River Marked

by Briggs, Patricia

The pulse of Stonehenge’s magic was growing more regular, like a beating heart. I thought it was getting even stronger, too, but that might have been because I was sitting on the ground. My own heart sped up a little until it kept beat with the magic. It wasn’t unpleasant, just disconcerting.

  “Mercy?” Calvin called.

  “Not yet,” I told him.

  “How long?”

  “As long as it takes,” growled Adam, his voice hoarse and deep as he was caught halfway between wolf and man.

  The flow of magic paused, as if it had heard him, then took up its beat again. I didn’t like it.

  “Are you all right?” I asked, very quietly.

  He didn’t say anything, which I took as answer enough.

  His breathing grew labored until I started to be seriously worried for him.

  “It’s the earth’s magic,” Coyote said, sitting down beside me on the side opposite Adam’s struggle.

  Adam growled, a hoarse and pained sound that was nonetheless a threat.

  “No harm to you or yours,” Coyote told him. “I stand guard for you. They were supposed to tell you to change before you came here. I suppose the instructions got garbled in the translation from Jim to Calvin. Mother Earth does not change easily—that is an aspect of water or flame. Earth magic is interfering with his change, but it shouldn’t make it impossible.”

  Impossible wasn’t good—but I buttoned my lips because even I knew that intent and will played a part in any kind of magic. No sense putting doubts into Adam’s head until he really failed to shift.

  “What are we doing tonight?” I asked Coyote to give myself something else to think about.

  “Probably wasting our time.” He didn’t look at me but stared out over the world spread beneath our feet. I noticed that he seldom spoke directly to me. Half the time it felt as though he addressed the open air instead.

  “And if we aren’t wasting our time?” I waited a minute, trying not to listen to Adam’s struggles because he wouldn’t want me to hear him. I could feel the claustrophobic panic that he was repressing. He couldn’t afford for me to panic, too. “Come on, Coyote. It isn’t a secret because even Calvin knows.”

  He laughed, slapping his leg. “Point to you. Fine. Fine. I’m hoping to call a little help. We aren’t what we once were, and some of us never were much for interfering with people. But Raven is curious, and Otter should feel he has something at stake.” He paused, glanced at me, and continued, “Nice black eye, Mercy. Upon reflection, Otter might be on the wrong side. That would be unfortunate.”

  “You’re calling the others like you?” I asked.

  “There are no others like me,” he returned. “None as handsome or strong. None as clever or skilled. None with so many stories told about them. Who was it brought fire down so people could roast their food and keep warm in the winter? But I’m hoping to call the others, yes.”

  “Other what, exactly?” I asked. “Just what kind of creature are you?” The fae, some of them, had set themselves over the early residents of Europe as deities. The Coyote stories never had that feel to them. Coyote was a power but not one who asked to be worshipped.

  “Have you read Plato?” he asked.

  “Have you?” I returned because the idea of Coyote reading The Republic or Apology was absurd and somehow totally believable because of its very absurdity.

  “You are familiar with his theory of forms,” Coyote continued without answering my question.

  “That our world isn’t real but a reflection of reality. And in the real world there are archetypes of things that exist in our world, which is how we can look at a chair we’ve never seen before, and say, ‘Hey, look. It’s a chair.’ Because in the real world, there is an object that is the epitome of chairness.” I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

  “Close enough,” he agreed. “I am the reality of all coyotes. The archetype. The epitome.” He smiled out into the darkness. “You are just a reflection of me.”

  “They should have called you Narcissus,” I told him, trying not to flinch at the sounds that Adam made. “Too bad you aren’t the enemy we need to defeat. We could just put out a mirror for you to admire yourself in.”

  “And then they wouldn’t call you Mercy anymore,” he said. “Your name would be She Who Traps Coyote.” He reached over and took my hand, and said in a low voice, “It won’t be much longer. But I’d wait until he invites you to look before you gaze into his eyes.”

  “Are your sisters really berries in your stomach?” I asked him.

  “Ah,” he said delightedly. “You need to find someone to teach you the rude versions of my stories. They are much more entertaining. Modesty prevents me from telling stories about myself.”

  I laughed, as he meant me to.

  “My sisters aren’t speaking to me right now,” he finished with great—and I suspected entirely feigned—dignity, “so it does not matter what they are.”

  Beside me, Adam rose with a snarl. I lowered my head to show that I was no threat. After a bad change, it would be a few minutes before Adam had a leash on his wolf. To my surprise, Coyote bowed his head as well.

  “I like this man, your husband,” he told me. Maybe it was an explanation. “He would have attacked me for putting you in danger—even though the wolf knew exactly what I was. And yet, when you asked him to have patience, he did. It is proper that men listen to the counsel of women.”

  “Like you listen to your sisters?” I said, as the wolf put his nose just under my ear. I tilted my head to give him my throat. Sharp teeth brushed against my skin, and I shivered.

  “Wise women,” Coyote agreed. “But sometimes pushy and easy to rile. I think they need to develop their sense of fun. They do not agree with me, so maybe they are not so wise as all that, eh?”

  Adam shook himself hard, his ears making a flapping sound—a signal.

  I turned to look at him, and he jerked his nose up toward the monument. I changed into my coyote self—which did seem to take a little more effort than it normally did—and followed Adam up the hill, Coyote striding beside us.

  At least he wasn’t Baba Yaga or Yo-yo Girl, I thought.

  GORDON WAS TALKING QUIETLY WITH CALVIN AND JIM when we walked into the henge’s circles. Jim was barefoot, dressed in new dark jeans and a long-sleeved shirt that looked to be blue in the light of the candles, though my coyote eyes are not always trustworthy with color at night. Gordon’s boots, for instance, looked black, but I thought they were probably the same red boots he’d worn the rest of the times we’d seen him. He wore a flannel shirt over a plain T-shirt.

  “I was beginning to think that it was time to leave,” said Gordon coolly, as we approached.

  “Earth magic isn’t the best thing for a change when you’re a werewolf,” Coyote said. “Which is why I told Jim to make sure he was a wolf when he got here.”

  “You said to tell Mercy to bring the wolf,” Jim said, sounding irritated. I was beginning to think that everyone sounded like that after a while of dealing with Coyote.

  Calvin’s eyes widened, and he looked as though he expected Jim to get hit by lightning.

  Coyote just laughed. “Mercy, you go sit up on the altar, would you?” He looked up at the hawks. “You two go sit next to her.”

  Gordon didn’t seem awed or surprised by Coyote, either. “Whatever you do in front of Hank, the river devil will see.”

  “Let her watch,” Coyote said indifferently. “But if nothing else happens tonight, I think I can get Hank fixed. Hawk owes me a few favors.”

  I hopped up onto the altar next to the hawks a little hesitantly. There was a bronze plaque on top, but it was too worn to read in the dark. Adam hopped up beside me and curled around me protectively, keeping the bulk of his body between me and the other predators.

  “Adam,” said Coyote, “not being Aztec, we are not going to sacrifice your bride on the altar. She just can’t be touching the ground when Jim performs the dance. However, s
hould Wolf answer this call, it would be disastrous if your head were higher than his. Usually he shows up in human or humanlike form, but he is one who often prefers his wolfskin. Would you mind taking a position just in front of the altar, between it and the fire?”

  Adam snarled soundlessly at the hawks, a clear warning, and slipped off the altar to sit where Coyote had asked him to.

  Gordon’s eyebrows had risen almost to his white hair. “A polite Coyote?”

  Coyote growled something in a foreign language.

  “I thought you were not her father,” Gordon said placidly. “That makes him not your son by marriage.”

  “Say, then,” said Coyote, “I respect him and don’t fancy getting in the middle of a dogfight tonight if I can help it. Now let us get this done.”

  He changed. His shift was even faster than mine, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. Between one blink and the next, there was a huge coyote the size of a Saint Bernard. He stalked over to the monolith that was on one end of the horseshoe and hopped up on top of it.

  Gordon looked sour, then he became the largest eagle I have ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen some huge golden eagles. As a bird, he stood taller than the man he’d been. I couldn’t say what color his feathers were though they looked as if they were several shades darker than the hawks’. Then he spread his wings, and I realized Gordon wasn’t an eagle after all. No eagle ever had a wingspan that large.

  “Thunderbird,” said Calvin reverently. “Grandfather said you were Thunderbird, but that was when he was calling me by my father’s name more often than not.”

  Thunderbird.

  The bird leaned forward and rubbed that wicked sharplooking beak against the side of Calvin’s head. Since Calvin’s head stayed on his shoulders, I had to assume it was a gesture of affection. With a movement that was half hop and half flight, he landed on the monolith opposite Coyote. He made the standing stone look a lot smaller. Gordon, who was Thunderbird, nudged the candle until it was situated where he wanted. The candlelight turned his feathers a warm dark chocolate. He rocked back and forth a bit, stretching his wings out, then settled into stillness.

  Calvin brought out a rolled-up rug, a small drum, and a beaded parfleche bag. Parfleche—untanned hide—was more commonly used by the plains Indians than the plateau Indians like the Yakama, I thought. However, I supposed a medicine man could use whatever implements he wanted to.

  Calvin set the bag to one side of the prepared but as-yet-unlit fire. Then, with great formality, he unrolled the carpet, aligning it with the altar stone. He took the drum with him to sit next to Adam.

  Jim stood in front of the carpet and closed his eyes. It looked like a prayer, but whatever he did caused the magic to sit up and take notice—I could feel it even through the cement I perched upon.

  He stepped onto the carpet and held a hand over the stacked wood. “Wood,” he said, “who swallowed the flame of the Fire Beings, it is time to burn.”

  When the little fire burst into flame, Adam flinched a bit, but it didn’t seem to surprise Calvin or Jim.

  Jim gave a small nod to Calvin, who began to play the drum. At first he played with a simple, one-handed beat. It wasn’t a steady sound but tentative and irregular—until he caught the beat of the magic that ran beneath us. He stayed with that for a while, then began to speed up, accenting the simple beat with grace notes. When the magic followed his additions, he switched up the cadence to a driving, syncopated rhythm. And the magic followed his lead.

  The wind chose that moment to pick up and throw smoke from the fire into my eyes. I blinked but I must have gotten some ash in with the smoke. Putting my muzzle down on top of the stone, I scrubbed at my face with my paws. It helped. I lifted my head as soon as I could see—and I was alone.

  11

  I STOOD UP IN A PANIC, THE BEAT OF CALVIN’S DRUM still strong—but the bond between Adam and me was strong and reassuring. It gave me courage to stay where I was, take a deep breath, and look around to see if I could figure out what had happened to everyone else.

  The fire burned, the candles were lit, and the night sky overhead was clear and star-spangled. However, there was a thick fog at ground level, and I could see nothing beyond the outer ring of the henge. About that time I realized that I was in my human shape, wearing the clothes I’d taken off and carefully folded a little while ago. They felt real under my fingers—even the slight roughness where I’d dripped a little mustard on my jeans that afternoon.

  But I was pretty sure this was a vision. I couldn’t think of any other reason that I could still hear the drum.

  The rising hair on the back of my neck told me that somewhere, someone was watching me. I couldn’t hear or smell them, but I could feel eyes on me.

  Maybe they were waiting for an invitation. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Mercedes.”

  I turned around and found that there were four women walking in through the largest of the staple-shaped rocks. All of them were dressed in identical white doeskin wedding dresses complete with fringe and elk teeth. Their feet were bare and callused, and the pale dust from the light gray gravel covered their feet as if they had been walking in it a long time. They smelled clean and astringent, like sage or witch hazel, but sweeter than either.

  I was no expert on native peoples, despite a bit of heritage searching while I was in college. But I was sufficiently well versed to know that each of them was from a very different tribe, despite their too-beautiful-to-be-real features. The first woman looked Navajo or Hopi to me—or maybe even Apache. Her skin was darker than any of the others, and her features were soft. She wore her hair in Princess Leia-like buns on either side of her head, which I thought was a traditional Hopi style—the style of one of the Pueblo Indians, anyway.

  The second woman had the rounded, low cheekbones of the Inuit, and her eyes crinkled at me in a friendly fashion. Her hair was separated into two thick braids that hung down to her shoulders.

  The third woman looked like someone from one of the Plains tribes, though I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what made me think so. Her face was a little less soft than the first two, her gaze clear and penetrating. Like the second woman, she wore her hair in a pair of braids, but hers hung down past her waist. She had bone earrings in her ears—the only one of the four to wear jewelry of any kind.

  The fourth woman wore her dark hair pulled loosely back from her face, but otherwise it was free to flow halfway down her back. It was thick and wiry, like the mane of a wild horse. I could not tell what people she was from, except that she was Indian. Her features were sharp, her nose narrow, and her lips full. She was the one who spoke first.

  “Mercedes is not a proper Indian name.” Her tone, like her words, was critical, but not emotionally so. I’d have expected to hear such a tone from a woman in a market looking at fruit. She pursed her lips briefly, evidently considering my name. “She is a mechanic. We should call her She Fixes Cars.”

  The first woman, the one who might have been Hopi, shook her head. “No, sister. Bringer of Change.”

  The woman who looked like one of the Plains Indians but not quite Crow, Blackfeet, or Lakota, frowned disapprovingly. “Rash Coyote Who Runs With Wolf. We could shorten it to Dinner Woman.”

  The merry Inuit woman laughed. “Mercedes Who Fixes Volkswagens, we have brought you to see us since our brother would not bring us to see you.”

  “Your brother?” I asked carefully. I was still standing on the altar, which had me looking down on them. That felt wrong, so I stepped off onto the sand and the magic in the ground promptly turned my knees to rubber.

  “Coyote,” they said at the same time, while the Inuit woman kept me from falling.

  I couldn’t help but think that it would be a bad thing to sit on the ground if just standing on it had this much of an effect. I sat on the altar and pulled my feet up.

  “We cannot tell the future,” said the sharp-featured woman whose tribe I couldn’t place at all. “But we know what our brother
is planning. Would you tell him that it is very dangerous, but it is also the only thing that we could think of that might work?”

  “What is he planning?” I asked.

  “We can tell you here.” Inuit Woman sat beside me but left her feet on the ground. “But he can’t tell you until he rids himself of her spies. That’s actually why we brought you here—that, and we wanted to get a look at you. He Sees Spirits—you know him as Jim Alvin—has opened this way between us for a short time. Coyote needed privacy to speak to the others, to Hawk and Raven, to Bear and Beaver, and to the rest. We decided that you should know what he says.”

  “River Devil,” said the Hopi-Navajo-possibly-Apache woman, “is a creature who lives in your world and ours at the same time. In ours she is immortal, but she can be killed in yours. Once she is dead, she cannot go back unless she is summoned. But at that time she returns bigger and more dangerous than before. The last time our brother confronted her, he trapped her rather than killing her in the hope that it would be more effective than killing her had proved.” I decided she was Hopi, and as I did so, her features changed just a little until there was no possibility of her being anything else.

  “Who would summon that thing?” I asked.

  The Inuit woman shrugged. “There will always be fools, and the river devil can be persuasive to the minds of men.”

  The sharp-featured woman.

  “Cherokee,” I said, suddenly certain I had it right.

  She smiled a small secret smile, the kind that always makes me want to smack Bran. “If you like.” She tilted her head, and said, “River Devil is Hunger because living between worlds for those without a hold in either is costly. She must consume food for both her aspects: meat for the flesh and for the spirit.”

  The Hopi woman continued, “All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility.”