Very Best of Charles de Lint, The (3 page)

Meran shook her head. “Oh, no. I’ll best this little fellow with my wits, or not at all. I made that bargain with myself the first time he tripped me in the woods. Now come. Where’s that tune you promised me?”

Cerin brought Telynros up onto his lap and soon the cottage rang with the music that spilled from the roseharp’s strings. Outside, Old Badger listened and the wind continued to make a dance of the leaves between the trees and only Meran could have said if the smile returned to its voice or not, but she would speak no more of bodachs that night.

* * *

The morning Cerin left, Meran’s favourite mug fell from the shelf where it was perched and shattered on the stone floor, her hair when she woke was a tangle of elfknots that she didn’t even bother to comb out, and the porridge boiled over for all that she stood over it and stirred and watched and took the best of care. She stamped her foot, but neither she nor Cerin made any comment. She saw him to the road with a smile, gave him a kiss and a jaunty wave along his way, and watched him go. Not until he was lost from sight, up the track and over the hill, with the sun in his eyes and the wind at his back, did she turn

and face the woods, arms akimbo, to give the trees a long considering look.

“Now we’ll see,” she said.

She returned to the cottage, Old Badger at her heels.

The morning passed with her pretending to ignore the presence she knew was watching her from the forest. She combed out her hair, unravelling each knot that the little gnarled fingers of an elfman had tied in it last night. She picked up the shards of her mug, cleaned the burnt porridge from the stove, then straightened the kindling pile that had toppled over with a clatter and spill while she was busy inside the cottage. The smile on her lips was a little thin, but it never faltered.

She hummed to herself and it seemed that the wind in the trees put words to the tune:

Catch me, snatch me,

Catch me if you can!

You’ll never put the fetters

On a little kowrie man!

“That’s as may be,” Meran said as she got the last of the kindling stacked once more. She tied it in place with knots that only an oakmaid would know, for she was the daughter of the Oak King of Ogwen Wood and knew a spell or two of her own. “But still we’ll see.”

When she went back inside, she could hear the kindling sticks rattle about a bit, but her knots held firm. And so it went through the day. She rearranged everything in the cottage, laying tiny holding spells here, there and everywhere. She hung fetishes over each window—tiny bundles made up of dried oak leaves and acorns to represent herself, wren’s feathers for Cerin, a lock of bristly badger hair for Old Badger, and rowan sprigs for their magic to seal the spell. Only the door she left untouched. By then twilight was at hand, stealing softfooted across the wood, so she pulled up a chair to face the door and sat down to wait.

And the night went by.

The wind made its teasing sounds around the cottage, Old Badger slept under her chair. She stayed awake, watching the door, firmly resolved to stay up the whole night if that was what it took. But as the hours crept by after midnight, she began to nod, blinked awake, nodded again, and finally slept. When she woke in the morning, the door stood ajar, her hair was a crow’s nest of tangles, and there was a small mocking stick figure drawn with charcoal on the floor at her feet, one arm lifted and a wide grin almost making two halves of the head.

The wind gusted in through the door as soon as she was awake, sending a great spill of leaves that rattled like laughter across the floor. Stiff from an uncomfortable night spent in a chair, Meran made herself some tea and went outside to sit on the stoop. She refused to show even a tad of the frustration she felt. Instead she calmly drank her tea, pulled loose the new night’s worth of tangles, then went inside to sweep the leaves and other debris from the cottage. The stick figure she left where it had been drawn to remind her of last night’s failure.

“Well,” she said to Old Badger as she went to set down a bowl of food for him. “And what did you see?”

The striped head lifted, eyes mournful, until the bowl was on the floor. And then he was too busy to reply—even if he’d had a voice with which to do so. Meran knew she should get some rest for the next night, but she was too busy trying to think up a new way to stay awake to be able to sleep. It was self-contradictory, and she knew it, but it couldn’t be helped. A half year of the bodach’s tricks was too long. Five minutes worth would be too long. As it drew near the supper hour, she finally gave up trying to rest and went to the well for water. A footfall on the road startled her as she was drawing the bucket up. She turned, losing her grip on the well’s rope. The bucket went rattling down the well until it hit the bottom with a heavy splash. But she didn’t hear it. Her attention was on the figure that stood on the track.

It was an old man that was standing there, an old travelling man in a tattered blue coat and yellow breeches, with his tinker’s pack on his back and his face brown as a nut and lined with age. He regarded her with a smile, blue eyes twinkling.

“Evening, ma’am,” he said. “It’s been an awfully dry road I’ve been wending, no doubt about that. Could you see yourself clear to sparing me a drink from that well of yours?”

It’s the bodach, Meran thought. Oh, you mischief-maker, I have you now.

“Of course,” she replied, smiling sweetly. “And you’ll stay for supper, won’t you?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. I wouldn’t want to put you to any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

“That’s kind of you.”

Meran drew the bucket up once more. “Come along to the house and we’ll brew up some tea—it’ll do more for your thirst than just water.”

“Oh, it does that,” the old man agreed as he followed her back to the cottage. Meran watched him with many a sidelong glance as they entered the cottage. He gave the chair facing the door an odd look, and the charcoal drawing an even odder one, but said nothing. Playing the part of an old tinker man, she supposed the bodach meant to stay in character. A tinker would know better than to make remarks about whatever oddities his hostess might have in her house. He laid his pack by the door and Meran put the kettle on.

“Have you been travelling far?” she asked.

“Oh, far enough for these old bones. I’m bound for Matchtem—by the sea, you know. My son has a wagon there and we winter a little farther down the coast near Applewater.”

Meran nodded. “Do have a seat,” she said.

The old man looked around. She was busy at the table where the other chair was, so he sat down gingerly in the one facing the door. No sooner was he sitting, than Meran slipped up behind him and tossed a chain with tiny iron links over him, tying it quickly to the chair. Oh, the links were small and a boy could have easily broken free of them, but anything with iron in it bound a bodach or one of the kowrie folk. Everyone knew that.

Meran danced around in front of the chair.

“Now I have you!” she cried. “Oh, you wicked bodach! I’ll teach you to play your tricks on me.”

“I
am
an old man,” the tinker said, eyeing her carefully, “but I’ve played no tricks on you, ma’am—or at least none that I know of. My name’s Yocky John, and I’m just a plain travelling man.”

Meran smiled at the name, for she knew a word or two in the old tinker language. Clever John, the bodach might call himself, but he wasn’t clever enough for her.

“Oh?” she asked. “You didn’t tangle my hair, nor break my crockery, nor play a hundred other little mischiefs and tricks on me? And who was it then?”

“Is it trouble with the little folk you’re having?” Yocky John asked.

“Just one. You. And I have you now.”

“But you don’t. All you’ve caught is an old tinker, too tired to even get up out of this chair now that he’s sitting. But I can help you with your bodach, I surely can. Yocky John’s got a trick or two for them.”

Outside the wind made the leaves laugh as they rushed in a rattling spray against the walls of the cottage. Meran listened, then looked uncertainly at the tinker. Had she made a mistake, or was this just another of the bodach’s mischiefs?

“What sort of tricks?” she asked.

“Well, first I must know how you’ve gained the little fellow’s ill will.”

“I don’t know. There’s no reason for it—save his nature.”

“Oh, no,” Yocky John said. “They always have a reason.” He looked slowly around the room. “It’s a snug place you have here—but it’s not so old, is it?”

Meran shook her head. It was just a year now since she’d lost her tree—the tree that a wooderl needs to survive. It was only through Cerin and the spells of his roseharp that she was able to live without it and in this cottage that they’d built where her tree had once stood.

“A very snug place,” the old man said. “Magicked, too, I’d say.”

“My husband’s a harper.”

“Ah. That explains it. Harp magic’s heady stuff. A bodach can’t live in a harper’s home—not without an invitation.”

“Still he comes and goes as he pleases,” Meran said. “He breaks things and disrupts things and generally causes no end of mischief. Who’d
want
to have a bodach living with them?”

“Well, it’s cold in the winter,” Yocky John said. “Out in the woods, with no shelter but a cloak of leaves, maybe, or a rickety lean-to that the wind howls through. The winds of winter aren’t a bodach’s friends—not like the winds of summer are. And I know cold, too. Why do you think I winter with my son? Only a fool tries to sleep in the snow.”

Meran sighed. She pictured a little kowrie man, huddled in a bare-limbed winter tree, shivering in the cold, denied the warmth of a cottage because of a harper’s magics.

“Well, if he felt that way,” she said, “why didn’t he come to us? Surely he’d have seen that we never turn a guest away. Are we ogres?”

“Well, you know bodachs,” Yocky John said. “He’d be too proud and too shy. They like to creep into a place, all secret like, and hide out in the rafters or wherever, paying for their way with the odd good turn or two. It’s the winter that’s hard on them—even magical kowrie folk like they are. The summer’s not so bad—for then even an old man like myself can sleep out-of-doors. But in the winter…”

Meran sighed again. “I never thought of it like that,” she said. She studied the tinker, a smile twinkling in her eyes. “Well, Yocky John the bodach. You’re welcome to stay in our rafters through the winter—but mind you leave my husband and I some privacy. Do you hear? And no more tricks. Or this time I’ll let his roseharp play a spell.”

“I’m not a bodach,” Yocky John said. “At least not as you mean it.”

“Yes, I know. A bodach’s an old man too—or it was in the old days.”

“Do I look like a kowrie man to you?”

Meran grinned. “Who knows what a kowrie man would look like? It all depends on the shape he chooses to wear when you see him, don’t you think? And I see you’re still sitting there with that wee bit of iron chain wrapped around you.”

“That’s only because I’m too tired to get up.”

“Have it your way.”

She removed the chain then and went back to making supper. When she called him to the table, Yocky John rose very slowly to his feet and made his way over to the table. Meran laughed, thinking, oh, yes, play the part to the hilt, you old trickster, and went and fetched his chair for him. They ate and talked awhile, then Meran went to bed, leaving the old man to sleep on the mound of blankets that she’d readied for him in front of the hearth. When she woke in the morning, he was gone. And so was the charcoal drawing on the floor.

* * *

 “So,” Cerin said when he came home that night. “How went the great war between the fierce mistress of the oak wood and the equally fierce bodach that challenged her?”

Meran looked up towards the rafters where a small round face peered down at her for a moment, then quickly popped out of sight. It didn’t looked at all like the old tinker man she’d guested last night, but who could know what was what or who was who when it came to mischief-makers like a bodach? And was a tinker all that different really? They were as much tricksters themselves. So whether Yocky John and the bodach were one and the same, or merely similar, she supposed she’d never know.

“Oh, we made our peace,” she said.

The Badger in the Bag

This is what happens:

there is a magic made
.

—Wendelessen,

from “The Old Tunes”

They travelled in a tinker wagon that year, up hill and down. By the time they rolled into summer they were a long way from Abercorn and the Vale of the Oak King, roaming through Whistlederry now, and into the downs of Dunmadden. The wagon belonged to Jen Kelledy who was a niece of Old Tess, Cerin’s foster-mother, making her a cousin of sorts. She was a thin reed woman with a thatch of nutbrown hair as tangled as Meran’s, but without the strands of oakmaid green that streaked Meran’s brown curls. Among the tinkerfolk she was known as Tulo Jen—Fat Jen—because she was so thin.

The road had called to them that spring—to Meran who was no longer bound to her tree, and to her husband the harper—so they packed the cottage up tight when Tulo Jen’s wagon pulled into their yard one fine morning and, before the first tulip bloomed, they were away, looking like the three tinkers that one of them was, following the road to wherever it led. They left Old Badger behind, for he was never one to travel, but they carried a badger all the same. Tulo Jen had a fiddle with a boar’s striped head carved into the scroll. She called it her badger and kept it in a bag that hung from the cluttered wall inside the wagon, just above the spot where Cerin’s harp was tied in place. There wasn’t a tune that, once heard, Tulo Jen couldn’t play on her fiddle.