Changer (Athanor)

by Jane Lindskold

  “Vera? Certainly you aren’t going to say that she is less than competent.”

  “True, but she did not give her oath to the Sea King. I did.”

  Eddie rubs his hands together briskly. “Then you’re in a bit of a bind, aren’t you?”

  The Changer scratches under his chin, enjoying in an abstract fashion the squabbling his simple announcement has generated. Vera turns to him.

  “When are you going?” she asks. Her voice is quite steady.

  “Tonight, I think,” he says. “There is no need to delay. If someone can drop us off, we would have several hours to find a place to hide until day.”

  Arthur nods. “That won’t be a problem. I can drive you myself if no one else is available.”

  “Good.” The Changer’s tone does not acknowledge that he is aware of the great honor which has been offered.

  “But where do you want to go?” Vera presses. “Surely not back where you were before?”

  “No,” the Changer says. “I have been considering my old hunting grounds and comparing them against current maps. There are large portions of the Sandia Mountains that are either park or reservation land. That should do. With summer coming on, I would prefer not to be out in the plains.”

  Lovern looks hopeful. “So you are going to stay close to Albuquerque.”

  “For now. Shahrazad would be endangered in ranch lands. She isn’t afraid enough of people to avoid traps and poison.”

  “The Sandias begin the eastern edge of Albuquerque,” Arthur comments. “If you’re looking to keep her away from people, wouldn’t it be better to range farther?”

  “Yes.” The Changer’s yellow eyes narrow. “But I haven’t forgotten our enemy—even if he has forgotten us. I want to be near enough to join you if you get a lead.”

  Vera brightens perceptibly. “Then we can visit you!”

  “I’d prefer not.” The Changer’s tone is not cold, but nonetheless his words wilt the smile from her face. “My goal is to teach my daughter to be a wild thing. If I have my way, she will never interact with humans again.”

  Conversation moves to other things. With Anson’s return, the party breaks up. Vera goes to her office and shuts the door firmly behind her.

  As the Changer walks toward his room, Lovern follows him.

  “Changer,” he says when they are alone in the hallway.

  “Yes?”

  “I saw Shahrazad at the Harmony Dance.”

  “So did I.”

  “You realize what that means.” When the Changer does not answer, the wizard forges on. “She is athanor, not just coyote.”

  “I know.” The Changer’s expression is sad. “But a long time may pass before we know if she is anything other than a potentially long-lived coyote. Why do you think I want her to know how to live wild?”

  “True, but…”

  “No ‘buts,’ Lovern. She must know how to be a coyote. Otherwise, she has nothing but her life, and life, as we all know, is a very fragile thing.”

  In the forests of Oregon, Rebecca Trapper sits and stares out of a window set in a frame of earth, hidden from view by misdirection and a light screen of brush. She does not appear to see the towering pines or the clouds that scud above their tops. Nor does she look upon the crystalline waters that cascade from the waterfall that conceals a hidden exit from their home. Her usually warm, brown gaze is blank and empty.

  “Becky?” Bronson Trapper’s voice is rough yet tender. He shambles into the room, bringing with him the scents of leaf mold and mink musk.

  Rebecca does not answer, nor does she move when he comes and places a huge, hairy hand on the silky black fur of her head.

  “Becky?”

  She turns slowly then, looking up at him as if the effort to move her head is almost too much.

  “What’s wrong, sugar bug?”

  “It’s over. That’s all.”

  “The Review?”

  “Yeah.”

  Bronson considers her response. He had followed this Review via the new computer modem and satellite-dish link to the live video; it had given him a more comprehensive coverage than had been available even five years earlier.

  The pictures on the video monitor had reminded him somewhat of when his second cousin (or was that third?) had lived nearby. Viola had the rare gift of scrying and had summoned up segments of the Review in a pool of water spread with oil. They had used the then-new telephone technology to comment on the action. When Viola had married a Tibetan yeti, the scrying had ended. Bronson had not really missed it.

  As technology had caught up with magic, he had taken to recording the Review, skimming the meetings via tape and fast forward, then sending his comments in. He’d done the same this year, but now that he considers the past week, he remembers that Rebecca had barely budged from her computer while the meetings were in session.

  “Are you unhappy with any of the results?”

  “A little.” Rebecca’s gaze returns out of the window. “I thought that Arthur might have to change some of his policies. In the end everything stayed the same.”

  Bronson frowns. “I wouldn’t say that. The new committee to distribute funding for ecological issues is quite a monumental change. I never thought I’d see Arthur agree to make anything like that official rather than merely voluntary.”

  “That was a good thing,” Rebecca agrees. “Do you think that the Sea Queen’s presence influenced the King’s decision?”

  Bronson considers. “Yes, I do. Her rather forceful presentation that no landmass is as isolated as land dwellers would like to believe made an impression even on me.”

  “And she was pretty, wasn’t she?”

  “If you like skinny, bald, blond creatures”—Bronson chuckles—“which I don’t particularly.”

  Rebecca turns from the window, rising all in one movement, surprisingly lithe for a creature of her height and bulk.

  “Bronson, the members of my chat group have been talking about taking a trip to Albuquerque in September. I want to go.”

  “What? Why?”

  “Because Albuquerque is where Arthur is. We wanted to go for the Review but decided that we really couldn’t pull it off in the summer. Too many of us need to wear heavy clothes to cover our…” She searches for a word, her expression bitter, “Our inhumanity.”

  “Nonhumanness,” Bronson corrects sternly.

  “Arthur acts as if we are inhuman—somehow less than those who can wear a human shape. Would he have listened to Amphitrite if she had shown up with a fish tail and eaten raw herring?”

  “Probably. The sea is a powerful force. Its monarchs are not to be taken lightly.”

  “Still, she chose to wear human-form. Even the tengu and the Changer himself wore human-form. The time has come for Arthur to face that some of our people are not human.”

  “None of us are human, Rebecca.”

  “You know what I mean.” She begins to pace, clenching and unclenching her long-fingered, simian hands. “Arthur and his ilk pretend that they are humans—just the better, longer-lived models. They ignore those of us who threaten that illusion!”

  “I do not call the help we have received from Arthur’s government ‘ignoring,’ Becky. We would not have this land nor the electronic equipment you so treasure without his assistance.”

  “Gilded bars for a cage!” Rebecca retorts. “If the humans learn of us, then the jig is up for the rest of them. I watched all the submeetings, the ones you skipped. Over and over again the theme was concealment lest we be discovered. If they’re worried about creating electronic records or financial trails, how much more do they fear people with fur or hooves or horns!”

  “‘They’? They are us. We are one type of people: the people of myth and legend, those who live outside of human time.”

  “No! We’re the huldre folk, just like Louhi said. We are hidden from view. We’re Eve’s unwashed children, the people that everyone denies. I, for one, am tired of it!”

  Bronson looks
at her, his heavy brows drawn down over jetty eyes. “And so you want to go to Albuquerque.”

  “Yes.”

  “And what will you do once our hiding is over?”

  “Live like a normal person.”

  “But we are not normal people. We are tall, massive, covered with fur. We have heavier bones. We climb trees like monkeys. We live for centuries—except when we are slain by action or chance. You cannot deny what we are, Rebecca. We are not normal people.”

  She stares, having rarely heard him speak so passionately.

  “Then,” she says, more hesitantly, “we will show them that shape and size don’t matter. What matters is the mind.”

  “You believe that you can demonstrate this… even though humans still divide themselves with barriers of race or creed or nationality?”

  “Yes!” She raises her chin defiantly. “Of course. How can they deny the evidence of their own eyes?”

  “Easily.” Bronson scratches beneath his furry rib cage. “They do it all the time. Get out on that precious web of yours and look at something other than the opinions of your isolated chat group. Take a look at the splinter religions, the hate groups, the news reports from areas where humans are busily slaughtering each other. Do that for a week and then tell me with the same confidence that humans are ready for sasquatch and satyr, fauns and tengu, sea serpents and jackalope.”

  “I want to go to Albuquerque,” she says stubbornly. “I’ve hardly been anywhere but these forests.”

  Bronson frowns. “We go to visit the Olsens.”

  “Same old forests, just in Washington State.”

  “I took you to Alaska to visit Snowbird’s family.”

  “That was cold. I want to see cactus. I want to feel really hot sunshine. I want to talk to people up close, not just through the computer or telephone.”

  “You see the Olsens, Frank MacDonald, and the Vagrant every year. The Smith comes by, too.”

  “A handful of people out of billions! They’re all athanor. I want to know what a crowd is like. I want to know something different! Bronson, I’m two hundred years old—almost as old as this country—and instead of seeing my horizons increase, I watch them getting narrower with every technological advance.”

  “Two hundred years,” Bronson smiles, “and each day as long as any other day for anyone else. Yes, I know. I forget that what seems like peace to me may seem like stagnation to you.”

  Rebecca frowns, uncertain if she is being teased. “I know you are older than I am…”

  “Much. My grandmother carried my father to this continent in her arms when there was still a land bridge over the Bering Strait. I remember migrations across this continent when I was small. My father died then; my mother, too. We may have had more freedom, but life was much more dangerous.”

  Bronson takes her hand. “Come and walk outside with me. You’ve been too much indoors.”

  She starts to pull away, to return to the comfortable terrain of her depression and sulky mood, but the unbearable tenderness in his expression touches her.

  “All right.”

  They walk outside. June is turning into July with an end to pale greenness. The trees are in heavy leaf now. Birdsong speaks of territories defended, young calling, not of courtship. Far above the lake, an eagle screams and dives.

  “I’ve known that eagle longer than I have you,” Bronson comments. “Twice I’ve removed bands from his leg to protect his secret. I think fifty years had to pass before I was certain it was the same bird. Just goes to show that we don’t all know each other on sight.”

  “Some do,” Rebecca says tentatively. “Right? I’ve heard that some athanor can identify others of our kind by scent or by some indefinable aura.”

  “That’s true, but just as not all of us have magic or fur or whatever, not all of us have that talent.”

  “We differ so. Are we really all one people?”

  “Yes. No matter shape or size or gift, we are all in Harmony. Harmony is what gives us our long lives and greater resilience. The Harmony Dance, more than any other single thing, proves that we have something in common.”

  “But we don’t get to Dance.”

  Bronson strokes her furry rump. “Really?”

  Rebecca blushes. “There was something extra that night, wasn’t there?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s it like when you’re alone?”

  “You must know. You didn’t always live with me.”

  “But I lived with my family. Then after the accident…” Her eyes cloud with tears as she recalls the flash flood and mud slide that had wiped out her entire family when she was seventy-five, “I lived with the Olsens until I met you. They always held a celebration. I’ve always had other sasquatch around. You’ve been absolutely alone.”

  “That’s true.” Bronson considers. “I think there’s always a tingle at the edge of the mind, but for many years I didn’t attend to why it was there. I was just more likely to celebrate with a glass of honey mead and reflect over my good fortune that I had survived another few years.”

  They walk for a time in silence. Bronson remembers other places. Days when mammoths and dire wolves walked the continent, when humans were a fragile novelty, not a threat. Until Rebecca came to him, he had always been something of a loner and had never really been lonely. Perhaps that was Nature’s compensation for a people that seemed to breed more males than females and very few children. Perhaps he had just learned to consider solitude the norm. Whatever the reason, Rebecca is not him. She is clearly lonely, and if he does not help her, he may lose her.

  “Rebecca?” he says, decision made. “If you want to go to Albuquerque, we will, but it must be on my terms.”

  “We will!” She stops. “What are your terms?”

  “We will take care to conceal ourselves. We will warn Arthur of our coming, not take him by surprise. I want you to remember that he is not an enemy—no matter what role your chatroom has cast him in.”

  “We haven’t!”

  She protests, then, grinning, runs a few steps and grabs a low-hanging branch. Lithe as the apes she vaguely resembles, she swings back and forth. The tree shakes slightly in protest.

  “Bronson! You’re wonderful!” She jumps down and hugs him tightly.

  “I’ll want to read the plans your group is making and offer suggestions,” he warns.

  “Of course!”

  “And we’ll need to start researching appropriate clothing…”

  “I’ve done a little already.”

  “And think about how we’re going to avoid being noticed for our height.”

  “That’s harder, but I’m certain we can come up with something.”

  “I don’t want to depend on some wizard for our security,” Bronson warns. “Debts to that type are never a good idea.”

  “Fine!”

  “You’re happy, aren’t you?”

  She turns a cartwheel, comes up and squeezes him again. “Oh, you can tell, can you?”

  Her joyful laughter fills the air, blending with the cry of the immortal eagle soaring out over the bright waters of the lake. Bronson feels his chest tighten both in response to his wife’s beauty and with the faintest touch of fear.

  Sitting in her office, mechanically responding to queries in her e-mail, Vera jumps when the knock sounds on her door. For a moment she considers not answering. Then she feels a sudden thrill of emotion. Maybe it is…

  “Come in!”

  She swivels her chair, unaware that a touch of rose has risen to her coppery cheek, knowing that her breathing has quickened and struggling to slow it. When she sees that her visitor is Amphitrite, she feels unreasonably disappointed.

  “I hope I’m not interrupting anything too important,” Amphitrite says.

  “No, just answering routine queries—mostly for copies of the sessions or for the resolutions. Nothing that won’t wait.”

  Her heart has stopped thudding now, but irrationally, Vera struggles against a sens
e of expectancy. She gestures toward one of the taupe chairs.

  “Make yourself comfortable.”

  “Thanks.” Sitting, Amphitrite toys with the end of one blond lock. “Want to go to South America with me?”

  “Me?”

  “You.” Amphitrite leans forward. “I know a great deal about the world under the waters, but I know very little about the politics of the land. Their very passion for the issues distorts the South American contingent’s presentation. I would like to have a more objective point of view along.”

  “But you will have Lovern.”

  “He is not objective. Although he stays in the background, Arthur’s policies are his policies.”

  “I’m on Arthur’s side, too,” Vera reminds her.

  “As are Duppy Jonah and I, but there is a difference between agreeing that someone is the best ruler and agreeing with all of that person’s policies.”

  “True.”

  “And, honestly, I am not overly fond of Lovern. For too long I have known him mostly through his public role and through my husband’s resentment of his trespass into our realm.”

  Vera taps a few keys, sending off another burst of electronic information. “The sea is a big place. Lovern may have felt Duppy Jonah’s control extended only to what he could govern at a given time.”

  “I am certain that he did,” Amphitrite says. “I was small fry in those days. Duppy Jonah was the Midgard Serpent, however, and recently defeated. Lovern took advantage of that. Had he been chivalrous to a defeated foe, I might feel differently.”

  “I can understand your point of view.”

  “You are of Arthur’s party,” Amphitrite continues. “You know the full reasons for his stance on certain issues. I would feel better advised if you were along.”

  “The South Americans might not like it.”

  “Tough. I am a reigning monarch. I am entitled to whatever entourage I choose. Besides, they may enjoy the opportunity to indoctrinate you.”

  Vera smiles a bit wryly at such arrogance coming from what to all appearances is a blond beach bimbo.

  “True.”

  “And I thought that you might enjoy an excuse to get away.”

  “Why?” This last comes out more defensively than Vera had intended. She softens her tone. “I mean, now that the Review is over, things will quiet down. I can return to my weaving.”