by Garth Nix
“They’re ringing the cab for a May Dance,” she said grimly. “Cold iron might anchor us. I dunno, this is a new one to me. I’ve never seen so many, and as for ’em trying anything like this in daylight, forget it! We’d better go!”
“Right,” said Merlin. “You break east? We’ll go west?”
“Yeah,” said Audrey.
“You got something suitably ancient to hit them with?”
In answer Audrey pulled a blackthorn stick down from above her head, where it had been clipped above the sun visor. A yard-long length of gnarled, knobby, iron-hard wood, without ferrule or adornment. Two of the natural thorns had not been cut or ground off the stick, forming a kind of hilt. She pushed it through the hatch.
“You take it,” she said quickly. “It must be Susan they’re after.”
“Thanks,” said Merlin.
“If you make it, turn out the guard,” said Audrey.
“You do the same,” said Merlin.
“Ready?” asked Audrey. “Go!”
“What?” asked Susan. She was still looking out the window. Everything appeared to her to be entirely normal. At that moment, a child popped up, close to the glass. An odd, pinch-faced child of five or six, bright-eyed and red-cheeked, wearing an oversized, bright scarlet, badly ripped shirt, like a clown who’d gone through a wind tunnel.
He started to caper up and down, adding to the clown impression, then suddenly grinned widely, showing a blackened, destroyed mouth, save for two very sharp and long incisors of yellow-streaked white.
Susan jumped back. Merlin grabbed her hand and swung open his door, leaping out, as Audrey did the same in front.
A dozen flamboyantly dressed, misshapen children were dancing around the taxi, holding hands, but had not quite closed the ring. Merlin swung the stick left-handed to smash down two reaching arms, made a gap, and dashed through. Susan followed as closely as she could to avoid having her arm pulled out of its socket.
Merlin stayed on the road, running alongside the car ahead, but stopped suddenly as even more of the weird, frightening children poured into the street, gyrating and tumbling and leaping about.
At that moment, Susan realized with horror that all the other pedestrians had vanished, all the colorful umbrellas were gone, the turned-up collars on sensible coats, the fast-moving coatless optimists. There were only dozens and dozens of these children, who were clearly not children, a great crowd of them dancing closer and closer, reaching out to join hands. But their hands had only three fingers, their thumbs were in the wrong place and bent backwards, and their nails were horribly long, all in all more like the taloned foot of a hawk than a human hand.
The dancers had already formed a second, wider handfast ring around the empty cab, Merlin, and Susan, this one made up of forty or fifty dancers, all moving in a counterclockwise direction. They made no noise save the shuffle of their rag-wrapped feet, though their mouths were open to show their fangs and rotten gums, and their breath was fetid. Around and around they went, shuffling and capering, shuffling and capering. . . .
Merlin drew Susan close, his right hand tight on her left, and held the stick down at his side.
“Too late,” he said. “They’ve got us in a May Dance. Don’t let go.”
“Where did everyone . . .” Susan started to say, but she stopped, staring around in bewilderment more than fear. Beyond the circling ring of urchins, not only had all the ordinary people vanished, but now the street and the cars and buildings were fading away as well, replaced by open fields to the north, and close to them, a huddle of tents, shanties, barrows, and stands. Even the clouds and rain had disappeared, the sky was a vivid blue, and it was hot, like a prime August day, though it was—or had been—only the nineteenth of May.
“Don’t accept anything anyone gives you freely,” warned Merlin. “Particularly food or drink.”
“But there’s no one—” Susan started to say, but she stopped as suddenly there were people, a great crowd of them. People dressed in medieval clothes, jerkins and smocks and hose, boots and simple leather shoes. Sound suddenly came back as well, sellers calling out their wares, people talking and laughing, musicians in the distance, pipes warbling above a constant drum. Smells wafted across—sweaty, unwashed people stink and earthy farmyard stench, overlaid with cooking meat and fat, and smoky, burning smells.
The circling dancers stopped, laughed in unison, and suddenly broke apart, individuals racing off in all directions through the crowds, ducking and weaving to disappear among the larger people.
“Where are we?” asked Susan. She blinked several times. There was something wrong with how everything looked, but she couldn’t quite work out what it was. . . .
“The May Fair,” said Merlin shortly. “Or more precisely, a mythic resonance of the fair that was held here for centuries, with the obvious lending of its name to the place later. It’s a trap. The urchins . . . who you might know better as goblins . . . have danced us here. Which is extraordinarily unlike their usual behavior. They’re tricksters, but usually fairly harmless. They never kill, for example, not on purpose—”
“Give us a kiss, darling,” roared a drunken man clad only in a rough smock hitched too far above his knees. He leaned in close to Merlin, who dodged aside and smacked him across the back of the knees with the blackthorn stick, sending him crashing down to the muddy ground. Holding Susan’s hand all the tighter, the bookseller led her away as the man lay in the puddled track that had been Curzon Street, laughing his head off as if he had wanted to land there all along.
“They’re real,” said Susan, aghast, as she was brushed by the corner of a tray of small steaming pies being carried past by a woman whose face was transformed by the most delighted smile. “And all weirdly happy.”
“It’s real for us, for now,” said Merlin. “They’re happy because, like I said, this is an idealized version of the best days of the fair. The urchins have trapped us here. But they have to follow tradition and give us a chance of getting out—”
He jerked aside to avoid a skipping child—a human one, not one of the pinch-faced, sharp-canined urchins—and Susan had to jump after him to avoid letting go of his hand.
“Like the Shuck, the goblins have to follow the rules of the legend. Apart from the two of us, there’ll be something here that doesn’t fit, that isn’t right. They have to show it to us three times. If we don’t claim it, we’ll be stuck here forever; we’ll forget who we are, become archetypes, caught up in the mythic fair.”
“Something that doesn’t fit?” asked Susan slowly. She was distracted because a bear was ambling towards them along the right-hand alley between the closer tents. A glossy-furred bear on a flimsy chain, dancing as if it was enjoying itself, the bear ward by its side mimicking the bear steps, in a way that made it look as if they were happily dancing together.
“It could be an object, a person, anything that looks wrong, out of place,” said Merlin. He pulled on Susan’s hand, dragging her out of the way of the bear, in front of a sausage table heavily laden with pyramidal piles of different kinds of fat sausages below a cloud of flies. Dozens more were cooking behind on a grill laid over a charcoal firepit.
“Sausages! Best sausages! Fit for a king . . . or for a queen!” roared the vendor. A small woman with a very loud voice, she bowed low before Susan and extended her cooking fork, a section of sausage steaming on the end. “Try a taste, Your Highness!”
The cooking sausages did smell wonderful, overriding any distaste for the unsanitary conditions. Susan’s mouth watered, and she felt extraordinarily tempted. But before she could reach out, Merlin dragged her on, past three jugglers and an eel-diving contest with the contestants leaping into the largest barrel Susan had ever seen, to a narrow space between two wattle-and-daub huts that got them out of the immediate rush of fairgoers.
“Eat nothing, remember!” snapped Merlin. “That would fix you here. I wish Vivien was with us.”
“Who’s Vivien?”
“M
y sister. Right-handed. Very good at puzzles and so on. Seen anything so far?”
“How would I know what’s out of place?” protested Susan. “I’ve never been to a medieval fair before! Even a modern re-creation of one.”
“We’d better walk around,” said Merlin. “Keep your eyes open, and don’t let go of my hand.”
“The happiness is unsettling, all the smiling and laughing,” muttered Susan as they proceeded along the narrow lane that led to a much broader one, in the heart of the fair. “I mean, it’s kind of more unnerving than if they were scowling.”
“The other side of the fair will be here, too, somewhere, or will come along. The dark doings and despair, the thievery and murder hidden by the glitter and fun. We need to get out before it turns into that fair. But I can’t see anything out of place!”
At the next intersection of alleys, Susan paused to stand on tiptoe and have a good look around. She was taller than almost everyone anyway, which she wasn’t used to, but it helped. A group of dancing musicians was coming towards her: several drummers, two lutenists, a bunch of others playing recorder-like instruments, and one something that looked like an oversized set of bagpipes. But as the two lutenists pirouetted apart, she saw a young girl behind them with a huge basket of flowers, and Susan realized what was out of place, and what had been bothering her all along.
“The flower seller!” she exclaimed, sliding between a group of gawping, sack-clothed country folk, red-faced and doubled up with laughter at the antics of two stilt-walking jesters who were mimicking some sort of failed amorous coupling, possibly of insects. This time, she dragged Merlin after her, instead of the other way around.
“What?”
“Everything’s in brighter color than it should be!” explained Susan, ducking under a tray of pies that might have been swung across to slow her down, Merlin slinkily following. “It all looks like a Super 8 film! Supersaturated, brighter than life. But the flower seller, she’s got a flower that has no color at all. There she is!”
The flower seller was walking away from them, and the crowd between grew thicker. Everyone in the fair had suddenly turned around and was streaming back to the intersection ahead, their intention obvious—to prevent Susan and Merlin from reaching the girl, without actually stopping them—bending the letter of whichever ancient law said they had to be given the opportunity to escape.
Merlin moved in front again, swinging his blackthorn stick. People swerved away from it, as if fearing the touch of the wood, but when he did make contact, they showed no pain, continuing to smile and laugh.
The flower girl turned to go down one of the narrower lanes, and as she did so, Susan saw the flower again, and this time, so did Merlin. A tall rose, a translucent flower that might have been made of glass, save that its stem bent and petals trembled as the flower seller walked.
“Second sighting!” snapped Merlin. “Come on!”
He pushed the stick between the legs of an eel carter, sending the woman and the tub of eels she carried on her head sprawling, the eels sliding every which way, people slipping over them and falling down in a confused mass. All still smiling and laughing, as if it was an experience they’d paid to enjoy.
Merlin and Susan jumped over the writhing trail of eels and ran after the flower seller, who was only a dozen paces ahead, walking briskly down a much narrower alley between the backs of a row of small theaters, two- or even three-story affairs of painted canvas over timber frames.
As they ran, a shadow caught up with them overhead, clouds obscuring the sun and the blue sky, and there was a sudden chill in the air.
“Oh, play fair!” shouted Merlin. He accelerated, and managed to touch his blackthorn stick to the flower seller’s back, the lightest tap. She stopped, and turned to face them. She’d looked like a pretty, smiling girl when Susan had spied her across the crowd, but now her face had narrowed, her skin was lightly scaled, and her mouth was broken-toothed and decayed save for the sharp canines of a goblin, and she had shrunk a foot or more.
“We are not of this time or place, and nor is the rose,” declaimed Merlin. “Deliver it to—”
A growl was the only warning Merlin had of sudden attack. Spinning in place, he rammed his stick across the mouth of an enormous shaggy dog that lunged out of the shadows between the shacks. Its sheer weight drove him back several steps, and since he wouldn’t let go of her hand, Susan was dragged with him, falling sideways into the mud onto her hip. She saved herself from worse by putting her free hand down, but it still hurt. A lot.
“Bad dog!” she shouted, more from instinct than anything. “Bad dog! Drop that at once!”
Much to everyone’s surprise, perhaps not least the beast itself, the dog did drop the stick.
“Sit!” commanded Susan, standing up. She was furious: furious at falling in the mud, furious at being dragged into the mythic shenanigans, plain furious about everything.
The dog sat. Susan looked at the flower seller.
“And you! Urchin, goblin, whatever you are. Hand over the rose.”
The flower seller plucked the colorless rose from amidst the riot of colored posies in the basket, and passed it to Susan, going down on one knee as she did so.
Susan took it.
The May Fair disappeared like a fast-forwarded video of an ice sculpture melting, the vibrant colors replaced by the drabber, grayer reality; the medieval stench by vehicle exhausts; and the human hubbub of the May Fair by the sound of twentieth-century Mayfair.
They were on the footpath, on Curzon Street, near the laneway entrance to Shepherd Market. The rain was coming down harder, a drop splashing right in Susan’s eye. Two young Americans, clearly tourists, were standing nearby.
“Did you see those little kids?” one of the tourists asked her friend. “The ones that ran through a second ago?”
“What? Sorry, I kind of phased out there for a few seconds. Must be jet lag. Hey, look down this cute alley! A real British pub.”
“They’re in for a shock,” said Susan. “Room-temperature pints of real ale and young Americans do not go well together—”
“That was actually a wolf biting my stick, you know,” said Merlin. He frowned and inspected the deep tooth marks in the bog oak, sighed, and brushed some flecks of mud off his dress, smearing them into streaks that somehow looked punky, intentional, and cool. “So now I really wonder who . . . or what . . . you are.”
“I’m me,” said Susan slowly. The rose was in her hand, but it was only glass now, rigid and fragile. “I’ve always had a way with dogs.”
“Have you now?” asked Merlin cheerfully. He put his stick over his shoulder in best Gene Kelly style and skipped through a puddle, sending his dress swirling as he spun about to look back at Susan, who was motionless, lost in thought. “Come on, it’s not far to the bookshop now!”
Chapter Six
It is not music that soothes those savage hearts
Our soldiers, left-handed, of many parts
Stories and tales leech their wrathsome blood
The beast is calmed, embanked the flood
THE NEW BOOKSHOP HAD ONLY A SMALL BRONZE PLATE BY THE front door of the imposing five-story Georgian town house to announce that it was, in fact, a shop of any kind. As the front door was itself shielded by a columned portico, it was unlikely anyone who wasn’t already looking for the shop would ever step inside.
Unusually, there was a kind of vestibule beyond the front door, a short hallway that was closed off by an inner metal door of antique bronze, etched with the figure of two bearded giants raising nailed clubs, their eyes large inset crystals that looked like diamonds but were far too big to be actual gems. As Merlin ushered Susan inside, the outer door swung shut behind him and clicked heavily as it locked itself.
“We have unwanted visitors from time to time,” explained Merlin. He stepped past her and pressed the bell button next to the inner door. “We won’t have to wait long.”
“That’s beautiful work,” said Susan,
looking at the giants etched in the door.
“Gog and Magog,” said Merlin.
The giants’ crystal eyes suddenly lit up, making Susan start and step backwards.
“The door was made by the ‘Great Rondelhyde, Magic Artificer’ in 1899,” said Merlin. “One of the right-handed. His real name was Ronald Biggins. Amongst other things, he made apparatus for stage magicians in the last half of the nineteenth century, disappearing cabinets and so on. He loved this kind of stuff. Our customers enjoy it, too.”
“Does it do anything?” asked Susan. “I mean, is it actually a magical door?”
“No,” said Merlin. “The eye lights are electric and mainly to make sure we can clearly see who’s waiting. It is a very solid door, though, two-inch bronze on a steel frame.”
Susan looked up. There was an odd-looking mirror set into the ceiling.
“One-way glass,” she said.
“Oh no, that is magical,” said Merlin. “Two handfuls of water from . . . let’s say a sacred lake . . . cupped in the same moment from different shores. If it was big enough you could walk through to the other side, though as that is just the tea room here, it would be disappointing. Here we go.”
With considerable creaking and rumbling, the bronze door began to open. It got halfway, with one of the two giants sliding out of view, and then stopped. Through the gap, Susan saw a charming, comfortable book room lit by bright electric chandeliers above six rows of glass-door bookcases full of old tomes bound in green and red and blue and black leather or buckram; or more exotic materials like animal hides and even metal. Each row of shelves was bookended with a well-worn leather chair, for the most languid book-browsing experience.
Straight ahead there were two long mahogany tables stacked with more old books, and in the aisle between them stood a bright-eyed, middle-aged bookseller with a surprisingly long beard, which had been plaited into three braids. He wore a green apron with numerous pockets over his untidy, shiny-at-the-elbows blue suit; a checked shirt; and a limp, pale green bow tie. He wore a white cotton glove on his right hand and Susan noticed his apron had a scabbard pocket for very long, thin paper knife.
