Changer's Daughter

by Jane Lindskold

  Far down below, she can see Frank’s tiny figure coming out of the ranch house. He’s shrugging into the quilted jacket he wears when he plans to be outside for a long stretch and is carrying a large pack slung from one hand. A couple of the dogs bounce at his heels, getting more excited as Frank turns toward the garage. In another minute, one of the pickup trucks pulls out of the garage, two dogs in the bed, another in the cab.

  When the truck has vanished down the driveway, Shahrazad no longer has the excuse of watching it as a distraction. Hip and Hop balance on their back legs, browsing idly on the dried leaves still clinging to a sapling. They have confirmed that Shahrazad’s scenting is not just her imagination, but that is where their interest ends.

  For the first time, Shahrazad realizes that her mind works differently than theirs. It is not just the difference between jackalope and coyote, nor even that of older and younger. Just yet she cannot place what the difference is, but it both scares her and fills her with elation.

  Dangerously close to revelation, the coyote distracts herself by taking another sniff at the old scent trail. Concentrating, she sorts it out from all the surrounding scents, including a strange impulse to believe that it is not there. She struggles against this last, frustrated by the conflict between her nose and her mind, until something in her mind snaps. The scent trail is no longer occluded.

  A human passed here the day before. A male. A male known to her. Wayne, the human who smelled of cows and who had prowled around the ranch house. She lowers her head and begins coursing the trail.

  Wayne had passed here, walking with confidence yet keeping behind rocks and big trees whenever he could. For a time he had stopped and studied the ranch house, then moved on. Shahrazad picks up her pace, wondering that she should have had any trouble finding this trail, wondering, too, why the corvids who normally would warn Frank of any intruder on his land had not spoken. Could it be that Wayne’s trail had been hidden from them as well?

  That thought so shocks her that she halts, flopping down to consider how this could be so. Like most wild things, she depends on the corvids. Nosy scavengers that they are, their caws and jeers provide the audible newspaper of the animal world. Even now Shahrazad hears a couple of jays harassing a bobcat as it slinks through the undergrowth with a rabbit hanging loose in its jaws. More distantly, a small flock of crows are commenting on the remnants of a dead deer. When she had hunted at dawn, she had saved a portion of her kill for a couple of juvenile ravens who, though not athanor, had reminded her of her father. Probably they are in the general vicinity, wondering if she is going to do any more hunting this morning.

  With a sudden sense of urgency, Shahrazad follows Wayne’s day-old trail again. He had shown some skill, for a human, but there are times she can lope along swiftly, tracking by eye rather than by nose, dipping her muzzle now and then to confirm that she is still on his freshest trail.

  When she comes to the fringes of the territory claimed by the wolves she halts, her back paws actually digging small furrows in the soil. The signpost urine is strong and rank. It reminds her of her lesson several days ago, reminds her that wolves are far bigger than coyotes and that the pack does not suffer trespassers lightly.

  Even though she has become acquainted with those werewolves who help Frank with various chores, this does not mitigate Shahrazad’s fear. Wayne’s track goes on, but here is a line that she will not cross. She backs away to the nearest cover, hearing relieved chirps and whistles from Hip and Hop.

  Trotting downhill and back toward the ranch house, she considers what she has learned. If Frank were here, she would try to explain things to him. His comprehension of coyote concerns is almost canine. Since he is human as well, he might be able to explain to her what Wayne was doing—or he might tell her that Wayne had permission to come onto OTQ land.

  The last thought gives her some relief. Frank had entertained Wayne, had even given him food. Perhaps like the Wanderer or the Changer, Wayne is become a friend and as a friend he can cross into Frank’s territory. She is still thinking about this when she hears the corvids call out to the western fringe of the ranch, a call that means intruder.

  Abruptly heading that way, Shahrazad sees a flash of raven-dark feathers. Quorking hoarsely one of her young ravens lands on a branch of a nearby evergreen, putting himself between her and the west.

  Shahrazad may not speak to animals as Frank does, nor is there any romantic Ur-language that enables animals to speak with each other, but she is coyote enough to know that the bird is warning her. She appreciates this, takes it as tribute for the numerous kills she has shared.

  West, though, is the direction in which she heads.

  A coyote’s lope covers distance far more rapidly than one might assume from such a small canine. It must. In sparsely populated areas, a coyote’s hunting territory may be twenty-five or thirty square miles.

  “Her” juvenile ravens fly with her, darting ahead to check the lay of the land, coursing back to keep her company. The two jackalopes follow more reluctantly. They have not stayed alive as long as they have by tempting human observation. For the first time since Frank assigned them to chaperon Shahrazad they show real reluctance to follow where she leads. Even when she had tempted the wolf pack they had not been this edgy.

  But Shahrazad is too interested in learning who has crossed into Frank’s land to back off now. She has her suspicions, but oddly enough the errant darting of the wind does nothing to confirm them. If Wayne once again prowls the OTQ, he has found a way to conceal—not merely to mask—his scent.

  Now the cries of the corvids are growing more erratic, more confused, as if the crows, ravens, and jays are losing sight of the invader. One by one, the voices drop into silence until only the determined quorking of one athanor raven, a son of the Raven of Enderby who inherited his father’s long life without his father’s tendency toward magic, sounds the alarm.

  There is a single barking shot, as from a hunting rifle, and the Son’s voice also grows still. There is an indignant clamor of corvid call, then silence.

  Shahrazad knows where she is going now. More importantly, for it antidotes to the force that is attempting to cloud her senses, she has her suspicions. This morning she had laboriously tracked Wayne’s old trail as he headed toward the wolf wood. Now she makes the assumption—a great deductive leap—that Wayne is going that way once more.

  She stops searching the wind for sign, stops listening for birdcalls. Instead she moves stealthily, that rifle shot warning her to keep to cover, heading to intercept Wayne’s trail.

  About a half mile shy of the wolf wood, she finds him. Dressed in the mottled clothing she has been taught to associate with hunters, a cap pulled snugly down almost to his brows, Wayne strides along a deer trail. From her hiding place beneath a low growing evergreen, her belly fur pressed into the duff, Shahrazad studies him.

  The cattleman knows how to handle himself in the forest. The coyote recognizes the difference between how he moves and how she has seen other humans move. Yet he is making no great effort to hide himself, opting instead for a balance between speed and efficiency. A rifle is slung at his back. He carries another loosely in one hand. The Changer has taught her to recognize an armed human, so Shahrazad also sees that Wayne carries knives and a small handgun on his belt.

  All these weapons make her edgy, but what truly frightens her is that to other eyes, Wayne seems to be invisible. A small bird bouncing on a branch lets him pass so close that he could have stroked her feathers. A fox sniffing about for rabbits doesn’t even look up when Wayne tromps by. Even a deer mouse, normally among the edgiest of the woodland animals, lets him pass without fleeing.

  Creeping after the human, Shahrazad checks to see if Hip and Hop are aware of him. She is reassured to find that they do see him. Soon after she realizes that if the jackalopes lose direct sight of the man, they tend to dismiss the threat he offers. It is less that he is invisible then that he radiates an aura signaling that he is unimporta
nt and unthreatening.

  Sincerely afraid now, Shahrazad considers whether it might be best if she, too, tried to forget that Wayne is a threat. The concept is so tempting that she can feel it sliding clouds around her thoughts even as she considers it.

  After all, Wayne’s evident prey is the wolves. Wolves do not like coyotes. Coyotes do not like wolves. These wolves in particular have threatened her. It would be easy to let Wayne hunt them. A wolf or two less would make the OTQ a friendlier place for coyotes. True, Frank likes the wolves, but that is his shortcoming. He can do with a wolf or two less.

  The idea has almost gotten its teeth into her when Shahrazad notices a flicker of white in the forest north of Wayne. She focuses on it and realizes that she is not the only one who is tracking the human. One of the unicorns, the white mare Pearl, is stalking him as well.

  Shahrazad has never gotten over her feeling that it is unfair that an herbivore be as wellarmed as a unicorn. Now, beneath her automatic flash of resentment, there is relief. Someone else knows that Wayne is there. The responsibility for dealing with him is not hers alone.

  Pearl, Shahrazad sees, is by herself. She wonders where Sun, the golden unicorn is, as the two seem to graze together. A distant jay’s call, deeper in the mountains, gives her an answer. Doubtless Sun has led the rest of the unicorns into the hidden valley that is their ultimate refuge. His size and strength, which would not help him track the invader, would make him an ideal defender if Wayne heads that way.

  Shahrazad has never been to that valley, though she knows of its existence from things Frank has told her. It is on the other side of the wolves’ territory. For the first time, Shahrazad realizes that the wolves defend the unicorns. The peculiarity of this concept vanishes almost as soon as she thinks about it.

  Her mind is performing one of those uncomfortable stretches it has from time to time in her life. Almost painfully, Shahrazad recategorizes the creatures who live under Frank’s aegis on the OTQ.

  They are not divided, as she had thought, into carnivores and herbivores or even into hunters and prey. She thinks about the eagle-puma, the Eyes. She considers the jackalopes and the Cats of Egypt, the unicorns and the wolves. She remembers the gatherings at Arthur’s Pendragon Estates and the different shapes, sizes, scents, and sounds of the creatures who had gathered there as equals. For the first time, she realizes that she is more like one of them than like any other coyote she has ever met.

  A surge of fellow feeling, of kinship similar to what she feels for her father, connects her to these creatures. She remembers how she had felt on that dark night when she had danced a complicated design with the other guests at the estate, prancing a measure with a cat, another with a king, another with a great brown-furred creature that was neither human nor bear. Without words, without discussion, Shahrazad finally understands that she is athanor.

  She wants to sit, to rub her head in the dirt like she might against a rotting bit of carrion, to luxuriate in this new concept, but she realizes with a start that she cannot. The wolves deserve her help, even those wolves who are not part of the Dance, for they are the kin of those who are her kin.

  Glancing back at the nervous jackalopes, Shahrazad feels real fondness for them, a fondness that goes beyond the games they have shared, beyond an awareness of how patient they have been with her puppy foolishness. Opening her mouth, she pants a smile and a reassurance that she is not going to do anything impulsive. With a wrinkling of her muzzle, she directs their attention to where Pearl stalks Wayne.

  Will the unicorn attack the human? Certainly the herbivore is capable of stopping him. Pearl might be small and slight for a unicorn, but if she ran forward and drove her horn deep into that unsuspecting human’s back, the man would have no chance.

  Shahrazad, although close to her full growth, would have more difficulty successfully attacking the man. He is too big to grasp in her jaws and shake as she does a rabbit or a mouse. Also, something in her shrinks away from killing when she is not personally threatened. There must be something else she can do.

  Meanwhile, Wayne walks forward, crossing the invisible line into the wolves’ territory. Shahrazad balks, then follows.

  18

  Il lupo cangia il pelo, ma non il vizio.

  (The wolf changes his fur but not his nature.)

  —Italian proverb

  Almost certainly, Katsuhiro Oba would have waited to break the peace within Regis’s stronghold until he had located his sword and had laid the tactical groundwork for his escape if he had not come upon four of the Chief General’s guests passing Teresa from man to man like a party favor.

  Regis’s pretty secretary is naked to the waist. Rat-faced Mr. Ekute holds her arms pinned behind her back while his assistant reaches up under her skirt to peel off her panty hose. Judging from the items of clothing held like prizes by the other men in the room—a blouse, a bra, and a pair of high-heeled shoes—this game has been going on for a while.

  Teresa is taking the abuse with a dangerous patience, a small, ugly smile on her lips. Katsuhiro knows why. When the game evolves into rape—as it most certainly will—she will have her revenge.

  For a moment, Katsuhiro considers letting the game go on. He has seen worse—has taken part in worse—at various points in his life. He is not called the Swift Impetuous Male without cause. However, two things force him to act. One is a feeling of responsibility toward Teresa. He has vowed to rescue her from this place—though she knows nothing of this vow. Therefore, his honor is entangled with how she is treated in his presence.

  The second is a rational awareness of the sexual habits of the African male. Even those who are technically Christian often have, in effect, multiple wives. Those wives may also have multiple partners, depending on tribal customs and the strictness of their husbands. AIDS has spread rapidly in this hospitable climate, and many victims are children who were never given a choice.

  Still, in all personal honesty, the challenge to Katsuhiro’s honor is what moves his hands, what raises a battle cry to his lips, what causes him to leap forward and into the crowded room.

  His guards, dulled by the previous day’s slow tour of the facility, fail to stop him. Once Katsuhiro is in the midst of the throng of honored guests, they dare not shoot. One guard runs to find Regis. The others cluster in the doorway, shouting at him to stop.

  Katsuhiro is enjoying himself far too much to take heed. A flying kick of the sort he would never condone in any dojo he supervised knocks Supreme General Agutan onto his round, fat ass. He wheels smoothly, forearm raised to block an unskilled punch from young Taiwo Fadaka. Gently, then, for Katsuhiro rather likes the young scoundrel, he knocks the man unconscious.

  The other three men drop back, blustering but not moving out from the relative security of their position. Teresa, half-sobbing, half-laughing, quite close to hysteria, has moved behind Katsuhiro. Only he can hear what she hisses between her clamped teeth.

  “You shouldn’t have stopped them. I could have killed them all! The filthy bastards!”

  Katsuhiro wonders that the venom in her gaze alone is not enough to kill. However it will not, and he should not kill Regis’s guests, no matter what he thinks of their behavior. The guards, having learned long ago that knowing too much is the fastest way out of a job, have turned their attention to the corridor, preventing escape but nothing more.

  Striking a pose straight from a Bruce Lee film, Katsuhiro sets himself between the violated woman and her attackers.

  “So,” he says, studying them, narrow-eyed over hands raised to attack or defend, “is this how you treat our host’s hospitality when he does not have you under his eye?”

  The men who are conscious glance at each other. Now that their testosterone-fueled camaraderie has been interrupted they seem less like important men and more like schoolboys caught stealing candy.

  “We were just messing around a bit,” says Agutan. “The woman didn’t seem to mind.”

  Katsuhiro snorts, raising his eyebr
ows slightly, deigning to respond to such a juvenile response.

  “Fadaka started it,” Ekute adds. “When we came in here for a meeting, he was feeling up the girl and kissing her. We protested, and he said that there was plenty of her to go around.”

  Katsuhiro sneers. “So instead of stopping an impetuous youth at his dishonorable game, you joined him. Now, one at a time, toss her back her clothing. If you move before I give the word, I will attack!”

  They are so cowed, no one questions the apparent bravado of this statement, or perhaps some deep instinct tells them that it is not bravado at all. To Katsuhiro’s vague disappointment, the would-be rapists politely return first the bra, then the blouse, and lastly the shoes.

  Teresa is buttoning her blouse when Regis pushes in past his guards. The mulatto does not look at all pleased. Indeed, the urbane manner that had marked him at their first meeting has all but vanished. His eyes are wild, and the true cruelty of his nature is close to the surface. For a moment, Katsuhiro wonders if he will have to fight him here and now.

  Regis glowers at the three men against the wall, at Taiwo, who is moaning softly on the floor, and lastly at the Japanese standing before the trembling, disheveled woman. Careful to keep his own expression neutral, Katsuhiro wonders if anyone other than himself realizes that Teresa’s trembling is not from fear and shame, but from hatred and rage.

  Determined to shelter her from her own impulses, Katsuhiro steps forward, bows shortly, and speaks in the clipped manner of a soldier giving a report. “These men were disgracing you with your secretary. I took the liberty of interfering before they could do more than frighten her.”