Pamela Dean (27 page)

she whispered.

They all stood still. And under the rustle of dry leaves in the light wind, the sounds came clearer now: not only the sedate thud of hoofs and the creak of leather, but a dim jingling that, as it grew louder, made a music purer than the bagpipes. Janet opened her eyes wide, staring into the mottled darkness; next to her, Peg pushed her glasses up her nose and said, "I see lights."

Janet saw them too. They looked like fireflies, and then perhaps like lanterns; and then they were just an enormous greeny-gold glow that showed up the trunks and branches of the trees, the dead dry stalks of weed and a few late-blooming flowers, like things in a pencil sketch. The broad path on the other side of the bridge lit up, every stone and stick on it like a jewel; the light touched the rough wooden bridge and made it dazzling; and then they could see the riders.

Janet murmured, "Get back," to Peg, and pushed Sharon and Molly into the bushes.

Peg turned and did the same for Susan and Rebecca. Nobody protested. The first riders came, sedately walking, down the broad path to the bridge. The horses were black as coal.

Their manes and tails were braided and strung with beads and ribbons that did not sparkle, but glowed, with a light that showed the riders but cast no shad ow. The riders were strung

with beads and ribbons, too, covered with flowing clothes of no familiar pattern. Their faces were pale and solemn. Their yellow hair blew behind them, though they went slowly and there was little wind.

These were the first three, who might have been men or women. The fourth was a woman in artful tatters of red and green. If you had seen a picture of her, or tried to describe her, you would have had to say she was in rags. But in motion her dress was complete and perfect. She had red hair, not like Janet's or Melinda Wolfe's, but like black wood with a red grain in it. Her face was high and pale like the others', and her hair sprang from a peak at her forehead and waved back at her temples in the same way as theirs.

The three riders and the woman on the black horses passed by, stirring up the gravel, and swung onto the highway. Behind them were smaller horses, brown, homely-looking ones that might have come from the farm attached to Blackstock. They, too, were alight with beads and ribbons. On them were men and women exceedingly beautiful, but looking, after the four who had just passed, as homely as the horses. Janet thought she saw Anne and Odile, but they all looked so much the same, she was not certain. She did see Melinda Wolfe, in a dress that looked sometimes green and sometimes gray, and knew her by her red hair and the tilt of her head. With her was a young man who might have been the newest instructor in Classics, or might not; and behind them an older man with dark hair and an angelic face, who was definitely Professor Ferris of Classics.

They went by, too, and behind them on white horses came people Janet knew. The nice thick boy with the southern accent, with whom she had talked about squirrels. Kit Lane, like a dark copy of Thomas. Somebody who looked so much like them both that he must be the mysterious Johnny. Robert Benfield. Jack Nikopoulos. And Nicholas Tooley.

His curly head, his blunt profile, the faint slouch of his shoulders, were unmistakable. And in that crowd of stern or smiling faces, only his was scowling. He was having to manage not only his own horse, but another white horse with an empty saddle. Robin's, Janet supposed; you could hardly play the bagpipes on horseback.

They all went by, looking straight ahead; and when they were all gathered on the highway, somebody let out an unholy whoop, and the entire troupe of them went pounding up the empty road, striking sparks from it and making it look, in the moment of their passing, like a river of gold. They went up the hill in a flurry of light, and turned the corner at the top, and were gone. A last sound of bells drifted down.

Nobody said anything. The night was silent. In the woods beyond the stream, the pipes began again.

Molly stirred herself at Janet's side, marched out of the bushes, and stamped down the dirt path and across the wooden bridge. The piping stopped in mid-squall. It was so quiet you could hear Molly's bell-bottoms dragging in the dirt. Janet went after her, as she had gone over the other wooden bridge the last time they met Robin and his pipes, because she felt some obscure twinge of danger. But it was, once again, only and really Robin. He was not in his old patched jeans and T-shirt, but in something velvet, dark blue or deep green or maybe black, with a coat to it, and high boots; and his coat's small carved buttons, like the jewels of the riders, made a light of their own. In it his neat-boned face with its tidy beard looked wary and affronted.

Molly was affronted too. "Cowering under the bed," she said flatly.

"It was good advice," said Robin, in a mild tone.

Janet, fighting a desire to inform Robin that it had not been phrased as advice, thought she had better fade over the bridge and take the rest of the interested audience back to interrupt Thomas and Tina and finish the last of the cider. But as she took her first step backward, silently, Robin addressed her over Molly's shoulder. "Janet Carter," he said.

"Where's Thomas?"

Stifling an indignant and irrelevant "How should I know," Janet said temperately,

"He's in our room with Tina."

"Good place for him," said Robin.

"Are you tired of that crew, too?" said Janet.

"Are you tired of the wet rain, and the cold snow, and the way the wind moves the air around?" said Robin.

A whole cloudy discussion of weather, and human and poetic reaction to it, rose up in Janet's brain. She scowled at Robin, and said, "I'm tired of not being told anything."

Molly, who still had her back to Janet and the rest of the guests, made an impatient movement.

"If you'll see her home, Robin, we'll be going," said Janet.

"For Christ's sake," said Molly, with the first real anger Janet had seen in her since they met. "I can see myself home."

And you'll probably have to, thought Janet. She turned and walked back to the goggling crowd. "Come on, you guys," she said. "There's a whole loaf of pumpkin bread waiting."

They came with her obediently, chattering all the while about the horses. A few awed references to the light cast by the company of riders were scornfully laid to rest by Peg, who told them to for pity's sake go read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" if they thought such effects were so hard to come by, and to remember that there are Chemistry majors in the world. While Susan and Sharon were attempting rejoinders to this, probably more out of pique than conviction, Nora said quietly to Janet, "Are we about to have an upheaval?"

"I haven't the faintest idea," said Janet. "I don't think you have to worry. Molly's method of coping with a broken heart is probably to memorize her math book."

"Thank God," said Nora. "Now that the idiots at the end of the hall are settled, I thought I might have some chance of passing my courses and graduating. Try not to have any upheavals."

"If we do," said Janet, as they topped the rise where the lilac maze crouched in the dark like a giant unkempt sheep, "I'm sure Melinda Wolfe would advise us."

Nora laughed, not very pleasantly. "Do everybody a favor," she said. "If you want to go that route, tell me and I'll introduce you to somebody harmless."

"Thanks, I think I've got one of those," said Janet. "But I'll let Molly know."

"You mean Nick?" said Nora, and laughed again. "Nick Tooley harmless? He rides with Medeous. She's not interested in harmless people."

"Well," said Janet, "I'm not sure I am either. At least, if I weren't trying to go to college I wouldn't be."

"But you are trying to go to college," said Nora. Her voi ce was a little breathless,

though they had been going downhill, and were now abreast of Dunbar again. "What's
your
remedy for a broken heart?"

They filed over the wooden bridge and trudged up the eroded gully between Forbes and Eliot. The sounds of merriment had mostly died down. Somewhere at the top of Forbes, a large group was singing "Amazing Grace" with agonizing slowness in several warring keys. Janet's party had fallen silent, as if they wanted nothing better than to know her remedy for a broken heart.

"Writing poetry, I expect," said Janet, carelessly. "What's yours?"

"Ice cream," said Nora.

"I cut my hair off," said Susan. "It made me feel like somebody else. It was down to my knees. I estimate I won't be the girl who was heartbroken again for another two years."

She was greeted with a chorus of giggles and a flurry of other suggested remedies.

Last of all, when everybody else had had her say and they were climbing the steps to Fourth Ericson, Sharon asked Peg, who had not spoken, what her remedy would be.

"I'd imitate the Lady of Shallott," said Peg.

The Lady of Shallott had killed herself for love of Lancelot, and floated down the river to Camelot in a boat. Janet opened her mouth to contest so extreme a solution, looked at Peg's quiet face, and closed it again.

Molly came back at six o'clock in the morning, waking Janet, who had had a series of incoherent and disturbing dreams involving horses, bagpipes, the river, rapiers, and the bust of Schiller. "Take your pill," she hissed at Molly.

"Oh, God, two in one day will probably bring on the effects again," said Molly; but she rummaged in her drawer for the dispenser, and did as she was told.

"Where were you?"

"Tell you later," said Molly, rolled, army jacket, shoes, and all, onto her bed, and put the pillow over her head.

She was still there when Janet got up at eleven. Tina was already gone. Janet took a shower, and as she was coming back down the hall, in her bathrobe, with a towel around her wet head, she heard a melodious whistling in the staircase; not Tina, but Nick, working absently, and with variations, on one of the songs from
Cyrano.
"Night making all things dimly beautiful, one veil over us all, you are all light, I am all shadow." He burst through the double doors, and, seeing Janet, let fall his armful of notebooks and hugged her vigorously. He was not in fact quite all bones, but had a good thin layer of muscle over any part of him Janet had had the opportunity to investigate; his hugs were irresistible.

Janet squeezed him firmly and dropped her arms. He stepped back, his hands on her waist below the belt of the bathrobe, and looked wary and a little affronted, very much as Robin had last night. The end of the term seemed very far off.

"Have you talked to Robin today?" Janet said.

"No; why?"

"We heard the pipes last night," said Janet, "during the party you didn't bother to tell us you weren't coming to." He raised his eyebrows but said nothing. Janet went on, "We saw you ride past. You weren't cowering under your bed. Would it really be too much to ask to request that you tell me you had another party to go to?"

"I'd hoped to get out of it," said Nick, briefly.

"Well, why couldn't you have said that?"

Nick now looked completely confused, like an actor being given the wrong cue. Janet could see, on his expressive Irish face, the precise moment when he flung caution to the winds. "I thought you'd want to go," he said.

"All I want," said Janet, "is a little basic communication. You don't have to go sneaking off to Classics Department parties without me; all you have to do is to tell me that's where you're going if you think I expect you somewhere else."

"There aren't so many of them," said Nick, rather vaguely.

"You can have them every Saturday night if you want to!" said Janet. "Just
tell
me."

"I'm not much used to that," said Nick.

A number of unwise answers rose to Janet's lips. She rejected them. It was difficult to explain what was the clearest thing in the world to you, the basis of your assumptions and the thought behind your actions. She finally said, less temperately than she wanted to, "Can you manage to tell me if you won't be appearing?"

"I don't expect to not be appearing at all often."

"That'll just make it worse."

"Will it?" said Nick, as if this were some brand-new psychological theory of great appeal but little likelihood. He pushed his glasses back up his nose and kissed her on the right eye. "That would be a pity."

Is that a capitulation or a threat? thought Janet. She felt obscurely in the wrong, as if these things ought to be managed on some level other than that of speech. Which way, she was fairly sure, lay madness, or at least a great deal of trouble. "I wanted to ask you," she said, pursuing this thought rather than the actual discussion, "about your herbal remedy."

"What about it?"

"Where do you get it? Could we persuade Tina to try it instead of those damn pills?"

"It's rather a complex formula," said Nick, slowly, "made me by a friend, as a favor.

Thomas would have to ask him. And you know, Tina is a biologist and a materialist; I doubt if she wouldn't be suspicious."

"What is there to be suspicious
of,
for heaven's sake?"

"Not a thing, bless you. But she'd want to know what was in it, and I couldn't tell her, not for my life."

It was true that Tina had read the entire text of the package insert for her pills on the bus coming home, according to Molly, and also that she had pestered the doctor at Planned Parenthood with a lot of questions. Janet would have pestered the doctor, too, had she been reduced to going to one. Having seen what the pills did to Molly and Tina, she preferred Nick's remedies. She wondered what the package insert on the box said. She had put it away and almost forgotten it. If the instructions were too vague or disquieting, she should find out in time to arrange an alternative.

"So, then," said Nick. "Molly wants to teach Robin to play Scrabble. Shall we watch the carnage?"

The package insert, when Janet got around to examining it, was handwritten in flowing characters, like the lists of ingredients on the baked goods from natural-food stores. It said, "For the preventing of conception in the young and healthy; they are hot and dry in the third degree, provoke hunger, and wholesome for the stomach, stay vomiting, stop the terms, help sore heads in children and the studious."