The Summer Country

by James A. Hetley

  Maureen remembered a history course, Patton's armor cutting through France after D-Day. The hedgerows there could stop a tank. These looked like they would even stop a rabbit. She circled the house, warily, in and out around the wanderings of the green fence.

  Finally, she decided it really was a castle--one made of soft, living stone that would bend but never break. You'd need an army to get in, flame-throwers, bulldozers, a commando assault team with blasting charges, if you weren't invited.

  She wondered what protected it from the air. Long odds, you couldn't just fly in.

  An orange cat lay sunning his belly by one of the two white gates. Maureen held out her hand for sniffing and learned that a chin-scratch would be appropriate toll. She spent a few minutes at the task--you never knew when you'd need a friend in a tight corner. She was rewarded with a purr like an idling Ferrari.

  It was a damn shame the apartment had a "no pets" lease. The world was a better place with cats in it. And if Fiona kept a cat as her gatekeeper, she couldn't be all bad.

  Cats, plural, Maureen amended, when she opened the gate and slipped inside. A gray and white female joined them, tail up in a greeting question-mark. They were probably sentries. She'd just rung the doorbell, but she was too tired to really care.

  The hedges apparently formed a maze. Just inside the gate, she faced a blank wall of green and the option of right or left down a flagstone path. Each way ended in a sharp turn that blocked any further view.

  Even if she'd been desperate enough to climb the thorny hedge, it arched over to form a barbed-wire tunnel. Fiona's defenses might be prettier than Castle MacKenzie’s, but close up, they looked just as strong.

  The thorns are probably poisoned as well, she thought. Or maybe the pretty blossoms breathe out narcotic vapors, like the poppy fields on the way to the Emerald City, or the bees carry stone-fish toxin in their stingers. Brian told you the job was dangerous when you took it.

  She had two choices. She could follow the right-hand rule or follow the cats. If she looked like a person who might operate a can-opener, the cats would probably lead her straight to the kitchen. Humans were as obsolete as Homo habilis if cats ever evolved an opposable thumb.

  More likely they'll lead you straight over a pit-trap set for human weight, her paranoia answered. They are Fiona's cats, after all, familiars of a powerful witch.

  The cats went right. Maureen went right, accompanied by a round of ankle-polishing. It was either that or flip a coin, and she'd left her purse at the Quick Shop, back in another world.

  Right again, the gray and white led, and Maureen shook her head. The hedge hadn't bumped out in that area. She turned around and checked behind. From this side, the turn still went right. Her head spun--the hedge looked like a mirror rather than "real" life.

  The orange tom leaned against her leg, and she scratched his ears. He looked up with eyes filled with lazy scorn at her insistence on the laws of physics and geometry. She shrugged.

  Right again, and right again, and right again, she followed the cats. Maureen gave up on mapping an impossible spiral. The hedge shrank down to just above her head, open now to the sun and the butterflies. She had a sneaking suspicion the walls would be just above anybody's head, even a seven-six NBA center. It would always be high enough so you couldn't see where you were going.

  Then she caught up with the cats. They sat in a pool of sunlight, daintily washing their paws, at a blank dead end.

  Maureen turned around. Instead of the path she had walked between the hedges, she faced another dead end. Butterflies and bees danced across a solid wall of green dotted with pale pink roses. The hedge had boxed her into a trap.

  She squatted, nose to nose with the orange tom. He went back to washing his ears with one paw, a study in calm confidence.

  "Okay, fuzz-face, what gives?"

  "You wouldn't have gotten this far if the cats thought you were dangerous."

  Maureen jerked at the voice, nearly falling backwards into the hedge. A face formed in the leaves, sort of a Cheshire Cat in green, and smiled at her. It could have been Fiona.

  "I've always hated answering machines, love," the face said, "so I've decided to make mine more personal. I'm not in, right now, but you can leave a message. What makes my service more personal is this: the message will be you. You can't leave until I release you."

  Something furry butted Maureen's hand, and she supplied scratching service automatically. Then she realized she could still see two cats. A third had joined them, a gray tiger-stripe. She couldn't see any gaps in the hedge around her.

  "If," the green voice went on, "you're anybody I really want to meet, you'll figure out how to get on to the house and have a cup of tea while you wait. Otherwise, tough shit."

  The hedge-face melded back into the wall of green, from the edges inward, leaving a smile. Somebody had been reading too much Alice.

  "Oh, by the way," the smile added, as the eyes returned. "I wouldn't recommend touching anything purple, love. I've decided the color doesn't go with my complexion."

  The face faded out completely. Maureen shook her head and looked around, at a sunlit box of greenery and three smug cats grooming themselves. Bees hummed from flower to flower and then rose up to float away south, probably to their hive.

  Purple? What the hell had she meant, don't touch anything purple? Poison?

  The gray tiger-stripe batted at a butterfly, leaping up with paws spread wide. She missed, landed with a flip of her tail that said, "I meant to do that," and cocked her ears at the fluttering cat-toy. The yellow ribbing of the tiger swallowtail turned purple. It wavered its way past Maureen's ear and into the bush, where it perched on a purple rose-blossom, sipping nectar.

  All of the blossoms were purple, now. They had been pink a minute ago.

  Another purple swallowtail fluttered across Maureen's nose. She brushed it away. Fire flashed up her arm, and she stared at the red blotch left on the back of her hand. It throbbed like a hornet sting.

  Hot coals touched her neck and arm, feathery touches that left acid running up her nerves. Butterflies flitted across, an inch from her eyes, brushing her ears, lighting on her knees to fan their wings. She felt the heat of them even through the denim of her jeans.

  The hedge inched closer. She could have lain down crosswise in the path, before, and never come near the bushes. Now she could touch the thorns on each side with her outstretched arms. More blossoms spattered the walls with purple. More butterflies filled the air. Maureen huddled in on herself.

  The cats ignored it all. She wondered how they judged which visitors were dangerous and which could pass into the maze. Two of them sat in loaves, with tails and paws tucked in, watching her like feline Buddhas. The third, the orange tom, had vanished through a cat-door into a parallel dimension.

  Poe, not Lewis Carroll, she thought. Fiona had created her own version of "The Pit and the Pendulum." The problem was, nobody was going to show up to arrest the Inquisition.

  Purple, that was the problem. Nothing had happened until the first butterfly turned purple. She glared at the lavender roses. Pink, she screamed in her mind. You were pink!

  They stayed purple. She singled out one, ignoring the heat of a score of fiery butterflies perched on her blouse and pants. Something brushed her cheek and left a swelling welt. She squinted against the pain and tears, thinking of nothing but the single blossom. If she couldn't return to the past, maybe she could change the future . . . .

  She snarled at the flower. "Okay, dammit, you're yellow. I'll paint all you bastards yellow, like the cards in Alice painting the roses red."

  Maureen leaned closer, her eyes crossing as she held the blossom centered in her sight. Her breath rustled the leaves and shivered the fragile petals of the rose.

  "Yellow," she whispered. "You are a yellow rose."

  Her vision narrowed to a tunnel, and she lost touch with her body. The burning coals died in the darkness. The hornet stings left her flesh. The humming bees and the w
hisper of wind through the hedge died out of her ears, the warm green smells of grass and tree and earth abandoned her nose. All that remained was rose--the glistening velvet petals of the flower, the golden pollen on the stamens, the soft perfume of the nectar.

  Time froze around her. "Yellow," she repeated, as a mantra. "You are a yellow rose."

  She reached out and set her thumb and forefinger between the thorns. She flowed her will into the stem. She plucked it.

  It was yellow.

  Her vision opened out again. The roses around it were yellow. The swallowtails were yellow. Golden sunlight poured down around her, splashing on golden sandstone under her feet.

  The cats unfolded themselves and stretched, lazily, as cats do when they want to show they are granting you a favor. The gray-and-white female padded daintily back the way she had come, through space that had been hedge a moment before, and turned left. Maureen followed.

  They walked into grass and open sun. A thatched stone cottage sat in the midst of daffodils and azaleas and tulips, walls whitewashed into a travel-brochure for the Emerald Isle, waiting. The orange tom lay on a windowsill, basking in the only sunbeam falling on that wall. The rest was shaded by a tall rowan-tree guarding the side porch.

  Maureen opened the door, nervous, expecting further traps. It squeaked heavily on its hinges but showed her nothing except a tiled entry and an arch back into a modern kitchen. The cats scalloped past her ankles and strode inside.

  Have a cup of tea, Fiona's leafy face had said. Jimson weed? Or water hemlock? It would take a brave woman to brew tea in a witch's kitchen. Maybe there would be milk for the cats. That bastard brother of Fiona's had been buying milk at the Quick Shop. But he'd left it there, on the counter . . . .

  She stepped inside. Brian sat at the kitchen table, reading. He looked up when her shadow crossed his book, a smile breaking across his face. Then the smile died, replaced by blankness.

  Maureen understood, with a chill. He'd expected Fiona. She wasn't Fiona. That was the end of it. Nothing else mattered.

  He didn't look as if he even recognized her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Brian paid no more attention to her than to the cats. He didn't speak. He acted as if Fiona had reached inside his brain and frozen part of it.

  Maureen shied away from him, her own thoughts scattered and useless. She groped for something to do, something to say, a way to break the wall of ice between them. She glanced out the window, at a thin plume of smoke on a distant hill. Maybe that was where Fiona had gone, squabbling with her fellow witches and wizards over the spoils Dougal left behind.

  Instinct had said, "Go to Fiona's place." As far as Maureen was concerned, instinct could damn well continue making suggestions. Besides, if she had come with some kind of plot in mind, had come looking for a fight, the hedge and the cats probably would have kept her out. Sometimes improv was the only way that worked.

  Other than Brian and the cats, the house seemed empty. And it was a house, even a farmer's cottage, not a castle or a palace. Maureen had seen no sign of servants, another difference between Fiona and Dougal.

  The orange tom rubbed her leg insistently and then padded over to a refrigerator purring in the corner, reminding her of milk. The machine seemed vaguely incongruous in the old cottage kitchen, but it held a stoneware crock of milk with a thick skin of cream floating on the top. She found three saucers, and filled them with cat-bribes, and drifted into irrelevant questions to avoid thinking about Brian. He was still ignoring her. The cats gave the cottage more of a lived-in feeling than he did.

  Electric refrigerator and microwave oven--Fiona had to have some solar panels on the roof, like the ones Dougal had. But the wood stove, oil lamps, marble counter-top with slate sink and hand pump, and lines of cabinets with buttercup-yellow paint worn back to bare wood along the edges and knobs made a comfortable mix of old and new. It looked as if centuries of feet had worn the slate floor smooth and darkened it to ebony. Bundles of herbs hung from the blackened beams of the ceiling, perfuming the air with sage and tarragon and rosemary and more exotic scents. It didn't feel like a dangerous place.

  A black laptop computer lay in one corner of the counter, somehow less clashing than it should have been. Maureen smiled at a vision of Fiona keeping her spells in a database, maintaining inventory on her eye of newt and toe of frog electronically to make sure she always had fresh stock--a thoroughly modern witch, perhaps with her own Web site.

  Brian sat at the table, ignoring her, reading. The damned man could at least say good afternoon, nice to see you, beautiful day we're having. She'd been counting on him.

  You're suffering from Snow White Syndrome, her critic snarled. Once Prince Charming is in the picture, he should take over and everything will be Happily Ever After. Ain't a-gonna work that way, this once-upon-a-time.

  This time, it was the Handsome Prince who'd eaten the poisoned apple, and the Princess had to wake him. A simple kiss probably wasn't going to work.

  Her hand was rubbing her belly again. Maureen jerked it away, bumping against the hilt of the knife. She pulled the heavy blade, sheathed, from her waistband and dropped it in the middle of Brian's book.

  "I think this might be yours."

  He didn't even look up. He did pick up the knife, running his fingers over some scars in the black leather of the sheath and then showing a couple of inches of steel to read the maker's mark.

  "It looks like my spare," he said to a point somewhere beyond her left shoulder. "Where did you get it?"

  "Dougal had it. I killed him with it, this morning."

  He blinked. "I gave it to David before we came here. Dougal must have taken it from him."

  That was all the response she got? Chop the villain into stew-meat and burn down his castle after spending a week or so naked in his dungeon, and all the man did was blink?

  Hey, girl, you've got a serious problem here. The man's a zombie.

  "Where's David?" she asked.

  "Dougal bound him to the land. He's in the forest, near the dragon." Brian put the knife down and turned back to his book.

  She snatched the book out from under his nose and threw it into a corner. Cats scattered and glared at her. Maureen glared back, and they vanished.

  Brian still stared at the table. She grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled his face up to meet hers. "Goddamn you, what fucking dragon?"

  "David killed a dragon." He spoke slowly and patiently, as if he was talking to a young child. "It belonged to Dougal. Dougal bound David to the land in a blood sacrifice, for revenge." He reached up and squeezed the sides of her hand, forcing her fingers loose from his hair and driving white-hot pain into her pinched nerves.

  So that was what was rotting in the forest. Maureen stared into his eyes, forcing him to recognize her. "Take me there. Help me set David free." She massaged her hand, wiggling the fingers until they all worked again.

  "Ask Fiona. If she says I can go, I'll show you where he is." He paused for a moment, frowning as if he was almost starting to notice the woman standing in front of him. "If you killed Dougal, you own his lands by right of conquest. That's the law of the Summer Country, as much as there is any law. If David is still alive, you can set him free without my help."

  Maureen exploded. "Damn you, I want to find David and Jo and get the fuck out of this freaking place! I need your help!"

  "Ask Fiona."

  She backed away from him with a sick feeling in her gut. She remembered the tree's picture-show: Fiona dancing around Brian, singing to him, enslaving him.

  If you want him, you're going to have to fight for him, the whispering repeated in her head.

  How do I fight for a man?

  The answer only added to the flip-flops in her belly. She was going to have to seduce him. That was what Fiona's dance had done. Maureen was going to have to turn into Jo. Maureen, the woman who was afraid of men. Maureen, the woman who had just killed a man for raping her. If she wanted Brian's help, she was going t
o have to break this spell.

  The only way was with a spell of her own.

  You slept with a monster, to get a chance to kill him. Why the hell can't you seduce the man you love, to save him?

  Her head hurt, and her eyes refused to focus.

  You. Must. Bed. A. Man.

  Just thinking the words made it hard to breathe. Dougal didn't really matter. She knew it had happened, knew a time bomb might be ticking in her belly, but she remembered nothing. She'd switched off that part of her brain and slept right through it.

  She remembered Buddy with perfect clarity. He was huge. He was on top of her. He hurt her.

  She remembered his face hanging over hers--panting, red, sweaty, the glazed look of animal hunger in his eyes. She remembered sweat dripping off that huge flat cave-man nose like scientists always showed on their Neandertal sketches.

  Brian had that nose. So had Dougal, and Liam before him. Sean didn't. Maybe that meant it was for tracking female Old Ones by their smell.

  Fear condensed into her bladder. It felt like it would explode any minute, reminding her of the night in her apartment, walking down the hall away from Brian's fading glamour. She remembered how she'd nearly killed herself in the tangle of insanity afterwards, how she'd hated him for tampering with her emotions. And now he ignored her.

  If Fiona used a hand pump, she probably had an outhouse. Maureen tried doors in the vain hope for an indoor toilet and found one, just off the kitchen. She emptied herself and sat in the universal refuge, arguing with the voices in her head.

  What do you want? they asked.

  I want him to help me find David and Jo. I want him to help me find a home. I want him to talk to me. I want him to smile at me. I want him to touch me.

  What are the first three words of all those sentences?

  I want him.

  What was he doing in your dreams, last night?

  Maureen clenched her fists, staring at the white knuckles standing out under her flushed skin. He was kissing me, she answered. He was running his hands over my naked body. He was . . .