The Wood Wife

by Terri Windling

  “Tell me about this buck,” she said to Tomás. His silence made her nervous. “How long has it been coming around here?”

  “There’s been a white stag in these hills,” he said, “for nearly fifty years, according to Cooper.”

  “But not the same one,” said Maggie. “That would be impossible.”

  Tomás’s lips quirked in a smile. “Black Maggie, you’re still talking about what is possible and impossible, even now?”

  She shivered. “Why did you call me that?”

  “That’s what the stones and the wind call you.”

  “You’ve heard the stones and the wind speak my name? Are you one of them too? Like Crow and the others?”

  He laughed; he seemed to find this hilarious. “No,” he said finally, “I’m just a man. And I’m partial to this old shape I wear.”

  She refused to let herself feel embarrassed. It had been a reasonable question. She asked him another. “What about this stag, then? He’s fifty years old, he sheds turquoise stones where he walks. He’s surely of their world, not ours.”

  “Their world is our world,” Tomás told her. “They’re born of this earth, and so are we.”

  “The stag,” she persisted, “is it a shape-shifter like Crow? Or maybe a mage?” she added, trying out the word.

  He laughed again. She wasn’t quite sure why Tomás found her so amusing. “You’re like Fox. You want some Big Wise Man to come along and give you all the answers. What makes you think that I know more than you? Or that my answers will be the same as yours? You tell me, what do you know about this stag, Black Maggie?”

  She considered the question. “I know that there’s a stag man in the hills. Anna called him the Nightmage, the ‘guardian of the east’—which I assume is here in the Rincons. You have a drawing of the creature. Juan has made a sculpture of him, and that sculpture feels … true to me. There must be a painting of him as well, but no one knows where that is now… No wait, I think I do know where it is. In her journal, Anna called the stag man her muse. And she once sent a painting that she said was of her muse to a woman named Maisie Tippetts, in New York. It was the last painting she ever painted, and she told Maisie not to let it ever come back to the mountains again.”

  Tomás was staring at her, his eyes intent. “You see, you do know more than I do. Even Cooper didn’t know where that painting was. Cooper died still wondering.”

  “Is it important?”

  “Yes,” Tomás said simply. He did not offer to tell her why. He looked at Maggie sternly, or perhaps his fierce brown face made it seem that way. “If you make a gift of that information again, make sure it is to someone you trust.”

  She nodded. “Like I did this time,” she said.

  He gave her that wonderful smile of his. He stood. Then he turned to her suddenly. “You’ve given me a gift of information. I should give you a gift as well, and so I’ll tell you that it’s not just the painting of the Nightmage that is missing. It’s the mage himself, the guardian of this place. The stones, the fire, the water—I’ve heard them calling him. And no one answers.”

  “How long has he been missing?” Maggie asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Tomás as he started up the trail. “It’s difficult to tell. Time works differently for them—and for us, when we’re around them.”

  As she followed behind him, climbing up the steep path that led to the next rocky ridge, she said, “May I ask you one more question?” He did not answer yes or no, so Maggie pressed on. “Have you told me this because it is dammas to give something back again?”

  “Dammas? What is that?” the older man said, pronouncing it correctly.

  “Beauty, motion, that-which-moves.”

  “Ah. That’s what my Dineh relatives would call hohzo: walking in beauty. That is how a man should live his life. If he doesn’t, he sickens and dies.” He reached down, offering his hand to pull her up over the lip of the ridge. “Dammas,” he mused, pondering the word as they continued down the trail together.

  At the foot of the next ridge, the path grew narrower and Tomás took the lead once more. The trail was even steeper here, and they needed both hands and feet to climb. She moved warily over the rock, avoiding cactus spines, loose stones, the shadows where snakes or scorpions might hide. Tomás soon outdistanced her, although even he was working at the climb. The sun was fierce. Maggie stopped once again and gulped down more spring water.

  She was breathing hard by the time she reached the edge of the ridge above her. Here the land leveled out into a broad saddle that was filled with tall old saguaro and boulders twice her height. Tomás was somewhere far ahead; Maggie couldn’t see him on the trail. She continued on, feeling light-headed up here. The sky was close, and very blue. The rocks were golden, capturing the light, and she could almost hear them speaking to her, a low sound, a sigh, a murmuring. She began to understand what Tomás meant; there were words in the rocks underfoot and the wind overhead—where had she heard them before? She had a half-memory of a dream she’d dreamt last night, and then that memory was gone. But the words remained. They were poetry, filling her like the thin mountain air she gulped down, trying to catch her breath.

  Overhead, a bird called raucously. It was huge and black, circling the cliffs. It swooped down on her like a hawk on its prey. Maggie flinched and the bird’s raucous cry turned to laughter. Crow was standing before her.

  She looked behind him for Tomás. The trail was empty. “Oh, he’s not here,” said Crow. “I’ve led him astray on an animal path. Now why do you look alarmed? I thought you wanted me to come? Oh dear, you’ve hurt my feelings now,” the shape-shifter told her, laughing at her.

  Maggie laughed suddenly herself. She said, “You have no feelings, Crow.”

  “None that you would recognize as such,” Crow agreed. He climbed a pillar of rock, and when he perched there looking down on her, it was the face of a grey desert fox he wore over the muscular figure of a man. He was singing to her, his voice lower and raspier in his throat: “Sun and dark she followed him, his teeth so bright did shine—and he led her over the mountains, that sly bold Reynardine…”

  “Reynardine, the were-fox,” Maggie said.

  “Very good,” Crow growled at her, gaping his mouth of canine teeth in something that might have passed for a smile. “You remember your English folklore.”

  “Yes, I do. But why do you? We’re an ocean away from England.”

  “True fact,” he said. “Why do you think?”

  She frowned. “You’re taking things from my head.”

  “Wrong. I took that one from Cooper’s, so don’t give yourself airs, my dear. Have you come to answer my question again?”

  “Well now, can’t you just take the answer from my head?”

  He growled, a low rumble in his throat. “I want you to give it to me.”

  She looked up at him, squinting against the sun, and said with exasperation, “I’ve only got the answer you’ve already dismissed. At the core, I still feel like a poet—that’s just how the world looks to me. I’ve tried to think of something else clever to tell you, but I haven’t come up with anything.”

  He cocked his head and looked at her. “I accept that answer,” he growled. He snapped his jaws as if he had gobbled it up, and licked his chops.

  Maggie glared at him. “Why will you accept it now? Why wouldn’t you accept it before?”

  He shrugged. “It’s true now. It wasn’t true yesterday.” He scrambled halfway down the rock and peered at her with interest. “What’s changed? What’s different about you today?” He sniffed her with his pointed canine nose. Maggie pushed the nose away. “Besides, of course, the fact that you have lost your maidenly virtue.”

  “I lost my maidenly virtue over twenty years ago,” she snapped. “And I’m not here to discuss my sex life. If you’ve accepted my answer now, then you owe me some answers yourself.”

  He slid off the rock and stood beside her, his arm around her shoulders. He smelled wild�
��musky and rank; and Maggie tried not to inhale. “I want to know what’s different now,” he persisted. “Then you can ask me all your little questions.”

  “I don’t know what’s different. But last night, today, I hear language in the stones below. I find that I want to write poems again,” she said, and realized that this was true. “I can feel them bubbling up in me. I’ve not felt that way in years.”

  He sniffed her again, closely, intimately, making her cheeks flush red with heat. He narrowed his foxy eyes at her. “I’ll be careful of you from now on.”

  He dropped to the dirt, and sat there, cross-legged. She sat down and faced him, crossed-legged as well. A small fire burned between them, with no source of fuel that Maggie could see. She took the knapsack off of her shoulder, and pulled out two small bundles of cloth. She unwrapped them. Inside one was cedar and sage; the other contained tobacco. Fox had given them to her, and now she was glad that he had.

  Crow watched, slit-eyed, as Maggie poured a small palmful of tobacco into the fire. A flat stone rolled out of the flames toward her. The stone was glowing red with heat. She covered it with cedar and dried white sage; their smoke and scent billowed into the air. In the smoke, she could almost make out the pale forms of the creatures in the fire last night.

  Crow sat and watched her, silent for once, an expression of interest on his pointed face.

  “How many questions may I ask?”

  Crow said, “I have promised you only one. After that, as long as you amuse me, I will answer. When you stop amusing me, I shall go away.”

  “All right, but the one you’ve promised me I already know the answer to. I know who you are.”

  “Today I’ll stew and then I’ll bake, tomorrow I shall the Queen’s child take: Ah! how famous is the game; there’s nobody here who knows my name…”

  “It’s not Rumpiestiltskin. You are a creature of this land, a Trickster and a shape-shifter. When I met you, you were wearing a shape that Anna Naverra gave to you.”

  Crow inclined his head in assent. His eyes were very wide and dark, reflecting the flames of the fire.

  “I also believe that you are Mr. Foxxe, and that you fathered Angela and Isabella, but not Johnny. Am I right about that?”

  “Wrong,” he said with evident satisfaction.

  “Wrong about it all? Or wrong in part?”

  “There is no Mr. Foxxe. Angela and Isabella have no father but the sky, no mother but the earth.”

  “Then where did they get the shapes they wear? From Anna? From Cooper?”

  “Wrong and wrong again! Their shapes come from a painter from New York City, a children’s book illustrator. He came to the desert on vacation and he hiked into the canyon to sketch. One of his drawings was a true drawing. He never knew what he’d left behind.”

  “But Johnny Foxxe is different. He’s human,” she persisted.

  “As you are in a position to know,” he said lewdly.

  She ignored this. “Then who is his father? Cooper?”

  “Ask his mother,” said Crow, and he laughed.

  “All right,” Maggie said, “I will do that. Maybe she’ll even answer.”

  Crow narrowed his eyes. “If you can do that, I shall be careful of you indeed.”

  “What about Juan? Where is he now? Is he all right.’ ”

  Crow cocked his head, as though he listened for something. He sniffed the air. And then he told her, “He is sitting on the banks of Redwater Creek. It is a wonder you didn’t trip over him as you came up the hill just now.”

  “He’s all right then,” Maggie said with relief.

  “He’s alive,” Crow amended. He yawned. “This begins to grow tedious.” He made a gesture and the fire, the scented smoke, all disappeared.

  “No, wait,” Maggie said. “Tell me about Cooper. Tell me how Davis Cooper died.”

  Crow got to his feet. “Ask Cooper,” he said. “I think you’ve asked enough questions now.”

  “One more,” Maggie said, rather desperately. He paused, half-turned away from her, and she ran through all the questions that had been building up inside her these last several weeks. She grabbed one, almost at random, and said, “So what is the ‘spiral path’?”

  “Ah,” he said, turning back again, “now you begin to interest me. Do you wish to walk the spiral path?”

  “Perhaps,” she equivocated warily.

  “Davis Cooper is there,” he told her.

  That sounded rather sinister to her. “If death is the spiral path, then no thank you.”

  He barked with laughter. “You need not die. The dead walk on the path, it’s true; but the place where they walk, no living man can reach.” He offered his hand to pull her to her feet. She took it, and rose. “Come, walk with me,” Crow said, and now his face was shaped as a man’s—beautiful, and lightly drawn with spiral tattoos across the cheeks. She was glad to see that face again. The fox face had been too unnerving. “Come, and I will show you the path. Then you can decide for yourself whether you wish to follow where it leads.”

  He took her to the mountain’s edge. The city sprawled in the valley below, surrounded by mountains, half hidden by long plumes of clouds drifting past the ridge where they stood. Crow waved his hand and spoke a word in a strange tongue. The clouds moved with his movement, creating a straight and unnatural line that ran from the mountains on the northern horizon to the Santa Rita range in the south.

  He said, “That’s the path that you humans walk, from the moment of birth until the moment of death. You think that every year, every step, is a progression from the one that fell before it to the one that follows after. You call it Time. It makes no sense to us.” He waved his hand and the line disappeared. The clouds broke up. He waved, spoke a word, and then he spun them into a perfect circle.

  “This is also Time. It is the cycle of the seasons, the harvests, of a woman’s blood moon, of birth and death. The circle is a true shape; it has beauty in it. Yet it’s still a human Truth, not one of ours. It is not dammas,” he told her. He dismissed it, waving. The circle dispersed, the clouds scattering across the wide valley, casting patterns of shadows that drifted across the lower mountain slopes.

  Crow spoke another word. He made a stirring motion, as though he stirred a great cauldron of soup. The clouds below them spun and roiled, then formed the shape of a white spiral that seemed to be made out of fine spun sugar. It covered the valley, blocking it from sight, and unlike the other cloud forms, it moved—a slow, barely perceptible movement, steady as the orbit of the earth.

  “This is our path, the spiral path. This is how the world looks to us. We have no Time, as you know Time. We know only that-which-moves. On the spiral path, the past and the future are simply two different directions. I stand in the present, at the center of the spiral, and I can walk as easily to one as to the other.”

  Maggie stared at the cloud form before her, shaped like the patterns on the bracelet she wore, like the spirals in Anna Naverra’s paintings. She tried to grasp what Crow was telling her; but it felt exactly like stepping off the side of the cliff. She shuddered. “Did Anna walk the spiral path?”

  “She tried,” Crow said. “And she failed.”

  Maggie looked at the white cloud shape before her, the great unknown spreading at her feet. She could understand why Anna had failed. It was not a human path at all; it was neither rational nor safe. It threatened her whole understanding of the world, and her place in that world, in Time, in history. It was beautiful and terrible. Maggie looked away, feeling dizzy.

  “What about Cooper, then?” she questioned Crow. “Did he try to walk the path?”

  “Maybe he did and maybe he didn’t.” The smile Crow gave to her was sly. “If you really want to know, I suggest that you go and ask Cooper yourself.”

  She stared at him. “I could do that?” she said, her husky voice breaking. “I could talk to Cooper?”

  “Of course. On that path, you could walk into any of the years when Cooper was alive on t
his mountain.”

  Maggie stood, overwhelmed, understanding the true seduction of what he offered. For all of the years of her adult life she had wanted to talk face-to-face with the man whose words had opened poetry to her, and unlocked the poet within herself. Fox, Dora, Tomás, the Alders—they had all had, all taken for granted, the very thing that she had been denied, and had thought she had lost forever. Crow smiled a small, self-satisfied smile, knowing that he had found the one desire buried in Maggie’s heart that would lead her to walk off a cliff.

  Crow said, “One road lies to wickedness; one road lies to righteousness; and the third road—”

  “—lies to fair Elfland, where thou and I must go,” said Maggie, finishing the line from an old folksong. She hesitated, remembered her promise to Fox, to be careful around this man. She looked at him. “What’s the price? What does one have to give up to do this?”

  He crossed his arms. “That’s negotiable,” he said with that smile she knew better than to trust. “Tell me, Black Maggie. What will you give me?”

  “What did Anna give you?”

  He shrugged. “Something she wanted to be rid of. Something she came to regret.”

  “Her art,” said Maggie.

  “Wrong,” said Crow, amused. “Try again.”

  Her eyes widened. “The pregnancy,” she guessed, and she could see by his face that she’d guessed correctly. “You took the baby, didn’t you?”

  “Baby? There was no baby,” Crow said. “There was only the idea, the glimmer of one. She was six weeks pregnant. She would have miscarried in another three weeks anyway.”

  “But you took it.”

  “That’s right. I took it from her belly as a stone—a stone in the palm of my hand.”

  “The Night of the Dark Stone…”

  The sly smile returned. “How quick you are after all, Black Maggie. It took Cooper forty years to discover that.”

  “Why? Why didn’t you tell him?”

  Crow cocked his head. “Because it amused me not to.”

  “And did it amuse you not to tell Anna that she would have miscarried anyway? Did it amuse you to watch her eat her heart out with guilt and sorrow afterwards?”