A bent old woman sat on a flat stone bench with a fiddle set to her chin. She sawed a mournful tune while a fire burned merrily within the confines of a circular hearth constructed of the same flat stone used to build the dun. The dun had a door, closed, and three high windows, shuttered, and an air of being entirely deserted, like a corpse whose spirit has fled. Beyond the fire and almost lost in the darkness stood a stone trough and next to it a well ringed by a waist-high wall of white stone and capped with a hat of thatch from whose supporting pillars hung a rope and a brass bucket. The horse whickered, smelling water, and the fiddler ceased in midsong and lowered the instrument.
Without looking around and in a voice that sounded much younger than her stooped form appeared, she said, “Peace to you on this fine evening, traveler.”
Hearing the village speech here in the spirit world surprised me, but I managed a reply to her back. “Peace to you. I hope there is no trouble.”
“No trouble indeed, thanks to my power as a woman. A fine afternoon and a fine day it has been.” She still did not turn around. “How does it find you?”
We ran down through an exchange of greetings until I finally asked, “My pardon, but is there some reason you keep your back to me, maestra?”
“Is there some reason you are unaware it is foolish to look any creature in the face in the spirit world before you are sure what manner of creature it is?”
“It is?” I blurted.
She laughed. “Na! Come. Into the light,” she said, by which I recalled my surroundings enough to realize that night had fallen and the spirit world breathed in darkness while her cheery fire alone lit the world. There was no moon, and there were no stars, yet neither did the haze that blinded the heavens feel like clouds. Here beyond the aura of light, I began to think the forest below the cliffs had begun to breathe and actually move. A twig snapped.
I led the mare out from under the oak and, staying well back, circled the hearth until I came around to stand behind another stone bench. I faced the woman across the fire.
She was old, with a crooked back, and as thin as if she had not had enough to eat for many months. But she held my eyes with the confident gaze of a person who is sure of her authority in the world. Her loose, comfortable boubou, the robe sewn out of strips of gold, red, and black cloth, appeared practical for journeying and easy to wear. Her skin was quite black, unusual in these parts, and a scarf wrapped her head, although it had slipped back to reveal twists of silver hair. She wore gold earrings.
“You’re a djeli,” I said. “A djelimuso.” A female djeli.
She opened a case and placed the fiddle and bow within, then closed it and looked at me. “What are you?”
“I’m Catherine,” I replied. The horse shied and snorted. I yanked down on the reins just as a pair of saber-toothed cats ambled out of the night and flopped down beside the well.
“Are these also your companions?” asked the djeli with remarkable calm. When she shifted her head to look directly at the big cats, her earrings caught strands of firelight and sent it shooting like arrows into the night, and then I blinked; after all, the earrings were only gleaming slightly, as any polished surface must do.
“Not my companions, but they seem to have followed me.” I did not see the sable male cat; these might be two of the ones I thought had stayed behind to guard… or to eat…
“Andevai!”
How any man could manage to look so haughty and offended while limping I could not say. And yet, infuriatingly, it was indeed Andevai who emerged out of the night, appearing very much the worse for the wear with his clothing rumpled and stained. Besides that, he looked immensely annoyed. Behind him strolled another three of the big cats, whose demeanors bore the smug satisfaction of a petted house cat that has just deposited a mouse before its surprised human. And I was very surprised.
With not even a polite by-your-leave, and ignoring the huge saber-tooths, he approached the roaring fire.
The djeli rose. “Peace, traveler. I hope the night finds you at peace.”
He pulled up so sharply that I laughed, for it was as if he’d been reined in.
“I have no trouble thanks to the mother who raised me,” he said politely. “May this night find you at peace.”
Honestly, they went on in this vein for far longer than I could ever have dragged out a greeting with my inadequate command of village customs. I thought they might wind down through the health of unnamed fathers and uncles and mothers and cousins into the well-being of the cattle, dogs, chickens, wheat, and barley and what troubles the vegetable garden might have seen since the two had last met, which, since these two had evidently never before met, would no doubt take a century to complete.