Plumage

by Nancy Springer

  “I love your luggage,” Racquel said, eyeing her tote bags.

  Sassy refused to acknowledge the sarcasm. “Thank you.” She brushed past him and headed for the mirror.

  The shop spread around her hushed and shadowy, as before. The feathered collars and capes rustled and whispered as before. She stood in front of the same dimly glimmering mirror as before.

  Only her blue budgie looked back at her out of the dark glass. Stupid bird. Sassy was starting to think that maybe she ought to give it a name. Hold a mirror up for it to look at and see if it would chirp. Teach it to talk or something.

  She sighed and set her bags on the floor; it didn’t look as if she’d be going anywhere real soon. Of course it couldn’t be simple; why should anything be simple? Maybe it depended on the phase of the moon or something. Maybe it was because of menopause, or something she ate.

  Maybe she’d imagined the whole thing, like Racquel wanted to believe. Maybe she was crazy.

  No. There was a blue parakeet looking back at her—

  Even crazier. Racquel was right. He—

  But he had never answered her question, that other time. “Racquel,” she asked him again, “what do you see in the mirror?”

  “What do you mean?” He slouched closer, his handsome brown face expressively blank. He seemed to be in a sour mood this evening.

  “Just tell me. What do you see?”

  “I see you, backwards. What the hell should I see?”

  But Sassy barely heard him, for in the dark depths of the glass something swirled—Sassy gasped. It was not a resplendent presence this time, just an intimation, a movement, something lifting into flight between feathery trees, a long flow of hair or mantle or pinion, a comely head turning away. Something about that starlit glimpse made Sassy yearn as if for eternal love. She cried out and lunged after it, hands outstretched, fingers questing.

  She dived into the mirror as if into a pool of limpid water, and like water, the mirror closed behind her.

  Perched silent, unable to sing, too dejected even to search for food, Kleet contemplated his utter failure. For a short while there had been shreds of hope. But he had left hope behind in the hardair world.

  That strange, shining world—he had gone there questing for a mate but had found her not. Instead, he had flown into love of a different sort, he had found Deity—but a wrathful deity who had tested him almost beyond endurance. A deity who had driven him away from the joy of her presence until the fell day when the captive air had turned to mist-vine and entangled him in its meshes.

  Then, that hawkbeak day, she had come to his aid. She had rescued him and nested him in her warm branches. With her holy twigs she had smoothed his ragged feathers. She had sung to him. She, Deity.

  And he had thought his trials were over.

  But then somehow—the One Tree …

  It was the One Tree he had seen in the oval pool of hard air. And he had left his newfound deity and flown to the One Tree; he could not do otherwise.

  Nothing less could have cozened him away from her.

  Yet it was nothing. Some strange beckoning, that was all. And here he was, home again, but alone.

  Sassy landed on something soft, started to scramble to her feet, then sank back onto her butt and just gawked.

  Her first thought was glory, glory, before her stuttering mind could find the word for which it was searching: forest. Between trees that towered out of sight amid cloud, spokes of lambent light sifted down, not quite reaching the ground. Sunlight? Sassy’s mind stammered some more; wasn’t it supposed to be night? But she couldn’t think; treetops and sunlight rang with wild cries she could not identify, and she gaped up at a vast confusion, gold, green, bright, dark—she could take it in only a bit at a time. A scarlet spike unfurling from a mossy bole. Barbaric jade-green swordblades. Purple-green swags trailing fringes of—liana, grape, ivy? Celadon filigree balls far overhead—mistletoe? Sassy glimpsed flits of shimmer and movement everywhere, yellow, orange, azure—but when she looked to see what they were—efts, birds, butterflies?—she saw only misty greengolden glow, heard only the echoing flutelike calls of what might have been birds or—or fetches or some eerie spirit that lived in mirrors. And the trees, so soaring—surely any or every one of them must have been the world tree, the arbor vitae, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

  “Eden,” Sassy whispered. “Paradise lost.”

  But where—where was the bird-being she had glimpsed in the mirror? And what was it? An angel with a flaming sword? And how in the name of heaven … where was she to find her parakeet in all this?

  Or her lost soul?

  The magnitude of what she faced made Sassy sag back and just lie there on the moss—it was no wonder she had landed on moss, for moss grew shaggy everywhere in the twilight under the trees, on the ground, on boulders and boles and roots that swelled and knotted like muscles. Sassy lay amid moss and ghostly, nodding white plants like Irish clay pipes, and glossy lavender mushrooms, and shoots putting up translucent leaves. Saplings grew whip-thin, yearning toward the distant light, probably doomed to die. It was a shadowland down here, far beneath the paradise up above. Sassy grew aware of a babbling sound—running water somewhere, and also her mind. Lost, her mind dithered, lost scared wet hungry

  “Hush.” Sassy got up, comforted herself with the thought of graham crackers, and turned around to pick up her bags. They were of course not there. There was nothing there but moss and more mushrooms, Spam-pink this time. She had left her totes on the floor in PLUMAGE, probably five feet away but it might as well be—

  Forever, bleated her brain.

  “Hush!” At least there was water. And the water prompted Sassy to put a mundane name to the place so she wouldn’t be so scared. “It’s just a rain forest,” she told herself sternly.

  Except it wasn’t. Sassy had read enough books on rain forests to know that it wasn’t. The towering, vine-draped trees made her think of such a primal jungle, but this eden was sweetly cool, not hot or humid or rife with bugs. Some of the immense tree trunks vanished upward into a green so deep it seemed almost black—galaxies of needles. They were conifers of some sort—redwoods? Sequoias? And what about the mistletoe? And what would English ivy be doing in a rain forest?

  A black-and-lavender butterfly the size of a robin bobbed by like a Muppet. A misty-gray moth the size of what Sassy considered a normal butterfly fluttered up. Then, from somewhere above, a foot-long pinion the color of dawn floated down, spiraling on the air like maple wings. Within arm’s reach in front of Sassy it halted, hovering four feet above the ground, then wheeled so that its shaft pointed away from her.

  Sassy gawked at the feather behaving in defiance of gravity. Then, simply because it was beautiful, she reached for it.

  The feather scooted just beyond her grasp, then stopped again.

  It was silvergold tea rose whisper tawny pink and lustered like nacre. Sassy stepped forward and lifted her hand, but her fingers hovered like the feather; caution had kicked in. What sort of uncanny thing was this? And what might it do to her if she touched it?

  The shimmering pinion wheeled toward her, then turned away again, pointing about twenty degrees to the right.

  “Am I, uh, am I supposed to follow?” Sassy asked—rhetorically, of course. She was one of those middle-aged women who talked to herself, even in the supermarket.

  The feather, however, seemed to hear her. It jiggled encouragement, nodded like a horse, and led off.

  “Now wait a minute!” It seemed to Sassy that she ought to take time to think about this. Come up with a plan. Formulate some options.

  The feather paused where it was and bobbed on the air like the blip on the monitor of somebody working up to a heart attack.

  “Um, okay, okay!” Options, what options? Sassy swallowed hard, swallowing her dithers, and walked after it.

  “Look,” Racquel told the police detective, “I just know her to have coffee with her.”

  “Ma’am,
that’s not what the other maids said.” The cop was a no-neck flat-faced man who spoke with a ponderous show of respect but probably knew that any self-respecting woman hates to be called “ma’am.” Racquel, of course, knew himself not to be a self-respecting woman and he was trying not to sweat or let fear show in his face or his taut body. The shaky hands were the hardest to control. Damn, he was scared. What might happen to him if he got taken in, searched, what might happen if he went to jail … no. Don’t think about it.

  “… hung around with you a lot,” the police officer was saying.

  “For God’s sake,” Racquel said, “maybe she just went away for a few days.”

  “For nine days so far? Without calling in to work? Without stopping her mail or canceling her dental appointment? Without telling her landlady, without telling anybody? Did she tell you she was going on a trip?”

  Racquel did not answer. He did not know what to answer. It seemed out of the question to try to explain to the officer that Sassy had gone on a little jaunt through the mirror after a stray parakeet.

  “On a trip, you think? With two tote bags? Which is what she was carrying when she was last seen, heading in here.” The policeman paused to slowly scan PLUMAGE’s racks of feather-trimmed gowns with half-lidded eyes, showing no expression. “At 11 P.M. of the evening of February 27,” he resumed.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Racquel said.

  “I think you do.” The cop suddenly looked him straight in the face, and Racquel could not help flinching. “Aren’t you usually closed at that time of night?”

  “Usually. Maybe I stayed late—”

  “Yeah, yeah, to do the books or something. I think I’ll have a look around, if that’s quite all right with you.”

  “It’s not all right. Do you have a warrant?”

  “This shop is open to the public, ma’am. I don’t need a warrant.” The cop headed for the back room.

  “If you stay in the public area.” Racquel didn’t know why he was arguing. His black-boy upbringing was kicking in, making him mad, making him stupid.

  “I can come back with a warrant, if you like,” the cop said. “For your arrest.”

  It probably wasn’t true. But the possibility that it was made Racquel sweat, he couldn’t think of what to say, and the cop was already through the door into the office/storage area, where Racquel had stowed Sassy’s tote bags, figuring she’d be back for them sometime. Hoping she’d be back. Kind of worried about her, but couldn’t think of anything he could do about it.

  The cop had already found the totes as Racquel strode in. Racquel perched on the edge of the desk so as not to squash his bustle, glad he was wearing his crimson shantung with the cutaway back and the hackle-trimmed band collar; hackles always gave him confidence, and he knew his bare shoulder blades made him look sexy. He watched the policeman kneel and root through the totes, find Sassy’s wallet, look in it for ID and grunt with satisfaction as he stood up.

  “Still say she wasn’t here?” he asked, shooting a hard look at Racquel.

  “I just said I wouldn’t know.”

  “And I said I think you do know. I think you better come down to the station with me.”

  Racquel crossed his legs to draw attention to his gold strappy sandals with escargot heels and shook his head, making sure it was tilted at an attractive angle. Playing it as dumb-blonde as he could considering that he was six feet tall and black. “Sorry, Officer, I can’t. I have things to do here.”

  “You don’t seem to understand, ma’am.” The cop lowered his head like a charging bull but spoke patiently. “I’m taking you in for questioning. Get your coat.”

  “I don’t have to go unless you’re arresting me, do I? And if you’re arresting me, I want a lawyer.”

  The police officer stared at him. The police officer took a long breath and let it out again. “You refuse to cooperate?”

  “I’m cooperating! I just told you, I have things to do, you know? I have to get the payroll together. Get some orders off. Clothes don’t just stock themselves, you know?”

  The police officer stared at him. Racquel lowered his false eyelashes to half-mast.

  “I’ll be back,” the cop said. He swaggered out.

  Racquel sent his employees home and locked up. Ten minutes after the cop had left, Racquel stood in front of the mirror via which Sassy had made her inexplicable exit, venting his feelings in expletives.

  “Jesus jumping on the water, what a mess!”

  He clicked at the mirror with his enameled fingernails, finding it glassily unyielding. He pushed at it with his palms. He glared at his reflection, noticing that he had chewed off his lipstick and his lips looked like a hamburger bun. This was no time to worry about fixing them. “Mirror, you gotta let me in,” he said.

  He frowned, then tentatively launched himself at the mirror. His forehead impacted it painfully. He stood back, rubbing it.

  “Mirror, come on! I gotta get her back and keep my lovin’ tuckus out of jail.”

  He tried going in hands first and broke a nail. He swore some more.

  “Mirror, what’s the matter with you? You want the lights off, is that it?”

  He tried it with the lights off. He tried to step in, sidle in, dive in. He tried coaxing the mirror and kissing it. He tried threatening to break it, and he would have followed through on the threat except—then what?

  He passed from desperation into sweating frustration into despondency. When he reached despair he said, “Damn you,” turned his back on the unresponsive mirror, leaned against it, tilted his head back and closed his eyes to think.

  As if pushed off the edge of a swimming pool he fell backward into an alternate lucidity.

  With a lump in her throat, Sassy gazed up a misty green ravine at a waterfall so ravishing it made her think of drowning herself in its sunbow beauty. Spray bathed her face like tears.

  Then, mingled with the music of the torrent she heard another voice singing, a human voice, a tenor so sweet it brought real tears to her eyes. She shifted her gaze to the pool below the waterfall. There, swirling in the eddies and drifting toward her, floated the face and streaming hair of a handsome young man with his eyes lidded but his mouth wide open in song. Face to the sky, he lay with his head upon a sort of curlicue raft—no, it was a harp, a lyre. Sassy stood rapt in the beauty of his song, although she could not understand the words.

  At first she assumed that the rest of him was swimming below the surface. But as he drifted closer, she gasped, for she saw that there was no body.

  Still, he was the closest thing to a human being she had yet seen. She hated to interrupt the song, but—“Excuse me,” she called to him as he floated past her, “where am I?”

  His mouth closed, song cut off, and his eyes opened and gave her a lapis gaze which seemed not to understand.

  “What place is this, I mean?”

  He spoke something brief in a language which clearly was not English. His eyes closed again as he floated on downstream.

  From somewhere far, far above, echoing down as if from a distant star, his song began again, but this time in a young woman’s wild soprano voice.

  Sassy gasped and gawked up where the crowns of the trees forming a lacy jigsaw limned with turquoise—sky so bright it made Sassy blink. That vast riddle of sky and treetops revealed to her nothing. She saw intimations of cobalt and canary which might have been blossoms or birds or god-sized butterflies or quirks of sungleam amid the greenery or an angel taking a joyride in a chariot of gold. Anything, anything might have been hidden in that immensity. The voice sang like a rebel angel, like a bird of paradise, like a sunbow forming in the murmur of the cataract, like wind from the stars:

  … what you find in shadowland

  depends on what you’ve lost

  wanderers in shadowland

  abandoned souls in shadowland

  eidolons in shadowland …

  Sassy heard no more, although the music continued, for percussion joined in as if
God were practicing to be a drummer and was using the earth for his bass. Whomp whomp whomp, and with a snap and rattle of vines and saplings, something massive sprinted out of the shadows. Sassy gasped and stepped back as a huge bird ran past, twice as tall as she was, its legs as thick as city trees. It looked like a pinheaded ostrich on steroids. For a moment she thought she was seeing a dinosaur, a thunder lizard. Then she wasn’t sure what she was seeing. Whatever it was, so Godzillan was the reverberation of its footfalls that Sassy was not aware of the drumbeat of galloping hooves until the pursuers swept past, laughing: golden youths in Grecian pleated tunics, riding bare-legged and bareback on their finely profiled steeds, as if a vignette from an amphora had come to life. A knight in shining armor would look like a dump truck by comparison.

  But no, he didn’t. Here came one now.

  … eidolons in shadowland

  glory forest limboland

  and who you find

  depends on whom you’ve lost …

  The song faded away like a rainbow. The bass drumbeat of an extinct bird’s running feet faded; hoof thunder faded into distance. Sassy heard only the murmur of the waterfall and the silvery jingle of spurs as the—no, it wasn’t a knight after all. For a moment—why had she thought it was a knight? Because the horse wore a silver-studded breastplate? Whatever. It was a white horse, of course, with a lot of Spanish flashiness about it, and on board was a cowboy in a white Stetson and white fancy-tooled leather chaps.

  She stood there in a stunned trance, as if she were watching the mother of all parades; what next? She stared shamelessly. The cowboy halted his head-tossing cayuse and touched his gloved fingers to the brim of his hat.

  “How do, little lady?” he drawled with just the right crinkle of smile she remembered from her childhood days watching Bonanza. Under the wide brim of that white hat he was a suitably weathered, rugged Marlboro Man of a cowboy, with maybe a touch of Little Joe Cartwright thrown in.