Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

Which had now stopped, Bettina realized. She hoped her conversation with Tadai hadn’t driven them away. She tried to listen for some sound on the other side of the ridge. A click of goatish hooves on stone. A murmur of song. There was nothing.

“They seemed like such fun,” she said, not even trying to hide her disappointment.

Tadai nodded. “But they are dangerous. Cadejos are the children of volcanoes. How can they not be dangerous with such powerful entities as parents?”

“I’ve never heard of them before.”

“In your world they are invisible… and mostly forgotten.”

“But why are they dangerous?”

“Bien. For one thing, they are doorways and can pull you between worlds.”

“Is that how I got here? Did the cadejos bring me?”

Tadai gave her a tired look. “Either that, or you were sent here by someone weary of your endless questions.”

“Now who’s being rude?”

“Me perdona. But you are a most conversational child.”

Again the child business.

“I’m almost sixteen.”

“Ah.” As though that explained everything.

“In the old days I’d be married now, with children.”

Tadai shook his head. “Children having children. What a sad world you come from.”

Bettina decided she had listened long enough to this sort of talk. It was bad enough that Ban ignored her, without complete strangers voicing their opinions on how young she was. She stood up and with great dignity carefully brushed the dirt from her jeans.

“Where are you going?” Tadai asked as she started up the slope.

“Home,” she told him without turning. “If you haven’t scared them off with all your talking, I’m going to ask los cadejos to send me home.”

“But—”

Bettina paused to look back at him. “You’re the one who said that they’re doorways between worlds.”

Tadai scrambled to catch up to her.

“Sí,” he said. “But you don’t necessarily get to choose which world they will send you into.”

Bettina wasn’t interested in listening to him anymore. She quickly gained the top of the ridge and was half walking, half sliding down its far slope before Tadai could stop her. The cadejos were below, sprawled out in repose like a pack of javelinas.

“;Por favor!” she called to them. “Send me back home.”

They rose in a wave of color, yipping and laughing, blue and green and bright pink tails wagging, and surrounded her as she came the rest of the way down the slope, arms pinwheeling to keep her balance.

“¿Dondtestá tu casa?” one of them cried. Where is your home?

“¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!” the others took up.

“¡Qué suerte! Tienes una casa.” How lucky. You have a home.

“¡Tu casa, tu casa, tu casa!”

“Somos los homeless.”

“No tenemos casa.”

“Verdaderos, verdaderos.”

“¡Somos los cadejos!”

They ran around and around her as they yipped and barked and made a bewildering noise. Bettina grew dizzy as she turned around herself, trying to focus on one of them long enough to make herself understood. But the cadejos danced around her like so many spinning carousel animals, with her at their hub, unable to move, while they were always in motion, Catherine-wheeling finally into a blur of color and sound.

“Bettina!” she heard Tadai call.

She tried to see where he was, but there were always cadejos in front of her, yapping, chattering, laughing. The vertigo rose up again, a huge dark swell of it, and this time she didn’t fight it. At least it would take her away from the blur of motion and their voices. Except the dogs leapt up at her now, not attacking, not even playing, but jumping at her all the same, little cloven hooves scattering dirt behind them, and into her chest they went, swallowed into her skin, and she could still hear their voices as she tumbled towards unconsciousness, only now they were echoing inside her head.

As everything went black, Tadai reached the place where she’d been standing.

“And sometimes they make you into a doorway,” he said, but he was alone on the bajada now, Bettina and cadejos, both gone.

Bettina’s spirit rose up from the darkness to find a hundred faces peering down at her, all of them spinning and turning like the carousel of cadejos had earlier. But slowly they resolved into two faces, Ban’s and her grandmother’s.

“Chica, chica,” Abuela said. “You’ve made us so worried. I thought my heart would stop when you disappeared the way you did.”

Ban put his arm around her shoulders and helped her sit up when she couldn’t quite manage it on her own. The sudden movement made her head spin once more, but the vertigo quickly ebbed. Candlelight filled her sight, flickering on the offerings stuck into the cave’s wall niches and hanging from its roof. When she saw them she realized that they were still in I’itoi’s cave. So it had all been a strange dream. Except…

“I... I disappeared… ?”

“Sí,” Ban said. “One moment you were here, the next you were gone.”

“I thought it was a dream…”

“What did you see?” her abuela asked.

Bettina didn’t answer for a long moment. She felt surprisingly clearheaded and was enjoying the sensation of being so close to Ban. See? she wanted to say to him. Does this feel like a child you hold in your arms?

“Bettina?” Abuela said.

Bettina sighed and looked at her grandmother.

“I met Tadai,” she said.

“A roadrunner?”

“No. Yes. At first. Then he became a man. He said he knew you, Abuela. That you had been lovers.”

Abuela’s eyebrows rose. “Did he now.”

Bettina could feel herself blushing. “Well, he said you had shared intimacies.”

“I see.”

“And that I should give you his regards.”

“Very thoughtful of him.”

“Do you know him?”

Her grandmother smiled. “I know a rather short, shape-shifting curandero whose imagination often gets the better of him. Did he… harm you in any way?”

Bettina shook her head. “Why didn’t you come for me?” she asked. “I called to you.”

“I know,” Abuela said. “I heard you. But, chica, la epoca del mito, it is a large place with many layers of time and myth laid one upon the other. It could have taken me weeks to find you. I thought it better to wait a few minutes first, to see if you could return on your own.”

“A few minutes?”

Ban laughed. “Time moves to its own rhythm in that place,” he said. “Half a day there can be but a minute here. You were gone no more than a few moments.”

“I felt like it was at least an hour….”

“It is a confusing place,” Ban agreed, “especially at first. But come, let’s get you outside. You’ll feel better under the open sky.”

He and Abuela started to help her out through the cave opening, but she made them wait until she could dig into her pocket and leave behind a piece of candy for Pitoi. Outside, the night lay dark upon the bajada, a hundred thousand stars peering down on them from the clear sky overhead. But there was no moon. And Ban was right. She did feel better now that she was out of the cave. More herself. More inside her own skin.

“We’ll camp here tonight,” Ban said, “and make our descent in the morning.”

“Sí,” Abuela said. “Tonight you will rest.”

“But I’m feeling much better.”

“Bueno. Still, humor your old grandmother. Tell us, what else did you see?”