“I felt terrible knowing it would die. The creature was marvelous — not as beautiful as the girl but a wonderful glass creature — and I was so happy and even a little afraid to see the thing — a miracle of glass — my heart went out to it — I couldn’t bear for it to be lost—”
His voice died away. Was he babbling? Perhaps there was no fit way to tell the shape-shifting strangeness of what had happened.
Putting her arms around his waist, the girl leaned her cheek against his bare chest. Xan wrapped his arms around her, and in that instant knew that he loved her because she was everything otherworldly that he had tried to claim in his art, the visionary beauty that he saw in glimpses of glass or sometimes in the fire heaving with life.
“And so I pinched the wound together and thrust the body into the glory hole and hoped — prayed it would live. While I slept, the salamander changed.”
Garland stared at the girl in a handwoven curtain and the young gaffer.
“You must be careful, Xan. She has no soul—”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t be angry with me — the angels have no souls. And don’t need them. Fairies as well. Demons most of all.”
Xan pulled her close. “She’s no — she’s not any of those things. She’s a woman; I’m sure.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Garland glanced around the studio.
“Have you ever made witch balls? With a web of color? Streaks and loops around an orb?”
“That’s tourist work,” Xan said, shrugging.
“A farmer always knows the date. It’s almost the last of the ramps: it’s the eve of Beltane when witches take their spring tonics and get frisky. On a few country greens, villagers will be setting a peeled tree trunk in the earth, decking it in ribbons and flowers, and asking young women to dance. You see? Like the ash poles set up to Ashtaroth long ago.”
“Why should I make a witch ball because children dance around a maypole?”
“The ball catches the spirits of air! They get lost in the maze, or so it’s said. You could try to protect her.”
“But there’s no such—” The gaffer laughed. What was he saying? He gathered the strands of the girl’s hair in one hand, wondering at its fine glassine texture. She was so precious — he would do anything not to lose her. Hadn’t she come to him as mysteriously as a gift from another world? “Garland, I’d be a fool not to take your advice,” Xan said. “You were the one to tell me about the salamander fire. Help me tote the wood, and I’ll make a gaudy sphere for every door, window, and chimney in the house and studio.”
The girl persisted in trailing after him. He couldn’t make her understand that when he crossed a sill, he hadn’t vanished and would return shortly. She seemed to know little except how to kiss, though she had managed to arrange the curtain so that she could move more freely. The glass on the shelves and in the annealers allured her, and she gestured from him to the vessels in what seemed comprehension.
At last satisfied that out of sight did not mean gone, she perched on a stump as the two men ferried split lengths between woodshed and furnace.
Garland paused to look up, squinting.
“What’s that?”
Xan’s arms were loaded with myrtle and oak. He glanced up to see an enormous sky blue pitcher plummeting from the sky. Astonished, he recognized a copy of the vessel he had made on the first morning of his challenge. When it slammed into the earth near the stump, he let the wood crash to the ground.
The foot sprouted legs; the belly, arms; and with a thlomp! a big ugly head popped from the spout.
“No!” Xan flew toward his salamander girl, Garland pounding at his heels, but the demon grinned, snatched her up, and tossed her into the mouth of the pot. As it bounced across the clearing, she learned how to shriek. Her clamor made the demon roar with glee as he leaped toward the top of the mountain opposite the cabin. He hung in the air, the lip and handle looking like clouds and the body of the pitcher almost invisible, and then plunged to land and vanished.
“I’ll find you!” Xan dropped to his knees. The pitcher did not return to sight.
“Get up.” Garland hauled him onto his feet. “The car—”
They were off, whirling away from the studio, headed toward Cullowhee Mountain.
“You saw where they went?” Xan craned out of the window, staring toward the tiptop of the slope.
“Her hair’s fire in the sunlight. Near the summit road.”
Fifteen minutes later they ducked under branches that bordered the asphalt, Garland apologizing for the sack flung over his shoulder. “Might find some late greens.”
For an hour they tramped up and down the ridge before they stumbled on a fissure in the earth.
Wisps of steam and voices filtered up.
The farmer held a finger to his lips.
“Scag, did you see the glass doll? Pretty thing. We’ll enjoy tormenting her!”
“Phew! Nothing but a salamander. I haven’t seen one of those in a coon’s age.”
“Ignorant spark of pipe-guts! You golleroy! I saw one last week at a smithy in Central Asia.”
“You’re lying—”
“I snatched out my tongs and grabbed the thing by the tail and flew off before anybody noticed me fiddling in the flames. I’d been having a bask and was roasting my toes when the salamander trickled from a log—”
“Dottle-pated fool!” There was a crack as of club meeting skull, a howl, and a stutter of noise like an exploding string of firecrackers.
The two eavesdroppers moved away from the cleft and squatted by a mound of trillium and trout lily.
Xan caught the older man’s wrist. “When I find her, how do I manage to get her a soul?”
The farmer gave a slight shake of his head. “That’s not in the encyclopedia, not spelled out for sure. Some of the old fairy tales say to marry. And baptism may work if it doesn’t kill. But I don’t think anybody knows. What you really need is some fellow with a spare one. But who’s got that?”
“I’d give her half of mine if I knew how. I’m going down there. If I’m not back in three hours—”
“I’ll wait. You’ll be clambering up in a jiffy. Here.” He reached in his jacket and pulled out a dark apple. “Fresh from the cellar, an Arkansas Black off our trees. Better take it — you might get hungry. Want to borrow my jacket?”
They had sped away so quickly that Xan still wore nothing but pants and battered clogs slipped on at the door. He stuffed the apple into his pocket.
“You may need it. I have a feeling that I won’t be cold,” he said.
Garland leaned over the gap to watch him go.
Xan shimmied down the walls of a corkscrewed passage. “So long,” he whispered. He could see the other man’s silhouette against the sunlight.
Barely had he caught the answering reply when he lost his grip and began sliding. His hand found but couldn’t seize hold of slits in the rock. He drew up his knees, rocketing down a chute toward faint blue light until he shot into the air and splashed into an immense pool. He leaped upward, shocked that this was not water but fire that lapped the walls of an underground cave. It tingled all around him, warm but somehow insubstantial — distant, he thought, scooping up handfuls of blue. Looking around, he saw nothing of Scag and his companion.
An immense stone, tilted to one side, made an isle that reflected light like a moon. White splinters and spears of brightness broke the surface of waves, and here and there figures lay underneath or floated on top. Eyes open, they were not looking at him but seemed to gaze at something far off. The bodies were pale or dark, the hair floating, and they appeared as oddly simplified as if they were carved Cycladic dolls. Perhaps their details had been worn down by the tide of fire.
He paused to check each one, in case the salamander girl sailed under waves, her staring copper eyes now coins for payment to the ferryman of the dead. Once, wading near the shallows, he hauled a woman to the surface. Slowly, slowly, her eyes groped toward his face. But he couldn’t force her to answer his questions. A mist clouded her eyes; she fell into dream. Others had been skewered by the glowing white darts, and on these a golden flame played where shaft met flesh. Recalling the virtue ascribed to the salamander’s blood, he wondered if the waves could be hotter than they appeared.