The Very Best of Charles De Lint Page 4

  “Oh, do be still!” Tulo Jen told him.

  Cerin bit back the joking retort that was on the tip of his tongue when he saw that the pair of them were serious.

  “Did you know about it?” Meran asked the tinker. “About the little badger and all?”

  “No. But Ballan knows, it makes sense in a lovely sort of a way, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose. But now you can see why I’m not sure what I should do. What if the flute doesn’t want a name? What if I give it the wrong one?”

  “You couldn’t do that,” Cerin said, all jokes aside.

  “But how’s one supposed to know?”

  Tulo Jen and the harper exchanged glances. It was Cerin who answered.

  “Because when the name comes to you, it will come from the instrument. It’s the same as Old Badger. We don’t call him Duffer or Stripes or anything but Old Badger, because that’s who he is. You’ll just know.”

  “Oh, it’s easy for you to say. You’re a harper.”

  “I didn’t name Old Badger.”

  “Well, he’s always been Old Badger,” Meran said. “Ever since I can remember.”

  But as she spoke, she could remember the first time the name had come to her. She was tousling with the old fellow, back in a time before she’d met Cerin, when she’d still been tied to her tree. She could remember the exact instant that the name had formed in her mind and then sounded in the air for the first time. She’d called him many things before that moment, but when that name came, she’d just known it was the right one.

  “I see,” she said slowly.

  “So will you name your flute?” Tulo Jen asked. “Because that’s the first part of the trick, you know. And then it’s just listening.”

  Meran thought of badgers in bags that were fiddles sometimes and other times were not. She touched her flute, then drew it from its bag and studied it in the sunlight. The wood gleamed, its grain rich with spiraling curlicues.

  Badgers were tricksters, she remembered Tulo Jen telling her, and she could see that, considering the mischief Old Badger could get into. And there was a trick to learning tunes quickly. But like it or not, the image of the little brown man who lived in their rafters came to mind and, looking at her flute and thinking of him, she knew she had no choice.

  Oh, but it was just making trouble for Cerin and herself, for now they’d have a pair of them in their rafters every night, not just the odd night when their gnarled little bodach had his friends over.

  “I’ll have to call it Bodach,” she said, “because that’s its name.”

  Cerin looked at her with raised eyebrows, but Tulo Jen nodded her head.

  “That’s a good name,” she said.

  Meran thought she heard a laugh in the wind that blew through the branches of the trees overhead and wondered if she’d been tricked into the whole thing. She sighed and pushed the flute back into its bag. As she put it away, she thought it moved in her hands, but perhaps it was just the way it had rolled between her fingers.

  “Just you remember,” she told it. “Your tricks are supposed to help me.”

  This time she was sure she heard a laugh on the wind.

  And the Rafters Were Ringing

  “She’ll have to be young,” Yocky John said. “Otherwise she won’t believe.”

  Wee Jack, skinny as a stick figure, nodded his narrow little head. “And pretty, too.”

  “Pretty’s not so important,” Yocky John said with a frown. “What good’s pretty? But weight’s important. Furey’s already carrying Peadin and you and me—he’ll want her to be thin.”

  Wee Jack hugged his knobby knees and rocked back and forth. He almost fell from the rafter, but Yocky John caught hold of his jacket and pulled him back into place.

  “Hsst!” he said with a sharp breath. “Keep it down.”

  Wee Jack stared from their perch on the rafter to the bed below. The couple lying there appeared to be asleep. Then he caught the gleam of an eye and knew that Meran at least was awake and watching. He ducked quickly back out of sight.

  They were bodachs these two, a pair of tricksters hiding up in the rafters of a harper’s stone cottage. Yocky John was the older of the pair, a grizzled gnome of a bodach who took his name from an old tinker man he’d once befriended and whose shape he could wear if the fancy took him. But usually he looked like the bodach he was—bearded and brown with thick brows like tufts of grass over a pair of glittering eyes, slight of figure, though not so skinny as his companion.

  Wee Jack had a pair of shapes, too. There was the one he wore now, and the one he wore when Meran put her lips to her flute. For then he was her flute, given life after she named him Bodach. Yocky John didn’t much care to call him Bodach. To his mind, that was like the pair below calling each other Man and Woman, instead of by their given names. So he called the younger bodach Wee Jack. Soon enough all the kowrie folk, from Furey who lived in the river to the ravens who nested in the Oak King’s Wood, were doing the same.

  “The Mistress spied me,” Wee Jack told Yocky John.

  “I’m not surprised,” the older bodach replied, “what with the way you carry on. I swear, if there’s something to trip on, you will.”

  “Maybe so,” Wee Jack said. “But all the same, I know someone’s who’s young and thin and pretty, too.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do. Hather the shepherd’s youngest daughter Liane.”

  A wide grin beamed across Yocky John’s face. “I never thought of her.” He leaned closer to his companion. “We’ll snatch her at moonrise and won’t that be a night for her! She’ll remember it until she’s wizened and old, and still she won’t forget.”

  “Maybe I should be called Yocky Jack,” Wee Jack said, puffing up his chest, “because I’ve gone all clever.” Yocky was a tinker word that meant just that. “And you can be Wee John, because your brain’s gone all small on you.”

  Yocky John aimed a cuff at the younger bodach, who backed quickly away and lost his balance again. Yocky John snatched him out of the air by his collar before he could fall.

  “Whose brain is wee?” he asked.

  “Not yours,” Wee Jack said quickly.

  * * *

  Down below, Meran stared up at what she could see of the pair in the rafters.

  “They’re up to no good,” she whispered to her husband.

  Cerin turned onto his back and looked up. “You’re always saying that. How can you tell this time?”

  “I can feel it. Besides, they’re bodachs and bodachs are always up to no good.”

  “It wasn’t I who invited the one to live here and named the other,” Cerin said.

  Meran gave him a poke in the ribs with her elbow.

  “Still,” Cerin amended. “It wouldn’t hurt to keep an eye on them, now would it?”

  “Just what I was thinking,” Meran said.

  Cerin rolled over again and went back to sleep, but his wife stayed awake a long time, staring up into the rafters and straining to hear what the two little pranksters were talking about.

  * * *

  The next morning, while Cerin was transcribing some tunes that he’d recently picked up from one of his tinker cousins, Meran kept a sharp eye out for Yocky John. When he slipped away from the cottage at midmorning, she followed, keeping well back as he made his way through the oak wood, which was the holding of the Oak King Ogwen, Meran’s father. Old Badger tramped at Meran’s heels, his broad striped head almost directly underfoot. As the hour drew closer to noon, Yocky John emerged from the forest and clambered up a short hill. A reed-thin figure was waiting for him there by a rough cairn of old grey stones.

  Meran recognized the figure easily enough. It was Peadin the hillhob. His skin was as dark as the earth of his hills, his hair a dull red thatch. Eyes like small saucers predominated his features. With his brown jacket and trousers, and skin darker still, he could be almost invisible, even when standing just a few feet away. Meran had spied him from time to time on her
midnight rambles with Old Badger, so she knew him by sight and by the rumours of his prankish nature, but not to talk to.

  Leaving Old Badger at the foot of the hill, she crept up the slope, bent low in the gorse, but close as she got, she only made out a few words.

  Spree…snatch…Liane…

  That was enough. Before she could be spotted, she hurried back to where Old Badger was waiting and the pair of them disappeared into her father’s wood. The badger regarded her quizzically.

  “I knew it,” she told him. “I knew he was up to no good. Cerin can tease me all he wants, but I know what I know.”

  And what she knew at this moment was that the tricksters meant to kidnap Hather’s daughter for who knew what purpose. She turned her steps now towards that part of the moors where the shepherd’s cot looked out over the Dolking Downs. Old Badger followed dutifully on her heels.

  * * *

  Liane was at home in her father’s cot, carding wool. She was a slender red-haired girl, the red a bright flame rather that the dull burn of Peadin’s unruly locks. Seeing that hair, Meran understood why the bodachs had chosen her. Red was the colour of poets and bards and the colour kowrie folk liked best in their humans. Liane rose from her work with a smile when she saw Meran approaching.

  “It’s not often the Oak King’s daughter herself comes to visit,” she said as she set about readying tea for them both.

  Liane lived alone with her father. Her mother had died and her two older sisters were married now and lived in other parts of Abercorn.

  “I’ve come with a warning,” Meran said. She sat down on a chair by the hearth, Old Badger stretched out by her feet.

  “A warning?” Liane’s eyebrows rose questioningly.

  Meran told her of what she’d overheard and explained her suspicions.

  Liane smiled. “Oh, the hobs would never hurt me,” she said. “They tease a bit, but we put out their bowl of cream every night and sometimes they even leave behind a fairy cake in exchange.” At the look that came into Meran’s eyes at that, Liane’s smile widened and she added, “Oh, we take care not to thank them for it. We might live a simple life, but we’re not simple people.”

  The kettle began to whistle over the fire and Liane busied herself with steeping them each a strong cup of tea. She served oatmeal cookies when the tea was ready, and talked readily about whatever came to hand, but she took no more notice of Meran’s warnings at the end of the visit than she had when Meran had first arrived. Finally Meran gave up and returned home across the downs.

  * * *

  She found Cerin by the river where he was still worrying over the transcriptions of his harp tunes. She talked to him there, rather than at home where Yocky John might be able to listen in on their conversation if the bodach had already returned.

  “She just wouldn’t listen,” Meran said, obviously frustrated. “It’s hard when even a fourteen-year-old human won’t take you seriously.”

  An oakmaid such as Meran lived a long life—as long as her tree. She had green blood running in her veins and green tints in her curly nut-brown hair. She no longer had a lifetree, but her husband’s harp magics had drawn her back from the veil that separates the world of the living from that of the dead.

  “Maybe you’re taking it too seriously,” Cerin tried, keeping the tone of his voice as diplomatic as possible.

  “Oh, really!” Meran replied, tapping her foot with a dangerous gleam in her eyes. “And when her father wakes tomorrow morning and finds she’s been snatched by a rowdy band of tricksters? Will you still think I’m taking it all too seriously?”

  “The bodachs never hurt anyone,” Cerin protested. “They have a bit of fun, I’ll admit, and they can be wearying at times, but they’re not going to hurt anyone.”

  Meran sighed. “I wish they’d snatch you,” she muttered and returned to their cottage to leave him sitting there, the roseharp on his knee, his gaze following the stiff set of her back.

  He didn’t like seeing her so upset, but when it came to bodachs she had a stubborn streak three field-lengths wide and there was simply no shifting her once she had her mind set that they were up to mischief. He considered finishing up his work early, but when he heard the clank and rattle of pots and pans being knocked about, he thought better of it. Glancing down at the music he’d just written out, he ran through the passage that was giving him difficulty again.

  * * *

  That night, as soon as Yocky John was sure that Meran and Cerin were asleep, he gave a low whistle. In its bag, Meran’s flute changed into a little bodach and Wee Jack crawled out from the cloth folds, rubbing his hands together and dancing on the spot, hardly able to keep quiet for excitement. Before he could wake the sleeping pair, Yocky John swung down from the rafters and, grabbing Wee Jack by his jacket collar, steered him outside.

  “Oh, won’t this be fun,” Wee Jack said. “Won’t it just.”

  Yocky John looked up into the night skies, deep with stars, and nodded. “Oh, it’s a grand night for a spree,” he said. “Now come along and do be quiet.”

  He set off for the riverbank where a black horse shape rose from the water and pranced onto land. The kelpie shook his coat and water sprayed all about, glinting in the starlight.

  “Ho there, Furey!” Yocky John called softly. “Are you still in the mood for a night of drink and dance?”

  The kelpie shimmered in the darkness until he stood there in a bulky man-like shape. Water and weeds dripped from his clothes. His black hair lay flat against his head. Dark eyes gleamed with good humour.

  “What do you think?” a new voice asked and then Peadin was stepping out from between the trees.

  “Time to ride,” Furey said in a deep voice. His shape shimmered again and the black horse was back. The hillhob and bodachs clambered up onto his tall back and with a shout from Wee Jack, they were off.

  * * *

  Meran rose as soon as the bodachs left the house. She didn’t follow them to the riverbank, but made straightway for Hather’s cot on the downs. But by the time she arrived it was only to see Peadin and Yocky John carrying the shepherd’s daughter out of the cot. Peadin leapt nimbly onto Furey’s back, then he and Wee Jack reached down to take the weight of the girl from Yocky John. The older bodach took his place behind Liane as soon as she was hoisted from his arms. Before Meran could call out, they were off again with the girl seated between Yocky John and the hillhob and Wee Jack at the fore clinging to Furey’s mane.

  Meran followed at a run—the quick distance-eating gait that only kowrie folk can maintain, all night if need be. But quick though she was, the kelpie was quicker, burdened down and all. Across the downs he galloped, the gorse and heather disappearing underhoof with a blur. Meran could only follow as best she could, trying to keep them in sight. When they reached the stone formation known as the Five Auld Maids, she was still a hill and a half away.

  She could see Furey encircle the stones. Once. Oh, there’s a spell brewing, she thought, and put on more speed. Furey circled the stones a second time, hooves drumming hollowly on the sod. An amber glow sprang up around the hill. Meran’s heart was fit to burst and a pain stitched her side. Furey completed the third circuit, then leapt into the center of the standing stones with a high belling cry. Meran covered the remaining distance at a desperate gait and threw herself in amongst them as well, just as the kelpie’s spell took hold, and then they were all spirited away.

  A moment later, the hilltop stood empty, except for five old stones.

  * * *

  Cerin stirred restlessly in his sleep. He threw out an arm across the bed, but there was no oakmaid there to snuggle close to. His hand hung over the edge of the bed. He woke when Old Badger gave it a lick with his rough tongue.

  Sitting up, Cerin stared around the darkened cottage. “Meran?” he called.

  When there was no answer, he looked up to the rafters. There was no one there either.

  “Why don’t I listen to her?” he asked Old Badger as he h
urriedly threw on his clothes. Slinging his roseharp across his shoulder, he set off for Hather’s cot at a quick walk.

  * * *

  The room was smoky, especially up in the rafters where Meran found herself precariously balanced and about to fall until she clutched a support beam. She wrapped both arms around it, took a few quick breaths to steady herself, then looked around.

  Farther along the rafter, she spied the kowrie folk with Liane’s bright red-haired head lifting above the other four. They didn’t seem to be aware of Meran’s presence. Below them was the commonroom of an inn. Music was playing—two fiddlers and a piper, with an old man sitting off to one side rattling a pair of bones in time to the tune. Meran recognized it as a reel that Cerin played sometimes called “The Pinch of Snuff.” There were a half a dozen other mortals in the crowd—a pair dancing, three by the hearth, and the landlord on a chair by the kitchen door, tapping a foot to the music.

  It was one of those rambling houses, Meran realized. A place where the local folk gathered for music and stories and songs, with the tunes and the drink and the dance going on until late in the night. No one ever knew how a certain place came to be known as the local rambling house. It was never planned. It might be a cobbler’s kitchen or a farmer’s barn, as soon as an inn. The best of such places simply happened. Meran had been in any number of them, for Cerin and his tinker cousins seemed to sniff them out no matter where they happened to be.

  It was not a place for a girl of fourteen, Meran thought. She wondered why on earth the kowrie folk needed Liane here. She turned her attention back to them.

  “Now do you remember the words we taught you?” Yocky John was asking Liane in a low voice that Meran could only just make out.

  The shepherd girl nodded. Her face was flushed and there was a sparkle of excitement in her eyes. She cleared her throat and leaned over the rafter.