Changeling: Starry Wisdom Temple
The Minneapolis Renaissance Faire. Steven Brust is standing on a table waving
a tankard and singing a blues version of "Wild Rover." In the corner of
the picture is a tall, thin woman with a wild cloud of dark hair and silver hoops
in her ears so big they touch her shoulders. She's playing the bodhran. If you could
see the performer's pass in her belt pouch, the name on it would be Maggie Wren.
The pouch also contains three hits of blotter acid, two condoms, a wicked little
butterfly knife, a lump of amber with a 3-millimeter-long human skull embedded in
it, and the gold MasterCard of a lawyer from St. Paul who won't realize it's gone
until two days later, when Maggie and the twelve-string Gibson she bought with it
are seven states away.
The Roots Festival in San Diego. She's on the beer-garden stage sitting in with the
Balkan Cafe Orchestra, dressed in flowing tie-dye with a pound of Afghani silver
and carnelians at her throat. Her long fingers are dancing on the neck of her guitar
like angels let out of school early on a Friday afternoon. She has a perfectly legal
ID in her pocket that says Molly Underhill. Four guys in the audience and one on
the festival staff are convinced they'll sleep with her before the weekend is over.
Three of the five are right. One of them never sees his gold watch again.
The Midsummer's Eve celebration of the kithain in Santa Fe. Among the brilliant plumage
of the Sidhe in all their splendor she stands out for her darkness. Having shed her
mortal seeming, she stands seven feet tall and narrow as a willow tree. Her skin
is olive bronze, the pupils of her eyes are the colour of beaten gold and her face
is ornamented like a Tuareg's with tattooed indigo dots. She tells two stories of
the Great Serpent of Darkness, and then the tale of the Fabulous Manx-Cat Ploy, all
of which she learned from a Seattle troll named Frank. When she curtsies afterwards,
holding her batiked skirts away from her long legs, the enthralled changelings around
her throw pearls and opals and dross into her lap. By dawn she has been influential
in the breaking of an engagement, the end of a marriage, and a prank involving Vicks
Vapo-Rub in a K-Y Jelly tube that leads to a certain satyr barely escaping lynching.
"Ch'mista" will not be welcome in Santa Fe for a long, long time--though
the local pookas call her a heroine and more of them claim to have slept with her
than even she would admit to.
The New York Renaissance Faire. On stage by the main gate, Kenny & Tzipora are
singing "Twa Corbies" as if the Clancy Brothers had written it, and a dark-haired
woman in a low-cut peasant bodice is working the fringes of the crowd. Thirty-seven
jerks from Jersey--ahem, paying customers--go home minus cash and plus tiny scraps
of paper on which are written, in a spidery hand, "The Renaissance is not just
anything pre-Beatles."
The Michigan Womyn's Music Festival. Topless like half her audience, her torso painted
in crescent moons and morning glories, she's telling the story of how Coyote's penis
wandered off without him and got stuck in the bramble bushes. They know her as Yarrow,
and many of them are falling in love with her already. Several will share her tent,
and not realize until after she's gone that they never had sex with her–she just
kept them up all night asking them to tell her their stories.
The Renaissance Pleasure Faire in Agoura--the biggie, the Faire that started it all.
During its run, eighty percent of Los Angeles County's drug traffic moves through
Agoura. Under the bright banners that flutter from the trees, a busker called Annie
Silver--barely legal age, by the look of her--ducks into the back of the chocolate
booth to join her friends for an "attitude adjustment break," as the booth's
manager cuts lines of cocaine for everyone. A minute later she's back on the main
road, singing "Maids When You're Young Never Wed an Old Man" as passers-by
drop money into the basket at her feet. After dark, when all the "turkeys"
are gone, the Faire Folk and the Fair Folk break out the rum and the hashish and
there are tales told around the fires and twosomes and threesomes rutting in the
bushes. It is the closest thing to paradise that "Annie" has ever found.
For months after the Faire season ends, she keeps her costume, unwashed, in the bottom
of her backpack and takes whiffs of its heady scent--woodsmoke, dust, beer, sweat,
massage oil, hashish--to keep her spirits up between adventures.
A Fleetwood Mac concert in Denver. While Stevie Nicks sings, dozens of girls in flowing
dresses get up and dance in the aisles. The dark-haired one in ragged lace moves
like nobody else; not actually dancing, but telling a story with her long limbs.
A raven seems to fly down and settle on her upflung wrist--how did it get into the
auditorium? It must have been a trick of the light. Nobody sees it when the lights
come up after the show. Nine people open their wallets the next day to find their
cash missing, dried flowers left in its place.
The first springtime of the seventies in Seattle. A too-pretty young man recognizes
something in the scruffy underaged girl panhandling at the foot of Queen Anne Hill
in the cold rain. He brings her back to his Freehold. When asked to tell a story,
she shamefacedly admits she doesn't have one. Taunted by the sidhe childlings--who
ever heard of an eshu without a story?--she flees the common room, followed by the
Seelie sidhe lordling who found her and is desperate to get into her panties. He
shortly finds that she isn't wearing any. The next day she overhears him boasting
to a friend that he won their bet over who could get a hippie girl into bed the quickest.
By nightfall she's gone, and so is his chimerical sword. A week later a little eshu
calling herself Magpie has a fine story to tell the Unseelie freehold in Vancouver--and
the sword to prove it.
The Summer of Love, San Francisco. A young runaway is dancing in Candlestick Park.
She has no name, no identification. She does have a cloud of unruly dark hair, a
long dress the color of smoke, and an anklet of green glass beads on a silver wire.
Her little feet move over the grass without crushing it, and her eyes are fixed on
something far away that others cannot see. Anyone looking at her can tell that she
ran away from a comfortable suburban life somewhere only a few days ago and never
looked back. A few who look at her know why.
©1998 Allison Lonsdale
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