It took Meg a while to sort through the story and all the jumbled pronouns. “Are you just a child, then?”
She wasn’t sure if he’d take offense, but he nodded and said, “My mum and da were the only ones to have a baby in the last two thousand years, full fairy, that is. My mum swore something fierce when they sent me away, but there weren’t nothing she could do. I’ve been a brave boy, just like she said, though. Haven’t I?” He looked at Meg pleadingly.
“Of course you have,” she assured him, and patted an arm that was bigger around than her waist. He had the same shape-shifting abilities as all fairies, but he was just a kid, after all. He should still be with his mother. How cruel to banish a mere child, even one who could look as fearsome as this. He had survived on his own for nine hundred years, alone, away from his own kind, thrust into a world that would at best ignore him, always mock him, at worst persecute him. Somehow, wandering, alone, he had put his rare abilities to use at harvests. And, oh, how horrible of those men to trick him, year after year!
“You can’t mow this year,” she said. “You can’t mow in the contest.”
“How come not? I like to mow.”
Meg hesitated. As much as her dander was up at Fenoderee’s ill treatment, and for all he was no more than a little boy, he was a huge little boy with a scythe, and a fairy, to boot. What would he do if she told him he was being tricked? She wasn’t sure, but she had visions of him going after his deceivers with that glinting, grinning blade. They almost deserved it, but no, not quite.
“Can’t you not mow this year? For me? For Finn?”
“You’re going to lose,” Finn said, and Meg shushed him and made a face, which he didn’t understand at all.
“You lost last year, didn’t you? And the year before that?”
“I did,” Fenoderee said, “but I tried. That’s what’s important, they always tell me. Mr. Smythe, he always wants his man to mow against me because I’m such a good sport, he says. I try my best, but the hay is always hard to mow in the beginning. Later, when I mow all Mr. Smythe’s fields, it gets easier. Mr. Smythe says I just don’t get limbered up until I’ve mowed an acre or two.”
If she saw Smythe again, she vowed, she would step on his toe as hard as she could.
“I’ve got to go or I’ll be late, and everyone will be mad at me. They all smile and laugh when I mow. That’s why I like to do it.” And he ran off before Meg could think of a way to tell him he was being tricked that wouldn’t result in the evisceration of three men.
The Edification of the Common Man
“… OR WE CAN FIND A FAIRY MUSHROOM CIRCLE, and I can go in and grab one, and you’ll have a rope around my waist to pull me out. Or, no, I better be on the outside, I’m stronger than you. Or we can … oh, look, pies!” Silly’s already rather squeaky voice squealed up an octave as she spied a confection shop down a little alley off High Street. Though obscurely tucked away from the bustle of the main boulevard, it did a thriving business, first because it used far more sugar and butter and chocolate and marzipan and cinnamon than can possibly be good for anyone and second because it had an industrial fan in the doorway to waft its delicious scents down the alleyway to High Street. Silly made a beeline for the inviting window with tiers of pastries on display and was soon sucked in.
Silly and Dickie emerged a few minutes later, a bit poorer and a lot stickier, gobbling the last crumbs. They were lured to a floating gossamer dragon at a kite shop a few doors down. But they couldn’t afford their favorite kites, so they came out again and were immediately caught by a barker at the door of a little store selling exotic pets.
“I have here in my ’umble establishment the very last of the pigmy hooded rats, denizen of the far-off minarets of the Orient. Last of his ilk, I tell you, and a steal at five pounds.”
They peered down at a perfectly ordinary dark-brown and white Norway rat washing his nose and whiskers with clever pink paws.
“Or I have the rare and exotic coracle tortoise. Most tortoises can’t swim, you know, but this one lives in the flood-prone Valley of Kings, and when the river rises, he just flips on his back and floats till the water recedes. Only seven pounds, cage and swimming bowl included.”
They saw a pretty little tortoise who obviously wanted nothing whatsoever to do with his water bowl.
“I see I’m dealing with a couple of savvy youngsters,” the man said, tapping the side of his nose with one forefinger. “Tell you what, you head down the alley till you get to the empty lot where the orphanage used to be afore the fire. My cousin Carl from the Cotswolds is there with his wagons, having a show for the edification of the common man. Wonders you never did behold in all your many years, my kiddies. All for fifty pence at the gate, fifty pence each for the special exhibits. Even a couple of blasé kids-about-town might learn a thing or two there.”
This tantalizing information was enough to send Dickie and Silly farther down the narrowing alley until they found an open paved spot sprinkled with bits of crumbled masonry as though a building had once stood there and been demolished.
A tattered banner at the makeshift gate read CARL COTTAGER’S ODDITIES AND FREAKS OF NATURE. For the first time in her life, Silly didn’t know what to do or where to look. She was filled with curiosity, an overwhelming desire to just stare, but countering that were pity and embarrassment. She felt ashamed of herself for wanting to look, ashamed of her fellow man for so eagerly seeking out society’s poor unfortunates, and yet, she did not walk away. She couldn’t. She and Dickie handed over their fifty pence and walked into a realm that could have been filled with denizens of the Green Hill, or the creatures from a painting by Hieronymus Bosch.
A young black-and-white heifer with an extra leg growing out of her back lowed mournfully in a dirty pen. A man in striped satin pantaloons thrust a two-headed snake at any squealing girl who passed too close. He wiggled the poor beast to make it look more menacing, but the snake hung his heads and tried to hide up the man’s sleeve. A headless chicken in a cage continued to scratch at bits of grain. Strange, lifeless creatures floated in jars of formaldehyde.
“Ugh! The poor things. This is terrible!” But Silly couldn’t look away. And anyway, she had spent her fifty pence, and why be half shocked when she could be wholly shocked?
She didn’t know which was sadder, the helpless animal entertainers or the human ones who might be thought to have a say in the matter but in point of fact had few other options. Some were merely performers—a sword swallower, a contortionist—some obvious frauds, like the bearded lady, but others had been born with deformities so grotesque that they only felt at home with other grotesqueries. They perched on stools atop raised platforms, covered with curtains so that spectators could only get limited glimpses of them.
“Some of them look like fairies, don’t they?” Silly said. And it was true. A single-armed young man’s legs were fused so he looked like the one-armed, one-legged creature whom Silly had seen wielding a mace in the Midsummer War. And a woman with huge, puffed and swollen feet resembled a fairy who’d lumberingly capered behind the Seelie rade on the night Silly saw her first fairies. But that big-footed fairy had almost instantly shifted to a lissome, gazellelike creature, and that monster with the mace chose his form for its frightening appearance. Fairies could be anything they liked and laughingly change when the fancy struck them. But these poor people were trapped forever in their misshapen form and had decided that the only way to survive was to let people stare at them for money.
Silly felt ashamed but justified it by telling herself that if she didn’t stare, they wouldn’t get paid, and they wouldn’t like that much, would they? It never occurred to her to pay and not stare, and it certainly never occurred to her that Carl kept all but a modicum of the money his freaks earned for him, giving them just enough for food but not enough to leave. Carl gave them clothes, too, but only their outlandish show costumes, so that they’d have nothing normal to wear if they tried to escape. They were virtual prisoners,
of their bodies, their circumstances, and their ringmaster.
“They should be in hospitals,” Dickie said. “Some of them anyway. That woman must have some kind of lymph disease, and she’s not getting proper treatment. And look at the fat lady. She’ll be dead in a few years if she keeps that up.” The Fabulous Blubberous Maybelle, as her sign identified her, lolled in a cart drawn by four hairy-legged drafthorses, a cart she no longer had the strength to leave. She was the only member of Carl Cottager’s show who was well fed, though by well he meant sticks of butter and bowls of sugar, which she swilled down for a cheering audience. Once, when she told Carl her bones ached and she wanted to try a diet, he threatened to roll her off her cart in Piccadilly Circus and let the news crews find her. After that, she obediently ate her sticks of butter. To be carted around to provincial venues and treated like a massive sort of fertility goddess was one thing, but such public humiliation would kill her faster than her clogged arteries. And so she thought she was trapped, just like the others.
There were two tents with special exhibits at which spectators could gawk for an additional fifty pence each. One was labeled “For Adults Only,” and from the comments of people leaving the tent, Silly and Dickie gathered it had something to do with Siamese twins. The other promised “A Creature So Strange It Will Haunt Your Dreams! Only 50 Pence for a Peek at the Goblin Brat!” They handed over their coins and filed in with a few other people when the last group came out.
“From the dank, dark underground fairy warrens comes this wee monster,” Carl said in high melodrama. “Just a baby, yet strong as a rhino.” He guided them to a dark corner where a small shrouded box sat on a table.
“Is that it?” Silly asked. “There can’t be much under that.” It was bigger than a bread box, but smaller than a television. Whatever it was, she thought, at least it wasn’t another poor deformed human. Or was it?
“This beastie is endowed with the magic of the ages,” Carl continued, toying with the moth-eaten green velvet curtain draped over the box. “They call them the Good Folk. They call them the Neighbors. But never let your guard down around a fairy, my friends. He would kill us all, slaughter us where we stand with his thoughts alone, if not for the powerful charms we’ve placed on him. Observe! The cage is thrice barred with iron, deadly poison to the fairies and pixies. Around the cage we have tied the finest gossamer spiderwebs, and onto their deadly stickiness we’ve blown dandelion seeds, and those things together no fairy can penetrate. We’ve wrapped the whole in strands of ivy and bound up the wee man’s powers.”
He could see the crowd was getting restive, but he wanted to give them their money’s worth, and he had a tale to tell. He told them something about a wedding and a funeral held at the same time, and a man in a high silk top hat who might have been the groom, might have been the chief mourner, might have been both, and how a train of little green men came through, and the last one was scooped up in that high hat and imprisoned. But Silly hardly listened. From near her ear came a hissing voice. The Wyrm, coiled around Dickie’s shoulder and still invisible, woke to point something out.
“Do you remember what I told you about how to trap a fairy? All around us is flummery, but this, methinks, is real.” There was a sound of shifting scales as he, invisibly, raised his head to see what was inside the covered box.
The man made a few more boastful claims about the rarity and danger of whatever hid in the box, then, pressing a lever with his foot that made a multicolored strobe light start to flash, he grasped the green curtain in the center and pulled it up with a dramatic flourish.
Silly and Dickie couldn’t see anything at first. The adults in the room pressed forward and crowded the children out as they pushed their faces against the box. A moment later, though, like the tide turning, they began to drift away with little disappointed murmurs. Dickie heard someone tell his wife they should demand their money back. Silly pulled him through a gap, and he finally managed to look into the box.
Crouched in the back, as far from the invasive eyes and leering faces as it could get, was a creature no bigger than a newborn baby, naked and scrawny. Its skin, baby soft, was a very pale mottled jade, and its eyes were unnaturally big. Its twiglike arms were curled against its chest, and it trembled uncontrollably. It caught Silly’s eye, and for a moment the hopeless look vanished and it started forward, but then a fat, sweaty matron, who had bargained a cheaper price for her brood of ten children, shoved Silly and Dickie aside, determined that her chicks should have their sport and she would get her money’s worth.
“What is it, Mum?” a towheaded boy asked.
“It’s a dirty fairy,” the mum said.
“Why’s he dirty, Mum?” asked a freckled girl in chestnut pigtails.
“’Cause he sucks eggs,” she replied irrelevantly.
“Is this what’ll get us, then, if we go in the scummy pond?” a redhead inquired.
“Or if we climb the roof?” asked a black-haired girl.
“’Cause you allus tell us the fairies’ll get us if we do anything,” said a tiny tot with golden wispy curls.
“If this is fairies,” said the eldest boy, “then I ain’t afeard of them. Mum, I’m a-gonna swim in that scummy pond when we get home, first thing. If I’da known this is all there is to fairies, I’d a-done it long ago!”
Seeing her lifelong hold over her unruly offspring quickly evaporating, Mum ushered her brood out the door and hauled Carl after her by his sleeve, giving the poor man a shrill piece of her mind for corrupting good, wholesome family life with this shocking display. Silly, Dickie, and the Wyrm were left alone with the little green fairy.
Silly, impulsive as ever, attacked the box bodily, but the iron bars wrapped all the way around and were joined by a padlock as big as her fist. She tore off the spiderwebs and dandelions and vines, and the little fairy seemed to relax a bit, as if relieved of some constant pain, but it still wasn’t able to get past the iron bars.
“What do we do?” she asked Dickie helplessly. Her main resources, strength and recklessness, had failed.
I don’t know, he almost answered, but he’d learned in the last few weeks that looking confident was almost as good as being confident, and certainly makes everyone around you feel better. So he said, “Go to the door and keep watch. If anyone comes, cough and do what you can to distract them.”
She stood just inside the tent flap and peeked out to see Mum still haranguing Carl. As if they were another sideshow spectacle, a group was gathering round them. Silly felt a tickle in her throat, an almost unbearable desire to cough.
“What do we do?” Dickie asked the Wyrm when they were alone. “How can I get through the metal?”
“Alas, there are great gaps in my metallurgical knowledge. Once I lived a score of years with the dwarves of the Rhineland, learning all the skills of forge and bellows, but now … oh, look, a set of keys.” The Wyrm pointed his wedge head behind the cage, but seeing Dickie look wildly around, he remembered he was still invisible and considerately changed to a ghostly, half-visible shape. Dickie took the bunch of keys from the large iron ring hanging from a hook at the back of the cage. It was a lesson he’d yet to learn: When in doubt, try the obvious.
“Silly,” he called softly, “we found the keys!”
Silly snatched them out of his hand with a jangle and started trying them in the lock. In her rush she wasted a lot of time, trying keys that were obviously too big or too small and dropping them twice and losing complete track of which ones she’d already tried. If she had just let Dickie do this, a lot of what came next could have been avoided. Dickie could see almost at once which key must fit the lock, and they could have been off with the little green fairy quick as billy-o, and when Carl returned to find the fairy missing, he naturally would have suspected Mum and her multitudinous offspring, obviously using a distraction technique. No one had noticed Silly and Dickie in the crowd, and they would have gotten off scot-free. But no, thanks to Silly, who had to do everything herself, it
was not to be.
Finally, when she had exhausted every other possibility (some twice or more) she lit on the right key and the lock fell open with a rusty protest. The door swung outward and Silly found herself with an armful of little green fairy—who wasn’t a little green fairy for long. In a fit of shapeshifting, it changed from a giant mushroom to a tiger cub to a Psammead to an unwieldy bird that might have been a dodo. It made little mewling sounds as it changed back into a little green fairy and wrapped its skinny arms chokingly tight around Silly’s neck. She hugged it back with a fierce love she’d never expected, that protective love we sometimes feel instantly and automatically for things that depend on us.
They heard a cough from the tent flap, the sign for an approaching intruder, but it wasn’t one of them as sentry—it was Carl, and his face was red and fuming.
“Hand him over, you lousy little brats,” he said. He actually said something much, much worse, but since neither of them quite knew what the words meant, “lousy little brats” will give you the general idea. He held a wrench in one hand and slapped it against the palm of the other.
Silly clutched her small fairy to her and felt it bury itself in her hair. “I’ll never let him go! Never!” And then she did a very foolish thing—she charged straight at an angry man five times her size who was holding a bludgeon. Maybe she didn’t really think he’d use it. Maybe she simply couldn’t conceive of failure. Maybe she panicked. Who knows. She charged directly at his belly, tucked like a linebacker ready to tackle, and at the last instant dodged to the right. Carl raised his wrench, and even he didn’t know if he would actually hit her. He had children of his own, but these brats were stealing his livelihood.
Guardian of the Green Hill Page 12
