The Ivory and the Horn

the place I went when I was waiting for my dad to come home from work, a haven from my loneliness because I didn't make friends easily in those days. Not having anyone with whom I could share the fruits of my imagination, I put all that energy into making up a place where I was special, or at least had access to special things.

Faerie blood— courtesy of a mother who, Jilly is convinced, was a dream in this world, a moon in her own— is what makes it all real.

5

'Who was that guy you spent half the night talking to?' Jilly wanted to know as she and Sophie were walking home from the restaurant where they'd all gone to celebrate after the opening. Sophie had asked Max to come along, but he'd declined.

'Just this guy.'

Jilly laughed. ' 'Just this guy.' Oh, please. He was the best-looking man in the place and he seemed quite smitten with you.'

Sophie had to smile. Only Jilly would use a word like smitten.

'His name's Max Hannon,' she told Jilly, 'and he's gay.'

'So? This means you can't be friends?'

'Of course not. I was just pointing out that he's not potential boyfriend material.'

'It's possible to be enamored with someone on an intellectual or spiritual level, you know.'

'I know.'

'And besides, you already have a boyfriend.'

Sophie sighed. 'Right. In my dreams. That doesn't exactly do much for me in the real world.'

'But your dreams are like a real world for you.'

'I think I need something a little more... substantial in my life. My biological clock is ticking away.'

'But Jeck—'

'Isn't real,' Sophie said. 'No matter how much I pretend he is. And Mabon isn't a real city, no matter how much I want it to be, and even if it seems like other people can visit it. You can talk all you want about consensual reality, Jilly, but that doesn't change the fact that some things are real and some things aren't. There's a line drawn between the two that separates reality from fantasy.'

'Yeah, but it's an imaginary line,' Jilly said. 'Who really decides where it gets drawn?'

They'd been through variations on this conversation many times before. Anyone who spent any amount time with Jilly did. Her open-mindedness was either endearing or frustrating, depending on where you stood on whatever particular subject happened to be under discussion.

'Well, I'll tell you,' Jilly went on when Sophie didn't respond. 'A long time ago a bunch of people reached a general consensus as to what's real and what's not and most of us have been going along with it ever since.'

'All of which has nothing to do with Max,' Sophie said in an attempt to return to the original topic of their conversation.

'I know,' Jilly said 'So are you going to see him again?'

'I hope so. There's something very intriguing about him.'

'Which has nothing to do with the way he looks.'

'I told you,' Sophie said. 'He's gay.'

'Like Sue always says, the best ones are either married or gay, more's the pity.'

Sophie smiled. 'Only for us.'

'This is true.'

6

The desert dream starts in the alley behind Mr. Truepenny's shop— or at least where the alley's supposed to be. I'm in the back of the store with Jeck, poking around through the shelves of books, when I hear the sound of this flute. It goes on for a while, sort of lingering there, in the back of my mind until finally I get curious. I leave Jeck digging for treasure in a cardboard box of new arrivals and step past the door that leads into the store's small art gallery. The music is sort of atonal, and the instrument appears to have a limited range of notes, but there's something appealing about it all the same. I walk down along narrow corridor, the walls encrusted with old portraits of thin, bearded men and women in dresses that appear far too stiff and ornately embroidered to be comfortable. The soles of my shoes squeak on the wooden floor in a rhythmic counterpoint to the music I'm following. I stop at the door at the far end of the hall. The music seems to be coming from the other side of it, so I open the door and step out, expecting to find myself in a familiar alleyway, but the alley's gone.

Instead I'm standing in a desert, I turn around to see that the door through which I came has disappeared. All that I can see on every side of me is an endless panorama of desert, each compass point bordered by mountains. I seem to be as far from Mabon as that city is from the place where my body sleeps.

'What is this place?' I say.

My voice startles me, because I didn't realize I was speaking aloud. What startles me more is that my rhetorical question gets answered. I turn to see the oddest sight: There's a rattlesnake coiled up under a palo verde tree. The pale color of the tree's branches and twigs awakes an echoing green on the snake's scales which range through a gorgeous palette of golds and deep rusty reds, That's normal enough, What's so disconcerting is that the snake has the face of a Botticelli madonna— serene smile, rounded features enclosed by a cloud of dark ringlets. The Virgin and Child With Singing Angels comes immediately to mind. And she's got wings— creamy yellow wings that thrust out from the snake's body a few inches below the face. All that's lacking is a nimbus of gold light.

'A dreaming place,' is what the snake has just said to me.

For all her serenity, she has an unblinking gaze which I doubt any of Botticelli's models had.

'But Mabon's already a dreaming place,' I find myself replying, as though I always have conversations with snakes that have wings and human faces.

'Mabon is your dreaming place,' he says. 'Today you have strayed into someone else's.'

'Whose?'

The snake doesn't reply.

'How do I get back to Mabon?'

Still no reply— at least not from her. Another voice answers me. This time it's that of a small owl, her feathers the color of a dead saguaro rib, streaks of silver-grey and black. She's perched on the arm of one of those tall cacti, looking down at me with another human face nestled there where an owl's beak and round eyes should be, calm madonna features surrounded by feathers. At least wings look normal on her.

'You can't return,' she tells me. 'You have to go on.'

I hate the way that conversation can get snarled up in a dream like this: Every word an omen, every sentence a riddle.

'Go on to where?'

The owl turns her head sharply away then turns back and suddenly takes off from her perch. I catch a glimpse of a human torso in her chest feathers— breasts and a rounded belly— and then she's airborne, wings beating until she catches an updraft, and glides away. A stand of mesquite swallows her from my sight and she's gone. I turn back to the rattlesnake, but she's gone as well. The owl's advice rings in my mind.

You have to go on.

I look around me, mountains in every direction. I know distance can be deceiving in the open desert like this, in this kind of light, with that immense sprawl of sky above me. I feel as though I could just reach any one of those ranges in a half-hour walk, but I know it would really be days.

I find my sense of direction has gone askew. Normally, I relate to a body of water. In Newford, everything's north of the lake. In Mabon, everything's south. Here, I feel displaced. There's no water— or at least none of which I'm aware. I can see the sun is setting toward the west, but it doesn't feel right. My inner compass says it's setting in the north.

I turn slowly in place, regarding the distant mountain ranges that surround me. None of them draws me more than the other, and I don't know which way to go until I remember the sound of the flute that brought me here in the first place. It's still playing a sweet low music on the edge of my hearing that calms the panic that was beginning to lodge in my chest.

So I follow it again, hiking through what's left of the afternoon until I don't feel l can go any further. The mountains in front of me don't seem any closer, the ones behind aren't any further away. I'm thirsty and tired.