Ivory and the Horn

by Charles de Lint

  Instead, I’m standing in a desert. I turn around to see that the door through which I came has disappeared. All that I can see on every side of me is an endless panorama of desert, each compass point bordered by mountains. I seem to be as far from Mabon as that city is from the place where my body sleeps.

  “What is this place?” I say.

  My voice startles me, because I didn’t realize I was speaking aloud. What startles me more is that my rhetorical question gets answered. I turn to see the oddest sight: There’s a rattlesnake coiled up under a palo verde tree. The pale color of the tree’s branches and twigs awakes an echoing green on the snake’s scales which range through a gorgeous palette of golds and deep rusty reds. That’s normal enough. What’s so disconcerting is that the snake has the face of a Botticelli madonna—serene smile, rounded features enclosed by a cloud of dark ringlets. The Virgin and Child With Singing Angels comes immediately to mind. And she’s got wings— creamy yellow wings that thrust out from the snake’s body a few inches below the face. All that’s lacking is a nimbus of gold light.

  “A dreaming place,” is what the snake has just said to me.

  For all her serenity, she has an unblinking gaze which I doubt any of Botticelli’s models had.

  “But Mabon’s already a dreaming place,” I find myself replying, as though I always have conversations with snakes that have wings and human faces.

  “Mabon is your dreaming place,” she says. “Today you have strayed into someone else’s.”

  “Whose?”

  The snake doesn’t reply.

  “How do I get back to Mabon?”

  Still no reply—at least not from her. Another voice answers me. This time it’s that of a small owl, her feathers the color of a dead saguaro rib, streaks of silver-grey and black. She’s perched on the arm of one of those tall cacti, looking down at me with another human face nestled there where an owl’s beak and round eyes should be, calm madonna features surrounded by feathers. At least wings look normal on her.

  “You can’t return,” she tells me. “You have to go on.”

  I hate the way that conversation can get snarled up in a dream like this: Every word an omen, every sentence a riddle.

  “Go on to where?”

  The owl turns her head sharply away then turns back and suddenly takes off from her perch. I catch a glimpse of a human torso in her chest feathers—breasts and a rounded belly—and then she’s airborne, wings beating until she catches an updraft, and glides away. A stand of mesquite swallows her from my sight and she’s gone. I turn back to the rattlesnake, but she’s gone as well. The owl’s advice rings in my mind.

  You have to go on.

  I look around me, mountains in every direction. I know distance can be deceiving in the open desert like this, in this kind of light, with that immense sprawl of sky above me. I feel as though I could just reach any one of those ranges in a half-hour walk, but I know it would really be days.

  I find my sense of direction has gone askew. Normally, I relate to a body of water. In Newford, everything’s north of the lake. In Mabon, everything’s south. Here, I feel displaced. There’s no water—or at least none of which I’m aware. I can see the sun is setting toward the west, but it doesn’t feel right. My inner compass says it’s setting in the north.

  I turn slowly in place, regarding the distant mountain ranges that surround me. None of them draws me more than the other, and I don’t know which way to go until I remember the sound of the flute that brought me here in the first place. It’s still playing, a sweet low music on the edge of my hearing that calms the panic that was beginning to lodge in my chest.

  So I follow it again, hiking through what’s left of the afternoon until I don’t feel I can go any further. The mountains in front of me don’t seem any closer, the ones behind aren’t any further away. I’m thirsty and tired. Every piece of vegetation has a cutting edge or a thorn. My calves ache, my back aches, my throat holds as much moisture as the dusty ground underfoot. I don’t want to be here, but I can’t seem to wake up.

  It’s the music, I realize. The music is keeping me here.

  I’ve figured out what kind of flute is being played now: one of those medicine flutes indigenous to the Southwest. I remember Geordie had one a couple of years ago. It was almost the size of his Irish flute, with the same six holes on top, but it had an extra thumb hole around back and it didn’t have nearly the same range of notes. It also had an odd addition: up by the air hole, tied to the body of the flute with leather thongs, was a saddle holding a reed. The saddle directed the air jet up or down against the lower reed, and it was adjustable. The sound was very pretty, but the instrument had next to no volume. Geordie eventually traded it in for some whistle or other, but I picked up a tape of its music to play when I’m working—medicine flute, rattles, rainstick and synthesizers. I can’t remember the last time I listened to it.

  After carefully checking the area around me for snakes or scorpions or God-knows-what else might be lurking about, I sit down on some rocks and try to think things through. I’d like to believe there’s a reason for my being here, but I know the dreamlands don’t usually work that way. They have their own internal logic; it’s only our presence in them that’s arbitrary. We move through them with the same randomness as the weather in our world: basically unpredictable, for all that we’d like to think otherwise.

  No, I’m here as the result of my own interference. I followed the sound of the flute out the door into the desert of my own accord. I’ve no one to blame but myself. There’ll be no escape except for that which I can make for myself.

  I’m not alone here, though. I keep sensing presences just beyond my sight, spirits hovering in the corners of my eyes. They’re like the snake and the owl I saw earlier, but much more shy. I catch the hint of a face in one of the cacti, here one moment, gone the next; a ghostly shape in the bristly branches of a smoke tree; a scurry of movement and a fleeting glimpse of something with half-human skin, half-fur or -scale, darting into a burrow: little madonna faces, winged rodents and lizards, birds with human eyes and noses.

  I don’t know why they’re so scared of me. Maybe they’re naturally cautious. Maybe there’s something out here in the desert that they’ve got good reason to hide from.

  This thought doesn’t lend me any comfort at all. If there’s something they’re scared of, I don’t doubt that I should be scared of it, too. And I would be, except I’m just too exhausted to care at the moment.

  I rest my arms on my knees, my head on my arms. I feel a little giddy from the sun and definitely dehydrated. I came to the desert wearing only sneakers, a pair of jeans and a white blouse. The blouse is on my head and shoulders now, to keep off the sun, but it’s left my arms, my lower back and my stomach exposed. They haven’t so much browned as turned the pink that’s going to be a burn in another couple of hours.

  Something moves in the corner of my eye and I turn my head, but not quickly enough. It was something small, a flash of pale skin and light brown fur. Winged.

  “Don’t be scared!” I call after it. “I won’t hurt you.”

  But the desert lies silent around me, except for the sound of the flute. I thought I caught a glimpse of the player an hour or so ago. I was cresting a hill and saw far ahead of me a small hunched shape disappear down into the arroyo. It looked like one of those pictographs you sometimes see in Hopi or Navajo art—a little hunchbacked man with hair like dreadlocks, playing a flute. I called after him at the time, but he never reappeared.

  I hate this feeling of helplessness I have at the moment, of having to react rather than do, of having to wait for answers to come to me rather than seek them out on my own. I’ve walked for hours, but I can’t help thinking how, realistically, all that effort was only killing time. I haven’t gotten anywhere, I haven’t learned anything new. I’m no further ahead than I was when I first stepped through that door and found myself here. I’m thirstier, I’ve got the beginning of a sunburn, and that ab
out stuns it up.

  The air starts to cool as the sun goes down. I take my blouse off my head and put it back on, but it doesn’t help much against the growing chill. I hear something rustle in the brush on the other side of the rocks where I’m sitting, and I almost can’t be bothered turning my head to see what - made the noise. But I look around all the same, and then I sit very still, hoping that the Indian woman I find regarding me won’t be startled off like every other creature I’ve met since the owl gave me her cryptic advice.

  The woman is taller than I am, but that’s not saying much; at just over five feet tall, I’m smaller than almost everyone I meet. Her features have a pinched, almost foxlike cast about them, and she wears her hair in two long braids into which have been woven feathers and beads and cowrie shells. She’s barefoot, which strikes me as odd, since this isn’t exactly the most friendly terrain I’ve ever had to traverse. Her buckskin dress is almost a creamy white, decorated with intricate beadwork and stitching, and she’s wearing a blanket over her shoulders like a shawl, the colors of which reflect the surrounding landscape—the browns and the tans, deep shadows and burnt siennas—only they’re much more vibrant.

  “Don’t run off on me,” I say, pitching my voice low and trying to seem as unthreatening as possible.

  The woman smiles. She has a smile that transforms her face; it starts on her lips and in her dark eyes, but then the whole of her solemn copper-colored features fall easily into well-worn creases of good humor. I realize that hers is the first face I’ve seen in this place that didn’t look as though it had been rendered by a Florentine painter at the height of the Italian Renaissance. She seems indisputably of this place, as though she was birthed from the cacti and the dry hills.

  “Why do you think I would do that?” she asks. Her voice is melodious and sweet.

  “So far, everybody else has.”

  “Perhaps you confuse them.”

  I have to laugh, “I confuse them? Oh please.”

  The woman shrugs. “This is a place of spirits, a land where totem may be found, spirits consulted, lessons learned, futures explored. Those who walk its hills for these reasons have had no easy task in coming here.”

  “I could show them this door I found,” I start to joke, but I let my voice trail off. The crease lines of her humor are still there on her face, but they’re in repose. She looks too serious for jokes right now.

  “You have come looking for nothing,” she goes on, “so your presence is a source of agitation.”

  “It’s not something I planned,” I assure her. “If you’ll show me the way out, I’ll be more than happy to go. Really.”

  The woman shook her head. “There is no way out— except by acquiring that which you came seeking.”

  “But I didn’t come looking for anything.”

  “That presents a problem.”

  I don’t like the way this conversation is going.

  “For the only way you can leave in such a case,” the woman goes on, “is if you accompany another seeker when their own journeying is done.”

  “That… that doesn’t seem fair.”

  The woman nods. “There is much unfairness—even in the spirit realms. But obstacles are set before us in order that they may be overcome.” She gives me a considering look. “Perhaps you are simply unaware of what you came seeking?”

  She makes a question of it.

  “I heard this flute,” I say. “That’s what I followed to get here.” “Ah.”

  I wait, but she doesn’t expand beyond that one enigmatic utterance.

  “Could you maybe give me a little more to go on than that?” I ask.

  “You are an artist?” she asks.

  The question surprises me, but I nod.

  “Kokopelli,” she says, “the flute-player you heard. He is known for his—” she hesitates for a moment. “—inspirational qualities.”

  “I’m not looking for ideas,” I tell her. “I have more ideas than I know what to do with. The only thing I’m ever looking for is the time to put them into practice.”

  “Kokopelli or Coyote,” she says. “One of them is responsible for your being here.”

  “Can they help me get back?”

  “Where either of them is concerned, anything is possible.”

  There’s something about the way she tells me this that seems to add an unspoken “when hell freezes over,” and that makes me feel even more uneasy.

  “Can you tell me where I might find them?”

  The woman shrugs. “Kokopelli is only found when he wishes to be, but Coyote—Coyote is always near. Look for him to be cadging a cigarette, or warming his toes by a fire.”

  She starts to turn away, but pauses when I call after her.

  “Wait!” I say. “You can’t just leave me here.”

  “I’m sorry,” she tells me, and she really does seem sorry. “But I have duties that require my attention. I came upon you only by chance and already I have stayed too long.”

  “Can’t I just come along with you?”

  “I’m afraid that would be impossible.”

  There’s nothing mean about the way she says it, but I can tell right away that the question is definitely not open to further discussion.

  “Will you come back when you’re done?” I ask.

  I’m desperate. I don’t want to be here on my own anymore, especially not with night falling.

  “I can’t make you a promise of that,” she says, “but I will try. In the meantime, you would do better to look within yourself, to see if hidden somewhere within you is some secret need that might have brought you to this place.”

  As she starts to turn away again, I think to ask her what her name is.

  “Since I am Grandmother to so many here,” she says, “that would be as good a name as any. You may call me Grandmother Toad.”

  “My name’s Sophie.”

  “I know, little sister.”

  She’s walking away as she speaks. I jump to my feet and follow after her, into the dusk that’s settling in between the cacti and mesquite trees, but like everyone else I’ve met here, she’s got the trick of disappearing down pat. She steps into a shadow and she’s gone.

  A vast emptiness settles inside me after she’s left me. The night is full of strange sounds, snuffing and rustles and weird cries in the distance that appear to be coming closer.

  “Grandmother,” I call softly.

  I wonder, how did she know my name?

  “Grandmother?”

  There’s no reply.

  “Grandmother!”

  I run to the top of another ridge, one from which I can see the last flood of light spraying up from the sunset. There’s no sign, no trace at all of the Indian woman, but as I turn away, I see the flickering light of a campflre, burning there, below me in a dry wash. A figure sits in front of it. The sound of the flute is still distant, so I make the educated guess that it isn’t Kokopelli hanging out down there. Grandmother’s words return to my mind:

  Look for him to be cadging a cigarette, or warming his toes by a fire.

  I take one last look around me, then start down the hill toward Coyote’s fire.

  7

  Sophie awoke in a tangle of sheets. She stared up at a familiar ceiling, then slowly turned her head to look at her bedside clock. The hour hand was creeping up on four. Relief flooded her.

  I’m back, she thought.

  She wasn’t sure how it had happened, but somewhere in between leaving Grandmother Toad and starting down towards Coyote’s fire, she’d managed to escape the desert dream. She lay there listening to the siren that had woken her, heard it pass her block and continue on. Sitting up, she fluffed her pillow, then lay down once more.

  No more following the sound of a flute, she told herself, no matter how intriguing it might be.

  Her eyelids grew heavy. Closing her eyes, she let herself drift off. Wait until she told Jeck, she thought. The desert she’d found herself in had been even stranger than the fen
s where she and Jeck had first met—if such a thing was possible. But when she fell asleep she bypassed Mr. Truepenny’s shop and found herself scrambling down a desert incline to where a mesquite fire sent its flickering shadows along a dry wash.

  8

  “Little cousin,” Coyote says after we’ve been sitting together in silence for some time. “What are you doing here?”

  I can’t believe I’m back here again. I would never have let myself go back to sleep if I’d thought this would happen. Still, I can’t stay awake forever. That being the case, if every time I dream I’m going to find myself back here instead of in Mabon, I might as well deal with it now. But I’m not happy about it.

  “I don’t know,” I tell him.

  Coyote nods his head. He sits on his haunches, on the far side of the campfire. The pale light from the coals makes his eyes glitter and seem to be of two different colors: one brown, one blue. Except for his ears, his silhouette against the deep starry backdrop behind him belongs to a young man, long black hair braided and falling down either side of his head, body wrapped in a blanket. But the ears are those of the desert wolf whose name he bears: tall and pointed, lips quivering as they sort through the sounds drifting in from the night around them.

  Wind in the mesquite. Tiny scurrying paws on the sand of the dry wash. Owl wings beating like a quickened breath. A sudden squeal. Silence. The sound of wings again, rising now. From further away, the soft grunting of javalinas feeding on prickly pear cacti.