She and Tal came very year to the initiation ceremonies, but this was the first year that they were taking an active part in the actual ceremony itself, for this was the year that both Tal and Kieran would receive their drums from the elders and so be inaugurated as drum-brothers to Mother Bear. They had worked hard—if something they loved so much could be called work—toward this day and she was proud of them both. She desperately wanted to be watching with Ha’kan’ta when the two of them left the rath’wen’a lodge with their first water drums in hand.
The Way of the Bear wasn’t her path, but that in no way diminished her respect for the rath’wen’a and their harmonious melding of spiritual matters with the more practical environmental and health concerns that were so much a part of their day-to-day existence. She understood Beauty, she just sought it by following a different road.
“I don’t know why you don’t follow the path with us,” Kieran had said when he and Tal first began their journey to the heart of the drum.
But Sara’s feelings lay inarticulate in her heart. What was right for them was wrong for her.
“Saraken is like the quin’on’a,” Ha’kan’ta had answered while Sara was still trying to frame her explanation in words that would make sense. “She’s as much a manitou as she is a child of human parents. Why do you think Pukwudji offers her such enthusiastic friendship? They’re like wolf pups, born in the same litter.”
“Sure, but—”
“What you study,” Ha’kan’ta added, “she already knows. In here”—the shaman touched a closed fist between her breasts—“where Beauty was first born.”
“Lord lifting Jesus,” Kieran said. “You make her sound like a saint.”
But he smiled, taking the sting from what he said.
Ha’kan’ta smiled. “She still has a long road to travel before she can reach that place of Beauty and call it up at will.”
Tal hadn’t spoken, but then, Sara found that there was such a connection between them that words weren’t always necessary. Which was why she wasn’t surprised to find him waiting for her as soon as she reached the camp.
He looked odd, almost a stranger, naked except for his breechclout, his long red hair pulled back from his head in the thirty braids of an initiate, his pale features and chest emblazoned with ghostly white clay patterns, highlighted with darker daubs of paint: berry red, sweetgrass green, the blue of Mother Bear’s sky, the black of her rich forest loam.
But his green eyes were familiar, watching her from the raccoon mask of daubed white clay that surrounded them.
“I was worried,” he said.
Sara smiled. “I’m okay. It’s just...”
“We have to go.”
It was uncanny the way it almost seemed as if they could read each others’ minds, but she knew he was just picking up on her mood. What they had was a form of empathy that she supposed all couples developed after a while.
“No,” she said. “I have to go. You’ve worked too hard for this week.”
“It won’t be the same without you.”
She smiled again. “That’s sweet of you to say, but I really want you to stay and, you know, get your drum and everything. It’s important to me. Besides, it’s probably no big deal.”
He didn’t ask, Then why are you going? But then he wouldn’t. He trusted her judgment as much as she trusted him. He reached out and touched the hooded cloak with his fingertips.
“What happened?” he asked.
Briefly, she described how her regular Tai Chi workout had been interrupted.
“This was all that was left,” she said, holding up the garment she was carrying.
Tal nodded thoughtfully. “And when he spoke of this wood... ?”
“He gave it a capital ’W’ and acted—well implied, really—that I should know what he was talking about with this ’Heart of the Wood’ business.”
“The oaken heart of the Mondream Wood,” Tal said, “where Myrddin lived awhile.”
“Or something like that,” Sara said, remembering when she was a child and Merlin lived in a tree in the garden enclosed by her uncle’s house. “I don’t think it’ll be dangerous or anything,” she added. “I mean, if there was a real problem at the House, someone would have come for me. Esmeralda, or Ohn.”
“Unless this sending was the only way that they could communicate with us.”
“Don’t make it sound scary,” Sara said. “It’s bad enough I’ve got to go in the first place.”
She knew it wasn’t going to be easy to leave. She and Tal had been inseparable for almost seven years now. This would be their first time apart since the whole business with Tom Hengwr had brought them together initially. But she knew she had to go all the same. Not because she really thought there was any danger. It was more as though the hooded man had instilled some sort of compulsion in her so that she had to go.
What did they call it in the old Romances? A geas. Something you had no choice but to fulfill.
Tal sighed. “I’ve no sense of foreboding about this,” he said finally. “No sense of anything at all—good or bad—and that worries me.”
“But I have to go,” Sara said.
He nodded. “That I do feel. For all our farwalking, the world of your birth retains its hold on you; Tamson House will always be your home. And your responsibility.”
“I know. And I’ve been kind of lax about checking up on things, haven’t I?”
Tal didn’t seem to have heard her. His eyes had taken on an unfocused, faraway look.
“If it was the oak that called for you,” he said, “that’s not so bad. He offered protection and can guide you safely home, for he stands on the doorway to the mysteries, straddling the worlds. But there are other trees in the Wood who don’t bear the same affection for humankind. The alder and the yew...”
“Don’t get all spacey on me,” Sara said.
Tal blinked and focused on her again.
“You’ll be careful?” he said.
“Every moment. Maybe I’ll even be back, for the final ceremony itself. I’ve got four days, right?”
Tal nodded. “I’ll miss you,” he said.
A drum spoke out before Sara could answer. It echoed a high-pitched summoning throughout the camp.
“I guess they want you,” she said.
“All the initiates,” Tal said. “The honochen’o’keh must have arrived to hallow our drums.”
Sara would have liked to have seen them. She had a special spot for the rath’wen’a’s spirits of goodwill—partly because they were Pukwudji’s cousins, but mostly for their own charm.
“You’d better go,” she said.
She wanted to hug him, but was afraid of smearing his clay and paint markings. They had to be just right for all these ceremonies. But Tal had no such compunction. As he drew her close, she felt a sudden tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the pressure of his arms around her. Her eyes got all misty, but she managed not to cry.
“Go gentle,” Tal said as he stepped back.
“You, too,” Sara said.
She watched him go, following the rattling sound of the summoning drum to where the elders awaited the initiates, and it was all she could do not to call after him.
Don’t be a baby, she told herself. You’re only going to be gone a few days.
But as she fingered the cloak and watched him go, she heard the hooded man’s words again.
There is a need.
All of a sudden that simple phrase took on far too many unpleasant implications.
6
The long-term residents of the House had fallen into regular duties as time went by. After Jamie died and Sara went away, Blue took over administrating the various bills and legal needs until Esmeralda had shown up and he could thankfully hand things over to her. He was back on security and general maintenance now, aided and abetted by Emma and Judy, which was how he liked it. The only thing the three of them didn’t take care of was the gardening. But this spring, Tim had
, if not given up, then at least set aside his ambition to be a playwright and accepted responsibility for the gardens.
Of the other three longest-staying houseguests, one was a man named Anton Brach, an Austrian chef disillusioned with the hostelry business, who had set up shop in the Pen-with Kitchen, on the other side of the garden from the Silkwater. So long as you told him beforehand that you’d be sitting in on one of his meals—the timetable was strictly structured and while a dress code wasn’t enforced, T-shirts and the like were definitely frowned on—you could be assured of a gourmet meal to make all others you’d had before pale in comparison. Blue basically liked the guy, even if he was a little anal-retentive.
The second was Ginny Saunders, who’d taken charge of the Library, over by Sara’s Tower. She was a small Gambian woman who kept her kinky hair in a long braid that fell to the small of her back and tended to dress like a Midwestern schoolmarm from some old B-western. Blue wasn’t sure what she did with all the time she spent in the Library beyond the fact that she oversaw the various students who were hired to input all the Library’s books and papers into the House’s computer system—that had been Esmeralda’s idea. What he did know was that if you had a question, and the answer was somewhere in the Library, then Ginny knew where to find it.
The third was Ohn Kenstaran, Glamorgana’s bard, reformed now. He, along with Esmeralda, helped infuse the House with its sense of spirituality—that aura of mystery that drew as many hermetic scholars and pagans to visit as it did artists. But where Esmeralda was not exactly aloof, just a little distant because she tended to be preoccupied a lot of the time with obscure matters, Ohn mingled freely with the other houseguests. He played music at the Wicca rituals, argued with the occultists, sat in on the pagan discussion groups and generally got along with everyone.
And then, of course, there was Jamie....
Blue didn’t really understand what had happened to his friend. Jamie’s death was one thing; the hurt had lodged inside Blue and just stayed there, with nothing capable of easing it. He’d wake up nights, cheeks wet, chest tight; or turn some corner of the House, expecting to see Jamie standing there only to have the hard truth hit him all over again. Jamie was dead and nothing Blue could do would bring him back. But that first time that Jamie had spoken to him from the computer in the Postman’s Room—pixeled words left behind in the trail of the screen’s cursor...
It didn’t make sense, but there it was. Jamie wasn’t alive, but he’d come back as a spirit inhabiting the House that had been his home for so many years, seeing through its windows, hearing through its walls. Blue wasn’t sure how much of Jamie had returned, but there was enough of him haunting the House that there was no denying who it was that ghost-spoke from the computer screen, played chess with Esmeralda, or pored over the information that Ginny’s students entered with a scanning device.
It had given Blue the creeps at first. No, first it had scared him shitless, then it gave him the creeps. Now he just accepted it. He still missed Jamie—the flesh-and-blood Jamie that he’d hung out with—but having some part of him come back as it had was... well, comforting.
But Blue didn’t feel comforted at the moment. By the time he returned to Sara’s Tower, all the regulars were with him except for Anton and Ginny. Wordlessly, they stood beside him in Sara’s workroom and stared at the graffitied wall.
“It’s Ogham,” Esmeralda said finally.
Ohn nodded. “The Beth-Luis-Nuin alphabet of my people.”
“So what does it say?” Blue asked.
Esmeralda and Ohn exchanged glances.
“It’s Ogham,” Ohn said, “but the letters, when I translate them, don’t form familiar words.”
Esmeralda nodded. “It’s either a foreign language... or gibberish.”
But then Emma spoke up. “I know what it says. ’Oh all the past is lost and we despair,’” she read. “’Each root, each branch... its memories stolen, hope lost; the river grown so wide we will never again its waters cross.’”
Beside Emma, Judy Kitt ran a hand through her frizzy blond hair, combing it with her fingers. She was wearing a pair of greasy overalls and a once-white T-shirt. Her delicate features were wrinkled in a puzzled frown.
“How’d you do that?” she asked. “I mean if Ohn couldn’t read it...”
“I... I don’t know,” Emma said.
Esmeralda laid a hand on Emma’s shoulder.
“Ogham was born from the trees of the first forest,” she said. “The same forest that blessed Emma with her Autumn Gift. This Ogham must translate into the primal language that the ancient wood first taught the druids.”
“You’re saying some forest left this message for us?” Blue asked.
Esmeralda shook her head. “I don’t know. All I know is that there’s something very odd in the air tonight.”
“No kidding,” Tim said and then he told him about what he’d seen by the fountain earlier that day.
“This,” Esmeralda said, pointing at the Ogham when Tim was done, “is a message. But what Tim’s just told us...”
Ohn nodded. “Speaks of borders breaking. I should have seen that earlier.”
“How could you know?” Esmeralda said.
“Say what?” Tim asked. “What kind of borders?”
“Those between this world and the Middle Kingdom,” Esmeralda explained. “What you saw must have been bodachs—a kind of wood spirit. They like to play tricks on us—nothing really hurtful, but as Tim’s already seen, they can be disconcerting. Usually they can’t cross over, but if a crack’s opened in the veil that separates our world from theirs, they would come through to bedevil us.”
“Great,” Blue said. “Like we really need this....”
Although some of those who’d gathered in Sara’s workroom had shared experiences beyond the norm with him, Blue was the only one left in the House at he moment who remembered a time seven years past when the House had been under siege by creatures from the Otherworld. A lot of good people had died. Fred. Jamie....
“They won’t be the source of the problem,” Esmeralda went on. “Just a more visible consequence—a kind of forerunner to the real problem.”
Tim looked nervously out a window to where the garden lay dark and shadowed.
“Well, what is the source of the problem?” Blue asked.
Esmeralda shrugged. “It’s too early to tell. But look.”
She crossed the room and knelt by the baseboard to point at where what looked like a kind of fungus was growing.
“Jesus,” Blue said as he joined her. “It’s some kind of mold.”
“It’s moss actually.”
“Mold, moss—what’s the difference? It still shouldn’t be growing here.”
“True, but—”
“Oh, my God,” Judy said.
Turning, Blue saw what had caught her attention. Small twigs had grown out of the wooden base of a floor lamp, complete with tiny leaves. Looking around the room they saw that other wooden furniture had also sprouted sprigs of greenery.
“Oh, man,” Blue said. “What the hell’s going on?”
“Maybe Jamie knows,” Esmeralda said. “Where’s the nearest terminal—in the Library?”
Blue nodded. “Yeah, there’s one in there hooked up to Jamie’s mainframe—”
The floor suddenly rumbled underfoot, shaking the furniture and making them all lose their balance.
“It’s an earthquake!” Tim cried, heading for a doorway.
As a second tremor shook the building, they all started to move—all except Emma. She stood in the center of the room, riding the shock like a sailor on a deck braced against a rough sea. Her eyes had a far-off look about them.
“No,” she said. “It’s the forest. It’s coming back.”
“What does she mean by ’it’s coming back’?” Blue asked Esmeralda, who had caught hold of his arm to keep herself from falling as a third tremor made the floor bounce underfoot.
“I don’t know,” she told him
. “But it can’t be good.”
7
Cal Townsend had always been a little leery of the pagans he met. He was a slender, intense-looking individual; his eyes a little too large and owlish behind his glasses for the narrow features that surrounded them; his dark curly hair cut so close to his scalp that he appeared to be wearing a skullcap. He had his own way of worshipping what he saw as the creative force behind the world—anthropomorphizing nature in ways that were similar to the Wicca’s Antlered God and Moon Goddess—but he could never quite get comfortable with the organized pagan versions of worship. It smacked too much of the lunatic fringe to him, for all that he was basically at one with and sympathetic to their beliefs.
At least it was like that until he met Julianne Trelawny.
She made the weird seem both logical and normal to him, but he couldn’t quite shake the nagging doubt that the only reason he was into all this stuff now was because he was hot for her.
If it was only looks, that’d be one thing. She was voluptuous—there was no other way to put it—with a heartbreaker of a face and gorgeous red hair that hung all the way down to her waist. And unlike most redheads, she had a dark complexion—due to one of her grandparents being a Native American—and that just made her seem more exotic and attractive to him. There weren’t many women—pagan, Christian or otherwise—who could come close to how good she looked in her ceremonial cloak.
But it wasn’t just looks. He could listen to her talk for hours because she always had something interesting to say, from her wry commentaries on the world at large to her ability to convey her very sincere old-religion beliefs without ever sounding like she was a space cadet. And she wasn’t all deadly serious, either. She loved the old hardcore punk from the seventies, for example, as well as the new acoustic music that was currently making its mark on the charts, and she had a pixilated—a truly whimsical—sense of humor that just charmed the hell out of him.
Was it any wonder, Cal thought, that he was so taken by her?
They’d first met at the Occult Shop on Bank Street. They were both browsing through the bookshelves—she comfortably at ease in the place, while he felt as though anybody walking by outside and looking in through its window had to be thinking that he was a real basket case to even be in here in the first place. But they’d struck up a conversation and when he found out that she was living in Tamson House—or rather when he found out what kind of a place Tamson House was—he moved in as well. Not in the same room or anything, but it was almost like they were living together, wasn’t it, even if the House was the size of a city block and had who knew how many people living in it?