Cat Magic

  It grew much colder.

  George drove onto the campus, went to the lab, and began loading the coils into cardboard boxes. Four trips back and forth and his car was full. There remained only one thing to get: the tranquilizer gun. There was enough scopolamine in one of those cartridges to close a human being down for a good hour.

  He pocketed it. His pistol was nowhere to be found, Clark, no doubt, making sure the doctor didn’t do himself in.

  No, not yet. The good doctor had been in a tailspin, yessir. But the good doctor was now flying again.

  He had a fine plan. He was going to become the spider of the house. Do a little web sitting.

  Sooner or later, dear little Mandy would be bound to return, if only to get her things.

  When she did, he was going to kill her.

  Farewell, Amanda.

  And bring her back to a normal life.

  Hello, again. (Applause.)

  Together they would share their triumph with the world—

  Chapter 16

  Mandy awoke to the sound of dripping water. She opened her eyes and found herself looking across a dirt floor. Her shoulders ached, her thighs ached, and greasy male flesh wrapped her body. Robin, in the truth of the morning, needed a bath.

  As she became fully conscious, she was struck by powerful, pounding emotions. There was sorrow over the horse that had been killed, but at the same time something new moved in her, a sense of tautness, as if a little steel had impregnated her bones, and her muscles had been filled with the energy of a coiled spring. Robin was not a large, distant model of her father, but somehow smaller, and she knew that she could share power with a man, or even take it from him if she wished.

  Beyond these newly discovered feelings and powers, though, there was something much greater. Over the past twenty-four hours it had emerged as the new center of her understanding, revising everything. It was her memory of the Leannan Sidhe, the Fairy Queen. To lie back in the straw and know she had seen the Leannan and that the fairy were real gave her the most exquisite possible joy. For her the meaning of the world had deepened and grown much richer. The joy that filled her extended itself beyond love of the Leannan to include Robin and Constance and the whole Covenstead. She had reached, she thought, the center of the world’s beauty.

  She indulged in an elaborate stretch, feeling every muscle, every limb.

  The water was gurgling, tinkling, pinging all around the outside of the wattled building. Here and there a drip came through the thatch. The unseasonable snow was melting.

  Around her people sighed and snored. She was the only person awake, but the animals were snuffling about in their stalls. Across a tossed expanse of sleeping humanity a soft-eyed goat was munching hay.

  Besides her enormous sense of personal well-being, there was a physical reality she could not ignore.

  She felt sticky and clammy, dirtier than she had been since the days of tattered sneakers and sand piles.

  She could not recall wanting a shower quite as much as she wanted one now. The dripping sounds made her long to feel a warm stream sluicing across her skin, to smell the gentle billows of Ivory as they washed away the battles of the night.

  She stared back at the eerie lozenges floating in the goat’s eyes. Somehow it did not seem entirely innocent, this goat. Who knows what is in the mind of the animal—the simple emptiness that seems to be there or a silent, motionless intelligence? Its ears pricked forward. Her staring had made it curious.

  There came the memory of thunder in the dark. The hard flash of the shotgun, the quivering of her devastated horse.

  Her horse? She hardly knew his name.

  But for a little while that horse had been part of her. He was the shaded man she had touched once or twice inside herself. In every woman, she thought, there lives a father and a bandit of a man, who is somehow reached through mat mad love of horses that affects many an adolescent woman. Mandy could remember owning pictures of horses and going to the county fair to see the trotters.

  You do not just kill a magnificent horse.

  Robin’s hand dangled across her thigh. She took it to her lips and kissed it. How unfamiliar it was. She decided that she did not actually love him. She felt passion for him. For her, this was a very rare experience. Her relationships with men were not straightforward. There had been too much anger between her and her father for her to ever trust herself to a man—

  Idly she ran her fingers in his hair, touched his sleeping face. Would she love him, this man who had been given to her, or did the gift preclude that desperate, clinging thing?

  Through the smoke hole far above came a blast of light. Outside chickens were cackling, and a rooster set up a lusty crowing. A cow kicked her stall and something made a chortling sound.

  Something else moved in the far shadows, disturbing the dark near the wall. When Mandy raised her head to look more closely, the movement stopped.

  She was not deceived, though. Even her brief experience with raw nature had already changed her perceptions. Animal cunning did not fool her so easily. She knew something was there.

  Stillness settled, and as it did, the shadows began to move again. Something slid along, changing the curve of a leg, the thickness of a thigh, the length of an arm, as it moved among the sleepers.

  Mandy understood all at once what she was seeing, and when she did she jammed her fist in her mouth to keep from screaming. It moved steadily across the room, its head held just above the floor, its tongue darting, its eyes polished knobs.

  Mandy watched it come into the center of the circle. Midway down its length was a lump about the size of a rat. It was at least six feet long, a great red and yellow creature, fairly glowing with reptilian health. It was on its way home after its predawn hunt.

  The snake was no fool. It did not attempt to go near the animal stalls, but rather headed toward the door, crossing sleeping people with impunity, staying strictly away from the hoofed things. As it slid across a child’s bottom, she giggled in her steep.

  Not ten seconds after it had disappeared into a crack in the wattling beside the door, the great gong boomed. Somebody coughed. The child awoke laughing. Other shadows began rising in the half light.

  Cloaks and jackets and shirts were found. Mandy chose to watch the activity out of half-closed eyes.

  She didn’t want to miss any chance, however small, to learn more about these people. She was now able to accept that she was important to them, and thus it bothered her all the more that they were such strangers to her. She had already learned that direct questions didn’t help much. Ask them their names and they would say Flame or Wild Aster or Garnet or some such thing. But never a legal identification.

  As if he existed half in her imagination and half in reality, she saw Tom clinging in the rafters, a vividness fading. He had done terrible things, that cat. You could hear his fury in the way he breathed.

  The general shuffle in the room awoke Robin. He shifted, stretched, then groaned.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “I must be alive. I ache all over.”

  “You aren’t alone. I’m hungry as well as sore.”

  He laughed. “You’re lucky you don’t have to eat and run. I’ve got to commute ail the way to New York.”

  Surely he was joking. The Holly King couldn’t possibly be a commuter.

  “Don’t look so amazed. You make me feel like I’ve got two heads or something. I go to the Pratt Institute. I’m studying design. It’s no big deal. A lot of us commute. The Covenstead has to exist in the real world, after all. And it’s out there, believe me, belching smoke and vomiting a continuous stream of Big Macs and VCRs.”

  He stood up and took a couple of halting steps. “Damn. I might be cutting class this morning. Look at my feet.”

  She touched the cuts, the swellings, the bruises. He had run barefoot as well as naked last night.

  Considering which, his feet were actually in fairly good condition.

  Now that she was fully awak
e she recalled the Wild Hunt in exact detail. And she wondered about the morality of such an escapade. She and Robin had abused their bodies. Above all, there was the death of the horse and the terrible chase that could so easily have ended in their murder. One of the things the Wild Hunt had given her was the willingness to ask hard questions. She did not know it, but she was beginning to take the first, hesitant steps toward rule. “Why did you go into the town?”

  “The Wild Hunt would hardly be wild if there was no danger. And the town covens would have been bitterly disappointed.”

  “You could have found danger in the woods.”

  “Safer danger? Come on. Our enemy lives in Maywell.”

  “I lost my horse.”

  “Raven was a great creature.”

  “I loved him.”

  “He was part of you last night, wasn’t he?”

  “More than you realize.”

  “Then he still is, Amanda. Now and always. And you should thank Brother Pierce for that. He gave you Raven.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “No air is sweeter than that we breathe after we have escaped our enemy.” Robin touched her face.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s find us some breakfast.”

  She found herself willing to accept his touch and the consolation in his voice. The Wild Hunt was over.

  Nobody needed to tell her that she had passed that test as well. From the new power and assurance she felt within, she knew it.

  They went out into a mild morning. The ground was sodden, everything wet with runoff. The temperature was easily fifty. The air smelled of hot bread and wood fires, with a colder breath coming off the mountain. Robin inhaled, looked around. “If the snow had come a week earlier or stayed a day longer, it would have destroyed our crops.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “Some people around here think the Leannan can control the weather. All the covens cast spells for a thaw, though. Maybe that’s what did it.”

  “Show me some spells ”

  “Soon.”

  “Oh, come on. I’m sick of being kept in suspense by you people. I want to know now!”

  “Look—quick!” He pointed toward a tangle at the base of the mountain.

  “What?”

  He laughed. “Fairy. You have to be quick to see them.”

  “I’d like to see them up close again.”

  “They don’t let you do that.”

  “I’d like to see the Leannan again. Really see her.”

  “Except for Constance, you’re the only human being who’s ever seen the Leannan. Unless there are some who saw her and didn’t survive the experience.” What he said both chilled and delighted her. She tossed her head, laughing somewhere deep inside. She remembered the silver-blond hair, the face with its laughing, sultry smile. “Do you wonder what she’s like?”

  “Of course.” His voice was sharp, she thought a bit disappointed.

  They came to a cottage near the center of the village. Inside Ivy was making oatmeal in a kettle over the open fire. Mandy had never actually been inside one of the cottages before. It was low-ceilinged, with rush beds against two of die walls. They were concealed by dark brown draperies of homespun. Each bed was wide enough for two. In the center of the room was a large table on which there were four earthenware bowls. A loaf of black bread sat on a board in the middle of the table. Beside it was a large wedge of pale cheese and a pitcher. There were earthenware cups and wooden spoons. A young man in a gray pinstripe suit laid plates out beside the bowls.

  “Morning, Ivy,” Robin said. “Morning, Yellowjacket.”

  “You both look like hell,” Ivy replied. “And you smell worse. Go down to the sweat lodge, please.

  There’ll still be plenty of food left when you’re endurable.”

  Robin took Mandy’s arm, guided her out. “It’s her house,” he said. “Better not rile her.”

  “I’d love a bath anyway.”

  “You know about the sweat lodge? I was hoping it’d be a surprise.”

  “Whatever are you talking about?”

  “The sweat lodge. I designed it, you know. The structure, all the equipment. Everything.”

  She had not noticed the long, low building hugging the edge of the village before. Smoke came from tall chimneys at either end, it was made of brick, with a roof of cedar shakes.

  There were shoes and boots lined up along the doorstep. An overhang protected articles of clothing from the elements. “Hang your other clothes under your cloak.”

  “I’m not wearing any other clothes.”

  They disrobed together. She stood, feeling the prick of the morning air, her hands touching her breasts.

  “I hope it’s warm in there.”

  He opened the door into a steamy wonderland. The odor alone was unforgettable, a heady ambrosia of pine and cedar and soap. Cedar beams sweated above. There were three tubs made of glazed bricks.

  Under them fireboxes glowed. People sat up to their necks in the water. A woman lay nearby on a wooden table being gently massaged by another. Two men did stretching exercises together on the wet slate floor. People talked quietly, laughed. Men shaved before a long, dripping mirror, their faces lathered light green. A girl, blond and tall, tossed wood into the fires, then went to a large canvas mechanism. She dipped the canvas bucket in one of the pools and raised it by a winch to the ceiling. “Shower’s ready,”

  she said to Robin and Mandy.

  At last, a wish granted. The soap, however, wasn’t Ivory. The bars were heavy and green, and flecked with herbs. They created dense lather that smelled of mint and left Mandy’s body feeling smooth and very clean, almost as if her skin had somehow been penetrated and renewed from within.

  “Get rinsed,” the girl said. “Your water’s almost over.” As Mandy finished she heard the girl telling some of the people in the tubs to hurry.

  “Maywell has only one bus into New York,” Robin said as he dried himself with a huge, rough towel. “If we miss it we miss work. So we do our ritual sweats in the evening. This is just your ordinary garden-variety communal bath.” Saying that, he got into one of the big tubs. Mandy followed, slipping down into the delicious water. The other soakers were just getting out, and she and Robin soon had the tub to themselves.

  “What do you people do in New York? My impression was that you were living out here in isolation, fanning and things like that.”

  “We’ve got a great farm. But people have jobs, too. Careers. Some of us don’t choose to give them up.

  In addition to this, our economy isn’t completely internalized. We have to go outside for a few things.”

  “You mean matches—”

  “We don’t need matches. We use rushes and waxed tapers and take from fire to fire.”

  “Candles, kerosene?”

  “I doubt if the whole Covenstead uses ten gallons of kerosene in a year. Wax comes from our own bees.

  We have fine hives, and Selena Martin is an outstanding mistress of bees.”

  “Medicine, then. Surgery. Advanced diagnostics.”

  The attendant interrupted. “I’m going to damp back the fire now. It’s past time and you have your bus, Robin.”

  Robin only nodded. “Would you believe me if I told you that modem medicine is to some extent an addiction. The more you rely on it, the more you need it. When we get sick, really sick, the medical team goes to work. We use herbal remedies extensively and effectively. As far as diagnostics are concerned, Constance is extraordinary. And she can heal, too. When a witch chooses death, the whole Covenstead celebrates. It is sad to be saying good-bye, but we’re also happy for the dying witch. You will learn about the Land of Summer, where we believe we go to await rebirth. Witches do not deny death. For us a death is as rich and joyous an occasion as a birth or a marriage.”

  “I always think of it as a tragedy.”

  “That’s just a cultural habit. Death is just another stage of life, perhaps the fullest, best stage.”

/>   “But what if somebody—some female witch—is dying in abject agony from breast cancer? What then?

  Do you dance and sing?”

  His eyes filmed for a moment, then cleared. “A hard death is a blessing also. Anyway, we have powerful drugs for pain, not to mention hypnosis. All of that is Connie’s province. I don’t know much about it.”

  “What is she, beyond leader?”

  “Oh, she’s not a leader at all. Connie is much closer to being a mother than a ruler. She’s where you go when you have need—advice, encouragement, medicine, whatever your need is, she is there for you.”

  So that was to be her own role. Life was turning, Connie had grown old. “She wants me to be her assistant. That’s why they call me Maiden.”

  “She has no assistant. She is Crone. Once she was Maiden. As she matured, the character of the Covenstead changed. When she was Maiden, things were much wilder, more intense. Then in her Motherhood we were builders, knitters, carpenters. Now she is Crone, and we are a contemplative Covenstead. When she passes—” He stopped suddenly, and she held out her hand to him. “I’m sorry.

  She will die, or she would not have brought you here to be initiated. You will never be anybody’s assistant. When you are Maiden, we will belong to your will and your will only, just as we belong to Connie now.” He raised his head, smiled. “You will not rule us, though. We rule ourselves, each one of us. The only hierarchy of the Covenstead is that of heart and hearth.”

  “Robin, this is just fascinating. But I have to admit that the water’s getting awfully cold.”

  “Yeah, that’s a fact. Maybe we’d better go for breakfast, assuming Ivy’s saved anything for us.”

  On the way back to the cottage they passed women and men hurrying off in the direction of the main house. They carried briefcases, wore topcoats, even some hats. Others had gathered into a work gang and were marching toward the fields. These wore plain homespun trousers and jerkins, men and women alike.

  “What about taxes?” Mandy asked suddenly. “And those suits and ties. Surely you didn’t weave those.”

  “The suits are bought. As far as taxes are concerned, the IRS knows where we are, and we pay our taxes. You have trouble writing off Bell, Book, and Candle as a business expense, though, so don’t even think about it.”