by Tad Williams
Theo groaned. "My life sucked already, and now I'm getting lectured about my relationships by a fairy the size of a dog's chew toy. Perfect." She didn't say anything for a long moment, didn't even move. When she spoke, even with her head so close to his ear, he could barely hear her over the noise of the traffic. "I'm going to give you one chance to apologize."
"What?"
"You heard me." "What did I say? I'm sorry!" He was turning his head so sharply trying to make eye contact that he had to stop in the middle of the sidewalk. A twoway procession out of an illustrated children's book eddied around him. "Applecore, please don't leave me. I said something stupid — okay, I'm sorry. But I don't even know what it was."
"Theo," she said after a pause, "almost everything you say is stupid." "Probably," he said, relieved. Her voice had sounded almost normal again. "And you shouldn't pass up an opportunity to kick me when I'm down, anyway — you might not get another one for at least ten minutes. But I really don't know what I said."
"Do you think my size makes me stupid?"
"No!"
"And do you think I'm a woman?"
"Of course I do . . ." He swallowed down the "I guess," reasoning that it might muddy the situation.
"And the problem you're snivelin' about — would that be a problem with a woman?"
"Yeah, but . . ."
"So why would I not be qualified to give you the benefit of my experience, being as I'm a member of that particular sex?"
"Jeez, that wasn't what I meant. I just . . . Shit. Forget it. I'm wrong and so what else is new?"
"Quit whinging and start walking, ya thick. And listen a little bit."
"Okay, okay." "What did you do wrong — isn't that what you asked? You said, 'But I didn't promise her anything!' as if how someone feels about you was some kind of court case or a contract, like you can solve it just by taking out the agreement and waving it around — 'See, I never said it!' But how people feel isn't like that, Theo, especially women. And the thing is, you know it, too."
He groaned again. "I don't know anything." "Oh, yes, you do. I used to have a gentleman friend just like you. Sweettempered most of the time — he could be lovely, he could — but he just took everything that was given him and never wondered what was expected back."
"So what the hell is expected back, will you tell me that? Or are we men just supposed to read your minds?" "By the Trees," she said, "it's like talking to a faun in the springtime. Look, fella, so you didn't tell her you loved her or that you were going to live with her in a cottage by the sea. Did you hold her hand? Did you listen while she talked about how happy she was? Did you or did you not tell her she was lovely and that you were glad you met her?"
"I thought you were sleeping! You were listening!" "Fair play to you. This is my life, too, remember. Can you blame me for being curious about what stupid things you might tell the daughter of one of the people who are trying to kill us?"
He was walking again, all but oblivious to the grotesque and beautiful faces watching him through the windows of restaurants and bars, to the shouts and the foreign musical tones of the coach horns, even to the snatches of intriguingly exotic melody wafting out of stores. "Okay," he said at last. "You were listening. What was I supposed to say? She was nice."
"You're just like that other fella I went with. Theo, what do you lads expect? You make us work for every word out of you. Half the time if we let you have what you want, we never hear from you again, or if we do, you've gone all strange on us. We have to try to read you like a book in some language we don't know, then when we make a mistake, you tell us, 'Ha! I never said that! You can't prove it!' Look, you, you can't hold a girl's hand, cuddle up with her, tell her she's beautiful, then pretend that because you didn't ask for her hand in marriage it's all a mystery why she's upset when you piss off at the first opportunity."
Theo shook his head. "But you didn't even like her! You wanted me to stay away from her!"
"I like her better for not sitting around listening to your excuses. But you're right, I didn't want us mixed up with her at all. Which, you may have noticed, is why you didn't see me playing finger-tickle with her, or rubbing me leg on hers when I thought me companion was asleep. Turn right here."
"What?"
"Turn right here. There's a stop down this street for the bus through to the Morning Sky District." The stop, an ornate bench beneath a small but equally ornate, leaf-shaped roof, stood in front of a boarded-up storefront. The sign over the store's front entrance had been pulled down, but in the silvery streetlights Theo could still see the bolts that had held the letters in place, spelling "Lily Pad Sundries" in that strange gibberish-but-he-could-read-it way that Fairyland writing usually appeared to him. There was only one other person waiting at the stop, a goblin sitting with a very straight back at the end of the bench. He did not look over when Theo sat down, but there was a change in the quality of his attention to the street that suggested he was not entirely oblivious.
"Okay, you win," Theo told Applecore. "You're the zen master of relationships and I'm the whatever, the uncarved block. Teach me."
She laughed sourly. "As if I need to add to my list of impossible jobs. Just use your brains, fella. I think you've got some."
"Is that a compliment?" "Of a sort." She frowned. "If this is the right bus, we can stop at my place first before we go on to . . ." She stopped and shot a quick look over to the goblin, who was still solemnly watching the traffic slide past, his long nose pointed at the street like a finger. "To the other place."
Theo couldn't even remember where they were going — to see Foxglove? No, Applecore had vetoed that. "We're not going to go . . . wherever it is tonight, are we?"
"I don't know," she said. "It's getting a bit late. But I don't know where else you can stay."
"You said we were going to stop at your place. I'm not picky — I'd be happy to sleep on the floor or something." She cocked her head, looking puzzled, but before she could answer the bus came around the corner, the engines humming with a sound like drowsy wasps, the brakes screeching a little as it pulled up at the stop. It was shaped a bit like a caterpillar, with accordion folds and a humped back, but still recognizably a bus.
I'm getting used to things here already, Theo thought as he went up the steps, then stopped when he got to the top. It wasn't the driver who gave him pause, a squat, donkey-eared woman half Theo's size on a special booster seat, with modified pedals in reach of her dangling feet. "Damn! I don't have any money," he whispered to Applecore.
"Doesn't cost anything," she said. "But that's a good thought. We need to get our hands on a bit of the yellow stuff pretty soon — I've pretty much emptied my tallybank."
The little goblin had got on ahead of them and had already made his way back to the rear of the bus. Since all the seats at the front were full, Theo followed, with Applecore on his shoulder. The passengers hardly looked up as he went past.
They wound up in a seat in the second-to-last row, beside a sleeping fairy woman with a faint lavender tint to her skin, who seemed a bit the worse for drink or something: she had an odd smell to her, almost like camphor. Her cheek was mottled with an old bruise and her wings were bedraggled, one of them even tattered along the edge. The goblin had taken a seat behind them in the last row, and was still staring ahead as though afraid to do anything else.
The bus had gone a few blocks when Theo realized he had been drifting, thinking of the look on Poppy Thornapple's face as she threw him out of the car and wondering why it hurt him so much to remember it. "About money," he said. "Why don't we just have Tan . . ." He paused: Theo was learning the trick of discretion, too. "Why don't we just ask your boss to wire us some. You can do that here, can't you?"
She frowned. "Not as simple as you think, but for reasons I don't want to talk about now. And I still have to puzzle out where we can put you up for the night."
"But . . ." He hesitated. "Listen, I don't want to cause trouble. I mean, if there's some religious reaso
n or something that an unmarried sprite can't bring home a member of the opposite sex a hundred times her size . . ." He suddenly thought of something. "Wait, is this your parents' place? Is that why you don't want to bring me home? But I thought they lived back in . . ."
She stood up and touched his lip, silencing him before he could say more. "No, you great eejit. It's just that when I'm staying here in the City, I live in a comb."
He didn't get it. "And, so, what, do you have a hairbrush you keep as a weekend place? If you don't want me in your house, just say so." Applecore rolled her eyes. "A comb! It's a place where people like me live. You don't think I rent something the size of what you'd live in, do you? What a waste! It's a special place just for sprites and us other wee folk, ya thick."
"Oh. Is that . . . comb like 'honeycomb'?"
"You get the prize, boyo."
"And I take it that it's not big enough for me to sleep on the floor." "Theo, if you took the roof off you could just about wedge your head into the parlor, but you wouldn't have space left to wink. As for my room, well, I've got the biggest in our part of the place, and you couldn't probably spread your fingers on the floor without touching the walls."
"Our?" "Me roommates. We're all in and out, but there's near a dozen of us altogether. That's just in our bit — the whole comb's got thousands." She looked out at the street. "We're almost there."
The thought of thousands of winged fairies in one place was faintly disturbing — like termite-hatching season. "Okay, I see why that wouldn't work. So what am I going to do? I sure don't have any money myself. Can I sleep in the park, or will the constables or whatever they're called come roust me out?"
"More likely you'd get eaten by werewolves." She didn't look like she was kidding. "Truly, you don't want to be in the park at night if you can help it. This is our stop."
As the bus shuddered to a halt and a few of the other passengers, gnomes and spriggans and various bogles squeezed their astonishingly disparate and in some cases quite awkward shapes out of the seats and into the aisle, a furred hand suddenly appeared beside Theo's head holding something small and vaguely white. He turned to see the goblin who had shared the bus stop with them leaning forward.
"Please forgive my too-sharp ears." The goblin smiled, showing sharp little teeth, and cleared his throat. "I had no intentions to destroy your privacy, but I could not help hearing something of your dilemma. If you should find yourself without a roof in this the very large and not excessively friendly city, come to this place. My friends and I share it. Not much, it is not much, but it is safe." He nodded emphatically. "Safe."
"Time to go," Applecore said, hovering noisily by Theo's ear.
"Thank you." Theo took the paper and stared at it for a moment, then closed his fingers around it. "That's very kind." "We all wait on the hilltop." The goblin nodded his head again, just once this time — it almost looked like a benediction. "And we all wait for the wind to change."
Still trying to make sense of the last two remarks, Theo followed Applecore down the stairs and onto the sidewalk. "What was that about?" "Who knows? Some kind of cult — goblins go for all that shower." Theo stared at the slip of paper. The goblin had written on it in a surprisingly neat hand, "Beneath the old Fayfort Bridge." He showed it to Applecore.
"Not your high-rent cult, then," was all she said. He was about to crumple it and throw it away when he remembered where and what he was: in a strange city in an unfamiliar land, penniless and homeless. Can't afford to throw anything away, he thought. I might need to leave a note for someone and not have any paper. A suicide note, maybe . . . He folded it instead and put it into the inner pocket of his shirt.
"Here we are," she said as they turned another corner. "Orchard Flower Comb." His first impression was not what he had earlier thought it might be, a termite nest, but of a vertical meadow full of fireflies: the air in the small side street was absolutely ablaze with flickering, swooping lights — graygreen, pink, yellow, and pale blue, like a blizzard of radioactive snow. Some of the glowing shapes stood on the banks of tiny balconies that stretched the length of the street, but most of the gleaming spots were actually flying in or out of the hundreds of doors.
"What are all those lights?"
"Sprites," Applecore said. "A few pixies and hinky-punks and hoblanterns, too, but all the flying ones are sprites. Why, what did you think?"
"But . . . you don't glow in the dark."
"Can't be bothered. Come along, you." She tugged at his ear, then flew on ahead of him. Theo took a breath and followed. Bright shapes shot past him with every step, and although many of them were indeed tiny little people as humanlooking as Applecore, the phenomenon felt more like walking through tracer-fire: for every self-illuminated winged figure, at least a half dozen that were unlit whizzed past him in the evening darkness, making themselves known only by the wind of their passing, an occasional wing brush through his hair, or in a few cases, a small voice shouting something that he could not make out. In fact, now that the rumble of traffic from the larger streets was behind him, he could hear high-pitched chatter all around — laughing, shouting, gossiping from balcony to balcony as the residents hung clothes or just enjoyed the evening. The firefly-colony metaphor was beginning to fail; with its rush of wings and the background of barely audible voices, the alley that contained Orchard Flower Comb was beginning to seem more like a cavern inhabited by talking bats.
The housing complex extended all the way along a wall that Theo only realized after some moments was the back of another, full-size building. The comb started at about the level of his knees and extended several yards up above his head, something between a high-rise tenement and a dovecote, row after row of box-shaped buildings joined side to side so that it looked almost like someone had mounted an immense set of wooden post office boxes on the wall and cut little birdhouse doors in each one. Most of the dwellings had balconies added onto them, although some of these seemed little more than fruit baskets fastened just below the doorway.
Theo's first impression of something as swarming and impersonal as an insect nest did not last long: the residents had clearly worked hard to put their individual stamp on their homes. Many of the fruit-basket terraces had potted flowers, hanging tinsel or streamers of cloth and other decorations, and most of the tiny houses had windows cut into the front walls as well, with curtains or blinds which colored the light that shone inside so that the pastel flickerings generated by many of the residents were matched by the more static colors of the windows. Some of the dwellings had been modified even farther, perhaps by a single family which had bought anywhere from two to a half dozen of the boxy apartments and then connected them in a number of clever ways, with exterior stairways and sliding poles. A few, to the secret delight of Theo's inner child, were scaffolded by a complex arrangements of chutes and ladders.
Not all the ladders led from one dwelling to another. Long accordions of steps hung down to the ground from most of the buildings, and looked as though they might be meant to be pulled up in an emergency.
"What are those long ladders for?" Theo asked. "Pixies don't fly," Applecore said. "Now, you, wait here. I'll be back in just a wee while." She rose a yard or so above his head and then flew into a lighted door he could just barely see. A few small shapes poked their heads over adjacent balconies to look at him but didn't appear overwhelmingly interested.
The sprite didn't hurry back out. As he loitered in front of Orchard Flower Comb, Theo found himself wondering for the first time what it was like to be Applecore — how he would feel if he had grown up in a world of giants who were, proportionately, as tall as ancient redwoods. He couldn't quite wrap his head around it.
Somebody from my world who knows something, a college professor or somebody, ought to come here and study this place. No, researchers, a whole bunch of them. Because you could live here for years, I'll bet, and only just start to get a handle on how different it is . . .
"Ooh, he is a big one," someone said ab
ove him. For a moment, the pseudo-Hibernian dialect made him think it was Applecore poking fun at him, but the voice wasn't quite right.
"Well, of course he is," said someone else. "She told us he was a big one."
"I meant he's a big one for a big one," protested the first. "He's got shoulders!"
"Will the two of you quit it, you silly starlings?" said a third unfamiliar voice. "I'm getting me headache back." Theo squinted upward. On a balcony just above his head a trio of Applecore-sized figures stared down at him. All three were young women, as far as he could tell, two with dark hair, one cut short, the other long, and the last with an immense fluffy mane of gold half-rolled in curlers. All three had wings poking out of the back of their housedresses.
"Are you Theo?" asked the blonde. "You're a big one, aren't you?" "Can you think of nothing else to say, Ginnie?" snapped the one with short dark hair. "You're doing my head in." She looked down. "Pay no attention to this lot. They've only been in from the country about two hours."
"Ooh, Pit, it's terrible you are!" said the other brunette. "She's been here about a month longer than us and she puts on such airs!"
"Ummm . . ." He tried to let his brain catch up. "Are you . . . are you some of Applecore's roommates?" "Yes," said the long-haired brunette, "although for as much as Core comes around these days, you'd think we were sharing the place with a will-o'the-wisp." She made a little mock-curtsey. "I'm Fuzz. The one with the sour face is my sister, Pit."
"Fuzz . . . Pit . . ." Theo nodded, still struggling.
"We're Peaches. And that one with her hair all sticking out like Peg Powler is Ginnie." "Don't tell him that! That's just a nickname," the blonde said, and sniffed at her roommate. "It's really Auberginnie. I'm an actress and that's my stage name."
"Yeah, back home in Hawthorn she was just another Eggplant," said Pit.
