Parts of this poem ran icy fingers down his back. He remembered Jo with her hair standing up on end when the magic took her, like static on a mountaintop in a thunderstorm. These words woke the same feeling. His palms turned slippery and his heart started racing, fear dumping an overdose of adrenaline into his blood. Words carried power -- power enough that a second-hand vision of their images could pull you across the borders for a moment and form a new world in your eyes and ears.
When David worked on the images of their battle in the forest, he started to smell the torn earth and raw sap of broken trees. He started to feel the rank sweat of fear down his back. His right arm ached where he'd dislocated his elbow when the dying dragon's tail knocked him damn near into tomorrow. It seemed like something far stronger than memory, as if he could take another step, chant another stanza, and he'd be there.
He shivered. He stared at the coffee machine, at the hot aromatic brown liquid spilling down into the carafe underneath it so real and bitter and mundane. The boundaries of reality couldn't be so fragile.
Jo had teased him that a man named Marx had no business playing on an Irish band. He loved the music, but he didn't have a drop of any Celtic blood in his veins, much less the magical "Old Blood." His family traced back to the Hanseatic League and what was now Gdansk, Danzig it was when his great-grandfather had fled the Nazis with his family. No Sidhe there. He might sneak in some Old Blood genes through whatever lurked in the shadowed forests and hidden valleys and dank mine-shafts of Poland, but he'd never even learned the names.
No, it was the magic of words. People talked about how a good book could transport the reader to another land, how disoriented you could feel when something pulled you out of the story into mundane life. This just threatened him with that next step beyond.
He could tell that the Summer Country fascinated Jo. She belonged there, for all the horror she'd found in their brief visit. She wasn't out of work and digging for lost change under the sofa cushions there, she didn't keep having her nose rubbed in a mother lying brain-dead in a nursing home and a father boozing and whoring the rounds of Harlot Street to keep her awake at nights.
And she didn't have to settle for a yellow-ass coward of a poet and erstwhile guitar-player for a lover. She could find somebody like Brian, tough and competent and with the power of the Old Blood in his veins. He'd seen that measuring squint in her eyes when she'd looked at the guy. Wondering how he was in bed, whether Maureen had landed the better fish.
David shook himself. He poured a cup of coffee and hauled himself over to the window, staring out at the bleak scene that Jo could leave anytime she wanted. Raining again. The thaw had uncovered a whole stack of garbage bags across the street, buried in some January storm when the snowplow came by before the trash trucks did. Now the dogs or coyotes had gotten at the well-aged windfall. Fast-food wrappers and gnawed chicken bones and brown curled grapefruit rinds and empty chili cans all over the place. Lovely, against the infamous yellow snow.
Sirens warbled in the distance, bad omen. But he could discount that. They lived about a half mile from the hospital, had ambulances howling around day and night like banshees heralding their cargoes of woe. Had the medivac helicopters whomping over at all hours, fetching and carrying the wreckage of most of eastern Maine.
He swallowed coffee, absent-mindedly wincing at the heat of it. It hadn't worked. Jo hadn't come bounding up the stairs and scratched her key into the door and homed in on the aroma like a wolf smelling fresh moose blood.
The hell with it. He turned back to the kitchen, dumped the remaining half-cup in the sink, and grabbed his hat and jacket. He needed out. He needed to escape from a place where Jo was supposed to be, substitute a place where her absence wasn't so noticeable. And at least the rain was fresh.
Fresh and clean and cold, with a wind behind it that cut right through his fog and cleared his thoughts. That poem wasn't wearing through the veil between the worlds, it was just waking up memories. Bardic magic was a pile of bull, concocted of fantasy and wishful thinking. And Jo stripping Brian with her glance was just the same as David admiring high-school sex-goddesses at the mall. Aesthetic appreciation, not proof she'd be happier elsewhere.
"Fleeing danger, legs uncaring,
"Dropping weapons fled the bard.
"Turning, weeping, no choice offered,
"Came again to battle hard."
Happier elsewhere, indeed. Damned brain, still chewing on epic battles. What would he do if Jo disappeared? Brian had tried to warn him off, before the first time, but David hadn't really understood.
Now he knew, remembering how they'd leaned together against a tree, weak-kneed and drained and supporting each other, drenched in sweat and blood and pain, staring at the impossible hulk of the dead dragon only to find what stood behind it. They'd gone through all that just to be frozen helpless by a snap of Sean's fingers.
Now David knew just how many layers of danger waited, each one more vicious than the last. Sean had been little more than Fiona's shadow, and Brian said that the surviving dragon was even larger and smarter than the one they'd killed. And mad like you wouldn't believe, where the other one had merely been bound by Dougal's spell to guard the path.
That nibbled at the flavor he wanted, the unavoidable clash between two doomed characters, neither at fault. A Greek tragedy sort of thing, with the scheming gods forcing Achilles and Hector
