Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

As she knew it would. Her visions of what was to come weren’t always clear, especially when they related to her, but of this she was sure. She had seen it. Not the details, not when or exactly where, or even what face the mystery would present to her. But she knew it would come. Until then, every day was merely another step in the journey she had undertaken when she first began to learn the ways of the spiritworld at the knee of her abuela, only now the days took her down a road she no longer recognized, where the braid of her India and Mexican past became tangled with threads of cultures far less familiar.

But she was accepting of it all, for la epoca del mito had always been a confusing place for her. When she was in myth time, she was often too easily distracted by all the possibilities: that what had been might really be what was to come, that what was to come might be what already was. Mostly she had difficulty with the true face of a thing. She mixed up its spirit with its physical presence. Its true essence with the mask it might be wearing. Its history with its future. It didn’t help that Newford was like the desert, a place readily familiar with spirits and ghosts and strange shifts in what things seemed to be. Where many places only held a quiet whisper of the otherwhere, here thousands of voices murmured against one another and sometimes it was hard to make out one from the other.

The house at the top of Handfast Road where she now lived was a particularly potent locale. Kellygnow and its surrounding wild acres appeared to be a crossroads between time zones and spirit zones, something that had seemed charming and pleasantly mysterious until los lobos began to squat in its backyard, smoking their cigarettes and watching, watching. Now she couldn’t help but wonder if their arrival spelled the end of her welcome here.

“You might not know them,” Nuala said as though in response to her worries, “but you called them here all the same.”

Bettina shook her head. “I doubt it,” she tried, willing it to be true. “They are spirits of this place and I am the stranger.”

But Nuala, la brujería less hidden in her eyes than Bettina had ever seen it before, shook her head.

“No,” she said. “They are as much strangers as you are. They have only been here longer.”

Bettina nodded. The shallow rooting of their spirits said as much.

“How do you know this?” she asked.

Nuala hesitated for a long moment before she finally replied. “I recognize them from my childhood. They are spirits of my homeland, only these have been displaced and set to wandering after they made the mistake of following the emigrant ships to this new land. They watched me, too, when I first arrived in Kellygnow.”

Bettina regarded her with interest. “What did they want?”

“I never asked, but what do men ever want? For a woman to forsake all and go running with them, out into the wild. For us to lift our skirts and spread our legs for them.”

Bettina tried to imagine Nuala in a skirt.

“But they grew tired of waiting,” the older woman said. “They went their way and I remained, and I haven’t seen them now for many years.” She paused, then added, “Until you called to them.”

“I didn’t call them.”

“You didn’t have to. You’re young and pretty and enchantment runs in your veins as easily as blood. Is it so odd that they come like bees to your flower?”

“I thought they were part of… the mystery,” Bettina said.

“There’s no mystery as to what they want,” Nuala told her. “But perhaps I am being unfair. As I said, I’ve never spoken to them, never asked what they wanted from me. Perhaps they only wished for news of our homeland, of those they’d left behind.”

Bettina nodded. Spirits were often hungry for gossip.

“Sometimes,” she said, “what one mistakes for spirits are in fact men, traveling in spirit form.”

“I’ve never met such,” Nuala told her.

Nuala might not have, but when she was younger, Bettina had. Many of them had been related to her by blood. Her father and her uncles and their friends, Indios all, would gather together in the desert in a similar fashion as los lobos did in the yard outside the house here. Squatting in a circle, sharing a canteen, smoking their cigarettes, sometimes calling up the spirit of the mescal, swallowing the small buttons that they’d harvested from the dome-shaped cacti in New Mexico and Texas.

Peyoteros, Abuela called them.

At first, Bettina had thought it was a tribal designation—like Yaqui, Apache, Tohono O’odham—but then Abuela had explained how they followed another road into the mystery from the one she and her abuela followed, that the peyote buttons they ate, the mescal tea they drank, was how they stepped into la epoca del mito. Bettina decided they were still a tribe, only connected to each other by their visions rather than their genes.

“Where I come from,” she told Nuala, “such men seek a deeper understanding of the world and its workings.”

“But you are no longer where you come from,” Nuala said.

This was true.

“And understand,” Nuala went on. “Such beings answer only to themselves. No one holds you personally responsible for their presence. I’m simply making conversation. Offering an observation, nothing more.”

“I understand.”

“And perhaps a caution.” Nuala added. “They are like wolves, those spirits.”

Bettina nodded. “Los lobos,” she said.

“Indeed. And what you must remember about wolves is that they cannot be tamed. They might seem friendly, but in their hearts they remain wild creatures. Feral. Incorrigibly amoral. It’s not that they are evil. They simply see the world other than we do, see it in a way that we can never wholly understand.”

She seemed to know a great deal about them, Bettina thought, for someone who had never spoken with them.

“And they are angry,” Nuala said after a moment.

“Angry?” Bettina asked. “With whom?”

Nuala shrugged. “With me, certainly.”

“But why?”

Again there was that long moment of hesitation.

“Because I have what they lack,” Nuala finally said. “I have a home. A place in this new world that I can call my own.”

The housekeeper smiled then. Her gaze became mild, la brujería in her eyes diminishing into a distant smolder once more.

“It’s late,” she said. “I should be in bed.” She moved to the door, pausing in the threshold. “Aren’t you sitting for Chantal in the morning? You should try to get some rest yourself.”

“I will.”

“Good. Sleep well.”

Bettina nodded. “Gracias,”she said. “You, too.”

But she was already speaking to Nuala’s back.

What an odd conversation, she thought as she went over to the table and began to put the milagros back into the envelope she had taken them from earlier. Nuala, who so rarely offered an opinion, little say started a conversation, had been positively gregarious this evening.

Bettina’s gaze strayed to the window. She couldn’t see beyond the dark pane, but she remembered. After a moment, she took down someone’s parka from the peg where it hung by the door and put it on. It was far too big for her, but style wasn’t the issue here. Warmth was. Giving the kitchen a last look, she slipped out the door.

It was already colder than it had been earlier. Frosted grass crunched under her shoes as she walked to where the men had been watching the house. There was no sign now that they’d ever been. They’d even taken their cigarette butts with them when they’d withdrawn from the yard.

She considered how they would have gone. First into the trees, then down the steep slope to where these few wild acres came up hard against the shoulders of the city. From there, on to the distant mountains. Or perhaps not. Perhaps they made their home here, in the city.