Five-time winner of the World Fantasy Award, Terri Windling has been a guiding force in imaginative literature for more than a decade. Now with The Wood Wife, a heady, luminous novel filled with passion, mystery, and wonder, Windling takes her place beside such authors as Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, and Patricia A. McKillip as one of modem fantasy’s finest talents.

  The Wood Wife is the story of Maggie Black, who walked out of her life as the wife of a trendy West Coast musician to pursue her dreams. When Maggie’s mentor, prize-winning poet Davis Cooper, died mysteriously in the canyons east of Tucson, he left her his estate, and the mystery of his life—and death.

  Now, in Cooper’s desert home, Maggie begins a remarkable journey of self-discovery that will change her forever. She is astonished by the power of that harsh but beautiful land and intrigued by the uncommon people who call it home—especially by Fox, a man unlike any she has ever known, who understands the desert’s special power.

  As she reads the letters and papers left behind by Cooper and his lover, Anna Naverra—a gifted painter driven mad by the visions she saw—Maggie will come face-to-face with the wild, ancient spirits of that place and undertake a quest to discover their dark, long-hidden secrets.

  “A wonderful, elegant fantasy—sensuous

  fascinating, and eerily spiritual.”

  —Robert Holdstock

  “This is a novel of muscle and tenderness,

  of sharp edges and great delights.”

  —Charles de Lint

  “If there is a single person at the nexus of

  fantasy literature in the 1990s, it is Terri Windling—as

  editor, as writer, as painter, as critic, as muse.”

  —Jane Yolen

  ALSO BY TERRI WINDLING

  The Changeling

  Anthologies edited by Terri Windling

  The Armless Maiden and Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors

  Elsewhere I (with Mark Alan Arnold)

  Elsewhere II (with Mark Alan Arnold)

  Elsewhere III (with Mark Alan Arnold)

  Faery!

  Borderland (with Mark Alan Arnold)

  Bordertown (with Mark Alan Arnold)

  Life on the Border

  Snow White, Blood Red (with Ellen Datlow)

  Black Thorn, White Rose (with Ellen Datlow)

  Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: First Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Second Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Third Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fourth Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Fifth Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Sixth Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Seventh Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Eighth Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror: Ninth Annual Collection (with Ellen Datlow)

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  Praise

  Also By the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapters

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Postscript

  About the Authors

  Back Cover

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  THE WOOD WIFE

  Copyright © 1996 by Terri Windling

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  The author is grateful for the permission to reprint the following works: Excerpt from “Ars Poetica” by Jorge Luis Borges, from Dreamtigers by Jorge Luis Borges; translated from the Spanish by Mildred Vinson Boyers and Harold Morland; © 1964 by Jorge Luis Borges; published 1970 by E. P. Dutton &. Co., Inc., by special arrangement with the University of Texas Press, Austin, TX. “Trees” by Michael Hannon, from Ordinary Messengers by Michael Hannon; © 1991, Floating Island Publications, Point Reyes Station, CA. Excerpt from “Rain (Rapa Nui)” by Pablo Neruda, from Pablo Neruda: Selected Poems; translated from the Spanish by Anthony Kerrigan; © 1970 by Anthony Kerrigan; published 1972 by Dell Publishing Co., Inc., New York, NY. Excerpt from “The Gardens” by Mary Oliver, from American Primitive by Mary Oliver; © 1983 by Mary Oliver; published by Little, Brown and Co., Boston, MA. “Evening” by Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke; translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell; © 1982 by Stephen Mitchell; published 1982 by Random House, New York, NY.

  Edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, Inc.

  Design by Basha Durand

  ISBN 0-312-85988-0

  Printed in the United States of America

  The Wood Wife is for

  Brian, Wendy, and Toby Froud,

  with love.

  And in memory of Herbert Emil Rasmussen

  (1916-1994), who is greatly missed.

  Who wants to understand the poem

  Must go to the land of poetry.

  —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  PROLOGUE

  On the night that Davis Cooper died, coyotes came down from the hills to the town in the desert valley below. They came from the Santa Rita Mountains in the south. From the Tucson Mountains in the west. From the Catalinas in the north. From the Rincons, where the sun would rise over the dead man’s body.

  They entered the sleeping city, shadows travelling stealthily through a network of dry riverbeds, slipping through the streets, through parking lots, through drainage tunnels and alleyways. There was one small boy who saw them pass, his nose pressed to the window glass as four, ten, twenty coyotes drifted through suburban yards, headed for some wilder place where the child longed to follow. Later his mother would tell him it was only a dream, and he would believe her.

  The place where the coyotes gathered—by the hundreds, a sea of silver fur beneath a moon like a bright new coin—was not a place that one would easily find on any city map. Davis Cooper had known that place. One other had found it, and returned. Now she ignored the calling song. She shut the window, sat down at her kitchen table, lit another cigarette. She was free now. Free. The word tasted sour. Her heart was as heavy as a stone.

  Johnny Foxxe made a camp among the trees at Deer Head Springs, high in the Rincon Mountains. In the city below on the desert floor the spring night had been soft and warm, but here it was sharp, biting through his denim jacket and the flannel shirt beneath. He gathered deadfall for a fire. The wood was dry and lit easily. The smoke streamed upward to the stars and marked his presence, if anyone watched.

  He breathed in familiar mountain smells and bent down at the lip of the springs to taste the sweetness of the water. Deer Head Springs was on a trail so steep that few ever climbed it except the animals who had given it its name: the small, shy desert mule deer, and the elusive white stag whom he’d glimpsed only twice in all his years on the mountain.

  The first time he had seen the stag had been by Red Springs, many years before. The second time had been right here, two months ago, on the day he’d left the mountain. He smiled. Now he was back again. It was several miles by mountain trails to the Red Springs house where he’d been born, but the entire length of the Rincon range was home to Johnny Foxxe. Each time he left it, it summoned him back. He’d never been able to resist its call. No woman, no job, no other ties had ever bound him so securely.

  In several days he would make the long hike to the canyon where the old house stood. But now he had a job to do. His smile vanished. He sat down by the fire and arranged his tools beside him. A copal flute, a deerskin drum. A hunting knife and a sharpening stone. He sat and bided his time until the water trapped the image of the moon. He fed live oak branches into the fire, waiting, preparing himself.

  Dora del Rio woke from a deep sleep in the middle of the night. Something was howling outside the bedroom window—a strange, feral, ferocious sound, neither quite human nor animal. She reached for Juan, but he wasn’t there asleep in the bed beside her. She turned on the light. The cats were curled and stretched among the bedclothes. She counted all four. The cats were all right. The dog was snoring on the rug below, but Juan was gone and the bed was cold. The clock read 1:15 in the morning.

  Outside the howling stopped abruptly. She got up, shivering, and reached for her shawl. Through the window, she could see lights on in the barn where Juan had his studio. She stopped to put on dusty boots beneath her

long white nightdress, and then she stepped out into the dark and crossed the stable yard.

  The doors to the barn were flung open. Inside, Juan stood in the center of the room, a hunting knife clutched in his hand. Ten years worth of paintings hung in tatters, the frames shattered, the canvases slashed. Clay sculptures littered the room in pieces. Carvings smouldered on the wooden floor, threatening to torch the whole barn.

  Dora stood and stared at him. Then she ran to fetch a bucket. Juan watched, impassive and glassy-eyed, until she doused the flames with water. Then he wrenched the bucket from her hands and struck her, hard, across the jaw. He had never hit his wife before and even in this wild state the action seemed to startle him; he stopped and looked at her, wide-eyed. And then he made that howling sound, an animal sound, a sound of pain, wrenched from deep in the gut.

  He pushed past Dora and out the open door. She fetched another bucket of water and thoroughly drenched the piled wood. Then she dropped the bucket and ran to the door. Juan had already disappeared. The night was quiet. The moon was bright. Blood spattered the cobbled yard. She stopped in the house just long enough to put on a sweater, gloves, and call the dog. Then she snatched a flashlight and went out to follow her husband up the mountainside.

  She sent the dog first and followed after, hoping the dog would follow Juan. The hills sounded strangely quiet now; the birds were still, the coyotes as silent as though they all had disappeared. She climbed for many hours that night, farther and farther up the mountain slope. Her jaw ached where Juan had struck her, a thing he’d vowed he would never do. Dora shivered and she continued to climb, looking for signs of his passage. She saw jackrabbits, a pair of deer, a huge white owl passing overhead, but she did not see any sign of Juan and at last she admitted defeat. She whistled for the dog and circled back toward the house nestled in the hills below. Beyond were the distant lights of the city farther down on the desert floor.

  She found him on the way back home, at the place where Redwater Creek cut through the granite to form deep bathing pools. He was curled up, naked, fast asleep on the flat boulders at the water’s edge. He had marked himself with oil paint: jagged white lines, green snake curves, blue spiral patterns and slashes of red. There was paint in his hair, blood on his chin. He had cut himself above one cheek; any closer and he would have lost the eye.

  She touched him gently. “Juan?” she said.

  He opened his eyes and smiled at her. Then tears began to fall, mixing with blood, oil paint and dirt. “I want to go home,” he whispered to Dora.

  “All right, my love. Here, take my hand.”

  He rose to his feet unsteadily, leaning heavily on her smaller frame. His feet were bare. His legs were bruised. His skin was cold and his eyes confused. She led him down the steep mountain path, the dog trailing silent behind.

  The saguaro cactus were straight and slim, standing ten and twelve feet tall, bathed in the silver moonlight. They clustered on the rocky slope, silent guardians of the low foothills, their arms upraised as if in prayer, or preparation for flight.

  At their feet was Davis Cooper. The dead man lay facedown in the dirt, his body sprawled in the bottom of a dried-out riverbed. The old man's lungs were filled with water, although no water had run through that wash for forty years. His skin was stained with smears of paint; the fingers of one hand were curled as though he had held on to something tightly—but whatever it had been was gone. Only the poet's body remained, circled by a single pair of footprints lightly pressed into the ground and soon scattered by the desert wind.

  Tomás stared into the fire, aware of the other fire that burned that night several miles away. The flames leapt high into the dark. The mesquite wood burned quick and hot. He could feel a rhythm, a pulse, a drum, sounding deep in the rock below.

  He poured kinnikinnick from a pouch into the scarred palm of one hand, then tossed a mixture of herbs and tobacco into the dancing flames. The voice of the fire spoke to him. And the voice of the wind in the mesquite wood. Of the stone people, and of the water flowing there at the canyon’s heart.

  It has ended, these voices told him. It has ended, and it has just begun.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  * * *

  The hills call in a tongue

  only the language-haunted hear,

  and lead us back again

  into the place where we have started.

  —The Wood Wife, Davis Cooper

  Nigel came down the street toward her, his face shadowed with annoyance. Her heart, that traitorous organ, still leapt when she saw her ex-husband through the window glass. She knew then why she’d run back to Los Angeles, away from the nice man up north who said he loved her; Nigel was a hard act to follow. He entered the cafe, his irritation and his energy like a cloud that entered with him, changing the weather of the entire room. And reminding her of why she’d once run away from Nigel too.

  He looked around the cafe with displeasure. Maggie had picked the place, a little Czech bakery popular with film students and would-be poets half her age. She imagined that he would have preferred some trendy new restaurant where he could make a point of paying the extravagant bill. But this was her turf, not his, for once in their lives. She needed every advantage she could get. And he’d be mollified once he tasted the pastry. Good food, in Nigel’s book, always won out over ambiance.

  “For god’s sake, there you are.” Nigel threaded his way through the students to her table in the corner. She stood for his embrace. In her boots with the heels she was even taller than he was. He kissed her on both cheeks, the European way, and said, “You’re looking well. Fantastic, in fact.”

  Maggie shrugged off the compliment as lightly as it was given. Unbidden came the image of Nigel’s current wife, a skinny young Parisian fashion model.

  “How are you, Nige? You look . . . tired,” she said.

  He sighed as he sat, rested his chin on his hand, and gave the grin that had won her heart years ago. “What day is this? Thursday? Still Wednesday for me. I never got home to bed last night. We play Toronto this weekend, Chicago on Tuesday, my alto is sick and my percussionist has just discovered his wife is sleeping with the soundman. So what’s good here?”

  “The coffee. The strudel. Any of the unpronounceable Czech pastries. The French ones will disappoint you.”

  He signalled the waitress, a young woman with hair dyed an alarming shade of magenta wearing a “Kafka in Prague” T-shirt covered with paint. Nigel ordered for both of them without consulting Maggie, a habit she’d never been able to get him to break. He remembered this too late, and gave her a guilty smile. “Is there something else you wanted? I’ll call her back.”

  Maggie shook her head. “So long as there’s coffee and lots of it. Look, Nige, I can’t stay that long. I’ve got a plane to catch at four.”

  “Today?” he said, genuinely taken aback. “I thought you’d be in L.A. a while.”

  “This is just a stopover. To pick up a few things. And see you.” She rolled a fork across the table nervously. “Actually, I’m headed for Tucson.”

  “Tucson? As in Arizona? Whatever for?” He leaned back in the chair and asked the question casually, but she knew that she had rattled him. His transatlantic accent shifted back to his native British whenever he was feeling out of sorts.

  Despite her nervousness, she took a certain malicious pleasure in telling him, “I’m going to live there for a while. I found another tenant for the house here; I told that piano player of yours he could have it. He’s made an offer to buy it, and I think we should consider it. I can’t honestly imagine coming back to Los Angeles.”

  Nigel sat still, with the ominous quiet he sunk into whenever something displeased him. She envied him that. She always spoke first and thought after—and usually regretted it.

  The waitress brought their order as Maggie waited for the inevitable barrage of questions. She picked up the coffee cup gratefully, letting its warmth dispel her anxiety. She didn’t need Nigel’s permission or blessing. She needn’t have told Nigel any of this at all. So why did she feel nervous as a cat on a griddle, as her granddaddy in West Virginia used to say?

 

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