Woman King Read online

  There are probably plenty of people who wouldn’t expect sports to be a family interest in a house primarily full of women, but they would be wrong. My grandfather loved the Giants, and I have fond memories of listening to the play-by-play coming out of every radio, in every room of the house. When we would drive into the city, the sound of the cheering crowd from the car’s radio would envelop us as we crossed the Bay.

  My mother is not as enthusiastic about baseball as I am. But she does enjoy soccer, a result of her many sojourns to Europe over the years. She calls it football, but few people in the U.S. understand what she means, since that name is reserved for the large, hulking creatures that hurl themselves at one another every Sunday. Soccer, on the other hand, is a sport that involves very thin, agile men (usually very handsome men) running up and down a field for 90 minutes in shorts. Who wouldn’t enjoy that? My dinner companions appeared not share my love for baseball or soccer, however.

  “Baseball is not a sport,” was all Elsa could muster as she sampled another dumpling. “There is no blood involved.”

  Changing the subject seemed like the best idea. “Tell me about being a fairy, Lily.”

  Lily put down the container of garlic green beans. “What do you want to know?”

  “Why do you work in the library?” was my first question, followed by “Where is your family and what kind of powers do you have?”

  “I come from a clan of fairies that has always lived in the human world,” Lily said. “We’ve dedicated our lives to public service. Although we make visits to the Other Side, we mostly stay in this world. I’m one of a long line of librarians. And yes, I have added a little magic to the library system. Who would return to a library if it never had the book you wanted? Having a well-run, popular library system is good for San Francisco.”

  “Why libraries?”

  Lily finished chewing before she spoke again. “Because fairies are voracious readers of books and texts in many languages. Working in a library affords us the luxury of being surrounded by words and information. There is no better way to learn about humans, and the world in general, than to work in a library.”

  “What does that have to do with public service?” I asked, putting another dumpling on my plate.

  “That is easy,” Lily said. “Libraries are important for humans. In the human world, being able to read is the key to all of your activities. It’s pretty clear that the less people know, the worse their fate is. Allowing people to have access to the same kinds of information for free is important. When people are uneducated it …well, it creates opportunities for others to manipulate the situation.”

  Elsa snorted. “Humans want to be controlled; they appreciate limited choices.”

  I decided to ignore Elsa’s pointed remark for the moment. “Tell me about the rest of your family.”

  “Everything you know, the story I’ve told you, is true. My father and mother are retired, but did work as librarians. They do live in San Jose. My sister really lives in Seattle and my brother really lives in Portland. He’s a firefighter, but that’s rare; normally we’re terribly afraid of fire.”

  “And your powers? What kinds of things can you do?”

  “I’m not a circus act,” Lily said, again sounding slightly annoyed. “I don’t do tricks.”

  “I’m sorry, Lily. That came out badly.”

  Elsa placed herself into the conversation and turned to me. “I think we need to focus our energies on freeing up your gifts.”

  “And how do you plan to do that?”

  “I have to run an errand,” she said, “but tomorrow we’re going out on an overnight adventure.”

  “Overnight? Are we camping?” I asked, wondering what destination she had in mind.

  “You could say that,” she said with a smile. “I need to leave in a few moments to look for some supplies. Assuming I’m successful, we will leave here tomorrow night after sunset.”

  “Where are you going? And how will you get there?” I asked casually, not expecting the reply I received.

  Elsa looked at Lily when she spoke. “I travel using a portal in the park.”

  “Can I come tomorrow?” Lily asked.

  Elsa nodded. “Yes, it will be better if there are two of us.”

  “What’s a portal?” I asked, worried.

  Lily and Elsa exchanged knowing glances. “It will be better if we show you,” Elsa said.

  “OK,” I said, feeling relieved to avoid, if temporarily, yet another hidden detail about the world I’d missed. Lily and Elsa left the house in unison and I watched as they walked down the street together into the night’s thick fog. One minute I could see them very clearly, and the next, they were gone.

  ****

  CHAPTER 8

  For the first time in many days, I woke up alone in the house. I confess I missed my roommate, or at least I missed the feeling of having someone nearby. I don’t have a great track record with men. There have been no great romances in my life. Instead, I have amassed a collection of single-night memories. To be sure, there have been a few multi-week excursions, but they never transformed themselves into repeat engagements.

  It would be nice to feel great passion for someone, to feel my body long for another with every fiber of my being. But that has not been a sensation I’ve experienced. Perhaps watching my mother come unraveled has made me timid. From where I sit, spilling over with emotion looks messy, and if unreciprocated, humiliating. As a result, the only male voice heard emanating from my living room on a regular basis is the baseball radio announcer Jon Miller.

  Even without Elsa, I followed my normal schedule, rising early to eat a banana and then heading straight for the park to work out. I entered at Ninth Avenue and ran west toward the coast. I managed to reach the graffiti scarred retaining walls of Ocean Beach in less than an hour.

  To cool down, I decided to walk onto the broad beach and stretch on the sand. The fog from the night before had retreated, perching along the edge of the horizon as if it couldn’t decide what to do next. The sun was coming up into the sky and the air around me was cool and mild. It felt delicious to be outside. I decided to prolong the feeling by walking over to Judah Street for a cup of coffee at a nearby beach café.

  The Java Shack was fairly busy, with other people apparently also working at extending their morning. I managed to find a table outside and picked up a rumpled copy of the San Francisco Chronicle someone had left behind. For several minutes I sipped my cappuccino, gazing at the sea, enjoying the first moments of quiet I’d had in days.

  As I regarded the foamy waves rolling in and out with the tide, I worried about what was coming next. I was rapidly moving toward a moment when I would have to open myself up again to feel my emotions and those of others, something I had avoided for a long time. I felt like Pink at the moment when the bricks of the Wall are set to come tumbling down. What would I discover, I wondered, when the dust settled?

  I pushed aside my worries and settled in to scan the day’s news. Within a few minutes I came upon a headline that surprised me, “Internet CEO Seeks Return to Congress.” I read with interest a story about my former boss, Levi Barnes, and his decision to run for office again, this time as a congressman representing Silicon Valley. My first job in Washington had been with Levi when he was a congressman from Salt Lake City. After losing a particularly tough re-election bid, he’d left politics and moved to the Bay Area to become an entrepreneur. It seemed unthinkable that, after losing so badly before, he would give up his privacy and success to reenter national politics. What had changed for him? It had been more than a year since the two of us had spoken, and I made a mental note to call him to catch up. I was also curious to see who he had hired to run his campaign.

  The high-pitched squeak of the N-Judah streetcar jarred me out of my thoughts. It was time to head home. Seeing that a train had reached the end of the line, and was turning east again toward downtown, I decided to hop on and ride back to my house.

  By mid-af
ternoon, a few hours later, Elsa had returned. She walked straight into the kitchen and began brewing some kind of concoction that gave off a quite unpleasant aroma. I came into the kitchen just as she was placing small button-shaped fruits into boiling water with what looked like cinnamon sticks and a vanilla bean.

  “What are you making?” I asked, trying to breath through my mouth.

  “It’s going to be a tea,” she said. “You’re going to drink some tonight before we go out.”

  “Is it going to taste as bad as it smells?”

  “Actually, it’s going to taste worse,” she said, keeping her back to me as she hunched over the stove brewing her potion. “The trick is to drink quickly and not think about it.”

  “What does it do?” I asked, thinking that I should know what I was getting myself into.

  “It should help you regain your senses,” Elsa said. “It’s an old recipe that has been used by many women over the years.”

  “Where did you go last night?”

  Elsa kept her back to me. “New Mexico, mostly. I had a few other stops to make.”

  “You don’t seem to have flown on a commercial jet to get there,” I said, hoping to provoke a discussion about portals and time-walkers.

  For the record, it’s not that I find it difficult to imagine that there is more to things than what we see at first glance. And I don’t doubt that the world has more complexity to it than we imagine. I’ve just never wanted to accept it.

  What I want from life is something more rational. If I’m going to pay attention and care, then I want to know how the mysteries work. If I can understand the mechanics, then I can manage my fear. After years of living in a very logical fashion, now I’m expected to be Alice in the looking glass, throw caution to the wind and drink my potion so all can be revealed.

  “You know I didn’t fly on an airplane,” Elsa said. “I used a portal. It’s a door between places. They are scattered across the city.”

  “Where do you go when you use them?”

  “With a little practice and focus, you can go anywhere,” Elsa said.

  “Am I going to use one tonight?”

  “No. Tonight you’re going to work on finding those instincts of yours so we can see what kind of empath you really are. I sense you have great abilities, Olivia, but you have stuffed them so far beneath your skin that only the most drastic efforts will draw them out.” She removed the pot from the stove and strained the contents into a ceramic pitcher, which she placed in the refrigerator.

  “It will be better chilled.”

  “I’m scared,” I said, admitting the obvious. “What’s going to happen to me tonight?”

  “Lily and I will be with you,” Elsa said. “Whatever happens, and maybe nothing will, you will be with us and we will take care of you.”

  “This is not a reassuring speech,” I said.

  “I’m not here to reassure you.” Her voice was stern. “I’m here to protect you and to get you to stop living a half-life.”

  “A half-life,” I repeated. “How is running a business and owning a home a half-life?”

  “Olivia, you were born with a sixth sense—a set of instincts that allows you to read people before they even know something themselves,” she continued. “Instead of using those skills, you have buried them and left yourself vulnerable to all kinds of danger and mischief. At minimum, you might have been able to stop Stoner Halbert’s demon from stealing your clients. Do you think a man with eyesight would knowingly blind himself? That’s what you’ve done.”

  “I haven’t blinded myself,” I responded, my pride wounded once again. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I see more clearly than you do?”

  Elsa snorted. “After tonight we will see if that’s really true. You should go upstairs and rest. You won’t get much sleep tonight.”

  ****

  CHAPTER 9

  Not long after drinking the tea I began to feel ill. Elsa must have known what was coming because she was at my side, quickly guiding me toward the sink where I began to wretch. Lily was also there, running her hand up and down my back in a soothing motion. They were both murmuring words in my ear to calm me, but I was in no shape to understand. Large sounds filled my head—vibrations, really—that resonated off my sternum as I grasped the edge of the sink. A great freight train was barreling through me, and I could feel it coming down the tracks through every bone in my body.

  “What is happening to me?” I asked, my heart racing inside my chest.

  Elsa grasped my shoulder and whispered in my ear, “Don’t be afraid. Whatever happens Lily and I will not leave your side. Just remember: Not everything you see tonight will be real.”

  We must have left the house after Elsa’s remarks, but the particulars of our exit are a bit fuzzy. Next, we were walking through a pair of ornate green iron gates that featured delicate-looking vines and leaves. We strode onto a red brick path sheltered by a canopy of trees. Moonlight illuminated the path and suddenly I felt as if I were a bride in a wedding, although what I was about to be joined with remained a mystery. In the middle of the path sat a well-worn sundial perched on a stone pedestal. The metal glowed with a golden light. Fascinated, I reached out to touch the illuminated dial. The moment my skin made contact with the triangle of the dial, I felt a jolt of energy run through my body as a panoply of voices began to pierce my skull. I laughed aloud as if I understood the joke, and tried to listen to the conversation.

  Before I could lock onto a single word, Elsa removed my hand from the dial. I turned to face her and exhaled suddenly. She was awash in color, shimmering waves of yellow, orange and green pouring from her body.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” I exclaimed, reaching out to touch the light. “You’re so beautiful.”

  “What do you see?” she asked.

  “I see colors,” I said. “I hear voices and I see colors.”

  “Good,” Elsa said. “Don’t worry, you’re not crazy. The peyote is working. Let’s see what happens next.”

  I looked up to see billowing strands of moss hanging from a Monterey pine. A cold wind arrived, carrying in a wicked fog bank that was rolling across the park at a furious speed. I should have been cold, but instead my skin burned as the crisp air enveloped me. On fire, I quickly shrugged out of my fleece and flung it to the ground. Again, I lost track of time, and when I refocused, I found that we were standing in the main concourse of Golden Gate Park, where the de Young Museum and Academy of Sciences are located. I swallowed hard, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth.

  The park was bursting with noise. Every living being, it seemed, made some kind of sound as it moved. The night was awash in color. I absorbed all of this information and felt it take root as a young tree establishes itself in new ground. I laughed again, feeling an uncanny sense of new knowledge. I was ruminating on the meaning of the sounds I was hearing when my attention was abruptly drawn to a fountain in the center of the concourse.

  The bowl of the fountain was illuminated by lights below it, and in the center of its pedestal stood an enormous stone saber-toothed tiger. Trapped between its massive claws was a serpent that was partially coiled around the cat’s body. Locked in a fierce battle, the massive, muscled arms of the cat, which looked more human than feline, seemed to be moving, wrestling with the snake.

  I sat down on a wooden bench nearby, unable to tear my gaze away from the fountain.

  “It’s Elsa!” I yelled aloud, surprised at the sound of my voice. “It’s Elsa taking on the devil.”

  Now Elsa laughed. “What do you hear, Olivia?”

  Responding to her question, I strained to listen. At first I could not detect any sound coming from the fountain. But as I focused, I began to feel a vibration moving through my body and I stood up, unable to sit still.

  “Up,” I said. “It’s saying, ‘Get up and come in.’ ”

  Elsa preened like a proud mother. “Very good. That’s exactly what it’s saying. One day soon we will go inside, but for now we
have to say goodbye to The Guardian.”

  “The Guardian,” I whispered to myself. As I murmured the name, I caught sight of a light coming from a large tower in front of us. I also could feel the intense light. “Bright!” I screamed as the light expanded behind my eyes, momentarily blinding me. I pressed my hands to my eye sockets and bent my head in pain.

  “What light, Olivia?” Lily asked. “Where is the light coming from?”

  I pointed up toward the tower, which belonged to the de Young Museum.

  Elsa turned me so that my back was away from the source of the light. “You must breathe deeply and try to push the light out of your mind, Olivia. Focus on the light and push it away.”

  The pain from the light roiled my already sensitive stomach. Taking a deep breath, eventually I was able to do what Elsa asked. I inhaled and exhaled, slowly bringing my attention to the center of my forehead where the pain was the strongest.

  Meanwhile, Elsa had begun shouting at no one in particular in a language I didn’t understand. While Lily stood nearby looking grim, Elsa walked briskly to the fountain, touched the edge of the cement and disappeared.

  Hand outstretched, I screamed for her. Lily was at my side immediately, pulling me away. Quickly we grabbed our things and began to run, setting a brisk pace through the wet foggy night. As we passed through the damp, muddy trails of the park’s forests, I removed more clothing, dropping items along the way. My body temperature continued to climb, despite the fact that I was now wearing nothing but a running bra and bike shorts.

  “I need water, Lily,” I said, my throat raw from running in the cold night air.

  She opened a backpack and handed me a bottle.

  “Drink,” she said. “The effects of the tea will start to wear off in a few hours.”

  “Is Elsa coming back?”

  “I’m not sure,” Lily said. “She had to go see someone.”