With a Tangled Skein Read online

  In due course Cedric, fulfilled, fell asleep. Now Niobe became aware of her discomfort. She got up, carefully cleaned herself, washed her hair, and applied some healing salve. She did not want Cedric to think he had hurt her, though it was a pain that changed her life. Then she checked the bed and spied the stain of blood on the sheet; how was she to conceal that? Certainly she did not want that going through the college laundry, betraying to the staff not only what they had been up to, but that it had been the first time. So she fetched a sponge, dampened it, and worked on the stain until it had faded to the point of unidentifiability. Now, at last, she could relax.

  She lay down—and Cedric stirred. She took his hand, kissed it, and murmured a soothing word to him, and he drifted off again. She was relieved; she loved him, but right now she wanted to sleep.

  In the morning she returned home, leaving Cedric to his studies and his phenomenal new memories. But she did not allow much time to elapse before she visited him again. It was not that she had suddenly become a sexual creature—she had been advised by her mother that no woman could match the appetite of any man in this respect—but that she missed him and wanted to be with him as much as possible. Her tidy house no longer satisfied her. She wanted it to be animated again by Cedric’s presence. She was indeed in love.

  They made love again in the guest house, and this time it was easier because they were slightly experienced. Also, as she thought wryly, she was broken in. Again she responded almost as rapidly and emphatically as he, despite her mother’s cautions, for love propelled her. Again, at the climactic moment, she had a vision.

  This time, as she stood before the water oak, she saw a spider climbing an invisible strand. I can do that, she thought. She reached up and caught hold of her own invisible strand and climbed it, for she had four hands and four feet. In fact she was a spider, the ultimate spinner and weaver. What a web she would make! But then the ecstasy abated, and she was human again, relaxing in the embrace of her beloved.

  She thought to ask him whether he, too, had visions in that moment, but she desisted, fearing that it would seem that she was bored with lovemaking. She wasn’t; in fact it seemed more likely that her visions represented a transcendent overflow of pleasure. When a system was stimulated beyond its rated capacity, it could short out or blow off; could this be why the images were so far removed from the present experience?

  She had no decent answer—but she would be glad to explore the matter further. She liked making love to Cedric, and she liked the visions, even if the thematic connection between the two was tenuous. “Oh, Cedric!” she exclaimed, hugging him again. “I’m so glad we found each other at last!”

  “You’re still the perfect woman,” he said, and fell asleep.

  “You foolish man,” she murmured fondly, and nibbled on his ear.

  Cedric completed his first year of college with outstanding grades and came home for the summer. He now knew more than Niobe did about the wetlands, and she was fascinated by the lore he had acquired. He would squat by a stagnant pool and scoop out a handful of glop and show her how the algae in it emitted little spells of nausea to discourage such interference. It was true; when she came close to the handful, she felt like retching, but when she stepped back she felt all right. Of course the smell might account for it—but it didn’t help to hold her nose, so she was satisfied that it was, as he said, magic. He was able to identify the exact species of water oak near their cabin, and the variety of hamadryad too. He knew where the timid forest deer hid and what their preferred forage was. “I owe it all to you, Niobe,” he said generously. “You showed me the wetlands!”

  “I’ll cry, I’ll cry when the wetlands are dry,” she agreed, smiling. How little had she realized what her innocent song would start!

  And of course they made love again, for the first time at home, erasing their prior failures here. Once more she launched into vision—but this time it was sinister. She saw the face of a saturnine man—and that man’s mouth curled into a sneer, and he winked at her. She screamed and snapped from the vision to find Cedric frozen in midmotion, horrified that he had somehow hurt her.

  “No, no,” she reassured him immediately. “It wasn’t you! I had a bad dream.”

  “You were asleep?” he asked incredulously.

  Then she had to tell him of the visions, for the misunderstanding would be worse than the reality. He admitted that he did not have such visions, but had heard of those who did. “Mostly women,” he concluded.

  “Oh? How do you know about women?” she asked archly.

  “My text in human biology,” he said. “It’s one of the freshman required courses.”

  So she was, after all, typical. “But the awful face— why would I see that, when I’m having such joy of you?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe we should stop those visions.”

  “Oh, Cedric, I don’t want to stop—”

  “I said visions, not love!” he said, laughing. He was no longer shy about sex; once he had gotten into it, he liked it. “I’ll try to sing to you, next time.”

  The notion appealed to her. The rapture of his magic superimposed on that of the loveplay—the ultimate experience!

  They tried it, and it worked. He did not even have to sing aloud; if he ran the song through in his mind, the orchestra played for her, and no visions came, no matter how transported she was by the experience.

  So it went through the summer. In the fall it was time for college again, and she packed him off with genuine regret. But he had a real future, once he completed his education, and she refused to deny him that. She would suffer through the separation and visit him often.

  But it was harder on her than she had anticipated. She felt chronically out of sorts, and sometimes ill. Then she got nauseous in the mornings. What was wrong with her?

  Suddenly she realized: she wasn’t ill—she was with child.

  —3—

  SHOOTING DEER

  She had to tell him, of course. She did so on the next visit. Cedric was amazed at what he had wrought, and pleased. “I’ll be a father!” he exclaimed, as if this were a completely unique experience.

  “Well, it isn’t as if you didn’t try for it,” she reminded him.

  “I guess that will have to stop now,” he said regretfully.

  “No, not yet. Just—carefully.”

  They were careful. The winter passed, and the baby expanded within her. When Niobe reached the eighth month, her mother came to stay with her and midwife the birth if it occurred early, for there was no convenient hospital. Cedric was ready to quit college and come home, but Niobe made him remain to complete his courses; he had gone too far to throw it away now. So it was that, before he turned eighteen and just before he made it home for the summer, Cedric became the father of a healthy son.

  He was pleased—but he knew there was a price. Niobe had been able to make do alone, but she would no longer be able to do that. Cedric had to retire from college and become a full-time family man. He was ready—but she knew he also regretted it. It had been clear that if he had continued his program at the college, he could have become a professional, perhaps even a professor in due course. He could still be one—but now there would be a delay, and by the time he could return, years hence, the situation could have changed. So it was a calculated risk for Cedric’s career. Almost, she wished she had not conceived so quickly.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Cedric said. “A man’s got to do what he’s got to do in the time he has, and I want to be with you.”

  “That’s sweet,” she said, and rewarded him with a kiss. Still, she felt guilty.

  “Prof told me that if he’d had a wife who looked like you, she would have had a baby just as fast,” he added.

  “Still, you have such a good career awaiting you; you must return to it as soon as possible.”

  “We’ll see,” he said.

  But when she thought of the baby, her mood swung the other way. Junior was an absolute joy! She knew from the first
hour that he would be a genius like his father— and he would have proper schooling from the outset. Oh, she had such dreams for Junior!

  Cedric took care of things, pretty well running the household until she was back on her feet. Then, as time opened up, he began spending time in the swamp. He was making a chart of the local ecology—the trees, the smaller vegetation, the animals, the insects, the algae, the waterflows, and the observable interactions between them.

  Hunters roamed the forest, in and out of hunting season, poaching game. Cedric came across the remains and grew angry. “If the deer shot back, the hunters would be less bold!” he exclaimed. Then he paused in realization. “Maybe I can arrange for the deer to shoot back!”

  Niobe laughed—but he was serious. He was a wetlands major, not a magic major, but he got a tome of spells and searched through it, trying to find one that could be adapted to his purpose. If magic could bounce an arrow or a bullet back on its origin, so that the hunter in effect shot himself—

  But magic was no subject for amateurs, any more than science was. It required years of study to master the basic precepts and stem discipline; even then it had its special hazards. Cedric was smart, but more than intelligence was needed. “I just don’t have the time!” he exclaimed, frustrated.

  “You’re welcome to take all the time you want, dear,” Niobe said. She was nursing Junior and hated to see Cedric upset. When he was annoyed, she tended to echo the feeling involuntarily, and it seemed to change the milk and make Junior colicky, and if there was one thing worse than an upset husband, it was a colicky baby.

  Cedric paused as if weighing something momentous. “Of course,” he agreed, and went outside. Had she somehow offended him? Her husband seemed more nervous, irritable, and generally tense than he had been. Maybe she should try to hire a maid for the chores so that Cedric could, after all, return to college. She knew what a sacrifice he was making and she wanted to set things right. Their love was so wonderful that she hated to have any strains put on it.

  But when she broached the matter, later in the day, Cedric would have none of it. “I’m through with college!” he declared. “My destiny is here.”

  “But the Prof said you have such potential! I think he wants you to become a—”

  He put his big hand on hers. She felt a stirring of the music in him, but this time it was a strange, discordant, disturbing sound. “It would not be worth the cost,” he said. “Prof understands.”

  She experienced a kind of dread, but could not fathom its cause. The flickering image of a demonic face came to her, and one of the water oak, three of whose views were positive, the fourth an unglimpsed horror. What cost? Separation from her? Yet Cedric had endured that before and prospered. Why had he changed his mind?

  “Cedric—is something wrong?”

  “Of course not,” he said quickly.

  She didn’t believe him, but realized that he would not tell her the truth. That disturbed her further, and she had to stop nursing Junior. She was sure it wasn’t any fault in Cedric’s love for her; that was unfailing. He was a father new, a proven man, yet sometimes even now she would be working at the loom, and would look up to discover him watching her with a touching expression of adoration. No, he loved her and wanted to be with her. Still she laid Junior in the crib. “Cedric, we could move closer to the college so you could commute—”

  He took her in his arms and kissed her. “This is our home. I love you—and the wetlands. My life is here.”

  So it seemed. She did not try to argue further, and indeed their life together was good. They resumed making love as she recovered from childbearing, and Cedric was enormously gentle and, he sang to her, and in those moments it seemed that nothing else mattered.

  As Niobe grew stronger, she started taking Junior for walks outdoors, for fresh air was good for babies. He seemed to like the wetlands, especially the huge water oak. Niobe would sit at the foot of the tree and sing, and Junior would listen. The hamadryad got used to the new arrival and came to like Junior. She didn’t quite trust Niobe, for adults had a long and bad history of cynicism toward wild magic, but when Niobe set the baby in his carrier by the tree and retreated a reasonable distance, the dryad would come down and play with him. Niobe was thrilled; very few mortals could approach any of the wilderness creatures, either natural or supernatural, and it was a mark of special favor when one could. Maybe Junior would grow up to be a world-famous naturalist! Certainly there was no threat from the dryad; Cedric had assured her of that, and she believed it. In the dryad’s presence Junior was always alert and smiling.

  Events elsewhere were not as sanguine. A developer bought a large tract of land that included their swamp. It was theirs in proximity and spirit, not in the eyes of geographic law. The company planned to drain the swamp, cut down the trees, and build a number of identical houses there.

  Cedric exploded. He trekked to all the residents for miles around and so impressed them with the need to preserve the wetlands that they formed a citizen’s committee to oppose the development. They wrote letters to newspapers and the county authorities; when these failed to halt the project, they set about constructing deadfalls for bulldozers. They filed suit in court to stop it. When the company lawyer tried to suggest the swamp was nothing more than a murky waste that posed a public health threat as a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes, Cedric argued persuasively that those mosquitoes carried no diseases in this region, being the wrong species for that, served as food for pretty birds, and wouldn’t even bite people who were sensibly protected by repellent or a spell. Then he spoke of the other aspects of the wetlands—the fish and amphibians, the foxes and deer, the trees that could grow nowhere else, the special interactive magic these living things had developed to get along. “There is no bad water coming from this region,” he concluded, and he had documentation to prove it: studies the college had made. “No erosion, no bad flooding. The wetlands keep the water pure and contained, so that we who live near it can live at peace with nature. Too little of this kind of natural paradise remains; how can we pave it over with another foul city!” And such was the nature of his eloquence that the spectators in the courtrooms applauded. Few had really cared about the wetlands before; now they all did.

  But man’s law remained on the side of the developer, and the judge, with open regret, ruled in favor of the company. The bulldozers would be allowed to forage in the swamp.

  “I’m so sorry,” Niobe told him, but Cedric only shrugged. “They will be stopped,” he said grimly. But he didn’t say how.

  One foggy morning Cedric kissed her with special tenderness and lifted Junior out of his crib. “I’m taking him for a walk down to the oak,” he said.

  She was pleased—but somehow alarmed too. There seemed to be an edge to his final words: “We’ll be there.” Yet they were innocent words, and the water oak was the safest kind of place for the baby; the hamadryad was virtually a babysitter now. In fact, the nymph had begun to teach the baby some wild magic—and if there was one thing rarer than the company of a dryad, it was the sharing of the magic of a dryad. Junior, too young to walk or talk, nevertheless did seem to understand and almost seemed to be able to do a spell. So why should there be any concern? Niobe knew she was being foolish. There was, she reminded herself firmly, absolutely no threat to Junior.

  She labored at the loom, forming a fine picture of that very tree, and as her hands moved, largely of their own volition, she daydreamed. The image of the tree fogged out and was replaced by that of the saturnine face. “Today I come for you!” it said, grinning evilly. “My emissary is on its way and cannot be stopped. You are doomed, mistress of the skein!”

  Niobe screamed. The image vanished, and there was only the forming tapestry. She was shuddering with reaction. This was the vision other lovemaking rapture, but it was quite foreign to love. Cedric had banished it by his music, but now it was terrorizing her directly! What did it mean?

  Then she heard a shot. She jumped. That was
the sound of a gun—and it was from the direction of the swamp— and Cedric was there with Junior. He had no gun!

  Horribly alarmed, she rushed outside and ran headlong down the winding path to the oak. As she approached, she heard a thin screaming from the tree. It was the dryad, hanging by a branch, shrieking with all her frail strength. Below her was the carrier, overturned.

  “Junior!” Niobe cried, her horror magnifying. She scrambled to the tree and took hold of the carrier.

  Junior was in it, his body smudged with dirt, and now he bawled lustily. But he seemed to be unhurt. He had overturned and that had alarmed him; that was all.

  She glanced up at the dryad. No, of course she wouldn’t have tried to hurt the baby! In fact the nymph was still screaming, one little hand pointing away from the tree, to the dark lower side where the gloom of the swamp was strong.

  Niobe looked in that direction—and saw Cedric’s body sprawled in the bushes. Suddenly her premonition of dread had a sharp new focus. Not her baby—her husband!

  She ran to him. He was face down, and blood welled from the wound in his belly. He had been shot! He was unconscious, but his heart still beat.

  She looked up—and the dryad was there, for the moment away from her tree. “What—who—?” Niobe asked, forgetting that dryads do not talk.

  The nymph took a stick and held it like a rifle, then shook it to suggest its firing. But Niobe already knew he had been shot. “Have you any magic—for his wound?” she demanded.

  The dryad ran back to her tree, ran up it as a squirrel might, and disappeared into the foliage. She returned in a moment with a small branch.