The War of the Flowers

by Tad Williams

  Theo hadn't really thought of himself as determined, let alone heroic, but for this instant it was nice to think it might be so. Maybe all heroes are basically cowards like me, he thought, and it's doing whatever you have to do anyway that's important. I mean, if you aren't scared, if you're just completely oblivious to danger, how heroic is that? Still, he didn't quite feel ready to put himself in the camp of the determined and brave just yet — it went against too many years of self-image. He turned his attention to something much more immediate and much more pleasant.

  When he had finished kissing her she took his hand and began to lead him down the levee once more, the moonlight so strong Theo and Poppy even cast shadows. "Where are we going?" he asked.

  "I'll show you." She led him on until the camp was just a clot of darkness lit by a few fires huddled along the banks of the river. The big moon was disappearing into the horizon like a leaking balloon. Poppy rucked up her long skirt and sat cross-legged on the damp ground, then beckoned Theo to join her. The wind had picked up. He shivered a little and wished once again that he hadn't been forced to trade away his leather jacket to a troll, however sensible the bargain.

  When he was seated she put her cool hands on either side of his face. She seemed to have retreated a little, her face set in that now-familiar Flower mask. "I want you to love me, Theo — but only if you mean it."

  He shook his head. "I don't know enough . . . that is, I wouldn't want you to . . ." "That's not what I mean, whatever you're going to say. I want you to love me with your body. Your heart — well, that will make its own choices. But I don't want you to be my lover because you feel sorry for me or because you think it will make up for something else you did wrong."

  He took her hand. "I don't know how much of me there really is, Poppy, but what there is — well, right now, it's yours." "Good." And now she let the mask slip a little. "Then come back and kiss me again and let's forget about all the horrible things for a while. Love me."

  He got up on his knees to kiss her and found himself shivering again. "But . . . it's so cold. And not very private."

  She laughed. "I brought a pavilion." "A what?" "Watch." She took something out of the pocket of her pants and held it out to him. It was a small sachet about the size of a tea bag. "A very useful charm. Will you think I'm terrible if I admit I bought it this afternoon, planning to come find you?" She closed it in her hand and broke it open with her fingers, then clambered to her feet, bent over, and began to sprinkle the shimmery dust in a wide circle around them. The air just above the line of powder on the ground seemed to waver; it might have been a trick of the dying moonlight, but Theo felt pretty sure it wasn't. The effect spread and traveled upward with surprising speed, coming together over their heads at a point some six or seven feet above the ground.

  "You mean . . . no one can see us now?" He looked around. The walls distorted the light like thick glass, turning the stars wobbly, but they were by no means opaque. He also didn't feel much warmer. The whole experience was exciting but strange; he shivered again, not entirely from the cold.

  "Nobody can see in — in fact, unless they're standing right next to it, they won't even see the pavilion at all." She reached out and clasped his hands. "You really are cold, aren't you? I'm sorry, Theo. The store where I got it only had these inexpensive ones. We'll have to warm it with our own body heat — but that shouldn't be too bad, should it?" She shrugged off her coat and pulled her sweater over her head then undid her blouse. She was wearing nothing underneath but a thin silver-white chain around her neck; her pale skin seemed to glow like the moon. He reached out his hand and touched her breast. "It's not warm in here yet, though, is it?" She laughed but she sounded nervous. "Look — goosebumps."

  He pulled her to him then and by the time he had puzzled out the strange mechanics of the fastenings on her other clothes (you had to tap on them at least four times) he had forgotten about the temperature, about other eyes, about nearly everything except the black-haired woman he was kissing and the glossy, underwater stars gleaming above them, and he was fast forgetting about the stars as well.

  At one point she pulled back from him and said, a little breathlessly, "I have some other charms as well."

  "For what?" It was hard to use spoken language after long minutes of nearly perfect silent communication. A thought occurred to him. "Birth control? I mean, for not having babies?"

  "Black iron, no!" she said and giggled. "We learn those charms with our first blood and I've already done mine for this moon. No, these are just . . . lovemaking charms. Little ones to make things, I don't know, more interesting. They were in this display at the apothecary." She looked away, suddenly shy. "I just thought you might . . ."

  "I don't need anything but you." Whether because of heightened senses or the close space inside the charmed circle, the smells of her skin and hair were as powerful as any drug. "And I don't want anything but you. This is magic . . . pardon . . . science enough for me."

  "I'm so glad you said that." And then they stopped talking again. The Van Gogh stars glittered like snowflakes in the cold sky, but inside the pavilion the air had grown warm as deepest summer.

  35 A SORT OF REUNION

  Another dream of a lost parent had caught him up. He was surrounded by clouds again, a hospital corridor full of smoke, or perhaps it was Daffodil House — the ghostly shapes in the halls might have been ash-covered victims or only patients in white hospital gowns. He was looking for his father, shouting for him — but not for "Pete" (which Theo had called him in that awkward, twenty-something stage of trying to find some common ground) or even "Dad."

  "Daddy! Daddy, where are you?" He thought he saw him through the haze, turning the corner at the end of the hall, slump-shouldered, balding on top, wearing one of the Hawaiian shirts that he put on every Saturday morning as if to prove to himself that the weekend had really come. As a teenager Theo had been astonished to realize that to the old man a Hawaiian shirt was actually cool, a symbol of some kind of tiny rebellion against the gray suits, white shirts, and ugly ties.

  "Daddy?" He realized, or at least the Theo in the dream realized, that he had never said good-bye, not properly. He had clutched his father's hand while he lay in the hospital bed after his stroke, but if Pete Vilmos had been aware of his son and his wife in those last hours he had given no sign.

  Theo hurried down the darkening corridor. It seemed increasingly important he tell his father something of what he had learned and done in the years since the old man's death, prove to him that life was worth it, that the mind-numbing years of work Pete Vilmos had endured to put food on the table and toys under the Christmas tree meant something, but he couldn't think of what to say. There's nothing to tell, is there? I'm nobody, just like he was. Still, he was desperate to catch up with that shuffling figure.

  "Daddy?" A voice came back to him through the smoke, thinned by distance. "Theo? Theo, where are you?"

  He struggled toward the sound but something had caught him, hands were pulling at him — the other patients must be trying to hold him back . . . unless they were victims, burned sufferers trying to climb past him and down the stairs to safety. Had the dragon come back? He fought without strength. He could still hear his father's voice but it seemed to be receding.

  "Theo, wake up!" It was another voice — a woman's voice. "Theo, someone's looking for you."

  He came up shuddering, tangled in his own discarded clothes. Poppy had her arms around him. "There's someone out there," she said. He shook his head, clumsily trying to assemble the details into a coherent whole and having little luck. Then the voice came again and for an instant he thought it really was his father or his father's unsettled spirit; his heart lurched and his skin tingled.

  "Theo? Are you out here?" "Oh my God — it's Cumber. I completely forgot. I'm supposed to . . ." He sat up and began to drag on his pants. "Where is he? Why can I hear him so clearly?"

  "Because he's probably only a few yards away." She was naked and seemed
a little shy. It was very distracting to be here with this lovely unclothed near-stranger while someone was searching for him. The filtered light of the stars played unevenly across her milky skin as she sat up.

  "Then why doesn't he . . . ?" He remembered. "The charm."

  "Just step outside, then he'll see you." She tried to smile. Still hopping as he pulled up his pants, he passed through the wall of the pavilion without feeling anything until he was suddenly engulfed in the chill of night. Cumber was a few dozen paces down the levee, his back turned until Theo called him.

  "By the Grove, you startled me!" the ferisher said. "Where have you been? I was terrified — I thought that dead thing had come and taken you! We have only a little more than an hour until dawn." He squinted. "What are you doing wandering around out here half-naked?"

  "I'll explain later. I'm sorry I forgot. I'll meet you back at the tent in a few minutes." Cumber Sedge shook his head. "Not there. Down by the river at this end of the camp. You'll see why when you get there. You really had me worried — I've been looking for you all over. Are you sure you're all right?"

  "Fine. Sorry for the trouble. Go ahead now and I'll catch up with you."

  The ferisher gave him a strange look. "Are you sure everything is all right?"

  "Really. Go on."

  Cumber nodded slowly, then turned and walked back up the levee. Even though he was only a yard from it, it took Theo a few moments to locate the pavilion again: with the moon down, the slight blurring of the air that marked its presence was hard to distinguish from the mists rising off the river. Crossing the barrier was much different this time, moving from the cold into the warm and back into the scents of their lovemaking.

  "You have to go." She had put her blouse back on but stopped there. He wanted to lie down beside her and kiss her smooth leg, the taut skin of her side just above her hip, but knew that if he did he would never be able to make himself get up again.

  "I do," he said, "I really do. Button seemed to think it was very important we leave before dawn."

  "Who's Button?" He hesitated. He trusted her now, of course he did, but he did not want to add to her danger, either. What had Button said? "We cannot tell what we do not know." "He's a friend of mine from the camp. A goblin."

  "I want to make you stay," she said. "Make you want to stay, that is,"— again, the sad smile — "but I know I shouldn't. If you weren't the kind of person who was going to help his friend, you wouldn't be the person I'm . . . that I feel this way about."

  Is this how it works? he wondered. The magnitude of what was before him came rushing back, dreams and even Poppy's presence no longer enough to distract him. He felt weak and ill. Is this how you get less shallow? You do the right thing, no matter how it feels and how much you wish you could run away, then everyone thinks you're a grand guy? Everybody cries at your funeral? But there was something heartening in it too, even if it was a lesson he was learning too late to be of much use — a path toward reinvention. She thinks that's who I am, so that's who I am to her. "I don't want to leave you," was all he could think of to say. "But I have to."

  "I know." She had put her mask of control back on, but it was not entirely effective and she could not meet his eye. "I . . . I want you to have something. Well, two things."

  "One of your gloves to wear on my lance when I ride into battle?"

  She did look up then, puzzled. "Why would you be taking a lance?"

  "I'm not, it's just . . . what the knights of my world used to do with gifts from their lady-loves." "Well, you'd better take more care of these than putting them on some lance." She handed him something about the size and shape of a long lipstick tube. "Use this and call me if you need me. I mean it, Theo. If you need anything, I'll get it for you. If you need me, I'll be there — no matter what."

  He looked at the small, silvery wand. "I may not get a chance to make any calls for a little while. But thanks. After . . . after whatever happens, it will be nice to be able to reach you without having to give Streedy a headache."

  She smiled but her eyes were wet. "You'd better call me, that's all I'll say. And I want you to have this, too." She tugged a thin silver chain and pendant out of the neck of her blouse, the one thing she had kept on all during the night. Now she took it off and held it out to him. What he had thought might be a small coin he now saw was a moon, one crescent of it made of something like polished opal. "It's a chip from my mother's family moundstone. She gave this to me."

  "What does it do?" "Do? It doesn't do anything. It's something she gave me — one of the only things she ever gave me. It's really important to me, Theo, and I'm giving it to you to make sure you come back to me."

  He had expected some fairy-charm, some magical talisman to protect against danger, and for a moment he was almost disappointed — he suspected he was going to need all the help he could get. Then he realized the significance of what she was giving to him and he felt something expand inside his chest, a quiet rapture that was bigger and more powerful than even the heights of their lovemaking. "Thank you," he managed to say. He carefully lifted the necklace over his head, let the moon fall onto his chest. "Thank you. I'll do my best to come back to you."

  She laughed, but it was raw with pain and anger. "This is so wretched. I knew there was a reason I didn't want to fall in love any more, but I never thought . . ." She struggled for composure. "Kiss me and go, Theo. Hurry."

  "Will you be able to get back all right . . . ?"

  "Black iron, will you just kiss me and get out of here? My heart is breaking."

  "Mine too," he said, and was surprised and frightened to realize it was true. ————— Cumber was waiting for him on the banks of the dark river, but he was not alone.

  "Coathook?" Theo had to look twice to make sure — he was still not entirely adept at telling one goblin from another. "What are you doing here?"

  "Button says we shouldn't go through the City to get to . . . to the place we're going," Cumber told Theo. "Even just along the edges. He says it's better to go by water."

  "That doesn't explain why you're here," Theo said to Coathook. "Because I know how to paddle a boat without making as much noise as a drowning troll." The goblin's slot-eyes gleamed with reflected starlight. "You don't."

  "Oh. Well . . . thanks."

  Coathook pointed to the open boat, which was little more than a canoe. "Come." "Where's Streedy?" Theo asked as they pushed off and into the sluggish current. "I was kind of hoping he could come with us, in case there were some, I don't know, alarms or magic fences . . ."

  "Button says he needs him today," Cumber said. "And that he doesn't think getting in will be our biggest problem, anyway." Theo let that sink in as they made their way silently up the Moonflood to the point where it widened as they met the newer channel of the river. Theo and Cumber ate a breakfast of bread and sweet cheese the ferisher had brought while Coathook guided the boat across the breadth of the flow and up close to the bank on the far side. Theo could see houses on slender stilts looming above them, some with lights burning in the windows. Below them, like barnacles on the pilings of a dock, smaller and far humbler dwellings clustered on the river shore.

  "Who lives there?" Theo asked in a whisper. "Niskies," said Cumber. Coathook silenced them both with a motion of his clawed hand.

  A few larger boats were anchored in the coves and in marinas, shiny, many-oared things that looked more like ancient triremes or even upsidedown centipedes than like modern ships, but no other traffic was moving on this section of the river. Theo wondered if that was normal, or if it was something to do with the Flower War curfew. He couldn't help wishing there were a few other vessels plying the channel down toward Ys, if only to make their own boat less conspicuous. Although Coathook kept to the edge of the river and, as he had promised, plied his paddle as quietly as a knife cutting warm butter, Theo could not help feeling terribly exposed.

  Finally, as they turned a bend in the Moonflood and saw the whole expanse of Ys stretching before t
hem, a black immensity barely touched even by Faerie's exuberant starlight, Coathook took his paddle out of the water. "After this, no more talking," he said, so quietly it barely carried. "But Button says to tell you, today might be a good day to go on to Hellebore House."

  "What?" Theo had trouble keeping his voice low. "What does that mean?"

  Coathook shrugged. "No more talking now. We are close." The word "close," Theo decided, must have a very odd meaning to goblins, since they paddled on for at least another quarter of an hour. The section of riverbank they could see through the hanging mists was studded with broken-down industrial buildings, once-exuberant Faerie versions of old warehouses and canneries. A few of the structures were apparently still occupied — signs glowed sputteringly here and there like dying fireflies, "End of the Rainbow Storage" or "Grotto-4-U"— but the rest seemed long-disused, and with the first lightening of the sky Theo could make out painted advertisements, sometimes with one sign flaking off to reveal an earlier message. They were close enough to the bank that he could even read some of them. "King Kilpie Ocean Goodes," proclaimed one, illustrated by a dim, rather frightening picture of a fishy humanoid with a crown and a basket full of fish and shellfish: "Lawfull Purveyor by Their Majesties' Charter of the Fruites of Ys."

  Something slapped at the water and Theo looked over, startled that Coathook should suddenly lose his touch, but the goblin was looking back at him as though the noise had been Theo's doing. Something in the dark water beside the boat caught Theo's eye: a little sprinkling of pale bluegreen lights was moving just below the surface. For a moment he thought it was a parade of glowing fish, but the movement was different than any shoal of fish he had seen on a television nature show. He found himself watching in fascination as the ordered glimmer moved closer to the surface just below him, but it was another long moment before he realized that what he was looking at was a human shape, pacing them in the water with effortless movements. It rolled toward him, the face only inches beneath the surface, glowing like the dial of a watch. The eyes met his — a woman's eyes, he could see now, but huge compared to the rest of the narrow face. Even with all its strangeness, it was a very lovely face. The staring eyes were black, so very black . . . blacker even than the water, and they seemed to be getting larger and larger as he leaned toward them. Larger . . . and larger . . .