Charles de Lint: Forests of the Heart

Bettina paused for a moment at the edge of the trees, both enchanted and mildly disoriented at how the familiar had been made strange. She could hear rustlings in the undergrowth—los mitos chicos y los espíritus scurrying about their secret business—but caught no more glimpses of any of them.

El lobo took her to where, in her time, Salvador kept his carp pond. Here the neat masonry of its low walls had been replaced by a tumble of stones, piled haphazardly around the small pool water, but the hazel trees still leaned over the pool on one side. Lying on the grass along the edges of the pond was a clutter of curious objects. Shed antlers and posies of dried and fresh flowers. Shells and colored beads braided into leather bracelets and necklaces. Baskets woven from willow, grass, and reeds, filled with nuts and berries. On the stones themselves small carvings had been left, like bone and wood milagros. Votive offerings, but to whom? Or perhaps, rather, to what?

When they reached the edge of the pool, her companion pointed to something in the water. Bettina couldn’t make out what it was at first. Then she realized it was an enormous fish of some sort. Not one of Salvador’s carp, though she’d heard they could grow to this size.

The fish floated in the water, motionless. She had the urge to poke at it with one of the antlers, to see if it would move.

“Is… is it dead?” she asked.

“Sleeping.”

Bettina blinked. Did fish sleep? she wondered, then put the question aside. This was la epoca del mito. Here the world operated under a different set of natural laws.

“What sort of a fish is it?” she asked.

“A salmon.”

She glanced at him, hearing something expectant in his voice, as though its being a salmon should mean something to her.

“And so?” she said.

El lobo smiled. “This is a part of the mystery you seek.”

“What do you know of me or what I might be looking for?”

“Of you, little enough. Of the other…” He shrugged. “Only that the older mysteries play at being salmon and such in order to keep their wisdoms hidden and safe.”

Bettina waited, but nothing more was forthcoming. Fine, she thought. Speak in riddles, but you’ll only be speaking to yourself. Ignoring him, she leaned closer to look at the sleeping fish. There seemed to be nothing remarkable about it, except for the size of it in such a small pool.

“If it were to wake,” el lobo went on. “If it were to speak, and you were to understand its words, it would change everything. You would be changed forever.”

“Changed how?”

“In what you were, what you are, what you will be. The mystery that you follow could well swallow you whole, then. Swallow you up and spit you out again as something unrecognizable because you would no longer be protected by your identity.”

Bettina lifted her gaze from the pool and its motionless occupant to look at him.

“Is this true?” she asked.

As if he would tell her the truth. But he surprised her and gave what seemed to be an honest answer.

“Not now, perhaps. Not at this very moment. But it could be, if you bide here too long. We should go—before an bradán wakes.”

An bradán. She understood it to mean the salmon, but whatever enchantment had been translating their conversation passed over those two words. Perhaps because they named the fish as well as described it?

“Would that be so terrible?” she was about to ask.

For she found herself wanting to be here to see the salmon wake. To call it by name. An bradán. To watch its slow lazy movements through the water and hear it speak. To be changed. But the question died stillborn as she turned back to the pool. On the far side of the water, a stranger was standing—a tall, older man, as dark-haired and dark-skinned as el lobo, but she knew immediately that he wasn’t one of her companion’s compadres. Los lobos were very male and there was something almost androgynous about the angular features of the stranger. He seemed to be a priest, in his black cassock and white collar, and what might be a rosary dangling from the fingers of one hand. There was an old-fashioned cut to his cassock, his hair, the style of his dusty boots. It was as though he’d stepped here directly from one of the old missions back home. Stepped here, not only from the desert, but from the past as well.

His gaze rested thoughtfully on her and for a long moment she couldn’t speak. Then he looked down at the water. She followed his gaze to see the salmon stirring, but before it could wake, before it could speak, el lobo pulled her away from the fountain and the priest, out of myth time into the cold night of her own world, her own time.

They stood beside Salvador’s carp pond, the water frozen. From nearby, the windows of the house cast squares of pale light across the lawn. Bettina shivered and drew the loose flaps of her borrowed parka closer about her, holding them shut with her folded arms.

“Who was that man?” she asked.

“I saw no man,” el lobo replied.

“There was a padre… standing across from us, on the other side of the pool…”

Her companion smiled. “There was no man,” he said. “Only you and I and the spirits of the otherwhere.”

“Bueno. Then it was a spirit I saw, for he was nothing like you or your friends.”

His smile returned, mildly mocking. “And what are we like?”

Bettina merely shrugged.

“You think of us as wolves.”

“So now you read minds?” Bettina asked.

“I don’t need to. I can read eyes. You are wary of us, of our wild nature.”

“I’m wary of any stranger I meet in the woods at night.”

He ignored that. “Perhaps you are wise to be wary. We are not such simple creatures as your Spanish wolves.”

Bettina raised her eyebrows. “Then what are you?”

“In the old land, they called us an felsos, but it was out of fear. The same way they spoke of the fairies as their Good Neighbors.”

They were no longer in myth time, so there was no convenient translation for the term he’d used to describe himself. She still spoke Spanish, but he had switched to an accented English. She hadn’t noticed until this moment.

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

“I could be a friend.”

“And if I don’t want a wolf for a friend?”

Again that smile of his. “Did I say I was your friend?”

Before she could respond, he turned and stepped away. Not simply into the forest, but deeper and farther away, into la epoca del mito. Bettina had no intention of following him, though his sudden disappearance woke a whisper of disappointment in her.

She stood for a long moment, looking down at the frozen surface of the pond, then into the trees. Finally she shook her head and began to make her way back to the house. As she crossed the frozen lawn, she caught a flutter of movement in one of the second-floor windows, as though a curtain had been held open and had now fallen back into place. It took her a moment to remember whose window it was. Nuala’s.

She kept on walking, eager for the warmth inside. In the few brief moments since el lobo had brought her back into her own time, the bitter cold had already worked its way under her borrowed parka and was nibbling deep at her bones. But she was barely aware of her discomfort.

There was so much to think upon.

Qué extraño. How strange the night had turned.

The media couldn’t stop discussing the see-sawing weather.