The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  She looked at him and her smile tightened. "You don't have much of a sense of humor, do you, Pinkie?" She stood up; her head almost touched the low ceiling. For a terrifying moment Theo thought she was going to wad him up like a candy bar wrapper. "In fact, I think you're a bit shallow, you know that?" She turned to Applecore. "See you when you get back from the station." She left the room with elephantine dignity.

  "She's right, but," said the sprite, rising up from the floor like a helicopter with a bent rotor. "She didn't mean nothing by it — she was only messing. You must be a deft hand with the ladies back home."

  "Yeah, whatever. I'm sorry. Aren't we supposed to be meeting Tansy?" It was bad enough having everyone back in the real world look at him like he was a complete loser — now it was starting to happen to him in Fairyland as well.

  "Oh, 'course, wouldn't want to hold you up." She sounded angry. As they walked down the hall — a different hall, Theo felt sure, but it had taken the place of the one that had been outside his door the previous night — he suddenly caught up to Dolly's parting comment. "What did she mean, 'see you when you get back from the station'?"

  "Just because you act like an utter mean eejit sometimes doesn't mean I wouldn't see you off," Applecore said quietly. "I'm not spiteful, meself."

  "You mean . . . you're not going with me?" "Go with you? Back to the City? That's why Tansy's sending one of his relatives with you. What good would I be? Besides, this is where my family lives, I'm just back, and I owe my ma and da a good long visit."

  "Oh." He was a bit stunned — no, worse than that: he was devastated. He had taken it for granted that Applecore would go with him. By the time they reached Tansy's lab Theo was feeling very depressed and could barely muster the strength to respond to the count's greeting. Another fairy was with him, one who seemed somehow a bit younger (as far as could be told with such ageless faces) and was certainly a bit plumper, which meant he was built like a slender mortal. And he actually smiled, although he did not go so far as to extend his hand to Theo.

  "This is my cousin, Rufinus weft-Daisy," Tansy explained as he led them across the house. The day was dark outside the long windows, the sky streaked with charcoal-colored clouds. "He's going to accompany you to the city."

  "Rather exciting it will be, too," said Rufinus. "Quite secretive. Like the old days of the last Flower War." Tansy gave him an irritated look. "Something which you were not yet alive to see. In any case, let's not have any talk like that where outsiders can hear. It won't do to set people thinking."

  "Yes, yes, certainly." Rufinus gave a vigorous nod. "Quite right, Cousin Quillius."

  Oh, my God, Theo thought miserably. I'm going off into horrible danger with an Upper-Class Twit for a bodyguard.

  "Now, in just a moment Heath will bring the coach around to take you to the station . . ."

  "Coach?" ". . . And thus," Tansy told Theo sternly, "we do not have much time for chat. Cousin Rufinus will have ways of getting in touch with me, but on the very small chance that you two should become separated, I suppose you should be able to reach me, too. Using public communications may not be feasible, so . . ." — he reached into the breast pocket of his white coat — ". . . I want you to have this."

  Theo stared dumbly at the tiny leather case for a moment. At last, since it seemed expected of him, he flicked it open. A piece of golden filigree lay cushioned in the velvet interior, a slightly abstract sculpture of a bird about the width and length of two extended fingers. "What . . . what is it?" he asked at last.

  "It is what we call a shell. It will give your words wings," said Tansy complacently. "Open the case and speak to it when you are in dire need and I will speak back to you."

  "Oh. It's kind of like . . . a cellular phone?" Tansy frowned ever so slightly. "It is a scientific instrument. Treat it with respect." He regained his bonhomie as they reached the large, sandcolored entry hall whose main feature was a sweeping minimalist staircase. Theo hadn't realized the house had an upper story. If in fact it did. "Hob," Tansy said, "has Heath come with the coach?"

  "He is waiting in the courtyard." "Then your adventure is just about to begin, Master Vilmos." Tansy smiled. He was pretty good at it, but still not quite convincing. "Come — I will show you the way to the front doors."

  My adventure? Theo could not help remembering other great euphemisms of the past, such as a high-school girlfriend telling him that breaking up would be "a learning experience."

  The dark clouds had rolled in overhead, turning morning's glow to a midday twilight and filling the air with the wet smell of an approaching storm. It seemed to match the change for the worse in Theo's mood. If he had half-hoped that Dolly and Teddybear and some of the other household folk would come out to bid him farewell, he was disappointed. In fact, even Tansy did not seem to want to linger too long in the outside air. As they piled into the back of the coach, which turned out to be something that looked just like a slightly old-fashioned beige town car, indistinguishable (except for some extravagant bits of silver and gold ornament) from a vehicle that Theo might have seen idling in a pickup lane at San Francisco Airport during his boyhood, Tansy spoke quickly.

  "You'll do fine. Rufinus knows just where to go — don't you, Rufinus?"

  "Most certainly, Cousin." Young weft-Daisy laughed in a confident sort of way. Theo shook his head in a mixture of confusion and resignation. He had many more questions to ask, but Applecore was crawling across his shoulder trying to get onto one of the backseat headrests and Rufinus was bashing him painfully in the shins with a huge suitcase he had dragged into the car. By the time Theo had figured out what was going on, Tansy had already slammed the door and retreated into the house, which looked much more normally shaped on the outside than he would ever have dreamed, a long modernist manor of pale stone, pagoda roofs, and notquite-transparent glass.

  Theo flinched as a nightmarish face peered in on Rufinus' side of the car. It had a long, horselike muzzle and was a sort of pearly gray-green, a skin color that went nicely with its crisp navy blue suit and cap. It had huge nostrils but no eyes. "Can I take that bag for you, governor?" it asked Rufinus. The arms that came through the car window ended in gloved hands rather than hooves, although the fingers were thick and spatulate. "I'll put it in the back."

  "Most kind, Heath," said the young fairy with lordly condescension. "Just that one — I'll keep the smaller one with me."

  When the strange greenish creature had disappeared around toward the trunk of the car, Theo let out his breath. "What . . . what is he?" "Too loud by half," growled Applecore from her perch on top of the headrest as Heath thumped the suitcase into the trunk. The sprite was apparently still feeling the effects of her overindulgence.

  Rufinus leaned toward Theo. "Of course, you're a stranger here. Heath is a doonie. They are terrible ones for the drink, doonies — fermented mare's milk is their tipple, don't you know — but extremely loyal. And they're excellent drivers, of course."

  "Excellent . . . ? But he doesn't have any eyeballs!"

  "Ah, but he smells extremely well."

  "I've smelled better." Applecore was lying back with her eyes closed. "Ooh, the bleeding Trees, me head still throbs." "Oh . . . my . . . God," Theo said quietly to himself as the chauffeur with no eyes climbed into the front seat and pulled out of the courtyard and its circular road, tires spitting gravel.

  Oddly enough, Heath did indeed prove to be a very good driver; after a few minutes, even Theo had to admit that perhaps vision was an overrated commodity in the chauffeur business. Whether it was his excellent sense of smell that allowed him to do it, or some other strange trick beyond Theo's understanding, he kept squarely to the middle of the country lanes, made the turns without anyone shouting, "Hey, you, go right!" and stopped in plenty of time for processions of small strange animals Theo largely didn't recognize to cross the road in front of them.

  Applecore had slid down from the headrest and crawled across the seat to find a more stable spot to sleep off her head
ache, curled on top of Rufinus' coat. The young fairy lord had opened his valise, which seemed to be a sort of laptop computer or the equivalent, though what it looked like was a shallow box full of mercury that eddied and rippled but somehow never spilled over the edges. Tansy's cousin watched its sparkling movements avidly and closely, talking and even laughing to himself, waving his fingers above it.

  "Reading my mail," he explained when he saw Theo staring. The skies stopped merely threatening and began more active intimidation. The first drops of rain splattered against the windshield like fat rotten berries and within moments Heath had set the windshield wipers ticking back and forth. Outside whatever beauty made this Fairyland as opposed to just Any-Old-Land was obscured by gray light and swirling rains.

  In other circumstances Theo might have wondered why a blind driver needed windshield wipers, but at the moment he was using all his energy just being miserable.

  It was nothing so simple as homesickness, although he was feeling that in spades, or even simple terror, which was in excellent supply as well. Dolly's remark about his shallowness was working away in the pit of his stomach. Was it true? Even Applecore was so disenchanted with him that she wasn't going to cut short a visit with her folks to spend time with him.

  So I'm supposed to be a hero, a diplomat, what? I didn't ask to come here. I didn't ask to have any of this happen. Just because I've got the brains to say, "This sucks" instead of pretending it's some kind of wonderful fairytale trip, does that make me a bad guy?

  Cat's pale face hovered in his thoughts, her dogged determination to add to the legend of Theo the Useless even from her hospital bed: "It's always the same. You're thirty years old but you act like a teenager. The shit you start and never finish. Your going-nowhere job . . ."

  He had to concede a few points, but he wasn't ready to give in completely. Besides, when people said you were acting like a teenager, didn't that usually mean they were jealous because you had more freedom than they did? Was having an all-consuming job you didn't like very much, like Cat's, somehow proof of being a grown-up, or proof of having given up on the possibility of better things?

  Well, nobody has to worry about my own going-nowhere job, because I don't have it anymore. And as for going nowhere in general, I've certainly gone somewhere now, haven't I? He sighed.

  The horselike face of Heath the driver surveyed him in the rearview mirror — or seemed to: it was hard to tell with no eyes there to meet his. "You're the mortal, aren't you?"

  "Isn't it obvious?"

  "Not really. You smell a little foreign, but that's true with a lot of people who've been traveling, if you get what I mean." "Yeah, I guess." Desperate for something to alleviate his gloom, Theo seized on the age-old diversion of Talking to the Driver. Suicidally bored mandarins probably did this with the rickshaw guys back in ancient China, he thought. "So how does someone get a job like yours?"

  "Ah, you know, it's kind of in the family. My dad and granddad were both hackies. That's what we do, a lot of us."

  "Doonies, you mean? Have I got that right?" "Yeah, exactly. We all used to be road-guardians — each family would have their own patch and they'd take care of it, live off small offerings, reward good or kind travelers and punish bad ones, like that. Then the Flowers up in the City decided to begin building the Interdomain Highway System and . . . well, we doonies fought it. Organized ourselves, pleaded our case in front of the Parliament, you name it. I suppose a few roads might have got torn up as well." He shrugged, a gesture that looked strange until Theo realized he didn't have the same kind of shoulders as a human. "Anyway, we lost. Now the roads belong to all of Faerie, they say. Whatever that means. It don't mean doonies, I'll tell you that for free. So we made the best of it — it was a while ago. A lot of us started driving, like my granddad. We do like being near the roads, still."

  There was a note of loss in his voice that Theo recognized very clearly. "And how long have you been driving for Count Tansy?" "Well, not for him as such, y'see, but for the Daisy clan. Pretty much all my life. My dad hooked up with them in the old lord's day, would have been . . . six hundred years ago? Give or take a few decades."

  Theo had to swallow before he could say anything else. "And how . . . how are they to work for?" Heath darted a quick if eyeless glance at the other side of the mirror. Rufinus was still chortling to himself over his valise. "Oh, fine, fine. Better than most. Treat you pretty good, almost like one of the family."

  "Urgh," said Applecore. She levered herself upright and peered blearily from the folds of Rufinus' coat, then clambered slowly onto Theo's leg and up his sleeve, her wings waggling slowly. "I feel like a bugbear just shat inside me skull." From her new perch on Theo's shoulder she squinted out the rainy window at the wet country lane. "Where are we? We've gone way past Oxeye Station."

  "We're not going there," said Rufinus without looking up from his shimmering valise. "Cousin Quillius thought it would be a bad idea — that if someone should be looking for us, they'd certainly be looking for any trains coming into the terminal from Oxeye — it is the Daisy station, after all. So Heath is driving us all the way to Penumbra Station. It should be usefully crowded because of the holiday. It's Mabon the day after tomorrow," he said to Theo by way of explanation. "The trains will be very full."

  "Fairy trains," said Theo, still not quite used to the idea, even while riding in a fairy limousine. "And what the hell is a Mabon?"

  "Stop the coach," said Applecore suddenly. "Quick!"

  "What?" Rufinus frowned. "You heard what I said — Cousin Quillius wants us to go all the way to . . ."

  "Stop the coach!" "Why?" asked Theo, beginning to panic. "What's wrong?" "I'm going to be bloody sick, that's why!" groaned Applecore, then immediately proved it.

  As Rufinus hurriedly opened the window and began flapping his hand to get some air into the backseat and counteract the slight but acrid smell, Applecore wiped her mouth with her arm and looked at the small mess she had made down the shoulder of Theo's jacket.

  "Sorry," she said sullenly. "It was those be-damned berries." Theo sighed and tried not to look at it. He was in a car being driven by a green pony-man with no eyes, he was spattered with cold rain and pixie barf, and was about to be deserted by his only friend so he could continue on to an unfamiliar city with a companion right out of a Monty Python sketch. He tried to imagine a way the words "fairy tale" could be stretched to this meaning without destroying it entirely. He failed.

  "Yeah, well," he told Applecore. "One of those days, I guess."

  14 PENUMBRA STATION

  "You should be grateful you weren't wearing anything nice," Rufinus said solemnly as Theo used the rainwater-dampened handkerchief to remove the last of the spot Applecore had made. The fairy frowned. "If something like that happened to one of my Acanthus suits, I'd be perfectly murderous." The handkerchief was Heath's — even the thought of his own being used that way had sent Tansy's young cousin into shudders.

  "Grateful. Yeah." Theo felt like he was hanging by his fingernails over a bottomless pit of bleakness.

  "I didn't mean it to happen," Applecore said a touch defensively. "I told you to stop the coach, didn't I?" Rufinus practically had his mouth pressed against the opening between window and doorframe where he sucked clean air as though he were trapped in a coal mine filling with deadly gas. "Yes, I suppose you did," he snapped. "But you could have been a bit clearer."

  Theo was tired of their bickering and so depressed he felt like he might start screaming. Instead, he asked, "Where are we now?" They were passing through something that looked almost like a suburban town, although it was a little different from the kind of places where Theo had grown up and spent most of his life. There were no sidewalks, and not only weren't the roads straight, they had clearly been made crooked on purpose, as though right angles brought out the same kind of reaction in the town's designers as too many femented berries had in Applecore. The houses were small, or seemed to be — most were hidden in copses of leafy trees —
but Theo had learned from Tansy's manor that you couldn't trust first impressions. The dwellings he could see were painted a riot of different colors and patterns, and came in a much wider variety of basic forms than Theo was used to — not just boxes, but cylinders, spheres, and more complicated shapes he couldn't define — and even, in the case of one upside-down pyramid balanced on its point, seemed actually to defy gravity.

  "This is Penumbra Fields," said Heath. "It sort of grew up around the railway station. Commuter town, I think they call it. Lots of people with a house here work in the City, even though it's a long trip. Only come back on weekends, most of them."

  The idea of fairies living in commuter towns didn't sit right, but Theo couldn't think of any specific reason why it shouldn't be so. It was definitely a suburb: they passed a park where a group of fairy children were chasing a small golden object that didn't look like either a ball or an animal, but was inarguably hopping; near them, other kids were flying colorful kites that didn't seem to have strings. He watched a line of smaller kids in many different sizes and shapes, winged and wingless, singing as they were led along the road by a floating, shimmering rainbow bubble the size of a cantaloupe; he guessed they were being escorted to or from school. He wanted very much to hear their song, but before he could figure out how to get his window down the car had passed the small parade.

  More confusing was that he could see shiny automobiles in many of the houses' driveways, smaller and less ornate than the car in which he rode, but otherwise not much different: it was obvious that "coaches" weren't just for the rich. In fact, it seemed that the mechanized, early-Victorian nature of fairy civilization his great-uncle had written about as though it were the product of his own fancy, was not only true, that fairy civilization had advanced a great deal since Eamonn Dowd had filled his notebook.

  But it's less than thirty years since he wrote that, Theo thought, and they were still deep in the gaslight era then. He stared at a very modern stoplight, similar to what you might find at an Earth intersection except for the colors of the lights, orange and lavender-blue instead of red and green — that and the fact that it hovered in midair, unsupported. Has everything here really changed so fast? Or has the time passed differently from our world? He remembered Tansy's talk of "slippage" and "distortion." What did that mean, exactly?