War for the Oaks

by Emma Bull

  Her lyrics. They weren’t just sounds to be made; they were a sliver of experience, with photographs in her memory for illustrations. If she wanted, she could summon back every emotion. But it was her audi­ence she wanted to give them to, once she’d called them out.

  Interference

  Or is that the broadcast that I’ve got?

  Your appearance

  Renders me incapable of thought.

  Here’s your voice on the phone.

  Your sweet and sullen tone,

  What am I to believe?

  Did you blow me a kiss

  Or was that just tape hiss?

  When I hang up, will you grieve?

  Have pity, now, what’s signal and what’s noise?

  Here’s your photo,

  I found it cleaning out my bottom drawer.

  When you wrote, oh,

  I couldn’t keep from wondering what for.

  Through the gray, through the grain,

  A picture taken in the rain,

  That doesn’t show your face.

  Connected dots don’t make a line,

  You confuse me every time,

  Confusion has its place,

  But just this once, what’s signal and what’s noise?

  Yeah, like that. She let the band pause for breath between songs, but not much more. Then they swept on, like heroes in search of glory and plunder, and those who watched and danced followed after.

  It was the end of the first set before Eddi discovered how her band worked.

  The revelation came with their cover of a Nate Bucklin song, “She’s Getting Desperate.” It opened with Hedge’s galloping, grumbling bass notes and Willy’s lead vocal. Eddi stepped back and let them take the spotlight. She turned to Carla and Dan, to gather them up with her eyes and launch them into the second verse. Carla was half dancing on her drummer’s throne, sticks poised, barely contained. Dan’s dark fin­gers hovered twitchy over the keys. They were ready.

  Eddi leaned into the harmony vocals on the last two lines of the verse, and gathered Hedge and Willy as she had the other two. Hedge rocked contemplatively over his axe, unruffled but not unmoved by the rhythm. Willy sang strong and crisp and clean, biting off each word. His left hand curled over the chord on the neck of his guitar, and his right hung above the strings, prepared to strike. His hair had fallen over one eye; the other eye blazed.

  They’d practiced the transition from first verse to second until it was flawless, until she woke up two days in a row with it running like a loop through her head. Last word of the verse, and three beats. Then the rest of the band would come in like the end of the world, just when the audience thought it was safe.

  That was exactly what happened. Not with the offhand perfection of a long-rehearsed band; it sounded like the hot improvisation of a solo artist. One with ten hands. Eddi knew, with a rush of warm and cold, that she was responsible. Four people watched her for cues, relied on her to keep them together, counted on her to let them run amok when it was right and leash them when it wasn’t. Four artistic, anarchic personalities had placed themselves under her rule.

  She nearly forgot her harmony part.

  If they hadn’t scheduled a break after that, they would have had to take one anyway. They’d worked themselves up to an emotional peak that was hard to abandon, and they needed night air to cool the sweat off their faces and blow the crazies away.

  So it was out the doors behind the stage once again. Carla plucked a cigarette and lit it with a trembling match. “Holy shit,” she said on a mouthful of smoke. “That was kinda fun.”

  Dan laughed. “Yeah.” He said it again, softer, and tapped a beat against his thighs. Willy leaned against the white stone wall, hands in his pockets, head back, eyes closed. He was smiling.

  Hedge was the last one off the stage, the last out the door by a long minute. When he came into the night, it was with his head down, and no attention paid to any of them. He sat down on a lip of stone, a little removed from the group.

  Eddi felt her elation weighted down with something in the region of her stomach. She debated the issue for a moment, then she went to sit next to Hedge. She tried not to look too purposeful about it.

  For a little while they sat in silence, and Eddi watched his knuckly hands massage each other. Then she asked, “You okay?” Not profound, but to the point.

  His smile was not the one that sometimes lit his face; this one looked hard to do, and fragile.

  “Can I help?” She knew better, at least, than to ask if he wanted to talk about it.

  Hedge shook his head and made knots with his fingers again. “ ‘S too good,” he muttered after a moment. “Nothin’ so good lasts.”

  “Oh, come on,” Eddi grinned at his bent head. “That’s not true. Why shouldn’t it last?”

  Hedge looked up again, and this time he made no pretense of smil­ing. “ ‘Cause it won’t. Nothin’ so good c’n last.”

  There was something almost oracular in the intensity of his voice. His eyebrows pulled together, as if some idea or lack of one frustrated him. Eddi understood suddenly what prompted grownups to promise impossible things to children.

  “I’m going to try to make it last,” she said. “I know what the odds are, and I know what I’m up against, and I’m still going to try.”

  He gave her an impenetrable look from the covert of his hair.

  “But it would help . . . well, if you believed in me. Hokey as it sounds.”

  He blinked, looked down again, and after an oppressive bit of time, nodded once.

  “Good enough,” Eddi said. She wondered if she should pat his shoulder or hug him or something. But she didn’t feel quite comfortable about it. Instead they sat for a minute or two in what became a com­panionable silence.

  Eddi broke it at last with, “Have I told you lately that you play great bass?”

  This time his smile was brilliant and genuine.

  “Five minutes, ladies and gentlebeings,” said the phouka, poking his head out the door. Then he grinned. “And the dancers need every second of it, poor things.”

  Willy’s eyes grew round. “Hazel and Thorn. I forgot.”

  “Forgot what?” Eddi demanded, alarmed by his tone.

  It was the phouka who replied. “Have I told you about the Faerie rings? No? Well, now is certainly the time. We are fond of music and dancing, as you know.”

  He smiled benignly, and Eddi fastened on a warning glare.

  “On occasion, mortals have, knowingly or inadvertently, crashed the party. They quickly discover one of the most notable characteristics of Faerie music: it makes one dance.”

  “So?” Eddi said.

  “You don’t understand,” Willy interjected. “It makes you dance.”

  Carla frowned and raised a finger as if to question that. Then she stopped, her mouth open and eyes wide. Dan got it at about the same time. “Shit. I mean . . . you mean . . .” He stared at Willy and the phouka. “Shit.”

  It made a certain appalling sense. The crowd had danced to the first song, they’d danced to the originals—in short, they’d shown a re­markable willingness to dance, even under the worst conditions. But. . .

  “What makes this Faerie music?” Eddi asked.

  The phouka cocked his head. “Two of you are fey. One of you is closely tied to the Folk. The other two”—and he grinned at Carla and Dan—“have picked up an uncanny lick or two out of sheer proximity. Oh, the effect isn’t perfect yet. It’s possible to resist the urge to dance, and possible to stop when one is wholly exhausted. But try to have a little mercy on the poor things in the second set, won’t you?”

  Dan stared at the phouka, then turned his now-what-do-I-do ex­pression on Eddi. Carla looked at her hands and started to giggle. Then she began to laugh. She staggered over to the wall and slid down it until she was sitting in the grass, still laughing.

  “Carla?” Eddi said. “Carla, calm down. Are you hysterical, or what?”

  “No, no, it’s—oh,
God, you’ll kill me. I can’t tell you.” And she burst into another fit of giggles.

  “Carla . . .”

  “Eddi and the Fey!” Carla squeaked, and had another attack.

  “What?” said Eddi.

  Willy rubbed his chin. “Not bad.”

  “Quite good, actually,” the phouka seconded.

  Dan began to grin. “Sure doesn’t make us sound like something we’re not.”

  Hedge seemed to be trying not to smile.

  Eddi looked around at all of them, wondering if they had gone mad simultaneously. “What? You mean—good grief, as a band name? You’re all crackers.”

  “Nah,” Dan said. “It’ll be great.”

  “Eddi and the Fey,” Willy said, wrapping his splendid voice around it and making it resonate.

  “Hell, I’m smart,” Carla sighed happily.

  “I suppose form demands that it be put to a vote,” said the phouka. “All in favor?”

  Three fey hands and two mortal ones went up, as Eddi flapped hers helplessly. “Who said this was a democracy?” she wailed, and no one paid the least attention. It wouldn’t help a bit, she reflected, to rule that the roadie couldn’t vote. Besides, it was growing on her. Eddi and the Fey. It embarrassed her, putting her own name in the band’s. But it was her band. . . .

  They’d fallen silent, and watched her eagerly. “Nobody’ll know what it means,” Eddi warned.

  “Jefferson Airplane,” Carla intoned. “X. The Psychedelic Furs. At least this one you can look up in a dictionary.”

  “Well . . .”

  “And it’s a lot better than InKline Plain.”

  “Okay,” Eddi said. “But if anybody laughs, I’m gonna tell who made it up.”

  “You’re late,” said the phouka, and they scrambled for the door.

  Eddi used the new name to introduce the band. No one laughed; they applauded and yelled.

  She led off alone on the intro to “When You Were Mine,” her guitar thin and high and lonely. Then the rest of the band swelled up under that, with Willy on his electric demon fiddle. Carla and Dan had come up with a bizarre percussive patch for one of the synthesizers, and hung it on the end of the fiddle’s phrases. The effect was that of a succession of violins being bitten neatly in half.

  Eddi found that the single-minded frenzy of the first set had passed. She still had the crackling energy, but she had a clear head to use it with as well. She tried to make every note glow; she felt the rest of the band respond to that and stretch like a racehorse seeking that one winning length. And they listened to each other. A sudden musical discovery by any one of them would be picked up immediately by the others, so quickly it must have looked rehearsed.

  The party was supposed to end at 11:30, but with the encore they ran late. “An encore,” Carla grinned. “These people must all run mar­athons in their spare time. Jesus Christ.” But they played it, wringing wet and panting, and if the crowd was reduced by weariness to a sort of vigorous swaying-in-place, nobody seemed to mind.

  Afterward, people came up to the stage and told them they were a wonderful band. Eddi had forgotten that things like that happened. It was all she could do to say, “Thank you,” instead of, “My God, aren’t we?” Was Hedge right? Was all this too good to last? Let him be wrong, let him be wrong, Eddi prayed.

  They tore down their equipment; then Eddi went to the ladies’ room and washed the sweat off her face. She studied her badly lit reflection in the mirror and grinned. No, she looked exactly as she had when she left her apartment that evening. Well, exhausted. But she still felt as if the night’s work should have changed her. “Great band,” she told the mirror, and went back to the gallery.

  Something was wrong. The phouka stood at the lip of the stage, one of Willy’s cables half-coiled between his hands. Willy was on his feet, too. The double doors were still open, but the station wagon was gone—no sign of Carla or Dan. Hedge stood in the doorway, and if Eddi were to believe his face, someone had glued his feet to the sill and he wasn’t happy about it.

  Their attention was fixed on a woman who stood on the dance floor, looking up at them. Her back was to the gallery door, and all Eddi could see of her was the smooth, shining coil of her black hair, her gray trench coat cut long and full, sheer black stockings, and black lizard pumps. She carried a wide-brimmed black hat in one hand.

  From behind, she was elegant but nothing more. The phouka, how­ever, was in front of the woman, and his expression . . .

  He was afraid. It was difficult to tell at first; but he looked past the woman in the trench coat and saw Eddi, and she was sure. The phouka was afraid, and for her.

  Willy’s chin was up in that haughty way of his. Something about that seemed odd, but Eddi hadn’t time to think about it. She stepped warily toward the stage.

  She could have sworn that the woman had seen the phouka’s look, and knew Eddi was behind her. But she didn’t turn. She was speaking in a low, pleasantly hoarse voice, and as Eddi drew near she heard her say to the phouka, “Well, my compliments. I couldn’t have done better myself.”

  The phouka bit his lip for an instant, then lapsed again into stillness.

  “This is no business of yours,” Willy said, but not with any great certainty.

  “Isn’t it? Perhaps you don’t think so.” Eddi heard laughter in the woman’s voice as she turned a thin hand toward the phouka. “But I’d bet he wouldn’t agree.”

  Eddi took a deep breath. “May I help you?” she said crisply. “I’m the bandleader.”

  The phouka closed his eyes.

  The trench-coated woman inclined her head, as if thinking about Eddi’s offer, then, in no discernible hurry, she turned around.

  Not beautiful—she was too feline for anyone to comfortably call her beautiful. Her gleaming black hair was scraped severely back from her face, which made her gray almond eyes look as huge as a cat’s. Her eyebrows were thick and black, and their high arch gave her a look of perpetual gentle surprise. She had a small, narrow nose, dwarfed by the rest of her face, and a wide, well-shaped mouth painted the color of cyclamen petals. Her cheekbones were pronounced, and her chin was pointed. She was tall, wide-shouldered, and narrow-hipped, and looked very good in the cream-colored suit under the trench coat.

  She tipped her head and smiled. “You must be Eddi, then—oh, unless it’s one of those band names.”

  “No. No, it’s . . . I’m Eddi.” In the fourth grade she’d had a teacher like this, gracious of manner, elegant of person even on a teacher’s wages. Eddi had adored her.

  “So pleased to meet you. Your band is fabulous.” The woman ex­tended one of her thin hands to Eddi.

  Of course, the teacher’s wages had, as it turned out, been supple­mented. . . . “Thank you. But I think you’d better get to the point.” Eddi put her hands in her pockets.

  Those black arched eyebrows climbed a little more. “I beg your pardon?” Her voice remained pleasant, and for a dreadful moment Eddi doubted.

  But she pressed on anyway. “They’ll tell me all about you as soon as you leave,” Eddi said, pointing at the phouka and Willy. Hedge, she saw, now stood openmouthed behind the stage. “I know all the things I’m not supposed to know. So there’s no point in pretending.”

  The woman looked at Willy and the phouka, neither surprised nor displeased. Then her attention returned to Eddi. “How did you guess I wasn’t just another audience member? For the sake of my curiosity, you understand.”

  “The way Willy acted. One of his redeeming social graces is that he almost never subjects mortal strangers to that nose-in-the-air rou­tine. I saw him do it to you when I came in, and it bothered me, until I realized that either you weren’t a stranger, or you weren’t mortal.”

  She laughed. “Or both. But why did you assume I wasn’t one of your allies, and decline to shake my hand?”

  “The way the phouka behaved,” Eddi said.

  The woman turned another look, longer this time, on the stage. “Ah, of cours
e, your watchdog. Don’t trust too much to one guard­ian—he’s not incorruptible, my dear.”

  “Who is?”

  The woman’s throaty laugh was quite genuine. “Exactly! I’ve built a very old reputation on that principle.”

  Hedge took a step forward, his hands curled into fists and raised. Eddi and the dark woman turned almost in unison, each equally wary, it seemed, of breaking eye contact.

  The dark woman stared at Hedge, then smiled one of her quiet smiles. He glowered and turned his face away.

  “Leave him alone,” Eddi said quietly. “We’re not on the battlefield now.”

  “No, we aren’t—quite.” The woman returned her attention to Eddi. “And there are better targets.”

  She set her black hat on her head at a striking angle, casting a diagonal of shadow across her features. “Again,” she said to Eddi, “a marvelous band, and I was delighted to meet you. I’m sure we’ll see one another soon.” And she left the gallery, her heels making small, sharp noises with the measured cadence of her stride.

  “Front door’s locked,” Eddi said thoughtfully.

  “Oh,” Willy replied, “she’ll get out.”

  The phouka sank down on the edge of the stage and buried his face in his hands. Eddi hurried to him, alarmed.

  “Phouka. . .?”

  “Heart failure,” he murmured through his fingers. “I warned you, my primrose, that I would be like to die of it, should you go on as you have.”

  She made a disgusted noise and pulled his hair. He lowered his hands and grinned wickedly up at her.

  “Creep,” she said. “All right, guys, who was that?”

  Hedge looked at his feet. The phouka drew breath to answer, but it was Willy who spoke first. “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” he said. His voice was soft and pitched low, but every surface in the room seemed to catch his words and whisper them back.

  Willy was standing at the back of the stage, his eyes fixed on the empty oblong of the gallery door. He rubbed his hands absently over his upper arms, as if he suffered from cold and knew there was no relief for it.

  “She scares you,” Eddi said.

  “She scares anyone with any sense,” Willy replied sharply. He stepped off the back of the stage and went outside through the double doors. After a moment and a long inscrutable look at Eddi, Hedge went, too.