From Earn Fire
Shahnzee
Mallory Dock, on the Gulf of Mexico on the western side of the Island City, is famous for its nightly ritual gathering of Sunset-watchers. It is long established as a place where friends and strangers meet, and expectancy and meeting form the woof and warp of the fabric of its ambience.
The dawn sky had brightened enough to reveal dim outlines and some details. As if posing for a tourist snapshot, a pelican drowsed inscrutably on a decayed wooden piling that swayed in the current of the in-coming tide next to the concrete dock. His name was Shahnzee, but most people called him "Pete." He had come to believe that "Pete" meant "food."
Too sudden and too far from the dock for a snapshot, if a tourist had been there, a dolphin broke the surface of the calm Gulf water and exhaled with a deep sigh through the blowhole in the top of his head.
The half-awake pelican knew that dolphins often feed on schools of fish moving with the tide, and so he half-registered the occurrence.
But instead of diving again to feed, as Shahnzee half-expected, the dolphin stayed on the surface and rolled partly onto his side, exposing one eye, one earhole, and one side of the perpetually smiling mouth. In itself, this was not unusual, but it most often happened when people were nearby. When Shahnzee looked at people, it was normally just long enough to determine if they would feed him. Dolphins seemed to study people for reasons not connected with food, but Shahnzee could not imagine why.
He glanced hopefully around the dock and parking lot but saw no one. He looked back at the dolphin and followed his gaze to the derelict round cable hut near the edge of the dock. To one side of the padlocked wooden door lay a pair of shoes tied together by the laces, but Shahnzee could see no people. He lifted his wings in a shrug and was settling back into his drowse when the roof of the hut fell in with a crash and a cloud of dust.
He lifted his wings in alarm, prepared for flight, but he hesitated. He had staked out his claim early and did not want to give it up until early-rising tourists or fishermen had served his breakfast. He nervously watched the cloud of dust float toward him and awaited developments.
The dolphin kept his eye on the hut with people-watching intentness and an anxious twist in his grin. A muffled thud on the door sent a shower of rust flying from the padlock. A louder thud, and a section of the door softly splintered outward in a spray of powdered dry rot.
A human head appeared in the opening, and Shahnzee's face sagged with forlorn hope. The head lifted, showing a bearded face with the eyes shut tightly as if in pain. The man sniffed curiously, like a dog in strange surroundings, but kept his eyes closed. He reached a hand through the opening in the door and tested the concrete before placing weight on it.
The dust and a faint aroma of whiskey reached Shahnzee. He turned his back and noticed the dolphin submerge. The man squinted his eyes open and looked around. He saw the pelican and smiled, then chuckled softly.
At the sound, Shahnzee glanced over his shoulder and saw the head disappear back through the door, followed by the hand. A weathered, padded camera bag flew out the door and landed with a clinking, rattling crash. Then the hand appeared and carefully laid a small, ancient harp next to the bag. The harp's silver strings collected dim starlight from the still-dark western sky and glittered. Grooves, notches, and scratches covered the neck, fore-pillar, and body like some forgotten system of hieroglyphics. Then the man twisted his shoulders sideways to fit the narrow gap in the door and eased the rest of his body out. His feet were bare and his eyes screwed shut again.
He sat with his back against the hut and took the harp into his lap. The fingertips of both hands traced the patterns on the harp thoughtfully. A gold ring on the right forefinger gleamed quietly in harmony with the glittering strings. The ring was a hoop that whirled into two single spirals springing into a double spiral that overlay them.
The man gathered six strings with the thumb and two fingers of each hand and tested the tuning with a chord. The tinkle of the upper notes and the rich hum of the lower notes rippled through the dense, humid air. Shuffling around to face the man, Shahnzee vaguely sensed a familiar meal sharer close to the man without seeing anyone. A double jig--"The Man Who Died and Rose Again"--bounced out of the harp, and its last note launched "The Minstrel Boy."
The march tune's chords thundered. Drones thrummed low and swelled. The defiant melody pulsed and stormed like squally winds. Shahnzee anxiously scanned the sky for rain clouds, but the dolphin's grin widened. The man hummed through to the last two lines, then sang with soft intensity:
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee.
He dropped his hands and squinted his eyes open to look around while the final chord dissipated, but the dolphin had submerged, and he saw no one but the pelican. He closed his eyes and put his hands to the strings again.
"Eileen Aroon" stepped forth majestically from the air, her form lightly sketched by chords. Single notes and doublings and glissandos painted almost-visible leaps, twirls, stances, and bows. Shahnzee blinked and blinked again to try to solidify the presence-trace into a breakfast-bearer. At the end, the man whispered the next to last line--"Truth is a fixèd star"--and Eileen Aroon exited through the upper strings in a series of entrechats extended by "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." Seven eyes--the resurfaced dolphin kept one toward the hut--lifted to focus on the one star that still clung to the lightening western sky.
The resonance of the last silver note filled the harp and the man through his ear pressed to the shoulder of the harp. The note was included in the woman's voice that said "That was lovely," and he didn't recognize it as a strange voice until it continued: "Play some more."
Startled, he opened his eyes and looked around for the source.
"I'm right here, on your left."
He stared vaguely and unseeing in the direction of the voice.
"Oh, you're blind."
The young woman in cut-off jeans and T-shirt sitting next to the cable hut moved forward, and the dark green cloak that had shielded her from the cool of the night and the hardness of the concrete and all eyes but the dolphin's slid to the ground. Shahnzee recognized her as the familiar food provider and dining companion he had sensed. The man glanced down at the cloak and frowned at her bare feet, then raised his eyes to her face with intense but cautious interest.
"Not blind," he said. "I just couldn't see you."
She glanced around to avoid his stare and saw the pelican.
"Oh, Shahnzee," she called. "Hello."
Pockets of woe deepened hopefully in Shahnzee's face.
"Do you have any food?" she asked the man.
"No, but actually I am a bit ..."
"Never mind. I think I have a banana."
She pulled a small, durable banana from the back pocket of her cut-offs and peeled it. Shahnzee bounded from the piling and lumbered toward her. She tossed the banana into his flight path. He grabbed it, remarked the man's expression that out-forlorned his own, granted the more pressing need, wheeled over the man, and awarded the banana to him.
The man caught the banana and saluted the pelican with it--"Thank you, Shahnzee"--before stuffing it eagerly into his mouth. Shahnzee returned to his piling, and the man and the woman studied each other while he chewed.
"Do you always sleep here?" she asked to deflect his intense gaze.
"Sleep? In a ... a ..." He waved a hand vaguely at the cable hut behind him and laughed. "No, not sleep, exactly."
The gesture fanned the whiskey fumes upwind toward the woman, and she shrank back.
"I live over there," he said to reassure her, waving toward the town.
She looked at the warehouse across the parking lot and nodded.
"I see."
"No, in a house," he corrected, to dilute the fear he saw rising in her eyes.
"Of course."
She tried to avoid glancing at his dirty clothes and bare feet and uncombed hair. Then she looked deliberately to pay back his critical inspection of herself. They stared with the instinctive challenge and curiosity, but closed, not open, of children meeting at a playground for the first time.
He underguessed her age at a mature twentyish--girlish but independent-minded. She bracketed his between twenty-five and forty--haunted boyish eyes, silver-shot brown hair. Her face: pretty, fresh, strong, compelling. His: rugged, sensitive, appealing. Beautiful and handsome only to eyes colored by love. Eyes: both sets variable blue and guarded, dangerously vulnerable. Hair: hers summer-short and sun-reddened, his straggling over the ears with a matching charge of silver in the three-month beard. Each just above average height--five-eight and six feet. Neither could place the other's accent closer than foreign-veneered northern.
He studied her bare feet intently and seemed not to be reassured by what he saw, in spite of the protection afforded her by his old friend, the cloak Feith Fiadha. One bad sign and one good. When he looked up again, she was relieved by his rejection of her but frightened by the ferocity of the defenses in his eyes. She could not have guessed that a few months earlier he would have invited her home without hesitation and with innocent intention. "To prove I live in a house," he would have said, but in fact to provide shelter from the fears he sensed in her.
But just now he wanted sleep safe from unpredictable and often dangerous barefooted people. And to be alone with his thoughts and feelings as soon as he could bring his brain up to speed with coffee. Coffee, then sleep. How long had it been since that bitter comfort had surged through him? Since the perfect cup served by the Hamper of Gwyddnaw Garanhir supplied by Morgan Mwynfawr's Chariot when it delivered him to ...
"What month is it?" he asked suddenly.
"What month?"
She drew back further and clutched the green cloak.
"And date?" he added.
"When do you think it is?"
He counted on his fingers, watching her for a reaction. There was none. A good sign. Finger-counting had spooked Arianrhod.
"We must be into July by now," he calculated.
She opened her mouth to give a smart answer, then closed it and looked puzzled.
"Well, the moon ... Last night it was ..." She made a crescent with her right hand. "But I don't know the date."
Not many people calculated by the moon besides Arianrhod and Brigit. That made two bad signs and two good. On balance, he chose caution. He stood up, balancing the harp on his left shoulder, and slung the camera bag over his right, wincing at the jingle of loose pieces.
"Well, I'll be going now." He hoped she wouldn't follow him.
"Goodbye," she said pleasantly. "I'm sure you'll have no trouble finding a date if you ask someone else."
The shakiness in the bravado of her gentle mockery made him glance at her eyes before she could mask the fear again. He was leaving. The fear remained. It wasn't him she was afraid of. What, then? Or who? With an effort, he held back the hand that instinctively tried to reach out to her.
"That's all right," he said. "I'll check it in the paper when I get home."
He had a sudden vision of more than two months worth of Miami Heralds stacked like firewood on his porch. The image made him smile and dulled his caution. He stood in front of the woman with his right hand extended.
"No." Her voice was panicky. She pulled Feith Fiadha around her and disappeared. "She's not yours."
"I know that. I didn't mean ..."
His hand with the spiral ring was grabbed invisibly.
"The spirals," she gasped.
The cloak slid off as she stood up, visible again.
"The harp. The star," she babbled, ignoring the incomprehension in his face, not believing he wouldn't understand. "You're the One. Oh, thank God, you're ... you're ..."
Her eyes rolled up, showing white, and she slumped against him in a faint. He stooped quickly to throw his right arm around her and catch her chin with his collarbone. The harp and the camera bag defied gravity and clung to his shoulders. He wondered fleetingly about that: Macalla, yes, but why the camera bag? He stood for a moment in perplexity, looking around the parking lot. It was empty.
He took a step toward Feith Fiadha, trying to think of a way to pick up the cloak without putting the woman down. He tripped over the woman's feet, staggered, and caught his balance at the edge of the dock. Concern rippled the dolphin's grin. The man didn't notice the dolphin, but the dock-edge reminded him of a recent experience with a cliff, and it gave him an idea. He sidled away from the edge and spoke hopefully:
"Seud."
The concrete beneath their feet blurred, and a barrel-shape covered with short black-spotted yellow hair grew out of the Saint Johnswort-scented blur. It solidified as it rose upwards from the dock between their legs. A horse's head materialized at the end of the blur behind the woman, and a rump and a tail formed behind the man. Both were lifted on the horse's back as the legs emerged until four hooves stood solid on the concrete. The man nodded toward the green cloak.
"Seud, do you suppose ..."
The horse reached down and picked up the cloak with his teeth, shook her, and tossed her up and back. The cloak spread and pitched herself like a tent on the man's and woman's heads.
"Thank you, Seud. Thank you, Feith Fiadha."
Shahnzee had spent all his long life in Key West and had seen many things most people rarely even read about. When his banana-bearing friend and his fellow but superior food-cadger and the horse winked out of sight, he composed himself to resume his drowse, even though he could still hear the man's voice, and the dolphin continued to watch the spot from where the people had disappeared.
"Now, the way I usually go home, Seud ... Never mind. I'm sure it's part of the Pattern."
The horse reached down and picked up the man's forgotten shoes and began walking toward the exit of the parking lot. At the sound of his name whistled by the dolphin, Shahnzee opened his Gulf-side eye to see a fish flying toward him. He caught it by the tail. Remembering the hungry man, he opened his land-side eye. He heard the receding clip-clop of the horse but didn't see anyone, so he saluted his thanks to the dolphin with the fish, flipped it, and swallowed it head first.
"Everything comes round in time," the dolphin whistled in the sea-creature dialect of Old Speech.
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