Charles De Lint - The Ivory and the Horn

"What am l going to do? " Sophie said.

"Beats me," Jilly said. "We should go back inside. Geordie's going to think we deserted him."

"You're not being any help at all."

"If it were up to me," Jilly said, "I'd join you in a minute. But it isn't. Or at least, we've yet to find a way to make it possible."

"He's going to drive me mad."

"Maybe you should give him a taste of his own medicine," Jilly said. "You know, act just as loony."

Sophie laughed. "Only you would think of that. And only you could pull it off. I wish there was some way to bring you over. Then I could just watch the two of you drive each other mad."

"You could always just sleep with him."

"I've been tempted— and not simply because I think it'd drive him away. He's really quite attractive, and he can be very... persuasive."

"But," Jilly said.

"But I feel as though it'd be like eating the fruit in fairyland— if I give in to him, then I'll never be able to get away."

10

So every night when I dream, I come to the desert and Coyote and I go looking for my way out. And every night's a trial. My night-nerves are shot. I'm always on edge because I never know what's going to happen next, what he's going to want to discuss, when or if he's going to put a move on me. We never do find Kokopelli, but that's not the worst of it. The worst thing is that I'm actually getting used to this: to Coyote and his mad carrying-on. Not only used to it, but enjoying it. No matter how much Coyote exasperates me, I can't stay mad at him.

And my desert time's not all bad by any means. When Coyote's being good company, you couldn't ask for a better friend. The desert spirits aren't shy around him, either. The aunts and uncles, which are what he calls the saguaro, tell us stories, or sing songs, or sometimes just gossip. All those strange madonna-faced spirits drop by to visit us, in ones and twos and threes. Women with fox-ears or antlers. Bobcat and coati spirits. Cottontails, jack rabbits and pronghorns. Vultures and grouse and hawks. Snakes and scorpions and lizards. Smoke-tree ghosts and tiny fairy-duster sprites. Twisty cholla spirits, starburst yucca bogles and mesquite dryads draped in cloaks made of a thousand perfectly shaped miniature leaves.

The mind boggles at their Variety and number. They come in every shape and size, but they all have that madonna resemblance, even the males. They're all that strange mix of human with beast or plant. And they all have their own stories and songs and dances to share.

So it's not all bad. But Kokopelli's flute-playing is always there, sometimes only audible when I'm very still, a Pied Piper covenant that I don't remember agreeing to, but it keeps me here. And it's that loss of choice that won't let me ever completely relax. The knowledge that I'm here, not because I want to be, but because I have to be.

One night coyote and I are lying on a hilltop looking up at the stars. The aunts and uncles are murmuring all around us, a kind of wordless chant like a lullaby. A black-crested phainopepla is perched on my knee, strange little Botticelli features studying mine in between groomings. Coyote is smoking a cigarette, but it doesn't smell like tobacco— more like piñon. A dryad was sitting on an outcrop nearby, her skin the gorgeous green of her palo verde tree, but she's drifted away now.

"Grandmother Toad told me that this is a place where people come to find totem," I say after a while. I feel Coyote turn to look at me, but I keep my own gaze on the light show overhead. So many stars, so much sky. "Or they come to consult spirits, to learn from them."

"Nokomis is the wisest of us all. She would know."

"So how come we never see anybody else?"

"I'm nobody," the little phainopepla warbles from my knee.

"You know what I mean. No people."

"It's a big desert," Coyote says.

"The first spirits I met here told me it was somebody else's dreaming place— the way Mabon is mine. But they wouldn't tell me whose."

"Spirits can be like that," Coyote says.

The phainopepla frowns at the both of us, then flies away.

"Is it your dreaming place?" I ask him.

"If it was my dreaming place," he says, "when I did this—" He reaches a hand over and cups my breast. I sit up and move out of his reach. "— you'd fall into my arms and we'd have glorious sex the whole night long."

"I see," I say dryly.

Coyote sits up and grins. "Well, you asked."

"Not for a demonstration."

"What is that frightens you about having sex with me?"

"It's not a matter of being frightened," I tell him. "It's the consequences that might result from our doing it."

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a condom. I can't believe this guy.

"That's not quite what I had in mind, " I say.

"Ah. You're afraid of the psychic ramifications."

"Say what?"

"You're afraid that having sex with me will trap you here forever."

Am I that open a book?

"The thought has crossed my mind," I tell him.

"But maybe it'll free you instead."

I wait, but he doesn't say anything more. "Only you're not telling, right?" I ask.

"Only I don't know," he says. He rolls himself another cigarette and lights up. Blowing out a wreath of smoke, he shoots me a sudden grin "I don't know, and you don't know, and the way things are going, I guess we never will, hey?"

I can't help but react to that lopsided grin of his. Frustrated as I'm feeling, I still, have to laugh. He's got more charm than any one person deserves, and when he turns it on like this, I don't know whether to give him a hug or a bang on the ear.

11

A week after her show closed at The Green Man Gallery, Sophie appeared on Max Hannon's doorstep with Hearts Like Fire, Burning under her arm, wrapped in brown paper.

"You didn't pick it up," she said when he answered the bell, "so I thought I'd deliver it."

Max regarded her with surprise. "I really didn't think you were serious."

"But you will take it?" Sophie asked. She handed the package over as though there could be no question to Max's response.

"I'll treasure it forever," he said, smiling. Stepping to one side so that she could go by him, he added, "Would you like to come in?"

It was roomier inside Max's house than it looked to be from the outside. Renovations had obviously been done, since the whole of the downstairs was laid out in an open layout broken only by the necessary support beams. The kitchen was off in one corner, separated from the rest of the room by an island counter. Another corner held a desk and some bookcases. The remainder of the room consisted of a comfortable living space of sprawling sofas and armchairs, low tables, Navajo carpets and display cabinets.

There was art everywhere— on the walls, as might be expected: posters, reproductions and a few originals, but there was even more three-dimensional work. The sculptures made Sophie's heartbeat quicken. Wherever she looked there were representations of the desert spirits she'd come to know so well, those strange creatures with their human features and torsos peeping out from their feathers and fur, or their thorny cacti cloaks. Sophie was utterly entranced by them, by how faithful they were to the spirits from her desert dream.

"It's funny," Max said, laying the painting she'd given him down on a nearby table. The two ocotillo cacti spirit statues that made up the centerpiece seemed to bend their long-branched forms toward the package, as though curious about what it held. "I was thinking about you just the other day."

"You were."

Max nodded. "I remembered why it was that you looked so familiar to me when we met at our your opening."

If her desert dream hadn't started up after that night, Sophie might have expected him to tell her now that he was one of its spirits and it was from seeing her in that otherworldly, realm that he knew her. But it couldn't be so. She hadn't followed Kokopelli's flute until after she'd met Max.