The Buffalo Man
The oaks were full of crows, as plentiful as leaves, more of the raucous black-winged birds than Jilly had ever seen together in one place. She kept glancing out the living room window at them, expecting some further marvel, though their enormous gathering was marvel enough all on its own. The leaded panes framed group after group of them in perfect compositions that made her itch to draw them in the sketchbook she hadn’t thought to bring along.
“There are an awful lot of crows out there this evening,” she said after her hundredth inspection of them.
“You’ll have to forgive her,” the professor told their hosts with a smile. “Sometimes I think she’s altogether too concerned with crows and what they’re up to. For some people it’s the stock market, others it’s the weather. It’s a fairly new preoccupation, but it does keep her off the streets.”
“As if.”
“Before this it was fruit faeries,” the professor added, leaning forward from the sofa where he was sitting, his tone confidential.
“Wasn’t.”
The professor tched. “As good as was.”
“Well, we all need a hobby,” Cerin said.
“This is, of course, true,” Jilly allowed, after first sticking out her tongue at the pair of them. “It’s so sad that neither of you have one.”
She’d been visiting with Professor Dapple, involved in a long, meandering conversation concerning Kickaha Mountain ballads vis-à-vis their relationship to British folktales, when he suddenly announced that he was due for tea at the Kelledys’ that afternoon and did she care to join them? Was the Pope Catholic? Did the moon have wings? Well, one out of two wasn’t bad, and of course she had to come.
The Kelledys’ rambling house on Stanton Street was a place of endless fascination for her with its old-fashioned architecture, all gables and gingerbread, with climbing vines and curious rooflines. The rooms were full of great solid pieces of furniture that crouched on Persian carpets and the hardwood floors like sleeping animals, not to mention any number of wonderfully bright and mysterious things perched on the shelves and sideboards, on the windowsills and meeting rails, like so many half-hidden lizards and birds. And then there were the oak trees that surrounded the building, a regular forest of them larger and taller than anywhere else in the city, each one of them easily a hundred years old.
The house was magic in her eyes, as much as the couple who inhabited it, and she loved any excuse to come by for a visit. On a very lucky day, Cerin would bring out his harp, Meran her flute, and they would play a haunting, heart-lifting music that Jilly never heard except from them.
“I didn’t know fruit had their own faeries,” Meran said. “The trees, yes, but not the individual fruit itself.”
“I wonder if there are such things as acorn faeries,” Cerin said.
“I must ask my father.”
Jilly gave a theatrical sigh. “We’re having far too long a conversation about fruit and nuts, and whether or not they have faeries, and not nearly enough about great, huge, cryptic parliaments of crows.”
“It would be a murder, actually,” the professor put in.
“Whatever. I think it’s wonderfully mysterious.”
“At this time of the day,” Meran said, “they’d be gathering together to return to their roosts.”
Jilly shook her head. “I’m not so sure. But if that is the case, then they’ve decided to roost in your yard.”
She turned back to look out over the leaf-covered lawn that lay under the trees, planning some witty observation that would make them see just how supremely marvelous it all was, but the words died unborn in her throat as she watched a large, bald-headed Buddha of a man step onto the Kelledys’ walk. He was easily the largest human being she’d ever seen—she couldn’t guess how many hundreds of pounds he must weigh—but oddly enough he moved with the supple grace of a dancer a fraction his size. His dark suit was obviously expensive and beautifully tailored, and his skin was as black as a raven’s wing. As he came up the walk, the crows became agitated and flew around him, filling the air with their hoarse cries—growing so loud that the noise resounded inside the house with the windows closed.
But neither the enormous man, nor the actions of the crows, were what had dried up the words in Jilly’s throat. It was the limp figure of a slender man that the dapper Buddha carried in his arms. In sharp contrast, he was poorly dressed for the brisk weather, wearing only a raggedy shirt and jeans so worn they had almost no color left in them. His face and arms were pale as alabaster, even his braided hair was white—yet another striking contrast to the man carrying him. She experienced something familiar, yet strange when she gazed on his features, like taking out a favorite old sweater she hadn’t worn in years and feeling at once quite unacquainted with it and affectionately comfortable when she put it on.
“That’s no crow,” Cerin said, having stepped up to the window to stand beside Jilly’s chair.
Meran joined him, then quickly went to the door to let the new visitor in. The professor rose from the sofa when she ushered the man and his burden into the room, waving a hand toward the seat he’d just quit.
“Put him down here,” he said.
The black man nodded his thanks. Stepping gracefully across the room, he knelt and carefully laid the man out on the sofa.
“It’s been a long time, Lucius,” the professor said as the man straightened up. “You look different.”
“I woke up.”
“Just like that?”
Lucius gave him a slow smile. “No. A red-haired storyteller gave me a lecture about responsibility and I realized she was right. It had been far too long since I’d assumed any.”
He turned his attention to the Kelledys then.
“I need a healing,” he said.
There was something formal in the way he spoke the words, the way a subject might speak to his ruler, though there was nothing remotely submissive in his manner.
“There are no debts between us,” Cerin said.
“But now—”
“Nonsense,” Meran told him. “We’ve never turned away someone in need of help before and we don’t mean to start now. But you’ll have to tell us how he was injured.”
She knelt down on the floor beside the sofa as she spoke. Reaching out, she touched her middle finger to the center of his brow, then lifted her hand and moved it down his torso, her palm hovering about an inch above him.
“I know little more than you, at this point,” Lucius said.
“Do you at least know who he is?” Cerin asked.
Lucius shook his head. “The crow girls found him lying by a Dumpster out behind the Williamson Street Mall. They tried to heal him, but all they could manage was to keep him from slipping further away. Maida said he was laid low by ill will.”
Jilly’s ears perked up at the mention of the crow girls. They were the real reason for her current interest in all things corvid, a pair of punky, black-haired young women who seemed to have the ability to change your entire perception of the world simply by stepping into the periphery of your life. Ever since she’d first seen them in a cafe, she kept spotting them in the most unlikely places, hearing the most wonderful stories about them. Whenever she saw a crow now, she’d peer closely at it, wondering if this was one of the pair in avian form.
“That makes it more complicated,” Meran said.
Sitting back on her heels, she glanced at Lucius. He gave her an apologetic look.
“I know he has buffalo blood,” he told her.
“Yes, I see that.”
“What did Maida mean by ill will?” Cerin asked. “He doesn’t appear to have any obvious physical injuries.”
Lucius shrugged. “You know how they can be. The more they tried to explain it to me, the less I understood.”
Jilly had her own questions as she listened to them talk, such as why hadn’t someone immediately called for an ambulance, or why had this Lucius brought the injured man here, rather than to a
hospital? But there was a swaying, eddying sensation in the air, a feeling that the world had turned a step from the one everyone knew and they now had half a foot in some other, perhaps more perilous, realm. She decided to be prudent for a change and listen until she understood better what was going on.
She wasn’t the only one puzzled, it seemed.
“We need to know more,” Meran said.
Lucius nodded. “I’ll see if I can find them.”
“I’ll come with you,” Cerin said.
Lucius hesitated for a long moment, then gave another nod and the two men left the house. Jilly half expected them to fly away, but when she looked out the window she saw them walking under the oaks toward the street like an ordinary, if rather mismatched, pair, Lucius so broad and large that the tall harper at his side appeared slender to the point of skinniness. The crows remained in the trees this time, studying the progress of the two men until they were lost from sight.
“I have some things to fetch,” Meran said. “Remedies to try. Will you watch over our patient until I get back?”
Jilly glanced at the professor.
“Um, sure,” she said.
And then the two of them were alone with the mysteriously stricken man. Laid low by ill will. What did that mean?
Jilly pulled a footstool over to the sofa where Meran had been kneeling and sat down. Looking at the man, she found herself wishing for pencil and sketchbook again. He was so handsome, like a figure from a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Except for the braids and raggedy clothes, of course. Then she felt guilty for where her thoughts had taken her. Here was the poor man, half dead on the sofa, and all she could think about was drawing him.
“He doesn’t look very happy, does he?” she said.
“Not very.”
“Where do you know Lucius from?”
The professor took off his wire-rimmed glasses and gave them a polish they didn’t need before replacing them.
“I can’t remember where or when I first met him,” he said. “But it was a long time ago—before the war, certainly. Not long after that he became somewhat of a recluse. At first I’d go visit him at his house—he lives just down the street from here—but then it came to the point where he grew so withdrawn that one might as well have been visiting a sideboard or a chair. Finally I stopped going ‘round.”
“What happened to him, do you think?”
The professor shrugged. “Hard to tell with someone like him.”
“You’re being deliberately mysterious, aren’t you?”
“Not at all. There just isn’t much to say. I know he’s related to the crow girls. Their grandfather, or an uncle or something. I never did quite find out which.”
“So that’s why all the crows are out there.”
“I doubt it,” the professor said. “He’s corbae, all right, but raven not crow.”
Jilly felt a thrill of excitement. A raven uncle, crow girls, the man on the sofa with his buffalo blood. She was in the middle of some magical story for once, rather than on the edges of it, looking in, and her proximity made everything feel bright and clear and very much in focus. Then she felt guilty again because it had taken someone getting hurt to draw her into this story. Considering the unfortunate circumstances, it didn’t seem right to be so excited by it.
She turned back to look at the pale man, lying there so still.
“I wonder if he can turn into a buffalo,” she said.
“I believe it’s more of a metaphorical designation,” the professor told her, “rather than an actual shapeshifting option.”
Jilly shook her head. She could remember the night in Old Market when she’d first seen the crow girls slip from crow to girl and back again. It wasn’t exactly something you forgot, though oddly enough the memory did have a tendency to try to slip away from her. To make sure it didn’t, she’d fixed the moment in pigment and hung the finished painting on the wall of her studio as a reminder. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think it’s a piece of real magic.” She leaned closer to the man and reached forward to push aside a few long white hairs that had come to lie across his lashes. When she touched him, that swaying, eddying sensation returned, stronger than ever. She had long enough to say, “Oh, my,” then the world slipped away and she was somewhere else entirely.
2
“I have resumed my responsibilities,” Lucius said as the two men walked to his house a few blocks farther down Stanton Street.
Cerin gave him a sidelong glance. “Guilt’s a terrible thing, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
The harper shrugged. “It makes you question people’s motives, even when they’re as straightforward as my wanting to help you find a pair of somewhat wayward and certainly mischievous relatives.”
“They can be a handful,” Lucius said. “It’s possible we’ll find them more quickly with your help.”
Cerin hid a smile. He knew that was about as much of an apology as he’d be getting, but he didn’t mind. He hadn’t really wanted one. He’d only wanted Lucius to understand that no one was holding him to blame for withdrawing from the world the way he had— at least no one in the Kelledy household was. Responsibility was a sharp-edged sword that sometimes cut too deep, even for an old spirit such as Lucius Portsmouth.
So all he said was, “Um-hmm,” then added, “Odd winter we’ve been having, isn’t it? So close to Christmas and still no snow. I wonder whose fault that is.”
Lucius sighed. “You can be insufferable.”
This time Cerin didn’t hide his smile. “As Jilly would say, it’s just this gift I have.”
“But I appreciate your confidence.”
“Apology accepted,” Cerin told him, unable to resist.
“You wouldn’t have any crow blood in you, would you?”
“Nary a drop.”
Lucius harrumphed and muttered, “I’d still like to see the results of a DNA test.”
“What was that?”
“I said, I wonder where they keep their nest.”
Stanton Street was lined with oaks, not so old as those that grew around the Kelledy house, but they were stately monarchs nonetheless. Having reached the Rookery where Lucius lived, the two men paused to look up where the bare branches of the trees laid their pattern against the sky above. Twilight had given way to night and they could see stars peeking down from among the boughs. Stars, but no black-haired, giggling crow girls. Lucius called, his voice ringing up into the trees like a raven’s cry.
Kaark. Kaark. Tok.
There was no reply.
“They weren’t so happy with this foundling of theirs,” Lucius said, turning to his companion. “At first I thought it was because their healing didn’t take, but when I carried him to your house, I began to understand their uneasiness.”
He called again, but there was still no response.
“What do you find so troubling about him?” Cerin asked.
Though he had an idea. There were people and places that were like doors to other realms, to the spiritworld and to worlds deeper and older than that. In their presence, you could feel the world shift uneasily underfoot, the ties binding you to it loosening their grip— an unsettling sensation for anyone, but more so for those who could normally control where they walked.
The still, pale man with his white braids had been like that.
Lucius said as much, then added, “The trouble with such doors isn’t so much what they open into, as what they can close you from.”
Cerin nodded. To be denied access to the spiritworld would be like losing a sense. One’s hearing, one’s taste.
“So you don’t think they’ll come,” he said.
Lucius shrugged. “They can be willful … not so responsible as some.”
“Let me try.”
“Never let it be said I turned down someone’s help.”
Cerin smiled. He closed his eyes and reached back to his home, back to a room on the second floor. A harp stood there with a rose carved i
nto the wood where curving neck met forepillar. His fingers twitched at his sides and the sound of that roseharp was suddenly in the air all around them, a calling-on song that rose up as though from the ground and spun itself out against the branches above, then higher still, as though reaching for the stars.
“A good trick,” Lucius said. “Cousin Brandon does much the same with his instrument, though in his case, he’s the only one to hear its tones.”
“Perhaps you’re not listening hard enough,” Cerin said.
“Perhaps.”
He might have said more, but there came a rustling in the boughs above them and what appeared to be two small girls were suddenly there, hanging upside down from the lowest branch by their hooked knees, laughter crinkling in the corners of their eyes while they tried to look solemn.
“Oh, that was veryvery mean,” Maida said.
Zia gave an upside down nod. “Calling us with magic music.”
“We’d give you a good bang on the ear.”
“Reallyreally we would.”
“Except the music’s so pretty.”
“Ever so truly pretty.”
“And magic, of course.”
Cerin let the harping fall silent.
“We need you to tell us more about the man you found,” he said.
The crow girls exchanged glances.
“Surely such wise and clever people as you don’t need help from us,” Maida said.
“That would be all too very silly,” Zia agreed.
“And yet we do,” Cerin told them. “Will you help us?”
There was another exchange of glances between the pair, then they dropped lightly to the ground.
“Are there sweets in your house?” Zia asked.
“Mountains of them.”
“Oh, good,” Maida said. She gave Lucius a sad look. “Old Raven never has any sweets for us.”
Zia nodded. “It’s veryvery sad. What kind do you have?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Well, come on,” Maida said, taking Cerin’s hand. “We’d better hurry up and find out.”
Zia nodded, looking a little anxious. “Before someone else eats them all.”