The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Jenny had sat mesmerized while her abductor rattled on, all the time dashing to and fro. Now she took tea, sugar, dried milk, two envelopes of Knorr’s oxtail soup, and a packet of flat objects called Garibaldis here in England but raisin cookies by Nabisco (and squashed-fly biscuits by the children in Swallows and Amazons). She was famished, and lulled into calmness as the old fellow contrived to sound more and more like an Oxbridge don providing a student with fussy hospitality in his rooms in college. She had not forgotten the sensation of being dragged as by a freight train along the footpath, but was willing to set the memory aside. “What became of your accent? Last night I could barely understand you—or are you the same one that brought me in?”

  “Oh aye, that was me. As I said, none of the others is awake.” He glanced rather uneasily at the row of shadowy cots. “Though it’s getting to be high time they were. Actually, what’s happened is that most of the time you were sleeping, I’ve been swotting up on my Standard English. I used the wireless, you see. Better switch it off now, actually, if you don’t mind,” he added. “Our supply of batteries is very, ah, irregular and where should we be now if there hadn’t been any left last night, eh?” Silently Jenny clicked off the red radio and handed it to him, and he tucked it carefully back into its cubby. Then he reseated himself upon the stool, looking expectant.

  Jenny swallowed half a biscuit and objected, “How can you totally change your accent and your whole style of speaking in one night, just by listening to the radio? It’s not possible.”

  “Not for you, of course not, no, no. But we’re good at languages, you see. Very, very good; it’s the one thing in us that our masters valued most.”

  At this Jenny’s wits reeled again, and she closed her eyes and gulped hard against nausea, certain that unless some handle on all this weirdness were provided right away she might start screaming helplessly and not be able to stop. She could not go on chatting with this Santa’s elf for another second. Jenny Shepherd was a person who was never comfortable unless she felt she understood things; to understand is, to some extent, to have control over. “Please,” she pleaded, “just tell me who or what you are and what’s happening here. Please.”

  At once the old fellow jumped up again. “If I may—” he murmured apologetically and peered again into the treasure trove of Jenny’s backpack. “I couldn’t help noticing that you’re carrying a little book I’ve seen before—yes, here it is.” He brought the book back to the table and the light: the Dalesman paperback guide to the Cleveland Way. Swiftly finding the page he wanted he passed the book over to Jenny, who got up eagerly from the bed, holding the robe around her, to read by candlelight:

  The Cleveland area is extremely rich in folklore which goes back to Scandinavian sources and often very much further. Perhaps the hobs, those strange hairy little men who did great deeds—sometimes mischievous, sometimes helpful—were in some way a memory of those ancient folk who lingered on in parts of the moors almost into historic times. In the years between 1814 and 1823 George Calvert gathered together stories still remembered by old people. He lists 23 “Hobmen that were commonly held to live hereabout,” including the famous Farndale Hob, Hodge Hob of Bransdale, Hob of Tarn Hole, Dale Town Hob of Hawnby, and Hob of Hasty Bank. Even his list misses out others which are remembered, such as Hob Hole Hob of Runswick who was supposed to cure the whooping cough. Calvert also gives a list of witches.…

  But this was no help, it made things worse! “You’re telling me you’re a hob?” she blurted, aghast. What nightmarish fantasy was this? “Hob … as in hobbit?” However dearly Jenny might love Tolkien’s masterpiece, the idea of having spent the night down a hobbit-hole—in the company of seven dwarves!—was completely unacceptable. In the real world hobbits and dwarves must be strictly metaphorical, and Jenny preferred to live in the real world all the time.

  The odd creature continued to watch her. “Hob as in hobbit? Oh, very likely. Hob as in hobgoblin, most assuredly—but as to whether we are hobs, the answer is yes and no.” He took the book from her and laid it on the table. “Sit down, my dear, and bundle up again; and shall I pour out?” for the water had begun to sizzle against the sides of the little pot.

  “What did you mean, yes and no?” Jenny asked a bit later, sitting up in bed with a steaming Sierra Club cup of soup balanced in her lap and a plastic mug of tea in her hands, and thinking: This better be good.

  “First, may I pour myself a cup? It’s a long story,” he said, “and it’s best to begin at the beginning. My name is Elphi, by the way.

  “At least the dale folk called me Elphi until I scarcely remembered my true name, and it was the same with all of us—we took the names they gave us and learnt to speak their language so well that we spoke no other even amongst ourselves.

  “This is the whole truth, though you need not believe it. My friends and myself were in service aboard an exploratory vessel from another star. Hear me out,” for Jenny had made an impatient movement, “I said you need not believe what I tell you. The ship called here, at Earth, chiefly for supplies but also for information. Here, of course, we knew already that only one form of life had achieved mastery over nature. Often that is the case, but on my world there were two, and one subordinate to the other. Our lords the Gafr were physically larger than we, and technologically gifted as we were not, and also they did not hibernate; that gave them an advantage, though their lives were shorter (and that gave us one). We think the Gafr had been with us, and over us, from the first, when we both were still more animal than thinking thing. Our development, you see, went hand in hand with theirs but their gift was mastery and ours was service—always, from our prehistory.

  “And from our prehistory our lives were intertwined with theirs, for we were of great use to one another. As I’ve said, we Hefn are very good with languages, at speaking and writing them—and also we are stronger for our size than they, and quicker in every way, though I would have to say less clever. I’ve often thought that if the Neanderthal people had lived on into modern times their relations with you might have developed in a similar way … but the Gafr are far less savage than you, and never viewed us as competitors, so perhaps I’m wrong. We are very much less closely related than you and the Neanderthal people.”

  “How come you know so much about the Neanderthalers?” Jenny interrupted to ask.

  “From the wireless, my dear! The wireless keeps us up to date. We would be at a sad disadvantage without it, don’t you agree?

  “So the Gafr—”

  “How would you spell that?”

  “G, A, F, R. One F, not two, and no E. The Gafr built the starships and we went to work aboard them. It was our life, to be their servants and dependents. You should understand that they never were cruel. Neither we nor they could imagine an existence without the other, after so many eons of relying upon one another.

  “Except that aboard my ship, for no reason I can now explain, a few of us became dissatisfied, and demanded that we be given responsibilities of our own. Well, you know, it was as if the sheepdogs hereabouts were one day to complain to the farmers that from now on they wanted flocks of their own to manage, with the dipping and tupping and shearing and lambing and all the rest. Our lords were as dumbfounded as these farmers would be—a talking dog, you see. When we couldn’t be reasoned or scolded out of our notion, and it began to interfere with the smooth functioning of the ship, the Gafr decided to put us off here for a while to think things over. They were to come back for us as soon as we’d had time to find out what running our own affairs without them would be like. That was a little more than three hundred and fifty years ago.”

  Jenny’s mouth fell open; she had been following intently. “Three hundred and fifty of your years, you mean?”

  “No, of yours. We live a long time. To human eyes we appeared very old men when still quite young, but now we are old indeed—and look it too, I fear.

  “Well, they put fifteen of us off here, in Yorkshire, and some dozen others in S
candinavia somewhere. I often wonder if any of that group has managed to keep alive, or whether the ship came back for them but not for us—but there’s no knowing.

  “It was early autumn; we supposed they meant to fetch us off before winter, for they knew the coming of hard winter would put us to sleep. They left us well supplied and went away, and we all had plenty of time to find life without the Gafr as difficult—psychologically, I suppose you might say—as they could possibly have wished. Oh yes! We waited, very chastened, for the ship to return. But the deep snows came and finally we had to go to earth, and when we awoke the following spring we were forced to face the likelihood that we were stranded here.

  “A few found they could not accept a life in this alien place without the Gafr to direct their thoughts and actions; they died in the first year. But the rest of us, though nearly as despairing, preferred life to death—and we said to one another that the ship might yet return.

  “When we awoke from our first winter’s sleep, the year was 1624. In those days the high moors were much as you see them now, but almost inaccessible to the world beyond them. The villages were linked by a few muddy cart tracks and stone pannier trods across the tops. No one came up here but people that had business here, or people crossing from one dale into another: farmers, poachers, panniermen, Quakers later on … the farmers would come up by turf road from their own holdings to gather bracken for stock bedding, and to cut turf and peat for fuel, and ling—that’s what they call the heather hereabouts, you know—for kindling and thatching. They burned off the old ling to improve the grazing, and took away the burned stems for kindling. And they came after bilberries in late summer, and to bring hay to their sheep on the commons in winter, as some still do. But nobody came from outside, passing through from one distant place to another, and the local people were an ignorant, superstitious lot as the world judges such things, shut away up here. They would sit about the hearth of an evening, whole families together, and retell the old tales. And we would hang about the eaves, listening.

  “All that first spring we spied out the dales farms, learnt the language and figured our chances. Some of us wanted to go to the dalesmen with our story and ask to be taken into service, for it would have comforted us to serve a good master again. But others—I was one—said such a course was as dangerous as it was useless, for we would not have been believed and the Church would have had us hunted down for devil’s spawn.

  “Yet we all yearned and hungered so after direction and companionship that we skulked about the farms despite the risk, watching how the men and milkmaids worked. We picked up the knack of it easily enough, of milking and churning and threshing and stacking—the language of farm labor as you might say!—and by and by we began to lend a hand, at night, when the house was sleeping—serving in secret, you see. We asked ourselves, would the farmers call us devil’s spawn for that? and thought it a fair gamble. We’d thresh out the corn, and then we’d fill our pouches with barley and drink the cat’s cream off the doorstep for our pay.

  “At least we thought it was the cat’s cream. But one night in harvesttime, one of us—Hart Hall it was—heard the farmer tell his wife, ‘Mind tha leaves t’bate o’ cream for t’hob. He deeas mair i’ yah neet than a’ t’men deea iv a day.’ That’s how we learnt that the people were in no doubt about who’d been helping them.

  “We could scarcely believe our luck. Of course we’d heard talk of witches and fairies, very superstitious they were in those days, and now and again one would tell a tale of little men called hobmen, part elf, part goblin as it seemed, sometimes kind and sometimes tricksy. They’d put out a bowl of cream for the hob, for if they forgot, the hob would make trouble for them, and if they remembered he would use them kindly.”

  “That was a common practice in rural Scandinavia too—to set out a bowl of porridge for the tomte,” Jenny put in.”

  “Aye? Well, well … no doubt the cats and foxes got the cream, before we came! Well, we put together every scrap we could manage to overhear about the hobmen, and the more we heard the more our way seemed plain. By great good fortune we looked the part. We are man-like, more or less, though we go as readily upon four feet as two, and stood a good deal smaller than the ordinary human even in those days when men were not so tail as now, and that meant no great harm would come of it should we happen to be seen. That was important. There hadn’t been so many rumors of hobbish helpfulness in the dales for a very long time, and as curiosity grew we were spied upon in our turn—but I’m getting ahead of my tale.

  “By the time a few years had passed we’d settled ourselves all through these dales. Certain farmsteads and local spots were spoken of as being ‘haunted bit’hob’; well, one way and another we found out where they were and one of us would go and live there, and carry on according to tradition. Not all of us did that, now—some just found a farm they liked and moved in. But for instance it was believed that a certain hob, that lived in a cave at Runswick up on the coast, could cure what they called t’kink-cough, so one of us went on up there to be Hob Hole Hob, and when the mothers would bring their sick children and call to him to cure them, he’d do what he could.”

  “What could he do, though?”

  “Not a great deal, but more than nothing. He could make them more comfortable, and unless a child was very ill, he could make it more likely that they would recover.”

  “How? Herbs and potions?”

  “No, not at all—merely the power of suggestion. But quite effective, oh aye.

  “There was a tradition too of a hob in Farndale that was the troublesome sort, and as it seemed wisest not to neglect that mischievous side of our ledger altogether, once in a while we would send somebody over there to let out the calves and spill the milk and put a cart on the barn roof, and generally make a nuisance of himself. It kept the old beliefs alive, you see. It wouldn’t have done for people to start thinking the hobs had all got good as gold, we had the sense to see that. The dalesfolk used to say, ‘Gin t’hobman takes ti yan, ya’r yal reet i’ t’lang run, but deea he tak agin’ ’ee ’tis anither story!’ We wanted them to go right on saying that.

  “But we did take to them—aye, we did indeed, though the Gafr and the dalesmen were so unlike. The Yorkshire farmer of those times for all his faults was what they call the salt of the earth. They made us good masters, and we served them well for nigh on two hundred years.”

  Jenny wriggled and leaned toward Elphi, raptly attending. “Did any of you ever talk with humans, face to face? Did you ever have any human friends, that you finally told the truth to?”

  “No, my dear. We have no friends among humans in the sense you mean, though we befriended a few in particular. Nor did we often speak with humans. We thought it vital to protect and preserve their sense of us as magical and strange—supernatural, in fact. But now and again it would happen.

  “I’ll tell you of one such occasion. For many and many a year my home was at Hob Garth near Great Fryup Dale, where a family called Stonehouse had the holding. There was a Thomas Stonehouse once, that lived there and kept sheep.

  “Now, the time I’m speaking of would have been about 1760 or thereabouts, when Tommy was beginning to get on a bit in years. Somehow he fell out with a neighbor of his called Matthew Bland, an evil-tempered fellow he was, and one night I saw Bland creep along and break the hedge, and drive out Tommy’s ewes. Tommy was out all the next day in the wet, trying to round them up, but without much luck for he only found five out of the forty, and so I says to myself: here’s a job for Hob. The next morning all forty sheep were back in the field and the hedge patched up with new posts and rails.

  “Well! but that wasn’t all: when I knew Tommy to be laid up with a cold, and so above suspicion himself, I nipped along and let Bland’s cattle loose. A perfectly hobbish piece of work that was! Old Bland, he was a full fortnight rounding them up. Of course, at the time the mischief was done Tommy had been in his bed with chills and a fever, and everybody knew it; but Bland came an
d broke the new fence anyway and let the sheep out again—he was that furious, he had to do something.

  “As Tommy was still too ill to manage, his neighbors turned out to hunt the sheep for him. But the lot of ’em had wandered up onto the tops in a roke like the one we had yesterday evening, and none could be found at all. All the same, that night Hob rounded them up and drove them home, and repaired the fence again. Bear in mind, my dear, that such feats as the farmers deemed prodigious were simple enough for us, for we have excellent sight in the dark, and great strength in the low gravity here, and are quick on our feet, whether four or two.

  “Now, four of Tommy’s ewes had fallen into a quarry in the roke and broken their necks, and never came home again. When he was well enough he walked out to the field to see what was left of the flock and cut some hay for it—this was early spring, I remember, just about this time. We’d waked sooner than usual that year, which was a bit of luck for Tommy. I saw him heading up there, and followed. And when I knew him to be grieving over the four lost ewes I accosted him in the road and said not to fret any more, that the sheep would be accounted for and then some at lambing time—for I knew that most were carrying twins, and I meant to help with the lambing as well, to see that as many as possible would live.