The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  His thoughts were interrupted as Heath pulled the car through a wide turn, out of the tree-lined back avenue they had been following and into a wider road that dumped them into a busy town square. Theo stared at the row of tall, slender buildings surrounding the square like candles around the rim of a birthday cake. Some of them were over a hundred feet high, weird combinations of heavily decorated, almost Gothic architecture with unusual overall shapes and modern building materials. The large, low building just ahead that he guessed was the railroad station looked a bit like a pointless jumble of spiky objects, but it had a stately dome atop it that wouldn't have looked out of place on a small state capitol, although the hemisphere of this dome seemed more spiderweb than solid thing and was clearly open to the elements.

  Must be miserable inside on a day like today, he thought, fighting a surge of homesickness so intense it verged on panic. Just my luck. What he found most surprising was that they had passed out of a quiet country lane and in only moments were in a busy town center, even if the town itself wasn't very big. It was the first time he'd seen a lot of the socalled "coaches" in one place. Almost all of them were smaller than the town car in which he was riding, and came in a charming array of shapes and hues, from things that looked almost like Volkswagen Beetles to oddly asymmetrical creations whose front end and back end could only be ascertained for certain once Theo could see which way the drivers were facing. People were also traveling on things that looked like bicycles and motorcycles, and children rode on skimming boards and scooters, although calling them by those names substantially broadened the original concept — he saw at least one "scooter" that had weird coppery lizard legs instead of wheels. But if the road that went around the outside of the town square was full of odd conveyances, it was even more full of pedestrians, hundreds and hundreds of them.

  "So many people here!" he said out loud.

  "Ah, yes." Rufinus chuckled. "It must seem very large and loud to you, I suppose." Theo scowled. "I didn't mean that. We have cities where I come from that are a thousand times bigger than this. I just . . . this is the first time I've seen more than a few of you people in one place." Although he had to admit to himself, "people" was another term that didn't quite fit. At a rough estimate, at least half of the folk in the square seemed much smaller than humans, although a few were much, much larger. Besides the kneehigh gangs of young brownie toughs, the flocks of even more diminutive winged schoolchildren in uniforms, and the slender, wet, and sad-looking blue women pushing baby carriages or shopping carts, he also saw three or four hulking ogres and at least one weird scarecrow shape nearly ten feet tall that looked a bit like a man on stilts but clearly wasn't.

  "Polevik," Applecore explained when she saw him staring at the tall fellow. "They can be shorter if they want to be. Probably got a job washing windows or something."

  "Most of the other people in the square seem pretty small — um, no offense," he added quickly. "But a lot smaller than me, anyway. Why's that?"

  "Ah, yes," said Rufinus. "I suppose that could be because they do not get the bracing country air we enjoy in the commune." Applecore rolled her eyes. "Probably it's because lots of the big folks ride in coaches and the rest of us walk or fly, and that's why so many of the folk you see on the street are on the wee side."

  "Ah." Rufinus nodded his head sagely. "I suppose you could be right about that, Kettledrum. Heath, be a good fellow and just turn here at the entrance." He scowled. "By the Trees, the holiday traffic is dreadful! I can understand the people needing to travel, but all these others hanging about — why are they not home spending Mabon with their families?"

  "Because they can't get home," Applecore said a little sharply. "They can't afford it and their families live too far away."

  "Hold on," Theo said to Rufinus. "You said somebody might be looking for us."

  "Yes?" "Well, shouldn't we find somewhere else to get out of a big car . . . big coach, I mean . . . like this? I mean, if there's anyone watching the station, wouldn't they be more likely to notice the coach than they would be to notice us by ourselves?"

  Rufinus weft-Daisy nodded again. "Hmmm. That is an idea. Yes, you might very well be right." He turned to the doonie, who was already signaling for a left turn. "I've changed my mind. See if you can find us a place around the back to get out, won't you, Heath? Where we won't be so . . . so . . ."

  "Conspicuous," Theo supplied, but he was thinking, Oh, God, I'm so doomed. From reading part of a Tom Clancy novel in a doctor's waiting room, I'm already better equipped for danger than this guy is.

  It was quite a different scene around the back of the station; Theo had his first look at a less savory side of Fairie. Some of the shopfronts were boarded up, the walls were graffittoed — crosses and Stars of David were among the symbols used, he noticed in a bemused way, perhaps for shock value — and the streets were littered with what looked like drifting bits of paper. Fairy-folk in an interesting assortment of shapes stood in the doorways or thronged on corners. Theo had to keep reminding himself that none of them were wearing masks. He was in Fairyland and this was just how people looked, this bizarre aggregation of what he thought of as purely human characteristics along with horns and hooves and fur and bat ears. Some of the locals seemed to be having fun, laughing and talking or even playing musical instruments, which briefly made him want to get out of the car and spend some time listening, but many of the others looked lost — abandoned. A large portion of these street-fairies were of one particular type. They were all thin and almost all barefoot, with toes and fingers that stretched like tree roots, and the parts of their bodies he could see were covered in an uneven pelt of hair that might be greenish-gray or brown or several shades in between. They stood anywhere from half to three-quarters human size, and their skinny noses were as long as human fingers.

  Theo pointed to a group of these creatures as they turned to watch the car roll past; he could not help noticing that they all had disturbingly bright yellow eyes. "What are those?"

  "Goblins," said Rufinus. "There are so many here now! I can't imagine where they all came from."

  "They came to work in the fields," Applecore said. "And they did, until the crops were in and the jobs ended."

  "Then they should go back to . . . wherever it is they go," pronounced Rufinus. "Goblin Land. There is really no point to them standing around, cluttering the streets."

  "I'm sure they feel the same way," Theo said, but quietly. At first it had just been his own situation that dragged on him, but now he had discovered that Faerie itself could be depressing, too.

  As if worried that the troop of indigent goblins might follow them, Heath drove carefully over a sidewalk and down a narrow alley before stopping behind the station. Theo realized, with a jolt of sorrowful panic, that it was time to say good-bye to Applecore, but before he could think of anything to say — and while he was still worrying he might start blubbering like a child and completely humiliate himself — she buzzed up into the air.

  "I think I'd like to go in and have a bit of a wash," she said. "It's a long ride back and I don't want to sit with meself that long just stinkin' like a dayold mackerel. Plus I need to go for a slash in the worst way."

  "We have plenty of time," declared Rufinus airily, although Theo could tell he thought the sprite vulgar. "You can use the facilities, then we can all have a cup of tea together before you go. Heath will wait. And I will carry my own luggage!"

  Heath, who was already unloading the bags, nodded his equine head. "If you're sure, your lordship. Yeah, I'll be here waiting, so take your time, missy." The doonie straightened up and turned to Theo. "Hey, I bet you were wondering about the window wipers, weren't you? My first-time passengers usually do."

  "I think I guessed," Theo said. "It's for the rest of us, right? Because we'd get nervous if we couldn't see out the front, even though it doesn't make any difference to you."

  If he'd had eyes, Heath might have had a twinkle in them. "Pretty good. That's part of it, yeah.
But there's also the flying muryans." "What are those?" "They're little guys that look a bit like bugs. They hover over the roads and go splat on the windshield, which they deserve, because it's pretty stupid to hover over the Interdomain Highway even if it does cut through your ancestral land. It doesn't kill 'em most of the time, but it can't feel very good. Anyway, the wipers sweep them off before they have time to put a curse on you." He set Rufinus weft-Daisy's suitcase down on a relatively dry spot on the sidewalk, then raised a blunt-fingered hand and saluted before he swung himself back into the driver's seat. "Have a good trip, your lordship. You too, buddy," he told Theo. "Stay lucky."

  "Now, let me think," said Rufinus as they ducked out of the rain and pushed their way in through the back entrance. "Where was that tea shop?" An old fairy with draggled wings and skin like an orange peel, bent over and coughing vigorously, shuffled a bit to the side to let them pass out of the vestibule and into the high-ceilinged station concourse.

  Theo followed weft-Daisy, but slowly because he was staring around the station. There was something odd about the place, something that nagged at him. It wasn't the hundreds of fairy-folk of all shapes and sizes — he was growing used to that — or even the signs in a completely unfamiliar language and alphabet that he could nevertheless read, against all logic. (The one in front of him, written in what appeared to be some longdefunct Middle Eastern script, clearly had too many consonants, not to mention a few vowels that he'd never seen before, yet just as clearly said, "Citizens who appear to be Luggage must be prepared to Present their Tickets for Inspection at Any Time.") Neither was it the bronze statue they passed, although it was also fairly odd: what seemed to be a wingless sprite standing on the head of a sleeping, normal-sized figure, its arms raised in muted triumph. The plaque on the bottom said "We Will Never Forget Our Dead." It was only a moment later, when he saw the smaller words "Penumbra Veterans, Second Gigantine War" and puzzled out what "Gigantine" meant that he realized the two figures might just as well represent a normal-sized person standing on a dead giant. Someone had set a small pyramid of ripe apples in front of the monument, perhaps an offering of sorts.

  Giants? he thought uneasily, and could not help looking up, as though even now some vast hand might be reaching down toward him. As he stared into the vaulted spaces of the ceiling, into the gray light streaming through the latticework of the dome and glinting across the silhouettes of tiny, flying humanoid creatures, all as strangely super-real in its own way as the scenery in Larkspur's forest, Theo suddenly realized what had been nagging at him. As he had seen from outside, there was no glass or anything else in the open fretwork of the dome, but although light was leaking in plentifully, the rain that had been splashing down all across the town was not.

  All the rules are different here, he realized. Even the physics or whatever. Just . . . different.

  Some things, though, seemed to be the same in both worlds. Women and their bladders, for instance.

  "I'm burstin', Vilmos," Applecore confessed suddenly. "Oh, you walk slow, but. Can you just tell me where you're going and I'll meet you?" "There's a cozy little tea shop in the corner near Track One, I believe," said Rufinus with the air of a veteran boulevardier. "Nothing much, but a bit better than average. We'll be there. What would you like?"

  "The shortest possible distance to the jacks," she said; an instant later she was off like a wasp fired from a slingshot. Theo, meanwhile, could not help his slow progress. For the first time he was getting a chance to see faces up close — fairy faces of all types. There were the little people, of course, brownies and gnomes (he guessed they were gnomes; they certainly had the boot-tickling beards for it) and many other types who did not even reach his waist, most of them with faces as wrinkly and knobby as dried-apple dolls. Even smaller were the sprites like Applecore, little more than swift shimmers in the air until they stopped to hover. There were plenty of goblins as well, some working menial jobs in the station, some waiting for trains, others apparently just hanging around, doing a bit of panhandling. The goblins seemed of all ages and many economic stations, but all of them seemed actively to avoid eye contact with Theo and Rufinus.

  Are they supposed to do that or something? he wondered. Do they get in trouble for looking at the upper-class fairies? Or do they just hate our guts?

  Our? He was amused despite himself. And what makes you think that if you lived here in Fairyland, you wouldn't be a goblin or something even farther down the totem pole? It's like reincarnation, those people who believe in previous lives always think they were dukes or queens or something, ignoring the fact that most people back then spent their whole lives up to their knees in shit before dying of toothless old age at thirty.

  But it was the faces of the upper-class fairy men and fairy women that were most intriguing — the women in particular, of course. Not just because the "nobles" were by far the most human, or because by human standards they were all good-looking (although they certainly were) but because of how they were good-looking.

  They weren't perfect. In fact, although by and large they had a greater regularity of feature than the average set of human train station visitors, they weren't more attractive in aggregate than your average Hollywood party full of wanna-be actors and actresses. But what kept them from being perfect — and thus perfectly dull — were features Theo couldn't quite define, features which pulled them away from the human norm and which were fascinating precisely because he didn't recognize where they came from.

  When he had first met Count Tansy he had thought him something like a Celtic-Asian or Scandinavian-Asian mixture, but with skin tones lighter than either. Now, seeing all this fairy nobility at once, he began to see a fuller example of the types that he had only been able to classify with human approximates before. The "Asian" eyes were by and large set wider in the face than in most humans. What he had thought an extreme Northern European lightness of skin in Tansy actually seemed to be near the middle of the fairy scale, and there were subtle colors in that skin type, green and purple overtones so faint as to be almost invisible, that made even the most linen-pale of Irish maidens look like a ruddy Sicilian dock roustabout by comparison.

  That was what made them so interesting, and the women so alluring: these average fairies were not much more beautiful than humans, but they were compounded of so many different — and to Theo unfamiliar — types that each face seemed almost a new world in itself.

  Not that it was always easy to get a good look at the faces, especially those of the women. At least one aspect of the fashions which Eamonn Dowd had described appeared to have survived into this more modern era — allenveloping clothing for women: gloves and long soft skirts and calf-length coats of crisp, pale fabrics. Dozens of upper-class fairy women waited on benches or took tea with friends in the small station restaurants, but there was scarcely an ankle to be seen among them. Big hats and head scarves seemed to be in fashion, too. The whole scene was bizarrely Edwardian: if it hadn't been for things like swooping sprites and little men with heads like pug dogs working the shoeshine booths, Theo could have been watching a costume drama on public television. He wondered for a moment if the rainy weather was making them cover up, but if so, the working fairies, big and small, seemed to pay it little mind, dressing for comfort and blithely displaying bare arms, bare legs, bare wings . . .

  "Hey, why don't any of you have wings?" Theo asked suddenly.

  Rufinus turned in obvious irritation. "What are you talking about?" "Wings. You don't have 'em. Your . . . cousin, whatever, Tansy — he didn't have 'em either. I thought maybe it was only the little ones that grew them, but there goes somebody your size," he pointed to a young fairy woman in a funny white hat that looked like a flattened seagull, "and she's got 'em."

  "She's a nurse," said Rufinus, as if this explained something.

  "But why don't you and your cousin have wings?" Rufinus shook his head slowly. "The better people . . . don't. Now, here is the tea shop. I hope they haven't changed proprietors —
I've not been here in months."

  Theo shrugged and followed him in. As Rufinus ordered three teas, two large and one extra-small, from a redfaced woman with stubby wings who had to stand on a stool to see over the countertop, Theo found himself staring at the various delicacies behind the glass. The pastries were lovely, each one a piece of staggeringly careful craftsmanship. He was just about to ask Rufinus to order one for him when he noticed that the dainty little torte whose shimmering colors had caught his eye appeared to be made from real butterflies. Real, living butterflies, since the wings were still gently moving. Another had a pile of what seemed to be sugar-dusted fish eyes mounded on its center.

  His appetite in retreat, he followed Rufinus and the tray toward a table in front of the tea shop which afforded them a grand view of the concourse — and the concourse a grand view of them. "Ummm, I hate to be a nag," Theo said, "but shouldn't we sit farther back? Just to keep a low profile?"

  This time Rufinus could not hide his annoyance at Theo's suggestion, but he shrugged with what was probably a fairy lord's equivalent of good grace and let Theo lead him back to a more shadowy spot along the shop's inside back wall. As Rufinus poured the tea, Theo watched Applecore appear in the shop's open frontage, a small shadow zigzagging in place as she hunted for them. "Over here!" he called.

  She saw them and buzzed across the room so quickly that one of the patrons was just beginning to swat absently at a spot above his head as Applecore landed on the table next to Theo's saucer.