The Little Country

by Charles de Lint

  “Are you a poet?” Jodi asked. “I met one once‌—in the Tatters. His rhymes were fine, even if the lines didn’t scan as well as they might. But they were funny poems. What kind do you write?”

  “I use the word in its old sense,” Edern said. “Words have power, and power is the realm of magic.”

  “I thought magic lay in names.”

  “It does,” Edern said. “And what are names, but words. They are the first words‌—the ones we learn as babes to make sense of the world around us. They lose their power as most of us grow older; only for poets do they retain their potency.”

  “Are you a poet? I mean that kind of a poet. Are you a . . . magician?”

  “Of a sort.”

  “Then how come you didn’t magic your way out of the Widow’s place when she caught you?”

  “Because she bound me in a body constructed of metal.”

  “And there was iron in the alloy?”

  Edern nodded.

  “She caught my dreaming mind,” he said. “Caught it and pulled it from my world to yours, then confined it in that body with its iron bindings so that I could not escape back home again to where my body lay sleeping.”

  “So you were never a traveling man? She never turned you into a Small‌—like she did to me?”

  “No.”

  “Why did you lie to me?”

  “I didn’t know if I could trust you.”

  “But you trust me now?”

  “I would trust you with my life,” he said.

  Jodi shook her head. “I don’t understand. What changed?”

  “I came to know you,” he replied simply. “Had we more time together in your world, I would have told you there.”

  Easy to say now, Jodi thought. But then she realized that she believed him. She couldn’t have explained why that was. Maybe she’d just come to know him, whatever that entailed. Or maybe it was just that she wanted to trust him.

  “Why did you want me to come here?” she asked finally.

  “Our worlds need each other,” Edern said. “They grow too far apart now and we suffer for it‌—both our worlds suffer. Their separation makes for a disharmony that reflects in each of them. Your world grows ever more regimented and orderly; soon it will lose all of its ability to imagine, to know enchantment, to be joyful for no other reason than that its people perceive the wonder of the world they are blessed to live in. Everything is put in boxes and compartmentalized and a grey pall hangs over the minds of its people. Your world will eventually become so drab and drear that its people will eventually destroy it through sheer blindness and ignorance.”

  “And your world?”

  “Grows too fey. Magics run amuck. Anything that can be imagined, is, and if left unchecked, my world will simply dissolve into chaos.”

  “This sounds like Denzil’s two-minds theory,” Jodi said with a smile.

  “How so?”

  “Well, he says that each side of our brain has a different”‌—she paused to search for the word‌—“physiology. The left side is sort of like the captain of a lugger. It handles all the day-to-day aspects of our lives.” Her voice took on the cadences of Denzil’s theorizing as she spoke. “It sees everything up close, like through a microscope. The right side holds the hidden self. It’s non-dominant and that’s where our feelings and instincts come from. It gives a wide view of the world, connects everything instantly, instead of you having to figure it out through trial and error; it does it intuitively. The trouble is, you can’t just call on it like you can the left side‌—that’s why Denzil calls it the hidden half. But if you don’t use it, it gets lazy.

  “We need to use both, Denzil says, because both are necessary for a fully rounded personality.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Edern said. “Your world is becoming a place without light‌—an opaque and joyless place that is almost no longer real‌—while my world has too much light, so much so that it will eventually consume us. We both‌—the peoples of your world as well as my own‌—have knots in our minds that need to be untied and the only way we can do that is by bringing the worlds closer together again.”

  “But what you’re saying isn’t true,” Jodi said. “There’s people in my world who make the most beautiful things‌—painters and sculptors and artists and musicians. . . . If they don’t have any of this light of yours, then how can they do that?”

  “Are there many of them‌—in relation to the rest of your population, I mean?”

  Jodi shook her head.

  “It’s the same in my world. We have our logicians and theorists, but they are few in number and while they are respected by the general populace, no one truly understands them. Not what motivates them, nor exactly what it is that they are sharing with us.”

  Jodi nodded slowly. “I suppose it’s the same thing with the artists in my world,” she said. “Sometimes I think that they don’t even know what they’re doing, they’re just driven to do it.”

  “They are reaching out for the Barrow World,” Edern said, “just as my people reach for the Iron World‌—your world.”

  This, Jodi thought, seemed a perfect opportunity to find out something that she’d been curious about ever since she’d arrived in the Barrow World.

  “Where are your people?” she asked.

  “They knew you would be arriving soon, so they stayed away,” Edern explained. “They didn’t want to meet you.”

  Jodi scowled. “That’s not very nice.”

  “No, no,” Edern said. “Don’t think ill of them. It’s for a very good reason that they stay away and it doesn’t reflect on you personally. The danger with meeting an Iron Worlder for us is that we can never forget that meeting. Forever after we yearn for that other half of ourselves. That sense of wanting something more‌—of reaching to your world‌—is always present in us, but it becomes unbearable once we have had the actual experience.

  “It can drive us mad.”

  “Like mortals crossing over into Faerie,” Jodi said.

  Edern nodded.

  “Our folktales say the same thing,” she added. “That the experience leaves a man mad . . . or a poet.” She looked more closely at Edern. “Is that what happened to you?” she asked.

  Edern nodded again. “I dreamed too long in your world.”

  “Oh raw we. Is it going to happen to me?”

  “I don’t know. I’m hoping we can do something about it‌—you and I.”

  “But I don’t have any magic,” Jodi protested. “I’m nobody important.”

  “It doesn’t require either importance or magic,” Edern explained. “Only sympathy . . . and music.”

  Jodi laughed. “You certainly picked the wrong person then. I don’t know the first thing about playing an instrument and whenever I try to sing, people applaud‌—but only because I’ve stopped.”

  “You don’t need to know how to play an instrument or sing,” Edern said. “You just have to be able to take the music into your heart and carry it back into your world with you.”

  “But how?”

  “We all carry that music inside us,” Edern said. “Here”‌—he tapped his chest‌—“in our hearts. It’s the pulse of our heartbeat.”

  “If it’s already there, then why do I have to carry it back with me?”

  “Because you have to learn to recognize it‌—and then teach others to do the same. It’s not difficult. That’s the real magic of the world‌—its truths are far simpler than we make them out to be.”

  “Yes, but‌—”

  “Let me explain. How much do you know about music?”

  “I know a good tune when I hear it.”

  Edern smiled. “People composing music‌—and I speak of the true artists now‌—are only trying to recapture the strains of a first music‌—the primal music that shaped the world and gave it its magic. That is what drives them. The closer they get, the more they are driven to seek further. Then there’s the old music‌—the jigs and reels that have
always seemed to be around. Are you familiar with them?”

  Jodi nodded. “I like them best.”

  “Most people do; it’s because they set up a resonance‌—an echo to things lost‌—in the listener. The reason those old tunes retain that resonance is that they haven’t been tampered with as much, they haven’t really been changed. The musicians who play them retain the heart of the music, layering new instrumentation or arrangements over them, but the bones are always there.

  “Those tunes are played now as they were played then‌—a hundred years ago. A hundred hundred years ago. They come very close to that first music, but they’re still wrong. They still remain only echoes of the first song that the snake taught Adam and Eve‌—an old dance, the oldest dance of all.

  “What I want to teach you is that first music. I want you to learn how to recognize it in yourself, in others, in your own world. Wake it, and the borders will grow thin once more.”

  Jodi shook her head. “I don’t understand. If you know it, then why don’t you do all of that?”

  “We all know it in this world,” Edern said. “We know it too well. It’s the underpinning to the magic that runs rampant in the Barrow World. Where it isn’t remembered is in your world. It must sound in both.”

  “But I told you‌—I can’t carry a tune.”

  “If you’ll let me,” he said, “I will teach you how.”

  “Will it be hard or . . . hurt?”

  Jodi didn’t know why she was asking that. She supposed it was just because it seemed that it couldn’t be that simple‌—never mind what Edern said about that being the magic of the world.

  Its truths are far simpler than we make them out to be.

  “It will hurt some,” Edern said. “It’s an old magic. Remembering calls up both sides of the coin‌—the storm and the sunny day.”

  “And will it help me get back to my own size?”

  Edern shook his head. “That you must accomplish as I told you. The Widow has a part of you that you need to regain from her. But the music will help you once you have done so.”

  “Why is it that her magic still works in my world? I thought you said it was all gone.”

  “I didn’t say it was gone,” Edern replied. “Only that it was going. But most of it is gone. Will you help me, Jodi?”

  “I . . .”

  She was frightened now. And again, she couldn’t have said of what. But there was a hollow feeling deep inside her. Her throat was dry and felt like sandpaper. Her chest felt too tight; an enormous stone had settled in the pit of her stomach.

  Bother and damn, she thought. Wasn’t this what she’d been aching for? Hadn’t she been complaining about just this sort of thing to Denzil not two days ago? How she wanted to do something that was important. Something that had meaning.

  She swallowed dryly.

  “I. . . I’ll try,” she said.

  She thought she’d feel better with the decision made, but the hollow feeling only grew worse.

  “But I’m scared,” she added.

  “I’ll be by you,” Edern assured her.

  And that brought some comfort.

  She wondered if what she was feeling‌—all these instinctual trusts and suspicions, the sudden fluctuation of her emotions‌—had something to do with the Barrow World itself. If it was like Denzil’s two-minds theory, and this world was her world’s subconscious, then didn’t it stand to reason that it would have her own intuition working at full tilt? Except then, why didn’t she already know this first music that Edern was talking about? Know it the way she knew him . . . ?

  Her head started to ache the more she tried to think it all through.

  “When do we start?” she asked.

  “As soon as you’re ready.”

  Jodi took a deep breath. She looked around at the sunny moorland about her‌—the sweeps of heather and dried ferns, the gorse all still in bloom, yellow flowers bobbing on their prickly stems.

  She’d stepped from night in her world to this.

  From the Iron World into the Barrow World.

  By magic.

  And hadn’t there been a music playing, just before the light took her away and brought her here? A wonderful, heart-stopping music that brought tiny chills mouse-pawing up her spine when all she did was just think about it? A music that when you heard it, you realized you’d been sleeping through your life, because what it did was it woke you up. Suddenly and completely.

  If that was the music he was going to teach her . . .

  If he was going to show her how to always know it . . .

  She smiled at Edern. He smiled in return, his unfamiliar features growing more familiar the longer she sat with him here. Not because she was growing used to them, she realized, but because she was learning to know him.

  “I’m ready,” she said.

  2.

  Denzil’s first thought was for the children. He should never have let himself be talked into allowing the children to accompany them here. They’d been mad to let them come.

  But then the whole affair was mad, wasn’t it?

  Witches and bogies and walking dead men.

  Jodi vanishing in a wash of music and light. . . .

  Despair stalked his heart and he turned to his companions, but they were more concerned with practical matters.

  “Bugger them,” Henkie grumbled. “The seawater won’t do us any good with this bloody bunch, will it?”

  “Not likely,” Taupin said. “They’ll be mostly seawater themselves‌—corpse flesh and bone, seawater and weed.”

  “I thought the bloody Widow couldn’t abide the stuff,” Henkie said.

  “Maybe she can’t,” Kara said. “But these things can.”

  Ethy huddled near Denzil, her small hand creeping up to clasp his.

  “I am scared now,” she said in a small voice.

  Denzil nodded. “No less than I, you.”

  For they were monstrous figures, these sea dead. Their eyes were flat, swallowing the light that spilled from Henkie’s oil lamp, rather than reflecting it. Their pale flesh gleamed wetly, seaweed hanging from their tattered clothing in long, damp streamers. Behind them, other shapes moved in the darkness that lay beyond the circle of light cast by the lamp‌—long, thin shadowy figures that seemed to caper and prance with glee.

  They moved, not as might normal shadows cast by some flickering light, but with a movement all their own. Their dance mesmerized Denzil, sending new shivers through him to join the fear that was already lodged deep in his chest.

  There was a boggy smell in the air‌—that same unpleasant odor that Denzil had smelled last night when the Widow’s spies were near. But they had been just tiny things, hadn’t they? That was what Jodi had told them. The sloch that she and Edern had faced had been tiny and about as swift-moving as these slow drowned men with their shuffling gait.

  But these shadowy creatures . . .

  What new deviltry had the Widow called up with her witcheries?

  Nowhere could Denzil spy the Widow herself, but then what need was there for her to make the trek out here? She wanted them all dead, but it need not be by her own hand. Her drowned dead and giant sloch would be more than up to completing the task on their own and the end result would be as final.

  At least Jodi was safe from them.

  It was small comfort, but it would have to be enough.

  “What can we do?” Lizzie said.

  The Tatters children were clustered near the tolmen, all except for Peter and Kara who stood their ground with the adults.

  “Well, now,” Henkie said. “Mostly made of seawater, are they?” He turned to grin at Taupin, teeth flashing white. “What is it you do when you get a soaking?”

  The dead men came shuffling closer. Denzil looked for something he could use as a weapon, but nothing lay at hand. Their only weapons were the hammer in Henkie’s belt and the small penknife that Peter had produced from his pocket and was now holding, blade outward, in a trembling hand.
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  “Why, you dry yourself off,” Henkie went on, answering his own question. “You sit near the fire and steam the bloody damp from you, don’t you just?”

  He stepped suddenly forward and, opening the top of the lamp, swept it in a half circle in front of him. The oil caught fire as it sprayed outward, splashing over the nearest creatures. In moments their clothing was afire and patches of oil burned on white flesh, set thatches of limp hair aflame. The night air, already fouled with the boggy smell of the sloch that capered beyond the sea dead, now filled with the stench of burning hair and cooked flesh.

  A dull wet roar gurgled and spat from the drowned men as they burned. Henkie howled and tossed his lantern at another pair. The only light now came from the oil burning on the flesh of the sea dead.

  “Have at them!” Henkie roared.

  He charged forward, brandishing his hammer. The first blow struck one of the sea dead square in the chest and the drowned man’s flesh literally exploded from the blow. Salt water sprayed from the wound and the monster collapsed into a limp, shapeless bundle to the moor.

  Denzil stared, aghast. He held Ethy’s head against his side so that she couldn’t see. All that remained of the drowned man were his bones and the pale white folds of his skin that had covered them.

  “They can die!” Henkie cried, attacking another.

  A second fell, then a third.

  Now there was an opening in their ranks.

  “Come along,” Denzil cried, pulling Ethy and another of the children in Henkie’s wake.

  “Get your balloons ready,” Taupin said.

  He and Lizzie ushered the rest of the children ahead of them and then took up the rear. Kara took a saltwater bomb from her satchel.

  “What good will they do?” she asked. “They come from the sea.”

  “It’s not for the sea dead,” Lizzie said. “But for them.”

  She pointed to where the thin shadowy figures of the sloch were gathering to attack Henkie ahead of them.

  Kara nodded and flung her balloon. Her arm was strong, her aim true. The saltwater bomb flew over Henkie’s head and burst against the foremost sloch. Salt water sprayed over it and its nearest companions. Wails and shrieks filled the air. As Kara reached for another balloon, the other children began to throw theirs as well.