The Solstice had come and gone, the Sun returning in rebirth, rising up upon the broad eastern plains like a young King in the arms of his Mother. The days were growing longer now, winter giving way, minute by daylight minute, to spring. The land could look towards summer.
Christa looked towards summer too, not only in expectation of yet another turning of the year—the King dying on the longest day, yielding his life to the increasing darkness—but also in the certain knowledge of a battle that would determine the remainder of her life. Judith was in sight.
But the nights were still long and cold. The band had dispersed to spend the holidays with family and friends, and Kevin was off to Wyoming.
Often now, Christa found herself wondering at him, at her feelings for him. On her thirteenth birthday, she had taken the cup of womanhood from the hand of her priestess, and since then, the giftings that she had made of her body—to Judith most often, but also to some of the gentler harper lads of the school whom she had loved as she now loved Kevin—had been colored with a sacredness that, despite differences of culture and history, she had hoped to share with Kevin.
Kevin, though, had gone to reclaim his own heritage; and in rejoining his people and their ways, he could not but be distanced from her. Christa could not say that his action was an evil one. She could only regret the loss and consider sadly what the Solstice might have been for both of them.
Christmas Day would have found her alone had Devi not called in the afternoon. She, too, was alone. For all the keyboardist had ever said, her family might have been as vanished as Christa’s.
“What’cha doing today, Chris?”
“Ah…” Aside from the social observance, the day meant little to the Gaeidil. But it was hard to live by oneself in America and not be touched by loneliness on Christmas. She shrugged. “Hanging around. What about you?”
“The same. Tell you what: I’ll pick you up. We’ll find some place that’s open and have a burger.”
Christa still heard the wall behind Devi’s words, but the wall had developed a few cracks recently. Devi needed friends, family, and she had turned to Christa.
A burger? Indeed not. “Why don’t you come over here?” said Christa. “I’ve got some steaks in the freezer.”
“Steaks? Whoa. I’m in. You’re sure no vegetarian, are you?”
Christa smiled. “It runs in my family.”
It was a simple dinner she prepared: meat, mealcakes flavored with honey, vegetables, and cider. Devi thanked her, but kept her mask in place. “You think our gig up at InsideOut went well?” she said as she started on her beef.
Christa set an uncut loaf before her—a
bairgin banfuine
, the portion of an adult woman—and put the butter beside it. “Very well. In fact, I got a phone call day before yesterday from a gentleman named Bill Sarah. He wants to manage us. He already has a return booking for us at InsideOut if we want it.”
Devi stared. “Bill Sarah? Jesus Christ! He’s a big name in Denver. How come you didn’t tell us?”
“Almost everyone’s away, Devi. I decided it could wait until next rehearsal. Bill seems an honorable man, and he’s willing to deal with our preference for in-town work.”
“Damn. Maybe Melinda’s right. Maybe we’re going places.” Devi broke the
bairgin
, spread butter on it. “Speaking of Melinda though…”
“That Friday? I noticed.”
“I hope she doesn’t make a habit of that. I mean, a lot of people do coke, but if she’s going to mess up on stage, we’ve got problems.”
“I spoke to her. She didn’t want to talk.”
“Shit. Sounds like the same thing she pulled years ago.
Christa poured cider. “There was a problem?”
“She really screwed herself over—like she thought the way to the top was to sleep with everyone and shoot up. I have to give her credit, though: she turned herself around. Been clean for years… until Friday at the club.”
Some of the reasons for Melinda’s sleepless nights were becoming clear to Christa. “There was no difficulty the rest of the week,” she said, “so I assume it was a onetime thing.”
“Damn well better be.” Devi sampled the mealcake. “This is really good, Christa. Is this what people in Ireland eat?”
“It was, once. Before the conquests and the famines. I was a little lonely today…” Strange: she was even admitting it now. “… and all this reminds me of my family.”
Devi was silent for a minute. “Do you see much of them?”
“Nothing. It’s been a long time.”
Bairgin
in one hand, knife in the other, Devi sat, unmoving. “Same here,” she said finally. “I…” Her mouth worked. “My father—” She broke off suddenly, bent her head. The wall crumbled.
Devi did not have to explain. “Where I come from,” Christa said softly, “the High King would have had the man put to death.”
Devi did not look up. “You don’t come from around here, do you, Chris?”
“I do not.”
“It’s supposed to be my fault.”
“Who told you that?”
“He did.”
“You believe him?”
“I’d…” The wall remained down, and Devi’s childhood seethed acridly in the open. “I’d like to not believe it. But that seems to be the general opinion.”
“It didn’t used to be.”
Devi wiped at her eyes. “What do you think?”
Christa searched through a foreign language for words that might help to undo the damage of a foreign culture, but English was not Gaeidelg, America was not Eriu, and words were only empty things in any case. “You were abused,” she said gently. “You’re not anymore, though. A woman is free until she gives herself, and when she takes herself back, then she is free once more. Take yourself back, Devi.”
“Easier said than done.”
“It is, surely.” In the face of Devi’s past, words were nothing. But once, at her passage from childhood into womanhood, Christa had been given more than words. “Here,” she said, refilling Devi’s cup. “Here is an image for you. The cup is a symbol of the Goddess, of women. It contains everything, but it isn’t controlled by what it contains. Rather, it gives its contents form and shape. Reality… if you want to call it that.”
Aoine, the priestess, would have smiled at the rephrasing of the mystery, but Devi stared at the cup, her lips pressed together in a crooked frown. “I…”
“You can think about it later,” said Christa. “For now, just believe. Pretend. It’s the same thing. That’s your cup, Devi. That’s you. What do you want to contain?”
Devi looked up at her, eyes streaming. “What kind of a question is that?”
“What do you want to contain? What do you want to make real?”
“You’re talking about magic, Christa.”
“I am, surely. What do you want to make real?”
Devi stopped her tears seemingly by force of will. “How about some fucking self-respect?”
The harper offered the cup to Devi as, long ago, Aoine had offered it to her. “Take. Drink. This is self-respect. This is the beginning of the end of fear. This is yourself, whom you now take back.”
For a moment, Devi hesitated; then she grabbed the cup, brought it to her lips, gulped the contents. The cider was strong, and she coughed violently for the better part of a minute, face flushed, eyes clenched.
When she was done, she wiped her eyes with a tissue, blew her nose, shuddered. “Did it work, Chris?”
“You took the cup by yourself.”
Devi blew her nose again. “I guess I did.”
“It’s a beginning.”
“Yeah.” The keyboardist suddenly looked stricken, as though she realized how thoroughly she had revealed herself. “You know, I really didn’t come here tonight to cry all over you.”
“I said I was here. I meant it. I still do.” Christa gestured at the table. “Eat now.”
“But—”
“Don’t worry about it. Just remember it.” Smiling, Christa poured more cider.
Every woman is a priestess
, Aoine had told her after her passage.
Every woman can heal with her hands, with a word, sometimes with just a smile
. In her pursuit of the mysteries of the
Cruitreacha
, she had forgotten the mysteries of her own body. But, on Midsummer Eve, a prayer to Brigit and the memory of Aoine’s chalice had brought her to rock and roll and to hope. Perhaps now, at Midwinter, it was time to remember again.
Devi was shaken, but they finished their meal together, and Christa noticed that her smile was a little warmer now, a little stronger. And though the wall was rising again, it did not seem quite so high, nor so thick. Nor was it needed so much. A beginning.
“A priestess now,” Christa murmured as she watched Devi’s van pull away into the midnight darkness. “And what else must I be, my Goddess?”
The phone rang, and her heart caught. She had a little prescience. She knew that it was Kevin.
Siudb’s hands have loosened, and the sound of her old harp rings clearly in the twilight air of the Realm, echoes off the still blankness of the reflecting pool, hangs shimmering among the leaves of the myrtle grove. The old magic is returning, the powers of the notes and intervals falling easily beneath her fingers. She has surpassed anything that she ever achieved at the harpers’ school, has broken through the spell of continuity that holds the Realm. Soon she will be ready to open a gate into the mortal lands, to shield herself from the deadly years, to step, with Glasluit, into freedom.
On the bench beside her, Glasluit watches and admires. Were it flawless, immortal harping that he wished to hear, he could listen to Orfide, for the bard’s playing is nothing save bloodless precision. But Glasluit is finished with perfection, and Siudb’s music is redolent of the mortality to which he is drawn: the transience of seasons, the unending but ever-changing cycles.
She plays, lost in the inner world she creates as her nails strike the bronze strings. Glasluit feels—sees—the dead limbs of the winter forest grow green with the leaves of spring and flower with the heat of summer. Orfide’s music speaks only of an everlasting present, but as Suidb continues, the forest darkens, drops its leaves and fruit, retires again into deathlike sleep.
The last chord quivers. Siudb comes to herself. “It is a song my teacher gave me,” she says. “The first song that novices are given upon entering the school at Corca Duibne.” She runs her hand along the strings as once she touched Chairiste’s body: gently, almost fearful of the holiness of flesh and music both. “It is said that a harper can spend a lifetime perfecting it.”
“I do not wish to hear it played perfectly.”
Her smile was fond, gracious. “Then your wish is granted, because it cannot be.”
He seems to her at times to be something other than Sidh, as though the shallowness of his immortal heart has been—by desire or by her music—deepened, enlarged. He might be now no more than a Gaeidil lad, a straw-haired, richly clad
flath
come to listen to a harper maid and lose his heart to her.
If he loves her for her mortality and her strength, she in turn has come to love him for his devotion. She did not think that she could ever desire a Sidh, but Glasluit, perhaps, is now as mortal as she. In defiance of his nature, in defiance of the Realm, he has grown, changed, become something else.
She sets her harp aside for a time. To become something else. For a time.
Christa pulled to the side of the highway, flicked on the dome light, puzzled over the directions to Kevin’s house that, hastily scrawled in accordance with his hoarse dictation, were now almost unreadable. Her neat handwriting had disintegrated with concern, and she could hardly focus on the paper long enough to put the words together.
Parmalee Gulch Road… In
—…
It was cold outside, and the air smelled of frost. Her white wool robe was warm, her big blue Kinsale even warmer, but she shivered anyway. Perhaps it was not the cold. perhaps it was horror.
“
In
—, Ceis? Do you remember what I said?”
Muffled under a thick comforter to keep the cold away, the harp deliberated. *Inca*
“Inca Road. Good. Right or left?”
*left*
With Ceis’s help, she followed the road into the Indian Hills community, found Inca, and then took the turnoff that led to Kevin’s home. The house itself was dark, almost invisible in the shadows of the mountain night, but her headlights picked up the familiar shape of his Volkswagen. She pulled in beside it, switched off her engine.
Silence. And cold. And the beating of her heart.
Holding Ceis under her arm, she picked her way to the door. “Is he here, Ceis?”
*here*
Christa knocked, then pounded. The oiled wood shuddered. Snow spattered down on her from the eaves. “Kevin!”
No answer.
When she tried the knob, she found the door unlocked. She swung it open and fumbled for the light switch. The yellow glare showed her a small living room: butcher-block furniture and cushions neatly arranged, Frankie’s old guitar propped in a corner. An empty glass on the coffee table. A few issues of
Guitar Player
magazine.
And on the floor beside the sofa was an old harp, dusty, its brass corroded, its wood rotten. It was of the kind she had seen played at the Belfast competitions in 1792, where, during her single, heartbreaking visit to an Ireland she no longer recognized, she had paused in search of something familiar. But the harps were different, the music was different, and only venerable old Dennis Hempson still played wire strings with his nails.
She touched the instrument; and as though it recognized that a friend had come to it, it responded with a kind of a fluttering life, like a wounded bird come out of the winter snow into a warm house, frightened at first, then unbelieving of its fortune.
“Poor dear thing,” she murmured. “A long time it’s been for both of us.” She straightened. “Kevin?”
“I’m here.”
She made out his form in the dining alcove where the light did not quite reach. He was slumped in a chair, his head in his hands, but at her call, he rose and tottered into the living room.
His face was gray, wasted. “I’m an idiot,” he said softly. “A stupid kid, calling you up in the middle of the night. Selfish— ”
“You said you needed me.” She set Ceis on the chair, doffed the Kinsale, and laid the cloak beside the harp. “You sounded like you did.”
“Yeah, well…”
She went to him. “You sound like you still do, Kevin.”
He dropped his eyes.
“What happened, man?”
He broke, sobbed dryly. She put her arms about him, guided him to the sofa, held him while he shook. As the harp, so Kevin.
“What happened?”
“Everything’s dead up there,” he whispered. “Dead. Ma and da don’t even touch, my sisters are all fucked in the head, Danny’s dying somewhere. Lynch is dead, but he still runs that family. If you can call it a family anymore.”
He told her what had happened, choking out the words, his voice catching in mid-sentence as it always did when he spoke of his family. But this time there was a finality to his tone that made each pause a small death, and Christa was torn between a civilized pity and a savage rage at the tale.
“I told them to keep their God,” he said as he finished. “And I told them I was gone for good, that they wouldn’t see me any more. I’d thought that I could go back and find my family, but I just found everything that I hate. I haven’t got a family, I haven’t got a God, I haven’t got anything. I’m just empty.
“Coming home down I-25, all I could see was my father. All I could hear was him going on about the justice of God, about how Danny got what he deserved. I imagine I’ll get it too, sooner or later. And I’ll probably do it to myself… just like Danny did…”
Christa took his head in her hands, forced him to look at her. “That’s not true, Kevin.”
His eyes were blank. “Maybe it isn’t,” he said. “I’d have to believe in something for that. And I don’t. I don’t believe in anything.” He looked at Frankie’s guitar propped forlorn and abandoned in the corner; at the harp, old and pleading and hopeful. “I don’t think I even believe in music any more.”
White-robed, clad in flesh that, for all its years, was still hardly older than that of the girl who had accepted the cup and had thereby become a woman, Christa tried to find in herself the divinity that she had faced during that passage. A woman could heal by a word, but she felt that words would be, for Kevin as for Devi, only a beginning.
A word, a touch…
Sweat dampened her forehead, gathered at her temples. Kevin was dying as she watched. Could she apply the mystery of the cup to her own body?
She spoke the words. “What do you want, Kevin?”
“I wanna die.”
She touched his face, shaking at what lay before her. “What do you want?” And her tone said that she would not accept an easy, despairing answer.
He could not look at her. “I want… I want to belong somewhere. I want a family that doesn’t condemn my brother because he’s gay, that isn’t an asslicker to a bunch of priests. I want to believe in a God that doesn’t hate everything I do… or think. I want my life back.”
What he asked, she knew she could give. Indeed, she wanted to give it; for whether Kevin knew it or not, she owed him a great debt: he had guided her into the music that could bring her lover back. He had helped her, he had helped Judith, and, in the process, he had begun to grow.
There was too much music left in Kevin—she would not turn her back on him. And though she was no more an ordained priestess than she was a master poet, she was a woman, of flesh and blood, and she loved him. And that was enough.
Christa rose, shook back her hair. “If that’s what you want, Kevin, take it. There are other Gods, and Ireland has a heritage that reaches back well before the coming of Patrick. For a family…” She thought of her land, gone now, and the tears came for a moment. “Harpers once wandered the length and breadth of Ireland, free to go where they would. There was a reason for that. Everyone was their family.”
He did not look up. “I’m no harper, Chris.”
“You are not. But you’re a guitarist, and these days that’s the same thing.” She tried to remember how Aoine had looked. Soft, gracious, strong, replete with the Goddess, the priestess had smiled at her, offered the chalice, offered everything.
“Ah, shit, Chris. I’m too fucked up.”
“Look at me, Kevin.” Her voice had picked up strength. “Look at me. If you want something else, take it.” She reached up to her throat, pulled loose the tie of her robe. The garment slipped off her shoulders, fell. “Take it,” she said proudly. “Take me.” Her words, like harpsong, seemed to echo through the room and beyond, resonating throughout the Worlds. “Take my people. Take my heritage. Take my Gods.”
He looked at her at last, his face worn as if by years. He struggled with words. “I…”
She heard his reluctance and knew that it came not from him, but from the inheritance of shame that he was leaving. Her eyes flashed, her head tossed imperiously, and she understood then that it was not simply Christa Cruitaire who stood, naked and holy, before a man who had asked for rebirth. Nor was it Chairiste Ní Cummen. “Sin or sacrament, Kevin,” she said. “Which is it? Which do you want it to be?”
She held out her hands to him—offering, commanding— and after a time, as though he suddenly recognized her, he took them.