The Girl with the Peacock Harp

by Michael Eisele

  Ivan gestured to the left where a subtle glow was beginning at the horizon. ‘The moon’s near full, My Lady,’ he said. ‘ ’Twill be up soon.’

  ‘Good,’ Natalia said, as if she had known this all along and settled back into the leather seat, placing her bag with its oddly heavy contents securely in her lap. She’d managed to gather it up along with her wrap as she left and it contained nothing but last year’s birthday present from Uncle Vanya, her father’s brother and still at more than sixty years of age the chief supplier of the family fur business. She’d always admired the deadly grace of the long barrelled rifle he used in Siberia on his hunting expeditions, which hung over the fireplace as sole ornament whenever he was at home. When he cleaned and oiled it, sometimes he would let her touch it, her soft fingertips caressing the polished blue steel and carved walnut stock, his gnarled hand like old leather careful to keep her clear of the trigger guard. How she had begged with such persistence for one like it, to be allowed to go with him to the snows of Siberia and to bring back all those exquisite furs.

  Uncle Vanya had laughed, indulgently, but last year there had been a slim wooden box tied with ribbon for her birthday and inside a beautiful gleaming pistol. It was not one of the jewelled lady’s derringers, practically a toy, she had seen in the reticules of her Mother’s friends; the octagonal barrel was fully as long as her hand and the hand grips, though carved of mother of pearl, were nonetheless shaped to fill her palm. There were lessons also, how to hold it, how to aim, fire and care for it, a box of cartridges for its single chamber. ‘For a good hunter needs only one,’ he’d said severely when she asked about revolvers such as she had read about in novels from America.

  She smiled at the memory, settling the bag securely between her knees, careless of the possibility of oil stains on her gown. They were moving along the road that bordered the river now, and suddenly there was an increased illumination as the moon rose from the opposite shore, sending an immediate spear of silver over the frozen surface, smooth as a mirror. Other stars glinting from frost covered branches and sparkling from the ice itself were immediately evident, and Natalia drew in her breath at the fairyland transformation.

  Suddenly she recalled an old landing up ahead and a mad impulse seized her. The moon, gliding along and keeping pace, seemed to smile as she called out, ‘Ivan! Up ahead! Let us drive on the river to the Dacha!’

  The sleigh hissed to a stop as Ivan drew rein. He turned to her a face barely visible between the bulk of his felt cap and the full beard that obscured his mouth and cheeks, speckled with frost it gave him the air of an Old Testament Patriarch. His voice was concerned, however, rather than overbearing. ‘My Lady, this is far from wise,’ he began, ‘The forest begins here, and there are dangers in the night. . . .’

  ‘Oh, well, if you are afraid. . . .’ Natalia said innocently, arching an eyebrow in a way she’d been practicing. The response was all she could have hoped for. She saw his face contract and the two grooves that instantly appeared over his nose, and without answering he snapped the reins and guided the sleigh up the bank and down past the wooden jetty and onto the ice itself.

  Once on the surface of the frozen river Natalia drew in her breath at the beauty of the scene that unrolled before her. The nearly full moon turned the wide expanse of the Neva into a silver highway, and Sasha, her nostrils flaring, began to pick up speed, her iron shoes shedding splinters of ice as they dug into the surface. The air began to rush past and she drank in the wind as though it had been some rare wine, feeling the pearls of her necklace turn to drops of ice as the cold invaded the wrap at the throat. So exhilarated had she become after some minutes that she was not aware at first of the frequent glances Ivan was directing at the opposite shore, dark with the massed trees of the taiga, and it was only when the first faint howl reached her that a reason for his concern suggested itself.

  ‘Wolves?’ She shouted to be heard over the hoofbeats, and it was then that the ice invaded her chest as Ivan jerked his head to the rear of the sleigh. She turned to look behind, several strands of her dark hair escaping from the fur hood to obscure her vision until she managed to tuck them out of the way. Then she saw them, three running forms a hundred paces or more behind, dark shadows against the ice, and as she watched more emerged from the forest on the banks until there must have been a dozen or more, running hard and slowly drawing nearer. Another howl sounded and Ivan reached for the whip, snapping it twice in the air over the mare who responded, whether to the whip or the echoing howl with an increase in speed, the glittering splinters of ice from her iron shoes a cloud around her pounding hooves.

  To no avail for the pack drew nearer and Natalia saw with horror the feral gleam of their eyes, the lean flanks proclaiming their hunger and desperation. In the forefront ran the black leader and his eyes catching the moonlight glinted yellow, not the warm tint of fire but a cold malevolent colour that spoke of a remorseless purpose and determination. The pack was now only twenty paces distant, their combined breath pluming in the deathly cold, and Ivan without turning lashed poor Sasha with the whip to urge her on to greater efforts, the foam starting around the bit and staining her flanks.

  Yet the wolves drew still nearer and now they were only a dozen paces behind, the moonlight glittering on bared fangs and lolling tongues and the black leader with his eyes fixed on Natalia’s in a stare in which was nothing of effort or hate, but only a feral purpose. And as if it were a message passed to her she could see how Sasha would tumble in a confusion of tangled reins, hamstrung in the first savage assault, how the sleigh would splinter to ruin on the adamant surface of the ice, its polished ebony with the gold inlay broken and scattered, mingling with a spreading stain nearly black in the moonlight as the pack swarmed over their helpless bodies.

  It was terror that caused her frozen fingers to fumble at the opening of her bag tugging the cold pearl grips of the pistol free, thinking at first only, ‘One cartridge, only, for me . . .’ and then a rush of shame and a sudden vision of Uncle Vanya’s stern face, and like a lightning flash she recalled a story he had told once of being pursued by wolves on the plain in Siberia . . . one shot, only one . . .

  She rested the barrel of the pistol on the back of the sleigh but there was too much vibration from their mad gallop, and in a frenzy of desperation she shouted to Ivan to slow, to give her a chance to aim. He risked one backward glance, his eyes showing their whites as he took in her stance and the silver gleam of the pistol barrel in her hands, but he stopped lashing the mare and held firmly to the reins and the sleigh slowed slightly.

  Natalia could see the yellow eyes of the leader as they bored into hers and it seemed they were connected in some strange way, as if it were only she who was the object of his pursuit. Carefully she extended the pistol barrel over the back of the sleigh and—was it her imagination? She thought the yellow eyes widened, taking in the significance of the weapon in her hands and the fixed grin that exposed the gleaming fangs seemed to become more pronounced, and there was nothing of fear in him but only a calm fatalism. She felt that he knew that this instant was a duel between them, that perhaps she would miss with her single shot and there would be no time for a second as the pack overtook them, or she would succeed and he . . .

  She took a quick breath and let half out as she had been taught and the explosion of the shot was no louder than the snap of Ivan’s whip, but the black leader threw up his head, one ruined eye already welling to somersault onto the ice and the next instant to be buried under the snapping, snarling mass of the pack, a dark pile of writhing fur that quickly receded behind them. There was a quick backward glance from Ivan that somehow contained amazement, relief, and a respect bordering on love before he faced forward to guide the exhausted mare to a break in the undergrowth and back onto the relative safety of the road.

  Natalia sat numbly enduring the jolting return to the icy ruts of the roadway, the smoking pistol forgotten in her hand, only seeing a vision of two staring yellow eyes boring i
nto hers with the purity of a single purpose, mingled with the calculating, the weak, the pleading gaze of the men at her ball. She realised with a sudden flash of insight why she had left the ball, and what it was she had sought there and not found—until now.

  WHAT DREAMS MAY COME

  The sun rose blistering red, shedding its light over the shattered landscape as she awoke. Her golden eyes, still half lidded with sleep, surveyed the rough circle of the nest as she automatically turned her head first one way and then the other, releasing the grip of each talon in turn to shift her position on the perch. The bronze coloured feathers of her crest raised as the downcurved beak opened silently and closed with a chitinous click, then settled neatly into place.

  She spied the rude woven shelter in a corner of the nesting area where two of the Ktah (the word meant and sounded like ‘the unclean ones’) were cowering, the whites of their eyes showing against the disgusting moss that covered their gangling featherless bodies, and she clicked her beak again in displeasure as she spied thrust into a corner a pile of their scat. Her eyes fully open now, she glared at them and hissed an order. Immediately the male—she thought: it was difficult to be sure they looked so alike—crawled out and with a forelimb scooped up the ordure and flung it over the side, finishing by wiping the member on his thigh.

  She shook her head sharply as if to rid herself of the sight and sighed. Many of her people would not have had the four-legged scavengers sheltering in their eyrie at night, thinking it bad enough if they clambered up during the day when the occupants were away hunting; but she found them useful for repairing the interlaced sticks of the nest and ridding it of parasites, which they ate as if the insects were some rare delicacy, and she did not begrudge them the little space in the circular rock-floored expanse to construct their flimsy shelters against the pitiless sun. For the present that was; it would soon be the mating season. When there were young to consider she would perhaps feel differently.

  She ceased to think of the matter as she shifted around to survey the valley below her, still shrouded in twilight out of which rose, rank upon rank, the stone towers of her people, the sandstone pillars sculpted by the eternal winds into fantastic leaping flat topped shapes, each one crowned by the nests where her people made their homes. In the steadily growing glare the laboriously twisted and woven structures seemed dipped in molten gold and she felt a moment’s warm pride in the numbers and strength of her tribe, before a sharp pang of hunger brought her attention back to more immediate matters.

  Far away to the west she saw the dark green of the Yiesh, the wide grasslands that were her people’s preferred hunting grounds. Her preternaturally acute eyesight could discern the moving dots of a herd just emerging from a sheltering thicket, and with a sudden intake of breath she spread her great wings, each one more than twice her body length in width, and with a ferocious spring she launched herself into the void. The Sun was hot upon her back, loosening and stoking the humped wing muscles, but the air still retained the night’s coolness as it streamed through her feathers. She banked at the top of her rise, sighted upon the still oblivious herd in the distant meadow and then like a flung spear launched herself into the long shallow glide that in a short time would bring her above her intended prey.

  The percussive sound of her wings breaking her descent alerted the beasts to her presence, and as she hung there effortlessly riding the thermals above the waving grass the female and her two young wheeled and made for the cover of the low thorn trees. She watched them go with only a part of her attention, not needing to consider what she instinctively knew, that one did not hunt the mother before she had raised her young so the food supply might remain constantly replenished; but males, even such a well armoured specimen as the one standing at bay beneath her, were fair game at this season. She saw the rising sun glint off of the rack of needle points rising from his forehead, and he pawed the ground and belled a challenge as he prepared to defend his family’s retreat, head raised to keep her in sight.

  She began a wide circle, banking sharply, and the male reared on his hind legs as he pivoted, always keeping the sharp tines of his antlers facing her. She waited until it seemed he had begun to anticipate the rhythm of her turn, then beat her wings once, twice, with a sound like a thunderclap. The grass flattened around him and as he paused, fatally confused, and she dropped upon him from behind. With a single convulsive clenching of her talons she broke his neck and held his twitching and shivering body until all movement ceased, then dropped him to the ground, spread her wings upward and settled on the corpse, bending hungrily forward toward the warm softness of the lower belly.

  It was the unnatural movement of the grass alongside him that alerted her. They glided forward, four of them crouching close to the ground, thin and desperate after the winter’s famine, slavering and red-eyed as they approached from both directions at once. They were young, she saw, too young to know how foolhardy was the attempt to deprive one of her kind of a lawful prey, and in an instant she had risen to her full height and struck at the nearest pair with both wings, crushing the skull of one and sending the other sprawling with an agonised yelp that told of broken ribs at least. Her peripheral vision caught the flicker of movement as one of the others launched itself at her back. Tucking up her legs she spun in the air and with her talons extended prepared to . . .

  The shrill voice of the alarm woke her and for a moment Meryl sat up amid the disorder of the bedclothes, half believing that the sound was the harsh war cry she felt straining her throat. Then she was awake and clutching the clean softness of a pillow to her chest, trembling and gasping in the aftermath as the violence of the dream gradually faded, to be replaced by the distant sounds of traffic outside. Helplessly she shook her head, returning to full wakefulness.

  The dreams were getting worse, she thought with a sinking of fear in the pit of her stomach. They had not been so bad when they began several weeks ago, simply brief visions of gliding over a reddish coloured desert. She had not minded that: all the books said that dreams of flying were a positive sign. She pushed herself further up and turned the bedclothes back, swung her legs over the edge of the mattress and stood up, having to push her nightdress down from where it had bunched up around her waist. Next she’d be sleepwalking, she thought in horror, staring down at her legs in momentary confusion. They seemed so thin, thin and pale and weak . . . she pressed the heels of both hands over her eyes, pressed hard so that a starburst of light surged out behind her closed eyelids. This was ridiculous! She jogged around the Central Park reservoir with her friends twice a week, for god’s sake, her legs were her best feature, everyone said so.

  She lowered her hands and clenched them into fists. My name is Meryl Gordon, she told herself desperately. I am thirty-two, married and divorced, and I have an interesting and challenging job I enjoy. These dreams are nothing more than fantasy from watching too many movies. She marched herself determinedly into the bathroom and stared grimly into the mirror. Her own ordinary face stared back, frowning (were those wrinkles starting around the eyes?) In any case, very ordinary eyes, brown with golden flecks, set in an oval face framed by ordinary brown hair . . . was that a hint of grey over the ears? She peered closer, momentarily distracted then laughed in relief, pushing back her hair and reaching for the toothbrush. Just a silly dream, she told herself, what was she getting so upset about?

  As if to underscore the return to reality HobNob pushed his face around the doorway and miaowed plaintively for breakfast. In the next instant the little Siamese had disappeared and Meryl found herself facing the doorway in a half crouch, both hands raised to shoulder height and the toothbrush clattering into the sink. ‘Oh no! Oh God no!’ she moaned. Her heart thumping madly she sank down on the toilet lid, tears beginning to leak from her closed eyelids. That was it, she said to herself, she was definitely losing her mind. The dreams must be the sign of a brain tumour or something. She jerked her head up as something touched her leg softly, and looked down into HobNob�
�s brown face, his sapphire blue eyes staring up at her in concern. Half laughing she scooped the little animal up to her lap, then stood cradling him to her chest, petting him and crooning reassurance as she walked into the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, sorry, baby, did Mommy scare you? Don’t worry, Mommy’s just going a little crazy, but we’ll get Auntie Ruthie to feed you and take care of you when they cart Mommy off to the bughouse . . .’

  Reassured that things were back to normal the cat began to purr loudly, then leaped to the floor and began to circle her ankles.

  An hour or so later, after a shower and her usual breakfast of yoghurt and green tea, Meryl felt able to face the real world once more. She could even laugh a little to herself as she walked briskly down the corridor to the marble lobby that led to the street outside. What after all could it mean but a few random images picked up by her subconscious coupled with the sort of fantasy films she’d been watching lately. That desert, for instance, wasn’t it like parts of the Arizona you were always seeing in magazines, those sandstone pillars with the flat tops?

  Her reverie was interrupted as the Super’s door opened to one side of the lobby, and there was Ruthie fitting the ring of keys that was like a badge of office to her capacious waist. Her friend and landlady’s face lit up as she spied Meryl, and she called out in a voice roughened by too many cigarettes, ‘Hello, someone looks happy this morning! After such a night, too, what time did he leave?’

  ‘Who? What are you talking about?’ Ruthie’s insistence that Meryl’s wild love-life was a secret they both shared could be a little unsettling at times and especially first thing in the morning.