Neither I nor the Iberian Peninsula was stable enough to allow it to bear fruit. I packed my things and headed off to Asia, eventually coming back to Europe with Khan’s hordes.
Since then I had from time to time toyed with the idea of starting a small Druidic grove somewhere, but the threat of Aenghus Og on the one hand and persecution by monotheists on the other always made that an idle daydream. Perhaps now it would not be so far-fetched, though, if I was able to survive the Morrigan’s divination.
My deal with her wasn’t a universal get-out-of-death-free card. It applied only to the Morrigan, who had first dibs on my life, and that was grand, no doubt; but death gods are a staple of every pantheon, and if Aenghus Og was truly making an alliance of some kind with hell, then death would come for me on a pale horse, according to Revelation
6:8.
The part of her divination that truly bothered me was the Heather wand, which suggested that the soon-to- be-dead warrior would be surprised before he bit the dust. I didn’t think Aenghus could do much to surprise me at this point, but that coven of witches certainly could. They had already surprised me several times, first with the runaround about making Aenghus impotent, then lying to my face about their alliance with him, and even giving me their leader’s blood with confidence that they could either steal it back or that I would never use it against them. And all of that was accomplished by only three of the witches in their coven: What would they surprise me with when the whole lot of them focused on me?
And now here, in Rula Bula, in Granuaile’s head, was another witch who claimed she could take on the whole Polish coven by herself, provided she had a certain ruby necklace-which obviously was a potent magical item or none of the cool witches would want to kill one another for it. Did I want to let someone that powerful off the leash?
Granuaile stopped in front of me and leaned over to get my attention before I could answer the question.
“Okay, Atticus, I’m going to let Laksha come out. Play nice.” She grinned impishly at me, and then her head lolled to one side as she relinquished control. When her head came back up, her expression was inscrutable, though a sense of old age was conveyed by a tightening around the eyes and mouth. Her accented voice greeted me with clipped consonants and vowels and the lilting intonation of Tamil speakers. “I have been looking forward to our conversation, Druid,” she said. “I am Laksha Kulasekaran, greeting you in peace.”
The transformation from a young, sunny Irish American girl to an ancient Indian witch was absolutely creepy, no matter how many words of peace came flowing out of Granuaile’s mouth. It gave me what Samuel Clemens used to call a shivering case of the fan-tods.
Chapter 20
“I hope we remain at peace,” I said to the witch in Granuaile’s head. “Why don’t you tell me how you came to be talking to me here.”
“I was born in 1277 in Madurai during the reign of the Pandyan king Maravaramban Kulasekaran, whose name I honor by taking it myself,” Laksha said. “I met Marco Polo when I was sixteen and through him realized how large the world must be to contain people like him in it.
“I married a Brahmin and played the dutiful wife while he was at home. While he was away, I played with the demon kingdom. I saw no other way for a woman in a caste system to free herself from that system.
“The things I have learned are mostly horrible-rakshasas have nothing delightful to share. The trick of transferring one’s spirit from place to place I learned from a vetala. You have heard of them?”
“Yes,” I replied. “Vedic demons. They possess corpses.”
“Precisely. I use the same principle to transfer my spirit into a gem or into a person.”
“Can you transfer it into anything?”
Laksha seemed surprised by the question. “I suppose. The spirit can fit almost anywhere. But why would you want to put it into something that could be broken or something that is of small worth? Gems tend to endure.”
“All right. Tell me how you wound up on the ocean floor inside a ruby.”
Lasksha shrugged Granuaile’s shoulders. “I wanted a new life-a new world. I decided to leave India. In 1850 I bought passage on a clipper ship that ran opium to China. Once there, the owners of this ship, called the Frolic, wanted to capitalize on the gold rush in California. So they loaded the ship in China with expensive silks, rugs, and other luxuries that would be sold in San Francisco and insured it heavily.
“This was an opportunity I could not pass up. America was much newer than China, a place where a woman could own a business if she chose, and so I bought passage there too, bribing the captain with promises of sexual favors to keep my name off the list.
“He was unimaginative in bed and smelled awful. Perhaps he sensed my dissatisfaction, for when the ship ran into some rocks off the coast of what is now Mendocino and the hull began to fill with water, he did not take me in his lifeboat.
“Everyone got into lifeboats, but I was sharing a boat with Chinese crewmen who had no loyalty to me and did not speak any language I knew. And on the water, without the time and space for ritual, I am not powerful.
“As we were making our way to shore, with four of the men rowing, I saw that the men were looking at my necklace and talking about me. They were probably thinking that I could simply disappear, a victim of the shipwreck, and no one would be the wiser. They probably planned to sell the necklace in San Francisco and split the money between them.
“Whatever their plan was, one of them suddenly drew a knife behind me and plunged it into my back, while another tried to tear the necklace from my throat. In tremendous pain and trying to get away from the knife, I stood up abruptly and pitched myself overboard, taking the would-be thief with me, still fighting for the necklace.
“I could feel myself dying, and I could not swim anyway. Luckily, neither could my assailant. He succeeded in pulling the necklace from my throat, but not from my hands, and soon he gave up in a panic and left me to thrash his way to the surface, where his crewmates would rescue him.
“With my vision fading and not trusting the vetala’s methods in water, I had to choose between leaving this world or sending my spirit into the stone through direct contact. Obviously I chose the latter, and now here I am.” She did not finish her story with a smile. She simply stopped and waited for my reaction.
“All right, what are your goals now?”
“To get my necklace back and then get a new body.”
“Right, let’s take those one at a time. Why is it important to get the necklace back? We can go to the jewelry store and buy you a ruby right now if that’s what you want.”
“No. That particular necklace is a magical focus, crafted by a demon. It amplifies my powers. Does your necklace not serve the same purpose for you?” She pointed a finger at it and tilted her head quizzically.
“It wasn’t made by a demon, but, yes, it serves a similar function,” I replied, trying my best to sound nonchalant. All this time my Scary Witch-O-Meter had been traveling further and further into the red. The phrase crafted by a demon sent it all the way over to the right so that the arrow was pointing only a degree or two above the x axis. But I asked myself, Why stop there? Let’s ask her a really scary question. “Tell me about getting a new body. How do you propose to do that?”
“In the past I just took them, but now I adhere to a higher moral standard.”
“Took them? I beg your pardon, did you mean live ones or dead ones?”
“Whatever was available and attractive at the time.”
“So the body at the bottom of the sea-that wasn’t the body you were born with?”
“Of course not! I am not knowing of a way to make bodies last for hundreds of years.”
“Of course not.” I smiled and shook my head. “Stupid question, sorry.” The dial on the Scary Witch-O-Meter
