So it was that in the lingering summer twilight, half asleep in the saddle as I rocked in rhythm to the horse's smooth gait, I came down into low country as flat as if it had been ironed. The chalk
path gave out in a tangle of scrub vegetation, with thick forest beyond. The loss of a vantage point made me feel small. As I tried to decide what to do next, a hoarse cry like that of an anguished monster bellowed from deep within the forest. Twilight certainly had begun to draw a cloak over the world, and a chorus of frogs, of all things, rose from an unseen pool. The sable cat circled us and Howed over in its lazy way to stand before a wild blooming thicket with flowers strung like tiny bells from drooping branches. As the wind brushed through them, did they tinkle}
The cat yawned in a catlike way that happened also to display to great advantage its impressive saberlike canines, which measured the length of my forearms. I began to think the creature-it was male and probably young-was showing off. It vanished into the shrubbery with a flick of its tail. I pressed my mount forward enough to identify an overgrown track leading into the undergrowth and thence beneath the trees.
I could follow it. But a moment later, I spotted a thread of smoke away to the right, barely visible against the hazy sky. Smoke meant fire. Fire, I deduced, suggested a being not related to a cold mage. I turned away from the thicket and rode parallel along the flats beneath a line of ragged cliffs held together by clumps and tufts of grass.
I soon realized I had misjudged the fire: Whatever hearth expelled the fire came from the cliffs north of me, not from the flats. The twilight hung as though suspended, and it was not yet dark when I spotted a round stone tower, very like an ancient dun although as stout as if it had been built yesterday. I dismounted and led the horse up a track scraped into the earth to reveal chalk. As I came closer, panting at the steep climb, I heard fiddling. At the height, I paused under the canopy of a vast oak.
A bent old woman sat on a flat stone bench with a fiddle set to her chin. She sawed a mournful tune while a fire burned merrily within the confines of a circular hearth constructed of the same fiat stone used to build the dun. The dun had a door, closed, and three high windows, shuttered, and an air of being entirely deserted, like a corpse whose spirit has fled. Beyond the fire and almost lost in the darkness stood a stone trough and next to it a well ringed by a waist-high wall of white stone and capped with a hat of thatch from whose supporting pillars hung a rope and a brass bucket. The horse whickered, smelling water, and the fiddler ceased in midsong and lowered the instrument.
Without looking around and in a voice that sounded much younger than her stooged form appeared, she said, "Peace to you on this fine evening, traveler."
Hearing the village speech here in the spirit world surprised me, but I managed a reply to her back. "Peace to you. I hope there is no trouble."
"No trouble indeed, thanks to my power as a woman. A fine afternoon and a fine day it has been." She still did not turn around. "How does it find you?"
We ran down through an exchange of greetings until I finally asked, "My pardon, but is there some reason you keep your back to me, maestra?"
"Is there some reason you are unaware it is foolish to look any creature in the face in the spirit world before you are sure what manner of creature it is?"
"It is?" I blurted.
She laughed. "Na! Come. Into the light," she said, by which I recalled my surroundings enough to realize that night had fallen and the spirit world breathed in darkness while her cheery fire alone lit the world. There was no moon, and there were no stars, yet neither did the haze that blinded the heavens feel like clouds. Here beyond the aura of light, I began to think the forest below the cliffs had begun to breathe and actually move. A twig snapped.
1 led the mare out from under the oak and, staying well back, circled the hearth until I came around to stand behind another stone bench. I faced the woman across the fire.
She was old, with a crooked back, and as thin as if she had not had enough to eat for many months. But she held my eyes with the confident gaze of a person who is sure of her authority in the world. Her loose, comfortable boubou, the robe sewn out of strips of gold, red, and black cloth, appeared practical for journeying and easy to wear. Her skin was quite black, unusual in these parts, and a scarf wrapped her head, although it had slipped back to reveal twists of silver hair. She wore gold earrings.
"You're a djeli," I said. "A djelimuso." A female djeli.
She opened a case and placed the fiddle and bow within, then closed it and looked at me. "What are you?"
"I'm Catherine," I replied. The horse shied and snorted. I yanked down on the reins just as a pair of saber-toothed cats ambled out of the night and flopped down beside the well.
"Are these also your companions?" asked the djeli with remarkable calm. When she shifted her head to look directly at the big cats, her earrings caught strands of firelight and sent it shooting like arrows into the night, and then I blinked; after all, the earrings were only gleaming slightly, as any polished surface must do.
"Not my companions, but they seem to have followed me." I did not see the sable male cat; these might be two of the ones I thought had stayed behind to guard… or to eat…
"Andevai!"
How any man could manage to look so haughty and offended while limping I could not say. And yet, infuriatingly, it was indeed Andevai who emerged out of the night, appearing very much the worse for the wear with his clothing rumpled and stained. Resides that, he looked immensely annoyed. Behind
him strolled another three of the big cats, whose demeanors bore the smug satisfaction of a petted house cat that has just deposited a mouse before its surprised human. And I was very surprised.
With not even a polite by-your-leave, and ignoring the huge saber-tooths, he approached the roaring fire.
The djeli rose. "Peace, traveler. I hope the night finds you at peace."
He pulled up so sharply that I laughed, for it was as if he'd been reined in.
"I have no trouble thanks to the mother who raised me," he said politely. "May this night find you at peace."
Honestly, they went on in this vein for far longer than I could ever have dragged out a greeting with my inadequate command of village customs. I thought they might wind down through the health of unnamed fathers and uncles and mothers and cousins into the well-being of the cattle, dogs, chickens, wheat, and barley and what troubles the vegetable garden might have seen since the two had last met, which, since these two had evidently never before met, would no doubt take a century to complete.
"Are you finished?" I demanded when there came a pause, rather embarrassed at my rudeness but really beginning to shake now. I could use fear if I turned it to anger. "Begging your pardon, maestra." I drew my sword, and the cats rose as if in answer, yawning to display their ferocious teeth, although they stayed by the well. "I thought you were dead?
He swung around to look at the cats, then back to face me. His own sword remained sheathed. "A more correct statement would be that you wished! was dead."
"I wished no such thing. I am sure I hold no animosity toward you at all except for the small detail that you tried to kill me. Indeed, for all I know, you did kill me, and I am wandering
here as in Sheol, with saber-toothed cats stalking my trail and you plaguing me. I suppose you intend to attack me again, perhaps by the light of this lovely-" I broke off.