sure.”

  “Alec,” whispered David very slowly, “I know you’re not going to believe this . . . but I see a full moon.”

  “Made out of green cheese or painted blue, no doubt?”

  David sighed and flung his hands up in dismay; then he rose and jumped off the steps, striding decisively toward the driveway, his paces long and deliberate. Alec almost had to run to catch up.

  “Damn, Sullivan, what’re you doing fumbling around out here in the dark? Aren’t you at least gonna get a flashlight?”

  David turned almost savagely on his friend but did not slow down. “I don’t need a flashlight. I see a full moon, and I see by its light. If you want to come along, you’re welcome, but don’t slow me down; there’s something I gotta do tonight. I don’t know what it is yet, but something magic is cooking, Alec. I know it. Maybe, just maybe, if you come with me, you’ll see something too—and believe me.” His voice softened. “I don’t like not having you believe me, Alec. But you won’t without proof, so maybe I can give you some.”

  Alec stared at David as he followed him toward the logging road. “I just don’t want you breaking your leg in the dark or something.”

  “Ha!” came David’s scornful voice ahead of him, at the point where the trees began to close in. “You’re the one who needs to worry—especially if you don’t catch up.” His voice took on a lighter coloring. “There are werewolves on this mountain, I hear.”

  “Werepossums, anyway,” came Alec’s voice close behind him.

  An hour or so later they reached their destination. It was impossible to tell exactly how long the trip had taken, because David discovered he had let his watch run down: It still registered twelve o’clock. The moon seemed to have moved, too, but somehow in not quite the right manner. David shrugged it off. Time was the least of his worries.

  As he and Alec came into the open space of the lookout, David suppressed a chill as he recalled the last time he had been there. He glanced furtively at the sky before trotting over to stand on the overlook itself.

  There was the usual gut-wrenching sensation of being suddenly very high in the air, the more so because the wind blew fallen leaves about, blurring the distinction between sky and earth, even as the darkness itself did. The waterfall roared incessantly to the left, strangely loud as it poured into the pool, its edges fringed with decaying brown leaves.

  David and Alec found their customary ledge at the very tip of the lookout. Without a word they stretched out side by side, hands hooked behind their heads, gazing up at the stars. A meteor obligingly flashed out of the northwest. Alec pointed. “Did you see that? Nice one!”

  “I did.” David nodded.

  “You know, this old rock is pretty comfortable. I could nearly go to sleep here.”

  “You’d freeze half to death and be stiff as rigor mortis in the morning.”

  “Appropriately!”

  “Appropriately.” David levered himself up on his elbows. “We’d best start back soon. I don’t know why I wanted to come up here; I have no idea what I’d hoped to find.”

  “The Holy Grail?”

  “This is serious, Alec.”

  Alec closed his eyes. “Just wake me in the morning,” he sighed.

  David continued to watch the sky for a while, hoping to see another meteor—or something. Somehow, though, he could not seem to muster quite enough energy to start the long trip back home. Or was it that he still felt that sense of anticipation, as in something important were about to happen? He sat up again, hunched over, wrapped his arms awkwardly about his knees, and rested his chin on them, wishing he had brought a jacket.

  “Yes, it is a little cold,” came a voice behind him, a voice that sang in his ears like music, though the phrase was in no way remarkable. David would never forget the first words he heard that voice speak.

  He did not start when the voice sounded; rather, he very calmly and quietly stood up and looked back toward the mass of mountain—and was not at all surprised to see a robed figure sitting placidly on one of the rocks by the waterfall. His eyes tingled, too, but he scarcely noticed as he glanced one last time at Alec. His friend appeared to be sound asleep, a smile of almost abandoned pleasure curving the full lips above his pointed chin, making tiny dimples in his cheeks. David smiled in turn and slowly approached the figure. As he crossed the thirty or so feet between them, the thought came to him that he should not have been able to hear the man’s speech above the roar of the waterfall beside him—yet the voice had sounded clearly, like a whisper in an empty church.

  Almost without thinking David found himself sitting on a rock opposite the man. Beneath the gray-white hood the man seemed to look at David, and yet not at him; his gaze seemed fixed somewhere slightly above David’s head. Slowly the man extended a hand, brushed his fingertips briefly against David’s brow—and as slowly withdrew it—then raised both hands to the hood and flung it back.

  David watched almost as if hypnotized, taking in every detail: the ancient and corded hands, like old tree bark; the nails perfect and almost metallic-looking, a ring on each finger. No, on all fingers but one—each of them silver, but all different. The rest of the body seemed indistinct, nebulous. David could not make his eyes focus on it, but he had an impression of a slender form shrouded in long gray-and-white robes of a soft fabric like velvet. If moonlight was woven into fabric it would be like that, he thought.

  And the face . . . David hesitated to look full on it. It was the face of an old man, lined with a thousand wrinkles, yet still with its power and dignity about it, and still with the joy of youth playing about the lips and eyes. David realized that the appearance of age lay mostly on the surface, for the muscles and bones kept their firmness; it was more like a patina on silver or the fine network of cracks on an old painting. The hair was white, too, white as the stars in the sky, long, and infinitely fine, sweeping back from the furrowed forehead. And the eyes! David didn’t know how long he looked at those eyes as the man continued to smile softly in the silence. They were silver-colored: from edge to edge, dark silver. Blind, David knew instinctively, but beautiful, and infinitely strange.

  “You will have to look a long time to read my whole story there, David Sullivan,” the stranger said at last, and a hush fell about that place, as if the world had stopped to listen.

  “Who are you?” David managed to croak. “Why did you want me to come here?”

  “Did I want you to come here?” the blind man asked calmly.

  “Someone changed the moon down at my house. This isn’t the real moon.”

  “I’m a blind man. How could I know that?”

  “The same way I could hear your voice over the sound of the wind and the water,” said David, rather pleased with himself.

  “Well put,” said the blind man, smiling again. “And since I know your name, and thereby have power over you—according to some—I will give you mine in return. When I last walked freely among mortal men I was called Oisin.”

  “Oisin,” David said incredulously. It was a name he remembered from Gods and Fighting Men. The very sound of it cast shadows in his mind: of the ocean, of endless leagues of dark water sailed by a silver boat under a moon that never waned, while harp music floated softly over the waves; and then of other things: of the Sidhe, and the banshee; and the soft but threatening sheen of cold steel weapons well made.

  “It is a name like any other,” Oisin said quietly. “It conjures images like any other. Some day I may tell you what visions shine in my inner eye when I hear David Kevin Sullivan spoken aloud—or Suilleabhain, as it was in the tongue of your fathers.”

  David realized, then, that the language Oisin spoke was English, though strangely stressed and cadenced. There was none of that remote, heard-under-water quali
ty he recalled from his encounter with the Sidhe. That, he suspected, was their own language rendered intelligible in his mind alone.

  Oisin rapped David on the knee with his cane so that David flinched in alarm. “But I did not come here to speak of words and languages, boy. I came to speak of deeds. And particularly of your deeds, once and future.”

  “Deeds? I don’t plan any deeds. I just want to go on living a normal life, like I was living before . . .”

  “Like you thought you were living, you mean,” Oisin interrupted sharply. “Few men of this age stay up nights reading anything at all, David, much less the sort of things you read. And you have seen things no one in this land has seen—things no one may see and remain unchanged.”

  “You seem to know a great deal about me,” David observed suspiciously. “Buy why should I trust you? What difference does it make to you what happens to me?”

  Oisin turned his face toward the cold blue sky. “That would be obvious if you knew my story. Indeed, I am surprised you do not know it, but perhaps men have forgotten. At times I forget myself. Certainly most of the Sidhe seem no longer to recall that I was once a mortal man such as you; that blood red as yours once ran in my veins.”

  “Your story . . . ?” David ventured uncertainly.

  “I came to Tir-Nan-Og once, as a youth. Years I spent here, ageless. And then a craving came on me to return to Ireland. That grace the Sidhe granted me, but as soon as I touched the earth of that land, age fell upon me, and I withered where I stood. I can but recall with bitterness how I crept back here with my youth stricken from me by my own careless folly and by the curse of the Sidhe—how the Faery women would have nothing to do with me because I was no longer a fit lover, and how the Faery men lost interest because I was no fit opponent in their endless duels. I do not want that to happen to you, and it could—easily—in spite of the protection that is now upon you.

  “Nothing changes in Faerie, David: The dead do not stay dead; the living scarcely know they are alive. What passion there is, in love and hate, in pain and pleasure, has no fire beneath it. It is only gratification of the moment, for when time does not matter, neither does anything else. The past is gone, yet the present is so like it that there is little to distinguish this year from those a thousand gone. To the Dagda, the Sons of Mil came yesterday; to him the sun will fade tomorrow. There is eternity in a moment, and a moment may span a century.

  “Now look at me!” Oisin commanded fiercely. “Imagine your features cast upon mine, and ask yourself if anyone would wish this upon another of his own kind.”

  Almost against his will David found himself staring into the blazing gaze of the old man’s blind eyes. The force of the horror and regret he found there chilled him to the core. Finally he blinked, and stared at the ground.

  “Now do you see why I feel it my duty to speak to you?” Oisin asked, shifting his position slightly. “But enough of this. I have some things to tell you, and some things to ask you, but first of all I have a warning for you, and that warning is this: Beware the wrath of Ailill. He is a great threat to you and those you love.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” David snorted. “He’s been after me at least once today already . . . either him or somebody—or something—that works for him. There was this black horse that came after me and some of my friends while we were swimming. If it hadn’t been for all those white animals—they weren’t you, were they?”

  “White animals? No, I have not lately worn any shape but my own. Now tell me of these things.” Urgency filled Oisin’s voice.

  “Well, first there was a white dog, and then today I saw a white squirrel, and a white trout, and . . .”

  “Those would all be Nuada, I think . . . or some of his minions. He is of your faction.”

  “My faction? What faction?” David shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  “The Sidhe are of two minds about you, David,” Oisin said. “One side, of whom Ailill is chief, regards you as a threat. They say that when your people made the chariot road that passes near here, and thus it became an easy thing for great numbers of men to come into these mountains, there was then no longer a possibility of peace between the Worlds; that unless the Sidhe make a stand very soon, the day is not far off when only the Deep Waters will remain where the immortals may walk free—and there are no stars in the Deep Waters, and no moon. Ailill and his minions fear you, yet they dare not slay you, if only for fear of the wrath of Nuada and Lugh. But they would be glad to have you safely in Faerie so drunk on Faery wine that you never recall your own lands. This Ailill would have done on Lughnasadh had Nuada not tricked him—and had your answers not been so skillful. Ailill did not like that at all, for he and Nuada have become great enemies, and the rift between them grows wider by the day. Lugh is greatly vexed.”

  “Lugh is your king, right?”

  Oisin nodded. “The Ard Rhi—for this time and this place. It was not always so, nor will it always be. Nuada was king once; he may be again, and for your sake I hope that day is soon. It is his faction which feels that you may be of service to us as you are: a youth largely untouched by the grosser things of this world.” Again he rapped David on the knee. “This group feels that you may serve us best if you remain free among mortals, maybe in time to become a sort of ambassador between the Sidhe and mortal men, working in secret for their causes.”

  “But why would I do that? I’m mortal myself. And what would I do? Go to Atlanta and say to the Governor, ‘I’m David Sullivan, and the Irish fairies have told me to tell you not to build any more roads in the mountains ’cause they were there first’? Shoot! They wouldn’t listen to the Indians; they sure won’t listen to anybody they can’t see!”

  “The Indians gave us no sorrow,” Oisin said wistfully. “The Nunnihe, they called us.”

  “But I’ve only seen a couple of things,” David protested, “and already I’m fidgety all the time. I can’t trust anything to be what it looks like. I don’t mean Ailill any harm, Oisin! I don’t want to hurt any of the Sidhe.” David buried his face in his hands.

  “And they wish that you—and all men of this land—would leave them alone.” Oisin’s response was momentarily sharp; then it faded into gentler tones. “Oh, it is a true thing, lad, that no one may harbor ill will toward what he does not know exists, but the taint of mortal men nevertheless intrudes more and more into Faerie. The days of the Sidhe in the land you call Ireland are nearly finished because of that intrusion. Here in these mountains the taint is less, yet now this land, too, is becoming closed—by things like the iron tracks that once lay where the chariot road now lies. Fifty years they have been gone, yet the shadow remains. The Road is still very weak there, the Walls between the Worlds very thin. For that brief distance the Sidhe must ride almost wholly in your World. And this year those Walls were thinner than ever before, only the faintest veil of glamour. Anyone with even a trace of Power could hear our music and see our lights. And such Power is in you and in your brother as well, though it still sleeps in him. What has awakened it in you, I do not know. But we have more important things to discuss now. You said you thought Ailill had been after you already?”

  “If that really was him today—that water-horse thing. And there was a really weird wind, too. Could he have had something to do with that?”

  Oisin shrugged. “Neither would surprise me at all; Ailill is very fond of shape-shifting, and is a master of winds and tempests as well, though it seems strange that he would attack you by daylight, for his Power is greatest at night. As I mentioned before, a protection has been laid upon you. I imagine he seeks to learn its nature, and so uses the tools he knows best. But, more importantly, he fears the threat he thinks you embody—and a frightened man is very, very dangerous.”

  David drummed his fingers on his leg. “But what about the ring? It’s mixed up in this, I’m sure. Is it the protection you spoke of earlier?”

  “Ah.” Oisin smiled. “The ring. I was myself among the host th
at you encountered, and even as we rode away, I reminded Ailill of the promise he had made to you for a token of the meeting, and how it was an ill thing for him not to see that part of the bargain fulfilled. Oh, he was in a black mood after his double defeats, let me tell you, and he dismissed me with a shrug, saying that if tokens were wanted, someone else would bestow them.

  “And then I thought of these many rings I have, each given me by a Faery lover when I was young”—and Oisin spread his fingers so that David could see the intricate metal work, the almost infinitely tiny gems—“each one of which is magic, but one alone, I knew, affords protection against the Sidhe themselves, for it was forged by a druid of the Fir Bolg and once belonged to Eochaid their king. That ring I caused to be put on your finger.”

  “But how . . .”

  Oisin smiled simply. “One learns much magic in a thousand years, even those of mortal birth such as I was before I put away the substance of your world. Mortality is both a blessing and curse, David, for though it shortens our lives, it quickens our wits.”

  “You say the ring protects me?” David asked cautiously.

  “It will protect you and those you love—those you truly love—from the Sidhe. While you possess it, the Sidhe are powerless to do you any physical harm. They may not touch you against your will, and their magic will have no power over you. But the ring has its limits. I yet retain some control over it, for instance, such as I used to bring you here, and the Straight Tracks are a greater Power and older; even the Sidhe do not understand all their workings.”

  “But how will I know whom it protects?”

  “You have only to watch, for you are not without Power yourself. Things have Power because you give them Power, David, do not forget that. Discover that Power! Use it! There are people, for instance, to whom you have given enough of yourself, knowing or unknowing, that part of your Power is in them. Just as there are things like that, and places—Places of Power for you, like this one. There is part of you in that boy over there”—Oisin pointed to where Alec still slept—“or in that red-haired girl.”