“Is that likely?” I asked.
“No. We’re far more likely to end up a thousand years ago, in the middle of space, light years from anywhere.”
And with those cheerful words, his lips sat again. His hand reached forward and touched a button, and then–
I expected something: a tremor, a spasm. But he didn’t move at all, except for seeming to relax tonelessly in the pilot chair.
Everything blinked. The landscape outside the windows, the lights of Earth below, flickered.
And then we were—elsewhere. For a moment, I thought we’d really gone back a thousand years, to a far less brightly lit world.
And then Glenn lifted his hand and pushed back the helmet.
He looked at the panel, he looked outside, he punched a program into the pilot, and we started flying, slowly, down from orbit.
“Did it work?” I asked.
“What?” Of course. “That,” he said, “is Valhalla. Of course, you might not recognize it, because we’re on the other side from the spaceport. I am trying to keep us from being spotted as anything but local traffic.”
I refrained from telling him I wouldn’t have recognized Valhalla from any angle, and instead, looking at him, realized from the way his face had relaxed that he was more relieved than he’d ever admitted. “It worked, then?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yes. And in Valhalla, we’ll replicate it. Our people will be able to pilot Schrödingers for anyone, or for themselves. And there will be no more Luff to kill us young.”
I took a deep breath. “I’m glad,” I said. “I’m glad.” Even though I knew this meant I was out of a job. “I’m glad the adventure had a happy ending.”
He grinned, as the Schrödinger glided over a land of forests and rivers. He put out his hand and touched my fingers, just the lightest touch of his warm feelings. “The adventure,” he said, “is just beginning.”
An Answer From The North
ALONG THE PERFECT CORRIDORS OF THE GLITTERING PALACE of air and light, the intruder came striding. Gloved and attired like the Lords of Fairy, in velvet and silver he came, dark hair glossy, every feature perfect, and his blue eyes sparkling like the ice that had once protected the children of magic.
Wherever he stepped, his iron spurs clinked against the tiles and left dark marks upon the polished marble floors. And behind him, the beautiful ladies of fairy grew a little paler; the singers of elfland grew a little quieter, and light flickered and faded, just a little – while magic seemed to waver, like a flame on the edge of extinguishing.
“To see Albric,” he came, he said. “The High King of fairies,” he said. “Or elves, or the bright ones, or whatever you call yourselves. For I care not. But I will see him, or else, I will sit in your palace like a blight. I will not leave and I will not tire. Until you agree to see me and to meet my terms.”
Behind their fans, the ladies of fairyland looked yet paler, their gazes long with fright, and a messenger, a puck, one of the humble woodland fairies, was sent to summon his majesty.
***
That was how King Albric sat with the stranger and heard from his rude human lips the conditions and terms laid by his infant race onto the fair ones, the shimmering ones, the blessed ones – the ones who’d married the land in her youth and espoused her in her splendor, those who harnessed her magic to their purposes, and looked over creation with a benevolent eye.
Albric was not old. Not as his race reckoned it. But he remembered when ice covered all of the land, making it glitter like a jewel and sparkle with magic. Before human kind. Before fire. Before the poisoned iron that ripped open the womb of the land and poisoned it ever after for magic and fairy kind alike.
Then the humans had come, from the south – bringing plow and fire and war-like ways, and hastily built houses, and temples to their barbarous gods. They had no magic and they warred all the time – against the remaining ice; against each other; against their gods and against the world. Ephemeral creatures, the king had thought them. Passing. They meant nothing. They would be nothing. Nothing would mark their passage and after they vanished again, their iron would go with them and fairy kind would resume its play upon the face of the Earth.
Instead they’d grown, populous and fractious. And now one of them was here. Right here, in the palace of fairy kind, unafraid and demanding.
Albric came into the room, wearing his sparkling cloak, woven of dark, starlit nights, his tunic spun from silken butterfly wings, and met the human who, meeting sparkle with sparkle and shimmer with shimmer seemed to Albric to be more solid, more whole, made of finer stuff than Albric himself.
And when they sat together, the human commanded, as though he were the victor of some war that Albric wasn’t aware of fighting. “You will leave all these lands to us,” the human said. “every fertile field. Every pasture meadow. You do not use them and you do not need them. You can retreat to the desolate places, the rocky lands that will not admit plow. You may haunt the lakes and the dreary forests, but you will not,” the human said, looking at the king with his icy blue eyes full of disdain. “You will not take woman or babe. You will no more replace our children with your mewling changelings, nor will you make it so that buildings collapse unless a blood offering is made.”
Albric had opened his mouth to protest that he’d never done any of those things. Aye, women or babes his court might have taken, now and then, but only for love of the lost and abandoned, or to prevent their dying a cruel death in the dark woods. But changelings and human sacrifice – or blood sacrifice of any kind – that he’d never demanded, never thought of. His kind lived of the natural-born grains, the natural-grown berries, the naturally spun magic of the world. The others, the dark ones, those ruled by the Queen of the North might demand more even of the ephemeral, iron-bearing humans. His kind did not.
But then he realized protest would be for naught. The humans knew only one kind. Human and not. Iron and magic. Elf and not elf. They would not be swayed nor consider that within a kind many kinds subsisted, nor would they temper their hatred for one for the sake of the other.
Instead, he’d thought he needed to gain time. He needed to find if this man were a mere messenger, or what his power was to deal with the king. And, if he had the authority, Albric must sway him. “And who be you,” he asked. “Who would dictate to the king of magic?”
The man smiled and looked up, unbowed. “I am Cedric,” he said. “And ruler of my tribe and I speak for all humans who, after us, might live in this land.”
“And what gives you that right? How can you dictate to us? What will you do if we throw you out and ignore your demands?” the king asked, and tried to ignore the feeling that came from the stranger, and the way the light dimmed and bent around him. As if he were not a mere ephemeral human, but something else. Something new.
“Ah. I dictate by right of plow and iron. If you throw me out, I will come back.”
“With warriors?”
“With plows,” Cedric said, and smiled. “And I will tear your palace, and I will plow your land. And I will sow it with iron-laced salt, so that your kind will be no more of this world nor of the next, but captured in between, caught and bent, and unable to live or die while you watch my kind thrive and grow and forget you.”
“And how did you find our palace?” the king asked, because never before had a human been able to find it unless the elven folk wished him to, much less to come into it with iron spurs and ill intent.
But Cedric only smiled and bowed. And his blue eyes reminded the king of something he wished he could forget. And his features reminded the king of his own, glimpsed before his mirror every morning. Albric thought and he thought but he couldn’t remember any indiscretion with a human maiden that could have created this fierce foe.
Instead he turned his mind to more important thoughts – how to defend from the attack, how to thwart the enemy, how to get Cedric who-could-violate-fairyland subdued or bought, or silenced. And then, now awake to the danger,
Albric would think of a way to turn the humans from the door, to tame them or to slow them. If they weren’t going to die off, they’d need to be contained, so fairy kind’s magic would not die. So elves could survive.
It was the humans or the fey.
“Well, Cedric, I lay it upon you, while I think over your message, that you stay with us and share with us bed and board and ease. That you listen to our music, that you taste of our mead, that you be our friend before you are our foe.”
He expected refusal, or else confusion. Surely the man knew – by now they all knew – that tasting the mead of fairyland meant the mortal would leave no more. And if this Cedric who could walk in fairy and bring iron to the hallowed precincts were vanished, surely the other humans would take fright.
But Cedric only smiled and said, “Three days you have to think. Three days three nights and not one more, oh king of those who ride the winds and dance at secret revels in the heart of moonlit nights. Three days I’ll bide with you and drink your mead and taste your delights. Three days and not one night more.”
***
In his room, the king called forth Peaseblossom, his attendant nymph and swift rider of the currents of air. Writing fast, in words of light upon a sheet made of dragonfly wings, he sketched a message to an ancient foe. We are besieged, my lady, he wrote. By a human named Cedric, who commands a band of men bearing iron and fire, and who threatens to destroy and desecrate this our abode, unless we agree to be banished to the lands his people neither want nor need. Unless we agree to give up our magic dwelling upon this blessed land and retreat to desolation, he will make us less than ghosts and more than dead. I ask your help. Your people ever were better at fighting and destroying, at cursing and blighting. Now we need your magic to fight this man – to find how he can see our palace and violate our presence with iron. To find how we can make him and his people go away and torment us no more.
He sealed the missive with his magic ring and handed it to Peaseblossom who looked back at him with wide, frightened eyes, and who seemed almost as colorless as the winds she rode.
“Take this,” he said. “Over the bridge of air, to the Queen of the Northern Lights. And tell her that it is urgent and not something she should delay, no matter what her resentment against me.”
Peaseblossom had bowed, her fright glimmering forth from her like a frosty current, and then she vanished, running, towards the invisible bridge that extended between the bright court and the dark.
That he should have to ask her help rankled Albric, but nothing could be done on that score. If, for once, the queen saw the urgency and acted to save his people and hers all would be well. For could she doubt that, after doom befell him, his own fate would befall her?
He had a memory of eyes of scintillating ice, of dark, glimmering hair, of her red, red lips so soft, so warm, so yielding, and of her face beautiful like the visions of angels that men tried to sculpt out of clay. He remembered her touch and her smell and the perfume of her skin.
And he remembered he hated her.
***
The Lady Breena, fair as the sunlight, accounted prettiest in king Albric’s court looked at her lord in disbelief, “The human, my Lord?” she asked, as though he’d ordered her to lay with a rough woodland creature and enjoy it. “You wish me to sit with the human at a feast?”
“Aye,” King Albric said, sad to see fear and dismay in the lady’s eyes, but not knowing what else to do. Bed and board and rest the man had accepted. And until and unless the queen of the North came to the rescue, bed and board and rest were the best weapons the king could deploy against him.
The blessed court had neither army nor terrible magical curses with which to lay waste to the enemy. It had nothing but the weapons of delight, with which to enslave the man and make him a willing thrall to fairyland. “Aye, you’ll sit with him, and feed him honeyed cakes, and for him you’ll play your enchanted harp, for you’re as fair and bright as any in my kingdom, and your music is as captivating as the whispering rivers in spring, and your sweets more delightful than mortal kind can make. You’ll play and you’ll sing, and you will make him love you.”
“But sire!” she said. Looking up, she met only the ice and command he willed into his eyes. She bowed her head, and knelt at his feet, and cried but did not beg. She rose, and left, to fulfill his command.
***
Cedric did not wear his spurs, the king noticed, when he came into the banquet hall. And in Albric’s heart a flame of hope was kindled. For now the light didn’t dim around the man and the bright palace of fairy kind sparkled with its wonted brilliance. Enough to dazzle mere mortal eyes unprotected by iron.
The flying fairies thronged the air, spreading flower petals like rain. The floral scent, as the petals were crushed underfoot, filled the hall with the sweetness of spring and the heady joy of a summer day.
Beneath this fragrant fall, Lords of ladies of fairy kind, dressed in their best, sat or reclined, attended by pucks, who refilled their shiny crystal glasses with mead-sweet and brought candied cakes to their idle lips.
Cedric reclined, and tasted of the mead and ate of the cakes, and yet his mind remained unbowed and his eyes clear, looking around as though to say that among his rude people he’d seen better and more magnificent sights.
And the king, sighing, saw that Breena’s sacrifice would be necessary. He stood and he clapped his hands, and she came forth, from where she’d waited.
She was fair, oh so fair. For her five elven poets had spun a hundred delicate poems so beautiful that humans would die to hear them. Her face was as perfect as a jewel chiseled and polished in every detail, her emerald eyes shone with the green of new leaf, the joy of new life. And her skin was clear and bright as the petal of the rose before it’s fully unfolded to the sun. She wore white which made her cream and pink skin look yet fairer and her glossy gold and red hair yet brighter. As she stepped in, graceful in her white slippers, and approached Cedric with a bright smile, his mouth dropped open, and his cup fell, quite unnoticed, from his nerveless fingers.
Cedric rose and bowed to her, and he drank his mead by her side.
But late that night, when the high lords of fairy had drunk themselves into stupor, his eyes remained clear, his mind remained unfettered, and when the king took his leave, Cedric said, “You have two days, Albric. And not one night more.”
***
“Where is Peaseblossom?” the king asked the puck, who helped him remove his robes and don his night garment woven of spider-silk. “And is there an answer from the North?”
But the Puck only bowed and spoke, with the voice of his kind which was rather like the rubbing of dry twigs or the grating of rocks. “No, sire. Peaseblossom has not come again, over the bridge of air, and there is no answer from the North.”
***
The next day the court rode, amid the meadows and fields, disporting themselves upon their fairy steeds. Three people stayed behind in the glittering palace: the human, who remained, locked within his chambers as though fearful of trickery or attack, should he step out; the king, heavy with his thoughts, not knowing which would be worse, to ally with his northern foe or to be lost forever; and Lady Breena, who mourned her fate.
For years she had been as fair as moonlight, as joyous as laughter. If she thought to marry – as she supposed it must one day come – she’d expected to be picked by Albric himself. For who else would he choose from his dazzling court, but the most beautiful?
But the years had passed and the king hadn’t asked. Indeed, he seemed to have no thought to creating that which after him must hold the throne, for though fairy kind lived long, they were not immortal. The king seemed content to watch season and year, decade and century pass by with no thought of love, no delight in children, no desire for her.
Sometime, long ago, she remembered hearing he’d crossed the bridge of air, night by night every night, to sup with the queen of the bright northern lights. But that had been another time, and a sort of m
adness – for who could marry day to night, or the gentle magic of the blessed to that of the night fairies? Who could join dark and light? Surely such an union would tear asunder and fracture, and with it the world caught in between the two lovers. No children could be born of such a match, or else, any born would die, in the instant of breath, the moment of first feeling magic. For how would their magic be? Neither dark nor light, neither blessing nor curse.
And so Breena had waited, and she’d dreamed, and spun a trousseau as bright as butterfly wings, as soft as the feathers of birds in the spring. She’d learned to play, and learned to sing. Against the day when Albric would make her his queen.
But now he ordered her, with force and with magic, to expend her enchantment on a mere, rough human? He would sacrifice her to save his kingdom.
All that was soft in her heart turned to ice towards him. Ice as bright and glittering as the blue eyes of the man named Cedric.
***
That night, the hall shone brighter than ever. The captured light of a thousand stars was scattered across the glittering crystal ceiling that reflected the velvet-dark sky above.
When the Lady Breena entered, in her dress of the purest blue, the human, Cedric, rose and bowed to her, and bent low upon her hand to kiss it.
Then he stood by her, right near, as she played music upon her silver harp.
She played melodies that were as old as the ice that had one day covered all of the land that men had now taken. And as she played, frosty fingers seemed to touch the faces of those who listened – to caress hair, to kiss lips, to tease like a lover and play like a child, among the grand assembled company.
And Cedric stood and stared, and listened, and hung upon every note. When she sang the desolate songs of long-lost paradise before human kind, her voice as silvery as the notes of the harp, he shaped his mouth in wonder, and his eyes opened wide, as though he thought he’d been transported to paradise, and there was nothing more wanting in his life.
Here Be Dragons: A collection of short stories Page 17
