The Very Best of Charles De Lint Read online

  “Liane, don’t!” Meran called to her, pitching her voice as low as Yocky John’s. Five heads turned as one towards her.

  “Oh-oh,” Wee Jack said nervously.

  “Have you lost your senses?” Meran demanded. “What are you doing to the poor girl?”

  “No harm, that’s for sure,” Yocky John retorted. “Broom and heather, Mistress, what do you take us for?”

  “Incorrigible mischief-makers. Kidnappers. Troublemakers. That child you’ve stolen—she’s just fourteen.”

  “We needed her young,” Yocky John said. “We needed a human to speak the charm that will let us join the spree below without the folk knowing we’ve come, and we needed her young because it’s the young humans that still believe enough to make a kowrie spell work from their lips.”

  Meran left her perch and edged carefully along the rafter towards them. “Well, she’s coming straight home with me and you can speak your own spells.”

  “Oh, please,” Wee Jack said. He stood up and came towards her. “Don’t spoil the fun. I’ve never been to a spree.”

  “You move aside, or I’ll—”

  Meran never finished her threat. Wee Jack, swaying on the rafter, lost his balance and fell.

  Yocky John grabbed for his collar and missed.

  Meran grabbed as well, but her fingers closed only on air.

  Horrified, they watched Wee Jack fall, wailing and cartwheeling his limbs. But when he hit the floor, it was a flute that struck the hardwood boards and broke in two with a snap.

  Utter silence fell like a leaden weight across the commonroom. Ten humans looked from the broken instrument lying on the floor, up to the rafters where they all clung, staring down.

  “Oh, no.” Meran was sure her heart had stopped. Tears welled in her eyes.

  “You’ve killed him,” Yocky John said flatly.

  “Hey!” the inn’s landlord called up in an angry voice. “What are you doing up there?”

  “Take us away,” Peadin said to Furey.

  “Can’t,” the kelpie replied. “Wee Jack was a part of the coming spell, so he’s got to be a part of the going back one as well.”

  The landlord got a big axe from behind his kitchen door and waved it in their direction. A couple of the other men ranked themselves beside him, stout canes in hand.

  “Get down here!” the landlord cried. “I’ll have your skins for sneaking about in my rafters.”

  “It’s looking ugly,” Furey said softly to Yocky John. “Best we get down there and I’ll give them a taste of a kelpie’s hooves. We’ll see how well they can shout while they’re choking on their own teeth.”

  Meran barely heard what any of them were saying. She stared down at the broken flute through a blur of tears. She couldn’t believe that the little bodach was dead. And that was not all…. The flute was one of the three charms that Cerin had made from her lifetree to call her back from the realm of the dead. A comb and a pendant were the other two. She had them still, but it needed all three for the harper’s spell to work. Already she could feel the dead lands calling to her.

  “Mistress?” Yocky John called softly to her. She looked so pale and wan.

  “I did kill him,” she said hoarsely. “And now I’m dying, too.”

  Below them, the bones player and one of the fiddlers had fetched a ladder and leaned it up against the rafters.

  “If you don’t come down, then,” the landlord cried, “I’ll come up and throw you all down.”

  “That man has too many unpleasant words stored away in him,” Furey said. “He needs to be thrashed.”

  “Don’t make it worse than it is,” Peadin said. “We’ll have to pay for our trespass.”

  Yocky John nodded glumly. “Though we’ve already paid too dear a price,” he said, looking down at what was left of his friend. And Meran… She appeared to be losing her substance now as the grip of the dead lands grew stronger on her.

  “Take ahold of your anger!” Peadin called to the men below. “We’re coming down.”

  One by one they descended the ladder. Last to come was Meran who ignored the men and went to the broken flute. Sitting on the floor, she took the broken pieces onto her lap and held them tightly.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” she whispered. “I’ve cheated death once, so every day I’ve had since then has been a gift. But you—I made you. You were meant to live a long and merry life….”

  “They’re kowries,” the landlord said, staring at them. Here and there, some of the men made the Sign of Horns to ward themselves against evil. “Look at the green in that one’s hair and the strange faces of the others.”

  “She’s no kowrie,” the piper said, pointing to Liane.

  The landlord nodded. “Come here, girl. We’ll rescue you.”

  “I don’t want to be rescued,” Liane told them.

  “They’ll have gold hidden somewhere,” one of the landlord’s customers said greedily. “Make them give us their gold, or we’ll take it out of their skins.”

  The landlord didn’t seem so certain anymore. Now that the little bedraggled company was standing in front of him, his anger ran from him. It was wonder he felt at this moment, that he should see such magical folk.

  “I have an old flute some traveller left behind,” he said to Meran. “Would you like that to replace the one that broke?”

  “You don’t give kowries gifts,” the other man protested. “You take their gold, Oarn.” He hefted his cane. “Or you lather their backs with a few sharp blows—just to keep them in line.”

  He took a step forward with upraised cane, but at that moment the front door of the inn was flung open and a tall figure stood outlined in the doorway.

  He had long braided hair, and a long beard, and there was a fey light glimmering in his eyes. A harp was slung over his shoulder.

  “Whose back do you mean to lather?” he asked in a grim voice.

  “Mind your own business,” the man said.

  “This is my business,” the harper replied. “That’s my wife you mean to beat. My neighbour’s child. My friends.”

  “Then perhaps you should pay their coin,” the man said, taking a step towards the harper with his upraised cane.

  “No!” the landlord cried. “No fighting!”

  But he need not have spoken. Cerin brought his harp around in front of him and drew a sharp angry chord from its strings. The harp was named Telynros, a gift from the Tuathan, the Bright Gods, and it played spells as well as music. That first chord shattered the man’s cane. The second loosed all the stitches in his clothing so that shirt, tunic and trousers fell away from him and he stood bare-assed naked in front of them all. The third woke a wind and propelled the man out the door. Cerin stood aside as he went by and gave him a kick on his backside to help him on his way.

  “Good Master,” the landlord began as Cerin turned back to face him. “We never meant—”

  “They trespassed,” Cerin said, “so you had reason to be angry.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Please,” the harper said. “I have a more pressing concern.”

  He crossed the room to where not much more than a ghost of his wife sat, holding the two broken halves of her flute on her lap.

  “Oh, Cerin,” she said, looking up at him. “I’ve made such a botch of things.” Her voice was like a whisper now, as though she spoke from a great distance away.

  “You meant well.”

  “But I did wrong all the same, and now I have to pay the price.”

  Cerin shook his head. “What was broken can be mended,” he said.

  He sat on the floor beside her and took Telynros upon his lap. Music spilled from the roseharp’s strings, a soft, healing music. Meran grew more solid and colour returned to her cheeks. The two halves of the flute joined and the wood knitted until, by the time the tune was finished, there was no sign that there had ever been a break. As Cerin took his hands from the roseharp’s strings, the flute shimmered and Wee Jack lay there in
Meran’s lap.

  “I…I think I fell,” he said.

  “You did,” Meran told him with a smile that was warm with relief.

  “I was in such a cold place. Did you catch me?”

  Meran shook her head. “Cerin did.”

  Wee Jack looked around at the circle of faces peering down at them. Yocky John had a broad grin that almost split his face in two.

  “Did I miss the spree?” Wee Jack asked.

  “Is that why you came?” the landlord asked. “Because you wanted a bit of craic? Well, you’re welcome to stay the night—you and all your friends.”

  So Cerin joined the other musicians and Meran joined him, playing the flute that the landlord had offered her earlier so that Wee Jack could caper and dance with the others. The jigs and reels sprang from their instruments until the rafters were ringing. Liane drank cider and giggled a great deal. The bodachs and Peadin stamped about the wooden floors with human partners. Furey sat in a corner with the landlord, drinking ale, swapping tales and playing endless games of sticks-a-penny. When they finally left, dawn was cracking in the eastern skies.

  “You’re welcome back, whenever you’re by,” the landlord told them, and he spoke the words from the pleasure he’d had with their company, rather than out of fear because they were kowrie folk.

  “Watch what you promise bodachs,” Cerin said before he spelled the roseharp and took them all home the way he’d come—on the strains of his music.

  Meran held a sleepy Wee Jack in her arms. “Oh, they mean well,” she said.

  Behind her, Yocky John and the others laughed to hear her change her tune.

  Merlin Dreams in the Mondream Wood

  mondream — an Anglo-Saxon word

  which means the dream of life

  among men

  I am Merlin

  Who follow the Gleam

  —Tennyson, from “Merlin and the Gleam”

  In the heart of the house lay a garden.

  In the heart of the garden stood a tree.

  In the heart of the tree lived an old man who wore the shape of a red-haired boy with crackernut eyes that seemed as bright as salmon tails glinting up the water.

  His was a riddling wisdom, older by far than the ancient oak that housed his body. The green sap was his blood and leaves grew in his hair. In the winter, he slept. In the spring, the moon harped a windsong against his antler tines as the oak’s boughs stretched its green buds awake. In the summer, the air was thick with the droning of bees and the scent of the wildflowers that grew in stormy profusion where the fat brown bole became root.

  And in the autumn, when the tree loosed its bounty to the ground below, there were hazelnuts lying in among the acorns.

  The secrets of a Green Man.

  * * *

  “When I was a kid, I thought it was a forest,” Sara said.

  She was sitting on the end of her bed, looking out the window over the garden, her guitar on her lap, the quilt bunched up under her knees. Up by the headboard, Julie Simms leaned forward from its carved wood to look over Sara’s shoulder at what could be seen of the garden from their vantage point.

  “It sure looks big enough,” she said.

  Sara nodded. Her eyes had taken on a dreamy look.

  It was 1969 and they had decided to form a folk band—Sara on guitar, Julie playing recorder, both of them singing. They wanted to change the world with music because that was what was happening. In San Francisco. In London. In Vancouver. So why not in Ottawa?

  With their faded bell bottom jeans and tie-dyed shirts, they looked just like any of the other seventeen-year-olds who hung around the War Memorial downtown, or could be found crowded into coffeehouses like Le Hibou and Le Monde on the weekends. Their hair was long—Sara’s a cascade of brown ringlets, Julie’s a waterfall spill the colour of a raven’s wing; they wore beads and feather earrings and both eschewed makeup.

  “I used to think it spoke to me,” Sara said.

  “What? The garden?”

  “Um-hmm.”

  “What did it say?”

  The dreaminess in Sara’s eyes became wistful and she gave Julie a rueful smile.

  “I can’t remember,” she said.

  * * *

  It was three years after her parents had died—when she was nine years old—that Sara Kendell came to live with her Uncle Jamie in his strange rambling house. To an adult perspective, Tamson House was huge: an enormous, sprawling affair of corridors and rooms and towers that took up the whole of a city block; to a child of nine, it simply went on forever.

  She could wander down corridor after corridor, poking about in the clutter of rooms that spread like a maze from the northwest tower near Bank Street—where her bedroom was located—all the way over to her uncle’s study overlooking O’Conner Street on the far side of the house, but mostly she spent her time in the library and in the garden. She liked the library because it was like a museum. There were walls of books, rising two floors high up to a domed ceiling, but there were also dozens of glass display cases scattered about the main floor area, each of which held any number of fascinating objects.

  There were insects pinned to velvet and stone artifacts; animal skulls and clay flutes in the shapes of birds; old manuscripts and hand-drawn maps, the parchment yellowing, the ink a faded sepia; kabuki masks and a miniature Shinto shrine made of ivory and ebony; corn-husk dolls, Japanese netsuke and porcelain miniatures; antique jewelry and African beadwork; kachina dolls and a brass fiddle, half the size of a normal instrument…

  The cases were so cluttered with interesting things that she could spend a whole day just going through one case and still have something to look at when she went back to it the next day. What interested her most, however, was that her uncle had a story to go with each and every item in the cases. No matter what she brought up to his study—a tiny ivory netsuke carved in the shape of a badger crawling out of a teapot, a flat stone with curious scratches on it that looked like Ogham script—he could spin out a tale of its origin that might take them right through the afternoon to suppertime.

  That he dreamed up half the stories, only made it more entertaining, for then she could try to trip him up in his rambling explanations, or even just try to top his tall tales.

  But if she was intellectually precocious, emotionally she still carried scars from her parents’ death and the time she’d spent living with her other uncle—her father’s brother. For three years Sara had been left in the care of a nanny during the day—amusing herself while the woman smoked cigarettes and watched the soaps—while at night she was put to bed promptly after dinner. It wasn’t a normal family life; she could only find that vicariously in the books she devoured with a voracious appetite.

  Coming to live with her Uncle Jamie, then, was like constantly being on holiday. He doted on her and on those few occasions when he was too busy, she could always find one of the many houseguests to spend some time with her.

  All that marred her new life in Tamson House were her night fears.

  She wasn’t frightened of the house itself. Nor of bogies or monsters living in her closet. She knew that shadows were shadows, creaks and groans were only the house settling when the temperature changed. What haunted her nights was waking up from a deep sleep, shuddering uncontrollably, her pajamas stuck to her like a second skin, her heartbeat thundering at twice its normal tempo.

  There was no logical explanation for the terror that gripped her—once, sometimes twice a week. It just came, an awful, indescribable panic that left her shivering and unable to sleep for the rest of the night.

  It was on the days following such nights that she went into the garden. The greenery and flowerbeds and statuary all combined to soothe her. Invariably, she found herself in the very center of the garden where an ancient oak tree stood on a knoll and overhung a fountain. Lying on the grass sheltered by its boughs, with the soft lullaby of the fountain’s water murmuring close at hand, she would find what the night fears had stolen from
her the night before.

  She would sleep.

  And she would dream the most curious dreams.

  “The garden has a name, too,” she told her uncle when she came in from sleeping under the oak one day.

  The house was so big that many of the rooms had been given names just so that they could all be kept straight in their minds.

  “It’s called the Mondream Wood,” she told him.

  She took his look of surprise to mean that he didn’t know or understand the word.

  “It means that the trees in it dream that they’re people,” she explained.

  Her uncle nodded. “‘The dream of life among men.’ It’s a good name. Did you think it up yourself?”

  “No. Merlin told me.”

  “The Merlin?” her uncle asked with a smile.

  Now it was her turn to look surprised.

  “What do you mean the Merlin?” she asked.

  Her uncle started to explain, astonished that in all her reading she hadn’t come across a reference to Britain’s most famous wizard, but then just gave her a copy of Malory’s La Morte d’Arthure and, after a moment’s consideration, T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone as well.

  * * *

  “Did you ever have an imaginary friend when you were a kid?” Sara asked as she finally turned away from the window.

  Julie shrugged. “My mom says I did, but I can’t remember. Apparently he was a hedgehog the size of a toddler named Whatzit.”

  “I never did. But I can remember that for a long time I used to wake up in the middle of the night just terrified and then I wouldn’t be able to sleep again for the rest of the night. I used to go into the middle of the garden the next day and sleep under that big oak that grows by the fountain.”

  “How pastoral,” Julie said.

  Sara grinned. “But the thing is, I used to dream that there was a boy living in that tree and his name was Merlin.”

  “Go on,” Julie scoffed.