The Summer Country

by James A. Hetley

  Whatever the crows fought over here, she didn't need that adding to the queasy feeling in her stomach. Maybe it was the result of eating too much after starvation. Either that or it was psychosomatic morning sickness: her belly thought vomiting could purge it of poisons that came in the other way. Too early for the real thing.

  Her hand kept returning to the cold hilt of the knife and then slipping off to caress the skin of her belly. Was she pregnant? Half of that baby is you, she thought. Half of it is Dougal. Yang and yin, black and white, Ahriman and Ormazd battle in my womb. The forces of darkness wrestle with the forces of light. Do I damage my soul more by joining the fight or by staying neutral?

  I don't even know if there is a baby, she answered.

  That's because you're afraid to look, the whispers muttered. You're hoping the moon and your body's tides are wrong, you're hoping for implant rejection or a defective egg or the side-effects of starvation, you're hoping for any one of the thousands of reasons why women don't get knocked up every time they fuck.

  You're hoping for a spontaneous abortion so you don't have to create one yourself.

  She gritted her teeth and reminded herself to let the dead past bury its dead. Or cremate them. She didn't have to decide anything for weeks or even months. Like, maybe, eight of them, and then there were adoption agencies for after that. Right now, she had more urgent worries: Brian, and Jo, and David.

  She touched a tree, a smooth-barked beech with a kind face wrinkled into its gray elephant's hide, and asked the way to Fiona's land. {Straight to the morning sun,} the tree said, clearly. {Go through the woods and across the pasture. You'll see the roof and chimneys over her hedges, and the top branches of the house-rowan spreading against the sky.}

  Fiona.

  Dougal had said the dark-haired woman was his enemy. He'd blamed Fiona and Sean for the dangers to Brian and David and Jo. Sean, yes. Maureen could believe Sean poisoned Socrates, crucified Christ, and shot Lincoln and both the Kennedys one morning before stepping out for lunch. But the one time Maureen had talked to her, Brian's sister hadn't seemed all that bad.

  Kinky, yes. Who the hell wanted a baby by her brother?

  Ruthless, yes. Fiona had used a street gang to try and kidnap Brian.

  Brian had explained that as a lack of any moral sense, of conscience, as if the Old Ones lacked souls. Brian was an Old One. It sounded like a philosopher's paradox.

  You are an Old One, Maureen's mental voice reminded her. You have the powers to prove it.

  She shuddered. Walking down the hillside from the smoking chimney that had been Dougal's keep, she had touched each mounted skull as she passed it. The bleached bones had powdered into dust, giving up a sigh as if each touch released a bound soul.

  Souls, souls, souls. Did she even have a soul, she wondered? What percentage of human blood made a soul? There was a question for Father Donovan and his black-robed Jesuits.

  Enough. She needed to keep track of priorities. Find Brian, free him: he knew this land. Find David and Jo with his help. Get the fuck to someplace safe before her legs gave out and dumped her on her ass. Anything else was secondary.

  She touched another tree, a rough-barked ancient European maple her professors would have graded as a prime veneer log and valued by the inch. Did trees have souls?

  Brian, she asked it. Have you seen Brian? She closed her eyes and called up an image of his stocky body, his shaggy blond hair, his blue eyes as deep as a mountain sky. Her heart felt strange when she thought of those eyes, and the warmth of his hand seemed to touch her arm.

  Her pulse beat through her fingers into the bark, and pictures returned: Brian in the forest, Brian and David and Dougal and Sean, and then Fiona. Fiona danced around Brian, rubbing against him, singing words Maureen didn't understand in a voice that tore her soul.

  Seduction spell, her growing sense of witchcraft said. You can’t understand the language because it’s weaving magic as strong as the land itself. Fiona had spun a web of words to bind Brian to her.

  If you want him, you'll have to fight for him.

  Maureen's eyes snapped open. A faint aroma teased her, just above the dry bitterness of the bark and lichen under her nose. Her memory flashed back to Jo's apartment, and she stood weeping over the rumpled sheets of a bed. Lust and sweat blended with the paired scents of Jo's Passionflower perfume and David's after-shave, the morning after she'd met Brian.

  They were here.

  She spun around. Nothing. The scent faded as her hand left the maple. She turned back to it, touched it, and grabbed the barest hint of the scent returning. She smelled them through the tree, through the breath of the forest.

  What she smelled was magic: the magic of her blood, the magic of this land. It called to her--seductive, dark, and private.

  {Trees have souls. You have a soul. Everything alive has a soul, and some things that have never lived.}

  Maureen's hand jerked from the bark, as if the tree had tried to bite her.

  {Not that slow sleeping chunk of firewood, woman with fur like mine. It thinks in pictures only. If you want words, I'd recommend an oak.}

  Maureen traced out the speaker, a muzzle and sharp bright eyes and radar ears separating out from the shadows of the undergrowth. It was a picture puzzle, an illusion of camouflage in which bush became fox and fox became bush, each time she shifted her eyes. Once she saw the animal, she wondered how she'd ever missed it.

  {You only see me because I wish it. The forest wonders about you. What better animal to satisfy that curiosity than a fox?}

  A thrill of joy ran down her spine and out to each finger and toe. She'd always thought the fox was the spirit of the forest, the expression of its soul. She'd only seen glimpses of them in Carlysle Woods or out in the Experimental Forest. They were as shy as ghosts.

  Cross fox, her mental catalog named it: Vulpes fulva, a color variant on the more common red fox, known by the dark cross-marking on the back. Reddish body, light underside, white tail tip and dark legs.

  {You have the naming sickness. Wild magic doesn't work that way. Putting a name on me doesn't give you power.}

  Without moving, it vanished into the shadows.

  Maureen jerked as if waking from a dream. She started to search the brush for a den entrance, then shook her head at the image of following Alice down into Wonderland. A fox's den probably wouldn't lead to the same sort of place as The Rabbit Hole.

  "Come back," she whispered, half to herself.

  {How can I? I never left.}

  And the fox mask poked out of the forest gloom, in the same briar-tangled shadow underneath a kind of dogwood Maureen didn't recognize. She traced out the body, with lumps down chest and belly. It was a vixen, with recent kits hidden somewhere near.

  Maureen willed the fox to stay, to continue this blessed instant. Talking with a fox was almost worth the cost of Dougal.

  "I don't name things to gain power over them. A name helps me to think about you, remember you, gain understanding of how you live and what you need and how you affect the forest in which you live."

  {You killed the Master.}

  How could she condense kidnap, torture, and rape into something a fox would understand? "He kept me in a cage."

  {Ah.}

  The fox settled into a sphinx-pose, almost like a cat. Maureen wasn't fooled: twitch a hand and the vixen would vanish without a sound.

  "What does the Master's death mean to you?"

  {It depends on what replaces him. He was a hunter. I understand hunting. Life and death are two sides of the paw. The Master did more. He controlled. Are you one of those?}

  Maureen closed her eyes and shuddered. "The falcons are free. All the cages are broken. The skulls are empty dust."

  {Ah. And you--are you predator, or prey?}

  A fox would think that way.

  Maureen opened her eyes again, forcing them against her need for sleep. She was so tired . . . .

  "Humans eat anything. You know that. Omnivores."


  The vixen held a dead chipmunk between her paws. That was the forest: one of the cutest critters on God's green earth was also just another snack.

  Maureen could live with that. Simple hunger was so clean compared to the fear she'd carried all her life.

  {I spoke of mind, not food. Are you predator, or prey?}

  "I was prey. I'm done with that. But I refuse to turn into Dougal MacKenzie."

  {In this forest, there is no third choice.}

  Maureen's gaze devoured the fox, marveling at the flick of one pointed ear identifying a distant sound, the twitch of whiskers, the clean daintiness of the paws. Sight had to substitute for feeling the warmth of her red-brown fur, smelling her sharp animal musk. Maureen's fingers itched to caress that fur and soak up the pulse under it.

  The fox radiated alive.

  "I'm a watcher. I'll make a third choice. Steward. Keeper of the balance."

  She paused, then went on as if she was justifying herself to a human listener. "I love chipmunks alive, and I love chipmunks turned into fox. I love this tree standing in the forest, talking with the wind. I love it formed into planks to make a table, glossy with hand-rubbed oil and the careful strokes of a cabinet-maker's tools. I love it burning in a fireplace, or in a hot black wood-stove with the cold January wind howling music down the chimney. And I would love to climb it, if I was feeling strong enough."

  {You claim to be a poet?}

  "You claim to be a fox?"

  The vixen tossed the chipmunk into the air with a flip of her head, caught the body, bit. Bone crunched. No chipmunk.

  {If I am not a fox, what ate that noisy little windbag?}

  "You've got an awfully big vocabulary for a fox."

  A red tongue wiped the spatters clean. Then wicked eyes sparkled up at Maureen, mirroring the foxy smile.

  {Who better? Although many things in this land are not quite what they seem.}

  Maureen stared at emptiness where the fox had been. This time, she did step forward and kneel to touch the ground. She felt warmth, and her fingers found blood and chipmunk fur, but there was no sign of a den or burrow.

  "I wish you hadn't left."

  Damp cold touched her ankle. Maureen swallowed a scream and looked down. Yellow eyes glinted back at her. She felt almost as if the animal was teasing her. Or--courting her?

  Slowly, carefully, she reached back along her leg and touched the cold nose. Her fingers traced the wiry whiskers and caressed the ridges over the vixen's eyes, then moved on to scratch between the ears. Soft fur, smooth fur, silken fur cool at the surface and warm beneath, delighted her fingertips. The vixen closed her eyes, like a cat, and gently leaned into Maureen's touch.

  She felt a pulse, racing at twice the speed of her own. And then the fox vanished.

  I'm hallucinating again. Got to get more sleep.

  Maureen sniffed her fingers. Nothing--no smell of fur, no pungent fox-reek almost as strong as skunk.

  {And the forest? Is this a waking dream as well?}

  The fox looked down on her from a huge moss-covered boulder. The vixen licked one paw and cocked her head as if listening for a mouse.

  Maureen listened.

  She heard the wind brushing the tips of leaves, she heard the stealthy scuffle of beetles under bark, she heard the chitter of a distant squirrel. She heard her own pulse.

  She didn't hear cars, or the thumping National Guard helicopters that made the Naskeag Falls airport their base. She didn't hear the constant background hum of civilization that might as well be distributed on utility poles along with electricity and phone.

  No matter what time of day or night she went into Carlysle Woods, she never heard only forest. Even out in the puckerbrush beyond the last straggling villages of backwoods Maine, there'd always been the distant roar of jets overhead and log-skidders growling over their prey two ridges to the west.

  Camped out in the middle of the mountains, you could hear the Maine Central diesel airhorns at midnight grade-crossings twenty miles away. The voice of man was noise.

  Not this. This was the way forests had sounded before the first machine. Maureen felt peace wash through her. God knows, she'd earned it.

  "I've dreamed of forests like this."

  {The land is yours, if you choose to claim it.}

  Maureen studied the forest, opening her professional eyes. Coming here, the land had been a blur--first the theater backdrop to Sean's glamour, then something vague red-tinted through her rage and fear. She'd never seen it.

  She saw lichen an inch thick on the trees, carpets of reindeer moss on the ground between the bunchberry and the bramble, dens and rocky labyrinths and damp pockets of rotting leaves spiked with lycopodium. Oak. Beech. Maple. Birch. Others she did not know the names of or the uses, European trees she'd never learned. Fir and pine and cedar and spruce. Young trees, old trees, giants and scraggly dwarfs. Beautiful trees, trees with heart and history and character.

  This land waited for her touch, her understanding, and her healing.

  How much land had Dougal held? The view from his keep had shown forest for miles in every direction--rolling green out to the distant tilled fields and the pastures. She traced the furrows of watersheds in her mind, almost stroking their leafy fur with her hand.

  This land was damned near empty. The Old Ones were loners, distrustful of each other and of humans, almost like Daniel Boone and the other American wanderers. It was time to move on when you could see the smoke from your neighbor's chimney on a frosty morning.

  She remembered Fiona in Carlysle Woods, talking of the Summer Country. "Think of it as clay on the potter's wheel, and you the potter."

  The fox offered her a forest to tend, tend by her own rules.

  Old trees to talk to. New trees to learn. The mystery of that wrongness she'd felt, to solve and correct by careful stewardship--psychotherapy for an ecosystem.

  No one to call her crazy when she talked of the soul of a tree. No stockholders to complain when she guided her decisions by what the land needed rather than by numbers on a ledger.

  If some land-management firm in Maine had offered her this job, she'd have killed for it.

  I already have.

  She found her hand on the knife-hilt again, and jerked it away. The fox vanished.

  Magic. Maureen wondered if it was the mundane magic of a red fox startled by her movement, or the true magic of the Summer Country.

  She felt like a mystic blessed by the touch of God.

  {Next time you come here,} the fox whispered, {bring your wooden flute. You'll find it plays a different kind of music in its true home.}

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Maureen struggled to separate reality from illusion.

  Had she conjured the fox out of sleep deprivation and a week of fasting? Could she hold a clear and rational conversation with a beech tree if she was still on medication?

  How does this world define sanity?

  First things first. She had to find Brian. He understood this crazy place.

  She strode off through the forest, straight east. Her hand went to the hilt of the knife again and then massaged her belly underneath it.

  A low stone wall divided the forest from rolling pastures, divided the smell of old leaves and damp forest moss from a breeze full of fresh green grass and wildflowers. Maureen sensed another boundary there, as well, as if she'd be crossing into enemy territory when she climbed over the line of fieldstone.

  Her paranoia revived: they were watching her. She found herself chuckling at the notion. She hadn't realized how much the magic of the land had changed her until the old feeling returned. Now every blade of grass had eyes and ears.

  Maybe this time it was true.

  She sat on the fence, chewing on an apple while she rested her legs. Her queasy stomach welcomed the food, so she pulled out a chunk of cheese and gnawed on it, then followed up with slices of dried sausage. The warm sun tempted her to lie down in the grass and sleep. A short nap, say a week or maybe two, s
eemed just about right. Wake up and eat, then sleep again.

  Recover first. Brian could wait. She leaned back against an oak--an ancient white oak rooted firmly on her side of the stone wall--and closed her eyes.

  {That's Fiona talking,} the oak whispered. {You're at the edge of her territory now. She's far more skilled than Dougal was, more subtle. Let the paranoia rule for a little longer. Even paranoids have real enemies.}

  Maureen jerked awake and shook herself. Father Oak never spoke that clearly. He tended to be more like a Greek oracle, all enigmatic and vague. She looked over the landscape with a fresh eye, looking for trouble.

  A chimney poked out of green lumps, a mile or so away. Maureen studied it, picking out the rounded line of a thatched roof pale against the spring shrubs. She'd expected something more impressive, more defensive, something cold and tall on a hill, like the castle she'd left in flames.

  Fiona seemed to keep a lower profile than Dougal had. Basic psychology said it meant she was more confident--probably with good reason.

  Maureen heaved herself upright again, groaning quietly. Spending a week or so in a dungeon hadn't done anything good for her stamina. Her legs were sore. She felt more tired than she had any right to be, after walking only a mile or two.

  Also, she seemed to have done something nasty to her right shoulder in the process of hacking Dougal into bits. That was typical. Every time she tried something new, like canoeing, bicycling, or simply killing people, she seemed to find muscles she'd never used before.

  There was no way to hide, so she went openly. The fields spread out around her as she walked, neat stone-walled pastures like velvet lawns with no sign of any cattle or sheep to keep them mowed, no smell of the barnyard, no meadow muffins. The grass was part of a picture, she decided, a setting rather than a working farm. Fiona had said that she kept gardens.

  The hedges around the house mirrored that casual perfection. Tangles of hawthorn and wild rose laced together with briar and grape; they built solid walls with the precise and studied wildness of a Japanese garden. The hedge hummed with bees floating from one sweet pink rose to another.