by Livi Michael
‘Where’ve you been?’ she says. ‘Away with the faeries?’ and I look at her sharply, wondering how much she knows. She smiles, and looks away from me, and suddenly I know, I should’ve known all along. Myrna’s been there too.
That little girl they found, separate from all her clan, with the strange gifts and stories, who’s lived so much longer than the rest of us. She’d been with the faeries just like me. I open my mouth to ask her, but she just touches my cheek. ‘No talking just yet,’ she says gently.
Weird thing is, I can’t speak. Whenever I try to tell my mother what happened to me, something happens in my head, and my memories shift so the words come out different and I’m talking about something else. Eventually I stop trying. I hardly speak at all that first day, but watch what’s going on around me, as though I’ve never seen it before, as though I’m afraid that I’ll forget it all – Bryn mending the thatch on the roof, the fire sputtering and crackling. I’ve chosen this world, I think. This ordinary, beautiful world.
Then Digri comes to visit, with little Ogda. Seems strange, seeing her now, after seeing her as an old woman. I don’t feel like playing. I don’t want to leave my mother and Lu, but she gives me a little push.
‘Go on and play,’ she says. So for the first time I step out of my hut.
I see my shadow in the autumn sun, long and spindly, with Digri’s shadow, and Ogda’s.
‘My shadow!’ I say, and they look at me like I’ve gone daft. I lift my hand, and my shadow lifts hers. But it’s only a shadow. It can’t talk back to me and it doesn’t want to play. I look all around me then, and none of it seems real. It feels as though I’m dreaming, and I’ll wake up soon, and none of it’ll be there. I stand still, staring at all the familiar sights.
There’s a kind of smoke about early winter, mist rising from the river, curling up from the earth itself, and down from the clouds lowered over the fields. Smoke curls upwards from hearths and wreathes into it and even the sun is misty, shining through a smoky haze. I can hear the men working on the dyke, trying to finish it before the winter sets in, and Mabda smiles at us, carrying a basket of apples on her hip. I feel a terrible fear then, that it will all disappear soon, and I will be alone again, in Mabb’s world.
‘Are you coming to play or what?’ Digri says, and I follow him down to the river.
Gradually, as I play with the others, with Digri and Peglan and Arun and Ogda, the memory of Mabb’s world fades, as though that was the dream, terrible, and lonely and enchanting.
At the same time, and I can’t describe it any other way, I’m struck by a powerful sense of loss. The crying of a bird pierces through me, and I look up at the light in the far distance, where sky and earth are blue. Then I look at the others, who are absorbed in their playing, just to remind myself that this is real.
Finally, I look up at Mabb’s Hill.
The light changes around us. Everything turns brown and grey. A few drops of rain fall, making circles in the brown water. The stones are wet and dark, the fungus on them a luminous green. Darkness seeps up from the earth and mist floats down from the sky. I can hear the river rushing on, but I can’t hear what it’s saying any more. The trees are heavy and dark and silent. All the colour and light is draining out of the world.
Digri looks up. ‘We’d best get back,’ he says, picking Ogda up.
I can’t help feeling cheated as I follow them slowly back to the huts. Back to all the jobs I have to do. Back to the hut where my mother lives with Bryn, where my father no longer lives. I fall behind the others, thinking about everything I’ve lost. Thinking that I wish I’d brought something back with me, like Guri. Something that proved it had all really happened. I even wish I could see the Peggotty Witch one more time. I wouldn’t chase her again, or try to drive her away with sticks and stones.
The rain comes down harder, and brown pools form in the grass. I look down into one, and see my reflection – the real, ordinary me.
Then just as I’m straightening up, I see something else. Another reflection. The reflection of an old grey woman, wrapped in a shawl. The Peggotty Witch! I think. But even as I stare down at it, it lifts its face, and it’s Mabb’s face. I’m staring down at Mabb!
I bend so far down over the water I nearly fall in. And she looks at me as though she’s trying to speak, as though she’s sorry. Then she blows me a kiss.
The kiss rises like a bubble to the surface, and I reach out and touch it with my finger. The bubble stays on my finger, and as I lift it up, its shining surface changes.
I straighten up slowly, staring at the shining object that’s growing now, in the palm of my hand. It’s a little chariot, just like the one I travelled in with Mabb, that was made from an empty hazlenut shell, with the round parts on either side that make it roll. They are like, but not like, the logs the men use to roll stones to the river. I touch it with my finger and make the round parts move, and I remember how I touched one of the rounded ends before.
‘What is it?’ I asked her, and her voice comes back to me now, just as if I’d never left her.
‘It’s a wheel, Keri,’ she says. ‘Nothing magical. It’s just a wheel.’
‘Wheel,’ I repeat now, moving the round parts with my finger. ‘Wheel.’
There’s a stick underneath the chariot that connects the moving parts. It’s like the rollers that the big stones move on, only thinner, because the rollers are just smooth logs. If they were hewed away so that they were thin in the middle and round at both ends, like the parts of this chariot, they would roll much more easily.
I’m standing in a pool of water in a muddy field, and it comes to me like a flash of pure magic, how much difference that would make – how this one little wheel could change all our lives.
What was it Griff said – we need another Gift. I touch it again and I know this is it – another Gift all the way from Faerie – from Mabb, Queen of the Faeries, to me, Keri.
Keri’s Gift.
