Fantasy Magazine Issue 58, Women Destroy Fantasy! Special Issue

by Fantasy Magazine

  At last she took the big drum, the journey-drum, out of its wicker case and set it on the sheepskin. The drum would help her partway on her travels. But when she crossed the border, she would have to leave body, fingers, drum all at the crossing, and the drum would fall silent. She needed so little: just a tap, tap, tap. Well, her heart would have to do.

  Moon dropped cross-legged on the sheepskin. Right-handed she took up the knife and drew lightly on the floor around herself as if she were a compass. She passed the knife to her left hand behind her back, smoothly, and the knife point never left the slate. That had been hard once, learning to take the knife as Alder Owl passed it to her. She drew the circle again with a pinch of salt dropped from each hand, and with cedar and myrtle smoking and snapping on their charcoal bed. Finally she drew the circle with wine shaken from her fingers, and drank off the rest. Then she took up the drum.

  She tried to hear the rhythm of her breathing, of her heart, the rhythm that was always inside her. Only when she felt sure of it did she begin to let her fingers move with it, to tap the drum. It shuddered under her fingers, lowing out notes. When her hands were certain on the drum head, she closed her eyes.

  A tree. That was the beginning of the journey, Moon knew; she was to begin at the end of a branch of the great tree. But what kind of tree? Was it night, or day? Should she imagine herself as a bird or a bug, or as herself? And how could she think of all that and play the drum, too?

  Her neck was stiff, and one of her feet was going to sleep. You think too much, she scolded herself. Alder Owl had never had such trouble. Alder Owl had also never suggested that there was such a thing as too much thinking. More of it, she’d said, would fix most of the world’s problems.

  Well, she’d feel free to think, then. She settled into the drumbeat, imagined it wrapped around her like a featherbed.

  —A tree too big to ever see all at once, one of a forest of trees like it. A tree with a crown of leaves as wide as a clear night sky on a hilltop. Night time, then. It was an oak, she decided, but green out of season. She envisioned the silver-green leathery leaves around her, and the rough black bark starry with dew in the moonlight. The light came from the end of the branch. Cradled in leaves there was a pared white-silver crescent, a new moon cut free from the shadow of the old. It gave her light to travel by.

  The rough highroad of bark grew broader as she neared the trunk. She imagined birds stirring in their sleep and the quick, querulous chirk of a squirrel woken in its nest. The wind breathed in and out across the vault of leaves and made them twinkle. Moon heard her steps on the wood, even and measured: the voice of the drum.

  Down the trunk, down toward the tangle of roots, the knotted mirror-image of the branches above. The trunks of other trees were all around her, and the twining branches shuttered the moonlight. It was harder going, shouldering against the life of the tree that always moved upward. Her heartbeat was a thin, regular bumping in her ears.

  It was too dark to tell which way was down, too dark to tell anything. Moon didn’t know if she’d reached the roots or not. She wanted to cry out, to call for Grandmother, but she’d left her body behind, and her tongue in it.

  A little light appeared before her, and grew slowly. There were patterns in it, colors, shapes—she could make out the gate at the bottom of the garden, and the path that led into the woods. On the path—was it the familiar one? It was bordered now with sage—she saw a figure made of the flutter of old black cloth and untidy streamers of white hair, walking away from her. A stranger, Moon thought; she tried to catch up, but didn’t seem to move at all. At the first fringes of the trees the figure turned, lifted one hand, and beckoned. Then it disappeared under the roof of the woods.

  Moon’s spirit, like a startled bird, burst into motion, upward. Her eyes opened on the center room of the cottage. She was standing unsteadily on the sheepskin, the journey drum at her feet. Her heart clattered under her ribs like a stick dragged across the pickets of a fence, and she felt sore and prickly and feverish. She took a step backward, overbalanced, and sat down.

  “Well,” she said, and the sound of her voice made her jump. She licked her dry lips and added, “That’s not at all how it’s supposed to be done.”

  Trembling, she picked up the tools and put them away, washed out the wooden bowl. She’d gathered up the sheepskin and had turned to hang it on the wall when her voice surprised her again. “But it worked,” she said. She stood very still, hugging the fleece against her. “It worked, didn’t it?” She’d traveled and asked, and been answered, and if neither had been in form as she understood them, still they were question and answer and all that she needed. Moon hurried to put the sheepskin away. There were suddenly a lot of things to do.

  The next morning she filled her pack with food and clothing, tinderbox and medicines, and put the little ash drum, Alder Owl’s drum, on top of it all. She put on her stoutest boots and her felted wool cloak. She smothered the fire on the hearth, fastened all the shutters, and left a note for Tansy Broadwater, asking her to look after the house.

  At last she shouldered her pack and tramped down the path, through the gate, down the hill, and into the woods.

  Moon had traveled before, with Alder Owl. She knew how to find her way, and how to build a good fire and cook over it; she’d slept in the open and stayed at inns and farmhouses. Those things were the same alone. She had no reason to feel strange, but she did. She felt like an imposter, and expected every chance-met traveler to ask if she was old enough to be on the road by herself.

  She thought she’d been lonely at the cottage; she thought she’d learned the size and shape of loneliness. Now she knew she’d only explored a corner of it. Walking gave her room to think, and sights to see: fern shoots rolling up out of the mushy soil, yellow cups of wild crocuses caught by the sun, the courting of ravens. But it was no use pointing and crying, “Look!,” because the only eyes there had already seen. Her isolation made everything seem not quite real. It was harder each night to light a fire, and she had steadily less interest in food. But each night at sunset, she beat Alder Owl’s drum. Each night it was silent, and she sat in the aftermath of that silence, bereft all over again.

  She walked for six days through villages and forest and farmland. The weather had stayed dry and clear and unspringlike for five of them, but on the sixth she tramped through a rising chill wind under a lowering sky. The road was wider now, and smooth, and she had more company on it: Carts and wagons, riders, other walkers went to and fro past her. At noon she stopped at an inn, larger and busier than any she’d yet seen.

  The boy who set tea down in front of her had a mop of blond hair over a cheerful, harried face. “The cold pie’s good,” he said before she could ask. “It’s rabbit and mushroom. Otherwise, there’s squash soup. But don’t ask for ham—I think it’s off a boar that wasn’t cut right. It’s awful.”

  Moon didn’t know whether to laugh or gape. “The pie, then, please. I don’t mean to sound like a fool, but where am I?”

  “Little Hark,” he replied. “But don’t let that raise your hopes. Great Hark is a week away to the west, on foot. You bound for it?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose I am. I’m looking for someone.”

  “In Great Hark? Huh. Well, you can find an ant in an anthill, too, if you’re not particular which one.”

  “It’s that big?” Moon asked.

  He nodded sympathetically. “Unless you’re looking for the king or the queen.”

  “No. A woman—oldish, with hair a little more white than black, and a round pink face. Shorter than I am. Plump.” It was hard to describe Alder Owl; she was too familiar. “She would have had an eggplant-colored cloak. She’s a witch.”

  The boy’s face changed slowly. “Is she the bossy-for-your-own-good sort? With a wicker pack? Treats spots on your face with witch hazel and horseradish?”

  “That sounds like her . . . What else do you use for spots?”

  “I don’t know, but the horsera
dish works pretty well. She stopped here, if that’s her. It was months ago, though.”

  “Yes,” said Moon. “It was.”

  “She was headed for Great Hark, so you’re on the right road. Good luck on it.”

  When he came back with the rabbit pie, he said, “You’ll come to Burnton High Plain next—that’s a two-day walk. After that you’ll be done with the grasslands pretty quick. Then you’ll be lucky if you see the sun ‘til you’re within holler of Great Hark.”

  Moon swallowed a little too much pie at once. “I will? Why?”

  “Well, you’ll be in the Seawood, won’t you?”

  “Will I?”

  “You don’t know much geography,” he said sadly.

  “I know I’ve never heard that the Seawood was so thick the sun wouldn’t shine in it. Have you ever been there?”

  “No. But everyone who has says it’s true. And being here, I get to hear what travelers tell.”

  Moon opened her mouth to say that she’d heard more nonsense told in the common rooms of inns than the wide world had space for, when a woman’s voice trumpeted from the kitchen. “Starling! Do you work here, or are you taking a room tonight?”

  The blond boy grinned. “Good luck, anyway,” he said to Moon, and loped back to the kitchen.

  Moon ate her lunch and paid for it with a coin stamped with the prince’s face. She scowled at it when she set it on the table. It’s all your fault, she told it. Then she hoisted her pack and headed for the door.

  “It’s started to drip,” the blond boy called after her. “It’ll be pouring rain on you in an hour.”

  “I’ll get wet, then,” she said. “But thanks anyway.”

  The trail was cold, but at least she was on it. The news drove her forward.

  The boy was right about the weather. The rain was carried on gusts from every direction, that found their way under her cloak and inside her hood and in every seam of her boots. By the time she’d doggedly climbed the ridge above Little Hark, she was wet and cold all through, and dreaming of tight roofs, large fires, and clean, dry nightgowns. The view from the top of the trail scattered her visions.

  She’d expected another valley. This was not a bowl, but a plate, full of long, sand-colored undulating grass, and she stood at the rim of it. Moon squinted through the rain ahead and to either side, looking for a far edge, but the grass went on out of sight, unbroken by anything but the small rises and falls of the land. She suspected that clear weather wouldn’t have shown her the end of it, either.

  That evening she made camp in the midst of the ocean of grass, since there wasn’t anyplace else. There was no firewood. She’d thought of that before she walked down into the plain, but all the wood she could have gathered to take with her was soaked. So she propped up a lean-to of oiled canvas against the worst of the rain, gathered a pile of the shining-wet grass, and set to work. She kept an eye on the sun as well; at the right moment she took up Alder Owl’s drum and played it, huddling under the canvas to keep it from the wet. It had nothing to say.

  In half an hour she had a fat braided wreath of straw. She laid it in a circle of bare ground she’d cleared, and got from her pack her tinderbox and three apples, wrinkled and sweet with winter storage. They were the last food she had from home.

  “All is taken from thee,” Moon said, setting the apples inside the straw wreath and laying more wet grass over them in a little cone. “I have taken food and footing, breath and warming, balm for thirsting. This I will exchange thee, with my love and honor, if thou’lt give again thy succor.” With that, she struck a spark in the cone of grass.

  For a moment, she thought the exchange was not accepted. She’d asked all the elements, instead of only fire, and fire had taken offense. Then a little blue flame licked along a stalk, and a second. In a few minutes she was nursing a tiny, comforting blaze, contained by the wreath of straw and fueled all night with Alder Owl’s apples.

  She sat for a long time, hunched under the oiled canvas lean-to, wrapped in her cloak with the little fire between her feet. She was going to Great Hark, because she thought that Alder Owl would have done so. But she might not have. Alder Owl might have gone south from here, into Cystegond. Or north, into the cold upthrust fangs of the Bones of Earth. She could have gone anywhere, and Moon wouldn’t know. She’d asked—but she hadn’t insisted she be told or taken along, hadn’t tried to follow.

  “What am I doing here?” Moon whispered. There was no answer except the constant rushing sound of the grass in the wind, saying hush, hush, hush. Eventually she was warm enough to sleep.

  The next morning the sun came back, watery and tentative. By its light she got her first real look at the great ocean of golden-brown she was shouldering through. Behind her she saw the ridge beyond which Little Hark lay. Ahead of her there was nothing but grass.

  It was a long day, with only that to look at. So she made herself look for more. She saw the new green shoots of grass at the feet of the old stalks, their leaves still rolled tight around one another like the embrace of lovers. A thistle spread its rosette of fierce leaves to claim the soil, but hadn’t yet grown tall. And she saw the prints of horses’ hooves, and dung, and once a wide, beaten-down swath across her path like the bed of a creek cut in grass, the earth muddy and chopped with hoofprints. As she walked, the sun climbed the sky and steamed the rain out of her cloak.

  By evening she reached the town of Burnton High Plain. Yes, the landlord at the hostelry told her, another day’s walk would bring her under the branches of the Seawood. Then she should go carefully, because it was full of robbers and ghosts and wild animals.

  “Well,” Moon said, “Robbers wouldn’t take the trouble to stop me, and I don’t think I’ve any quarrel with the dead. So I’ll concentrate on the wild animals. But thank you very much for the warning.”

  “Not a good place, the Seawood,” the landlord added.

  Moon thought that people who lived in the middle of an eternity of grass probably would be afraid of a forest. But she only said, “I’m searching for someone who might have passed this way months ago. Her name is Alder Owl, and she was going to look for the prince.”

  After Moon described her, the landlord pursed his lips. “That’s familiar. I think she might have come through, heading west. But as you say, it was months, and I don’t think I’ve seen her since.”

  I’ve never heard so much discouraging encouragement, Moon thought drearily, and turned to her dinner.

  The next afternoon she reached the Seawood. Everything changed: the smells, the color of the light, the temperature of the air. In spite of the landlord’s warning, Moon couldn’t quite deny the lift of her heart, the feeling of glad relief. The secretive scent of pine loam rose around her as she walked, and the dark boughs were full of the commotion of birds. She heard water nearby; she followed the sound to a running beck and the spring that fed it. The water was cold and crisply acidic from the pines; she filled her bottle at it and washed her face.

  She stood a moment longer by the water. Then she hunched the pack off her back and dug inside it until she found the little linen bag that held her valuables. She shook out a silver shawl pin in the shape of a leaping frog. She’d worn it on festival days, with her green scarf. It was a present from Alder Owl—but then, everything was. She dropped it into the spring.

  Was that right? Yes, the frog was water’s beast, never mind that it breathed air half the time. And silver was water’s metal, even though it was mined from the earth and shaped with fire, and turned black as quickly in water as in air. How could magic be based on understanding the true nature of things if it ignored so much?

  A bubble rose to the surface and broke loudly, and Moon laughed. “You’re welcome, and same to you,” she said, and set off again.

  The Seawood gave her a century’s worth of fallen needles, flat and dry, to bed down on, and plenty of dry wood for her fire. It was cold under its roof of boughs, but there were remedies for cold. She kept her fire well built up, for
that, and against any meat-eaters too weak from winter to seek out the horses of Burnton High Plain.

  Another day’s travel, and another. If she were to climb one of the tallest pines to its top, would the Seawood look like the plain of grass: undulating, almost endless? On the third day, when the few blades of sun that reached the forest floor were slanting and long, a wind rose. Moon listened to the old trunks above her creaking, the boughs swishing like brooms in angry hands, and decided to make camp.

  In the Seawood the last edge of sunset was never visible. By then, beneath the trees, it was dark. So Moon built her fire and set water to boil before she took Alder Owl’s drum from her pack.

  The trees roared above, but at their feet Moon felt only a furious breeze. She hunched her cloak around her and struck the drum.

  It made no noise; but from above she heard a clap and thunder of sound, and felt a rush of air across her face. She leaped backward. The drum slid from her hands.

  A pale shape sat on a low branch beyond her fire. The light fell irregularly on its huge yellow eyes, the high tufts that crowned its head, its pale breast. An owl.

  “Oo,” it said, louder than the hammering wind. “Oo-whoot.”

  Watching it all the while, Moon leaned forward, reaching for the drum.

  The owl bated thunderously and stretched its beak wide. “Oo-wheed,” it cried at her. “Yarrooh. Yarrooh.”

  Moon’s blood fell cold from under her face. The owl stooped off its branch quick and straight as a dropped stone. Its talons closed on the lashings of the drum. The great wings beat once, twice, and the bird was gone into the rushing dark.