Shahrazad prepares to leap, to interpose herself between the dryad apple tree and the human. What she doesn’t count on is that the dryads might have plans of their own.
When the branches start moving, Johanna thinks a wind must be rising. Then she realizes that the sweat dampening her temples remains untouched. Given the chill of the winter day she should feel any breeze strong enough to move the trees.
But there is no breeze. The air hangs almost unnaturally still and cool. Yet the branches are moving, swaying almost lazily.
No.
Johanna makes her feet carry her forward, toward the promise of the apple tree and the cluster of twiggy growth that means her future and her fortune. She’ll need to climb a few feet off the ground in order to cut the witches’-broom out, but that won’t be hard. She has a rope ladder, but she shouldn’t need it. Apple trees are almost the perfect climbing trees, especially well-pruned ones.
This one has been beautifully tended. Awkward crossing branches have been sawn back so they won’t rub against each other and damage the bark. Old fruit has been cleared away so it won’t breed infection as it rots on the ground.
Johanna concentrates on her goal. She’s having more trouble reaching that tree than she had thought possible. Twiggy hands seem to be plucking at her, drawing her back. Saplings bend to interpose themselves across what she had been sure was a fairly open path. The ground is rougher than she had thought, too. Roots thrusting up through the leaf mold nearly trip her several times.
Of course they can’t be doing that. That’s only her imagination, just like it’s only her imagination that the apple tree itself is moving, that a flower garlanded woman is standing in front of the tree. She is pregnant, cradling her hands protectively in front of her abdomen, those hands cupping a shining apple. The woman’s expression is both frightened and resolute.
Johanna forces her foot ahead a pace. When the tree branches bend to impede her, she pulls out the two-edged saw she’d brought along for cutting away underbrush. One side of the blade is serrated, but the other is smooth and sharp, like a machete or a sword. She slashes out with the sword blade at the sapling bending in front of her, feels a certain satisfaction when the slender trunk parts in two. She takes two more steps, hacking away at anything that gets in her way. If she can just get out into the open, she’ll be fine. There’s only some winter dried grasses there, nothing to grab or claw.
Her heart is beating a crazy, erratic tattoo, her breath is coming short, but Johanna makes her determined way forward, her gaze fixed on the promise of safety ahead. She chops through another twisting limb, watches it fall.
When she looks up, she sees a devil standing in the meadow, goat-horned and goat-hoofed, just like the illustrations in her grandmother’s old Bible. The devil’s eyes are pale yellow with the same weird, squared pupil goats have. He smiles, but there is nothing friendly in his expression.
This final shock is too much. Johanna forgets the grasping hands of the trees, lets the saw slide from fingers suddenly numb, screams, and turns to run.
When the trees start moving, Shahrazad forgets about her plan to impersonate a dog. She’s suddenly one very frightened coyote, scenting malice as certainly as she had scented the odor of human sweat. She presses herself flat against the leaf mold, piddling in frightened submission. Her coyote brain doesn’t think in words, but if it did those words would certainly be: “Don’t hurt me!”
Other than where they accidentally sweep against her while straining toward the intruder, the trees seem to accept her plea. After a terrified moment, Shahrazad’s natural inquisitiveness reasserts itself. She lifts her head slightly, trying to figure out what is happening, understanding all too quickly that the trees are determined to drive the human from their midst.
Shahrazad watches, ears plastered flat against her skull lest one of the thrashing branches deal them a stinging blow. She recognizes that the power granting this almost animal movement to the usually stolid trees is not their own. It is coming from the half-dozen or so dryad trees growing around the edges of the meadow. They are using the more normal trees to extend their reach, sacrificing them to protect themselves.
The coyote understands that the human is lucky the trees—both dryad and more usual—are settled into their winter dormancy. Had it been summer, when the sap runs fast and hot, the woman would have been plucked from the earth and dashed down again before she could take more than a few steps. As it is, she is offering a good fight, trying to make her way into the meadow where the cold-burnt grass offers no life the dryads can awaken.
Then Shahrazad sees the faun. It is not Demetrios. She struggles to remember the human-language name by which this faun is identified. Kleon. That’s it. Kleon. A sound that tells nothing, convenient, though, for those who must talk.
Scents work so much better than names, for they are always unique. By this faun’s scent, Shahrazad recognizes Kleon as one of the bolder members of Demetrios’s flock, one with whom Demetrios sometimes butts heads over some incomprehensible matter of policy. For example, Kleon hadn’t wanted Shahrazad to stay with them. He had been among the last to offer her even grudging welcome—and that had held more the flavor of resignation than anything else.
Now Kleon stands in the center of the meadow, bigger seeming than Shahrazad remembers, but with his shaggy black and white flanks and small curling goat horns not too terribly frightening—certainly not in contrast to the tossing limbs and grasping twigs of the weirdly animated trees.
Yet the woman, who had stood her ground—even fought back—against the trees, takes one look at the faun, freezes, and screams with such pure terror that Shahrazad again flattens involuntarily into the leaf mold and squeezes her eyes shut.
When Shahrazad opens her eyes, she hears the woman crashing through the undergrowth in panicked flight, sees the faun leaping after in pursuit. Kleon is laughing, the sound cruel and harsh against the sudden quiet that comes when the trees settle into vegetative stillness once more.
Shahrazad understands what that laughter says more easily than she would have understood words. Kleon will not be content to drive the woman away. The woman has threatened his home, his dryads, and, perhaps worst of all, she has seen him as he is—an alien thing in the human world. For this she must die.
And Shahrazad, lectured repeatedly from puppyhood about the dangers that come from stirring up humans, realizes that the trespasser cannot be driven to her death. Killing her would bring far more trouble than it would resolve. The faun, however, is beyond clear thought. Kleon is not Demetrios, wise and wary beyond most to the dangers offered by humankind. Kleon will be foolish, and that foolishness might well destroy the very secrets he seeks to protect.
Shahrazad forces herself to stand on trembling legs, her tail limp behind her. As she does so, she sees motion from the direction of the meadow. A woman—and yet not completely a woman, for her slender limbs are more like branches, her long hair intertwined with leaves and apple blossoms—stands in front of one of the trees.
“Stop the faun,” the dryad says. “Please, leggy one. Stop him. We will help you if we can, but we are rooted.”
Coyote pride will not let Shahrazad give into fear in front of any plant—even one as wondrous as this dryad is proving to be. Shahrazad forces the weakness from her limbs, shakes herself, and bolts through the suddenly accommodating undergrowth in pursuit of the faun.
Johanna’s flight is blind. Fingers fumbling, she unstraps her framepack and lets it thump to the ground behind her. The release of weight gives her wings, but when she spares a single panicked glance behind she sees the devil still bounding after her.
There is a wicked grin on his black-bearded face, and his lack of clothing means that nothing hides the excitement the chase has aroused. One glance is enough. Johanna presses a hand to her thudding heart and runs.
Which way is the ravine? Can she even climb down the sides without slowing too much? Yet falling would be preferable to letting the devil catch h
er. The cold waters of the stream would be welcoming compared to what he intends.
She is angling her steps in the direction of the ravine when something golden-brown bursts out of the undergrowth ahead of her. A dog, she thinks, or a wolf. Too small to be a wolf, too slender. A coyote?
Species identification is not important, not when the animal is rushing at her, alternately growling and barking. Johanna shies away from those sharp, white teeth. The coyote—Johanna thinks it must be a coyote—dodges behind her, swerves to run alongside. It is driving her away from the ravine, down a slope, towards, Johanna realizes, the sprawling farmhouse where Demetrios Stangos resides.
This seems like a good idea. Revealing that she had been trespassing doesn’t seem all that bad now, especially when seen as an alternative to the devil chasing her. She glances back. The devil might have fallen off a few paces, but he’s definitely still after her.
Even if Mr. Stangos isn’t about Johanna can certainly appeal to someone down at the house. Stangos had seemed like a steady fellow. Certainly he’s married. Mrs. Stangos will protect her. They’ll be glad to help her, especially when she tells them about the devil in their forests.
Meanwhile the coyote has dropped back and is directing his barking at the devil.
Maybe it isn’t a devil. Maybe it’s just a wildman. Johanna could have imagined the horns, couldn’t she? Or maybe they were fakes, purchased from some costume store at Halloween. It’s amazing the things people do with plastic these days.
Johanna’s thoughts are hardly comforting—there isn’t much choice between naked wildman or woods devil. What is comforting is the sight of the white-sided farmhouse set among neatly trimmed fields. Goats are grazing on the short-cropped grass, small as a child’s toys at this distance. Two or three raise their heads as if hearing the crashing through the forests above their pasture.
Johanna wishes she had the breath to scream for help, but she barely has breath enough to run, and her heart is pounding wildly, its beats irregular.
I should have gotten more exercise, she thinks before her wobbly legs betray her. She trips over an exposed rock, sprawls headlong. Her own momentum carries her forward as she falls. She lifts her arms in a futile attempt to shield her head. A burst of brilliant light fills her thoughts, followed by absolute darkness.
Shahrazad’s momentary thrill of triumph when she succeeds in herding the woman toward Demetrios’ house dies when she sees Kleon’s anger turned upon her.
“Away, little bitch,” he commands in a deep, gruff voice, while advancing a few steps toward the fallen woman. “Let me through and you won’t get hurt.”
Feeling very small and very weak, Shahrazad wants to bolt. Terror radiates from the goat-legged man, cutting into her spirit as the winter wind cuts through her coat. She runs, meaning to go only the few paces that will carry her to the human.
Beginning to run is a mistake. Once Shahrazad begins to run, she wants to keep running. Had a root not snagged her paw and slowed her head-long retreat, Shahrazad might not have stopped. As it is, she manages to dig her hindquarters into the soft ground and stop near the human.
The woman is breathing hard: short, ragged gasps. Blood is trickling from a fresh cut on her head. She smells as if she has lost control of her bladder.
The coyote stands over the unconscious figure, bares her teeth, feels her hackles raise, and growls.
“Threatening me, little dog?” The faun laughs very unkindly. “What are you going to do? Bite me? Oh, I’m so very frightened.”
Shahrazad growls again, ears flat. She snaps her teeth once in Kleon’s direction, doesn’t step away from the human, though her every nerve is singing with raw fear.
“I’ll bite you,” she threatens with the fur prickling up along her back. “It will hurt. Go away.”
The faun understands, but he sneers.
“I suppose you think I’m afraid of you,” Kleon mocks. “Little dog, I’m not afraid of you. I’m not afraid of your father. I’m not afraid of Demetrios. That woman you are guarding so faithfully, little dog, she tried to steal my baby away, might have injured my wife. That human is not leaving here alive.”
Shahrazad cannot believe Kleon’s bravado. Anyone in his right mind would be afraid of the Changer. Demetrios is pretty formidable, too, in his fussy fashion. Demetrios is head of the herd here, isn’t he? Demetrios—not Kleon.
Shahrazad has already noticed that the other fauns are keeping clear of this confrontation. That means they aren’t certain Kleon is in the right. And hadn’t the tree—the tree who was apparently this faun’s mate—hadn’t she pleaded with Shahrazad to stop Kleon?
Neither young things nor coyotes particularly like thinking things through, but faced with the consequences of failure Shahrazad thinks hard. Kleon is trying to push her into a fight. He’ll probably win, too, if it comes down to that.
But he isn’t coming forward. The headlong rage that had sent Kleon after the intruder is ebbing now. The incitement to panic has vanished, and Shahrazad realizes that Kleon had been causing much of her own fear.
Though unclouded eyes she looks at Kleon She sees a strong creature, a bit small for a human, quite large for a goat. His haunches are piebald, the coarse hair clean and well-brushed. His hair is shiny black, touching his shoulders, but neatly trimmed. He wears his beard, quite naturally, in a goatee. His gaze, wholly human now with no trace of goat, holds a hint of uncertainty.
Having herself pushed acceptable limits too far numerous times, Shahrazad understands. Kleon had been genuinely furious. Had Shahrazad not intervened, had the human not run so fast, Kleon might have driven the intruder to her death. Now he has calmed somewhat, is rational enough to realize the consequences of his actions, yet he does not wish to be seen backing down. Herd creatures and pack animals are quite alike in this.
Shahrazad realizes that she knows the perfect solution to their standoff. She will do nothing. She will wait here, guarding this human. She doesn’t think the woman will be waking up any time soon. Surely Demetrios will come back before long. He would not have left Shahrazad if he did not plan to return before too many hours had passed.
She will simply wait. Then Demetrios can deal with Kleon. Demetrios can figure out what to do about the trespasser.
It isn’t a heroic decision, but it is a sublimely coyote one, and whatever else she is, Shahrazad, daughter of the Changer, is most certainly a coyote.
Feeling her hackles settle, Shahrazad lowers herself onto her haunches alongside the human, bends to lick the blood from the woman’s head wound, and reassures herself that nothing seems smashed beyond repair.
Kleon stands staring at Shahrazad, then he grunts and turns away, trotting off into the forest. One by one, several shadows detach themselves from where they had been watching—the other fauns, joining their fellow. A few nod thanks in Shahrazad’s direction. One waves a small object and shouts encouragement in which the only words Shahrazad understands are “called Demetrios.”
Sometime later, Shahrazad hears the music of the panpipes, haunting and delicate, yet filled with furious energy. It is coming from direction of the distant apple orchard. Wild as the music is, it comes to her as the sound of peace.
Johanna awakens to find herself lying in a strange bed in a room hung with photographs of orchards in flower. A golden brown dog is sleeping near her feet. When Johanna moves, the dog hops down off the bed and trots out of the room. A few moments later, she hears the sound of boots against the hallway floor and a man comes into the room. She immediately recognizes him as Demetrios Stangos.
Oddly, he is wearing a hat, though they are inside the house, a jaunty fedora that looks rather nice against his reddish brown hair. His eyes are also brown, and though their expression mingles stern disapproval and concern, she thinks she sees kindness there as well.
“Johanna,” he says. “I am Demetrios Stangos. You may recall me from some past business. How do you feel?”
“My head aches, Mr. Stangos,” Johann
a admits. “I ache all over.”
“Please, call me Demetrios,” he says. “You are a guest in my house.”
Johanna colors at this, remembering how she had come to be there. Demetrios ignores her embarrassment with old-fashioned courtesy.
“You fell, several times according to the doctor. You may have had a minor heart attack.”
“Doctor? Heart attack?”
“I had a doctor in to see you. He has left now, but will return with an ambulance. He would like you to come in to the hospital and be hooked into a heart monitor. However, he wanted you to rest first, since you probably have a concussion.”
Demetrios pauses, then goes on with the air of one reciting a lesson. “From the concussion you should expect some lapses in memory. Do not trust what memories you do have—at least those dealing with the immediate past. Head injuries are tricky that way.”
“I remember,” Johanna says hesitantly. “I was in the forest, near an old orchard. I saw something that frightened me... A devil and a woman holding an apple. I was so scared I just turned and ran. The trees... They moved....”
She hears her voice catch; the words end on a sob.
Demetrios smiles at her with gentle amusement.
“Hallucination,” he says, “perhaps brought on by the tales they tell about this forest. You have heard how my lands are haunted, haven’t you?”
Johanna nods reluctantly. The motion make her head throb and swim.
Demetrios pours her a glass of water from an elegantly simple stoneware pitcher.
“Drink this. The doctor left you something for the pain, but he said it was best if you used it sparingly. Concussions are tricky.”
“You sound like you know personally,” she says, accepting the water. It is very cold and tastes of minerals: artesian well water, no doubt.
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