by Celia Rees
They were stopped by an invisible barrier, some kind of force field.
“These Fairish, are they—?” Tom whispered.
Before Augusta could answer, two of them stepped out. They looked like a cross between kick-boxers and ninja warriors. Tall, with narrow hips and broad shoulders, short leather jerkins sculpted to their muscular torsos, long arms and legs clad in wool and soft leather. They wore their silver hair braided, twined with threads of different colours and bells that chimed softly as they crossed long spears tipped with flint as thin and delicate as a leaf, the edges translucent and sharper than any sword.
“Who goes here?”
Augusta stepped forward. “We seek sanctuary. We would speak to the Summer Lord.”
The guards exchanged looks. No words passed between them.
“Very well, but leave your weapons. Anything made of iron must be left here.”
Swords, guns, knives were left in a pile along with belts, buckles, even steel buttons. The men clutched their trousers as they followed the two guards along a narrow raised walkway leading them deeper. The walkway branched left and right into further caverns, lit with the same golden light. Caverns within caverns; it was like being inside a honeycomb.
At last, they came to a great hall so wide that they couldn’t see the walls, so high that the slender columns disappeared into the darkness above them. At the centre stood a tall throne made from gleaming white travertine, laid down and formed to the shape by millennia of dripping water. A halo of silver lights seemed to float around it. Fairish soldiers stood to either side bearing long, bronze, leaf-shaped blades. Their own guards prodded them forward.
“Bow before the Summer Lord!” they commanded and stepped back.
“Who do you bring me? Who enters by the Deep Way?”
The Summer Lord spoke from his stone throne. He seemed young, lounging as though in an armchair. He was wearing a suit of soft leather, dyed the deep green of midsummer. His handsome face was compelling: light hazel eyes under straight black brows; his skin a flawless golden brown; his beard, close cropped, as soft as otter fur. His hair was a deep bronze gold. Three pronged horns jutted forward through the curls. At first, Tom thought he was wearing some kind of crown or headdress, but when he looked closer, he saw that the horns were a growing part of him.
Augusta stood before him, spokeswoman by unspoken consent.
“We ask for sanctuary.”
“Lady Augusta.” He stood in one lithe movement. “It is a long time since you thought to visit us.” He came down the steps in a sideways dancing movement. “Why should I grant you sanctuary? Your people have not been friends to me and mine this very long time.” He paced up and down before her. “They have made our lives impossible with the din of their machines, their great wheels churning and turning in the waters of our streams, and everywhere the ring of iron upon iron. Few of their folk respect the old ways or are friends to us. They block our trooping paths; fill the air with choking smoke so we can no longer breathe it. Even Robin can no longer go among them. Our places grow fewer; we are cut off from our fellows.” He paused. “We have many grievances against you and your kind.”
He looked at her, his eyes the light peaty brown of pools in a moorland stream: to gaze too long into their clear depths was to drown. Augusta paled under his scrutiny but she held his gaze steadily.
“Not I, my lord,” she said in a quiet voice. “I would do nothing to hurt you and your people. Robin Goodfellow is always welcomed among us.”
“Who speaks my name?”
A boy appeared beside the Summer Lord—or Tom took him for a boy. He was half sized anyway, dressed all in skins, his thick hair in roped dreads, braided and stuck with wisps of wool, beads, acorns, shells and the bones of small animals. He had the face of a child, rounded with wide brows, a short nose and a pointed chin, his skin as brown and smooth as a hazelnut, but his eyes were as old as time: cloudy, yellowish, semi-translucent, like flakes of flint. He had a quiver on his back and held a short bow, half drawn, an arrow already nocked and ready to fly.
“What think you, Robin?” The Summer Lord put a hand on his small companion’s shoulder.
“Let me kill them,” Robin said, his voice disconcertingly gruff and deep. “They have no place here.” He drew his bowstring taut, aiming at Augusta.
She didn’t turn or flinch but stepped backwards and held up her hand to ward him off.
“There are no good folks any more. No merriment to be had.”
“Now, Robin.” A woman’s voice sounded, soft and silvery. “You know that’s not true and that this is not the way we treat our guests.”
She stepped out to stand on the other side of the Summer Lord. They could only be brother and sister: the same height, the same hair, the same eyes, although hers were paler, a strange tawny gold. She wore no antlers but they were not the eyes of humankind. She wore a hat banded with feathers: long, barred pheasant tails; tawny owl wing, short and speckled; the blue-black iridescence of crow and raven; the russet spray of a grebe’s crest.
“Augusta!” She stepped over and embraced her. “I haven’t seen you since you were quite a child and you would get lost on purpose to find the glen. You visited us often then.”
“I remember.” Augusta returned her embrace. She smelt of flowers and sweet summer grass. “I thought you might have forgotten.”
She held Augusta at arm’s length. “We do not forget. Forgive Robin and my brother. Much has happened to darken our feelings against your kind. But you have done nothing against us. You have always been our friend.” Her fine nostrils flared and she walked along, looking from one to the next. “One of your party is hurt. I can smell the sweat on him, the wound.”
Tom felt her touch on his shoulder, as light as one of the feathers she wore. His knees went from under him.
Roberts and Webster jumped forward to support him.
“Bring him this way,” the woman ordered. “I will see to his wound. Meanwhile…” she smiled at her brother, “treat our guests kindly.”
“His fever has gone.” The Lady touched the boy’s forehead. “He’ll sleep now.”
The Fairish were great healers; the Lady the most skilled of all. Tom already looked better, lying on a low wooden bed in a clean shirt with his wound bound, the colour returning to his face.
Augusta felt relief fill her like the healing fragrance of the herbs that hung from the ceiling of the cool room: camomile, lavender, thyme, sage and others she couldn’t name. The walls were pale grey stone, carved from the living rock. A spring, pure and silver, bubbled in one corner and fell into a clear stream that flowed round a great tree growing up through the roof. Light filtered, pale and diffuse, from tiny windows set at angles to catch the light from sun rising to sunset.
“He will sleep now. It’s the best healer of all.” The Lady paused, her hand resting lightly on Tom’s brow. “There’s something strange about him.” She looked up at Augusta. “Where did he come from?”
“I don’t know,” Augusta replied. “He just appeared at the head of a troop of soldiers. I thought he’d come from Parry, or Ross, but they are far away so that’s impossible.”
“Have you asked him?”
Augusta nodded. “He doesn’t seem to know or—”
“Or he chooses to be silent on the subject?”
Augusta shrugged. “Do you know?”
“Not from this place, or this time. I sense something else. A great hurt. Not this.” She touched his shoulder. “Something deeper, more… profound.”
“Perhaps he’s come here so it can be cured.”
“Maybe. But it is beyond my healing. He is out of time, out of place. He may become lost here, unable to return.” She shook her head. “I can get no sense of him but what I do know is that his very presence here holds danger.”
“For whom?”
“For himself.” She looked at Augusta, her golden eyes distant and sad. “For you.”
“Can you not see?” Augusta ask
ed. “Can you not look now?”
The Fairish were famous for having the Sight. In the centre of the room was a basalt basin, fed from the spring but never filled, the water always dark and still. It was called the Black Water and it was said that the Fairish used it to overlook the present, to view anyone, at any distance, and see into the past and into the future. Augusta could see nothing in the surface, only her own reflection, but for the Fairish woman, the waters would clear and she would see as through a window.
“I’m reluctant to try the Black Water. The Sight is not for humankind. Very few of you have it, and for those that do it is an affliction. To see all is to see too much for most to bear. I will have to think on it. Sometimes, it shows us what we don’t want to see.” She brushed back a lock of Tom’s dark hair. “He’s here for a purpose, but for good or ill, I cannot tell.”
“He’s here now, so there’s no escaping whatever he brings with him.” Augusta looked down at the sleeping boy, surprised, shaken by the emotions he stirred.
“Have a care.” The Fairish Lady looked at her. “Remember he doesn’t belong here. Don’t get too close to him.”
Augusta met her eyes. “Maybe there’s no escaping that, either.”
When Tom came round, he was lying on a low bed. The pillow smelt of lavender; the mattress beneath him was soft with down and feathers. The uniform he’d been wearing had been removed. He was wearing a finely woven woollen shirt and soft leather breeches. He flexed his shoulder. It didn’t hurt at all. When he pulled his shirt aside to see the wound, there was nothing there, just a slight discoloration, a small indentation the size of a penny where the wound had been.
“The Fairish are skilled at healing.” Augusta stood up from the chair where she had been sitting.
Tom struggled to sit. He looked down at his clothes.
She laughed. “Don’t worry. Roberts and Webster did the honours. Nothing to do wi’ me!” She was dressed similarly in wool and leather, dyed in different shades of grey. Her hair was wet, tied back in a knot. She looked younger, prettier. “It was good to bathe and to get out of that uniform, even if I’m wearing borrowed clothes. These things are much more comfortable. How are you feeling?”
Tom swung his legs off the bed. “I feel fine. Never better.”
“You must be ready for something to eat. Come. They are waiting for us.”
Tom followed her down a long corridor to a great hall. They were shown to their places at the high table, the host ranked below them like at a medieval banquet. Tom tried not to stare. Apart from the guards, who Tom had privately named Thranduil and Legolas, most of them were small of stature, more like Robin than the man with the horns and his sister. The Summer Lord and the Lady were the most normal-looking, even with those weird horns. Some of the others were very strange. The further away from the top table, the stranger they got: big heads and small bodies, small heads and big bodies, pointed ears and long noses, slanted eyes and wide mouths, teeth sharp and pointed and, yes, some of them did have wings. None of them looked anything like the pretty little fairies in books or films. He guessed that was just an idea of them. No one had actually ever seen one, so people were free to make up what they wanted. Yet here he was with them. Wherever here was and whoever they were…
“What are they?”
Augusta put a finger to her lips. “They don’t like to be talked about,” she said, although he hadn’t been aware that he was speaking out loud. Is she reading my mind now? “Or stared at.”
He took his eyes off the host and stared at the wooden platter in front of him. Is this real? He touched the polished grain of the wood, inhaled the steam coming off the dishes being placed before him: the venison smelt really good, as did the mushrooms, and the greens and roots. He was reaching for a slice of bread—crusty, yeasty, warm from the oven—and yellow butter to spread on it, when a memory came back from somewhere. Didn’t something happen if you ate the food in Fairyland? Like you’d never get out again?
“Stop sniffing everything,” Augusta whispered. “They’ll be even more offended. Whatever you’ve heard, their food is fine.”
He shrugged and picked up his goblet. Real or not, he could pinch himself all he liked but he wouldn’t wake up. The wine tasted like wine. The food looked like any other food, and he was hungry.
Everyone was eating heartily. Except Webster—it seemed like he’d bought into the same stories Tom had about eating the food. He could hear Webster’s guts rumbling but he wasn’t touching a thing.
“What is wrong, my friend?” The Fairish King smiled. “You will not be poisoned and no harm will come to you. We take what the land gives us and trade for the rest. Some of the countryfolk are glad to give us salt for our meat, flour for our bread, hops and barley for our beer, milk and butter for our table in return for our favour. Thomas—”
“What? I’m sorry.” Tom realized that he was being addressed.
“We had a Thomas as a guest at my mother’s house in the Northlands. True Thomas they called him. I remember him. He was a poet.”
“When was this?” Tom asked.
The Summer Lord frowned, thinking. “Our time runs differently, like a slow stream compared to your fastrushing river. I remember him telling me that he was born in your year twelve hundred and twenty.”
Tom made a quick calculation. “That would be eight hundred years ago.”
Augusta looked at him strangely. “Six hundred years, surely?”
The Summer Lord laughed. “I told you time runs differently. In your world, too, it seems. Come, my friends, eat and drink. Afterwards, rest. You are free to stay with us as long as you wish.”
“A word.” After the meal, the Lady drew Augusta aside. “I have done as you asked. I looked into the Black Water.”
“What did you see?”
“Many things.”
“Did you see me?”
“Yes. I speak to you as you really are. Not as you pretend to be. Be warned: this game you play with your brother and sisters, that you’ve played for these many years—it is no longer a game and you are no longer a child.”
“What else?”
The Lady shook her head. “I saw greatness about you—fame, acclaim, honours. A life beyond a life. The reverence of people you don’t know, will never know…”
“In this world, you mean, as Lady Augusta?”
“No.”
“In my real life? That can’t be right!” Augusta laughed at the very idea, although suddenly she felt cold, and goose pimples stippled her arms.
“The Waters never lie. It’s perhaps a blessing that what we see is rarely believed.”
“What else? What else did you see? Did you see Tom? Do you know where he is from?”
“Yes, and no. What he said as we dined was no mistake. He is from the future, from a further two hundred years of the world’s turning. The Waters became as cloudy as a stormy sky shot through with lightning. I was in a world I hardly recognized. I fear that it is as my brother has foreseen: there is no longer room for us there. There are more and more of your kind, destroying the wild places, poisoning the air and the waters. We are of the Air and to the Air we will return.”
“What does that mean?” Augusta frowned. Why did the Fairish always retreat into oracular obscurity when they had something important to say?
“I don’t know.” The Lady sighed. “I saw much I didn’t understand, and I can’t explain what I don’t know. When I returned to myself, I was wearing this.”
She was wearing two bracelets, silver bands, with oblong, dullish black stones set into them. She took one off and fixed it round Augusta’s wrist.
“What is its purpose?” Augusta held up her arm. The bracelet was a very fine mesh, made of some light metal, and sat close to her skin.
“I don’t know. But I feel it will give you protection and that, if you are in danger,” she said, holding up her own arm, “you will be able to summon me. Now it is time to rest. An attendant will show you to your quarters. Tom and h
is companions have already retired.”
At least I won’t lose it, Augusta thought, as she got ready for bed. For turn and turn the bracelet as she would, she could find no break in the mesh for a hinge or clasp. She could see no way that she would ever be able to remove it from her wrist.
THE NEXT MORNING, they breakfasted alone on oatcakes and honeycomb. The Summer Lord was out hunting with his host and the Lady was collecting herbs while the dew was still fresh on the ground, Augusta explained, and Roberts and Webster had gone with Robin to collect their weapons and to scout the countryside around.
“What’s that on your wrist?” Tom frowned. “I haven’t seen that before.”
“The Lady gave it to me.”
“Let’s have a look.” Tom peered closely. “That’s odd.”
“What’s odd?”
“It looks like—” Tom started, then he stopped.
“Looks like what?”
“Oh, nothing.”
The thing on her wrist looked like a Fitbit or a smartwatch, which, given the circumstances, was extremely odd, but how could he even begin to explain it?
“Have you finished?” Augusta stood up from the table. “Come on then. Let’s go.”
Tom followed her out into sunlight dappling through new green leaves.
“No matter the weather or season, it is always summer in the Vale of the Summer Lord,” Augusta said.
They walked down to a clear, fast-flowing stream, braided and starred with water crowfoot, that ran along the bottom of this hidden valley. The meadows on either side were full of flowers: primrose, cowslip, forget-me-not; the air filled with the scent of violets and lily of the valley.
“It’s so beautiful,” he said. “I’d like to stay here for ever.”
What he really wanted to do was take her hand and wander to the willow tree that hung over the water, pick flowers for her, make daisy chains, just lie in the warm sun gazing at the river until evening came. He didn’t say any of this. She might be upset if he took her hand, offended. He didn’t even know where any of that had come from…
