Orfeia

by Joanne M Harris

  Fay stood up and looked at the red-light signal. It showed no sign of changing: it shone as bright as the sun on a winter rose. What kind of stories had Mabs meant? Was this another riddle?

  For a moment her mind went back to the tale of King Orfeo and the Oracle. The King had rescued his wife, and yet, robbed of her shadow, she had been unable to remember her life, or rekindle her love for him. Like the knight in the song, the Oracle had given the King three riddles to solve before he and his wife could be together again.

  When you can make me a cambric shirt…

  Without any seam or needlework—

  There must be a solution, she knew. But a shirt without seams or needlework? Even allowing for poetic licence, how was that possible?

  Just then, Fay noticed something perched on the flap of her backpack. Looking closer, she saw that it was one of the tailor bees that had helped weave her gown the previous night. It was alive, but barely: for the air of Nethermost London was cold, and there were no flowers to be seen anywhere in the station.

  Fay held the tiny bee in the palm of her hand. It looked so out of place in this world. She wished she could help it, somehow. And then she thought of the red rose, and taking it out of her backpack again, she set the tailor bee down gently onto the scarlet petals. Maybe it would find nourishment there. The bee crawled into the heart of the rose and Fay heard it begin to buzz contentedly. She gently replaced the rose and the bee into the pack’s side pocket.

  And then she realized that she knew the first part of the riddle. ‘The answer is bees,’ she said aloud. ‘The first part of the riddle is bees.’

  Fay looked at the signal-light again. The light had dimmed, she was certain of it. Her head felt suddenly as light as after a dose of madcap. At the time she’d assumed it was the madcap smoke that had shown her the vision of Daisy, but could it have been the song itself that had opened the crack in the pavement?

  The signal light was definitely a little dimmer than before. Fay searched in her mind for the words of the song, fearing she had forgotten them, but there they were, and the melody too, as clear as a childhood memory. She stepped up to the platform edge, clutching her pack like a lost child, and raising her voice, she let it rise like a cloud of butterflies:

  My plaid away, my plaid away

  And o’er the hill and far away…

  The signal was visibly darkening, changing slowly from red to green, and now Fay could hear a roaring sound, like an approaching hurricane, like a tide of floodwater running along the railway tracks, like a swarm of wild bees, although there was still no train in sight—

  She raised her voice, feeling it soar, sweet and powerful and strong:

  And o’er the sea to Norroway…

  Now she could feel the slipstream dragging at her hair, her clothes, but still there was no train in sight, and no change but for the signal light that now shone green as springtime. The easiest way to board the Night Train is to die, she thought. What if all this was a mistake? What if the inner voice was right, and the Night Train would not accept her fare?

  She took a breath. The air was sweet as honeycomb.

  ‘My plaid shall not be blown away,’ she said firmly and, closing her eyes, her pack still held tightly against her body, she stepped right off the station platform and into the path of the Night Train.

  Three

  For a moment Fay was in darkness. Her head was filled with tumbling stars; her heart raced like an engine. Then she opened her eyes to find herself lying on a carpeted floor, a floor that thrummed and shuddered.

  For a few terrifying seconds, Fay had no idea where she was. What was she doing? What was this place? Then her outstretched hand touched her pack, and her memory returned. She was on another train, she saw: a train that seemed to be travelling through a tunnel – the stutter of lights through the windows was the only illumination.

  She struggled to her feet, keeping hold of her backpack as she did so. Now she remembered the travelling girl; the station and the Night Train. She remembered Mabs and Alberon, and the hellride into London Beneath, and waking up on the platform at last, dressed in nothing but spider silk and her dead husband’s hoodie. A light came on in the carriage now; it was yellow and intermittent, but it gave her the chance to look around and take in her surroundings. The seats were of ancient velvet, the carriage windows milky with age. And in the seats were passengers, looking wanly through the glass, their dead and expressionless faces livid in the corpse-light.

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Fay.

  No one replied. Her fellow travellers sat and stared, unblinking, through the windows.

  ‘Is there anyone in charge?’ called Fay, but her voice sounded dead and exhausted in the velvet-lined interior. She found a vacant seat and sat down. From outside came a blur of light as the train flashed through a station. Fay read a sign on the white tile wall: ELPHAME. And then they were back in the hurt-ling dark, and she watched the tunnel lights strobing. Sometimes she caught glimpses of their surroundings, flashing by at the speed of Dream. Sometimes they seemed to be underground, sometimes high above the clouds; sometimes running through desert sands, sometimes underwater. And the signs flashing by said: TIR NA NOG, THE LAND OF ROAST BEEF, or FAERIE, or ALFHEIM, or XANADU, or ATLANTIS. But however intently she looked, she saw nothing that looked like the place she had seen through the cracks in the pavement; and even if she did, she thought, how would she stop the train?

  She turned to the nearest passenger, a woman in her twenties, wearing jeans and a pink sleeveless top and a vinyl necklace. In another kind of light she might have been pretty, but in the intermittent gleam of the Night Train’s exhausted cells, she looked as dead as the rest of them. Fay put out a hand to touch her bare arm. The young woman did not respond.

  ‘Talk to me. Please. Am I still alive? Is this the Night Train?’

  Still the woman said nothing.

  Fay reached out to touch the woman’s necklace. The name MAISIE had been laser-cut out of a piece of black vinyl, and studded with little crystal stars. ‘Maisie? Is that your name?’ she said. ‘Maisie, please. Talk to me.’

  At the sound of her name, the young woman’s eyes finally quickened into a kind of awareness. She turned her head slightly, parted her lips and whispered:

  ‘A named thing is a tamed thing. I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’

  Fay’s heart gave a leap, and she took the young woman’s hand in hers. ‘How do I find the Hallowe’en King? Where do I ask the Night Train to stop?’

  Maisie gave a weary sigh. ‘The Night Train never stops,’ she said. ‘I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’

  ‘But it has to stop!’ said Fay. ‘The Hallowe’en King has my daughter.’

  ‘The Hallowe’en King takes his due. I speak as I must, and cannot lie.’

  Fay struggled with the urge to cry from sheer frustration and fatigue. But she had not come so far simply to give up now. ‘The Train will stop for me,’ she said. ‘All I need to know is where.’

  Maisie sighed again, and said: ‘Dream is a river that runs to the sea. I speak as I must, and—’

  ‘So tell me!’ said Fay. ‘How do I get to the Hallowe’en King? How do I make him give Daisy back?’

  Maisie gave a final sigh. Her voice, faint from the start, had grown almost inaudible. ‘If you can find me an acre of land between the salt water and the sea sand,’ she whispered, her eyes beginning to close. ‘Then, and only then…’ Her whispering voice fell silent once more. The fleeting life in her features was gone. And Fay was alone on the Night Train, with only the dead for company.

  Four

  For a time, Fay travelled in silence, looking out at the scenery. Sometimes they travelled in darkness: sometimes through a field of stars; sometimes underwater or across bright meadows of sunflowers. The stations were places from legend and dream; cities long vanished; deserts unknown. Some had names that she recognized; others were written in foreign script, hieroglyphics or ancient runes.

  Inside the car
riage, nothing moved. The passengers – even Maisie – were impossible to rouse. Fay wondered how she had managed to communicate with the young woman at all. Perhaps only because she had known her name – after all, hadn’t Maisie said: A named thing is a tamed thing?

  Was that another riddle? It had not escaped Fay’s notice that Maisie’s reply to her last question had been very like the riddle the Oracle had given King Orfeo. And the words with which she punctuated each answer was similar, too: I speak as I must, and cannot lie. It could hardly be by chance: that story, thought Fay, was linked to hers in ways that could not be coincidental. Bees had been the first clue, and Fay had managed to solve it, and buy her passage on the Night Train. But… a land between the shore and the sea? A man without a shadow? Surely these were simply ways of asking the impossible?

  And yet a riddle had brought her on board. Perhaps another could direct her where she needed to go? And so she raised her voice and sang to her audience of the dead:

  Who can find me an acre of land,

  Bay, bay, lily, bay

  Between the salt water and the sea sand?

  The wind hath blown my plaid away.

  For a time nothing happened. Fay’s voice sounded strange and flat inside the crowded carriage. But then she began to become aware of a change in the sound of the engines; a slowing of the scenes outside as they passed through the alien countryside. Until finally, in a long squeal of brakes, the Night Train stopped at a platform by the side of a long grey beach, with no sign of habitation but a hand-lettered sign that read:

  NORROWA.

  Norrowa

  ≈

  ‘I have an aiker of good ley-land,

  Which lyeth low by yon sea-strand.’

  Child Ballad no. 2:

  The Elphin Knight

  One

  Fay stepped out onto the platform, still carrying her backpack. The air was mild and smelt of the sea, and of the salt of the sandy dunes that lined the deserted platform. There was no sign of any kind of human habitation: no road; no buildings; nothing but the dunes, and the path to the beach, and beyond it, the gleaming grey ocean. A few blue thistles lined the boards; otherwise, the platform was bare. Fay took off her running shoes and stepped barefoot onto the sandy path. She turned – and saw that during those moments, the platform, the rails, the hand-lettered sign and the Night Train itself had all vanished, leaving nothing but dune and grass, and the long, bare, bleak expanse of the beach, shining in the sunlight. The shadows were long, the sun low, and there was nothing to hear but the keening sound of the wind and the waves on the sand. Where was she? Her head felt strangely light, and looking for her shadow, she saw that it was unusually faint against the mica-speckled sand.

  A phrase from a song came back to her: The wind hath blown my plaid away. What was the song? The memory seemed very distant, and yet it felt somehow significant. She closed her eyes and tried to recall why it had been so important to leave the train. What had she been looking for? She looked down at her backpack and for a moment could not recall who it belonged to, or where it was from: then she saw the corner of Daisy’s blanket poking out from under the flap, and remembered why her shadow was dim –

  I accepted a ride on the Night Train. I forced one of the dead to speak. And I accepted the challenge that Lord Death gave to King Orfeo.

  Fay’s heart seemed to tighten with dread. How much of her memory had she lost? She opened the backpack and laid out the contents onto the sand. The blanket of stars; the tailor bee; the rose; her phone, the first-aid kit and the key ring, with the tiny notebook attached. She opened the book and read aloud the words she had written the night before, but none of them seemed like memories. She still remembered Daisy, of course, and the terrible grief of losing her, but the memories she had written down – the sandcastle, the birthday cake – seemed as remote as the Night Train now, with all its silent passengers. There was no recognition, no spark: no light behind the images. She thought of a Polaroid photograph, fading out of existence. That was all that remained of them now. The words were only a story.

  She picked up the tiny pencil and wrote:

  I am still losing my memories. Payment for the progress I’ve made. Mabs warned me to keep my plaid close. I have to remember Daisy.

  And then she wrote:

  Daisy’s princess dress, all white, embroidered with silver stars. She wanted to wear it all the time. With a sword, of course: because why shouldn’t princesses have swords?

  A cherry strudel, on a bench, at a Christmas market.

  The first time she went on an aeroplane, and how she said she could see the clouds from the top of the sky.

  The answer to the first was bees. I’m here to find the second.

  There were now only two tiny pages left of the little notebook.

  Fay slipped it into her pocket and turned towards the ocean, which shone like a shield in the burnished sunlight. The sea was going out: she could see the gleaming of the wet sand. A cone-shaped shell lay on the shore, larger than any she had ever seen.

  He blows his horn both loud and shrill, thought Fay, and picked up the seashell. It felt smooth and inviting.

  I wonder, would it make a sound? Fay raised it to her lips. There was a tiny aperture at the sharp end of the shell, and blowing into it, she thought she heard whalesong, low and sweet and melancholy, over the sound of the waves on the beach.

  The sun was setting at her back, sending the shadows sprawling. Even her own, faint as it was, stretched all the way to the tideline. She put the seashell in her pack, along with the rose and the blanket of stars. Over the sea to Norroway, she thought, as she stood on the seashore, watching the silver sky darken to blue, until at last all the shadows were gone, and nothing was left but a river of stars.

  Two

  Fay lay on her back on the sand with her pack as a pillow. The stars were coldly, achingly bright, wrapping the night in a broad, bright band. Slowly the moon rose over the sea, painting a silver path to the shore. Then came the bats – hundreds of them, swooping and dancing like butterflies across the broken face of the moon. They reminded Fay of Alberon, and of how he and Moth and Peronelle had vanished into a cloud of wings. She remembered that night vividly: the moonlit statue of Anteros; the madcap and the butterflies; the vision of Daisy through the cracks. Whatever had happened to her mind and to her memories of home, these memories were still intact, like the tale of King Orfeo, and the Oracle’s riddle:

  Who can find me an acre of land,

  Between the salt water and the sea sand?

  The words had power. The riddle, too. And had not the tiger told her there was truth to be found in stories? Alberon’s tale of the Queen who left her kingdom to fall in love; the tale of King Orfeo and the Hallowe’en King; the Oracle’s mocking answer – all these were linked to some deeper truth, some message she was meant to decode. And under the glamours and stories and tricks, through the veil of the madcap smoke and her failing memory, she knew that Daisy was waiting. She had to solve the second part of the riddle. The Night Train had carried her thus far – surely for a reason. And so she lay on the cool dark sand and watched the river of stars above, and listened to the sound of the waves that slowly crept back up the beach, and somewhere between the tideline and the pale rags of the rising waves, Fay heard the sound of distant song, and soon fell asleep and was dreaming.

  Three

  Dream is a river that runs to the sea, the dead girl on the train had said. And now Fay dreamed – or thought she dreamed – of lying on the beach at night, looking up at the circling stars, with the sound of the sea all around her. The moon was high now, pale and sharp above a silver bank of cloud: its light shone on the water like a ladder to the sky. And in her dream Fay saw a ship moored between the banks of cloud; a ship that shone with the light of the stars, its sails as fine as spider silk, and she could see people clinging to the rigging and looking down from the deck, and soaring like birds around the hull on wings that gleamed like moonlight.

 
; Awake or asleep, Fay thought it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen; and as she watched, she realized that she could hear voices, raised in song above the rushing of the sea:

  There lived a king unto the east

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  Who loved a queen unto the west

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  The king he has a-hunting gone

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  And left his true love all alone

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  The King o’ Faërie, with his dart,

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  Hath pierced the lady to the heart

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  Hath kept her in his fortress deep

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  Within the realm of endless sleep

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  But King Orfeo in pursuit

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  Played a reel upon his flute

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  And first he played the notes of noy

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  And then he played the notes of joy

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  And then he played the gabber reel

  (Blow, blow, the winds blow)

  The notes that make a sick heart hale

  (Green, green, the hedgerow).

  ‘What does it mean?’ said Fay aloud. The song had sounded so familiar, the words so intimate and strange. There had to be a message in there – it could be no coincidence that this was a version of Alberon’s tale of King Orfeo and the Hallowe’en King, who, in this version, seemed to be the King of Faërie. She thought of the travelling girl’s words in London Beyond: Some call him Lord Death, the Harlequin, the Erl-King, or the Elphin Knight. Sometimes they call him the Shadowless Man.