Changer's Daughter Read online

  JANE LINDSKOLD

  Obsidian Tiger Books

  Changer’s Daughter

  Copyright © 1999 by Jane Lindskold.

  First published as Legends Walking by Avon Books, Inc.

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

  Cover design by Pati Nagle.

  Obsidian Tiger Books, Albuquerque, New Mexico

  This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  As ever, for Jim

  Introduction: Changing Changer

  Changer’s Daughter—which was first published under the title Legends Walking—was the first time I set out to write a sequel to an earlier novel, in this case, my award-winning novel Changer. It’s difficult to talk about a sequel without providing spoilers for the first novel, but I’m going to give it a try.

  The first challenge I faced was that Changer had been written without any anticipation of a sequel. This meant that, unlike series where the novels are really parts of one story, I needed to come up with a story that would fit in without violating the action of the earlier novel.

  Frankly, I’ve always hated those sequels that undo the progress made in the first book. I think you know what I mean: Novel One ends with the hero and heroine happily married. In Novel Two they’ve broken up or are arguing or whatever. Or Novel One ends up with the enemy defeated, but in Novel Two we find that there was a boss, and the boss is even worse, and now our hero has to go after the boss.

  That doesn’t mean that when writing a sequel it’s not necessary to take into account questions that might remain from the first novel. Whatever happened to that character who showed promise by the end of Novel One? Did the defeat of the opposition really end the troubles they’d instigated?

  Once I’d asked myself those questions about Changer, I asked myself an even more important one. Did I want this sequel to focus on characters and situations already introduced or did I want to focus on completely new elements? The answer was that I wanted to do both. Shahrazad, the coyote pup, had really surprised me in Changer. I wanted to see what she’d do next. Then there were the internal politics of the athanor. The compromises made at the conclusion of Changer were fraught with further complications.

  Yet I’ve always loved books that take me over the horizon, to new places and new situations. I didn’t want this sequel to become nothing more than an exercise in myopic gazing into the athanor crystal. Where could I explore?

  West Africa immediately sprang to mind. I was introduced to the complex cultures of West Africa many years ago when I was a newly minted PhD at Fordham University. There I was asked to tutor a very talented West African philosophy and theology student named Emmanuel Eze. The person who approached me on Emmanuel’s behalf explained the problem as follows: “He’s brilliant, multi-lingual, and incredibly flexible. However, his writing is all over the place. One paragraph will be perfectly clear, then the next will make no sense at all. We’re not asking you simply to teach him grammar, but to figure out the source of the problem.”

  I liked Emmanuel right off and found him easy to talk to. I think the feeling was mutual. After reading several of his papers, I said, “These are excellent, but you have a real problem with tense.” Emmanuel replied with something close to desperation, “Tense! Tense! Dr. Lindskold, what is tense?”

  I blinked. This was clearly more than a request for a definition of a grammatical term. Eventually, we worked out that, although Emmanuel had memorized case endings for numerous languages, he’d never understood the concept of dividing time up into neat little blocks. For him, past, present, and future were not separate elements, but rather elements of a continuous present. Suffice to say that in figuring out a way that Emmanuel could reshape his thinking to enable him to use tenses correctly, I learned a lot about the cultures that had shaped my student.

  As a thank you, Emmanuel gave me a copy of Wole Soyinka’s epic poem Idanre. From there I went on to read other West African writers. I found therein a fascinating blend of tribal cultures and Christian imports, the modern and the traditional thriving side by side.

  This came back to me when I considered the sequel to Changer. I decided that West Africa, later narrowed to Nigeria, would be a perfect place to set a portion of the novel. It was a land where, to this day, gods and mortals walk side by side. My athanor would find themselves right at home.

  Another incentive for setting part of the novel in Nigeria was that I had always craved mythic fantasy that went beyond a handful of cultures—and with these cultures usually presented in isolation from the rest of the world. At best, the mythic elements of two cultures might war against each other. Changer had made clear the athanor were an international community. Changer’s Daughter would give me a chance to show a new facet.

  Using Nigeria as a setting did present a challenge. I had never been to Nigeria, nor was it likely I would be going there before the novel was written. Book research could only take me so far. I’d find myself puzzled by little things. For example, I kept encountering references to a dish called “moi-moi.” Moi-moi was almost always described as “succulent.” I read the ingredients and discovered that moi-moi was made primary from chickpeas. How could that be succulent? Well, I found a cookbook with a recipe for moi-moi and made it. Guess what? It is succulent!

  And so it went... I had a wonderful time involving myself in cultures where time is seen differently, where personal names shift according to who is addressing whom. And through this window, I also found the means to introduce a type of athanor that is—even within the athanor community, where the members know how most myths have their roots in reality—considered by many a myth.

  From the start, this evolving novel was Changer’s Daughter to me, and not only because one of the plot lines dealt with Shahrazad the coyote. Like most of my titles, Changer’s Daughter is meant to mean one thing to the reader at the start of the book and something else at the end. Changer’s Daughter was the book I turned in to Avon and the book my editor and I discussed.

  Then the word came down that some anonymous higher-up at Avon Books didn’t like the title. I’ve never known why. A declaration was issued to find another title. After creating and consulting over massive lists, the title we settled on was Legends Walking. It was okay (although I’ve always had to resist a desire to refer to it as Legends Hopping, Legends Skipping, Legends Bouncing, and so forth). Now, however, with this reissue I’m giving the novel back its original name.

  Finally, as a bonus, I’m including “Witches’-Broom, Apple Soon,” the only athanor short story I’ve written to this point. Originally published in the anthology Faerie Tales, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and Russell Davis, it’s a story about Shahrazad the coyote, Demetrios the Faun, and, well, witches’-brooms and a woman who hunts them.

  Whether you’re revisiting the novel or venturing into the story for the first time, I hope you have fun. I certainly have...

  Anger and forgiveness

  Two bright arrows

  shot

  Piercing a heart

  1

  The more you love your children the more care you should take to neglect them occasionally. The web of affection can be drawn too tight.

  —D. Sutten

  Life has its own scent. Contrary to common belief, there is nothing light or floral about it. Rather, it is akin to the yeasty scent of rising dough or the earthy richness of freshly turned soil.

  Catching this scent one morning upon the wind blowing f
rom the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, the Changer knows that the change he has been considering is upon him. Without further hesitation, he barks.

  His sharp-voiced summons is answered by the emergence of his daughter from beneath the gnarled juniper where she has been drowsing. Twigs and dried juniper foliage cling to her fur. She yawns and shakes, emitting a jaw-creaking whine.

  When she is alert, Changer begins walking, setting his course downhill, out of this patch of autumn sunshine, ultimately out of the mountains. His daughter follows him without question, partly from trust, partly because she lacks the vocabulary to ask anything as simple as “Where are we going, Dad?”

  The baby weeps, his little brown face twisted up but his eyes wide open as if he seeks to make sense of a universe that hurts so very much. His infant skin is thickly marked with swollen pustules, dark red and running against cocoa-colored skin.

  His mother, a young woman just out of college, cradles him in her hands, gently lowering him into a basin of water in the hope of bringing down his fever. The water is tepid, but it seems to bring some comfort. The baby stops crying. After a moment, his mother realizes that he has stopped breathing as well. She screams.

  The dull slap of bare feet on an earthen floor answers her cries. A shadow darkens the door to a bedroom now become a death chamber. Beyond the shadow can be heard the murmur of many voices, gossiping, conjecturing, a few raised to wail, but the shadow does not speak.

  It crosses the room and in the light from the partially curtained window resolves into a large woman, full-breasted and mature, lovely as a ripe yam is lovely. She lifts the infant’s body from where his mother’s hands still cradle it within the cooling water.

  “He has been taken by this illness,” the older woman says, “as are so many others.”

  “Oh, Oya, how I hate the King of Heaven!” the young woman sobs.

  “So do I, Aduke,” Oya answers, studying the girl quizzically. “I think the time has come to make him answer.”

  Chris Kristofer opens the front door of the hacienda at Pendragon Estates to find a tall, lean man standing in the sandstone entryway. The man’s black hair is long and loose. He wears nothing but a pair of red-nylon gym shorts, this despite the fact that the overcast November day is anything but warm.

  “I want to use the telephone,” the man says in a deep, gravelly voice.

  The last time Chris had seen this man he had lacked an eye, but now he has two, both the same yellow as those of the young reddish gold coyote bitch sitting on her haunches beside him. Catching Chris’s glance her way, the coyote thumps her tail in greeting.

  Clearing his throat, Chris says, “Come right this way, sir. You’re the Changer, right?”

  “Yes.”

  The Changer doesn’t seem inclined to say more, but when Chris started this job a month and a half before, he had been given a short list of people who were to be assisted without question. The Changer had topped this list. So now Chris leads the Changer into an empty seminar room and indicates the telephone.

  “Is that all, sir?”

  “Get me Frank MacDonald’s number.”

  Chris pulls an electronic organizer from his pocket and scribbles a number on the pad by the phone.

  “And tell Arthur I’m here.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t call me ‘sir.’”

  Chris exits without another word, noting as he does so that the young coyote has happily settled down to chewing on a corner of an expensive handwoven rug.

  “Arthur?” Chris enters the King’s office after a polite tap at the door. “You have a guest.”

  The athanor who is once again using the name Arthur Pendragon looks up wearily from his computer screen and glowers at the human standing in the doorway. Chris Kristofer is an Anglo of average height and average build. His brown hair is neither too long, nor too short. His hazel-green eyes behind large wire-rimmed glasses are intelligent. There is nothing distasteful about his appearance, except that he is not the person whom Arthur wishes was there.

  “Yes? Does this person have an appointment?”

  Chris knows perfectly well that the King resents him. However, he also knows that keeping this job is a matter of life or death for him. Literally. He schools his voice to patience and answers:

  “It’s the Changer, Arthur.”

  “Oh!” Arthur’s blue eyes widen. He stands, smoothing his neat, reddish gold beard in a thoughtful gesture. In that attitude, he no longer looks like a slightly overweight desk jockey. He looks like the king he has been in many lifetimes. “Ask the Changer if he will come to me here.”

  Chris hesitates. “Shahrazad is with him, sir.”

  Arthur remembers the young coyote with a fondness that is tinged by memory of the destruction she can create.

  “I see. The day is too chilly for us to sit in the courtyard. Ask the Changer to come to the kitchen. He’ll be hungry after his journey. Shapeshifters always are.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Another thought strikes Arthur.

  “Is the Changer wearing anything?”

  “Gym shorts.”

  Arthur sighs. Doubtless the shorts are stolen. The Changer not only has no respect for personal property, he doesn’t really acknowledge its existence.

  “Chris, there are clothes that should fit the Changer in one of the ground-floor guest rooms. Ask him if he wants them.”

  “Right.”

  When Chris has left, Arthur recalls that the last time the Changer arrived unannounced on his doorstep, all sorts of trouble had ensued—trouble that had nearly meant the end of Arthur’s reign. The trouble hadn’t been the Changer’s fault, but Arthur has never completely discarded the primitive superstitions that he had imbibed along with his mother’s milk in ancient Sumer.

  “It can’t possibly be that bad again,” he says to the empty air. But leaving his office he raps his knuckles against his desk. The gesture is comparatively modern—having originated in ancient Rome.

  “Touch wood,” he mutters.

  First their reservations had been lost. Then the plane had a flat tire that necessitated an overnight layover at some obscure airfield until a new tire could be flown in. After that, they had paid a small fortune in bribes -- “dash” the Nigerians called it— before they could clear Customs. Then they had paid even more money to be taken to a small hotel run by friends of Anson, only to be told that the manager and his wife had cleared out a week before, leaving no forwarding address.

  Fresh from the United States, from not only civilization but also from the privileged life of a wealthy man, Eddie Zagano is having the most fun he has had in years. He’d forgotten how much fun it could be to be irresponsible, not to be at anyone’s beck and call, not to have it matter when he arrived somewhere or when he left.

  True, he’d fidgeted a bit at first, but his traveling companion, Anson A. Kridd, had laughed at him so hard that Eddie had fallen into a sulk. He’d let Anson deal with everything. Then, when after a day or so no catastrophe occurred, he realized that Anson could deal with everything. After that, he had relaxed and enjoyed the ride.

  “Your soul is taking color from your face, eh?” Anson says some days after they arrive in Lagos. “Not so much hurry-hurry, lots more taking the day as it comes.”

  Eddie nods. “Ifa alone knows the destiny the unborn soul has chosen, not me. Prayer might change my life, but worrying won’t.”

  His speech is in flawless Yoruban, spoken with the accent of a native of Lagos, but Eddie is no more Yoruban at heart than he is naturally dark brown of skin, hair, and eye. Both his mastery of the language and his new appearance come courtesy of Arthur’s staff wizard, Ian Lovern. These sorcerous alterations enable Eddie to pass as a citizen of Nigeria, born to the Yoruba people, and a resident of Lagos. The false papers he cobbled together from his complicated data bank back in New Mexico complete the trick.

  To conceal his ignorance of Lagos, Eddie’s cover story is that he has been studying for the
last ten years in the United States and has only just come home. Since Lagos is as large as New York City and not an intimate family compound, he can memorize enough details to maintain his deception.

  Anson A. Kridd (also known as Anansi the Spider, and by many other names, not all of them complimentary) needs no such elaborate cover. In this life he is registered as Anson A. Kridd and possesses dual citizenship in Nigeria and the United States. For this trip, he has cropped off the long dreadlocks he had worn until recently and colored his English with a heavy local accent, but otherwise he remains as before: long, thin, and wiry with only a small potbelly despite his voracious appetite.

  For Eddie, who only recognizes the perpetual five o’clock shadow in the face that looks out from his reflection, Anson’s constancy is the buoy he holds on to as he launches into the uncharted chaos of Lagos.

  “So, what’s next, boss?” he asks, as they come out of a shop where Anson has been interrogating the barber.

  “I want to find my friends who are missing,” Anson says, “and I begin to think I know where to find them. All the gossip says that they received a message from their home city, Monamona, and went there.”

  “Without leaving a forwarding address?” Eddie asks, the organized American in him surfacing. “And knowing that you were coming?”

  “They must have had a reason,” Anson answers, but he frowns as he says this. “Fortunately, I, too, have business in Monamona.”

  “You do?” Eddie says, almost indignant. “This is the first I have heard of it!”

  Anson grins. “So, maybe I forget to mention it, eh? No matter what good Arthur think, I have a job and earn my living by it. That job is what will take us to Monamona.”

  “Oil,” Eddie says. “Right?”

  “Oil,” Anson answers. “Come, I ask some more questions. Then we see how best we get to Monamona. Maybe we kill two birds with one stone and eat from a full pot.”